September 6, 2021
This week, lawmakers will begin to construct the details of the $3.5 trillion infrastructure package they declared their intention to pass. On August 11, the Senate approved a budget resolution telling committees to hammer out the details of a bill that will deal with the “soft” infrastructure not covered in the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that dealt with roads, bridges, broadband, and other “hard” infrastructure needs. The larger bill will focus on child care, education, elder care, health care, and climate change.
If this measure passes, it will expand the ways in which the government addresses the needs of ordinary Americans. It updates the measures put in place during the New Deal of the 1930s, when Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt shored up nuclear families—usually white nuclear families—by providing unemployment insurance, disability coverage, aid to children, and old age insurance.
After World War II, people of both parties accepted this new system, believing that it was the job of a modern government to level the economic playing field between ordinary men and those at the top of the economic ladder. Republican presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon expanded government action into civil rights and protection of the environment; Democrats Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Jimmy Carter expanded education initiatives, health care, anti-poverty programs, civil rights, and workers’ rights.
But opponents insisted that such government action was “socialism.” In America, this word comes not from international socialism, in which the government owns the means of production, but rather from the earlier history of Reconstruction, when white opponents of Black voting insisted that the money to pay for programs like schools, which helped ordinary and poorer people, must come from those with wealth, and thus redistributed wealth. They demanded an end to the taxes that supported public programs.
They elected Ronald Reagan president in 1980 to reject the post–World War II “liberal consensus” that used the government to level the economic playing field, focusing instead on cutting taxes to return power to individuals to make their own decisions about how to run their own economic lives. Over the past forty years, that ideology has cut the national safety net and moved economic power dramatically upward.
True to that ideology, opponents of the $3.5 trillion infrastructure package are already calling it, as Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) said, a “freight train to socialism." But more than 60% of Americans want to invest our money in our people, as lawmakers of both parties did from 1933 to 1981.
Grover Norquist, a former spokesman for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who rose to power by pushing the opposite idea, that economic development depended on consistent and complete tax cuts, told Michael Scherer of the Washington Post, “We are really on this precipice, this knife’s edge, and each party goes, ‘If I just push a little bit harder I can control politics for the next 20 years.’” The conservative activist added, “And it’s true.”
But what Norquist didn’t spell out was that Democrats are trying to win control by protecting the ability of Americans to have a say in their government, while Republicans are trying to make their ideology the law of the land by skewing the mechanics of our democracy to permit a minority to rule over the majority.
Scherer laid out what this skewing looks like. Since 1988—the year George H. W. Bush was elected—Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of nine presidential elections. And yet, Republicans have taken the White House through the Electoral College and have appointed 6 of the 9 justices now on the Supreme Court.
The concentration of Republicans in rural states with smaller populations means that the Senate is also skewed toward the Republican Party. Public policy scholars Michael Ettlinger and Jordan Hensley crunched the numbers to show that today’s 50 Democratic senators represent 26% more people than Republican senators: 202 million compared to 160 million. They go on to say: “A Black American is 16% less represented in the Senate than an American on average; [a] Latinx American 32% less.”
Ettlinger and Hensley note that, as the Senate has become less representative, Republican senators have relied on arcane rules to let a minority stop popular legislation. “In the current Senate,” they report, “41 Republican senators representing as few as 75 million people can block most legislation from even coming to a vote—thwarting the will of a group of Democratic and Republican senators representing as many as 270 million Americans."
In the House of Representatives, gerrymandering allows Republicans to hold more seats than their share of the popular vote. In 1996 and 2012, Republicans lost the national vote tally but controlled Congress nonetheless.
The skew in state legislatures is also large. Scherer points out that the Michigan legislature, for example, has a Republican majority although Democrats have won a majority of the popular vote there for a decade. In North Carolina in 2018, Democrats won 51% of the popular vote but got only 45% of the seats.
After the 2020 election, Republican-dominated legislatures in states where Democrats likely make up the majority—Georgia, Texas, and Florida, for example—have worked aggressively to restrict voting rights. More than a dozen states have enacted more than 30 new laws to suppress votes. Tonight, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that tomorrow he will sign another major voter suppression measure in his state.
Noting “how far the [Republican] party has fallen on fundamental matters of democracy,” the Washington Post editorial board today called on Democrats to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore and expand the Department of Justice’s protection of the right to vote, gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013 and 2021.
The board continued: “They should merge it with other provisions designed to promote fairness at the ballot box, such as universal voter registration, protections for absentee voters, standards to guard against rampant gerrymandering and restrictions on partisan interference with vote counting. They should dare Republicans to vote down a package that unambiguously enhances democracy, with no extraneous measures. If Republicans continue to unify against it, they should consider ways to reform the filibuster rule blocking urgent democracy reform.”
At stake is whether our government will work for ordinary Americans who make up the majority of our population—including in 2021 women and minorities as well as white men—or whether it will serve an entrenched minority.
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Notes:
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/10/1026081880/senate-passes-bipartisan-infrastructure-bill
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/06/us/politics/democrats-biden-social-safety-net.html
How does one avoid post-trauma stress disorder (PTSD) after ratatat news about devastating hurricanes, frightening, uncontrolled forest fires, flooding that leaves a wakes of deaths and resource-less survivors, refugees and evacuees worldwide, relentless climate change, and pissant politicians?
Some of you may find solace from knitting, wood working, puzzles, yoga meditation, or some liquid excelsior. Since I knit not, my only wood working success was in third grade shop, I lack puzzle patience, my body cannot do yoga stretched, 30 seconds is my meditation max, and I am steadfastly a one-beer-a-day guy, I have found battleground relief elsewhere.
I relish spelunking in history and biography. I luxuriate in past stories of hair-raising tales and generally uplifting outcomes. Reading Peys on London during a horrific 17th century decade makes our current nightmares seem more like Perils of Pauline than PARADISE LOST.
My favorite thumb sucker is David McCullough’s BRAVE COMPANIONS, a marvelous collection of 17 biographic essays ranging from Baron von Humboldt to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louis (I’ll never look at a fish the same way again’) Agassiz. For me David, who became my friend at age 13, is our American Clio. He is a complete storyteller and, for me, BC is the essence of his quintessence.
When I get pissed at pseudo ‘originality’ Constitutionalists, I bask in Catherine Drinker Bowen’s MIRACLE AT PHILADELPHIA: THE STORY OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, a whacking fine account of how our Constitution was crafted. It was a perilous story fraught with do-or-die compromises, For me our Constitution is the most successful political document in all of history. I lament that our current court does not seem supreme.
Individuals store historic cocktails. Without resolving Carlye’s conundrum whether heroes master events or events create heroes, I love to read about noble personalities and knaves. There are many marvelous biographies (Taubman on Khrushchev is a stunner, and Doris Kearns Goodwin and Barbara Tuchman rank high among page-turner biographies). Recently I have re-read Margaret MacMillan’s HISTORY’S PEOPLE: PERSONALITIES AND THE PAST. Professor MacMillan, Canadian born and later at Oxford, provides sparkling, insider accounts ranging from FDR, Hitler, and Stalin to Babur and Samuel de Champlain.
My deepest get-away-from-it-all retreat is Daniel Boorstin’s THE DISCOVERERS, the best of his plethora of superb books. In TD Boorstin describes, in illuminating detail, how the measurement of time evolved, the predecessors to Darwin’s and Wallace’s breakthrough on evolution, the story of writing and the creeping progression to books with punctuation, pages and finally movable type, and much, much more.
On a daily basis my richest reading feast is Heather’s remarkable LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN, which provides a succulent bouillabaisse of which I have previously discussed.
John Barrasso has a net worth of more than 8 million dollars . he was an orthopedic surgeon in Casper from 1983 -2007. He raked the money in doing surgery that most Americans could not afford until medicare was passed in 1965. He seems to have learned nothing about Christian charity at Catholic high schools in Pennsylvania, two years at Georgetown University and at Georgetown Medical School, if he thinks that the democrats soft infrastructure budget is a socialist plot. He is just another Republican who has no interest in improving the circumstances of those most in need in this country. As to Grover Norquist, there is nothing good that can be said on his behalf.
Your column excellently details how bad gerrymandering is in so many states where each citizens vote really is not counted equally creating this imbalance between the popular vote and representation by party. Once again our Supreme Court under John Roberts has repeatedly shown Its unwillingness to deal with this issue. Until this happens this will continue to be something that annually undermines our democracy