New York Times
By Adam Nagourney
January 15, 2014
LOS ANGELES — One year ago, Gov. John W. Hickenlooper, a Colorado Democrat, stood before a state legislature controlled by his party and laid out an aggressive agenda that included a sweeping expansion of gun-control laws after the mass shooting at an Aurora movie house. “Why not have universal background checks for all gun sales?” he asked.
When Mr. Hickenlooper stood again before the legislature last week — after a year in which three Democratic state senators who supported his bill were forced from office — there was little mention of gun control, or for that matter, any potentially divisive social or fiscal issue.
“We got a lot of pushback over universal background checks,” Mr. Hickenlooper said in a telephone interview. “I’ve spent a lot of time trying to think about how to do things differently, so there isn’t a partisan divide.”
“There were a lot of mistakes,” he said of how he sold the gun measures to his state. “We just didn’t do a very good job of communicating the benefits. And I think we were ahead of parts of the state. We didn’t do a good enough job of reaching out to rural Colorado.”
Mr. Hickenlooper, who is facing a potentially difficult re-election this November, is not alone in recalibrating in the face of suggestions that he and other elected officials might have overreached. Across the country, in many, though not all, of the states under single-party Democratic or Republican control, lawmakers are stepping back this election year, steering away from the divisive battles on abortion, gun control, collective bargaining and large tax cuts that have marked recent sessions in state capitols.
This is a striking change from the past few years, when 36 states — more than at any other time in the past 60 years — came under single-party control: 23 Republican and 13 Democratic. Far from being gripped by the partisan gridlock that has paralyzed Washington, these states have been humming legislative laboratories, trying out their party agendas and pulling the nation on two quite different policy paths.
The lowered ambition amounts, in some cases, to a declaration of victory, as is the case with abortion restrictions in Ohio and providing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants in California. But it also reflects political concerns among some legislators and governors up for election that they at times claimed an unfounded mandate with this aggressive period of legislating, according to analysts and elected officials.
For the past three years, under the hand of a Republican governor and a Republican legislature, Ohio has forged an ambitious, if occasionally unorthodox, conservative agenda, enacting laws to limit the availability of abortion, cut taxes and restrict the power of unions, while also bolstering some programs for the needy. But for now at least, lawmakers are looking at consensus legislation, such as requiring parental notification for children getting opiate prescriptions rather than restricting bargaining rights of public workers.
“We have 60 out of the 90 members, so sometimes there are a lot of members who want to do something on social conservative issues,” said William G. Batchelder, the Republican speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives. “But it’s my job to make sure that what we want to do is something that is valued by the citizenry — especially in even-numbered years.”
Not all states under one-party control are holding back.
Republicans in Indiana are pushing a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and legislation requiring beneficiaries of governmental assistance to undergo drug tests, while Republicans in Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska and Wisconsin are pushing for tax cuts. Democrats in California and Hawaii are rallying around universal prekindergarten coverage, and there are moves to raise the minimum wage in Illinois and Minnesota.
“Retrench is not a word in my vocabulary,” said Darrell Steinberg, the Democratic leader of the California State Senate. “And universal preschool for 4-year-olds is a pretty good example of where we are going to push.”
But the muted agenda in Colorado and elsewhere suggests that in some cases, the party in control pushed beyond the will of the general electorate. In Colorado, which passed the gun-control law and approved civil unions for same-sex couples, party registration is evenly split, with 31.1 percent of the electorate registered as Democrats and 31.5 percent registered as Republicans. President Obama won Ohio in 2008 and 2012. Even North Carolina, which pushed through laws ending teacher tenure, requiring voter IDs at the polls, rejecting an expansion of Medicaid benefits for the poor and restricting access to abortion, voted for Mr. Obama in 2008.
Many Republicans came to power in the party’s sweep of 2010, carried by carefully targeted political funds and a surge of conservative voters mobilized by the enactment of Mr. Obama’s health care act.
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