Truly Torn

Oh, Mike Pence! Sometimes you do confound me! Apparently, you’ve accidentally done something good!

According to a recent report in The Indiana Lawyer, 

Under the administration of Gov. Mike Pence, legal fees paid to the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana have soared beyond $1.4 million and may approach $2 million, according to an Indiana Lawyer analysis. The $1.4 million total does not include fees that have been or will be paid in the current fiscal year ending June 30 or other legal fees ACLU claims are owed by the state. The fees represent the state’s payment of legal bills to parties who prevail in federal court on claims that government action violated their constitutionally protected civil rights.

Regular readers of this blog will remember that I spent six years (1992-98) as the Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU. Those were rewarding years in so many ways–I learned so much and met so many wonderful people; it was so gratifying to be part of an organization that defended individual liberties…..

But I must admit that the most vivid memory I took with me when I left the ACLU for academic life was the constant pressure of fundraising. We had wonderful lawyers and dedicated clerical staff, and we all worked for a pittance–but I had to raise that pittance. The ACLU only has two sources of income: charitable gifts (fundraising) and legal fees.

And legal fees aren’t a given. The organization only gets legal fees when it wins a lawsuit and the law allows such recovery. Even when the organization is successful and the case is a fee-generating one, it can take years of litigation–first, the case itself, then a fight over fees…

So I really, honestly do want to thank Governor Pence for his largesse to Indiana’s ACLU. I mean, $2 million dollars is a windfall! It should allow the ACLU some much-needed “breathing room,” some assurance that it will “be there”–in a position to protect LGBT Hoosiers from discrimination, reproductive rights from theocratic lawmakers, public school students from government-imposed prayer, law-abiding citizens against official overreach…Well, you all get the idea.

Here’s another idea: Each time Indiana’s constitutionally clueless Governor and AG lose another case to the ACLU, let’s all send the ACLU a few extra dollars to celebrate. Because after November, I have a feeling this bonanza may dry up….and Jane Henegar, the wonderful current Executive Director, will have to resume her begging.

Send a few bucks to Indiana’s ACLU in “honor” of Governor Pence.

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Entrails, Tea Leaves and Other Prognostications…

The just-announced Pulitzer Prizes for 2016 included the award for Drama, which this year went to the smash hit Hamilton.

At Political Animal, the irony of that award was duly noted:

What’s so fascinating about all this is that – in the midst of a nativist Republican backlash to “take our country back” – the hottest thing in the country is a rap musical performed mostly by people of color that is all about our lily white founding fathers. Ain’t life grand?

At risk of reading too much into these particular “tea leaves,” I think the success of Hamilton does  rest on more than the admitted brilliance of its music and staging (we were fortunate enough to see it a few months ago, and I can attest to that brilliance). I think it signals an embrace of the culture change that–among other things– is driving our contemporary toxic politics.

I have previously suggested that this is a time of paradigm shift–a time when our previous understandings of the world we inhabit are being challenged by globalization, scientific discovery and diversity.

A “paradigm” is a pattern of received beliefs that we use to make sense of the world. The term was popularized by Thomas Kuhn, a physicist who—in the course of research for his dissertation—picked up Aristotle’s Physics and found that it made no sense to him. Reasonably enough, Kuhn assumed that neither he nor Aristotle was stupid, so he concluded that they were operating from such different realities that communication was not possible. He subsequently wrote a book about the way science adapts to new discoveries, or “shifts” its paradigms.

It isn’t only science. Cultures shift in much the same way.

Our paradigms, or worldviews, are formed through a process of socialization into a particular culture–a constant transmittal of messages about the way the world works, about the reality we inhabit, about the “natural order” of things. Every so often, in human history, that “natural order” is challenged, and the result can be disorienting.

Most social change is incremental, evolutionary–and even then, it can be hard for people to navigate. But we seem to be at one of those junctures where the shift is both relatively sudden and massive. Long-held belief systems–religious and secular–are being called into question.People who can’t deal with the pace and scope of this change are understandably terrified.

Think how you’d feel if you awoke one morning in an unfamiliar environment–surrounded by people (including your own children and/or grandchildren) speaking a language you didn’t understand except for tantalizing bits and pieces, with customs that were both alien and familiar, and expectations you couldn’t fulfill.

As hard as it sometimes is to be sympathetic, we need to realize that for inhabitants of the “old” reality, the world really is ending. Same-sex marriage, empowered women, an African-American President, “press 1 for English,” drones, social media….We wake up every day to a million and one reminders that we inhabit a new and uncharted world; a rap-music, multicultural portrayal of America’s founding fathers is just one of them.

And for so many people, it’s a reality too hard to accept. Too hard to get one’s head around.

So..back to a (mythical) simpler past with Trump? Or an embrace of a different, fairer, more equal world? I guess we’ll see.

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That Urban/Rural Divide

There are lots of ways to “slice and dice” human populations (and unfortunately, we humans excel in exploiting and magnifying those differences). One dividing line that has not gotten the attention it deserves is the one between inhabitants of rural and urban America.

As the authors of a famous rant–The Urban Archipelago—pointed out some years back, America’s cities are big blue dots, many of which are swimming in red seas. For many reasons, people who live in more densely populated areas tend to be more supportive of the institution of government, and less likely to respond to political attacks on its legitimacy. (To take just one example, people who regularly pick up a rifle and go hunting look at gun control issues differently than people worrying that their children will be victims of a drive-by shooting or be on the wrong end of a Saturday-night special.)

That these differences lead to different behaviors at the polls is no surprise; the political problem, however, is that our current method of drawing electoral districts significantly advantages rural areas–at the same time that those areas are rapidly losing population to urban America.

Take Indiana. As Michael Hicks recently reported

In last month’s population report, the number of shrinking counties rose to 54, and those growing faster than the nation as a whole rose to 14. That left 24 counties in relative decline. All the growth is happening in urban places, and all the decline is in rural or small town Indiana. It has been this way for half a century, but the pace is accelerating. This population redistribution matters deeply for Indiana’s health through the 21st century.

Cities grow for simple reasons that cannot be duplicated in rural areas no matter how wishful the thinking. Through the forces of agglomeration, each 5.0 percent growth in population causes GDP per worker to rise by roughly 1.0 percent. This leads to higher wages that in turn attract more educated workers to urban areas, which further boost productivity. In cities, workers combine to be more productive overall than the sum of their individual skills. Economists call this phenomenon ‘increasing returns.’

The phenomenon Hicks reports on is being replicated all over the world, and if the social science research is to be believed, the flow of population from farm to metropolitan area is unlikely to reverse any time soon.

This population distribution creates a real problem for a political system ostensibly based on “one person, one vote.” I have posted previously about gerrymandering, but even when the process of creating districts is fair, our human tendency to move to areas where people are like-minded results in “packed” districts that generate so-called “wasted votes”–a migratory process that Bill Bishop has called The Big Sort. 

It isn’t only that the urban dweller’s vote counts less, troubling as that is.

Municipal areas are the drivers of state economies, but in states like Indiana, the urban economy is still in thrall to decisions made by a predominantly rural legislature. Unsurprisingly, tax policies and distribution formulas favor rural areas with diminishing populations over growing urban and suburban communities, and culture war bills like the recent anti-gay measures in North Carolina and Mississippi typically pass with the votes of rural representatives unconcerned that such measures trigger boycotts that hurt urban enterprises owned by people who generally opposed them.

People living in a downtown high-rise deserve to have their votes matter as much as the votes of people living on a farm. Even more importantly, they deserve to have their laws made by people who understand the needs and realities of city life.

We need to do something to level the playing field, but I’m not sure what that something is.

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Unintended–and Deserved–Consequences

Well, I see that “The Donald” won yesterday’s New York’s GOP primary. Handily.

If you are a Republican (or just a citizen) wondering how this posturing buffoon could have become the party’s likely Presidential nominee, a bit of recent history may be instructive.

One of the (many) things that has driven me nuts these past few years has been the single-minded obstructionism of House and Senate Republicans to anything and everything that President Obama has proposed. Good idea, bad idea–even, originally, their own idea…it hasn’t mattered. (So much for the quaint notion that we elect these bozos to work on our behalf.)

There’s a reason the GOP has been dubbed “the party of NO.”

My frustration with the childlike refusal of these political partisans to engage with the policies rather than the personalities–a refusal which has reached its apex with their defiance of their constitutional duty to “advise and consent” to a Supreme Court nomination–is probably why my reaction to this article was “serves them right.”

MEMO to Republican legislators biting your nails over the New York primary, wondering if you can finally derail Donald J. Trump’s candidacy with, gulp, Ted Cruz: You brought it on yourselves.

The article pointed to the characteristics of Trump’s supporters, the majority of whom are white men without college degrees–precisely the workers most negatively affected by changing economic realities.

Throughout his presidency, Mr. Obama has put forward constructive proposals to help those displaced workers. For its part, the Republican Congress has been behaving like Nero.

Take, for example, the administration’s 2011 proposal of a $447 billion package of measures including payroll tax cuts and the creation of an infrastructure bank that would have led to the creation of thousands of construction jobs, as well as other substantial economic benefits.

Designed to be bipartisan and fully paid for by higher taxes on rich Americans and some corporations, the American Jobs Act was nonetheless dead virtually upon its arrival on Capitol Hill.

The Jobs Act was only one of a number of initiatives designed to help precisely this population. The article lists a number of others: proposals for larger tax credits for child care; community college investments; expansion of the earned-income tax credit; changing retirement plans to be portable across employers and available to part-time workers; and tax credits for manufacturing communities.

Most recently, with truly breathtaking arrogance, Congressional Republicans refused to even consider the President’s budget.

If there had been a serious discussion of the merits or demerits of these proposals–if, following such a discussion, Republicans had rejected one or several of them, citing such analyses–that would be a very different matter. Americans might agree or disagree on policy grounds, but that’s the way the process is intended to work.

Instead, what we’ve had (and let’s not pretend otherwise) has been an unprecedented display of petulance and racism: We don’t care what that black guy in the White House wants; we don’t care if it is good or bad for our constituents; we don’t care that the level of disrespect shown our duly (and overwhelmingly) elected Commander in Chief empowers America’s enemies at home and abroad.

The truly unAmerican vendetta being waged against the President has slowed overall recovery from the recession, to be sure, but its most damaging consequences have fallen on the people who are currently supporting Donald Trump. If Trump, or Cruz, end up leading the Grand Old Party into the wilderness in November, the wounded will have no one to blame but themselves.

I think they call that Karma. Or just desserts.

For me, it’s schadenfreude.

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Dick Lugar and the GOP That Used to Be

Yesterday, I logged on to the New York Times to be greeted by an Op-Ed written by former Indiana Senator Richard Lugar. In it, he defended Presidential authority over immigration enforcement decisions.

That authority is currently being challenged by a number of Republican Governors (including–surprise!–Indiana’s Mike Pence) in a case before the Supreme Court.

In his op-ed, Indiana’s former Senator patiently explained the nature and extent of Presidential discretion over immigration, and the reasons Congress has historically granted the Commander-in-Chief that discretion.

[W]hether or not you like President Obama’s actions, he has operated under longstanding provisions of law that give the executive branch discretion in enforcement. This presidential prerogative has been recognized explicitly by the Supreme Court. Moreover, the nature of immigration enforcement and the resources (or lack thereof) appropriated by Congress necessitate exactly the type of choices that the president has made.

Lugar followed this observation with citations to Supreme Court cases, Congressional measures, and similar discretionary decisions by previous Presidents of both parties . And in what can only be read as a reproach to the GOP’s current Presidential contenders–all of whom profess support for mass deportations–he wrote:

The immense moral and legal consequences of a deportation campaign targeting up to 11 million undocumented immigrants are obvious. Even Americans whose frustration has overcome their compassion and led them to support the harshest immigration enforcement would be likely to reconsider if they actually saw such an operation in action.

A huge roundup like that would require an extraordinary expansion of federal law enforcement capabilities and resulting intrusions into American society. But in reality, there is no prospect for such a campaign because Congress has not made available more than a small fraction of the necessary money and manpower.

This is why, by its nature, immigration enforcement requires executive discretion.

Anyone who has followed Richard Lugar’s illustrious career knows how carefully he has always parsed his words, and how reluctant he has been to criticize other political figures–especially his fellow Republicans. (If you are looking for an exemplary example of civility, you can hardly do better than Dick Lugar.) That is why I was particularly struck by these paragraphs:

President Obama’s actions, therefore, are hardly unprecedented. There are two major differences. First, he gave speeches advocating for explicit programs with names, rather than relying on subtler agency direction.

Second, immigration policy has been caught up in today’s hyper-partisanship, where a strident anti-immigration tide within the Republican Party overwhelms all bipartisan compromise. All 26 state officials who have challenged the administration’s executive actions in the Supreme Court case are Republicans, and last month the G.O.P.-led House of Representatives voted to file an amicus brief on behalf of the entire House.

From these howls of outrage, you wouldn’t know that the Obama administration has vastly exceeded the deportations under President George W. Bush. And Mr. Bush vastly exceeded those of President Clinton. President Obama’s directives to focus enforcement efforts on those who have committed crimes in the United States and recent border crossers are a rational executive prioritization, given the resources and the realities…..

When the president took his executive action on immigration, he was not flouting the will of Congress; rather, he was using the discretion Congress gave him to fulfill his constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

My own political involvement began with a long-ago effort to elect Dick Lugar Mayor of Indianapolis. Over the years, especially during his Senate tenure, he moved steadily to the Right on matters of domestic policy, and I came to disagree with him on several issues. Like most Hoosiers, however, I never doubted his intellect, his integrity, or his mastery of policy–especially foreign policy.

Even after he lost a primary election to a clueless culture warrior pandering to the GOP’s ever more rabid base, Lugar has continued to be supportive of his party, seemingly reluctant to criticize even those who are besmirching his legacy of thoughtful statesmanship. That reluctance makes yesterday’s op-ed even more significant.

When you look at the chasm–the abyss!– between a statesman like Dick Lugar and an in-over-his-head theocrat like Mike Pence, it’s enough to make a former Republican cry.

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