The Supreme Court Is Hiding Important Decisions From You

As the Supreme Court begins to release its written opinions from its most recent term, much of the public’s attention is focused on high-profile cases on affirmative action, election law and environmental regulation. But according to Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas Law School, this narrow focus on the most headline-grabbing decisions overlooks a more troubling change in the High Court’s behavior: The justices are conducting more and more of the court’s most important business out of the public eye, through a procedural mechanism known as “the shadow docket.”

Quantitatively speaking, cases arising from the shadow docket — which include everything apart from the court’s annual average of 60 to 70 signed decisions — have long made up a majority of the justices’ work. But as Vladeck documents in his new book, The Shadow Docket, published this week, the court’s use of the shadow docket changed dramatically during the Trump years, when the court’s conservative majority used a flurry of emergency orders — unsigned, unexplained and frequently released in the middle of the night — to greenlight some of the Trump administration’s most controversial policies.

“What’s remarkable is that the court repeatedly acquiesced and acquiesced [to the Trump administration], and almost always without any explanation,” Vladeck said when I spoke with him. “And they did it in ways that marked a pretty sharp break from how the court would have handled those applications in the past.”

It wasn’t just the frequency of the court’s shadow docket decisions that changed during the Trump years; it was also the scope of those decisions. Whereas the justices have traditionally used emergency orders as temporary measures to pause a case until they can rule on its merits, the current court has increasingly used emergency orders to alter the basic contours of election law, immigration policy, religious liberty protections and abortion rights — all without an extended explanation or legal justification. To illustrate this shift, Vladeck points to the court’s emergency order in September 2021 that allowed Texas’s six-week abortion ban to take effect — a move that effectively undermined Roe v. Wade nine months before the court officially overturned it in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. 

“It really highlights a problem that’s endemic to how we talk about the court, which is that we fixate on the formality of the court’s decision and explanations and downplay the practical effect of its rulings, whether or not they come with those explanations,” Vladeck explained.

The shift in the justices’ use of the shadow docket adds line of critique in the ongoing debate over the court’s legitimacy, which has raged in recent weeks thanks to new revelations about a conservative justice’s previously undisclosed relationship with wealthy Republican donor. For Vladeck, it isn’t a coincidence that concerns about the shadow docket are arising at the same time as concerns over the court’s ethics.

“They are both symptoms of an unaccountable court,” Vladeck said. “It’s emblematic of the deeper problem, which is the court’s notion that Our docket is up to us, our ethics are up to us, our decision-making is up to us.”

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and concision. 

Ward: The shadow docket isn’t new — it has existed in some form for as long as the Supreme Court has existed — but you argue that the way the court uses it changed dramatically in 2017. What prompted that change?

Vladeck: The seeds were there before 2017, but the real shift in 2017 was that all of a sudden, the court was inundated with a flurry of applications for a particular type of shadow docket ruling — application for emergency relief — from the Trump administration.

Across two very different two-term presidencies, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the federal government [went] to the court for emergency relief eight times in 16 years — literally once every other year. Then, all of a sudden, Trump goes back to the court again and again and again — 41 times in four years — trying to get the court to let him carry out policies that lower courts had blocked.

What’s remarkable is the court has repeatedly acquiesced and acquiesced, almost always without any explanation, in ways that [marked] a pretty sharp break from how the court would have handled those applications in the past.

Ward: How else did the Trump administration’s use of those requests differ from the use of previous administrations?

Vladeck: The real innovation we saw was using the shadow docket as a way of allowing the administration to carry out policies that lower courts had blocked based on no irreparable harm, other than the fact that the policy had been blocked. In older cases, the argument was usually that the reason for the Supreme Court to intervene was that something really, really bad would happen if the court didn’t intervene. But [during the Trump administration], the really, really bad thing that would happen without intervention is just that the president would be frustrated in carrying out his policy goals.

That argument seems to work because the court kept granting relief. That set the idea that the shadow docket could be a place to make policy without making law — that the Trump administration could carry out policies that no lower court ever upheld for years on end, without any conclusive adjudication of their legality.

Ward: During the course of the Trump administration, though, the Court went beyond using the shadow docket to “make policy without law,” as you put it, to simply using it to make law. Can you explain how that shift happened?

Vladeck: There’s this tendency, especially among folks who want to defend the court or the Trump administration, to dismiss the Trump cases as a unique one-off phenomenon, where it was just the court responding to lower court judges behaving badly. Even if that narrative works — and if you actually pull it apart, it doesn’t — we see that by the end of the Trump administration, and even shortly after the Trump administration, the court started to use emergency orders to actually produce substantive changes in the law.

The place where that is most visible is in Covid mitigation cases. In a series of rulings starting in the fall of 2020 and culminating in the spring of 2021, the court kept blocking Covid mitigation measures in blue states — in New York and California, in New Jersey and Colorado — based on what ended up being novel interpretations of the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment.

The denouement of this trend came in April 2021 in a decision called Tandon v. Newsom. California had said, Hey, you can’t have people from more than three households in a private home, and this is challenged as interfering with Bible study and with the ability of pastors to hold religious observances in their homes. By a 5-4 vote — with John Roberts in dissent, by the way — the court blocked California’s policy, even though for the court to issue that kind of relief, the rights that are at stake are supposed to already be indisputably clear. But the court says, We’re blocking this policy because we are embracing a new theory of the Free Exercise Clause. Here’s an instance where the court was literally making a new law on the shadow docket when it wasn’t even really allowed to.

Ward: To what other ends has the current conservative majority used the shadow docket?

Vladeck: If I can resist one piece of how you frame that, I think it’s possible that the shadow docket is being used to achieve particular outcomes, but you don’t have to believe that to even still believe that the behavior is problematic.  

But we see the court make really significant changes in the law of religious liberty on the shadow docket, and we see some pretty significant changes in election law on the shadow docket, especially when it comes to so-called “majority-minority districts” under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. There are actually a couple of decisions in early 2022 that basically allow red states to use electoral maps that lower courts had said violated the Voting Rights Act, based on what could only be a new reading of Section 2 of the Act.

The problem to me is not actually the bottom line of these decisions, even though I understand that that's what folks are fixated on. The problem is that when you have rulings that are unsigned and unexplained … and that seem to be favoring Republican governments or Republican challenges to Democratic governments, the court is deprived of the best response. Usually, the best response to the charge that the court is partisan is the opinions, where the justices say, Hey, here are the legal reasons we are compelled to rule this way. You and I might look at those opinions and disagree with the principles, but it’s hard to disagree that they are principles, right?

Ward: In the book, you argue that it doesn’t make sense to think of the shadow docket as one entity and the merits docket as another, because some decisions on the merits docket are made possible by decisions on the shadow docket. Can you give an example of that interplay?

Vladeck: I would go further. The merits docket is a creation of the shadow docket. The merits docket — the 60-ish cases that the justices decide after argument each term — is almost entirely within the justices’ own control. These are cases and issues that the court has chosen to hear. All of the court’s power to choose for itself what cases it is going to hear and what it’s going to decide within those cases is power that’s exercised like everything else on the shadow docket — through unsigned unexplained orders with virtually no transparency.

Flipping to the direct interplay, we see contexts where the court will do one thing on the shadow docket and then come back and change its mind on the merits docket, further undermining the idea that there are coherent neutral principles at work. One example: We discussed how often the court intervened to allow the Trump administration to carry out its immigration policies. Shockingly, the court has not been nearly as aggressive in allowing the Biden administration to carry out its immigration policies. In a couple of these cases, after not staying a lower court injunction, the court actually sided with the Biden administration on the merits.

Ward: Your book is trying to effect a broader shift in the way that the public in general — and media in particular — talk about and cover the court as an institution. Are there signs that the public and the media have a grasp of the importance of the shadow docket in a way they didn’t have, say, five years ago?

Vladeck: Absolutely. I think folks who cover the court on a regular basis have started to come at these issues holistically and have really started to bake into their coverage of the court a whole lot of things that might once have seemed trivial. There was a case in April 2022 where, for the first time, [Chief Justice] John Roberts actually joined a dissent from Justice Elana Kagan [that criticized the court’s use of the shadow docket], and that got picked up by almost every outlet — like, “Gosh, look, Roberts has joined Kagan in criticizing the shadow docket.” That’s not how we looked at the court as recently as 2018, 2019 or even 2020.

Ward: Is there any evidence that the increase in public scrutiny is changing the way the court is using its shadow docket?

Vladeck: There’s at least correlative evidence. I think we’ll have to wait 75 years until we see the justices’ papers to know whether it’s causal. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this cryptic October 2021 concurrence by Justice [Amy Coney] Barrett — which basically says, Maybe we’re not going to grant emergency relief quite as often — comes right after all of the sustained public backlash that resulted from the court allowing the Texas abortion ban to basically go into effect. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in the OSHA vaccination case, the court agreed to hold oral arguments on an emergency application for the first time since the 1970s. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the court keeps granting what’s called “certiorari before judgment,” or basically, hustling merits cases onto the docket before an intermediate appeals court can rule, as opposed to resolving things on the shadow docket.

So yes, I think there are lots of ways in which you can see in the court’s behavior a tacit admission that some of its prior behavior was problematic and that its practices ought to be reformed.

Ward: What sort of immediate steps could the other two branches of government take to check the use of the shadow docket?

Vladeck: There’s a ton of stuff Congress can do. I almost don’t care which specific thing Congress does, because anything would be an improvement over the last 35 years. It’s been 35 years since Congress meaningfully altered or meaningfully sought to regulate the Supreme Court’s docket.

One of the things Congress can do is to take pressure off the shadow docket by making it easier for certain kinds of cases to get to the Supreme Court faster, so that the justices don't feel as much pressure to resolve cases on emergency applications. Congress could write into federal law the judge-made standards for relief on emergency applications. For example, there’s a traditional four-factor test for stays, and there’s the heightened rule for injunctions. Those are interpretations of statutes, but Congress could actually say, “No, we actually mean them,” which would put more pressure on the court to follow those standards.

Congress could also push the court back toward the historical model for emergency applications, which was having them resolved in chambers by individual justices. That model actually had the benefit of more process. So I have a wish list, but wish number one is just, “Do something.”

Ward: Is there any underlying connection between the shadow docket and the ethics complaints that are currently hanging over the Supreme Court?

Vladeck: I think that they are related in the sense that they are both symptoms of an unaccountable court. They’re both symptoms of a court that no longer worries about Congress at all.

One of my favorite anecdotal examples of this is that Chief Justice [Warren] Burger started the tradition [in 1970] of the year-end report as a way of having a sort of State of the Union for the judiciary. But Burger also meant it as a wish list. He meant it as a way for the court to say, “Hey, Congress, here’s what we need.” The tradition of year-end reports has continued, but very quietly, in 2009, Roberts stopped asking Congress for things. I think that’s emblematic of the deeper problem, which is the court’s notion that Our docket is up to us, our ethics are up to us, our decision-making is up to us.

For 200 years, that just wasn’t true. The story of the Supreme Court was the story of an independent institution that was nevertheless part of an interbranch dialogue about the nature of its docket and its workload.

Ward: Much of the debate over the court’s legitimacy centers on the public perception that the Court is unduly result oriented and unduly oriented toward certain partisan outcomes. How does the shadow docket complicate that debate over the court’s legitimacy?

Vladeck: I think it sharpens the debate, because there are features of the court’s behavior on the shadow docket that ought to be raising legitimacy concerns that are unrelated to the bottom lines.

It’s commonplace for us to look at the high-profile merits decisions — whether it’s the Dobbs decision from last term or what’s coming in the affirmative action cases this term — as the focal point for talking about the court’s legitimacy. But I actually think that there are ways in which even the controversial merits rulings are actually fairly consistent with the court’s own articulation of its legitimacy.

The court has always said that its legitimacy derives to a large degree from its ability to provide principled justifications for its decision-making. The reason for that is because it’s in the principles that the public is supposed to have proof that these are not just partisans in robes. But when you don’t have principles — or at least when the principles are not articulated — it really does nothing to disabuse those who are convinced that the justices are political actors.

The biggest problem that I have with how much more the court is using the shadow docket is that it really exacerbates the charge [of partisanship] in ways that are very hard to respond to. The more the court can either explain itself on the shadow docket — or stop doing so much of what it does on the shadow docket — the more it can ameliorate those critiques.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/m7gU1Nq
via IFTTT

Read More

The Casey DeSantis Problem: ‘His Greatest Asset and His Greatest Liability’

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Please tell us, she was asked, about your husband.

Casey DeSantis, the wife of Ron DeSantis, just a few minutes before at a table in the crowd had looked oddly disengaged, listening to him give a speech this past Saturday evening in a drab hotel conference room here, sitting somewhat stiffly, clapping intermittently, her face flat and her shoulders almost slumped. Now, though, having been prompted to join him up on stage, she turned in expression and tone suddenly and noticeably brighter.

“That’s a good question,” she cooed, thanking the head of the state Republican Party for having them and for convening this scripted Q&A, before launching into a 3 ½-minute stump speech of an answer — in which she called her husband a fighter and “a good dad” and “a good person” and “really the embodiment of the American dream,” tracing his biography from Jacksonville in Northeast Florida to Dunedin in the Tampa Bay area to Yale College to Harvard Law to joining the Navy and becoming a judge advocate general and then going to Iraq and then getting elected to Congress and then getting elected to be the governor of “the third-largest state in the country and now the 13th-largest economy in the world” and at some point the crowd found a place to applaud and she had a chance to take a breath.

Here, then, in eastern Iowa and in concentrated form, was a preview of what is to come in the about-to-be-announced presidential candidacy of DeSantis — not just his run but also the often stage-dominating prominence of her role.

For some time now she’s been seen mostly and by many as an absolute superstar of a political spouse, a not so “secret weapon,” even something like his saving grace — an antidote for her sometimes awkward husband, social in a way that he is not, charismatic in a way that he is not, generally and seemingly at ease in the spotlight in a way that he so often and so evidently is not. A telegenic former television personality, a breast cancer survivor and a mother of three young kids, Casey, 42, has a sort of policy portfolio of her own that ranges from hurricane recovery to issues of mental health. In the DeSantis political project, she is unusually important and uncommonly involved, according to hundreds of interviews over the last few years and more than 60 more over the last few weeks — an array of former staffers, current supporters and donors, state and federal lawmakers and Florida lobbyists and political professionals. “She is every bit as involved in Ron’s rise as Ron is himself,” David Jolly, the ex-GOP Florida congressperson who’s now an MSNBC analyst, told me. “In shaping him, in driving him … it’s different,” said a veteran Republican lobbyist. “Unlike any first lady in my extended memory,” added Tallahassee fixture Mac Stipanovich.

For nearly as long, too, though, others who have worked with her or around her have nodded more quietly to the downsides of the starring part that she plays. She is and always has been by far his most important adviser, they say, because she is hesitant to cede that space to nearly anybody else. The DeSantis inner circle is too small and remains so, they say, not only because he constitutionally doesn’t trust people but because she doesn’t either. Especially forthright are the people who are granted anonymity on account of their fear of retribution given their power — not just his but hers. “She’s the power behind the throne,” a Republican lobbyist told me. “The tip of the spear,” said a Republican consultant. She is, they say, in the middle of good decisions of his, but bad ones, too. One in particular during the first year of his administration struck many then as a shortsighted miscalculation and looks to them now like a possibly fatal mistake — the ouster of Susie Wiles, the well-respected operative who had helped former President Donald Trump win Florida in 2016, and then helped DeSantis, 44, get elected governor in 2018 but now is running Donald Trump’s rival White House bid.

“Have you ever noticed,” Roger Stone, the notorious political mischief-maker who is both a DeSantis antagonist and a many-decades-long Trump loyalist, remarked in a Telegram post last fall, “how much Ron DeSantis’ wife Casey is like Lady Macbeth?” — an agent, in other words, of her husband’s undoing.

Stone’s hyperbolic charge is but a piece of a broader effort on the part of Trump forces to kill in the crib the candidacy they consider their greatest threat. They recently have scored a series of key albeit early strategic wins — a flurry of in-state endorsements, for instance, contributing to the perception of a novice, faltering DeSantis that’s also visible in a slide in early primary polls.

In the tragic drama, of course, Lady Macbeth prods her husband to kill the king so she can be the queen. At this juncture, the literary analogy goes only so far. Ron DeSantis has trouble even criticizing Trump by name, but with the head-to-head battle about to begin, the role of his wife is of paramount concern to many in and around the world of DeSantis, as well as those considering whether to back him. The more complicated but also more instructive reality is that she is neither the fawning caricature she’s made out to be in conservative and even at times mainstream media nor a Shakespearean villain. She might well be a bit of both, say even some DeSantis proponents, and somewhere in this tension sits the central dynamic of the pending DeSantis campaign. She can ameliorate some of the effects of his idiosyncrasies. She can also accentuate, even exacerbate, his hubris, and his paranoia, and his vaulting ambition — because those are all traits that they share. He wouldn’t be where he is without her. He might not get to where he wants to go because of her.

“He’s a leader who makes political decisions with the assistance of his wife, who was elected by nobody, who’s blindly ambitious,” said a former DeSantis administration staffer. “And she sees ghosts in every corner.”

“She’s more paranoid than he is,” said a second staffer.

“He’s a vindictive motherfucker. She’s twice that,” said a higher-up on one of his campaigns. “She’s the scorekeeper.”

“Does she sort of humanize the robot? Does she push him on the grip-and-grin, the baby-kissing, give him a cleaner, softer image? Yes,” said another former gubernatorial staffer. “Does she also feed into his, I guess, worst instincts, of being secluded and insular and standoffish with staff? Yes.”

And it’s not just opponents and others with axes to grind who think this. “She is both his biggest asset and his biggest liability. And I say biggest asset in that I think she does make him warmer, softer,” Dan Eberhart, a DeSantis donor and supporter, told me. “But he needs to be surrounded with professional people, not just her,” he said.

“I’ve heard from staffers frustrated that they think the governor’s made a decision, he talks to her, comes back, the decision is the opposite or different,” he said.

“The sad part is I think she’s very smart. I think she’s very talented,” Eberhart said. “But she also needs to realize if they want to play on this stage, they need serious help. I worry that winning the gubernatorial race, winning the reelect, has made her overconfident in her ability to de facto run a presidential campaign.” He suggested she needed to “take a more traditional role.” Meaning? “Active and visible — but not the principal’s wife and the architect.”

The DeSantis campaign-in-waiting officially declined to comment but more broadly and not surprisingly rejects this notion, seeing her as an unalloyed asset — intelligent, relatable and compelling, and a key piece of a family tableau that can’t help but present a contrast with a GOP frontrunner who’ll turn 77 this summer. America is not about to see less of Casey DeSantis. America is about to see more of her.

Still, though, after three congressional campaigns, an aborted Senate campaign and two gubernatorial campaigns, will there be in this vastly more complex presidential campaign a bigger, more entrusted, more empowered inner circle? Or will it be what it’s always been in the political ascent of Ron DeSantis?

Casey.

Here on Saturday evening on the stage, clad in a light blue dress and tan high heels, she finally arrived at the end of her answer to the question about her husband. “That’s who this guy is,” she concluded, “and only in America does that happen, and I am so proud.”

They were partners from the start.

“It’s always been a them,” said a person who’s known them since before his first run for Congress — one of many people who will speak candidly only when granted anonymity because of the power of a governor who might be a president and also that of his wife and what they perceive to be their collective capacity for spite.

“They are,” said a second person who’s known them for nearly as long, “this singular entity.”

“The DeSanti,” some in their orbit started saying, so tethered were the two of them in their visceral political ambition.

They had met in the spring of 2006 hitting golf balls at the driving range at the University of North Florida. (“She was dressed in classy golf attire and was generating an impressive amount of clubhead speed,” DeSantis wrote in his recent book.) Their first date was later that day at a Beef ‘O’ Brady’s. Jill Casey Black had grown up in Troy, Ohio, a small, mostly white, conservative town not far from Dayton, the younger of two daughters of an optometrist and a speech pathologist, a member in high school of the homecoming court, active in track, basketball and student government. She had gone to College of Charleston in South Carolina, where she graduated in August of 2003 with a degree in economics and a minor in French, the school confirmed, and competed on the equestrian team — by all accounts an able rider of horses.

By the time she met her would-be husband when he was a JAG at Jacksonville’s Naval Station Mayport, she had established a promising career of her own as a reporter and sometimes anchor at the local TV station WJXT (“… an alligator in the middle of a neighborhood … as Channel 4’s Casey Black shows us … it’s a story with real teeth …”). They were married in September of 2009 at (at this point ironically) Disney World. It rained on their reception at the Italian pavilion at Epcot.

Come 2012, though, he was running for Congress in a new district that stretched south from Jacksonville. He had a good resume (the Ivy, the Navy), and he had good timing (tapping into Tea Party ardor, he ran against Barack Obama as much as he did the half-dozen other contestants in a crowded Republican primary). But he also needed help. He needed her. This was obvious to his supporters and his opponents alike.

“He doesn’t make small talk easily, but Casey was always with him and she filled that gap,” Bev Slough, one of the other candidates, once told me. “He put so much emphasis on her. Every single speech he ever made, he almost always led off with her, or within two minutes he had mentioned her.” She buzzed house to house on an electric scooter to knock on door after door on his behalf. DeSantis mailers had on them his picture, and hers.

“She was who impressed people really more than him,” former Jacksonville mayor John Delaney told me in 2020.

“Ron even used to joke, they used to go door to door,” one of his former top-level congressional aides once told me, “and people recognized her. I mean, she was on TV there in Jacksonville, and so Ron used to always laugh. ‘People probably think they’re voting for Casey.’”

DeSantis in Congress had three chiefs of staff — one for every term he served. But first and foremost he had her. She introduced him at his first town hall in 2013. She accompanied him on a congressional trip to Israel in 2014. Even as she transitioned from reporting and anchoring for WJXT to co-hosting a midday talk show for First Coast News, even as she gave birth to their first child, she helped conduct interviews for his staff. She served as his media strategist, putting to use her professional knowledge of optics. “I learned how to do my makeup from Ron DeSantis, and he learned from Casey,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, told me in 2021. “He worked harder on his fundraising than anybody else,” said the aforementioned top congressional aide, “and he did it in conjunction a lot of times with Casey.” Those who worked for Ron DeSantis quickly deduced they in essence worked for her too. And it was clear she was not to be crossed. “She was looped in on every email and calendar invite,” a former staffer told Vanity Fair last year. “If Casey said jump, we would pull out the trampoline.”

David Jolly got a close-quarters glimpse of the sharp edges of her personality when he and DeSantis both were running in the 2016 cycle for the United States Senate. (DeSantis and Jolly left the race after Marco Rubio halted his presidential campaign and wanted to come back and keep his seat.) In a lobby in a hotel in Tampa, Jolly’s elderly mother asked the DeSantises if she could take their picture to have as a keepsake. They obliged and she thanked them. “And Casey,” Jolly told me, “turns and snaps at my mom and says, ‘I better not see that photo in any opposition research.’” Jolly was appalled. He called her in our conversation an ice queen. “Both ice and queen,” he said, “are doing the work there.”

In 2018, in his first run for governor, Casey introduced him at his announcement event in January, gave birth to their second child in March and stumped with him in the Florida heat around the state that summer. The most memorable (and effective) DeSantis ad that year had two stars. The first star was Trump. The second was her. She put to Trump’s all-but-victory-ensuring endorsement of her husband a face and a voice that made the transaction seem (to some) more cute than crass. She injected her opinions into policy differences, too, chastising in the general election Democrat Andrew Gillum’s stance on school choice. “Shameful and wrong,” she said.

She also, it seems, got her husband to change the way he says his family name.

“Dee-Santis,” he would say up until around that point. It’s how he always said it. She, on the other hand, would soften that first syllable. “Deh-Santis.”

People noticed the discrepancy and asked about it. “Yes,” campaign spokesperson Stephen Lawson confirmed that September to a reporter from the Tampa Bay Times. “He prefers Dee-Santis.”

Or did.

On election night Ron Deh-Santis took the stage with his wife. She wore a striking long red gown.

“When Casey and I launched this effort,” he said, “the pundit class gave us no chance.” He called her his “most significant and valued supporter.”

“I very much hope and I think I will be a great governor, but I can guarantee you, on day one, of all 50 states, Florida will have the best first lady in the country,” he said in his speech, “in my wife Casey.”

Casey DeSantis didn’t want to be a traditional first lady, it was evident immediately to the politicos of Tallahassee, and she wasn’t going to be.

She picked for herself in the governor’s Capitol suite an office that usually had been used by the chief of staff. Shane Strum, the governor’s first chief of staff, also had an office adjacent to the governor’s office — but hers was the bigger of the two. Publicly, she started to make a joke that would fast become standard, politically useful fare, laughing about how they were going to have to baby-proof the executive mansion. “We are working on moving all of the breakables up about four feet,” she said at a rally in Port Orange in DeSantis’ “Thank You Tour” — a nifty bit that positioned her as just another mom but also subtly cast their family as agents of generational change. More privately, she had a key hand in who was in and who was out on the inaugural committee, and again she interviewed potential staff. “We didn’t ever feel bad in the transition,” said a person intimately involved in the transition, “in involving her in major decisions on policy and personnel, because we kind of felt like people voted for her as much as they voted for him.”

She told reporters the day before her husband’s inauguration that she didn’t want to limit her agenda to a single signature issue.

“I’d like to pick more than one,” she said. “We’re going to be busy.”

All of a week into DeSantis’ tenure, Heather Barker, a top fundraiser for the governor, sent to Susie Wiles — who by then was highly influential in the governor’s political operation and the Republican Party of Florida — a memo underscoring among other things the importance of Casey DeSantis. “At the direction of the Governor and the First Lady,” Barker wrote. “I will send the Governor and the First Lady a weekly finance report,” she wrote. “Using time from the First Lady for relationship building and soft fundraising will enable more productivity from the governor directly.” Both DeSantises “have approved” Barker’s memo, Wiles wrote four days later in a memo of her own to Strum, Barker and two other staffers. The first lady, Wiles noted, wanted to play “an integral role in many of these activities.”

As important, though, as Wiles was, neither of the DeSanti trusted her. They thought she was still more loyal to Trump than to them. They thought she had stocked the state party with people whose loyalty was similarly conflicted. They thought she had gotten too much credit for DeSantis’ win in 2018. “The righthand person to DeSantis, there’s only going to be one of those, and Casey was going to make sure it was her,” a longtime Republican lobbyist in Tallahassee told me. The first lady along with Strum in April went to the RPOF offices to meet with Sarasota state senator and state party chair Joe Gruters and others. “I get a call from Joe,” said a GOP consultant who was granted anonymity to speak freely for fear of retribution, “and he says, ‘You’re not going to believe this. The governor wants to conduct an audit of the RPOF.’ And he says, ‘But you’re not going to believe who’s meeting with our RPOF staffers beginning the audit.’ I said, ‘Who?’ He says, ‘Casey DeSantis. Casey DeSantis.’”

If that was the beginning of the end of the DeSantises’ relationship with Wiles, the end of the end was a leak of the memos from January to a reporter from the Tampa Bay Times. The DeSantises blamed Wiles. And so they got rid of her, axing her from her positions of influence adjacent to the administration, angling to have her sidelined from any involvement in the Trump 2020 effort in Florida, and reportedly leaning, too, on people to boot her from her post at Brian Ballard’s powerful lobbying firm. (“It’s absolutely false,” Ballard told me of the situation with Wiles, “that the governor or anyone affiliated with the governor ever put pressure on me or any member of my firm.”) But they weren’t just firing her. They were trying to banish her from any useful place in Florida politics, to financially and reputationally cripple her. “Casey DeSantis is an amazing person,” Peter O’Rourke, the former Trump acting Veteran Affairs secretary who replaced a Wiles ally as the executive director of the RPOF, told me in a recent text message, adding that “her leadership style is an asset to her husband” and that she “was kind and generous with her time and expertise.” Those, needless to say, were not everybody’s takeaways.

The lesson in the estimation of Florida-based former Republican strategist and Lincoln Project founder Rick Wilson: “Never cross Casey.”

“Make no mistake. The reason why there is so much turnover and has been within the DeSantis ranks throughout the years,” a Republican consultant told me, “is if you get on the wrong side of Casey DeSantis, you’re gone.”

“Some of the sharpest knives in the set belong to her,” said a GOP lobbyist.

Roger Stone in the aftermath of her dismissal called Wiles “probably the single most effective operative in the state.”

“This,” he warned, “is a mistake they might regret.”

Starting in 2020, the first lady receded somewhat, and for understandable reasons. That March, as Covid altered so much but also supercharged the political posture and prospects of Ron DeSantis, Casey DeSantis gave birth to the third of their three children. In October of 2021, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In March of 2022, after tiring rounds of treatment, she was deemed to be cancer-free — just in time, as it happened, for the home stretch of an election year.

If anything, her role was more prominent than previous campaigns. She voiced straight-to-camera an ad that landed like a Charlie Crist kill shot. Many saw her imprint all over the other most eye-opening ad of his of the cycle — a spot that posited in all but explicit terms the notion that the political ascent of Ron DeSantis has been divinely inspired. She tweeted it out. “Casey, I think, thinks they’re on a mission from God, or Ron is, in that he’s preordained for this,” a former gubernatorial staffer told me. She spearheaded a million-moms-strong “parents’ rights” initiative dubbed “Mamas for DeSantis.” In negotiations of the terms of the one debate with Crist, the person on the call on behalf of DeSantis was not a person a Crist consultant had ever heard of. It wasn’t the DeSantis campaign manager or a deputy or even a counterpart. “And I was Googling, like, who is this person I’m negotiating with?” the Crist consultant told me recently. It was a top aide — not of Ron DeSantis but of Casey DeSantis. She had started around then, too, to show up at the governor’s side for news conferences in the wake of Hurricane Ian. Mac Stipanovich told me he found himself watching. “She’s talking about how we have deployed so and so, and we have ordered the Department of Transportation to do so and so,” said Stipanovich, a former Florida gubernatorial chief of staff to Republican Bob Martinez and who managed Jeb Bush’s 1994 gubernatorial campaign. He was flummoxed. “Who the fuck are we?”

The “Florida Blueprint,” “Make America Florida,” anti-“woke”-warrior policy platform DeSantis is going to run on — the limiting of teaching of gender and sexual identity in schools, the banning of critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion programs, the expulsion of the top prosecutor in Tampa he judged as too progressive, the policing of what the state’s teachers can teach particularly about history and race, the six-week abortion ban and his vengeful clash with Disney that’s more than anything else spooked some big-dollar donors — it’s a roster of accomplishments to some, and missteps, flashpoints or even autocratic overreach to others. And it’s hard to lay it at the feet of his wife. He, after all, is the governor. He, after all, is the candidate. Not her. But still …

“I have never seen Ron DeSantis make a decision of great significance, in life, in government or in politics,” Gaetz told me in 2021, “without consulting with Casey and getting her perspective.” Trump, for his part, last November expressed a similar sentiment with his distinctive bite: “I know more about him than anybody other than perhaps his wife, who is really running his campaign,” he said to reporters on his plane. “I can’t think of a spouse who’s more involved in their husband’s political career,” said John Thomas, a Republican strategist and the founder of the Ron to the Rescue super PAC. “She is,” Wilson said, “the primus inter pares of his advisers.” She is, if nothing else, a woman who may or may not have gotten her husband to change the way he says his own name.

On election night last November, marking her husband’s 20-point re-election and proto-presidential win, she was predictably resplendent in a golden gown. Again at the inauguration, and then again at his “state of the state” address earlier this year, she wore long white satin gloves, evocative of iconic first lady Jackie Kennedy. “Long gloves, in the context of politics, are so connected to Mrs. Kennedy,” commented a fashion critic of the New York Times, “that when a first lady (state or federal) adopts the same style of dress, she implicitly connects herself with that White House and all the qualities related to it: style, youth, promise, change …”

On the governor’s recent trip abroad, in the estimation of consultants, lawmakers and lobbyists, she was all the more conspicuously front and center. “I have never received so many messages from Republicans, from Republican consultants, from lawmakers … saying, ‘What is going on here?’” a consultant told me. “To me,” one lobbyist said, “and I think to a lot of other people, it kind of comes across almost as if she wishes that she was the elected official.”

During this whole time, though — 2020, ’21 and ’22 till now — Susie Wiles, too, slowly has re-emerged as a key cog in Trump’s victory in Florida in ’20 (one of the few bright spots in his overall loss) and then as one of his most important and indispensable advisers in the ramp-up to 2024. “The Susie Wiles deal was in major part a Casey DeSantis issue,” said a veteran GOP lobbyist in Tallahassee. “What led up to Susie Wiles’ departure, no secret, was differences of opinion on loyalty, trustworthiness and relationship that largely was incubated with Casey.” (Wiles declined to comment.)

“Had she never been kicked out of DeSantis world,” said a second lobbyist, “she probably would be at his right hand, in the foxhole trying to figure out how to go after Trump.”

“It’s not very useful to couple a dragon with a dragon lady,” said a third.

“You don’t want to label somebody an enemy,” said a fourth, “because all that does is embolden them to seek revenge. It’s a very Shakespearean kind of situation.”

“What’s done,” to quote Lady Macbeth, “cannot be undone.”

Storm clouds loomed when the DeSantises arrived this past Saturday in Iowa. In their first stop, midday in Sioux Center at GOP Rep. Randy Feenstra’s annual “family picnic,” the weather windy and cool with a whiff of hog confinement in the air, she was unexpectedly and uncharacteristically uninvolved. She sat at a table up front next to the governor of Iowa but was not invited to speak. She briefly waved from the stage before mingling for a short time with some of the hundreds of people who had gathered on her way back to a waiting SUV. When her husband went to flip hamburgers and pork chops for a couple minutes for a jostling crescent of cameras, she did not. People with the picnic had ready a red apron with his name on it, and one for her, too. “Where’s Casey?” he said.

Some five hours later, over here in Cedar Rapids, she was on the stage.

“Tell us,” the head of the Iowa Republican Party said of one of her signature issues, “about Hope Florida.”

And then she talked for the next eight minutes, longer than her husband’s two answers to that point combined, as he sat there, looking at her, looking toward the crowd, looking into space, looking sort of impatient, looking finally a kind of I know amused, waiting.

Danny Wilcox Frazier contributed to this report.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/cdJ5TUi
via IFTTT

Read More

How Abraham Lincoln Broke the Barrier Between Church and State

In September 1862, weeks before he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln wrestled with the enormous dilemma of whether to change the stakes of the Civil War. As he deliberated, he committed his thoughts to paper. In a private document that his secretaries found after his death, the president struggled to understand what God expected of him and of the nation.

“The will of God prevails,” Lincoln began. “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party — and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose.”

These ruminations marked a gradual but profound change in Lincoln’s personal belief. As a rising politician in Illinois, the future president was dogged by rumors that he was an outspoken religious “scoffer,” and indeed, he was by every account a nonbeliever. That changed during the war, particularly after the death of Lincoln’s beloved son, Willie, who succumbed to typhoid in early 1862. As he struggled to overcome his personal grief and to understand his role in a historic and bloody war that would eventually claim approximately 750,000 lives, Lincoln developed a strong sense of spirituality.

“I am almost ready to say this is probably true,” Lincoln continued, “that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.”

Like many of his religious supporters, Lincoln believed that God had willed the Civil War, and, in time, the president would echo popular jeremiads that cast the suffering imposed on the nation as divine retribution for the sin of slavery. But where Lincoln grappled with the question of which side God had chosen, most Northern religious leaders — lay and clergy alike — were certain. The Union was on God’s side, and God was on the Union’s.

With Lincoln’s active encouragement, the Northern churches mobilized in full force behind the war effort, firm in the belief that theirs was a holy writ. Breaking with decades of tradition that respected a wall between religion and politics, the largest evangelical churches engaged fully in politics, coming over the course of the war to champion not only the war effort, but particular policies (notably, abolition and total war) and, by 1864, the Republican Party.

Lincoln, ever the iconoclast, never shared the certitude of his fellow Christians, but he recognized the power and influence of the evangelical united front. Even as he remained privately doubtful that God was on the Union’s side, he encouraged Christian leaders to bring their faith into the public sphere in a way that had lasting implications on American society. Never again would ministers and lay leaders be reticent about mixing religion and state. It was a watershed moment that continues to define our political culture and render it distinct from other western democracies.

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, America experienced an intense period of religious revivalism — what historians call the Second Great Awakening. Millions of Americans flocked to new evangelical churches, which held that through belief, repentance and a personal relationship with Christ, individuals could find grace in this life and the next. Church membership exploded in these years. The ranks of the clergy swelled. Tract societies and evangelical newspapers became key staples of public culture.

By numbers alone, organized Protestant churches were arguably the most influential public institutions in the United States. On the eve of the Civil War, the number of active Methodist clergymen roughly equaled the number of postal workers nationwide (a significant benchmark, as before the war, the post office was the largest federal agency and the branch through which most Americans experienced a direct relationship with the federal government). By some estimates, the total receipts of all churches and religious organizations were almost equal to the federal government’s annual revenue. Among the country’s roughly 400 colleges, almost every last one was affiliated with a church.

Evangelical Christians in the antebellum period involved themselves enthusiastically in the business of social reform, ranging from Sabbatarianism — which advocates keeping the Sabbath in accordance with the Ten Commandments — and temperance to public education and abolitionism. But with few exceptions, the churches stayed clear of politics, viewing it as their mission to fill pews, convert sinners and build the foundation for a millennium of peace that would herald Christ’s second coming. Even abolitionists favored a campaign of moral suasion aimed at persuading individuals to abandon the sinful practice of slave owning. They believed that the antislavery cause was one of personal conversion, and that a political system that tolerated and supported slavery was inherently sinful.

All of this changed during the Civil War, as Northern evangelical churches snapped into action, first in support of the war effort, and later, in support of the Republican Party. Churches became recruiting stations for the Union Army. They raised funds and materiel for the war effort, furnished the military with chaplains and organized two government-sanctioned organizations, the Sanitary Commission and the U.S. Christian Commission, which ministered to soldiers’ physical and spiritual needs. They were early and enthusiastic advocates of both abolition and the embrace of a total, rather than limited, war against the Confederacy — one that would assume a scorched-earth approach, rather than seek simply to corner and defeat the Confederate army. Studies of wartime Ohio and Pennsylvania found that clergy “transferred the war into a moral venture, a blending of Christian and national loyalty,” according to historian George D. Harmon, and that “the ministers of the gospel probably rallied more completely to the support of the government than any large, influential class.”

Individual denominations often blurred the line between the sacred and the secular in their own fashion. A Presbyterian synod likened the Confederacy to Satan’s attempted usurpation of the throne of God. At Methodist meetings, American flags were often on prominent display — many Methodist churches also flew them on flagstaffs beside the crosses on their rooftops — and congregants were frequently encouraged to swear mass loyalty oaths. Citing Romans 13:1, 4, which teaches that “the powers that be are ordained of God,” and that it was Christian duty to obey the law, ministers framed the act of secession and rebellion itself as a sinful affront not just to Congress, or to Abraham Lincoln, but to God himself.

If most Northern evangelical churches were united and impassioned in their displays of patriotism, and in their belief that the Union’s cause was holy, the Methodist Episcopal Church went the extra measure. “Methodism is loyalty” became the church’s unofficial watchword during the war. “The cause of the country is the cause of God,” a minister intoned, reflecting the denomination’s broader commitment. When attendees at the New York East Conference in 1863 took a loyalty oath, en masse, administered jointly by a federal judge and an army general, they placed on full display the convergence of secular and religious enthusiasm. Salmon Chase, a devout Episcopalian, “thanked God that the Methodist church … knew only one sentiment, that of devotion to … our country.” Methodist leaders encouraged the faithful to see a powerful confluence between loyalty to God and country, bidding them to remember, in the words of the Southern Illinois Conference, that “it is an enormous sin against God and humanity for any person to oppose the Constitutional Government of the United States.”

As president and titular head of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln did more to court the churches and encourage their active political engagement than any other elected official, high or low.

Notwithstanding the likelihood that he developed a genuine sense of spirituality during the war, he also appreciated the growing importance of the churches in motivating the Northern public and the outsize role that evangelical voters might play in the 1864 presidential election, should they vote as a bloc. Governing in an era long before the development of public polling, the president could count only on anecdotal evidence and personal instinct. Both led him to believe that evangelicals would, for the first time, be a largely united and powerful political force. He went out of his way to receive influential lay and clerical leaders, as well as representatives from the principal religious service organizations. The president met frequently with delegations from the Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist churches.

He also infused his public speeches and papers with quotes, themes and language drawn from the King James Bible, a book he had memorized almost chapter and verse early in life, even before he was anything close to a believer. The translation with which most Americans were then familiar, published in 1767, was a revision to the original edition published in 1611. It knowingly invoked Elizabethan English — Shakespearean English, with its poetic rhythms and antediluvian verb formations, often ending in “-th.” Long a devotee of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, Lincoln gravitated naturally to the melodic formations of the King James Bible as he struggled to come to terms with the butcher’s bill he had asked the country to pay.

At Gettysburg in 1863, he dated the nation’s founding to 1776, not 1789 — a subtle but important nod to antislavery radicals, many of whom had long held the Declaration of Independence as America’s true founding document, and not the Constitution, with its two-thirds compromise and recognition of the international slave trade. How he said it was almost as remarkable as what he said. “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation” might seem a florid way to say “eighty-seven years ago, our nation was born,” but to devout Christians, it was a familiar linguistic construction, similar to “threescore years and ten” (Psalm 90:10) — “an hundred and fourscore days” (Esther 1:4) — or “brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations” (Revelation 12:5). When he continued, “We can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow this ground,” he knowingly chose three purposeful verbs that appear frequently in the King James Bible.

In promising that America could “have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” Lincoln invoked language designed to appeal to a nation of devout Christians. The idea of “new birth” was deeply steeped in evangelical theology — a knowing reference to the sinner’s regeneration upon accepting Christ. The phrase, “shall not perish from this earth,” appears verbatim, two times, in the King James Bible, and a third time nearly verbatim (“His remembrance shall perish from the earth” [Job 18:17]). This idea surely resonated with devout Protestants who had grown accustomed to hearing their ministers frame the death of loved ones as a necessary step toward national regeneration.

Lincoln’s active courtship of evangelical Protestants didn’t just build support for the war. It cemented a large, core political constituency to the Republican Party. In 1864, for the first time, leading evangelical denominations formally endorsed a partisan ticket. Regional Methodist conferences and Baptist associations explicitly asked members to vote Republican in the fall elections. So did Congregationalist organizations, several Presbyterian synods and individual churches. Religious bodies often took care to wrap their political endorsements in patriotic cloth. The election was not so much a contest between Democrats and Republicans but, in the words of the Methodist Repository, a matter of showing “true and honest loyalty to our government.” The American Presbyterian did not need to use the word Democrat when it scorned those who would “embarrass and seek to overthrow the Government in the very crisis of the awful struggle ... to seek to baffle and confound it by sowing discord, discontent and despondency among the people. ... What is this but Disloyalty!”

Prominent clerics like Henry Ward Beecher, Granville Moody and Robert Breckinridge — and hundreds of political clergymen, particularly in the battleground states of the Midwest — stumped for the party with impunity. They signaled little concern for those of their coreligionists made uncomfortable by the casual commingling of the spiritual and the secular. On the eve of the election, Methodist Bishop Matthew Simpson rallied the faithful at the New York Academy of Music. In a special election version of his famous “war speech” — part sermon, part patriotic exhortation — he waved a bloody battle flag belonging to New York’s 55th Infantry Regiment and declared that though the “blood of our brave boys is upon it” and the “bullets of rebels have gone through and through it ... there is nothing on earth like that old flag for beauty, long may those stars shine.” Those assembled took to their feet and let out wild cries and cheers as Simpson called on all Christians to vote for “the railsplitter … President” in the upcoming canvass.

On Election Day, a great majority of evangelical voters appear to have heeded the instruction of their leaders. Lincoln and his party carried the election largely on the strength of their lopsided support among native-born Protestants, particularly those in rural areas, in a time when most Americans still worked and resided on farms. Assessing the president’s decisive victory, the editor of a Methodist newspaper observed that there “probably never was an election in all history into which the religious elements entered so largely, and so nearly all on one side.” It was the first time that evangelicals voted as a bloc, representing both the emergence of a new religious influence in politics and the full politicization of evangelical religion.

Ironically, Lincoln never shared the faith of most evangelical Protestants that God was on the Union’s side, or that the Union was fated to win the war. As he grew more personally religious, he “came to believe himself an instrument foreordained” to end slavery, according to his friend, Joseph Gillespie. He regarded himself as a passive player in this drama — “a mere instrument, an accidental instrument, perhaps I should say, of a great cause.” “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me,” Lincoln told a correspondent in 1864. “Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.”

But to engage the churches and their congregants, Lincoln needed evangelical leaders to believe firmly in the religious imperative behind the war. He needed them to enjoy the certitude he lacked. Lincoln was the first president to understand and channel the spiritual and institutional power of the evangelical churches.

Today, the intersection between religion and politics is so commonplace as to seem timeless and natural. It wasn’t always so. Over a century before Jimmy Carter became the first born-again resident of the White House and Ronald Reagan declared before the Religious Roundtable, “I know you can’t endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you,” Lincoln, the erstwhile skeptic, unwittingly helped pave the way for a muscular brand of Christianity that would assert itself in the nation’s political life — in the late 19th century, over matters as diverse as public health and safety, and public morality; and in more recent times, over questions like same-sex relationships, reproductive rights, contraception, school prayer and women’s rights.

This underappreciated legacy of the Civil War continues to influence American politics to this day.

From LINCOLN’S GOD by Joshua Zeitz, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Joshua Zeitz.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/YPsDHQ2
via IFTTT

Read More

Opinion | America’s Poverty Is Built by Design

In late 2020, a crowd of mostly Black and Hispanic workers rallied outside the statehouse in Albany, New York to gather support for a $15-an-hour minimum wage for tipped workers. A group of white people wearing red MAGA hats approached. Coincidentally, the protest was taking place the same day the state legislature was meeting to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election — and MAGA protesters had gathered to challenge the count. You’d expect clashes to ensue. But when some Trump supporters stumbled upon the workers of color pushing for higher wages, they shook hands and joined their protest.

Matthew Desmond recounts this story in the epilogue to his ground-breaking new book, Poverty, By America to suggest that a movement to abolish poverty could transcend our toxically divided politics.

Many Americans already know that the core of Desmond’s argument is true: that systems are rigged to favor people who are already advantaged. He makes a refreshing, brutally honest case that poverty is pervasive in America by design, to enable the lifestyles of affluent people. U.S. rates of poverty are substantially higher and more extreme than those found in 25 other developed OECD countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal and the United Kingdom.

How did America become a land of economic extremes, with entrenched, grinding poverty for those struggling at the bottom — even as most poor adults who are not seniors are working?

Desmond’s greatest contribution is changing the lens from individual behavior — the hoary focus of so many books about poverty — to asking and answering the larger question, “Who benefits from practices that keep people poor?” Poverty, he argues, results from three quintessentially American habits: exploitation of the poor; subsidization of the rich; and the intentional segregation of the affluent and the poor such that opportunity is hoarded and social mobility is rare.

Desmond acknowledges the role of anti-Black racism in perfecting Americans’ antipathy to spending for public benefits. Other books engage directly with the “dog-whistling” politics that dissuade working and middle class people from voting their economic interests. Desmond focuses more on making transparent the systems that fabricate scarcity and offers solutions.

He paints a clear picture of the morally fraught systems we all participate in. Well-paid professionals like me benefit as consumers from the poverty wages paid to others in an economy where Uber is a verb and surveilled and squeezed gig workers respond to —and deliver — our every need. Our stock investments swell as companies cut or outsource jobs, stagnate wages and oppose unions. We get free checking; the poor get usurious fees from banks and “payday” lenders. Meanwhile, zoning codes that allow only single-family homes create artificial housing scarcity that enhances our property values while foisting high costs and homelessness on others. Segregation encourages “private opulence and public squalor,” Desmond argues, as affluent people withdraw from public institutions and society systemically disinvests in the public goods ordinary people need.

Desmond also shows how the federal government, through the tax code, greatly subsidizes the affluent. In 2021, the U.S. spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks, forgoing revenue that otherwise would have been paid in taxes, much of it going to very rich people. For example, each year the U.S. loses more than $1 trillion in unpaid taxes because of the tax avoidance strategies of multinational corporations and wealthy families.

What to do about this system of American-designed poverty? Desmond offers a bold proposal. He argues that we could bring nearly every family in America above the official poverty line without adding to the deficit simply by collecting unpaid federal income taxes from the top one percent of households — from closing loopholes to going after tax cheats. That would amount to an estimated $175 billion annually; those resources would then be allocated to expand broadly popular programs, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, that directly alleviate poverty. He also advocates for structural reforms that reverse the practices that deny poor people choices in housing, banking and employment.

If it is utterly easy — as Desmond claims — to find plenty of money to abolish poverty by closing nonsensical tax loopholes, then why don’t we do it? He notes that in 2019 other western democracies like France and Germany raised as much as 38 percent of their GDP in tax revenues and invested broadly in public goods while U.S. total revenues were at 25 percent and the U.S. “lavished government benefits on affluent families and refused to prosecute tax dodgers.”

After laying out his analysis, Desmond urges readers to become poverty abolitionists, to spread an ethic that shuns companies that exploit workers and supports government policies that rebalance the social contract toward alleviating poverty rather than helping elites grow their wealth. Importantly, he is not arguing for redistribution per se. He is arguing that if the rich pay their taxes and the government stops over-subsidizing them and instead invests in the general welfare with aid to the poor, poverty can be eliminated, without adding to the deficit. 

It remains to be seen whether an ethic of poverty abolition can take hold or overcome the rigging of electoral politics, particularly by Republican-dominated legislatures that constrain majority will through voter suppression and extreme gerrymandering. But Desmond’s surprising insights and proposals offer much needed new thinking.

This brings me back to the role of racial division and the necessity of transcending it if America is to dismantle extreme systemic inequality — in which people of all colors suffer.

Desmond notes that white families with accountants benefit most from government largesse. They have the strongest antigovernment sentiments and vote more often than those who both need and appreciate the role of government. And race-coded rationalizations justify hostility to government benefits — a false, debunked propaganda that public benefits create welfare dependency being first among them.

Herein lies the rub. Decades of anti-Black racial coding, including Ronald Reagan’s stoking of the “welfare queen” stereotype, helped perfect anti-tax and anti-government attitudes and consolidate Republican power, especially in the South. Just as the forces that perpetuate poverty are structural, so are the politics that undergird it.

(Oddly, Desmond doesn’t mention political culture-warring against the IRS which underfunded and undermined the agency, itself something of a tax cut for the rich, even as the IRS audited poor wage earners at five times the rate of everyone else. Hopefully, the Inflation Reduction Act will reverse these trends with its $80 billion increase in IRS funding over the next decade.)

Desmond finds hope for a transcending scenario in polls showing that most Americans believe the economy benefits the rich and harms the poor; that the rich do not pay their fair share of taxes; and that there should be a $15 federal minimum wage. Invoking “abolition” as a mantra for the transformation that needs to occur aptly describes his ambition, though advocates for racial equity or reparation for the legacy of slavery, redlining and other forms of racial oppression may wince at his call for universal strategies for all races. The deep irony is that anti-Black policy and rhetoric were central to the creation of savage systems of inequality that harm everyone, and anti-Black processes continue to sustain segregation. But direct efforts to repair the economic and social damage to Black people inevitably produces backlash or is weaponized by the political right to woo voters, as was done with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Desmond admits that Black people have been disproportionately harmed, especially from historic and contemporary redlining and discrimination in housing. But he suggests that the universal reforms he recommends would disproportionately benefit Blacks while broadening political coalitions to end poverty.

This is an important debate. For my part, I have called for the abolition of America’s residential caste system and argued in support of policies that promote racial equity and repair for historically defunded Black neighborhoods — and the citizens who have most suffered predation and disinvestment by government and private institutions. And I applaud local governments that are doing this work. But in wrestling with the conundrum of how to repair the damage of anti-Black racism, I have also been greatly influenced by the late stage thinking of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and contemporary Black civil rights visionaries. They pursued a fusion politics that Desmond also admires.

In the final months of his life, Dr. King envisioned a national Poor People’s Campaign that intentionally built a multiracial coalition to demand an economic bill of rights. In the 2010s, Reverend William Barber II successfully led the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina and recently revived a Poor People’s Campaign that brings conservative poor whites into the movement for economic fairness. The North Carolina movement paid off in 2023 expansions to Medicaid in the state, for example. They are a sign of hope in a nation riven by division, racism and hate. I see traction for a bold politics that joins the aspirations of all economically oppressed people, similar to the exciting rhetoric and moral claims of the new-South “Justins” who are building multiracial power in Tennessee by speaking to a rainbow of humans seeking freedom from gun violence and oppression of all kinds. The alternative is more of the same, a nation divided, with systems that elevate the wealthy — and crush others.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/WJvCpuB
via IFTTT

Read More

EU hits Meta with record €1.2B privacy fine

It’s the largest fine imposed under the bloc’s flagship General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy law.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/bMItEPq
via IFTTT

Read More

Greece’s conservatives achieve landslide victory but fall short of majority

Sunday's "political earthquake" shows New Democracy has the backing to govern alone, Prime Minister Mitsotakis said.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/psv6BwW
via IFTTT

Read More

American imprisoned in Russia calls CNN to push for his release

Paul Whelan, the American corporate official imprisoned in Russia since 2018, called CNN from his prison camp on Sunday to urge the United States to speed up its efforts for his release.

“I remain positive and confident on a daily basis that the wheels are turning,”he told the news network. “I just wish they would turn a little bit more quickly.”

Whelan’s case drew a great deal of attention at the time the U.S. was seeking to obtain the release of WNBA basketball star Brittney Griner last year. There were hopes that the two could be released together, but the deal Washington negotiated in December was a one-for-one swap: Griner for the notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

American negotiators were unable to secure Whelan’s release at the same time as Griner’s — similar to the case of a former U.S. Marine, Trevor Reed, who was exchanged in April 2022 in another one-for-one swap.

Whelan’s name has come up again as the Biden administration tries to secure the release of Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was arrested in March and accused of espionage. Whelan told CNN on Sunday he was concerned that he could once again be left behind in Russia if a deal were negotiated for Gershkovich.

“That’s an extreme worry for me and my family,” he told CNN, adding: “I feel that my life shouldn’t be considered less valuable or important than others who have been previously traded.”

He also told CNN that prisoners from his prison camp in the region of Mordovia had been recruited to fight in Ukraine, and that international sanctions were having an impact on the quality and quantity of what is being provided to the prisoners.

Elizabeth Whelan, his sister, complained in February that lawmakers who had mentioned her brother in connection with Griner had seemingly lost interest after Griner’s release.

“We haven’t heard from any of them,”she said in February. “No one has called.”

But on May 4, Lynne M. Tracy, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, visited Whalen in prison.

“Paul has been wrongfully detained in Russia for more than four years, and his release remains an absolute priority,” the U.S. Embassy in Moscow tweeted.

Whelan was arrested in Russia in December 2018 on espionage charges and sentenced to 16 years in prison in June 2020. Both his family and the U.S. government maintain that Whelan, a former Marine employed as a corporate security executive for BorgWarner, was unjustly accused and convicted.

It was not clear how or why Whelan came to call CNN. The network did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/xGyU9LC
via IFTTT

Read More