HR 1

HR 1 was the first bill passed by the House of Representatives after the Democrats won control in 2018, and it languished, of course, in Mitch McConnell’s “do-nothing-good” Senate. The question now is whether– with Democrats razor-thin control of that body–it can be passed.

Because passage is truly essential if we are to recover basically democratic governance.

There have been a number of articles and editorials about HR 1, but I particularly agreed with the headline on the subject from Esquire:“If We Don’t Pass HR 1, We Are F**ked As A Nation.”

The headline came from a quote by Josh Silver, who works for Represent.Us, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to ending political corruption, extremism, and gridlock.  The organization has promoted model legislation very similar to HR I since 2012.  Silver believes that, should we fail to pass these reforms,  America will continue what he calls “our decline into authoritarianism.”

“It is these problems that the bill addresses that are the root cause of the extremism and polarization that gave rise to Trump and the new sort of anti-representative form of government that the Republican Party has chosen to embrace. And I’m saying that as a truly nonpartisan guy.”

So–what would this measure accomplish?

Title one of the bill is John Lewis’s Voter Empowerment Act. Lewis introduced it–and saw it die–in five congresses in a row. It would make voting and access to the ballot box easier and more convenient by creating automatic voter registration across the country, and expanding early and absentee voting. It would also restore voting rights for felons, streamline the vote-by-mail process, and prohibit various voter-suppression tactics currently in vogue. It would also beef up election security– promoting the use of paper ballots and strengthening oversight of election-system vendors. (It also evidently backs a  grant of statehood for Washington, D.C., although not directly.)

In my favorite part of the bill, HR 1 would take on gerrymandering. It would require states to use independent commissions subject to strong conflict-of-interest rules. District maps would be approved differently, and would be more easily challenged if they are partisan and/or unrepresentative.

Another part of the bill–called the Disclose Act– would address “dark money” in politics.

The bill would institute an “Honest Ads” policy, where disclosure requirements for online political advertisements are expanded and strengthened. It would put in place a “Right to Know” policy where corporations would have to make shareholders aware of their specific political activity. It would root out participation of foreign nationals in fundraising—a foreign money ban. It would, per the name, beef up disclosure requirements for organizations engaging in political spending, including by reinforcing the Internal Revenue Service’s powers and prerogative to investigate misuse of charities to hide the source of political money.

The bill also addresses fundraising for Inaugurations, which has previously been a way for wealthy donors to curry favor with incoming administrations.

And finally, HR 1 deals with lobbying. It closes what has recently been called “the Michael Cohen exception,” where people who don’t lobby directly aren’t covered by some of the registration requirements, and it gives real enforcement power to the Office of Government Ethics. The bill bolsters ethics law in general: it requires presidents to release their tax returns, expands conflict-of-interest policy and divestment requirements, and attempts to slow the “revolving door” through which members of Congress and their staff have moved between government and the private sector, influence peddling while lobbying or serving  on corporate boards.

There are other provisions, but this overview gets at the major elements. Every citizen who has railed against vote suppression, despaired of getting rid of gerrymandering, and  cursed the outsized influence of big money in politics should lobby their Senators for its passage.

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The GOP And QAnon

GOP Senator Ben Sasse says all the right things–although his voting history is, shall we say, a bit more complicated. Sasse has a recent essay in the Atlantic in which he challenges his party to choose between conspiracy and reality–between the “delusional QAnon conspiracy theory,” and rationality.

We hear a lot about Qanon, but to understand not just Sasse’s argument but the political moment we inhabit, it’s important to recognize just how insane it is.

Although there are various iterations, the basic “theory” that supporters accept requires them to believe  that a “righteous” Donald Trump (!) is leading a “historic quest” to expose the fact that America’s federal government has been captured and is being controlled by a global network of cannibalistic pedophiles. This “cabal” includes not just the despised “deep state” bureaucrats, but also the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice and at least a dozen senators (including Sasse), along with George Soros and other notable Jews. (The conspiracy borrows heavily from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.) When Mike Pence explained that he couldn’t refuse to accept the certification of electoral votes, QAnon cultists added him to the network, ignoring his four years of sniveling sycophancy,

Millions of Americans actually believe this insanity. Virtually all of them are Republicans.

Writing in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, Sasse makes what should be an obvious point: the GOP can be a political party, or a bizarre cult, but not both.

The violence that Americans witnessed—and that might recur in the coming days—is not a protest gone awry or the work of “a few bad apples.” It is the blossoming of a rotten seed that took root in the Republican Party some time ago and has been nourished by treachery, poor political judgment, and cowardice. When Trump leaves office, my party faces a choice: We can dedicate ourselves to defending the Constitution and perpetuating our best American institutions and traditions, or we can be a party of conspiracy theories, cable-news fantasies, and the ruin that comes with them. We can be the party of Eisenhower, or the party of the conspiracist Alex Jones. We can applaud Officer Goodman or side with the mob he outwitted. We cannot do both.

As he notes, prior to the assault on the Capitol, GOP leadership figures and consultants told themselves that they could “preach the Constitution while winking at QAnon.”  What they have discovered–one hopes–is that such a strategy is impossible. If the party does not reject conspiracy theories, it will be consumed by them.

Sasse provides a perfect illustration of the fecklessness of Republican leadership:

The newly elected Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. She once ranted that “there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it.” During her campaign, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had a choice: disavow her campaign and potentially lose a Republican seat, or welcome her into his caucus and try to keep a lid on her ludicrous ideas. McCarthy failed the leadership test and sat on the sidelines. Now in Congress, Greene isn’t going to just back McCarthy as leader and stay quiet. She’s already announced plans to try to impeach Joe Biden on his first full day as president. She’ll keep making fools out of herself, her constituents, and the Republican Party.

In the remainder of the essay, Sasse makes a bow to the obligatory “both sides” equivalence (the Left has crazy people too!), and points a pop-sociology finger at media–all media, not just social media and the Internet; he also blames the collapse of “institutions” and “America’s loss of meaning.” If you click through and read that part of his essay, you can decide for yourselves whether you find it particularly helpful or insightful. (Spoiler alert: I didn’t.)

That said, Sasse is clearly correct when he says the GOP cannot be a “big tent” that includes people like Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse and even Liz Cheney–people we may strongly disagree with but still recognize as serious adults– together with lunatics like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes and Louie Gohmert.

No tent is that big. Sasse is clearly correct when he says that the Republican Party must choose between insanity and reality.

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Antifa And The Right

Sometimes, when I was a little girl (eons ago–it may have been the Ice Age) and had done something I knew was forbidden, I would protest innocence: it wasn’t me! It must have been someone else! To which my mother would respond with an old verse:

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…

These days, the “little man who wasn’t there” is likely to be a member of Antifa–currently the favored scapegoat of the Right. “It wasn’t us! It was Antifa!!”

Just who– or what –is Antifa? After an inquiry from a lawyer friend, I decided to do some research.

Is Antifa the the highly organized group of “terrorists” portrayed by Trump Republicans–a source of rioting and looting?  Or is it more accurately described as an idea–a dismissive label for people opposed to fascism and white supremacy?

Actually, according to an investigation by CBS News, it’s something more than a description of people opposed to fascism, but considerably less than an organized movement. (I’ve noticed that the quarrelsome Left has a lot more trouble organizing than the authoritarians on the Right.)

In general, people who identify as Antifa are known not for what they support, but what they oppose: Fascism, nationalism, far-right ideologies, white supremacy, authoritarianism, racism, homophobia and xenophobia. Some antifa activists also denounce capitalism and the government overall.

To the extent they “belong” to anything, Antifa followers tend to be members of small, local cells that sometimes coordinate with other movements, such as Black Lives Matter. Self-described Antifa members have organized to confront Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys, and other far-right groups during public demonstrations, typically through researching and tracking those organizations, although some confrontations have become violent.

CBS was able to confirm only one instance in which a person self-identifying as Antifa was linked to a deadly attack at a protest. Michael Forest Reinoehl, 48, was considered a prime suspect in the August 2020 killing of a right-wing activist who was shot during demonstrations in Portland. (Reinoehl was later shot to death by federal authorities as they moved to arrest him.)

Given the hysterical accusations from Trump, Cruz and others, it is noteworthy that the Trump administration’s own Department of Homeland Security and FBI didn’t share the view that Antifa poses a significant threat to domestic law and order.

A DHS draft document from September 2020 reportedly named white supremacist groups as the biggest terror threat to America. That same document doesn’t mention Antifa at all.

The FBI also considers far-right groups the “top of the priority list.” FBI director Christopher Wray said in February 2020 that the FBI places the risk of violence from racially-motivated extremist groups “on the same footing” as the threat posed by foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and its sympathizers.

Antifa has certainly been involved in sporadic violence, and to the extent that its members have broken the law, they should be punished. But according to the FBI and other government agencies, a number of rumors about Antifa have been spun from whole cloth– sometimes by people later identified as right-wing extremists. According to the CBS report, Twitter shut down multiple “Antifa” accounts in June of 2020 that were later found to be fake. Those fake accounts were advocating violence against white suburbs; subsequent investigations tracked the accounts to Identity Evropa, a white supremacist organization.

In the wake of the Capitol insurrection, Trump and several Republicans insisted that the rioters were really Antifa. Thanks to the behaviors and selfie-documented identities of the participants, that didn’t begin to pass the smell test. As Forbes Magazine reported:

FBI Assistant Director Steven D’Antuono said Friday there is no evidence that Antifa activists were involved in the violent riots in and around the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, debunking the baseless conspiracy theory propagated by several prominent Republican lawmakers and right-wing pundits that anti-fascist leftists—not a pro-Trump mob—were responsible for death and destruction at the Capitol.

As my mother would have said,

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…

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Let’s Talk About…Sea Shanties?

I am generally oblivious to popular culture. This is not a characteristic that has developed with age–unfortunately, I have never been “with it.” (My students came to recognize the blank look that was my response to musical references more recent than Dean Martin.)

This personal history is by way of explaining my confusion over recent references to the popularity of Sea Shanties. 

I consulted Dr. Google, and found that Sea Shanties are “unifying, survivalist songs,” designed to transform a large group of people into one collective body, all working together to keep the ship afloat. Their sudden resurgence of popularity has been attributed to the anomie of our time, and the fact that so many people are desperate for connection–evidently, the original goal of the Sea Shanty was to foster community, as sailors worked long hours aboard a ship.

That desire for connection has also manifested itself in current calls for national unity. In the case of the Trumpian “fellow travelers” in the Senate– Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and their ilk–those calls are deeply dishonest and self-serving, but others, including the incoming administration, seem genuinely committed to healing the deep rifts that separate ordinary Americans.

One question, of course, is whether healing and unity can ever be achieved in the absence of accountability. Another is the nature of unity in a radically diverse society. There is ample evidence that people are longing for connection, for community, for belonging–but connection to what? What defines the community we aspire to join? 

My entire research focus has been devoted to that question. How do very different people live productively together? What sort of governing arrangements can both function for everyone and still honor/respect individual and group differences?

My conclusion lies in what has been called America’s “civic religion”– allegiance to the overarching  values embodied in America’s constituent documents–values that are central to what I call the American Idea. During his inauguration speech, President Biden quoted St. Augustine for much the same sentiment–that a “people is a multitude defined by the common objects of their love.”

In 2004, I wrote a column in which I listed what I saw as the values that define us as Americans–the values that should be the “common objects of our love.” These are the overarching principles that infuse the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and that, at least in my view, are absolutely central to what it means to be an American–hyphenated or not.

Here is that list.

Americans believe in justice and civil liberties—in equal treatment and fair play for all citizens, whether or not we agree with them or like them or approve of their life choices.

We believe that no one is above the law—and that includes those who run our government.

We believe that dissent can be the highest form of patriotism. Those who care about America enough to speak out against policies they believe to be wrong or corrupt are not only exercising their rights as citizens, they are discharging sacred civic responsibilities.

We believe that playing to the worst of our fears and prejudices, using “wedge issues” to marginalize gays or Blacks or Muslims or “east coast liberals” (a time-honored code word for Jews) in the pursuit of political advantage is un-American and immoral.

We believe, as Garry Wills once wrote, in “critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences.”

We believe, to use the language of the nation’s Founders, in “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” (even non-American mankind).

We believe in the true heartland of this country, which is anywhere where people struggle to provide for their families, dig deep into their pockets to help the less fortunate, and understand their religions to require goodwill and loving kindness rather than legal or cultural dominance.

We believe that self-righteousness is the enemy of righteousness.

We really do believe that the way you play the game is more important, in the end, than whether you win or lose. We really do believe that the ends don’t justify the means.

It’s true that America’s aspirational values have never been wholly realized, but pursuing them is what unifies us. They are our Sea Shanties.

Healing and unity will require that Americans committed to those values reclaim the vocabulary of patriotism from those who have hijacked the language in service of something very different. 

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Mandating Fairness

Whenever one of my posts addresses America’s problem with disinformation, at least one commenter will call for re-institution of the Fairness Doctrine–despite the fact that, each time, another commenter (usually a lawyer) will explain why that doctrine wouldn’t apply to social media or most other Internet sites causing contemporary mischief.

The Fairness Doctrine was contractual. Government owned the broadcast channels that were being auctioned for use by private media companies, and thus had the right to require certain undertakings from responsive bidders. In other words, in addition to the payments being tendered, bidders had to promise to operate “in the public interest,” and the public interest included an obligation to give contending voices a fair hearing.

The government couldn’t have passed a law requiring newspapers and magazines to be “fair,” and it cannot legally require fair and responsible behavior from cable channels and social media platforms, no matter how much we might wish it could.

So–in this era of QAnon and Fox News and Rush Limbaugh clones– where does that leave us?

The Brookings Institution, among others, has wrestled with the issue.

The violence of Jan. 6 made clear that the health of online communities and the spread of disinformation represents a major threat to U.S. democracy, and as the Biden administration takes office, it is time for policymakers to consider how to take a more active approach to counter disinformation and form a public-private partnership aimed at identifying and countering disinformation that poses a risk to society.

Brookings says that a non-partisan public-private effort is required because disinformation crosses platforms and transcends political boundaries. They recommend a “public trust” that would provide analysis and policy proposals intended to defend democracy against the constant stream of  disinformation and the illiberal forces at work disseminating it. 
It would identify emerging trends and methods of sharing disinformation, and would
support data-driven initiatives to improve digital media-literacy. 

Frankly, I found the Brookings proposal unsatisfactorily vague, but there are other, more concrete proposals for combatting online and cable propaganda. Dan Mullendore pointed to one promising tactic in a comment the other day. Fox News income isn’t–as we might suppose– dependent mostly on advertising; significant sums come from cable fees. And one reason those fees are so lucrative is that Fox gets bundled with other channels, meaning that many people pay for Fox who wouldn’t pay for it if it weren’t a package deal . A few days ago, on Twitter, a lawyer named Pam Keith pointed out that a simple regulatory change ending  bundling would force Fox and other channels to compete for customers’ eyes, ears and pocketbooks.

Then there’s the current debate over Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, with many critics advocating its repeal, and others, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, defending it.

Section 230 says that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider” (47 U.S.C. § 230). In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do. The protected intermediaries include not only regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but also a range of “interactive computer service providers,” including basically any online service that publishes third-party content. Though there are important exceptions for certain criminal and intellectual property-based claims, CDA 230 creates a broad protection that has allowed innovation and free speech online to flourish.

Most observers believe that an outright repeal of Section 230 would destroy social networks as we know them (the linked article explains why, as do several others), but there is a middle ground between total repeal and naive calls for millions of users to voluntarily leave platforms that fail to block hateful and/or misleading posts.

Fast Company has suggested that middle ground.

One possibility is that the current version of Section 230 could be replaced with a requirement that platforms use a more clearly defined best-efforts approach, requiring them to use the best technology and establishing some kind of industry standard they would be held to for detecting and mediating violating content, fraud, and abuse. That would be analogous to standards already in place in the area of advertising fraud….

Another option could be to limit where Section 230 protections apply. For example, it might be restricted only to content that is unmonetized. In that scenario, you would have platforms displaying ads only next to content that had been sufficiently analyzed that they could take legal responsibility for it. 

A “one size fits all” reinvention of the Fairness Doctrine isn’t going to happen. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make meaningful, legal improvements that would make a real difference online.

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