Public Policy and Governance – Page 4

What Individuals Must Do

Almost everything I’ve read in the wake of the election has fallen into one of two categories: why did it happen? and what can we do? Articles in that first category vastly exceed those in the second, and that is unfortunate. Although it is always important to analyze the source of a problem, too many of the purported analyses have been smug, finger-pointing accusations by self-important know-it-alls–hardly helpful suggestions for action.

Also, many of us want an answer to the question: what can I do? I’m one of those people: tell me I can only solve problem X by climbing that mountain, and I’ll strap on my boots and start climbing. Tell me there’s really nothing I can do about problem X and I just feel helpless and depressed.

A newsletter from Democracy Docket (no link) recently summarized how we got here, and did so in an abbreviated (but reasonably accurate) few paragraphs:

The moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party did not happen overnight. It happened gradually — starting with Newt Gingrich’s attack on the government in the early 1990s. It continued with the Tea Party movement, the birther conspiracy and the nomination of Donald Trump in 2016.

It gained momentum when Trump won the 2016 election despite losing the popular vote. Once in office, it grew worse when his attacks on democratic institutions were met with acquiescence by most of his party.

The mistake many of us made was believing that the aftermath of the 2020 election marked an end to the GOP’s descent into moral collapse. We were wrong. Jan. 6 marked a further descent into the moral abyss.

By 2024, the few principled Republicans had already abandoned their party for the “Never Trump” movement. What was left were Trump dead-enders and those without any core principles at all. A party once built on the promise of Lincoln had become the morally bankrupt party of Trump.

So here we are. We have one party that has become, for all intents and purposes, a cult. It has turned its back on the project of governing in favor of a hysterical retreat into a past that never existed and an agenda of resentment and “othering.” That has left the remaining party the unenviable task of herding cats–representing voters who range from center-Right but too sane to stay in the GOP all the way to Bernie Sanders and AOC and even further Left.

So that’s where we are. That rather obviously leaves us with the second question: what can we do? Are there promising steps that individuals can take that are likely to make a difference, or are our problems so massive that all we can do is marinate in our distress?

I’ve arrived at an answer that may or may not be correct, but works for me. (I encourage you all to rebut my suggestions and to offer better or additional ones).

As I indicated in a couple of recent posts, I think those of us who recognize that we are individually powerless to affect the dysfunctions and outrages of a national government headed by Trump have to turn to activism at the local level. Even rural occupants of Blue states can work through local government to protect citizens from the Trump assaults; in Red states, cities of over 500,000 are uniformly Blue, and activism is possible at the municipal level. (Rural folks in states like Indiana can at least join statewide organizations working to protect civil liberties or immigrants’ rights or the environment.)

In my case, given my interests and background, I will volunteer with local lawyers’ groups–certainly the ACLU, but perhaps others as well– to determine the measures that are available in our federalist system, and work to use whatever tools we identify, including but not limited to lawsuits. While we no longer have a Supreme Court that we can rely upon to enforce the Constitution, there are numerous good judges at the local and appellate levels, and justice is famously slow. By the time any appeals reach the Supreme Court, we may be emerging from much of the current darkness.

Others of you might work with local groups focused on immigrant rights, or on health, reproductive or environmental issues.

Most importantly, local activists need to work with educators and with recently established local media outlets, to educate and inform the voting population. If there was any systemic failure that led to our current disaster, it was widespread civic ignorance and misinformation. Citizens need to understand the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and they need to recognize the ways in which MAGA Republicanism rejects that foundational framework.

We have work to do.

Comments

The Merits Of Federalism

I have always been ambivalent about American federalism. I know that many in the legal community, including Supreme Court Justices who came after him, agreed with Justice Brandeis that federalism encourages the states to be “laboratories of democracy,” but I also know that many states–including the one I inhabit–use “states’ rights” as their defense against compliance with national rules, especially– but certainly not exclusively–the extension of civil liberties to their own citizens.

The election of Donald Trump, however, has made me a federalism fan.

In a recent opinion piece, Jennifer Rubin focused on the possibilities for resistance that our federalist system provides to Blue state governors in the face of Trump’s assault on rational federal governance.

The positive news: Governors are constitutionally empowered and morally obligated to check the federal government and fill the gaps where the federal government has abandoned vulnerable people. They will be the last line of defense against an irresponsible and reckless Trump administration.

Fortunately, an extraordinary batch of Democratic governors including Tim Walz of Minnesota, JB Pritzker of Illinois, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Wes Moore of Maryland, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Maura Healey of Massachusetts appear ready to both protect their residents from a reckless administration and offer an alternative vision that benefits average Americans.

Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, told the New York Times, “States in our system have a lot of power — we’re entrusted with protecting people, and we’re going to do it.” He added, “They can expect that we’re going to show up every single time when they try to run over the American people.”

What can states do to counter what Rubin calls Trump’s “grab bag of crackpots?” His bizarre choice of RNK, Jr., who has declared war on medicine, is joined by his pick for secretary of defense, a man who doesn’t appear to believe in germs, and a nominee to head up Medicare who championed the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19, (Her column appeared before the CEO of the Wide World of Wrestling was chosen to head up the Department of Education.)

In the face of growing evidence that Trump intends to decimate the federal government, what can governors do? According to Rubin, plenty. With respect to health issues,

they can stockpile vaccines and abortion medications, offer medical school students from red states a transfer to their schools, loosen rules for telemedicine, ease requirements to license doctors accredited elsewhere, reiterate vaccine requirements for schoolchildren (and fund free vaccine programs for vulnerable communities), expand their own health departments and pool resources to fund medical research. In short, they can develop an alternative model of responsible health-care governance.

Governors’ actions can go well beyond healthcare. If Trump’s government tries to enforce his promises to roll back overtime and worker safety rules, governors can enforce state laws protecting workers. They can defend the environment by bringing a steady stream of litigation to protect air, water and natural resources. (Rubin notes that Democracy Forward, a legal group formed after Trump’s 2016 win, has built a “multimillion-dollar war chest and marshaled more than 800 lawyers to press a full-throated legal response across a wide range of issues.”)

On other fronts, they can sue to enforce consumer protection rules or challenge coercive action depriving states of federal funds. (States filed roughly 160 suits against the first Trump administration.) Bob Ferguson, Washington’s Democratic attorney general and governor-elect, recently said that, according to Associated Press, “offices of Democratic attorneys general have been in touch for months to talk about how to push back against Trump’s policies.” They also can maintain strict gun safety regulations, bring suits against gun manufacturers and fund research on gun violence….

To promote democracy, they can offer enhanced civics education, public media literacy programs and public service requirements for high school and college graduates. And, as leading legal minds have been arguing for some time, they can creatively expand multistate compacts on everything from “social services delivery; child placement; education policy; emergency and disaster assistance; corrections, law enforcement, and supervision; professional licensing; water allocation; land use planning; environmental protection and natural resources management; and transportation and urban infrastructure management.” A new entity, Governors Safeguarding Democracy, may be just the vehicle to facilitate this activity.

Finally, Rubin notes that governors can counter the right-wing media ecosphere by highlighting the damage caused by anti-family, anti-child and anti-life MAGA policies.

Rather obviously, Red state governors won’t take such measures, so the resistance won’t be uniform. But it will be instructive. And it will offer Americans options– places to relocate to if and when their own state’s compliance with the wrecking crew becomes too onerous.

Comments

The Pollyanna Approach

The daily headlines confirm the utter incompetence of the MAGA Republicans Trump has selected to run the federal government, and it understandable that rational people are experiencing varieties of depression. At least in the short-to-medium term, millions of people will be hurt. Badly. Assuming Trump gets his tariffs and his appointees, there will be dramatic inflation and domestic chaos; worse still, the chances of triggering World War three will be higher than they’ve been in a long time.

Not exactly the sort of situation to inspire hope. So how would a Pollyanna approach what promises to be a very dark time?

The answer to that question lies in the “what comes after.” There is no doubt that, barring a miracle, the next few years will see significant destruction of federal governance. We have already experienced the erosion of longstanding norms of democratic behavior in Congress; the narrowness of GOP victory (and the return of several congressional lunatics) will undoubtedly keep the House dysfunctional. Trump’s Supreme Court has already demonstrated its willingness to abandon the rule of law. With the guardrails gone, it will get very ugly very quickly, and a lot of people will suffer.

But the thing about ugly is: it engenders anger and resistance. And it ultimately collapses.

Over the past two hundred plus years, American law and policy have changed–often for the better, but also for the worse. Our electoral system has ossified, becoming less representative and less democratic. Our economic system has morphed from capitalism to a corporatism/crony capitalism that heavily favors the haves. Our social safety net is unwieldy, unnecessarily bureaucratic and underinclusive. Our citizens no longer trust the government or each other.

The underappreciated Biden Administration moved to correct much of the economic damage–and those moves were widely successful. Had Harris been elected, it is likely that she would have continued along that path of incremental improvement–but she couldn’t have dislodged the moneyed interest groups or repaired the the baked-in electoral dysfunctions–the Electoral College, the bloated version of the filibuster, the widespread gerrymandering and other structural mechanisms distorting the “voice of the people.”

The term “creative destruction” was first coined by Marx, who applied it to capitalism, but it has subsequently taken on a variety of other meanings. Here, I’m using it to describe a process in which widespread destruction of existing systems facilitates the birth of a better replacement. As we watch the Trumpers’ purposeful destruction of a governing framework that has developed over 200+ years, we need to consider what we will create to replace it. Any such consideration requires that we be clear-eyed about the nature of our structural, economic, legal and educational failures and inequities.

It will also require a national conversation on a basic topic: what is government for?

In coming posts, I will lay out my own argument, which is essentially that government is the mechanism through which a society provides two necessary infrastructures: one physical and one social. There is very little disagreement about responsibility for the physical infrastructure, although the pro-privatization movement made some (largely unsuccessful) inroads. Instead, our political disputes have largely centered on the contours of the social infrastructure.

America’s obsessive focus on individual responsibility and achievement has obscured recognition of the equally important role played by the governing institutions within which we are embedded. Elizabeth Warren summed it up in a much-cited comment.

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there – good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea – God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

We Americans too often fail to recognize the extent to which individual success is dependent upon government’s ability to provide a physical, legal and cultural environment within which success can occur.

Bottom line: We absolutely need to resist the illegal and inhumane actions of the incoming administration. But we also need to think long and hard about the repair job–the dimensions of an improved social contract– that will be needed when this eruption of corruption and bigotry has run its course.

Comments

Resistance And The Environment

If even a small percentage of Project 2025’s proposals–or Trump’s fever dreams– are implemented, Americans will suffer. Times will be very dark, and very unAmerican. So it may seem Panglossian to predict that we can and will emerge from those dark times, not unscathed, but essentially intact.

That said, however, there is one element of the coming assault on reason and evidence that poses a truly existential threat, and that is the denial of climate change– the likely withdrawal from global efforts to combat it, the resumption of reliance on fossil fuels, and the termination of federal green energy incentives. We humans can recover from bad governance. We can (and undoubtedly will) learn from the experience of being governed by corrupt and profoundly ignorant people.

But we are unlikely to survive a failure to take climate change seriously.

I find it hard to understand people who deny the reality of a warming planet–the captains of the fossil fuel industries who place a higher priority on their bottom lines than their grandchildren’s lives, the religious fundamentalists who are sure God will protect us (or perhaps is punishing us for our sins), the people who simply choose not to believe facts that might inconvenience them. In my own lifetime (and yes, I’m old) I’ve seen spring come earlier and earlier, and summer last far longer than it used to. As I write this, we are nearing the end of November, yet temperatures are in the 50s and 60s, flowers are still blooming and the leaves remain on most trees. When I was young, it was much colder at this time of year, and we’d typically already had snowstorms.

The rejection of science and evidence by Washington’s clown show is depressing, but those who have chosen climate as their resistance focus need to recognize how much impact is possible–and for that matter, necessary– at the local level, through actions both by local governments and the private sector.

Time Magazine recently had a story about the ways in which small business enterprises (SME’s) can fight climate change. The author reminded us that there are numerous ways to focus on “tackling climate change from the ground up—from cities cutting their own footprints to grassroots activists making changes in their backyards.”

Approximately 90% of the world’s businesses are SMEs; those firms are responsible for a significant share of global emissions. News headlines at the intersection of business and climate often focus on big companies with household names, but to achieve global climate ambitions, small firms need to be engaged….

For the small companies that engage, decarbonization can be rewarding. It helps them access new markets as Europe and many Asian markets have begun to impose sustainability requirements for imported products. Greener products appeal to consumers who are looking for sustainable products, too. And sustainability efforts make SMEs more resilient to climate risks like extreme weather.

The article noted a report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that identified emerging mechanisms—from green loans to supply chain finance—intended to facilitate green practices at small businesses.

Local governments also have a number of initiatives they can employ to combat climate change–everything from installing new technologies to improve their own energy efficiency, to encouraging the construction of energy efficient buildings (including rooftop solar and/or green roofs), moving public transportation systems to clean energy and promoting other kinds of low-carbon transportation, creating pedestrian and bicycle-only zones and enhancing urban green spaces…the list goes on.

Many of these projects also enhance the quality of urban and suburban life. Planting trees and expanding public parks are environmentally important steps that also provide recreation for citizens, for example.

There is an argument to be made that –if sufficient numbers of local jurisdictions engage in these efforts–the impact would equal or exceed the mechanisms currently employed (and endangered) at the federal level. In any event, most of the actions available to local businesses and governments cannot be stymied by the know-nothings in Washington.

As a recent article from the University of California explained,

Local government can play a unique and critical role addressing the climate crisis. Local governments have immediate impact on the daily lives of community members and personal connections to constituents. We have a clear line of sight to understand how climate change is impacting people on a daily basis. If leveraged correctly, local governments have the power to bring people together across party lines to address local issues with creativity and agility.

The article listed a number of successful efforts already underway. Consider them a “road map” for resisting Project 2025’s prescription for planetary disaster.

Comments

Patriotism Betrayed

As Trump rolls out his loony-tunes Cabinet choices, we are beginning to see the irony of “America First.” Rather than even a skewed version of patriotism, Trump is threatening a wholesale retreat from America’s founding ideals and from America’s place in the world.

I won’t waste pixels on his desire to put a science-denying medical conspiracy theorist in charge of the nation’s health, although I will note that–should RFK, Jr. actually make it through the confirmation process–most of the people who will sicken and/or die will be the True Believers in the MAGA base, the same folks who refused to wear masks or get vaccinated against COVID.

RFK, Jr. and his brain worm aren’t the most unbelievable nominees. Others pose an immediate threat to America’s global dominance. A recent essay in the Bulwark addressed the consequences if those nominees’ should take office. With respect to Tulsi Gabbard, the author wrote:

In addition to the problems she will cause American intelligence, her appointment will also send shockwaves through allied intelligence groups.

Because absolutely no one is going to share intel with us once she’s at the top of the org chart.

Instead our allies will cobble together alternative working relationships that do not include America. Without a seat at those tables, decisions will start to be made without consideration of America’s interests.

Eventually those informal working relationships will be codified. And America will be on the outside looking in. Hostage to events with a diminished ability to shape them….

It will also mean that the Pacific nations will have to come to their own arrangements with China. Because if the American public was not willing to shoulder the burden of merely shipping arms to Ukraine, then there is zero chance that we will be willing to go kinetic in the defense of Taiwan.

Tulsi Gabbard–one of Putin’s “useful idiots” and a woman so compromised she couldn’t get a security clearance– at the head of America’s intelligence agencies would be very bad for America, but as the essayist notes, it would be worse if our allies still believed there was a chance America would continue as a guarantor of the global order, only to find that they were mistaken when Putin and Xi acted.

If the Gabbard nomination wasn’t a sufficiently clear sign of America’s retreat from its global obligations and alliances, Trump’s choice for Defense Secretary “sealed the deal” as the saying goes.

Trump has always mistaken acting for reality, and his choice of Pete Hegseth–a television host–confirms his inability to distinguish manner from substance. As the Independent recently reported, not only is Hegseth, a Fox News pundit, massively unqualified, he wants to launch a “frontal assault” against top brass, kick women out of combat, and “implement Donald Trump’s sweeping agenda for the world’s third-largest standing fighting force.”

Hegseth’s nomination, which came as a shock to members of Congress who will ultimately be asked to vote to confirm him, reflects a broader trend among Trump’s Cabinet-level nominations and White House appointments — grievance-fueled loyalists whose disdain for a perceived establishment matches Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to governing and disregard for expertise and experience in a government that tens of millions of Americans depend on.

Since the announcement of Hegseth’s nomination, we have learned that he self-identifies as a Christian Nationalist, sports several White Nationalist tattoos, and has been credibly accused of sexual assault. If confirmed, he will enthusiastically implement Trump’s promises to reimpose a ban on transgender service members, end a policy that covered travel costs for service members seeking abortion care, and gut diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Hegseth is also an out and proud bigot, who spent his college years crusading against diversity and “the homosexual lifestyle,” and suggested in a 2024 book that General Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, and an Air Force fighter pilot with 130 combat flying hours and 40 years of service, only got the job because he is Black. (I’m sure that accusation endeared him to the African-Americans who comprise over 20% of America’s armed forces.)

There are very real issues with U.S. foreign policy. Critics–especially on the Left–point to multiple episodes where American interventions have been highly improper, to put it mildly. Others find fault with current Mideast policies. Americans of all political stripes routinely criticize aspects of the bloated Defense budget.

Correcting past blunders and “right-sizing” the budget, however, require competent leadership, and Trumpworld, from the top down, is thoroughly incompetent. (On the other hand, if the goal of America First is to make America the first country to surrender global influence and abandon its allies, they’ll be great…)

Putin and Xi are undoubtedly cheering….

Comments