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Category Archives: Politics

Bidenomics as Transformational

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Ronald Reagan gave us Reaganomics, for which he should never be forgiven. The next “n” president was responsible for Clintonomics, a set of policies somewhere to the left of Reaganomics. Now we have Bidenomics. Journalist and lecturer John Stoehr is very impressed:

Joe Biden ran for president as Mr. Normalcy. During the pandemic, with the body count rising and the economy teetering, he looked pretty good next to a lying, thieving, philandering sadist who refused to lead the nation or take responsibility for it. Compared to [that other guy], Biden was a no-brainer. All he had to do was brush his teeth and mind his posture.

But Biden is not Mr. Normalcy…. Last month, during a speech in Chicago, he embraced the fact that he is what his former boss (you remember center-left Obama) had always wanted to be: a transformational president. “Bidenomics is working,” he said….

This is a BFD, and not because he’s reclaiming an insult. “Bidenomics” is real, new and, most of all, believable. Its namesake is self-consciously embracing it, indeed he’s running for reelection on it. Biden is saying the old regime is dead, and if I win, I’ll make sure it stays that way.

That’s a BFD.

“Bidenomics” is real. The economy is adding jobs at rates unseen since the 1960s. Private firms hired nearly half a million people last month, doubling expectations. (Inflation has also been slowing, for months) [now at an annual rate of 3% according to the government’s latest estimate].

“Bidenomics” is new. The last time the government invested in the economy, in the way that it’s currently investing in it, was six decades ago, which is also the last time jobs were added at such rates.

“Government is no longer shying away from pushing investment toward specific goals and industries,” wrote EJ Dionne. “Spending on public works is back in fashion. New free-trade treaties are no longer at the heart of the nation’s international strategy. Challenging monopolies and providing support for unionization efforts are higher priorities.”

But the biggest reason “Bidenomics” is a BFD is that it’s believable.

Since I came of age in the 1980s, most people most of the time have been receptive to the claim that “government interference” in a free market society – taxing wealth progressively, regulating critical industries, expanding opportunities, investing in public works – is something akin to socialism. To be sure, no one really knew what socialism was, not even the so-called socialists. It just sounded right….

For one thing, the Great (Long) Recession showed us that a free market society can’t be free. If you’re too big to fail, you’re also too big to jail – full stop. For another, the pandemic showed us that “government interference” isn’t as bad as we thought, given that we’d have died without it. The lucky survivors among us would be much poorer, too.

So Biden is not arguing that the old political order is dead. He’s pointing his finger at its moldering cadaver and saying, look! It’s dead! In Chicago, he declared that the regime of the last 40 years, which included the policies of his Democratic predecessors, is no longer viable. New conditions, challenges and urgencies call for a new regime.

Normal presidents try to appear to break from the past.

Transformational presidents do not try to appear to break. They break.

But the past was already broken.

Biden is not leading us toward regime change as much as he is leading us toward a consensus that the old regime has already changed. The old regime (sometimes called “neoliberalism,” sometimes called “Reaganomics,” after Ronald Reagan) started OK. It privileged tax cuts, deregulation, privatization and free trade. But that was at the expense of normal people, their standards of living, and the democracies they inhabited. The old regime was good — for the very obscenely rich.

Even so, every president since 1980, including Biden’s former boss, protected that political order, even as it immiserated the middle class over time. (Wages were higher in the 1960s, adjusted for inflation, than today, though, thanks to “Bidenomics,” they are finally catching up.)

Joe Biden is the first president in my lifetime, going back to Richard Nixon, to self-consciously take the side of people who work for a living while also self-consciously making enemies of people who own so much they don’t have to work. That’s a transformational president.

That’s regime change.

That’s a BFD.

“Bidenomics” Could Be a Very Big Deal

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It seems to me that there were articles saying Democrats needed an “industrial policy” back in the 70s. It looks like they’ve finally got one. From E. J. Dionne for The Washington Post:

President Biden might not seem like a revolutionary, but he is presiding over a fundamental change in the nation’s approach to economics. Not only is he proposing a major break from the “trickle-down” policies of Ronald Reagan, as Biden highlighted in a speech in Chicago on Wednesday. He is also departing from many orthodoxies that shaped the presidencies of Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Government is no longer shying away from pushing investment toward specific goals and industries. Spending on public works is back in fashion. New free-trade treaties are no longer at the heart of the nation’s international strategy. Challenging monopolies and providing support for unionization efforts are higher priorities.

You can trace the break in part to new circumstances and challenges, as national security adviser Jake Sullivan argued in an important speech of his own in April.

Heightened competition with China and the urgency of dealing with climate change are part of the story. So is the long rise of wealth and income inequality accompanied by the collapse of many of the country’s industrial communities. The breakdown of supply chains during the pandemic put an accent on resiliency and an emphasis on bringing home manufacturing, for semiconductors especially but for other products, too.

The shift also has to do with [with Biden’s] unease with the Reagan-era economic consensus that hovered over Democratic administrations….

The confidence Biden and his lieutenants have in the new path is reflected in their eagerness to tout the word “Bidenomics,” a label the president now embraces after initially being abashed about paternity for a school of economic thinking….

As a political matter, Biden wants to show that his signature policies on technology, climate action and infrastructure are working. On Wednesday, he stressed they are producing well-paying jobs for those who have been on the short end of economic growth: Americans without college degrees and those living in places with “hollowed out” economies….

[In his speech, Sullivan proposed] a “new consensus” to replace “a set of ideas that championed tax cutting and deregulation, privatization over public action and trade liberalization as an end in itself.” The old formulas, Sullivan argued, not only failed to address new problems; they didn’t work on their own terms.

“In the name of oversimplified market efficiency,” he said, “entire supply chains of strategic goods, along with the industries and jobs that made them, moved overseas.” The idea that freer trade “would help America export goods, not jobs and capacity, was a promise made but not kept.” He stressed the need for “a modern American industrial strategy” and the benefits of “moving beyond traditional trade deals to innovative new international economic partnerships”….

The Post’s Jennifer Rubin expands on the topic:

The economy has created 13 million jobs, inflation has been more than cut in half, huge investments are being made in infrastructure and green energy, wage growth has begun to outpace inflation, the first drug price controls are going into effect and the biggest corporations will finally be forced to pay something in federal taxes. Yet polls show voters incorrectly think we are in a recession and remain negative about the economy [note: although the polls could be wrong].

Beginning this week, the White House is making a focused push to narrow the gap between performance and perception. On Monday, senior Biden advisers … released a four-page memo explaining the president’s vision, which they call “Bidenomics”:

Bidenomics is rooted in the simple idea that we need to grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up — not the top down. 
 Implementing that economic vision and plan — and decisively turning the page on the era of trickle-down economics — has been the defining project of the Biden presidency.

They then ticked off a list of accomplishments: an economic recovery five years earlier than expected, … nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs, a higher job-participation rate for working-age Americans than at anytime in the past 20 years….

[The strategy has three parts:] “targeted investment” that encourages private investment (comparing it to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s rural electrification and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s interstate highway program); empowering workers (made-in-America provisions, increasing Pell grants…); and promoting competition (enforcing antitrust rules, cracking down on noncompete clauses, Medicare negotiation for lower drug prices)….

According to a White House fact sheet, the bipartisan infrastructure law has already created 35,000 projects across the country. Its green energy push has spurred more than 150 battery plants and 50 solar plants. “In all, we’ve seen $490 billion in private investment commitments in 21st century industries since the President took office, and inflation-adjusted manufacturing construction spending has grown by nearly 100% in just two years,” the fact sheet announced. “New data 
 shows the clean energy workforce added nearly 300,000 jobs in 2022 and clean energy jobs grew in every state in America. 
 Inflation-adjusted income is up 3.5% since the President took office, and low-wage workers have seen the largest wage gains over the last year.”

A recent Treasury Department report emphasized the volume of that investment and the quality of jobs created. “Real manufacturing construction spending has doubled since the end of 2021.” It found: “Within real construction spending on manufacturing, most of the growth has been driven by computer, electronics, and electrical manufacturing. Since the beginning of 2022, real spending on construction for that specific type of manufacturing has nearly quadrupled.” Because such investments increase productivity, the result should be both increased growth and downward pressure on inflation.

Biden’s [and the Democrats’ electoral] success will depend on continued growth, job creation and inflation reduction. But it’s hard to deny the results so far have been impressive. Economists may look back on this time as an inflection point when historic investments ushered in a new era of domestic manufacturing, gave a new lease on life to the Rust Belt and improved the balance sheet of middle–class Americans.

He’s Calling It the “John Roberts Two-Step”

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One thing about getting old is that you don’t often encounter new ideas. You’ve heard them before expressed one way or another. Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times is one of the best columnists writing today. Here he discusses an idea called “racecraft”:

In 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1, which struck down race-based “tiebreakers” in school admissions programs in Seattle and Louisville, Ky. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race,” Roberts famously wrote, “is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Last week, in his opinion for the majority in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions, Roberts echoed his earlier self with a similar assertion which I also discussed in my column on Friday: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

Both lines encapsulate Roberts’s view that the Constitution is colorblind and sees no racial distinctions.

One thing I noticed, reading both opinions, is that while Roberts may mention “race,” “discrimination based on race” and “racial discrimination,” he doesn’t discuss racism. In both opinions, Roberts underpins his argument with the court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

“Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin,” the chief justice wrote in Parents Involved. Similarly, in Students for Fair Admissions, Roberts writes that in Brown, the court had finally determined that “The time for making distinctions based on race had passed.”

The issue here is that Brown v. Board of Education was not about states making distinctions based on race. The question before the court was whether state governments could use racial classifications to separate Black Americans from white Americans in order to deny rights to the former and extend privileges to the latter. The question, in other words, was whether racism was a legitimate state interest.

“Brown did not raise the issue of whether states could use race-conscious classifications to integrate schools,” wrote the legal scholar Joel K. Goldstein in a 2008 analysis and critique of Roberts’ opinion in Parents Involved. “With one pertinent exception, the briefs and oral arguments focused entirely on the way in which the government then used racial classifications — to segregate and demean blacks.”

I want to highlight Chief Justice Roberts’s avoidance of racism as a prime example of “racecraft,” the term coined by the historians Karen and Barbara Fields to describe the transmutation of a set of actions (racism) into a set of qualities or characteristics (race).

Racecraft, the Fieldses write in “Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America,” “transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss.” They offer a useful and pertinent example:

Consider the statement “black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color”— a perfectly natural sentence to the ears of most Americans, who tend to overlook its weird causality. But in that sentence, segregation disappears as the doing of segregationists, and then, in a puff of smoke — paff — reappears as a trait of only one part of the segregated whole.

This, you might say, is the Roberts two-step. He takes racism, a system of subjugation and social control, and removes the racists. What’s left is the mark of racism, that is, race. A landmark case about the legitimacy of race hierarchy — Brown v. Board of Education — becomes, in Roberts’s hands, a case about the use of race in school placement.

To remove racism and racists from the equation is to pretend that there’s no social force to push against — no inequality to rectify. Instead, there is only a quality, race, that Roberts says the Constitution cannot recognize.

The result is a society that continues to reinforce and reconstitute these previous patterns of domination, except hierarchy is now hidden from law, and what is a feature of society becomes, instead, a quality of the people afflicted.

Unquote.

There may be other examples of this phenomenon. Discuss bad behavior but somehow make the subject something to do with the victims, not saying outright that it was the fault of the victims, but making something about the victims the subject. It’s an interesting and, to me anyway, new idea.

This Former Republican Is Disgusted with the Media

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Jennifer Rubin writes for The Washington Post. She was known as a conservative years ago but gave up on the Republican Party. She’s not happy with negative coverage of the economy:

“U.S. Economy Shows Surprising Vigor in First Half of 2023” a Wall Street Journal headline proclaimed this past week. On Axios, one read: “The economy’s latest upside surprise.” Yahoo Finance intoned, “Surprisingly Strong US Economic Data Keeps Recession Fears at Bay.”

You might find it remarkable that outlets touting their economic foresightedness and keen analysis could be continually surprised about the economy’s strength after 29 consecutive months of job growth, inflation steadily declining, durable goods having been up for three consecutive months, 35,000 new infrastructure projects, an extended period in which real wages exceeded inflation and outsize gains for lower wage-earners. It’s as though outlets are so invested in the narrative of failure and imminent recession that reams of positive data have had little impact on their “narrative.”

The most sanguine headline came from Fortune: “Economists scrambling to justify their recession predictions 
 but maybe they were just wrong.” Conversely, maybe the administration was right in its approach to building the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out” despite the histrionics from Republicans, hand-wringing from the media and negative opinion polling.

Part of the problem might be the media’s preference for political horse-race coverage over events on the ground. “What do voters think?” (about what? about the media’s own negative spin on the economy?) replaces “What is going on?”

We have seen far too little coverage of the economic transformation in little towns, rural areas and aging metro centers brought about by new investment in plants, infrastructure projects and green energy related to the Chips Act. It sure would be nice to know what’s happening in the heartland when a new chip manufacturing plant creates thousands of jobs or when a new bridge creates scores of construction jobs and then cuts commute times. So intent on hyping the politics of what the administration is doing, the mainstream media too frequently neglects coverage of what President Biden’s initiative are accomplishing.

When the media consistently gets the big stories wrong or fails to cover major economic changes, one would hope they’d look back to explain why their coverage diverged from reality and do a better job of covering actual developments rather than GOP talking points, process stories (how Biden is “selling” his plan) and polling. Unfortunately, waiting for the mainstream media to engage in self-reflection (e.g., maybe it overdid the “But her emails” in 2016; maybe there was no red wave in 2022), let alone self-correction, might be a waste of time.

If outlets are concerned about low trust in the media, explaining a historic economic transformation might help inform voters and leave the media less “surprised” when the data comes back. Instead, they are invariably on to the next groupthink exercise, the next round of gloom-and-doom and the next batch of credulous coverage of Republican talking points.

Good-bye, Supreme Court. Hello, Super Legislature.

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President Biden doesn’t think we should expand the Supreme Court because it would “politicize” it. Pick a metaphor. That train has already left the station? That ship has sailed? That horse has left the corral? Republican senators destroyed the notion that the Court isn’t political when they refused to let Obama appoint a justice almost one year before the 2016 election and then rammed one through in 2020 when people were already voting.

The president needs to review recent events. Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC summarizes while asking “who died and made the Supreme Court a legislature?”

… It’s one of Republicans’ longest-running talking points: “Don’t legislate from the bench.”

Now that Republican appointees are a supermajority on the Supreme Court, you would think that this majority would steer clear of anything that might look like it was writing laws and thereby undermining the people’s representatives in Congress.

But you’d be wrong.

Today’s conservative justices are happily imposing their reactionary legislative vision on America, not just by interpreting laws, but by effectively rewriting them, in order to implement unpopular policies that could never get passed through Congress. Separation of powers be damned.

Take some of the biggest, most divisive, most consequential issues in American life right now: student loan relief, climate change, voting rights, labor laws and gun control. Now the Supreme Court decides what happens on those issues. Not you. Not me. Not our elected representatives.

Like on Friday when the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that 43 million Americans would not receive student loan relief under President Joe Biden’s plan.

The conservatives ruled the program had not been explicitly approved by Congress in the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, or HEROES Act.

But that law allows the Education Department to “waive or modify” financial assistance programs “as the Secretary deems necessary” in a national emergency.

Like the Covid pandemic we were still in when Biden announced his plan last year.

In her dissent, liberal Justice Elena Kagan slammed her conservative colleagues, writing: “The result here is that the Court substitutes itself for Congress and the Executive Branch in making national policy about student-loan forgiveness.”

Got crippling student debt from predatory loans? Tough. The Supreme Court says you can’t get relief.

On climate change, the Supreme Court has undermined Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency twice in the last year alone.

In West Virginia v. EPA, a 6-3 majority ruled the EPA exceeded its authority by regulating carbon emissions from power plants. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority: “It is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme. 
 A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself.”

Except that Congress did explicitly give the EPA the authority to use the “best system of emission reduction” when it passed the Clean Air Act in the ’60s.

As Kagan put it in her dissent, “The Court will not allow the Clean Air Act to work as Congress instructed. The Court, rather than Congress, will decide how much regulation is too much.”

Then in May in Sackett v. EPA, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority in a precedent-setting opinion that the Clean Water Act only allows the EPA to regulate wetlands that have “a continuous surface connection” to “waters of the United States.”

Except that’s not what the law says. The law applies to “all waters of the United States” and explicitly wetlands “adjacent” to those waters. But instead of applying the law as written, Alito just changed the meaning of the word “adjacent” to mean “adjoining.”

You want Congress to decide how to protect our air and water? Tough. The Supreme Court decides that now.

Next, look at voting rights, where in the last 10 years, the Supreme Court effectively rewrote the core protections of the historic Voting Rights Act, first passed by Congress in 1965.

Congress passed the VRA explicitly to force southern states with a history of disenfranchising Black  voters through seemingly neutral voting requirements to get approval from the federal government before they could implement any new voting laws.

This “preclearance” was such a crucial part of the VRA that Congress voted overwhelmingly to extend the preclearance provision in 1982 and again in 2006.

But in 2013, a 5-4 majority led by Roberts decided that voter suppression laws were no longer a problem in those states. That ruling in Shelby County v. Holder effectively voided the preclearance provisions that Congress had voted overwhelmingly to extend just seven years earlier.

In Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee in 2021, the 6-3 majority upheld an Arizona election law that imposed burdens upon Native Americans living on reservations because the majority felt the burdens alleged were “modest when considering Arizona’s ‘political processes’ as a whole.”

As Kagan noted in her dissent, “The Court has (yet again) rewritten—in order to weaken—a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses.”

Do you want Congress to protect voting rights and stop racist rules from suppressing minority votes? Tough. The Supreme Court is writing the laws now.

Now look at labor rights, where this anti-worker, anti-union court has legislated from the bench to create new rights for corporations, and against their employees, in two major cases.

In 1935, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, which enshrined the right of workers to join unions and to organize orderly strikes. To resolve disputes between workers and employers, the law also established the National Labor Relations Board.

This court has hacked away at that system.

This happened most crucially in 2018 with Janus v. AFSCME, when the Roberts court struck down the long-standing practice of mandatory union “agency fees” being deducted from employees’ paychecks.

“There is no sugarcoating today’s opinion,” Kagan wrote in her dissent. “The majority overthrows a decision entrenched in this Nation’s law—and in its economic life—for over 40 years.”

You want Congress to protect labor rights? Tough. The Supreme Court has other policy ideas.

In the absence of much meaningful action by Congress, this Supreme Court has done more than any legislature to radically alter gun policy.

In Washington, Chicago and New York state, over more than a century, lawmakers passed tailored gun regulations, but in recent years, the Supreme Court has gutted them.

In 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, five justices struck down a Washington, D.C., handgun ban, deciding that the Second Amendment wasn’t about colonial militias but about the right of the average Joe to brandish a Glock.

In 2010, that ruling was extended to the rest of the country with McDonald v. Chicago.

Then in 2022, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, the court went a step further and decided that the Second Amendment also says Americans are guaranteed a right to carry guns in public, contradicting New York’s century-old law requiring gun owners to show proper cause for doing so and obtain a license.

As liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it during oral arguments, describing the implications of a court stepping in on a state’s legal turf, “You’re asking us to make the choice for the legislature.”

The six conservative Supreme Court justices were more than happy to make that choice for the state Legislature. States only get to put limits on really dangerous things, like voting rights and abortion.

You want Congress to stop mass shootings? Tough. This Supreme Court is calling the shots.

Making the choice for the legislature — that’s exactly what this Supreme Court now does, on a regular basis, and on a range of key issues. It takes issues decided by the people’s representatives and then re-decides them in a manner that pleases the conservative supermajority on the bench. So an elected, and Democratic-controlled, Congress can write and pass a progressive law, but an unelected and very conservative Supreme Court can just rewrite it.

Confidently. Brazenly. Shamelessly.

These are not neutral judges. These are politicians in robes.

Unquote.

Too late for Hasan’s article, a radical judge appointed by the last president has issued an injunction that stops various parts of the Executive Branch from talking to social media companies on the ludicrous theory that right-wing voices are being censored. It may be the most ridiculous ruling yet from the recent batch of Republican federal judges.

It was 1869 when Congress and President Grant increased the Supreme Court from 8 to 9 justices. At the same time, they created 9 circuits or courts of appeal spread around the country, one for each Supreme Court justice to partly administer.

There are now 13 circuits and many more Americans, lawyers and cases. The Democrats should add 4 justices next time they hold the White House and both houses of Congress. Thirteen circuits, thirteen justices.

That will require at least 50 Democratic senators who are willing to ignore a Republican filibuster. Let the Republicans complain that the Democrats are politicizing a Court that’s already political.