Author Archives: Sheila

Abuses of Power

For the past couple of months, I have been watching the political shenanigans in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Maine and elsewhere with increasing disbelief, trying to figure out what has prompted such disdain for civility, democratic process and  individual rights.

In the latest bizarre twist from Wisconsin, the Governor and GOP leadership simply ignored an order of the federal court. The court had issued a stay of the law repealing collective bargaining rights, pending an evidentiary hearing on whether it had been passed in a manner consistent with the state’s open door law. The legislature could have abided by the order, or it could have held another vote, after proper notice. Instead, those in charge decided to thumb their noses at a court order.

The belligerent and tone-deaf Governor of Maine unilaterally decided to erase a mural that he didn’t like. It was on the walls of the state’s Department of Labor, and portrayed the history of the labor movement.

In Michigan, the Governor has proposed–and the legislative majority has apparently approved–a bill that gives him unprecedented, nearly dictatorial powers of the sort not seen in the United States (probably because those powers appear to conflict with our constitutional system of checks and balances).

In Indiana, the Republicans who now control both houses have been indulging in some of the most vindictive lawmaking we’ve seen. (A former student of mine who has been lobbying this session recently characterized the chamber as “the Hatehouse.”)  They are busily passing measures to marginalize gays, harass immigrants, and make it difficult if not impossible for women to control their own reproduction. (During arguments over the imposition of a three-day waiting period before women can obtain an abortion, a woman legislator asked that an exception be added for cases of rape; the sponsor angrily responded that such an exception would be a ‘major loophole’ because women would all claim to have been raped! The proposed amendment was then voted down.)

I could go on and on, unfortunately. But the larger question is: what is going on? What explains this epidemic of bullying?

I don’t know if I can explain the “why” of all this, but I think I can characterize the “what.”

One of the goals of this nation’s founders was memorably related by John Adams, who explained that the Constitution was intended to establish a nation of “laws, not men.” We would have a country where the rule of law trumped the exercise of raw power. No one was to be above the law, and the purpose of the law was to limit the ability of those in power to abuse that power. What we are seeing is what happens when people elected to office behave like thugs, using their positions for personal and political aggrandizement rather than for the common good.

The people elected in 2010 talk a lot about the constitution, but their actions betray their absolute ignorance of its central purpose.

Comments

Good Citizens

I have been asked to address students at an Indiana High School on “Good Government Day.” My assignment was to describe to them the attributes of a good citizen.

Here’s what I plan to tell them. (Constructive criticism is welcome!)

Good governments require good citizens. If there is one thing that history has taught us, it is that without good citizens to hold government accountable, power really does corrupt those who exercise it.

So the question becomes: what makes a good citizen? I think that there are three requirements topping the list: Constitutional literacy, critical thinking skills, and the willingness to pay one’s dues.

What do I mean by each of these?

Let’s start with Constitutional literacy. You simply can’t be a good, responsible citizen if you are ignorant of the history and philosophy of your own country. A week or so ago, Newsweek Magazine ran an article titled “How Ignorant Are You?” It was a quiz, with questions taken from the tests immigrants have to pass in order to become citizens. The percentages of Americans who could answer the questions correctly were embarrassing—for most of them, it was less than 30%. There are literally hundreds of other surveys that confirm how little most Americans know about their own system: two-thirds of us don’t even know that we have three branches of government!

If you don’t know what the Enlightenment was, and how it shaped our constitutional system, if you don’t understand that the purpose of the Bill of Rights was to protect individual rights both from government and from the majority, if you don’t understand the difference between civil liberties and civil rights, you can be a good person, but I would argue that you don’t know enough to be a good citizen.

Constitutional and historic literacy are just the beginning. You also need critical thinking skills.

What I mean by critical thinking skills is the ability to tell the difference between facts and garbage. One of the reasons that Constitutional literacy and an analytical mind are such important parts of good citizenship is that the world is a more complicated place than it used to be, especially when it comes to the oceans of information we get every day. The internet is a wonderful thing—I’m not sure how I survived before google—but because it brings so much unfiltered material into our lives, the ability to separate factual, credible information from spin and propaganda is more important than it has ever been. If you don’t know what the Constitution and Bill of Rights really say, or how the Courts have defined and interpreted what they say, you’re a lot more likely to believe that forwarded email you got from your crazy Uncle Ray.

In the last few years, we have seen incredible changes in the media. Fewer people read newspapers or even watch the evening news on television, and more and more of us get our information on line. Some of that is great, some of it isn’t. We are in danger of losing real journalism—where people monitor what government does, where they fact-check and provide context and background. Instead, we have mountains of unsubstantiated opinion, PR and spin. Good citizens have to be able to separate fact from fantasy. They have to live in the world as it is, not in a bubble where they listen only to things that confirm what they already believe—and the internet makes it so easy and tempting to construct that bubble. At the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, where I teach, we are so concerned about this issue that we have established a new undergraduate major in Media and Public Affairs. So far, it is the only major of its kind in the country.

Finally, the third quality of a good citizen:  Willingness to pay one’s dues—taxes. This one isn’t going to make me any friends, but it’s true. We’ve had 25 years of politicians telling us that taxes are like theft, that they are government stealing our money.  Not so. Taxes are the price we pay to live in a society that makes it possible for us to earn a living and live in safe communities. Taxes pay for everything from national defense to paved roads to air safety to garbage collection. Tax dollars pay for the school you attend, the parks you play in, the police and firefighters who keep you safe. Don’t misunderstand—good citizens are diligent watchdogs of the public purse, because there’s nothing virtuous or patriotic about waste or duplication—but they are also willing to pay their fair share without whining about it.

Think about a basketball team where some players just don’t pull their weight, or clubs you belong to where most of the members let a few people do all the work. Most of us don’t think very highly of the slackers. Good citizens aren’t slackers—they do their share. And that includes paying their share.

There are lots of other behaviors that characterize good citizens—voting, keeping up on the news, serving on juries, working for a political party or for a cause you believe in—all the things we mean when we encourage civic engagement. But if you aren’t civically literate—if you don’t know the basics of our history and constitutional system—your vote won’t be as informed.

If you don’t have the ability to assess the credibility of the news and commentary you are receiving, you won’t get the whole story, or the accurate account, and you will make decisions based on bad information.

And if you accept public services—police protection, garbage collection, paved roads, education and so many more—but you don’t pay your fair share of taxes, you aren’t a citizen at all. You’re a freeloader.

At the end of the day, being a good citizen requires a lot more than just being born in the United States. It’s more than wearing a flag pin, or being proud of what this country has accomplished. Being a good citizen means doing your part to move America forward, it means helping this country of ours live up to its highest ideals. And that requires civic knowledge, intellectual honesty and a willingness to contribute time, effort and tax dollars to our common civic enterprise.

Comments

Interesting Observation

My granddaughter Sarah currently lives in Wales; she is attending the University of Wales and will graduate this summer. She reads the Guardian, and this morning sent me the following text message.

“Taken from the comment and debate section of the Guardian this morning: ‘what you need to say and do to be credible in the Republican Party essentially deprives you of credibility outside it. The Republicans recognize this, but like an obese glutton at an all-you-can-eat buffet, they just can’t seem to help themselves.'”

The comment was in response to an article on “The American Right, Stuck in a Hyperbolic World,” and I think it captured the current dynamic perfectly. Right now, for example, it looks quite likely that the House GOP will shut down government, despite Democrats’ willingness to meet their demands halfway. (The Republicans want 60 billion in cuts; Democrats are offering 30 billion.) They seem absolutely oblivious to the damage indiscriminate cuts will do to the still-fragile recovery–and equally oblivious to the political damage their posturing is inflicting.

As the commenter noted, they just can’t help themselves.

Comments

Death and Taxes

These days, those of us who follow policy debates are suffering from overload: same-sex marriage, immigration policy, foreign policy—not to mention the re-emergence of pocketbook issues like collective bargaining rights—are generating lots of heat, if distressingly little light.

And then, of course, there are the perennial complaints about taxes.

Everyone, it seems, wants government to cost less–until someone suggests cuts to our particular sacred cows. In Washington, we see lawmakers eager to de-fund Planned Parenthood and NPR become livid when someone suggests cutting military spending. Here in Indiana, an eminently reasonable proposal by Governor Daniels and the Chief Justice to incarcerate fewer nonviolent offenders and save the billions of tax dollars that we would otherwise spend building additional prisons has been eviscerated by defenders of “law and order.”

In fact, the criminal justice system offers one of the best opportunities to save significant tax dollars, beginning with abolition of the death penalty.

People have different opinions about the morality of capital punishment, and I leave those arguments to ethicists and theologians. There are, however, some pretty compelling practical and fiscal arguments for abolition.

As a practical matter, years of scholarship have confirmed that capital punishment is not a deterrent. In 2009, states with the death penalty had murder rates of 5.2 per 100,000 residents; in states without, the rate was 3.9—a 35% difference. Police agree. In a recent poll, police chiefs ranked the death penalty last among ways to reduce violent crime; they also considered it the least efficient use of taxpayer money, and complained that it diverted money from more effective crime control measures.

Which brings us to the fiscal issues.

In 2010, Legislative Services analyzed capital punishment costs in Indiana, and determined that the average cost of a capital trial and direct appeal was 449,000–over ten times the 42,658 cost of a life-without-parole case.  In California, taxpayers pay 114,000,000 more each year than it would cost to keep those same offenders imprisoned for life. In Kansas, capital cases are 70% more expensive than non-capital cases, even including the costs of lifelong incarceration. In Texas, a death penalty case costs three times what it would cost to imprison someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years.

Advocates of the death penalty often complain that the higher costs are a result of “interminable appeals,” but that isn’t actually true. Appeals do add costs, but a capital trial is very expensive. Cells on death row and extra staff cost more.

We could eliminate appeals and execute people immediately upon conviction. That would save money. Unfortunately, such a proposal raises another pesky problem we have with capital punishment—the fact that we convict innocent people. Since 1973, over 130 people have been released from death row because they were found to be innocent. These were not folks freed on a “technicality,” they were people wrongfully convicted.

One of those people will be in Indianapolis on April 14th. Randy Steidl will speak at the IUPUI Campus Center at 7 p.m. about the 17 years he spent on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Randy comes from a law-abiding middle-class family; his brother is a retired State Trooper. His story is troubling, to say the least: there was evidence of the sort of police and prosecutorial misconduct that—more often than we might like to think—accompanies the rush to solve high-profile murders.

As Steidl says, “If it happened to me, it can happen to anyone.”

I guess that’s one of those “moral” arguments I said I wasn’t going to make.

Comments

Have You No Shame, Sir?

I think what is most appalling about the crop of new “Tea Party” governors, is the absolute impunity with which they use their positions for personal, as well as political gain. In my tradition, we call this sort of behavior “chutzpah.” In English, I think the word is “criminal.”