Saturday, September 16, 2023
Republicans Betray America's Children Again
I’ve been writing about economics and politics for many years, and have learned to keep my temper. Politicians and policymakers often make decisions that are simply cruel; they also often make decisions that are stupid, damaging the national interest for no good reason. And all too often they make decisions that are both cruel and stupid. Flying into a rage every time that happens would be exhausting.
But the latest census report on income and poverty made me angry. It showed that child poverty more than doubled between 2021 and 2022. That’s 5.1 million children pushed into misery, for it really is miserable to be poor in America.
And the thing is, this didn’t have to happen. Soaring child poverty wasn’t caused by inflation or other macroeconomic problems. It was instead a political choice. The story is in fact quite simple: Republicans and a handful of conservative Democrats blocked the extension of federal programs that had drastically reduced child poverty over the previous two years, and as a result just about all of the gains were lost.
The cruelty of this choice should be obvious. Maybe you believe (wrongly) that poor American adults are responsible for their own poverty; even if you believe that, poor children aren’t to blame. Maybe you worry that helping low-income families will reduce their incentive to work and improve their lives. Such concerns are greatly exaggerated, but even if you worry about incentive effects, are they big enough to justify keeping children poor?
Why do I say that this policy choice was stupid as well as cruel? Two reasons. First, avoiding much of this human catastrophe would have cost remarkably little money. Second, child poverty is, in the long run, very expensive for the nation as a whole: Americans who live in poverty as children grow up to become less healthy and productive adults than they should be. Even in purely fiscal terms, refusing to help poor children may, over time, actually increase budget deficits.
About the immediate budgetary costs: The thing about helping low-income Americans is that precisely because their initial incomes are so low, fairly modest amounts of aid can make a huge difference to their well-being.
More than half of the rise in child poverty could have been avoided by extending the 2021 enhancement of the child tax credit. Such an extension would probably have had a direct budget cost of about $105 billion a year.
[I]t’s actually a modest sum. It’s less than half a percent of the country’s gross domestic product. It’s a small fraction of what we spend on Social Security ($1.3 trillion) and Medicare ($800 billion). It’s only a bit more than half the annual revenue loss from the 2017 Trump tax cut.
Furthermore, we could have significantly blunted the rise in child poverty by retaining just one piece of the child tax credit enhancement, the part that made the credit fully refundable — that is, allowed the lowest-income households to get the entire $2,000 credit. The estimated cost of doing this would be around only $12 billion a year — pocket change in the context of the federal budget.
But we didn’t do any of these things, again, because of conservative opposition. And the nation as a whole will pay a steep price.
The proposition that helping poor children makes them healthier, more productive adults isn’t hypothetical. On the contrary, it’s backed by solid evidence — better than the evidence that spending on physical infrastructure is good for the economy (although I believe that too) and infinitely better than the evidence that tax cuts promote growth, which is nonexistent.
How so? Historically, anti-poverty programs like food stamps and Medicaid weren’t introduced uniformly across America. Instead, they were rolled out gradually across regions, so we can compare the life trajectories of Americans who had access to these programs as children with those of Americans who didn’t. The results are clear: Aid to low-income children is a “highly cost-effective investment.” Those who received such aid ended up healthier, better educated and more economically self-sufficient than those who didn’t.
Since adults who aren’t productive or healthy are, among other things, a fiscal burden, this may well mean that even in purely budgetary terms cutting off aid to poor children is self-destructive. Yet here we are.
Unfortunately, children can’t vote and poor adults tend not to vote either. So politicians can get away with policies that harm poor children.
Realistically, the political will to undo our terrible mistake doesn’t exist at the moment. But there’s always hope that we’ll eventually do the right thing.
Friday, September 15, 2023
How the "MAGA Doom Loop" Is Harming the GOP
For almost three years now, Republicans have defended or embraced Donald Trump’s authoritarianism — from lies about his 2020 loss to inciting an insurrection — which backfired as Americans proved unexpectedly eager to vote in defense of democracy in the 2022 elections as well as in contests this year.
But Republicans aren’t giving up — they’re going even further. To an unappreciated degree, they have responded to these electoral losses with even more flagrantly anti-democratic maneuvers all around the country.
The pattern is becoming clear: Even as voters are mobilizing to protect democracy at the ballot box, Republicans are redoubling their commitment to the former president’s anti-majoritarian mode of politics. And this, in turn, is motivating voters even more.
Call it the “MAGA doom loop.” It’s playing out in state after state.
Let’s start with Michigan, where Trump’s decisive loss in 2020 led MAGA loyalists to reshape the state Republican Party around devotion to the “big lie.” Then Democrats resoundingly captured full control of the state’s government in the 2022 midterms, in which election-deniers across the country lost races up and down the ticket.
Now, the Michigan GOP is in shambles. Just this month, the chairman again called for scrutiny of supposed 2020 fraud, prompting infighting over debunked conspiracy theories. And as the New York Times reports, the party’s descent into MAGA mania is alienating donors, draining volunteer enthusiasm and driving away swing voters.
Or take Wisconsin. The GOP-controlled state legislature is threatening to impeach state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz, who won her seat earlier this year by 11 points, handing liberals a majority. Democrats ran ads about protecting democracy to boost Protasiewicz, arguing that her ascent would thwart attempts to overrule the state’s 2024 outcome.
Given that this message already proved successful with Democrats and swing voters, it’s all the more striking that Republicans want to respond with impeachment. Rather than causing introspection, their landslide election loss has them dredging up comments that Protasiewicz made about abortion and gerrymandered maps during her campaign — a concern dismissed by a nonpartisan state panel — as grounds for removal.
But that absurdity aside, Democrats will surely be able to use those MAGA-approved tactics to mobilize voters against Trump and Republicans in 2024. “The threat to overturn an election through impeachment pushes MAGA attacks on democracy to the top of voters’ minds,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me.
Then there’s North Carolina, where the GOP legislature is attempting to strip Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s control over the State Board of Elections and to pass new voting restrictions. . . . “They know North Carolina is getting bluer and more college educated,” Morgan Jackson, a Democratic consultant in the state, said of Republicans.
And in Ohio, after watching numerous pro-choice ballot measures pass last cycle, state Republicans recently pushed a referendum to raise the threshold for amending the state constitution to 60 percent of votes. The tactic was rejected by a decisive majority, suffering a crushing 14-point defeat.
Despite President Biden’s unpopularity, recent Times polling shows his surprising resilience in swing states — and Cohn suggests this partly reflects backlash against MAGA-fied state parties in these places. By embracing Trump’s efforts to nullify his loss, they are only reminding voters that democracy is once again in peril, including whether their own votes will be counted next time.
Issues become salient for voters when elites talk about them a lot. That has certainly been the case with democracy and that will surely continue next year. Big events — such as Trump’s prosecution for Jan. 6, 2021-related offenses and the GOP’s continued devotion despite those criminal charges — will only reinforce what’s at stake.
“As long as the MAGA-Trump faction remains a threat to free and fair elections, a consequential slice of the electorate will continue to vote on this issue,” political scientist Lee Drutman told me.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the MAGA doom loop might keep on working its magic — all the way through 2024.
Thursday, September 14, 2023
Republicans' Word Games on Abortion Will Fail
Republicans are getting increasingly desperate over the issue of abortion. On one hand, they cannot cross the religious right, their main source of energy and funding, from wealthy fundamentalists to everyday evangelical foot soldiers. But after the overturn of Roe v. Wade last year, the rigidly anti-abortion views of the GOP have become a major electoral liability, with close elections breaking blue as voters turn out to protect the right to terminate unwanted or unsafe pregnancies.
The GOP plans to nominate a widely hated chronic criminal for president in 2024, which already dampens their party's odds at the polls. The added headache of abortion is making the situation dire for Republicans indeed. Of course, the solution was never going to be dropping the religious right and going forward as a less fascist, more moderate party. (Which would also require dropping Donald Trump.) Instead, Republicans have latched onto the last resort for a losing agenda: Playing word games in hopes of tricking voters.
"Republicans are trying to find a new term for 'pro-life' to stave off more electoral losses," reads the headline last week from NBC News. GOP strategists presented polling data to Senate Republicans, the article explains, showing the term "pro-life" has become toxic to voters. But rather than accept that this reflects the larger public opposition to abortion bans, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., insisted voters don't "probably don't" know what "pro-life" means. Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind. suggested a rebranding of "pro-baby," claiming he just wants "to demonstrate my concern for babies."
Obviously, there is nothing "pro-baby" about a party that consistently opposes funding for health care, food security, or education. Nor is there anything "pro-baby" about a party that rejects gun safety measures necessary to keep children from getting shot up in schools and grocery stores. But beyond that, really, is the sheer contempt for the voters that radiates off these comments. Hawley and Young really capture how Republicans think voters are stupid enough to be bamboozled with a little bit of linguistic hand-waving.
Ironically, "pro-life" is itself a euphemism, which tries to obscure the sadism at the heart of the forced childbirth movement. Prior to the Dobbs decision that ended abortion rights, however, Republicans saw great success with the "pro-life" framing, often getting half or slightly more than half of Americans to identify with the term. But that's because, with Roe in place, "pro-life" functioned more as a moralizing term than a statement of policy preference. Lots of people who claimed to be "pro-life" meant something like, "abortion is okay for me, but not for some hypothetical woman I think has too much sex." Without Roe, however, people are forced more to worry about their own loss of access.
This contempt for voter intelligence is evident in the GOP embrace of the grossly dishonest term "abortion trafficking." At stake is the growing trend of women traveling out of state to get abortion care that's been banned in their own states. Pro-choice states that neighbor anti-choice states are seeing skyrocketing numbers of abortion patients, simply due to this abortion travel.
In response, Republicans are starting to argue that women do not have the right to travel freely. Last week, Alabama's Republican attorney general, Steve Marshall, argued he can prosecute people for "criminal conspiracy" if they help women leave the state to get safe abortions. . . . In Texas, GOP-controlled towns and counties are passing laws making it illegal for women to drive through them on the way to an abortion clinic out of state.
To justify this crackdown on the most basic right of free movement, Republicans are pretending to believe in something they call "abortion trafficking." The term doesn't just equate abortion with sex work. It feeds off this long-standing anti-choice myth that no woman really wants an abortion, and any woman getting one is necessarily being controlled by someone else.
By pretending they're "helping" women escape "trafficking," of course, Republicans are actually cutting women off from necessary support. At a bare minimum, patients getting in-clinic abortions, like anyone getting similar procedures like colonoscopies, are required to have someone accompany them home.
It also follows that the "trafficking" language is an unsubtle attempt to call every abortion patient a "whore." Regardless of how you view sex work (and I certainly believe it should be safe and legal), it's safe to say this rhetoric is an attempt to demonize. It's also likely to backfire since most voters are adult enough to understand that women have minds of their own and that not every woman is ready to have a baby at every moment in time.
The embrace of a misleading and prudish term like "abortion trafficking" also illustrates why Republicans are having such trouble reskinning themselves as "moderate" or "compassionate" on the issue of abortion. They can switch terms all they like — why not go with "pro-crib" if "pro-baby" doesn't work out? — but these word games fail to understand why it is that abortion has become such an albatross for their party.
It's not just that Americans are unsettled by the steady drumbeat of stories of women being denied care for serious medical conditions because of draconian abortion bans, though that certainly doesn't help. It's that abortion has become a symbol for how the GOP is in the thrall of right-wing extremists. It's tied up with other issues, like book banning and anti-democracy organizing. No matter what words Republicans use, when they talk about abortion, they remind voters that they are an anti-democratic party trying to force all Americans to live under a strict set of religious rules that have no relationship to how most modern people live. No minor tweaks to language will distract from that reality.
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
Trump and His Cronies Underestimated Fani Willis
Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis has been the target of right-wing venom and legal second-guessing. I was among those who doubted the wisdom of bringing a complex racketeering charge in Georgia, which complicated her opposition to one defendant’s attempt to move the case to federal court.
But consider what she has already accomplished. She indicted former president Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants. She got an Oct. 23 trial date for at least two defendants. And, at least at the district court level, she beat back former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’s attempt to move his case to federal court (known as “removal”), eliciting an opinion that has grave implications for Trump. She compelled Meadows to admit under cross-examination that he was intimately involved in the phony elector plot and had no reason to believe the election was stolen.
Among her most effective arguments: the Hatch Act, which prohibits White House officials’ political conduct while on duty, means that Meadows’s admittedly campaign-related actions were outside the scope of his official duties.
When, over her objections, the special grand jury’s vote tallies for 39 people were released (a terrible injustice to those who were not charged), the public could see that rather than pursue every possible defendant, Willis exercised appropriate discretion.
She has been so effective that Georgia Republicans have been mulling a maneuver to remove her from office. Fortunately, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) rebuffed that effort forcefully. “The bottom line is that in the state of Georgia, as long as I’m governor, we’re going to follow the law and the Constitution, regardless of who it helps or harms politically,” he declared at a recent news conference. He added, “I have not seen any evidence that DA Willis’s actions or lack thereof warrant action by the prosecuting attorney oversight commission.”
Most recently, in a delightful slapdown of House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Willis penned a letter in response to his attempt to meddle in her case and force her to release the prosecution’s documents. She did not mince words: “There is no justification in the Constitution for Congress to interfere with a state criminal matter, as you attempt to do.” She retorted, “The demands in your letter — and your efforts at intruding upon the State of Georgia’s criminal authority — violate constitutional principles of federalism. Criminal prosecutions under state law are primarily the responsibility of state governments.”
Citing chapter and verse of federal precedent, Willis tersely informed him: “The defendants in this case have been charged under state law with committing state crimes. There is absolutely no support for Congress purporting to second guess or somehow supervise an ongoing Georgia criminal investigation and prosecution.” She told Jordan that “violation of Georgia’s sovereignty is offensive and will not stand” and “your demand for information regarding an ongoing criminal prosecution — a core executive function — is offensive to any notion of separation of powers that recognizes the distinct roles of the executive and legislative functions of government.”
Her letter deserves more attention. It serves as an effective takedown of many of Trump’s phony excuses and defenses. “The criminal defendant about which you express concern was fully aware of the existence of the criminal investigation being conducted by the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office at the time he announced his candidacy for President,” she reminded Jordan. “I have no doubt that many Americans are the subject of criminal investigations and prosecutions at any given moment.” Trump’s whining notwithstanding, she knocked down the notion that running for office can spare one from criminal investigation and prosecution. “Any notion to the contrary is offensive to our democracy and to the fundamental principle that all people are equal before the law.”
She concluded by pointing to “the racist threats that have come to my staff and me because of this investigation” and vowing to “keep the promise of my oath to the United States and Georgia Constitutions and … not allow myself to be bullied and threatened by Members of Congress, local elected officials, or others who believe lady justice should not be blind and that America has different laws for different citizens.”
Willis still faces a host of challenges. Having charged 19 people, she faces the prospect of a single ungainly trial or, more likely, a series of expensive, time-consuming trials that allow those tried later to see the prosecution’s full case.
That said, Willis knew the pitfalls and risks going in. She nevertheless moved expeditiously, did not bring the case before she was ready and now might have the distinction of holding the first trial in the phony elector scheme. Moreover, in a proceeding that will be televised, she has the unique opportunity to teach Americans a thing or two about the justice system and the overwhelming evidence of a failed coup that Republicans still defend. If her answer to Jordan is any indication, her presentation is bound to be fiery, effective and incontrovertible.
Tuesday, September 12, 2023
Tyranny of the Minority;Today's GOP
One of the most amazing - and frightening -political development of the last decade is how quickly the Republican Party became the anti-democracy, pro-autocracy party. Part of the transformation is due to the GOP's shrinking and ever more extreme base of Christofascists and white supremacist which has driven the Party to seek to remain in power at any cost and to maximize its advantages under flawed provisions of the U.S Constitution. Another severe factor is Donald Trump who has normalized misogyny and made blatant racism and homophobia totally acceptable within the orbit of the Party and the "conservative" news media. Yet another factor is the mainstream media's continued treatment of the GOP as a normal political party and to continue to engage in false equivalency that masks how extreme today's GOP has become. The authors of “How Democracies Die” have a new book out titled “Tyranny of the Minority” that looks at the perilous position of American democracy and the push of the GOP towards fascism and minority rule. Here are highlights from a column in the New York Times that looks at the book and its findings. Here are excerpts:
One of the most influential books of the Trump years was “How Democracies Die” by the Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Published in 2018, it served as a guide to our unfolding ordeal. “Over the past two years, we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States — but that we recognize as having been the precursors of democratic crisis in other places,” they wrote.
Because that volume was prescient about how Donald Trump would try to rule, I was surprised to learn, in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s new book, “Tyranny of the Minority,” that they were shocked by Jan. 6. Though they’ve studied violent insurrections all over the world, they write in this new book, “we never imagined we’d see them here. Nor did we ever imagine that one of America’s two major parties would turn away from democracy in the 21st century.”
What astonished them the most, Levitsky told me in an interview last week, “was the speed and the degree to which the Republican Party Trumpized.” In “How Democracies Die,” he and Ziblatt had reproved Republicans for failing to stop Trump’s rise to power. But at the time, he said, “we didn’t consider or call the Republican Party an authoritarian party. We did not expect it to transform so quickly and so thoroughly.”
“Tyranny of the Minority” is their attempt to make sense of how American democracy eroded so fast. “Societal diversity, cultural backlash and extreme-right parties are ubiquitous across established Western democracies,” they write. But in recent years, only in America has a defeated leader attempted a coup. And only in America is the coup leader likely to once again be the nominee of a major party. “Why did America, alone among rich established democracies, come to the brink?” they ask.
A disturbing part of the answer, Levitsky and Ziblatt conclude, lies in our Constitution, the very document Americans rely on to defend us from autocracy. “Designed in a predemocratic era, the U.S. Constitution allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities, and sometimes even govern them,” they write. The Constitution’s countermajoritarian provisions, combined with profound geographic polarization, have locked us into a crisis of minority rule.
Liberals — myself very much included — have been preoccupied by minority rule for years now, and you’re probably aware of the ways it manifests. Republicans have won the popular vote in only one out of the last eight presidential elections, and yet have had three Electoral College victories. The Senate gives far more power to small, rural states than large, urbanized ones, and it’s made even less democratic by the filibuster. An unaccountable Supreme Court, given its right-wing majority by the two-time popular-vote loser Trump, has gutted the Voting Rights Act. One reason Republicans keep radicalizing is that, unlike Democrats, they don’t need to win over the majority of voters.
All liberal democracies have some countermajoritarian institutions to stop popular passions from running roughshod over minority rights. But as “Tyranny of the Minority” shows, our system is unique in the way it empowers a minority ideological faction at the expense of everyone else. And while conservatives like to pretend that their structural advantages arise from the judicious wisdom of the founders, Levitsky and Ziblatt demonstrate how many of the least democratic aspects of American governance are the result of accident, contingency and, not least, capitulation to the slaveholding South.
Most Democrats, however, feel little choice but to acquiesce to a system tilted against them. Depending on the Constitution for protection from the worst abuses of the right, they’re reluctant to delegitimize it. Besides, America’s Constitution is among the hardest in the world to change, another of its countermajoritarian qualities.
Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t have any shortcuts for emerging from the straitjacket of minority rule. Rather, they call on readers to engage in the glacial slog of constitutional reform. Some people, Ziblatt told me, might think that working toward institutional reforms is naïve. “But the thing that I think is really naïve is to think that we can just sort of keep going down this path and that things will just work out,” he said.
Personally, I don’t know anyone who is confident that things will just work out. It’s possible that, as The New York Times reports, Trump’s Electoral College edge is fading because of his relative weakness in battleground states, but he could still, running on a nakedly authoritarian platform, be re-elected with a minority of the vote. I asked Levitsky and Ziblatt how, given their work on democracy, they imagine a second Trump term unfolding.
“I think the United States faces a high risk of serious and repeated constitutional crisis, what I would call regime instability, quite possibly accompanied by some violence,” said Levitsky. “I’m not as worried about the consolidation of autocracy, Hungary or Russia-style. I think that the opposition forces, civil society forces, are probably too strong for that.” Let’s hope that this time he’s not being too optimistic.
Once again I find myself ashamed to have ever been a Republican.
Monday, September 11, 2023
Red States Are Rolling Back Civil Rights
The struggle over the sweeping red-state drive to roll back civil rights and liberties has primarily moved to the courts.
Since 2021, Republican-controlled states have passed a swarm of laws to restrict voting rights, increase penalties for public protest, impose new restrictions on transgender youth, ban books, and limit what teachers, college professors, and employers can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Some states are even exploring options to potentially prosecute people who help women travel out of state to obtain an abortion.
In the early legal skirmishing over this agenda, opponents including the federal Justice Department have won a surprising number of decisions, mostly in federal courts, blocking states from implementing the new laws.
But eventually most of these issues are likely to be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the court’s six-member Republican-appointed majority has generally ruled in ways that favor the conservative social-policy priorities reflected in the red-state actions. That inclination was most dramatically demonstrated in last year’s Dobbs decision, when the Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion.
In the coming years, the Court will face a series of decisions on the new red-state agenda that may determine whether the U.S. maintains a strong baseline of civil rights available in all states or reverts back toward a pre-1960s world where people’s rights varied much more depending on where they lived.
Since President Joe Biden’s election, the 22 states where Republicans hold unified control of the governorship and the state legislature have moved with remarkable speed to create a two-tier system on issues including abortion, classroom censorship, and the treatment of LGBTQ people. “The fact that all of this is happening on so many different fronts simultaneously is unprecedented,” Donald Kettl, a former dean and professor emeritus of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, told me.
This broad red-state push to retrench rights, as I’ve written, is reversing the general trend since the 1960s of nationalizing more rights, a process often called “the rights revolution.”
Civil-rights advocates have limited options for reversing this tide of red-state legislation. So long as the Senate filibuster exists, Democrats have virtually no chance of passing national legislation to override the red-state actions on issues such as abortion and voting rights, even if the party regains unified control of the federal government after the 2024 elections.
Opponents are challenging some of the new statutes in state courts. The Center for Reproductive Rights, a group that supports legal abortion, has cases pending in six states, including Ohio, Wyoming, Iowa, and Florida, arguing that abortion restrictions adopted since the Dobbs decision violate provisions in those states’ constitutions. But recent rulings by state supreme courts—in South Carolina, upholding the state’s six-week abortion ban, and in Texas, dismissing an injunction against the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors—show the limitations of relying on red-state courts to undo the work of red-state political leaders.
That leaves federal courts as the principal arena for those hoping to overturn the restrictive red-state laws.
These federal cases raise a range of legal arguments. Mostly they revolve around the claim that the state laws violate the U.S. Constitution’s protection of free speech in the First Amendment and the due process and equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. As courts consider these claims, the key early federal rulings have covered cases involving a variety of issues.
Freedom of speech: In a striking victory for critics, a federal district judge in Florida issued two decisions blocking enforcement of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s signature Stop WOKE Act, which restricts how private employers and college and university professors talk about racial inequity. In one ruling, Judge Mark Walker called the law “positively dystopian.” . . . The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has denied DeSantis’s request to lift Walker’s injunction against the law while the case proceeds.
Federal courts have also blocked enforcement of the Florida law DeSantis signed increasing the penalties for public protest. But another federal judge has twice dismissed a case attempting to block DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law restricting discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in K–12 classrooms.
Abortion: Though the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision preempted any frontal federal legal challenge to the state laws restricting or banning the procedure, abortion-rights supporters continue to fight elements of the new statutes.
In late July, a federal district judge blocked guidance from Raúl Labrador, the Republican attorney general of Idaho, a state that has banned abortion, warning doctors that they could be prosecuted for helping patients travel out of state to obtain the procedure. A separate federal lawsuit filed in July is challenging Idaho’s law imposing criminal penalties on adults who transport a minor out of state to obtain an abortion. The Justice Department won an injunction last year preventing Idaho from enforcing another portion of its abortion ban on the grounds that it violates federal law requiring treatment of people needing emergency care in hospitals.
Immigration: Another front in the red-state offensive is an increasing effort to seize control of immigration policy from the federal government. The Biden administration last week won a federal-district-court decision requiring Texas to remove a flotilla of buoys it has placed in the Rio Grande River to repel undocumented migrants . . .
Voting: As with abortion, critics have found a legal basis to challenge only provisions at the periphery of the voting restrictions approved in most red states since 2021. Last month, the Justice Department won a federal court ruling blocking a measure that Texas had passed making it easier for officials to reject absentee ballots.
LGBTQ rights: Federal litigation has probably progressed most against the intertwined red-state moves to impose new restrictions on transgender people. The Biden Justice Department has joined cases seeking to overturn the red-state actions on each of the major issues.
Of all the issues affecting transgender people, litigation against the statutes passed in 22 Republican-controlled states barring gender-affirming care for minor children, even with their parents’ approval, may reach the Supreme Court first. In a flurry of decisions made mostly this summer, multiple federal district courts have issued injunctions blocking the implementation of such laws in several states.
Over recent years, the [U.S. Supreme] Court has restricted the ability of blue states to impinge on rights that conservatives prize while mostly allowing red states to constrain rights that liberals prioritize. The Court has displayed the former instinct in its rulings striking down gun-control laws in blue jurisdictions, allowing religious-freedom exemptions to state civil-rights statutes, and barring public universities from using affirmative action. Conversely, the Court has loosened restrictions on red states with the Dobbs decision and the 2013 Shelby County ruling effectively revoking the Justice Department’s authority to preemptively block changes in state voting laws.
The one point both sides can agree on is that the Supreme Court’s rulings on the red-state measures will represent a crossroads for the country. One path preserves the broadly consistent floor of civil rights across state lines that Americans have known since the 1960s; the other leads to a widening divergence reminiscent of earlier periods of intense separation among the states.
Kettl believes that if the Supreme Court doesn’t constrain the red states, they almost certainly will push much further in undoing the rights revolution. “We haven’t seen what the boundary of that effort will be yet,” he told me, pointing to the ordinances some Texas localities have passed attempting to bar women from driving through them to obtain an abortion out of state.
If the Supreme Court allows the red states a largely free hand to continue devising their own system of civil rights and liberties, Chemerinsky said, it will present Americans with a “profound” question:
“Will the country accept being two different countries with regard to so many of these important things, as it did with regard to other important things such as slavery and civil rights?” he said. “Or will there be a point that people will say, ‘What divides us as a country is much greater than what unites us.’ And will we start hearing the first serious calls to rethink the United States?”
Sunday, September 10, 2023
"Conservative Christians" Continue to Fall for Charlatans
In many ways, it's the least surprising story of our times: A showily Christian conservative holds themselves out to be the moral arbiter for others to follow but is soon exposed as a hypocrite and a villain, accused of violence or abuse against the vulnerable people they claimed to champion.
It could be the establishment of the Catholic Church, which covered up sexual abuse by priests for years. Or the Southern Baptist Convention, which also spent decades reflexively shielding abusers. Or Jerry Falwell Jr. and Liberty University. Or the Duggar family from TLC's reality TV series and their religious leader, Bill Gothard. The drumbeat of similar stories is unrelenting. Once a person holds themselves out to be an exemplar of clean Christian living, it feels like it's just a matter of time before their closetful of dark secrets comes spilling out.
So it wasn't really a shock when another Christian right celebrity, Ruby Franke of the YouTube series "8 Passengers," was recently arrested and charged with six charges of felony child abuse. Franke was part of a new crop of Christian "influencers" who have recreated the Duggar family's reality TV success for the social media era. There seems to be an unending number of these content creators. They rake in massive views and advertisers by dishing up a fantasy of blindingly white, well-scrubbed, "wholesome" family life.
Franke was a bog standard example: A thin Mormon housewife with 6 kids and expensive-looking blond hair, living in small town Utah. She and her husband, Kevin Franke, kept up a YouTube channel documenting how their strict, religious parenting style supposedly led to an upright and enviable life. She partnered with ConneXions Classroom, which bills itself as a counseling service to "create joy in your life and relationships!" All this is advertised with familiar imagery: Laughing children in fields, content-looking white wives in well-appointed kitchens, ruggedly handsome husbands with full heads of hair.
Behind the scenes, according to police and prosecutors, was massive amounts of child abuse, which was exposed when Franke's 12-year-old son escaped out of a window of the home of Jodi Hildebrandt, who runs ConneXions. The boy reportedly had duct tape on his arms and legs and was starving. His 10-year-old sister was found in the house, reportedly also malnourished. Four minors were taken into care by the Department of Child and Family Services, according to a statement from the Santa Clara-Ivins Public Safety Department. Franke's oldest daughter responded with gratitude for the arrest . . . .
What's so confounding about this story is that so many other people were buying Franke's B.S. image of herself. She had over 2 million subscribers on her YouTube channel. While some of those people were skeptics, by and large, it was the same audience you always get for these Christian influencers: People who desperately want to believe in this fairy tale of the shiny, happy perfect white Christian families.
It's not like the red flags weren't there. The Frankes made a big deal out of being strict disciplinarians on their channel, which led to describing punishments of children. . . . . Some viewers criticized the Frankes for this, as well as their repeated assertions that children do not deserve privacy. Most of the audience, however, didn't clock this as abuse, and no wonder. The Christian right has long pushed the idea that harsh punishments are "loving" and that treating your kids like property is "good" parenting. Christian bookstores are full of parenting books that advocate hitting children, which is often minimized with the word "spanking." It's common to read writers like James Dobson, who claim the only reason beating kids wouldn't work is the "spanking may be too gentle." A popular parenting book, "To Train Up A Child," recommends beating kids from infancy and hitting them with a "switch," on the grounds that open-handed spanking isn't painful enough.
The viciousness, which often verges on flat-out sadism, goes a long way toward explaining the apparently bottomless yearning for Duggar-style propaganda. It's all about reassuring conservative Christians that all this religious oppression and cruelty is justified.
[T]he need to believe that they're one more spanking away from Christian utopia clearly drives a lot of people to consume this Hallmark-style propaganda by the bucketfuls. Worse, this notion that harsh "discipline" is the key to living this saccharine image is used to justify all manner of hurtful policies. Anti-choice activists advocate for abortion bans by suggesting that forced childbirth will turn women from hussies to glowing mothers, gratefully cuddling babies they didn't know they needed. The current mania for book-banning and bullying LGBTQ students in schools is fueled by the notion that there are "innocent" Christian families that need "protection." And, of course, this recasting of child abuse as mere "discipline" makes it incredibly difficult for authorities to intercede when children are in danger.
The police, social workers and teachers are not to blame, however. They're often prevented from doing anything to interfere in child abuse, because Republicans, at the behest of the Christian right and under the guise of "parents rights," implement laws that make it very hard for authorities to deal with abusive parents. In many states, for instance, it's against the law for one adult to hit another adult, but you are allowed to hit a child so long as it doesn't bruise or break the skin. The teacher may not like watching a kid go hungry at lunch, but until the kid is in medical danger, it's not against the law in Utah. Republicans are so hostile to laws protecting the safety and well-being of children that they've even blocked the U.S. from ratifying the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, making ours the only nation in the world that doesn't recognize the human rights of children.
"Over and over again, the worst states for children are clustered around the 'pro-life' Bible Belt, and the map of the states that are the worst for children looks a lot like a map of red state America." The same religious right that treats women like second-class citizens takes a similar view of the humanity of children, treating them more like property than people.
Ruby Franke's is just the latest in a long line of stories that illustrate the gap between the image the Christian right likes to portray and the ugly reality just under the surface. Millions of dollars every year spills into an industry framing conservative Christianity as a romanticized world full of beaming white people, living in bucolic environs untroubled by the problems that the sinners of the world supposedly bring upon themselves. The image of the emaciated 12-year-old boy with rope burns and duct tape on his limbs, slipping out the window of a pricey McMansion, is an alarmingly resonant symbol of reality: Behind that spiffy, shiny Christian exterior is all too often a world where the most vulnerable people trapped and malnourished.
It is a racket and one big con-job all too often.
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