Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

The Legislature That Won’t Stay In Its Lane

Indiana’s legislature is preparing for its 2026 session. Despite the Indiana Senate’s recent, surprising show of integrity in refusing to bow to Trump’s gerrymandering order, my expectations remain low. 

For the past several years, Rightwing Republicans (a large number of whom are White Christian nationalists) have enjoyed a super-majority in Indiana’s General Assembly. They haven’t simply ignored the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State, they”ve also demonstrated their total disdain for federalism–the constitutional division of authority that accords different powers to those managing local, state and federal jurisdictions.

Indiana’s legislators seem unable to grasp the fact that they are state legislators, not mayors and/or city counselors.

The Indianapolis Star recently shared research by the Indiana Coalition for Human Services, research that focused only on policies regarding the “social determinants of health.” The report included analysis of things like economic stability, health care and public safety, and the researchers found that roughly three dozen so-called “preemption” laws have been passed since 2010. Virtually all of those measures are examples of our radically Rightwing legislature stepping in to overrule policies our legislative overlords consider progressive or–horror of horrors–“woke.”

As Gary Snyder recently wrote on his “Snyde Report,” 

Indiana lawmakers keep insisting they believe in “local control,” right up until a city tries to do literally anything remotely progressive. A new report finds the Statehouse has quietly stacked more than 50 laws designed to block cities like Indianapolis from raising wages, protecting renters, regulating guns, or extending basic protections to LGBTQ Hoosiers — all in the name of making sure nobody accidentally improves quality of life without legislative permission. Since 2010, roughly three dozen of these preemption laws have been passed, part of a national trend where Republican supermajorities treat local governments less like partners and more like misbehaving children who need their policy toys confiscated.

The official excuse is “business-friendly uniformity,” but the results look a lot like wage stagnation, housing shortages, and two in five Indiana households unable to afford the basics where they live. Cities can’t raise the minimum wage, require affordable housing, or even ban puppy mills without the Statehouse swooping in to say no — yet lawmakers remain baffled by Indiana’s poor rankings on gun deaths, pollution, voter turnout, and overall quality of life. With a fresh wave of bills queued up to crack down on immigration, ban ranked-choice voting, police homelessness, and even let legislators impeach locally elected prosecutors, the message is clear: Hoosiers can have local government — just not local solutions.

My only quibble with that summary would be with its last sentence. Thanks to a legislature that refuses to stay in its own lane, Hoosiers don’t even have genuine local government–we just elect local “functionaries” who must obey the dictates of their legislative masters. As the Coalition for Human Services found, Indiana’s state lawmakers have repeatedly used the doctrine of preemption to target policies that could help lower-income Hoosiers and others in vulnerable groups, but sometimes, the reasons for preempting local government decisions don’t seem ideological–why, for example, did the legislature overrule at least 20 local ordinances meant to combat puppy mills? Is saving puppies “woke”? (My best guess: lobbyists and contributions from the owners of those establishments.)

In 2016, I was infuriated when Indiana’s legislators banned local governments from restricting the use of plastic bags at stores. The law prohibited local governments from banning (or taxing or placing fees on) plastic bags and similar single-use “auxiliary containers.” In a measure that clearly demonstrated that “home rule” is a fiction in Indiana, the law amended Indiana’s toothless home-rule statute to expressly bar local units of government from adopting “any prohibition, restriction, fee, or tax on items like plastic bags, paper bags, cups, boxes, or other one-time use packaging at stores.”

In Indiana, local governments retain that mythical “home rule” only so long as our legislative overlords approve of their “home rules.” Since our legislature is filled with MAGA Republicans who refuse to believe that climate change is a real thing, efforts by local folks to ameliorate environmental threats–even through such modest steps as banning the use of plastic bags–simply cannot be tolerated. 

When you live in a Red state, you soon learn that your legislature considers federalism–along with the protections of the Bill of Rights– optional.

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Is Social Media A Drug?

Paul Krugman recently compared access to social media to the legalization of heroin–to what would happen if heroin was sold without any restrictions on its marketing or use.

Heroin distribution and sales would quickly become a huge, multibillion-dollar industry. They would become a significant part of GDP, even though heroin harms and often kills those who consume it. Given the increasingly naked corruption of U.S. politics, the heroin industry would be able to purchase massive political influence, enough to block any attempts to limit the harm it does — the harm it knows it does, because heroin industry executives would surely be aware of the damage their products inflict.

Through massive political donations — enabled by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling – and de facto bribery enabled via cryptocurrency deals, the industry would be able to enlist the U.S. government as an ally in its efforts to block regulation in other countries. For example, U.S. officials might threaten punitive tariffs against countries that try to limit and regulate heroin use.

Krugman insists that this fanciful exercise–which may seem “extreme and implausible”–is actually a pretty accurate description of the social media landscape. As evidence, he quotes a report issued in 2023 by the U.S. Surgeon General’s office, titled “Social Media and Youth Mental Health.” (Krugman advises downloading it quickly, before RFK Jr. suppresses it.) That publication summarized the now-extensive evidence that children and adolescents who consume excessive amounts of social media sustain mental health damage.

It isn’t as though the tech “bros” responsible for these platforms are unaware of the damage being done.

In 2021 the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Facebook Knows Instagram is Toxic for Teen Girls, Documents Show: Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public.” In 2024 Meta finally introduced some relatively ineffectual limits on what teens can see.

The Journal reported that Meta’s own internal projections estimated it would earn 10% of its overall annual revenue – that’s $16 billion dollars– from advertising scams and banned goods. In other words, Meta’s platforms are knowingly pushing (and I use the word “pushing” intentionally) “fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.”

And where have our intrepid Senators and Representatives been while these facts have emerged? Evidently, the same place they’ve been hiding while Trump dismantles the federal government.

Krugman writes that last year Congress was on the verge of passing the Kids Online Safety Act, a law that would have been the first to impose any rules on social media. The Act initially had bipartisan support; some ninety-one senators had signed on. But then, Krugman reports, “Mark Zuckerberg and his billions came to town, and the legislation died.”

Once again, other countries have done what the U.S. won’t. The European Union passed the Digital Services Act, which–among other things–requires large platforms to self-police and refrain from engaging in a variety of activities, including “dissemination of illegal content” and matter shown to have “negative consequences” for “physical and mental well-being.” Australia has recently passed a law that would prevent anyone under 16 from having a social media account. (I’ll admit to skepticism about the ability to enforce this, but at least Australia is trying.)

A couple of weeks ago, under its Digital Services Act, the European Union fined Musk’s X 120 million euros, based on several violations of that Act, including the fact that X’s “Blue checks” are a fraud. (X claims that a blue check means that the poster’s identity has been verified. But in fact X sells them and makes no effort to verify identity.) X also refuses to provide information on advertisements sufficient for users to identify scams, and refuses to make its public data available to researchers.

Unlike the EU, the Trump administration is pulling out the stops to support our tech titans’ resistance to European regulation.

Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, has explicitly linked U.S. tariffs on European steel to demands that Europe weakens its digital regulations. If the EU tried to make comparable demands on the United States, we’d consider it an outrageous infringement on our national sovereignty. And I’m pretty sure that making this linkage violates U.S. trade law too. But rule of law is for the little people.

As Krugman argues, unregulated social media is a lot like unregulated drugs. Powerful social media billionaires are preventing us from protecting our children. They are also using that power to dictate U.S. foreign policy, “punishing our erstwhile allies for daring to limit their ability to push their product.”

America is now a digital narco-state.

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Why The GOP Is No Longer A Political Party

I have repeatedly insisted that the MAGA cult currently operating as the Republican Party isn’t just a far cry from the party of Lincoln, but an equally far cry from the once-respectable political party of my younger days. As regular readers of this blog know, I spent some 35 years in that earlier GOP–met my husband and made many lifelong friends while serving in a Republican administration, and won a Republican Congressional primary with an agenda that included support for reproductive choice and gay rights.

I still have that husband and those friends. None of them vote Republican these days. All of them are appalled by the racism and viciousness of what has replaced a once-respectable political agenda.

Recently, the Contrarian focused on the vast differences between the MAGA/Trump cult and the political party it has displaced. The article began by agreeing that today’s GOP is more properly seen as a cult than a political party, finding it composed of “Trump idolaters, followers, zealots, sycophants, or devotees” who lack not just a concrete policy agenda “but all other fundamental elements of a political party.” Today’s iteration is “an empty political shell based exclusively on fidelity to a decrepit, unhinged autocrat.”

A political party is properly defined as a group of persons “organized for the purpose of directing the policies of a government”. As the article asserts–and as any sentient American can see– the GOP members of Congress have shown zero interest in discharging their constitutional duties or entering into serious debates over policy.

What about a governing agenda? The article notes the complete absence of a consistent ideology.

“States rights”? Well, they rail against federal regulatory overreach, but they condone federal troops’ invasion of U.S. cities. Indiana’s right-wing governor has threatened his own Republican state lawmakers for not capitulating to Trump’s gerrymander demands, just as MAGA Texas Governor Greg Abbott leaned on his state legislators (at Trump’s behest) to pass a redistricting grab that Texas lawmakers disliked. And while the MAGA contingent nominally supports “law and order,” it cheers the pardon of Jan. 6 felons and the dismissal of those who prosecuted them. Invariably, policy inconsistencies (e.g., America First but start a war with Argentina, fiscal hawkishness but run up the debt) swallow any cogent dogma. The only consistency is subservience to Trump. (Recall that the “party” platform boiled down to “whatever Trump wants.”)

Likewise, unlike normal political parties, the MAGA crew has no minimum standards for membership. Racists, misogynists, xenophobes, conspiracy mongers, criminals, antisemites, insurrectionists, and adjudicated sexual assaulters are all welcome—indeed, they can rise to highest rungs of the party! The days when conservatives ejected the John Birch Society are long gone.

The article went on to describe the party of Lincoln, and the historic elements of the party platform–especially a provision in the platform of 1856 pledging to uphold the principles of the Constitution and the rights of the States–and contrasted that agenda with today’s Trumpers who have essentially signed on to “anything Trump wants,” irrespective of constitutional constraints.

Today, the formerly Grand Old Party has substituted White nationalism for the Declaration’s “all men are created equal.” It no longer respects the limits on executive power extolled in previous platforms. The party that decried “judicial activism” now celebrates a corrupt Supreme Court. The party of free markets has abandoned competition and genuine capitalism for corporatism and crony capitalism. And the party that once opposed Russian aggression cheers as Trump betrays our allies, commits war crimes and makes the world more dangerous.

I know that several of my more partisan readers will post comments to the effect that the GOP was always on the wrong side of liberty and equality. They’re wrong. As the linked article notes,

Let’s face it, the current crowd bears no resemblance to the party with a policy legacy that includes such achievements as the Emancipation Proclamation, the post-Civil War amendments, the Land Grant Colleges and Homestead Act, civil service reform, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the National Park system, the first food and drug safety act, the interstate highway system, the EPA, the peaceful integration of Germany at the end of the Cold War, and the Americans With Disabilities Act. Indeed, no doubt Trumpists would condemn all that as part of a “woke,” communist agenda.

We need to face the fact that America does not currently have two political parties. We have the Democrats and today’s iteration of the KKK.

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Those Neglected Issues

It isn’t simply that our attention is consumed by the daily obscenities of the Trump administration–the increasingly overt and unapologetic racism, the economic damage, the assaults on the rule of law. Reeling from the daily headlines and trying to stem the progress of MAGA’s anti-Americanism takes up most of our policy bandwidth, meaning that we neglect the large number of important issues that we ought to be addressing.

One of those issues is America’s housing crisis.

I have previously posted about various elements of that housing crisis--including out-of-state buyers of homes (My own city, Indianapolis, is now first in the nation for out-of-state ownership of rental property, but such ownership is a real problem in most cities.) More recently, I’ve posted about the escalating rate of evictions, also acute locally, and about the laudable effort by the genuinely religious folks in GIMA-The Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance– to provide permanent housing and supportive services for individuals experiencing chronic homelessness through the Streets to Homes initiative.

Local efforts are important, but housing problems are national. A recent article in The Atlantic took an in-depth look at the extent to which private equity has changed the housing market.The article begins with a recitation of the problem: the country is short by approximately 4 million housing units, and the shortage is most severe in areas like starter homes, moderately priced apartments in low-rises, and family-friendly dwellings.  Among the increasing numbers of Americans who are renting, half of them are spending more than a third of their income on shelter, and in numerous markets, wages are insufficient to cover the rent of a two-bedroom apartment.

It isn’t just private equity, of course. Multiple factors contribute to the housing crisis, including but not limited to restrictive zoning codes, excessively bureaucratic permitting processes, and the escalating costs of labor and building materials. But the problem has been significantly aggravated by the aggressive entry of private equity into the housing market. As the article reports, “Institutional investors have bought up hundreds of thousands of American homes since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, outbidding families and pushing up rents.”

And it matters.

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Center for Geospatial Solutions published a report showing that corporations now own a remarkable one in 11 residential real-estate parcels in the 500 urban counties with data robust enough to analyze. In some communities, they control more than 20 percent of properties….These investors are pouring the most money into “buy low, rent high” neighborhoods: communities, many of them in the South and the Rust Belt, where large shares of families can’t afford a mortgage.

These private equity firms are buying up huge numbers of starter homes in low-income, minority neighborhoods, intensifying America’s racial wealth and homeownership gaps. The article notes that, in Cleveland, corporations own 17.5 percent of residential real-estate parcels, primarily in low-income areas. In the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, just one in five homebuyers in 2021 took out a mortgage, and in 2022, owner-occupants made just 13 percent of purchases. In a nearby majority-white neighborhood, owner-occupants bought more than 80 percent of homes that same year. In affluent White neighborhoods,  out-of-state corporations owned less than 1 percent of residential parcels.

Private equity isn’t to blame for high housing costs in desirable cities and neighborhoods, but it is distorting markets in low income communities, and pushing thousands of Black and Latino families off the property ladder. And to add insult to injury, renters of these investment properties often find that corporate owners are more prone to skimping on maintenance and upkeep and quicker to evict their tenants than local, individual owners.

Policymakers have advanced a variety of proposals to address the problem. Washington State is debating a proposal to cap the number of units that a corporation can own, but that approach would simply invite investors to set up multiple entities to purchase properties. Other policymakers suggest classifying firms that own more than 10 properties in a given jurisdiction as commercial owners, subjecting them to higher property-tax rates and higher taxes on their capital gains, but there are obvious “work-arounds” to that approach as well.

The most straightforward remedy would be a dramatic expansion of the country’s housing stock–especially the supply of affordable housing. During the presidential campaign, Kamala Harris released a detailed plan to improve housing affordability and increase housing supply, but voters chose to ignore boring proposals aimed at ameliorating real problems, instead choosing to install a bloviating ignoramus who gave them permission to publicly express their bigotries.

I wonder if We the People have learned our lesson…

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I Guess I’m A Domestic Terrorist…

Charlie Sykes says if we’re not alarmed, it’s because we aren’t paying attention.

Granted, paying attention to this corrupt and incompetent administration means constant alarm–my own ranges from moderate concern to abject terror–but Sykes was singling out a recent memo issued by the bimbo who is currently cosplaying as US Attorney General, Pam Bondi.

The memo orders the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism.”

And who are these “domestic terrorists”? Apparently, anyone engaged in an activity that “paints legitimate government authority and traditional, conservative viewpoints as ‘fascist.”  Bondi proposes to punish such offenses “to the maximum extent permitted by law.” (If she was a minimally-competent lawyer, she’d recognize that the First Amendment prohibits punishing “activities” that are really just beliefs…)

The memo orders the creation of a massive dragnet that focuses on “Antifa.” As sentient Americans know–but the credulous MAGA base evidently does not–Antifa is simply a word meaning “anti-fascist.” (You. know, like the American soldiers who fought in WWII.) There is no “Antifa” organization, nothing comparable to the communist cells that so terrified patriotic citizens back in the Cold War/McCarthyite days. But Bondi’s use of the term accurately signals her obvious goal, which is focused on ideology, not on terrorism as we have historically defined that word.

As Sykes explains (emphases his):

Although the directive mentions the statutory definition requiring acts dangerous to human life, it directs federal law enforcement to investigate individuals whose “animating principle is adherence” to several viewpoints.

And the“extreme viewpoints” and ideological frameworks the Attorney General instructs federal law enforcement to prioritize include? (These are direct quotes)

• Opposition to law and immigration enforcement…

• Extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders…

• Adherence to radical gender ideology…

• Anti-Americanism…

• Anti-capitalism…

• Anti-Christianity…

• Support for the overthrow of the United States Government…

• Hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality,,,

Sykes accurately describes this as “clowns-with-flamethrowers territory.” and notes that Bondi appears to be quite serious– that she’s providing “heavy hitters  with legal hammers, writing that “The JTTFs [Joint Terrorism Task Forces] shall prioritize the investigation of such conduct.”

Needless to say, an attack that characterizes “antifa” as the cause of domestic terrorism ignores reality and the mountains of data confirming that far-right attacks –especially those from white supremacists–vastly outnumber all other forms of domestic violence. (That documented and fact-based conclusion has now been deleted from the department’s website.)

I am fascinated by Bondi’s list, which certainly establishes that–at least in her opinion–I’m a “domestic terrorist.” I may not own a gun or other weapon (I certainly don’t!) and I may run from anything remotely like a physical confrontation (yes, I’m a big coward), but I am firmly opposed to the current administration’s “immigration enforcement” tactics. I definitely adhere to what MAGA considers “radical gender ideology” (I support same-sex marriage and the right of trans people–including young people–to access appropriate medical interventions). I have a sneaking suspicion that Bondi would consider my strong objections to Trump’s war crimes and pathetic pro-Putin betrayal of Ukraine to be “anti-Americanism.”

I’m equally sure that my disdain for White Christian nationalism and my practice of putting quotation marks around “Christian” to recognize those using the label inappropriately would be sufficient for Bondi to consider me “anti-Christian.”

And I am absolutely hostile to the “traditional views” that have kept women in the kitchen and out of the workforce, LGBTQ+ people in the closet, and dark-skinned folks in servitude. You might call any of these hostilities my “animating principles.”

When I look back at the comments that are routinely posted in response to my daily rants on this site, I have to conclude that most of my readers are “domestic terrorists” too. In fact, if survey research is to be believed, a majority of Americans run afoul of several of the vague descriptions on Bondi’s ridiculous culture-war list.

For that matter, Trump, Bondi and this entire clown car of an administration are the ones guilty of “Anti-Americanism.” Bondi’s list is just additional evidence of that fact.

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