Tag Archives: Bill of Rights

Christian Nationalists Are At It Again

At the base of all policy disputes is a foundational question: What is government for? What sort of decisions are properly within the remit of the state, and which must be left to individuals exercising their own beliefs? The nation’s founders answered that question with the Bill of Rights, which is properly read as a list of things that government is prohibited from doing.

Those amendments answer a fundamental question: who decides, and that makes it an impediment to the “Christian” warriors who want to dictate how the rest of us should live. As most Hoosiers are aware, a lot of those warriors– beneficiaries of Indiana’s extreme gerrymandering–have been elected to Indiana’s embarrassing legislature.

You would think–okay, hope–that this year’s short session would curtail efforts to violate citizens’ individual rights, but you’d be wrong. The Indiana Citizen has recently reported on several bills that would, if passed, advance the desires of those “Christian” nationalists for control over Hoosier behaviors.

One of those is SB 88, which has passed out of committee “with all of the committee’s Republicans supporting the bill and the Democrats who were present opposing it.” It will be heard by the full Senate.

The Citizen tells us that the bill’s author, Sen. Gary Byrne, did strip some of the bill’s most controversial elements ahead of the vote, including a requirement that middle school civics courses teach the meaning and significance of “historic” documents like the Ten Commandments, and another that would have restricted how civics teachers could address race, gender identity and issues of inequality.

In its current form, SB 88 would add something called the Classic Learning Test to the list of college entrance exams state colleges and universities are required to accept. (Like the ACT and SAT.) The Classic Learning Test is described as “a conservative-backed standardized exam that emphasizes classical literature and Christian thinkers.”  SB 88 would also expand the statutory definition of “good citizenship” instruction, requiring schools to teach students a version of “good citizenship” that includes graduation from high school, holding a full-time job, and waiting until marriage to have children.

(And here I thought “good citizenship” meant things like civic literacy, jury duty and voting…these days, I’d expand that definition to include protesting and when appropriate, civil disobedience.) As several Democrats noted, the bill would impose (some people’s) moral instruction under the guise of civics education.

The inability of Indiana’s GOP to distinguish between America’s legal structure and their carefully cherry-picked bible lessons is a common hallmark of Christian nationalism. A recent post from Lincoln Square highlights a recent publication from the Heritage Foundation, a follow-up to that organization’s Project 2025.

Do you believe that husbands should be in charge of their wives? Do you think that women who get a divorce ought to be ineligible for government benefits? Are you against gay marriage? Well, I’ve got good news for you!

The Heritage Foundation’s new report, Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years, reads like a white Christian Nationalist fever dream.

There are legitimate disagreements among legal scholars about the intent/meaning of several constitutional provisions. There are legitimate disputes over the application of provisions of the Bill of Rights to contemporary realities the Founders could never have envisioned. But there is absolutely no credible scholarship supporting the notion that government should mandate behavior approved by a religious sect–or impose legal sanctions on behaviors that a given religion disapproves.

There is no historical basis for creating an American Christian theocracy.

Most religions–and most non-believers–share broadly-held views that are also moral: against murder, against theft, against aggressions of various kinds. Our government can and does forbid those behaviors–not because they violate some religious tenets, but because they violate the libertarian premise upon which our government was founded. That premise, articulated by Enlightenment philosophers and endorsed by America’s Founders, was simple and profound: Individuals should be free to pursue their own ends–their own life goals–so long as they do not thereby harm the person or property of someone else, and so long as they are willing to accord an equal liberty to their fellow citizens. Government’s role is to protect our individual liberties while keeping the strong from abusing the weak.

It is not government’s job to prescribe our prayers or to dictate when, how or whether we should procreate, and it’s none of government’s business who we may choose to love. Laws imposing the religious beliefs of these performative “Christians” on the rest of us are unconstitutional and profoundly unAmerican.

Majority members of Indiana’s General Assembly need to take a remedial civics course.

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Why Government Grew

Among the many things that drive me up the wall (I’m close to the ceiling most of the time) is the common inability to distinguish between bigger government and inappropriately intrusive government. What the Founders feared was a government that invaded the individual liberties of citizens, not a government that established new agencies to deal with new problems.

This isn’t, I hasten to say, a misconception held only by Republicans. I still remember a friend who worked for the state during the Evan Bayh administration. His small agency was addressing the then-emerging problems of HIV. The federal government instituted a program that would have paid to place two more desperately-needed personnel in his agency–including the overhead costs of their employment. He was told he couldn’t take advantage of that program because Bayh didn’t want exposure to the accusation that state employment had increased during his term in office.

I think about that persistent bias against numerical growth–the very common inability to differentiate between the growth of power and authority and an increase in manpower–whenever I read about Musk’s determination to slash the size of government while blithely erasing limits on its authority.

A recent New York Times essay provided a perfect example of the difference–and a brief demonstration of how government growth occurs and why the Trump/Musk assault is so dangerous.

In the late 19th century, the government chemist Harvey Washington Wiley proved several shocking suspicions about the American food supply as correct: Milk was routinely thinned with dirty water, coffee contained bone, ground pepper was full of dirt, cocoa was packed with sand, and cayenne was loaded with brick dust.

The findings turned Wiley into a crusader for food safety, and by 1906 Congress finally agreed that regulations were needed. With the passage of the Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act, the United States created the framework for a federal system to test ingredients, inspect food factories and recall unsafe products.

This system has been criticized as seriously underfunded and often overcautious. But it has prevented a return to the fraudulent and poisonous food supply of the 19th century, which one historian called the “century of the great American stomachache.” That is, until recently, when the Trump administration began to unravel that safety net.

When this nation’s Founders wrote the Constitution, most Americans still grew their own food. If mom wanted to cook chicken for dinner, she was likely to go out in the yard and wring the neck of one of her flock; if that chicken was ill, the consequences were her responsibility. When food preparation became an industry, responsibility for product safety became a communal issue. The representatives of We the People decided (properly, in my view) that government had an obligation to regulate that production.

Our mad king doesn’t recognize that responsibility, and we are all endangered by the heedless effort to reduce government employment and responsibility.

Along with its other ill-considered actions, the administration has been targeting food safety programs for “downsizing.” As the linked article notes, last month two Department of Agriculture advisory committees that had provided guidance on fighting microbial contamination of food as well as meat inspection protocols were simply shut down. (If that wasn’t dangerous enough, the administration also expanded the ability of some meat processors to speed up their production lines–a provision that makes it more difficult to carry out careful inspections.)

The administration also delayed a rule that would have required both manufacturers and grocery companies to quickly investigate food contamination and pull risky products from sale. At the start of April, thousands of federal health workers were fired on the orders of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; a plan called for terminating 3,500 employees at the Food and Drug Administration — a move that he welcomed as a “revolution.” Consumer watchdogs and others described it as a safety blood bath.

Of course, it isn’t just food safety. Or drug efficacy. The Founders didn’t envision an FAA, either. Forgive me for wondering whether the recent rash of air mishaps is connected to the “downsizing” of that agency. And while the MAGA morons dispute the reality of climate change–okay, the utility of science generally–the EPA also protects the water we drink and the air we breathe from industrial pollution, among other things that didn’t exist in the 1700s. The list goes on.

The threat to individual liberty doesn’t come from the employment of officials to monitor food and drug safety, or oversee air traffic. The threat comes from autocrats unwilling to respect the constraints of the Bill of Rights.

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I Told You So…

Okay, okay…I hate smart-alecks who say “I told you so”– and now I’m one of them.

During my twenty-one years as a university professor, I constantly talked (well, ranted) about the American public’s lack of civic literacy–Americans’ gob-smacking lack of knowledge of our national history and constitutional structure. I established a Center for Civic Literacy at IUPUI (now IU Indianapolis), where researchers documented the gaping holes in public understanding of even the most basic elements of the country’s legal and political structures.

That public ignorance is largely responsible for our ignorant, embarrassing and very dangerous President.

David French connected those dots in a recent “conversation” among opinion writers for the New York Times. The writers had been discussing whether people cared about Trump’s assaults on America’s most fundamental philosophical commitments, and French pointed to the elephant in the room (pun intended): civic ignorance.

I really wish those of us who follow politics very closely understood more, because there’s a another question besides “Do people care?” and that is “Do people know?”

French noted that one thing that distinguishes Trump from other presidents “is the extent to which he has weaponized and exploited civic ignorance.”

One of the things that I think we’re learning is how much the American experiment has depended on the honor system. That presidents of both parties, with varying degrees of truthfulness and honor, by and large, maintained American norms and did not explicitly weaponize American ignorance in the way that Trump has.

I think what Trump and the people around him have realized is that he can do wild things, like some of the executive orders that will thrill MAGA and, of course, enrage his opposition. But then outside MAGA, there won’t be a ripple that any of this occurred at all.

Those American norms were rooted in the political philosophy that undergirds the Constitution and the Bill of Rights–a particular approach to the purpose of government, and especially to the importance of restraints on the exercise of government power. When a majority of the population doesn’t understand that philosophy and/or the centrality of those restraints, would-be dictators emerge.

I have previously posted about the importance of language and the effects of imprecise usage. An example is the way in which the term “limited government” has been transformed from the meaning given to it by the Founders into a belief in small government. The early American public insisted on passage of a Bill of Rights as a condition of ratifying the Constitution, and that Bill of Rights incorporates their insistence upon limiting the power of the state. (And since we are talking about words and their usage, I will note that “the state” in this context means government.)

If most citizens understood  America’s foundational principles, today’s media propaganda would be far less effective–audiences would recognize when claims being made are incompatible with America’s constitutional structure. Fox News and its clones rely heavily on the civic ignorance of their viewers.

In our system, government is supposed to be limited (not small). Among other things, it cannot tell citizens what they can say, what they can read, what they must believe. Government may not base laws on any religion. It may not interfere with citizens’ activities in the absence of probable cause. It must guarantee criminal defendants due process, and may not impose unreasonable penalties on those who are subsequently found guilty.

In the wake of the Civil War, the 14th Amendment added further limitations. Probably the most important was the mandate of equal protection–government cannot treat different kinds of citizens differently. (That amendment also included a provision that anyone born on American soil is a citizen–a provision that can only be changed by Constitutional amendment.)

The original Bill of Rights also explicitly limited the authority of the federal government by providing that powers not expressly granted to the federal government are retained by the states and/or the people.

Trump and his racist MAGA movement stand in opposition to virtually the entire Bill of Rights. It is very likely they have absolutely no familiarity with, or understanding of, that document. Worse, the election of Trump is evidence–as if we needed it–that the majority of Americans (especially those who didn’t bother going to the polls) were unaware of the degree to which a Trump victory would be inconsistent with America’s founding principles; evidently ignoring the campaign rhetoric that clearly pointed to that inconsistency and threatened those principles.

Too many Americans simply fail to understand that–far from making America great– Trump is intent upon destroying the genuine greatness to which America has aspired.

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Minding Our Own Business

The brilliance of Tim Walz’ response to the GOP’s culture war is that it put a foundational element of the Bill of Rights into everyday language.

“Mind your own damn business” is a more direct expression of that underlying philosophy than the one that I used in my classroom–“Live and let live.” As I have posted innumerable times on this blog, the Bill of Rights, taken as a whole, is based on the libertarian premise that individuals should be free to pursue their own ends–their own life goals–so long as they do not thereby harm the person or property of someone else, and so long as they are willing to accord an equal liberty to their fellow citizens.

Government’s role is to protect our individual liberties while keeping the strong from abusing the weak.

Adherence to that philosophy means that even if you strongly disagree with your neighbor’s choice of religion or life partner or reading material, you mind your own damn business. You don’t try to get the government involved in the absence of harm to nonconsenting others. You don’t try to use the power of the state to impose your own religious or lifestyle preferences on your neighbor–and he doesn’t get to impose his on you.

Live and let live.

The current iteration of the GOP has utterly abandoned fidelity to that limited government principal. The culture war being waged by the MAGA Christian Nationalists is all about punishing–or at least burdening–life choices with which they disagree. The latest–and yes, weirdest–example is JD Vance’s insistence that women who don’t produce biological children should be socially and legally disfavored. (Vance has even proposed that people with children be rewarded by giving them “extra” votes.)

These very unAmerican approaches to policy disputes also tend to be delivered in the nastiest possible way. As the Bulwark recently noted,

Consider the latest weird statement by JD Vance to emerge. Vance disagrees with the education policies pushed by the American Federation of Teachers and its president, Randi Weingarten. He doesn’t like Weingarten’s political activities either. Fine. That hardly makes him unique among Republicans.

But apparently he can’t just say that. He has to attack her personally. Weingarten, it seems, doesn’t have children. And Vance has a view on that. What’s more, he has a view on the character and effectiveness of teachers who have kids and those who don’t, and has decided he’s “disturbed” by those who don’t.

One could ask, are the private lives of millions of teachers any of JD Vance’s damn business?

As the article proceeded to note, Vance obviously thinks so. But it isn’t just Vance–it’s a core belief of MAGA world that everything is their business.

For MAGA—as for other authoritarian movements of the left and right—the personal is the political. MAGA is about judging and disparaging other people, whole classes of people, whole groups of our fellow Americans…The routine slander of individuals and groups is part of the essence of the movement.

It is true that political disputes often get nasty. History is replete with examples of unfair accusations and various slanders leveled by candidates for office and their supporters. What the Bulwark reports in this particular case, however, gets to the essence of what is wrong with today’s GOP, and its devolution into White Christian Nationalism. There are a number of reasons to label that movement unAmerican, of course–any fair reading of the First Amendment and the Founders’ insistence on Separation of Church and State will provide the most obvious one. What is less obvious, but equally shocking, is the MAGA movement’s manifest belief that government should be able to dictate the personal behaviors of individuals even when those behaviors do not affect others.

So MAGA says government can force women to give birth. That government can prevent medical personnel from helping trans children. That government can remove library books that offend MAGA sensibilities, even though many other citizens want access to those books and no one is forcing the censors or their children to read them.

MAGA Republicans want government as busybody, despite the fact that such a role is entirely contrary to the foundational philosophy of this nation.

If, as I believe, real patriotism requires fidelity to our foundational philosophy– if it requires citizens to mind our own damn business in the absence of harm to unconsenting others– then MAGA culture warriors must be ranked as the most unpatriotic of all Americans.

We all need to listen to Tim Walz.

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Federalism And MAGA Lies

I know it’s hopeless to expect anything approaching logic–or constitutional knowledge– from MAGA conspiracy theorists, but I’ll admit I still get surprised by the sheer fact-free idiocy of some of their anti-Biden accusations. In many cases, that idiocy is an outgrowth of what I call “civic illiteracy”–an obvious lack of knowledge of the most basic structures of American government.

Take the MAGA folks who are screaming over Trump’s New York prosecution and subsequent guilty verdicts. Republican partisans–some of whom, as elected officials, should certainly know better–accuse the Biden administration of “weaponizing” the Department of Justice, claiming that President Biden was responsible for both Alvin Bragg’s decision to charge Trump and for the subsequent jury verdict.

Yeah! As the Lincoln Project recently noted, it’s also Biden’s fault you got that speeding ticket!

Anyone who took a high school government class (and actually passed) should know the difference between federal and state jurisdiction. That difference is part of what we call federalism–and it’s foundational to our legal and governmental systems. As I used to explain to my students, the Founders gave us both horizontal and vertical checks and balances: separation of powers (dividing authority among the branches of government–someone should tell Tommy Tuberville), and federalism (dividing authority between federal, state and local units of government).

Federalism is evidently a concept utterly foreign to a large segment of the voting population. As the Washington Post recently reported, a CBS News-YouGov poll tried to figure out just “how many Americans buy into the baseless idea that Biden had something to do with the charges against Trump in Manhattan.

Turns out, it’s 43 percent — and 80 percent of Republicans. Those are the percentages who agree that the charges were brought because of “directions that came from the Biden administration,” rather than merely by “prosecutors in New York.”…

The article debunked several aspects of the claim, and noted

This theory was also firmly rejected in recent weeks by no less than former Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina, who worked on Trump’s defense early in the Manhattan prosecution. He called the idea “silly” and “ridiculous.”

“Joe Biden or anyone from his Justice Department has absolutely zero to do with the Manhattan district attorney office,” Tacopina said in an MSNBC interview, adding, “We know that’s not the case, and even Trump’s lawyers know that’s not the case.”

“People who say that,” Tacopina told MSNBC, “it’s scary that they really don’t know the law or what they’re talking about.”

By Tacopina’s formulation, 4 in 10 Americans have no idea what they’re talking about.

As the article notes, this is hardly the first time Trump’s base has come to believe nonsense, despite a lack of any evidence–and in spite of the fact that believing it requires total ignorance of the structure of their own government.

Believing that the federal government stage-managed a state-level trial also requires a considerable amount of cognitive dissonance, since the GOP has long insisted on an extreme version of “state’s rights.”

In fact, the Republican Party has never quite gotten over its original resentment over incorporation–the odd word for the doctrine that nationalized the Bill of Rights. That process was initiated after passage of the 14th Amendment constitutionalized the principle that the fundamental liberties protected by the Bill of Rights should be a “floor”–that a citizen in Alabama should enjoy the same basic rights as a citizen of New York. States are able to enlarge on those rights, but thanks to nationalization of the Bill of Rights, they are forbidden to retract them. (That’s why the theocrats found it necessary to eliminate reproductive freedom from the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights.)

Our relatively strong federal government was founded in reaction to the serious and multiple problems the country experienced under the Articles of Confederation, which gave states far too much authority.  Obviously, not all policies need to be nationally uniform–there are plenty of areas where local control is appropriate. However, questions about who is entitled to fundamental rights–and what those rights are–shouldn’t be one of them, as the patchwork of approaches to reproductive freedom that’s emerging is likely to demonstrate. Forcefully. Justice Alito’s dismissal of the substantive due process doctrine is-–among other incredibly negative things– a step back toward the fragmentation of the Articles of Confederation.

But that step back didn’t merge state and federal justice systems.

Some of the Republicans who champion “states rights” are happy to ignore the whole concept in order to fabricate a ridiculous–albeit comforting– accusation. Others–probably the majority– are just broadcasting their profound ignorance of America’s basic governance structure.

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