Politics and American Democracy – Page 142

Food Industry Giants Must Fix Their Plastic Pollution

Civil Eats – Op-Ed:

Food Industry Giants Must Fix Their Plastic Pollution

McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and other major brands are creating massive amounts of plastic waste. Their initiatives are not enough and they need to be held accountable for the plastics crisis.

By Ashka Nail – July 6, 2023

Plastic bottles for recycling are seen at a junkshop on April 11, 2023 in Manila, Philippines. (Photo by Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)

Op-ed: Is There Plastic in Your Soda?

Beverage Companies Must Go Beyond Recycling

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Plastic has allowed many food industry giants to become the massive entities they are today. For example, Coca-Cola generates 3 million tons of plastic packaging a year; PepsiCo has been found to use nearly 2.3 billion tons of plastic each year for its bottles and packaging; and McDonald’s has been called out for generating the weight of “100 Eiffel Towers” worth of packaging waste.

It hasn’t always been this way. Plastic became the packaging material of choice in the mid-20th century, when it took over human imagination with its malleability, seeming ease of production, and strength. Its production increased threefold during WWII alone.

The political power of plastic also became palpable rather quickly with the emergence of plastic industry lobbying more than 30 years ago. Its primary function has been to fight laws designed to safeguard people and the planet from plastic’s well-documented toxicity. Plastic industry lobbyists also amped up their work as widespread concern grew about plastic’s presensce in the ocean, in animals, in farming systems, and in the human body. And while the industry has always had grand plans of recycling its plastic waste, most plastic is not recycled today.

“Predictably, when we take a closer look at some of these initiatives, what we find is not much evidence of meaningful or sustained progress.”

This lobby’s political power was also present in the corridors of the United Nations recently, as the majority of the world’s countries negotiated a legally binding agreement on plastic pollution focused on production, design, use, and disposal. In this context, the industry has worked diligently to position itself as a solution to a crisis it has avariciously fueled.

Over the years, in addition to making unverifiable commitments to reduce the use of plastic and ensure more of its products are recycled, the industry has convened at platforms like the Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty, the World Economic Forum, Global Plastic Action Partnership, and the NextGen Consortium.

The industry has also judiciously crafted narratives about its commitment to solving this global emergency by supporting entities like the Ocean Cleanup, Ocean Conservancy’s Trash Free Seas Alliance, and World Wildlife Fund’s ReSource.

Predictably, when we take a closer look at some of these initiatives, what we find is not much evidence of meaningful or sustained progress. In fact, recent investigations have found that many corporations like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have been backing these initiatives while using more plastic than even before.

There is also a litany of corporate doublespeak on plastic in the media. Take the recent New York Times article by Boyan Slat titled, “Reducing Plastic Pollution in Our Oceans Is Simpler Than You Think.”

Slat is the founder of Ocean Cleanup, “a nonprofit funded by donations and a range of philanthropic partners with the mission to rid the oceans of plastic.” In the article, Slat claims his program has salvaged “more than 0.2 percent of the plastic in the [garbage] patch so far,” and mentions the need for stopping “more plastic from flowing into the oceans,” but conspicuously shies away from calling on Coca-Cola and his other program partners to stop producing plastic.

Instead, he writes that “meaningful reductions in plastic use will be difficult to achieve.” Slat also blames the lagging waste management systems in middle- and lower-income countries for the majority of ocean plastic pollution without recognizing that much of the plastic waste from the Global North is in fact being dumped in middle- and lower-income countries—such as Vietnam, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

He fails to recognize the fact that it is often “waste colonialism” that forces these nations to become what Slat calls “hot spots” of plastic pollution.

Corporations often tout the fact that the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s (EMF) New Plastics Economy Global Commitment reports on their plastic use. But if you dig deeper, the information it shares doesn’t provide much actual transparency.

For instance, its audit of PepsiCo says there is “no third-party verification or assurance in place.” Coca-Cola’s reporting on this portal yielded no concrete third-party reviewed progress, but more of the same—self reporting and more corporate marketing speech than evidence of verifiable progress. In fact, an analysis done by Oceana of the data from the 2022 progress report found that Coca-Cola increased its plastic packaging use by nearly 9 percent between 2020 and 2021, and PepsiCo increased its use of virgin plastic by 4.5 percent in 2021 compared with the previous year.

Another disturbing example of promises unkept comes from the world’s largest distributor of plastic toys, McDonald’s. It has publicly committed to “drastically reduce plastics in Happy Meal toys [including the latest toy, a replica of The Little Mermaid, a symbol of the ocean] around the globe and transition to more sustainable materials by the end of 2025.”

However, when some of the largest food and beverage corporations were surveyed by a conservation organization last year, McDonald’s emerged as one of only two whose “plastic intensity” was actually increasing. And then at the company’s annual meeting in May, McDonald’s faced investor scrutiny (p.101) for its staunch opposition to proposed EU plastic waste reduction laws.

The company distributes nearly 1 billion toys a year, every year. To its credit, it claims that in Japan it has recovered toys to make trays that can be equivalent to approximately 0.75 percent of its annual global toy distribution. The number of recycled toys for other countries where it operates, and there are nearly 100 of them, are difficult to find; it’s not clear whether they even exist.

All these initiatives and commitments tell the true story of plastic. It is about time McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and other food and beverage companies own up to their role in fueling the plastics crisis, by eliminating the use of plastic from their entire supply chains immediately. For more than 80 years, Coca-Cola mainly used glass and aluminum, so it can be done! It’s time for these companies to devise business models that stop exploiting the planet, its ecosystems, and the public to benefit a handful of shareholders.

These corporations also need to be held accountable by legal systems and democratic institutions across the world for their inaction.

Yes, the power of plastic has proven potent in changing the course of our history, but lest the world forget, so has the power of the people to determine our collective future. It’s about time food and beverage companies stopped jeopardizing the viability of future generations of all species to have a livable planet to call home.

Ashka Naik is a director of research and policy at Corporate Accountability. Her work focuses on on strategic campaign development, corporate research, and equity-centered analysis of corporate power across issues that guide the vision and overall success of the campaigns. She also spearheads Corporate Accountability’s food program, which focuses on structural determinants and sociopolitical dimensions of food systems, nutrition, and public health, while uncovering industry’s influence in the policies and politics of global food security, sovereignty, and justice. Read more >

The Supreme Court is on a mission to ensure the US assumes the form that the Republican Party wants

Salon

The Supreme Court is on a mission to ensure the US assumes the form that the Republican Party wants

Chauncey DeVega – July 5, 2023

Clarence Thomas; John RobertsPhoto illustration by Salon/Getty Images

Last week, the United States Supreme Court issued a series of decisions that ended race-based affirmative action programs at colleges and universities, voided President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, and made it legal for people to cite sincere “religious objections” as a reason for discriminating against the LGBTQ community (and presumably other marginalized individuals and groups as well) in ways that violate civil rights laws.

The Washington Post bizarrely described the Supreme Court’s last term as “restrained.” The reality is very much the opposite: it was a political and judicial bloodletting, a collective act of radical right-wing judicial activism that will have serious negative implications for the American people and the country as a whole for decades to come. These decisions by the “conservative” majority on the Supreme Court are part of a decades-long project to return American society to a time period before the civil rights movement(s) of the 1960s and 1970s and back to the Gilded Age (if not before) when white men and moneyed interests – a true tyranny of the minority —were able to exercise dominion over American society, largely uncontested.

In an attempt to make better sense of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions about race-based affirmative action and its broad implications for American democracy, the law, and society, I recently spoke with Khiara M. Bridges. She is a Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law whose scholarship examines race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Professor Bridges is the author of three books, the most recent of which is Critical Race Theory: A Primer.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How are you feeling given the Supreme Court’s decisions this week, in particular the decision to ban the consideration of race in university and college admissions?

I’m tired – even though none of this is surprising. All of this was perfectly predictable. We knew that decisions such as the one gutting affirmative action were almost inevitable after Kavanaugh and Barrett joined the court. The decisions this week are the realization of a long-term project by the Republican Party to use the federal judiciary to shape the nation into its vision of what the country ought to be.

It has been an exhausting week.

How do we connect the dots between the affirmative action decision and the decision to allow “religious objections” to be used as a justification for discriminating against gays and lesbians — and presumably other groups as well?

“I think that what we are seeing is just how hellbent the Supreme Court is on ensuring that the U.S. assumes the form that the Republican Party wants it to assume.”

Those two decisions represent a backlash against people of color and LGBTQ people. Both groups have realized substantial gains in terms of being conceptualized as equal and valuable members of the body politic. Many people want to reverse those gains. They want to return LGBTQ people and Black and brown people to second-class citizenship. The court is doing the bidding for those folks.

The Republicans, “conservatives” and other members of the larger white right are joyous and celebrating the end of affirmative action. Black and brown folks, white folks and others who believe in multiracial democracy and equality are hurting and lamenting this decision and what it symbolizes and means for our society and the harm it does to real people. How are you reconciling those divergent responses?

I understand these celebrations as consistent with a right-wing effort to erase America’s brutal history of racial subjugation and to deny the consequences that history has on society today. Conservatives are celebrating the myth that America is “post-racial” and the lie that events like chattel slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, “urban renewal,” etc. really have no effect on contemporary society. And most of all, they are celebrating the fact that there is a Supreme Court that is willing to affirm those fictions.

In the most basic sense, what are the competing visions of the law and its role in society that we are seeing play out with the Supreme Court this week, and of course the Age of Trump these last few years?

I think that what we are seeing is just how hellbent the Supreme Court is on ensuring that the U.S. assumes the form that the Republican Party wants it to assume. It is important to keep in mind that the Court creates its own docket; it selects the cases that it wants to hear. And it is no coincidence that the Court is deciding to hear cases that touch on all of these hot button issues: affirmative action, abortion, guns, religious freedom, LGBTQ rights. And of course, it is no coincidence that the Court is deciding these cases in ways that are consistent with the Republican Party’s platform.

Harvard comes under fire for “legacy admissions” following SCOTUS affirmative action ruling

It is also important to keep in mind that it is really hard to reconcile these decisions with one another in terms of an overarching theory of law. So, the government can force people to carry pregnancies to term, but the government cannot forbid people from carrying firearms outside of the home. Institutions cannot consider race when making college admissions decisions, but they can consider their customers’ sexual orientation and gender identity when deciding whether to sell products and services to them. Those decisions cannot be reconciled with one another very easily in terms of law. It’s all politics.

In simple terms, how do we explain what “affirmative action” is or isn’t and how it’s been distorted by the right wing and its propaganda machine for the general (white) public?

In order to understand what affirmative action is in the context of university admissions, one has to understand how decisions traditionally have been made about who is admitted to a school. This generally has consisted of evaluating a student’s GPA and performance on standardized tests. Affirmative action moves beyond just grades and standardized testing. It insists that those measures are not the totality of an individual. We actually know empirically that grades and standardized testing only imperfectly predict success in college. For example, a student that has had to raise their younger siblings while they’re in high school probably has the determination and grit to succeed in a four-year university. We might guess that a student who has managed to learn and succeed in an underfunded school lacking in resources will likely learn and succeed at a university or college that has lots of resources.

Race-based affirmative action specifically says that we ought to be conscious of a student’s race when making admissions decisions, because a student’s race might help us understand their grades and standardized test scores. Race contextualizes those numbers. Despite what conservatives say about it, affirmative action is not some type of “handout” like “welfare” for lazy and unqualified Black and brown people.

Of course, the right-wing members of the court did not mention legacy admissions or how the children of big money donors get preferential treatment — what is a de facto type of white privilege and white unearned advantage, an “affirmative action” program for unqualified white people. Likewise, the majority did not object to how at most universities a decision is made to admit more “unqualified” male students as a way of achieving gender parity in a given cohort.

There is a conservative argument about so-called “mismatch,” where students of color are imagined to be admitted through affirmative action into institutions where they supposedly do not have the skills and preparation to succeed. Clarence Thomas mentions this theory repeatedly. But the science is not there to justify mismatch theory. It has been debunked time and time again, which Justice Sotomayor mentions in her dissent. Interestingly, the right-wing justices who claim to be concerned about mismatch in terms of students of color going to competitive colleges and universities do not have the same level of concern about mismatch in terms of legacy admits.

“It is really hard to reconcile these decisions with one another in terms of an overarching theory of law.”

Your dad and granddad having graduated from college does not prove that you have the academic chops, or discipline, or determination to succeed in the school. Similarly, your family having donated millions of dollars to the university does not translate into academic ability and intelligence. Students who lack the highest SAT scores and GPAs, but who are admitted because they are athletes, would fall into that category as well. The court was not concerned about those students either.

For me, this reveals that the justices who signed on to these opinions are not really worried about whether Black and brown students are going to do well in elite institutions; it is just that they do not want Black and brown students to “take the seats” of white and Asian students who they believe actually deserve to be at these elite institutions.

In their decision to end affirmative action at the nation’s colleges and universities, the right-wing justices summoned up Brown v. Board of Education. This is part of a larger project by the “conservative” movement and white right to weaponize, distort, abuse, and misrepresent the victories of the long Black Freedom Struggle and civil rights movement as a way of undermining and ultimately reversing them. Please help me process their twisted readings of Brown v. Board and the Equal Protection Clause.

Brown v. Board looms over these debates about affirmative action. Those who oppose race-based affirmative action and those who support it both say that their position is faithful to Brown v. Board. In 1954, the court decided in Brown that racially separate schools were inherently unequal and that they were a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Brown is subject to many interpretations. One interpretation is that Brown mandated colorblindness; it forbade school districts from taking into consideration students’ races when assigning them to schools.

Another equally plausible interpretation of Brown is that the court was concerned with anti-subordination. In this view, segregated Black and white schools were unconstitutional because they functioned to subordinate Black people; they functioned to subjugate Black people vis-à-vis their white counterparts. So, which is the better understanding of Brown? Was Brown about colorblindness, or was it about antisubordination?

In my opinion, Brown was about antisubordination. And I get there because I think that we have to pay attention to the motivations behind the Equal Protection Clause, which was added to the Constitution after the Civil War. The 14^th Amendment, which contains the Equal Protection Clause, was proposed and ratified in order to make formerly enslaved Black people equal citizens.

“The conservative majority on the court does not care; they are very comfortable with subjugating non-white people in America.”

The Equal Protection Clause was designed to undo slavery. And the problem of chattel slavery was not that white people weren’t being colorblind. The problem of chattel slavery was that white people thought that Black people were an inferior race of humans and treated them accordingly. The Equal Protection Clause was ratified not to make white people colorblind, but rather to ensure that Black people were no longer treated as subhuman. Race-based affirmative action programs are consistent with what the 14th Amendment requires because it is interested in real racial equality, not just colorblindness.

A Supreme Court justice made the intervention not too long ago that to get past racism one must take account of race.

That guy’s gone, right? It’s really just a numbers game with the Supreme Court today. Before Justice Kennedy retired, conservatives on the court just didn’t have the votes to instantiate this view that the Constitution mandates colorblindness. Now they do. It’s not that those arguments make more sense today than they did 10 years ago. It’s not that there is more evidence to support that right-wing view. It is most certainly not true that we as a country are closer to a multiracial democracy than we were ten years ago. Ultimately, the only thing that has changed is the composition of the court.

As a factual and historical matter, the United States Constitution is not “colorblind.” In reality, it is a document that represented the interests of the white slave-owning class and was one of the bedrock documents of a herrenvolk racial state. Serious historians and other scholars have repeatedly documented how as a group the framers and other white elites saw little if any contradiction between white on Black chattel slavery, white supremacy, and their vision of (white) democracy. Yet, the right-wing justices insist on the Constitution somehow being “colorblind” and then reasoning from that incorrect premise to whatever conclusion they want to reach. Taking them seriously, how is such a view of the Constitution structured?

I think they believe that if you keep saying it, somehow it becomes true. But reality does not work that way. The Constitution is very much aware of race. The document literally contemplates race. The 3/5th clause is an obvious example. The majority opinion in the court’s recent affirmative action decision repeats “colorblind” so many times that an uninformed person may actually think that if you read the Constitution, you would see the words “colorblind” or “colorblindness.” But it doesn’t say that. What it does say is that no person shall be denied “equal protection of the laws.” Conservatives insist that those words mean “colorblindness.”

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What the conservative majority will say is that during those lamentable and tragic moments in our nation’s racial history, the court was not interpreting the Constitution to be colorblind. They would say that the problem was that the court was allowing people to think about race. However, in my view, the problem of separate but equal, for example, wasn’t that people were thinking about race. The problem was how people were thinking about race. And they were thinking about race in order to conserve the existing racial hierarchy and to protect white supremacy. The conservative majority pretends that it cannot see the difference between those divergent uses of race. These conservative justices—all of whom got the finest educations from competitive universities—supposedly cannot see the difference between thinking about race in order to subjugate somebody and thinking about race in order to attempt to undo that subordination. Of course, they can see the difference. They know better.

The distinction here is important. Do the right-wing justices, like Clarence Thomas for example, actually believe in the factually wrong version of history and the Constitution (and reality) that they are articulating in the decision to end affirmative action, and more generally in terms of their legal theories? Or are they just ideologues and operatives, zealots, who don’t really care about the substance of the law and the Constitution and are just using it to advance a larger political and societal project?

I don’t know. And I don’t think it matters. What I do know for sure is that they are very comfortable signing on to decisions and handing down interpretations of the Constitution that will hurt people of color. In the end that is all I need to know. They won’t lose any sleep at night thinking about how students of color are going to be even more underrepresented in the nation’s colleges and universities. They don’t care about the real world implications of striking down affirmative action; they don’t care that, quite literally, lives will be lost, as Justice Jackson so compellingly and brilliantly demonstrated in her dissent when she talked about the effect that doctor-patient racial concordance has on reducing Black infant mortality. The conservative majority on the court does not care; they are very comfortable with subjugating non-white people in America.

Why the US ‘does not get to assume that it lasts forever’

CNN

Why the US ‘does not get to assume that it lasts forever’

Ronald Brownstein – July 3, 2023

As the United States marks its 247th birthday Tuesday, questions about how many more the nation will celebrate in its current form have become ominously relevant.

Possibly not since the two decades before the Civil War has America faced as much pressure on its fundamental cohesion. The greatest risk probably isn’t a repeat of the outright secession that triggered the Civil War, though even that no longer seems entirely impossible in the most extreme scenarios. More plausible is the prospect that the nation will continue its drift into two irreconcilable blocs of red and blue states uneasily trying to occupy the same geographic space.

“I can’t recall a time when we’ve had such fundamental friction between the states on such important issues,” says Donald Kettl, former dean and professor emeritus of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and author of the 2020 book, “The Divided States of America.”

The strains on America’s basic unity are broad and diverse. They include a widening divergence in the basic rules of life between red and blue states on everything from the availability of abortion and guns to what teachers can say in the classroom; sharpening conflicts not only between the states, but among the urban and rural regions within them; a growing tendency of voters in each political coalition to view the other party not only as a political rival but as an “enemy” that threatens their core conception of America; the increasing inability of almost any institution – from the media to federal law enforcement to even consumer products – to retain comparable credibility on both sides of the red-blue divide; more common threats of political violence, predominantly from the right, against local and national officials; and the endurance of Donald Trump as the first leader of a truly mass-scale American political movement who has demonstrated a willingness to subvert small-d democracy to achieve his goals.

Behind almost all of these individual challenges is the same larger force: the mounting tension between those who welcome the propulsive demographic and cultural changes reshaping 21st century America and those who fear or resent those changes. It’s the collision between what I’ve called the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation” and the Republican “coalition of restoration.” As the US evolves toward a future, sometime after 2040, when people of color will constitute a majority of the population, political scientists point out that the country is trying to build something without exact modern precedent: a true multi-racial democracy that provides a voice to all its citizens.

The urgent demands for greater opportunity and inclusion from traditionally marginalized groups (from Black to LGBTQ people) and the ferocious backlash against those demands that Trump has mobilized in his “Make America Great Again” movement demonstrate how fraught that passage has become.

“To expect we are going to be as unified as we [have been] trying to negotiate these fundamental transformations of American demography is wholly unrealistic,” says Daniel Cox, a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “There is going to be real differences and divisions on these things and, unfortunately, some people are weaponizing them in a way that is unhelpful.”

The ideal of national unity celebrated on July Fourth has almost always been overstated: the country from its founding has been riven by sectional, racial, class and gender conflicts. Large groups of people living within our borders have always felt excluded from any proclaimed national consensus: American Indians who were brutally displaced for decades, Black people who faced generations of legal slavery and then decades of state-sponsored segregation, women denied the vote until the 20th century.

But today’s proliferating and intersecting pressures have reached a height that is forcing experts to contemplate questions few Americans have seriously considered since the Civil War era: can the United States continue to function as a single unified entity, and if so, in what form?

In the late 1990s, Alan Wolfe, a Boston University political scientist, wrote a book called “One Nation, After All” based on in-depth interviews with hundreds of Americans around the country. His book was one of several published in the era that concluded the broad American public was not nearly as divided as its leaders and that average Americans, however much their views differed on issues, recognized the importance of finding common ground with others of opposing views.

Now, Wolfe told me in an interview, he considers the current situation much more worrying. “I was so optimistic with the title of ‘One Nation, After All,’ but I couldn’t say that now,” Wolfe, a professor emeritus, said. “I think the book was right for its time. I think the sociology of it was right. That’s what I found. But I’m sure I wouldn’t find it now.”

To Wolfe, the US is now trapped in a “vicious cycle” of rising partisan and ideological hostility in which political leaders, particularly on the right, see a “benefit in fueling the rage even more.” While President Joe Biden, Wolfe says, has struck traditional presidential notes of emphasizing the value of national unity, Trump – currently the front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination – has built his political strategy on widening the nation’s divides in ways that may be difficult to reverse any time soon. “I don’t know if [Trump’s] a political genius or just instinctively knows something, but he sure has exacerbated the shocks, and I don’t know how we are going to recover from him,” Wolfe says.

Experts may be the least concerned about the most often discussed scenario for a future American unraveling. That’s the prospect the nation will fully split apart into separate entities, as it did when the South seceded to create the Confederate States of America after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican from Georgia who has become a close ally of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, has called for “a national divorce” in which Republican- and Democratic-leaning states would go their separate ways, presumably peacefully. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” Greene said in a tweet on President’s Day this year.

Susan Stokes, a political scientist and director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, said that prospect could receive growing discussion in coming years, particularly on the right, “if we continue to go in this direction and we continue to view each other as threats and as anathema, immoral, and a threat to each other’s existence.”

But the practical barriers to any formal national divorce, she says, are likely to limit such discussion to the fringes. Unlike the Civil War, which had a clear geographical boundary, the nation’s current political divide has created a checkerboard – with Democrats strongest in coastal and upper Midwest states, as well as parts of the Southwest, while Republicans hold the edge in most Heartland states, particularly those in the South and Great Plains. Plus, Stokes notes, the red-blue line runs not only between but within the states, with the urban areas of every state leaning relatively more toward Democrats than their rural neighbors. In some future national divorce, “What do you do with upstate New York? What do you do with Memphis or Austin?” she asked.

For those reasons, none of the experts I spoke to worry much about full-scale national separation through any intermediate time frame, though most no longer consider it inconceivable either. (Polls don’t show extensive interest among the public, with one national CBS/YouGov survey last year finding a quarter of Americans favoring the idea.) One wild card is what might happen if Trump wins in 2024 and moves to implement some of the policies he’s proposed that amount to mobilizing federal power against blue institutions and individuals – including a massive deportation program of undocumented immigrants and the deployment of the National Guard into high-crime cities. Blue state governors, legislatures and mayors might respond to such an offensive in forceful ways difficult to predict today.

The nation’s greater challenge may be the continuing incremental separation between the red and blue blocs – the political equivalent of continental drift. Polls show that voters in each coalition hold darkening views of the other. In that 2022 CBS/YouGov survey, about half of the voters for both Trump and Biden said they considered the other party not just “political opposition” but “enemies, that is, if they win, your life or your entire way of life may be threatened.”

More tangibly, red and blue states are hurtling apart. The most aggressive moves have come from red states shifting social policy sharply to the right on a broad array of issues, from retrenching abortion and LGBTQ rights, to censoring classroom discussion of race, gender and sexual orientation, expanding access to guns while limiting access to books that provoke conservative objections, and restricting access to voting. With red states exploring various ways to discourage their residents from traveling to blue states for banned activities (such as abortions or gender-affirming care for transgender minors), and blue states passing laws to inhibit such red state enforcement, the nation is facing open conflict over the cross-border application of state law reminiscent of the bitter disputes between free and slave states over the Fugitive Slave Act.

No single issue separates the red and blue states today as profoundly as the gulf between those with and without legal segregation during the Jim Crow era, or that between states with and without slavery before the Civil War. But, as experts point out, the current divergence involves more issues in more states than those earlier conflicts, with nearly half the country joining the red state drive to create what I’ve called “a nation within a nation” operating by its own rules and values.

“I really feel like we are becoming two different countries, if not that it has already happened,” says Wolfe. “I don’t like it, but I don’t see what we have in common anymore. I really don’t.”

To some students of government, allowing states to set their own course on these divisive issues may relieve pressure and help hold the nation together. “In some ways, you can say how this is terrible, how can we remain a unified country and address global concerns” when states are separating this fundamentally, says Cox. “But by the same token, there’s something that is positive about these ‘laboratories of democracy’ where one party is given free rein to put forward their ideas and legislate and the public can see how they do and react to that.”

Yet allowing states to diverge this comprehensively may do more to heighten than relieve national tensions. Cox acknowledges one reason: severe gerrymandering in many states’ legislative districts means most politicians are unlikely to suffer consequences even if the public doesn’t like the agenda they have advanced.

A second problem is this experimentation is unlikely to proceed on an even track. The Republican-appointed majority on the US Supreme Court has encouraged the red state social offensive with decisions that stripped away national rights – most prominently on abortion and voting. Many legal experts believe that conservative majority is unlikely to block many of the new red state social laws that critics (including, in many cases, the Biden administration) are challenging in federal courts. On the other hand, the six GOP-appointed justices have shown no hesitation about overturning blue state initiatives, such as gun control measures that conflict with their reading of the 2nd Amendment, or LGBTQ protections they argue infringe on religious liberty or free speech. “Given the make-up of the courts, it’s difficult for blue states to be hopeful about this,” says Kettl.

The biggest challenge created by the widening distance among the states is where to draw the line between local leeway and preserving a baseline floor of nationally guaranteed rights in every state. Racial segregation, after all, was justified for 70 years on the ground of respecting “local traditions.”

From both Congress and the Supreme Court, the general trend in American life from the 1950s through the 2010s was to nationalize more rights and to restrict the ability of states to curtail those rights. Now, though, the red states are engaged in the most concerted effort over that long arc to roll back the “rights revolution” and restore a system in which people’s basic civil rights vary much more depending on where they live.

“It is certainly good to have a chance to have a contest over basic values, and that’s one of the great strengths of the American republic,” says Kettl, co-author of the new book “Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems.” He continued: “But there is also a basic question of the fundamental rights of individuals and whether the balance of power in deciding them ought to lie” with states or the nation as a whole.

The chasm between the civil rights and liberties available in blue and red states has widened to the point where it will be highly explosive for either side to attempt to impose its social regime on the other. If Democrats win unified control of the White House and Congress in 2024 and pass legislation to restore a national floor of abortion or voting rights, red state leaders would likely sue to block them (even though abortion rights are popular in several of them). This Supreme Court majority could prove receptive to such challenges. Conversely, the fear that Republicans will seek to pass national legislation imposing the red state rules on blue and purple states, particularly on abortion and guns, may be the best Democratic asset in the 2024 presidential race in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona.

Michael Podhorzer, the former long-time political director for the AFL-CIO, has argued that the wave of restrictive red state social laws has simply made more apparent something that has long been true: that the red and blue parts of the country are so divergent in their values, priorities and even economic structures that they are more accurately described as separate nations than separate regions. In his mind, what’s changed isn’t that these different regions – or different nations – have divergent approaches on both social and economic issues, but that the Trump-aligned MAGA movement ascendant in the red states is now pursuing such an extreme and even anti-democratic (small d) agenda.

Eric Liu, co-founder of Citizen University, a non-partisan organization that trains people to work together on local problems across ideological, racial and other boundaries, agrees that Trump and much of his movement represent a unique threat to the future of American democracy. The nation, Liu says, now faces the challenge of doing two things at once: countering and isolating that threat to democracy, while building a bigger coalition for cooperation and consensus-building among what he calls (borrowing from Richard Nixon’s phrase) the “silent majority” of Americans who want to coexist.

Liu counsels that lowering the temperature does not require an artificial level of agreement between people of differing views: “It’s OK to argue it out. It’s necessary to argue it out because America is an argument.” But it does, he believes, require both sides to commit to respecting the democratic process and staying engaged with the other when that process produces decisions they don’t support. “That means to recognize that politics is not a one-and-done, winner-take-all, wipe-the-other-side-off-the-face-of-the-earth, scorched earth endeavor,” he says.

Even more important, strengthening the nation’s bonds, he believes, requires people on both sides of the political divide to see the other “as three-dimensional, complicated, sometimes contradictory human beings.” The best way to achieve that, he says, is to work together to solve local problems. Liu’s group tries to facilitate that through programs like Civic Saturdays that promotes collaborative local actions, or initiatives that bring together rural and urban residents around shared concerns.

Such interactions, Liu believes, can nudge the US toward the national unity it celebrates on July Fourth. But he acknowledges there’s no assurance this patient nurturing of civic connection can overcome all the forces in politics, the media and communications technology blowing toward separation. Even the most carefully cultivated garden, after all, may not survive a gale-force wind.

“It is totally not a given that we get through this,” Liu told me. “The United States does not get to assume that it lasts forever.”

Conservatives go to red states and liberals go to blue as the country grows more polarized

Associated Press

Conservatives go to red states and liberals go to blue as the country grows more polarized

Nicholas Riccardi – July 4, 2023

Jennifer and Tim Kohl poses for a photo in their front yard with the American flag and a thin blue line flag in Star, Idaho, on April 14, 2023. The couple recently moved to Idaho from the Los Angeles area. Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history. (AP Photo/Kyle Green)

Kathleen Rickerson poses for a photo at her home Wednesday, May 24, 2023, in the west Denver suburb of Lakewood, Colo. Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Aaron and Carrie Friesen feed chickens in the backyard of their home in Boise, Idaho, on April 12, 2023. The couple, who has three children, recently moved to Idaho from the Bluffton, S.C., area. Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history. (AP Photo/Kyle Green)

Leah Dean, a native of the Texas Panhandle, poses outside her home Monday, July 3, 2023, in Denver. Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

STAR, Idaho (AP) — Once he and his wife, Jennifer, moved to a Boise suburb last year, Tim Kohl could finally express himself.

Kohl did what the couple never dared at their previous house outside Los Angeles — the newly-retired Los Angeles police officer flew a U.S. flag and a Thin Blue Line banner representing law enforcement outside his house.

“We were scared to put it up,” Jennifer Kohl acknowledged. But the Kohls knew they had moved to the right place when neighbors complimented him on the display.

Leah Dean is on the opposite end of the political spectrum, but she knows how the Kohls feel. In Texas, Dean had been scared to fly an abortion rights banner outside her house. Around the time the Kohls were house-hunting in Idaho, she and her partner found a place in Denver, where their LGBTQ+ pride flag flies above the banner in front of their house that proclaims “Abortion access is a community responsibility.”

“One thing we have really found is a place to feel comfortable being ourselves,” Dean said.

Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history.

One party controls the entire legislature in all but two states. In 28 states, the party in control has a supermajority in at least one legislative chamber — which means the majority party has so many lawmakers that they can override a governor’s veto. Not that that would be necessary in most cases, as only 10 states have governors of different parties than the one that controls the legislature.

The split has sent states careening to the political left or right, adopting diametrically opposed laws on some of the hottest issues of the day. In Idaho, abortion is illegal once a heartbeat can be detected in a fetus — as early as five or six weeks — and a new law passed this year makes it a crime to help a minor travel out of state to obtain one. In Colorado, state law prevents any restrictions on abortion. In Idaho, a new law prevents minors from accessing gender-affirming care, while Colorado allows youths to come from other states to access the procedures.

Federalism — allowing each state to chart its own course within boundaries set by Congress and the Constitution — is at the core of the U.S. system. It lets the states, in the words of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, be “laboratories of democracy.”

Now, some wonder whether that’s driving Americans apart.

“Does that work as well in a time when we are so politically divided, or does it just become an accelerant for people who want to re-segregate?” asked Rob Witwer, a former Republican Colorado state lawmaker.

Colorado and Idaho represent two poles of state-level political homogenization. Both are fast-growing Rocky Mountain states that have been transformed by an influx of like-minded residents. Life in the two states can be quite similar — conversations revolve around local ski areas, mountain bike trails, and how newcomers are making things too crowded. But, politically, they increasingly occupy two separate worlds.

Witwer watched Colorado steadily swing to the left as affluent, college-educated people fled the coasts for his home state starting in the late 1990s. For two decades, it was one of the nation’s fastest-growing states, and during the Trump era it swung sharply to the left. Democrats control all statewide offices and have their largest majorities in history in the legislature, including a supermajority in the lower house.

In contrast, Idaho has become one of the nation’s fastest-growing states during the past decade without losing its reputation as a conservative haven. It has moved even more sharply to the right during that time and become a beacon to those, like the Kohls, fleeing blue states where they no longer feel welcome.

The states’ swings aren’t simply due to transplants, of course. The increasing clustering of Americans into like-minded enclaves — dubbed “The Big Sort” — has many causes. Harvard professor Ryan Enos estimates that, at least before the pandemic, only 15% of the homogeneity was due to people moving. Other causes include political parties polarizing on hot-button issues that split neatly on demographic lines, such as guns and abortion, and voters adopting their neighbors’ partisanship.

“A lot of this is driven by other sorting that is going on,” Enos said.

When Americans move, politics is not typically the explicit reason. But the lifestyle choices they make place them in communities dominated by their preferred party.

“Democrats want to live in places with artistic culture and craft breweries, and Republicans want to move to places where they can have a big yard,” said Ryan Strickler, a political scientist at Colorado State University-Pueblo.

But something may have changed as the country has become even more polarized. Businesses catering to conservatives fleeing blue states have sprouted, such as Blue Line Moving, which markets to families fleeing from blue states to Florida. In Texas, a “rainbow underground railroad” run by a Dallas realtor helps LGBTQ+ families flee the state’s increased restrictions targeting that population.

The switch might have been flipped during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, which created a class of mobile workers no longer bound to the states where their companies were based. Those who are now mobile are predominantly white-collar workers and retirees, the two most politically engaged parts of the national population.

Mike McCarter, who has spearheaded a quixotic campaign to have conservative eastern Oregon become part of Idaho, said most people didn’t pay much attention to state government until the pandemic.

“Then it was like ‘Oh, they can shut down any church and they can shut down my kids’ school?’” McCarter said. “If state-level government has that much power, you’d better be sure it reflects your values, and not someone else’s values that are forced on you.”

The pandemic helped push Aaron and Carrie Friesen to Idaho. When the pandemic hit, they realized they could take their marketing firm remote from its base near Hilton Head, South Carolina. They’d always planned to return to the West, but California, where Aaron, now 39, was born and raised, was disqualified because of its cost and progressive politics.

The Friesens and their three children settled on Boise. They loved the big skies, the mountains rearing up behind the town, the plethora of outdoor activities.

And they liked Idaho’s pandemic policies. When the Friesens visited, almost no one was wearing masks, which they took as a good sign — they were happy to mask up when sick, but found constant masking pointless.

“This was a place that had like-minded people,” Carrie Friesen said.

The Friesens are happy with the direction of their new state and the abortion and transgender restrictions out of the latest legislative session. But they don’t see themselves as part of what they called “the crazy right,” referring to the families displaying Trump yard signs in the less-politically-mixed Boise suburbs. They like living close to the center of Boise, one of the more liberal areas in the state.

They try not to make too many decisions based on politics — to a point.

“With the temperature of politics nowadays, if people choose to move somewhere, they are going to choose to move to a place with like-minded people,” Aaron Friesen said.

That’s apparently been happening in Idaho, said Mathew Hay, who oversees a regular survey of new arrivals for Boise State University. Historically, transplants mirrored the conservative population’s leanings, with about 45% describing themselves as “conservative,” and the rest evenly split between liberal and moderate.

But something changed last year — the share of newcomers that said they lived in Idaho for the politics jumped to 9%, compared to 5% for long-timers. The percentage describing themselves as “very conservative” also rose.

When Melissa Wintrow rode her motorcycle across the U.S. in 1996, she was captivated by Idaho.

“It was this grounded, commonsense, reasonable group,” Wintrow said. “Of course they were conservative, but they weren’t going to say openly racist and homophobic things.”

Now a Democratic state senator, Wintrow is aghast at how her adopted state has become more hardline.

“The state has just moved to a more extreme view,” she said. “It’s a certain group of people that is afraid their ‘way of life’ is diminishing in the world.”

In Colorado, the reverse may be happening.

Bret Weinstein, owner of a realty firm in Denver, said politics has become the top issue for people buying a home.

“It’s brought up in our initial conversations,” Weinstein said. “Three years ago, we didn’t have those conversations, ever.”

Now, many entering the state tell him they’re looking for a way to escape their red state — and homeowners leaving Colorado say they’re fed up with it turning blue. Even within Colorado, Weinstein said, homebuyers are picking based on politics, with some avoiding conservative areas where debates on mask mandates and curriculum has dominated school board meetings.

One of those politically motivated migrants is Kathleen Rickerson, who works in human resources for Weinstein’s firm. Rickerson, 35, lived in Minnesota for seven years, but during the pandemic grew weary of the blue state’s vocal anti-masking, anti-vaccine minority.

Rickerson’s parents and sister urged her to join them in Texas, but that was out of the question. Ready for a change, Rickerson instead zeroed in on Colorado. She moved to a Denver suburb in December 2021.

Cheered by the state’s strong stance to protect abortion rights, Rickerson wants Colorado Democrats to go further.

“Colorado isn’t as quick to take a stand on things, and I’d like to see that happen a bit more,” she said.

That was a sentiment shared by Colorado progressives, who were frustrated their party didn’t muscle through an assault weapons ban and other priorities of the left during the most recent legislative session.

“There is a point at which we need to stop acting like trying to get along with our enemies is going to preserve our institution,” progressive state Rep. Stephanie Vigil said at the end of the session, after the chamber’s Democratic leader said it was important that Republicans still feel like they have a voice.

The increasing political homogeneity in states makes it harder for both parties to feel invested, said Thad Kousser, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego.

“It gives one party the ability to move a state further when they’re doing exactly what their constituency wants,” he said.

The system works as a sort of escape valve, Kousser said, letting the majority in the state feel in power regardless of what’s happening in Washington, D.C. But the local minority party gets shortchanged.

The Kohls felt shortchanged in California. They said they watched their native state deteriorate before their eyes, and no one was willing to fix the problems. Trash piled up with homeless encampments. Tax money seemed to go to immigrants who had entered the country illegally rather than U.S. citizens. Jennifer’s mother qualified for government assistance due to her low income, but was on dozens of wait lists that were seven years long. Tim’s police station, in a former hippie colony in the mountains running through West Los Angeles, was firebombed during the George Floyd protests in 2020.

The Kohls wanted to live in a red state, but Jennifer said they’re not just party-line voters. A nurse, she hasn’t registered with either party and has a wide range of beliefs, including that abortion is sometimes necessary.

“I believe so many different things,” she said.

On balance, they feel more comfortable in a more conservative place.

“Here, the tax dollars naturally goes to the citizens, not the immigrants,” said Tim Kohl, who can understand why Idaho is growing so fast. “Most of the people we’ve met here are from California originally.”

In Denver, Dean has found other people who fled red states. She and her partner, Cassidy Dean, discovered that their neighbors fled Florida after the state’s hard turn to the political right.

Leah Dean was a 19-year-old cosmetology college student in San Antonio in 2008 when she had an abortion. She chafed at the obstacles she faced — the state-mandated waiting period before the procedure, having to get a sonogram before the procedure — and became a committed Democratic activist. She met her partner at the Texas state party convention in 2016, and every year since then she’s felt the Republican state legislature and governor make the state less and less hospitable to people like her.

Now in Colorado, she and her partner both work from home, telecommuting to their old Texas jobs. They have limited social outlets, but took care of that by throwing themselves into politics again, with Leah Dean becoming vice chair of Denver Democrats.

“It’s also how we meet people,” she said. “We don’t have any other way to do that.

The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Florida construction and agricultural workforces diminished after new immigration law takes effect

The Week

Florida construction and agricultural workforces diminished after new immigration law takes effect

Catherine Garcia, Night editor – July 4, 2023

Buildings under construction in Miami Joe Raedle / Getty Images

A new law that took effect in Florida on July 1 is already hitting the state’s agricultural and construction industries hard.

The law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in May, makes it a third-degree felony for people to use a false identification to get hired for work. Any business that is found to knowingly employ those unauthorized workers could have its license revoked and face daily fines. Additionally, hospitals that accept Medicaid are now required to question a patient’s immigration status, driver’s licenses given to undocumented immigrants in other states are invalid, and it’s a third-degree felony to knowingly transport undocumented immigrants into the state.

An estimated 772,00 undocumented immigrants lived in Florida in 2019, with many working on construction sites, farms and packaging facilities. Migrant workers began leaving the state once DeSantis signed the new law in May, The Wall Street Journal reported, including those who are authorized to work but are married to someone who isn’t. A spokesperson for DeSantis defended the law, saying that businesses that hire undocumented immigrants “instead of Floridians will be held accountable.”

At multiple construction sites in Miami, workers shared with the Journal that they have lost about half of their crews; one man said he knows people who went to Indiana, where they could make $38 an hour instead of $25 and not have to worry about running afoul of the immigration law. Tom C. Murphy, co-president of Coastal Construction, told the Journal there was already a labor shortage before the law went into effect, and while “we fully support documentation of the immigrant workforce, the new law is aggravating an already trying situation.”

Immigration is usually a federal area of law, immigration lawyer Daniela Barshel told the Journal, and it will be difficult to give guidance to clients when there are differing state and federal rules. “It’s kind of extreme that Florida passed a law like this,” she said. Companies cannot be advised to stop hiring noncitizens, since that could be discrimination on the basis of race or national origin, leaving businesses with no easy path forward. “You don’t want to be fined by the government, and you also don’t want to be sued by someone because they were authorized to work and you didn’t hire them,” Barshel said.

A shadowy club in California recently associated with Clarence Thomas is being sued for multiple labor violations. Here’s what the secret retreat is known for.

Insider

A shadowy club in California recently associated with Clarence Thomas is being sued for multiple labor violations. Here’s what the secret retreat is known for.

Hannah Getahun – July 2, 2023

In this July 29, 1971 file photo is the roadway into the exclusive Bohemian Grove, a quiet encampment 80 miles north of San Francisco in Monte Rio, Calif.Sal Veder/AP Photo

Former workers, known as valets, are suing an elite men’s club for alleged labor violations.
The lawsuit claims they were forced to work over 15 hours daily without breaks.
The Bohemian Club has been associated with right-wing political figures, including Clarence Thomas.

The Bohemian Club, an all-men’s private society in California that counts former presidents among its members, faces a class action lawsuit from servers for alleged labor violations.

The exclusive club occasionally pops up in the news, primarily for its association with elite and wealthy men. Most recently, a ProPublica report detailing Justice Clarence Thomas’ relationship with Harlan Crow mentioned the club.

Thomas, who went on luxurious vacations with the billionaire real estate magnate and GOP megadonor, accompanied him to Bohemian Grove — a hidden woodland retreat often associated with the club that hosts events like a 14-day summer camp.

Former valets who used to work at Monastery Camp in Monte Rio, California, which they described as one of the “most prestigious and well-known camps at Bohemian Grove,” filed the complaint on June 5.

The valets, who attended to wealthy guests during summer camp, claim in the complaint that workers were required to work over 15 hours a day with no breaks or meal periods while only receiving pay for 8 hours a day. The suit alleges that club management “continually worked together to come up with methods to avoid paying payroll taxes and overtime.”

The suit names Bohemian Club treasurer William Dawson as someone who directly asked employees to “falsify payroll records.” It also claims that valets were asked to hide when the owner of the payroll company Pomella LLC, also named as a defendant in the suit, came to inspect the Grove. The suit alleges that the payroll company was also aware of the falsified timesheets.

The lawsuit also alleges that valets working at around 100 other camps plaintiffs say are associated with the club are run by captains that have engaged in similar labor violations. The lawsuit says that Bohemian Club may seek to distance itself from these camps during litigation, but asserts that these affiliate camps are a joint venture of the main club and that members pay the club to access these sites.

The members are suing for up to $1.5 million in damages.

In a statement to the Press Democrat, Sam Singer, a communications representative for the club, said that the club “has always valued and respected its employees, and that includes our commitment to full compliance with all applicable wage and hour laws and regulations.”

“We believe these three individuals know full well they did not work for the Club and that this lawsuit is a transparent attempt to drag the Club into their individual circumstances,” Singer told the Press Democrat. “The Club will vigorously defend itself in this action, as it would in any other meritless lawsuit.”

The Bohemian Club, which has thousands of members and has been associated with Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and George HW Bush, has been hosting the summer camp for over 150 years and describes itself as a club of “gentlemen who are connected professionally with Literature, Art, Music, or the Drama.”

The club, full of elite men often tight-lipped about its members and events, has garnered the interest of conspiracy theorists, left-leaning protestors, and interested onlookers. Although there is still much to learn about the club, one ritual was uncovered by InfoWars host Alex Jones, who snuck into the Bohemian Grove summer camp to film a strange ritual that consisted of robed members burning a coffin effigy — named “Care” — in front of a 40-foot owl statue.

According to previous investigative reports, the Grove also hosts various social activities, like plays and comedy shows featuring men portraying female characters. The club is also known for hosting “Lakeside Talks,” where members, often those of the political elite, speak about policy ideas.

The Bohemian Club and a lawyer for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

Why is America not the lawless, gun-free, socialist wasteland Republicans warned us about?

USA Today – Opinion

Why is America not the lawless, gun-free, socialist wasteland Republicans warned us about?

Rex Huppke, USA TODAY – July 2, 2023

Last I checked, there are approximately 3,756 Republicans running for the GOP presidential nomination, and the vast majority of them – particularly the Donalds Trump and the Rons DeSantis of the world – want voters to know they should be terrified.

Terrified of what, you ask? Oh, I dunno. Socialism. Marxism. “Radical” teachers. Mickey Mouse. Drag queens. “Others.” Pretty much everything, it seems. All the fears. (I’d add spiders to that list, but that’s just me, a liberal scaredy cat.)

Fearmongering is a tried-and-true Republican Party tradition and with the 2024 election cycle about to kick into full gear, it’s mongering season.

Republican fearmongering, and some questions about why fears are never realized

So I have a suggestion for GOP voters, from the MAGA loyalists to the (three remaining) moderates to everyone in between. The first GOP presidential debate will be Aug. 23 in Milwaukee. At that event, you should demand answers to the following fear-related questions:

Why is “her” – the Hillary Clinton character in the “Lock her up!” chant – not locked up? Former President Donald Trump was supposed to do that, yet “her” walks free.

President Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during a debate in 2016.

Why haven’t we been literally invaded by umpteen South American migrant caravans?

Where is the country-destroying migrant surge that was supposed to come after Title 42 ended?

Why aren’t there violent MS-13 gang members on every street corner?

Fascist? Moms for Liberty newsletter quotes Adolf Hitler, complains about being labeled ‘extremist’

Why haven’t the tyrannical Democrats taken our guns?

Why hasn’t Obamacare been repealed?

Where is the GOP health care plan? (Coming in two weeks, I’m sure of it!)

Why, with godless, devious Democrat Joe Biden as president, are Americans still allowed to say “Merry Christmas”?

Campaign buttons for sale during the North Carolina Republican Party Convention in Greensboro on June 10, 2023.

Why did the COVID-19 vaccines work? Why did they not contain tracking chips that allow the government to monitor us?

Why has the economy not collapsed and why has the American way of life not been destroyed?

Why is there not, as Michigan gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon promised in 2022 before not becoming governor, “a drag queen in every classroom, indoctrinating our children”?

Why haven’t drag shows turned all Americans into drag queens?

Years of fear, with so few results – it’s almost as if they’re manipulating voters

Why are America’s big cities not actually dystopian hellscapes?

Why is the murder rate declining when we’ve been told repeatedly that crime is spiraling out of control?

How come our children are able to watch Disney movies without turning gay?

Why are Americans still allowed to speak English?

Why are we still able to hold dear all the things we hold dear?

I was specifically promised widespread socialism. What the heck?

Why has nobody come to confiscate our guns? We have actual buckets filled with guns in the basement and bullets everywhere and not a single damn Democrat has come to rip them from our hands, cold and dead or otherwise.

Losing already? Maybe Ron DeSantis’ flailing presidential campaign caught ‘woke mind virus.’

Why has virtually everything a Republican candidate or Fox News talking head ever said to instill fear in our hearts wound up being either total nonsense or, at best, an almost bizarre overexaggeration of a relatively minor issue?

Why has America not been transformed into a socialist wasteland?

Why, for the last time, do we still have all of our guns?

You deserve answers to these questions, my Republican friends. Because often, in this big and confusing world of ours, there are inescapable signs that suggest you’re being lied to.

Learning to spot them is an important life skill. Off you go.

Idaho Republican Party’s rule changes have a precedent: The Soviet Politburo

Idaho Statesman – Opinion

Idaho Republican Party’s rule changes have a precedent: The Soviet Politburo | Opinion

The Editorial Board – June 30, 2023

Imagine Rep. Jane Smith voted against a bill to censor public libraries.

Returning home to her rural Idaho district, she is ordered to appear before the Central Committee, where Party officials pepper her with questions. Her answers are unimportant.

The Central Committee announces the decision it made weeks ago: Smith will be cast out, the fact that she won the support of 70% of voters in the last election notwithstanding.

Because the requirement for wielding power is not loyalty to the people who elected you, but loyalty to the party bosses.

This isn’t a scene from the Soviet bloc. It’s the Idaho Republican Party’s immediate plan for running politics in the Gem State under the guidance of Premier Dorothy Moon, a plan it moved at its summer meeting in Challis to begin implementing with a series of rules.

As Melissa Davlin of Idaho Public Television reported, the party passed resolutions that include allowing central committees to summon, censure and even revoke the right of lawmakers to run as Republicans; revoking the voting privileges of the Young Republicans, College Republicans and Republican Women; supporting a constitutional amendment to allow the party to control the primary; and issuing a vote of no confidence in Gov. Brad Little and a number of Republican House members for failing to support library censorship.

The organizing logic is simple: Whatever power there is, it ought to belong to the Party.

Whatever power these ideologically extreme and power-hungry Party bosses successfully take, it will come at the expense of Idaho voters.

Because policy positions favored by huge numbers of Republican voters in Idaho are formally verboten under the Idaho GOP’s official platform.

If a Republican lawmaker doesn’t sign on to a proposal to revoke your right to cast a ballot in U.S. Senate elections, they’ve violated the GOP platform, which requires support for revoking the 17th Amendment.
If they support the continued existence of some number of grizzly bears or wolves in Idaho, they’ve arguably violated it as well.
Or if they don’t support a return to the gold standard.
Or if they don’t support the repeal of Medicaid expansion.
Or if they don’t support nullifying the U.S. Supreme Court decision recognizing marriage equality.
Or if they support the right of a child who was raped by a family member to have an abortion, or if they think that such an abortion should be handled in some way other than with a murder charge.

For these and countless other examples of crimethink, the people’s elected officials could be hauled in and stripped of their right to call themselves Republicans by a bunch of people that most Idaho Republican voters have never heard of, much less voted for.

With Idaho’s most powerful party fully hijacked, the open primary initiative seems to be the best bet for keeping the political process under popular control, precisely because it would diminish the political relevance of parties. It would allow everyone to weigh in on which candidates will face off in the general election, regardless of party, and it would allow voters to rank general election candidates in order of preference, so they wouldn’t have to worry they’re throwing their votes away if a third-party candidate is their first choice.

None of this would help people the extremist Party has termed RINOs or secret liberals or any of that nonsense. Conservatives would do well with an open primary and ranked-choice voting system because Idaho is full of conservative voters.

Those elected under such a system would know that it was the people, not the Party bosses, who put them in office. They would know it is the people, not the Party bosses, to whom they answer for their record.

Statesman editorials are the unsigned opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe, newsroom editors Dana Oland and Jim Keyser, and community member Mary Rohlfing.

Liz Cheney on what’s wrong with politics: ‘We’re electing idiots’

The Washington Post

Liz Cheney on what’s wrong with politics: ‘We’re electing idiots’

John Wagner – June 27, 2023

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) arrives in Jackson Hole, Wyo., to speak after losing her Republican primary election on Aug. 16. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Ex-congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) offered a blunt assessment of her former profession Monday night: “What we’ve done in our politics is create a situation where we’re electing idiots.”

Cheney, who lost her Republican primary last year to a candidate backed by former president Donald Trump, shared her view at an event that was billed as a conversation on the future of the two-party political system in the United States.

Cheney, who co-chaired the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, has emerged as a leading critic of Trump, repeatedly calling him “unfit for office.” In the conversation Monday at the 92nd Street Y in New York, guided by moderator David Rubenstein, Cheney said ensuring Trump doesn’t return to the White House is her top priority.

That prompted Rubenstein to ask whether Cheney would run for president as an independent next year if presented with polling data showing such a bid would damage Trump.

“Look, I think that the country right now faces hugely challenging and fundamentally important issues,” Cheney responded. “And what we’ve done in our politics is create a situation where we’re electing idiots.”

Liz Cheney launches anti-Trump ad ahead of former president’s CNN town hall

After laughter from the audience subsided, she continued: “And so, I don’t look at it through the lens of, is this what I should do or what I shouldn’t do. I look at it through the lens of, how do we elect serious people? And I think electing serious people can’t be partisan.”

“You know, because of the situation that we’re in,” Cheney continued, “where we have a major-party candidate who’s trying to unravel our democracy — and I don’t say that lightly — we have to think about, all right, what kinds of alliances are necessary to defeat him, and those are the alliances we’ve got to build across party lines.”

The conversation moved on without Cheney directly answering whether she might move forward with a presidential bid if it could damage Trump.

Earlier, she suggested she wouldn’t run for president if she thought doing so could help Trump, who has continued to lead in Republican primary polling despite state and federal indictments.

“I am not going to do anything that would help Donald Trump,” Cheney said.

North Carolina GOP bars promotion of certain beliefs in state government, 1 of 6 veto overrides

Associated Press

North Carolina GOP bars promotion of certain beliefs in state government, 1 of 6 veto overrides

Gary D. Robertson – June 27, 2023

FILE – Democratic North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper speaks to The Associated Press in a year-end interview at the Executive Mansion in Raleigh, N.C., Dec. 14, 2022. On Friday, June 16, 2023, Cooper vetoed GOP legislation that would ban the promotion of certain beliefs that some lawmakers have likened to critical race theory in state government workplaces. (AP Photo/Hannah Schoenbaum, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina’s GOP-dominated legislature swept six bills into law Tuesday with veto overrides, including one barring promotion of certain beliefs in state government workplaces that some lawmakers liken to critical race theory and another placing new limits on wetlands protection rules.

The measures, which also address green investing in state government, consumer loans and local government finances, became law after a succession of votes with margins large enough to overcome Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s formal vetoed objections earlier this month.

Five of the veto overrides were completed Tuesday with House votes, which followed several similar Senate votes over the past week. A sixth veto override effort cleared both the House and Senate on Tuesday.

The state constitution deems an override successful if at least three-fifths of the members in each chamber present and voting agree to enact the bill anyway despite the governor’s objections.

The overrides exemplify the expanded political muscle of Republicans after electoral seat gains last fall and a House Democrat’s party switch in April gave them exact veto-proof majorities in each chamber for the first time since late 2018. Cooper had been able to block several dozen GOP measures over the previous four years with vetoes because there were enough Democrats supporting his efforts.

Several of Tuesday’s override votes in the House included support from a few Democrats. Still, Republicans needed to ensure that enough of their party colleagues were in attendance to complete overrides.

Among the bills enacted Tuesday is the legislature’s annual farm bill, which contains more than 30 provisions such as penalties for cutting down timber, waiting periods for regulators to inspect veterinarians’ offices and the establishment of an official “Farmers Appreciation Day” in November.

Cooper’s farm bill veto came Friday. He said the measure would weaken the regulation of wetlands that help control flooding and pollution. His administration and environmental groups have said the bill’s language, when combined with a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, would leave about half of the state’s wetlands unprotected.

Republicans and their allies blunted the impact of the bill’s language on wetlands, saying it would affect largely affect isolated terrain that rarely floods and align standards with federal law.

Another now-enacted law that takes effect in December bans trainers of state employees from advancing concepts to workers such as that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,” or to believe they should feel guilty for past actions committed by people of the same race or sex. It also would prohibit hiring managers for state agencies, community colleges and the University of North Carolina system from compelling applicants for policy-making jobs to reveal their personal or political beliefs as a condition of employment.

In his veto message, Cooper said the bill attempts to suppress workplace discussions related to diversity, equity and inclusion that can reveal “unconscious bias we all bring to our work and our communities.” But supporters of the bill said it actually encourages a diverse set of beliefs within public agencies.

Both the House and Senate voted Tuesday to override the veto of a measure that now ban state agencies from using “environmental, social and governance” standards to screen potential investments, award contracts or hire and fire employees.

On state investments like those in pension funds, the bill says the state treasurer could solely consider factors expected to have a material effect on the financial risk or financial return of an investment.

At least two other states have already enacted laws banning such criteria. Republicans nationwide has raised questions about big business focusing upon environmental sustainability and workplace diversity so much that it harms shareholders and pensioners.

Cooper said in his veto message late week that the measure would needlessly limit the treasurer’s ability to make investment decisions that are in the best interests of the state retirement fund.

Other bills enacted over Cooper’s vetoes in part would raise interest rates and late fees on certain amounts of personal consumer finance loans as well as on consumer credit sales, such as when someone buys a car and pays for it in installments or with a finance charge. Cooper said the higher costs, which would take effect in October on new, renewed or modified loans, would harm residents who already are faced with rising costs of living.

Another bill with a veto now overridden would permit the state’s Local Government Commission to order withheld a portion of sales tax revenues the state collects for cities and counties that fail to complete annual audits of their accounts. Bill supporters said the measure will promote government accountability. Cooper said it was well-intentioned but would likely hurt the state’s smallest communities.

Category: Politics and American Democracy

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