Trump is clueless about the global market
By Michael D'Antonio
If you haven't heard, President Trump is a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He regularly brags about his education because Wharton is famous for its graduate programs in economics. What he doesn't mention is that he was not a graduate student at Wharton, but a lowly undergrad at Penn, which, in fairness, is a prestigious school. But we don't need this key detail to recognize that he's a few credits short of an advanced understanding of economics.
Consider, for example, the issue of trade. With his tariff war threats, attacks on free trade agreements and more recent lambasting of the American motorcycle-maker Harley-Davidson, Trump has affirmed what many experts feared as he ran for president: He really doesn't know how companies function in a global market.
The Harley Davidson case began with Trump picking fights with trade partners in Europe -- They don't play fair! was his complaint -- and announcing tariffs on steel and aluminum shipped to the United States.
The Europeans said that two can play the trade war game, proposing European tariffs that would hit Harley hard, and the American firm responded by announcing plans to make more bikes abroad in order to avoid tariffs and maintain sales. Because he takes everything personally, Trump's reaction included threatening that Harley will be "taxed like never before." Never mind that Harley faces intense competition worldwide and the company's survival depends on selling bikes everywhere.
Setting aside the silly idea that a president can impose extra taxes on a single company (he can't) let's consider what this incident reveals about Trump's crude approach to policy.
With his sudden announcement of tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum, Trump acted on his decades-old belief that other countries take advantage of the United States in trade because prior presidents were weak leaders. He bypassed the kind of careful study that those same cautious presidents devoted to policy and confirmed that he is an abjectly poor student of economics.
Did Trump know that the world has changed in the last few decades when he made comments about the automotive industry that would have made sense in the 1980s? When considering a tariff on steel and aluminum, did he consider how prices would be affected by higher manufacturing costs incurred by US firms using these materials? Did he have a sense of how many jobs could be lost if these costs were to make manufacturing certain products in the United States an impracticality?
Today, orders for sales of American soybeans to China have fallen sharply, Jack Daniels is facing an uncertain future due to potential EU tariffs on American liquors, and at Mid-Continent Nail, America's largest nail manufacturer, layoffs have already begun.
The negative consequences already arising from the trade wars Trump started could worsen if he follows through on threats to kill the North American Free Trade Agreement. Trump is using a hammer to deal with a fly -- attacking the whole sweeping open trade arrangement instead of seeking improvements that are widely supported.
As a billionaire, Trump could be forgiven for not knowing how NAFTA keeps prices on US supermarkets down. However, he should be able to get information on the pluses and minuses of trade from his commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, or his trade adviser, Peter Navarro.
Wait a minute. That won't work. Ross and Navarro were the two authors of a paper on economic policy that made the bizarre argument that trade deficits, by importing more than we export, "subtract" from a nation's economic growth. They suggest that a solution would be increasing exports and reducing imports, but imports are not expendable commodities in an economy. To understand why, consider an oil-poor country that imports fuels to power its industries. The imports cause a trade deficit. But, as Vox points out, cutting them off would cause the entire economy to grind to a halt. In this imaginary scenario, as in the real world, imports are not the enemy of a healthy economy. As with so many issues, the balance of trade is not the simple matter the Trump team suggests it is.
If Ross and Navarro are the masterminds behind the tariffs, then the president is listening to the wrong guys. Of course, he lost his best economic adviser, Gary Cohn, who worked in finance and seemed to at least understand that America exists in a truly global economy.
In fact, the biggest risk Trump is taking as he bullies and alienates allies and rivals is that the world will move on without the United States. This may be happening already, as Pacific region countries make new arrangements in response to Trump pulling the United States out of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).
The rise of a free market in the Pacific without the United States is just one of the consequences that could have been predicted by almost any knowledgeable expert when Trump killed the TPP. Ask these same experts to forecast the future impact of Trump's lurching policies and you would get similar agreement on the risks he courts. In fact, trends in the bond market have some on Wall Street quite worried about an impending recession.
In the time since he took office, Trump has sought to take credit for good news on the economy when, one could argue, he was riding the momentum created by the policies of his predecessor. Should a downturn occur, Trump should logically shoulder the blame. I know, I know. Trump never accepts blame and is generally unmoved by logic. Voters, however, will surely ask: Is this how we make American great?
June 29, 2018
Already in motion
The plan to overturn Roe v. Wade at the Supreme Court is already in motion
By Clare Foran
Now that President Donald Trump has the opportunity to appoint a new justice to the Supreme Court, some abortion opponents hope that Roe v. Wade will end up overturned or gutted -- and they have already been working towards that moment.
Over the past year, state legislatures in Iowa, Louisiana and Mississippi have advanced strict limits on abortion that some lawmakers believe could trigger a successful challenge to the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
"I think it's virtually certain that some or all of those laws will wind up before the Supreme Court," said CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin. "And they will get a much more favorable reception with any of the judges on President Trump's list of 25 possible nominees."
When Trump ran for president in 2016, he pledged to appoint "pro-life" justices to the Supreme Court, while his running mate, now-vice president Mike Pence, said that he hoped to see Roe v. Wade end up on the "ash heap of history."
Trump's first Supreme Court pick, made after Senate Republicans blocked President Barack Obama's pick to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, was Neil Gorsuch, who has been a reliable conservative vote. Trump said he will pick from a list of 25 conservative candidates.
Trump's opportunity to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, who had voted to uphold Roe in 1992, is "exactly what we had hoped for," said Jim Carlin, an Iowa Republican state senator.
"With (Kennedy) as the swing vote, I don't know that we would have had the capital on the Supreme Court to reverse Roe v. Wade," Carlin said. "If we were to get another conservative justice to the bench at the Supreme Court, I think our chances are much, much higher."
"Anything that we can do to soften the blow of Roe v. Wade or weaken it or dilute it, it's up to us to do that," said Lawrence Bagley, a Louisiana Republican state representative.
Iowa's "heartbeat" law prohibits doctors from performing an abortion if a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can happen as early as six weeks, with exceptions in the case of certain instances of rape, incest or medical emergency.
Mississippi and Louisiana recently passed legislation banning abortion after 15 weeks with limited exceptions.
In Arkansas, a legal battle is currently playing out over a law that imposes limitations on access to medication-induced abortions.
Planned Parenthood reacted on Wednesday to the news that Kennedy will step down with alarm.
"The right to access abortion in this country is on the line," Dawn Laguens, the executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. "The idea of Trump having his choice to fill another vacancy is terrifying for not only abortion rights, but for our ability to live free from discrimination in this country."
The ACLU and Planned Parenthood have challenged Iowa's law in state court, and it was put on hold by a judge as the case plays out.
Veronica Fowler of the ACLU of Iowa said that while getting the law to the Supreme Court "was definitely the goal of some extremist politicians in the Iowa Legislature," the group "purposely chose to challenge it under the Iowa Constitution because any appeals would end up in the Iowa Supreme Court."
She added, "the US Supreme Court does not have the opportunity to review state supreme court decisions concerning state constitutional questions -- it doesn't have jurisdiction."
The fact that the law faces a state challenge hasn't convinced some of its supporters that it won't make it to the Supreme Court, however.
"The question we are raising is if you have a heartbeat, you have a life and if you have a life then under the Constitution, you are guaranteed a right to life and due process and equal protection under the law before that life is taken away," Greg Heartsill, an Iowa GOP state representative, said in an interview. "That's essentially what we're putting before the court and if they do their due diligence, they've got to answer."
In the end, the Supreme Court doesn't have to entirely overturn Roe v. Wade to leave the legal standard substantially weakened or even effectively gutted, said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law.
"The Supreme Court could do quite a lot of damage to the right recognized in Roe without ever formally overruling it, simply by upholding state laws that make it harder and harder for women to obtain abortions without banning them," Vladeck said.
That idea could be tested in Arkansas.
The 2015 state law says that any physician who "gives, sells, dispenses, administers, or otherwise provides or prescribes the abortion-inducing drug" shall have to have a contract with a physician who has admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.
The Supreme Court last month refused to take up an early challenge to the law, which cleared the way for it to take effect in mid-July, but did not say if the law is legal or not, leaving that to a lower court to determine. Earlier this month, a federal judge imposed a temporary restraining order on the law, setting the stage for the case to potentially return to the Supreme Court at some point in the future. Planned Parenthood has said that the law is both medically unnecessary and would effectively ban medication abortion in the state.
Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research organization, said the Arkansas law "conflicts with Roe by imposing an undue burden on a patient seeking an abortion."
In Mississippi, after Republican Gov. Phil Bryant signed the bill banning abortion after 15 weeks, the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging it as unconstitutional and a federal judge temporarily blocked the law from going into effect. Louisiana's 15-week law is also on hold pending the outcome of litigation in the Mississippi law.
The Center for Reproductive Rights points out that in recent years, the Supreme Court has declined to review a number of lower court decisions striking down abortion bans prior to the point of viability.
"The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the right to abortion over many decades and it has done that with many justices from appointed by many different administrations," said the group's senior director of litigation, Julie Rikelman.
State lawmakers pledge to keep trying.
"Until the Supreme Court chooses to touch on that issue again, you're going to continue to see states push the edge and push the envelope on pro-life protections," said Louisiana state Rep. John Stefanski.
"I think inevitably we're going to come up with something that I believe the Supreme Court is going to have to take a look at again," the GOP lawmaker added.
By Clare Foran
Now that President Donald Trump has the opportunity to appoint a new justice to the Supreme Court, some abortion opponents hope that Roe v. Wade will end up overturned or gutted -- and they have already been working towards that moment.
Over the past year, state legislatures in Iowa, Louisiana and Mississippi have advanced strict limits on abortion that some lawmakers believe could trigger a successful challenge to the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
"I think it's virtually certain that some or all of those laws will wind up before the Supreme Court," said CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin. "And they will get a much more favorable reception with any of the judges on President Trump's list of 25 possible nominees."
When Trump ran for president in 2016, he pledged to appoint "pro-life" justices to the Supreme Court, while his running mate, now-vice president Mike Pence, said that he hoped to see Roe v. Wade end up on the "ash heap of history."
Trump's first Supreme Court pick, made after Senate Republicans blocked President Barack Obama's pick to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, was Neil Gorsuch, who has been a reliable conservative vote. Trump said he will pick from a list of 25 conservative candidates.
Trump's opportunity to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, who had voted to uphold Roe in 1992, is "exactly what we had hoped for," said Jim Carlin, an Iowa Republican state senator.
"With (Kennedy) as the swing vote, I don't know that we would have had the capital on the Supreme Court to reverse Roe v. Wade," Carlin said. "If we were to get another conservative justice to the bench at the Supreme Court, I think our chances are much, much higher."
"Anything that we can do to soften the blow of Roe v. Wade or weaken it or dilute it, it's up to us to do that," said Lawrence Bagley, a Louisiana Republican state representative.
Iowa's "heartbeat" law prohibits doctors from performing an abortion if a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can happen as early as six weeks, with exceptions in the case of certain instances of rape, incest or medical emergency.
Mississippi and Louisiana recently passed legislation banning abortion after 15 weeks with limited exceptions.
In Arkansas, a legal battle is currently playing out over a law that imposes limitations on access to medication-induced abortions.
Planned Parenthood reacted on Wednesday to the news that Kennedy will step down with alarm.
"The right to access abortion in this country is on the line," Dawn Laguens, the executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. "The idea of Trump having his choice to fill another vacancy is terrifying for not only abortion rights, but for our ability to live free from discrimination in this country."
The ACLU and Planned Parenthood have challenged Iowa's law in state court, and it was put on hold by a judge as the case plays out.
Veronica Fowler of the ACLU of Iowa said that while getting the law to the Supreme Court "was definitely the goal of some extremist politicians in the Iowa Legislature," the group "purposely chose to challenge it under the Iowa Constitution because any appeals would end up in the Iowa Supreme Court."
She added, "the US Supreme Court does not have the opportunity to review state supreme court decisions concerning state constitutional questions -- it doesn't have jurisdiction."
The fact that the law faces a state challenge hasn't convinced some of its supporters that it won't make it to the Supreme Court, however.
"The question we are raising is if you have a heartbeat, you have a life and if you have a life then under the Constitution, you are guaranteed a right to life and due process and equal protection under the law before that life is taken away," Greg Heartsill, an Iowa GOP state representative, said in an interview. "That's essentially what we're putting before the court and if they do their due diligence, they've got to answer."
In the end, the Supreme Court doesn't have to entirely overturn Roe v. Wade to leave the legal standard substantially weakened or even effectively gutted, said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law.
"The Supreme Court could do quite a lot of damage to the right recognized in Roe without ever formally overruling it, simply by upholding state laws that make it harder and harder for women to obtain abortions without banning them," Vladeck said.
That idea could be tested in Arkansas.
The 2015 state law says that any physician who "gives, sells, dispenses, administers, or otherwise provides or prescribes the abortion-inducing drug" shall have to have a contract with a physician who has admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.
The Supreme Court last month refused to take up an early challenge to the law, which cleared the way for it to take effect in mid-July, but did not say if the law is legal or not, leaving that to a lower court to determine. Earlier this month, a federal judge imposed a temporary restraining order on the law, setting the stage for the case to potentially return to the Supreme Court at some point in the future. Planned Parenthood has said that the law is both medically unnecessary and would effectively ban medication abortion in the state.
Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research organization, said the Arkansas law "conflicts with Roe by imposing an undue burden on a patient seeking an abortion."
In Mississippi, after Republican Gov. Phil Bryant signed the bill banning abortion after 15 weeks, the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging it as unconstitutional and a federal judge temporarily blocked the law from going into effect. Louisiana's 15-week law is also on hold pending the outcome of litigation in the Mississippi law.
The Center for Reproductive Rights points out that in recent years, the Supreme Court has declined to review a number of lower court decisions striking down abortion bans prior to the point of viability.
"The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the right to abortion over many decades and it has done that with many justices from appointed by many different administrations," said the group's senior director of litigation, Julie Rikelman.
State lawmakers pledge to keep trying.
"Until the Supreme Court chooses to touch on that issue again, you're going to continue to see states push the edge and push the envelope on pro-life protections," said Louisiana state Rep. John Stefanski.
"I think inevitably we're going to come up with something that I believe the Supreme Court is going to have to take a look at again," the GOP lawmaker added.
Democrats badly underestimated how stupid Americans are....
Democrats badly underestimated Trump
By Julian Zelizer
Democrats have a history of underestimating Republican presidents.
Ronald Reagan, numerous Democrats originally thought, was a lightweight Hollywood actor with charisma and television appeal but not much more. George H.W. Bush, according to his critics, was a well-meaning "wimp" whose leadership skills were lacking and who could never escape from the shadow of Reagan.
His son George W. Bush, Democrats joked, was a nice guy who you might want to have a beer with but someone who didn't know much about world or domestic affairs. Americans who saw the televised debates in 2000 can probably still hear the sound of Vice President Al Gore sighing after almost every remark.
In each case, however, the Democrats didn't see what was coming.
Reagan went on to be a two-term president who vastly expanded military spending, slashed corporate and individual income taxes, lowered spending for much of the social safety net and negotiated a historic arms agreement with the Soviet Union.
Though he couldn't win re-election in 1992, President George H.W. Bush led the nation into its first major military operation since Vietnam with Operation Desert Storm, reached a historic deficit reduction agreement with the Democratic Congress in 1990 and he presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Under President George W. Bush, who left Democrats shell-shocked when he won a second term in 2004, the nation saw the administration vastly expand the national security state after 9/11, launch two major military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the second disastrous -- cut income taxes even further and withdraw from a major climate change accord, while pushing through Congress several major legislative initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and the Medicare prescription drug plan.
The last two weeks have been another a loud wake-up call for Democrats who have railed against President Donald Trump but who thought that this reality star commander-in-chief was so incompetent, corrupt and self-centered that it was only a matter of time before he went away.
In their view, the President who surrounded himself with third-rate advisers and who had no legislative skills to speak of would be hampered in how much damage that he could inflict before his term ended.
It's looking very different right now.
The minute that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he was retiring, every Democrat who has been paying attention to the Court realized the implications. With the evangelical right cheering him on, President Trump now has the opportunity to push through a giddy Republican Senate a judicial nominee who will dramatically swing the majority of the Supreme Court much further to the right.
Trump's sway
With Justice Kennedy's announcement coming at the same time that the court announced that it was dealing a major blow to public employee unions and upholding the president's controversial travel ban, the implications of Trump's sway over the highest court in the land were immediately apparent.
Whoever is president after 2020 will be dealing with a Supreme Court majority that has much less tolerance for strong intervention by the federal government and will be less supportive of the rights-based policy gains that have vastly strengthened the social standing of African-Americans, gay Americans, women and others who have suffered marginalization for decades.
Policies such as abortion access, family planning, affirmative action and voting rights now hang in the balance.
If Democrats were thinking that President Trump's blistering rhetoric about undocumented immigrants was just talk, they now know just how far the President is willing to go. He is very serious about closing the borders and the Supreme Court's decision to uphold his travel ban will embolden him.
Although he was pressured into backing down from his draconian policy of separating children from their parents at the border, Trump sent his message loud and clear. He is willing to go as far as he thinks is necessary to fight for stringent border policies. He is willing to inflict psychological damage on kids and subject border crossers to the toughest security measures possible until he convinces Congress to build the physical wall that he has been promising.
While he backed away from the policy of family separation, he is seeking congressional authority to detain entire families for longer than 20 days.
He has already dismantled President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, leaving hundreds of thousands of young people's lives in America under a cloud. Their future depends on a Congress that is unable to reach agreement on any legislation dealing with immigration. Indeed, the president used his Twitter account to effectively torpedo an effort last week to pass compromise legislation on immigration that would have fixed the crisis he created with the Dreamers.
His sympathy remains with the hardline anti-immigration elements in the Freedom Caucus who will keep pushing for tighter and more restrictive policies on immigration -- both undocumented and legal.
Last week's Gallup polls and the results of Tuesday's Republican primaries in South Carolina and New York are also strong indications that his political support remains much more substantial than Democrats had expected.
In the months that followed the inauguration, the conventional wisdom had been that as his national approval ratings kept falling, his political support within the GOP would follow. But we can see from the recent polling that Republican support for the President remains rock-solid and seems to be getting stronger.
Despite all of his chaotic and controversial decisions, his national approval ratings in some polls have even crept upward to the range of 45%. With a low rate of unemployment and a booming stock market, there is reason to believe that those numbers might hold fairly steady.
Trump is also demonstrating that the power of the President to tear things down is immense, especially if that President is not particularly interested in putting something different in its place. Interestingly enough, the real estate developer President has not turned out to be much of a builder. He prefers to take things apart and then walk away from the rubble without looking back.
Short of obtaining repeal and replace, he has severely weakened the Affordable Care Act by taking smaller steps like ending the individual mandate. He pulled out of TPP, pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord and pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. He has issued executive orders rolling back Obama-era regulations to curb climate change and constrain Wall Street.
While Congress and the courts have significant power when it comes to checking legislative initiatives from the Oval Office, a president who is intent on dismantling policies -- such as stripping away regulations or withdrawing from international agreements -- can get a lot done if he or she is determined. A president who wants to use the bully pulpit to undercut the public confidence in institutions, such as the news media or law enforcement, can do great harm if they don't care about the long-term consequences.
As the dog days of summer begin, Democrats should be more concerned than ever before about the consequences of a Trump presidency. The possibility for President Trump to seriously transform American policy keeps growing and the potential for a two-term presidency can no longer be dismissed. This unstable, shallow television star is starting to demonstrate that he has some very real political muscle to keep pushing forward.
The stakes of the 2018 midterm elections should be clear. If the national party does not figure out how to put forth an effective campaign that generates high turnout and excites the passions of their electorate, and if they don't engage in the upcoming Supreme Court confirmation fight in a way that slows down the process and uses the President's pick to awaken voters to the stakes of this struggle, President Trump could be looking at two more years of united government, with a GOP that will see him as an influential kingmaker, and the Congress will be more willing to start handing him legislative victories on the path to 2020.
By Julian Zelizer
Democrats have a history of underestimating Republican presidents.
Ronald Reagan, numerous Democrats originally thought, was a lightweight Hollywood actor with charisma and television appeal but not much more. George H.W. Bush, according to his critics, was a well-meaning "wimp" whose leadership skills were lacking and who could never escape from the shadow of Reagan.
His son George W. Bush, Democrats joked, was a nice guy who you might want to have a beer with but someone who didn't know much about world or domestic affairs. Americans who saw the televised debates in 2000 can probably still hear the sound of Vice President Al Gore sighing after almost every remark.
In each case, however, the Democrats didn't see what was coming.
Reagan went on to be a two-term president who vastly expanded military spending, slashed corporate and individual income taxes, lowered spending for much of the social safety net and negotiated a historic arms agreement with the Soviet Union.
Though he couldn't win re-election in 1992, President George H.W. Bush led the nation into its first major military operation since Vietnam with Operation Desert Storm, reached a historic deficit reduction agreement with the Democratic Congress in 1990 and he presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Under President George W. Bush, who left Democrats shell-shocked when he won a second term in 2004, the nation saw the administration vastly expand the national security state after 9/11, launch two major military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the second disastrous -- cut income taxes even further and withdraw from a major climate change accord, while pushing through Congress several major legislative initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and the Medicare prescription drug plan.
The last two weeks have been another a loud wake-up call for Democrats who have railed against President Donald Trump but who thought that this reality star commander-in-chief was so incompetent, corrupt and self-centered that it was only a matter of time before he went away.
In their view, the President who surrounded himself with third-rate advisers and who had no legislative skills to speak of would be hampered in how much damage that he could inflict before his term ended.
It's looking very different right now.
The minute that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he was retiring, every Democrat who has been paying attention to the Court realized the implications. With the evangelical right cheering him on, President Trump now has the opportunity to push through a giddy Republican Senate a judicial nominee who will dramatically swing the majority of the Supreme Court much further to the right.
Trump's sway
With Justice Kennedy's announcement coming at the same time that the court announced that it was dealing a major blow to public employee unions and upholding the president's controversial travel ban, the implications of Trump's sway over the highest court in the land were immediately apparent.
Whoever is president after 2020 will be dealing with a Supreme Court majority that has much less tolerance for strong intervention by the federal government and will be less supportive of the rights-based policy gains that have vastly strengthened the social standing of African-Americans, gay Americans, women and others who have suffered marginalization for decades.
Policies such as abortion access, family planning, affirmative action and voting rights now hang in the balance.
If Democrats were thinking that President Trump's blistering rhetoric about undocumented immigrants was just talk, they now know just how far the President is willing to go. He is very serious about closing the borders and the Supreme Court's decision to uphold his travel ban will embolden him.
Although he was pressured into backing down from his draconian policy of separating children from their parents at the border, Trump sent his message loud and clear. He is willing to go as far as he thinks is necessary to fight for stringent border policies. He is willing to inflict psychological damage on kids and subject border crossers to the toughest security measures possible until he convinces Congress to build the physical wall that he has been promising.
While he backed away from the policy of family separation, he is seeking congressional authority to detain entire families for longer than 20 days.
He has already dismantled President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, leaving hundreds of thousands of young people's lives in America under a cloud. Their future depends on a Congress that is unable to reach agreement on any legislation dealing with immigration. Indeed, the president used his Twitter account to effectively torpedo an effort last week to pass compromise legislation on immigration that would have fixed the crisis he created with the Dreamers.
His sympathy remains with the hardline anti-immigration elements in the Freedom Caucus who will keep pushing for tighter and more restrictive policies on immigration -- both undocumented and legal.
Last week's Gallup polls and the results of Tuesday's Republican primaries in South Carolina and New York are also strong indications that his political support remains much more substantial than Democrats had expected.
In the months that followed the inauguration, the conventional wisdom had been that as his national approval ratings kept falling, his political support within the GOP would follow. But we can see from the recent polling that Republican support for the President remains rock-solid and seems to be getting stronger.
Despite all of his chaotic and controversial decisions, his national approval ratings in some polls have even crept upward to the range of 45%. With a low rate of unemployment and a booming stock market, there is reason to believe that those numbers might hold fairly steady.
Trump is also demonstrating that the power of the President to tear things down is immense, especially if that President is not particularly interested in putting something different in its place. Interestingly enough, the real estate developer President has not turned out to be much of a builder. He prefers to take things apart and then walk away from the rubble without looking back.
Short of obtaining repeal and replace, he has severely weakened the Affordable Care Act by taking smaller steps like ending the individual mandate. He pulled out of TPP, pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord and pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. He has issued executive orders rolling back Obama-era regulations to curb climate change and constrain Wall Street.
While Congress and the courts have significant power when it comes to checking legislative initiatives from the Oval Office, a president who is intent on dismantling policies -- such as stripping away regulations or withdrawing from international agreements -- can get a lot done if he or she is determined. A president who wants to use the bully pulpit to undercut the public confidence in institutions, such as the news media or law enforcement, can do great harm if they don't care about the long-term consequences.
As the dog days of summer begin, Democrats should be more concerned than ever before about the consequences of a Trump presidency. The possibility for President Trump to seriously transform American policy keeps growing and the potential for a two-term presidency can no longer be dismissed. This unstable, shallow television star is starting to demonstrate that he has some very real political muscle to keep pushing forward.
The stakes of the 2018 midterm elections should be clear. If the national party does not figure out how to put forth an effective campaign that generates high turnout and excites the passions of their electorate, and if they don't engage in the upcoming Supreme Court confirmation fight in a way that slows down the process and uses the President's pick to awaken voters to the stakes of this struggle, President Trump could be looking at two more years of united government, with a GOP that will see him as an influential kingmaker, and the Congress will be more willing to start handing him legislative victories on the path to 2020.
Fallout of a bruising trade war
It sure looks like China’s preparing for a trade war with the US
China is looking for ways to wean itself off its dependence on US exports.
By Zeeshan Aleem
China seems to be positioning itself to deal with the fallout of a bruising trade war with the US.
On Thursday, China’s commerce ministry announced that the country had agreed to lower or cancel existing tariffs, or border taxes, on thousands of goods from India, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Laos starting July 1.
Trade experts say that the move is plain evidence that China is looking for alternative sources for goods that it imports from the US. China is currently planning on imposing sweeping tariffs on numerous goods from the US, retaliating against Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods that are scheduled to begin next week.
For example, China plans to lower tariffs on soybeans imported from those five Asian countries — all of which are party to the Asia Pacific Trade Agreement (APTA). That should help Chinese consumers find alternatives to soybeans imported from the US, which are going to become much more expensive when China hits them with tariffs.
“There’s no question that China is preparing for a trade war,” Edward Alden, a trade scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me.
China is currently planning on placing tariffs on $34 billion worth of US goods in response to Trump’s plan to hit $34 billion in Chinese goods with tariffs next week. Beijing is attempting to dissuade Trump from considering additional tariffs in the future by matching the scale of the US’s first batch of them.
While China and its Asian trading partners began to work on an agreement before the recent escalations in trade tensions between the US and China, analysts say the timing of the announcement is politically charged.
China’s plan to impose tariffs on soybeans is going to hit the US hard. China buys about a third of the US’s soybean exports, making it far and away the largest importer in the world for the American crop. The biggest soybean producers in the US include Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, and Indiana — states in the heart of Trump country where neither the president nor his party wants to see economic instability or job losses in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, or the 2020 elections.
Experts say that China’s move will also help it foster closer ties with its neighbors at a time when US influence in the region is ebbing.
“These tariff cuts will also help to strengthen China’s relations with its Asian neighbors, even as the United States has turned its back on the region economically, by walking away from the TPP,” Alden told me.
Trump pulled out of the TPP — a free-trade agreement with 11 other Pacific Rim countries — in his first week in office. At the time, trade analysts feared that China, which was not a member of the agreement, would have a unique opportunity to consolidate power in the region. That seems to be exactly what’s happening.
China is looking for ways to wean itself off its dependence on US exports.
By Zeeshan Aleem
China seems to be positioning itself to deal with the fallout of a bruising trade war with the US.
On Thursday, China’s commerce ministry announced that the country had agreed to lower or cancel existing tariffs, or border taxes, on thousands of goods from India, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Laos starting July 1.
Trade experts say that the move is plain evidence that China is looking for alternative sources for goods that it imports from the US. China is currently planning on imposing sweeping tariffs on numerous goods from the US, retaliating against Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods that are scheduled to begin next week.
For example, China plans to lower tariffs on soybeans imported from those five Asian countries — all of which are party to the Asia Pacific Trade Agreement (APTA). That should help Chinese consumers find alternatives to soybeans imported from the US, which are going to become much more expensive when China hits them with tariffs.
“There’s no question that China is preparing for a trade war,” Edward Alden, a trade scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me.
China is currently planning on placing tariffs on $34 billion worth of US goods in response to Trump’s plan to hit $34 billion in Chinese goods with tariffs next week. Beijing is attempting to dissuade Trump from considering additional tariffs in the future by matching the scale of the US’s first batch of them.
While China and its Asian trading partners began to work on an agreement before the recent escalations in trade tensions between the US and China, analysts say the timing of the announcement is politically charged.
China’s plan to impose tariffs on soybeans is going to hit the US hard. China buys about a third of the US’s soybean exports, making it far and away the largest importer in the world for the American crop. The biggest soybean producers in the US include Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, and Indiana — states in the heart of Trump country where neither the president nor his party wants to see economic instability or job losses in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, or the 2020 elections.
Experts say that China’s move will also help it foster closer ties with its neighbors at a time when US influence in the region is ebbing.
“These tariff cuts will also help to strengthen China’s relations with its Asian neighbors, even as the United States has turned its back on the region economically, by walking away from the TPP,” Alden told me.
Trump pulled out of the TPP — a free-trade agreement with 11 other Pacific Rim countries — in his first week in office. At the time, trade analysts feared that China, which was not a member of the agreement, would have a unique opportunity to consolidate power in the region. That seems to be exactly what’s happening.
Gun problem, explained...
America's gun problem, explained
The public and research support gun control. Here's how it could help — and why it doesn't pass.
By German Lopez
On Thursday, it happened again: another mass shooting. This time, the gunman killed five people at the Capital Gazette offices in Annapolis, Maryland.
Already, the mass shooting has given rise to new calls for gun control laws. Gabrielle Giffords, a former member of Congress who became a major advocate for gun control after an assassination attempt, said in a statement, “Reporters shouldn’t have to hide from gunfire while doing their jobs. A summer intern in the newsroom shouldn’t have to tweet for help. We shouldn’t have to live in a country where our lawmakers refuse to take any action to address this uniquely American crisis that’s causing so much horror and heartbreak on what feels like a daily basis.”
But if this plays out like the aftermath of past mass shootings, from Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 to Las Vegas in 2017, the chances of Congress taking major action on guns is very low.
This has become an American routine: After every mass shooting, the debate over guns and gun violence starts up once again. Maybe some bills get introduced. Critics respond with concerns that the government is trying to take away their guns. The debate stalls. So even as America continues experiencing levels of gun violence unrivaled in the rest of the developed world, nothing happens — no laws are passed by Congress, nothing significant is done to try to prevent the next horror.
So why is it that for all the outrage and mourning with every mass shooting, nothing seems to change? To understand that, it's important to grasp not just the stunning statistics about gun ownership and gun violence in the United States, but America's very unique relationship with guns — unlike that of any other developed country — and how it plays out in our politics to ensure, seemingly against all odds, that our culture and laws continue to drive the routine gun violence that marks American life.
1) America's gun problem is completely unique
No other developed country in the world has anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as America. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate as Canada, more than seven times as Sweden, and nearly 16 times as Germany, according to UN data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)
To understand why that is, there's another important statistic: The US has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated in 2007, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 88.8 guns per 100 people, meaning there was almost one privately owned gun per American and more than one per American adult. The world's second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 54.8 guns per 100 people.
Another way of looking at that: Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world's population, yet own roughly 42 percent of all the world's privately held firearms.
That does not, however, mean that every American adult actually owns guns. In fact, gun ownership is concentrated among a minority of the US population — as surveys from the Pew Research Center and General Social Survey suggest.
These three basic facts demonstrate America's unique gun culture. There is a very strong correlation between gun ownership and gun violence — a relationship that researchers argue is at least partly causal. And American gun ownership is beyond anything else in the world. At the same time, these guns are concentrated among a passionate minority, who are typically the loudest critics against any form of gun control and who scare legislators into voting against such measures.
2) More guns mean more gun deaths. Period.
The research on this is overwhelmingly clear: No matter how you look at the data, more guns mean more gun deaths.
This is apparent when you look at state-by-state data for gun ownership and gun deaths (including homicides and suicides) within the United States, as this chart from Mother Jones demonstrates.
And it's clear when you look at the data for gun ownership and gun deaths (including homicides and suicides) across developed nations, as this other chart based on data from researcher Josh Tewksbury shows.
Opponents of gun control tend to point to other factors to explain America's unusual levels of gun violence — particularly mental illness. But people with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And Michael Stone, a psychiatrist at Columbia University who maintains a database of mass shooters, wrote in a 2015 analysis that only 52 out of the 235 killers in the database, or about 22 percent, were mentally ill. "The mentally ill should not bear the burden of being regarded as the ‘chief’ perpetrators of mass murder," Stone concluded. Other research has backed this up.
Another argument you sometimes hear is that these shootings would happen less frequently if even more people had guns, thus enabling them to defend themselves from a shooting.
But, again, the data shows this is simply not true. High gun ownership rates do not reduce gun deaths, but rather tend to coincide with increases in gun deaths. While a few people in some cases may use a gun to successfully defend themselves or others, the proliferation of guns appears to cause far more violence than it prevents.
Multiple simulations have also demonstrated that most people, if placed in an active shooter situation while armed, will not be able to stop the situation, and may in fact do little more than get themselves killed in the process.
This video, from ABC News, shows one such simulation, in which people repeatedly fail to shoot an active shooter before they're shot:
The relationship between gun ownership rates and gun violence rates, meanwhile, is well established. Reviews of the evidence, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center, have consistently found that when controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths. Researchers have found this to be true not just with homicides, but also with suicides, domestic violence, and even violence against police.
For example, a 2013 study, led by a Boston University School of Public Health researcher, found that, after controlling for multiple variables, each percentage point increase in gun ownership correlated with a roughly 0.9 percent rise in the firearm homicide rate.
As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in the 1990s found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, based on data from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime.
Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.
"A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar," Zimring and Hawkins wrote. "A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London."
Guns are not the only contributor to violence. (Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, and alcohol consumption.) But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America's high levels of gun ownership are a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.
To deal with its problem, America will have to not only make guns less accessible, but likely reduce the number of guns in the US as well.
The research also speaks to this point: A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives.
But even with the outrage over gun massacres, the sense that enough is enough, and the clear evidence that the problem is America's high gun ownership rates, there hasn't been significant legislation to help solve the problem.
3) Americans tend to support measures to restrict guns, but that doesn't translate into laws
If you ask Americans how they feel about specific gun control measures, they will often say that they support them. According to Pew Research Center surveys, most people in the US support universal background checks, a federal database to track gun sales, bans on assault-style weapons, and bans on high-capacity magazines.
So why don't these measures ever get turned into law? That's because they run into another political issue: Americans, increasingly in recent years, tend to support the abstract idea of the right to own guns.
This is part of how gun control opponents are able to kill even legislation that would introduce the most popular measures, such as background checks that include private sales (which have upwards of 80 percent support, according to Pew): They're able to portray the law as contrary to the right to own guns, and galvanize a backlash against it.
This kind of problem isn't unique to guns. For example, although many Americans say they don't like Obamacare, most of them do in fact like the specific policies in the health care law. The problem is these specific policies have been masked by rhetoric about a "government takeover of health care" and "death panels." Since most Americans don't have time to verify these claims, especially when they involve a massive bill with lots of moving parts, enough end up believing in the catchphrases and scary arguments to stop the legislation from moving forward.
Of course, it's also the case that some Americans simply oppose any gun control laws. And while this group is generally outnumbered by those who support gun control, the opponents tend to be much more passionate about the issue than the supporters — and they're backed by a very powerful political lobby.
4) The gun lobby as we know it is relatively recent but enormously powerful
The single most powerful political organization when it comes to guns is, undoubtedly, the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA has an enormous stranglehold over conservative politics in America, and that development is more recent than you might think.
The NRA was, for much of its early history, more of a sporting club than a serious political force against gun control, and even supported some gun restrictions. In 1934, NRA president Karl Frederick was quoted as saying, "I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses."
A 1977 revolt within the organization changed everything. As crime rose in the 1960s and '70s, calls for more gun control grew as well. NRA members worried new restrictions on guns would keep coming after the historic 1968 law — eventually ending, they feared, with the government's seizure of all firearms in America. So members mobilized, installing a hard-liner known as Harlon Carter in the leadership, forever changing the NRA into the gun lobby we know today.
This foundation story is crucial for understanding why the NRA is near-categorically opposed to the regulation of private firearms. It fears that popular and seemingly common-sense regulations, such as banning assault-style weapons or a federal database of gun purchases, are not really about saving lives but are in fact a potential first step toward ending all private gun ownership in America, which the NRA views — wrongly, in the minds of some legal experts — as a violation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.
So any time there's an attempt to impose new forms of gun control, the NRA rallies gun owners and other opponents of gun control to kill these bills. These gun owners make up a minority of the population: anywhere from around 30 to around 40 percent of households, depending on which survey one uses. But that population is a large and active enough constituency, particularly within the Republican base, to make many legislators fear that a poor grade from the NRA will end their careers.
As a result, conservative media and politicians take the NRA's support — especially the coveted A-to-F ratings the organization gives out — very seriously. Politicians will go to sometimes absurd length to show their support for gun rights. In 2015, for example, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) starred in a video, from IJ Review, in which he cooked bacon with — this is not a joke — a machine gun.
Although several campaigns have popped up over the years to try to counteract the NRA, none have come close to capturing the kind of influential hold that the organization has.
Kristin Goss, author of The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know, previously told me this might be changing. She argued that newer gun control groups like Everytown for Gun Safety and Americans for Responsible Solutions are much more organized, are better funded, and have more grassroots support than gun control groups have had in her decades covering this issue. As a result, Democrats at the state and federal levels seem much more willing to discuss gun control.
But supporters of gun control face a huge obstacle: far more passionate opponents. As Republican strategist Grover Norquist said in 2000, "The question is intensity versus preference. You can always get a certain percentage to say they are in favor of some gun controls. But are they going to vote on their 'control' position?" Probably not, Norquist suggested, "but for that 4-5 percent who care about guns, they will vote on this."
What's behind that passion? Goss, who's also a political scientist at Duke University, suggested that it's a sense of tangible loss — gun owners feel like the government is going to take their guns and rights. In comparison, gun control advocates are motivated by more abstract notions of reducing gun violence — although, Goss noted, the victims of mass shootings and their families have begun putting a face on these policies by engaging more actively in advocacy work, which could make the gun control movement feel more relatable. (See: #NeverAgain.)
There is an exception at the state level, where legislatures have passed laws imposing (and relaxing) restrictions on guns. In the past few years, for instance, Washington state and Oregon passed laws ensuring all guns have to go through background checks, including those sold between individuals. "There's a lot more going on than Congress," Goss said. "In blue states, gun laws are getting stricter. And in red states, in some cases, the gun laws are getting looser."
But state laws aren't enough. Since people can cross state lines to purchase guns under laxer rules, the weaker federal standards make it easy for someone to simply travel to a state with looser gun laws to obtain a firearm and ship it to another state. This is such a common occurrence that the gun shipment route from the South, where gun laws are fairly loose, to New York, where gun laws are strict, has earned the name "the Iron Pipeline." But it also happens all across the country, from New York to Chicago to California. Only a federal law could address this issue — by setting a floor on how loose gun laws can be in every state. And until such a federal law is passed, there will always be a massive loophole to any state gun control law.
Yet the NRA's influence and its army of supporters push many of America's legislators, particularly at the federal level and red states, away from gun control measures — even though some countries that passed these policies have seen a lot of success with them.
5) Other developed countries have had huge successes with gun control
In 1996, a 28-year-old man walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, Australia, ate lunch, pulled a semiautomatic rifle out of his bag, and opened fire on the crowd, killing 35 people and wounding 23 more. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia's history.
Australian lawmakers responded with legislation that, among other provisions, banned certain types of firearms, such as automatic and semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. The Australian government confiscated 650,000 of these guns through a mandatory gun buyback program, in which it purchased the firearms from gun owners. It established a registry of all guns owned in the country and required a permit for all new firearm purchases. (This is much further than bills typically proposed in the US, which almost never make a serious attempt to immediately reduce the number of guns in the country.)
The result: Australia's firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate fell by 57 percent, according to one review of the evidence by Harvard researchers.
It's difficult to know for sure how much of the drop in homicides and suicides was caused specifically by the gun buyback program and other legal changes. Australia's gun deaths, for one, were already declining before the law passed. But researchers David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis argue that the gun buyback program very likely played a role: "First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates."
One study of the program, by Australian researchers, found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides, and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Dylan Matthews noted for Vox, the drop in homicides wasn't statistically significant because Australia has a pretty low number of murders already. But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking.
One other fact, noted by Hemenway and Vriniotis in 2011: "While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the [Australia gun control law], resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres."
6) Although they get a lot of focus, mass shootings are a small portion of all gun violence
Depending on which definition of a mass shooting one uses, there are anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of mass shootings in the US each year. These events are, it goes without saying, devastating tragedies for the nation and, primarily, the victims and their families.
Yet other, less-covered kinds of gun violence kill far more Americans than even these mass shootings. Under a broad definition of mass shooting, these incidents killed fewer than 500 people in the US in 2016. That represents less than 2 percent of the nearly 39,000 gun deaths that year — most of which were suicides, not homicides.
Preventing suicides isn't something we typically include in discussions of gun control, but other countries' experiences show it can save lives. In Israel, where military service is mandatory for much of the population, policymakers realized that an alarming number of soldiers killed themselves when they went home over the weekend. So Israeli officials, as part of their solution, decided to try forcing the soldiers to keep their guns at the base when they went home. It worked: A study from Israeli researchers found that suicides among Israeli soldiers dropped by 40 percent.
So while politicians often lean on mass shootings to call for gun control, the problem goes far beyond those incidents. Though it's hard to fault them for trying; mass shootings, after all, force Americans to confront the toll of our gun laws and gun culture.
But it seems that we as a nation just aren't willing to look, or else don't sufficiently mind what we see, when these events occur. Even the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut — in which a gunman killed 20 young children, six school personnel, and himself — catalyzed no significant change at the federal level and most states. Since then, there have been, by some estimates, more than 1,600 mass shootings. And there is every reason to believe there will be more to come.
The public and research support gun control. Here's how it could help — and why it doesn't pass.
By German Lopez
On Thursday, it happened again: another mass shooting. This time, the gunman killed five people at the Capital Gazette offices in Annapolis, Maryland.
Already, the mass shooting has given rise to new calls for gun control laws. Gabrielle Giffords, a former member of Congress who became a major advocate for gun control after an assassination attempt, said in a statement, “Reporters shouldn’t have to hide from gunfire while doing their jobs. A summer intern in the newsroom shouldn’t have to tweet for help. We shouldn’t have to live in a country where our lawmakers refuse to take any action to address this uniquely American crisis that’s causing so much horror and heartbreak on what feels like a daily basis.”
But if this plays out like the aftermath of past mass shootings, from Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 to Las Vegas in 2017, the chances of Congress taking major action on guns is very low.
This has become an American routine: After every mass shooting, the debate over guns and gun violence starts up once again. Maybe some bills get introduced. Critics respond with concerns that the government is trying to take away their guns. The debate stalls. So even as America continues experiencing levels of gun violence unrivaled in the rest of the developed world, nothing happens — no laws are passed by Congress, nothing significant is done to try to prevent the next horror.
So why is it that for all the outrage and mourning with every mass shooting, nothing seems to change? To understand that, it's important to grasp not just the stunning statistics about gun ownership and gun violence in the United States, but America's very unique relationship with guns — unlike that of any other developed country — and how it plays out in our politics to ensure, seemingly against all odds, that our culture and laws continue to drive the routine gun violence that marks American life.
1) America's gun problem is completely unique
No other developed country in the world has anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as America. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate as Canada, more than seven times as Sweden, and nearly 16 times as Germany, according to UN data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)
To understand why that is, there's another important statistic: The US has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated in 2007, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 88.8 guns per 100 people, meaning there was almost one privately owned gun per American and more than one per American adult. The world's second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 54.8 guns per 100 people.
Another way of looking at that: Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world's population, yet own roughly 42 percent of all the world's privately held firearms.
That does not, however, mean that every American adult actually owns guns. In fact, gun ownership is concentrated among a minority of the US population — as surveys from the Pew Research Center and General Social Survey suggest.
These three basic facts demonstrate America's unique gun culture. There is a very strong correlation between gun ownership and gun violence — a relationship that researchers argue is at least partly causal. And American gun ownership is beyond anything else in the world. At the same time, these guns are concentrated among a passionate minority, who are typically the loudest critics against any form of gun control and who scare legislators into voting against such measures.
2) More guns mean more gun deaths. Period.
The research on this is overwhelmingly clear: No matter how you look at the data, more guns mean more gun deaths.
This is apparent when you look at state-by-state data for gun ownership and gun deaths (including homicides and suicides) within the United States, as this chart from Mother Jones demonstrates.
And it's clear when you look at the data for gun ownership and gun deaths (including homicides and suicides) across developed nations, as this other chart based on data from researcher Josh Tewksbury shows.
Opponents of gun control tend to point to other factors to explain America's unusual levels of gun violence — particularly mental illness. But people with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And Michael Stone, a psychiatrist at Columbia University who maintains a database of mass shooters, wrote in a 2015 analysis that only 52 out of the 235 killers in the database, or about 22 percent, were mentally ill. "The mentally ill should not bear the burden of being regarded as the ‘chief’ perpetrators of mass murder," Stone concluded. Other research has backed this up.
Another argument you sometimes hear is that these shootings would happen less frequently if even more people had guns, thus enabling them to defend themselves from a shooting.
But, again, the data shows this is simply not true. High gun ownership rates do not reduce gun deaths, but rather tend to coincide with increases in gun deaths. While a few people in some cases may use a gun to successfully defend themselves or others, the proliferation of guns appears to cause far more violence than it prevents.
Multiple simulations have also demonstrated that most people, if placed in an active shooter situation while armed, will not be able to stop the situation, and may in fact do little more than get themselves killed in the process.
This video, from ABC News, shows one such simulation, in which people repeatedly fail to shoot an active shooter before they're shot:
The relationship between gun ownership rates and gun violence rates, meanwhile, is well established. Reviews of the evidence, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center, have consistently found that when controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths. Researchers have found this to be true not just with homicides, but also with suicides, domestic violence, and even violence against police.
For example, a 2013 study, led by a Boston University School of Public Health researcher, found that, after controlling for multiple variables, each percentage point increase in gun ownership correlated with a roughly 0.9 percent rise in the firearm homicide rate.
As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in the 1990s found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, based on data from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime.
Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.
"A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar," Zimring and Hawkins wrote. "A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London."
Guns are not the only contributor to violence. (Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, and alcohol consumption.) But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America's high levels of gun ownership are a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.
To deal with its problem, America will have to not only make guns less accessible, but likely reduce the number of guns in the US as well.
The research also speaks to this point: A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives.
But even with the outrage over gun massacres, the sense that enough is enough, and the clear evidence that the problem is America's high gun ownership rates, there hasn't been significant legislation to help solve the problem.
3) Americans tend to support measures to restrict guns, but that doesn't translate into laws
If you ask Americans how they feel about specific gun control measures, they will often say that they support them. According to Pew Research Center surveys, most people in the US support universal background checks, a federal database to track gun sales, bans on assault-style weapons, and bans on high-capacity magazines.
So why don't these measures ever get turned into law? That's because they run into another political issue: Americans, increasingly in recent years, tend to support the abstract idea of the right to own guns.
This is part of how gun control opponents are able to kill even legislation that would introduce the most popular measures, such as background checks that include private sales (which have upwards of 80 percent support, according to Pew): They're able to portray the law as contrary to the right to own guns, and galvanize a backlash against it.
This kind of problem isn't unique to guns. For example, although many Americans say they don't like Obamacare, most of them do in fact like the specific policies in the health care law. The problem is these specific policies have been masked by rhetoric about a "government takeover of health care" and "death panels." Since most Americans don't have time to verify these claims, especially when they involve a massive bill with lots of moving parts, enough end up believing in the catchphrases and scary arguments to stop the legislation from moving forward.
Of course, it's also the case that some Americans simply oppose any gun control laws. And while this group is generally outnumbered by those who support gun control, the opponents tend to be much more passionate about the issue than the supporters — and they're backed by a very powerful political lobby.
4) The gun lobby as we know it is relatively recent but enormously powerful
The single most powerful political organization when it comes to guns is, undoubtedly, the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA has an enormous stranglehold over conservative politics in America, and that development is more recent than you might think.
The NRA was, for much of its early history, more of a sporting club than a serious political force against gun control, and even supported some gun restrictions. In 1934, NRA president Karl Frederick was quoted as saying, "I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses."
A 1977 revolt within the organization changed everything. As crime rose in the 1960s and '70s, calls for more gun control grew as well. NRA members worried new restrictions on guns would keep coming after the historic 1968 law — eventually ending, they feared, with the government's seizure of all firearms in America. So members mobilized, installing a hard-liner known as Harlon Carter in the leadership, forever changing the NRA into the gun lobby we know today.
This foundation story is crucial for understanding why the NRA is near-categorically opposed to the regulation of private firearms. It fears that popular and seemingly common-sense regulations, such as banning assault-style weapons or a federal database of gun purchases, are not really about saving lives but are in fact a potential first step toward ending all private gun ownership in America, which the NRA views — wrongly, in the minds of some legal experts — as a violation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.
So any time there's an attempt to impose new forms of gun control, the NRA rallies gun owners and other opponents of gun control to kill these bills. These gun owners make up a minority of the population: anywhere from around 30 to around 40 percent of households, depending on which survey one uses. But that population is a large and active enough constituency, particularly within the Republican base, to make many legislators fear that a poor grade from the NRA will end their careers.
As a result, conservative media and politicians take the NRA's support — especially the coveted A-to-F ratings the organization gives out — very seriously. Politicians will go to sometimes absurd length to show their support for gun rights. In 2015, for example, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) starred in a video, from IJ Review, in which he cooked bacon with — this is not a joke — a machine gun.
Although several campaigns have popped up over the years to try to counteract the NRA, none have come close to capturing the kind of influential hold that the organization has.
Kristin Goss, author of The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know, previously told me this might be changing. She argued that newer gun control groups like Everytown for Gun Safety and Americans for Responsible Solutions are much more organized, are better funded, and have more grassroots support than gun control groups have had in her decades covering this issue. As a result, Democrats at the state and federal levels seem much more willing to discuss gun control.
But supporters of gun control face a huge obstacle: far more passionate opponents. As Republican strategist Grover Norquist said in 2000, "The question is intensity versus preference. You can always get a certain percentage to say they are in favor of some gun controls. But are they going to vote on their 'control' position?" Probably not, Norquist suggested, "but for that 4-5 percent who care about guns, they will vote on this."
What's behind that passion? Goss, who's also a political scientist at Duke University, suggested that it's a sense of tangible loss — gun owners feel like the government is going to take their guns and rights. In comparison, gun control advocates are motivated by more abstract notions of reducing gun violence — although, Goss noted, the victims of mass shootings and their families have begun putting a face on these policies by engaging more actively in advocacy work, which could make the gun control movement feel more relatable. (See: #NeverAgain.)
There is an exception at the state level, where legislatures have passed laws imposing (and relaxing) restrictions on guns. In the past few years, for instance, Washington state and Oregon passed laws ensuring all guns have to go through background checks, including those sold between individuals. "There's a lot more going on than Congress," Goss said. "In blue states, gun laws are getting stricter. And in red states, in some cases, the gun laws are getting looser."
But state laws aren't enough. Since people can cross state lines to purchase guns under laxer rules, the weaker federal standards make it easy for someone to simply travel to a state with looser gun laws to obtain a firearm and ship it to another state. This is such a common occurrence that the gun shipment route from the South, where gun laws are fairly loose, to New York, where gun laws are strict, has earned the name "the Iron Pipeline." But it also happens all across the country, from New York to Chicago to California. Only a federal law could address this issue — by setting a floor on how loose gun laws can be in every state. And until such a federal law is passed, there will always be a massive loophole to any state gun control law.
Yet the NRA's influence and its army of supporters push many of America's legislators, particularly at the federal level and red states, away from gun control measures — even though some countries that passed these policies have seen a lot of success with them.
5) Other developed countries have had huge successes with gun control
In 1996, a 28-year-old man walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, Australia, ate lunch, pulled a semiautomatic rifle out of his bag, and opened fire on the crowd, killing 35 people and wounding 23 more. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia's history.
Australian lawmakers responded with legislation that, among other provisions, banned certain types of firearms, such as automatic and semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. The Australian government confiscated 650,000 of these guns through a mandatory gun buyback program, in which it purchased the firearms from gun owners. It established a registry of all guns owned in the country and required a permit for all new firearm purchases. (This is much further than bills typically proposed in the US, which almost never make a serious attempt to immediately reduce the number of guns in the country.)
The result: Australia's firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate fell by 57 percent, according to one review of the evidence by Harvard researchers.
It's difficult to know for sure how much of the drop in homicides and suicides was caused specifically by the gun buyback program and other legal changes. Australia's gun deaths, for one, were already declining before the law passed. But researchers David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis argue that the gun buyback program very likely played a role: "First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates."
One study of the program, by Australian researchers, found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides, and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Dylan Matthews noted for Vox, the drop in homicides wasn't statistically significant because Australia has a pretty low number of murders already. But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking.
One other fact, noted by Hemenway and Vriniotis in 2011: "While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the [Australia gun control law], resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres."
6) Although they get a lot of focus, mass shootings are a small portion of all gun violence
Depending on which definition of a mass shooting one uses, there are anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of mass shootings in the US each year. These events are, it goes without saying, devastating tragedies for the nation and, primarily, the victims and their families.
Yet other, less-covered kinds of gun violence kill far more Americans than even these mass shootings. Under a broad definition of mass shooting, these incidents killed fewer than 500 people in the US in 2016. That represents less than 2 percent of the nearly 39,000 gun deaths that year — most of which were suicides, not homicides.
Preventing suicides isn't something we typically include in discussions of gun control, but other countries' experiences show it can save lives. In Israel, where military service is mandatory for much of the population, policymakers realized that an alarming number of soldiers killed themselves when they went home over the weekend. So Israeli officials, as part of their solution, decided to try forcing the soldiers to keep their guns at the base when they went home. It worked: A study from Israeli researchers found that suicides among Israeli soldiers dropped by 40 percent.
So while politicians often lean on mass shootings to call for gun control, the problem goes far beyond those incidents. Though it's hard to fault them for trying; mass shootings, after all, force Americans to confront the toll of our gun laws and gun culture.
But it seems that we as a nation just aren't willing to look, or else don't sufficiently mind what we see, when these events occur. Even the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut — in which a gunman killed 20 young children, six school personnel, and himself — catalyzed no significant change at the federal level and most states. Since then, there have been, by some estimates, more than 1,600 mass shootings. And there is every reason to believe there will be more to come.
Fight dirty
Why this political scientist thinks the Democrats have to fight dirty
“The Republicans are behaving like a party that believes it will never be held accountable.”
By Sean Illing
In September 2016, an anonymous conservative writer published an essay called “The Flight 93 Election.”
The title was a reference to the one hijacked flight on 9/11 that didn’t reach its destination because passengers overwhelmed the hijackers and brought the plane down.
The logic of the essay was simple enough: The prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency was so positively ruinous that conservatives had no choice but to support Donald Trump — no matter how awful or incompetent he appeared to be. The stakes were simply too high.
Until now, there was no left-wing equivalent to the “Flight 93” essay, no rallying cry that urged Democrats and liberals to do whatever is necessary to win. But David Faris’s new book, It’s Time to Fight Dirty, is the closest anyone has come so far.
Faris, a political scientist at Roosevelt University, argues that the Democratic Party must recognize that Republicans aren’t engaged in a policy fight; instead, they’re waging a “procedural war.”
What he means is that Republicans have spent the past two decades exploiting the vagueness of the Constitution to create structural advantages for their side — passing discriminatory voter ID laws, using the census to gerrymander districts, blocking Democratic Supreme Court nominees, and so on.
Faris writes Democrats have to recognize this reality and act accordingly, especially now that the Republicans are poised to conquer the Supreme Court for a generation. I reached out to him to find out what, exactly, he has in mind.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Your book feels like the left-wing equivalent of the “Flight 93” essay — an urgent Democratic call to arms. Is that how you see it?
David Faris
Yeah, I think so. We’re at a very dangerous moment in American history. There’s been a massive erosion of trust in public institutions and in the broader electoral process. The Trump administration has been disastrously disruptive to the norms of our political culture.
We’re also in a very dangerous moment for the planet, and I worry that we’re sleepwalking into a series of crises that we’ll have to deal with for a very long time, that our kids will have to deal with for a very long time. So yes, I am sort of sounding the alarm, and I think Democrats have to recognize the urgency of the moment and act accordingly.
Am I in “charge the cockpit or die” mode? I don’t know, but I do think our predicament justifies some serious procedural hardball from the Democrats.
Sean Illing
Well, let’s talk about the Democrats. There are roughly three competing visions within the party about how to move forward: 1) Go the way of Bernie Sanders and appeal to working-class voters with progressive policy ideas; 2) go the centrist route in a bid to grab moderate, suburban independents and Republicans who might have voted for Trump but can be persuaded to jump ship; or 3) double down on the 2008 and 2012 strategies and hope to recreate the Obama coalition of women, minorities, and young people.
You say all these are nonstarters — why?
David Faris
I think Democrats should have this debate, but my point is that no policy platform is going to win three or four consecutive national elections for Democrats because we know policy isn’t what decides elections; that’s not how most voters make decisions.
So there are no policy changes that are going to reverse the overall trajectory that this society is on right now. We have to address some of the structural barriers to progressive power in this country, and we need to take those things as seriously as we do the policy fights within the party.
Sean Illing
I definitely want to get into some of these structural barriers, but let’s be clear about this point you’re making. A lot of people still think there’s some meaningful connection between policy outcomes and voter decisions, but there’s a good bit of political science research to suggest that’s just a fantasy.
David Faris
Right. People just don’t seem to make the connection between policies and the party in power.
So, for example, the Democrats passed Obamacare and gave millions of people heath care, and yet tons of people who benefited from it have no idea what it is or how they benefited. And it’s like that with a lot of policies — voters simply don’t connect the dots, and so they reward or punish the wrong party.
I think the idea that we’re going to deliver these benefits to people and they’re going to be like, “Thank you Jesus, thank you for everything that you’ve done, let me return you with a larger majority next time,” is just nonsense. It’s the wrong way to think about politics.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do things for people, but we’ve got to be serious about how elections are won. And they’re not being won on the basis of policy proposals or policy wins.
Sean Illing
In the book, you say that Democrats are engaged in “policy fights” and Republicans are waging a “procedural war.” What does that mean?
David Faris
The Constitution is a shockingly short document, and it turns out that it’s extremely vague on some key procedures that we rely on to help government function at a basic level. For the government to work, cooperation between parties is needed. But when that cooperation is withdrawn, it creates chaos.
Since the ’90s, when Newt Gingrich took over Congress, we’ve seen a one-sided escalation in which Republicans exploit the vagueness or lack of clarity in the Constitution in order to press their advantage in a variety of arenas — from voter ID laws to gerrymandering to behavioral norms in the Congress and Senate.
Sean Illing
What the Republicans did to Merrick Garland was one of the most egregious examples I’ve ever seen.
David Faris
Right. They essentially stole a seat on the Supreme Court — a swing seat, no less. But they correctly argued that they had no clear constitutional obligation to consider the president’s nominee for the seat. They didn’t violate the Constitution. They violated the spirit of the Constitution. They violated the norms that have allowed these institutions to function normally for years and years.
This is the sort of maneuvering and procedural warfare I’m talking about, and the Republicans have been escalating it for two decades. And they’ve managed to entrench their power through these dubious procedures.
The result is that the structural environment is biased against Democrats and the Republicans have engineered it that way.
Sean Illing
Let’s dive into some of your proposed solutions. For starters, you think Democrats should break California up into seven states. Why?
David Faris
I don’t think the architects of the Constitution understood that population dynamics would create a state like California with 38 million people, and then a bunch of states like the Dakotas and Wyoming and Vermont and Delaware that have very small populations.
The end result is that voters in California and New York and Texas are systematically disadvantaged in national policy relative to their counterparts in smaller, rural states. It’s absurd that California and Delaware should have the same number of senators.
Given the current system, Democratic-leaning states, which contain far more people, are rarely going to be represented in the Senate. That’s not fair or democratic, and we shouldn’t accept it, especially with the current horror show in the White House.
Sean Illing
It’s extremely unlikely that this will ever happen, but tell me how it would play out if it did.
David Faris
Technically, from a constitutional standpoint, all it would require is an act of the California state legislature, signed by the governor of California, and then accepted by Congress.
So here’s what we need to happen: A referendum on breaking the state up into smaller states passes, and then it’s validated by the state legislature and then the governor, who would obviously need to be a Democrat, signs it, and finally, a Democrat-controlled Congress makes it official.
This is not as crazy an idea as people think. There have been several attempts to do it in California already, and you can make a pretty strong argument that the state is far too large to be ruled from Sacramento.
And if Californians managed to pull it off, we’d likely have another 12 Democratic senators in Washington, or at least more than we have now. More Electoral College votes too.
Sean Illing
Tell me about some other “dirty” tactics you recommend in the book.
David Faris
I think they should grant statehood to DC and Puerto Rico. Both states have held referenda that endorsed statehood. We have millions of Americans right now who have no representation in Congress.
To me, it’s just unquestionably the right thing to do. We should grant people the representation they want and deserve, and it just happens that doing so would almost certainly send four more Democrats into the Senate, and probably an all-Democratic congressional delegation from Puerto Rico too.
Sean Illing
You also think the Democrats should kill the filibuster, right?
David Faris
Yeah, I think they should eliminate the filibuster in the first month of the next Democratic administration, if it even survives that long. I think it’s another anti-democratic procedure in the Senate. We already have a constitutional framework that is deliberately difficult to work around to get policy change, and then you add a supermajority requirement in one of the two national legislatures? It’s just bananas. There’s no other country on the face of the earth that has a supermajority requirement to make routine legislation.
Sean Illing
You write, as well, that Democrats should start packing the courts with as many left-leaning judges as possible.
David Faris
The Constitution doesn’t say how many Supreme Court justices we should have, and we have not always had nine. Up until the mid-19th century, it was routine for the number of justices to change based on the whims of Congress, so it’s not unprecedented.
The way I look at it, Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections. I went back and added up all the votes for the US Senate since 1992, and Democrats have won 30 million more votes over that time period. I think the American people have pretty clearly expressed their desire to have Democrats staff the federal judiciary, and yet, due to the Republicans’ procedural tactics, they’ve not been able to do that.
Sean Illing
This is another one of those areas where you think the Democrats really have no choice but to play hardball because Republicans are already doing it and, in any case, are going to continue doing it.
David Faris
The Republicans are already fighting court wars, and they’re winning. Obviously, the Merrick Garland story speaks for itself, but they also held up Obama’s judicial nominees throughout his entire term in office, including hardly allowing him to appoint anyone to the federal courts in his last few years, after they took the Senate.
So yeah, we’ve got to play hardball. And there are other things we could do that might be less inflammatory, like amending the Constitution to eliminate lifetime tenure on the courts.
That might actually lower the temperature around this issue and make the stakes for presidential elections a little less existential.
Sean Illing
I don’t really disagree with your logic, but doesn’t this spiral of norm-violating give you pause? I get that this is a war Republicans are already waging, and it’s near suicidal for Democrats to ignore that. But I wonder what the end game is here.
David Faris
We’re in the midst of a slow-motion unraveling of democracy in this country. If we don’t return the favor with some of this procedural war stuff, the only other option is to continue watching the other side do it. That’s not an acceptable option in my opinion.
I don’t think we can restore order by respecting rules that are not respected by Republicans. I do believe we’ll have to find a way to end this procedural war at some point, but now is not that time. Republicans need to know what it’s like to be on the other end of normative violations. The Republicans are behaving like a party that believes it will never be held accountable for anything they’re doing, and so far they haven’t been.
That has to change before we can fix this mess.
“The Republicans are behaving like a party that believes it will never be held accountable.”
By Sean Illing
In September 2016, an anonymous conservative writer published an essay called “The Flight 93 Election.”
The title was a reference to the one hijacked flight on 9/11 that didn’t reach its destination because passengers overwhelmed the hijackers and brought the plane down.
The logic of the essay was simple enough: The prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency was so positively ruinous that conservatives had no choice but to support Donald Trump — no matter how awful or incompetent he appeared to be. The stakes were simply too high.
Until now, there was no left-wing equivalent to the “Flight 93” essay, no rallying cry that urged Democrats and liberals to do whatever is necessary to win. But David Faris’s new book, It’s Time to Fight Dirty, is the closest anyone has come so far.
Faris, a political scientist at Roosevelt University, argues that the Democratic Party must recognize that Republicans aren’t engaged in a policy fight; instead, they’re waging a “procedural war.”
What he means is that Republicans have spent the past two decades exploiting the vagueness of the Constitution to create structural advantages for their side — passing discriminatory voter ID laws, using the census to gerrymander districts, blocking Democratic Supreme Court nominees, and so on.
Faris writes Democrats have to recognize this reality and act accordingly, especially now that the Republicans are poised to conquer the Supreme Court for a generation. I reached out to him to find out what, exactly, he has in mind.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Your book feels like the left-wing equivalent of the “Flight 93” essay — an urgent Democratic call to arms. Is that how you see it?
David Faris
Yeah, I think so. We’re at a very dangerous moment in American history. There’s been a massive erosion of trust in public institutions and in the broader electoral process. The Trump administration has been disastrously disruptive to the norms of our political culture.
We’re also in a very dangerous moment for the planet, and I worry that we’re sleepwalking into a series of crises that we’ll have to deal with for a very long time, that our kids will have to deal with for a very long time. So yes, I am sort of sounding the alarm, and I think Democrats have to recognize the urgency of the moment and act accordingly.
Am I in “charge the cockpit or die” mode? I don’t know, but I do think our predicament justifies some serious procedural hardball from the Democrats.
Sean Illing
Well, let’s talk about the Democrats. There are roughly three competing visions within the party about how to move forward: 1) Go the way of Bernie Sanders and appeal to working-class voters with progressive policy ideas; 2) go the centrist route in a bid to grab moderate, suburban independents and Republicans who might have voted for Trump but can be persuaded to jump ship; or 3) double down on the 2008 and 2012 strategies and hope to recreate the Obama coalition of women, minorities, and young people.
You say all these are nonstarters — why?
David Faris
I think Democrats should have this debate, but my point is that no policy platform is going to win three or four consecutive national elections for Democrats because we know policy isn’t what decides elections; that’s not how most voters make decisions.
So there are no policy changes that are going to reverse the overall trajectory that this society is on right now. We have to address some of the structural barriers to progressive power in this country, and we need to take those things as seriously as we do the policy fights within the party.
Sean Illing
I definitely want to get into some of these structural barriers, but let’s be clear about this point you’re making. A lot of people still think there’s some meaningful connection between policy outcomes and voter decisions, but there’s a good bit of political science research to suggest that’s just a fantasy.
David Faris
Right. People just don’t seem to make the connection between policies and the party in power.
So, for example, the Democrats passed Obamacare and gave millions of people heath care, and yet tons of people who benefited from it have no idea what it is or how they benefited. And it’s like that with a lot of policies — voters simply don’t connect the dots, and so they reward or punish the wrong party.
I think the idea that we’re going to deliver these benefits to people and they’re going to be like, “Thank you Jesus, thank you for everything that you’ve done, let me return you with a larger majority next time,” is just nonsense. It’s the wrong way to think about politics.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do things for people, but we’ve got to be serious about how elections are won. And they’re not being won on the basis of policy proposals or policy wins.
Sean Illing
In the book, you say that Democrats are engaged in “policy fights” and Republicans are waging a “procedural war.” What does that mean?
David Faris
The Constitution is a shockingly short document, and it turns out that it’s extremely vague on some key procedures that we rely on to help government function at a basic level. For the government to work, cooperation between parties is needed. But when that cooperation is withdrawn, it creates chaos.
Since the ’90s, when Newt Gingrich took over Congress, we’ve seen a one-sided escalation in which Republicans exploit the vagueness or lack of clarity in the Constitution in order to press their advantage in a variety of arenas — from voter ID laws to gerrymandering to behavioral norms in the Congress and Senate.
Sean Illing
What the Republicans did to Merrick Garland was one of the most egregious examples I’ve ever seen.
David Faris
Right. They essentially stole a seat on the Supreme Court — a swing seat, no less. But they correctly argued that they had no clear constitutional obligation to consider the president’s nominee for the seat. They didn’t violate the Constitution. They violated the spirit of the Constitution. They violated the norms that have allowed these institutions to function normally for years and years.
This is the sort of maneuvering and procedural warfare I’m talking about, and the Republicans have been escalating it for two decades. And they’ve managed to entrench their power through these dubious procedures.
The result is that the structural environment is biased against Democrats and the Republicans have engineered it that way.
Sean Illing
Let’s dive into some of your proposed solutions. For starters, you think Democrats should break California up into seven states. Why?
David Faris
I don’t think the architects of the Constitution understood that population dynamics would create a state like California with 38 million people, and then a bunch of states like the Dakotas and Wyoming and Vermont and Delaware that have very small populations.
The end result is that voters in California and New York and Texas are systematically disadvantaged in national policy relative to their counterparts in smaller, rural states. It’s absurd that California and Delaware should have the same number of senators.
Given the current system, Democratic-leaning states, which contain far more people, are rarely going to be represented in the Senate. That’s not fair or democratic, and we shouldn’t accept it, especially with the current horror show in the White House.
Sean Illing
It’s extremely unlikely that this will ever happen, but tell me how it would play out if it did.
David Faris
Technically, from a constitutional standpoint, all it would require is an act of the California state legislature, signed by the governor of California, and then accepted by Congress.
So here’s what we need to happen: A referendum on breaking the state up into smaller states passes, and then it’s validated by the state legislature and then the governor, who would obviously need to be a Democrat, signs it, and finally, a Democrat-controlled Congress makes it official.
This is not as crazy an idea as people think. There have been several attempts to do it in California already, and you can make a pretty strong argument that the state is far too large to be ruled from Sacramento.
And if Californians managed to pull it off, we’d likely have another 12 Democratic senators in Washington, or at least more than we have now. More Electoral College votes too.
Sean Illing
Tell me about some other “dirty” tactics you recommend in the book.
David Faris
I think they should grant statehood to DC and Puerto Rico. Both states have held referenda that endorsed statehood. We have millions of Americans right now who have no representation in Congress.
To me, it’s just unquestionably the right thing to do. We should grant people the representation they want and deserve, and it just happens that doing so would almost certainly send four more Democrats into the Senate, and probably an all-Democratic congressional delegation from Puerto Rico too.
Sean Illing
You also think the Democrats should kill the filibuster, right?
David Faris
Yeah, I think they should eliminate the filibuster in the first month of the next Democratic administration, if it even survives that long. I think it’s another anti-democratic procedure in the Senate. We already have a constitutional framework that is deliberately difficult to work around to get policy change, and then you add a supermajority requirement in one of the two national legislatures? It’s just bananas. There’s no other country on the face of the earth that has a supermajority requirement to make routine legislation.
Sean Illing
You write, as well, that Democrats should start packing the courts with as many left-leaning judges as possible.
David Faris
The Constitution doesn’t say how many Supreme Court justices we should have, and we have not always had nine. Up until the mid-19th century, it was routine for the number of justices to change based on the whims of Congress, so it’s not unprecedented.
The way I look at it, Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections. I went back and added up all the votes for the US Senate since 1992, and Democrats have won 30 million more votes over that time period. I think the American people have pretty clearly expressed their desire to have Democrats staff the federal judiciary, and yet, due to the Republicans’ procedural tactics, they’ve not been able to do that.
Sean Illing
This is another one of those areas where you think the Democrats really have no choice but to play hardball because Republicans are already doing it and, in any case, are going to continue doing it.
David Faris
The Republicans are already fighting court wars, and they’re winning. Obviously, the Merrick Garland story speaks for itself, but they also held up Obama’s judicial nominees throughout his entire term in office, including hardly allowing him to appoint anyone to the federal courts in his last few years, after they took the Senate.
So yeah, we’ve got to play hardball. And there are other things we could do that might be less inflammatory, like amending the Constitution to eliminate lifetime tenure on the courts.
That might actually lower the temperature around this issue and make the stakes for presidential elections a little less existential.
Sean Illing
I don’t really disagree with your logic, but doesn’t this spiral of norm-violating give you pause? I get that this is a war Republicans are already waging, and it’s near suicidal for Democrats to ignore that. But I wonder what the end game is here.
David Faris
We’re in the midst of a slow-motion unraveling of democracy in this country. If we don’t return the favor with some of this procedural war stuff, the only other option is to continue watching the other side do it. That’s not an acceptable option in my opinion.
I don’t think we can restore order by respecting rules that are not respected by Republicans. I do believe we’ll have to find a way to end this procedural war at some point, but now is not that time. Republicans need to know what it’s like to be on the other end of normative violations. The Republicans are behaving like a party that believes it will never be held accountable for anything they’re doing, and so far they haven’t been.
That has to change before we can fix this mess.
Two-thirds
Two-thirds of Americans oppose rolling back Roe v. Wade
Both women and men agree.
By Li Zhou
An overwhelming proportion of Americans oppose rolling back Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that guarantees a woman’s right to an abortion, according to a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The poll — which was conducted prior to the announcement of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement — found that about two-thirds of Americans do not think Roe v. Wade should be overturned, with roughly the same percentage of men and women expressing this viewpoint. The results are a bit more stratified along party lines, with 81 percent of Democrats agreeing that the decision should stay intact, while just 43 percent of Republicans do.
The preservation of Roe v. Wade has been chief among the concerns that Democrats have expressed following the announcement of Kennedy’s departure, a move that is expected to shift the court further to the right.
As Vox’s Dylan Matthews writes, Kennedy’s decision to step down means the court will likely have the votes to chisel away at the protections offered by Roe — or even overturn the decision wholesale.
Although he’s a conservative, Kennedy was a pivotal swing vote on the high court — siding with liberals on numerous abortion cases, including Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed Roe in 1992. More recently, Kennedy also voted with the Democrats in favor of striking down Texas regulations on abortion clinics.
Undoing Roe is not that simple, of course. Here’s Matthews’s breakdown:
This may take years after the replacement’s confirmation; a state would need to pass a law clearly incompatible with the Court’s existing approach to abortion rights and wait for the challenge to reach the Supreme Court before the new justice would have a chance to join a ruling. The anti-abortion movement might choose a more cautious strategy, instead chipping away at Roe with measures that fall short of outright bans.
As University of Florida law professor Nancy Dowd tells Vox, public sentiment is one unknown that could play a role in drumming up opposition to such efforts — or at the very least, slowing them down. “One unknown to add to the mix is the response of women, who are most deeply affected,” she says. “Even women opposed to abortion find the existence of the right important to them in particular circumstances, or would afford this to women who feel differently.”
Democratic senators are already trying to appeal to the potent attachment people have to abortion rights as one means of pushing a Kennedy replacement who’s closer to the center, according to Politico.
If two-thirds of voters see this as an issue at the polls, it’s possible lawmakers could think twice about backing a candidate who intends to launch an outright attack on the decision.
Both women and men agree.
By Li Zhou
An overwhelming proportion of Americans oppose rolling back Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that guarantees a woman’s right to an abortion, according to a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The poll — which was conducted prior to the announcement of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement — found that about two-thirds of Americans do not think Roe v. Wade should be overturned, with roughly the same percentage of men and women expressing this viewpoint. The results are a bit more stratified along party lines, with 81 percent of Democrats agreeing that the decision should stay intact, while just 43 percent of Republicans do.
The preservation of Roe v. Wade has been chief among the concerns that Democrats have expressed following the announcement of Kennedy’s departure, a move that is expected to shift the court further to the right.
As Vox’s Dylan Matthews writes, Kennedy’s decision to step down means the court will likely have the votes to chisel away at the protections offered by Roe — or even overturn the decision wholesale.
Although he’s a conservative, Kennedy was a pivotal swing vote on the high court — siding with liberals on numerous abortion cases, including Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed Roe in 1992. More recently, Kennedy also voted with the Democrats in favor of striking down Texas regulations on abortion clinics.
Undoing Roe is not that simple, of course. Here’s Matthews’s breakdown:
This may take years after the replacement’s confirmation; a state would need to pass a law clearly incompatible with the Court’s existing approach to abortion rights and wait for the challenge to reach the Supreme Court before the new justice would have a chance to join a ruling. The anti-abortion movement might choose a more cautious strategy, instead chipping away at Roe with measures that fall short of outright bans.
As University of Florida law professor Nancy Dowd tells Vox, public sentiment is one unknown that could play a role in drumming up opposition to such efforts — or at the very least, slowing them down. “One unknown to add to the mix is the response of women, who are most deeply affected,” she says. “Even women opposed to abortion find the existence of the right important to them in particular circumstances, or would afford this to women who feel differently.”
Democratic senators are already trying to appeal to the potent attachment people have to abortion rights as one means of pushing a Kennedy replacement who’s closer to the center, according to Politico.
If two-thirds of voters see this as an issue at the polls, it’s possible lawmakers could think twice about backing a candidate who intends to launch an outright attack on the decision.
Messier 24: Sagittarius Star Cloud
Unlike most entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog of deep sky objects, M24 is not a bright galaxy, star cluster, or nebula. It's a gap in nearby, obscuring interstellar dust clouds that allows a view of the distant stars in the Sagittarius spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. When you gaze at the star cloud with binoculars or small telescope you are looking through a window over 300 light-years wide at stars some 10,000 light-years or more from Earth. Sometimes called the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud, M24's luminous stars fill the left side of this gorgeous starscape. Covering about 4 degrees or the width of 8 full moons in the constellation Sagittarius, the telescopic field of view contains many small, dense clouds of dust and nebulae toward the center of the Milky Way, including reddish emission from IC 1284 near the top of the frame.
Devastating
“This Is Devastating”: a Top Reproductive Health Researcher Talks About Kennedy’s Retirement
“There is the opportunity now for the US Supreme Court to take the case and roll back abortion rights. They would have a lot of leeway.”
BECCA ANDREWS
Now that Justice Anthony Kennedy has announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, vacating a seat that the Trump administration and conservatives in Congress are excited to fill, the future of abortion rights is in serious jeopardy. While the conservative justice has ruled to uphold abortion restrictions over his career, he has long been a stalwart defender of Roe as a constitutional certainty.
The last time a major abortion rights case was heard before the Supreme Court was in 2016, when Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt was argued—a suit over two Texas restrictions that required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and that clinics have facilities comparable to ambulatory surgical centers. In a 5-3 decision, the Court ruled that the restrictions placed a substantial, undue burden on women who seek abortions, and therefore violate the Constitution, thus striking down the state’s provisions and handing a win to the plaintiff, a Texas organization that runs seven abortion clinics in the state. But with a second seat about to be filled by another Trump-appointee, the balance is changing. And the several states that have been pushing abortion restrictions for years, many of which are now working their way through the lower courts, are undoubtedly eager to test a new justice who almost certainly will not wholly protect Roe.
Just after Wednesday’s retirement news, we called up Elizabeth Nash from the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that researches reproductive health, to hear what an impending Supreme Court shift could mean for abortion rights in America.
Mother Jones: What was top of mind for you when you heard the news of Justice Kennedy’s retirement?
Elizabeth Nash: My immediate thought was it was devastating—with the loss of Kennedy, we’re looking at a much more conservative US Supreme Court, and on abortion rights, specifically, we could be looking at some real rollbacks. We had a 5-3 decision in Whole Woman’s Health, and that decision was incredibly important for so many reasons, including that it pushed back against abortion restrictions generally, not just the two restrictions that were struck down in Texas. And now we have many cases winding their way through the court system, whether they’re on bans on abortions at 15 weeks, such as in Mississippi, or bans on specific methods of abortion in places like Texas and Arkansas and Alabama. With those cases, assuming that they make it to the Supreme Court, there is the opportunity now for the US Supreme Court to take the case and roll back abortion rights—either some abortion rights or all abortion rights. They would have a lot of leeway.
MJ: How do you anticipate anti-abortion state legislators will respond to the likely shift on the Court? Do you think this will embolden them?
EN: I think in a lot of state legislatures, we will see a lot of action around abortion restrictions. There was already action this year in Iowa, where a new law that bans abortion at about six weeks of pregnancy was enacted. Some of the rhetoric around the enactment of that law was not only about banning abortion, but about a challenge to Roe v. Wade. [The authors of the law] were expecting a court case and they welcome that court case, because the anticipation was that the Supreme Court would look very different by the time it made its way up there. And by looking different, I mean being a more conservative court that’s more likely to uphold abortion restrictions.
MJ: What are the most common restrictions you’ve seen come out of state legislatures that signal this approach?
EN: We’ve seen even more extreme legislation in Mississippi’s 15-week ban or Iowa’s six-week ban or bans on some methods of abortion, such as in Kentucky and Texas. But we’re also seeing a shift in the approach that abortion opponents are taking to legislation. One approach had been to say that abortion restrictions are necessary because the state has an interest in protecting the woman’s health. Ever since the decision in Whole Woman’s Health came out, which said those Texas restrictions didn’t do anything to benefit women’s health, we’re now seeing abortion opponents saying the state has an interest in fetal life. They’re making that shift, a distinction so that potentially there could be a way to uphold a restriction, because instead of being predicated on protecting a woman’s health, it’s now about protecting fetal life.
Primarily, we’ve been seeing a bit of a dip in the number of abortion restrictions enacted in 2018. But we are still seeing these very extreme restrictions moving through state legislatures and with the potential shift at the Supreme Court now, we could see more of an uptick in the number of abortion restrictions at the state level.
MJ: The shift in language regarding protecting women’s health is interesting, and pretty bold.
EN: Yeah, it’s a way to get around the Whole Woman’s Health decision by taking a different tactic. We’ve also seen some conservative judges preserve abortion restrictions. We saw the Eighth Circuit uphold an abortion restriction in Arkansas that required a provider of medication abortions to have a contract with another provider who has admitting privileges at a hospital. That restriction was upheld, in part because the Eighth Circuit said there wasn’t enough evidence presented that women were going to be harmed in Arkansas. That’s really turning the Whole Woman’s Health decision on its head. [Editor’s note: Justice Stephen Breyer’s Whole Woman’s Health majority opinion points out that the state was unable to prove that its abortion restrictions improved the health of any woman in Texas.] We’re also seeing judges stepping into this debate as well, and the retirement of Justice Kennedy is really adding some fuel to the fire.
MJ: Which states do you think would be most affected by a potential ruling overturning Roe and why?
EN: If we assume that a court case makes it up to the US Supreme Court and they take it, it could result in an overturning of Roe or it could result in an undermining of Roe rather than an outright overturn. That would really exacerbate what we’re seeing already. We already know that abortion access and rights are incredibly limited in some states in the country—look at the South. In some states, there’s only one abortion clinic, and there are all kinds of restrictions on abortion. States like Texas and Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, all come to mind. States like North and South Dakota come to mind as places where it’s very difficult to access abortion already. In some places, like the Northeast and the West Coast, the laws are much more supportive for abortion rights. But if abortion rights are undermined or overturned in a court decision, we would see states have more leeway in adopting abortion restrictions. So the differences between states would be much more exacerbated, with some states taking it to the limit and enacting as many restrictions as they could and some states protecting access.
MJ: Talk to me a little bit about how trigger laws factor into all of this.
EN: So there are four states that have enacted what are known as “trigger laws.” These laws are essentially abortion bans with a delayed effective date—the effective date being when Roe v Wade is overturned. So in these four states— Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, and South Dakota—abortions would be banned if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned. We then have another subset of laws that have pre-Roe abortion bans on the books, which are abortion bans that were enacted before 1973 and were never repealed after Roe v. Wade. That’s in 10 states, and those states vary from places like Alabama to Massachusetts. Whether or not pre-Roe abortion bans could go into effect would depend on a lot of what is already going on in the state, like the legislators there and how hostile or supportive it is of abortion rights. It also depends on the makeup of the executive branch, including the governor and attorney general.
MJ: Is there any particular legislation that you think will be considered by the Supreme Court in the near future?
EN: There are a number of cases in the pipeline. There are two cases around abortion method bans that are further along than some other cases—a case in Texas, which has been appealed to the Fifth Circuit, and the case in Alabama that was heard before the 11th Circuit in May. Both of these cases would ban a method that’s typically used in the second trimester [known as the dilation and evacuation procedure]. If those bans were to go into effect, it could make it really hard to access abortions after 14 or 15 weeks. So having a successful challenge to these laws is incredibly important to maintain access at that point of pregnancy. Those two cases are the furthest along, so they’re the next that we could potentially see appealed up to the Supreme Court.
MJ: What else is on your mind right now?
EN: There are a lot of attacks on reproductive health and rights, not only at the state level, that have been ongoing for so many years, but we also are seeing so many attacks from the federal side—the attacks on Title X or attacks on insurance coverage or now this looming new potential makeup at the US Supreme Court.
“There is the opportunity now for the US Supreme Court to take the case and roll back abortion rights. They would have a lot of leeway.”
BECCA ANDREWS
Now that Justice Anthony Kennedy has announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, vacating a seat that the Trump administration and conservatives in Congress are excited to fill, the future of abortion rights is in serious jeopardy. While the conservative justice has ruled to uphold abortion restrictions over his career, he has long been a stalwart defender of Roe as a constitutional certainty.
The last time a major abortion rights case was heard before the Supreme Court was in 2016, when Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt was argued—a suit over two Texas restrictions that required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and that clinics have facilities comparable to ambulatory surgical centers. In a 5-3 decision, the Court ruled that the restrictions placed a substantial, undue burden on women who seek abortions, and therefore violate the Constitution, thus striking down the state’s provisions and handing a win to the plaintiff, a Texas organization that runs seven abortion clinics in the state. But with a second seat about to be filled by another Trump-appointee, the balance is changing. And the several states that have been pushing abortion restrictions for years, many of which are now working their way through the lower courts, are undoubtedly eager to test a new justice who almost certainly will not wholly protect Roe.
Just after Wednesday’s retirement news, we called up Elizabeth Nash from the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that researches reproductive health, to hear what an impending Supreme Court shift could mean for abortion rights in America.
Mother Jones: What was top of mind for you when you heard the news of Justice Kennedy’s retirement?
Elizabeth Nash: My immediate thought was it was devastating—with the loss of Kennedy, we’re looking at a much more conservative US Supreme Court, and on abortion rights, specifically, we could be looking at some real rollbacks. We had a 5-3 decision in Whole Woman’s Health, and that decision was incredibly important for so many reasons, including that it pushed back against abortion restrictions generally, not just the two restrictions that were struck down in Texas. And now we have many cases winding their way through the court system, whether they’re on bans on abortions at 15 weeks, such as in Mississippi, or bans on specific methods of abortion in places like Texas and Arkansas and Alabama. With those cases, assuming that they make it to the Supreme Court, there is the opportunity now for the US Supreme Court to take the case and roll back abortion rights—either some abortion rights or all abortion rights. They would have a lot of leeway.
MJ: How do you anticipate anti-abortion state legislators will respond to the likely shift on the Court? Do you think this will embolden them?
EN: I think in a lot of state legislatures, we will see a lot of action around abortion restrictions. There was already action this year in Iowa, where a new law that bans abortion at about six weeks of pregnancy was enacted. Some of the rhetoric around the enactment of that law was not only about banning abortion, but about a challenge to Roe v. Wade. [The authors of the law] were expecting a court case and they welcome that court case, because the anticipation was that the Supreme Court would look very different by the time it made its way up there. And by looking different, I mean being a more conservative court that’s more likely to uphold abortion restrictions.
MJ: What are the most common restrictions you’ve seen come out of state legislatures that signal this approach?
EN: We’ve seen even more extreme legislation in Mississippi’s 15-week ban or Iowa’s six-week ban or bans on some methods of abortion, such as in Kentucky and Texas. But we’re also seeing a shift in the approach that abortion opponents are taking to legislation. One approach had been to say that abortion restrictions are necessary because the state has an interest in protecting the woman’s health. Ever since the decision in Whole Woman’s Health came out, which said those Texas restrictions didn’t do anything to benefit women’s health, we’re now seeing abortion opponents saying the state has an interest in fetal life. They’re making that shift, a distinction so that potentially there could be a way to uphold a restriction, because instead of being predicated on protecting a woman’s health, it’s now about protecting fetal life.
Primarily, we’ve been seeing a bit of a dip in the number of abortion restrictions enacted in 2018. But we are still seeing these very extreme restrictions moving through state legislatures and with the potential shift at the Supreme Court now, we could see more of an uptick in the number of abortion restrictions at the state level.
MJ: The shift in language regarding protecting women’s health is interesting, and pretty bold.
EN: Yeah, it’s a way to get around the Whole Woman’s Health decision by taking a different tactic. We’ve also seen some conservative judges preserve abortion restrictions. We saw the Eighth Circuit uphold an abortion restriction in Arkansas that required a provider of medication abortions to have a contract with another provider who has admitting privileges at a hospital. That restriction was upheld, in part because the Eighth Circuit said there wasn’t enough evidence presented that women were going to be harmed in Arkansas. That’s really turning the Whole Woman’s Health decision on its head. [Editor’s note: Justice Stephen Breyer’s Whole Woman’s Health majority opinion points out that the state was unable to prove that its abortion restrictions improved the health of any woman in Texas.] We’re also seeing judges stepping into this debate as well, and the retirement of Justice Kennedy is really adding some fuel to the fire.
MJ: Which states do you think would be most affected by a potential ruling overturning Roe and why?
EN: If we assume that a court case makes it up to the US Supreme Court and they take it, it could result in an overturning of Roe or it could result in an undermining of Roe rather than an outright overturn. That would really exacerbate what we’re seeing already. We already know that abortion access and rights are incredibly limited in some states in the country—look at the South. In some states, there’s only one abortion clinic, and there are all kinds of restrictions on abortion. States like Texas and Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, all come to mind. States like North and South Dakota come to mind as places where it’s very difficult to access abortion already. In some places, like the Northeast and the West Coast, the laws are much more supportive for abortion rights. But if abortion rights are undermined or overturned in a court decision, we would see states have more leeway in adopting abortion restrictions. So the differences between states would be much more exacerbated, with some states taking it to the limit and enacting as many restrictions as they could and some states protecting access.
MJ: Talk to me a little bit about how trigger laws factor into all of this.
EN: So there are four states that have enacted what are known as “trigger laws.” These laws are essentially abortion bans with a delayed effective date—the effective date being when Roe v Wade is overturned. So in these four states— Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, and South Dakota—abortions would be banned if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned. We then have another subset of laws that have pre-Roe abortion bans on the books, which are abortion bans that were enacted before 1973 and were never repealed after Roe v. Wade. That’s in 10 states, and those states vary from places like Alabama to Massachusetts. Whether or not pre-Roe abortion bans could go into effect would depend on a lot of what is already going on in the state, like the legislators there and how hostile or supportive it is of abortion rights. It also depends on the makeup of the executive branch, including the governor and attorney general.
MJ: Is there any particular legislation that you think will be considered by the Supreme Court in the near future?
EN: There are a number of cases in the pipeline. There are two cases around abortion method bans that are further along than some other cases—a case in Texas, which has been appealed to the Fifth Circuit, and the case in Alabama that was heard before the 11th Circuit in May. Both of these cases would ban a method that’s typically used in the second trimester [known as the dilation and evacuation procedure]. If those bans were to go into effect, it could make it really hard to access abortions after 14 or 15 weeks. So having a successful challenge to these laws is incredibly important to maintain access at that point of pregnancy. Those two cases are the furthest along, so they’re the next that we could potentially see appealed up to the Supreme Court.
MJ: What else is on your mind right now?
EN: There are a lot of attacks on reproductive health and rights, not only at the state level, that have been ongoing for so many years, but we also are seeing so many attacks from the federal side—the attacks on Title X or attacks on insurance coverage or now this looming new potential makeup at the US Supreme Court.
Take it from him and shuv it up his ass..
Stacey Abrams Schools Republicans on Guns During a Pointed Interview with Seth Meyers
“As someone who learned how to shoot when I was growing up in Mississippi, the first thing you learn is you don’t do that.”
JAMILAH KING
Brian Kemp, who is vying to be Georgia’s next governor, really wants everyone to know he is a hardcore Republican and he really likes guns.
But that doesn’t mean he knows how to actually handle them—at least, he doesn’t according to Stacey Abrams, the Democrat running against him (and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle until a Republican run off next month).
Kemp has made something of a national name for himself thanks to a series of over-the-top TV ads. One features him playing up the biggest tropes of Trumpian conservatives: threatening to catch migrants at the border in his pick-up truck, promising to take a “chainsaw to government regulation,” and posing with a small arsenal of pistols and shot guns.
Another notorious ad features Kemp playing the all-American protective dad confronting a poor dude named Jake, a clean-cut white guy who has designs for one of his daughters.
In the ad, Kemp points a gun at Jake as her nervously sits in a chair next to him—a theme the candidate returned to in another ad featuring Jake that was released this week.
But Abrams, on Late Night With Seth Meyers Tuesday, couldn’t help but point out how ridiculous his behavior is, and not necessarily in the way you’d think. Unlike Kemp, Abrams is a staunch advocate of gun safety, aiming to limit access to assault rifles and expand government regulation over the sale of other firearms. But, unlike Kemp, she says, she also knows how to behave with a gun.
“As someone who learned how to shoot when I was growing up in Mississippi, the first thing you learn is you don’t do that. That Firearm 101 is you don’t do that,” Abrams told Meyers. “That Firearm 101 is don’t point it at people, because Firearm 102 is you go to prison.
“So you keep it pointed down … it is an interesting approach to try to convince people they can trust you with their lives.”
“As someone who learned how to shoot when I was growing up in Mississippi, the first thing you learn is you don’t do that.”
JAMILAH KING
Brian Kemp, who is vying to be Georgia’s next governor, really wants everyone to know he is a hardcore Republican and he really likes guns.
But that doesn’t mean he knows how to actually handle them—at least, he doesn’t according to Stacey Abrams, the Democrat running against him (and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle until a Republican run off next month).
Kemp has made something of a national name for himself thanks to a series of over-the-top TV ads. One features him playing up the biggest tropes of Trumpian conservatives: threatening to catch migrants at the border in his pick-up truck, promising to take a “chainsaw to government regulation,” and posing with a small arsenal of pistols and shot guns.
Another notorious ad features Kemp playing the all-American protective dad confronting a poor dude named Jake, a clean-cut white guy who has designs for one of his daughters.
In the ad, Kemp points a gun at Jake as her nervously sits in a chair next to him—a theme the candidate returned to in another ad featuring Jake that was released this week.
But Abrams, on Late Night With Seth Meyers Tuesday, couldn’t help but point out how ridiculous his behavior is, and not necessarily in the way you’d think. Unlike Kemp, Abrams is a staunch advocate of gun safety, aiming to limit access to assault rifles and expand government regulation over the sale of other firearms. But, unlike Kemp, she says, she also knows how to behave with a gun.
“As someone who learned how to shoot when I was growing up in Mississippi, the first thing you learn is you don’t do that. That Firearm 101 is you don’t do that,” Abrams told Meyers. “That Firearm 101 is don’t point it at people, because Firearm 102 is you go to prison.
“So you keep it pointed down … it is an interesting approach to try to convince people they can trust you with their lives.”
Biggest Headache
Bayer Bought Monsanto and Is Now Stuck With its Biggest Headache
A blockbuster herbicide is still causing trouble across farm country.
TOM PHILPOTT
It’s happening again. In states from Mississippi to Indiana, some US soybean farmers are seeing a troubling sight: Previously healthy plants begin to look wan, their leaves puckering into a cup-like shape. Similar symptoms are hitting trees, ornamental and garden plants, flowers, berries, and vegetables.
If the story sounds familiar, that’s because cupped leaves and the angry farmers who tend them are emerging as a recurring summer saga in the Heartland, as swaths of land are exposed to errant mists of the potent herbicide dicamba. The pesticide is marketed by Monsanto, the erstwhile US seed/pesticide giant which will soon be subsumed into German chemical behemoth Bayer. And as Bayer integrates Monsanto, it’s also inheriting the smaller company’s dicamba mess.
For three years now, Monsanto has been hotly marketing a product called Roundup Ready 2 Xtend—soybean seeds genetically tweaked to produce crops that can withstand both dicamba and another herbicide, glyphosate (Roundup). The company’s “Roundup Ready” glyphosate-tolerant crops, released in the mid-1990s, became so ubiquitous in US farm country, and the chemical became so widely used, that weeds evolved to withstand it. Now, the company is pitching its dicamba-ready seeds as the answer to the declining effectiveness of its glyphosate-tolerant products.
Until 2016, dicamba was seldom used on farms after May, because by then, crops have fully emerged from the ground, and they’d be vulnerable to dicamba. But there was also another good reason not to spray it in high summer: In hot weather, dicamba is prone to volatizing—that is, turning into a gas and moving in the air to nearby fields, where it can cause unintended damage.
Engineering crops to be resistant to dicamba solved the first problem. To address the second one, Monsanto came up with a dicamba formulation—called “VaporGrip”—it said would be much less volatile than the old versions.
In 2016, the company debuted its Roundup Ready 2 Xtend soybeans seeds, and pioneering farmers planted the dicamba-ready legumes on about about 1 million acres—a tiny portion of the 85-90 million acres typically devoted to the crop. The catch was that the EPA had not yet approved the new VaporGrip dicamba mix, and the older formulations were not approved for use during the hot summer months. So farmers who bought the seeds weren’t supposed to spray dicamba on the resulting crops—something Monsanto says it made clear to buyers. But some of them apparently did so anyway, because neighboring landowners began to complain about damage to their own crops. In early August of that year, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it had gotten an “unusually high number of reports of crop damage that appear related to misuse of herbicides containing the active ingredient dicamba.”
By planting time in 2017, the EPA had given the green light to Monsanto’s “Vaporgrip” dicamba mix. Farmers went wild for the dicamba-tolerant soybeans, planting them on 20 million acres. By June, once again, reports of damage crops began rolling in. By the end of the growing season, more than 3.5 million acres of soybeans in more than 20 states had been damaged, as well as untold acres of shrubs, trees, vegetables, and lawns. Kevin Bradley, a University of Missouri weed scientist who tracked the destruction nationwide, was stunned. “In my opinion,” he wrote in August 2017, “we have never seen anything like this before; this is not like the introduction of Roundup Ready or any other new trait or technology in our agricultural history.”
Monsanto, for its part, denied responsibility, blaming the problem on farmers who had failed to apply dicamba as directed on the product’s notoriously complex and restrictive label. Weed scientists at universities throughout the south and Midwest argued that the chemical is extremely tricky to hold in place during the hot summer months, regardless of formulation. By December, several states had placed limits on dicamba use, ranging from Arkansas’ ban on applying the chemical after April 16 to Missouri’s ban after July 15.
The Trump EPA, not exactly known for its harsh regulation of pesticides, moved in October 2017 to require that the new dicamba formulation can only be sprayed by trained applicators, and also further tightened label restrictions (for example, it can now only be applied when wind speeds are below 10 mph, vs. 15 mph previously). The administration also planned to “monitor the success of these changes to help inform our decision whether to allow the continued over-the-top use of dicamba beyond the 2018 growing season.” Translation: If the off-target damage problem doesn’t end, the agency will consider revoking its approval of Monsanto’s dicamba formulation.
That would be a blow to Monsanto, which in 2016 announced a $975 million project to expand its dicamba plant in Luling, Louisiana. In an October 2017 note to investors, the company projected that its dicamba-ready soybeans would ultimately conquer 80 million acres of farmland, delivering the company at least $5 per acre in revenue more than current varieties—a windfall of $400 million annually.
So there’s lots of money riding on whether dicamba stays where it’s intended to this year. Early results aren’t looking great, according to weed scientists. In a June 21 post, the University of Missouri’s Bradley reported that “as of June 15th, university weed scientists estimate that there are approximately 383,000 acres of soybeans injured by dicamba thus far in 2018.” Other crops, too, are showing signs of damage, he reports:
I have personally witnessed this increasing problem of off-target dicamba injury to “other” crops and tree species in the calls I have received, field visits, and “windshield surveys” of Missouri that I have taken the past few weeks, especially when driving around southeast Missouri last week.
To get Monsanto’s perspective, I talked to Ryan Rubischko, the company’s North America dicamba portfolio lead. “From an overall standpoint, the feedback we’re getting [from growers] is quite positive,” he said. Rubischko noted that more than 94,000 herbicide applicators had gone through special training for chemical application since the 2017 growing season. And the company has set up a hotline to take reports of suspected off-target damage—and only 55 have come in so far, Rubischko said. Every one of them, he added, proved on investigation to be not the company’s fault—but rather damage caused by an applicator who failed to follow the dicamba label, or by another cause altogether.
Like last year, the company appears to be on a collision course with independent scientists over its blockbuster pesticide. And now it’s Bayer, a chemical company most famous in the United States for its aspirin, that will inherit the headache. For dicamba-using farmers and their neighbors, 2018 is shaping up to be yet another long, hot summer.
A blockbuster herbicide is still causing trouble across farm country.
TOM PHILPOTT
It’s happening again. In states from Mississippi to Indiana, some US soybean farmers are seeing a troubling sight: Previously healthy plants begin to look wan, their leaves puckering into a cup-like shape. Similar symptoms are hitting trees, ornamental and garden plants, flowers, berries, and vegetables.
If the story sounds familiar, that’s because cupped leaves and the angry farmers who tend them are emerging as a recurring summer saga in the Heartland, as swaths of land are exposed to errant mists of the potent herbicide dicamba. The pesticide is marketed by Monsanto, the erstwhile US seed/pesticide giant which will soon be subsumed into German chemical behemoth Bayer. And as Bayer integrates Monsanto, it’s also inheriting the smaller company’s dicamba mess.
For three years now, Monsanto has been hotly marketing a product called Roundup Ready 2 Xtend—soybean seeds genetically tweaked to produce crops that can withstand both dicamba and another herbicide, glyphosate (Roundup). The company’s “Roundup Ready” glyphosate-tolerant crops, released in the mid-1990s, became so ubiquitous in US farm country, and the chemical became so widely used, that weeds evolved to withstand it. Now, the company is pitching its dicamba-ready seeds as the answer to the declining effectiveness of its glyphosate-tolerant products.
Until 2016, dicamba was seldom used on farms after May, because by then, crops have fully emerged from the ground, and they’d be vulnerable to dicamba. But there was also another good reason not to spray it in high summer: In hot weather, dicamba is prone to volatizing—that is, turning into a gas and moving in the air to nearby fields, where it can cause unintended damage.
Engineering crops to be resistant to dicamba solved the first problem. To address the second one, Monsanto came up with a dicamba formulation—called “VaporGrip”—it said would be much less volatile than the old versions.
In 2016, the company debuted its Roundup Ready 2 Xtend soybeans seeds, and pioneering farmers planted the dicamba-ready legumes on about about 1 million acres—a tiny portion of the 85-90 million acres typically devoted to the crop. The catch was that the EPA had not yet approved the new VaporGrip dicamba mix, and the older formulations were not approved for use during the hot summer months. So farmers who bought the seeds weren’t supposed to spray dicamba on the resulting crops—something Monsanto says it made clear to buyers. But some of them apparently did so anyway, because neighboring landowners began to complain about damage to their own crops. In early August of that year, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it had gotten an “unusually high number of reports of crop damage that appear related to misuse of herbicides containing the active ingredient dicamba.”
By planting time in 2017, the EPA had given the green light to Monsanto’s “Vaporgrip” dicamba mix. Farmers went wild for the dicamba-tolerant soybeans, planting them on 20 million acres. By June, once again, reports of damage crops began rolling in. By the end of the growing season, more than 3.5 million acres of soybeans in more than 20 states had been damaged, as well as untold acres of shrubs, trees, vegetables, and lawns. Kevin Bradley, a University of Missouri weed scientist who tracked the destruction nationwide, was stunned. “In my opinion,” he wrote in August 2017, “we have never seen anything like this before; this is not like the introduction of Roundup Ready or any other new trait or technology in our agricultural history.”
Monsanto, for its part, denied responsibility, blaming the problem on farmers who had failed to apply dicamba as directed on the product’s notoriously complex and restrictive label. Weed scientists at universities throughout the south and Midwest argued that the chemical is extremely tricky to hold in place during the hot summer months, regardless of formulation. By December, several states had placed limits on dicamba use, ranging from Arkansas’ ban on applying the chemical after April 16 to Missouri’s ban after July 15.
The Trump EPA, not exactly known for its harsh regulation of pesticides, moved in October 2017 to require that the new dicamba formulation can only be sprayed by trained applicators, and also further tightened label restrictions (for example, it can now only be applied when wind speeds are below 10 mph, vs. 15 mph previously). The administration also planned to “monitor the success of these changes to help inform our decision whether to allow the continued over-the-top use of dicamba beyond the 2018 growing season.” Translation: If the off-target damage problem doesn’t end, the agency will consider revoking its approval of Monsanto’s dicamba formulation.
That would be a blow to Monsanto, which in 2016 announced a $975 million project to expand its dicamba plant in Luling, Louisiana. In an October 2017 note to investors, the company projected that its dicamba-ready soybeans would ultimately conquer 80 million acres of farmland, delivering the company at least $5 per acre in revenue more than current varieties—a windfall of $400 million annually.
So there’s lots of money riding on whether dicamba stays where it’s intended to this year. Early results aren’t looking great, according to weed scientists. In a June 21 post, the University of Missouri’s Bradley reported that “as of June 15th, university weed scientists estimate that there are approximately 383,000 acres of soybeans injured by dicamba thus far in 2018.” Other crops, too, are showing signs of damage, he reports:
I have personally witnessed this increasing problem of off-target dicamba injury to “other” crops and tree species in the calls I have received, field visits, and “windshield surveys” of Missouri that I have taken the past few weeks, especially when driving around southeast Missouri last week.
To get Monsanto’s perspective, I talked to Ryan Rubischko, the company’s North America dicamba portfolio lead. “From an overall standpoint, the feedback we’re getting [from growers] is quite positive,” he said. Rubischko noted that more than 94,000 herbicide applicators had gone through special training for chemical application since the 2017 growing season. And the company has set up a hotline to take reports of suspected off-target damage—and only 55 have come in so far, Rubischko said. Every one of them, he added, proved on investigation to be not the company’s fault—but rather damage caused by an applicator who failed to follow the dicamba label, or by another cause altogether.
Like last year, the company appears to be on a collision course with independent scientists over its blockbuster pesticide. And now it’s Bayer, a chemical company most famous in the United States for its aspirin, that will inherit the headache. For dicamba-using farmers and their neighbors, 2018 is shaping up to be yet another long, hot summer.
A brain is needed for that...
Donald Trump, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Danger of Not Learning From America’s Anti-Immigrant Past
A new curriculum is providing the opportunity to delve into the little-taught, now more-relevant-than-ever slice of history.
KANYAKRIT VONGKIATKAJORN
For about two hours at Oakland Technical High School last winter, Jah-Yee Woo worked with her 11th grade honors US history students to assemble a timeline. On its surface, the activity seemed simple—with students placing small, colorful pieces of paper on a poster. But each piece of paper marked a different immigration policy throughout history, placed above or below the line following student debate over whether the entry was inclusive or exclusive. Inclusive polices fell above the line, exclusionary ones below. On the left of one group’s timeline was a yellow note describing the 1790 Naturalization Act, one of the first laws establishing citizenship, but only for a “free white person.” It was placed below the line. Toward the far right was a photo of President Donald Trump displaying the text of his executive order banning citizens from several Muslim-majority countries. It, too, was below the line. “Exclusive,” one student wrote on a post-it next to Trump’s face.
The exercise was just one part of a larger new curriculum developed by Woo and other teachers in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) that’s centered on provocative but increasingly crucial questions as Trump cracks down on immigrants seeking to enter the country: Who gets to be included in America, and why?
The curriculum hinges specifically on an often little-explored slice of history, the Chinese Exclusion Act—an 1882 law that barred all Chinese nationals from entering the United States and from becoming citizens. One of the first pieces of federal legislation to exclude a race and nationality from immigration and citizenship, the law remained in place for more than 60 years. The textbook Woo uses for US history, however, doesn’t explore it very much. “It’s one paragraph,” she says. “It doesn’t really bring to life the stories and struggles of so many members of that community.” So Woo and her peers are turning to archival documents, interviews with experts, and, crucially, a new powerful documentary about the act—The Chinese Exclusion Act, directed by Ric Burns and Li-Shin Yu—that aired nationally on PBS last month to teach a rich history of the law and its effects on the Chinese community.
And while the curriculum and documentary were initially developed before Trump took office, the history’s parallels to today are striking, particularly as Trump’s travel ban becomes settled law. The documentary portrays how politicians used growing anti-immigrant sentiment and nativism to keep the act in place while advancing their own political agendas. The film calls into question the idea that America has always been welcoming to newcomers, tracing how Chinese groups were targeted by discriminatory laws and, in several instances, lynched and driven out of their communities. But it also brings to life how they attempted to resist the laws through hundreds of lawsuits.
“It’s clear we are living in a politically and culturally fractious time, with the very definition of ‘Who is American?’ being contested,” says Steven Gong, the executive director of the Center for Asian American Media, which co-produced the film. And, he adds, understanding the history of Chinese exclusion “provides important historical context to this debate…If we don’t tell the history and show how it’s done and what the implications are…you get it repeated.”
The effort first began about a year and a half ago, when the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) approached the Oakland school district about creating a curriculum specifically around Chinese Exclusion Act. The San Francisco-based nonprofit had already helped facilitate hundreds of community screenings for the film across the country and wanted to make sure it could be accessible to K-12 students. For Elizabeth Humphries, OUSD’s high school history specialist, the request was “an unintentional moment of synergy.” The district had recently gone through a textbook adoption process and, after reviewing many of the materials, knew there were clear gaps it needed to fill in its classes. “There’s still a fairly traditionally dominant narrative that’s being presented,” says Humphries, adding that there was also “a gap in representation of Asian Americans, even in world history classes.”
What’s more, OUSD had increasingly been hearing from its Asian students that they wanted to see themselves reflected in the curriculum. When the district conducted a survey of its ethnic studies students during the 2016-17 school year, it found that students who identified as Asian American, Arab American, or as multi-ethnic were the least likely to say they were learning about their own history and culture. These concerns were echoed again in a recent listening campaign conducted among Asian and Pacific Islander students last fall. “I think our API students have felt invisible and unseen for a really long time, and it absolutely impacts their confidence, their understanding of who they are and their role in the world,” says Lailan Huen, who directs the district’s Asian Pacific Islander Student Achievement initiative, a targeted support program for the district’s approximately 6,000 API students.
Of course, OUSD isn’t unique in this regard, or the first to recognize the lack of representation in school curricula. Communities of color have long called for their histories to be included in educational contexts, and today, students often learn about these histories in ethnic studies courses, where they examine traditionally underrepresented perspectives. Though ethnic studies is most often taught at the college level, there’s been a growing movement to bring the courses into K-12 classrooms—and even make them a requirement for graduation, including in some school districts in California. Ethnic studies didn’t always have such a welcome reception, though: In 2010, for instance, Arizona lawmakers banned some of the courses outright, claiming they stoked resentment. (A judge eventually blocked the law.)
Studies have shown that ethnic studies courses can generally improve student engagement and increase their sense of agency. A 2016 Stanford study of the San Francisco Unified School District’s ninth-grade ethnic studies curricula found that struggling students who took the courses improved their attendance and academic outcomes. “When you start to include marginalized narratives, particularly of people of color, it tells students, ‘Look these people are also important. We need to know this history. These are our histories,’” Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University who has worked on developing ethnic studies curricula, says. “When [students of color] don’t see themselves as important and as having value, it stunts their pursuits.”
It’s also important for students to get a chance to critically learn about racism and how it comes about, says Christine Sleeter, a professor emerita at California State University-Monterey Bay who is considered an expert on ethnic studies curriculum. Students, even at a young age, can pick up on racist attitudes around them but don’t often have a good explanation for them. “When schools try to open up questions of racism and exclusion, it can help [students] understand why things are the way they are and how to make things fairer,” says Sleeter.
With funding from CAAM, as well as help from the University of California-Berkeley’s Social Science-History Project, the district began developing the Chinese Exclusion Act lessons last summer. The teachers created four modules, each addressing a particular theme or question within the law’s history—one lesson asked students to analyze the anti-Chinese political cartoons in order to understand biases in sources; another delved into how attitudes toward Chinese Americans changed over time.
In another module, students learn about resistance to the Exclusion Act and examine the kinds of tactics, such as within the court system or through protests, that were effective at challenging injustice. One of the cases the students analyze is the Geary Act, a proposal to require Chinese nationals to register and carry identification cards or face arrest and deportation. Community groups banded together to file a legal challenge to the law, and as many as 85,000 Chinese nationals refused to register—one of the largest acts of mass civil disobedience in history.
Showing resistance was crucial to the lesson as it “is often the last thing we teach—it’s always about oppression,” says Becca Rozo-Marsh, a teacher at Oakland’s Coliseum College Prep Academy who also helped develop the lesson plans. When Marsh taught the lesson on resistance in her own classroom, where the majority of her students are Latino, she says they were generally engaged and able to draw connections to their own families’ immigrant stories. Many were also surprised to learn that Chinese groups had experienced violence and discrimination. “I think it was important for them to challenge these preconceived notions,” she says, “and to not feel isolated—to know that there are relatable struggles.” She drew connections between some of the survival strategies the Chinese used to try to escape exclusionary laws, such as refusing to register under the Geary Act or forging their identities in order to enter the country, to how communities do so today by using fake Social Security numbers to work and make a living. “There were hundreds of anti-Chinese laws, but there was constant resistance. We want students to think about the Chinese exclusion act as oppressive measures continue—that people continue to resist and survive,” she says.
Woo says she’s been encouraged by how some students have continued to use similar frameworks to analyze other movements—as well as connecting it to their own experiences. One 11th-grade student, who identifies as Asian American and Latinx, told Woo that learning about the resistance strategies “inspired me to think more about using inside and outside tactics in my own life.” Another student who identifies as Latinx told her the activity “gave me insight into how different racial groups were targeted. I always thought it was just Mexicans who were excluded, but I saw how other groups were treated before us.”
She is also optimistic that students can apply the lessons to their own lives, and interrogate how certain policy decisions get made. At the end of the timeline activity, Woo asked students whether they thought the US was moving toward a more inclusive or exclusive period of history. And though some of her students were pessimistic following Trump’s election, she also wanted them to take into account the resistance that was happening today. “Even though our current immigration policy and what’s being proposed is so disheartening, I think seeing that there are ways to fight it [is] important, so students don’t just feel the weight of history, but that they feel the possibility of history,” she says. Woo feels the film is particularly crucial for this deeper level of understanding: “The narrative piece helps with thinking about, ‘Oh, what were people actually thinking and doing. What were their motives?’ And that in turn can help students ask, ‘What are we thinking and doing now about problems that we face in the present?'”
Woo and her peers are hopeful about the success of their curriculum, and with support from CAAM, they’ll present the lessons at a national social studies conference later this summer, with the goal of helping teachers across the country take them into their own classrooms. The finalized plans will be published online on PBS Learning Media later this year.
In the long term, Humphries hopes that OUSD can infuse an ethnic studies approach in the core history classes all students take. “Ethnic studies shouldn’t be the only place where students are seeing their communities or their experiences reflected in the history curriculum, and where students feel supported in their identity,” she says. “How can we bring what is effective about ethnic studies and actually use that to seriously change the way we approach teaching history? I think that’s our charge.”
A new curriculum is providing the opportunity to delve into the little-taught, now more-relevant-than-ever slice of history.
KANYAKRIT VONGKIATKAJORN
For about two hours at Oakland Technical High School last winter, Jah-Yee Woo worked with her 11th grade honors US history students to assemble a timeline. On its surface, the activity seemed simple—with students placing small, colorful pieces of paper on a poster. But each piece of paper marked a different immigration policy throughout history, placed above or below the line following student debate over whether the entry was inclusive or exclusive. Inclusive polices fell above the line, exclusionary ones below. On the left of one group’s timeline was a yellow note describing the 1790 Naturalization Act, one of the first laws establishing citizenship, but only for a “free white person.” It was placed below the line. Toward the far right was a photo of President Donald Trump displaying the text of his executive order banning citizens from several Muslim-majority countries. It, too, was below the line. “Exclusive,” one student wrote on a post-it next to Trump’s face.
The exercise was just one part of a larger new curriculum developed by Woo and other teachers in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) that’s centered on provocative but increasingly crucial questions as Trump cracks down on immigrants seeking to enter the country: Who gets to be included in America, and why?
The curriculum hinges specifically on an often little-explored slice of history, the Chinese Exclusion Act—an 1882 law that barred all Chinese nationals from entering the United States and from becoming citizens. One of the first pieces of federal legislation to exclude a race and nationality from immigration and citizenship, the law remained in place for more than 60 years. The textbook Woo uses for US history, however, doesn’t explore it very much. “It’s one paragraph,” she says. “It doesn’t really bring to life the stories and struggles of so many members of that community.” So Woo and her peers are turning to archival documents, interviews with experts, and, crucially, a new powerful documentary about the act—The Chinese Exclusion Act, directed by Ric Burns and Li-Shin Yu—that aired nationally on PBS last month to teach a rich history of the law and its effects on the Chinese community.
And while the curriculum and documentary were initially developed before Trump took office, the history’s parallels to today are striking, particularly as Trump’s travel ban becomes settled law. The documentary portrays how politicians used growing anti-immigrant sentiment and nativism to keep the act in place while advancing their own political agendas. The film calls into question the idea that America has always been welcoming to newcomers, tracing how Chinese groups were targeted by discriminatory laws and, in several instances, lynched and driven out of their communities. But it also brings to life how they attempted to resist the laws through hundreds of lawsuits.
“It’s clear we are living in a politically and culturally fractious time, with the very definition of ‘Who is American?’ being contested,” says Steven Gong, the executive director of the Center for Asian American Media, which co-produced the film. And, he adds, understanding the history of Chinese exclusion “provides important historical context to this debate…If we don’t tell the history and show how it’s done and what the implications are…you get it repeated.”
The effort first began about a year and a half ago, when the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) approached the Oakland school district about creating a curriculum specifically around Chinese Exclusion Act. The San Francisco-based nonprofit had already helped facilitate hundreds of community screenings for the film across the country and wanted to make sure it could be accessible to K-12 students. For Elizabeth Humphries, OUSD’s high school history specialist, the request was “an unintentional moment of synergy.” The district had recently gone through a textbook adoption process and, after reviewing many of the materials, knew there were clear gaps it needed to fill in its classes. “There’s still a fairly traditionally dominant narrative that’s being presented,” says Humphries, adding that there was also “a gap in representation of Asian Americans, even in world history classes.”
What’s more, OUSD had increasingly been hearing from its Asian students that they wanted to see themselves reflected in the curriculum. When the district conducted a survey of its ethnic studies students during the 2016-17 school year, it found that students who identified as Asian American, Arab American, or as multi-ethnic were the least likely to say they were learning about their own history and culture. These concerns were echoed again in a recent listening campaign conducted among Asian and Pacific Islander students last fall. “I think our API students have felt invisible and unseen for a really long time, and it absolutely impacts their confidence, their understanding of who they are and their role in the world,” says Lailan Huen, who directs the district’s Asian Pacific Islander Student Achievement initiative, a targeted support program for the district’s approximately 6,000 API students.
Of course, OUSD isn’t unique in this regard, or the first to recognize the lack of representation in school curricula. Communities of color have long called for their histories to be included in educational contexts, and today, students often learn about these histories in ethnic studies courses, where they examine traditionally underrepresented perspectives. Though ethnic studies is most often taught at the college level, there’s been a growing movement to bring the courses into K-12 classrooms—and even make them a requirement for graduation, including in some school districts in California. Ethnic studies didn’t always have such a welcome reception, though: In 2010, for instance, Arizona lawmakers banned some of the courses outright, claiming they stoked resentment. (A judge eventually blocked the law.)
Studies have shown that ethnic studies courses can generally improve student engagement and increase their sense of agency. A 2016 Stanford study of the San Francisco Unified School District’s ninth-grade ethnic studies curricula found that struggling students who took the courses improved their attendance and academic outcomes. “When you start to include marginalized narratives, particularly of people of color, it tells students, ‘Look these people are also important. We need to know this history. These are our histories,’” Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University who has worked on developing ethnic studies curricula, says. “When [students of color] don’t see themselves as important and as having value, it stunts their pursuits.”
It’s also important for students to get a chance to critically learn about racism and how it comes about, says Christine Sleeter, a professor emerita at California State University-Monterey Bay who is considered an expert on ethnic studies curriculum. Students, even at a young age, can pick up on racist attitudes around them but don’t often have a good explanation for them. “When schools try to open up questions of racism and exclusion, it can help [students] understand why things are the way they are and how to make things fairer,” says Sleeter.
With funding from CAAM, as well as help from the University of California-Berkeley’s Social Science-History Project, the district began developing the Chinese Exclusion Act lessons last summer. The teachers created four modules, each addressing a particular theme or question within the law’s history—one lesson asked students to analyze the anti-Chinese political cartoons in order to understand biases in sources; another delved into how attitudes toward Chinese Americans changed over time.
In another module, students learn about resistance to the Exclusion Act and examine the kinds of tactics, such as within the court system or through protests, that were effective at challenging injustice. One of the cases the students analyze is the Geary Act, a proposal to require Chinese nationals to register and carry identification cards or face arrest and deportation. Community groups banded together to file a legal challenge to the law, and as many as 85,000 Chinese nationals refused to register—one of the largest acts of mass civil disobedience in history.
Showing resistance was crucial to the lesson as it “is often the last thing we teach—it’s always about oppression,” says Becca Rozo-Marsh, a teacher at Oakland’s Coliseum College Prep Academy who also helped develop the lesson plans. When Marsh taught the lesson on resistance in her own classroom, where the majority of her students are Latino, she says they were generally engaged and able to draw connections to their own families’ immigrant stories. Many were also surprised to learn that Chinese groups had experienced violence and discrimination. “I think it was important for them to challenge these preconceived notions,” she says, “and to not feel isolated—to know that there are relatable struggles.” She drew connections between some of the survival strategies the Chinese used to try to escape exclusionary laws, such as refusing to register under the Geary Act or forging their identities in order to enter the country, to how communities do so today by using fake Social Security numbers to work and make a living. “There were hundreds of anti-Chinese laws, but there was constant resistance. We want students to think about the Chinese exclusion act as oppressive measures continue—that people continue to resist and survive,” she says.
Woo says she’s been encouraged by how some students have continued to use similar frameworks to analyze other movements—as well as connecting it to their own experiences. One 11th-grade student, who identifies as Asian American and Latinx, told Woo that learning about the resistance strategies “inspired me to think more about using inside and outside tactics in my own life.” Another student who identifies as Latinx told her the activity “gave me insight into how different racial groups were targeted. I always thought it was just Mexicans who were excluded, but I saw how other groups were treated before us.”
She is also optimistic that students can apply the lessons to their own lives, and interrogate how certain policy decisions get made. At the end of the timeline activity, Woo asked students whether they thought the US was moving toward a more inclusive or exclusive period of history. And though some of her students were pessimistic following Trump’s election, she also wanted them to take into account the resistance that was happening today. “Even though our current immigration policy and what’s being proposed is so disheartening, I think seeing that there are ways to fight it [is] important, so students don’t just feel the weight of history, but that they feel the possibility of history,” she says. Woo feels the film is particularly crucial for this deeper level of understanding: “The narrative piece helps with thinking about, ‘Oh, what were people actually thinking and doing. What were their motives?’ And that in turn can help students ask, ‘What are we thinking and doing now about problems that we face in the present?'”
Woo and her peers are hopeful about the success of their curriculum, and with support from CAAM, they’ll present the lessons at a national social studies conference later this summer, with the goal of helping teachers across the country take them into their own classrooms. The finalized plans will be published online on PBS Learning Media later this year.
In the long term, Humphries hopes that OUSD can infuse an ethnic studies approach in the core history classes all students take. “Ethnic studies shouldn’t be the only place where students are seeing their communities or their experiences reflected in the history curriculum, and where students feel supported in their identity,” she says. “How can we bring what is effective about ethnic studies and actually use that to seriously change the way we approach teaching history? I think that’s our charge.”
A ghost come knocking... That means another whitey..
The Frontrunner to Be Trump’s Supreme Court Pick Is the “Forrest Gump of Republican Politics”
Brett Kavanaugh is a reliable conservative and the consummate Washington insider.
STEPHANIE MENCIMER
As soon as Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement on Wednesday, people started taking bets on whom President Donald Trump would nominate to replace him—sometimes literally. Online betting isn’t legal in the United States, but an Australian online bookmaker, sportsbet.com.au, posted its odds for the leading Supreme Court candidates, and the site—like the Washington chattering class—pegs Brett Kavanaugh as the favorite.
So who is Kavanaugh? The 53-year-old currently sits on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. Elevating him to the Supreme Court wouldn’t add much diversity to the high court, but it would add a reliably conservative vote.
Kavanaugh was born and raised inside the Beltway—in Washington, DC, and the tony suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, respectively. He would be the fourth sitting justice to have graduated from Yale Law School and the sixth Catholic on the current bench. A former Kennedy clerk, he is a longtime active member of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal outfit that has played a key role in Trump’s judicial appointments.
Kavanaugh first emerged as a rising GOP star in 1994, when he joined the legal team of independent counsel Kenneth Starr, a former solicitor general for whom he’d worked during the George H. W. Bush administration. Starr’s investigation into an Arkansas real estate deal by Bill and Hillary Clinton morphed into a prurient examination of the president’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. Kavanaugh led the investigation into the suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, which gave birth to conspiracy theories that the Clintons had killed him. Kavanaugh was later a primary author of the Starr Report, which read like a steamy romance novel, with lines like: “On all nine of those occasions, the President fondled and kissed her bare breasts.”
In those heady days, Kavanaugh traveled in a circle of budding GOP legal eagles, including Fox News host Laura Ingraham, current Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and clerks for two conservative Supreme Court justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Kavanaugh’s presence in right-wing political circles landed him a cameo in Blinded by the Right, a book by conservative operative-turned-Democratic fundraiser David Brock. Brock wrote that during the Whitewater investigation into the Clinton Arkansas real estate deal, he once attended an event at Ingraham’s house to watch one of Bill Clinton’s State of the Union addresses. When the cameras panned to first lady Hillary Clinton during the speech, Brock said he witnessed Kavanaugh mouth the word, “Bitch.”
In an interview, Brock says that Kavanaugh in those days “was a very recognizable type in Washington: A young Federalist Society lawyer on the make in the conservative movement. He thought his ticket was helping bring down the Clintons.”
Kavanaugh so frequently inserted himself into high-profile political battles that during his confirmation hearing for his DC Circuit seat, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called him the “Forrest Gump of Republican politics.”
In 1999, Kavanaugh represented two members of Congress who filed a brief in a Supreme Court case supporting a New Mexico school district’s effort to maintain student-led prayers at football games. (The court found the prayers unconstitutional.) The following year, he got involved in the case of Elián González, the young Cuban boy who came to the United States after his mother drowned trying to bring him to the country, prompting an epic custody fight between his father in Cuba and his relatives in Miami. Kavanaugh worked pro bono for González’s Miami relatives in their vain appeals to keep the boy in the United States.
That same year, Kavanaugh represented Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in his fight to overcome constitutional hurdles to his controversial school voucher program that would direct public money to private religious schools. And when the 2000 election came down to some hanging chads in Florida and a contentious recount, Kavanaugh was there, too, working on George W. Bush’s legal team.
After the Supreme Court ruled in Bush’s favor, essentially awarding him the presidency, Kavanaugh landed a coveted spot in the White House counsel’s office, where he helped Bush select judicial nominees. Eventually he became one of them. In 2003, Bush nominated Kavanaugh to a seat on the influential DC Circuit, often considered a stepping stone to the Supreme Court. Three current justices have served there, as does Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s nominee for the high court whose confirmation was blocked by Senate Republicans.
Democrats aggressively opposed Kavanaugh’s nomination, in part because of his political resumé, but also because he had never tried a case and had very little experience with criminal law. Durbin observed during his confirmation hearing that Kavanaugh was nominated with “less legal experience than virtually any Republican or Democratic nominee in more than 30 years. Of the 54 judges appointed to this court in 111 years, only one—Kenneth Starr—had less legal experience. That is a fact.”
The American Bar Association, which initially rated Kavanaugh “well qualified,” downgraded that assessment to “qualified” after interviewing people who had worked with him. In its report, the ABA noted, “One judge who witnessed the nominee’s oral presentation in court commented that the nominee was ‘less than adequate’ before the court, had been ‘sanctimonious,’ and demonstrated ‘experience on the level of an associate.’” His nomination stalled for three years before he was finally confirmed in 2006.
Lawyer and court watcher Adam Feldman recently wrote on his blog Empirical SCOTUS that in his 12 years on the DC Circuit Kavanaugh has penned opinions “almost entirely in favor of big businesses, employers in employment disputes, and against defendants in criminal cases.” Kavanaugh made a name for himself as a staunch opponent of the Obama administration’s environmental agenda. His dissents in cases involving the Environmental Protection Agency often seemed to sway the Supreme Court.
He has supported the Trump administration’s efforts to prevent a pregnant immigrant girl from obtaining an abortion, supported the use of military commissions to keep Guantanamo Bay prisoners out of federal courts, and attacked Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s pet project, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In 2016, he wrote a 101-page majority opinion for a three-judge panel decrying the agency’s “massive, unchecked” power and predicting that the Supreme Court would ultimately find its existence unconstitutional. The decision struck down the part of the law requiring that the president have cause before removing the agency’s director and would have allowed the president to fire the director at will. But the decision was overturned a year later by the full DC Circuit. In a dissent in that case, Kavanaugh made an impassioned argument for protecting the rights of financial services providers, an argument dismissed by the majority as an “unmoored liberty analysis” that failed to take into account the individual liberty of the victims of those financial services corporations.
The future Supreme Court docket may have special relevance to Trump, and that could work in Kavanaugh’s favor. Trump, after all, has suggested that he has the power to pardon himself, a theory that’s never been tested but one that might become less theoretical should special counsel Robert Muller’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election ensnare Trump in a criminal case. The Supreme Court could ultimately decide whether Trump is right about the extent of his pardon power.
Kavanaugh seems likely to be a supporter of broad presidential powers. In 2011, the DC Circuit upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, in a prelude to what the Supreme Court would later do. In a dissent, Kavanaugh suggested that the president could simply declare a law unconstitutional and then refuse to enforce it. “Under the Constitution, the President may decline to enforce a statute that regulates private individuals when the President deems the statute unconstitutional,” Kavanaugh wrote, “even if a court has held or would hold the statute constitutional.”
Trump is likely to make his Supreme Court pick in the coming weeks, and Senate Republicans have promised a vote on the nomination by the fall, before the midterm elections.
Brett Kavanaugh is a reliable conservative and the consummate Washington insider.
STEPHANIE MENCIMER
As soon as Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement on Wednesday, people started taking bets on whom President Donald Trump would nominate to replace him—sometimes literally. Online betting isn’t legal in the United States, but an Australian online bookmaker, sportsbet.com.au, posted its odds for the leading Supreme Court candidates, and the site—like the Washington chattering class—pegs Brett Kavanaugh as the favorite.
So who is Kavanaugh? The 53-year-old currently sits on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. Elevating him to the Supreme Court wouldn’t add much diversity to the high court, but it would add a reliably conservative vote.
Kavanaugh was born and raised inside the Beltway—in Washington, DC, and the tony suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, respectively. He would be the fourth sitting justice to have graduated from Yale Law School and the sixth Catholic on the current bench. A former Kennedy clerk, he is a longtime active member of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal outfit that has played a key role in Trump’s judicial appointments.
Kavanaugh first emerged as a rising GOP star in 1994, when he joined the legal team of independent counsel Kenneth Starr, a former solicitor general for whom he’d worked during the George H. W. Bush administration. Starr’s investigation into an Arkansas real estate deal by Bill and Hillary Clinton morphed into a prurient examination of the president’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. Kavanaugh led the investigation into the suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, which gave birth to conspiracy theories that the Clintons had killed him. Kavanaugh was later a primary author of the Starr Report, which read like a steamy romance novel, with lines like: “On all nine of those occasions, the President fondled and kissed her bare breasts.”
In those heady days, Kavanaugh traveled in a circle of budding GOP legal eagles, including Fox News host Laura Ingraham, current Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and clerks for two conservative Supreme Court justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Kavanaugh’s presence in right-wing political circles landed him a cameo in Blinded by the Right, a book by conservative operative-turned-Democratic fundraiser David Brock. Brock wrote that during the Whitewater investigation into the Clinton Arkansas real estate deal, he once attended an event at Ingraham’s house to watch one of Bill Clinton’s State of the Union addresses. When the cameras panned to first lady Hillary Clinton during the speech, Brock said he witnessed Kavanaugh mouth the word, “Bitch.”
In an interview, Brock says that Kavanaugh in those days “was a very recognizable type in Washington: A young Federalist Society lawyer on the make in the conservative movement. He thought his ticket was helping bring down the Clintons.”
Kavanaugh so frequently inserted himself into high-profile political battles that during his confirmation hearing for his DC Circuit seat, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called him the “Forrest Gump of Republican politics.”
In 1999, Kavanaugh represented two members of Congress who filed a brief in a Supreme Court case supporting a New Mexico school district’s effort to maintain student-led prayers at football games. (The court found the prayers unconstitutional.) The following year, he got involved in the case of Elián González, the young Cuban boy who came to the United States after his mother drowned trying to bring him to the country, prompting an epic custody fight between his father in Cuba and his relatives in Miami. Kavanaugh worked pro bono for González’s Miami relatives in their vain appeals to keep the boy in the United States.
That same year, Kavanaugh represented Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in his fight to overcome constitutional hurdles to his controversial school voucher program that would direct public money to private religious schools. And when the 2000 election came down to some hanging chads in Florida and a contentious recount, Kavanaugh was there, too, working on George W. Bush’s legal team.
After the Supreme Court ruled in Bush’s favor, essentially awarding him the presidency, Kavanaugh landed a coveted spot in the White House counsel’s office, where he helped Bush select judicial nominees. Eventually he became one of them. In 2003, Bush nominated Kavanaugh to a seat on the influential DC Circuit, often considered a stepping stone to the Supreme Court. Three current justices have served there, as does Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s nominee for the high court whose confirmation was blocked by Senate Republicans.
Democrats aggressively opposed Kavanaugh’s nomination, in part because of his political resumé, but also because he had never tried a case and had very little experience with criminal law. Durbin observed during his confirmation hearing that Kavanaugh was nominated with “less legal experience than virtually any Republican or Democratic nominee in more than 30 years. Of the 54 judges appointed to this court in 111 years, only one—Kenneth Starr—had less legal experience. That is a fact.”
The American Bar Association, which initially rated Kavanaugh “well qualified,” downgraded that assessment to “qualified” after interviewing people who had worked with him. In its report, the ABA noted, “One judge who witnessed the nominee’s oral presentation in court commented that the nominee was ‘less than adequate’ before the court, had been ‘sanctimonious,’ and demonstrated ‘experience on the level of an associate.’” His nomination stalled for three years before he was finally confirmed in 2006.
Lawyer and court watcher Adam Feldman recently wrote on his blog Empirical SCOTUS that in his 12 years on the DC Circuit Kavanaugh has penned opinions “almost entirely in favor of big businesses, employers in employment disputes, and against defendants in criminal cases.” Kavanaugh made a name for himself as a staunch opponent of the Obama administration’s environmental agenda. His dissents in cases involving the Environmental Protection Agency often seemed to sway the Supreme Court.
He has supported the Trump administration’s efforts to prevent a pregnant immigrant girl from obtaining an abortion, supported the use of military commissions to keep Guantanamo Bay prisoners out of federal courts, and attacked Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s pet project, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In 2016, he wrote a 101-page majority opinion for a three-judge panel decrying the agency’s “massive, unchecked” power and predicting that the Supreme Court would ultimately find its existence unconstitutional. The decision struck down the part of the law requiring that the president have cause before removing the agency’s director and would have allowed the president to fire the director at will. But the decision was overturned a year later by the full DC Circuit. In a dissent in that case, Kavanaugh made an impassioned argument for protecting the rights of financial services providers, an argument dismissed by the majority as an “unmoored liberty analysis” that failed to take into account the individual liberty of the victims of those financial services corporations.
The future Supreme Court docket may have special relevance to Trump, and that could work in Kavanaugh’s favor. Trump, after all, has suggested that he has the power to pardon himself, a theory that’s never been tested but one that might become less theoretical should special counsel Robert Muller’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election ensnare Trump in a criminal case. The Supreme Court could ultimately decide whether Trump is right about the extent of his pardon power.
Kavanaugh seems likely to be a supporter of broad presidential powers. In 2011, the DC Circuit upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, in a prelude to what the Supreme Court would later do. In a dissent, Kavanaugh suggested that the president could simply declare a law unconstitutional and then refuse to enforce it. “Under the Constitution, the President may decline to enforce a statute that regulates private individuals when the President deems the statute unconstitutional,” Kavanaugh wrote, “even if a court has held or would hold the statute constitutional.”
Trump is likely to make his Supreme Court pick in the coming weeks, and Senate Republicans have promised a vote on the nomination by the fall, before the midterm elections.
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