Public Policy and Governance – Page 34

From Your Mouth To God’s Ears…

My grandmother had a favorite response whenever one of us made a rosy prediction. That phrase– “From your mouth to God’s ears!”–was her way of expressing hope that the prediction would come true.

I had a very similar reaction to a column by Greg Sargent in the Washington Post. Sargent asserted that a MAGA “doom loop” would defeat Trump and the GOP next year–an outcome I devoutly hope to see. His thesis is as follows: Republicans continue to defend and embrace Trump’s authoritarianism. That backfired when voters responded by defeating the predicted Red wave in the 2022 midterms and continuing to defeat Republican candidates in multiple ensuing special elections.

Subsequently–as Sargent accurately reports–rather than learning the rather obvious lesson from those defeats, Republicans have dug in. They’re going even further Right, responding to electoral losses “with even more flagrantly anti-democratic maneuvers all around the country.”

The pattern is becoming clear: Even as voters are mobilizing to protect democracy at the ballot box, Republicans are redoubling their commitment to the former president’s anti-majoritarian mode of politics. And this, in turn, is motivating voters even more.

Call it the “MAGA doom loop.” It’s playing out in state after state.

Sargent supports his thesis by surveying the disarray and infighting in several state-level Republican parties–notably, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin (where the GOP is threatening a bizarre, anti-democratic response to the electoral loss of a state supreme court seat.)

As Sargent predicts about Wisconsin,

Democrats will surely be able to use those MAGA-approved tactics to mobilize voters against Trump and Republicans in 2024. “The threat to overturn an election through impeachment pushes MAGA attacks on democracy to the top of voters’ minds,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me.

He also reminded readers of the recent shenanigans in Ohio, where Republicans tried to raise the threshold for amending the state constitution to 60 percent of votes cast, in order to head off an almost-certain victory for reproductive rights in an upcoming referendum. Despite scheduling the vote on this single, arguably technical issue for August, turnout was robust, and the change was defeated by a crushing 14-points.

Research confirms that Issues become salient for voters when elites talk about those issues a lot, and in the U.S., concerns about democracy have increasingly taken center stage. A newsletter I subscribe to recently and helpfully included a partial list of current GOP threats to democracy:

In May, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed into law a measure that will create a commission that can punish and remove prosecutors, saying it will curb “far-left prosecutors.” That includes a certain prosecutor pursuing the case against former President Donald Trump.

In April, Iowa’s Republican-led legislature introduced a bill that restricted information the state auditor—the only Democratic Statewide office holder—could access. “Let’s be clear about this, this is the destruction of democratic norms,” State Auditor Rob Sand said.

Immediately after last year’s nonpartisan Ohio State Board of Education election created a majority of members aligned with the Democratic party, conservative legislators moved to transfer the body’s power to a new department under the governor’s authority. While the bill failed during that year’s session, a similar bill passed in the Senate in January of this year and was introduced into the House in March (it’s currently in committee).

In 2021, Republicans in Arizona, using the state budget, stripped the Arizona Secretary of State—a Democrat–of the right to defend the state’s election laws in court—handing it over to the attorney general who happens to have been—you guessed it—a Republican. Any pretense that it was done as a move to strengthen some legal principle was undermined by the fact they intended the move to expire simultaneously with the end of the term of the secretary of state. Taking aim at secretaries of state is no accident, as these officers have authority over how elections are conducted. Legislators similarly trimmed the power of secretaries of state in Georgia and Kansas. In fact, Republicans have moved to take control over the election process in at least eight states.

In recent years, after Democrats were elected to statewide offices in North Carolina , Wisconsin, and Michigan, Republican-led legislatures and governors moved to severely weaken their powers.

This doesn’t even begin to address the gerrymandering and the changing of rules over the last decade or so to make voting harder, more complicated, and less likely, especially among people of color, including restrictive voter ID laws and aggressive voter purges.

The “chattering classes” tell us that democracy is on the ballot in 2024. They’re correct–it is.

I just hope Sargent’s “doom loop” thesis proves to be equally correct…..

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Research Supports A UBI

During the pandemic, the Biden administration instituted a childcare tax credit. The credit provided families up to $300 per child and broadened eligibility rules. The result? Child poverty rates plummeted.

But as Robert Hubbell, among others, has reported

Senator Joe Manchin joined with Republicans to kill the childcare tax credit because Manchin reportedly believed that caregivers were using the money to purchase illegal drugs. A new study by the US Census Bureau released on Tuesday reports that child poverty nearly doubled as a result of the termination of benefits by Manchin and the GOP.

An article written by a social worker addressed that widespread, distorted view of poverty and poor people.

If my decades of work as a social worker taught me one great lesson, it’s this. Poverty is an entrenched system of political choices by self-serving lawmakers, not a personal failing of ordinary people…..

Not one person I’ve ever met wants to be poor, sick, disabled, struggling, or on the receiving end of public assistance programs. These programs are vital but often inadequate and difficult to access…

In 21st-century America, people have to be in extreme hardship to be eligible for help, even as they sometimes work multiple jobs. Not one mother relishes taking three buses in terrible weather to get to the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) office to prove her worthiness to get help buying cereal for her toddler’s breakfast.

While the importance of hard work and individual talent to self-sufficiency shouldn’t be minimized, neither should it be exaggerated. When the focus is entirely upon the individual, when successes of any sort are attributed solely to individual effort, we fail to see the effects of social and legal structures that privilege some groups and impede others. When marginalized groups call attention to additional barriers they face, members of more privileged groups cling even more strongly to the fiction that only individual merit explains success and failure.

Anyone who has studied the issue, even superficially, knows that America’s social safety net is punitive and woefully inadequate. Too much of what we spend on the patchwork of programs we sneeringly refer to as “welfare” supports a needlessly complicated bureaucracy, rather than the people who desperately need help. (The working poor are basically ineligible.)

Worse still, these various programs are incredibly and arrogantly paternalistic. Bureaucrats–many well-meaning–decide what “those people” need, and legislate accordingly. Don’t buy a steak with those food stamps! Don’t continue to live in that neighborhood–we’ll move you to one we’ve decided is more appropriate.

If we just gave poor people money, and let them make their own decisions, it would be cheaper– and far more effective.

I have written before–and at length–about the multiple merits of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), and I hope at least a few of you will click through and read that expanded explanation, but today, I want to address the current “system” (note quotation marks) and the very expensive efforts to control what poor folks do with the benefits government provides.

A variety of UBI pilot projects have tested Manchin’s belief that idlers and other “unworthies” would simply use public money for booze or drugs. One such program has reached its halfway point, and its results mirror those of numerous other pilot projects.

Preliminary data is now available showing the effectiveness of guaranteed income as a means of combating poverty in Georgia – slightly more than half the women have saved some money, compared to none at the project’s outset; three times as many women have been able to afford childcare; and the share of women whose cellphone service was interrupted due to unpaid bills dropped from 60 to 40%.

These and other findings come as more than 100 projects centered on giving cash with no restrictions or requirements have started in the last several years, leading a group called Mayors for a Guaranteed Income to launch a nationwide speaking tour in recent weeks, screening a new documentary on these efforts called It’s Basic.

How did the recipients use these “no-strings-attached” funds? Most of the money went to utilities, food and rent. There were other positive effects; program researchers are measuring improved mental health, and researching whether participants are more likely to reach life goals with the help of guaranteed income.

Even homeless people act responsibly when given money. A Washington Post article reported on the results of a Canadian project that provided a lump sum of 7,500 Canadian dollars (about $5,540 today) to 50 people experiencing homelessness in Vancouver. Recipients spent fewer days homeless, increased their savings and put more money toward essentials compared with a control group of 65 people who received no cash transfer. It also saved the government money.

The study, which was published in the peer-reviewed PNAS journal this week, followed individuals for one year after they received the lump sum and reported no increase in spending on what researchers call “temptation goods,” defined as alcohol, drugs and cigarettes. By decreasing time spent in shelters, the intervention led to a decrease in public spending of 777 Canadian dollars (about $574) per person, the paper said.

Furthermore, a robust social safety net supports market economies. As Will Wilkinson, vice-president for policy at the libertarian Niskanen Center, argued in National Review, capitalists and socialists both misunderstand economic reality. The Left fails to appreciate the important role of capitalism and markets in producing abundance, and the Right refuses to acknowledge the indispensable role safety nets play in buffering the socially destructive consequences of insecurity.

Even capitalists would benefit from a simpler, more equitable and more reliable social safety net.

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Threats, Bribes And The GOP

The shocking acquittal of Ken Paxton in Texas despite what the Washington Post accurately called “mountains of damning evidence” should have been predictable.

Why do I say that? Because we’ve had other signs of the thuggery that has become deliberate Republican strategy. A few weeks ago, Yoel Roth highlighted that strategy in an opinion piece for the New York Times. Roth was formerly the head of “trust and safety” at Twitter–and one of those who made the call to ban Trump from Twitter. He says that nothing prepared him for what followed.

Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company’s head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. I’ve lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move.

This isn’t a story I relish revisiting. But I’ve learned that what happened to me wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t just personal vindictiveness or “cancel culture.” It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online.

Roth’s essay detailed a campaign of online harassment that lasted months. Twitter users demanded that he be fired, jailed or killed. And it had the desired effect on those who were watching.

Private individuals — from academic researchers to employees of tech companies — are increasingly the targets of lawsuits, congressional hearings and vicious online attacks. These efforts, staged largely by the right, are having their desired effect: Universities are cutting back on efforts to quantify abusive and misleading information spreading online. Social media companies are shying away from making the kind of difficult decisions my team did when we intervened against Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Platforms had finally begun taking these risks seriously only after the 2016 election. Now, faced with the prospect of disproportionate attacks on their employees, companies seem increasingly reluctant to make controversial decisions, letting misinformation and abuse fester in order to avoid provoking public retaliation.

In Texas, those of us following the Paxton impeachment can be forgiven for expecting a conviction–after all, the charges were brought by the Republican-dominated House, the witnesses were all Republican whistleblowers who had worked for Paxton, and the evidence of his corruption was overwhelming.

There are media reports that Republican Senators received very explicit threats of violence if they voted to convict. But according to the Washington Post, those threats were also accompanied by the other part of what we now understand to be standard GOP strategy: bribery.

That the fix was in for the attorney general in the Senate probably should have been apparent back in July. That’s when a campaign finance report revealed that a pro-Paxton political action committee, known as the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, had donated $1 million and made an additional $2 million loan to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who would preside over the impeachment trial.

Yes, you read that right: The person acting as judge took $3 million from the defendant’s deep-pocketed allies. Was it any wonder that only two Republicans in the Senate, where the lieutenant governor serves as president of the chamber, voted to convict?

According to the Texas Monthly, the big money folks who funded the bribe are the same evangelical Texas billionaires who are funding the state’s voucher campaign. Make of that what you will….

The Post article traced the devolution of Texas politics from the relatively genteel, often bipartisan Republicans of the Bush era into the hard-right fanaticism that gave Lone Star voters Ted Cruz and the assortment of corrupt culture warriors who currently run the state.

And now–in the only good news to emerge from this fiasco–the Texas GOP is preparing to eat its own.

Paxton’s far-right forces are now promising all-out warfare on the Republican House members — starting with Speaker Dade Phelan — who tried to remove the attorney general from office. And with Paxton supporter Donald Trump likely to be at the top of the ticket next year, you’d have to give them excellent odds of prevailing.

The rot extends far beyond Texas. So here we are, a good facsimile of a banana republic.

MAGA Republicans are a distinct minority of Americans and they know it–so they are willing to ignore more and more “rules of the game” in order to stay in power. If vote suppression, dark money and “flooding the zone” prove inadequate to the task, then they’ll move to threats of violence accompanied by outright bribery.

I won’t be surprised if the Texas Speaker wakes up one morning with a horse’s head in his bed…..

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Exceeding My Expectations

I recently ran across a cartoon showing a couple of shipwreck survivors heading toward two small islands– one with palm trees, the other with an erupting volcano. One of the castaways asked the other “which one should we choose?”

The 2024 Presidential election in a nutshell. Even someone who found that first island unappealing would have to be nuts to choose the one spewing volcanic ash. (I still can’t get my head around the millions of presumably uninformed or deranged Americans who cast ballots for volcanic ash in 2020…)

But here’s the thing: lots of people plan to vote Biden because they recognize that a vote for Trump is a vote for certain disaster. That reasoning–while sound–simply ignores the fact that Biden has been a transformative, progressive President. I loved Barack Obama, but fair is fair: Biden has accomplished far more.

I’ve previously shared my middle son’s observation that Biden is the first person he’s voted for who vastly exceeded his expectations.

I’d attribute the mismatch between performance and public perception to lackluster oratory, except that people voted for Trump, whose pronouncements are word salads showcasing his third-grade vocabulary.

A few pundits have begun to address the persistent lack of recognition of Biden’s considerable governing skills. The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland was one. As he began,

The tragedy of Joe Biden is that people see his age, his frailty and his ailing poll numbers and they miss the bigger story. Which is that his has been a truly consequential presidency, even a transformational one. In less than three years, he has built a record that should unify US progressives, including those on the radical left, and devised an economic model to inspire social democratic parties the world over, including here in Britain.

As Freedland writes, making the case for “Bidenism” isn’t hard.

Top of the list is, characteristically, something that sounds boring but is of enormous significance: the Inflation Reduction Act, passed last year. That seemingly technocratic piece of legislation actually achieves two epochal goals. First, it hastens the day the US makes the break from fossil fuels – by making clean energy not only the morally superior option for both industry and consumers, but the financially superior one too.

It does that through a massive raft of tax breaks, subsidies and incentives all designed to encourage the production of wind turbines, solar panels, ever improving battery technology, geothermal plants and the like, along with tax credits aimed at making electric cars irresistible even to those middle-American consumers more concerned about their wallets than the burning planet.

Those who understand the threat posed by climate change–everyone from environmental activists to Goldman Sachs–has hailed the act as a “gamechanger.”

But the second goal of the legislation is almost as significant. Biden insisted that this surge in green manufacturing would happen inside the US, thereby reviving industrial towns and cities in decline since the 1980s. It is US factories that are getting the subsidies to build all this clean tech – alongside an earlier, huge package of infrastructure spending – restoring jobs to workers who had long been written off.

Bidenomics resurrects Democratic principles discarded by Bill Clinton: an activist state making serious public investments in manufacturing;”muscular regulation” of corporations; and encouragement of unionized labour.

Freedland reminds us that securing passage of this transformative legislation was remarkable, given a Senate then split 50-50 between the parties.

A new book by Franklin Foer, The Last Politician, describes how Biden, whose hands were already full with the Covid pandemic and the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, was not content simply to be a caretaker manager, troubleshooting crises. Instead, “he set out to transform the country.”

The result is that Biden has “redirected the paradigm” of US economic life in a way that will affect Americans “for a generation”. While Obama and Clinton were “deferential to markets”, says Foer, Biden has reversed “the neoliberal consensus” in place since the Ronald Reagan era.

Biden insists–correctly–that “capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation,” and as a result, his administration is resurrecting anti-trust enforcement. Foer writes that, “As a matter of substance, he is the most transformational president since Reagan.”

Internationally, Biden is credited with bringing stability after the chaos and dictator-coddling of the Trump years and, especially, for building and maintaining a western alliance in support of Ukraine as it defends itself against Russian imperialism. Others admire his handling of China: robust, without crossing the line where a cold war turns hot.

Freedland says Biden campaigned in “reassuring prose,” but has governed in “radical poetry.”

Age isn’t all negative. Coupled with intellect and experience, it allows time for the development of skills. It allows people like Joe Biden to exceed our expectations.

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How Has It Come To This?

I’ve posted a lot about electoral structures that are currently enabling a distinct minority of Americans to govern the rest of us. One of those systematic distortions–gerrymandering–has been enabled by a judiciary unwilling to say what we all can see: that the practice is contrary to “one person, one vote” and thus the Constitution.

What’s relatively new is the willingness of the GOP to publicly defend its attacks on democracy.

In Wisconsin, Republicans have benefitted from a combination of extreme gerrymandering and the political complicity of a state Supreme Court dominated by Rightwing judges. A liberal judge just won a seat on that body (by a surprisingly large margin in a state where close elections have been the norm), and Republicans threatened to impeach her–before she can participate in a single case.

As an essay in the Guardian explains:

In 2011, Republicans gerrymandered Wisconsin’s state legislature so badly that the party can win supermajorities despite losing the popular vote, as it did in 2018. Voters have fought back, and earlier this year they elected Janet Protasiewicz to the state supreme court, ushering in a new liberal majority which looked poised to finally overturn the gerrymander and bring democratic regime change to Madison.

But Wisconsin Republicans have no intention of seeing their undeserved power slip away. They’re proposing to impeach Protasiewicz on spurious charges before she has ruled on a single case, paralyzing the court and leaving the gerrymander intact.

When Trump argued that he was the real winner of the election because the votes of people living in Democratic-leaning urban areas were somehow fraudulent and should not count, he was repeating arguments that Wisconsin Republicans had already honed. The speaker of the state assembly, Robin Vos, has explained that the state’s gerrymander is fair because “if you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority”. Because Madison and Milwaukee are the parts of the state with the largest concentration of non-white voters, Vos has revealed what the Wisconsin gerrymander is really about: race.

No surprise there. The urban/rural divide isn’t just about racism, but rural racial grievance explains a lot.

Per Talking Points Memo, the election of a liberal judge to the state’s high court infuriated the beneficiaries of Wisconsin’s undemocratic gerrymandering.

For months, Republicans have been plotting how best to overturn her election, as two redistricting lawsuits were immediately filed at the state’s high court. In recent weeks, they’ve been coalescing around impeaching her, settling on the rationale that she called the state’s maps “rigged.” Notably, state Republicans have not brought the same ire to Justices Rebecca Bradley and Brian Hagedorn continuing to preside over abortion cases after likening abortion to the Holocaust and calling Planned Parenthood a “wicked organization,” respectively.

The GOP is threatening to impeach both Protasiewicz, the judge, and Evers, the Democratic governor (since you can’t gerrymander statewide elections, voters were able to elect a liberal justice and a Democratic Governor). “The threat of actual democracy has convulsed the state government, while state Democrats express their outrage from their manufactured permanent minority.”

The use of skewed election systems to suppress the voices of minority voters is not new to the U.S. Wisconsin is only a blatant example.

Like their predecessors in other states, Wisconsin Republicans have been remarkably frank about their intention of ensuring that minorities stay in their place. When Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers powered to victory in 2018 with massive wins in Madison and Milwaukee, the Republican legislature used a lame-duck session to strip him of much of his power. Not content with that, Evers’ Republican opponent in 2022, Tim Michels, promised that if he was elected then Republicans in Wisconsin “will never lose another election”.

Give him credit for transparency…

Republicans aren’t even pretending any more. It’s not just Wisconsin–but what happens in Wisconsin will be a test case, telling us whether these increasingly brazen attempts to secure minority rule will succeed.

The author of the Guardian essay–a British historian of the United States–notes that Wisconsin Republicans were among the most fervent backers of Trump’s undemocratic coup attempt, “but they needed no lessons from him in how to suppress the will of the people.”

The Republican party’s belief in its own god-given right to rule – and that of its white, rural electorate – found its most dangerous expression in Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, but it long predated him. It will outlive him unless it is chastened by accountability and defeat at every turn. All eyes are now on Wisconsin and Janet Protasiewicz to see if it will be.

If the Wisconsin GOP’s shameless abandonment of even a pretense of playing by the rules succeeds, we’re in for a world of hurt.

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