The Reflecting Pool

Avid readers of The Pool have displayed severe symptoms of withdrawal during our most recent publishing hiatus.  Their anguish is evident in the e-mails we’ve received.  “Where are all those bon mots you promised in that very first column?”  (See The Reflecting Pool, February 21, 2007.)  “I don’t care what my friends say, I miss seeing The Pool on my cyber doorstep.”  “I didn’t realize you were part of the Writers Guild.  Are you on strike, too?”  “I read the New York Times and the Washington Post to find out who’s slipping and who’s gaining in the Iowa caucuses.  I get my sports news from espn.com.  But I need my state-federal fix from The Pool.  Where are you?  When will you be back?”
No more e-mails, please.  The Pool is back.  This post-mini-sabbatical column will satisfy your state-federal cravings by giving a quick run-down on some of the most important state-federal events of the past month.  We’ll start with three items on this week's calendar.

Former NCSL President Steve Rauschenberger testified Thursday morning before a House Judiciary Subcommittee on the streamlined sales tax legislation.  The legislation, co-sponsored by Massachusetts Congressman William Delahunt and Illinois Congressman Ray LaHood, would authorize states to require retailers to collect sales taxes on Internet and other remote sales—if the state conforms to the terms of the interstate sales and use tax agreement.  The hearing is one of a series of relatively slow steps toward passage of the legislation that, among other things, would even the playing field between hometown merchants and out-of-state sellers.
Although Rauschenberger left the Illinois Senate at the beginning of this year, he was an obvious choice to represent NCSL at this important hearing.  He clearly is the godfather of the streamlined sales tax movement, having co-chaired NCSL’s task force on the issue for six years, attended countless, sometimes mind-numbing meetings with state tax administrators and refereed among the many companies that have a stake in simplifying sales taxes.  As a self-described former recliner salesman from Elgin, Illinois, he has the persuasive skills to convince even the most disinterested congressman to support the federal legislation.

NCSL is part of the Big 7.  What’s the Big 7, you might wonder.  The Big 7 is comprised of the seven major organizations that work for state and local elected officials.  The one that comes closest to being a household word—after NCSL, of course—is the National Governors Association.  Mayors, city council members and county officials are also a part of it.  Staff of the groups have been getting together regularly for more than 25 years to plot joint action on federal issues.  The Big 7’s halcyon days occurred in the early to mid-1990s when the groups worked successfully on a range of issues, most notably passage of the Unfunded Mandate Reform Act in 1995.
The Big 7 has fallen on pretty hard times recently.  One of the groups has virtually abandoned it and the others have found fewer and fewer issues about which they agree.  The staff get together less frequently and it has been more than five years since the organization’s elected leaders have gotten together. 
A meeting Thursday morning called by Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell gave The Pool’s Pollyanna side reason to believe that the Big 7 is about to be re-energized.  Governor Rendell, who will become Chair of NGA next summer, has a long history with infrastructure and transportation issues.  He called the Big 7 executive directors together today to urge them to become part of a coalition that will work on reauthorization of the surface transportation bill in 2009.  The effort would be patterned after the Rebuild America coalition, which was instrumental in passage of major transportation legislation in the mid-1990s.  There was considerable enthusiasm around the table about Governor Rendell’s proposal; so it is very likely the governor may manage to do something that no one else has been able to do for quite a long time—get the state and local groups to coalesce around an important state-federal-local issue.

If we were doing the by-now clichéd T-shirts, they’d say:
Immigration World Tour
November-December 2007
Phoenix, Arizona
Seattle, Washington
Vancouver, British Columbia
Washington, D.C.

It started during last week’s NCSL Fall Forum in Phoenix, where we released the results of our latest research on state immigration legislation.  The study, done by Dirk Hegen and Ann Morse of NCSL’s Immigrant Policy Project, shows that the 50 state legislatures have considered an astounding 1562 bills related to immigration issues so far in 2007.  Of these, 244 have become law.  The message is pretty clear.  State legislatures are acting because the federal government hasn’t.
The next stops were Seattle and Vancouver, where NCSL’s Task Force Immigration and the States convened.  Hosted by Washington Representative Sharon Tomiko Santos, one of the task force co-chairs, the meeting naturally enough focused on U.S.-Canada border issues.  The task force got great cooperation from the Canadian government, our own Department of Homeland Security and the Seattle community.
The tour concludes today (Friday) in Washington, D.C. with a meeting that NCSL is co-sponsoring with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Homebuilders Association and the National Roofing Contractors Association.  Representative Tomiko Santos and Georgia Senator Don Balfour, NCSL’s Vice President, head the group of legislators attending the meeting, which recognizes the interest that the business community has in how state legislatures are handling immigration issues, especially in the absence of federal legislation.

On November 14, North Carolina Speaker Joe Hackney, NCSL’s President-elect, led a group of eight state legislators to our nation’s capital for meetings with Senate and House Democratic leaders.  The first meeting, with a half dozen members of the Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee, was supposed to concentrate on renewal of the State Children’s Health Program, but morphed into a broader discussion that covered the mortgage lending crisis, transportation funding and unfunded mandates.  Later, the state legislators met with Connecticut Congressman John Larson, the Vice Chair of the House Democratic caucus.  The focus, again, was the children’s health bill.  But that meeting, too, expanded to cover other issues, especially once Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined the group and the state leaders raised the subprime issue, streamlined sales taxes and infrastructure funding.  Perhaps the most promising aspect was Speaker Pelosi’s commitment to consult regularly by conference call with NCSL’s leadership.