Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Indiana’s Embarrassing AG

He’s at it again.

I don’t know how many pixels I’ve wasted on discussions of Indiana’s ridiculous Attorney General, Todd Rokita. When I took a look at the history of this blog, I realized that reports of his problematic behaviors began while he was still in Congress, and  accelerated when he became AG. 

Rokita’s self-importance isn’t matched by even a modicum of self-awareness, a lack that has led to admonitions of him from Indiana’s all-Republican Supreme Court. His tireless efforts to play to the craziest fringes of MAGA (and those are some fringes!) have led to his efforts to smear the IU Ob-Gyn who performed a legal abortion on  a ten-year-old rape victim, a recent request that the Trump administration send federal troops to Indiana, and his maintenance of an unvetted list of school teachers who are reportedly sharing “woke” positions in their classrooms.

Rokita’s sustained assault on public education has erupted again, via a bizarre lawsuit Rokita has filed against Indianapolis’ Public Schools for failure to assist ICE in terrorizing students. IPS has had the nerve to demand legal authority before allowing ICE agents into its classrooms.

As the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported, Rokita “filed suit against Indianapolis Public Schools — with help from a conservative think tank — accusing the state’s largest public school district of ‘thwarting’ federal immigration enforcement.”

In response, the IPS board re-affirmed the district’s commitment to “ensuring safe, supportive, and welcoming learning environments for all students.” (It isn’t difficult to picture the eye-rolls that must have accompanied the response–and the “here he goes again” sighs…) Per IPS,

As has always been the case, we will continue to uphold the law while keeping these commitments,” the board added, before knocking Rokita’s intentions.

While IPS takes all legal obligations seriously, we respectfully hope that all concerned parties will recognize the heavy burden that silly litigation and political posturing places on students, families, and taxpayers,” the statement continued. “Every dollar spent on defensive legal posture is a dollar not spent on instructional support, teacher development, student services, or enrichment. In this case, Mr. Rokita prefers those dollars go to fight gratuitous political battles, as has too often been the case.

A very tactful way of saying “we really don’t want to pay for his incessant grandstanding.”

IPS requires that officers have a warrant signed by a judge unless there is an emergency situation, and the school system’s legal counsel must authorize the access. That policy certainly appears reasonable; after all, school systems are legally charged with acting in loco parentis, and with safeguarding the children in its care. Rokita, however, argues that the district should allow individual employees to “voluntarily comply” with ICE demands.

Rokita’s office began “investigating” (harassing) IPS in February, and communications have evidently gone back and forth since, with Rokita’s most recent demanding immediate changes.  As the IPS response noted,

Unfortunately, despite taking six months to craft his opinion on IPS’ policies, Mr. Rokita permitted only five business days from the time IPS received his review to respond, and then refused IPS’ request for any additional time….Yet, these important issues deserve thoughtful, deliberative weighing of important legal rights — not impulsive, superficial efforts for political gain.

Board members also criticized Rokita’s use of the term “aliens” for noncitizen children and their families, accusing him of  “willfully dehumanizing” them.

Assisting Rokita in this effort at bullying the system is something called the America First Policy Institute. (I guess a name really does say it all…) The institute says the Indiana case is part of its mission to hold “rogue” government entities accountable. Evidently, it’s “rogue” to protect children from being terrorized without legal authority.

In the wake of the suit, the Indiana State Teachers’ Association affirmed its belief that “every child in Indiana, regardless of background or immigration status, has the right to a safe and welcoming public school.” The organization confirmed the  professional and moral responsibility of educators “to protect the wellbeing of their students and ensure schools remain places of learning, trust and stability….Turning schools into extensions of immigration enforcement threatens that trust and undermines the learning environment every student deserves. Our focus must remain on educating and protecting students, not politicizing their safety.”

A local immigration attorney interviewed by WTHR believes the lawsuit is part of an effort to increase ICE’s presence in Indianapolis, and characterized it as fear mongering playing to the base….”the idea of federal agents often masked and in full uniform and flak jackets going into schools is just diabolical.”

It would be nice if Rokita would stop his constant pandering to MAGA’s looney-tune fringe and spend some time doing the job he was elected to do, but I’m not holding my breath…

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The Equal Protection Of The Laws

From day one, the Trump administration has made its disregard for the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and its deep-seated racism too clear to ignore. Just a few examples will suffice: the recently-announced intent to limit the number of refugees the country will accept to 7500, while giving priority to White South Africans; directing ICE to stop and harass people based on nothing but skin color; the constant and ferocious attacks on DEI; the ongoing efforts to disenfranchise Black voters…the list goes on. And on. 

The best response to MAGA protests that the racist label is unfair was in a recent headline from The Hill. It read “If MAGA doesn’t want to be labeled racist, it should stop elevating racists.”

Memo to President Trump’s backers: If you want people to stop calling you racist, stop saying and doing racist things. And stop excusing racist posts and rants by leading voices in the MAGA media.

When Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson recently ranked among the top five on Spotify’s list of top trending podcasts, it screamed out that racism and antisemitism are not a problem for their MAGA-world fan base.

None of this, of course, surprises those of us who have understood since 2016 where Trump’s support lies. MAGA’s racism has been too glaringly obvious to ignore. But more recently, it seems that MAGA’s animus goes beyond race, gender and religion; the administration is evidently determined to undermine the very concept of Equal Protection–the belief that all citizens are entitled to the equal application of the laws. (For that matter, Trump clearly wants the effective repeal of the entire 14th Amendment–beginning with birthright citizenship, but definitely not ending there.)

The Washington Post has reported on the administration’s most recent assault on the very concept of Equal Protection of the Laws. The administration now wants to deny people who hold different political beliefs a benefit to which they are legally entitled.

Employees of nonprofit organizations that work with undocumented immigrants, provide gender transition care for minors or engage in public protests will have a hard time getting their federal student loans forgiven under regulations advanced Thursday by the Education Department.

The 185-page rule revises eligibility requirements for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which cancels the education debt of government and nonprofit employees after 10 years of service and 120 monthly loan payments. It will allow the education secretary to disqualify employers — not individuals — who engage in activities the department deems to have a “substantial illegal purpose” on or after July 1 — when the rule takes effect

Current law makes those holding student loans eligible for a federal program offering loan forgiveness if they focus on areas that serve the public good. The law has defined those categories as including careers in education, public health or public interest law. The proposed rule would dramatically change a program that has offered debt relief “to more than 1 million student loan borrowers across more than 20 sectors of the economy.”

The proposed rule was prompted by a Trump Executive Order that designated disfavored nonprofits that should no longer be eligible for government benefits. 

A partial list of those the administration wants to deem ineligible is telling:

Aiding and abetting violations of federal immigration laws.
Supporting terrorism or engaging in violence for the purpose of obstructing or influencing federal government policy.
Engaging in the chemical and surgical castration or mutilation of children in violation of federal or state law.
Engaging in a pattern of aiding and abetting illegal discrimination.

The subjectivity is obvious–and the point. We’ve seen how ICE defines the obstruction of government “policy.” We’ve seen what the administration considers “aiding and abetting” (i.e. offering opinions that are protected free speech). The administration defines medical treatment of transgender children to be “mutilation.”

And of course, the administration takes the position that any effort to level the playing field for minorities amounts to “illegal discrimination” against White Christians.

You can almost hear the mob boss. “Want your student loan forgiven, so you can afford a house or a new car? It would be a shame if all those payments you’ve already made didn’t count…maybe you should change jobs.” 

I doubt that Trump can spell, pronounce or define “arbitrary and capricious” but those terms describe what would result from his efforts to ignore the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment–and for that matter, the rest of the Bill of Rights.  Citizens would no longer have an automatic right to equal treatment–their access to government programs would depend upon the degree to which they are willing to bend the knee.

Like it works in a monarchy…..
 

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Money, Trump And The Media

The longer we suffer the agony of the Trump administration and its assaults on governance, science, logic and basic decency, the more I become convinced that our current information environment is largely responsible. The enormous growth of online propaganda is partially to blame for the fact that 37% of Americans still tell pollsters they approve of Trump.

But the Internet isn’t the only culprit allowing MAGA and MAGA-adjacent folks to escape confrontations with reality. The party that holds the White House has a built-in information advantage, and Trump’s visceral need for attention–and his ability to command it– has made use of that advantage.

That said, I have become more concerned about the decline of what we think of as “mainstream” journalism.

Take the reporting about the administration’s refusal to fund SNAP. On the NBC evening news I watched, the lack of funding was attributed to the shutdown; there was absolutely NO reference to the fact that the administration was refusing to release funds that had been appropriated for precisely this purpose–to ensure ongoing funding of a critical program in cases of government shutdown.

That failure to explain the actual reason for the SNAP crisis is journalistic malpractice. It allows partisans to point fingers and distort the political conversation. In a very real sense, it’s participation in a lie.

NBC isn’t the only network or mainstream source to evade this reality, and the question is: why? Why are major networks and news sources “both siding” multiple reports rather than accurately reflecting the fact that one side is primarily responsible? Why are they normalizing so many aspects of a profoundly abnormal Trump administration?

One recent report from the American Prospect provides a chilling answer to that question.  It involves Trump’s “stage-managing” the business of information.

Warner Bros. Discovery—which owns a movie studio, numerous cable networks (CNN, Discovery, TBS, TNT, HGTV, Cartoon Network, TCM), the pay-TV channel HBO, streaming service HBO Max, DC Comics, part of The CW network, part of Fandango, several gaming studios, some theme park in Madrid, and much more—has publicly announced that it is for sale. Several companies, including Comcast, Netflix, and Amazon, are sniffing around a purchase, but the one that’s clearly amped to acquire WBD is Paramount, fresh off of being acquired itself by David Ellison’s Skydance Media.

Ellison and his billionaire father have been moving to consolidate ownership of the mass media. Ellison’s Skydance Media has already taken control of CBS through its recent merger with Paramount Global. Reportedly, the Trump administration has vowed to block Comcast, Netflix or Amazon from buying WBD, and to facilitate its acquisition by Paramount. The Ellison family is a longtime Trump ally, while Comcast and Netflix “have angered the president with Saturday Night Live parodies or perceived wokeness; and these grievances are driving the discretionary application of law.”

Trump pays more attention to media mergers than other business combinations, as befits his obsession with how he is portrayed to the public. The Ellisons, who already have their hands on TikTok, would add CNN to CBS News, building out a right-leaning rival to Fox in old and new media. Doing so through a shotgun wedding with implicit (if not explicit) approvals is just deeply corrupt.

This wouldn’t be a slam-dunk: under the Clayton Act and new guidelines written by Biden antitrust officials, such a merger would trigger several structural presumptions of illegality.  State attorneys general can use them and the relevant federal laws to block the merger–assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t put a corrupt thumb on the scale. But the very prospect of yet another merger, another consolidation of ownership of the media, should be a wake-up call.

There has already been far too much consolidation, too much transformation of journalism into just another business, where owners worry more about official reprisals for stepping out of line than providing first-rate reporting.

A study by the University of Chicago found that, in the last ten years, consolidation of America’s TV broadcasting has accelerated–that currently 40 percent of all local TV news stations are controlled by three conglomerates: Gray Television, Nexstar Media Group, and Sinclair Broadcast Group, each of which owns about 100 ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC stations –and that those stations operate in more than 80 percent of US media markets. The research found “weaker constraints on owners’ interference with editorial decisions, whether for purely economic or for political motives.”

No kidding.

Our would-be King wants to control the information we receive–and with the help of his billionaire friends/courtiers, he’s well on his way.

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Building Back Better

There’s no avoiding the fact that U.S. citizens are currently experiencing a world of hurt. As one newsletter glumly reported, the federal government is now a subsidiary of Trump Inc. and the laws meant to prevent such a takeover go unenforced. There’s no investigation into Trump’s open corruption and self-dealing. The U.S. Supreme Court has elevated the president  above the law. Congress won’t even meet. 

No wonder Americans aren’t having policy debates.

The current lack of interest in the intricacies of policy may be entirely understandable, but–unless we are prepared to give in to Trumpian autocracy, we need to be thinking about how we go about rebuilding once the would-be king is gone and his MAGA racists have crawled back under their rocks.

According to a recent article in the American Prospect, a new think tank is doing precisely that. The organization is called Common Wealth. It is based in both Britain and the U.S., and it is focused not only on policy repair, but upon analysis of the policy failures that enabled Trump’s rise.

Common Wealth’s focus is on public ownership, public provision, and building state capacity. The first reason for this is simple reality: Despite the utter madness of what Trump is doing, the mess he’ll leave is going to have to be cleaned up. A future Democratic president, should there ever be one, will have no choice but to rebuild much of the entire administrative state from scratch—so they might as well build it back better, to coin a phrase. “We’re in a moment where things feel really perilous politically,” said Common Wealth’s U.S. program director Melanie Brusseler, “but also there’s a lot of hope in response.”

One important focus for Common Wealth is the affordability crisis. It has become obvious that neoliberal strategy didn’t work- belief in shipping jobs overseas to cut labor costs and keeping supply chain investment low finally collapsed during the pandemic, as supply shocks led to skyrocketing prices for goods and shipping. But it isn’t simply manufacturing; Common Wealth researchers point out that our current crisis of affordability is primarily driven by prices for things that can’t be offshored and/or imported– housing, education, health care, transportation. 

As a result, Common Wealth supports public provision, including Medicare for All and free college. As its researchers point out–and as this blog has frequently noted–America’s health care system is so plagued with hyper-complicated rent-seeking in which “uncountable private actors maneuver to swindle each other and/or the government and thereby claim a fat slice of America’s world-historical spending on health care, that the case for state coordination of providers as well as insurance practically makes itself.’

A primary focus of the new think tank is–understandably–climate change, and the policies necessary to ameliorate or slow it. Their researchers advocate “adaptations and asset development” –the creation of a huge number of publicly owned electrical generating assets that would be totally disconnected from volatile global markets for oil and gas.

Common Wealth claims affinity with previous efforts at what it terms “public provision.

Many Trump critics are focused on what he is doing to our basic democratic compact, and rightly so. But there’s a reason that all the presidents who led us through our worst previous crises also had an aggressive program of reform—and these also included public provision and ownership. Abraham Lincoln had greenbacks and land grant colleges; Franklin Roosevelt had Social Security, a massive public works program, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and much more. A core purpose of a democratic republic is to protect the welfare of the citizenry, and if a future government is to repair the damage inflicted by Trump and fight climate change as well, they will have to think even more ambitiously.

I will admit to significant reservations about some of the “public provisions” Common Wealth endorses, but we should all take comfort from the fact that there are institutions and individuals who are engaging with what will be a truly monumental task: rebuilding our governmental guardrails and ensuring the ability of those we elect to do their jobs. 

And speaking of “their jobs”–policy wonks need to start with a foundational inquiry: what is government’s job? What parts of our civic and economic life should government control, and what parts should be left to individuals and voluntary organizations? What aspects of our common lives must be approached collectively, and what parts must be protected against government overreach? 

That inquiry must be the framework within which we evaluate proposals to “build back better.”

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Ignoring The Obvious

America’s “legacy media” continues to downplay–or ignore–two of the most obvious sources of our current democratic crisis: Trump’s manifest mental disorders, and the undeniable corruption of the Supreme Court’s current majority. Our “papers of record”–the New York Times and the Washington Post–continue to normalize behaviors that are decidedly abnormal; they are aided and abetted by network news reports that carefully avoid even the implication that Trump’s behavior is “unusual” or that the Supreme Court’s majority is laying waste to its own jurisprudence.

There are, of course, independent newsletters and Internet sites that point to these realities, but those information sources are largely singing to the choir–Americans have long since sorted ourselves into audiences for “information” that panders to our preferred worldviews. As a result, MAGA folks are highly unlikely to have encountered the multiple psychiatric evaluations of Donald Trump–and equally unlikely to understand the radical extremism of the high Court’s majority.

One of my cousins is a cardiologist with a longstanding interest in psychiatry. He recently shared with me a column he’d written for his local newspapers, in which he reported on published psychiatric diagnoses of our demented President. I was especially interested in one published warning titled “Donald Trump, Like Hitler, is a Psychopath.”

Dodes warns that “this constitutes the most dangerous of all mental disorders, since it is the only psychological condition in which behaving in a morally reprehensible way is an essential part of its nature.” Manifestations of this disorder include the intentional creation of harm to others without guilt or remorse, for personal gain or self-gratification, which includes the sadistic pleasure of wreaking revenge against imagined enemies. Psychopaths cannot be reasoned out of their beliefs or their behavior, because they are unable to comprehend that others have value, or the concept of questioning themselves. The fact that Donald Trump has the most dangerous form of this disorder has two long-term consequences: It means that he is never going to stop intentionally harming others for his personal benefit, and it means that he will become worse over time. 

Basically, the psychiatric community has concluded that “Trump lacks the ability to listen to reason and draw conclusions from facts.” (As a frame of reference, the average score for psychopathy for someone in the general population is 5; the average for felons in a maximum-security prison is 22. Experts give Trump an average score of 34.) Add to that the fact that Trump is manifesting numerous, unmistakable and increasing signs of dementia, and the danger becomes too obvious to ignore–unless, of course, you are a member of the traditional news media.

If we had a properly functioning Supreme Court, Trump’s ability to destroy our government might be slowed. But we don’t have such a Court, a fact that Josh Marshall–the eminently moderate and reasonable editor of Talking Points Memo–recently addressed in a column titled “There is no Democratic Future without Supreme Court Reform.”

Marshall noted that–in the absence of Court reform– even a Democratic trifecta taking control and passing laws supportive of democracy, separation of powers and the rule of law wouldn’t be sufficient to solve the underlying problem, which is that a substantial minority of Americans really do favor autocracy. (What he didn’t say–and I will–is that what they favor is a White Christian autocracy.)

Any repairs would be at risk the moment Republicans were once again in control.

The simple truth is that none of the laws that are essential for reinforcing the federal system against Trumpist attack would survive the scrutiny of the current Republican court majority as soon as there is another Republican president. Most would be overruled much sooner because they would, like an anti-gerrymandering law, place limits on Republican states. You cannot consider the last three to four years and doubt any of this. And what follows from that is that no plan to recover from or even seriously battle with Trumpism can have any chance of success unless reforming the Supreme Court is the first order of business. The dire corruption of the Republican majority governs everything.

I agree. But the people who really need to understand what the mental health experts and constitutional scholars are telling us are unlikely to encounter discussion of these issues unless traditional mass media sources address them. The consolidation of media ownership by America’s plutocrats makes it very unlikely that we will see those sources engage in the journalism we need–a journalism that reports the obvious.

Talk about your perfect storm….

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