Tag Archives: GOP

Speaking Of Democracy…

I’ll begin this post with an admission. Back when I was Indianapolis’ Corporation Counsel–and that was way back,  1977-80–I thought citizen referenda were a bad idea. After all, America is a republic, meaning that ours is a representative form of democracy. (For those of you who are fond of pontificating that we’re a republic not a democracy, I hate to tell you this, but representative democracy is still a democracy.  We just elect people to make decisions and cast votes on our behalf.)

The theory is that the folks we elect will have time to fully investigate issues and form thoughtful and educated opinions, after which they will cast informed votes. Referenda, I thought then, would be won or lost based upon the “passions of the mob” that so worried the nation’s founders.

You have probably already seen the contemporary flaw in that reasoning.

Unfortunately, we  Americans no longer choose thoughtful, measured and educated people to make our laws. Those mob “passions” have translated into the nomination and election of far too many people we wouldn’t trust to choose our brand of toilet paper. Hence my change of opinion about referenda–a change of heart confirmed not just by the recent election in Kansas, but by the recognition that referenda are statewide, and unlike  legislative chambers, cannot be gerrymandered.

That inability to game the system is probably why Republicans are currently opposed to them.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of people signed petitions this year backing proposed ballot initiatives to expand voting access, ensure abortion rights and legalize recreational marijuana in Arizona, Arkansas and Michigan.

Yet voters might not get a say because Republican officials or judges have blocked the proposals from the November elections, citing flawed wording, procedural shortcomings or insufficient petition signatures.

At the same time, Republican lawmakers in Arkansas and Arizona have placed constitutional amendments on the ballot proposing to make it harder to approve citizen initiatives in the future.

The Republican pushback against the initiative process is part of a several-year trend that gained steam as Democratic-aligned groups have increasingly used petitions to force public votes on issues that Republican-led legislatures have opposed. In reliably Republican Missouri, for example, voters have approved initiatives to expand Medicaid, raise the minimum wage and legalize medical marijuana. An initiative seeking to allow recreational pot is facing a court challenge from an anti-drug activist aiming to knock it off the November ballot.

About half the states allow citizen initiatives. (Indiana is not one of them–we have to go hat in hand to the General Assembly and beg for permission to hold a local referendum. It took Indianapolis three sessions to get approval for our referendum on public transit.) The states that do allow these initiatives require a significant number of signatures by registered voters on a petition, and further require designated officials to certify the authenticity of those signatures and confirm that the ballot wording is clear.

Opponents of the process argue that campaigns by well-heeled “special interests” can influence the results. That argument would be more persuasive if it didn’t also describe the problem with today’s legislative processes, where the influence-peddling is rampant and far less transparent.

Republicans who fear the results of an actual, non-gerrymandered vote have resorted to truly petty arguments to keep these initiatives off the ballot.

In Michigan this past week, two Republican members of the bipartisan Board of State Canvassers blocked initiatives to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution and expand opportunities for voting. Each measure had significantly more than the required 425,000 signatures. But GOP board members said the voting measure had unclear wording and the abortion measure was flawed because of spacing problems that scrunched some words together…

In Arizona, the primarily Republican-appointed Supreme Court recently blocked a proposed constitutional amendment that would have extended early voting and limited lobbyist gifts to lawmakers. The measure also would have specifically prohibited the Legislature from overturning the results of presidential elections, which some Republicans had explored after then- President Donald Trump’s loss in 2020….

Arizona Republicans have spent the past decade enacting laws making it more difficult to get citizen initiatives on the ballot. State laws now require petition sheets to be precisely printed and ban the use of a copy machine to create new ones. Other laws require paid circulators to include their registration number on each petition sheet, get it notarized and check a box saying they were paid.

The assault on (small-d) democratic decision-making by Red state legislators could hardly be clearer. Fortunately, in Michigan, the state’s Supreme Court reversed the decision, and the issue will be on the November ballot.

When President Biden asserted that the upcoming midterm election is– above all– about saving democracy, he wasn’t exaggerating.

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America’s Trolley Problem

There’s a famous “what if?” used in classes teaching ethics: it’s called the Trolley Problem, and it poses a terrible dilemma. A trolley is bearing down on a group of five people, who are (unaccountably) unaware of its path. You are standing near a switch that can divert it–but if you do, it will kill a single person who would then be in its path.

What do you do? Do you resist taking an action that would make you, in effect, the person who murders that single unfortunate (and presumably innocent) bystander? Or do you shrug and let the trolley kill the five (presumably equally innocent) original targets, excusing your non-interference with the fact that your actions were not responsible for their demise? (Accidents happen…)

There’s no comforting solution to that dilemma, just as there is no “perfect” answer to most of the questions we wrestle with almost daily on this site and elsewhere.

I am one of the many former Republicans who is horrified by what that party has become, and I have been adamant about the importance of voting Blue in November. That advice has been criticized–on this site and elsewhere–by those who find both parties unworthy of their support. Democrats are far from perfect, they point out, so–as  advocates of moral purity–they refuse to draw any distinction between a fascist cult and an admittedly flawed political party.

Talk about making the perfect the enemy of the good!

May I suggest that the Jews living in Nazi Germany would have been grateful for a corrupt or inept or otherwise “imperfect” alternative to Hitler? (I don’t think that example is as far-fetched as it would have been in times past.)

We American voters are standing at that switch. We are watching the trolley come down the track.

Not unlike certain commenters to this blog, some number of progressive American voters entertain a firm belief in their own superior moral purity. Those voters exhibit disdain for the very idea of casting a vote in support of a political party that doesn’t meet their rigid and impossibly high ethical standards. They harp on the multiple failings of the political party that is–at this moment in history–the clearly preferable alternative.

That posture is particularly appealing to  American voters who are White, male and middle-class, and thus unlikely to be an early target of the Christian Nationalist cult that has taken over the once-respectable GOP.

The rest of us–women, people of color, non-Christians, immigrants, and others who don’t meet the Christian Nationalist definition of “real American”–are more likely to agree with President Biden about what is at stake this November.

Americans unwilling to make the perfect the enemy of the good will go to the polls and vote Blue No Matter Who because we care about reproductive choice, about protecting every citizen’s right to vote, about public education, about the economic well-being of working class Americans, about sensible gun laws, about genuine religious liberty (as opposed to the privileging of Christian religious doctrine), and about limiting the authority of government over our most intimate decisions.

Those of us who understand the choice before us aren’t blind– we understand that we won’t all agree about the policies that will be necessary or desirable to achieve our goals, or even, in some cases, the goals themselves. We are perfectly well aware that the Democratic Party includes plenty of lawmakers with whom we disagree, and some number whose behaviors are suspect and/or whose motives are impure.

It doesn’t matter.We can address those deficiencies once we save America’s admittedly imperfect democracy. Because–hysterical and overblown as it sounds–that actually is what is at stake. Moral purity from either the Right or Left is a pose and a fiction. Making the perfect (however one defines it) the enemy of the good is a cop-out–a defense for doing nothing.

November is America’s Trolley Problem.

No one wants to throw the switch that kills the single human on the alternate track, but refusing to do so will doom five equally innocent beings. The people refusing  to throw the ballot-box switch may not have been responsible for the trolley’s original path, but that fact doesn’t excuse their “pox on both your houses” refusal to distinguish between levels of harm.

Or perhaps, like the “Good Germans, they simply refuse to see the trolley…

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About That Loan Forgiveness…

President Biden has announced his college loan forgiveness program. Let the carping begin!

Critics scream that forgiveness takes money from the broader tax base, mostly made up of workers who did not go to college, to subsidize the debt of people with valuable degrees. Technically, I suppose that’s true–but it’s also true for the massive corporate subsidies and tax credits that the GOP loves.

What about Trump’s 2017 tax cut for millionaires? Or those oil company subsidies and multiple other subsidies for big companies that can afford to hire good lobbyists?  How about those lower tax rates for hedge fund managers (“carried interest deduction”)?What about tax provisions benefitting only the rich–for example, allowing 100% deductibility for yachts purchased for “business purposes,” and  100% of the future depreciation for private jets in their first year of service?

Where are the GOP howls of “unfairness” about those examples of “socialism?” (I forgot–in the good old U.S. of A., we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us…)

Republican lawmakers screaming the loudest about “unfairness” are the most hypocritical: Marjorie Taylor Greene  had $183,504 in PPP loans forgiven; Vern Buchanan (Florida) had more than $2.3 million forgiven;  Markwayne Mullin (Oklahoma) had more than $1.4 million forgiven; Matt Gaetz (Pedophile) had $482,321 forgiven. The list goes on. And on.

It also turns out that not all beneficiaries of loan forgiveness have those valuable degrees. A lot of them just have the debt. Researchers tell us that the people who struggle the most to repay their loans “are less likely to be baristas with six figures in debt and a graduate degree than blue-collar workers who have a smaller amount of unpaid loans but never graduated college.”

As Biden said, that worker has the “worst of both worlds — debt and no degree.”

The loan forgiveness program is specifically targeted to borrowers making less than $125,000 annually–those Yale graduates pulling down big bucks on Wall Street won’t qualify.  The relief will go to middle and low-income borrowers struggling to pay off their loans–and that targeted debt forgiveness is likely to have a significant positive economic impact. (As numerous studies have confirmed–when you give lower-income people more money, they spend it.)

A couple of things worth noting:  women ( Black women in particular) represent a disproportionate number of the borrowers who struggle with repayment; and school teachers are among those most likely to benefit.

A July 2021 report from the National Education Association showed that 45% of educators were student loan borrowers and over half of those still have a balance, averaging almost $59,000. Teaching typically isn’t a high-paying career, so paying off loans can be particularly burdensome. Experts say loan forgiveness would especially benefit early education (pre-K) teachers, who make even less than those in the K-12 system.

The loudest criticisms of loan forgiveness seem to come from people who paid off their own student debts. Alexandra Petri had a great –albeit snarky–response to those complaints in a Washington Post column.A couple of those paragraphs:

DISGUSTING! AWFUL! I have just received word that life is getting marginally better for some people, and I am white-hot with fury! This is the worst thing that could possibly happen! I did not suffer and strive and work my fingers to the bone so that anybody else could have a life that does not involve suffering and striving and the working of fingers to the bone. I demand to see only bones and no fingers!…

Every time anyone’s life improves at all, I personally am insulted. Any time anyone devises a labor-saving device, or passes some kind of weak, soft-hearted law that forecloses the opportunity for a new generation of children to lose fingers in dangerous machinery, I gnash my teeth. This is an affront to everyone who struggled so mightily. To avoid affronting them, we must keep everything just as bad as ever. Put those fingers back into the machines, or our suffering will have been in vain…

I fought uphill battles and squinted into the night and toiled and burdened myself in the hope that my children, one day, would also get to work exactly that hard, if not harder, and suffer at least as much as I did, and have, if the Lord allows, lives worse than mine. God, please make their lives worse!

These reactions do make me wonder why the owner of the corner hardware store isn’t howling about the unfairness of subsidies that pad the bottom lines of bigger businesses, or the tax cuts that saved him $10, but put lots more money in the pockets of the already-wealthy.

For my part, I really prefer having my tax dollars support the education of a kid from a low or middle-income family, rather than subsidizing the purchase of a yacht “for business purposes.”

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Bananas!

Sometimes, political reality is so bizarre, all you can do is laugh– and Dana Milbank is one of the funniest political commentators around.

You’d think that We The People would be accustomed to the GOP’s steady retreat from seriousness and sanity. There’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, who opposes solar energy because we won’t have electricity after the sun goes down. Louie Gohmert has continued to protect his reputation as the dumbest mammal to enter a legislative chamber since Caligula’s horse. Lauren Bobert wants all citizens to pass a test on the Bible…The litany of idiocy could go on for hours.

What set Milbank off was an even more recent example: one of Trump’s endorsed congressional candidates–a North Carolina  Republican nominee named Bo Hines– “weighed in recently on all the talk about the United States becoming a banana republic, one of those nominal democracies where the rule of law is shaky. But Hines, a former college football player, spoke as if everybody was referring to Banana Republic, the clothing retailer.”

“A lot of people have likened the situation going on right now, is, you know, they say we’re in a Banana Republic,” he told radio host John Fredericks. “I think that’s an insult to Banana Republics across the country. I mean, at least the manager of Banana Republic, unlike our president, knows where he is and why he’s there and what he’s doing.”
 
Hines’s campaign retroactively labeled this “a joke.” Ha! I nearly split my pleated chinos.

Sorry, but that excuse is a total Lululemon. Misunderstanding a universal idiom, particularly while maligning President Biden’s mental acuity, suggests Hines is just not very PetSmart. On an intelligence scale of 1 to 10, he’s Five Below.

I wonder how many Trump Republicans would understand Milbank’s references…let alone laugh…

The column also has fun with the ongoing joke that has been Dr. Oz’s campaign for Senate in Pennsylvania. Among other gaffes, the noted quack distributed a video showing him shopping at a Redner’s supermarket.  Not only did he misidentify the grocery as “Wegner’s,” he filled his arms with broccoli, asparagus, carrots, guacamole and salsa, leading Milbank to note that supermarkets have these things called carts. The point of the video was to blame President Biden for the high price of the vegetables, which he called crudités, a word unlikely to be used by average guys going to the store for their wives. (The Democratic candidate, John Fetterman, who has had what looks like a lot of fun trolling Dr. Dense, tweeted that people in Pennsylvania “call that a veggie tray.”)

Milbank had fun with several other GOP candidates, but he outdid himself when he came to Hershel Walker, Georgia’s Senate candidate. (Granted, it’s hard NOT to laugh at Walker. I know it’s not kind to make fun of people who are mentally disabled, but typically those individuals aren’t running for the U.S. Senate.)

Leading this confederacy of dunces is Herschel Walker, GOP Senate nominee from Georgia. He took the position that there are 52 states and asserted that the theory of evolution is wrong because, “If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it.”

Then think about Walker’s thoughts on the futility of fighting air pollution: “Since we don’t control the air, our good air decides to float over to China’s bad air. So, when China gets our good air, their bad air … moves over to our good air space.”

Cleanup in the crudité aisle!

Milbank then returned to the Banana Republic gaffe, and noted that the retailer is

all about encouraging sedentary Americans to pretend they are 19th century explorers in safari tents or sailing ships, wearing “pieces inspired by our history, a story of daring vision and imagined journeys.” Its clothes “wink at our heritage.” 

Given the current devolution of the GOP, Milbank had some suggested “winks.”

  • The White-Nationalist Linen Line. Yearn for the days when White men alone ruled America? Then put your wardrobe through a Great Replacement and return to the hoop skirts, bodices and tail coats of yore.
  • Stasi Style. As you report to the state on the activities of teachers, journalists and those who seek abortions, show your fashion sense by wearing the jackboots, baggy trousers and belted military jackets popularized by the East German secret police.
  • The Dezinformatsiya Line. Russian state television reports that it is “worried for our agent Trump.” Share the worry, visually, with a clothing line inspired by classic Cossack hats and babushka headscarves.
  • The Giuliani Collection. As Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani becomes a target of a criminal investigation, his chief financial officer prepares for a guilty plea and top-secret government files are found in Trump’s home, wear the crisp pinstripes and bold orange jumpsuits that define prison chic.

If we don’t laugh, we’ll cry…As Hershel Walker would say, “Think about it.”

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When Common Sense Became “Woke”

In a recent column, Paul Krugman traced the growing anti-environmentalism of the GOP. He noted that, in the 1990s, self-identified Republicans and Democrats weren’t that far apart in their environmental views, but that since 2008 or so, Republicans have become much less supportive of environmental initiatives. After considering several possible reasons for that devolution (“follow the money” among them), he concluded that

What has happened, I’d argue, is that environmental policy has been caught up in the culture war — which is, in turn, largely driven by issues of race and ethnicity. This, I suspect, is why the partisan divide on the environment widened so much after America elected its first Black president.

One especially notable aspect of The Times’s investigative report on state treasurers’ punishing corporations seeking to limit greenhouse gas emissions is the way these officials condemn such corporations as “woke.”

Wokeness normally means talking about racial and social justice. On the right — which is increasingly defined by attempts to limit the rights of Americans who aren’t straight white Christians — it has become a term of abuse. Teaching students about the role of racism in American history is bad because it’s woke. But so, apparently, are many other things, like Cracker Barrel offering meatless sausage and being concerned about climate change.

If this seems crazy, it’s because it is. Evidently, a substantial percentage of the American population is certifiably looney-tunes…

One of the most compelling explanations for that insanity was recently offered by Tom Nichols in the Atlantic. Nichols was opining about  political violence, or the possibility of another civil war. As he noted, however,  the actual Civil War was “about something.” Unlike today’s culture wars.

Compared with the bizarre ideas and half-baked wackiness that now infest American political life, the arguments between the North and the South look like a deep treatise on government.

Nichols writes that the “soldiers” fighting “wokeness” talk about “liberty” and “freedom,” but those are really just code words for personal grudges, racial and class resentments, and generalized paranoia.

What makes this situation worse is that there is no remedy for it. When people are driven by fantasies, by resentment, by an internalized sense of inferiority, there is no redemption in anything. Winning elections, burning effigies, even shooting at other citizens does not soothe their anger but instead deepens the spiritual and moral void that haunts them.

Donald Trump is central to this fraying of public sanity, because he has done one thing for such people that no one else could do: He has made their lives interesting. He has made them feel important. He has taken their itching frustrations about the unfairness of life and created a morality play around them, and cast himself as the central character. Trump, to his supporters, is the avenging angel who is going to lay waste to the “elites,” the smarty-pantses and do-gooders, the godless and the smug, the satisfied and the comfortable.

In other words, Trump is leading the battle against “woke” folks. You know, people who have the nerve to suggest that conclusions should be based upon verifiable evidence, that many if not most of the issues we face are complicated, and that knowledge and expertise are desirable and not simply an elitist construct devised to make less educated people feel inferior.

It”s “woke” to admit that racism and anti-Semitism and homophobia still exist; “woke” to recognize that climate change is real and that it threatens our future; “woke” to criticize the “Big Lie;” “woke” to argue that women are entitled to agency over their own lives and bodies…

To those on the political Right, to be “woke” doesn’t simply describe people who have awakened to obvious realities and begun trying to ameliorate inequities. To the True Believers, the Christian Nationalists, “woke” is today’s “mark of the beast.” 

So here we are.

“Wokeness”  no longer means you’ve reached certain conclusions about contemporary society based on research, observation and  common sense. It’s morphed. It has become a label to be applied to one’s mortal enemies–and a threat to be defeated at all costs. 

 It is simply not possible for rational folks to reason with the True Believers. The old adage is right–you can’t reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into. 

Welcome to the all-encompassing culture war.

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