The Great Colonial Kickback
Ezra Klein makes a good point about the Cornhusker Kickback, the deal which would provide the state of Nebraska extra funding for Medicaid expansion in the Senate health reform bill. That deal isn’t evidence that the Senate is broken. On the contrary, it’s evidence that the Senate is working just as designed.
It’s a peculiar thing—a kind of Sartrean bad faith, if you ask me—that people get so worked up over a few little deals favoring one state or another, or even a whole bunch of deals, yet don’t seem to recognize or show any concern about the deep, structural inequity built into the constitutional design of the national legislature1 : its bias toward the less populous states and against the more populous ones.
That bias is real and has measurable effects on federal spending in the states. Research by Brown University economist Brian Knight (pdf) has demonstrated a strong relationship between per capita federal spending in a state and the per capita size of the state’s congressional delegation. Simply put, federal spending favors the less populous states.
The 2008 Census data represented on the map below (compiled here) provides a telling illustration. (But note that this is just a snapshot and doesn’t independently prove the thesis.)2 In a state-by-state ranking of per capita federal spending, the top 25 states are home to 91.5 million people; the bottom 25 represent 211.9 million people. The top 10 states include Wyoming (50th in population), Alaska (47), Vermont (49), North Dakota (48), Montana (44), and Maine (40). The bottom 10 states include Florida (4th in population), Georgia (9), Texas (2), and Illinois (5). And it looks like 2004 data tell much the same story.
Per capita federal spending in the states — from datamasher.org
Also puzzling to me is all the indignation we’ve seen over “back-room deals.” I can understand fretting over deals that are made in secret and that affect the legislation in undisclosed ways to bestow undeserved benefits on powerful interest groups. It really is essential that we know, or have a chance to know, what are representatives are voting on before they vote on it. But I don’t really see the problem with a deal made between legislators, the product of which is drawn up in black-and-white language that, um, everybody knows about.
“Back-room dealmaking” is seen as symptomatic of a kind of moral degradation of the public sphere. Yet we celebrate the Constitution’s exaltation of the arbitrary geography of statehood as a Great Compromise. Which reminds me: you know what else was a back-room deal? The Constitution of the United States of America.
- And not only the legislature. The same structural bias is built into the electoral college. [↩]
- Also note that this datamasher map is not associated in any way with Brian Knight’s academic research. [↩]
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