Category Archives: Random Blogging

The Important “How” Question

When the shoe fits….

A recent post to Washington Monthly took Democrats and liberals to task:

For the most part, today’s left-leaning progressives are almost entirely focused on politics, economic justice, social issues, and the influence of money in politics. These are important subjects. But the vast complex of government is largely a black box to these folks. Other than defending the idea of government against anti-government conservatives, getting rid of the filibuster, reforming the primary system, and occasionally calling for more “accountability” and “transparency,” they would be hard pressed to articulate any coherent vision of how to reform the government we have, or any real understanding of how the damn thing works.

In all fairness, this is a thoroughly bipartisan flaw.

Whenever I hear people complaining that the President–any President–promised to do such-and-such and hasn’t done it, I want to ask the complainer if s/he has ever heard about those pesky three branches of government…

It also underscores a lesson I am constantly trying to hammer home in my policy classes: although the “what” is clearly important, the “how” is equally so. In fact, it is often only when we try to figure out how to do something–how to craft a system or device that will get us from here to there–that we have to confront the very real possibility that the “what” we so ardently desire isn’t achievable.

Our ubiquitous smart phones didn’t come about because someone said, gee, wouldn’t it be great if we could access the internet from our phones? Achieving the goal required understanding how to make the damn thing work.

Genuine political reform requires intimate knowledge of those boring nuts and bolts, an understanding of how government works (and–increasingly–why it doesn’t).

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This Isn’t Democracy…

Vox and several other sources recently reported on the composition of the incoming Congress, noting that “winning” can no longer be defined as “getting the most votes.”

On Tuesday, 33 US senators elected in November will be sworn in by Vice President Joe Biden — including 12 who are new to the chamber. The class includes 22 Republicans and 11 Democrats, a big reason why the GOP has a 54-46 majority in the Senate overall.

But here’s a crazy fact: those 46 Democrats got more votes than the 54 Republicans across the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections. According to Nathan Nicholson, a researcher at the voting reform advocacy group FairVote, “the 46 Democratic caucus members in the 114th Congress received a total of 67.8 million votes in winning their seats, while the 54 Republican caucus members received 47.1 million votes.”

The writer used these numbers to make the point that the Senate–a body to which all states, large or small, send two senators–is undemocratic.

I want to make a different point, and one that I find much more troubling. The Senate, after all, was intended to be less representative than the House. We may disagree with those initial choices, but in the case of the Senate, the system is working as designed.

When it comes to Congress and the nation’s statehouses, however, “one person, one vote” is no longer an accurate description of American elections. We have disenfranchised urban voters, and given control of the country’s policymaking to rural America.

In the 2012 Congressional elections, Democratic candidates for the House received over a million more votes than Republicans, yet the GOP easily retained control. In state after state, rural voters have a disproportionate voice–drowning out the political preferences of  urban inhabitants–partially as a result of gerrymandering and partially as a result of residential “sorting.”

The first Constitution counted African-Americans as 2/3 of a citizen [update: my bad. Slaves were 3/5ths, not 2/3ds]. Today, we count people in cities (where, I’m sure coincidentally, most minorities still live) as 2/3ds of a voter.

I don’t know what you call that, but it isn’t democracy.

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Two Paths Diverged in a Wood….

When news outlets reported that former New York Governor Mario Cuomo had died, I couldn’t help thinking of Robert Frost’s famous poem, the one that ends:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

It isn’t entirely apt, because Mario Cuomo actually represented the path “less traveled,” but the enduring message of Frost’s poem–at least to me–is that we choose the paths we will travel, and those choices do, indeed, “make all the difference.”

Mario Cuomo is probably best remembered for his speech to the 1984 Democratic convention, in which he criticized Ronald Reagan’s sunny description of America as “a shining city on a hill”–describing it as the worldview of a man unaware of poverty and unconcerned about impoverished Americans. “Mr. President,” he said, “you ought to know that this nation is more a ‘tale of two cities’ than it is just a ‘shining city on a hill.’ ”

Cuomo himself came from a poor, immigrant family, and he never forgot the struggles of his family and the families in the neighborhoods he grew up in.

Cuomo’s antipathy to the death penalty was undoubtedly rooted in his Catholic faith, but it was a position that he defended with secular logic. He was deeply religious, but (unlike so many of today’s ostentatiously pious politicians) he understood the difference between religion and government, and why keeping that bright line between them was necessary both to authentic faith and effective governance. His principled belief in church-state separation led him to defy the Catholic hierarchy and publicly defend elected Catholic officials who opposed both abortion and use of the power of the state to impose that opposition on others.

Brilliant and uncommonly thoughtful, Cuomo was an articulate voice for the “little guy” and a powerful advocate for the importance of government.

In his first inaugural address as governor he called on state government to “be a positive source for good.” But–as the New York Times noted in a column after his death– the speech “also offered a critique of Reagan policies and a liberal vision for the country. Fiscal prudence, Mr. Cuomo asserted, did not prevent government from providing “shelter for the homeless, work for the idle, care for the elderly and infirm, and hope for the destitute.”

At the time, Americans (including yours truly) rejected both Cuomo’s view of the civic landscape, and his belief in the possibilities of government.

In the 1980s, two political paths diverged in America. We chose the one that was easier, the one that asked less of us–the path that allowed us to believe in our own superiority, blame poor folks for their poverty, and pursue policies that benefited the already comfortable.

And that has made all the difference.

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The Blame Game

As we approach New Year’s Eve, many of us are making our (recurring) resolutions. Going to lose that weight. Going to save for retirement. Going to earn that promotion.

Can I suggest a collective resolution? Can we humans–and especially we Americans–take time off from the national pastime of finger pointing? Instead of trying to prove that “it’s their fault,” (whatever “it” is and whoever “they” are), might we turn our attention next year to actually trying to solve some of the problems we face?

Case in point: When two police officers were killed by a deranged man who claimed to be seeking vengeance for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, a number of right-wingers (most notably Rudy Guliani) immediately began blaming everyone– from the President on down–who had spoken out against police misconduct.

Really?

As Kevin Drum noted:

I assume this means we can blame Bill O’Reilly for his 28 episodes of invective against “Tiller the Baby Killer” that eventually ended in the murder of Wichita abortion provider George Tiller by anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder. We can blame conservative talk radio for fueling the anti-government hysteria that led Timothy McVeigh to bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City. We can blame the relentless xenophobia of Fox News for the bombing of an Islamic Center in Joplin or the massacre of Sikh worshippers by a white supremacist in Wisconsin. We can blame the NRA for the mass shootings in Newtown and Aurora…We can blame Sean Hannity for his repeated support of Cliven Bundy’s “range war” against the BLM, which eventually motivated Jerad and Amanda Miller to kill five people in Las Vegas after participating in the Bundy standoff… And, of course, we can blame Rudy Giuliani and the entire conservative movement for their virtually unanimous indifference to the state-sanctioned police killings of black suspects over minor offenses in Ferguson and Staten Island, which apparently motivated the murder of the New York police officers on Saturday.

As Kareem Abdul Jabbar pointedly noted:

The protests are no more to blame for [the shooter’s] actions than The Catcher in the Rye was for the murder of John Lennon or the movie Taxi Driver for the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. Crazy has its own twisted logic and it is in no way related to the rational cause-and-effect world the rest of us attempt to create.

Can we all agree that in a country that protects free expression, lots of people will say lots of things–none of which cause or excuse anti-social behaviors?

Can we all agree that it is in the best interests of the vast majority of good police officers to root out the bad apples?

Can we all agree that it is perfectly possible to condemn police or prosecutorial misbehavior while strongly supporting good police and honorable prosecutors? (When your kids misbehaved, and you punished that behavior, did that make you “anti-child”?)

Can we take a long look at our inadequate mental health system, and work on better detection and intervention for the minority of the mentally ill who are dangerous? (Failing that, can we at least stop arming them?)

Can we actually do something about the issues we face, instead of looking for someone to blame?

Oh well.  I’m still going to try to lose that weight.

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Maybe We Aren’t Evolving After All

All I want for Christmas is a little science literacy.

This is the season for lists, and Mother Jones recently ran a list of the dumbest science deniers of 2014.

Topping that list was Donald Trump, who may well be the most ludicrous and least self-aware person on the planet. Trump (who regularly takes to Twitter to embarrass himself) responded to freezing temperatures in parts of the country as evidence that “this very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop.”

Umm…Donald, there is a difference between weather and climate. Look it up.

The Donald also joined the anti-vaxxers, pointing to the thoroughly debunked link between autism and vaccination, and–to top it off– insisted that we shouldn’t allow those doctors and nurses who had been selflessly tending to Ebola patients back in the country. The tweet:”People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences.”

We can laugh at Trump (most people do), but far more portentous than the nattering of an ignorant, narcissistic billionaire is the ongoing attack on sound science from Congress. That attack is genuine cause for concern.

Republican Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas took his opposition to basic science straight to the source: The grant-writing archives of the National Science Foundation. In an unprecedented violation of the historic firewall between the lawmakers who set the NSF’s budget and the top scientists who decide where to direct it, Smith’s researchers pulled the files on at least 47 grants that they believed were not in the “public interest.” Some of the biggest-ticket projects they took issue with related to climate change research; the committee apparently intended to single out these projects as examples of the NSF frittering money away on research that won’t come back to benefit taxpayers. The investigation is ongoing, and the precedent it sets—that scientific research projects are only worthwhile if they directly benefit the American economy—is unsettling….

Science denial on Capitol Hill is set to get even crazier next year. When Democrats (and environmentalists) got a sound whooping in the midterm elections, a new caucus of climate change-denying senators swept in. Almost every new Republican senator has taken a position against mainstream climate science, ranging from hardline denial to cautious skepticism. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the incoming majority leader, has vowed to make forcing through an approval of the Keystone XL pipeline his top agenda item in the new year; he also wants to block the Obama administration’s efforts to reign in carbon pollution from coal plants. And the incoming chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is none other than James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who actually believes that global warming is a hoax orchestrated by Barbra Streisand. You can’t make this stuff up.

Maybe evolution is more selective than we thought…..

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