Shame On Indiana–Again

During this year’s session of the Indiana General Assembly, environmental organizations followed–and lobbied against–an effort to roll back Indiana’s already inadequate regulations of the state’s wetlands. As usual, when there is a conflict between science and profit, profit won.

After the bill emerged from the legislative process, 110 organizations and individuals wrote a letter to Governor Eric Holcomb, “respectfully requesting” that he veto it. Governor Holcomb has proved to be far more rational than Republican members of the state legislature–more in the mold of Republicans of days-gone-by– and he had even allowed members of his administration to testify against the bill as it proceeded through the House and Senate, so there was some reason for optimism.

That optimism was dashed. Holcomb is defending his decision to sign the measure by saying that, in its amended form, the bill was less objectionable. Environmental scientists beg to differ, asserting that it ‘puts wellbeing of millions of Hoosiers at risk, now and well into the future.”

Indiana’s existing wetlands law was written in 2003, and it was admittedly due for review and revision now that the state had several years of experience with it. But experts say that rather than improving and fine-tuning the existing law, the changes made by this particular legislation will do “substantial harm to Indiana’s water future.”

According to the environmentalists and other concerned citizens who petitioned Holcomb, the legislation he has now signed puts  the vast majority of Indiana’s wetlands–and there are at least 500,000 that are under state rather than federal jurisdiction– in jeopardy. Indiana already ranks fourth among the states with the greatest loss of wetlands . The likely negative results of this measure will be increased flooding and erosion, loss of groundwater recharge and water supplies, water purification, safe recreation and tourism opportunities, and loss of the diverse wildlife that (according to the letter) “makes Indiana special.”

I am sorely tempted to offer some snark about what I think “makes Indiana special,” but I’ll restrain myself. Let’s just say it is neither respect for expertise or appreciation of nature’s bounties…

The signatories to the letter appended background information detailing the function of wetlands, and offering policy alternatives. They should have saved their pixels.

The letter was signed by a diverse number of organizations, as well as by science professors in relevant fields, and–notably–by several Indiana cities and mayors, and by religious organizations. (The latter evidently take seriously the biblical admonition to be “stewards” of the Earth.)

The letter, the list of signatories, and the science-heavy addendum are widely available online, and the addendum, especially, details the science bolstering the very serious concerns expressed. Our legislators, however, have a history of ignoring science (if you doubt that, take a look at the number of medically-inaccurate assertions they’ve included in their various attacks on reproductive choice) and they have routinely privileged the short term economic interests of their supporters over the long term best interests of Indiana citizens. 

In this case, according to those who followed the bill, the legislative priority was protection of land developers who might find themselves unable to pave over or otherwise wrest profit from every inch of property they own, even under Indiana’s relatively weak regulations.  

Oh, Indiana….will Hoosiers ever grow up?






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The Crux Of The Problem

I was reading an article about Substack–the digital platform that has increasingly recruited media personnel to write newsletters for which recipients pay. (The only one I receive is the free version of Heather Cox Richardson’s.) The article considered Substack’s claim to be the “future of journalism.”

If that claim intrigues you, you should click through and read the whole article, which was interesting. But it was the very last sentence that grabbed me, because it is, in my opinion, the crux of the problem–“the problem” being America’s deep and growing polarization.

How do we create a shared sense of reality in a media landscape comprised mostly of individual writers and their loyal followers?

As regular readers of this blog know, for several years, I taught a university course in Media and Public Affairs, and I was fond of complaining that every time I taught that course, our constantly-morphing media environment required a new preparation.  It isn’t simply “a media landscape comprised of individual writers and their followers”–it is a dramatically fragmented media landscape that includes not just those individuals (with their individual and contending “takes” on the news of the day) but literally hundreds of media news sites focused upon different aspects of human activity, and doing so through a lens of different partisan and ideological commitments.

As I used to tell my students, this is truly uncharted territory. When printed-on-paper newspapers and three television networks served communities, residents of those communities at least occupied the same news environment. Good or bad, right or wrong, the local newspaper provided the only reporting most of us saw. Even if some people picked up the paper only to look for sports scores or wedding announcements or whatever, they had to browse past the same headlines that their friends and neighbors were seeing. 

People in a given city or town thus occupied the same general reality.

The same phenomenon played out on a national scale. Edward R. Murrow and his two counterparts delivered much the same information to a majority of Americans via the evening news on television, and a few “national” magazines and newspapers–notably the New York Times and the Washington Post–homogenized the national news.

Those days are long gone.

One of the books I urged my media and policy students to read was The Filter Bubble.It was an early analysis of the most challenging effect of the online media environment–our new ability to “shop” for news that feeds our preconceptions, and to construct a “bubble” within which we are comfortable. (As I used to tell my students, if you want to believe that the aliens really did land in Roswell, I can find you five internet sites offering pictures of the aliens…)

The angry souls who want to believe that the election was stolen and Donald Trump really won can find sites that reinforce that fantasy. People susceptible to conspiracy theories can  find “evidence” that Hillary Clinton is abusing and eating small children in the (non-existent) basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor, or confirmation that those California wildfires were started by Jewish space lasers. Whatever the deficits of newspapers “back in the day”–and those deficits were very real–this sort of “reporting” was relegated to widely-scorned rags like the National Enquirer that graced supermarket checkout counters. (My favorite headline: Osama and Saddam’s Gay Wedding.)

When the digital counterparts of those scandal sheets are visually indistinguishable from credible sites, not to mention easily and privately accessed (your neighbor isn’t watching you purchase the Enquirer as you check out), is it any wonder that the very human trait of confirmation bias leads us to occupy different–and incommensurate–realities?

And if that’s where we are– if Americans currently reside in dramatically different realities– how will we ever be able to talk to each other?

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The “Do Nothing” Senate

The 80th United States Congress met during the third and fourth years of Harry Truman’s presidency, from 1947-49. Republicans had a majority in both chambers. Truman famously nicknamed it the “Do Nothing Congress” and, during the 1948 election, campaigned as much against that “do nothing” body as he did against Dewey–and the strategy worked. Truman won, and the GOP lost nine seats in the Senate and 73 seats in the House.

Ironically, next to the sorry lot “serving” in today’s Senate, the 80th actually looks pretty good. It passed a  total of 906 bills, including the Marshall Plan and the Taft–Hartley Act. It had, however, opposed most of Truman’s Fair Deal bills, and he was able to turn that opposition into electoral victory.

Fast forward to 2021. As a newsletter from the New York Times noted,

When Republicans controlled the White House and Congress in 2017 and 2018, the only major legislation they passed was a tax cut, and the only other big bill that came close was a repeal of Obamacare, without a replacement.

When Donald Trump ran for re-election, the party did not write a campaign platform.
During Barack Obama’s presidency, and now Biden’s, Republicans have almost uniformly opposed significant legislation, be it on health care, climate change, Wall Street regulation or economic stimulus.

As President Biden has pointed out, his proposed legislation has broad bipartisan support–among voters. It’s only among members of our genuinely “do nothing” Congress that it has encountered intransigent opposition.

Admittedly, the GOP is far from a “do nothing” party at the state and local level–and what the party is doing there makes it more accurately the “do nothing good” party. State-level GOP lawmakers have engaged in multiple, unprecedented attacks on the right to vote, filing more than 360 bills to restrict voting–everything from proposals to make mail-in voting harder, to  turning minor voting errors into criminal offenses. According to one report, Michigan is even trying to stop the state’s top election official from providing a link to an absentee ballot application on a state government website.

If the United States was experiencing a period of widespread prosperity and tranquillity, a pause in legislative activity might be justifiable. There is no virtue in passing laws simply to look busy. But that is hardly the case. Substantial majorities of Americans–in both parties–identify pressing issues. Their priorities may differ, and they are proposing very different “fixes” for the issues they agree upon, but virtually all Americans believe that Congress needs to negotiate in good faith, compromise where possible, and act.

The reason for GOP intransigence is simple: for several years, Republicans in Congress have elevated party over nation. A Politico article from 2016 included a quote by former GOP Senator Voinovich that has been widely reported.It pretty much tells the tale.

Starting in 2009, the Republicans in Congress adopted a simple, coherent strategy of resisting anything Obama proposed. “If he was for it,” said former Ohio Senator George Voinovich, “we had to be against it.” No Republican senators and no House Republicans voted for the Affordable Care Act. After 2012, with healthy majorities, Republicans voted to repeal the law dozens of times, with no hope that such moves would have any effect other than to register opposition. The near debt default in 2011 to the Ted Cruz-led shutdown in 2013 to the current refusal to hold hearings for the Supreme Court seat vacated by Antonin Scalia’s death have continued that trend.

Today’s GOP is so radicalized, and its voters so misinformed (polls find that some two-thirds of self-identified Republicans think Trump won the election, despite a total lack of any credible evidence) that a Biden campaign modeled after Truman’s probably wouldn’t resonate. But it might be worth a try.

History–assuming America gets to have a history–will not be kind to the venal and self-interested poseurs occupying the halls of Congress. As Jennifer Rubin recently wrote in the Washington Post,

The Republican Party is descending into know-nothingism and nativism because of the silence of Republicans who know better. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) knows that November’s election was not fraudulent and that the disgraced former president incited the Jan. 6 insurrection. McCarthy is simply too cowardly to say so. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) knows this, too; he just is too craven and ambitious to admit it. Instead of working on the country’s problems, he spends his time lashing out at Major League Baseball for opposing voter restrictions.

These pathetic excuses for public servants make the members of Truman’s “do nothing” Congress look like towering statesmen by comparison.

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Red Meat

By this time, most Americans who follow the news–or, in the alternative, Fox– have encountered the great meat hoax. It will undoubtedly go into the history books next to those non-existent “death panels” that Republicans insisted were part of the Affordable Care Act.

In case you’ve been vacationing under a rock somewhere, here’s the short version. When President Biden announced his climate plans, a garbage story from the routinely garbage-y Daily Mail somehow conflated those plans with a 2020 research study that was totally unconnected. The study had considered various methods of combatting climate change, and identified a drastic reduction in meat consumption as good for the environment.

Many pundits, including Paul Krugman, reported on that article, and on what happened next.

Among other things [the Daily Mail] took the most extreme scenario from a University of Michigan study of how reduced meat consumption could affect greenhouse gas emissions — a study released in January 2020 that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Biden plans. The Daily Mail also used a deceptive graphic to make it seem as if this was an actual administration proposal.

American right-wing pundits and politicians then ran with it. Did they actually believe the nonsense they were spouting? Well, Kudlow’s apparent belief that beer is made with meat is arguably a point in his favor, an indication that he’s genuinely clueless rather than merely cynical.

The reference to Kudlow (I vote for clueless) was a response to his laughable assertion (on Fox, of course) that Biden would soon have Americans drinking beer made from plants. (As one wag asked, “What’s next? Fruit based orange juice?”)  Twitter and Facebook users wondered what Kudlow thought beer is currently made from.

What’s clear, however, is that neither Kudlow nor other Republicans touting an imaginary war on meat saw any need to check out their story, felt any concern that their audience — Fox News viewers, Republican voters — would find the claim that Joe Biden is coming for their red meat implausible.

Krugman has an answer to the question why Republicans don’t bother to fact-check: he suggests that facts are incompatible with the GOP’s goal to define Democrats as “woke feminist vegetarians who don’t share the values of Real Americans.” He cites the right’s constant yammering about “cancel culture” and persistent demonization of Democratic women of color, along with the continual portrayal of Biden– a white male senior citizen–as nothing but a passive puppet.

Right-wing media are pushing this narrative nonstop. According to a Morning Consult poll last month, more Republicans said they’d heard “a lot” about the move to withdraw some Dr. Seuss books than said the same about Biden’s huge Covid-19 relief bill.

Talk about your alternate realities! (Along the same lines, Tucker Carlson recently told Fox viewers that they should “report” parents of children wearing masks, because making your child wear a mask equates to child abuse.)

One commenter on this blog opined that the real pandemic in this country isn’t COVID; it’s insanity. Purveyors of snark clearly agree. As a columnist for the Chicago Tribune wrote (after emphasizing that neither Biden nor his administration had suggested a plan to reduce or limit the consumption of red meat):

But because the Daily Mail, a chronically wrong British tabloid, connected the Michigan study to Biden’s climate plan, America’s right-wing media ecosystem erupted over the weekend in a perverse display of meat-rage. It was a veritable beef freak out. Baseless burger bollocks.

Fox News, the network where facts go to die, ran a graphic featuring a double cheeseburger under the titles “Up In Your Grill” and “Biden’s Climate Requirements.” The graphic’s burger-adjacent text included the lines: “CUT 90% OF RED MEAT FROM DIET”; “MAX 4 LBS PER YEAR”; and “ONE BURGER PER MONTH.”

An equally accurate graphic would read: “REINCARNATED RONALD REAGAN LOCATES AND BEFRIENDS BIG FOOT, PAIR EXPECTED TO DEFEAT COMMUNISM.”

We can laugh at Larry Kudlow’s apparent ignorance about the origin of beer and we can shake our heads over the GOP’s increasing distance from sanity, but the willingness of partisans to believe and spread utter nonsense is frightening. It’s true that a significant percentage of Americans has always been credulous–think of those who panicked listening to Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds–but we have never before had a major political party  composed in large part of credulous citizens willing to believe “leaders” who routinely manufacture “red meat”–or attacks on red meat–for their consumption.

A disloyal opposition is dangerous.

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The Shadow Docket

When Senator Tim Scott gave the GOP’s rebuttal to President Biden’s address to Congress, one of his complaints was that the President hadn’t re-opened the nation’s schools. He evidently assumed that America’s widespread lack of civic knowledge would obscure the inconvenient fact that Presidents have no authority over public schools.

It’s called federalism, Senator. Look it up.

Speaking of civic knowledge, I have frequently cited a poll from a couple of years ago that found–among other, multiple deficits of civic knowledge–that only 26% of Americans could name the three branches of government. Although the survey didn’t ask the question, I’m reasonably certain that even fewer understand why the Founders opted for separation of powers–or why they wanted to insulate the judicial branch from the wrath of the electorate.

Both the legislative and executive branches are elected, and thus accountable to voters. (We’ll leave for another day’s discussion the gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics that have substantially eroded that accountability. We’re talking theory now.) The federal judiciary wasn’t just unelected, it was appointed subject to Senate confirmation–and once appointed, judges serve for a lifetime. The theory–the hope–was that judges would rule on the basis of their understanding of the Constitution, and would not need to worry about losing their job if that understanding was contrary to the desires of the public.

Right or wrong–and sometimes they would be wrong– those rulings would be based upon the judge’s honest and informed evaluation of the merits of the argument.

Thanks to politicians like Mitch McConnell, that ideal of dispassionate and informed rulings meted out by  judges insulated from partisan pressure has been breached, perhaps irreparably. The arguments about “term limits” for Justices, for adding Justices to the Supreme Court, and for other changes to the federal judiciary are responses to the blatant politicization that has eroded public confidence in and respect for the judicial system. (I’m not a fan of sports analogies, but I’ll suggest one: if an umpire is believed to be “in the pocket” of Team A, fans of Team B aren’t going to respect his calls.)

The ultimate “fix” for the current situation is unclear, but while lawyers, legal scholars and political figures squabble, we have increasing evidence that the current Supreme Court is ignoring precedent in favor of partisan ideology. A recent New York Times op-ed by a law professor from the University of Texas shone a light on the Court’s use of its little-understood “Shadow Docket.”

Late last Friday, the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, issued an emergency injunction blocking California’s Covid-based restrictions on in-home gatherings on the ground that, insofar as they interfere with religious practice, they violate the First Amendment’s free exercise clause.

Reasonable minds will disagree on this new standard for free exercise claims. But a far more glaring problem with the court’s decision is that it wasn’t an appropriate moment to reach it.

Like so many of the justices’ more controversial rulings in the last few years, this one came on the court’s “shadow docket,” and in a context in which the Supreme Court’s own rules supposedly limit relief to cases in which the law is “indisputably clear.”

Whatever else might be said about it, this case, Tandon v. Newsom, didn’t meet that standard. Instead, the justices upended their own First Amendment jurisprudence in the religion sphere, making new law in a way their precedents at least used to say they couldn’t.

The term “shadow docket” was coined to describe that part of the justices’ job that involves summary orders addressing management of the Court’s caseload, rather than decisions on the merits of cases.

But recent years have seen a significant uptick in the volume of “shadow docket” rulings that are resolving matters beyond those issues, especially orders changing the effect of lower-court rulings while they are appealed. Indeed, Friday night’s injunction was at least the 20th time since the court’s term began last October that the justices have issued a shadow docket ruling altering the status quo. And the more substantive work that the justices carry out through such (usually) unsigned and unexplained orders, the more the “shadow docket” raises concerns about the transparency of the court’s decision making, if not the underlying legitimacy of its decisions.

In fact, the author tells us that this ruling was the seventh time since October that the justices have issued an emergency injunction — and that all of them have blocked Covid restrictions in blue states on religious exercise grounds.

If all three of those branches that few Americans can name are “accountable” to partisan passions–if there is no demonstrably impartial arbiter of constitutional disputes–America’s slide toward civil chaos will continue to gather speed.

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