Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Why I Keep Harping On Gerrymandering

I’m sure many of you are getting tired of my repeated posts about gerrymandering. Sorry, but it’s important to detail all the various, terrible effects of this practice. (I can promise you that, if and when the Democrats retake control of the federal government and pass the John Lewis Act–which would outlaw gerrymandering among other desperately needed reforms–you will get a reprieve.)

In most of my past posts on the subject, I’ve detailed numerous negative results of the practice. Gerrymandering is the antithesis of democracy, because it allows representatives to choose their voters, rather than the other way around. It suppresses the votes of whichever party is the “loser” in that state. It increases political polarization by turning primaries  into the actual elections, virtually ensuring that Republicans will move to protect their right flank and Democrats their left. Etc.

What those past posts haven’t adequately described, however, is how the practice of partisan redistricting affects the legislative performance of those who owe their positions to the practice.

In one of his daily letters, Robert Hubbell provided an excellent example: he focused on a California Congressman named Kevin Kiley. Kiley represents one of the districts that was targeted by California’s mid-decade redistricting. When that redistricting occurred, he found himself left with a district that is no longer safe for the GOP. And suddenly, Hubbell reports, “he has found the courage to stand up to Trump.” Hubbell also notes that Don Bacon, who represents a competitive Nebraska district, frequently breaks with Trump. As he observes, “Funny how representing a competitive district gives Republicans the backbone to stand up to Trump.”

It isn’t just Washington.

Indianapolis Star columnist James Briggs recently pointed to the effects of gerrymandering on the Indiana legislature, where Republicans from safe districts that they’ve drawn revel in their super-majority and have become increasingly arrogant and entitled. As Briggs notes, the Republican House speaker, Todd Huston, controls what happens at the Indiana Statehouse. “Want to pass a bill? You need Huston. Want to stop a bad bill? Good luck without him.”

And how does an “entitled” Speaker perform?

Briggs reports on a recent, particularly egregious example. During the current session, Democrat Mitch Gore sponsored a bill that would have kept state officials from using taxpayer money to buy luxury cars (think Secretary of State Diego Morales’ GMC Yukon Denali and Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith’s $90,000 SUV.) The bill had passed out of committee unanimously and was ready for a floor vote. 

But Gore had evidently used his social media account to mock the Republicans who’d bought those luxury vehicles with Hoosiers’ tax dollars. As Briggs points out, the posts were well within “fair game” political territory–but Huston was evidently offended. He refused to bring the measure–which had substantial bipartisan support– to the floor for a vote.

So a good bill died.

As Briggs notes, this wasn’t the first time that Huston felt safe in jettisoning a bill for petty partisan reasons. As he writes, “Ideally, the Indiana House speaker would not be that petty. But if he is, that’s his prerogative, and Indiana Democrats need to figure out how to deal with a Statehouse kingpin who can strike them down at any time, for any reason.”

What Briggs (accurately) calls “pettiness” at the state level, is mirrored by what frustrated citizens call spinelessness at the federal level. These behaviors are all enabled by partisan redistricting–by gerrymandering. Representatives who believe they don’t have to worry about the approval or disapproval of their constituents feel free to ignore the common good in favor of  perceived personal political advantage, or just pique. They are less likely to hold town halls, or take the opportunity to find out what the folks they (theoretically) represent really think or want, and far–far–more likely to toe extremist partisan lines.

Good bills get deep-sixed. “Oversight” of corruption is limited to examination of members of the other party (see James Comer and the Epstein files.)

Without competition, good government takes a back seat to “what’s in it for me.” As Independent Indiana insists, competitive elections lead to better leaders and a stronger state.

The current crisis in America isn’t simply the result of electing terrible people. It’s a result of a practice–partisan redistricting aka gerrymandering– that virtually guarantees that terrible people will be the ones deciding who gets elected. You can call that systemic flaw many things, but democratic isn’t one of them.

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Parental Rights– And Wrongs

One of the thorniest issues in American law involves “parental rights.” On the one hand, the law recognizes the primacy and importance of parenthood, acknowledging the right of parents to inculcate (or at least try to inculcate) their children with their own values and religious beliefs.

On the other hand, the law makes exceptions for behaviors that abuse or endanger children. Courts have long intervened when parents have tried to deny their children life-saving medical care in favor of “praying the illness away,” no matter how sincere such religious beliefs may be. Child welfare departments are supposed to intervene in cases where parents are physically or sexually abusing their children.

In other words, the law attempts to balance respect for the rights and prerogatives of parents with the safety and well-being of children.

Which brings us to a case in Texas. (Of course, it would be Texas…)

There’s a case pending before the Supreme Court of Texas that will test the reach of that state’s newly minted “parental rights amendment.” That state-level constitutional amendment, approved by Texas voters in 2025, declares that parents have the “inherent right to exercise care, custody, and control” over their children and to make decisions about their upbringing.” The measure provides that any governmental action found to “interfere” with those parental rights must be subjected to the highest level of judicial scrutiny.

Presumably, this stringent level of analysis is intended to protect parents whose conduct is ambiguous, or those who engage in parenting rooted in foreign cultural backgrounds. The record in this case is neither. As the linked article reports,

The conduct at issue includes food deprivation, beatings with a belt, forced wall sits that lasted hours, and prolonged kneeling on grains of rice—forms of punishment that most people would recognize as physical and emotional abuse. The question now being seriously entertained is whether the Texas Constitution requires courts to presume such treatment is protected parental decision-making unless the state can meet the nearly insurmountable burden of strict scrutiny.

That this argument is being advanced at all is chilling. That it is being supported by prominent right-wing advocacy organizations, including the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Family Freedom Project, should force a reckoning with what the contemporary “parental rights” movement actually is.

We are all familiar with the rhetoric. Public schools are “undermining” parents. (Usually, by acknowledging that LGBTQ+ people exist, or by teaching accurate history or science rather than creationism.) As the linked essay notes, the phrase “parental rights” has functioned as a euphemism—it isn’t aimed at parents’ right to raise their children in a manner consistent with their values, but intended to protect a parental right to control what “any child is allowed to know, see, or understand about the world.”

The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Even as Texas voters were told the amendment would keep the government out of family life, the state was aggressively inserting itself into families whose children needed gender-affirming care, going so far as to label supportive parents as child abusers and to threaten investigations and removals. Parental autonomy, it turned out, was conditional. It applied only when parents’ decisions are aligned with conservative ideology.

Parental rights advocates insist that parents should have a veto over school library books or pronouns, but that same movement is quick to override parents who seek reproductive health care or gender-affirming treatment for their children. Now, the Texas Supreme Court is being asked to rule that extreme corporal punishment and deprivation are protected  parental “rights.” As the essay says, such a finding would be tantamount to ruling “that a child’s right to bodily integrity is subordinate to a parent’s ideological claim of authority, even in the face of clear harm.”

That unthinkable result would confirm the actual intent of the modern parental rights movement. As the author asserts, the movement is not about freedom from government overreach in any principled sense. It is about allowing some parents to “enforce obedience, suppress identity, and inflict harm without meaningful oversight.”

A society that treats children as mere extensions of parental will, rather than as people with rights of their own, abandons one of the most basic functions of law: protecting those who cannot protect themselves. If “parental rights” can be stretched to cover child abuse, then the phrase no longer names a safeguard for families. It names a license—and a warning.

The lower courts had (properly) terminated parental rights in the case. Given those rulings and the copious record of abuse, the willingness to appeal–to argue that abuse is a “parental right”– is a chilling admission.

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Listen To Nick Hanauer

I have previously referred to billionaire Nick Hanauer, and his clear-eyed view of what economic evidence tells us. Hanauer has, for example, explained multiple times why raising the minimum wage, not cutting taxes, creates jobs: it’s when people have enough disposable income to buy your widgets that employers hire people to make them. (When Seattle ignored the plutocrats’ warnings and raised its minimum wage, Hanauer’s position was vindicated.)

In 2023, Hanauer and a co-author wrote a book titled “Corporate Bullshit,” intended to help readers identify the “pernicious propaganda” promulgated by the wealthy. The book identified six categories of falsehoods that Hanauer says repeatedly thwart progress on issues ranging from civil rights, to wealth inequality, climate change, voting rights, and gun responsibility.

As Hanauer points out, Americans have a bad habit of giving credence to arguments made by the wealthy and powerful simply because those making the arguments are wealthy and powerful. (It always reminds me of that lyric from  Fiddler on the Roof’s “If I Were A Rich Man.”  “The most important men in town would come to call on me, asking questions that would cross a Rabbis eyes–and it won’t make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong…When you’re rich they think you really know.”)

Recently, on Facebook, Hanauer shared a letter he’d sent to one of the “movers and shakers” who spoke at Davos. Since he publicly shared it, I assume I can share it as well.

Here’s his letter:

I listened closely to your remarks at Davos, and you’re right about the core problem: capitalism is losing public trust because prosperity has left too many people behind. I warned us all about this when I wrote “The Pitchforks Are Coming for Us Plutocrats” back in 2014. You’re also correct that GDP and market caps are terrible proxies for whether an economy is actually working for working people.

But here’s the thing—this isn’t a mystery anymore, and it hasn’t been for a long time.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been having conversations—often with people who run large institutions, manage serious capital, and employ thousands—about exactly what to do next.

On Pitchfork Economics and in conversations across the ecosystem, we’ve talked with people like Joseph Stiglitz, Heather Boushey, Mariana Mazzucato, Robert Reich, Todd Tucker, Elizabeth Anderson, Mark Blyth, and many others who have laid out, in plain language, what will actually fix this problem.

They all point to a similar set of solutions:
–Tax extreme wealth and income at levels that reflect their real social cost
– Rebuild antitrust enforcement and curb monopoly power
– Strengthen labor markets and worker bargaining power
– Invest aggressively in public goods that make broad-based prosperity possible

None of this is radical. In fact, it’s how the U.S. built the most prosperous middle class in history. So when you say the answer is more “conversation,” I have to strongly disagree. We’re past the conversation phase. There are many ideas on the table, from every corner of the world. The evidence is overwhelming. And the political backlash you’re worried about is already here precisely because action hasn’t followed conversation.

On behalf of the handful of us zillionaires who have benefited from this system, we don’t need more panels or better messaging. We need the courage to support policies that will redistribute power, not just wealth—and to do so even when it’s uncomfortable or expensive for people like us.

You said that in order to solve inequality, the mountain—meaning Davos—needed to come down to earth. It’s a nice image, but it doesn’t reflect reality. What really needs to happen is the mountain needs to stop extracting from everyone else.

It’s fashionable these days to bash all billionaires, and a large number of them certainly deserve that bashing. But billionaires–like all other groups of people–are not a monolithic category. Just as all Somalis aren’t guilty of fraud in Minneapolis, all Jews do not support Israel’s activities in Gaza, and (possibly) all ICE agents aren’t thugs. We lose our grasp of reality when we fail to recognize the differences within identifiable populations.

Billionaires aren’t all like Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison. There are also people like Nick Hanauer and Abigail Disney. When the people with pitchforks come for the billionaires, as Hanauer has warned, they’ll need to be selective….



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The Smell Of Hypocrisy In The Morning…

I know we Americans are facing truly horrific challenges–the White House is occupied by a man whose malevolent insanity is impossible to ignore. His ICE agents are America’s version of a (masked) Gestapo. Our “guardrails” have failed us, with feckless Congressional Republicans refusing to honor their oaths of office and a corrupt Supreme Court enabling the madman in the Oval Office.

It’s an ugly picture, and I don’t want to minimize how dire things are. But what has really incensed me–probably out of proportion to the severity of all the other threats we face–is the unbelievable hypocrisy of both Trump and MAGA.

Let’s talk about guns. Trump wouldn’t have won in 2024 without the gun lobby–his victory was thin. He sold himself to the NRA and other Second Amendment “patriots” as a defender of their ahistorical application of that Amendment. Now, he defends the murder of a peaceful protester by his ICE thugs by declaring that the protester’s lawful possession of a gun–which that protester never held and certainly never “brandished”–justified killing him, saying “You can’t bring a gun. You just can’t.”

I’m waiting for those intrepid Second Amendment protectors in Congress to call for his impeachment…

Then there’s Trump’s even more egregious lie about why he sent ICE into Minneapolis–and his rhetoric about stamping out “fraud” that he attributed to all Somali residents (they’re Black, you know, so they must all be guilty). It was immaterial that those allegations, which involved a small number of Somalis, had already been investigated and addressed by state law enforcement. That excuse was really rich, coming from a President who continues to pardon people found guilty of multiple crimes–including fraud–by juries. Of course, those pardons only issue when the fraudster or a relative pays him off, or when–like the January 6th rioters–they engaged in criminal behaviors at his request.

And don’t get me started on Trump’s excuse for bombing fishing ships out of international waters and murdering an estimated 124 people on board without any due process or evidence. His excuse was that those boats were carrying drugs. Meanwhile, he granted a full and complete pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was given due process, and who had been convicted in a court of law for conspiring to import over 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.. 

Perhaps the most blatant hypocrisy is coming from Minnesota, where Trump’s MAGA supporters are having what one pundit called a “toddler tantrum” over the fact that hundreds of Minneapolis area businesses have put “NO ICE SERVED HERE” signs in their windows. The MAGA people fulminating over this “outrage” are the very people who have spent years protecting the “religious rights” of business owners. They are the same people who’ve gone to court to protect the “First Amendment rights” of bakers to refuse to bake wedding cakes for same-sex couples, and to protect web architects from having to design websites for gay folks.

And they won. Our disgraceful Supreme Court went out of its way (okay, out of the Constitution’s way) to accommodate those very “sincere” religious folks, to allow them to refuse to serve people whose very existence offended their “sincerely held” beliefs. Our home-grown theocrats celebrated the “liberty” of business owners to discriminate on the basis of principle. Their current outrage is just evidence of what the rest of us have always known: they were hypocrites. They weren’t interested in defending just any “principles” or moral beliefs upon which a given business owner might sincerely be acting–they were only interested in sending a “religious” message to particular people of whom they disapproved.

Trump’s hypocrisy is nothing new.

Back in 2022, Austin Sarat wrote in The Hill that Trump’s hypocrisy undermines democracy by eroding trust and breeding cynicism. “What Trump practices and what he preaches have little in common. He feels no compunction about doing the very things that he denounces and uses to demonize his political opponents.”

But democratic politics cannot thrive, or perhaps even survive, when hypocrisy becomes the norm. Political scientist John Keane has rightly observed that “Hypocrisy … is the soil in which antipathy towards democracy always takes root.”

Keane argues that democratic politics rests on a foundation of trust among citizens and between citizens and their representatives. Hypocrisy erodes that trust. It leads people to discount what others say in the political arena and promotes a corrosive disgust with politics.

“Corrosive distrust.” Sounds like a pretty apt description of where we are….

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I Have A Litle List…

Given the fire hose of illegality, unconstitutionality and immense stupidity coming out of the Trump administration on a daily if not hourly basis, people might be forgiven for failing to notice the effort to access and amass all kinds of data.

But control of data is important–and the nature of the information the administration is stockpiling is chilling.

As the Bulwark recently reported, the administration isn’t just compiling lists of immigrants in order to unleash ICE on them. It is busy collecting a wide variety of other information– lists of people with developmental disabilities, lists of “dissidents”—and lists of Jews.

The administration’s effort to collect such data may seem counter-intuitive; after all, it has been busy deleting and censoring any information that it finds inconsistent with its efforts to promote White Supremacy. (As a political science friend recently pointed out, the only campaign promise Trump has kept is his promise to MAGA to re-institute racism.) In addition to its ideologically-motivated elimination of statistics on climate change, hunger, trade and sexual orientation, it has methodically deleted photos of nonwhite people who have excelled in various areas, and even photographic evidence that nonwhites have served in the military from government websites. 

But now it’s becoming clearer that some of the most disturbing developments don’t involve data the administration is suppressing, but rather data it’s collecting—in some cases illegally—and the ways those data can be weaponized against perceived enemies.

It isn’t only nonwhite folks who are being targeted, it’s any group that MAGA fears and/or hates. The administration has actually sued the University of Pennsylvania because that institution has refused to hand over a list of its Jewish faculty, staff, and students. (Penn quite correctly has refused, but last year, Barnard complied with a similar demand.)

As the Bulwark article points out–and as every Jew knows–there are good historical reasons to worry when an authoritarian  leader is trying to compile a registry of Jews–especially when that leader has referred to Jews as “disloyal,” and that leader’s coalition has many outspoken Jew haters and Holocaust deniers.

It isn’t simply an effort to compile a list of individuals that MAGA considers “Other.” The administration’s war on diversity–on people and places that aren’t lily-White “Christian” enclaves–extends to entiire Blue states–states that Trump obviously considers enemy territory. The AP has recently reported that executive branch agencies have been ordered to compile a list of monies being sent to Blue states.

President Donald Trump’s budget office this week ordered most government agencies to compile data on the federal money that is sent to 14 mostly Democratic-controlled states and the District of Columbia in what it describes as a tool to “reduce the improper and fraudulent use of those funds.”

The order comes a week after Trump said he intended to cut off federal funding that goes to states that are home to “sanctuary cities” that resist his immigration policies. He said that would start Feb. 1 but hasn’t unveiled further details.

The obvious purpose of these lists–the only reason to acquire this data–is to differentiate between those MAGA considers “real Americans” (Whites, certain “Christians,” residents of Red states) and those who must be considered enemies. Other.

There are a number of recent “remakes” of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I have a little list…”  In all of them, the chorus is the same: “They never will be missed”….

Shades of Joe McCarthy.

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