The Democratic Party's New Playbook

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The Shipler Report has obtained an early draft of the National Democratic Committee’s manual for the next presidential candidate. It is the result of the post-election self-flagellation that only Democrats can perform with such alacrity. Here it is: 

                “Dear Candidate (insert name),

                Donald J. Trump has become a model of how to win elections in the new America. Following his successful campaign in 2024, we strongly recommend adopting his top ten techniques, as follows: 

1.      Begin to lie as soon as your lips start moving.

2.      Use only superlatives, as in, “We will have the best hurricanes ever,” and, “We have the worst open sewers in history. Nobody has ever seen anything like it.”

3.      Read Mein Kampf – great tips

4.      Terrify the citizenry and badmouth the country as swarming with swarthy, pet-eating ex-convicts and insane, blood-poisoning invaders.

5.      Use these four words often, no matter what the problem, imagined or real: “I will fix it.”

6.      Ramble for hours incoherently in front of large audiences by “weaving” unrelated digressions into a tangled web that makes you seem cognitively impaired.

7.      Sell Bibles that include an extra New Testament book with your name, and a preface reading, “The Gospel According to _________.” Price it exorbitantly so people know it’s valuable.

8.      Sell bright blue MAGA hats, but don’t tell anyone that the initials stand for “Make America Gullible Again.”

9.      Pretend to perform a sex act with a microphone.

10.  Lose millions in lawsuits for sexual assault, and keep bragging about grabbing women’s pussies. Most men love that, and millions of women do, too.”

This is satire. It’s all made up (except for what isn't), a disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.

Democracy: The Political Right's Alarming Lack of Alarm

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Right-wingers who tamper with democracies should be careful what they wish for. They might hold positions of power today, but as they undermine the checks and balances that stabilize and restrain, they hand formidable tools to their opponents who might take over tomorrow.

This is poorly understood in both Israel and the United States, two democracies now imperiled by extreme agendas that would weaken longstanding mechanisms designed to protect minority rights and moderate governmental authority.

The political right ought to take note: If Israel’s religio-nationalist government dismantles the separation of powers by emasculating the judiciary, what’s to prevent some centrist or more liberal government from driving unencumbered through the same gaping holes? After all, the right-wing governing coalition has only a four-seat majority in a 120-member parliament.

In the US, similarly, if Republican “conservatives” regain the White House and disempower independent agencies by transferring power to the president, as Trump’s team plans—and if they continue dismantling the non-partisan machinery of elections in swing states they control—what’s to prevent Democrats from doing the same where they hold or gain majorities? When you destroy the careful balances in a pluralistic system, the new structure is available to everyone, not just to you.

A case in point is Donald Trump’s anti-constitutional argument that Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, could have rejected slates of electors from some states that went for Joe Biden in 2020. But if Pence had that power, so would every vice president: Vice President Al Gore could have thrown out Florida’s Bush electors in 2000, where the popular vote was razor close and justifiably contested. And Vice President Kamala Harris could do it in 2024 if she doesn’t like certain states’ results.

Why don’t reporters interviewing avid Trump supporters ever point this out and ask for reactions?

It could be that Trump and his spellbound flock don’t grasp the universality of the powers they seek to acquire. Perhaps they think that only they will benefit by eroding the professional integrity of vote-counting, for example, not imagining that their opponents might use the same tactic. Perhaps they don’t see how a Democratic president could use the immense authority they seek for Trump should he be re-elected. In a society still largely subject to the rule of law, which carries with it a respect for precedent, consistency, and equal protection, systemic changes are just that: systemic. They flow through the entire system, no matter which faction is in charge, now or in the future.

It could also be that Republicans—privately—don’t really think Democrats are nefarious. Maybe right-wing politicians don’t believe what they say about liberals and progressives. Perhaps, in their heart of hearts, Republicans recognize that the “radical left” is not so devoid of civic and moral virtue that it would threaten democracy with the tools the Republicans are forging for themselves.

Indeed, that’s the flaw in this doomsday scenario: The Democrats are not the same, at least not now. Gore didn’t throw out Florida’s electors, and neither will Harris. Democratic state legislatures are not rushing to curtail voting rights or politicize vote-counting. There is no moral equivalency between Republicans and Democrats.

But will that be forever? Power is an aphrodisiac. The judicial system is growing more sharply partisan on both sides. Gerrymandering is a time-honored tradition by both parties. Imperious moves to stifle speech come from the left as well as the right. The danger of concentrating authority in too few hands, without sufficient checks, remains as acute today as when James Madison warned at the Constitutional Convention: “All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.”

So it also is in Israel, which has no constitution but a set of Basic Laws that are supposed to set the standards for governmental action. Without a constitutional text, the Supreme Court has overturned some statutes and practices as “unreasonable,” a squishy concept that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has just outlawed. (The Court itself will hear a case requesting that it overturn that new ban on its authority, setting up what Israelis loosely call a “constitutional crisis.”)

In addition, Netanyahu has proposed giving government officials a majority on the commission that appoints judges, and granting the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, the power to overturn any Supreme Court ruling with a simple majority vote. The specter of emasculating the courts—the only check on executive/legislative power—has ignited vast street demonstrations, disinvestment, protests by respected former intelligence and military officers, and refusals to serve by numerous military reservists. At least the center and left are alarmed, even if the right is not.

Ironically, Israel’s Supreme Court has moved somewhat to the right as new justices have been appointed during years of conservative government. So, if the judiciary is weakened and the rightist coalition loses its narrow majority in the future, a more centrist or left-tilting government could presumably overturn conservative Supreme Court decisions.

These might include rulings limiting the rights of Arab citizens, for example, or allowing more Jewish West Bank settlements on Palestinians’ land, or permitting gender discrimination by Haridim, the ultra-religious Jews who increasingly demand the separation of men and women in public transportation and elsewhere.

In fact, for many Israelis on both sides of the conflict over the judiciary, the very nature of the country is at stake—whether it remains a secular and pluralistic state or becomes increasingly theocratic, run by extensively by religious law. A centrist or slightly liberal government, empowered to overrule the Supreme Court, could conceivably sweep away judgments that uphold an expanded religious authority in domestic life, open the door to Israeli annexation of the West Bank, and other policies favored by the hard right. That is the risk that Netanyahu and his extremist partners run by changing the rules of the game.

Ultimately, citizens in both Israel and the United States will decide the momentous question, which is much larger than the personalities or slogans or temporal policies of the candidates. All democracies contain the built-in mechanism of their own destruction: the popular vote, which can elect those who will slice away the protections, usually little by little, until the citizens wake up one morning to find that their precious freedoms to choose how they are governed have disappeared. In a well-informed citizenry, the alarm sounds long before, across the entire political spectrum.

The Democratic Party's Cynical Caper

 

By David K. Shipler

               Now that the mid-term primaries are over, the cynical wing of the Democratic Party can tally its “wins.” Those are the radical right-wing election deniers and Pro-Trump fans of autocracy whose victories in Republican primaries were owed in part to Democratic-funded ads.

Six of thirteen such candidates won and are headed to the November election, where Democrats hope their extremism will be repulsive enough to the broader universe of voters that their Democratic opponents will prevail. That could happen, but it would be a sordid achievement.

              First, as some leading Democrats have warned, it’s a risky proposition. Some of those crazies could get elected, as Trump himself did after Hillary Clinton’s campaign ran as if Trump’s own flaws would defeat him.

Second, even where Democratic candidates prevail in the general election, the Republican radicals and their nonsensical conspiracy slanders will have been given more of a platform courtesy of Democratic money.

“Many of these candidates develop a much larger following, even if they lose the current race,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist. “What we have seen is, they come back and win for school board or state legislative race or for city councils because of this new awareness and this new recognition.”

Third, spending $53-million in nine states has broken faith with Democratic donors who thought their contributions to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee would be going to—duh—Democratic campaigns.

Fourth, and perhaps most important in the long run, to work against principled Republican House members who had the courageous patriotism to vote for Trump’s impeachment after January 6, is to help undermine the prospects for a reformation in the Republican Party. The country needs two responsible political parties, and the Democrats have now helped enhance the dangers of embracing decency.

The Republicans' Pro-Poverty Program

                                                             By David K. Shipler

                An irony of Donald Trump’s appeal to struggling, working-class Americans is his party’s complete indifference to their financial hardships. Wherever government can rescue people with direct cash assistance, Republicans are opposed. Wherever government can expand proven programs of aid—in health care, housing, food, day care--Republicans are opposed. See now how some Republicans are coming around to a thinly bipartisan infrastructure bill aimed at only things—bridges, highways, and the like—but are apoplectic over President Biden’s bill to help people. Things vs. people: no contest among the people’s representatives in the Republican Party.

                That coldness is compounded by uninformed moral judgments against those near the bottom. They have long been smeared by conservative Republicans as lazy, undeserving, and unlikely to strive upward without negative incentives—in other words, a whip at their backs.

Punitive provisions are almost invariably woven into Republican-sponsored policy. Assume that they don’t want to work, so cut off their $300-a-week cushion in unemployment benefits. Blame them for not taking low-wage jobs that can’t support their families, yet adamantly oppose raising the federal minimum wage to make those jobs worth having. Condition certain benefits on proof that they seek work or job training, pass drug tests, and avoid arrest—stipulations not made when the affluent get government subsidies and tax breaks such as the home mortgage interest deduction.

                Americans generally, even those technically below the official poverty line, don’t want to think of themselves as “poor,” since the society inflicts shame on the deprived. And those just above poverty, including many of Trump’s white supporters who are highly vulnerable to financial disruption, don’t display much empathy for those a notch or two beneath them. But they should, as many fell into disastrous misfortune during the pandemic and might well press the Republicans they elect to give them something back in return for their votes. 

America Hurtles Forward--and Backward

 

By David K. Shipler 

                According to Sir Isaac Newton’s third law, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction—a principle of physics, of course, but also true in politics and policy, at least currently in the United States. The country is moving in two directions simultaneously, as if two revolutions in thinking and practice are taking place, one progressing into a new era mobilizing government for economic and social reform, the other pushing hard into an old indifference to social injustice marked by blatant racial and class discrimination.

                Although the two revolutions frame their respective arguments around the size and role of government, they are driven by more fundamental clashes of concept. At root is the question of how inclusive a democracy should be, what problems it can solve, how the common good should be defined, and how near or distant the horizon of vision should be drawn.

Joe Biden, the 78-year-old Washington insider, did not raise radical expectations when he took office just over two months ago. He was forecast as a caretaker president who would decompress the political atmosphere with boring normalcy. Instead, he has quickly emerged as the unlikely catalyst of the most imaginative Democratic movement in at least a generation, perhaps since the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His aspirations are broad and intensely sophisticated, forming an agenda that would apply expansive ideals in mobilizing the nation’s expertise and financial power against the most vexing problems of race, class, health, education, climate, environment, energy, communication, low-paid work, elderly care, aging transportation networks, and just about every other failure in the American landscape.

The opposite revolution would leave all the failures in place, unresolved, and would add to them. It is more than a counter-revolution, led by Republicans who have become more than the Party of No. They go beyond saying no to every advance—no eased voting, no true help for malnourished children, no cleaner air or water, no safer workplaces, no better health care, no sufficient funding for schools, no mandatory wages high enough to support families. The new Republicans—for they are new in the history of the Republican Party—do not merely stand still and block. They are moving at speed back in time.

The Democratic Party vs. the Anti-Democratic Party

                                                     By David K. Shipler 

                If Donald Trump were solely responsible for the whirlwind that the United States now reaps, his departure on January 20 would bring calm. But the wind was sown long before Trump and will blow a long time after. It gnaws away at beliefs essential to a free people, even as Americans take pride in their democracy’s survival through the latest Day of Infamy, Jan. 6, 2021.

                Notwithstanding the democratic-sounding platitudes by Republicans since the riots, their party has not favored true, open democracy, but rather a kind of semi-democracy at best. The Republican Party has conducted nationwide operations to prevent minorities and other likely Democratic voters from casting ballots, efforts now ramping up in some state legislatures poised to restrict the early and mail-in voting that broadened turnout last November. It has eagerly worn the mantle of racism inherited from Southern Democrats. Its assertions of fraud in the presidential election have mostly cited heavily Black cities. And it has become the gateway through which right-wing authoritarian movements are entering the political landscape.

                Trump is the facilitator and the current figurehead, the “accelerant,” as former President Obama has called him. But he could never have done it as a Democrat. It was among Republicans that he found resonance for his multiple hatreds and autocratic impulses.

                Yale history professor Timothy Snyder likens the Republican Party to authoritarian parties of Eastern Europe: Law and Justice in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary. Fascist methods, he notes, depend on a Big Lie, as in the claim of election fraud, and on faking election results, as Trump sought to do. “The people who stormed the Capitol building were fascists,” Snyder says.

Could Bloomberg Really Beat Trump?

By David K. Shipler

                Michael Bloomberg’s tone-deaf paralysis in the Las Vegas debate puts a boldface question mark behind the growing assumption among many Democrats that only he can defeat President Trump in November. One debate fiasco might matter little in the end, given that many more people are seeing the flood of Bloomberg TV and internet ads. And maybe he’ll do better next time. Still, 19.7 million viewers watched his first. But if he gets the nomination, voters will see him extensively, out from behind his screen of commercials. He could use a serious makeover.

                His advantage is his money: his generous philanthropy on the liberal side of such issues as gun control and climate change, his decisive contributions to Democratic candidates, the networks of loyalty that he has purchased in cities throughout the country, and his extensive campaign organization. He knows how to direct his dollars effectively, and his ex-Republican centrism will surely appeal to moderate Republicans who are disaffected with Trump.

                Yet voter turnout is crucial, and that depends largely on a candidate’s appealing demeanor, vision, and forward-looking agenda. Trump has built a wall of zealotry. To break through it, a Democratic opponent needs a surge of young and minority citizens moved by passion and belief, plus a middle-spectrum of voters in swing states. Right now, Bloomberg looks like nothing more than the candidate of last resort. That’s not enough to drive enough people to the polls.

There is a sharp hunger in the land for decency. There is a thirst for honesty, candor, authenticity—all traits that Trump supporters mistakenly attribute to the president. Depending on which citizens you ask, the country is impatient for reform and afraid of it, welcoming and resentful of demographic diversity, idealistic and cynical about politics in America.

The Pitfalls of Political Trash Talk

By David K. Shipler

                Nobody in American politics can beat Donald Trump at the game of coarse insults, name-calling, and personal ridicule. And nobody should try, especially Joe Biden, who needs to keep his poise of dignity and decency if he has a chance of rescuing discourse from its quagmire. Little temper tantrums and macho posturing, provoked Thursday by an Iowa voter’s unfriendly question, are not going to please citizens looking for a return to decorum.

Besides, Biden’s not very good at it. An early attempt occurred back in October 2016, when Biden was campaigning for Hillary Clinton. He managed to deflect public attention from his powerful condemnation of Trump’s boast that he could grab any woman’s pussy. Biden called it “a textbook definition of sexual assault” and went on: “He said, ‘Because I’m famous, because I’m a star, because I’m, a billionaire, I can do things other people can’t.’ What a disgusting assertion for anyone to make!”

The burning anger in Biden’s face said it all. Then he stepped on his own message by adding: “The press always asks me don’t I wish I were debating him. No, I wish we were in high school so I could take him behind the gym, that’s what I wish.” The partisan crowd cheered, but the more important point was swallowed by the Biden bravado, which became the focus of the news.

Biden must have thought he’d scored, because he embellished in March 2018 at the University Miami: “If we were in high school I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him. . . . I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life. I’m a pretty damn good athlete. Any guy who talked that way was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room.”

Democrats Miss the Target

By David K. Shipler

It is so easy for President Trump and his allies to distract Democrats into skirmishes on the sidelines of the big game. Yes, it’s outrageous that Attorney General William Barr played spin doctor on the Mueller report by distorting its content. Yes, it’s even more outrageous that Barr is defying a Congressional subpoena to be questioned yet again about why he said what he said about the report.

But what’s really important is what the report itself says, not what Barr says about it. That’s what Democrats should be focusing on. For if you read all 448 pages, as every citizen should, you’ll see a troubling picture emerge of a bizarre, uneducable president who tries to run the government as if he were the head of a crime syndicate.

He uses his office to manipulate and intimidate. He lies to his aides, and they lie to him. He grooms himself as a cult figure whose approval is granted or withheld to the favor or detriment of acolytes. Some tell him they will obey even as they decide to defy him. He issues implicit threats (though not of violence, so far), and clearly expects his underlings to break the law on his behalf. When they do not, they are deemed “weak” and marked for retribution.  

More to the point of the Mueller investigation, the evidence in the report supports an assessment that Trump did, indeed, attempt to obstruct justice in at least two of the cases investigated, and possibly in another five. Mueller stops short of making that judgment explicitly. But since his report is like a legal textbook on the conditions required to make the charge, and his evidence on both sides of each question is spread out dispassionately in precise detail, even a layman can see the obvious.

This is what Democrats should be talking about. This is what they should be holding hearings on. They don’t need Barr to pillory, and they don’t need the “unredacted” version of the report. There is plenty in the public pages if anybody bothers to wade through the dry prose.

At the report’s end, Mueller writes something akin to a legal brief, rebutting arguments by Trump’s lawyers that obstruction statutes are too narrow and the Constitution too broad in its grant of executive power to permit a president to be charged for such behavior. With citations of Supreme Court opinions and discussions of legislative intent, Mueller has produced a document ready-made for a prosecutor wishing to defend any appeal against either criminal charges or impeachment.

The national interest might have been better served if Mueller had not punted on the bottom-line question of whether he thinks Trump tried to obstruct justice. “We determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment,” he writes, content with an approach that responsible journalists know as a kind of forensic exercise: on the one hand this, on the other hand that. Let the readers make up their own minds. “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime,” Mueller says, “it also does not exonerate him.”

Yet the evidence he lays out so impartially draws you to a conclusion in almost every instance. Mueller defines the three conditions that must be met for an obstruction charge: first, an obstructive act likely to interfere with an investigation; second, a nexus between the act and an official proceeding such as a grand-jury or law-enforcement investigation; and third, an intent to impede the investigation.
(Late today, more than 450 former federal prosecutors issued a letter concluding that Trump would have been charged with obstruction had he not been president.)

The two Trump activities that appear to satisfy all three conditions involve his praise and hints of a pardon for Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, and his efforts to limit the scope of the special counsel’s investigation to future elections, excluding 2016.

Trump frequently used the Mafia term “flip” to disparage insiders who turn state’s evidence, and Manafort won Trump’s accolades for refusing to “break.” By contrast, Trump called Michael Cohen, his former lawyer, a “rat” for cooperating with the special counsel.   

 “There is evidence that the President's actions had the potential to influence Manafort's decision whether to cooperate with the government,” Mueller says in his analysis of whether Trump committed an obstructive act. The report notes that while Manafort pleaded guilty in one case and entered a cooperation agreement, he lied to investigators after Trump “suggested that a pardon was a more likely possibility if Manafort continued not to cooperate with the government.” Further, Trump’s public statements during Manafort’s trial in another case, “including during jury deliberations, also had the potential to influence the trial jury.”

A nexus with an ongoing investigation clearly existed, Mueller finds, and the intent condition was also satisfied: “Evidence concerning the President's conduct towards Manafort indicates that the President intended to encourage Manafort to not cooperate with the government.” Sections on Roger Stone, Trump’s adviser, are blacked out, because his prosecution is ongoing.

Trump’s attempts to limit the investigation’s scope also appear in the report as having met the obstruction law’s three conditions. This came about as Trump tried to get Attorney General Jeff Sessions to scale back the investigation to future elections, although Sessions had recused himself. Oddly, Trump picked as his messenger Corey Lewandowski, a private citizen and former campaign manager. Lewandowski never delivered the request.

 The attempt “would qualify as an obstructive act if it would naturally obstruct the investigation and any grand jury proceedings that might flow from the inquiry,” Mueller writes, stopping short of giving the obvious answer. Since a grand jury investigation had become public knowledge at the time, the nexus to an official proceeding would exist if limiting the investigation “would have the natural and probable effect of impeding that grand jury proceeding.” That sounds like a no-brainer.

Finally, the report is crystal clear on intent: “Substantial evidence indicates that the President 's effort to have Sessions limit the scope of the Special Counsel's investigation to future election interference was intended to prevent further investigative scrutiny of the President's and his campaign's conduct.”

Mueller’s evidence places other episodes in a gray area between probable and iffy. Among those, the case against Trump seeming strongest is his repeated demand that Mueller be removed. Since the investigation would have continued anyway, “a factfinder would need to consider whether the act had the potential to delay further action in the investigation, chill the actions of any replacement Special Counsel, or otherwise impede the investigation.” The other two conditions—the nexus and the intent—appear to have been satisfied in Trump’s desire to get rid of Mueller.

 Trump’s actions portrayed by the report as less certain to qualify as obstruction of justice include his appeal to James Comey, the FBI director, to lay off Michael Flynn, the national security adviser; his dismissal of Comey; Trump’s repeated efforts to get Sessions to “unrecuse” himself and take over the investigation; and his orders to White House Counsel Don McGahn to deny that he tried to fire Mueller. Various caveats and questions are raised in all these cases, although a layman could be forgiven for seeing fire where there is smoke.

The report is refreshing because it embraces ambiguity where relevant, leaves room for debate on each of these episodes, and is full of solid research and sound reasoning, a rare display these days of intellectual honesty and impartial integrity.

Yet even without a final, ringing declaration of judgment, its cascading evidence provides a cumulative indictment of Trump—if not criminally, then in the broader sense of the term, as a president incapable and unfit, ignorant or indifferent to the law and the Constitution, unwilling to learn, and thoroughly incompetent to govern in a system that restrains authoritarianism. The Democrats should forget Barr and concentrate on what the report tells us about Trump.

How to Get Rid of Trump

By David K. Shipler

                “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” So said Ralph Waldo Emerson, as recalled by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. It is an admonition that ought to be placed as a screen saver on the computers of all the eager Democrats in the House of Representatives who are licking their chops at the prospect of impeaching President Trump. A king who survives an attempt on his throne can be wild with vengeance, especially when backed by zealous toadies and street fighters.

                  If the report by special counsel Robert Mueller turns out to be an anti-climax after nearly two years of hype, Republicans who have circled the wagons around Trump will probably remain in place. As long as they don’t see Trump as a political liability, he’s safe, for impeachment is a legal-political hybrid. Without a smoking gun linking him explicitly to Russian manipulation of the 2016 election, hardly any House Republicans would vote for articles of impeachment, and the Republican-led Senate would fall far short of the two-thirds needed for conviction. The Republican Party of 2019 is a very different animal from the Republican Party of 1974, when its leaders, Senator Barry Goldwater among them, told Richard Nixon to resign or be impeached and convicted.

 Therefore, two other scenarios for dumping Trump seem more conceivable:

                 1. A Democratic electoral sweep in 2020 decisive enough to force the Republican Party into a cowering fit of reform.

This is the preferable outcome. If Democrats take the White House and the Senate, and keep or increase their majority in the House, Republicans might regroup as a more centrist, responsibly conservative movement that conducts serious debates over serious issues. Instead of rightist radicalism that favors the destruction of government, a reborn Republican Party might try to govern on behalf of a broader array of Americans.

Lessons From the Shutdown

By David K. Shipler

                It’s too bad that air controllers and TSA agents didn’t call in sick on day one of the shutdown. Maybe next time. They’d get the government reopened in about 90 minutes.

               That’s Lesson One. Here are some others:

·         Financial security is a mirage for huge numbers of fulltime employees, not only of the federal government but of private firms as well. Wages are too low and expenses too high to generate an adequate cushion of savings for families in the so-called middle class. People quickly ran out of cash for such basic needs as housing and food. As a former Coast Guard commandant told NPR, petty officers with two or three kids are paid below the poverty line.

·         If those with steady government jobs are so vulnerable, think of the fragility of low-skilled laborers paid less, who might not be able to get more than part-time work. Every dime that comes in goes out, leaving them on the constant edge of crisis. An uncovered medical bill, missed work for a child’s illness, a car repair, a layoff, reduced food stamps, delayed housing subsidies, or myriad other disruptions can send families into a downward spiral.

·         Those housing subsidies—particularly the government’s Section 8 vouchers that help pay rent to private landlords for low-income tenants—faced interruption, exposing the poor to eviction and surely undermining owners’ willingness to accept the vouchers. It’s hard enough in normal times to get landlords’ participation in the program, and funding is inadequate anyway. Waiting lists are long, and families who have to pay unsubsidized market rents are often forced to cut spending on food. That leads to malnutrition among children at crucial stages of brain development, studies have found, creating long-term intellectual impairment. This is likely to be a hidden cost of the shutdown.

Looking for a Political Sweet Spot

By David K. Shipler

                The new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives is faced with a tricky feat of navigation. It must appeal to the upsurge of national outrage against President Trump from the left while steering a course that will also attract the respect of moderate Americans near the center. And to do that, its committees that draft bills and conduct investigations will need to find an elusive sweet spot where liberal principles meet pragmatic governance—with broad appeal.

                It goes without saying that the behavior of the House Democrats will set the stage for the 2020 presidential election. Trump will vilify them no matter what, but if they give him ammunition by flying off into fits of extreme rhetoric and blizzards of subpoenas, they run the risk of appearing politically vindictive and irresponsible. If such accusations stick, they will stain whatever Democratic candidate emerges as the party’s nominee.

Therefore, every argument and assertion has to be well-phrased and factually unassailable. Every subpoena—and there should be many—has to be carefully supported by legitimate grounds for investigative necessity. No flamboyant grand-standing, no smear campaigns, no positions too radical to woo back independent Trump voters are likely to work.

                Furthermore, whatever positions and policies the Democrats adopt need to be explained and justified better than Nancy Pelosi is usually able to do. She’s an accomplished fund-raiser and herder of the cats in her caucus, and she can get legislation passed. But let’s face it, she’s not a great messenger on broadcast news, the unfortunate test these days of a successful politician. Too often she can’t put a persuasive sentence together. Either she has to practice her lines or let a more articulate Democrat do the talking.

                Liberals are feeling too heady after the mid-terms, with voters having elected Native Americans, Muslims, and record-breaking numbers of women. It’s reasonable to think that the tide has begun turning against a Republican Party bent on dismantling much of the good that government does for the people. But the operative word is “begun,” for this is not a revolution so much as a stirring, perhaps the prelude to a sea change that might mature eventually into a dramatic expulsion from power of the pro-rich, anti-minority misogynists who have diminished America.

The Right to Exploit

By David K. Shipler

            No political movement in America can match the dazzling facility with words mastered by conservative Republicans. From “death tax” to “pro-life,” they brand complex issues with simplistic slogans that slide easily into conversation. So it has been with “right-to-work” laws, just passed in Michigan, and now on the books in 24 states.

            Like the “right to life,” the “right to work” is not a right but a diminution of a right, one that has contributed to the lowest labor union membership in decades, currently just over half the rate of thirty years ago. Only 6.9 percent of those employed in the private sector belong to unions, which are nearly extinct in the free enterprise economy. The unions’ last bastion is in government, where 28.1 percent of federal, 31.5 percent of state, and 43.2 percent of local government employees (mostly teachers, firefighters, and police officers) are unionized. This leaves the country’s overall union membership, public and private, at 11.8 percent, down from 20.1 percent when comparable data collection began in 1983.

            The result is not a free market in labor but a rigged market, one in which the seller is relatively powerless next to the buyer. No seller of her labor to Walmart can bargain alone against the gargantuan buyer, the employer who unilaterally sets the price. Low-skilled workers, especially, are not in a position to negotiate individually; with no coin of professional talent to put on the table, they must bargain collectively or not at all.