Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

I’ll Just Leave This Here…

Just in case you haven’t been following the chaos at Health and Human Services–or haven’t recognized the probable effects of placing a demented conspiracy theorist at its head– nine former CDC Directors published a joint op-ed in the New York Times, titled “We Ran The CDC: Kennedy Is Endangering Every American’s Health.”

An excerpt will convey their concerns, which are informed by that hated thing called expertise. (You know that in this administration, it’s disqualifying to actually know what you are talking about..)

Mr. Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replacedexperts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championedfederal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage. Firing Dr. Monarez — which led to the resignations of top C.D.C. officials — adds considerable fuel to this raging fire.

We are worried about the wide-ranging impact that all these decisions will have on America’s health security. Residents of rural communities and people with disabilities will have even more limited access to health care. Families with low incomes who rely most heavily on community health clinics and support from state and local health departments will have fewer resources available to them. Children risk losing access to lifesaving vaccines because of the cost.

This is unacceptable, and it should alarm every American, regardless of political leanings.

It is really difficult to get one’s head around the extent of the damage–not to mention havoc– being wrought daily by the proudly ignorant, intellectually-limited and thoroughly repulsive creature who inexplicably occupies the Oval Office. America’s stature in the world has cratered; domestically, we are slipping into fascism; economically we’re heading toward recession; and the cretins Trump has put in charge of our governing agencies are waging war against science, knowledge and expertise. (And history, culture, art and architecture, education…)

It’s not much comfort to recognize that the health of the racist, know-nothing MAGA base will decline with that of the rest of us.

I keep thinking about a meme making the rounds on social media: our best hope is that Trump is getting his medical advice from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

If the online speculation about his health caused by the sudden non-appearance of our publicity-hound President turns out to be accurate, perhaps there’s something to that…

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Rigging The Vote, Thanks To A Rogue Court

A number of pundits have pointed out that Donald Trump is a prime example of projection; that when he accuses someone of bad behavior, it is almost always behavior in which he, himself, has engaged. His current effort to get Red states to redistrict mid-cycle is a perfect example. Ever since he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Trump has insisted that he couldn’t possibly have lost “fair and square,” that the election had been rigged. So, in typical Trump fashion, he is engaging in an effort to rig the upcoming midterms.

As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has recently written,

Texas Republicans are in the midst of making their state even more of a mockery of the concept of representative democracy than it already was. In an attempt to preserve the GOP’s narrow House majority in the 2026 midterms, lawmakers are tinkering with the boundaries of the state’s 38 congressional districts to create five more safe Republican seats, forcing several Democratic incumbents to seek re-election next year in districts that are suddenly, alarmingly red. Scrambling the map in this manner would ensure that in a state in which Trump earned 56 percent of the vote in 2024, Republicans would lock up 80 percent of the state’s representation in Congress for the rest of the decade.

The effort to give Republican candidates unearned advantages isn’t limited to Texas–Trump is currently leaning on other Red states, notably Florida and Indiana–to engage in the same gerrymandering, which he clearly believes will forestall a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives. (He really shouldn’t be so confident; in a special election just last Tuesday, a Democrat won a seat in the Iowa legislature with 55% of the vote–in a district that Trump had carried by 11 points. But recognition of nuance and complexity aren’t among Trump’s very limited intellectual skills.)

As Marshall quite correctly notes, “you can draw a straight line between this frantic gerrymandering arms race and a mind-bendingly stupid decision from the U.S. Supreme Court.” That “mind-bendingly stupid decision” was a 5-4 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause, a 2019 case in which the five Republican justices held that partisan gerrymanders are a “political question”—that is, an issue that must be left to the democratic process. “Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that the Constitution yields no workable standard for determining when a given gerrymander goes too far to be legal.”

In what is, in my view, still one of the most embarrassing paragraphs to appear in the pages of the United States Reporter, Roberts wraps in Rucho by noting that the holding constrains only federal courts; Congress, he says, would remain free to enact anti-gerrymandering legislation, as would lawmakers at the state level. The argument here is that voters who are dissatisfied with corruption in the political process don’t actually need John Roberts’s help, because they can always seek redress of their grievances via the aforementioned corrupt political process. This is roughly analogous to the fire department pulling up to a burning house, attaching the hoses to fire hydrants, and then politely informing the owner that it could rain any minute.

As Marshall points out, and as I have previously written, there definitely are standards the Court might have applied. The decision was clearly partisan. Republicans control 59 of the 99 state-level legislative chambers, and both the legislature and the governorship in 24 of those states. That compares with just 15 for Democrats. Despite the fact that most Blue states have significantly larger populations than the more numerous Red states, Republicans have power over the line-drawing process in more places than the Democrats–a power that allows the GOP to win elections despite garnering fewer votes overall.

It’s hard to argue with Marshall’s conclusion that what is happening in Texas and California and elsewhere right now “demonstrates just how vapid and hollow the reasoning in Rucho always was. You do not have to have a law degree to understand that a Texas map that transforms a 56-42 advantage into a 79-21 blowout is not, in any meaningful sense, fair.”

But it isn’t just Rucho. The Roberts Court will go down in history (assuming we have a history) as a disgraceful, rogue Court in which a blatantly partisan majority enabled an autocrat and undermined the democratic process in multiple decisions contrary to years of judicial precedents.

If and when the Democrats control Congress, they need to impose term limits on the justices, and expand the Court.

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L’Etat, Ce Moi

“L’etat, ce moi”–meaning,  “the state, it is me– is a French phrase attributed to King Louis XIV, who probably never said it. Nevertheless, it represents the foundational concept of absolute monarchy, a regime in which the king has total authority over the state. 

I am confident that Donald Trump, the least educated President in history, never encountered the phrase, but its meaning clearly animates his conception of the Presidency. Law–in Trump’s limited and inaccurate view–is whatever he says it is. It certainly doesn’t exist as a separate framework.

In recent articles, the New York Times has outlined how this wholly unAmerican approach to the Presidency is undermining the rule of law, as our would-be monarch decides what rules should be ignored in the corrupt interests of his pocketbook and those of his plutocratic cohorts. 

 The most vicious and far-reaching attempts to thwart the laws of the land have come as part of Trump’s racist efforts to root out D.E.I. and other measures aiming to ameliorate discrimination.  Trump has ordered government offices to simply stop enforcing numerous civil rights provisions. According to a Times  newsletter (link unavailable), the Labor Department will no longer investigate employers who allegedly underpaid women or awarded promotions based on race. The administration has  abandoned hundreds of pending cases under the fair housing law–abandoning efforts to prosecute landlords who keep out gay people or owners who refuse to sell to people of a different faith. Trump has also instructed the government to nix the “disparate-impact” test, which looked at whether minority groups were affected differently by criminal background checks, credit checks, zoning regulations and other facially neutral laws.

And recognizing that direct orders are not the only way to stymie the enforcement of laws on the books, Trump has slashed budgets and head counts, which has a similar effect. As the Times accurately noted, laws work only if people are there to enforce them. So the EPA has been eviscerated under this administration; its ability to enforce environmental measures crippled. Employment at the IRS has been cut, severely limiting the ability of that agency to pursue tax cheats (like the President himself). Etc.

Mainstream media sources routinely describe measures taken by the Trump administration as “authoritarian.” That is, of course, accurate–but it tends to obscure the effects of the measures described above (and the many similar ones)–tends to make the very real harms seem somewhat abstract. (Theoretically, after all, an authoritarian leader could impose measures that advanced the public good–authoritarianism is the process, not the consequence.)

The same problem arises when pundits and bloggers like yours truly bemoan the daily assaults on the rule of law. Rule of law, too, is an abstraction. What isn’t abstract is when ICE thugs ignore the constitutional rights of those they are intimidating and snatching off the streets, or when the administration refuses to comply with the terms of its prior research grants.

A significant body of research confirms that a troubling percentage of the American public actually wants an authoritarian government–a ruler who relieves them of the burden of exercising thoughtful and responsible citizenship. Whether that desire to be ruled rather than governed is a result of inadequate civic education or personal intellectual/emotional deficit is unknown; it is also unknown whether those who prefer a monarchy to a democracy approve of the way the current Mad King and his Congressional enablers/courtiers are conducting–or refusing to conduct– the affairs of state. 

That Times newsletter did readers a favor by discarding the abstractions and pointing out the specifics of an authoritarianism that manifests its contempt for fundamental fairness and the rule of law every day.

MAGA cult members are likely to be surprised when their chosen authoritarian’s “policies” further enrich the plutocrats while tanking the economy, instituting stagflation, closing rural hospitals and throwing grandma off Medicaid. That’s the problem with allowing someone–anyone, but especially this bloated, ignorant and embarrassing buffoon–to believe that he is “the state.”

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A Fascinating Analysis

The other day, I came across a fascinating–and persuasive–analysis of MAGA’s fixation with the Confederacy and other “losing” episodes of American history. The author, Kristoffer Ealy, a political psychologist, did a deep dive into the pathology, and found what can only be considered one of the major wellsprings of the deep resentments that power the MAGA mindset.

What triggered his exploration was a media report about a southern Board of Education voting to restore the name of Robert E. Lee to the area high school.

As Ealy explained, he began his research with the conviction that there had to be a reason for people clinging so frantically to a symbol of defeat. Why, he asked, would people treat defeat like a comfort food? Clearly, this goes beyond mere “nostalgia.” As he concluded, it becomes “victimhood identity.”

Losing doesn’t just become part of the deal for MAGA — it is the deal. In psychology this is often called victimhood identity, where people begin to see themselves as perpetual victims of life, defining their entire self-image through the lens of being wronged. They come to expect mistreatment, distrust attempts to help, and use grievances as proof of their own righteousness. That’s why Trump can never just win cleanly — he has to make it a mythical landslide stolen by the “deep state,” because if he simply wins, the grievance-based identity collapses.

Layered into that is the contrarian mindset. You know the type — everyone has that one friend who has to disagree with everything, not because they’ve thought it through, but because their identity is wrapped up in opposition. My MAGA acquaintance is like that: if you ask him why he supports the movement, he can’t give a concrete answer. He’ll just start rattling off disconnected complaints—“woke indoctrination,” “globalists,” “cultural Marxism”—with no context, no follow-up, and no plan. It’s not about what he believes; it’s about making sure he’s on the opposite side of whatever you’re on. It’s conflict for conflict’s sake, and when you mix that reflexive opposition with a deeply ingrained victim identity, you get a worldview where losing isn’t a problem — it’s the whole point.

Another dimension of that victimhood identity is what Ealy calls “glorification of martyrdom” —a tendency to romanticize sacrifice and loss as inherently noble. As he points out, once you glorify a loss, the outcome–the fact that you lost– becomes irrelevant. So to the MAGA mindset, the Civil War wasn’t a bloody, pointless rebellion. It was a heroic last stand. As he writes, “The statues aren’t about historical literacy; they’re altars to a story in which defeat proves righteousness. If the statues come down, the tangible symbols of “our eternal struggle” come down with them — and that’s an existential threat to an identity built on keeping the wound open.”

Given this mindset, facts become irrelevant. Suffering becomes the whole point.

All of this sits on top of an external locus of control — the belief that everything bad happens because of someone else. Nothing is ever the result of their own bad choices or failed leadership. The Confederacy didn’t lose because it built its economy on slavery and overestimated its military; it lost because the North had more resources. Trump doesn’t lose elections because of his rhetoric or policies; he loses because of “cheating,” “the media,” or “corrupt officials.” It’s a worldview where the story always ends with “we were robbed,” never “we blew it.”

This analysis rings true to me. It certainly helps to explain the deep-seated animus toward those the movement labels “other”–non-Whites, women, gay folks. It’s their fault that good “Christian” White guys are losing social dominance. Those good guys are victims of society’s hated efforts at inclusion–efforts MAGA sees not as an attempt to level a tilted playing field, but as attempts to divest them of their rightful place in the social order. As Ealy notes, once you begin to look, you see this victim framework everywhere.

The article is lengthy, with enlightening examples. It explains a lot, and it’s well worth the time to read in its entirety.

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For When This Dark Time Is Over

NPR recently reported on a fascinating project in Kenya.

The project was one of a number of pilots around the world in which citizens were given no-strings cash. In this case, an unanticipated result was that infants born to people who received the payments were nearly half as likely to die as infants born to people who got no cash. The payments cut mortality in children under 5 by about 45%, on par with interventions like vaccines and anti-malarials.

As long-time readers of this blog know, I support replacing our fragmented and inadequate social safety net with a Universal Basic Income (UBI). It won’t happen in my lifetime, if ever, but it’s on my list of “when this MAGA nightmare is over…'”

As I’ve previously argued, policies to help less fortunate citizens can be delivered in ways that stoke resentments, or in ways that encourage national cohesion.  Consider public attitudes toward means tested welfare programs, and contrast those attitudes with the overwhelming majorities that approve of Social Security and Medicare–universal programs. 

What if the United States embraced a new social contract, beginning with the premise that all citizens are valued members of the American polity, and that membership has its privileges?

In my imagined “Brave New World,” government would create an environment within which humans could flourish, an environment within which members would be guaranteed a basic livelihood, a substantive, excellent education, and an equal place at the civic table. In return, members (aka citizens) would pay their “dues:” taxes, a stint of public/civic service, and the consistent discharge of civic duties like voting and jury service.

A UBI would require significant changes to the deep-seated cultural assumptions on which our current economy rests, but if the various pilot projects have demonstrated anything, it is that a UBI and a single-payer health program would ease economic insecurities, reduce the gap between rich and poor, restore workers’ bargaining power and (not so incidentally) rescue market capitalism from its descent into corporatism and plutocracy. 

 America currently has a patchwork of state and federal programs, with bureaucratic barriers and means tests that are expensive to administer and that operate to exclude most of the working poor. Those who do get welfare are routinely stigmatized by moralizing lawmakers pursuing punitive measures aimed at imagined “takers” and “Welfare Queens.” Current anti-poverty policies have not made an appreciable impact on poverty, but they have grown the bureaucracy and contributed significantly to stereotyping and socio-economic polarization.

As Andy Stern, former President of the Service Employee’s International Union has argued,

“A basic income is simple to administer, treats all people equally, rewards hard work and entrepreneurship, and trusts the poor to make their own decisions about what to do with their money. Because it only offers a floor, people are encouraged to make additional income through their own efforts… Welfare, on the other hand, discourages people from working because, if your income increases, you lose benefits,”

With a UBI, in contrast to welfare, there’s no phase-out, no marriage penalties, no people falsifying information–and no costly bureaucracy.

Support for the concept isn’t limited to liberals. Milton Friedman famously proposed a “negative income tax,” and F.A. Hayek, the libertarian economist, wrote “There is no reason why in a free society government should not assure to all, protection against severe deprivation in the form of an assured minimum income, or a floor below which nobody need descend.” In 2016, Samuel Hammond of the libertarian Niskanen Center, noted the “ideal” features of a UBI: its unconditional structure avoids creating poverty traps; it sets a minimum income floor, raising worker bargaining power without wage or price controls; it decouples benefits from a particular workplace or jurisdiction; since it’s cash, it respects a diversity of needs and values; and it simplifies and streamlines a complex web of bureaucracy, eliminating rent seeking and other sources of inefficiency.

Hammond’s point about worker bargaining power is especially important. In today’s work environment, characterized by dramatically-diminished unions and the growth of the “gig economy,” wages  have been effectively stagnant for years, despite significant growth in productivity. With a UBI and single payer health coverage, workers would have the freedom to leave abusive employers, unsafe work conditions, and uncompetitive pay scales. A UBI wouldn’t level the playing field, but it would dramatically reduce the tilt. And if the robots do come—if the predictions of jobs that will be lost to AI and automation are even close to accurate—a UBI could act as a national safety-net, helping the country avoid massive civil turmoil.

There have been several pilot projects to assess the pros and cons of UBIs, and the results have been uniformly positive. Counter-intuitive as it seems, a significant body of research supports the importance of a robust social safety net to market economies. As Will Wilkinson of the libertarian Niskanen Center, has written:

“A sound and generous system of social insurance offers a certain peace of mind that makes the very real risks of increased economic dynamism seem tolerable to the democratic public, opening up the political possibility of stabilizing a big-government welfare state with growth-promoting economic liberalization.”

As Wilkinson has convincingly argued, today’s left fails to appreciate the role of capitalism and markets in producing abundance, and the right refuses to acknowledge the indispensable role safety nets play in placating the human, deeply-seated distaste for feelings of uncertainty and insecurity.

If we were a country that truly valued all citizens, these would be compelling arguments. It’s on my list for “after,” assuming we make it through these depressing times…

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