Since Ezra Klein and I will be sharing a panel at a conference this Thursday to contine our debate on whether progressive domestic policy should be pursued at the state or federal level, I thought I'd elaborate on the issue in a few posts in coming days.

The core point is that despite the conventional wisdom, most domestic programs are funded and administered by state governments because federal instituations have historically been resistant to policy innovation, forcing states out of necessity to take the lead in creating the policies to solve the problems facing American working families.

Federal inaction and state innovation is not a historical oddity but part of the institutional DNA of our national constitutional system, symbolized by the Senate filibuster which kills policy after policy. For this reason, policymakers at both the state and federal level need to think about all policies in the light of creating a "collaborative federalism" that builds policy on that reality.

States: The Check on the Tyranny of Federal Inaction: Civics texts often celebrate the "checks and balances" in the federal Constitution, where the House checks the Senate, the President's veto checks the Congress, and Senate filibusters can block most legislation. While pictured as a check on government power, what's missing in this happy picture is the way this tyranny of the status quo allows social problems to fester and private corporate interests to benefit as wages are eroded by inflation year-by-year, health insurers hike health care rates, oil companies benefit from windfall profits even as global warming advances, and people continue to suffer discrimination based on their race, gender, sexual orientation, disability or of other characteristics.

The Filibuster as Defender of Status Quo: The Senate filibuster symbolizes this tyranny of inaction. Historically, that filibuster was used by a racist minority of Senators to delay federal civil rights laws for decades, but in recent years it has become the routine weapon of those blocking health care reform, labor reform, energy programs and a range of other needed legislation.

It's not just that forty-one Senators can block legislation from becoming law. It's that the uneven size of the populations those Senators represent means that Senators elected by incredibly tiny minorities of the American population can use their power to defeat the national democratic will. Here's how crazy the system is: the forty-one Senate votes needed to block legislation could be elected by just twenty-one states -- with two filibustering Senators from each of those states -- which if they came from the smallest states would mean that Senators representing just 11 percent of the American population can defeat legislation supported by Senators representing 89% of the population. See the chart below for a graphic version of how small the slice of votes represented by that minority.

Since most of a state's population doesn't vote and the Senators representing a state need only a bare majority to win office, it's actually possible, as Progressive State's co-chair David Sirota wrote in a column, Tyranny of the Tiny Minority, for Senators supported by just 7 million voters out of a population of over 300 million Americans, just 3% of the voting population, to block all substantive federal legislation. In practice, filibusters are put together with a hodepodge of states representing larger minorities of the population, but when corporate special interests start with such a low threshhold of votes needed to preserve the status quo, it's hardly suprising that federal inaction is the norm.

When you look at the years when the most iconic federal legislation was passed, such as the federal minimum wage in 1938 or Medicare in 1965, the numbers were overwhelming on the progressive side. Democrats held 76 seats in 1938, enough to overcome both Republican and Dixiecrat defections, while they held 68 seats in 1965. These were the highwater marks in American history of post-Reconstruction single party dominance and unlikely to be duplicated at least in the next couple of legislative cycles.

Enter the States: Luckily, our constitutional system does have a check on federal inaction, namely state governments that can generally take action with just a majority of the vote in their statehouses. Not only can states deal with crucial problems locally, they can collectively create such a strong wave of action that even Senate filibusters fold under the weight of the trend. Twenty-nine states passed state civil rights laws preceding passage of the landmark federal 1964 Civil Rights law and, more recently, states representing two-thirds of the American population enacted increases in the minimum wage in the last decade, finally spurring the national government to pass a long-needed change. But in many areas, federal laws may remain half-hearted in the face of filibusters, which is why state action will inherently remain critical in areas ranging from health care to energy policy.

Tomorrow- the little known secret that states spend far more money on domestic programs than the federal government-- and adminster almost all of them.