Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Sanctuary

You may have read about Jeff Sessions’ recent lawsuit against California. Sessions is pursuing the Trump Administration’s vendetta against immigrants (ostensibly against undocumented immigrants, but with rhetoric that signals distaste for anyone–legal or not–who is less pale than a Norwegian), and he’s determined to overcome any obstacles to that task.

Vox explains the lawsuit. 

The Department of Justice has just filed a lawsuitagainst the state over three laws it passed in 2017 that limit government officials’ and employers’ ability to help federal immigration agents, and that give California the power to review conditions in facilities where immigrants are being detained by the feds. Sessions, in a Wednesday speech to the California Peace Officers’ Association, a law enforcement union, is giving the message in person.

It’s a huge escalation of the Trump administration’s fight against “sanctuary cities” that limit local-federal cooperation on immigration enforcement. After a year of slow-moving or unsuccessful attempts to block “sanctuary” jurisdictions from getting federal grants, Sessions is moving to stop them from passing laws that limit cooperation to begin with. And he’s starting with a shot across the bow: targeting the bluest state in the union, whose 2017 bills represented a model for progressives to use federalism against the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

Sessions’ is determined to pursue his punitive federal policy without having to deal with impediments to enforcement enacted by progressive cities and states. According to Vox, we should view this lawsuit as the next phase “in a battle the Trump administration and California are equally enthusiastic about having: an ongoing culture war between progressive politicians who feel a duty to make their immigrant residents feel as safe as possible, and an administration (and its backers) whose stated policy is that no unauthorized immigrant should feel safe.”

Vox is right to label this a culture war. I used to reserve that term for fights over the so-called “social issues”–abortion, same-sex marriage, prayer in schools, religious icons on public land and the like. That was before I realized that environmentalism had also become a culture war issue, and that the division wasn’t simply between religious and secular Americans, but also between adherents of very different religious worldviews.

We Americans are currently very polarized, to put it mildly. The expanded “culture war” of which immigration is a part is an outgrowth of our increasing tribalism, our stubborn  residence within bubbles populated primarily by our “own kind,” both intellectually and geographically.

The big question is whether this is an era of transition–a time of paradigm shift brought on by rapid changes in technology and especially communications–or whether it is something more lasting. The activism of the younger generation that we have seen in the wake of the Parkland shooting is a hopeful sign that it may be the former–that the fear and insecurity that have prompted recent, distressing eruptions of bigotry and racial resentment will pass as my generation dies off.

The challenge will be to keep the Donald Trumps and Jeff Sessions of the world from inflicting irreparable damage in the meantime.

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They’re All Nuts

The other day, I spotted a bumper sticker that really says it all: “Any Sane Adult: 2020.”

It isn’t just our demented President. It’s his whole sorry crew.

Initially, I thought Scott Pruitt was just corrupt–bought and paid for by the fossil fuel companies he used to represent. And he certainly is corrupt, but the sleaze is only part of the problem. It appears he is as delusional and grandiose as Trump.

A recent profile of Pruitt in Mother Jones is chilling.

Pruitt’s quieter style masks the extent to which his approach to governing is the practical implementation of the president’s wrecking-ball rhetoric. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to “get rid” of the EPA “in almost every form.” In just his first year in office, Pruitt has already made stunning strides in that direction. He’s dismantling the Obama administration’s landmark Clean Power Plan, which imposed greenhouse gas limits on fossil-fuel-fired power plants. He has slashed enforcement efforts against polluters and tried to repeal rules meant to safeguard drinking-water supplies. He has threatened to roll back fuel economy standards. He’s moved to weaken new rules for smog, coal ash, and mercury pollution, poorly enforced a new toxic-chemical law, and refused to ban the dangerous pesticide chlorpyrifos. He’s taken aim at dozens of lesser-known rules covering everything from safety requirements for replacing asbestos to emergency response plans in hazardous chemical facilities.

Pruitt has chased away longtime EPA staff and dismantled scientific advisory boards. He has put representatives of fossil fuel companies in charge of key environmental decisions.

Pruitt has been almost cartoonishly contemptuous of the EPA’s work, pushing draconian cuts to the agency’s science, climate, regulatory, and enforcement offices. Meanwhile, in just his first year, he has reportedly expanded his around-the-clock security detail at a cost of at least $2 million annually. He spent $25,000 on a secure phone booth inside his office, at least $12,000for flights around the country between March and May (each of which included a leg in Tulsa), $58,000 on chartered and military flights over the summer, and nearly $40,000 on a trip to Morocco to promote natural gas exports. His frequent first-class trips with his security detail have added more than $200,000 to that tally.

Pruitt cites his evangelical Christianity to justify his environmental positions, especially his climate-change denialism.

But his biblical references are not restricted to climate change. Pruitt’s two guiding stars—evangelical faith and political zeal—sometimes seem interchangeable. In October, when he announced a controversial new “conflict of interest” policy barring researchers who receive EPA grants from serving on the agency’s science advisory boards, he quoted the Book of Joshua: “Choose this day whom you’re going to serve.”

The GOP is filled, of course, with politicians who twist biblical references to advance whack-a-doodle positions.

Pruitt evidently sees no conflict between his brand of Christianity and unethical behavior. Recently, there have been revelations about a sweetheart deal for a room in a Washington condominium owned by an energy lobbyist. One reporter noted that taking what look very much like bribes from energy lobbyists “is just par for the course for Pruitt.”

Pruitt wanted the EPA to purchase a “time-share” in a jet airplane for his personal use (and was evidently miffed when he was told it would be prohibitively expensive). He disregarded rules to give large raises to personal cronies he’d brought on staff. Newsweek reports that Pruitt uses high-ranking EPA investigators– who are supposed to be delving into environmental crimes– as his personal security detail.

“This never happened with prior administrators,” a former official of the agency’s Criminal Investigations Division told The Washington Post, which first reported the news. “These guys signed on to work on complex environmental cases, not to be an executive protection detail.” The Post report suggested that the EPA would spend $800,000 for “the security detail’s travel expenses” this fiscal year.

The corruption and grandiosity are appalling, but those pale in comparison to the damage he is doing to the environment. CNN recently obtained a secret memo detailing Pruitt’s new control over enforcement of the Clean Water Act.

In a new directive, Pruitt says he–and he alone– will make final decisions under the Act.

Pruitt has explicitly stripped authority from his staff and regional administrator and turned himself into America’s Water Czar. By secret fiat. If anyone wants to open a coal mine, pesticide plant, or factory farm, they no longer have to show that their actions won’t damage local streams, rivers, lakes and aquifers. They just need a nod from Pruitt.

Evidently, Pruitt doesn’t have grandchildren who will have to drink water, breathe air, or live on a ravaged planet.

I wonder where I can get that bumper-sticker……

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Who Do You Debate?

In a recent column in the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg raised a thorny but important issue: should liberal publications engage in affirmative action for conservatives?

The impetus for the question was a decision by The Atlantic to hire a conservative writer whose opinions would seem to place him outside the bounds of civil discourse.

The progressive objection to Williamson lies in the demeaning ways he’s written about poor people, black people, women, and trans people. He described an African-American boy in East St. Louis sticking out his elbows in “the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge.” Defiantly using male pronouns in a piece about the trans actress Laverne Cox, Williamson wrote, “Regardless of the question of whether he has had his genitals amputated, Cox is not a woman, but an effigy of a woman.” Feminism, he wrote, is a “collection of appetites wriggling queasily together like a bag of snakes.” He tweeted that women who have abortions should be hanged, later clarifying that while he has doubts about the death penalty, “I believe that the law should treat abortion like any other homicide.”

The decision to bring a “conservative voice” in-house is understandable–even commendable. After all, progressives insist that dialogue is good, that minds must be open, that all ideas deserve to be considered. The term “liberal” once denoted open-mindedness and the willingness to engage people with whom one disagreed. But Goldberg’s question goes to the heart of our current political dilemma:

[Atlantic’s] hiring has set off the latest uproar over which conservatives belong in the opinion sections of elite mainstream publications, including, of course, The New York Times. These controversies are, naturally, of particular interest to people who write for opinion sections, and so receive disproportionate media coverage. But there’s a broader significance to these recurring fights, because they’re about how we decide which views are acceptable at a time of collapsing mainstream consensus. The intellectual implosion of the Republican Party, it turns out, creates challenges for liberals as well as conservatives, because suddenly it’s not clear which views a person who aspires to fair-mindedness needs to grapple with.

This issue isn’t limited to publications. Universities are constantly being criticized because a preponderance of faculty–especially at more rigorous institutions–lean left. The accusation is that conservative scholars are subjected to discrimination.

The reality is considerably different–academics are pathetically eager to demonstrate even-handedness, and most of us who participate in search committees would be deliriously happy to discover that a highly qualified candidate was politically conservative.  (In some schools, like business, that does happen.) But search committees look first and foremost for evidence of sound scholarship–and in many fields, the candidates with the impressive resumes tend to be liberal.

Just as the university isn’t going to hire a science professor who insists the earth is flat or evolution is a myth, a reputable opinion journal is courting disaster by failing to distinguish between a philosophical conservative and a purveyor of conspiracy theories and/or racial resentments. These days, it’s hard to find a conservative who hasn’t been co-opted by Trumpism.

As Goldberg notes, it used to be that in order to understand national politics, you had to understand certain conservative ideas.

Trump put an end to that. The field of ideas has gone from being the ground on which politics are fought to a side in politics, which is why it’s so difficult to find serious intellectual Trump defenders. Trump has resentments and interests, but not ideology; he governs more as a postmodern warlord than a traditional party leader. Few things signal the irrelevance of ideas to his presidency like the appointment of John Bolton as national security adviser. Bolton’s relentless advocacy of regime change contradicts the isolationism Trump touted during the campaign. Trump called the Iraq war a “disaster”; Bolton is one of few who continue to defend it. Yet Bolton’s appointment isn’t discordant, because he and Trump are both belligerent bullies, and in this administration stylistic similarities matter more than policy details.

Inasmuch as there are ideas bound up with Trumpism, they are considered too disreputable for most mainstream publications. An opinion section that truly captured the currents of thought shaping our politics today might include Alex Jones, the conspiracy-mad Sandy Hook truther; the white nationalist Richard Spencer; and CliffsNotes fascist Steve Bannon.

The problem is, liberals need to engage with genuine conservatism. Just as the absence of a reputable Republican Party allows Democrats to become fragmented and intellectually lazy, liberal ideas need to be sharpened (and sometimes defeated) by contrary insights.

Giving a platform to people based upon their self-identification rather than their ability to articulate and defend a genuinely conservative point of view does conservatives–not to mention Americans– no favor.

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Follow The (Lack of) Money

After the West Virginia teacher’s strike, Vox published a fascinating graphic–an interactive database.

The article itself focused on the pay of teachers in West Virginia, and demonstrated how the buying power of those salaries–which remained essentially flat– had been eroded over the years by inflation. Accompanying the article was an interactive feature that allowed readers to see how their own states measured up.

I looked at Indiana.

The first graph showed average teacher pay (both elementary and secondary) over a fifteen-year period, in dollars, and not adjusted for inflation, both for Indiana and nationally. At the beginning of the fifteen years, national pay averaged $46,752 annually, and Indiana’s teachers came close to that average, at $45,791. By 2016, a significant gap had developed: national salaries averaged $58,950, but the average in Indiana was $50,554.

The graph that really “told the tale,” however, took the same time period and adjusted those numbers for inflation. That graph showed that teachers in Indiana have actually sustained a 15.1% pay cut over the past 15 years.

This is worse than the nation as a whole, where teachers have had their pay cut by an average of 3 percent when we adjust for inflation.

And since 2009, teachers in Indiana had their pay cut by 9.7 percent.

The interactive graph was followed by a table showing where each state’s education funding comes from. In Indiana, 9.8% comes from the federal government, 59.1% from the state, and 31.1% from local government.

There’s an old adage to the effect that “You get what you pay for.” Here in Indiana, the General Assembly came close to passing a bill that would have allowed school systems to hire classroom teachers who lack education credentials. As local media reported,

Like the rest of the country, Indiana is struggling to find enough qualified teachers to fill its public school classrooms. Lawmakers have proposed a possible solution: unlicensed teachers.

Right now, traditional public schools can only hire teachers who’ve met the state’s licensing requirements. While there are alternative paths to teaching, the traditional route to a license is a college teacher preparation program, student teaching and licensing exams in content and pedagogy, the actual practice of teaching.

Several recent studies have told us what most Americans already know: pay matters. The scholarship confirms that teacher salaries are linked to employee retention and that higher pay draws smarter people to the field and the classroom.

In most states, teachers are required to obtain a master’s degree. People with such credentials have options beyond the classroom. Very few of them are in a position to forego thousands of dollars annually in order work at jobs they may love, but that’s what we are asking them to do.

We shouldn’t be surprised if teachers in many (if not most) states who want to stay in the classroom follow the lead of West Virginia.

At some point, our slavish devotion to unrealistically-low tax rates has to give way to the need to pay for effective governance and necessary public services, including but not limited to education.

It’s like the old bumper sticker used to say: “Think education is expensive? Try ignorance.”

We’ve been trying ignorance for far too long, and thanks to the Trump Administration, the GOP and the NRA, among many others, we’re learning just how expensive it can be.

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It Isn’t That Simple

We Americans tend to be “either/or” people. A policy is right or wrong; a system is good or bad, “those people” are all sterling characters or (more frequently) worthless bums.

Things aren’t going well, and need to change? We throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Speaking of throwing, the election of Donald Trump has thrown a number of the problems with American governance into stark relief;  it’s hard to deny the influence of money, or the venality of certain lawmakers. But rather than resolutions to correct the laws and political processes that have led to the current mess, I am increasingly reading diatribes from people who have decided that it is all capitalism’s fault, and want to replace the country’s system of market economics with socialism.

As the kids might say, let’s get real.

First of all, the worst aspects of our current, deeply dysfunctional economy aren’t capitalism. A genuinely capitalist system is regulated by an impartial “umpire” (the government) to ensure that enterprises compete on that all-important level playing field. What we have today is corporatism: Corporatism has been described as what you have when you lose the laws and regulations that have kept businesses from being able to buy politicians– a system where government is effectively “owned” by special interests.

Market capitalism encourages transactions between willing buyers and sellers, both of whom are in possession of all information relevant to those transactions. Socialism is a system for the collective provision of goods and services that don’t meet that criterion–goods and services that the market cannot supply efficiently or fairly.  We “socialize” things like infrastructure, police and fire protection, and protection of clean air and water.

A healthy, growing economy requires both. Virtually all western industrialized countries have mixed economies, meaning that the government socializes certain areas of the economy and leaves other areas to the market. The challenge is to get the mix right.

Both capitalism and socialism can be manipulated by greedy or unethical offiicials–that’s why electing people who demonstrate respect for ethics and the rule of law is so critical. Unregulated capitalism becomes corporatism, allowing the “big guys” to prey on smaller businesses and consumers. Socializing too much of the economy depresses innovation,  invites stagnation and encourages petty bureaucrats to abuse their authority.

If we want to fix our broken economic system–and not so incidentally, our broken government–there is no substitute for doing the hard work of re-regulating markets in those sectors where markets work well, and carefully socializing areas (like health care) where the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that markets do not and cannot work.

We can and should argue about the level of regulation we impose on market enterprises–what is too much, what is not enough?–and we can and should require hard evidence before moving to socialize additional areas of the economy. What we shouldn’t do is apply  bumper-sticker solutions to problems requiring careful analysis and measured policymaking.

We don’t need to throw the baby out–just the dirty bathwater.

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