Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Texas Again

Texas really should serve as the primo example of a thoroughly UnAmerican state, a first-place spot that has been occupied until now by Florida. Granted, Florida won’t give up its win without a fight, and DeSantis’ success in turning Florida into a quasi-fascist state is impressive in a horrifying sort of way. But Texas is a worthy competitor.

We’ve all seen the death and destruction that accompanied the recent floods, and while Trump’s inept administration contributed significantly to the tragedy, the refusal to provide adequate warning mechanisms was a state and local decision. That bit of bad governance shouldn’t have come as a surprise; the administration of Governor Abbott–an administration that includes the state’s slimy Attorney General Ken Paxton and a GOP-dominated legislature–has diligently followed the MAGA (and Florida) playbook.

A few examples:

As enthusiastic participants in MAGA’s war on education, Texas has passed laws restricting expressive conduct on public campuses—banning protests and reassigning governance authority from faculty to politically appointed boards.

In its zealous war on immigration, Operation Lone Star has used razor wire and troop deployments, and engaged in mass busing of migrants to so-called “sanctuary cities.” The state also created state-level crimes for illegal entry and empower state judges to deport migrants–measures even the very conservative Fifth Circuit ruled unconstitutional.

Texas has enthusiastically fought the culture war: banning abortion, banning gender-affirming treatment for minors, and threatening medical professionals with license revocation.

Texas Republicans have eliminated Diversity, Equity & Inclusion efforts wherever possible, and removed such offices from public universities.

The state passed a law restricting content moderation on social media (an effort that has been temporarily blocked).

Because cities have a tendency to vote Blue, Texas passed what has been dubbed a “Death Star” law, restricting the powers of municipal governments to pass progressive policies. (A Travis County judge struck it down as unconstitutional interference in local self-governance.)

The Texas GOP’s Christian Nationalists won passage of a senate bill 10 requiring display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

Given the fact that many of these efforts have been stymied by courts noting their inconsistency with that pesky constitution, Abbott is emulating Trump; The Houston Chronicle recently accused Abbott of judicial appointments intended to reshape the Texas Supreme Court in his image.

It isn’t just the Texas Supreme Court. The Lever recently published an expose of a new kind of “court packing” in the great state of Texas.

On Sept. 1, Texas is slated to open its new business courts, a brand-new legal system backed by Big Oil — and several of the court’s main judges have in the past represented fossil fuel companies as lawyers, The Lever has found.

The judges were hand-picked over the last two months by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, a major recipient of oil industry cash — and many can be quickly replaced if they hand down decisions he opposes, a judicial design that he championed.

The courts consist of 11 regional business courts and a new statewide court of appeals to hear appellate litigation, which are expected to have immediate impacts on environmental cases in the state. As Public Health Watch, an independent investigative news organization, reported last month, a suite of cases involving state environmental authorities will now be transferred from a generally liberal appeals court to the state’s new Fifteenth Court of Appeals, created to oversee the business courts.

There, these cases will be decided by a panel of conservative judges historically friendly to industry — particularly oil and gas interests, a powerful force in Texas.

As a leader of the state’s Public Citizen organization put it, Abbot has created a “boutique court for corporations where he, not the voters, gets to pick the judges.” The article goes into some detail about the judges who have been appointed–details unlikely to comfort litigants who might be hoping for dispassionate judicial conduct.

For the past several years, pundits have predicted a revolt by Texas voters sufficient to turn the state purple, if not Blue. Extreme gerrymandering has forestalled that revolt, if indeed it was imminent, and as I posted a few days ago, Abbott has now called for a mid-cycle redistricting–a move urged by Trump as a means to maintain GOP control of the House of Representatives.

Political experts are dubious about the tactic. As Politico has explained,

The thoroughness of Texas’ gerrymander during the last round of redistricting in 2021 leaves no room for Republicans to grow their 25-member majority among the state’s 38 seats in the House of Representatives. Any alteration of the map will only hurt the GOP’s sitting incumbents and comes with a risk of backfiring.

We can only hope.

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It’s All About Bigotry

When Trump was elected in 2016, I was regularly reprimanded for insisting that MAGA was all about racism. People kinder than me (and that’s a lot of people) wanted to see MAGA voters as folks voting pocketbook issues, not as a re-emergence of the Confederacy or KKK.

The political science research that just keeps coming, however, supports my much less polite analysis. 

Let’s face it: we are fighting a new version of the Civil War. This time, the people who stand to benefit most from defending  bigotry aren’t the owners of plantations–they are the plutocrats and grifters dismantling the American system for profit–but like those plantation owners, our contemporary would-be overlords are using racism to enlist the support of a population desperate to believe that their religion and/or skin color makes them superior.

The evidence is overwhelming. There are the efforts to erase that hated DEI, the constant war on “woke-ism,” and the very unsubtle movement to substitute nationalist mythology for accurate history.

A recent example: An administration that has hollowed out the ranks of rangers who tend our national parks is now insisting that those who remain scrub park gift shops of “corrosive ideology.”

Remaining staff members have been ordered to report the presence of any retail item that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” or that includes in its description “matters unrelated to beauty, abundance or grandeur.” (It will be interesting to see how park leaders follow the administration’s directive in parks established to pursue an individual mission–for example, parks created to inform the public about the civil war, Indigenous history, slavery or other topics the Trump administration considers “defamatory” of historical Americans.) 

Hardly less obvious is the scorn and contempt constantly heaped by MAGA on urban America. As Paul Krugman has recently–and accurately–noted, these ugly assaults on the nation’s cities are both vile and dishonest–and all about bigotry. What really bothers MAGA about urban life is the idea that non-white people are exercising political power.

After Mamdani won New York’s Democratic primary, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared that New York is about to turn into “Caracas on the Hudson.” As Krugman observed,

Bessent isn’t really deeply worried about Mamdani’s economic ideas. But he feels free, maybe even obliged, to slander a foreign-born Muslim with language he would never use about a white Christian politician, even if that politician were (like some of his colleagues in the Trump administration) a total crackpot.

Krugman points to the resurgence of raw racism emanating from the Trump administration. That racism is apparent in the cuts at the National Institutes of Health, which are

so tilted against racial minorities that a federal judge — one appointed by Ronald Reagan! — declared he’d never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. You can see it in the renaming of military bases after Confederate generals — that is, traitors who fought for slavery. You can even see it in a change in the military’s shaving policy that is clearly custom-designed to drive Black men — who account for around a quarter of the Army’s new recruits — out of the service.

One problem with bigotry is that it feeds on itself. The definition of “my tribe” contracts. We saw it in Nazi Germany, where–as Martin Niemoller famously wrote, eventually there is no one left to “speak out for me.” As Krugman writes,

Now, maybe you imagine that you yourself won’t suffer from this new reign of bigotry and imagine that everyone you care about is similarly safe. But if that’s what you think, you’re likely to face a rude awakening.

I personally don’t have any illusions of safety. Yes, I’m a native-born white citizen. But my wife and her family are Black, and some of my friends and relatives are foreign-born U.S. citizens.

Furthermore, I’m Jewish, and anyone who knows their history realizes that whenever right-wing bigotry is on the ascendant, we’re always next in line. Are there really people out there naïve enough to believe MAGA’s claims to be against antisemitism, who can’t see the transparent cynicism and dishonesty?

The fact is that the Trump administration already contains a number of figures with strong ties to antisemitic extremists. The Great Replacement Theory, which has de facto become part of MAGA’s ideology, doesn’t just say that there’s a conspiracy to replace whites with people of color; it says that it’s a Jewish conspiracy.

There really is no “middle ground” between White Christian Nationalism and the American Idea.  Which of those will prevail is what this iteration of the Civil War is all about.

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Texas

Coverage of the horrific floods in Texas has dominated the media for several days–first, with videos and descriptions of the devastation and reports of the growing numbers of dead and missing, and more recently, with emerging evidence of governmental failures that undoubtedly cost lives by delaying both effective warnings and responses.

According to numerous media reports, local officials had been told repeatedly over a number of years that the area needed a better warning system, including sirens. But this was Red Texas, which–like Red Indiana–is a state governed by lawmakers congenitally allergic to taxation and dismissive of the common good. Local and state officials refused to spend tax dollars to pay for improving the warning system.

Worse, according to the Washington Post, the county had technology to turn every cellphone in the river valley into a blaring alarm, but local officials didn’t use it before or during the early-morning hours of July 4 as river levels rose to record heights. County officials did eventually send text-message alerts that morning, but only to residents who had registered to receive them.  According to the Post’s review of emergency notifications that night, county officials did not activate a more powerful notification tool they had previously used, even as federal meteorologists were warning of catastrophic flooding.

As usual, the cuts made by DOGE–ostensibly to “waste and fraud”–were also implicated in the tragedy. Thanks to indiscriminate cuts by people who had no understanding of the systems they were devastating, the National Weather Service was short-staffed. Its forecasting evidently remained accurate, but the job of “warning coordination,” the position responsible for transmitting  information from the forecasts to relevant local officials — was vacant.

FEMA’s reduced staffing–including terminated contracts for call-center operators–also deepened the crisis by delaying relief efforts for several days. Phone calls weren’t answered–indeed, according to media reports, response rates declined from nearly 100% to just over 5% on July 7.

And then there was the further delay caused by Kristy Noem, one of the members of Trump’s inept cabinet (appointees who confirm the accuracy of my favorite protest sign: “IKEA has better cabinets.”) According to CNN, Noem recently enacted a sweeping rule requiring every contract and grant over $100,000 to obtain her personal sign-off before any funds can be released–a rule displaying a total lack of understanding of the agency’s function and mission.

For FEMA, where disaster response costs routinely soar into the billions as the agency contracts with on-the-ground crews, officials say that threshold is essentially “pennies,” requiring sign-off for relatively small expenditures.

In essence, they say the order has stripped the agency of much of its autonomy at the very moment its help is needed most.

“We were operating under a clear set of guidance: lean forward, be prepared, anticipate what the state needs, and be ready to deliver it,” a longtime FEMA official told CNN. “That is not as clear of an intent for us at the moment.”

For example, as central Texas towns were submerged in rising waters, FEMA officials realized they couldn’t pre-position Urban Search and Rescue crews from a network of teams stationed regionally across the country.

Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until some 72 hours after the flooding began. 

Of course, the overall lack of preparedness, both locally and nationally, was enabled and abetted by the GOP’s widespread denial of the reality of climate change. (What’s that saying? “Reality doesn’t care if you believe it or not…”)

I wonder whether those MAGA Texans who enthusiastically supported Trump are delighted with the administration’s destruction of that hated “deep state,” filled with “elitists” who actually knew what they were doing. Are they applauding the substitution of lily-White ignoramuses for those despised (and credentialed) “DEI hires”? 

And predictably, In the wake of this enormous tragedy, Texas Republicans are adding insult to injury. Rather than exacting consequences for the glaring ineptitude of various state and federal officials, Texas has moved to further protect them from any possible voter retribution. Governor Greg Abbott has announced that mid-decade redistricting will be taken up during the state’s upcoming special session. The move is in response to White House pressure; Texas Republicans have been urged to redraw the state’s congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm election in order to protect the party’s slim majority in the House–a majority delivered via the GOP’s previous gerrymandering.

Welcome to MAGA’s version of democracy. Are we great yet? 

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The War On Inclusion

It’s a simple word, intended to communicate an equally simple concept. “Inclusion” is the practice or policy of extending equal access to opportunities and resources for people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized. In other words, it’s an affirmative effort to avoid discriminating against people based upon their race, religion or disability…a commitment to simple fairness.

The goal is to treat people as individuals, to avoid unfair exclusions that aren’t based upon the  deficits of a particular person but rather upon the practice of stereotyping all members of a group–a practice properly described as discrimination. What is it about that goal that so terrifies the MAGA cult? 

Here in Indiana, our MAGA Governor Mike Braun has proudly announced the elimination of “DEI” from hundreds of state programs and websites. As various outlets around the state have reported, that effort has included cancellation of grants to reduce racial health inequities, elimination of scholarships for Black and Hispanic students, bias training workshops and much more. Programs have been abolished, and references to them in agency websites erased in order to comply with a directive from Braun that ordered agencies to replace “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, throughout state government.

Instead, Braun decreed that state policies would elevate “merit, excellence and innovation.” 

I will just note in passing that the individuals currently governing Indiana fail–monumentally–to exhibit either merit or excellence, and that MAGA’s sole “innovation” has been an effort to return the state to the 1950s. I will also note that the clear intent of  substituting “merit and excellence”  for “equity and inclusion” is to convey the racist belief that merit and excellence aren’t attributes to be found in minority populations.

The Capital Chronicle dove into Braun’s effort, examining more than 3,800 pages of information released, and listing numerous examples highlighting the fervor of the attack on previous state efforts to ameliorate the effects of entrenched bigotries. For example, the Indana Department of Health has eliminated two positions– a disparities coordinator and a maternal health coordinator–despite the fact, as the Chronicle noted, that “Indiana has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the world — and Black mothers are more likely to die in the year following childbirth than their white counterparts.”

The linked report lists the elimination of dozens of these efforts, many of them obviously motivated by a desire to exclude minority populations, and others just unintentionally stupid or even humorous. The Indiana Economic Development Corporation, for example, which spends millions of dollars annually in an effort to bring new business into the state, has reportedly “revised its efforts.” I guess that means the agency won’t work to recruit businesses headed by Blacks or women, or enterprises seen as “woke,” despite the agency’s primary mission…

What about the other terms in DEI that so offend our MAGA White Christian male overlords?

Diversity simply means differences. For decades, scholarship has confirmed the benefits of diverse schoolrooms and business enterprises–benefits that are particularly important in a very diverse polity. If I visit your widget store and see no one who looks like me, it turns out that I am less likely to buy my widgets from you. If I am a resident of a city or town entirely governed by folks who represent only a small segment of the population, I’m less likely to participate in political life and more likely to harbor grievances.

And what about that third word: equity?

Equity is defined as the quality of being fair and impartial. Equity does not require giving minority folks extra advantages; it is a commitment to avoid disadvantaging people who don’t share your race, religion or able-bodiedness. When members of a majority group refuse to extend fundamental fairness to people outside their tribe, they are sending a message. They are telling us they don’t want to compete on a level playing field.

They are telling us who they are.  

Have some of the DEI efforts of the past few years gone overboard? Have some of them been less than effective–even “tilting” the playing field a bit too much? I’m sure they have. Whenever a society makes an effort to remedy a previous unfairness, some folks will go too far (and others will be too timid to be effective). But the all-out assault on efforts to erase practices that have been unfair and prejudiced isn’t an effort to correct excesses. It’s an effort to reinstate old prejudices, to offer justifications for bigotries, and to reinforce White (straight) male supremacy.

The Trump/MAGA assault on civic equality is an effort to return to some very Bad Old Days. We cannot allow it to succeed.

 
 
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More Insanity In The “Big Beautiful Bill”

When a piece of legislation is over 900 pages long, it shouldn’t surprise us to discover all kinds of “hidden” provisions that went unread and undiscovered even by the people elected to read and understand what they’re passing. (That includes Trump, of course–a man who evidently can’t read and quite clearly doesn’t understand anything beyond his own childish needs and impulses. Media sources have reported on his meeting with Republican legislators, during which he advised them not to touch Medicaid– totally unaware of what was in his “Beautiful” bill…)

Media outlets have varied widely in the adequacy of their coverage. Most have focused on the major elements of this abysmal legislation: the three trillion dollars plus it will add to the nation’s deficit, the largesse to plutocrats “paid for” by robbing millions of low and middle-income Americans of health care and food stamps, the gargantuan sums allocated to the creation of what can only be described as a Trump administration version of the Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s notorious SS.

Those elements are, admittedly, both the most prominent and most terrifying aspects of the bill, but the American Prospect recently highlighted ten lesser-known provisions that ranged from stupid to cruel.

File this one under “stupid.” The bill forces the states to shoulder more of the costs of the SNAP program. But when Lisa Murkowski negotiated a two-year exemption from cost-sharing for Alaska, the language of that provision exempted all states with an “erroneous payment rate” above 13.3 percent– language operating to exempt not just Alaska, but states with the ten highest error rates–and inadvertently incentivizing other states to increase waste and fraud in their programs.

The bill eliminates the $200 tax on gun silencers. Words fail.

Section 70309 allows municipalities to issue tax-exempt bonds to build spaceports. (I have no clue. Perhaps we’re closer to space travel that I thought?)

MAGA’s love of fossil fuels prompted a provision–inserted by Oklahoma’s Republican Senator Lankford– that eliminated taxes on oil drillers. The bill “includes an exemption for domestic oil and gas companies from the corporate alternative minimum tax, as long as they have intangible drilling and development costs.” Oil companies have lobbied consistently for this nice little loophole. (Climate change? Nah…just another scam like vaccinations…)

And speaking of the environment, the bill not only eviscerates President Biden’s climate program, it also provides vast subsidies to coal producers. As the article reports,

At least four million acres of federal land will be opened up to coal leasing, and the royalty rate will be cut from 12.5 percent to 8 percent. Incentivizing coal—the worst fossil fuel for the climate and also particulate pollution—in any way is bad, but Republicans are also literally subsidizing foreign steel companies in places like China, India, and Brazil, by making metallurgical coal eligible for “critical mineral” subsidies through 2030. This coal, which is used in blast furnaces to create steel, is mostly exported to poorer countries with fewer air pollution regulations. Sure enough, the coal doesn’t even have to be used domestically to get the subsidy.

Umn…how, exactly, does this make America great?

There’s much more: a $40 million appropriation to the National Endowment for the Humanities to build statues for a “Garden of Heroes” in Washington, D.C. (We don’t have money to feed children, but we do have money to build a “blood and soil” monument…); removal of limits on the ability of folks with pass-through income (think law partners or hedge fund managers), to take unlimited SALT deductions, giving rich people “yet another legal tax avoidance scheme, worth between $35 and $40 billion over the next decade.”

As policy analysts pore over the 900+ pages of this monstrosity, they will undoubtedly find more examples of pork for donors and lobbyists, funded by vicious cuts to programs for the needy. Meanwhile, the propaganda machine rolls on, with Republicans insisting that Medicaid recipients–the vast majority of whom are children, disabled and elderly–just need to get jobs. (As one FB response asked, “please send me a list of jobs that are available for Alzheimer patients.”) 92% of the rest already do have jobs.

Indiana’s two senators voted for this obscenity. Senator Jim Banks is a White Christian Nationalist and a fervent member of the MAGA cult; his vote was expected. Senator Todd Young, who might have been an effective lawmaker in a different party or time, and who clearly knows better, issued a statement that is gobsmacking in its dishonesty:

“The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will deliver the largest tax cut in history for working and middle-class Hoosiers, expand the child tax credit, spur new economic growth and job creation, and advance President Trump’s agenda.”

I don’t know how Senator Young sleeps at night….

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