Public Policy and Governance – Page 3

Reclaiming America

In the wake of the November election, I can’t count the number of friends and family members who have declared a moratorium on political news–who have taken a “time out” in order to protect their equilibrium/sanity and avoid descending into depression.

I will admit that I have dialed back my usual immersion in the news, for the same reason. It really has been an act of self-preservation to take a vacation from the evidence that so many Americans have dismissed the ideals of our founding, and are willing to close their eyes to threats posed to the principles that truly did make America great.

But a vacation is not a departure, and it’s time to determine how each of us can contribute to a massive uprising of people who may have different political affiliations and/or policy goals, but who agree on the importance of protecting civil liberties and participatory democracy in the face of the grifters, autocrats and racists–elected and otherwise– who are preparing to assume control of the government.

If those of you reading this are like me, your inbox has been filling up with notices from political and nonprofit organizations, both local and national, outlining their preparations for sustained activism in the face of those threats. One example–Democracy 2025–lists 280+ member organizations, and over 800 Lawyers, advocates, and experts already engaged in the work.

Despite claims, no President or their allies can just snap their fingers to implement an anti-democratic vision. Our laws and Constitution provide real protections and tools through the courts and in our communities to stop abuses of power and harms to people. Still, these threats are real, so we’re prepared to confront them.

Learn more about the threats we’ve identified, and check back often as we release additional analysis, tracking, and tools to respond.

I’ve received dozens of other, similar announcements, although none with as extensive a list of participants.

Local organizations–including numerous bipartisan and nonpartisan ones– are also gearing up to defend fundamental constitutional values, recognizing that what we are facing is not a partisan political confrontation, but a civic, social and indisputably moral conflict. We can go back to arguing about politics and policy when we have restored the rule of law and respect for time-honored democratic norms.

As Mark Twain once wrote: Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

A group of local organizations that define patriotism as Twain did is planning a rally at University Park, in downtown Indianapolis, on January 20th–the same day as the Inauguration and also, coincidentally, Martin Luther King, Jr. day. The rally is intended to reaffirm attendees’ commitment to King’s vision and opposition to the restoration of White Nationalism and patriarchy. There will be uplifting music, readings that remind us of America’s historical aspirations, and messages from clergy of different faith traditions. (Yours truly will also participate in the program.)

We will pledge allegiance to the America we love and believe in–a generous and welcoming country devoted to liberty, inclusion and equal civic participation.

The rally– titled Reclaim, Rebuild and Resist– will begin at 10:00 a.m and end at noon. It is intended to demonstrate a firm and unyielding commitment to the principles of liberty and equality enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, and espoused by Dr. King—to reaffirm our support for the original American motto: e pluribus unum (out of the many, one), and our concerns for the threats posed by members of the incoming state and federal administrations to the values of inclusion, equality and the rule of law.

We will pledge to reclaim the visions of Dr. King and other social justice warriors, to help in efforts to rebuild and reinforce America’s democratic institutions, and resist attacks on foundational American values from any and all sources.

If you live in central Indiana, I hope you will attend. And bring your friends and families.

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And So It Begins…..

As predicted, it’s beginning. “It” is the regulatory dismantling that became inevitable when our rogue Supreme Court overruled “Chevron deference” and held that judges, rather than subject-matter experts, should decide regulatory policies.

A court has now struck down Net Neutrality.

If you are unfamiliar with this policy, or unsure why it matters, Vox had a comprehensive explanation back in 2016, when the Trump administration attacked it. Basically, Net Neutrality prohibits Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from discriminating among users.

Trump’s prior assault on Internet equality was just one of his efforts to make America “great” for the powerful and wealthy. Now, Trump’s remade Court has super-charged the fight against the government’s ability to impose fair “rules of the road.”

As the New York Times reported,

A federal appeals court struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s landmark net neutrality rules on Thursday, ending a nearly two-decade effort to regulate broadband internet providers as utilities.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, said the F.C.C. lacked the authority to reinstate rules that prevented broadband providers from slowing or blocking access to internet content. In its opinion, a three-judge panel pointed to a Supreme Court decision in June, known as Loper Bright, that overturned a 1984 legal precedent that gave deference to government agencies on regulations….

The F.C.C. had voted in April to restore net neutrality regulations, which expand government oversight of broadband providers and aim to protect consumer access to the internet. The regulations were first put in place nearly a decade ago under the Obama administration and were aimed at preventing internet service providers like Verizon or Comcast from blocking or degrading the delivery of services from competitors like Netflix and YouTube. The rules were repealed under President-elect Donald J. Trump in his first administration.

I have previously explained why the Loper Bright decision was so wrongheaded–and another stunning departure from longstanding precedent.

Robert Hubbell has addressed the ruling with his usual common sense explanation.

One of the major controversies of the Court’s 2024 term was the termination of the Chevron doctrine that afforded deference to federal experts charged with rulemaking pursuant to congressional regulation. The reactionary majority on the Supreme Court concluded that federal judges—with crushing caseloads—are better equipped to make discretionary policy judgments about rules authorized by Congress to regulate industries as varied and complex as nuclear energy, general aviation, drug testing, coal mine safety, and deep-water oil drilling. See Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo,

In short, the Roberts’ Court substituted itself for tens of thousands of subject-matter experts with hundreds of thousands of years of experience regulating complex industries.

The first significant casualty of the Court’s hubris in Loper Bright was the “net neutrality” doctrine. A three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit overruled the FCC’s interpretation of whether broadband internet service is “an information service” or a “telecommunications service for purposes of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.”

Hubbell goes on to quote Chris Geidner’s Substack.

In the relatively brief, 26-page decision, [Judge] Griffin declared that three judges sitting on an appeals court representing four states in the middle of the country were better suited to decide what a law in place since the mid-1990s means than the experts or political appointees at the FCC.

Instead of the executive branch issuing its interpretation, subject to electoral constraints and judicial review (and with the benefit of those subject experts on the agency’s staff), a man who has been a judge since the 1980s wrote the Sixth Circuit’s opinion deciding the matter on Thursday . . . .

Welcome to the brave new world of federal judges overruling experts charged with rulemaking by Congress.

As I have previously explained, Chevron deference was a well-considered judicial doctrine that had been applied for 40 years in over 18,000 decisions. It applied to the multiple situations in which Congress sends “ambiguous” directions to executive agencies staffed with people who are experts in the particular area. That ambiguity is intentional and necessary; Congress isn’t equipped to determine the proper levels of contaminants in water or to identify carcinogenic chemicals–and even if such specifics were part of the legislation, they would be incredibly difficult to monitor and/or update as technical knowledge advances.

Under Chevron, technocrats didn’t have the last word–if a plaintiff could show that a regulation was unreasonable, courts could and did overrule it. The rule simply recognized the complexity of the world we inhabit–and the importance of specialized expertise–an importance this arrogant Court dismisses.

As Tom Nichols has amply documented, in the age of MAGA, education, knowledge and expertise have become unacceptably “woke”–and certainly not entitled to respect.

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Can We Talk?

It’s a new year, and Americans need to talk. But communication is hard. It has always been hard, even between people who speak the same language.

It isn’t just the crazy, although in the era of Trump, crazy seems to dominate. A recent article in the Atlantic, titled “Let’s Talk About Trump’s Gibberish,” noted the insane stuff that comes out of his mouth and then becomes subject to the media’s “sane-washing.”

For too long, Trump has gotten away with pretending that his emotional issues are just part of some offbeat New York charm or an expression of his enthusiasm for public performance. But Trump is obviously unfit—and something is profoundly wrong with a political environment in which he can now say almost anything, no matter how weird, and his comments will get a couple of days of coverage and then a shrug, as if to say: Another day, another Trump rant about sharks.

The article quoted one of Trump’s frequent departures from rationality. In a campaign speech, his digression focused on a fanciful encounter with a shark. “I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery’s now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’”This bizzare detour from the ostensible subject of the speech went on–and on– with Trump clarifying that–assuming he had his choice, he’d rather be zapped than eaten.

Evidently, people who voted for Trump simply discount his looney-tunes digressions (along with yesterday’s list of appalling behaviors). More to the point, the proliferation of disinformation, distortion and click-bait has desensitized us to “communication” that ought to alarm us–or at least signal that the speaker is mentally ill.

What, if anything, can we do about an information environment rife with intentional lies and propaganda and the purposeful “flooding of the zone”? (I believe it was Hannah Arendt who observed that propaganda isn’t intended to make us believe X rather than Y–it’s meant to destroy our ability to believe anything.)

Countering the ocean of disinformation we swim in was the subject of a December article in Common Dreams.

It’s a crisis. America is now among 11 nations deemed most threatened by both mis-and disinformation.

Little wonder that almost 90% of us fear our country is on the “wrong track.” And, President-elect Trump has led the way with 492 suspect claims in just the first hundred days of his first presidency. Then, before the 2020 vote, in a single day he made 503 false or misleading claims. By term’s end he’d uttered 30,573 lies, reports The Washington Post.

Now, he is joined by his promoter Elon Musk who is flooding his own platform X with disinformation—for example, about the bipartisan end-of-year funding deal.

Irish philosopher Vittorio Bufacchi distinguishes between lies, which are about a particular event, and “post -truth,” which is a “shift to another reality” –one where facts simply don’t matter anymore.

The article tackles the important question: what can we do to restore the centrality of fact to our discourse?

One key will be more independent and public journalism, including PBS and NPR, driven not by narrow profit or partisan agendas. As local journalism—perhaps easiest to hold accountable—has suffered a sharp decline in the past decades, state and local governments can step up with financial support and incentives. Here, many peer nations can inspire us.

The article points to an experiment from New Zealand, which it calls a “unique approach.”

Since 1989, its Broadcast Standards Authority has offered an easily accessible, transparent online platform for any citizen to call out disinformation. The authority is tasked with investigating and requiring removal of what is both false and harmful material.

The BSA seems to have been both cautious and effective.

In the early years, complaints were upheld in 30% of cases. But by 2021-22, those upheld had shrunk to just under 5%. That’s a big change. And, a possible implication? Knowing one can be exposed for harmful lies can discourage perpetrators.

Such a mechanism would help the ordinary citizens who cannot afford the financial cost of a lawsuit for defamation, which is our (expensive) remedy for such harms. Requiring courses in media literacy in the schools is a longer-term but important effort.

The problem–as I have repeatedly noted–is our very human proclivity for confirmation bias. People who share Trump’s hatred for “others” and don’t want to believe he is unfit for public office will gravitate to sites that characterize his “shark” episodes as humor and his ugly attacks as “locker-room jokes.”

If “post truth” is “pre fascism,” as Timothy Snyder asserts, we’re in a lot of trouble.

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George Packer On How We Got Here

I consider The Atlantic a truly indespensible source of information and commentary. The publication is a welcome island of thoughtful and penetrating articles in our ocean of superficial punditry and outright propaganda. I subscribe to the old-fashioned print magazine, and the last issue included an introductory essay by George Packer that I found particularly insightful. (Okay, honesty compels me to admit that I found his essay so “on target” because he essentially agreed with my own analysis. I’m not immune to confirmation bias…)

The essay is titled “The End of Democratic Delusions.” I think the following paragraph tells us how America has come to this unfortunate place.

This new era is neither progressive nor conservative. The organizing principle in Trump’s chaotic campaigns, the animating passion among his supporters, has been a reactionary turn against dizzying change, specifically the economic and cultural transformations of the past half century: the globalization of trade and migration, the transition from an industrial to an information economy, the growing inequality between metropolis and hinterland, the end of the traditional family, the rise of previously disenfranchised groups, the “browning” of the American people. Trump’s basic appeal is a vow to take power away from the elites and invaders who have imposed these changes and return the country to its rightful owners—the real Americans. His victory demonstrated the appeal’s breadth in blue and red states alike, among all ages, ethnicities, and races.

If we look back at history, at other periods of rapid, dizzying change, we see similar reactions and upheavals. The Industrial Revolution sparked labor uprisings, anarchist movements, and clashes between traditional monarchies and then-emerging democratic and socialist movements. The Protestant Reformation fractured the Catholic Church’s authority, reshaped Europe’s religious and political map, sparked religious wars (think the Thirty Years’ War), and devastated large parts of Europe. There are plenty of other examples.

As Packer notes, reaction is insular and aggrieved, and it “paints in dark tones.” It’s characterized by an intent to undo what most of us see as progress and “reverse history, restoring the nation to some imagined golden age when the people ruled.”

When Democrats lose a presidential election, they descend into a familiar quarrel over whether the party moved too far to the left or to the center. This time the question seems especially irrelevant; their political problem runs so much deeper. The Democratic Party finds itself on the wrong side of a historic swing toward right-wing populism, and tactical repositioning won’t help. The mood in America, as in electorates all over the world, is profoundly anti-establishment. Trump had a mass movement behind him; Kamala Harris was installed by party elites. He offered disruption, chaos, and contempt; she offered a tax break for small businesses. He spoke for the alienated; she spoke for the status quo.

As Packer also notes, we are at a time when the parties have once again switched identities. The GOP of Lincoln was anti-slavery and the Democratic party of the time (and for many years after) was the party of White supremacy; in the 20th Century, they essentially traded places. More recently, another major switch made Democrats rather than Republicans the party of institutionalism. As Packer points out, that realignment has been going on since the early ’70s:

Democrats now claim the former Republican base of college-educated professionals, and Republicans have replaced Democrats as the party of the working class. As long as globalization, technology, and immigration were widely seen as not only inevitable but positive forces, the Democratic Party appeared to ride the wave of history, while Republicans depended on a shrinking pool of older white voters in dying towns. But something profound changed around 2008.

Packard points to three of those profound changes: a growing “conviction that the political and economic game was rigged for the benefit of distant elites; a sense that the middle class had disappeared; and the absence of any institutions that might have provided help, including the Democratic Party.”

Packer is hardly the only political scientist who has reminded Americans that the reactionary period we are experiencing is global. He spends much of his essay focusing on the challenges posed by what he calls “The Trump Reaction,” which he also says is more fragile than many believe, thanks to the fact that Trump has surrounded himself with ideologues, opportunists, and crackpots who will inevitably turn on each other–and the even more obvious fact that Trump has absolutely no interest in governing.

Prior eras of rapid change have also sparked chaos and irrational reaction. History tells us that “this too shall pass.”

We really need to figure out how to speed that passage.

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The End Of Ethics?

Americans were recently treated to the official results of the U.S. House’s ethics investigation of Matt Gaetz. The concluding paragraph of the 37 page report says it all:

The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.

This was the person Trump initially chose to head up the Department of Justice. (I’ve lost a lot of respect for Merrick Garland due to his timidity and what has evidently been an overly zealous desire to avoid politicizing DOJ, but the contrast between a compulsively ethical Attorney General and a thoroughgoing degenerate is representative of the difference between today’s Democratic Party and the cult of Trump–aka the GOP.)

Because it isn’t just Gaetz. Trump has chosen nominees who mirror many of his own numerous legal and ethical failings–a clown show composed not only of ignoramuses and conspiracy theorists, but sexual predators, racists and businessmen with falsified resumes and glaring conflicts of interest. Long gone are the days when political figures were held to a high moral standard–when those aspiring to leadership positions took care to project an ethical and probative public persona, even if their private behaviors were somewhat less exemplary.

To be fair, the Trumpian mafia being assembled to run the Executive branch has its counterpart in the current, rogue Supreme Court; Rolling Stone, among others, has reported on recent, added discoveries of highly unethical behaviors by the Court’s “usual suspects.”

A new 20-month Senate investigation into ethical conflicts and legal violations at the Supreme Court has uncovered and underscored a raft of dubious behavior by justices both living — and dead.

The new 95-page report reveals that deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia — who expired in 2016 on a “free” quail hunting trip, paid for by a benefactor — was a conflicted mess, and effectively patient zero for the corruption now dogging the court. The arch conservative justice accepted “at least 258 subsidized trips” from wealthy patrons, including “several dozen hunting and fishing trips with prominent Republican donors.” Scalia accepted more such gifts “than any other justice,” the report states, and failed to properly disclose them “in violation of federal law.”

The report, issued by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, also excoriates current conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito for violations of federal law over undisclosed travel, including luxury fishing and yacht vacations. It targets Thomas in particular for having “accepted lavish gifts from billionaires with business before the court for almost his entire tenure as a justice,” adding that “the number, value, and extravagance of the gifts accepted by Justice Thomas have no comparison in modern American history.

Dick Durbin, chair of the Judiciary Committee, issued a statement underscoring the effect of these ethical lapses, saying that “justices are losing the trust of the American people at the hands of a gaggle of fawning billionaires.”

Disclosure of the repeated failures of Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from cases affecting the interests of the billionaires whose largesse they’ve enjoyed comes at a time when trillionaire Elon Musk has assumed a de facto role as “co- President,” and as Trump is preparing to install a cohort of shady billionaires with massive conflicts of interest in important government positions–positions for which most of them are massively unqualified.

As ABC News recently reported,

President-elect Donald Trump has shown no qualms about making or sticking by picks for his Cabinet no matter the baggage they carry — even some accused of sexual assault.

It’s a far cry from the days when much smaller-scale scandals, such as marijuana use or hiring an undocumented worker as a nanny, sunk candidates put forward by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, experts said.

“We’re in untested waters,” Jonathan Hanson, a political scientist and lecturer in statistics at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, told ABC News.

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise us. After all, American voters just elected a mentally-ill convicted felon who has also been found liable for sexual abuse by a civil jury.

Apparently, MAGA’s version of “Making America Great Again” is limited to its (very obvious) goal of “Making America White Again.”

Ethics? They don’t need no stinkin’ ethics!

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