The government shutdown is into its fourth week with no end in sight. President Donald Trump started the crisis on December 22 by refusing to sign a funding bill unless it contained money for his southern border wall.
A wide range of interests across the economic spectrum are jeopardized. But not all interests are suffering equally: Wealthier and more powerful interest groups have been granted preference by the government.
Over Christmas, the shutdown threatened to stop the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, from issuing flood insurance certificates. According to federal law, FEMA must provide flood insurance certifications before banks may issue federally backed mortgages to prospective homeowners living in federally designated floodplains — even in areas that FEMA has determined should not be built on due to high risk of flooding. The National Flood Insurance Program of 1968 ensures that FEMA has the ability to issue and pay out claims for the insurance.
Without the certificates, roughly 40,000 closings a month would be at risk, resulting in millions in lost revenue for banks and mortgage companies. So it came as no surprise when interest groups successfully lobbied a bipartisan congressional cohort to temporarily reauthorize the NFIP through May on the eve of the shutdown. The stopgap bill was signed into law by Trump on December 21, hours before the federal government shuttered.
“There are 140 million Americans who live in coastal counties, millions of whom depend on this program to protect them from flood risk,” said former Rep. Tom MacArthur, a Republican from New Jersey who lost his seat in the midterm elections, during the brief House debate on the bill. “Without this program, they cannot buy or sell homes.”
But that wasn’t the end of it. Despite the reauthorization, FEMA believed that the shutdown meant that the agency could not, by law, provide these certifications. The reason? A law called the Anti-Deficiency Act prohibits government agencies from entering into contracts or spending money if the projects aren’t funded.
“As long as the only people feeling pain are federal employees, nobody really cares about shutdowns.”Craig Fugate, the former administrator for the agency from May 19, 2009 to January 20, 2017, disagrees with FEMA’s take. The NFIP is solvent, Fugate explained, subject to a different funding source and funding code, and generates its own revenue. That allows the NFIP to continue operations in the face of a shutdown. There’s no lapsed funding for the program and thus, no need to stop it from working, even in a shuttered FEMA. “As long as they’re reauthorized, they’re up and running,” said Fugate.
Nevertheless, FEMA announced on December 26 that the agency was not going to issue the certifications, citing the shutdown and anti-deficiency. The reaction from interest groups was as swift as it was predictable.
The National Association of Realtors, the largest lobbying group for the industry, made its displeasure over the possibility of lost revenue and closed home sales known. “Today’s surprise FEMA ruling jeopardizes tens of thousands of home sales across America,” said the association’s Senior Vice President of Government Affairs Shannon McGahn, “as NAR estimates up to 40,000 closings are disrupted each month that the NFIP cannot issue flood insurance policies.”
Once the rage of the business sector — and Congress — was made clear to the White House, the administration ordered FEMA to resume issuing the certificates. “Upon realizing the trouble they were in — especially with Republicans — they back tracked pretty quickly,” Stephen Ellis, executive vice president for government watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, told The Intercept in an email.
In a December 28 statement, the agency announced that it would consider the 48-hour lapse in the program to never have happened, and that the program would be regarded as having continued without interruption since December 21.
“FEMA worked with the administration and industry partners during this funding lapse to assess the impact and determine what options exist to enable the NFIP [National Flood Insurance Program] to allow the sale and renewal of flood insurance policies to continue,” Alex Bruner, a FEMA spokesperson, told The Intercept in an email.
Looking at what happened to the NFIP, said Fugate, gives a lot of insight into the priorities of the government when it comes to the shutdown. Federal workers in the Transportation Security Administration, the Secret Service, and other agencies are expected to work without pay. Public lands are being destroyed by garbage and misuse in the absence of rangers. Those effects haven’t spurred the president or Congress to act.
“As long as the only people feeling pain are federal employees, nobody really cares about shutdowns,” said Fugate.
But when the unintended consequences of the political struggle affect the rich, the rich apply pressure. And the government doesn’t even allow half a week to go by before fixing the problem.
“You’ll notice the White House turned right around and ordered FEMA to issue the certificates,” said Fugate.
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The letter from the IRS is dated December 24, 2018, the Monday after the start of the government shutdown. The headline reads, “Notice of intent to seize (levy) your property or rights to property.” It describes how the recipient, Aaron Caddel, owner of a small chain of boutique bakeries called Mr. Holmes Bakehouse, has 30 days to pay the tens of thousands of dollars allegedly owed the government or face seizure of the funds from his company’s bank account.
Caddel, who has two stores in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco, insists that the entire issue is a misunderstanding, one he had been working with the IRS to resolve before the shutdown. But now, though, as computer-generated delinquency letters continue to get sent, Caddel can’t find a live human being at the IRS to respond to him and prevent the asset seizure. “Right now, we’re reaching dial tones,” Caddel said.
The Intercept called the phone number provided on the letter for recipients wishing to contest the seizure, and got the following message: “Welcome to the Internal Revenue Service. Live telephone assistance is not available at this time. Normal operations will resume as soon as possible. … We apologize for any inconvenience.”
The almost Kafka-esque situation, in which the IRS methodically moves forward with cash seizures and taxpayers struggle to find anyone available to stop them, is one of the more unique consequences of the government shutdown, which on Saturday became the largest in American history. The shutdown has hurt small businesses more directly through the halting of Small Business Administration loans. But potentially being whacked in tax disputes, seemingly without recourse, adds a twinge of unfairness into the mix.
Small businesses aren’t the only ones suffering as the shutdown lingers, of course. Health and safety inspections of public housing have stopped, and rental assistance payments could dry up at the end of the month. A lack of tax information has begun to delay home closings, a major aspect of the economy. Airline safety is “eroding,” according to air traffic controllers and pilots. FBI agents say investigations have ground to a halt. Farmers are teetering as loans and statistical information about crops become unavailable. Washington, D.C., has become a ghost town as thousands of workers are furloughed, damaging local businesses. Native American tribes are having difficulty keeping basic services, like food banks and medical clinics, running. National parks are being tragically defaced by thrill-seekers, causing damage that will last decades or more. That’s just a partial list.
Perhaps the most out-of-luck people in the shutdown are the thousands of workers the federal government pays the least: low-wage contract workers who perform janitorial, security, and food service tasks at public buildings. While the Senate unanimously passed a bill on Thursday guaranteeing that federal employees furloughed in the shutdown will receive back pay for the days missed, contract workers have not received that assurance and typically do not receive restitution.
Larry Howard, a greeter at the National Zoo, which was closed December 31, has been made anxious by the lost pay. “I’m angry, frustrated, fearful, and stressful,” Howard told The Intercept in an interview. “I’m feeling the pinch already.”
For Caddel, the problems began in the fall. He says that the IRS made a mistake with payroll tax deposits from Mr. Holmes Bakehouse. The company uses a payroll administrator, Paychex, which withholds money from worker paychecks and sends it to the government every quarter. Caddel got a notification from the IRS that his business missed the payroll deposit for the second quarter of 2018.
Paychex maintains that they sent payroll taxes to the government, and that the IRS just miscategorized the payment. For months, Caddel and Paychex worked with the IRS to try to resolve the matter. But that contact ended with the shutdown. The final notice, however, was sent, starting a 30-day clock before asset seizure.
It’s unclear to Caddel whether any of the skeleton crew still working at the IRS is involved in his case. Under the IRS’s shutdown contingency plan, activities “necessary for the protection of government property,” which includes seizure cases, are excepted from the shutdown. That means that an IRS agent who is not furloughed could legally seize Caddel’s business assets as soon as the 30-day clock triggered by the notification expires on January 23.
While the IRS recently announced that it would process tax refunds as filing season gets underway, customer service lines are down, as is the Taxpayer Advocate Service, one option for taxpayers contesting seizures. The U.S. Tax Court, a venue for disputes, has closed, and walk-in taxpayer assistance centers are also shuttered. Caddel and others in his situation could send a certified letter to the IRS asking to stop the immediate seizure, formally confirming his contesting of the situation. But he’d have to hope that the right person receives it in time.
Since the shutdown, Caddel has not been able to reach anyone to contest his case. “This is the one moment in our business life when we want to talk to the IRS,” he said. Caddel added that the issue would not be fatal to Mr. Holmes Bakehouse, but still significant. “With small business, cash flow is vital. We’d be able to make the payment, but it definitely would be super impactful to us.”
Calls to the IRS press office were not answered. Emails to the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget were not returned.
Caddel surmised that other individuals and businesses were in the same Catch-22, and there’s some evidence for that. In 2013, Reuters reported on taxpayers being “left defenseless” against asset seizures during that 17-day shutdown.
“I promise you there are several people in this situation,” Caddel said.
Howard, a 62 year-old single man, says he loves his job greeting visitors to the National Zoo. The work is always somewhat seasonal, with fewer hours in the winter because of the weather. But on December 29, Howard and his colleagues got an email from his bosses at Friends of the National Zoo, or FONZ, a nonprofit which contracts with the government to provide employees for zoo activities. The email informed them that the National Zoo and Smithsonian museums would close starting December 31.
Salaried employees are expected to work from home with pay, the email explained, and full-time hourly employees are furloughed but will receive 50 percent compensation for the first two weeks of January and 20 percent for the third week. FONZ is even covering the employee portion of medical benefits for those full-time hourly workers, and offering a $500 interest-free wage advance.
However, workers like Howard in retail and guest services positions, who get variable hours, receive no compensation during the shutdown. “This was a very difficult decision, and I am hoping that the shutdown is quickly resolved so the impact is minimized to our guest-facing Variable Hour team members,” the email reads. Howard could take paid vacation time, which he does receive, to at least generate some income. But that would run out rapidly.
According to Howard, this is not how FONZ handled low-wage workers during the 2013 shutdown. “They gave us training, and made sure we had money in our pockets,” he said. “This time we’re stranded on our own; nobody is saying anything.”
Requests for comment from FONZ were not returned.
Howard makes $13.50 an hour, just above the Washington, D.C., minimum wage of $13.25. He survives in part thanks to Medicaid and food stamps, the latter of which could be threatened if the shutdown extends beyond February. But being out of work has already strained his finances. He has roommates helping out with his rent, but no family to assist him as bills mount.
“I hope Congress will pass some kind of bill for our suffering and pain,” Howard said, mindful that federal contract workers are typically not given back pay after a shutdown. “It’s not fair that we are the fall person. Not fair at all.”
It may not be fair, but it’s how Washington has traditionally worked for contract workers who clean federal buildings, operate cafeterias, and work as security guards. When the government shuts down, they typically don’t get paid. This time around, some have resorted to opening GoFundMe pages to pay their rent as the shutdown drags on.
Some Democrats in Congress are mobilizing on behalf of low-wage contract workers. Freshman House member Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., has called for retroactive compensation. “I stand in solidarity with the with the working people who have been held hostage by this partial government shutdown,” Pressley wrote in a letter to congressional leaders.
On the Senate side, Minnesota Democrat Tina Smith has led the charge, working on legislation with five colleagues that would reinstate back pay for low-wage contract workers. She organized 33 Democrats on a letter to the Office of Management and Budget, asking it to direct federal agencies to work with contractors to ensure back pay. “Contract workers and their families should not suffer the consequences of a shutdown they did not cause,” the letter states.
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, a possible presidential candidate, shared stories of contract workers on Twitter this week, using the hashtag #ShutdownStories. Like Howard, all the workers in Brown’s shutdown stories are people of color. “President Trump’s temper tantrum is hurting the people who make this country work,” Brown said in a statement.
One last-resort option for workers dealing with the shutdown is to quit. Labor markets are tight and there are more jobs than people looking for them, making this option attractive. Numerous Transportation Security Administration workers have decided to find other work, according to its union.
Howard doesn’t want to quit his job greeting guests at the zoo, but he’s already been testing out the job market. “I hate to think about leaving, as I love working there, have a great time with my coworkers, and I love the animals,” he said. “But I have bills to pay and a roof to keep over my head, and losing that is not an option for me.”
The post Shuttered IRS Is Sending Automated Warnings of Asset Seizures, With Nobody to Call to Stop Them appeared first on The Intercept.
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Last week, the New York Times reported that the FBI, in 2017, launched an investigation of President Trump “to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security” and specifically “whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.” The story was predictably treated as the latest in an endless line of Beginning-of-the-End disasters for the Trump presidency, though – as usual – this melodrama was accomplished by steadfastly ignoring the now-standard, always-buried paragraph pointing out the boring fact that no actual evidence of guilt has yet emerged:
The lack of any evidence of guilt has never dampened the excitement over Trump/Russia innuendo, and it certainly did not do so here. Beyond being construed as some sort of vindication for the most deranged version of Manchurian Candidate fantasies – because, after all, the FBI would never investigate anyone unless they were guilty – the FBI’s investigation of the President as a national security threat was also treated as some sort of unprecedented event in U.S. history. “This is, without exception, the worst scandal in the history of the United States,” pronounced NBC News’ resident ex-CIA operative, who – along with a large staple of former security state agents employed by that network – is now paid to “analyze” and shape the news.
The FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of Trump is far from the first time that the FBI has monitored, surveilled and investigated U.S. elected officials who the agency had decided harboerd suspect loyalties and were harming national security. The FBI specialized in such conduct for decades under J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the agency for 48 years and whose name the agency’s Washington headquarters continues to feature in its name.
Perhaps the most notable case was the Hoover-led FBI’s lengthy counterintelligence investigation of the progressive Henry Wallace, both when he served in multiple cabinet positions in the Franklin Roosevelt administration and then as FDR’s elected Vice President. The FBI long suspected that Wallace harbored allegiances to the Kremlin and used his government positions to undermine what the FBI determined were “U.S. interests” for the benefit of Moscow and, as a result, subjected Wallace to extensive investigation and surveillance.
Nelson Rockefeller, left, chats with Senor Dr. Don Adrian Recinos, center, minister from Guatemala to the United States and Vice President Henry Wallace, right, at the National Press Club dinner party for Latin-American diplomats and leaders in Washington, D.C., April 19, 1941.
AP
Wallace was regarded by the FBI as having suspect loyalties because, as Vice President, he repeatedly insisted that the threat posed by Moscow was being exaggerated. He often accused the U.S. Government of disseminating propaganda about Russian leaders. He urged less belligerent and more cooperative relations with the Russian government. He opposed efforts to confront Russian influence it its own region.
And, because of these pro-peace beliefs, Wallace frequently ended up on the same side as the Kremlin when it came to foreign policy disputes. That Wallace was frequently critical of the oppression of Russian leader Josef Stalin made little difference: his dissent from prevailing U.S. foreign policy orthodoxy on how to deal with Russia made him suspect in the eyes of the FBI as a possible “national security threat,” a witting or unwitting Kremlin stooge or even as a traitor.
What particularly infuriated Hoover and other Russia hawks was a 1946 speech Wallace gave criticizing U.S. belligerence toward Moscow, while urging better relations. As the hawkish Truman ramped up hostilities toward Russia, Wallace delivered a speech in Madison Square Garden entitled “The Way to Peace,” vehemently criticizing this militaristic and aggressive approach, a speech that caused Truman to force Wallace’s resignation one week later and which intensified FBI suspicions that Wallace was a Kremlin tool (emphasis added):
Up till now peace has been negative and unexciting. War has been positive and exciting. . . . During the past year or so, the significance of peace has been increased immeasurably by the atom bomb, guided missiles, and air-planes which soon will travel as fast as sound. . . .
Make no mistake about it – the British imperialistic policy in the Near East alone, combined with Russian retaliation, would lead the United States straight to war unless we have a clearly defined and realistic policy of our own.
Neither of these two great powers wants war now, but the danger is that whatever their intentions may be, their current policies may eventually lead to war. To prevent war and insure our survival in a stable world, it is essential that we look abroad through our own American eyes and not through the eyes of either the British Foreign Office or a pro-British or anti-Russian press. . . .
We must not let our Russian policy be guided or influenced by those inside or outside the United States who want war with Russia. . . .
The real peace treaty we now need is between the United States and Russia. On our part, we should recognize that we have no more business in the political affairs of eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America, western Europe, and the United States. We may not like what Russia does in eastern Europe. Her type of land reform, industrial expropriation, and suppression of basic liberties offends the great majority of the people of the United States. . . .
But whether we like it or not the Russians will try to socialize their sphere of influence just as we try to democratize our sphere of influence. . . . Let’s get this straight, regardless of what Mr. Taft or Mr. Dewey may say, if we can overcome the imperialistic urge in the Western world, I’m convinced there’ll be no war. . . .
In the United States an informed public opinion will be all-powerful. Our people are peace-minded. But they often express themselves too late – for events today move much faster than public opinion. The people here, as everywhere in the world, must be convinced that another war is not inevitable. And through mass meetings such as this, and through persistent pamphleteering, the people can be organized for peace – even though a large segment of our press is propagandizing our people for war in the hope of scaring Russia. And we who look on this war-with-Russia talk as criminal foolishness must carry our message direct to the people – even though we may be called communists because we dare to speak out.
I believe that peace – the kind of a peace I have outlined tonight – is the basic issue, both in the congressional campaign this fall and right on through the presidential election in 1948. How we meet this issue will determine whether we live not in “one world” or “two worlds” – but whether we live at all.
To this very day, many of the same people who accuse Trump of being a Kremlin pawn still accuse Wallace of being the same thing, often for the same reasons. In October, 2016, Vox published an accusatory article about Henry Wallace by Will Moreland of the Brookings Institution designed to compare him to Trump when it came to potentially treasonous servitude toward Russia.
Moreland claimed that Wallace “shares Trump’s fate of being too blinded by his self-messianic vision to realize he too had become a Kremlin pawn.” To justify this accusation, Moreland – citing Wallace’s 1946 pro-peace speech – explicitly compared Trump’s desire for better relations with Moscow to Wallace’s similar desire and used it to claim that both Wallace and Trump were Kremlin stooges and assets, whether “witting” or otherwise. In Vox, Moreland wrote:
In Wallace’s mind, responsibility for the acrimonious relations between the United States and the Soviet Union fell on Washington. Like Trump, Wallace saw Russia as a partner. Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s actions in Eastern Europe and his authoritarian reign at home could be patched over for common goals. . . .
As Howard Norton of the Baltimore Sun reported at the time, there emerged “a growing and spreading conviction among New Dealers and other ‘liberals’ that Wallace, wittingly or unwittingly, is playing Moscow’s game and is hurting rather than helping the cause of peace.”
Wallace was unwitting, at least vis-à-vis the larger agenda behind Stalin’s endorsement. As with Trump today, the Kremlin was adroitly manipulating Wallace. . . . It is a time for engagement, not retrenchment, and for a leader with the judgment to recognize friends from adversaries — a judgment Donald Trump, like Henry Wallace before him, clearly lacks.
That the FBI conducted an extensive counterintelligence investigation of Wallace was unknown until 1983 – eighteen years after his death. Citing reporting by the Des Moines Register, the New York Times explained that “Wallace was watched by the Federal Bureau of Investigation while he was Vice President under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Secretary of Commerce for Harry S. Truman, and also in his 1948 run for the Presidency” and that “the bureau opened Wallace’s mail, tapped his supporters’ telephones and used informers and agents to trail him in search of ”possible Communist or pro-Soviet ties.'”
Even decades later, the FBI still refuses to release all of its investigative files on Wallace; as FOIA warrior Emma Best noted last night, the FBI “is still fighting to not release the files.” But many of the files are now declassified and online, and one can read the voluminous tracking by FBI agents of Wallace’s movements during the time he was the elected Vice President of the United States – all because his dissenting, pro-peace views on Russia made his patriotism suspect in the eyes of Hoover and his agents.
For decades, the FBI also maintained a massive dossier on long-time liberal Senator and 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern – first because he was suspected of Kremlin sympathies and then because he was a critic of the FBI. Among other things, the FBI, while relentlessly tracking his life, discovered that McGovern had fathered a child out of wedlock, and in the words of USA Today, “somehow, the material ended up with President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign – possibly leaked by the bureau’s longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover.”
It is not difficult to understand what is so ominous and even tyrannical about the FBI investigating domestic political figures whose loyalties they regard as “suspicious,” and whose political career they regard as a “national security threat,” simply because those politicians express policy positions about U.S. adversaries that the FBI dislikes or regards as insufficiently belligerent.
It’s the FBI’s job to investigate possible crimes under the law or infiltration by foreign powers, not ideological sins. If a politician adopts policy views that are “threatening” to U.S. national security or which is unduly accommodating to America’s adversaries or “enemies,” that’s not a crime and the FBI thus has no business using its vast investigative powers against a politician who does that.
That’s why it’s so easy to see that Hoover’s investigative scrutiny of Henry Wallace, and George McGovern, and an endless array of domestic dissenters, was so anti-democratic and dangerous. If a politician adopts “threatening” policy views or is too subservient toward or accommodating of a foreign adversary, it’s the job of the American voting public or Congress in its political oversight and lawmaking role to take action, not the FBI’s job to criminalize policy differences through investigations.
It should not be difficult for a rational brain free of partisan muck to see this same principle at play when it comes to the FBI’s investigation of Trump on the ground that he may be, in the eyes of FBI officials, a “national security threat.” Even if you’re someone who hates Trump’s overtures toward Russia or even believes that they are the by-product of excessive subservience to the Kremlin, the dangers of having the FBI take on the role of investigating that rather than the political wings of the U.S. political system should be obvious – as obvious as they are in the case of Henry Wallace and George McGovern.
Obviously, if there is reason to suspect that actual crimes have been committed – such as, say, Trump officials collaborating with Russia to hack into email inboxes or otherwise engaging in illegal deals with foreign powers – then it’s not just permissible but vital that the FBI investigate such allegations.
That’s why I’ve been a vigorous defender from the start of having a full-scale investigation into those allegations with the evidence publicly disclosed: so that we can know what happened rather than relying on self-serving, evidence-free, anonymous leak snippets laundered through MSNBC and the Washington Post. As I wrote in March, 2017 about Trump/Russia claims: “A formal, credible investigation into all these questions, where the evidence is publicly disclosed, is still urgently needed.”
But the FBI investigation revealed by the New York Times is separate from the Mueller investigation or even questions of collusion. It’s clearly based, at least in part, on the FBI’s disagreements with Trump’s foreign policy views and the agency’s assessment that such policies fail to safeguard “U.S. interests” as the FBI defines them. The NYT notes that among the events that prompted the investigation were that Trump “refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail,” that the GOP “softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia,” and that Trump decided to fire the FBI’s director, Jim Comey.
The NYT article is clear that at least some of the agents involved in this investigation, including the former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, vigorously disagreed with Trump’s view of Russia that it is less of a threat than many in Washington believed (a view which the Vox article identified as making Trump similar to Henry Wallace):
Many involved in the case viewed Russia as the chief threat to American democratic values.
“With respect to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous threat to that way of life,” Ms. Page told investigators for a joint House Judiciary and Oversight Committee investigation into Moscow’s election interference.
The person elected by the U.S. electorate to make foreign policy for the United States and to determine “America’s interests” was Donald Trump, not the FBI. It’s the role of elected officials in the White House and Congress, not the unelected police agents who report to them, to decide what is and is not in “America’s interests.”
If Trump’s foreign policy is misguided or “threatening,” that’s a matter for the Congress and/or the American public, not the FBI. However “threatening” one regards Trump’s foreign policy relating to Russia, the FBI’s abuse of its powers to investigate an elected official due to disagreement with his ideology or foreign policy views is at least as dangerous, it not more so, and the fact that those policy disagreements are characterized as “national security threats” does not make those actions any less threatening or abusive – whether for Trump, Henry Wallace or George McGovern.
It’s certainly possible, as the always-smart Harvard Law Professor and former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith wrote at Lawfare, that the FBI had far more grounds that is currently known for opening this investigation. But based on what we do know, Goldsmith adeptly argues, there is a potentially disturbing incident of serious overreach of the FBI’s role and grave abuse of its vast investigative powers. While Goldsmith is clear that he is not yet adopting this view – in part because some facts are unknown and in part because the Constitutional issues are murky – he lays out what the potential dangers are (emphasis added):
The reason the FBI step might have been imprudent is that it was premised on an inversion of the normal assumptions of Article II of the Constitution. . . .
It is not unusual for a president to make controversial policy decisions that could, in some quarters, be viewed as causing harm to the national security interests of the United States. For example, many saw George W. Bush’s decisions in the war on terrorism, or Barack Obama’s rapprochement with Iran and Cuba, as harming U.S. national security. Many believe that most of Trump’s foreign policy constitutes a similar threat—his attacks on allies and international institutions, his lies and erratic behavior, and the like. But the FBI obviously would not open a counterintelligence investigation for these matters.
They would not do so because these actions—and indeed the very determination of the U.S. interest in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy—are presidential prerogatives. . . . Because the president determines the U.S. national security interest and threats against it, at least for the executive branch, there is an argument that it makes no sense for the FBI to open a counterintelligence case against the president premised on his being a threat to the national security. The president defines what a national security threat is, and thus any action by him cannot be such a threat, at least not for purposes of opening a counterintelligence investigation. . . .
The FBI cannot act in a way that is legally premised on second-guessing the president’s national security bona fides. On this view, the FBI can fully investigate Russia’s interference with the 2016 election, including matters involving the president, as it has been doing for a while now. But it cannot cross the line of taking investigative steps premised on the president’s threat to national security. The Constitution leaves crossing that line up to Congress and the American people. . . .
First, presidents and their delegates all the time engage in controversial contacts with foreign leaders and with their intelligence agents that sharply change the direction of U.S. foreign policy concerning matters that some critics believe shows undue fealty towards a foreign power. Think of some critics’ view of Nixon’s opening with China or, again, of Obama’s with Iran and Cuba. Or imagine that Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is elected in 2020 and brings controversial foreign policy views to the presidency.
One danger in the what the FBI apparently did is that it implies that the unelected domestic intelligence bureaucracy holds itself as the ultimate arbiter—over and above the elected president who is the constitutional face of U.S. intelligence and national security authority—about what actions do and don’t serve the national security interests of the United States. It further suggests that the FBI claims the authority to take this step on the basis of the president’s exercise of another clear presidential prerogative—the firing of the FBI director in connection with the Russia investigation, which the Times says was the final predicate for the FBI’s action. . . .
[A]t one time, under J. Edgar Hoover, it secretly collected intelligence information on the president and other elected officials and used that secret information to influence the behavior of those officials. This is an ever-present danger with any intelligence bureaucracy in a democracy. A second adverse effect of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the president is that it gives credence to these types of concerns about the contemporary FBI—especially if the FBI opened a counterintelligence file on the president and did not notify him, as I suspect happened in the Trump case. . . .
As I have noted many times, one of President Trump’s most nefarious skills is to act in norm-busting ways that cause people and institutions to respond to him in norm-busting ways. If indeed the FBI took the unprecedented step of opening a counterintelligence investigation directed at the president premised on his threat to national security, I hope the bureau had much stronger evidence for doing so than the Times story provided—and I hope that something of investigative substance actually turned on it. Otherwise, the step strikes me as deeply imprudent.
This argument, and the entire affair, underscores two crucial paradoxes of the Trump era. The first is that our discourse manically shifts from claim that only maniacal and conspiratorial losers believe that there is such a thing as a “Deep State” in the glorious democracy of the United States, to prayers that the Deep State save us from Trump, and then back again. The core attribute of a Deep State is, to use Goldsmith’s words for what may have happened here, an “unelected domestic intelligence bureaucracy holds itself as the ultimate arbiter—over and above the elected president who is the constitutional face of U.S. intelligence and national security authority—about what actions do and don’t serve the national security interests of the United States.” Such a state of affairs is at least as dangerous for U.S. democracy as anything Trump is doing with Russia.
Even former members of the Deep State themselves – such as former GCHQ agent Matt Tait – are warning of the possible dangers of what the FBI did here:
However much you dislike the status quo, you'd much rather live in a country where elected branches are a check on the national security establishment than the other way around.
— Pwn All The Things (@pwnallthethings) January 12, 2019
The second paradox is the one Goldsmith so perfectly described: “one of President Trump’s most nefarious skills is to act in norm-busting ways that cause people and institutions to respond to him in norm-busting ways.”
It was a dangerous and shameful moment when J. Edgar Hoover investigated U.S. politicians as potential traitors and stooges because he believed they were too deferential and subservient to Russia, or because their advocated plans for peace with Moscow were “contrary to American interests.” It’s no better when the agency housed in the headquarters that, revealingly, still bears Hoover’s name does the same today.
The post The FBI’s Investigation of Trump as a “National Security Threat” is Itself a Serious Danger. But J. Edgar Hoover Pioneered the Tactic appeared first on The Intercept.
BUDAPEST—Viktor Orbán has found himself in something of a bind: Hungary’s growing economy has given him cover to dismiss his detractors, who rail against his moves to weaken the country’s institutions and his anti-immigrant rhetoric. But that same economic boom, paired with a dearth of workers—both homegrown and from abroad—is counterintuitively uniting a political opposition against him.
Orbán has been criticized for what critics say has been his authoritarian dismantling of democratic institutions, as well as for his stance against immigrants. But he has consistently been able to fend off opponents, thanks in large part to Hungary’s economy: The country’s gross domestic product has been growing at an annual rate of more than 4 percent for most of the past two years, unemployment has fallen to a low of 3.6 percent from 11 percent in 2010, and Orbán has enticed foreign companies such as BMW, Daimler, Samsung, and others to build factories here.
[Read: “The most dangerous man in the European Union”]
At the same time, though, Hungarian workers have continued to move out of the country in search of higher wages abroad. As many as 600,000 Hungarians—equivalent to around 9 percent of the working-age population—work outside of Hungary, and Orbán’s refusal to countenance immigrants filling the void has only made this shortfall more acute. In December, the government rushed legislation through Parliament to try to address this shortage. The new measures give businesses the right to require employees to work up to 400 hours of overtime a year, nearly twice as much as was previously allowed, and demand only that employers pay for that overtime at some point within three years. Simply put, employers can make their employees work more, and not have to pay them until later. The government maintains that these overtime hours remain voluntary and at the discretion of the employee, but many workers and trade unions argue that they have little choice in the matter.
Outrage over what has been labeled the “slave law” has sparked protests across the country and has united a fractured opposition against Orbán. A broad anti-government movement has swept the country, with thousands of Hungarians taking to the streets in the past several weeks (interrupted only by the holiday lull). Student groups, unions, and labor organizations have promised to go on strike in the coming days. The uproar may not topple Orbán or oust his Fidesz party from government, but Hungary’s prime minister now faces the most sustained popular movement against him since he took office in 2010.
“It is not about party politics,” Peter Ungar, a Green Party MP from western Hungary, told me. “It is about the 500,000 workers who will be affected by this new law.”
The persistence of the mounting opposition movement against Orbán has significance beyond Hungary’s borders. Orbán has served as a model for nativists the world over for his anti-immigrant rhetoric and his refusal to accept the European Union’s “migrant quotas”—an attempt by European officials to evenly distribute refugees fleeing to the continent across the bloc’s 28 member states. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, has praised Orbán as “heroic” and has promised to “spend a lot of time in Hungary” before European Parliament elections in May, while the far right, from internet trolls to Representative Steve King of Iowa, praise Orbán as a nationalist visionary in web forums, blogs, and videos.
When I visited Budapest just after the law was officially signed last month, thousands marched from the Parliament building on the Danube across the river to Buda Castle, once the home of Hungarian kings and now a symbol of the country’s history. By then, protests had been running almost nonstop for three weeks. Demonstrators eagerly shouted “Orbán egy géci!”—a chant that calls Orbán a swear word and that inspired the shorthand of the movement: #O1G. One placard read Sex, Drugs, and Overtime, while another poked fun at Orbán’s spending of EU funds on the construction of a train line, famed for its low passenger rate, that transports riders a grand total of six kilometers, from Orbán’s small, central-Hungarian hometown to a neighboring village. Roughly translated, the poster read: Roses are red / Violets are blue / There’s no brakes / On this Orbán choo-choo. In an emailed statement to The Atlantic, a Hungarian government spokesperson denied that any EU funds were misused and blamed the protests on various outside forces.
[Read: The risks to freedom in Hungary]
In recent years, the Hungarian leader has successfully circumscribed the media and single-handedly rewritten the constitution to cement his political control (with more changes promised). His government has also stacked previously independent institutions with loyal allies—another law passed in December allows the justice minister to handpick judges in administrative courts, drastically hindering judicial independence. Orbán’s election victory last year gave him a new mandate and renewed momentum to push his agenda. Opposing political parties were weak and fractured, and any popular protest attempts to challenge him had been sporadic and ineffective. The “slave law” appears to have changed that dynamic, though, highlighting not only Orbán’s intransigence when it comes to allowing in immigrants, but also the few levers available to his government to address the labor shortage.
To some extent, Orbán’s reliance on economic growth to counter his opponents is itself a dangerous strategy. While wages have been slowly increasing, partly thanks to economic growth and partly because of the labor shortage, the average Hungarian still makes only barely half that of the average person in Austria, a country that shares a border with Hungary (and that, a century ago, shared an empire). There are also reports that while Hungary’s overall economic indicators are improving, unemployment figures in particular appear to be buffeted by a state-run public-works program that employs large numbers of people.
“The labor market is one of the many houses of cards in this country,” said Ákos Hadházy, a former member of Orbán’s Fidesz party who is now an independent opposition MP. “It seems good but is guaranteed to collapse.”
Hadházy argued that the “slave law” has failed to address the core issue affecting Hungary’s labor market—that wages are too persistently low to keep Hungarians from migrating abroad, a sentiment echoed by union leaders and economists I spoke with. As an EU member state, Hungary is part of the region-wide labor market, meaning a Hungarian can travel elsewhere in the bloc to find better work, and higher pay, without requiring a visa. Orbán’s government has attracted thousands of people through an investor visa program, but its unwillingness to accept workers from outside Europe has hindered its overall ability to address the shortfall of employees.
[Read: A nonbinding migration pact is roiling politics in Europe]
Other countries have turned to immigration to address labor shortages. In fact, Hungary is not alone among Central European countries in facing such a problem. Poland, like Hungary, has vocally opposed the EU’s migrant quotas, for example, yet it has brought in thousands of Ukrainian workers fleeing that country’s conflict. And still, Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland’s prime minister, suggested in July that he would consider relaxing the country’s opposition to immigration, telling reporters, “If there is a demand on the labor market which Poles are unable or unwilling to meet, we need to take up the challenge so that we maintain our economic growth.”
For Orbán, though, the anti-immigrant stance is among his calling cards, the policy for which he is best-known. In his first news conference of the year, instead of the protests, he focused on immigration, calling for a new “anti-immigration axis” with other Central and eastern-European countries, as well as with Italy.
And even in the face of these demonstrations, Orbán shows no signs of backing down. In a statement released this month, Istvan Holik, a Hungarian government spokesperson, pinned the blame for the protests on a host of foreign actors.“These protests are being organized with George Soros’s money,” Holik said into a camera, evoking the philanthropist billionaire who is frequently an Orbán propaganda target, “so that they can turn Hungary into an immigrant country.”
More than 30,000 teachers in Los Angeles are heading to the picket line. Over the past year, teachers in states around the country—from West Virginia to Oklahoma—have staged walkouts calling for higher pay and better working conditions. Today, educators in the Los Angeles Unified School District joined them, driven by concerns that current school conditions aren’t adequately supporting the district’s students, 73 percent of whom are Latino, and who struggle with a lack of documentation, homelessness, and gang violence.
A new book makes the case that marijuana is far more dangerous that most Americans believe. Tell Your Children, by the journalist Alex Berenson, argues that marijuana is linked to psychosis and violence—and that the U.S. could be on the verge of a cannabis-induced murder epidemic. While there is evidence that pot isn’t the benign, nonaddictive drug that some may envision, Berenson’s argument may be more fear-mongering than an actual representation of the science literature. A slew of factors play into murder rates—in the Netherlands, where recreational marijuana use is legal, the homicide rate is one-fifth as high as in the U.S. In other words, the book is a good reminder that “science and medicine are rarely well served by writing in argument form.”
Subpoena the only other American present at a 2018 Trump-Putin meeting, David Frum argues. Alongside an intensification of the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s Russia ties, the president has taken extreme steps to conceal his talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin—from both the public and even officials in his own administration. Last July, Trump met with Putin in Helsinki for more than two hours without any aides present. One other American was in the room—Marina Gross, Trump’s interpreter. Frum makes the case that Congress should take the dire step of subpoenaing her because of the lingering questions of collusion that are dogging Trump’s presidency.
Unthinkable
Two years into President Trump’s first term in office, The Atlantic looks back on the moments that have defined his presidency. “Unthinkable” is our catalog of 50 of the most improbable incidents to date—from the truly outlandish to the truly destructive—that under any previous administration, Democratic or Republican, would still have been unthinkable.
At No. 5: when Trump fired then–FBI Director James Comey on May 9, 2017.
Join the conversation: Which moments from the Trump presidency would you add to this list? Email us at letters@theatlantic.com with the subject line “Unthinkable,” and include your full name, city, and state. Or tweet using #TrumpUnthinkable.
Evening ReadMaybe there’s an upside to forgetting things:
Memory itself is still something of a mystery, but it basically consists of physical changes in the brain that encode a representation of past experiences. Those memory traces—known as engrams—can be accessed to reconstruct the past, albeit imperfectly …
Engrams obviously do not save every detail of every experience. Some records of activity patterns do not persist. And that’s a good thing, says the neuroscientist Maria Wimber.
“An overly precise memory is maybe not really what we want in the long term, because it prevents us from using our memories to generalize them to new situations,” Wimber said in San Diego at a recent meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. “If our memories are too precise and overfitted, then we can’t actually use them to … make predictions about future situations.”
If your memory stores every exact detail of getting bitten by a dog in the park, for instance, then you wouldn’t necessarily know to beware of a different dog in a different park.
What Do You Know … About Education?1. Just how pervasive is the hunger problem among U.S. college students? Nearly two dozen studies have estimated that more than this percent of students are food insecure.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. In this 2018 memoir, Tara Westover describes a rural upbringing without formal schooling, an unlikely transition to college, and an even unlikelier ascent to completing a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. On Monday, more than 30,000 teachers in Los Angeles, the second-largest school district in the U.S., began a strike. It’s the city’s first in nearly how many years?
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: 30 percent / Educated / 30 years
Dear TherapistEvery week, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions in the Dear Therapist column. An anonymous reader from New York:
My younger sister and I are very close. We had a rough childhood, we’re only 13 months apart, and she’s always been my favorite person to be around—when things are going well. But she also has some anxiety issues that drive me crazy. She just left after visiting my city, and I’m still trying to unclench. “Lost” earphones (that are always in her bag) mean being drawn into a frantic search that involves me calling my husband at work to make sure he didn’t “do something” with them. A change in plans while she’s out doing tourist things means a phone call to me while I’m working so I can plot a new subway course for her. A hotel hold fee on her credit card means another phone call to help figure it out, even after the hotel has reassured her it will be refunded. And she never seems to be having a good time, which breaks my heart.
So, two questions.
→ Read the rest. You can write to Lori anytime at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult through the week.
Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
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It’s Monday, January 14. On the 24th day of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, midway through his first term in office, President Donald Trump took the stage at the American Farm Bureau Federation’s 100th anniversary convention and reiterated his case for building a wall on the United States’ southern border. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that a bipartisan group of senators is forming in an attempt to reach a deal that would end the shutdown. Here’s what else we’re watching:
Dueling Narratives: Recent reports that Trump had gone so far as to seize his own interpreter’s notes in an effort to conceal details about his meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that the FBI at one point opened an inquiry into whether Trump was working on Russia’s behalf sparked very different reactions from Republicans and Democrats.
Pivot!: Last week, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham was all in for Trump declaring a national emergency to secure funding for a border wall, even tweeting on Friday, “Declare a national emergency NOW.” But by Sunday, he had started to change his tune.
Courting the Kingmaker: Potential Democratic presidential candidates from Booker to Beto are courting the endorsement of the well-known civil-rights leader Reverend Al Sharpton, reports Edward-Isaac Dovere. (Need a refresher on who else is running? Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro, and Tulsi Gabbard are among those who have already declared, while others like Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand are expected to announce soon.)
Striking in Solidarity: More than 30,000 teachers in Los Angeles are striking for smaller class sizes and more funding for support staff. A sense of solidarity with the district’s students—73 percent of whom are Latino—is playing a large role in driving them to the picket line, some told The Atlantic’s Alia Wong.
Unthinkable(Drew Angerer / Getty)
Two years into President Trump’s first term in office, The Atlantic looks back on the moments that have defined his presidency. Unthinkable is our catalog of 50 of the most improbable incidents to date—from the truly outlandish to the truly destructive—that under any previous administration, Democratic or Republican, would still have been unthinkable. At number five: When Trump fired then FBI Director James Comey on May 9, 2017.
Join the conversation: Which moments from the Trump presidency would you add to this list? Email us at letters@theatlantic.com with the subject line “Unthinkable,” and include your full name, city, and state. Or tweet using #TrumpUnthinkable.
Snapshot
Ten-year-old Alessandro Niculescu holds up a sign in the rain during a teacher strike outside John Marshall High School in Los Angeles. Tens of thousands of Los Angeles teachers are striking after contentious contract negotiations failed in the nation's second-largest school district. (Ringo H. W. Chiu / AP)
The ConversationEric W. Orts argued earlier this month for a U.S. Senate that isn’t made up of two senators per state: Allocate one seat to each state, and apportion other seats based on state population.
"The constitutional designers had an elegant plan when they created the Senate and the House," Brad Vanderzanden of Knoxville, Tennessee, wrote. "If people really want to change the Senate to reflect the size of states, then just abolish the Senate."
"I have a better idea: one senator from each state, elected for a six-year term, and 50 senators elected at-large for 12-year terms," writes Daniel R. Van Wyk of Everett, Washington.
Read more reader ideas on reapportioning the Senate (or not), and read Orts’s response here.
Ideas From The AtlanticWhat’s the Difference Between Iowa Representative Steve King and Donald Trump? (Adam Serwer)
“In 2014, as Trump was mulling a run for president, he made an appearance in Iowa with King, calling him ‘special guy, a smart person, with really the right views on almost everything,’ and noting that their views on the issues were so similar that ‘we don’t even have to compare notes.’”→ Read on.
Subpoena the Trump-Putin Interpreter (David Frum)
“There’s only one American who does know: Marina Gross, the professional interpreter who assisted Trump. Should she be asked? It’s a tough, tough, tough question.” → Read on.
The Truth About the Gig Economy (Annie Lowrey)
“Uber and similar companies were not and are not driving tidal changes in the way that Americans make a living. Wild predictions aside, it was always clear that many gig workers were taking on these kinds of jobs as a temporary stopgap or as a way to supplement their income, rather than as a substitute for a full-time position.”→ Read on.
Bill de Blasio and Gavin Newsom May Give Restrictionism New Life (Reihan Salam)
“Just as Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona’s Maricopa County made his name by championing restrictionist policies at the local level, in keeping with the sensibilities of his core constituency, Newsom and de Blasio have moved decisively in the opposite direction, embracing an admissionism that takes pride in defying, or rather resisting, federal immigration-enforcement efforts.” → Read on.
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily, and will be testing some formats throughout the new year. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
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Earlier this month, Eric W. Orts argued that the time has come to reevaluate the apportionment of the Senate. “Today the voting power of a citizen in Wyoming, the smallest state in terms of population, is about 67 times that of a citizen in the largest state of California,” Orts wrote, “and the disparities among the states are only increasing.” Orts proposed what he called a “Senate Reform Act,” legislation that would allocate one seat to each state automatically, and apportion another 60 seats based on population.
Professor Orts’s “solution” puts us on a path to a European parliamentary model, where the United States becomes the Subordinate States of America. Under his plan, the Senate, being of the same makeup as the House, would become irrelevant within a decade and would be abolished. The electoral college would fall, and the president would become a prime minister. States would cease to be relevant political bodies—instead they would be merely administrative districts—and we would be subject to an all-powerful central government in Washington, D.C.
Dave Smith
Leawood, Kan.
This is long overdue. I see our country slipping into revolt as a result of what we have now. This seems to accelerate with each election. We cannot continue down a road that excludes the majority from taking the helm in a democracy. The path we are on now clearly gives the wealthy and powerful the exclusive right to rule America.
Robert Peacock
I have a better idea: one senator from each state, elected for a six-year term, and 50 senators elected at-large for 12-year terms. This is more equitable, and provides more people in the federal government who represent all the people, and not just one state.
Daniel R. Van Wyk
Everett, Wash.
Shouldn’t it be done on the model of the United Nations, the world’s most progressive, most inclusive, most fair and equal major political body? One state, one vote!
Louis F. Sander
Pittsburgh, Pa.
While Mr. Orts’s idea of majority rule sounds wonderful, there is a big pitfall in it.
For four years I was mayor of a small rural community in California, where legislature is by majority rule. There was never any concern in the legislature about the effect of legislation on the small and rural areas of the state. It was all about what the big cities wanted; small and rural areas were negated or ignored and thus problems never addressed.
Should Mr. Orts’s idea be adopted, there would be the same result. New York, New England, and the West Coast would be making decisions for all of the country, and vast areas of the United States would be ignored.
This is not in the best interests of all of the United States, just the big, populous states, and this is not what the Founders of our nation wanted.
Mike Blazenski
La Verne, Calif.
I respectfully disagree with attempts to change the Senate so that each state has equal voting rights. The constitutional designers had an elegant plan when they created the Senate and the House. The House would give precedence to each state’s size, thus giving the “majority” a voice, and the Senate would be a counterbalancing force giving equal weight to each state and thus giving the “minority” a voice. The two chambers would then have to negotiate in order to craft compromise legislation that took account of the needs of both sides. This apportionment was not about depriving people of their voting rights or favoring small states over big states—the House clearly was meant to address both of those concerns. If people really want to change the Senate to reflect the size of states, then just abolish the Senate.
Brad Vanderzanden
Knoxville, Tenn.
What this proportional representation idea does is punish some people just for being un-metropolitan.
Why not reassess the boundaries of the states every century or two to balance the scale of each state—like redistricting, except on a grander scale that addresses endemic migrations that will always occur?
Brian T. Rex
Brookings, S.C.
Dr. Orts has proposed an interesting path to solving the problems of representation in the U.S. Senate. However, he almost entirely fails to defend one of the underlying assumptions of the piece: that reforming the Senate is better and more elegant than simply abolishing the Senate.
Consider “better.” Throughout the article, Dr. Orts highlights numerical and racial equality as measures of quality, and says that sparsely populated and predominantly white states are overrepresented in the Senate. And yet neither of these problems exist in the House of Representatives. Same for the example of a larger number producing a broader spectrum of political representation—left-wing politicians like Beto O’Rourke already represent Texas in the House of Representatives. Thus, the supposed benefits could just as easily be gained by removing the Senate altogether.
Or consider “more elegant.” Nowhere does Dr. Orts describe what is elegant about reforming the Senate into a 110-member body whose proportions roughly match those in the House of Representatives. The redundancy this reform produces strikes me as a rather inelegant solution to the question of how to translate popular will into collective action.
Perhaps the closest Dr. Orts comes to defending the retention of the Senate is when he alludes to the “virtue in federalism,” but he never describes what he takes this virtue to be or how it is preserved in a body that can readily be swayed by the delegations of populous states.
I think this points to a question that is largely unanswered when it comes to current debates about representation in government: Just whom do we want represented in the federal government, states or citizens? People like Dr. Orts seem to favor the representation of citizens, but cannot let go of trappings of the time when states were more important units of organization. I can’t help but think that their arguments would be more convincing if they followed their values to their logical conclusions.
Wales Carter
Kingston, R.I.
One method that would preserve the makeup of the current body, but even out the voting power, would be to weight votes by the number of people represented.
The senator from California would effectively count as 67 votes and the senator from Wyoming just one. After each senator votes, a computer could add to the total based on the population weighting.
The weighting formula would be updated every time there is a census. This way, it would be as up-to-date as the last census, and it would be automatically adjusted every census, as populations change and move.
James Musters
Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.
The Senate was not designed to be representative of the people but of the states, and as such has served us well. Ideally each state sends two of its most esteemed people to the august body and they, with the other esteemed individuals, seek what is best for our nation. However, what has gotten out of whack is the House of Representatives. By limiting its size to 435 it has stolen the voices of millions.
Instead I would propose that representatives be apportioned based on the number of people living in the least populous state for a total of 531 representatives, all representing a comparable number of people equally.
Bruce R. Burns
Pekin, Ind.
Let me first say that I’m a European lawyer. I have no politically entrenched interest in this debate. Moreover, it seems to me that the political arguments put forward by Professor Orts in favor of his proposal have at least some merit. That said, as a lawyer, I find the legal arguments put forward by Professor Orts not very convincing.
First, it is hard to reconcile Professor Orts’s interpretation of the two-senators rule with any of the established methods of legal interpretation: wording, context, history, and purpose. As regards purpose, the most malleable method of interpretation: It would appear to me that the purpose of the two-senators rule was and is to preserve the sovereignty of the states forming the United States of America, not to preserve the dominance of any population group. The Founders clearly envisaged the Senate as an institution where the states are represented as equals (whereas the people are represented in the House of Representatives). One may dispute the wisdom of this choice, and of course other choices (such as the system proposed by Professor Orts) are conceivable. But to argue that this was not the choice of the Founders or that the principle of equality of states as such has somehow become moot seems far-fetched at best.
That brings me to my second issue with Professor Orts’s argument: that constitutional amendments protecting voting rights of citizens in the states could be construed as interfering with the voting rights of the states. That argument is unconvincing because it ignores the concept of state sovereignty and consequently confuses states and citizens as political actors.
My third issue is with the suggestion that the Constitution could be changed by simple federal law. This proposal is at odds with the basic legal principle that norms of a lower hierarchical order must be consistent with norms of a higher order. If it were otherwise, every town in America would be legally in its rights to reintroduce slavery by municipal ordinance (hint: They are not).
Without claiming to be an expert in U.S. constitutional law, it would appear to me that the only way to get rid of the two-senators rule legally would therefore be the path laid down in the U.S. Constitution: to gather the consent of each and every state for such a reform. Of course, there is also the alternative alluded to by Professor Orts: to hope for a majority of Supreme Court judges who are willing to close their eyes and think of England when the Senate Reform Act lands on their desk. But it doesn’t strike me as particularly convincing if the legal argument in support of the constitutionality of a legislative proposal is closed by the consideration that finding judges willing to ignore the Constitution would really help in passing the proposal.
Moritz Am Ende
Vienna, Austria
The U.S. Constitution, outdated as certain elements may be, is such a strong protection against abuses of power precisely because it is difficult to change. To suggest that Congress may ignore its tenets, or that those tenets do not supersede congressional power, is to defy the basic premise of the document itself, and erode one of its greatest strengths.
The Constitution’s stability—its oft-frustrating resistance to change—has been a great bulwark against the kinds of swings in policy, and resultant reactions, that have undone so many free societies. I can think of few precedents so destabilizing to civil peace as the doctrine that Congress can rewrite its basic founding document by legislative decree.
Such a constitutional runaround would elicit nuclear outrage from the states it would disempower. It would (quite rightly) give immeasurable ammunition to the anti-democrats who already warn of “legislative coups.” It would fatally undermine the essential merit of having a Constitution in the first place—the public trust that its promise of stability creates—at a time when that trust is needed more than ever.
Professor Orts is justified in his fundamental concern for a just franchise, and he is not inaccurate when he describes the current Senate apportionment as “a vehicle entrenching white supremacy.” But if he is sincere in his goals, he should join the campaign against gerrymandering, and for publicly funded elections, or for ranked-choice voting, or for any of the other grassroots, pro-democracy, and constitutional measures now gaining steam.
At the very least, he should pursue his reapportionment proposal through the path of a constitutional amendment, as have so many successful reformers. Instead, he has thrown a half-baked and illegal idea, like a brick, into the window of our fragile public peace.
Justin Roshak
Boston, Mass.
I do agree that our Constitution is more malleable than we imagine, but I believe the Supreme Court would regard legislation such as the Senate Reform Act, which would radically change Article V, to effectively be a constitutional amendment and thus subject to the amendment process outlined in Article V.
I don’t agree with your argument that the states have already consented to change their current Senate representation through the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth Amendments. These amendments were focused on protecting the voting rights of individuals, and I believe it is a stretch to argue that they act as a state’s implied consent to radically change its representation in the Senate.
But even accepting your proposition that a Senate Reform Act could be adopted, doesn’t this attack the very essence of the Senate? In “Federalist No. 62,” Madison states, “The government ought to be founded on a mixture of the principles of proportional and equal representation.” Madison clearly recognized the need for a smaller, more deliberative body in the legislative branch to cool the passions and control the urges of democratic masses. Wouldn’t giving larger states more senators undermine the Senate’s ability to do this, and diminish any distinction between it and the House? Isn’t giving the Wyoming citizen more voting power precisely the point of the Senate?
I believe a better solution would be to continue to fight against gerrymandering, thus making the House more representative, while preserving the Senate’s function of representing the states’ interests equally.
Justin Stoll
Fairfax, Va.
First, I’d like to thank everyone for writing letters to me here, as well as in emails and Facebook posts. It is very encouraging to know in these challenging times for American democracy that so many everyday citizens are engaged, concerned, and thinking critically about our current condition. One overall lesson to be learned is that our constitutional democracy depends not only on professional lawyers, judges, or constitutional scholars. Ours is a government of “We the People,” and that means that constitutional law cannot be confined to specialists or legal experts. The popular constitutionalism exhibited by these kinds of discussions is real and necessary. It’s what our country is really all about, and it’s what’s made our country truly great as the leading constitutional democracy in the world.
Second, let me respond to some of the very good questions and comments in the letters published above. I’ll go pretty much in order of appearance and use first names (and my apologies if that offends anyone).
Dave worries that my reform would turn the U.S. into a European parliamentary system and predicts that the Senate would become irrelevant. I don’t agree. The Senate would continue in all of its specialized functions: essential co-legislator of bills with the House, sole congressional body with responsibility for the approval of treaties and judicial confirmations, etc. Nothing changes except the adjustment of how many senators come from which states. Nothing changes also with respect to the election and role of the president, except that the Electoral College becomes more representative of the people as a whole. That reduces the chances of gridlock when the president and Congress represent different parties, which isn’t bad. Bottom line: My reform doesn’t alter our basic form of government.
Robert is on my side and makes an additional good point. Other measures are needed to reduce the undue influence of wealth in our elections. And it would help to have a Supreme Court that does not knock out bipartisan attempts to enact rational restrictions on money in politics, as it wrongly did in Citizens United and other cases. An additional argument in favor of my proposal follows from Robert’s concern: Small states with overpowered senators are probably an easier target for big money trying to sway elections. For example, a billion dollars probably goes further toward influencing an election in West Virginia or North Dakota than it does in California or New York.
I don’t agree with Daniel’s idea of 50 senators elected at large for twelve-year terms. Even if this were constitutional, I think the idea of U.S. representatives and senators having responsibility for a specified geographical area and set of constituents makes sense from a political theory point of view. It is better for the president to be the single person who represents U.S. citizens as a whole (and we should make sure, of course, that it’s only U.S. citizens who have a say in electing him or her, and not a foreign power such as Russia or China).
Louis raises the improbable idea of the United Nations as a possible model. I’m a fan of the UN, but I think that most observers believe that its “one nation, one vote” system is actually a problem rather than a model to emulate. The UN, in my view, is in need of a modern Madison or two to help it formulate a representative structure that better matches the relative power and population of nation-states, and gives bigger and more influential countries and regions such as the U.S., Europe, China, and India greater representation, while still respecting the sovereignty of the many other smaller countries. This nut is outside of my expertise, though, to crack here. At least, I don’t think the UN serves as a model of good and efficient government that the U.S. (or any other country) should follow. The “one colony, one vote” model, by the way, was of course a fatal flaw of the Articles of Confederation that preceded the U.S. Constitution and a major motivation for the foundation of our strong national government as a remedy.
Mike raises an appropriate concern that I have also heard from others in online commentary on Twitter and Facebook. I grew up originally in rural southeastern Ohio, but I’ve lived in New York City and Philadelphia for most of my life now, so it’s true that I’m a city-dweller and may have developed a biased perspective. But the plain truth is that more and more of us live in cities, and my own view is that urban populations are currently underrepresented not only in the Senate but more widely. Of course, views are going to differ between rural and urban populations, but I don’t see any reason to privilege rural interests in the U.S. Senate, especially if we’re talking about a ratio of 40, 50, or 65 to one in terms of voting power. Note also that in big states like California, Texas, Florida, and New York, there are a lot of rural areas too—and they are currently underrepresented. Adding senators for these states increases the probabilities that rural interests get represented in those states, as well as the big cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City. Take my own home state of Pennsylvania, for example. If it gets four senators, then in one election year of two senators, one senator might win who locks in the cities (as Senator Casey did in this election), and then another one might also win who claims more votes in rural areas (as Senator Toomey might).
Brad raises an argument based on the original intentions of the Founders, but I believe that the Founders adopted the “one state, two senators” rule mainly because the small states demanded it—and not for any other higher theory of politics, such as the idea that the Senate would represent “minority” rights (which also prompts the question: Which minority?). At the founding, James Madison and James Wilson argued strongly for an allocation of senators based on relative population (and perhaps wealth too). They lost this argument. The Senate was designed as an upper body that would have some degree of separation from “the People” because it was originally selected by state legislatures. The Seventeenth Amendment changed that, and confirmed a change that many states had already adopted, namely, the election of U.S. senators by popular vote. Under my suggested reform, the Senate would still act more deliberately—with six-year terms and a small number of members—and it would still give more weight to federalism than in the House. My reform would simply make the Senate more democratic—and structured more in line with our constitutional values of equal voting rights as well as federalism.
Brian suggests the idea of redrawing the lines of the states, and in theory this seems like a good idea. I’ve thought, for example, that it might be a good idea to redraw state lines not only to be more fair in terms of population but to better reflect natural geographic boundaries even more than they do already (e.g., around watersheds rather than rivers as boundaries). I think, though, that all of the states would have to buy into this sort of big change. Or you could try to get a constitutional amendment passed that would allow Congress to redraw state lines—but it’s unlikely that three-quarters of the states would agree. Another good change to our Constitution would probably be to make it easier to amend—say by two-thirds of the states rather than three-quarters.
Wales makes a strong challenge—that former Representative Dingell of Michigan would support— claiming that it’s more “elegant” to simply abolish the Senate. One founder that he has on his side is Benjamin Franklin. Franklin made the case for a unicameral legislature at the Constitutional Convention, but he gained nobody else’s support. The Pennsylvania legislature at the time (of which Franklin was serving as president) was unicameral, but the general feeling was that it wasn’t working well. I suppose that I have two responses to the criticism. First, I think that abolishing the Senate would pose a heavier lift constitutionally than that proposal I’m floating, which only reallocates representation of the Senate based on the delegated authority given to Congress under the voting-rights amendments. Where is the constitutional authority for an outright abolition of the Senate? It seems a harsh remedy for the problem of unequal representation. Under my reform, you can also interpret Article V not to apply, but it’s hard to make the same argument for legislation or an amendment abolishing the Senate. And how likely is it to get three-quarters of the states to vote for abolition when so many small states gain from the status quo? Second, as for federalism, I am generally in favor of it, and the wisdom of our Founders in establishing a regime of divided powers. (It’s good to see states like New York holding President Donald Trump accountable, for example, even as the Republican-dominated Senate drags its feet.) Nothing in my proposal departs from the federal allocation of powers—or separation of powers.
James argues for weighting the votes of the senators according to population rather than changing the numbers of senators, and this would work to solve the representation problem mathematically. But it doesn’t strike me as an adequate or practical solution, because what we want (I think) is for senators to exercise some degree of independent judgment. The Founders thought that we’d pick the best people for the job in making selections, and maybe that’s not always how it’s worked out, but I like their theory. I also think that weighting voting mathematically in this way would not work well in actual practice in the Senate on an everyday basis, where it really seems easier to make it one senator, one vote.
Bruce argues in favor of increasing the number of representatives in the House beyond 435—maybe to 535—and this suggestion tracks a recent editorial in The New York Times calling for “a bigger House.” I don’t have any objection to this idea, and as I argue in my working-paper version of “Senate Democracy,” a slightly bigger Senate of 110 would fit well with a bigger House.
I’ve responded separately to Moritz’s professional inquiries, and the main response for other readers is to see my longer working-paper version, which goes into details about the various “modes” of constitutional interpretation: text, structure, history, morality, and legal precedents. Briefly, I disagree with Moritz that “states have voting rights” in the U.S. system of representation. People should and do have voting rights, not states, and it is the right of people to vote that the voting-rights amendments protect. There is a view that senators should represent the “states” that they come from rather than the citizens in those states. But the modern view—and one confirmed by the Seventeenth Amendment—is that U.S. senators represent the citizens of the states and not the states themselves. This view represents an evolution of the U.S. system over time, but the idea that the Founders were creating a national government was a main point of the creation of our Constitution in Philadelphia, especially among the likes of James Madison, James Wilson, and Alexander Hamilton. And as for the “higher order of law” point, I ground the Senate Reform Act in the delegated powers given to Congress expressly by the voting-rights amendments. This sets up a conflict between two texts in the Constitution, but as I argue in greater length in the working-paper version, this conflict should be resolved in favor of the later amendments and a Senate Reform Act that would be enacted under their delegation of power.
I agree with Justin Roshak from Boston with respect to a need to focus on gerrymandering, and I support ranked voting as well as other innovations. I disagree with his characterization that my idea is unconstitutional. Roshak ignores my argument that the legislative authority is based in the voting-rights amendments delegating power to Congress to correct the abridgments of voting rights. Many are upset about the theory of equal voting rights that I advocate, but at least the theory itself is no more revolutionary than Madison’s vision for how the Senate should have been originally apportioned. In fact, my argument is pretty much an updated version of Madison’s original plan. As for the charge of the idea being “half-baked,” Roshak should consult my 70-page paper that is still in working-paper form. It’s not quite fully baked, I admit, but it’s more than halfway done.
Justin Stoll raises a good point, and a strong argument against my proposal is that the states have not “consented” to this change, as Article V seems to require. My argument, though, is not that the states “consented” to this particular change. They have consented repeatedly to give delegated power to the Congress to protect voting rights of many kinds as well as, essentially, “the equal protection of the laws” under the Fourteenth Amendment. As I discuss in the longer paper, some southern states have said that they never “consented” to the Fifteenth Amendment forbidding the denial or abridgment of voting rights on the basis of race or color. (Tennessee did not ratify it until 1997!) But these amendments went into force when three-quarters of the states ratified them. The states consented, then, to give Congress the power to correct the abridgment of voting rights by the United States or the states. The constitutional history of Article V is also interesting in this regard. In contrast to almost all of the other provisions of the Constitution, it was added at the last minute and without debate at the end of a long and tiring summer. (Madison and his allies might have been too worn out or distracted to object.) And finally, as to the famous quote of James Madison in The Federalist Papers, we should remember that The Federalist Papers (though increasingly revered as evidence of original intention) were actually written for propaganda purposes: focused mostly on getting the citizens of New York to ratify the Constitution after it was written. A number of good recent histories of the Constitutional Convention show that Madison was a strong proponent of apportionment of the Senate by population—the Virginia Plan—and he predicted trouble in the future if the “one state, two senators” rule was adopted. He was right. We’re in trouble. And I’m suggesting nothing any more revolutionary than to return to Madison’s original plan (though skipping his possible preference for illicit representation of slaves in the count). For good further reading on the history, see my late Penn colleague Richard Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (2009) and the Harvard Law professor Michael J. Klarman’s The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (2016).
Lastly, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank my Atlantic editor, Juliet Lapidos, who helped make “The Path To Give California 12 Senators, and Vermont Only One” a little punchier, more persuasive, and more provocative than it would have been without her excellent editing.
With a Democratic presidential field that’s bigger and more diverse than ever, and with a Democratic Party struggling with racial issues more than ever—both in grappling with its own history and in response to President Donald Trump—the Reverend Al Sharpton wants to be both kingmaker and validator.
The New York–based civil-rights leader and president of the National Action Network has already been flexing that power behind the scenes. He met with Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker over the weekend. He’s had conversations with Kamala Harris and Terry McAuliffe in recent weeks. And he soon will be scheduling an in-person meeting with Beto O’Rourke.
[Read: Man, Al Sharpton is slick]
Next Monday will be the biggest public showcase yet: Michael Bloomberg will join Joe Biden at the Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration in Washington, D.C., held by Sharpton’s advocacy organization, the National Action Network, while Gillibrand will speak at the group’s event in New York the same day, just after returning from her first trip to Iowa.
The 2020 Democrats’ courting of Sharpton is well under way. He says he expects his endorsement to make a difference when he makes it.
In the meantime, he says, he’s open to eventually backing either Bloomberg, despite the former New York City mayor’s stop-and-frisk policy that was found to have disproportionately harassed young African American men, or Biden, despite the former vice president’s support while he was a senator in the 1990s of a crime bill that included severe penalties that put millions of African Americans behind bars.
[Read: The political chops of Al Sharpton]
Some African American and progressive advocates have called those records disqualifying for Bloomberg and Biden, who are both considering jumping into the presidential race. Sharpton says he doesn’t think they are, and he’ll use his influence to say so.
“I don’t think we’re looking for someone without flaws. I’m looking for someone who can work on an agenda going forward,” Sharpton said in an interview on Monday.
[Read: Is Joe Biden running for president? He can’t decide]
The prospective presidential candidates are not the only Democrats Sharpton is talking to as he expands his reach: He met with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and invited her to the MLK Day events, according to a person told about the meeting.
But Sharpton isn’t making an endorsement any time soon, planning to hold off for at least a year. While candidates try to sort out how to talk about the economy, the president, foreign policy, and the future of the country, he says he is focused on seeing specifics of their plans for how to expand voting rights and civil-rights protections, and for how to deal substantively with police brutality.
[Read: Michael Bloomberg can buy popularity, but can he buy the presidency?]
“Dr. King is not in history and has a holiday because he just said, ‘Let us come together,’” Sharpton said. “He said, ‘Let us come together and stand for specific things.’”
Sharpton occupies a distinct space. Other than Barack Obama, there is no better-known black leader in the country, nor one with bigger reach: The National Action Network has 100 chapters across America, and Sharpton himself hosts a radio show on 70 stations every weekday and a TV show on MSNBC on Saturdays and Sundays.
Sharpton’s backing proved important for Obama in 2008: Sharpton endorsed him after the South Carolina primary, at a moment when Obama’s campaign was being rocked by questions about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who preached at the church the Obamas used to attend in Chicago. While Obama was in the White House, their relationship deepened and Sharpton moved further into the mainstream.
Sharpton said he’d likely hold off on making a pick until a similar point in the 2020 race, when the field has narrowed.
Sharpton has met with Booker several times, but of the prospective field, he has the longest working relationship with Bloomberg and Gillibrand. Bloomberg reached out to Sharpton the night he was first elected as New York mayor in 2001, and made a concerted effort to bring him into conversations during his 12 years in City Hall, which worked. In the interview, Sharpton said of Bloomberg: “I’m not looking for somebody to be my acolyte; I’m looking for someone to be accessible.” Gillibrand made a stop at the National Action Network her first public appearance after being appointed to the Senate from New York in 2009, and has been a regular at Sharpton’s events since.
Sharpton also hosted many of the others in the prospective field—Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, and Amy Klobuchar—at an event in Washington, D.C., a few weeks ago. No one has won him over completely yet.
“I’ve been in this too long to be swayed by charisma. I want to hear policy,” he said. “I’m hearing some good things, some incomplete.”
In a highly anticipated move that for key organizers has been years in the making, more than 30,000 educators on Monday kicked off a strike that’s put regular K–12 classes on hiatus in the country’s second-largest public-school district. A whopping 98 percent of L.A. teachers, who because of stalled negotiations with the district have been working without a contract for more than a year, voted to authorize the strike. They are demanding smaller class sizes and more funding for support staff such as counselors and nurses. They’re also calling for higher pay, though that is less of a sticking point now that the district and teachers’ union are all but in agreement on this front, with the former offering raises that are just 0.5 percent lower than the 6 percent hikes educators are demanding.
Rodolfo Dueñas, an L.A. native and public-school teacher who is picketing, describes this burgeoning movement as a natural next step for the many Latinos like him whose activism can be traced back to the mid-1990s, when thousands of Latino teens staged a school walkout in opposition to an anti-immigrant state-ballot initiative known as Proposition 187. For many like Dueñas in the “187 Generation,” those experiences eventually drove them into teaching. And Dueñas’s generation has been following in the footsteps of the Latino education activists who came before them, during the 1968 walkouts known by some as the Mexican Student Movement.
The L.A. strike is the latest teacher uprising in a string of walkouts across the country over the past year. Strikes took place in Republican strongholds including West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona last spring, all of them generally calling for increased funding and improved school conditions on top of better pay and benefits; smaller-scale walkouts also took place in Colorado and, just last month, Chicago, when teachers at a predominantly Latino charter-school network went on strike to demand things like smaller class sizes and stronger support for immigrant children. While the L.A. strike, which is United Teachers Los Angeles’s first strike in almost 30 years, is the latest installment of a trend driven by exasperated educators, various factors make it unique.
[Read: The ripple effect of the West Virginia teachers’ strike]
One distinction: the demographic makeup of Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)’s teachers compared with the district’s student body. In Los Angeles, 73 percent of students are Latino and another 15 percent or so are other racial minorities. Latino educators account for 43 percent of LAUSD’s teaching force this school year, district data show, up from 41 percent the year prior, while their white counterparts make up 34 percent. (Black and non-Filipino Asian teachers each account for about 10 percent, while 3 percent of educators are Filipino and just under 1 percent are either Native American or Pacific Islander.)
These statistics are striking when compared with the national landscape: Of the millions of educators who teach in the country’s public schools—where more than half of the nearly 51 million students are children of color—a whopping 80 percent are white. And Los Angeles stands out even when compared with nearby districts such as San Diego Unified, where close to half of all students are Latino compared with only 18 percent of their teachers. Across California, a recent EdSource analysis found, the rate of Latino public-school teachers is half what it is in LAUSD.
Numerous Latino teachers repeatedly told me that a sense of solidarity with their students is what’s driving them to the picket lines—a profoundly personal connection to those children, and a fear that current school conditions are not serving them.
The sprawling school district is the United States’ second largest, enrolling nearly 600,000 K–12 students on close to 1,000 campuses that stretch across the metropolis and dozens of surrounding municipalities. As is the case with other large urban districts, the vast majority of LAUSD’s children are low-income, with more than eight in 10 of them relying on subsidized meals. The handful of LAUSD teachers I interviewed told me how much they relate to their students’ struggles as immigrants who lack documentation, or as impoverished kids who frequently find themselves homeless, or as traumatized children whose lives have been disrupted by gang violence. Rodolfo Dueñas, for one, lost both his brother and sister to gang violence when he was young. It’s impossible to say exactly how many LAUSD teachers relate to students’ lived experiences in this way, and how Los Angeles compares with other urban school districts in this regard, because such data don’t exist. However, both the state and district are actively engaged in diversity-focused teacher-recruitment initiatives—and LAUSD even offers its own accredited teacher-preparation program targeted at people who already live in the community in which they’d teach.
Roxana Dueñas, a 34-year-old ethnic-studies teacher at a high school in Eastside L.A.’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, says her own background as an LAUSD student whose working-class parents immigrated from Mexico was a driving force behind her decision to pursue the profession. “I see myself in my students in both the literal and metaphorical sense,” she says, noting that her sister and cousins attend the school at which she teaches. (Roxana Dueñas and Rodolfo Dueñas are not related.)
This kind of synergy is rare in public education. Despite the growing emphasis in recent decades on racial inequality in the country’s school system, the share of educators of color has hardly budged, growing just a few percentage points over the past three decades, according to an analysis by the Albert Shanker Institute. Research shows that the problem isn’t uneven recruitment of educators but rather uneven attrition: Teachers of color leave the profession at a higher rate than their white counterparts—a trend that’s particularly pronounced among black educators, whose share of the teaching force has declined. According to the Shanker Institute report, teachers of color tend to be concentrated in urban schools serving high-poverty, minority communities, where the working conditions—often, a limited say in decision making and a lack of professional autonomy in the classroom—eventually burn them out. This is one force driving the teacher shortages seen in parts of the country.
The Shanker Institute report highlights Los Angeles as an outlier, because so many of its teachers are Latino. Following nine cities—including Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C.—over a decade, the report found that despite significant upticks in the Latino-student population, the share of Latino educators overall grew modestly at best but generally remained stable. Los Angeles was the only city that saw a sizable uptick in the share of Latino educators. In fact, turnover rates were lowest for LAUSD’s Latino teachers—with three in 10 of them leaving the profession after three years, compared with four in 10 of their white, black, and Asian counterparts.
But Monday’s walkout demonstrates that LAUSD may not keep up these retention rates for long. Not only have LAUSD’s teachers been working without a contract for more than a year, they argue that they’ve also struggled with a decade of budget cuts that have chipped away at school resources and made it nearly impossible to serve their students adequately. Some classes now have as many as 46 students, surpassing the 39-student limit the teachers’ previous contract stipulated. Meanwhile, many LAUSD schools lack full-time librarians and nurses.
“You’re working in these conditions committed to the students because you get satisfaction knowing you’re making a difference,” says Martha Infante Thorpe, a 48-year-old social-studies teacher who’s joining the strike. Infante Thorpe taught at a high school in South Central L.A. for more than two decades but recently moved and now teaches at a school in a middle-class community, a transition that’s exposed her to just how uneven public-school resources can be. “Then you come to this point when you realize that people are taking advantage of your kind and altruistic nature.”
Of course, while the teachers’ union argues that it is striking to improve conditions for the students, the walkout is leaving many vulnerable kids without a reliable place to go during the day. Schools remain open, serving meals to eligible children and offering before- and after-school programs, and relying on volunteers, substitute teachers, and non-district education employees to offer some semblance of instruction and extracurricular support to students who do show up. But it’s unclear how many will, and either way, the strike is likely creating immense stress for hundreds of thousands of low-income LAUSD parents, many of whom don’t speak English, as they scramble to figure out what child-care options are available in a sprawling city where traffic congestion is rampant and public transportation can be unreliable. The kids, also, could be missing out on valuable learning opportunities that teachers may not have time to revisit once they return to the classrooms; the ad hoc classes being offered to the children who do attend can only go so far.
[Read: The next populist revolution will be Latino]
Some observers challenge the premise that race—and, namely, Latino identity—is a key force behind the strike’s narrative. Critics such as Jeanne Allen, who founded and oversees the Center for Education Reform, which advocates for charter schools, chalks the walkout up to the latest desperate attempt by a teachers’ union to retain its control over a school system amid declining public support for collective bargaining and in the aftermath of a recent Supreme Court decision that limits unions’ fundraising abilities. Janelle Erickson, a spokeswoman for LAUSD, pointed to United Teachers Los Angeles President Alex Caputo-Pearl as the mastermind behind the uprising, citing a speech he made back in 2016 to suggest it’s been more than two years in the making. That most of L.A.’s teachers are people of color, many of whom relate to the students they teach, is noteworthy but coincidental, the thinking goes. Caputo-Pearl’s campaign against charter schools and other forms of “privatization” in education, Erickson argued in an email, is the driving force behind this walkout.
None of the classroom teachers whom I spoke with even mentioned Caputo-Pearl, however, and few of them talked about charter schools. Instead, when asked how their own background may have informed their take on the strike, almost every LAUSD teacher I interviewed used the word “personal.” For starters, many if not most of the middle-aged Latino LAUSD educators today pursued a career in teaching in part because it offered an entry point into the middle class, according to Maria Brenes, the executive director of InnerCity Struggle, a nonprofit aimed at enhancing the lives of youth in Eastside L.A. The cost of living in Los Angeles has soared in recent years, leaving many middle-class families, let alone those who rely on a teachers’ salary, unable to afford to buy a home.
But several striking teachers told me that better pay is a relatively low priority for them. Rodolfo Dueñas, for example, says he’s fighting to ensure that the aloof, uninspiring public schooling he received doesn’t repeat itself.
As a teacher in LAUSD today, “it’s almost like you’re looking at your little brother, your little sister, and you’re reliving the traumas of education in the past,” he says. “And you’re like, ‘Dang! Some of these things are still happening.’ It’s almost like you’re fighting for something you wish you could’ve fought for when you were in school.” He doesn’t recall his school doing anything to support him when his siblings were killed; he says no one asked him if he wanted to talk, let alone offered counseling. While LAUSD today offers much more mental-health support to kids than it did in Dueñas’s days, it’s far from enough, he argues. Absent a counselor at school, “they at least have someone like me who they can connect with,” he says, “but I’m not a professional, I’m not trained. I’m still trying to deal with my own trauma.”
Some teachers told me that they’re striking to set an example for their students, so students can recognize their own agency to change things. By striking, Roxana Dueñas says she’s modeling for her students the values that she’d wished she’d learned in school. “I think even our young people have learned to accept and normalize your condition,” she says. Her mission is to inspire her students to question the status quo, to ask: “‘Why is this happening? Why should we accept it?’”
On January 9, 2017, a Northwestern University sophomore named Jordan Hankins died by suicide in her dorm room in Evanston, Illinois. This week, two years after her death, her mother—Felicia Hankins—filed a complaint in federal court against Alpha Kappa Alpha, the sorority her daughter was pledging at the time of her death. The complaint alleges that Jordan Hankins, also a member of the university’s women’s basketball team, was subjected to “physical abuse including paddling, verbal abuse, mental abuse, financial exploitation, sleep deprivation, items being thrown and dumped on her, and other forms of hazing intended to humiliate and demean her” during the hazing process, which triggered her post-traumatic stress disorder and caused the prolonged anxiety and depression that eventually led to her death. (The lawsuit does not specify whether Hankins’s PTSD was a direct result of the hazing or existed before it.) Prior to Felicia Hankins’s complaint, most media coverage of Jordan Hankins’s suicide did not characterize it as having any relation to sorority hazing.
In late 2018, Hank Nuwer, the author of Hazing: Destroying Young Lives, estimated in a CNN story that across the country, at least one hazing death had occurred each year since 1970, and by CNN’s count, more than 77 fraternity hazing deaths had occurred since 2005. Death by Greek-system hazing, in other words, is hardly an uncommon tragedy in American higher education, and as Caitlin Flanagan wrote in her 2017 Atlantic story “Death at a Penn State Fraternity”—about the death of Tim Piazza, a sophomore pledge who died in the campus Beta Theta Pi house—a certain sequence of events tends to transpire when a young man dies as a result of fraternity hazing. The fallout from Jordan Hankins’s death has, unfortunately, begun to follow the familiar trajectory for hazing deaths on college campuses. But her case, if it can even be considered a hazing death, would be a somewhat unusual one.
In filing her complaint, Felicia Hankins has initiated what Flanagan describes as the “second half” of the hazing ritual—the half that gets invoked only after one of the pledges being hazed has died. After a “period of reflection” at the Greek house itself, in which the chapter will perhaps appoint a “blue-ribbon panel” to analyze what went wrong and then be shut down or suspended for a few years, then come condolences and condemnation from the university administration, and a media frenzy. Then the grieving parents “will hope to press criminal charges. Usually, they will also sue the fraternity,” Flanagan writes.
[Read: Death at a Penn State fraternity]
In a statement to The Atlantic, the headquarters of AKA emphasized the sorority’s “zero tolerance” policy for hazing: “We consistently educate incoming and current sorority members about behaviors that constitute hazing and the repercussions of such behaviors, including suspension and expulsion.”(Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically black sorority, is governed by the National Pan-Hellenic Council, which also oversees eight other African American fraternities and sororities, and is distinct from the two umbrella organizations that oversee most other national social sororities and fraternities.) In a statement, a university spokesman said the school is “deeply saddened” by Hankins’s death. Meanwhile, the Gamma Chi chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha has been suspended from campus since May 2017. It is reportedly scheduled to be reinstated this coming fall, but both AKA headquarters and the university declined to comment on why exactly the Northwestern chapter of AKA was suspended from campus, or whether it will return later this year.
But what usually follows, Flanagan writes, is this:
The parents will try to turn their grief into meaningful purpose, but they will discover how intractable a system they are up against, and how draining the process of chipping away at it is. They will be worn down by the endless civil case that forces them to relive their son’s passing over and over.
Jordan Hankins’s death and the ensuing lawsuit, of course, involve a mother seeking justice after the death of a daughter, not a son—a characteristic that would make the Hankins case something of a rarity in the long historical catalog of students who have died as a result of hazing. That list is made up overwhelmingly of young men, many of whom died as a result of alcohol poisoning or injuries sustained while extremely intoxicated. The two hazing-related deaths that have been reported since Piazza’s death, for example, were young men—a freshman pledging Phi Delta Theta at Louisiana State and another freshman pledging Pi Kappa Phi at Florida State—who died of alcohol poisoning in 2017. And as of September, police were investigating the death of another male student who was in the process of pledging the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity at the University of California at Riverside. His mother alleges that “extreme hazing” was to blame.
There is some precedent, though, for sorority hazing deaths. Notable recent examples include two women pledging Delta Sigma Theta at East Carolina University, who died in a car accident in 2010 when a fellow pledge fell asleep at the wheel after an all-night hazing ritual deprived her of sleep, and a woman who died in a car accident in 2003 when she and several other Plymouth State students who were seeking membership in Sigma Kappa Omega, a sorority that was not officially recognized by the college, were passengers in an SUV that crashed during a hazing event. The families of the deceased filed lawsuits in both cases. The year before, two women pledging Alpha Kappa Alpha, the same national sorority to which Jordan Hankins was seeking membership, drowned in the ocean during a hazing ritual imposed by the chapter at California State University at Los Angeles. The two women’s families’ lawsuits were settled out of court, according to the Los Angeles Times, and as part of the deal, the sorority reportedly vowed to work harder to end hazing.
Hankins’s death also stands apart from most hazing deaths in that it did not happen during a hazing event or as a direct physical result of one. Often a coroner’s report or medical intake form can provide evidence to link the cause of death to Greek-life hazing activities—a lethally high blood-alcohol content level, perhaps, or injuries that align with activities involved in the hazing. Felicia Hankins’s lawsuit instead alleges that her daughter’s suicide was the result of the emotional trauma inflicted on her during hazing, which will likely make it more difficult to prove a link between any hazing that may have occurred and Jordan Hankins’s death.
Still, while Jordan Hankins’s death looks different in a few ways from the “typical” hazing fatality, the figures that have emerged in the aftermath—the anguished parent seeking justice through the courts, the Greek organization keeping mum on its role in the incident—are all deeply and sadly familiar. And as the organization accused of playing a role in her daughter’s death prepares to return to campus and move on from the incident, Felicia Hankins is embarking on what may be a long, and likely unrewarding, search for closure.
You know how the saying goes: You wait years for a gripping British counterterrorism drama and then two come along at once. First the BBC’s Bodyguard arrived on Netflix in October, all clenched teeth and joylessness and impossibly frequent explosions, riveting viewers and somehow scoring a Golden Globe for its star, Richard Madden. Arriving amid more muted fanfare on Amazon last week was Informer, which is a shame because it’s easily the better of the two. If Bodyguard sweeps in broad, cartoonish strokes, Informer agonizes over the details of life in modern London. It parses the dynamics of council estates, code-switching, crime gangs, and police officers sinking deeper into an ethical morass in their efforts to keep people feeling “safe.”
Which people, though? Over its six episodes, Informer returns again and again to the idea of safety, as it documents the exploitative and fascinating (for our purposes) relationship between Gabe (Paddy Considine), a cop on the counterterrorism squad, and Raza (Nabhaan Rizwan), a young Londoner who’s coerced into informant work for Gabe. Right from the start, the relationship is a dysfunctional one. Gabe is desperate to uncover information about an imminent plot from a terrorist cell that’s already struck in Rotterdam and Turin. (Every episode begins with a flash-forward dissecting a horrific attack in London, which amps up the tension.) Raza, meanwhile, objects to the fact that Gabe is stereotyping him just like everyone else Raza meets, protesting, “I don’t know any terrorists, bruv.”
Informer is written by Rory Haines, a Brit, and Sohrab Noshirvani, an Iranian American. They met in Columbia University’s M.F.A. program and purportedly spent significant time talking to police officers, British Muslims, counterterrorism specialists, and migrants while researching their story. That depth of background shines through in the scenes set in East London, which crackle with a kind of topical energy. From the charismatic efficiency of the Albanian gangs dominating the drug trade to the “lost boys” preyed on by extremist recruiters, Haines and Noshirvani capture a world that’s dynamic, significant, and almost entirely unseen on modern television. (Bodyguard focused almost completely on the politics of counterterrorism, while another BBC drama, McMafia, bewilderingly chose to examine global crime syndicates from the perspective of a besuited Harvard alum.)
Where Informer falters, which it markedly does, is with characters whom the writers seem to have assumed they could sketch in easily. Mostly, these are women. Gabe’s partner, Holly (The Diary of a Teenage Girl’s Bel Powley), is a perplexing cold stare of a character with minimal backstory who chews on her pout and gazes blankly into space. The series makes clear that Gabe’s wife, Emily (Call the Midwife’s Jessica Raine), has very real reasons to object to her husband’s shadowy professional life, and yet Informer primarily has her sniping and sneering at him arbitrarily. The scenes in which Holly and Emily interact have a stiff, almost surreal theatricality compared with the ebullient back-and-forths between Raza and his family.
Considine’s Gabe gets a history that’s fleshed out in exhaustive detail. The series never explains how Raine’s Holly speaks fluent Arabic and has a thorough knowledge of the Koran, but Gabe’s neo-Nazi tattoos, glimpsed briefly in one scene, are virtually given their own topographical chart, as Gabe’s past as an undercover officer investigating violent white-nationalist movements in northern England is explored. It’s an intriguing subplot that’s always 10 percent too much. The sight of Gabe shaking and pale after testifying at a parole hearing is more than enough to communicate his mental turmoil; that he subsequently punches a mirror feels like over-egging the cake a bit. Considine, currently starring in The Ferryman on Broadway, is one of the most interesting and underrated actors working in Britain, but the challenge of playing a man who is himself perpetually acting seems to mute his energy.
What makes Informer is Raza. The series marks Rizwan’s screen-acting debut, which is hard to believe since he brings such varying levels to his part. Like Gabe, Raza is accustomed to shifting modes—the first episode shows him fluently switching from charming artist to quietly pious big brother to small-time rogue before it hints at how he got so deft at modulating himself. As Raza prepares to leave for a night out, his father (Paul Tylak) warns him to be careful in the wake of Islamophobic attacks after Rotterdam. “Tell ’em you’re a Hindu,” his dad says. “Don’t freak, I’m a Sikh,” Raza replies, grinning. His portrayal of a Muslim character on television feels almost unprecedented in its depth and intimacy, and it’s a valuable counterbalance to those on shows (Bodyguard, Homeland) that struggle to conceive of Muslims who aren’t terrorists.
As the show moves forward, Raza is increasingly asked to put his safety on the line in the name of preserving it for others. Gabe, who grew accustomed to risky situations in his old job, acts more and more recklessly, endangering himself as if to compensate for what he’s asking Raza to do. Informer has its finest moments when it considers the reverberations and repercussions that each person’s behavior has on others (despite the fact that everything comes together in far too clunky a form in the final episode). In one sequence the series tracks the path of a gun from its origins all the way through to its confiscation, noting the coincidences and events that led to its use in an appalling crime. It’s a microcosm of what Informer is trying to do more broadly—to explore not just the explosive set pieces and catastrophic tragedies, but also the particular details and collisions that paved the way for them to happen.
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