Sunday, August 23, 2020

Nothing Was the Best We Could Hope For

How much of the time, energy, and money of other people has the Administration wasted?
  1. On July 6, the Trump Administration announced it would require international students studying in the United States to take at least one face-to-face (as opposed to on-line) class at their universities or lose their visas and face deportation.  The announcement naturally created panic in the lives of international students and turned university plans for the coming year into chaos.  Universities didn’t know whether they would even be open for face-to-face classes and students had no time to consider other choices before the fall.
    In response, there was widespread anger and objection.  Scores of universities signed on to lawsuits to prevent the new policy going into effect.  Twenty state attorneys general across the country also sued in objection.   
    On July 14, eight days after the initial announcement, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) dropped the requirements for face-to-face classes.  Everybody breathed more easily; the policy had been reversed; the political system had worked.    
    But at what cost?  How many millions of dollars did universities spend in unneeded administrative meetings and legal fees preparing the suits?  How much time did state lawyers spend preparing their legal objections instead of taking care of other important issues?  What will be the impact on the mental health of international students whose entire futures whipsawed before their eyes?

    It wasn’t the only time.

  2. The President recently signed a memo in support of barring undocumented immigrants from being counted in the current census for the apportionment of congressional representatives.  It was a frivolous directive: The 14th Amendment to the Constitution is quite specific that “the whole number of persons in each State” shall be counted.  It couldn’t even survive administrative review.
  3. Since his inauguration the President has issued hundreds of directives interfering in some way with the Affordable Care Act.  Most of these are redundant since they have already been passed in legislation or the Administration does not have the power to enforce them, but each requires the time, energy, and money of individuals, non-profit organization, congressional committees and others to investigate and challenge.
Professor of political science Paul Musgrave, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has recently written an important article on the enormous impact — in both time, cost and energy — of countering President Donald Trump’s tweets, announcements and random statements.  Literally millions of opposition dollars are wasted in responding to hare-brained ideas launched — at almost no cost to them — by the President, his advisors and his acolytes.  Writes Musgrave:
It’s a struggle between firefighters and a spree arsonist. The firefighters must stamp out every blaze, while the arsonist enjoys pouring accelerant, igniting a spark and sauntering off to start anew with kindling elsewhere. And the gradual exhaustion of the firefighters makes it likelier that they will someday fail to contain the flames.
In essence, the administration has hit upon a low-cost way to make opponents spend time and energy. “If time is a political resource of value,” Syracuse University professor Elizabeth Cohen said, “then anything you can do to force people to spend their time on what you want them to do, not the work they would want to do, is effective.”

Each time Trump issues one of the directives or muses in a tweet about issuing one, the opposition jumps into action.  Often, that is the last we hear about it, and opponents consider themselves successful in blunting the President’s actions.  A tweet, however, is cheap for Trump to create, which he does multiple times a day.  But the opposition must then spend its time, money and energy to counter each one.  
 
And in the end we get … nothing.  Most days, nothing is the best we can hope for. 

Monday, August 17, 2020

President Sabotages Mail-in Voting (Part I)

[This is Part I of a two-part post on the impact of the slow-down in postal service on the Nov 3 election.]

As I have written before, the Republican Party has supported many forms of voter suppression over the last several decades: Voter-ID laws, reducing the number of polling places in poor, minority and immigrant areas, voter-roll purges and others.  President Trump has just discovered a new one: sabotaging mail delivery to interfere with mail-in voting.

In any political discussion of current voting in the United States, it is important from the very beginning to call out the Republican lie that there exists significant individual voter fraud in the country.  Multiple studies have confirmed that, for practical purposes, individual voter fraud (voting several times, impersonating another voter and so on) just does not happen.  In particular, despite the facts that absentee ballots have been permitted for years across the country and that universally available mail-in voting has been used in a majority of states, there is no evidence of voter fraud in mail-in voting.  Anyone who claims voter fraud as an issue in American elections is either ignorant or lying!  Period.

Mail-in voting does, however, have a significant impact: It increases voter turn-out. Despite a great deal of noise on both sides, most studies indicate that vote by-mail does not in itself advantage one party over the other.  Not surprisingly, of course, the party that works hardest to get out the mail-in vote benefits the most.  Since mail-in voting increases the total number of voters and does not increase voter fraud, the only possible reason for opposing it would be the desire to suppress the vote.

As a former businessman, President Trump has long railed against the US Postal Service (USPS) as an example of an inefficient public agency that does not pay for itself.  It is no surprise, however, USPS income does not meet its expenses:

  • Congress mandates that the USPS deliver mail at the set cost (now $0.55) everywhere on American soil.
  • Mail delivery to rural and other hard-to-reach areas does not come close paying for itself, but most would consider it an essential service.
  • Private enterprises such as UPS and Fed-Ex are allowed to cherry-pick the most profitable elements of mail delivery (for instance, packages) without any obligation to serve everyone and can, therefore, underbid USPS.

In May of this year, President Trump appointed the Republican mega-donor Louis DeJoy Postmaster General despite his lack of any experience with the postal service.  Trump’s avowed purpose was to "streamline" the postal service and increase its efficiency.  The new Postmaster quickly announced changes to

  • prohibit overtime,
  • ban letter carriers from coming back to the central station to pick up more mail and return to the route,
  • stop using automated letter-sorters that speed mail delivery, and
  • prohibit the testing of new mail sorting and delivery policies.

Predictably, the changes have slowed mail delivery.  

Some states anticipate that mail-in voting will cause ten times the normal volume of mail.   Despite this anticipated deluge, post office executives in July maintained the cuts in services but issued a warning "that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted" and that even "if people follow all of their state’s election rules, the pace of Postal Service delivery may disqualify their votes."  It is not clear how much of this is routine ("covering their butt" in case things don't work out perfectly) and how much is a legitimate warning.  In any case, it raises the possibility of more chaos.

Republicans in Congress have routinely forced the underfunding of the USPS.  This year the postal service has sought $25 billion in emergency funding and the House of Representative passed a proposal to provide $3.6 billion in additional election funding to the states.  Both of those requests have been tied up in congressional negotiations over a new coronavirus relief packages.  President Trump has said that he opposes both, explicitly acknowledging that his purpose is to prevent the Democrats from expanding mail-in voting, that is, he is actually admitting to trying to suppress legitimate voting.

Trump's actions are difficult to understand, even from his own point of view.  Although mail-in voting itself does not seem to advantage either party, Republican leaders in swing states are huge fans because it encourages senior and other voters in rural areas to vote.  In fact, it may very well be that the President's warnings will discourage home-bound Republicans from using mail-in ballots.  

Yet more puzzling is his open, public acknowledgment that he is trying to suppress voting, a fundamental American right.

There are several basic issues here. 

  • Trump's behavior gives further evidence of his unhinged  mental state.
  • Trump is using his presidential power to trash long-standing norms and universally recognized rights.  The most important impact will be to throw much of the November 3 election into chaos.

- Many people will understandably be confused about how to vote.  
- For others, fear of the pandemic will keep them from the polls.  
- The ballots of those who do vote by mail may arrive too late to be counted.
- The postal slowdown may cause significant delays in declaring the winner, further undermining the integrity of the elections.
- Trump may, conceivably, use any uncertainty about the results to reinforce his continued claim of “rigged elections” and use the unconstitutional claim to stay in office. 
[Continued in Part 2 tomorrow.]

Sunday, August 16, 2020

President Sabotages Mail-In Voting (Part II )

[This is an expansion and continuation of the post from two days ago that was intended to be the first part of a two-part post.]

Since my last post the Postmaster General Louis deJoy announced that the post office will postpone until after the election the changes in postal service that had threatened to slow ballot delivery and disrupt the election.  His announcement also disrupts this second part of the post I intend to send you today.

Several of the points I made last time are still relevant, however.

  • Trump's behavior both trying to institute the delay and then postponing it gives further evidence of his unhinged logic and his inability to recognize even his own self-interest.  It took the groundswell of objection and anger to persuade him to retract the changes.  It further supports the charge that even his own staff could not keep him tethered to reality, at least from the first decision to implement the delay.  And that further supports the concern that he is fundamentally unfit for office.
  • Once again, Trump tried to use his extraordinary presidential power to trash long-standing norms and universally recognized rights.  As in other situations, it was not against the law: the president does technically have authority to change the functioning of his own administration's agencies.  The actual impact on voting rights, however, would probably have been unconstitutional, although that judgment would probably not been rendered until after the election.
  • The most important impact would have been to throw much of the November 3 election into chaos much as I described in the first post:

- Many people would understandably have been confused about how to vote. 
- For others, fear of the pandemic would have kept them from the polls. 
- The ballots of those who did vote by mail might have arrived too late to be counted.
- If the election were at all close, the postal slowdown would have caused significant delays in declaring the winner, further undermining the appearance of the integrity of the elections.

  • Trump has, even yet, not agreed to accept the results of the election.  With any uncertainty he may well have used the ambiguity about the results to reinforce his continuing claim to remain in office.  The courts would undoubtedly have struck such action down, but, in the meantime, the confusion would have further polarized the country.

Fortunately, this time the public uproar has taken the major threats away.  But the postal service's initial decision demonstrated the President's perception of his unilateral, undemocratic power. 

I am personally now convinced that the President will not be re-elected in November.  I do, however, worry about what he might do in the remaining 2½ months until the election and, especially, in the 2½ lame-duck months after the election but before the Jan 21 Biden inauguration.

But the greatest concern for me — as it has been since the beginning of Donald Trump's presidency — is the continuing damage done to the institution of the presidency.  Under emergency, presidents have frequently taken new powers, in intelligence and national security, for instance, but even after the emergency is over, they have not generally given those powers up willingly**.  Nor have those presidents who followed them.  In 1950, for instance, calling it a "police action," President Harry Truman took us into the Korean War without a constitutionally-mandated congressional declaration of war.  Since that time the United States has been in constant "military conflict" without a single congressional declaration  of war.  Presidents — both Republican and Democrat — have frequently used non-constitutional "signing statements" or "executive orders" to go around Congress and create the non-binding but usually enforced equivalent of “law.”

Since his inauguration, President Trump has appropriated funds not approved by Congress to build the Mexican border wall, claimed immunity from congressional investigation, used the Justice Department for partisan purposes, used his presidential power to enrich his businesses, and arrogated for the first time in American history many other powers to a president.  How many of these powers will future presidents give up when confronted with the perceived need to use them?  Will a future president refrain from intervening when the Justice Department prosecutes someone whom the president judges should not be prosecuted?  Will future presidents countermand Environmental Protection Agency regulation that they deem inappropriate?  Will a future president resist firing an Inspector General whose investigation tarnishes the president?  Given that the current President has gotten away with these uses of his power, how will the democracy claw its way back to the appropriate balance of powers?

We may call President Trump an aberration, which he certainly has been.  But what will a future president do when a crucial Trump-broken precedent would be very useful … especially for a "good" purpose? 

It will not be possible to put the toothpaste completely back into the tube.  And our democracy will be the worse for it.

_____________

** Richard Nixon was forced from office and Congress subsequently curbed some of his abuses of presidential power.

Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Census Games

On August 3, the Census Bureau announced it was cutting short data collection for the 2020 census by one month.  Collection had been scheduled to end on October 31.  Now the deadline for critical door-knocking efforts and collecting responses online, over the phone and by mail has been changed to September 30.

The technicalities of census data collection may seem at first arcane, but this shortening of the period has profound economic, political and practical implications.  At this time, the Census Bureau has been unable to reach over 40% of American households, which they call the "hard-to-reach," predominantly the poor, minorities, immigrant groups and renters that tend to vote Democratic, although they also include rural voters who tend to vote Republican.  Even the October 31 date had been criticized by census officials as too soon because of the interruption of data collection efforts by the COVID-19 pandemic.  Well before the deadline was moved to Sep 30, Albert Fontenot, associate director for decennial census programs, said, "We are past the window of being able to get those counts by [Oct 31] at this point.”

The follow-up to count the hard-to-reach began August 11.  Census workers sometimes have to make as many as sixteen attempts to reach someone at their suspected residence, a time-consuming job made even harder by limitations caused by the pandemic.

"There is no reason not to extend the deadline unless you are trying to embed an undercount of certain groups of people in the census counts," said Nancy Potok, a former deputy director at the Census Bureau who recently retired as the United States' chief statistician.

It should come as a shock to no one that the Administration is pushing for an undercount to reduce the economic and political power of minorities and the poor:

  • The Administration had previously attempted to add a citizenship question to the census, which, it was generally agreed, would have decreased the number of immigrants responding to the questionnaire.  The citizenship question was later struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. 
  • In July, the number of political appointees to the Bureau was expanded from one person to three without a given reason.  The addition was initiated by the White House and was not vetted or even discussed with any Bureau official nor did the appointees have any special qualification for their positions.  (One had, in fact, previously questioned why the data collection should be expanded for hard-to-reach people.)
  • In defiance of previous explicit legal definitions, the Administration directed the Census Bureau late last month to exclude non-documented immigrants from the census count.  This directive will almost certainly be overturned by the courts.  In the meantime, the damage that will be done to an accurate count is unknown.

Decennial census data is used to apportion Representatives to Congress, so an undercount of hard-to-reach residents will result in state re-apportionments that skew Republican.  Census data dictates the allocation of federal dollars and influences everything from infrastructure investments, education programs (like free and reduced lunch) and public health-care spending.  Again this would have major impact upon the states.  It is also used for statistical measures that will affect the funding of multiple local, state, and federal programs.  The 2020 census count will remain the basis for all such decisions until 2030, making its impact long-lasting and potentially devastating: In Texas, for instance, data experts have estimated that even a one percent undercount of Latinos would lead to a loss of $300 million in federal funding per year for the next decade.

These important decisions will no longer be based on fact but on a politically-determined fiction.

Democrats have naturally challenged the Administration's re-imagining of reality, but it is unclear whether their challenges will have any impact on how the census is conducted.

The Democratically controlled House of Representatives has included in its new COVID-19 relief bill an extension of time for data collection, but the Republican Senate has, not surprisingly, refused to include it in its proposals.

While the President's blatant political attacks on the previously non-political Census Bureau are not a surprise, they remain profoundly destructive to our democracy.  The President and the Republican Party continue to destroy American democratic norms, excluding poor people and minorities from political representation and federal funds, using the power of the presidency to further pervert our democracy.

In writing the American Constitution, the Founders — having the autocratic King George in mind — carefully limited the authority of presidents by giving them few powers.  They did not, however, foresee the explosive growth of government that would give the president control over law enforcement, the military, economic policy, education, the environment, and most other aspects of national life.  That administration behemoth is responsible only to the president who is only loosely accountable to the electorate.  

The Founders also institutionalized the legislature and judiciary as branches co-equal to the presidency.  They did not, however, foresee the partisan degeneration of Congress that would render it incapable of controlling presidential malfeasance.  

The debacle of the census is only one further manifestation of a democracy in desperate need of reform.

Monday, August 3, 2020

Trump Unhinged

As the election nears, the pandemic rages, the economy stutters (again), and his approval numbers continue to slip, President Trump appears incapable of correcting the course that has brought him to this perilous state.  He’s even doubled-down on some of the very tactics that caused the most damage.  His decisions have worsened the pandemic, destabilized the economy, and decreased his chances for re-election almost to zero, yet he seems committed to them.  We have reached the point where a new question is necessary: Is the President emotionally and intellectually capable of responding to the reality that is destroying his chances for re-election.  Does he have the capacity to recognize his plight?  Is he becoming unhinged?

Superficially, this is not new behavior.  It is consistent with the first 3½ years of his presidency, during which time he evoked deep mistrust of the press, denied science to the point of rolling back desperately needed climate-change policies and pulling out of the Paris climate accords, asked for election help from foreign nations and much else.  What is different now is that his irrational actions are no longer effective in propping up his political support.  Even Republicans are recognizing the political damage and beginning to think about the exits

The President seems to believe he has truly magical powers to repeat his upset in 2016 and is depending on a strategy that worked then but which is now sabotaging his chances for re-election.  He cannot see what should be obvious: the social, political, and economic landscapes have changed dramatically. 

There is recklessness about it, especially as the President pushes for school openings in the face of public fear, hesitation from members of his own staff, and nervousness from politicians in the Republican Party.  His behavior has moved into the bizarre as he retweets medical advice from a fringe physician who belittles the use of face masks believes that having sex with demons can lead to gynecological illness.

Over the past several months, the President seems to have given up any semblance of paying attention to his impact on the public.
  • He seemed at first to backtrack from his disastrous decisions to downplay the Covid-19 crisis, acknowledging now that it will get worse before it gets better, recommending wearing a mask and even wearing one in public (although to date only three times total, more often  still also appearing in public without a mask), canceling his Jacksonville convention, and recommending social distancing.  Nevertheless,
  • He continued to downplay the virus, by claiming it will just disappear. 
  • He has continued to demand that all schools open completely (threatening to cut off federal funding to those who do not) in the face of  the universal medical opinion against complete re-opening, announcements by large school systems that they will not open for face-to-face classes and clear evidence that the public (including the parents who must decide whether they will send their children back to school and teachers who are considering resignation) does not support him.  Although he has acknowledged that districts in some virus hot spots “may need to delay reopening for a few weeks,” he has intervened to push the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to rewrite guidelines so they emphasize the educational risks of staying closed and de-emphasize the public health risk of opening. 
  • Notwithstanding the shortages in testing supplies that will be necessary for any control of the pandemic, Trump has continued to refuse to develop a national policy for containment of the virus. 
  • He escalated his law-and-order stance by using unidentified federal law enforcement officers to clear out lawful, peaceful protestors from Lafayette Square across from the White House so he could walk across the park for bizarre photo op, for which he was subsequently rebuffed by his Defense Secretary and the military’s chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff.  Uninvited by local political leaders, the President subsequently dispatched more federal officers to Portland, Oregon, to quell protests there and threatened to do the same to other (Democratically-controlled) cities despite unanimous objections from leaders there and concern that the federal presence was worsening the Portland situation.  Again, indications from polls are that the public strongly disapproves of his “law-and-order” approach.   
  • Despite widespread public agreement that black people are disproportionately affected by police violence, popular support for the Black Lives Matter movement and the ongoing protests following the death of George Floyd and others, the President has continued to minimize the problem of police violence. He has, unsurprisingly, denied his own role in perpetuating it, responding with the half-truth that more white people are killed than blacks.  (Due to their smaller population, African Americans are killed more than twice the rate of whites).  The civic unrest and the public’s deeper understanding of racism have revealed a President who is increasingly out of touch with his public and who slides into violent authoritarianism when he is frustrated.  Two-thirds of Americans feel that the President has increased racial tensions.
  • Perhaps most dangerously, the President is preparing his constituency for election fraud, as he did in 2016, continually refusing to promise that he will accept the results of the election.  He has said bluntly, without evidence, that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud, once again damaging confidence in our electoral process with unknown consequences.  Because of the pandemic this year, millions more people will be voting by mail, which will very likely delay vote-counting by as much as a week.  His recent donor-turned-appointee to head the Post Office has instituted "efficiency reforms" that will slow down delivery.  The President’s implied threat to refuse to accept the results could have severe, if difficult to predict, consequences.  Most recently he floated the idea of postponing the November elections almost before Republican leaders could reject it.
The signs that more and more individuals and institutions are standing up to him are everywhere:
Up until recently, President Trump’s irrational behavior has been largely protected from criticism by the fact that it didn’t seem to affect his political standing.  But in the face of his crumbling political support, his actions and rhetoric seem not only irrational but even unbalanced.

Too many pundits and too much of the public have been intimidated by Trump's surprise victory in 2016 to notice the differences between then and now.  President Trump is doing overwhelming damage to himself this time around.  Barring some extraordinary “October surprise,” he has destroyed his chances for reelection and, almost as likely, taken the Republican majority in the Senate with him.