Tag Archives: GOP

The Heckler’s Veto

Speaking of “framing,” as I did a few days back, Jamelle Bouie had a recent column in the New York Times that addressed Republican efforts to re-brand censorship as “parental rights.”

The official name of Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill, prohibiting “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity,” is the Parental Rights in Education Act. And the state’s Stop WOKE (short for Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act, which outlaws any school instruction that classifies individuals as “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” was framed, similarly, as a victory for the rights of parents.

As Bouie points out, these bills certainly do empower certain parents–those who want to remove books, films, and even whole classes that they believe will expose their children to material with which they disagree, or to those parts of history about which they’d prefer their children remain unaware.

In Pinellas County, for example, a single complaint about the Disney film “Ruby Bridges” — about the 6-year-old girl who integrated an all-white New Orleans school in 1960 — led to its removal from an elementary school.

Lest we shake our heads and mentally write off Florida as an aberration, Bouie reminds readers that these efforts are not limited to Florida under the increasingly autocratic rule of the appalling Ron DeSantis.

In his 2021 campaign for the Virginia governor’s mansion, Glenn Youngkin made “parents matter” his slogan, and he has asserted “parents’ rights” in his effort to regulate the treatment of transgender children and end “divisive concepts” such as “critical race theory” in schools. His early moves included new history standards that removed discussions of racism and downplayed the role of slavery in causing the Civil War.

And at this moment, Texas Republicans are debating a bill — backed by Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — that, according to The Texas Tribune, “would severely restrict classroom lessons, school activities and teacher guidance about sexual orientation and gender identity in all public and charter schools up to 12th grade.” Texas parents, The Tribune notes, already have the right to “remove their child temporarily from a class or activity that conflicts with their beliefs or review all instructional materials.” This bill would further empower parents to object to books, lessons and entire curriculums.

These efforts certainly do “empower” a subset of racist and homophobic parents. They don’t empower the majority of parents who want their children to learn about–and learn from– accurate American history. And they run roughshod over the rights of parents who want schools to educate their children by offering them a wide library of thought-provoking, age-appropriate books and materials.

Bouie says these laws amount to the institutionalization of the “heckler’s veto,” an observation with which I fully agree.

What is the heckler’s veto?

The term originated as a judicial response to arguments often made when unpopular speakers came to town–think Martin Luther King in the South during the Civil Rights movement, or the KKK planning an “event” on Indiana’s Statehouse steps, or similarly contentious presentations that raise a non-trivial possibility of violence and protest. Those who wish to shut the speaker down use that threat of conflict to argue that allowing the speech to take place will be too dangerous.

If successful, that’s an argument that permits the “hecklers”–those who disagree with the message– to  mute the speaker, to “veto” his First Amendment Free Speech rights. The Courts have seen through that tactic, ordering localities to respond to the threat by deploying a police presence sufficient to ensure the public safety– not by disallowing the speech or rally.

“Parents’ rights,” is just another form of the heckler’s veto, giving some parents the right to deny a similar right to the parents who disagree with them. It is, as Bouie writes, a movement is that is meant “to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents” allowing them to dictate education and curriculums to the rest of the community.

It is part of a wider assault.

The culture war that conservatives are currently waging over education is, like the culture wars in other areas of American society, a cover for a more material and ideological agenda. The screaming over “wokeness” and “D.E.I.” is just another Trojan horse for a relentless effort to dismantle a pillar of American democracy that, for all of its flaws, is still one of the country’s most powerful engines for economic and social mobility.

The only parents these hecklers are “empowering” are the parents who are soldiers in the GOP’s war on intellectual honesty and public education.

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Mitch Daniels And Tea Leaves

We all view the news of the day through a personal lens. I know that I do. So it may be that my “reading” of a recent item in the Indianapolis Business Journal simply reflects my conviction that the Republican Party is far along in the process of disintegration.

The article reported on former Governor Mitch Daniels’ acceptance of a new position:

Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is set to join the Carmel-based Liberty Fund this week in the new position of distinguished scholar and senior adviser, the educational foundation announced Tuesday.

The position was created specifically for Daniels, who has spent the past decade as president of Purdue University. The Liberty Fund said Daniels’ work will focus on the creation of educational programming and partnerships that will strengthen the not-for-profit’s existing education programs.

The Liberty Fund is one of the richest foundations in the state, with about $341 million in assets as of April 2021. The pro-free-enterprise foundation, which has about 45 employees, was founded in 1960 by businessman and philanthropist Pierre Goodrich, the son of James Goodrich, Indiana’s 29th governor (1917-21).

The foundation raised its local profile by opening a $22 million headquarters at 111th Street and U.S. 31 in Carmel in 2016.

“I have watched for decades as the Liberty Fund, with impeccable scholarship and fidelity to principle, has labored to keep lit the lamp of freedom, and spread understanding of its historical and intellectual underpinnings,” Daniels, 73, said in written remarks. “Now, with individual liberty under relentless threats foreign and domestic, I’m grateful for the funds’ invitation that I try to assist it in its noble and essential mission.”

Wealthy Republicans and conservative institutions have a long history of providing comfortable “stopping points” for politicians who are between electoral gigs, and perhaps this is simply another illustration of the cozy relationship of political folks with their moneyed patrons.

But through my “lens” I see it differently.

I’m superficially familiar with the Liberty Fund. I even attended one of their conferences. And while I have substantial differences with the extreme libertarian political philosophy that led Pierre Goodrich to establish the organization, it is a philosophy that for many years formed a significant part of the GOP’s policy agenda.

The books published by the Fund are by thinkers like Adam Smith, Ludwig  Von Mises, and David Hume, along with reprints of the Federalist Papers and other documents explicating the Constitution. The conference I attended focused on a scholarly discussion of totalitarianism and the writings of Hannah Arendt.

I seriously doubt that Kevin McCarthy or the ragtag members of the House misnamed “Freedom Caucus” have ever read any of those books, or have ever heard of Hannah Arendt. The vast majority of today’s Republican officeholders are buffoons and/or racists, intent only upon appealing to their White Nationalist MAGA base and retaining power.

And that brings me to the few remaining Republicans like Mitch Daniels. When Mitch was Governor, I disagreed with several of his policy priorities, but I endorsed and admired his refusal to engage in culture war politics.

I have been predicting the implosion of the Republican Party for several years. That’s my “lens.” The conservative businesspeople we used to call “Country Club” Republicans, who tend to be educated, are increasingly fleeing the out-and-proud racism, misogyny and conspiracy theories embraced by the MAGA Republicans and Trumpers.

Before I read about Daniels new position at the Liberty Fund, I’d been planning to post about the GOP’s abandonment of anything resembling a principled, intellectually-defensible conservatism. (That today’s GOP has no agenda–conservative or otherwise– was made abundantly clear by the party’s failure to produce a platform during the last election cycle.)

What does that have to do with Daniels new “gig”?

When there were rumors that Daniels might run for Senate, and oppose MAGA world’s Jim Banks in the primary, the far right Club for Growth came out with guns blazing, accusing him of being an “old guard” Republican–i.e., too liberal. (Still sane?)

That  knee-jerk reaction was just more evidence–as if we needed it– that today’s GOP is a pathetic assemblage of reaction and racism, leaving the Democrats as the party-by-default of everyone else. That’s terrible for the country, because we lose the benefit of principled conservative analyses of proposed legislation, and because the Democratic Party has to cope with the internal disputes that are inevitable when a party becomes home to pretty much every voter–from center-right to “out there” left– who rejects the current GOP.

Bottom line: My “lens” tells me that Daniels and the Liberty Fund and conservatives like Paul Ryan who once had a home in the GOP are mounting a last-gasp effort to retake the party.

My lens also tells me it’s too late.

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He Who Frames The Issue..

I keep thinking about a line from that old Burt Bacharach song–“What’s it all about, Alfie?” After all, figuring out what it’s all about–framing the correct issues– could be the most important task humans face.

We don’t do it well.

I used to tell students that what three years of law school teaches is: “He who frames the issue, wins the debate.” It’s a maxim that the GOP clearly understands.

  • Is the massive assault on trans children an effort to use a wedge issue to political advantage in our ongoing culture war? Or is it, as Republicans piously claim, an effort to “protect” children?
  • Are the various efforts to prevent schools from teaching accurate history and/or providing thought-provoking reading material mechanisms to control the educational narrative, or are they intended to “empower parents”?
  • Does “school choice” allow parents to select schools that are best for their children? Or are such programs a way to circumvent the First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State, so that tax dollars can flow to religious institutions?
  • Are laws forbidding mask mandates efforts to protect our precious individual freedoms, or do they represent dangerous pandering  to the GOP’s anti-science base?
  • Are the gun nuts in the legislature really protecting Americans’ “2d Amendment” rights? (I can’t even come up with an alternate framing rooted in policy–in my view, lawmakers who want to protect kids from “inappropriate” books but not from being murdered by firearms are mentally disordered.)
  • And of course, there’s the mother of all dishonest framing–abortion bans that will inevitably cause the deaths of large numbers of women masquerading as “pro-life” measures, rather than the anti-women efforts grounded in religion and misogyny that they clearly are.

You can probably come up with a number of similar examples of laws defended on the basis of X that are really expressions of Y.

I thought about the multiple examples of GOP excellence in framing when I read that Michigan’s Governor had signed a bill overturning that state’s brilliantly misnamed “Right to Work” law. Right to Work laws are one of the most successful examples of dishonestly “framing the issue” in order to win the debate.

Talking Points Memo recently reported on the decades of successful marketing that gave so many states these laws.

On its face, who’d object to a “right-to-work” law?

By that token, and divorced from its substance, who wouldn’t be “pro-life”? Who quibbles with the assertion that “all lives matter,” or that markets should be “free”?

Right-wing activists have historically been good at branding, at characterizing even policy positions that restrict rights as postures of freedom and advancement.

“Right-to-work” laws are a seminal example of this marketing technique. They have nothing to do with guarantees of employment, but allow those in unionized jobs to opt out of paying union dues — while the unions are still required to provide services, like representation in disputes with management, even to those non-paying workers.

These laws have become the topic of national conversation, as Michigan is poised to repeal its version, the first state to do so in over 50 years.

The article noted the origins of the phrase and the trajectory of its subsequent marketing.

There is some dispute as to the phrase’s origins, but most point to anti-union Dallas Morning News editorial writer William Ruggles as coining the modern usage. In his 1941 Labor Day column, he called for a constitutional amendment to prohibit the “closed shop” or “union shop” — workplaces where unions can negotiate a contract that includes union membership as a condition of employment.

His column reportedly piqued the interest of Vance Muse, an avowed white supremacist who was working for various racist, anti-Semetic and anti-union campaigns — including a push for a “right-to-work” law in Arkansas (the name for the legislation courtesy of a Ruggles suggestion). That effort was successful: Arkansas became one of the first states to pass a right-to-work law, along with Florida.

“Opponents to unionism in the South discovered this brilliant rhetorical phraseology, and they began to propagandize on it,” Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor who directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told TPM.

 From the beginning, this marketing campaign had a distinctly libertarian bent. It was meant to evoke the idea of individual freedom, that workers should get to pocket their hard-earned cash that would otherwise go to union dues.

Interestingly,  states with right-to-work laws are almost all the same states that have outlawed abortion. As the article notes, advocates for both are extremely good at marketing themselves, and at getting their chosen rhetoric to be adopted by the mainstream.

Meanwhile, Democrats keep using slogans like “defund the police.” No wonder we have minority political control.

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It’s Not Just Gerrymandering

Give credit where it’s due–Republicans are so much more strategic than Democrats. Of course, maintaining minority control requires certain…techniques.

Talking Points Memo recently reported on Texas’ state takeover of Houston’s schools , in an update of an academic article that was first published in The Conversation by an NYU political science professor.

School takeovers are supposedly efforts to improve public school performance. (Although thirty years of that pesky thing called evidence says takeovers fail to do so.) In Texas, however, the usual justification for takeover–that the  school district is failing–was absent; the district was actually doing reasonably well.

It seems that in 2015, Texas’ Republican-dominated legislature granted the state authority to take over an entire school district if a single school in that district failed to meet state standards for five or more years.

 Although the state has given the Houston Independent School District a B rating, it plans to take over the Houston schools because one school, Wheatley High School, has not made sufficient progress since 2017.

Houston has 280 schools serving over 200,000 students. It employs roughly 12,000 teachers. Wheatley High School serves some 800 students, and employs 50 teachers. Why take over an entire system based on the performance of fewer than 1% of the district’s student/teacher population?

Good question, and that NYU professor has an answer.

In order to understand the logic of the planned state takeover of the Houston schools, it pays to understand the important role that schools have played in the social, political and economic development of communities of color. Historically, communities of color have relied on school level politics as an entry point to broader political participation. School-level politics may involve issues like ending school segregation, demanding more resources for schools, increasing the numbers of teachers and administrators of color, and participating in school board elections.

The process of gaining political power at the local level – and eventually state level – often begins at the schools, particularly the school board. For instance, before Blacks and Latinos elect members of their communities to the city councils, the mayor’s office and the state legislatures, they often elect members to the school board first.

In virtually all Red states, Republicans are heavily dependent on White rural voters to retain power, and they gerrymander accordingly. But in states like Texas (and even, in some analyses, Indiana) population shifts mean that in a few years, racial districting won’t be sufficient.  Houston is the largest urban center in Texas; it’s at the forefront of the growing demographic challenge to the GOP’s grip on state power.

The nine-member Houston school board is reflective of the community it serves. It has three Latinos, four African Americans and two white school board members. This, in my view, is what has put the Houston public school system and school board at the forefront of a battle that is really about race and political power.

The Houston public school system is not failing. Rather–according to the article– Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, together with Education Commissioner Mike Morath and the Republican state legislature, has manufactured an education crisis to prevent people of color in Houston from gaining the sorts of experience and exposure that could eventually translate into statewide political power. (Immediately after the takeover, Abbott and his gang threw out all the board members.)

Takeovers aren’t as effective as gerrymandering, but ulterior motives are far less visible…..

What makes this scenario seem so improbable is that it requires considerable strategic smarts; from my Indiana vantage point, Gregg Abbott is a lot meaner than he is smart. But then I think about the massive gerrymandering that Republicans managed to pull off  in 2010, extensively detailed in the book “Ratfucked.” There were highly sophisticated–and undoubtedly highly paid–  political consultants who managed that very successful multi-state operation.

Maybe the Texas takeover is just part of the GOP’s unremitting war on public education, but the article makes a pretty compelling case that it’s part of the party’s ongoing effort to retain political control–control that is threatened by demographic shift.

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Schedule The Funeral

One of the negative aspects of aging–what you might think of as the “flip side” of an otherwise welcome longevity–is the steady loss of friends with whom we shared companionship and memories. Those losses can make it more difficult to cope with the other challenges that come with age, especially the accelerating cultural shifts that require an ability to adapt to new norms.

A void is left when what was familiar is no longer there–whether the loss is of people, social norms, or institutions that have been longstanding parts of our lives. 

Take politics.

Most of us fail to appreciate the role that political activity plays in the socialization of millions of Americans. In cities and small towns alike, people volunteer on campaigns, work at the polls on Election Day, hold or attend “meet and greet” events, and generally see themselves as foot soldiers for a chosen political party.

What do they do when that chosen party dies?

In a recent Substack letter, Robert Hubbell focused me on that question.

Hubbell noted three news items: Trump’s post calling for”death and destruction” if he is indicted (reminiscent of his January 6th “Be there, it will be wild,”); death threats received by Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg; and a delegation led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, to January 6th defendants in pre-trial detention, characterizing them as “political prisoners.” 

He then wrote:

 If the Republican Party was not irretrievably broken, its leadership would have condemned Trump’s statement—and the death threat to Alvin Bragg and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s visit to the January 6th defendants. Instead, they have remained silent.

When a reporter showed Jim Jordan a copy of Trump’s post predicting “potential death and destruction,” Jordan responded that he “can’t read well without his glasses.” Jim Jordan is a craven, depraved coward whose career should have ended with a comprehensive investigation of allegations at Ohio State.

 But here we are. Trump can tease violence and Greene can glorify insurrectionists because there is no Republican Party infrastructure capable of enforcing decorum, decency, or discipline. Instead, grifters and demagogues have appropriated its decaying scaffolding to festoon their campaigns with an aura of respectability they neither have nor deserve. The miscreants who roam the abandoned halls of the house Lincoln built will say and do anything without fear of condemnation or consequence—at least from the Republican Party….

The Republican Party no longer exists in any meaningful sense. It is an empty vessel hijacked by the lowest common denominator of demagogues with the cunning or connections to secure a place on the ballot.

It is simply no longer possible to deny that a mindless, frenzied, hateful mob has replaced a once-respectable political party. Today’s GOP is dominated by the Jim Jordans, Lauren Boeberts,  Marjorie Taylor Greenes and numerous others who don’t understand American government and don’t care to learn.

Actually, if it wasn’t so sad, it would be funny. Following the train derailment in Ohio, twelve GOP Congressmen sent a letter hotly criticizing Transportation Secretary Buttigieg for the performance of  “DOT’s National Transportation Safety Board.” Buttigieg was “alarmed to learn” that those elected officials didn’t know that the NTSB isn’t part of the Transportation Department;  it’s an independent agency.

Republican elected officials don’t feel the need to understand how the government is organized, or how it is supposed to work, because their entire agenda is limited to waging culture war and stirring up fear of the “Other”–attacks on defenseless trans children and civil servants (“deep state” villains), efforts to return LGBTQ citizens to the closet and women to the kitchen,  and constant, vicious assaults on non-Whites and non-Christians as “woke” enemies within.

Last Wednesday, Talking Points Memo published a long look at Mark “Bigg Smoke” Robinson, the sitting lieutenant governor of the Tarheel State, and the likely next Republican candidate for Governor.

Our story focused on his prolific Facebook oeuvre, which includes attacks on the LGBT community, Jews, Blacks, and immigrants. Along with the extremism, Robinson also posted a slew of conspiracy theories about the “Illuminati,” the “New World Order,” and even the moon landing.

Robinson’s digital archive is like a road map of the extremely online modern right-wing radicalization cycle. He was constantly posting, often many times a day. We searched back through several years of his extensive social media presence and saw how he went from Obama-era cable news scandals, to going viral at gun events, and eventually descending into full-on, QAnon-adjacent, pro-Trump rage.

It’s disorienting when we realize that an old friend or familiar acquaintence is gone forever. But the Republican Party we once knew no longer exists.There isn’t even a slight pulse.

It’s past time to schedule the GOP’s funeral–like all decomposing bodies, this one is emitting a putrid smell.

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