Women Will Save America

The “chattering classes” are still churning out their reactions to the mysterious non-appearance of a Red wave in the midterms, and several of those analyses echo that of conservative-but-not-crazy Bret Stephens. In his weekly back and forth with liberal Gail Collins in the New York Times, Stephens summed up Democrats’ surprising performance by concluding that– however American voters might feel about inflation or crime or the overall direction of the country — they weren’t ready to give up reproductive rights, endorse election denialism or cast ballots for “Republican candidates who have the intelligence of turnips and the personalities of tapeworms.”

A politically-savvy friend says voters had crazy fatigue…

Whatever else was in play, the enormous importance of reproductive rights to those election results has become increasingly obvious. All five states with abortion measures on the ballot voted for women’s bodily autonomy, including deep-Red Kentucky. More importantly, in virtually every state, turnout by women–many of whom had only recently registered to vote–increased.

That increase was consistent with longer-term trends; as The Center for American Women and Politics reports

Women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980, with the turnout gap between women and men growing slightly larger with each successive presidential election. Women, who constitute more than half the population, have cast almost 10 million more votes than men in recent elections.

Once again, more women voted, and the message they sent was unmistakable: women are not going backward, not handing their reproductive choices to state legislators.

In a VoteCast exit survey, pro-choice voters (those who said abortion should be legal in all or most cases) were far more likely than pro-life voters (those who said abortion should be illegal in all or most cases) to say that the Dobbs decision had a “major impact” on which candidates they voted for. The partisan gap was more than 30 points– 65 percent of Democrats said Dobbs was a major factor, compared to 32 percent of Republicans.

It isn’t just through voting.  Women are protecting America in other forums, too.  A recent column by Jennifer Rubin detailed the current status of the investigation into Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election being conducted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. 

A voluminous new report from the Brookings Institution provides a legal road map for the potential prosecution of Trump. The report debunks defenses that Trump will likely deploy and underscores the real possibility that his closest associates might flip in the case, given how many might face criminal liability.

The Brookings Report to which she cites enumerates the multiple efforts made by Trump and his associates to subvert the election results in Georgia, and concludes that those efforts violated several relevant criminal statutes, including: 1) solicitation to commit election fraud, Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-604(a); 2) intentional interference with performance of election duties, Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-597; 3) interference with primaries and elections, Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-566; and 4) conspiracy to commit election fraud, Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-603.

Meanwhile, in New York, another female Attorney General, Letitia James, has sued the Trump organization for fraud.

That lawsuit is currently being tried, but James already won an important interim victory: a New York court granted James’ motion for a preliminary injunction, finding that the claims in her lawsuit are likely to succeed at trial. The Court ruled that Trump and the Trump Organization “cannot transfer any material assets to another entity without court approval, are required to include all supporting and relevant material in any new financial disclosures to banks and insurers, and ordered to appoint an independent monitor to oversee compliance with these measures.”

Going into the midterms, there was considerable debate about whether American democracy would prove robust enough to withstand the obvious and significant challenges it is facing from White Christian Nationalists and MAGA Republicans. Democratic governance requires adherence to one of the most important elements of the rule of law: the principle that no one is above the law–not rich people, not celebrities, not elected officials, and not Presidents.

That essential principle–accountability– is one of the (multiple) aspects of American governance that Donald Trump and his corrupt cohorts utterly fail to understand. If there is any one thing Donald Trump clearly believes, it is that rules are for other people–that the rules don’t apply to him.

Thus far, one of the very few Republicans who has had the cojones to tell him otherwise–forcefully and publicly– has been another female: Liz Cheney. 

As Rubin noted in her column, it takes courageous women to do “what hordes of sniveling Republican politicians, donors and insiders cannot: hold Trump accountable.”

Don’t mess with us….

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Vouchers And The World’s Worst Legislature…

I have posted previously–several times– about the Indiana legislature’s misguided support for school vouchers. I won’t repeat those criticisms here–those of you who are regular readers, or who follow education policy, know the score. I’ll just remind you that there’s absolutely no evidence that the schools receiving vouchers do a better job than the public schools they are bleeding of desperately needed resources, and because most of the schools that accept vouchers are religious, voucher programs deepen social and civic divisions.

The truth is, vouchers are basically a First Amendment work-around allowing public funds to flow to religious schools. The Courts have accepted the pathetically obvious pretense that the funds go to parents rather than to religious institutions, so hey! no  Church/State violation.

In deep Red Indiana–which has the country’s most expansive voucher program–arguments against school vouchers have fallen on the same deaf ears that characterize other policy debates in the World’s Worst Legislature. Our rural Republican super-majority wants more guns, more women forced to give birth, and more kids “educated” in fundamentalist religious schools.

But maybe–just maybe–those of us who support public education have overlooked a messaging opportunity. Rather than pointing to research supporting the numerous criticisms of voucher programs, perhaps we need to take a lesson from Oklahoma.

As the linked article from The Brookings Institution recently reported,

Oklahoma is a deep-red state. In 2020, Donald Trump won the state with nearly two thirds of the vote. The state’s governor, both U.S. senators, and all five U.S. House members are Republicans. And the GOP holds about 80% of the seats in both chambers of the state legislature. So, when Governor Kevin Stitt and Oklahoma Senate leader Greg Treat declared a statewide school voucher bill a major priority for the 2022 legislative session, it might have seemed that its enactment would be a foregone conclusion. But when the legislature adjourned at the end of May, the voucher bill had failed by a vote of 24-22 in the Oklahoma Senate—and hadn’t even been called up for a vote in the Oklahoma House.

How could this happen? How could a bill supported by the Republican governor and introduced by the Oklahoma Senate leader fail to achieve a majority in a chamber where the GOP held more than three fourths of the seats? And why didn’t it even get to the floor of the Oklahoma House?

It turns out that in Oklahoma, like in Indiana, lawmakers don’t just divide  along partisan lines. Lawmakers of the same party who represent urban districts will also disagree with those in their party who represent rural areas. (In deeply gerrymandered Indiana, we’re talking about Republicans.)

That urban/rural division was what played out in Oklahoma.

It turns out that it isn’t just city schools that are under-resourced. A large number of rural school districts struggle financially, and have trouble recruiting teachers.  More significantly, in Indiana as in Oklahoma, there also aren’t many educational options in rural parts of the state, a situation that limits the appeal of voucher legislation to families in those areas.

When voucher proponents talk about “school choice,” they inevitably point to schools in the poorer precincts of cities. How often have we been told that vouchers would allow poor children “trapped” in under-performing schools to “escape” to a presumably  available and superior  private or  parochial school?

The thing is, those options–good, bad or indifferent–simply don’t exist in most of the small towns scattered through rural America. Those towns–most of which have been  losing population for a long time–don’t produce enough children of school age to support alternative institutions. That may be  one reason Indiana allowed its vouchers to be used at “virtual” online schools. (It appears that the state got massively ripped off by scammers pretending to be online educators…but our legislators never learn…)

Maybe the pitch we need to make to all those legislators in the Statehouse who represent Indiana’s rural areas is something along the lines of  “Do you know that school vouchers are really a way to shift tax dollars from your constituents to those pointy-headed liberals and “diverse” folks who live in the cities? Indiana’s voucher program is taking money from the good folks who live in places like  Roachdale and Pine Village and sending those dollars to folks in Indianapolis and South Bend and other urban areas.”

That argument has the virtue of being true. Of course, all the other criticisms of vouchers are also demonstrably true, and those criticisms haven’t made a dent.

Maybe, however, “the city folks are stealing your money” would be more effective, given the depth of Indiana’s rural/urban divide.

Worth a try…..

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Did Churchill Get It Backwards?

Can you all stand some semi-philosophical musing? Because I’ve been mulling something over, and wonder where you all come down on my rethinking of an old adage…

We’ve all heard the saying, usually credited to Winston Churchill, to the effect that “if you’re under 30 and not a liberal, you don’t have a heart, but if you are over 30 and not conservative, you don’t have a brain.”

As I have aged, studied law and history, and dabbled in political philosophy, I’ve come to think old Winston (or whoever) got it exactly backwards.

When I was much younger, the importance of individualism, of personal responsibility for success or failure seemed obvious: one’s life prospects were shaped by one’s energy, skill, hard work, moral merit…People who failed to do well in life simply lacked some essential personal attribute (if it was intellect, that was an unfortunate consequence of heredity, but other deficits seemed more optional.)

As a young person, I shared America’s cultural emphasis on individual merit and obliviousness of systemic realities.  It never occurred to me that the popular admonition to “Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps!” incorporated the very misleading assumption that everyone had bootstraps.(Not to mention feet.)

When I had lived a little longer–and especially when I went to law school–I began to see the flaw in those early assumptions. It turns out that our society has a number of structural elements that make life a lot harder for some individuals than for others.

A couple of random examples:

I still remember a long-ago conversation with a friend–a criminal defense lawyer–who explained that when the police arrested a middle-class white kid for smoking pot, he could usually get him off with what amounted to a slap on the wrist. If that kid was Black, however, the result was usually different. The system was less forgiving. (He also pointed out that the White kid from the suburbs who was “using” in the basement rec room of his house was far less likely to be apprehended than the the poor Black kid who was nabbed on the street…)

And I often think of another friend–White male, intelligent, 6’2,” athletic, whose parents had both graduated from prestigious universities– who firmly believed that his own (moderate) success was exclusively the result of his individual merit and hard work, and who insisted that anyone in America could achieve what he had if they just tried.

There are–as most of us now recognize–many, many more examples of what we’ve come to call the operation of “privilege”–a status that may not confer benefits, but does eliminate structural  barriers faced by people who encounter those barriers by virtue of their race, religion, gender, poverty or other facet of their identity or status.

It was my encounter with the political philosophy of John Rawls, and especially  his “veil of ignorance,” that really  opened my eyes to the importance of social systems to our individual life prospects. Rawls’ challenge is deceptively simple: imagine you haven’t been born yet, and you don’t have any way of knowing what your circumstances and personal attributes will be. You might be Black or White, beautiful or ugly, smart or mentally stunted, healthy or maimed, born into wealth or poverty…the lists (and options) go on. What kind of world– with what kind of social contract– would you want to be born into?

What sort of society would be most likely to treat you fairly no matter who or what you turned out to be?

Individual merit, however we define that, is obviously important. So are the social systems within which we individuals must apply our particular skills and talents. If America ever emerges from the “cold civil war” in which it is currently embroiled, we need to consider the appropriate balance between the two. We don’t want or need a system that fails to reward diligence and creativity–but we also can’t afford to perpetuate the structural barriers that prevent too many of our citizens from applying their diligence and creativity in ways that benefit us all.

Rawls had a lot to say about that, too.

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A Remedy? Or A Different Disease?

There has to be a better way to finance election campaigns.

The relief I felt after the just-concluded midterm election reflected two realities: the predicted Red wave failed to materialize, and I got my email inbox back. (Mostly.) I know I was not the only person being inundated with dire warnings, announcements of a three or four time fundraising “match,” and breathlessly reported one percent polling spreads–usually featuring bright colors and huge headlines.

And all–all!–asking for money.

I don’t know who those insistent, repetitive emails were supposed to persuade. They sure didn’t make me want to send them any money. (In some cases, they made me regret the small amounts I had contributed.)

When Howard Dean first demonstrated that the internet could be employed to encourage small donations, I was thrilled. When Obama raised zillions of dollars in small increments, I  thought the days of depending on political fat cats was over. Since no candidate could be “bought” for these small contributions, I counted this as a win for democracy.

It turns out to be more complicated than that.

Small dollar fundraising did indeed reduce political reliance on the “usual suspects”–the big money donors. But. (You knew there was a “but,” didn’t you?) This approach to fundraising has produced different–but equally troubling– negative consequences, and those negatives go far beyond the annoying assaults on our inboxes.

In a recent New York Times discussion between a liberal and a conservative campaign strategist, both opined that reliance on small-dollar donations is doing more harm than good.

The conservative strategist, Tim Miller, explained the problem: when McCain-Feingold banned unlimited, unregulated contributions from corporations, unions, and individuals, the fundraising focus turned to internet campaigns aimed at small donors.  That created some very perverse incentives.

I think that there were some nice sentiments about wanting to get corruption out of the system, limit the amount of money that bigger donors can give to candidates. But in doing so, campaigns weren’t going to decide to start spending less money. So they had to come up with other means in which to raise money. And it created a couple of scourges.

One, it just made fundraising the central activity for most politicians. And a lot of their time is spent around fundraising. I think that there are some pernicious side effects to that.

But it also created some negative incentives. I think one of them that I get into in the article is that what we saw very quickly, beginning with Joe Wilson, when he shouted, you lie, at Barack Obama during a joint address to Congress and then realized that he could raise a ton of money. Within 12 days, he raised more money sending out appeals to all the conservative lists he could buy than he’d raised in his entire campaign before that. Very quickly, then, there were a lot of imitators who realized that all of a sudden, they could raise big gloms of cash by being obnoxious and shouting things about the people they hate.

And I think that as a result of the decreased power, maybe the well-intentioned decreased power of bigger givers, politicians were then incentivized to do everything they could to get small-dollar money.

And usually — not entirely — that has tended to be saying things that are inflammatory, doing things that are going to get people to retweet you and post you on Facebook, spreading conspiracies, spreading mistruths. And so it has created just a different type of grift and a different type of corruption rather than the old company X gives you 20 grand in the hopes that you kill amendment Y.

When we decry contemporary political polarization, we need to recognize the part played by internet fundraising. As Miller pointed out, lunatics like Marjorie Taylor Greene have become massively successful fundraisers by saying insane things, followed by “an email about how the left wants to cancel her.”

The liberal strategist, Micah Sifry, agreed.

I think the problem is that we have a unhealed wound in this country that dates back to the Civil War and that we have had recurring cycles where opportunistic politicians decide to feed on the prejudices and on the warped beliefs of people who think that this was supposed to always be a white Christian country, and then use that to power their political careers.

The internet now enables some people like Marjorie Taylor Greene to self-finance, as it were, because she doesn’t have to worry if every Fortune 500 company in the country decides to stop donating money to her. So I think that there’s a deeper problem, which is, why do we have 30 percent of the population that wants this insanity and will fund politicians who give it to them?

Good question….

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Um..What Happened To Support For “Limited Government”?

Remember when Republican politicians all ran on platforms endorsing “limited government”? Granted, a lot of them seemed to confuse the size of government with the intrusiveness of government, but to the extent the party actually stood for something, it was the principle that government’s authority over citizens should be limited.

As Barry Goldwater famously put it, “Government doesn’t belong in your boardroom or your bedroom.” (Old Barry is probably spinning in his grave, along with a sizable number of other former GOPers…)

Today’s Republicans are only too happy to invade your bedroom–not to mention your uterus, if you’re a woman. And given Party members’ homophobia, it’s pretty clear that a significant number of folks in today’s GOP would love to return to the time when government could outlaw same-sex marriage and criminalize gay sex. 

But what about that pious declaration that government “doesn’t belong in your boardroom?”

One of the few consistent themes of Republicanism has been the sanctity of the market, and the belief that even the most reasonable regulation of business is a semi-Satanic attack on economic freedom. Republicans have tended to define democracy as consumer choice–let the market decide! Keep government’s nose out of it! (Ignore those armies of lobbyists making sure there are official “thumbs on the scales…”)

Turns out that today’s GOP is just as willing to invite government into the boardroom as it is to insert government into our bedrooms. As the linked Guardian article reports,

A powerful rightwing pressure group, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), is pushing states to adopt a new law shielding all US businesses from “political boycotts”.

Although primarily aimed at protecting controversial industries such as fossil fuel companies, big agriculture and gun manufacturers, the proposed legislation is written to prevent boycotts by investors, banks and other companies of any US business.

It comes amid rising consumer pressure on firms over whom they do business with, and follows the decision by major retail stores to stop selling MyPillow products after its chief executive allied himself with Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Alec, which is funded by major corporations, intends to press state legislators to adopt the readymade law, the eliminate political boycotts act, at its closed-door States and Nation Policy Summit in Washington DC at the end of this month.

I’ve previously posted about Alec, and the fact that legislators in Republican-led states (very much including Indiana)  have enacted dozens, if not hundreds, of Alec’s “model” pieces of legislation–adopting the organization’s hard-Right agenda virtually word for word, in laws addressing “immigration, voting suppression, the environment, guns and energy policy.”

The new model legislation requires every “governmental entity”, which covers a wide array of bodies from state government to local police departments and public universities, to include a clause in contracts requiring businesses to pledge they “will not engage in economic boycotts”.

 
As with all of Alec’s “model laws,” the text of this one has been written by Alec’s lawyers to make it simple; all an obedient legislature has to do is fill in the name of its state. This one is aimed primarily at banks, investment funds and corporations that might refuse to do business with companies that damage the environment or otherwise engage in activities detrimental to democracy or civil society.

The huge investment company BlackRock is among nearly 400 financial firms to have sold off shares in big oil companies over their failure to pursue sufficiently climate-friendly policies.

Some corporations are increasingly concerned that consumer pressure will cause other companies to boycott them over their funding of rightwing politicians and causes, or social positions.

The model legislation follows an Alec meeting in Atlanta in the summer at which participants launched a push against “woke capitalism,” claiming that boycotts may break financial laws.

Hmm…what ever happened to “let the market decide”?

It seems to me that one of the genuine merits of capitalism and market economies is the ability of consumers to choose where to spend their dollars. If I want to confine my investments and purchases and/or those of my company to “woke” companies–or if I prefer to support crazy pillow guys–that’s my right, just as it is my right to hold religious beliefs different from those of Justice Alito and my right to decide who to marry and whether and when to procreate. 

The past few years have certainly illustrated the dishonesty of those “limited government” claims. If we dare to use our liberties to deviate from their preferred behaviors, the GOP will happily invite the government into our bedrooms and our boardrooms.

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