The American Prospect #320

DAVID DAYEN: THE ART OF THE CONGRESSIONAL HEARING

MARCIA BROWN: BIDEN AND IMMIGRATION

I D E A S, P O L I T I C S & P O W E R

Helping Families Rise KALENA THOMHAVE

Making Cash Assistance Great BRYCE COVERT

Rosa DeLauro’s Triumph ALEXANDER SAMMON

M AY / J U N 2 0 2 1 $8.95 PROSPECT.ORG

The Politics of UBI

BONUS ISSUE, 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 35

“There is simply no reason why the blades for wind turbines can’t be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing.”

– President Biden, April 28, 2021

It’s time for the United States to build the infrastructure we need for a clean energy future.

Buy America rules will make sure this work happens in local communities like yours.

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contents

VOLUME 32, NUMBER 3 MAY/JUN 2021 PAGE 14

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COLUMNS 4 PROSPECTS THE CONFRONTATIONS ARE COMING BY PAUL STARR

NOTEBOOK 7 BIDENISM’S ONE-TWO PUNCH BY HAROLD MEYERSON 10 EVEN WEST VIRGINIA BOWS TO SOLAR BY GABRIELLE GURLEY 12 CONGRESS’S STRANGE BEDFELLOWS FIGHTING BIG TECH BY BRITTANY GIBSON

FEATURES 14 UNDOING WELFARE REFORM BY KALENA THOMHAVE IF CONGRESS MAKES THE EXPANDED CHILD TAX CREDIT PERMANENT, SIMPLE, AND UNIVERSAL, IT COULD HAVE REVERBERATIONS ACROSS THE ENTIRE WELFARE STATE. 22 CONGRESS’S MOST FAMILY-FRIENDLY MEMBER BY BRYCE COVERT ROSA DELAURO HAS SPENT 30 YEARS IN THE HOUSE FIGHTING FOR AN ADEQUATE CHILD TAX CREDIT AND PAID FAMILY LEAVE. SHE’S FINALLY GETTING SOMEPLACE. 28 CASH IS KING BY ALEXANDER SAMMON UBI IS POLITICALLY POPULAR, EASY TO ENACT, AND LOOKS EFFECTIVE AS POLICY. IS IT REALLY THAT SIMPLE? 36 INVESTIGATING OVERSIGHT BY DAVID DAYEN WHY CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS ARE BAD, AND HOW THEY CAN BE MADE GREAT AGAIN 48 STILL STUCK—AND ENDANGERED—ON THE BORDER BY MARCIA BROWN REVERSING ONE TRUMP POLICY, BIDEN HAS ALLOWED MANY ASYLUM SEEKERS TO ENTER THE UNITED STATES.

BY NOT REVERSING ANOTHER, HOWEVER, MANY THOUSANDS ARE STILL BEING EXPELLED.

CULTURE 55 MINORITY RULE BY ROBERT KUTTNER 59 WRESTLING WITH THE NEW DEAL BY ZACHARY D. CARTER 62 CICELY TYSON: A SHINING TITAN OF BLACK EXCELLENCE BY CATE YOUNG 64 PARTING SHOT NOTHING TO SEE HERE BY ROBERT YASUMURA Cover art by John P. Dessereau

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from the Editor

A

fter close-reading the early days of this presidency in our now dearly departed First 100 newsletter, I can draw a few conclusions. Joe Biden consciously modeled his presidential launch after Franklin Roosevelt. He saw himself as thrust into history, amid health and economic crises and a slippage of democracy.

The nature of the challenges had to be held up as the reason for the accelerated pace. As HAROLD MEYERSON points out in these pages, Biden has recast his agenda as a necessary patriotism, to fend off competition from illiberal rivals like China and show to the world an America that works. This harks back to FDR as well, whose New Deal, he argues, demonstrated democracy’s viability in a time when fascism was on the rise.

In his review of Eric Rauchway’s Why the New Deal Matters, ZACHARY D. CARTER explains that the New Deal inaugurated “a commitment that the American government would and could be an expression of peaceful common purpose for all Americans.” This is Biden’s urgent hope.

It’s why he’s prioritized only the most popular policies, constantly touting support for them among the Republican rank and file as a fair reading of bipartisanship. It has the potential, at least rhetorically, for a realignment.

And yet. While the American Rescue Plan was a towering $1.9 trillion accomplishment, positioning the country for an economic boom and facilitating a vaccine rollout that by midMay had 59 percent of U.S. adults over 18 with at least one dose, all of its measures are temporary. The most potent structural change, an increased Child Tax Credit advanced to families monthly, expires in just one year. Red-state Republicans have responded to what they perceive as an overfed army of welfare kings and queens by curtailing the unemployment insurance expansion, taking tens of billions of dollars away from the unemployed. Not much else has made it through a nearly even Congress. And a difficult 2022 map looms before the Democrats, with Republicans eyeing a takeover of the House, thanks in part to gerrymandering, voter suppression, and other tools to ensure victory, regardless of voter intent.

This period of uncertainty, for a president, for the country, and for a system of government, forms the raw materials of this issue. We lead with the expanded Child Tax Credit, which could establish the principle that children should not be penalized with poverty as their birthright.

Former Prospect writing fellow KALENA THOMHAVE celebrates this promise and cautions that meeting it will depend on policy design. BRYCE COVERT profiles the longtime champion of this transformative policy, Connecticut Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro. And ALEXANDER SAMMON wonders whether guaranteed-income programs are really the policy—and political— winners that everyone assumes they are.

Meanwhile, our co-founders PAUL STARR and ROBERT KUTTNER are concerned with threats from an unreconstructed Republican Party. Both counsel Democrats that they must not be deterred from making tangible progress by the structures (such as the filibuster) that entrench minority rule. That progress can also be furthered by strong executive action, but writing fellow MARCIA BROWN went to the U.S.-Mexico border to discover that, on immigration, Biden has been unwilling to break with some past policies that have immiserated the lives of asylum seekers.

A strong democracy demands a strong Congress, and in this issue I take a deep dive into congressional oversight: what makes for a good investigation and hearing, and why we haven’t seen enough of them lately. And there’s much more, including writing fellow BRITTANY GIBSON on the prospects of bipartisan legislation dealing with Big Tech, GABRIELLE GURLEY on renewable energy in the coalfields of West Virginia, and CATE YOUNG with an appreciation of the incomparable Cicely Tyson.

We also need to bid farewell to the aforementioned writing fellows, Marcia Brown and Brittany Gibson, who are at the end of their two-year cycle with us. I have been personally inspired by their growing confidence as they tackle important and often complex reporting. We are thrilled that they have found great new jobs, Marcia at The Capitol Forum and Brittany at Politico. Thanks to them both. –DAVID DAYEN

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EXECUTIVE EDITOR DAVID DAYEN FOUNDING CO-EDITORS ROBERT KUTTNER, PAUL STARR CO-FOUNDER ROBERT B. REICH EDITOR AT LARGE HAROLD MEYERSON DEPUTY EDITOR GABRIELLE GURLEY ART DIRECTOR JANDOS ROTHSTEIN MANAGING EDITOR JONATHAN GUYER ASSOCIATE EDITOR SUSANNA BEISER STAFF WRITER ALEXANDER SAMMON WRITING FELLOWS MARCIA BROWN, BRITTANY GIBSON EDITORIAL INTERNS JAROD FACUNDO, AMELIA POLLARD, PREM THAKKER CONTRIBUTING EDITORS MARCIA ANGELL, GABRIEL ARANA, DAVID BACON, JAMELLE BOUIE, JONATHAN COHN, ANN CRITTENDEN, GARRETT EPPS, JEFF FAUX, MICHELLE GOLDBERG, GERSHOM GORENBERG, E.J. GRAFF, BOB HERBERT, ARLIE HOCHSCHILD, CHRISTOPHER JENCKS, JOHN B. JUDIS, RANDALL KENNEDY, BOB MOSER, KAREN PAGET, SARAH POSNER, JEDEDIAH PURDY, ROBERT D. PUTNAM, RICHARD ROTHSTEIN, ADELE M. STAN, DEBORAH A. STONE, MICHAEL TOMASKY, PAUL WALDMAN, SAM WANG, WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, MATTHEW YGLESIAS, JULIAN ZELIZER PUBLISHER ELLEN J. MEANY PR DIRECTOR ANNA GRAIZBORD CONTROLLER SALLY FREEMAN COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST STEPHEN WHITESIDE BOARD OF DIRECTORS MEHRSA BARADARAN, DAAIYAH BILAL-THREATS, CHUCK COLLINS, DAVID DAYEN, STANLEY B. GREENBERG, JACOB S. HACKER, AMY HANAUER, DERRICK JACKSON, ROBERT KUTTNER, ELLEN J. MEANY, MILES RAPOPORT, JANET SHENK, ADELE SIMMONS, GANESH SITARAMAN, WILLIAM SPRIGGS, PAUL STARR, MICHAEL STERN SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMER SERVICE STEPHEN WHITESIDE, 202-753-0937, INFO@PROSPECT.ORG PRINT SUBSCRIPTION RATES $36 (U.S.), $42 (CANADA), AND $48 (OTHER INTERNATIONAL) REPRINTS PROSPECT.ORG/PERMISSIONS VOL. 32, NO. 3. The American Prospect (ISSN 10497285) is published bimonthly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 Eye Street NW, Ste. 600, Washington, DC 20005. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2021 by The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The American Prospect, Inc. The American Prospect® is a registered trademark of The American Prospect, Inc. POSTMASTER: Please send address changes to The American Prospect, 1225 Eye St. NW, Ste. 600, Washington, DC 20005. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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The Confrontations Are Coming

BY PAUL STARR

T

his spring has brought relief and hope—relief from the nightmare of the past four years and hope for the pandemic’s end and genuine progress in meeting the challenges of economic insecurity, climate change, and racism. Still, I can’t shake the sense that this is just a temporary respite from the country’s recurring crises of political gridlock and rightwing reaction. Donald Trump may be stewing in Mar-a-Lago, but Trumpism remains an undiminished force in a Republican Party that dominates key states and may soon be back in control of at least one house of Congress. With a 6-3 majority, the Supreme Court’s right wing is in a stronger position than at any time since the mid-1930s to overturn progressive policies.

In Arizona, Republicans are conducting a partisan recount of 2020 ballots that looks like a rehearsal for stealing future elections. The confrontations are coming with the red states, congressional Republicans, the high court, and Trumpism itself, and the question will be how, if at all, Democrats can overcome them.

In his first hundred days, Joe Biden has given his party a fighting chance to do that.

He’s responded to the country’s immediate crisis with two skilled rollouts—the rollout of COVID-19 vaccinations and the rollout of his domestic

4 PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2021

agenda, starting with the passage of the American Rescue Plan’s stimulus package and continuing with his ambitious proposals for investment in infrastructure and families. By front-loading big, popular ideas and framing them as a means of proving democracy works and competing with China, Biden has simultaneously moved left and co-opted appeals of the right. As Harold Meyerson writes in this issue, “Wrapped in the armor of both egalitarian nationalism and liberal democracy, Bidenism bids fair to have wider appeal than any defining Democratic ideology since, perhaps, the New Deal.”

Biden’s armor is partly his persona as an older, white, Catholic man who projects moderation even as he calls for liberal priorities. But he has also shown a keener strategic sense than most people previously gave him credit for. Republicans responding to his policies have seemed flat-footed, stuck in culture-war poses that don’t work as a way of taking him down. He has also kept Democrats largely united behind him; in the early going, he has combined his dual roles as the leader of the nation and his party more successfully than any recent Democratic president.

But despite his promising start, Biden faces severe limits from the fragile Democratic majorities in Congress and a Trumpified Republican Party that is in a panic about a

changing electorate and determined to use such power as it has to block Democrats from material accomplishments.

Conservative parties that see danger on the horizon typically resort to two formally legal strategies to entrench themselves. One is to change electoral rules; the other is to use counter-majoritarian institutions, principally the courts, to limit what elected opponents can do.

Republicans currently have two bastions of power in state governments and the Supreme Court, and they are leveraging those control points in a two-pronged entrenchment strategy—passage of restrictive electoral rules in the states and reliance on the Court to box in and roll back Democratic policies. (There’s also a third, more radical prong: the Trumpian claim of a stolen election and denial of Biden’s legitimacy, the predicate for rigging elections outright.)

The push by Republicans on the first prong has already begun in Georgia, Arizona, Florida, Texas, and other states where they are enacting measures to suppress voting by Democratic constituencies and to seize control of the counting of ballots. Republicans hold the advantage at the state level.

They control both legislative houses and the governorship in 23 states, while Democrats have trifectas in only 15. The redstate trifectas also give Republicans an edge in gerrymandering

electoral districts in the wake of the 2020 census.

If Democrats had done better in Senate elections in 2020 instead of just squeaking by with 50 seats, they might now be sure of passing the federal voting rights and electoralreform bills H.R. 1 and H.R. 4, which would override the state voter suppression measures and require the establishment of independent redistricting commissions. But unless Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema change their minds, the filibuster stands in the way. Perhaps some voter suppression measures can be defeated in court, but if the outcome depends on the Supreme Court, most will probably survive.

That’s not to say Democrats are doomed. Some of the Republican efforts could backfire; they could also fail if they serve as a wake-up call to progressives about the urgency of local organizing. But the organizing will succeed only if people believe that voting Democratic makes a real difference, which is why Biden’s early success on policies this year and next is so important.

The obstacles to Democrats’ retaining control of Congress in 2022 can appear overwhelming.

Not only does the president’s party nearly always lose House seats in midterm elections; midterm turnout tends to be disproportionately low for Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and younger

Prospects

voters. Democrats also face a likely net loss of House seats as a result of Republican-controlled redistricting and Democratic retirements in swing districts.

In the Senate, however, Republican retirements in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Ohio could help Democrats, who in 2022, as The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein points out, will not be defending a single seat in a state that voted for Trump. But they will have to defend Raphael Warnock’s seat in Georgia and Mark Kelly’s in Arizona— both states where Biden won by the narrowest of margins and Republicans are rewriting the election rules.

The deeper problem for Democrats in congressional elections is structural, due to the concentration of their voters in cities—and as Jonathan Rodden shows in Why Cities Lose, the Democratic vote is more concentrated in cities now than it has ever been. The Senate overrepresents the more rural and white states; in House elections, Democrats “waste” votes in urban districts where they run up lopsided victories.

To win a majority of legislative seats, Democrats don’t just need a majority of votes nationally; they need to win by a majorityplus—by several extra percentage points—to compensate for their inefficient geographic distribution.

That underlying problem, however, doesn’t wholly explain why Democrats met so many disappointments in downballot races in 2020. They initially seemed in a good position to win Senate races in Maine, North Carolina, Iowa, and Montana that they ultimately lost. They expected to gain House seats and instead lost 15, leaving them with a margin of only seven. Some voters who chose Biden apparently did not trust Democrats enough to vote for Democrats for Congress and give the party an unqualified mandate.

This is where Democrats could be in a stronger position in 2022. The pandemic-related fear that Democrats would lock down the economy at the cost of jobs may have been responsible for some voters’ ambivalence in 2020. If the pandemic is behind us next year, the economy is booming, and Biden continues to provide steady leadership, Democrats may be able to offer a politics of hope and reassurance as a convincing alternative to the Republican politics of fear.

But let’s face it: Democratic legislative opportunities may be cut off after the midterms, just as they were in 1994 and 2010. During last year’s campaign, many Democrats ridiculed Biden for his talk about bipartisanship and were surprised, once he was in office, that under his leadership Democrats went big and went alone on the American Rescue Plan. They know this may be their one opportunity. After the midterms, we may be back to gridlock.

THE SUPREME Court’s six-mem-

ber right-wing majority looms as a threat, and not just to the current progressive agenda.

No longer held back by the risk of a single defection from within their ranks, the conservative justices now have their opportunity to go big. This is the moment conservatives have been waiting for to enfeeble federal regulatory powers, unions, and other bulwarks of liberalism and the modern liberal state.

The Court’s right wing is in this position only because Senate Republicans played hardball twice. They broke traditional norms when they refused to vote on Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland more than a year before the 2016 election, and they broke those norms again when they confirmed Amy Coney Barrett on the eve of the 2020 election.

I agree with many others that Democrats need to play

hardball in response by expanding the Court and reforming it for the long term. Rather than make any proposal, however, Biden has appointed a commission to study Supreme Court reform, a step that some have criticized, as Elie Mystal does in The Nation, as an “excuse to do nothing.” The commission, Mystal fumes, “isn’t even allowed to make policy recommendations.”

It’s a good thing, though, that Biden both appointed the commission and told it not to make recommendations. It keeps Court reform under discussion at a time when the support for Court expansion in Congress and the country doesn’t yet exist. Some fruits cannot be picked before they ripen. The case for waiting until Court expansion ripens has been best laid out, interestingly enough,

by Charles Fried, who was Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general.

Last October, Fried warned that with Barrett on the court, its “six-person majority is poised to take a constitutional wrecking ball to generations of Supreme Court doctrine—and not just in matters of reproductive choice.”

Reciting a series of recent Court decisions on campaign finance, partisan gerrymandering, unions, and other issues, Fried noted that all of the rulings are “incurable by legislation because they were said to be based in the Constitution” and that “every one of them favors, and was favored by, partisan Republican interests and was decided 5 to 4 by Republicanappointed justices.”

Fried left no doubt about his position on Court expansion.

Echoing Winston Churchill’s famous line about democracy, he argued that expanding the Court “is a bad idea, except for all the alternatives,” which he added “boil down to just one: a predictable, reactionary majority on the Supreme Court for perhaps as long as another generation.” His advice was to

wait to see whether the Court’s majority “overplays its hand. If it does, then Mr. Biden’s nuclear option might not only be necessary but it will be seen to be necessary.” That is exactly the strategy Biden and the Democrats have to follow, as much as we may worry about how the Court’s right wing will rule imminently on a host of issues— including the threats to American democracy.

Today’s Republican Party is the source of those threats.

We saw it clearly after last fall’s election, when Donald Trump tried to alter the results and to intimidate Congress by inflaming a mob to attack it—and Republicans could not bring themselves to repudiate him.

We see it in Arizona, where the Republican state Senate has turned over an election recount to a private contractor who had echoed Trump’s claims. We see it in Georgia and Michigan where Republicans have repudiated officials who counted the vote honestly.

It’s not clear that a democracy with a two-party system can survive when one of the parties no longer agrees to be bound by the rules of fair elections. We may have just been lucky in 2020 that the institutional checks held; they may not next time.

Under these circumstances, Democrats have to be bold and careful simultaneously. They have to be bold in fighting the battles they are fighting, and they have to be careful in choosing which battles to fight and how they fight them. Not every cause is ripe; not every cause is equally urgent. Right now, they need to prove government works for ordinary people, and just as important, they need to pass federal election reforms to give American democracy the strongest possible defense against right-wing assault. If they are unable to do so because of the Senate filibuster, it will be the kind of colossal failure that later generations never forgive. n

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5

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Notebook President Joe Biden gives his first address to a socially distanced joint session of Congress on April 28, 2021.

Bidenism’s One-Two Punch The president’s case for his program rests on egalitarian nationalism and the value of democracy. That’s a more potent case than the Democrats have had in decades.

JIM WATSON / AP PHOTO

BY H A R O L D M E Y E R S O N PERHAPS BECAUSE he was compelled to wait longer than any presidential aspirant in American history before actually winning the White House, Joe Biden understands timing. Not just the need to move quickly on his far-reaching agenda, but also the order in which he presents its components. If Biden made one thing clear during his first hundred days as president, it’s that he understands, and is a master of, sequencing.

In his first address to Congress, as he did throughout the first hundred days, he led with proposals for fundamental change, but particularly with proposals so popular that they’re hard to oppose. In the Republican

response to Biden’s speech, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott skipped lightly and quickly through his critique of Biden’s proposals for infrastructure, family assistance, and access to health care. Like his fellow Republicans, Scott felt more comfortable decrying the horrors of cultural liberalism, despite the fact that Biden’s truly landmark proposals, the ones he wants to brand his presidency, are fundamentally economic.

Cobbled together, as they were in Biden’s congressional address, they amount to the closest thing to a social democratic manifesto that any American president has ever delivered. But it’s precisely the social

democratic aspects of Biden’s agenda that win the greatest popular support, including, polls show, from a quarter to a third of rank-and-file Republicans.

So long as the debate focuses on kitchen-table issues, on the lived experience of the American people, Republicans haven’t really had much to say. Scott offered praise for hardworking single mothers, but Biden concretely offered them affordable child care and an extension of the wildly popular child allowance included in the American Rescue Plan. Confronted with Biden’s proposals for universal pre-K, free community college, bigger exchange subsidies in the Affordable Care Act, paid sick and family leave, elimination of lead water pipes, America First purchasing policies, tax increases on billionaires and offshoring corporations, and sundry other Biden proposals, Republicans have tied themselves in knots to come up with oppositional arguments.

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(Exhibit A: Responding to the president’s plan to make community colleges free, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn has accused him of forcing high school graduates to take two more years of school.) Biden has put a lot on the table, while Republicans prefer to argue about what he hasn’t put on the table (his nonexistent war on hamburgers, for instance).

Having established with his rollout of the COVID vaccination program that the federal government can actually get important things done, Biden is now leading with fights he knows he can win in the court of public opinion. That’s still no guarantee that he and his Democratic cohorts can get them through the Senate. But the Republicans’ eagerness to turn the discussion to other subjects suggests they know they could pay a price for blocking them.

Biden has also made clear his support for other important

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fights—voting rights, police reform, gun control, a rational immigration policy—but his emphasis in the early days of his presidency has clearly been on creating a more broadly shared prosperity. That reflects his sense of sequencing. He made clear in his speech that he’ll push legislation to reduce the price of prescription drugs by having the government negotiate down the prices, but he hasn’t actually introduced that legislation yet, and left drug-pricing reform out of the American Families Plan. He knows he’ll face a deluge of Big Pharma attacks when he does, and he wants the government’s credibility enhanced by its performance not just on the pandemic but also on its job creation and family assistance when he takes on the drug industry.

Besides, if he can get a fight going next year that pits Democrats on the side of consumers against Republicans defending the drug companies,

Biden’s emphasis in the early days of his presidency has clearly been on creating a more broadly shared prosperity.

that wouldn’t be a bad thing for voters to think about as the midterm elections approach. (In an act of real heroism, Biden demonstrated that he’s not afraid to take on Pharma when he rejected the advice of many of his own officials and supported a humanitarian waiver of the companies’ intellectual-property rights to manufacture and distribute COVID vaccines globally.)

Throughout his congressional address and on numerous other occasions, Biden has repeatedly stressed that the United States is in an epochal competition with others (mostly China) on the question of which will thrive and which will sink in the 21st-century economy. Failing to use the government’s power to reshore research and industry, to recreate a vibrant and more inclusive middle class, he’s argued, is a prescription for national decline.

Biden’s is an argument with potentially wide political appeal. In one sense, it’s an appeal to a sane American nationalism. Unlike any previous president since the current era of financial globalization began, he states that the past 40 years of government acquiescence in and even encouragement of corporate flight and offshore investment has proven to be a national disaster, and he puts forth policies that would reverse that dynamic. In another sense, it’s an appeal to the nation’s commitment to democracy, recognizing that the rising challenge to the nation isn’t simply coming from other countries, but from autocracy itself, from the claims that autocracy provides a better path to progress than democracy does. If there is such a thing as Bidenism, it is this, a one-two punch aimed at financial globalism and oppressive autocracy, an affirmation of the value of both an egalitarian national interest and liberal democracy.

There have been a lot of comparisons of the size and scope of Biden’s domestic proposals to Franklin Roosevelt’s, but Biden and the people around him seem to have realized that there’s one other parallel, one that helped Roosevelt and can now help him. Roosevelt took office at a time when autocracy was on the

CAROLYN K ASTER / AP PHOTO

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rise. Hitler had come to power in Germany just one month before FDR was sworn in as president. Democracy stood in disrepute, as the governments of Europe and Herbert Hoover’s United States had utterly failed to find remedies for the worldwide depression.

Roosevelt’s case for governmental activism—as he put it in one 1932 campaign speech, his program boiled down to its simplest form was “Try something!”—often made note that the survival of democracy itself depended on the adoption of the policies that comprised the New Deal.

Biden has realized that the world now faces at least an echo of that same challenge, perhaps more than an echo. And like Roosevelt, he isn’t hesitating to make the case that the adoption of his policies will make a strong case for the viability of a nowchallenged democracy, at a time when European and other democracies haven’t been particularly good at meeting their citizens’ needs.

In one important sense, the argument for nationalism and the case for democracy can overlap: Democracies’ greatest successes have come at the level of the nation-state, and when corporations have gone global, there’s been no supranational democratic polity that could really rein them in.

In the current political discourse, a Democrat and a Trump-era Republican may both condemn corporate flight from the Midwest, but the Democrat will also note that corporations are fleeing labor and environmental regulations and tax rates enacted and enforced by a democratic national government, while the Republican wants to lure those corporations back by reducing governmental controls and standards to the levels of the tax havens and low-government-oversight nations to which the corporations have fled. That’s a distinction that makes Biden’s nationalism at once more democratic and more materially rewarding than that of his Republican critics.

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ROUTLEDGE

So constituted, Bidenism offers two strong challenges to Republicans. First, opposing his proposals to revitalize industry and rebuild the middle class can lay Republicans open to charges of being China’s useful idiots. That’s a term Biden would never use, but it comports nicely with reality nonetheless. Second, Bidenism challenges the primacy and legitimacy of the internal civil war and its accompanying demonizations that Republicans have promoted ever since the Soviet Union collapsed. Throughout the Cold War, Republicans defined themselves by fighting the scourge of Soviet communism, both in itself and because they could argue that the RooseveltTruman-Kennedy-Johnson reforms were really a slippery slope to socialism, communism, and the gulag.

(They still do that to an extent, though it’s lost its bite.) When the Cold War ended, two Republican leaders—Pat Buchanan on the hustings and Newt Gingrich in Congress—redefined the party’s mission by proclaiming the substitute for the commies were the Democrats, whose social liberalism and statism, timid though it was, posed an even greater threat to the nation than communism ever had. Since the mid-1990s, with rising hysteria, Republicans have centered their politics on waging this war.

Against this, Biden is arguing that we do have an enemy that threatens our democracy. That doesn’t mean he’s going to lead us into war with China, but it does enable him to redirect the nation’s attention to a conflict—or as he prefers to call it, a competition—that’s both more real and less internally divisive than the one the Republicans are waging against liberal sins both real and (mainly) imagined.

Wrapped in the armor of both egalitarian nationalism and liberal democracy, Bidenism bids fair to have wider appeal than any defining Democratic ideology since, perhaps, the New Deal. Getting the actual proposals through the Senate and into the lives of the American people will be a challenge. But through skillful sequencing, the initial plans enter the fray with broad public support. n

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 9

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Even West Virginia Bows to Solar The epicenter of coal country belatedly begins to acknowledge the realities of renewables.

BY G A BR I E L L E G U R L E Y IN THE SPRING OF 2020, West Virginia’s Republican legislature voted decisively to allow the state’s two major electric utilities to develop 400 megawatts of solar power resources on abandoned mine lands. The legis-

increasingly did not fly with prospective employers seeking renewableenergy resources that the state just did not have. Why tarry in coal country, they likely reasoned, when North Carolina, the number two solar pro-

West Virginia will allow solar arrays on abandoned mine lands.

lation reflects a grudging acceptance of the decisive shift in electricity generation economics from coal to solar and other renewables in a state that ranks second in coal production and where coal mining still exerts a powerful pull on the state’s psyche and politics.

Those economics have made West Virginia’s fierce attachment to coal increasingly untenable, especially when yoked to the climate change– driven episodes of severe drought and increased flash flooding that the state has experienced. Worse still, the state’s coal protectionism

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ducer in the United States, is right next door? General Mills, Procter & Gamble, Target, Walmart, and other firms that employ significant numbers of West Virginians and have adopted clean-energy goals all wanted those options. State lawmakers ultimately had to bow to renewables realities and these impeccably capitalist demands.

Today, more than 90 percent of the state’s current power needs are still met by coal-fired plants. A December report published by the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development of West Virginia University’s

College of Law estimated that the state could generate more than 70 percent of its power from wind and solar by 2035.

For more than a century, coal mining has obliterated huge swaths of forests and mountain hillsides.

Those abandoned mining sites—well, some of them—now could become home to solar facilities, though the process is strewn with obstacles.

Potential solar operators must reckon with the scarred, polluted landscapes that coal mining operations left behind and the burgeoning costs to remediate them that are likely to prove too daunting for West Virginia or other coal-producing states.

Abandoned mine lands are regulated under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, the first federal industry-specific environmental cleanup mandate, which requires states and tribal governments to remediate and restore mining lands and water sources with no identifiable owners.

To help pay for those projects, the act established a federal abandoned mine land trust fund. Administered by the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, the trust fund initially amassed about $12 billion through fees collected from coal operators to fund cleanups and reclamation for industrial, recreational, or wildlife habitat uses. Not surprisingly, however, those fees have been reduced since the fund’s inception, which has compromised its ability to backstop the states’ efforts. Indeed, after decades in which the funds have been disbursed to states and tribal authorities for reclamation projects and United Mine Workers health and retirement funds, only a little more than $2 billion remains in the trust.

Addressing the accelerating pace of bankruptcies in the coal sector will only further erode the trust fund’s staying power, tossing the bills for cleanup and reclamation costs to states and localities, costs that they may not be able to meet. In West Virginia, abandoned mine lands comprise some 100,000 acres out of the 400,000 acres throughout Appalachia. At the end of April, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) introduced a bill

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that would extend the fee program, which is set to expire later this year, for another 15 years. A second bill, the RECLAIM Act, would convey $1 billion from the trust fund to states for reclamation projects.

Some coal-producing states have been much more proactive than West Virginia in identifying and mapping potential sites for renewable facilities. Next door, Virginia has been a leader in encouraging renewable development. In early May, the Virginia chapter of the Nature Conservancy announced a new partnership with solar developer Sun Tribe of Virginia and solar operator Sol Systems of Washington, D.C., to build some of the first utility-scale solar projects in the Central Appalachian coalfields on six sites spread across approximately 560 acres. The tracts are part of the 253,000 acres that the environmental group secured across Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee in 2019.

Not every abandoned site is suited to solar generation. Sites must be relatively flat, and contain existing transmission and distribution lines and road access. (Many sites that have been identified in Virginia are already very close to transmission lines.) Some former mine areas and the surrounding communities might be better suited to wilderness habitat or recreation activities than to solar projects.

Bobby Hughes heads the Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation and spearheads the group’s research into abandoned mine land reclamation and development. He views reclamation as a process that provides employment opportunities for the former mine workers who know such lands well. They can parlay their knowledge into surveying careers using workforce training programs that provide instruction in field surveying, geographic information systems mapping, and water quality monitoring.

However, the notion of a “onefor-one replacement of coal jobs with solar renewables” is a fantasy, according to Ben Cahill, a senior fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that renewables’ share of electricity generation will more than double by 2050. for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

“There’s a simplistic idea that you hear sometimes that we can replace coal jobs with renewable energy,” he says. “It’s a great idea to use that land for another energy project, but that won’t work everywhere; a lot of coal communities just don’t have the solar radiation—the sunlight—that they need to support viable solar projects.”

As Appalachia confronts the green-energy transition, the country’s top coal-producing state, Wyoming, has decided that holding out is a better strategy. Shannon Anderson, an attorney for the Powder River Basin Resource Council, an environmental group in Wyoming’s mining region, says that state officials have yet to seriously debate the consequences of the coal industry’s collapse, and instead are determined to prop up the sector even though the problem of sorting out how to deal with firms that go bankrupt and do not have enough funds to complete reclamation projects continues to grow.

With 18 active thermal coal mines, Wyoming remains firmly committed to coal, despite the market signals that thermal coal (used to produce electricity) is fading faster than metallurgical coal (used to make steel).

Anderson notes that unlike some oil and gas companies that have diversified into renewables, coal firms have been hamstrung by their failure to shift gears: Many coal operators in Wyoming have been in and out of bankruptcy multiple times.

“Wyoming appears to be a little bit less enthusiastic about moving into the 21st century than some other states,” says Sean Gallagher, the Solar Energy Industries Association’s vice president for state and regulatory affairs. “Everything is

moving in a different direction, and it seems that they want to go backwards on this. When they finally come to the ‘oops’ moment, they’re not going to be well positioned.”

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that renewables’ share of electricity generation will double by 2050, from 21 percent in 2020 to 42 percent by 2050. Solar generation comprises most of that increase. Both coal and nuclear power are projected to drop by about half.

In April, United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) President Cecil Roberts joined with Sen. Manchin to announce the union’s support for a green transition—contingent on the federal government providing a diverse set of job protections, new employment opportunities, and financial assistance for laid-off workers. Roberts also called for preserving UMWA jobs by employing carbon capture technology at coal-fired power plants; loans to help sustain the industry; infrastructure rehabilitation for coalfield communities; and incentives to bring steel production back to this country, specifically to utilize metallurgical coal.

President Biden has exhibited a firmer commitment to coal country than his immediate predecessors.

Biden’s American Jobs Plan has called for some $16 billion to create jobs cleaning up and reclaiming abandoned coal mine lands, while last month, a report from the administration’s Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization identified the 25 most at-risk coal communities for immediate federal relief. There is an estimated $38 billion in existing federal monies that could be steered to these regions.

Five of them are in West Virginia, the most of any state.

But union officials are less than optimistic that the federal government can translate its ambitious aims into an action plan that benefits workers already enduring massive job losses. “There’s never been a just transition in the history of the United States,” said Roberts, even as he bowed to the realities of the cleanenergy revolution. n

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 11

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Congress’s Strange Bedfellows Fighting Big Tech Coming from two different perspectives, there’s an emerging consensus on blunting the market power of digital platforms. Now the parties have to legislate.

BY BR I T TA N Y G I B S O N MAJOR BIPARTISAN legislation has

been an endangered species in Congress the past several years. But an unlikely confluence of events has created a coalition of lawmakers, from far left to far right, in favor of regulating Big Tech monopolies. Now the question is whether they can actually legislate on an issue where they have stumbled into common cause.

Other attempts at bipartisanship this year have thus far led to partisan standoffs and filibuster threats.

But the impact of a 16-month investigation and report from the House Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee, alongside a culturewar fear of internet censorship on the right, has generated the conditions for Congress to act. Regulating technology companies was found to be one of two top areas of consensus in a poll of senior staffers on the Hill, conducted by Locust Street Group and Punchbowl News.

The Democrats’ report on competition in digital markets, published last October, was meant to rally bipartisan support for its expansive set of legislative recommendations. It came after months of hearings in the Capitol and the field put a spotlight on antitrust generally and Big Tech specifically (especially after calling the CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon to testify last summer).

But the subcommittee’s work doesn’t have a straightforward path to success, and the potential unification behind it wasn’t immediate.

While Democrats are in control of the House, the whole caucus is not likely to be on board with the Antitrust Subcommittee’s recommendations. The House Judiciary Committee recently adopted the subcommittee report, but Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who represents a district around Silicon Valley, submitted an “Additional Views” document for

12 PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2021

consideration, which stressed enforcement agencies and courts’ role in antitrust over congressional action.

Lofgren, a senior Judiciary Committee member, is not the only House Democrat with long-standing ties to the tech industry. Those members may be reluctant to break up or significantly regulate the platforms.

That makes conservative buy-in on any legislation even more important, not just to break a filibuster in the Senate, but even to pass the House.

This alone narrows the scope of any potential compromise. While the most progressive Democrats have pushed to extend the anti-monopoly conversation to other sectors of the economy, Republicans have made clear the limits of their interest. “I see the need in Big Tech because of the abuse … I haven’t seen that in other areas,” Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), ranking member of the Antitrust Subcommittee, told The Wall Street Journal.

On Big Tech specifically, there is dialogue between Democrats and Republicans. Buck became convinced during the course of the subcommittee investigation that something needed to be done. In response to the Democrats’ report, Buck wrote his own response to tackling Big Tech, called “The Third Way,” along with Republican Reps.

Doug Collins (R-GA), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Andy Biggs (R-AZ). (Collins is no longer in Congress.) The report agrees that “the ball is in Congress’ court” when it comes to regulating the power and market share of the Silicon Valley platforms. This raised hopes that a big bipartisan agreement in the House could put pressure on the Senate to act.

Buck’s sway over his colleagues is limited. When the full Judiciary Committee adopted the subcommittee report, they did it on a partyline vote, with no Republicans in

support. That does not bode well for a bipartisan solution.

But things are changing quickly.

On May 5, after Facebook’s Oversight Board (sometimes referred to as its own Supreme Court) decided it would continue its ban on Donald Trump’s account (while also saying it did not have the authority to permanently block the former head of state), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the most powerful Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, tweeted: “Break them up.” Jordan borrowing progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Big Tech battle cry was especially shocking, because ahead of the Antitrust Subcommittee’s Big Tech CEO hearing, he shared an internal memo warning that antitrust law shouldn’t “punish success” or focus on the “mentality that ‘big is bad.’” This internal memo was written by Tyler Grimm, a Jordan staffer who is particularly hostile to changes in antitrust.

Buck also responded to the Facebook Supreme Court decision by calling for antitrust reform. But Jordan’s three-word tweet signals an opening, because he has much more influence over the Republican caucus. If he is breaking with his more corporate-friendly staffers and demanding action, that could move other members.

The Facebook decision is just the latest Republican grievance with how Big Tech does business. Since the 2020 general election, GOP outrage has grown over the belief that Big Tech companies are censoring their speech in ways that specifically target conservative lawmakers, content creators, and then-President Trump. The January 6th insurrection at the Capitol signified this shift.

After months of Trump’s tweets being flagged or hidden behind a factchecking square, Twitter and Facebook decided to cut Trump’s main lines of communication, suspending his profiles on their respective platforms. Two days later, Twitter made its decision permanent.

By Saturday, January 9, Google and Apple had both banned the conservative alternative social networking platform Parler from their respective mobile app stores. Parler, like Trump’s specific social media

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accounts, was targeted for its connection to the Capitol invasion and singled out as the platform of choice for riot organizers (although Facebook and its groups were also used).

Parler was subsequently kicked off Amazon’s website hosting service, and without a new host, the app went dark for several weeks.

These unilateral Big Tech business decisions have brought Republicans around to questioning the extent of Big Tech’s power, and its ability to limit communication. What if Amazon Web Services was separate from Amazon the online retailer? Is Facebook (and its Supreme Court) so powerful that it can bar an elected official?

Should Google be separated from YouTube and Google ad services?

Another major factor is a Supreme Court opinion authored by Clarence Thomas, arguing that tech platforms should be regulated like public utilities. This again was in reaction to claims of Trump censorship, as Thomas claimed that “there is a fair argument that some digital platforms are sufficiently akin to common carriers,” meaning they would have to treat everyone on their platform in a neutral manner. Like Jordan, Thomas carries a lot of weight with conservatives, particularly on legal issues.

Democrats reacted to the Facebook decision by calling for Trump to be banned forever from the platform, but Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) statement ended with a similar call to

action for antitrust regulation. While Democrats and Republicans differ on their grievances with Big Tech, they are landing in places similar enough to find legislative compromise.

House Antitrust Subcommittee chair Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) recognizes this opportunity. He conceded to Axios earlier this year that large sweeping reform bills are unlikely to happen. But multiple more-targeted bills could be on the table. Cicilline suggested that ten or more bills would be harder for the likes of Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook to attack, even with their expansive lobbying budgets.

“It also is an opportunity for members of the committee who have expressed a real interest or enthusiasm about a particular issue, to sort of take that on and champion it,” Cicilline told Axios.

Cicilline’s office declined to comment to the Prospect on the status of any legislation.

Bipartisan Big Tech legislation would exclude Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s (D-MN) antitrust reform bill that would have an impact on all sectors of the economy, strengthening federal enforcers to stop mergers and acquisitions deemed anti-competitive.

Klobuchar, Cicilline’s counterpart on the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, has started her own series of hearings focused on Big Tech, the first of which focused on Apple and Google’s app store gatekeeping.

Reps. Ken Buck (R-CO) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) had been on opposite sides of the debate, but now both support breaking up Big Tech.

Klobuchar did get one victory on May 13, as the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill with bipartisan support increasing merger filing fees, giving more money to antitrust agencies to enforce the law.

Subcommittee ranking member Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), like Rep. Buck, has rhetorically gone after big technology companies. Before the app store hearing, Lee and Klobuchar co-authored an aggressive letter to Apple, after the company initially said it wouldn’t send a representative to the hearing. At the hearing, Lee grilled Apple and Google about how they treat other companies that want to reach smartphone users through their app stores. While he mentioned Parler and its removal from the app stores, he also had broader interests, inquiring about the treatment of the app developer Tile when Apple released a competing product.

Lee has often made rhetorical hay with Big Tech firms, but has shown little appetite to formulate actual legislation that would get in their way.

He would have to set aside his libertarian economic philosophy to join in agreement on a regulatory regime.

Both sides will also benefit from the added support of organized labor.

The failed Amazon warehouse union campaign in Bessemer, Alabama, earlier this year revived tensions between Big Tech monopolies and labor. In addition to labor leaders looking to support organizing within major corporations like Amazon, they have the added task of defending union workers who work in shipping. UPS, FedEx, and the U.S. Postal Service all do business with Amazon, but its own shippers, who are often non-unionized contract workers, are edging them out of work.

It’s unclear where all this will lead. But the groundwork laid through reports and hearings has met an unique opportunity to partner with conservative Republicans on this specific slice of antitrust reform. The dynamic is unlikely to make broad change, if it does anything at all; anger between the parties remains high. But on Big Tech reform, there’s a sliver of possibility, a Venn diagram that is increasingly overlapping with time. n

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 13

Undoing Welfare Reform If Congress makes the expanded Child Tax Credit permanent, simple, and universal, it could have reverberations across the entire welfare state.

By Kalena Thomhave

C

heri Honkala has been a welfare rights activist since the 1980s. It’s been decades of frustratingly slow work, ensuring that poor mothers like herself could access the benefits they needed to survive. These days, the bulk of her time is spent occupying empty houses for people with no alternative shelter. Combined with the pandemic, there is a housing crisis in Philadelphia, where Honkala lives.

The life of a welfare rights activist has been one of constant disappointment. In the 1960s, welfare agencies surveilled single-mother recipients to ensure men didn’t live in their homes; some states regularly found ways to exclude Black women from benefits. As the years went on, and welfare became increasingly racialized as Black women gained access to benefits, groups like Honkala’s worked to resist the linking of welfare to lowwage work. In 1996, President Clinton signed

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ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN P. DESSEREAU the law that would “end welfare as we know it,” which enforced lifetime limits on benefit receipt, allowed states to design their own programs with the new Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant, and, as the centerpiece, required work in exchange for benefits.

The welfare rolls plummeted, sometimes because people got jobs, but also because they were simply pushed off assistance. States often used block grant funds to patch up state budget holes, rather than on needy families. Nationally, just 23 of every 100 families living below the poverty line received cash assistance in 2019, compared with 68 out of 100 before welfare reform. In some Southern and Western states, the number can be as little as four out of 100.

“In the 30 years that I’ve been doing this, I never thought things would be this horrible,” Honkala says. She surprisingly looks back at the dawn of welfare reform as “the good old days.” Back then,

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 15

The CTC Benefit “Trapezoid” 2018–2025

Per-Child Benefit Level

$2,000

$0

2017; Post-2025 $1,000

$50,000

$150,000

Adjusted Gross Income

$450,000

Benefit levels from previous versions of the Child Tax Credit left out the poorest families.

The new version for 2021 does not. Source: Tax Foundation

she’d host a sit-in and win a negotiation with the human services department. Now, she and her fellow activists get hit with misdemeanors and felonies. And deprivation remains widespread. Even middle-income professionals come to her for help after falling on hard times.

But in March, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, a massive relief bill that expanded benefits for millions of people who slid out of economic security during the pandemic, and millions more who were never stable to begin with. Besides $1,400 stimulus checks, the plan expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), extended unemployment insurance benefits, increased housing assistance, delivered more TANF funds to the states for the first time since the Great Recession, and increased benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, commonly called food stamps).

Most notably, the legislation included an expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC). The expansion didn’t merely increase the benefit to as much as $3,600 per child; it also expanded eligibility to families with little or even no earnings.

Passage of a universal child allowance finally reversed a 25-year trajectory of welfare reform. “The expanded Child Tax

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Credit is an admission that child poverty is a policy choice and not an individual failing,” says Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, a book about how zero-sum thinking on racism destroyed public policies and programs that benefited everyone. The expansion itself, she says, “is a repudiation of racist thinking [and] racist politics and policymaking.”

For so long, it was taboo to consider welfare without work. An economic crisis coupled with stimulus payments helped to disrupt that thinking and gave us a new CTC. But it only gave it to us for the 2021 tax year.

And as the debate sharpens over extending it, serious questions remain about how to design cash benefits to maximize participation and impact. Where that debate ends could create an opening to fix many of the problems with the current social safety net.

“I think it’s a great opportunity,” says Honkala. “If people actually get it.”

LIKE MOST OF THE current welfare system, the original incarnation of the CTC is based on earnings. It features what observers often call a “trapezoid” shape. You have to earn at least $2,500 to receive anything from the traditional CTC; more than onethird of children are ineligible for the full

benefit, not because their parents make too much, but because they make too little. The credit then phases in at 15 percent of earnings, to a maximum of $2,000 per child.

(This was doubled from $1,000 in the 2017 tax reform; barring any changes, the CTC will revert back to $1,000 in 2025.) Because many poor families pay no federal tax, the first $1,400 of the old CTC was refundable, meaning that families receive it regardless of their tax burden.

The traditional credit phases out for incomes above $400,000 for households ($200,000 for single parents) and reduces to nothing at $480,000 for households ($280,000 for single parents). The phase-in and phaseout, plotted on a graph, make the benefit levels look like a trapezoid.

With the adoption of the American Rescue Plan, families will receive $3,600 for each child under the age of six and $3,000 for kids 17 and under (17-year-olds are newly eligible). The credit will be delivered in advance through “periodic payments,” mimicking a regularized cash benefit. It is meant to be paid monthly, but that couldn’t be confirmed by the time the bill’s language was finalized, though the government announced in May that monthly payments will begin to arrive in bank accounts on July 15. The remaining credit will then be paid out in 2022. The credit phases out starting at household incomes of $75,000 for single parents and $150,000 for married ones.

This has the potential to be transformative for lower-income families. Picture a single mom working in retail, making $10,000 a year. She has three kids: a toddler, an eight-year-old, and a 17-year-old. Under the traditional CTC, this hypothetical but likely very real family receives about $1,125 in payments—$562.50 each for the toddler and eight-year-old, while the 17-year-old is ineligible. Under the new law for this year, the toddler will receive $3,600 and the eight-year-old and 17-year-old will each receive $3,000. That’s $9,600 in one year, paid out monthly—an $8,475 boost from the traditional credit. The change would nearly double this family’s income.

“That’s potentially life-changing for those children,” says Chuck Marr, senior director of federal tax policy at the Center

FR ANK WIESE / AP PHOTO

on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). He adds that the traditional CTC and the EITC together push 5.5 million children across the federal poverty line; just the CTC alone will lift an additional 4.1 million children out of poverty, cutting child poverty by about half. Black, Latino, and Native American children will disproportionately benefit because they’re disproportionately impoverished, showcasing the racial-equity power of this almost-universal program.

The credit will also help middle-income families, through its design as a monthly benefit. A monthly cash payment will pad the budgets of these families and reduce the likelihood that an emergency will bankrupt them. In a typical year, nearly half of all children live in households that experience at least one income shock.

To H. Luke Shaefer, a professor (my former professor, in fact) at the University of Michigan and co-author of $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, finally expanding benefits to families with-

out earnings feels like “waking up from a bad dream,” reversing a welfare reform that needlessly divided Americans and did not lead to widespread prosperity for lowincome families, as promised. He notes that the pandemic-era stimulus payments sent more money than the entire annual TANF budget, straight to poor families.

With three stimulus checks sent out in 12 months—which nearly 80 percent of Americans approve of—the conversation around cash assistance may be changing, and quickly. “Maybe it’s not that Americans hate giving money to poor families,” Shaefer says. “Maybe it’s mostly that they want it too.”

But the thrill of America finally overcoming the welfare stigma and moving to universal cash benefits must be leavened by its temporary nature. As I write, the expanded CTC has not been made permanent. President Biden, in his American Families Plan, proposed making the credit fully refundable but only expanding it until 2025.

Remember, after 2025, the credit reverts back to $1,000. The White House did say that making the expansion permanent was the president’s “ultimate goal,” perhaps signaling a gamble to expand it for just four years now to make the budget look leaner, and assuming that the credit’s popularity will make it untouchable.

It does seem politically difficult to cut poverty by so much and then allow it to increase all over again. And not all con-

The expanded Child Tax Credit will lift 4.1 million out of poverty, cutting child poverty by about half.

People protested President Clinton’s approval of the welfare reform bill, at a rally outside the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles, August 4, 1996.

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AS MUCH AS ONE CAN call the credit “historic” and “unprecedented,” it is also true that it will only be as effective as it is accessible. For a family to access the expanded CTC, they have to file taxes—it is, after all, a tax credit. But the poorest people in the U.S. generally don’t have to file taxes, and some never have. While they pay payroll taxes and excise taxes, most owe nothing in federal income tax.

“Filing taxes is complicated, and for many people scary,” says Jen Burdick, an attorney at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia (CLS). Some of her clients don’t just think they don’t have to file taxes—they think they can’t, or worse, that they’re not supposed to and could get in trouble if they did.

It’s not merely anecdote that suggests this to be the case. About 1 in 5 workers who are eligible for the EITC don’t claim it. And we already know how difficult it was getting people connected to the tax system in order to receive stimulus payments. While many people received checks automatically through direct deposit, poverty made stimulus check receipt much more difficult.

For example, the IRS set up a simplified filing portal for people who weren’t required

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to file taxes to get their checks. You needed a computer to access it, and it’s hard to find public computers during a pandemic.

Many low-income people use their phones to access the internet, but the portal didn’t work on mobile devices. Then, you needed an email address to fill out your information. To create an email address, you may need to have a cellphone to get a confirmation text sent to you. What was your AGI in the previous year? You have to know it—and you have to know what an AGI is (adjusted gross income). Finally, you may need documents to confirm your identity, which you may not have if you move a lot or are homeless. Acquiring those documents will then cost money. And if you don’t speak English?

That’s another layer of difficulty.

And that was all with a simplified filing portal, which the IRS has not yet created for those filing to get the expanded CTC. (Last year’s simplified filing tool was closed in November 2020.)

In January, the IRS estimated that about eight million eligible households had not received their CARES Act stimulus payment. Some people may have accidentally thrown out their checks or IRS-issued debit cards, but most probably did not fill out

the IRS portal. This is the same population—unaware of IRS rules, unfamiliar with stimulus payments, unsure how to get their checks, earning so little (less than $12,400 in 2020) that they don’t have to file taxes— that would most benefit from the expanded credit.

Many advocates are pushing for a similar portal to the one that the IRS implemented for the stimulus payments to help families without tax obligations file taxes, so they can get the expanded CTC. It could also help families update changes in family structure or add new bank account information.

Such online portals could be designed to be friendlier toward the poorest tax filers.

Emma Mehrabi, director of poverty policy at the Children’s Defense Fund, envisions these tools as ones “families could use regularly and easily that don’t require the clunkiness and the confusion of filing a full tax return [and are] easily available online, on smartphones.” But for now, households have to file traditionally.

Burdick’s CLS has implemented a communications campaign to get the word out, creating flyers and graphics, doing radio interviews, and “thinking strategically” about where their clients get their infor-

JOHN NACION / SIPA USA VIA AP

servatives are against it.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) proposed his own version of a child allowance, a plan which impressed many progressives. And the libertarian Niskanen Institute was an important ally that helped drive the bipartisan appeal of the CTC. But you can expect plenty of Republican resistance, using old tropes that demonize welfare as an undeserved benefit for parents who don’t work.

The credit is more likely to become permanent if the rollout goes smoothly, if everyone eligible to receive it actually gets it, and if the benefits become visible and clear. But there’s some work to do to ensure that.

The Social Security Administration has 1,230 field offices nationwide, making it more accessible if it handled Child Tax Credit payments.

mation. Honkala wants legal aid services to set up public tents with information about filing taxes to ensure people receive the credit. But with the IRS planning to start delivery of expanded CTC payments in July, slowly building new systems is unlikely to be effective when people need to be put into the tax system now.

The Affordable Care Act implemented community navigators to help people sign up for health care, and something similar could be implemented for the expanded CTC. A human touch could be beneficial.

For instance, the IRS’s “virtual tax assistant” questionnaire to help people determine if they need to file taxes is at least 33 questions long and features bureaucratic language, like referring to stimulus payments only by the official name of “Recovery Rebate Credit,” which could be confusing for people who are used to calling these payments nothing but “stimulus checks.”

Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA), a national grant program that assists people in filing their taxes for free, is another avenue. Inaccuracy rates from paid tax preparers are actually higher than those from the free tax preparers who volunteer through VITA. However, VITA generally serves lowincome people who are used to paying taxes—not the underserved population who may have never filed. And additionally, unless Congress approves emergency funding, VITA is not funded after May 17, the updated 2021 tax-filing deadline.

Some VITA programs, as they’re all-volunteer, closed even before the extended tax deadline. The IRS may consider partnering with other community organizations

About 1 in 5 workers who are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit don’t claim it.

on the ground to get the word out and help people file.

People who don’t file taxes can still file a zero-dollar return after May 17 in order to secure eligibility for the expanded CTC; the filing deadline, after all, is for people who owe. But while one could file in 2022 to claim the 2021 benefit, will there be a way for people to get the advanced credit if they wait months after the tax deadline?

And unlike most public benefits, where dueprocess protections apply and beneficiaries are given notice and can appeal if they’re denied benefits, the IRS provides no such protections for tax credits.

An additional obstacle is that not all children live with the same caretakers over the course of the entire year, and some are raised by people other than those who will claim them on their tax returns. While child allowances in other countries generally give the credit to the primary caretaker, the CTC can only be claimed by a legal relative—the child in question must be a son, daughter, grandchild, stepchild, foster child, sibling, niece, or nephew of the claimant—and they also must have lived with the claimant for more than half the year. Low-income kids are more likely to frequently move and live in complex family structures; about two million children fail to get the traditional CTC each year because they don’t meet the relationship test.

The law does include a “safe harbor” provision to protect filers to some extent.

But if caretakers get it wrong and claim a child they aren’t eligible for (think two divorced parents each claiming the same child), overpayments received might need to be paid back, which would not only hurt those parents but diminish confidence in the program.

THE ONE-YEAR expansion provides an

opportunity to rework the program, to ensure that it can reach everyone who’s eligible. But if we do make the expanded CTC permanent, what should that look like? What agency should be tasked with its delivery? Should it be fully universal?

Should it be submerged as a tax credit or established as an automatic benefit?

Primarily, it needs to be as effective and

stable as possible. “You want it to be a third rail almost, where nobody would dream of putting some sort of complicated work test on this benefit, because that would hurt the divorced mom who is going to school,” says Shawn Fremstad, senior policy fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). What’s the best third-rail design?

Because of the very real possibility that millions of people who are eligible will fall through the cracks, robust debate has focused on whether the IRS should be the agency handling cash payments. The most popular alternative suggestion is the Social Security Administration (SSA). Unlike the IRS, the SSA already handles monthly benefit delivery on a regular basis, sending out 69.8 million checks for those receiving Social Security, Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Indeed, Sen. Romney’s CTC proposal delivers its cash benefits through the SSA. Matt Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project, points out that whenever a person has a child, they sign up with the SSA, so there’s “a very natural way to integrate that process with signing up for your check.” And ideally, it could be somewhat automatic. Imagine you’re at the hospital after childbirth. “That’s where you fill out the paperwork, [you could also indicate] where to send the check,” says Bruenig.

There’s political value to making the IRS the authorizing agency; everything in Washington goes down easier if it looks like a tax cut. And the IRS could certainly over time become better suited to delivering a monthly child benefit—it says it is working already to reach low-income people who didn’t receive stimulus payments. But on a simple communications level, another agency might be preferable. The IRS, as the tax authority, does not seem like your friend. Plus, there are only a few hundred IRS offices around the country, compared to 1,230 SSA field offices, further positioning the SSA as more client-friendly and accessible.

Tim Smeeding, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes that we need to use both the IRS website for simpler tax cases as well as the neighborhood SSA offices for more complex ones. Families

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 19

could go in person to SSA offices in order to get help with figuring out who will actually receive the credit. (Ideally, the law would allow the credit to follow the child.)

Better data matching between programs would be crucial. The SSA and IRS already share data, but states and the federal government can utilize the data they already have—from taxes as well as programs like SNAP, Medicaid, and SSI—to find people eligible for the CTC, instead of placing the filing burden on families themselves. It’s not that easy to coordinate data between state and federal agencies and across programs; it would require investment in improving administrative systems across the government. But legislation could require it and fund it. Mehrabi says that because the IRS is risk-averse, the agency “would more easily [implement data sharing] if Congress told them to do it.”

There is also the question of whether the credit should be universal. It’s already virtually universal, leaving out just the very wealthiest children. But full universalization may not only make the credit more politically popular, but also easier for everyone to get, not just rich families. The agency delivering the credit wouldn’t need income information, or to calculate the amount of the credit based on income phaseouts.

People wouldn’t need to report income at all. And Congress could just tax wealthier families on the back end to make up for providing them the child benefit.

Fremstad has proposed what he calls a Unified Child Benefit, which would merge and simplify the CTC and the EITC for parents, while keeping a “simplified worker credit” for workers who don’t have children at home, and adding supplemental benefits to single parents and children with disabilities. It would, Fremstad writes, be “politically feasible in the near-term” while also combining the essential dynamics of a broad and successful child benefit: “universality, adequacy on an annual and monthly basis, simplicity, and visibility.”

While the CTC was expanded to families with little to no income, the EITC—which mostly goes to children with families—still phases in based on earnings, leaving out the very poorest households. This means that

20 PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2021

some children are still punished because their parents don’t make enough money. A Unified Child Benefit would be designed to correct this.

Having two tax credits with different names but the same function of supporting families with children, but letting one treat poor children differently, doesn’t make much sense. “How can you see the injustice of saying you’re too poor to receive the CTC, but then you can’t see the injustice of saying you’re too poor to receive the EITC?” asks Bruenig. In January, before the expanded CTC passed, Bruenig published his own plan for a child allowance, which brings together the CTC and EITC for families with children and replaces them with a universal child benefit. (It’s similar to the CEPR proposal, and indeed Bruenig provided comments on the CEPR plan while it was in development.)

We can also look to other countries’ child allowances. Sweden, for example, provides an automatic payment to every child living in the country—Swedish parents don’t need to do anything to sign up. And in 2016, Canada introduced a new child benefit that phases out at higher income levels, much like the expanded CTC in the U.S. When I asked Marr, of CBPP, if he thought the expanded credit could be improved, he was caught on one word. “I don’t know I’d say ‘improved’ … Most important is it needs to be made permanent,” he said, while noting in passing the importance of making sure everyone eligible receives it.

Marr’s reaction is understandable—an incredible policy was passed that will cut child poverty in half, and I wanted to talk about how to make it better. It raises questions of what should take priority at this juncture: permanence or better program design. But the two things go hand in hand.

An ongoing program in theory that doesn’t deliver in practice would shortchange the

poor, defeating its purpose. And a program that struggles to meet its goals will become vulnerable to Republican anti-government attacks. Progressive governance is impossible without government working well.

IN JACKSON, Mississippi, Aisha Nyandoro

was a bearer of great news when she called the mothers she works with to tell them about the expanded CTC. Nyandoro is CEO of Springboard to Opportunities, which runs the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, a project that gives a guaranteed income of $1,000 a month to more than 100 low-income Black single mothers. It’s one of a number of small guaranteed-income pilots that have recently sprung up across the country.

Though the Magnolia Mother’s Trust gives more money per month than most people will receive from the CTC, the effects on participating mothers offer a glimpse as to how the expanded CTC will affect poor families nationwide. The mothers have been able to afford school uniforms and pay off debt. On average, they spent more money on food, and even were more likely to have health insurance coverage. Cash can also allow parents to raise their kids in environments absent the stress of poverty, which deleteriously impacts the entire family. Nyandoro says there is healing power when parents can let go of “always hav[ing] to say ‘no’ to their kids.” She puts it bluntly: “Cash without restriction works. It’s really that simple.”

The research suggests Nyandoro is correct. In 2019, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) published a much-lauded study on how to combat child poverty in the United States.

Because income poverty in childhood is associated with poorer mental and physical health, worse education outcomes, hardship later in life, and even negative neuro-

Full universalization may not only make the Child Tax Credit more popular, but also easier for everyone to get.

COURTESY OF MAGNOLIA MOTHER’S TRUST

Cajania Brown, a Black single mother from Jackson, Mississippi, receives $1,000 per month as part of a cash assistance program called the Magnolia Mother’s Trust.

logical effects, the cornerstone of the NAS report was an expanded CTC, at an amount similar to what landed on Biden’s desk.

Hilary Hoynes, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who sat on the NAS panel, describes the expanded CTC as “an investment in society as opposed to a handout.”

This summer marks 25 years since welfare reform was passed—a quarter-century of mainstream defense of welfare-to-work and erosion of the cash safety net. Even the EITC, for all its anti-poverty power, is another example of welfare-to-work mentality, since “earned income” is part of the name.

The American Rescue Plan did increase the EITC for adults who are not raising children and also expands the age range of eligible recipients. But the safety net still tends to do the least for adults without children in their homes.

The expansion of the CTC, and the evidence of the power of cash benefits, provides a moment to consider other changes

to the social safety net. The expanded CTC is transformational, but $3,600 a year is not enough to support a family or a child. If the expanded CTC can be established, what else can be done to shift how we treat publicassistance programs?

Outside of families with children, we can think about all adults, even those who don’t have kids living with them. It may be harder to get support for programs for adults versus children, because we don’t have the same data around long-term, adverse effects of poverty on adults. And obviously, child benefits are also more politically attractive; children evoke sympathy in a way that poor adults do not.

But children grow up into adults—and poor children generally grow into poor adults.

The U.S. has a long history of dividing the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, two categories that are generally premised on whether an adult is working hard enough to take care of their family. “What [the

expanded CTC] could do is really break that model and move us away from this view that people who are in circumstances of disadvantage have somehow made bad decisions to get there,” says Hoynes.

A system that moves away from a view of deservingness would be easier to access, with less administrative burden, less conditionality tied to benefits, less shame and less stigma. “It’s a little bit aspirational,” Hoynes says, but “if we build this thing and see its successes in a quick way, could it sort of lessen the burdens that we’ve been imposing on disadvantaged Americans for so many decades?”

Cash isn’t everything, of course.

The economy still features yawning inequality, stagnating wages, and structural racism. Honkala, the welfare rights activist, notes that the expanded CTC can’t pay for rent if a landlord won’t lease a place to a family unless they have a good credit score. The day we spoke, Honkala had spent the morning trying to convince three different landlords to not evict people.

That said, cash assistance has demonstrable benefits for the poorest members of society. So will America cut child poverty in half for a year, before reverting back to staining all public-assistance programs with the word “welfare” and demanding proof of work for benefits? Or, if designed with the realities of poverty in mind, could it be a lever to something different? If done right, the expanded CTC won’t only cut poverty and reduce income instability, but could be a catalyst toward more universal programs, toward rethinking why people in the U.S. are struggling, toward a new welfare state that values individuals, families, and children, and refuses to let them suffer when we have the resources to prevent it. n Kalena Thomhave is a Michigan-based writer on poverty and inequality and a former Prospect writing fellow.

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 21

Congress’s M Friendly Mem Rosa DeLauro has spent 30 years in the House fighting for an adequate Child Tax Credit and paid family leave. She’s finally getting someplace.

By Bryce Covert

E

lizabeth Warren first met Connecticut congresswoman Rosa DeLauro two decades ago, long before she became a senator from Massachusetts. DeLauro is famous among D.C. politicos for hosting twice-monthly dinner parties to which she invites academics, policy experts, and journalists to talk to members of Congress.

“She’s always driving the debate with an intellectual energy that’s uncommon around here,” Sen. Sherrod Brown, a frequent guest, told me.

This particular evening, Warren, then a Harvard professor who had just co-authored a book about why so many American families were mired in debt, was the star of the show. “She invited me to come to dinner and she said she’d have a few people over,” Warren recalls. Instead, she found DeLauro’s living room—painted and upholstered in the kind of neon-bright colors that also hang in DeLauro’s closet—packed with members of Congress. “I was knocked back,” Warren told me. “I didn’t get a bite to eat.”

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DeLauro didn’t just have her over to give a presentation about the problem, though. “When I came to those dinners to talk about what was happening with credit card debt, Rosa would say, ‘So what do you want us to do?’” Warren said. It’s not a question academics are used to. But DeLauro wasn’t just interested in talking about what was wrong. She peppered policy experts with questions about how to fix it. That’s Rosa DeLauro: She’s not interested in hogging a microphone to hold forth on the problems of the world. She wants to get something done.

This year, DeLauro will have served in Congress for exactly 30 years. In that time, she’s been a relentless advocate for policy solutions to many of the problems the experts and academics brought up at her dinner soirees. She has struggled to get many of them done, reintroducing them year after year while reaping little reward. But some of the things that may have seemed utopian when she first started championing them years ago may now be on

the verge of becoming permanently woven into the country’s policy fabric.

DeLauro first introduced a paid family leave bill in the House in 2013 and a paid sick leave bill in 2004; for the first time ever, the federal government guaranteed paid sick and family leave during the pandemic. While that guarantee is no more, President Biden has included a permanent paid family leave program in his American Families Plan.

DeLauro has also been stubbornly pushing her colleagues to expand and enhance the Child Tax Credit, which gives eligible parents a tax break for each of their children. She got her wish in January, when Congress passed and Biden signed a Child Tax Credit expansion that reaches even the poorest families, increases the benefit, and sends the money out in monthly installments, all but creating the country’s first child allowance. It’s projected to cut child poverty nearly in half.

Nearly everyone I spoke to about the Connecticut congresswoman used the same word to describe DeLauro: dogged. Her weapon of choice is her phone. During every

ALEX BR ANDON / AP PHOTO

Most Familymber

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 23

budgeting cycle Warren has experienced, she said, she’s received multiple phone calls from DeLauro hammering home what she wanted to see Warren fight for. “Morning, night, middle of the day,” Warren said.

“You’re in a hearing and Rosa pops up on my phone, and I know what it’ll be about.” Sen. Michael Bennet gets the Rosa treatment too. She’ll call him “on a Friday afternoon or Sunday afternoon to say, ‘Did you do this’ or ‘Did you do that,’ ‘I called this person, did you think of calling them,’” he told me. “She never leaves any stone unturned.”

“She’s got unrelenting, unrelenting energy and drive and ambition—not for herself, but for the people whom she fights for,” Brown said.

There’s nothing genteel about DeLauro’s passions, as she acknowledged in her 2017 memoir The Least Among Us: Waging the Battle for the Vulnerable. “I compete with Rahm Emanuel on the use of the F-word,” she wrote. (Emanuel himself has said of DeLauro, “Don’t make the bitch mad.”) She would rather, she’s admitted, have a colleague spot her in the hallway and think, “Oh God, there she comes again,” because they know she’s going to try to force them to take a position on the Child Tax Credit, than have them think of her as “someone who is safely ignored.”

Her intense style has cost her career advancements. In late 2008, after Barack Obama won the White House, she f lew to Chicago to meet with him to discuss becoming his secretary for the Department of Labor. “Obama’s style is cerebral, cool, whereas I come in guns blazing,” she recalled. She knew as soon as she left the room that she didn’t have the job.

“She is willing to bang heads with her colleagues, to do whatever it takes to get more support for the families that need it,” Warren said. She went head-to-head with Obama over food stamps cuts and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

(In her book, she calls Obama both arrogant and “condescending.”) She even voted against averting a government shutdown in 2013 because the deal didn’t fund long-term unemployment benefits. During one of their many phone calls, “She’ll tell me who’s in the way and why they’re creating problems

24 PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2021

and what we’re going to do just to cut ’em off,” Warren said.

She’s never tried to make herself into a household name. Despite the streaks of blue, red, or purple that adorn the front of her close-cropped hair, her loud clothing, or her flashy glasses, DeLauro’s not for show.

She’s a workhorse. “No job is too big or too small for her,” Bennet said. “I’ve never heard Rosa complain,” said former Connecticut senator and close mentor Chris Dodd. “Rosa thoroughly enjoys being with people. She loves a good conversation, a good debate.”

Most Americans would be hard-pressed to pick her out of a congressional lineup. But you’ll find her fingerprints all over the policy issues leading today’s Democratic Party.

DELAURO, WHO TELLS everyone she meets to call her Rosa, grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, daughter of Ted and Luisa, two Italian immigrants who both left school before they turned 14. Her father held a number of jobs; one—which kindled a passion for economic justice—was as a researcher for a Yale University project in which he interviewed workers who’d been laid off en masse from a local shoe factory that had employed over 1,000 people. Her mother worked as a seamstress in a sweatshop where women mass-produced dresses and shirts as fast as humanly possible, not even pausing if a needle got stuck in their fingers. “God help you if you got a drop of blood on a garment, you wouldn’t get paid for it and you had to support a family,” DeLauro told me.

Both of DeLauro’s parents eventually won seats on the city’s Board of Aldermen.

“I grew up in a family that was really rooted in local politics,” she said. “They were fierce advocates for working families, low-income families.” That advocacy, she said, is what she’s modeled her own career on. Her mother urged her to “make yourself heard,” she told me. “I’ve taken those words to heart.” It’s also how DeLauro learned to campaign, trudging along after her father as he door-knocked on every house and apartment in his ward. She learned to keep a neat set of red and blue file cards to track voters, like her father did.

She also got early lessons about how easy it is for working people to fall into econom-

Nearly everyone I spoke to about the Connecticut congresswoman used the same word to describe DeLauro: dogged. ic devastation. “I grew up in a family that struggled financially all of their lives,” she told me. They couldn’t afford a lot of new clothes, so her mother put her sewing skills to work making DeLauro’s dresses. Her father’s package store once went bankrupt.

When she was about ten years old, her family was evicted. “All of our furniture was on the street,” she said. The family lived with DeLauro’s grandmother until they could secure their own housing.

When she was not yet a teenager, a friend’s mother died in a workplace fire when the fire escape was locked and after the company had conducted no fire drills.

Her mother dragged her to the sweatshop after school to witness how grueling the work was. “Take the opportunity for an education,” her mother told her, “so you don’t have to do this.” Her mother refused to teach her how to sew, hoping to prod her instead to aim higher. DeLauro can only hem a shirt or replace a button to this day.

DeLauro learned from direct experience that “the life of people who work very, very hard every day and who do play by the rules is difficult,” she said. “People’s economic insecurity is real.”

A Catholic, DeLauro links much of what she’s focused her career on back to morals and values. At Catholic school, she learned that personal responsibility encompassed more than just individualism, but also an obligation to everyone around you. Faith, for her, demands “service to one’s neighbors,” she’s written. “[W]orking to protect the poor and the vulnerable [is] a proper vocation, essential to a life lived to the fullest.” Her pro–abortion rights positions have gotten her

AP PHOTO

DeLauro with Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA) at the Democratic National Convention in 1992. Both now chair key House committees.

in trouble with the Church, but she contends that poverty and inequality are “right-to-life issues.” A Child Tax Credit, for her, is grounded in the history of Catholic social teaching.

DeLauro got her first taste of grown-up politics serving first as campaign manager and then chief of staff to Frank Logue, who took on New Haven’s Democratic Party machine to become the city’s mayor. Then, in her mid-thirties, she got a call from Chris Dodd, then a congressman who was launching a run for the Senate. A friend had tipped him off to “this woman who was working in the mayor’s office in New Haven and he thought she was a special person,” Dodd told me. He invited her to a meeting.

It was a rainy day in 1979, and DeLauro’s flight was badly delayed. When she finally arrived, they talked for three hours. At the end of the meeting, Dodd asked if she would run his Senate campaign. “It’s probably ridiculous to do it that way in retrospect,” he said. “But I just liked her. It was immediate … I could sense she had some passion

for what she did.” She took the job. The two still talk on a nearly daily basis and live a block and a half away from each other in New Haven. They’ve attended each other’s family gatherings and weddings.

Dodd was one of a handful of Democrats to win Senate contests in 1980, the year of the Reagan landslide. Dodd asked DeLauro to be his chief of staff, and she became one of the few female chiefs of staff on Capitol Hill. She picked up a number of key lessons while working for him. As a new senator looking to make a difference, Dodd sought out issues to champion that other people weren’t working on. Children’s issues were the right fit, and he founded the Senate’s Children’s Caucus. “New members particularly have to learn to start somewhere, pick out some issues and then stay with them,” Dodd said. “Even when it’s not hot, people aren’t writing about it, no one’s calling you to find out what your views are—stay with them.” DeLauro would later find her own issues no one was paying attention to

and hold onto them as hard as a bulldog’s clenched jaw.

DeLauro left Dodd’s staff to run Emily’s List and then, in 1990, decided to make a run of her own, winning an open congressional seat in New Haven. Dodd was with her the night she won and the day she was sworn in. “I watched her mother beaming at her,” he recalled.

THE UNITED STATES stands out for the number of its children who live in poverty: over 20 percent in 2016, higher than 17 European countries and twice as high as the share in France, Sweden, or the United Kingdom. Children are an easy group to ignore when it comes time to fight among competing priorities in Congress. “Children don’t have an army of lobbyists, they haven’t been making big political contributions,” Warren said. “But they have Rosa.”

DeLauro became interested in childhood poverty while working as Dodd’s chief of staff, and can rightly claim to have been

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 25

26 PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2021

DeLauro, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and former Rep. Nita Lowey were so close that they came to be known as “DeLoSi.”

it good politics, a good campaign issue, and just built up this incredible head of steam,” said Ellen Nissenbaum, senior vice president for government affairs at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. So much so that it was well known that she wouldn’t let taxrelated legislation come together without it.

Along the way, DeLauro would find compatriots for her quest in the Senate. In 2013, Brown started working with her on expanding both the CTC and Earned Income Tax Credit. Another ally has been Michael Bennet, whose interest in the credit was sparked by parents at Denver public schools telling him while he was superintendent that they worked multiple jobs and still couldn’t afford the basics. Working with DeLauro “was a joy,” he told me, especially since she was his congresswoman when he was a student at Yale Law School. In his (brief) 2020 presidential campaign, he made expanding the CTC his signature issue.

It was no surprise, then, that DeLauro spotted an opportunity in the rescue packages Congress began considering to respond to the COVID pandemic in March 2020. “We tried to get it in every CARES package that we could,” she told me. But Republicans held the Senate and Trump

was in the White House, so a bigger CTC never made it in.

The political tides would turn. When Biden was running for president, she made sure to call him and press the importance upon him. DeLauro was able to secure a change in the last-minute aid deal Congress struck in December to let families calculate their eligibility based on 2019 income, allowing many more to claim it. Then a Democratic-controlled Congress and White House began putting together the American Rescue Plan in early 2021.

At first, DeLauro got word that the CTC wasn’t going to be in it. “I then just took to telephoning. I did a phone bank,” she said.

She called everyone in her Rolodex: Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain, National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, Council of Economic Advisers member and former Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein, White House Counselor Steve Ricchetti, and Director of White House Domestic Policy Council Susan Rice. “I went into full mode of organizing,” she said. She reminded them that she had been promised legislative movement when Democrats took control of the Senate and the White House. “If not now, when?” she asked them.

TOM WILLIAMS / AP PHOTO

promoting an expanded Child Tax Credit well before it was cool. She started pushing the CTC in early 2003 after meeting with and eventually befriending philanthropist father-and-son team Bill and David Harris, who have extensively studied child poverty and the CTC. She introduced an increase of $1,000 per child that would have also made it fully refundable, allowing families without tax obligations to receive it. It was defeated on a party-line vote.

“That started a legislative journey on the Child Tax Credit,” she told me. She launched what she characterizes as an “aggressive campaign” to convince her colleagues about its importance. “Every time there was a tax bill,” she said, she would “see if it was included.”

The fight for a bigger, better CTC was different from others DeLauro has engaged in. “There wasn’t so much an opposition to the Child Tax Credit as there was an indifference to it,” she said to me. It wasn’t that her colleagues were outright against it, but for years, few were willing to spend political capital on it.

It was also an issue outside of DeLauro’s jurisdiction; she was not on the Ways and Means Committee, which handles tax changes. She decided to champion it anyway.

DeLauro had won incremental improvements over the years even before the pandemic. She had the help of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with whom she was so close that, along with then-Rep. Nita Lowey, the threesome came to be known as “DeLoSi.” In the 2001 Bush tax cuts, the CTC was doubled and made partially refundable. In 2004, Congress accelerated the expansion. In 2007, to respond to the weakening economy, the credit was made available to more poor families. The threshold above which families qualify was further lowered in the TARP bill for one year. An expansion to even more poor families was included in Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus bill, which was eventually made permanent in a 2015 tax extension deal.

“I just kept at it and at it and at it,” she told me.

In the process, DeLauro made the Child Tax Credit a mainstream Democratic Party issue. “She figured out long ago how to make

Some of the things DeLauro’s spent her life fighting for appear closer than ever to becoming real.

The American Rescue Plan finally fulfilled DeLauro’s nearly career-long goals: It makes the CTC fully refundable, allowing even families with no income to claim it; increases the yearly benefit to $3,600 for each child under age six and $3,000 for older ones; and will eventually pay the benefits out monthly— effectively halving the nation’s rate of childhood poverty. The federal government has essentially created a child allowance akin to what many other developed countries have, albeit only for one year.

The day it passed, March 6, 2021, was “the best day of my career,” Brown said.

Former Rep. (and Ways and Means powerhouse) Charles Rangel called DeLauro up to congratulate her. “Because I used to plague Charlie Rangel every day about what we could do,” she said.

The achievement was built on decades of DeLauro’s blood, sweat, and phone calls.

“That’s why we stand where we stand today,” Warren said. “We’re not starting at ground zero. We’re starting in 2021 where Rosa has gotten us after nearly 20 years of backbreaking work.”

The changes, however, are set to lapse in a year. The next fight is to make them permanent, and DeLauro’s already on it.

DELAURO LEARNED she had ovarian can-

cer in 1986, the very day Dodd announced he was running for re-election to the Senate, a campaign she was supposed to run.

When she broke the news to him, he gave her “the response that everyone in that situation wants to hear,” she writes in her book: He told her to take the time off to get well.

She took two and a half months for radiation treatment “without the added worry that my

job would not be there when I returned.”

It was also the year she watched Dodd write and introduce the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guarantees covered workers 12 weeks of unpaid leave. Dodd would go on to introduce the same bill every year for eight years. Even after it managed to pass both the House and Senate twice, President George H.W. Bush vetoed it both times. “It was a tremendous lesson in taking the long view and abiding by your convictions in defeat after defeat,” she writes. President Bill Clinton would eventually sign it into law, the first bill he signed.

DeLauro wanted to take up Dodd’s torch and pass paid family leave, but in the President George W. Bush days she and the policy’s advocates decided to scale back their ambitions and push just for paid sick days.

They didn’t get either. Even when Obama took office, she watched her paid sick leave bill get crowded out by other priorities.

That hasn’t deterred her. “These have been the issues that have been really critically important to me,” she said. She first introduced the Healthy Families Act to guarantee seven days of paid sick leave in 2004 and has reintroduced it constantly since. She and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand introduced the FAMILY Act to guarantee 12 weeks of paid leave in 2013. Gillibrand brought the idea for how to craft a paid family leave system to DeLauro because “I knew she’d been a champion fighting for women and children and families for three decades,” Gillibrand told me. “It was an easy ‘yes.’”

At first their goal was to make sure it would get mentioned in a 2016 presidential debate— check. Then they wanted to make sure Hillary Clinton included it in her run for president— check. Eventually, Republicans started talking about the issue, even if their plans looked nothing like the FAMILY Act. “It’s grown in importance and vitality,” Gillibrand said.

Like the expansive CTC, paid leave became part of the American Rescue Plan that Biden signed into law. DeLauro believes there is now a real opportunity to pass paid family and sick leave on a permanent basis. “The legislation I have pioneered on behalf of children and families,” she told me, is “on the cusp of becoming part of the national fabric.”

DeLauro has experienced no shortage of setbacks and outright failures over her many years in public office. Her very first legislative proposal in Congress, a middle-class tax cut, went nowhere. Instead of passing her Paycheck Fairness Act in 2009, which would crack down on gender gaps in wages, the Senate instead passed the far milder Lilly Ledbetter Act to give women more time to file wage discrimination complaints.

“Play a long game,” she wrote in her book.

“Legislation that moves this country forward … takes a long, long time to pass.”

That long game may finally be paying off. After years of inching forward, these issues are now moving ahead at lightningfast speed. “When the window opens, it stays open for a brief amount of time and closes so fast,” Dodd told me. “When these things come around, you’ve got to be ready for them.” DeLauro is more than ready.

After years in the wings, DeLauro is now closer to the spotlight. In January, she became chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee, which controls Congress’s purse strings, deciding what gets funded and how much. DeLauro already knows what she might be able to accomplish from this perch. The committee is “where you have the most impact on what government does,” she wrote in her book long before she took command.

And some of the things she’s spent her life fighting for appear closer than ever to becoming real. Right now, DeLauro is pushing the Biden administration and fellow Democrats to make the expansion of the Child Tax Credit permanent. “That’s my mission of the moment,” she told me.

She’s working the phones once again, pestering anyone who will listen. Biden has so far proposed extending it “at least through the end of 2025,” as he said in his address to Congress on April 28. That’s not good enough for DeLauro. “We don’t know what will happen in 2025, we don’t know who will be in charge,” she told me.

“We’re all haranguing them,” Brown said.

“But we take our direction from Rosa.” n Bryce Covert is an independent journalist writing about the economy and a contributing writer at The Nation.

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 27

Cash Is King UBI is politically popular, easy to enact, and looks effective as policy. Is it really that simple?

By Alexander Sammon ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN P. DESSEREAU

A

s anyone who has ever covered or worked on a political campaign or encouraged you to buy cut-rate insurance, tax filing advice, or the newest Subway sandwich can attest, standing on a street corner handing out leaflets is an exercise in rejection and disinterest. Just getting someone to take a flyer, even if they escort it straight to the nearest trash can without breaking stride, constitutes a victory; getting them to buy your product, sign your petition, or perhaps most difficult, commit to voting for your candidate, is nearly impossible. Even when what you’re offering them is free money.

I’m standing with four volunteer members of the Andrew Yang for Mayor campaign, on the corner of Nostrand Avenue and Fulton Street in Brooklyn, New York, on a too-hot Sunday afternoon in early May, and that is effectively what’s happening.

This local faction of the Yang Gang is on the lookout for possible supporters of the man who, according to almost all available polling, is likely to be the next mayor

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of New York City. I am here to observe the political phenomenon that is universal basic income (UBI), Yang’s signature policy, which has quickly become so popular and persuasive in American politics that by merely prominently embracing it on television in a different political contest nearly two years prior, a man with no public-sector experience and precious little private-sector success is poised to become the top executive of the largest city in America. So though most passersby are showing little interest, this shared street corner also happens to be the momentary epicenter of a sensation.

Despite Yang’s front-runner status and significant fundraising, this is not an overweening outfit. The four volunteers, all of them younger than 35, stand in front of a small folding table with clipboards and pens. Against the wall behind them sits a banner featuring a black-and-white portrait of Martin Luther King Jr., in profile, and the text “The solution to poverty: guaranteed income—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ... Yang for New York.” The double attribution hearkens, not purposefully, to a certain

Wayne Gretzky quote attributed to Michael Scott from the television show The Office, made immortal as a meme.

Yang has other policies of course; on housing, climate, education (“He’s running on reopening the schools,” offers one volunteer, as a pedestrian quickly scurries off, disappointed). But guaranteed income is the reason we’re all here, and in fact how all four of these volunteers found out about Yang in the first place, after he embraced the suggestion of giving $1,000 a month to all American adults, in the midst of an improbable and arguably indefensible run for president in 2020. The embrace of that policy alone—and I mean alone, because the strength of his credentials working on Venture for America, or doing test prep, certainly weren’t what got Yang on the debate stage—yielded stunning success. He quickly became the silly face of a serious proposal.

He didn’t win any delegates, but he outlasted early favorites like Cory Booker and eventual vice president Kamala Harris.

Guaranteed income clearly made Yang a political phenomenon, propelled him to the

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top of the mayoral polls, and if we’re being honest, will be the best bet of convincing any of these passersby to vote him across the finish line.

To illustrate the political potency of UBI further, consider: These are novices. They have some light phone-banking experience, and some mutual-aid work, but this is the first campaign anyone here has ever canvassed for. “I loved the policy from the get-go, I just fangirled him so hard,” says Marissa, a special-education teacher and this group’s de facto leader. “I don’t know if he ever got it, but after he dropped out I messaged him on Instagram and said, ‘Please run for mayor.’”

IT’S NOT OFTEN THAT A new policy idea

gets so many people excited. It’s even less often that a new idea involving a major expansion of unfettered public-welfare spending is embraced in the post–welfare reform era. All of which makes universal

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income a rather stunning development, one that’s having an explosive moment.

For those not keeping active tabs: There are currently basic income proposals being seriously considered by the mayor of Los Angeles and the likely mayor of New York, the country’s two biggest cities. The state of California is deliberating over a statewide basic income proposal of its own, just months after the legislature finalized its own COVID relief package that resulted in one $600 cash payment to its poorest and undocumented residents, with another $600 in the works. In just the last several weeks, basic income programs, at some level of development, have been announced in Marin County, California, and St. Paul, Minnesota, joining over 40 cities looking at versions of the program.

Meanwhile, the hotly debated $2,000 (or at least $1,400 on top of $600) stimulus checks pledged to Georgia voters are credited primarily with delivering Democratic

victories in two improbable Senate special elections in January, which delivered a Democratic majority that allowed those checks to be sent, as well as the expansion of the Child Tax Credit that functionally serves as basic income payments for poor American families. The passage of those checks is also widely credited for the fact that Congress, long and rightfully a deeply reviled entity in the eyes of the American public, currently enjoys its highest approval rating in a decade.

Even Pope Francis, who has a direct line to the man upstairs, has said that “this may be the time to consider a universal basic wage.”

It’s no wonder that “give people money” has become both a rallying cry and the political commonsense slogan of the early 2020s.

Early returns on these programs show that they’re not just politically popular, but effective at curtailing poverty. The no-stringsattached cash payments of the CARES Act, though not universal and not recurring, combined with enhanced federal unemploy-

YICHUAN CAO / SIPA USA VIA AP

Mainly by embracing UBI, Andrew Yang, a man with no public-sector experience, may well become the mayor of New York City.

Is basic income a drastic expansion of the welfare state, or is it a reboot of neoliberal policy? ment benefits of $600 a week, caused the poverty rate to drop during the first three months of the pandemic, as millions lost jobs and earnings and health insurance.

Basic income has rapidly become a political phenomenon so potent it has some Democrats reconsidering what’s been a 30-year commitment to running, first and foremost, on health care. Why labor over convoluted policy negotiations with industry stakeholders when you can just cut people checks?

In a uniquely polarized political environment, money seems to be effortlessly cutting through the partisan tension.

So UBI is having a moment. But that begs the question: What is UBI? Is it a drastic expansion of the welfare state? Or is it a reboot of neoliberal policy, an expansion of marketization, the realization of Silicon Valley’s libertarian future? Is it the new world of welfare, or the frontier of its decline?

The policy has its share of skeptics. Josh Bivens, director of research at the leftwing Economic Policy Institute, recently told Marketplace that it was a “poorly targeted” use of resources whose triumph over simply expanding unemployment insurance “would be a bit of a shame.” As Adam Tooze, economic history professor at Columbia University, put it on a Bloomberg podcast, UBI can be seen as the result of “the weakness of American social institutions which required the distribution of checks … it still has a slightly Reaganesque feel to it. It isn’t really the government that’s showing up, it’s just the check.” Or, per Prospect contributor Bryce Covert in a recent column in The New York Times, UBI done wrong can be “a Trojan horse for dismantling public assistance altogether.” And of course, it’s

expensive: The three rounds of stimulus checks this year, which amounted to $3,200 a person, cost $850 billion, on par with the cost of the whole Medicare program over the same period of time. And nobody is living decently on $3,200 a year.

Just as important as whether it is actually good policy; is it actually good politics?

YANG IS NOT THE ONLY mayoral candidate

whose path out of obscurity was forged by UBI. Far from the Big Apple, 26-year-old Michael Tubbs ran for mayor of Stockton, California, in 2017 and won. He became the city’s youngest and first Black mayor.

This position has not been a fast track to a national profile. Stockton had not unrecently been named America’s “most miserable” city; four years before Tubbs’s swearing in, it had earned the dubious distinction of being the largest U.S. municipality to declare bankruptcy in decades. Stockton had been bled out by the financial crisis, which was only the most recent in a series of bad economic fortunes dating back literally to the end of the Gold Rush. Poverty was entrenched, corruption rampant, and the murder rate was triple the national average.

None of this was news to Tubbs, who grew up in the poorest part of Stockton, with a teenage mother and a dad in prison.

Tubbs didn’t run on universal basic income. But when he convened his advisers to find ways to mollify Stockton’s most intractable woes, that suggestion continued to surface. “What can a city do to end poverty?” Tubbs asked. “Give me a policy. And they came back with basic income.”

Tubbs went to Stanford, where he first encountered both UBI and, importantly, Big Tech. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel (“Evan,” as Tubbs calls him, “one of my best friends”) was in his graduating class and at one point even lived across the hall. That also got him close to Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s monastically styled CEO, and Chris Hughes, the Facebook co-founder turned Facebook detractor and anti-inequality crusader, in whom Tubbs found a kindred spirit for a number of his anti-poverty measures.

After a fortuitous seating chart brought Tubbs shoulder to shoulder with Natalie Foster at the Economic Security Project, a think

tank funded by Hughes to redress economic ills, a project took flight. Hughes’s money, via ESP, would fund a pilot program, where 125 Stocktonites living below the city’s median household income would receive $500 a month via debit card, no strings attached.

By January 2019, Stockton was the first American city with a universal basic income program, set to run for two years, with randomly chosen recipients reporting back regularly what they’d spent the money on, to get a sense of the program’s impact.

That wasn’t all Tubbs did; he enacted programs on education, housing, and more.

But the UBI pilot brought him and Stockton unlikely attention. In the words of Rep. Ilhan Omar, he was “the UBI mayor.”

BEFORE TUBBS, THERE was Thomas

Paine, in 1797. Or, if you’re being generous, before Paine there was the Holy Roman Empire, where, according to journalist Annie Lowrey in her book Give People Money, universal basic income was floating around as a policy idea. Sir Thomas More argued for it in Utopia, circa 1516; John Kenneth Galbraith was in on it too.

Perhaps more important is UBI’s inclusion in the social movements and Black radical tradition in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. For the better part of those two decades, the female-led National Welfare Rights Organization argued for loosening restrictions on welfare, and on cash payments in particular. In 1972, they even got eventual presidential candidate George McGovern to introduce a bill that would have guaranteed a $6,500 annual base income nationwide. Farther from the halls of Congress, “guaranteed jobs or a guaranteed income” was a pillar of the Black Panther Party’s ten-point platform, articulated in 1966.

The prominent backer you’re most likely to hear about today is MLK, whose embrace of universal basic income came from the work of one of his closest advisers and chief lieutenant, Bayard Rustin. Just two months after the August 1963 March on Washington, Rustin wrote an essay on the effect of automation on Black workers. “He basically says: There’s automation and deindustrialization happening. It’s happened to Black workers first; it’s going to happen to white

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 31

workers. If the civil rights movement can’t solve the political economy question around the future of work, we’re not going to get equal rights,” said Dorian Warren, president of Community Change and co-founder of the Economic Security Project. “Therefore, he landed on guaranteed income.”

Rustin’s embrace likely put it on the radar of King, who made guaranteed income one plank of his platform for economic justice in his famous 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?. And it had staying power within that Black radical tradition. “There was like a moment of probably five or six years where this was grounded in poor, Black, particularly Southern women who were like: guaranteed income,” said Warren. “Because the welfare system sucks, it’s dehumanizing.”

Despite the gradual kicking out of welfare supports in the 1990s, we’ve been living with basic income plans in various guises all around us for decades. Social Security is a universal cash payment program for Americans of retirement age that’s both wildly popular and extremely effective at mollifying poverty among the elderly. The Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays a dividend out of assets built up through incoming oildrilling revenues to every state resident, was enacted in 1976 and continues today. Last year, the dividend was $992; it has been as high as $2,072 in the past. Outside of the U.S., basic income proposals have been the basis for successful left-wing programs in Brazil, Kenya, Finland, and elsewhere. Even Ontario, Canada, recently trialed one.

It’s worth articulating, however, exactly what Dr. King’s vision looked like. He argued for a basic income worth as much as the country’s median income, more than $68,000 per household in today’s numbers.

Not a single proposal today approaches that level of generosity.

Furthermore, in the years after King’s assassination, basic income has also resonated with a very different set of enthusiasts, who used it to their own ends. Charles Murray, author of the infamous, eugenicsinflected The Bell Curve, backed a $10,000 annual UBI for all adults, with the condition that it replace all other government benefits entirely, Social Security and Medic-

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aid included. Milton Friedman, the patron saint of neoliberalism, championed basic income as an alternative to the social safety net in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, and again in his 1980 book Free to Choose. Friedman’s plan, funneled through the tax code, would also replace a suite of existing welfare programs.

During his presidency, Richard Nixon considered a form of guaranteed income, a negative income tax that would pay out $1,600 for a family of four; it was a proposal lifted directly from Friedman. Friedrich Hayek, another member of the laissez-faire pantheon, boosted basic income in his 1973 book Law, Legislation and Liberty. Basic income as cash payments in lieu of social services became the design favored by probusiness, small-government types.

It’s a short scooter ride from there to Silicon Valley, where the idea has found a home with a chorus of tech CEOs (including Dorsey and Spiegel) in the last ten years, hailed as a simple, nongovernmental offset to the damage to the labor market that their own innovation is sure to bring. That’s no happy accident, as techno-libertarian thinking clearly holds Friedman and Hayek as its progenitors of economic thought. In 2015, it was even referred to, perhaps ominously, in Valley circles as “the social vaccine of the 21st century.” Warren told me, “I get really nervous about the tech libertarian versions of UBI. Because I do think it can be won, I just think it’s not politically useful.”

The libertarian UBI enthusiasm builds upon its deep mistrust of government, the idea being that the only thing government can do competently is reroute tax revenue back to people. As liberal commentator Matt Zeitlin notes, “a welfare state designed around the lowest possible expectations for what the government is capable of doing is unlikely to be one that will be more generous.”

WHILE TUBBS COUNTS himself among the

tradition that sees UBI as additive rather than zero-sum, you can see how he, at the very least, could be perceived to be straddling the line. “I’ve been privileged to kind of sit between these two worlds, you have conversations with folks, on both sides, particularly a lot of the funding comes from the

Cash payments in lieu of social services became the design favored by pro-business, small-government types. tech sector, at least for these pilots,” was how he put it to me, diplomatically.

If Tubbs has one foot in the latter camp, Andrew Yang, despite putting MLK on the campaign poster, almost certainly has both.

In fact, the UBI mayor did not endorse the would-be UBI president. Far from it: Tubbs upbraided Yang for his suggestion that he would fund his national UBI by forcing recipients to choose between social services and cash payments. “I support the conversation we’re having about basic income, but I don’t support any proposal that would gut the social safety net,” Tubbs said in The Sacramento Bee. “I got swarmed by a bunch of the Yang Gang people,” he told me. “But me and Andrew are friends, that’s the thing. We text.” Tubbs even consulted on policy for Yang’s New York City mayoral campaign.

(For those wondering, Tubbs endorsed Kamala Harris, whose LIFT Act proposal, which she ran on very quietly, actually sported some basic income features: $500 a month in cash payments for all families earning less than $100,000 a year. And after that, he endorsed Michael Bloomberg.)

Tubbs’s program, the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED), was a huge success. For two years, households receiving even the relatively paltry $500 a month saw their month-to-month income volatility decline. Recipients spent the money overwhelmingly on essentials, including food, utilities, and gas. Households experienced a 100 percent increase in their ability to pay unexpected bills; many of them enjoyed a newfound ability to pay down lingering debts. In a swift and deci-

RICH PEDRONCELLI / AP PHOTO

Michael Tubbs, the former mayor of Stockton, was nationally revered for instituting a basic income program.

Then he lost re-election by 12 points.

sive blow to the most popular anti-welfare hysteria narratives of the 1990s, less than 1 percent of the money went to cigarettes and alcohol. People were healthier, reported improved mental states, lived better—and crucially, they actually worked more.

Take Falaviena, a mother of two preteens.

With the $500, “I was able to pay for my license, I was able to put food on the table towards the end of the month, because that was a struggle for me, especially before … and just keeping up with my bills, paying it on time and not having to pay late fees,” she responded in an exit interview. It even changed her relationship with her children.

“Before, they would ask me to get them stuff for school or they needed school supplies, and I couldn’t tell them, ‘Yes, we can go get it.’” Now, “[i]t feels great. You feel like a proud mom, that I’m able to provide for my kids when they need it.”

The anecdotal stuff is even more moving than the data, and the stories almost cat-

egorically go like this. Right away, the pilot showed that “guaranteed income is the kind of idea that can stabilize a family’s finances for any crisis, including the one that we’re currently in,” said Natalie Foster. “It was true years ago, it’s doubly true now.”

Tubbs knew that long before the final data came in, in tales both heartrending and charming. “We’d get so many thank-yous randomly from people,” he told me. “I was at the Men’s Wearhouse one time, and some woman came up to me and said, ‘Thank you, I’m buying our wedding outfits, the guaranteed income is paying for our wedding outfits.’”

Meanwhile, Tubbs began to scale up the ambition of the program, leaning even harder on his Silicon Valley connections to fund it and other social welfare initiatives. He recruited mayors nationwide to consider UBI-style pilots throughout 2020, an alliance that now counts 50 in total.

He got Jack Dorsey to contribute $3 million, and then another $15 million, to fund

basic income pilots; he got Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel to kick in $20 million for a Stockton college scholarship program. Mayors in Compton, California; Columbia, South Carolina; and Gainesville, Florida, are all adopting their own versions of the program.

Stockton’s pilot ended in January of 2021, which just so happened to be the very same month that Kevin Lincoln, a Republican pastor, was sworn in as mayor of Stockton.

The race wasn’t especially close: Lincoln drubbed Tubbs by 12.3 points.

ONE REASON FOR THE loss: As fast as

Tubbs could build new social welfare programs, Stockton’s old institutions were crumbling. Even nongovernmental social services, stuff far beyond his remit, were falling apart. In 2017, the year Tubbs was first sworn in, The Record, literally Stockton’s paper of record, laid off a third of its reporting staff. A year later, it closed its production facility.

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 33

Just as tech barons leapt into the void to fill the funding gaps for Tubbs’s crucial social services, it was tech that filled the void left by the newspaper, but in a much more malevolent way.

With the reputable media landscape clear-cut, a local blogger with a site called the 209 Times, named for Stockton’s area code, set out to take down Tubbs. Its author, Motecuzoma Patrick Sanchez, said as much. “We always admit and acknowledge our bias … We are one hundred percent responsible for him not getting re-elected.”

The 209 Times, according to Tubbs and nearly all reporting about its coverage, was more than a little loose with the facts. It ran things that were untrue, f lagrantly untrue, and borderline defamatory, accusing him of everything from embezzlement to secretly working a full-time job in New York City. It posted racist cartoons, and laid every instance of crime, arson, and homelessness at Tubbs’s feet.

More important than what Sanchez wrote was how the 209 Times disseminated it. And with over 100,000 followers on both Facebook and Instagram, more people than voted in the mayoral election by a lot, its reach was huge. It put the full power of Facebook’s targeting tools to work, and hammered voters. “These lies were broadcast every day, three times a day using social media targeting, micro-targeting people and feeding them that poison each and every day,” said Tubbs, who is now an adviser to California Gov. Gavin Newson on anti-poverty and cash assistance policies. “In exit interviews in some of the polling, what we found was that people were repeating things that were from this page, saying things like ‘We like Mayor Tubbs, but he steals money from us.’” Tubbs might have had Silicon Valley money, but it was no match for Silicon Valley advertising.

Sure, Tubbs made some enemies. Ending the public subsidy for golf courses didn’t endear him to Stockton’s business elite. His proximity to big-city business magnates on the other side of the state’s major freeways probably made him an easier target.

But is it possible that, despite enacting what is now seen as the winningest political proposal of this political era, one lowly

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blogger armed with Facebook’s targeted advertising was able to turn Tubbs from a 41-point victor into a 12-point loser in four years flat? Or was there a kernel of truth, that a high-profile project for a tiny sliver of Stockton’s poorest didn’t align with a public desire to fix much broader and deepseated problems?

“What we saw playing out was really, I think, a canary in the coal mine for what will happen if we don’t figure out investment in local media,” Foster told me. If Tubbs had allocated public money for local news, alongside all these other initiatives, might that have saved him? I asked him that question; he demurred. But he agreed that it painted a clear picture of the limitations of UBI, which can do immense good while being simultaneously unable to deliver what services do. That so many mayors are following Tubbs’s lead to build their own UBI pilots suggests that they see only political upside. After all, people like free money.

But they may not be fully incorporating the potential pitfalls into their analysis.

At this point, I wanted to speak with some recipients of Magnolia Mother’s Trust, arguably the country’s flagship basic income program, located in Jackson, Mississippi. Since 2018, it has granted lowincome Black mothers $1,000 a month for a year, also funded by Hughes’s Economic Security Project and administered privately. But when I tried to reach out to residents in Jackson to see how the program was working, the city was mired in crisis. A fire at an aging municipal water plant had cut service to the city, and resulted in a boil notice that lasted for multiple days. Two weeks prior, the plant had also lost power, causing a similar problem. And for three weeks in late February and March, the city was again without water, in the wake of a winter storm. An extra $1,000 a month seems secondary when you can’t get water to your house because the mechanisms providing it are so antiquated.

“We don’t believe UBI is a silver bullet.

And it’s often talked about like it is,” said Foster. “It has to sit alongside housing, health care. All of the big expenses that make life unaffordable for most people in this country.”

UBI can do immense good while being simultaneously unable to deliver what services do.

If UBI is going to be successful, then, it seems crucial that it not give with one hand and with the other take away. And there’s a risk with cash payments that its distribution, which is cheered for its lack of administrative obstacles, also means that it’s easier than almost any other social program to simply nix. Cutting Medicare is a political impossibility, even with a GOP government, in part because its administrative existence is a bulwark. But when Doug Ford and Ontario’s conservative government decided to cancel their UBI pilot two years before its due date, it was gone in a second. Its participants, promised three years of checks, were reduced instead to a class action lawsuit.

Still, there may also be other upsides to UBI. “There’s an untested hypothesis with the idea of guaranteed income, and that is, could it actually enhance worker power in this country?” asked Warren. “So if you think of UBI, could it work like the equivalent of a universal strike fund?” It would be a rich irony if Silicon Valley’s favored policy prescription became a conduit to the thing it fears most: the return of union density.

ANDREW YANG, IT MUST be noted, is not

running his New York City mayoral campaign on universal basic income. It’s certainly not universal, and it’s much smaller of a stipend than what he promoted in his presidential run. His proposal features an average of $2,000 per year for 500,000 of the city’s lowest-income residents. Even that pared-back version, which Tubbs considers “a major improvement” over Yang’s presidential concept, comes with a $1 billion-

STEPHEN ZENNER / SIPA USA VIA AP

Basic income has become a political phenomenon, even if it’s not necessarily a political slam dunk.

plus price tag, and the proposed funding has been controversial. In Yang’s envisioning, the city would come up with a billion dollars via a combination of (ever-evolving) progressive changes to the tax code, and a stripping back of “inefficiencies” in the social safety net, reallocating money from things like homeless services deemed to be redundant. The rest of the money would come in the form of private philanthropy, given by the city’s very rich.

Both the reliance on private philanthropy and the de facto cutting of social services have the city’s progressives skeptical.

On the ground in Brooklyn, group leader Marissa tells me that she and her fellow volunteers are on high alert against accusations of neoliberalism from hecklers, which they’ve encountered in the past. “People don’t understand this is the opposite of that,” she tells me. “And they misunder-

stand his past work with startups,” chimes in Chris, another volunteer wearing Yang’s signature MATH baseball cap.

Because of those caveats, the canvassers can’t just lead by pledging free money in exchange for a vote, which might make this leafleting session, which has yielded very few even verbal commitments, more successful, if not more exciting. “Maybe down the line [it will be money for everyone], but right now he’s just focused on helping the poor,” says Marissa. But it’s notable that, when applying what is supposed to be a slam-dunk policy to the real world of implementation, Yang is pulling his punches a bit, as if the politics don’t totally cohere.

Still, as the afternoon wears on, the gang is getting some positive feedback. More than a couple of amblers have flashed a thumbs-up, which could be a reference to one of Yang’s favored emojis, which he

tweets with regularity, though it’s admittedly hard to gauge the enthusiasm. Finally, 90 minutes in, the gang hooks its most promising prospect.

After an extended back-and-forth, a likely nonvoter with extreme skepticism of both political parties agrees, at the very least, to listen to Andrew Yang’s podcast.

“Politicians never do anything for us, they only look out for themselves,” he finishes the conversation by saying, a sentiment that could conceivably be issued by both UBI zealots and cynics who think it’s merely a cheap ploy to buy votes.

“You missed it,” says Gideon, a product manager at a tech startup and Stanford grad who’s at his first Yang outreach event, his first leafleting ever. “I got him with the UBI. He said he liked the sound of it, and asked how you’d pay for it. And I said, ‘By taxing the rich.’ He liked that, too.” n

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36 PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2021

INVESTIGATING T H G I S R E OV Why congressional hearings are bad, and how they can be made great again

By David Dayen ILLUSTRATION BY KAILEY WHITMAN

IN APRIL, THE House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, formed to scrutinize policy decisions made during the pandemic, held a hearing that will not go down in the annals of congressional history. “When do Americans get their freedom back?” squawked pugnacious Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) at Dr. Anthony Fauci, seeking a certain date for an end to mask-wearing and social distancing. Told that it would depend on the level of cases, hospitalizations, and vaccinations, Jordan repeated the question, decrying measures that he considered an assault on constitutional rights. As his time expired, Jordan didn’t stop. The next speaker began, but Jordan talked over her. “You need to respect the chair, and shut your mouth,” bellowed Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA).

Nobody would call it a useful five minutes of anyone’s life. But it’s what Americans

have come to expect from hearings in their Congress, which have too often served as an extension of cable news shout-fests. Indeed, in an era where attention and attention alone matters, the angry exchange, unlike nearly all congressional hearings, drew news coverage.

Grandstanding has its place in Washington, of course. But the deeper question is what the point of the hearing was at all.

This is a select subcommittee with subpoena power, charged with gathering information on the federal pandemic response. Members had Fauci, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky, and Dr. David Kessler, chief science officer for the coronavirus response, in front of them. It was an opportunity to drill down into the technicalities of the vaccine rollout and virus mitigation, and decipher what could be improved.

But over the three-hour hearing, Demo-

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 37

crats on the panel by and large praised President Biden’s response relative to Donald Trump, while Republicans mostly highlighted crowded immigration facilities that are failing to follow social-distancing guidelines. Several members gave five-minute speeches without asking a question. There were multiple exchanges about whether Tucker Carlson should retract statements made on his Fox News show.

In a sense, the hearing was unique, because at least the immigration facilities debate was based on one daylong trip by some Republicans to the southern border. Congress doing its own investigating on anything is novel these days. A combination of understaffing, stretched responsibilities, lack of coordination, and a pervasive inattention to the importance of oversight has crippled a core function of the legislative branch. Beyond that, few members have a coherent philosophy about the purpose of congressional hearings and oversight, so much so that when one of them offers a respectable response, it’s bracing.

“It’s an opportunity to educate the American people about what’s at stake in the policy choices we’re making,” said Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), who has quickly gained a reputation through her oasis-in-a-desert appearances in hearings. “The average American doesn’t have hours to spend to educate themselves on these topics. They don’t have staff, we do. We should use our access as congressmembers to these people to lift up the concerns of Americans and invite them to participate more.”

Historically, this was precisely oversight’s role. At their

38 PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2021

best, congressional investigations and hearings formed the basis for some of our most critical laws, from the Pecora Commission on financial abuses in the 1930s to the Kefauver hearings on antitrust in the 1950s, and the Ribicoff hearings on GM and auto safety in the 1960s. Inquiries that unearth new information, or revelatory hearing moments that put witnesses on the spot, still happen today, but they’re rare.

Congress has diminished its own understanding of the issues it legislates on, and dialed back its own curiosity. The result is objectively worse public policy.

The great investigative hearings of decades past used theater, as senators and congressmen dramatically confronted wrongdoers with their deeds. But the high drama was built on painstaking staff investigation. Today’s hearings, for the most part, are just the theater.

From the remaining members of Congress still engaged in thoughtful oversight, there’s much to learn. How do they thrive, while the overall framework of oversight languishes?

Is it a matter of will, or structural factors? And as we move into a governing period, with Democrats eager to resolve long-standing problems, how can Congress use the oversight function to acquire the knowledge it needs to make government work for people?

I AM PRIVILEGED AMONG most journalists to have a col-

league on staff with direct experience with congressional

COURTESY OF ROBERT KUT TNER

Robert Kuttner (center, with sign), seen here picketing the NRA in 1968 after the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, was chief investigator for the Senate Banking Committee in the 1970s, which he calls a “golden age” of oversight.

oversight. Robert Kuttner, who co-founded this magazine, was chief investigator on the Senate Banking Committee from 1975 to 1977, then chaired by Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI). The Capitol Hill job fell in between Kuttner’s tenures as a reporter, a good set of skills to bring to oversight.

Kuttner’s first big investigation was on redlining, the practice of restricting Black people and other minorities from access to mortgage credit. “I must have had 35 neighborhood groups from different cities who had done all of this investigative digging,” Kuttner told me. Armed with information on how entire neighborhoods were cut off from lending, Kuttner set up four days of intensive hearings, featuring community researchers, greedy bankers, and hapless regulators. The effort led to passage of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which required banks to give detailed information about their lending activities, and later to the Community Reinvestment Act, which affirmatively mandated lending in low-income communities and sanctioned banks for failure to serve them. All of this provided grist for more community monitoring of bankers.

It was, in Kuttner’s words, “regulation as an organizing tool.”

Next was a probe that would result in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, prohibiting U.S. companies from bribing foreign officials. This built off of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into hundreds of companies that admitted over $300 million in illegal payments. The committee focused on the Lockheed loan scandal. Defense contractor Lockheed had received $250 million in government loan guarantees to help avoid default, but the company never disclosed millions in payments to officials in West Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Saudi Arabia to secure military aircraft contracts. “We brought out some new stuff, and had Lockheed executives testify,” Kuttner recalled. “We were trying to build a case for legislation.”

There was a pattern to this work: identifying an abuse, highlighting it in public hearings, devising the remedy, and getting that through Congress. The most successful triangulated between oversight staff, public-interest groups committed to the issue, and media figures willing to report on it. One journalistic giant in the 1960s and ’70s was Morton

Mintz, a Washington Post investigative reporter. Mintz, now 99, confirmed for me that oversight committee staff would call him to ask when he would be available to cover hearings.

His subsequent write-ups would then get amplified by pressure groups and Congress, creating a positive-feedback loop.

Mintz broke the story in February 1966 that General Motors had sent a private detective to tail Ralph Nader, then involved in his own congressional investigation. Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed detailed the hazards of GM’s Corvair, using case files from over 100 different private lawsuits.

Sen. Abe Ribicoff (D-CT) had hired Nader as an unpaid consultant for a Senate Government Operations Subcommittee investigation on traffic safety, and later had him testify. After Mintz’s story ran, Ribicoff hauled in GM CEO James Roche, who admitted that the company hired the private detective.

Eventually, Nader won a $425,000 lawsuit against GM for invasion of privacy; he used the money to establish a series of organizations that fueled even more congressional hearings.

The Nader/GM kerfuffle was part of a yearlong Ribicoff investigation. “The principal challenge then was corporate lobbyists, there were very few institutional challenges,” Nader told me. “When we’d go to generally sympathetic chairs and subcommittee chairs, they never asked the lobbyists for permission.” Just ten months elapsed between the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed and the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which has been credited with reducing auto fatalities by 80 percent and saving 3.5 million lives. But it was the hearings that turned the book into a best-seller; advocacy couldn’t do it alone, without oversight.

This persistence carried throughout Congress, veterans of the era say. Sidney Wolfe, who helped found Public Citizen with Nader in 1971, pointed out to me that just one Senate small-business subcommittee helmed by Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-WI) held 135 days of hearings on the Food and Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical industry over the course of a decade, to say nothing of five to ten other members regularly holding hearings elsewhere. Even committees not primarily associated with oversight tried their hand at it, because it was a given that Congress had a responsibility to stay informed and convey that information to the public.

KUTTNER DESCRIBES HIS time as a golden age of congres-

At their best, congressional investigations and hearings formed the basis for some of our most critical laws.

sional oversight, but that’s hard to judge. The broad era of congressional investigation, from the 1930s into the 1990s, did not just oversee the executive branch; many epic hearings targeted corporate power.

Ferdinand Pecora, like Kuttner a Senate Banking Committee staffer, directed an investigation into the 1929 stock market crash that unearthed an orgy of self-dealing and conflicts of interest, and led to both the resignation of bank CEOs and an entire suite of regulatory reforms that kept the industry safe for 50 years. Around the same time, Rep. Wright Patman (D-TX) held investigations into longtime Republican

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cigarette use. “It was oversight, rather than legislation, that made the greatest impact on our nation’s relationship to tobacco,” Waxman wrote in his memoir.

Like Waxman, Sen. Gerald Nye, a former newspaper editor and North Dakota Republican, became effective from the minority party. He somehow managed to get himself made chair of a majority-Democratic select committee investigating America’s entry into World War I. The Senate Munitions inquiry became a dissection of war profiteering that really outlined the military-industrial complex, decades before Eisenhower’s famed address. Nye cultivated press coverage throughout the committee’s work, even giving a speaking tour and a national radio address. He had a dramatic flair as well: Nye would pile documents on hearing room tables to give the impression of massive evidence that military contractors pushed the country into war.

During World War II, a young senator and former haberdasher continued Nye’s work. “Harry Truman took it upon himself to do World War II military contractor oversight and became president as a result,” said Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project, a key organization analyzing congressional oversight. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) grew out of the Truman Committee’s probe.

In a different national-security context, Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) spent 1975 investigating intelligence community abuses, unearthing covert operations to kill adversarial world leaders and overthrow foreign governments, surveillance on activists through COINTELPRO, and much more. The Church Committee’s final report filled six books. It led to the creation of a per-

Great Moments in Congressional Oversight 1932: Rep. Wright Patman’s (D-TX) impeachment investigation of Andrew Mellon (below) leads to Mellon’s resignation as Treasury secretary.

1934–1936: Senate Munitions Inquiry into war profiteering in WWI, led by Sen. Gerald Nye (R-ND)

1932–1934: Senate investigator Ferdinand Pecora leads hearings into the Wall Street crash of 1929, paving the way for New Deal banking regulations.

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COVAIR BY CHARLES 01, HELMET BY MIKEOFV, ZUCKERBERG BY ANTHONY QUINTANO, CC BY, CC BY SHARE-ALIKE

Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon steering government benefits to companies he still controlled. Mellon resigned before being impeached. Patman would continue his hard-charging probes into financial malfeasance for four more decades.

“My favorite story of Patman, the Federal Reserve wouldn’t give him information,” said Matt Stoller, who wrote extensively about Patman in his 2019 book Goliath. “The Fed said, ‘We’re not part of the government, we don’t have to give you information.’

Patman said, ‘Oh, you’re not part of the government,’ so he went to the D.C. government and said that these Fed buildings aren’t part of the government, and they haven’t paid property taxes.”

The Temporary National Economic Committee from 1938 to 1941 delved into the concentration of economic power, and informed Thurman Arnold’s revival of trustbusting at the Justice Department. These investigations into corporate concentration were replicated by Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-NY) and Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) throughout the 1950s.

Nearly a half-century later, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) staged a dramatic set piece in an April 1994 hearing, putting seven CEOs under oath and asking them pointedly if nicotine was addictive, which they all roundly denied. Waxman went on to prove that these statements were false, showing that cigarette companies buried research about addictiveness and the cancer-causing properties of tobacco. Subsequent investigations, including when Waxman moved to the minority, created press attention and built momentum. The $246 billion Master Settlement Agreement with tobacco companies, and the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which Waxman co-authored, ensued. But more than that, the oversight itself coincided with reductions in

1950s: Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) and Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-TN) continue corporate power investigations in their respective committees.

1938–1941: Temporary National Economic Committee leads intensive investigations into corporate power.

1941–1945: Sen. Harry Truman (D-MO) probes war profiteering during WWII. It raised Truman’s profile and eventually led to his becoming president.

manent Select Committee on Intelligence to oversee the CIA and NSA, and an executive order banning political assassinations.

From 2007 to 2014, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) chaired PSI, coinciding with the financial crisis and its aftermath. Despite there being a parallel Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Levin and his chief counsel Elise Bean delivered a two-year, four-part investigation highlighting risky lending at Washington Mutual, abominable nonregulation at the now-shuttered Office of Thrift Supervision, failures at the credit rating agencies to properly rate toxic securities, and definitive evidence that investment banks like Goldman Sachs bet against their own clients in structuring mortgagebacked securities deals. This was just a piece of Levin’s work on financial malfeasance, which included Swiss bank tax evasion, rampant commodity speculation, and an incredible report detailing HSBC’s record of facilitating money laundering for rogue regimes and Mexican drug cartels. The last was so powerful that the company’s head of compliance resigned at the hearing. (Bean noted to me that he didn’t resign from the actual bank, only that position.)

Levin’s work encapsulated the best of the attributes of the oversight that came before him. It featured years of work on a single subject; Levin would only hold a handful of hearings a year. It was an open-ended fact-finding mission; Levin’s staff would take three months to investigate, three months to interview witnesses, and three months to write a report.

It was, remarkably for the time period, fully bipartisan, with Republican staffers in on the report formation from day one.

“Levin’s preference was to find the facts before the hearing and present them,” Bean told me. “He was an outlier in the

time and effort put into preparation. He knew the documents and facts as well as everybody.”

Like his predecessors, Levin would assiduously court media. His reports would land with a press conference, and then a separate session where staff would detail the report with press for a couple of hours. The hearings themselves stressed the drama, featuring a witness table full of leading financial executives, almost never experts or analysts. Levin, glasses perched precariously over his nose, would hammer witnesses with document after document. The Goldman Sachs hearing, which lasted 11 hours, was memorable for Levin referencing an email referring to a “shitty deal” the bank foisted on a client at least six times.

Finally, like the best oversight, Levin sought to actually fix the problems identified. “We were able to do something about everything we covered,” Bean said, highlighting Levin’s contributions to Dodd-Frank (even though he wasn’t even on the Banking Committee). This was all done in a partisan era without much cooperation or legislative thrust. Levin entirely subverted this through dogged oversight.

Though some used different techniques, these lawmakers were all dedicated to understanding problems in society, and spending as long as necessary to seek the truth.

They generated original information that could inform public policy. While there is no specific constitutional mandate for oversight, it was throughout history seen as intimately connected to everything else Congress does, from legislation to appropriations to serving as a check on the other branches of government. As James Landis wrote in 1926, “To deny Congress power to acquaint itself

1994: Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) hosts tobacco CEOs, who swear under oath that nicotine is not addictive. Waxman went on to prove that their statements were false.

1965–1966: Sen. Abe Ribicoff (D-CT) investigation, aided

by Ralph Nader, ushers in significant improvements in auto safety.

1975–1977: Senate Banking Committee investigations lead to the Community Reinvestment Act and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

2019–2020: Rep. David Cicilline’s (D-RI) House Antitrust Subcommittee conducts an 16-month investigation of the dominant tech platforms.

2007–2014: Sen. Carl Levin’s (D-MI) Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations delved into the causes of the financial crisis and other episodes of corporate malfeasance.

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with facts is equivalent to requiring it to prescribe remedies in darkness.”

Which, of course, is just what Republican revolutionaries taking power in 1994 wanted.

IN DISCUSSING OVERSIGHT with over 20 members of Con-

gress, current and former staffers, and congressional experts, many pointed to the rise of Newt Gingrich as House Speaker as a turning point. Committee chairs previously had much more autonomy to direct their own committees, but after Gingrich, they had to ask permission to hold a hearing. Budgets for committees and staffs were slashed, as were external organizations that assisted Congress with investigations and reports, like the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service. The Office of Technology Assessment, which provided scientific and technical analysis to Congress, was abolished entirely.

“The Congress disarmed themselves,” as Nader put it.

Gingrich shrank the House’s presence in Washington, stuffing most work between Tuesdays and Thursdays. That cannibalized 40 percent of a committee’s workweek that might otherwise be put toward oversight. A conservative movement that questioned the utility of government set about to destroy government from within, so they could point to that destruction as proof of their claims.

Daniel Schuman of Demand Progress, one of the closest watchers of the legislative branch, supplied me the numbers.

House committees receive $100 million less in funding than they did ten years ago, and Senate committees are down $60 to $70 million. Personal member offices have had the same allotment of 18 staff members since 1978. “The population of the districts have doubled, and those are the people who have to do constituency work,” Schuman said. “Policy work gets squeezed, and given to junior people because we don’t pay them well.”

But while it’s easy to blame Gingrich for these changes, Democrats have won back the House twice since his revolution, from 2007 to 2010 and then since the 2018 midterms, and haven’t really reversed much. Committee chairs remain disempowered and subordinate to leadership. Outside of specialized oversight committees, investigation has waned. Subpoenas, the most powerful tool in a committee’s toolbox, are rarely brandished. Staffs have simply too heavy a workload and not enough warm bodies to focus on more than one issue at a time. Meanwhile, few legislative aides are paid enough to make a career of it in a high-cost city like Washington, and therefore move in and out of government, stunting the institutional memory of Congress.

A weak committee structure ultimately centralizes power within leadership, which they’re reluctant to give back. Leadership staff has increased as committee staff has decreased. And although oversight could pay political benefits, particularly for frontline members—look at how Katie Porter built her name and made her swing district impregnable as a result—it’s seen

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House committees receive $100 million less in funding than they did ten years ago, and Senate committees are down $60–$70 million. as orthogonal to governing, instead of fundamental to it. “Entities like Big Pharma, parts of the government like military contracting, there are things you can watchdog over that would provide positive attention,” said Hauser. “But [Speaker] Pelosi seems to view oversight as creating more risk than upside.”

As a rueful example, Pelosi announced last December the creation of a new select committee on “Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth,” modeled on the Temporary National Economic Committee and designed to unearth facts about economic inequality in America. I’d tell you more about it, but the announcement of the committee is all that’s been done as of May; no committee members have even been named.

One option for thin legislative and committee staff is to just chase the 24-hour news cycle, convening hearings rapidly based on media reports or outside investigations. Having a hearing one week on a development from the week before might seem like Congress being responsive, but they have little actual utility. “There’s not enough time to get behind the story, to check the accuracy of it,” said Elise Bean, former chief counsel on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

This interacts with the fact that the life of a member of Congress leaves little time to focus on oversight. Between floor votes, constant fundraising, meetings with interest groups, and (due to the compressed schedule) multiple committee hearings and markups happening simultaneously, preparation is incredibly challenging. There’s no capacity to learn issues at a high enough level to ask follow-ups and challenge a witness’s premises. “This is the default mode of Congress, don’t do your homework and see what happens,” said one House aide. Many may wonder why witnesses read opening statements at hearings, when they are usually posted online the night before. It’s because members never have a chance to read them and therefore need to hear them live.

Staffers who can concentrate on the particular issue at hand would be a viable resource, but most committee rules prohibit staff from directly questioning witnesses in hearings.

A more unwritten rule, one staffer told me, is that executive branch officials cannot share hearing panels with anyone else.

So you cannot have a victim of deregulation sitting next to the regulator who approved it.

JOE MARQUET TE / AP PHOTO

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich defanged the House, shrinking its schedule in Washington and limiting committee independence.

As a result, we are often subjected to underdeveloped hearing topics and the familiar five-minute-per-side format, which creates multiple problems. First, five minutes isn’t always enough time to draw out information; what’s derided as “grandstanding” can be a function of the format, which favors quick gotcha questions over a slower-developing argument.

Lawmakers constantly shuttling in and out of the hearing room makes it hard for them to build on an argument; few hearings indicate any coordination between members. Second, the massive committee size means members usually don’t get a follow-up opportunity; the same basic question can be asked numerous times by unwitting members who sit down and read off a sheet, without awareness of what’s come before. “We make it impossible for members to be good,” said Schuman.

Plus, in the current polarized era, switching between Democrats and Republicans often gives the sense of two separate, simultaneous hearings in two separate realities. Even in the recent past, hearings would have a consistent tone and message regardless of party. Today, each side has their own preoccupations, and hearings can feel more like ping-pong matches.

The results can be grim. You can sort hearing questions into

a few familiar buckets. One is where the lawmaker takes the five minutes as an opportunity to give a speech, with the witnesses left to silently nod. Another involves the member saying some version of “Wouldn’t you agree that my legislation on this subject would solve the problem entirely?” And a third just reroutes the hearing into whatever preoccupation that member holds as their brand.

Even when there are good investigations, such as when Sen. Rob Portman’s (R-OH) Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations detailed how thieves use works of art to launder money and evade sanctions in 2019, he didn’t even hold a hearing, ensuring that nobody would hear about the report.

In place of oversight, you often get the dreaded congressional letter, asking executive branch agencies for a specific policy change.

Aside from attempting to solve the finances of the Postal Service by themselves by being the only people in America left sending letters, it’s as relatively hapless as it is revealing.

“The members’ addiction to sending letters is emblematic of how offices view their role: Instead of asserting control over a problem, a letter is a way of throwing your hands up in the air and exclaiming, ‘Won’t somebody else please solve this?’” said a senior House aide.

“Oversight impotence has been here so long no one knows they have real power.”

In other words, for all the correct claims about overworked and understaffed members under the thumb of leadership, the bigger problem could be the members themselves.

Since the 1970s, Congress has become cozier with corporate interests and more willing to abdicate authority to the executive branch, as long as it absolves them of responsibility. Those members with the energy and will to make real change from the hearing room serve as an implicit commentary on colleagues who appear to favor the trappings of power over the wielding of it.

THIS LONG INVESTIGATIVE drought may at last be chang-

ing for the better. Some of the most interesting work being done on oversight comes from the House Oversight Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, chaired by Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), who rediscovered an element of creativity, born of necessity.

In the Trump years, oversight became more and more equated with a rather single-minded approach best depicted visually as a helmeted man running repeatedly into a brick wall. Congress would ask for documents or testimony, and the Trump White House wouldn’t comply; they held up at least nine key investigations this way, according to an accounting by The

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Washington Post. “We’re still fighting for Don McGahn as a witness, that case continues,” notes Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), referring to the former White House counsel. (McGahn and the House Judiciary Committee just reached agreement on testimony on May 12, two years after the initial request.) Trump unlocked the insight that refusing to hand over information or witnesses would hem in oversight, without any political hit other than a few people lamenting the breakdown of process.

But Krishnamoorthi figured out that if the executive branch obstructed investigations, you could go to companies that were beneficiaries of quid pro quo relationships and get the same documentary information. He did this in 2020 with Philips Respironics, a company contracted with the government to build low-cost ventilators before the pandemic.

Despite receiving taxpayer funds to develop the low-cost products, Philips instead took the technology and sold ventilators on the private market at a sixfold markup. The Trump administration, led by Jared Kushner, then renegotiated the deal to buy the ventilators at an exorbitant price. Krishnamoorthi’s inquiry led to Trump canceling the contract.

Going through corporate entities rather than a cooperative executive branch is “definitely harder,” Krishnamoorthi told Some current oversight stars (L-R): Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL).

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me. “It’s not easy to locate where the right person is. But it’s incredibly fruitful if you pursue that path.”

In the Biden transition, Krishnamoorthi has kept focus on fraudulent corners of the economy and regulatory inattention. After 2019 reports about high levels of metals in baby food, the subcommittee demanded internal documents and test information from seven manufacturers. The results from four companies that complied confirmed the presence of toxic metals like lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury. Every metal tested for was found. Industry was allowed to set its own standards for threshold levels of these metals, and even those standards are routinely ignored, the report showed.

Krishnamoorthi and some colleagues introduced legislation in February requiring the FDA to lower its acceptable levels of metal in baby food. Before a hearing could be held, the agency announced to the baby food industry in March that it would regulate toxic metals, and then in April followed up with a specific timeline, beginning as soon as next year. “The FDA moved with warp speed by FDA standards,” Krishnamoorthi said. “I have concerns about it but it’s real progress.”

This has led to a niche in the subcommittee of speaking for the voiceless, with hearings and investigations on preda-

The prerequisite for good oversight is curiosity, a desire to get to the bottom of how things work. tory advertising at YouTube Kids, defective pet collars killing thousands of dogs and cats, and nonprofit organ procurement companies that fail to perform their job and gouge the government. This bipartisan probe with Rep. Mike Cloud (R-TX) has already led to the Biden administration adopting new rules for the industry, and Congress learned that top executives attempted to obstruct the investigation. “They said, ‘Raja is going away,’” said Krishnamoorthi. “I can tell you I’m not.”

One of the members of Krishnamoorthi’s subcommittee is a second-term congresswoman from Orange County named Katie Porter, who took out her by-now-familiar whiteboard to explain how a CEO of an organ procurement company used the company jet for vacation when it could have been used to pick up organs and ferry them to recipients. It was a common technique for Porter, who has mastered challenging corporate CEOs and regulatory officials. This is someone whose vanity license plate reads “OVRSITE.” “Hearings are a dialogue, not a place for speechifying,” Porter told me. “It’s also not a place for softballs.” Her questioning of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon (a parallel to Pecora and Nye questioning the actual J.P. Morgan) about how bank tellers making the company’s meager starting salary wind up $567 short per month broke through the Washington noise.

“The biggest thing,” Porter said, “was hearing from people who said, ‘I hate politics but that’s my story.’ That’s a fundamental part of how I think about the job.”

There’s a pedagogical nature to Porter’s style, working within the five-minute format and trying to get at just one essential truth, and present it to the broader public as a stand-in for the larger issue. When she revealed through questioning that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy didn’t really know the price of postage, it was an attempt to teach something about what DeJoy values in his position. Porter has also succeeded in making policy from the hearing room.

She got former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield to personally commit to making COVID testing free, which came entirely from her finding the statute giving CDC the authority to do that.

It’s telling that Porter’s use of a whiteboard was seen as highly controversial among older members, as if trying to break down complex subjects for the public is a bridge too far.

The tension led to Porter’s departure from the Financial Services Committee, where she had much of her career expertise before Congress. The whole episode gave the impression that it’s risky and unconventional to actually conduct oversight and ask questions. “They think she’s good because she’s good at theater,” said Matt Stoller, who worked for former Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in Congress.

“But she’s actually good because she’s interested in the details.”

Porter’s professor at Harvard Law preceded her in commanding a hearing room. Not surprisingly, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) takes the same approach to oversight, drilling down to a moment that puts powerful people on the spot.

“Back when I was a baby senator in the Banking Committee,” she told me, “we had all the financial regulators in front of us.

They moved in extra tables to fit them. These are the people who are entrusted with enforcing current law. They are theoretically responsible for going after the big institutions that break the law. The question I asked, ‘When is the last time you took someone to court?’ Dead silence!”

Warren’s philosophy is to use the hearing format to balance the scales, to give voice to people who usually get no purchase in Washington, whether customers cheated by Wells Fargo’s fake-account scandal (Warren’s performances in hearings got not one but two Wells Fargo CEOs to step down) or victims forgotten by federal regulators who give a stronger ear to corporate lobbyists. Entreaties to regulators in particular to carry out their actual mission can have a dual purpose. Yes, beating up on them can have a cathartic quality, showing the public that accountability can actually flow from Congress.

But it can also send a message inside regulatory agencies that they cannot relax enforcement any longer. The spectacle of the hearing room can help regulators regain control of a bureaucracy that may be misaligned with the party in power.

Virtually alone among politicians, Warren has taken on her own party. In the Obama years, she routinely opposed top officials for key posts like Larry Summers and Antonio Weiss. Just recently, she prodded Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, whom she recommended for the role, over her desire to exempt large asset managers from more persistent regulation. Warren was apoplectic in late April when SEC chair Gary Gensler, an ally whom she had heavily pushed for the job, hired as his enforcement director a conflicted Wall Street lawyer who resigned in disgrace after less than a week on the job. She confronted both Gensler and the White House.

This willingness to be confrontational, whether against Republicans or Democrats or CEOs, is a lost art, Warren says.

“Think about how hard it seems to be to get a member of Congress to stand up and say, ‘This company did something that’s wrong, they cheated the American people and there should be real consequences.’ I’m always surprised that my directness surprises other people. When we see something that’s wrong, why wouldn’t we be willing to call it out?”

Warren now has something that likely terrifies Wall Street

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and regulatory agencies alike: a gavel. She chairs the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Economic Policy and the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth. Her first Banking subcommittee hearing was on student loans, again picking a diffuse group without a megaphone.

She highlighted the esoteric topic of student loan servicers, companies that often steer debtors into overpriced options for dealing with monthly payments, making obvious that the system itself is busted as a prerequisite to drive change. An invite to billionaire Leon Cooperman for a Finance subcommittee hearing on taxing the wealthy was turned down; some people are wise enough to avoid being a punching bag.

To get around the short-staffing problem, Warren has devoted a considerable portion of her personal office to investigation, including bringing in Henry Waxman’s top investigator, Brian Cohen. At first she could only guarantee him a team of a couple people, but it’s been built out with investigative responsibilities among virtually the entire staff. Even with a small core, Warren has become known for pursuing investigations that illuminate hidden corners of the economy. “The question should be,” she said, “why aren’t 100 senators doing that?”

THE MOST IMPORTANT investigation of the past several

years put together all of these oversight tactics. Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) led the House Antitrust Subcommittee in a 16-month investigation of the dominant tech platforms (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google), producing a damning 450-page report recently adopted by the full Judiciary Committee. The investigation created and sustained bipartisan momentum, albeit slowly, for substantive legislation to reduce Big Tech’s power.

“It wasn’t creating a record simply to justify legislation that was already planned,” said Rob Weissman, president of Public Citizen. “It was a genuine investigative process.”

The process started with a determined lawmaker and a free hand. From the beginning, Cicilline framed it as a topto-bottom review of how digital markets work, associating directly with the antitrust investigations Emanuel Celler led.

He hired Lina Khan, a noted scholar whom President Biden later nominated to a seat on the Federal Trade Commission, as his key investigator. Khan looked directly to Carl Levin’s subcommittee report on the financial crisis as a model; Elise Bean was consulted on concepts for undertaking the inquiry.

And like those investigations, Republican staff was brought in from the beginning, with both sides working together to draft requests for information, conduct depositions, and brief lawmakers.

Negotiations with the tech firms to receive information were protracted. The subcommittee had to go up to the full committee level to obtain subpoenas, which were never issued, as the firms eventually gave up over one million documents. The investigative process was kept under wraps to avoid leaks. Briefings with members and agency experts used

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a slide deck that staff beamed from their computer screens, with no hard copies. Members couldn’t take the information home. Officials from companies affected by Big Tech dominance would drop in on the briefings to provide context.

And in addition to document review and private interviews, Cicilline used hearings as fact-finding events, including getting out into the field.

One field hearing in Colorado was significant. Members and staff were briefed by state attorney general Phil Weiser before the hearing, then heard from four small businesses about their struggles competing with tech platforms, and visited a local incubator afterward to learn more. The usual ability for tech lobbyists to get to members wasn’t available in Colorado. The event was a turning point for Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), who changed his let-the-market-sort-it-out views after hearing from real people in his home state.

After much back-and-forth, the Big Tech CEOs voluntarily testified, in a hearing that was initially delayed because of the death of John Lewis. Members held a mock hearing, with prominent tech critic Sally Hubbard standing in for one of the CEOs. Questions were planned out in advance, with an eye toward really challenging the firms. “It wasn’t ‘Why do you do this,’ it was ‘You do this, here’s how you do this, here’s why it’s bad,’” said one House aide involved in the investigation.

Armed with a year of investigative information, including never-before-seen internal communications showing anticompetitive practices, subcommittee staff got the members to buy in and not freelance, but to coordinate questions. Holding the mock hearing also stirred competitive juices among members to ask good questions and master the material.

“What I think made it extraordinarily successful is [Cicilline] had a postulate for what was going wrong in the high-tech economy,” said Rep. Raskin, who served on the subcommittee. “So many hearings are gotcha moments about showing an embarrassing fact and it’s over. There was an implicit systematic critique.”

The hearing, given the high-profile subject and the presence of a tech press, generated a lot of attention. Unlike other attempts at grilling tech CEOs, where lawmakers had clear difficulty with the subject of digital markets, subcommittee members showed both a command of the evidence and a willingness to play off their counterparts. That helped because the five-minute format was still in place; Judiciary Committee ranking member Jim Jordan (R-OH) wouldn’t agree to extend the time to 15 minutes. Nevertheless, members of both parties challenged the CEOs, yielding key admissions about cannibalizing rivals’ profits and silencing their voices. This informed the later report, which used the tech industry as a microcosm of the growing concentration across the economy, and developed ways of fixing it.

It was a satisfying demonstration of how congressional determination can overcome internal and external obstacles.

Cicilline managed to get the investigation into his subcom-

Entreaties to regulators in hearings can send a message inside regulatory agencies that they cannot relax enforcement any longer. mittee rather than the committee level, reducing the number of cooks who’d have to deal with it. He gave the time and space needed to stumble through a million documents to find the one that revealed Big Tech misconduct. He had cross-party buy-in and a set piece that drove attention.

You would think that a successful investigation and the media spotlight it drew would spur other members of Congress to seek to replicate that with their own oversight. It hasn’t happened yet. It’s true that there is something about the richest people in the world that will generate a bit more attention than some other policy failure. But the cultural antipathy within Congress to actually learning about the world and informing policy continues.

THERE’S A BUDDING SYSTEM of supports for encouraging

better oversight. The Levin Center at Wayne State University, established after Carl Levin’s retirement, provides online tutorials for how to develop an investigative plan, design a document request, interview witnesses, manage whistleblowers, and structure hearings. The short videos really provide oversight in a box, and a live version, known as the “oversight boot camp,” covers the same subjects in an intensive two-day session. Over 265 congressional staff have taken the classes over the past five years. “We create a fake scandal, and take them through the process,” Elise Bean said. “They have to write a report. Title, three findings, three recommendations.

That’s the first day. Then they write a hearing plan. And a follow-up plan, what will you do the next two years.”

Other outside groups, like the American Economic Liberties Project, have produced memos on how to effectively use oversight, stressing identifying manageable problems and developing an investigative record. The memo even supplied sample requests for information to demonstrate how to extract findings from corporations.

Some of the suggested areas of inquiry, like the role of private equity firms in the health care industry, have already led to hearings.

Inside Congress, Jamie Raskin has held boot camps for members, a series of lunchtime discussions about strategies and methods for questioning. Katie Porter took the class, after her bombshell questioning of Jamie Dimon. “People said, ‘What

are you doing here?’ I said, ‘This is hard! I want to learn more.’”

Daniel Schuman proposed a number of structural changes, like opening up the hearing format to larger blocks of time for each side or letting staff ask questions. More coordination between members to hit certain points in a hearing might improve things, as would more resources for staff and dedicated oversight staffers paid out of committee budgets. During the pandemic, scheduling changes have been favorable to oversight. “The process the House is doing, there are no votes, it’s a committee week, that’s great,” Schuman said. “All you have to do is committee work, and you can be anyplace.”

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has tested a strategy of holding oversight hearings as a caucus. They got lucky when David Williams, a former member of the Postal Service Board of Governors, came to the caucus and said he wanted to speak publicly about Louis DeJoy’s efforts to degrade the agency. The caucus structured a hearing, working with Williams on how to present his information. With the pandemic locking up committee activity, the small caucus staff had time to put together the virtual hearing, amplifying it through progressive organizations and media. “We were out of session, nothing else was happening,” said CPC executive director Mike Darner. “Let’s show that Congress can function.”

The result was a riveting hearing of Williams detailing the Trump administration’s involvement in forcing changes at the Postal Service. And it displayed a theatricality that is part of the oversight process, especially in a fast-paced news environment. Communicating with the mass public requires giving them something fresh or interesting. Ultimately, it’s a tool of politics, regardless of the high-minded talk about dispassionate fact-finding.

A younger class of members has shown a deeper commitment to oversight. “Committee hearings are one of the few venues that we have to hold people in power and corporations accountable and get information for the American people,” said freshman Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY).

Jones, who picked up a seat on the House Antitrust Subcommittee, shares a vision of oversight as an essential part of a legislator’s work, not an appendage. This must become more widespread. You cannot solve America’s challenges without fully understanding what those challenges comprise. The prerequisite for good oversight is curiosity, a desire to get to the bottom of how things work. If you have that, institutional resistance and structural austerity can be overcome.

Another freshman, Sen. Jon Ossoff, has taken the chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He’s easing into the role; there’s been no public statement from the subcommittee since last December. But he does have the right profile: Ossoff was an investigative journalist before reaching the Senate. “Good hearings are really just journalism with subpoena power,” Matt Stoller said. “It’s a show, it’s a performance where you find information and confront people. It’s not rocket science but it does take work.” n

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 47

has allowed many Reversing one Trump policy, Biden d States. By not asylum seekers to enter the Unite thousands are still reversing another, however, many being expelled.

BY MARCIA BROWN

MATAMOROS, MEXICO – At its height, more than 3,000 asylum seekers lived in the tent city in Matamoros, on the shores of the Rio Grande—a stone’s throw from another life in the United States. The encampment first began to take shape in 2019, just a few tents in a plaza abutting Gateway International Bridge, as the newly implemented Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) took effect. Also known as Remain in Mexico, this Trump administration policy required asylum

48 PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2021

seekers to wait in Mexico for their asylum hearings, sometimes for months or years.

In border cities like Matamoros or Reynosa, criminal cartels thrive, their hold amplified by an increasingly militarized border that migrants cannot easily cross. They prey on those migrants, confident that they can extract American dollars that the migrants’ relatives in the U.S. can wire—to pay the cartels to release the migrants they’ve taken hostage. Melvin, an asylum seeker who spoke to the Prospect from a shared apartment in Matamoros, said he was kidnapped in Matamoros and held for six days until his father sent money from Maryland.

The few tents in the plaza became dozens and then hundreds as migrants found solidarity and relative safety in numbers.

Within a few months, the camp had moved to a city park across the street. Media coverage and local awareness grew. Volunteer groups like Team Brownsville and Angry

Tias y Abuelas (Aunts and Grandmothers) sprang up to support the camp.

This was a refugee camp created by America’s policies, yet its residents weren’t refugees under American law. They were asylum seekers. This distinction meant that the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) never declared it a refugee camp like dozens of others around the world, which meant that UNHCR could not offer the accoutrements of refugee camp life, such as U.N. medical care, food, and other basic necessities. In its early days, there was scant public safety, no access to bathing facilities or bathrooms, and little adequate shelter. There were public-heath challenges, including an outbreak of chicken pox, even before the global coronavirus pandemic.

Despite those impediments, asylum seekers created a sense of community in the

those who remained, and the administration made an exception—a testament to the high profile of the Matamoros camp in particular. On March 12, Melvin and his brother Henry, crossed into the U.S. after nearly two years in Matamoros. As of the end of March, nearly 4,000 asylum seekers’ cases had been transferred out of MPP courts, indicating they have been allowed to cross into the U.S. Data indicate that most are Cuban nationals. The administration gradually opened the process to additional ports of entry. As of publication, six ports of entry are processing asylum seekers with

PHOTOS BY MARCIA BROWN

camp. They raised international awareness of their plight, fueling media coverage from around the world. On the campaign trail last year, Jill Biden visited the Matamoros encampment. After her visit, asylum seekers in the camp and their advocates sent hundreds of postcards to her, asking her to end Remain in Mexico should her husband win the election.

Once her husband won and took office, President Biden’s attempt to apply a moratorium to deportations was stymied by a Trump-appointed judge. However, his administration was turning its attention to the thousands of asylum seekers waiting in Mexico. The MPP program had enrolled nearly 70,000 asylum seekers, but only 26,000 had open cases when Biden took office. Advocates argue that asylum seekers

whose MPP cases were closed should have a chance to appeal. Lawyers say the process was rife with due-process violations and that the program violated the United States’ own laws barring “refoulement,” forcing migrants to return to a country where they may be in danger.

On February 19, the Biden administration began processing asylum seekers with open MPP cases. The administration enlisted UNHCR to help with management, and despite logistical hurdles, Biden’s team processed hundreds every week. At the outset, the administration prioritized the Matamoros camp, which saw the asylum seekers at the Matamoros port of entry processed far more speedily than those at other ports of entry.

But because the administration is only processing those with open MPP cases, dozens of asylum seekers in the Matamoros camp were left behind. Lawyers prepared a joint motion to reopen the cases of

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 49

open MPP cases, and by the end of April the administration had processed more than 8,000 asylum seekers in the program.

Biden’s rhetoric and his scrapping of the MPP program has signaled a major reversal of the cruel policies of his predecessor. But his administration has also sought to temper expectations, knowing the challenges to fully reversing and reckoning with Trump’s immigration system. For their part, while acknowledging that wholly altering Trump’s immigration system cannot happen overnight, immigrant rights advocates criticize the administration’s defense of some Trump policies, even as Biden reverses others. Indeed, many immigrants’ own experiences along the border belie promises of safety and humanity and illustrate the dire need for haste.

WHEN I SAW THE Matamoros camp in late

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The nearly vacant tent camp for asylum seekers, located in a park in Matamoros, Mexico, in late March 2021

environments around the world, took up residence across the street and continued treating camp residents as well as other migrants. But staff said that the increased security made it difficult to treat remaining residents, including pregnant women.

“The mission of GRM is to establish that as migrants move north, they have continuity of care,” Mark McDonald, a project manager for GRM, told me, referring to the patient rapport the group has developed with asylum seekers. “We are elated to see

that people are crossing that have been in the camp for well over two years. But yesterday, we were denied entry at the gate to provide medical care.”

On March 8, with camp conditions deteriorating, the remaining asylum seekers collectively made the difficult decision to leave the camp and move to a shelter deeper in Matamoros. Some went to other shelters or apartments. They worried, however, that without the visibility of the camp they would be left behind and forgotten.

MARCIA BROWN

March, it was nearly vacant, as the Biden administration had begun processing asylum seekers with open MPP cases. The asylum seekers who remained had closed or otherwise complicated cases. On the final day of the camp’s existence, roughly 60 asylum seekers remained. With cruel irony, their dwindling numbers made them more vulnerable to abuse, though the camp had never been particularly safe.

In what amounted to a crackdown, the Mexican government had fenced the park and dispatched guards to prevent new migrants and asylum seekers from entering.

That followed its August 2020 decision to bar all newcomers and media from entering the camp, arguing it was a COVID risk, even though the pandemic had started much earlier. Critics called the policy a media blackout, and an attempt to obscure the international profile of the asylum seekers.

In March 2021, even the volunteer medical staff was relegated to a clinic in a neighboring building. Global Response Management (GRM), an international nonprofit organization that staffs medical personnel in crisis

Volunteers rejoiced that their friends had entered the U.S. but had already begun to miss both them and this unusual period in their own lives.

The day after they departed, volunteers were granted access to the camp to salvage what they could.

As the volunteers walked through the abandoned grounds, they told me of all the work that asylum seekers and volunteers had done to make the campground livable.

Trenches half a foot deep carved up the dusty earth. Solidarity Engineering, a women-led nonprofit, had designed and constructed the trenches to prevent flooding and disease by directing water around the tents. Proceeding through the camp, we saw several large water containers connected to sinks for washing clothes and to showers. Charging stations composed of power strips drilled to a center plywood pole had enabled residents to charge their phones.

Some families had assembled taller tents, stitching one tent atop another to ease cooking indoors. Old washing machines were recycled into stoves and connected to an underground electrical wire from a city line. A newly constructed soccer pitch lay in the center of the camp, and a playground stood empty by the camp’s edge. A “free store” still stood, where camp residents had been able to pick up anything they needed for free. That tent was now empty, strewn with packaged razors, CDs, Q-tips, multivitamins, and lone socks. At one point, the camp had 44 showers and three free stores.

Wandering through the empty campgrounds was bittersweet for some volunteers, who rejoiced that their friends had

entered the U.S. but had already begun to miss both them and this unusual period in their own lives. “I told myself I was not going to come back in here,” said Brendon Tucker, a Texas native who first arrived as a volunteer in 2018 and helped build much of the camp’s infrastructure. “It’s a weird feeling to be here now that it’s empty.” He walked between rows of unzipped, now abandoned tents that sliced the camp into a quasi–city grid, and spoke about the infrastructure volunteers and asylum seekers had constructed to make the park more livable, to give it more dignity. Even as he spoke, city workers were already deconstructing everything, piling tents and other belongings onto trucks, leaving chalky park grounds behind.

Bending over, Tucker retrieved an abandoned cowboy hat, smashed it atop his baseball cap, and continued surveying the remnants of what was once a small city— boxes of Band-Aids, toothbrushes, a child’s lone Croc. The scattered remnants of the encampment illustrated the rush to gather up lives led here, pack it into luggage, and cross into the U.S. in search of a new life.

THE CAMP MAY BE gone, but new migrants

and asylum seekers continue to arrive in Matamoros, and others in the MPP program who have yet to be processed remain. I met one such asylum seeker, Jaquelyn, who sat on the edge of the bed she shared with her nine-year-old daughter, as, clasping her hands, she told me her story.

She had left Guatemala in July 2019, leaving behind a husband and three other children. Her nine-year-old daughter needed medical attention. When they presented themselves at the border, they were taken into custody and expelled to Mexico as part of the MPP program. Together with other mothers also seeking asylum, Jaquelyn and ten others were piled into one taxi “packed like sardines,” she said, and driven to a hotel where they pooled their resources for two rooms.

Eventually, Jacquelyn found the tworoom rental, where she met with me nearly two years later. She described being unable

to move freely around the city. “You always have to be looking around to be sure no one is following you,” she said. “There are people who have been kidnapped and put in cars and disappeared, so it’s not safe.”

Jacquelyn became increasingly desperate about the wait and worried for her daughter’s deteriorating health. She paid someone to cross the Rio Grande, but the smuggler failed to inform the cartels in advance. When the mother and daughter were ready to cross, cartel members seized them, thrusting a gun to Jacquelyn’s head.

Threating to kill Jacquelyn, they demanded to know who she had paid. They photographed Jacquelyn and her daughter, returned them to their apartment, and took down their names. The cartel forbade Jacquelyn from trying to cross again. That’s why the two never leave their apartment and why her daughter doesn’t play outside anymore, she said.

Asylum seekers like Jacquelyn and her daughter are generally processed based on their enrollment date in MPP, but some asylum seekers have been given priority because of urgent health issues or other particular vulnerabilities. Felicia Rangel-Samponaro, a volunteer who has helped Jacquelyn find medical care for her daughter, said the two should be prioritized. The fact that the two have been living in an apartment rather than the encampment may have been slowing their processing. But on March 17, the pair received a call from UNHCR, informing them of their appointment to cross into the U.S. and await their court date here. The two are currently living in Michigan.

The administration has processed just over 8,000 asylum seekers out of the more than 25,000 eligible in phase one of unwinding MPP. That leaves thousands waiting with open cases and another 30,000 or more whose MPP cases are closed but who should be able to appeal, advocates say.

The special case of those in the Matamoros encampment who were able to appeal sets a precedent for those 30,000 others. But there

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 51

are thousands of new asylum seekers and migrants arriving at the border regularly.

Since March 2020, they have been barred from entry and barred from asylum.

AS THE PANDEMIC took hold, the Trump administration concocted a new restriction on immigrants and asylum seekers: the Title 42 order. Conceived under the Centers for Disease Control’s existing authority, the order bars entry to migrants and asylum seekers at the border, ostensibly to stop the spread of COVID-19. But numerous publichealth authorities have said that rationale is meritless. The border has remained open to Americans, who cross daily without so

52 PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2021

much as a coronavirus test. With Title 42 still in effect despite the change in administrations, the only way that asylum seekers can enter the U.S. is by having a pre-existing open MPP case.

By reversing some Trump policies but still enforcing others, Biden’s presidency has created both hope and despair among migrants and their advocates. When the administration began processing asylum seekers in MPP, other asylum seekers not in the MPP program or newly arrived at the border became optimistic. Administration officials’ pleas to migrants and asylum seekers to wait did not obviate the root causes compelling individuals and families to flee their homes.

In fact, the same day the remaining asylum seekers departed the Matamoros camp for other shelters and apartments, a new group of Honduran migrants arrived. They had wanted to join the camp, believing that

the protection and solidarity that the camp had represented could help them.

Hundreds of miles west, in Tijuana, another migrant encampment had already been forming since the day Biden began processing open MPP cases. First predominantly populated by Haitian asylum seekers, the camp was full of immigrants seeking refuge but not yet able to access the new Biden policies. According to Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, Haitian asylum seekers in the camp had been waiting between one and a half and five years for entry. Most were not enrolled in MPP, giving them no recourse but the hope that the visibility of sleeping in tents in sight of the port of entry would dramatize their plight.

Though El Chaparral Plaza tent camp in Tijuana is currently home to about 2,000

DENISE CATHEY / AP PHOTO

Thousands of asylum seekers have been processed under MPP, but pandemicrelated health orders have still kept most immigrants out of the U.S.

Immigrant rights advocates are wondering why Biden’s rhetoric isn’t yet fully matched by his actions. migrants and asylum seekers, few Haitian families now remain, volunteers said.

The target of anti-Black racism from other migrants—even death threats—forced them to seek shelter elsewhere. As one Haitian asylum seeker told Al Jazeera in April, “The discrimination is very strong from other migrants, but even from Mexican organisations working in the camp.”

PAST THE 100-DAY MARK of the Biden administration, immigrant rights advocates are wondering why Biden’s rhetoric isn’t yet fully matched by his actions. Biden has extended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Venezuelans and Burmese, but advocates also want the program extended to refugees from Haiti, where political unrest and a stagnated recovery from a vicious 2010 hurricane have sent thousands fleeing, and to those from Cameroon, where five armed conflicts have enveloped the country.

It’s not as if the new administration hasn’t been working at reversing Trump policies.

Biden has proposed sweeping legislation to create new pathways for citizenship and legal residency, and established a task force to reunite children separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. (Thus far, just four families of over a thousand separated families have been reunited.) His administration has ended the asylum cooperative agreements with Central American countries, which restricted eligibility for asylum seekers, and moved to restart the Central American Minors program, an Obama-era

strategy to create more legal pathways for humanitarian protection.

Nevertheless, the administration has also worked hard not to appear “weak” on the border, and in mid-March brokered a deal with Mexico in which that country enforced stricter migration controls along its southern border in exchange for vaccines. As the number of unaccompanied children in government custody spiked to unprecedented levels, the administration repeatedly told migrants, “Don’t come.” To its credit, the administration worked around the clock to move children into the care of sponsors, but the situation became fodder for Republicans to pillory the president on immigration. In response, it appears that the president’s actions on immigration have fallen short of his rhetoric. Biden’s commitment to end border wall construction, for instance, is belied by reports that the administration has been considering filling “gaps” in Trump’s construction. The administration has also not yet reinstated the immigration judges’ union, a group that has campaigned for greater judicial independence and due process in immigration proceedings.

Title 42 endures, and Biden officials defend it. “The use of Title 42 is not a source of pleasure, but rather frankly a source of pain,” said Biden’s secretary of homeland security, Alexandro Mayorkas, on April 30.

“But it is something that is condoned by the reality that we are building an asylum system in a COVID environment, and we have other challenges, as well as we inherited the dismantlement of our operational capabilities to administer our nation’s asylum laws.”

The order has resulted in hundreds of thousands of expulsions and a virtual end to asylum, except for those with open cases.

The Human Rights First tracking report has tallied 1,544 public reports of murder, rape, kidnapping, torture, and assault against people returned to Mexico under the policy.

A separate report documents 490 reports of kidnappings, rape, and other violent attacks on people returned to Mexico under Title 42 just since Biden became president.

“The Trump admin’s longheld goal was to block refugees/asylum seekers under public health grounds,” tweeted Kennji Kizuka, associate director for refugee protection at

Human Rights First. “The pandemic gave them a pretext to do so. It’s shocking that Biden’s @CDCgov & @CDCDirector have not reversed this xenophobic order orchestrated

by Stephen Miller.”

The administration has begun to revise parts of the order. In early April, Biden began allowing more migrant families and those with particular vulnerabilities attempting to seek asylum to cross. Since November 2020, the government has not expelled unaccompanied children, though recent reports have indicated that the Biden administration is actually expelling some Mexican children under Title 42 after consultation with the Mexican consulate. Nevertheless, the order largely remains in place. For those still in Matamoros, the border remains closed unless they have an open MPP case.

Immigration attorneys contend the order is illegal and have won an injunction against applying the rule to unaccompanied minors.

As Lee Gelernt, lead counsel for the ACLU’s suit against the Trump administration, told the Los Angeles Times, “There is zero daylight between the Biden administration and Trump administration’s position.” The ACLU is continuing its lawsuit challenging the rule and is in talks with the Biden administration about it. As we went to press, those talks appear to have produced some incremental changes. On May 18, CBS News reported that as a result of those negotiations, the U.S. will admit 250 vulnerable asylum seekers per day but it has not ended its overall policy.

Some believe that Title 42 has contributed to the high numbers of unaccompanied children in government custody earlier this year. A recent CBS News report revealed that more than 2,100 unaccompanied children crossed the border between January 20 and April 5 after their families had been expelled under Title 42, indicating that some families

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 53

had made the anguished choice to send their children over the border alone.

As of publication, Title 42 deportations have hardly declined. The Haitian Bridge Alliance has documented that a May 7 deportation flight to Haiti was the 33rd since February 1. Biden had earlier announced a 100-day moratorium on deportation flights, but the executive order was blocked by a Trump-appointed federal judge. As of April 30, Biden’s administration had deported more than 300,000 migrants, according to United We Dream, a youth-led immigrant rights organization.

Many wonder if the initial aims of Biden’s immigration policies have become a casualty of his broader agenda. According to such speculations, as the GOP searches for a weak spot in his popularity, Biden understands he

54 PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2021

could be vulnerable on the issue. The refugee cap controversy actually showed he could be attacked from both right and left. Biden had initially promised to raise the refugee cap to 62,500 for the remainder of the fiscal year. But on April 17, he announced he would keep the cap at 15,000. After coming under a storm of criticism from not just immigrant advocates but many Democratic members of Congress, the president reversed course and announced that he would keep to his promise of 62,500.

But the Tijuana camp was established in January, just as the Biden administration took over. And despite Biden’s changes to MPP, the camp remains a temporary home for hundreds of families seeking asylum.

In Reynosa, 50 miles west of Matamoros, another new camp has also established itself. On April 19, asylum seekers there held a protest, chanting, “Biden, let us in!”

“It’s a legitimate tent city,” said RangelSamponaro, who runs the Sidewalk School, an organization that began in the Matamoros encampment to educate the children there. Her organization has since built a

school in Reynosa. In early May, local volunteers estimated there may be as many as 170 families living just a block from the international bridge, The Monitor reported.

The Sidewalk School has expanded to nine cities along the border, employing asylum seekers as teachers and building virtual classrooms, the school’s growth an illustration of how Title 42 forces asylum seekers to wait in Mexico—just like MPP. As more asylum seekers continue to arrive in Matamoros and Reynosa, volunteers said they fear the old border dynamics may be repeating themselves. Of the Reynosa encampment, Rangel-Samponaro said, “It’s like watching Matamoros all over again, except this time we have experience on how to run an encampment. We just now know how to run it more efficiently, which is very sad to say.”

Bertha Bermudéz contributed reporting and translation.

ERIC GAY / AP PHOTO

Clarisa Ladaverry and her nineyear-old daughter Monica sit at the Matamoros tent encampment in January 2019.

CULTURE Minority Rule

South, led by South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun, sought to protect slavery by asserting the right of states to nullify federal laws. This also failed.

Then in 1841, Calhoun and his allies invented the precursor to the modern filibuster—the tac-

legacy persists to this day.

With the crushing of Reconstruction in 1877 and the adoption of state Jim Crow laws to keep Blacks subservient, Southern politicians feared another burst of federal civil rights legislation. They regularly resorted to Calhoun’s tactic of talking a bill to death. Only in 1917 was the modern filibuster formalized with the enactment of Rule 22, giving the Senate the right to cut off debate with a twothirds vote. This was intended to limit the traditional talking filibuster. But ironically, the

tic of holding the Senate floor indefinitely to kill a bill. Despite delays, however, the Senate still functioned by majority rule.

The republic literally came apart over what was meant by minority rights. After decades of failed compromises, it took a Civil War to settle the question of slavery. But the race issue was far from settled, and Calhoun’s

rule gave the Southern minority just the weapon they needed: If they could muster just one-third of the Senate, they could block any legislation. From 1877 until 1964, Jentleson notes, “the only bills that were stopped by filibusters were civil rights bills.”

Invoking cloture for the first time to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 71 senators who

Given the Republican ferocity in trying to destroy basic rights, the road back to democracy is not civic but political.

BY R O BE R T K U T T N E R B

MEG KINNARD / AP PHOTO

A

s Republicans have increasingly become a permanent minority in America, they have resorted to ever cruder schemes to cling to power. This destruction of democracy has been intertwined with the effort to maintain white supremacy as nonwhites became a growing share of the population. The filibuster is both the emblem and the instrument of this minority rule, as well as the connection between slavery, Jim Crow, and today’s strategically racist Republican Party.

Adam Jentleson’s excellent Kill Switch traces the central role of the filibuster as a vehicle both for racial suppression and for Republican minority rule. From the beginning of the American republic, as Jentleson recounts, slaveholding states promoted anti-majority provisions for fear that some future national government might try to limit slavery. In the twisted ideology of the Southern slaveholding elite, they and not subjugated Blacks were the aggrieved minority whose rights had to be protected from a majority that didn’t appreciate the South’s “peculiar institution.”

The founders of the republic included multiple checks and balances, Jentleson notes, but the filibuster was not among them. The Articles of Confederation, requiring votes of twothirds of the states for national legislation, had been a disaster.

At the Constitutional Convention, Southern delegates tried to replicate some of this weakness piecemeal. They “pushed for a provision requiring a

O O

K

S

supermajority to pass all legislation governing interstate commerce and the navigation of waterways,” Jentleson writes.

This was rejected. A supermajority, Hamilton warned in Federalist 22, “is one of those refinements which, in practice, A statue of pro-slavery South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun is lifted out of Charleston in June 2020.

has an effect the reverse of what is expected from it in theory.”

He added, prophetically, that the result would be “tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.” Yet today, the filibuster is treated by its defenders as if it were part of the Constitution.

In the Jacksonian era, the

MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 55

CULTURE

voted “aye” included more than half of the Senate’s Republicans. But far from signaling the eclipse of the filibuster or a new era of bipartisanship on civil rights, this one-off victory prefigured a new age of minority rule. Calhoun would triumph after all. Just four years later, Richard Nixon devised his Southern strategy to peel away white voters resentful of the changes in the racial order.

Republicans and Dixiecrats soon reversed roles. The racist “Solid South” remained; only now it was a Republican South.

Jentleson, a former aide to Sen. Harry Reid and student of Senate history, narrates the mutation of the filibuster from a special gimmick for blocking civil rights laws into an all-purpose anti-majority device for general obstruction. The two-thirds requirement was reduced to 60 percent in 1975. But by the time Mitch McConnell became Senate Republican leader in 2006, it was taken for granted that to legislate in the Senate, you needed 60 votes. Under Obama, the Republicans routinely filibustered nearly everything Democrats proposed.

The takeaway here is the direct lineage from the warped Southern conception of anti-democratic “minority rights” to defend slavery, and the racist use of the anti-democratic filibuster to maintain Jim Crow, to the assault on democracy by Republicans in the 21st century. If we lose the democratic republic created

by America’s constitutional founders, it will be the ultimate legacy of America’s original sin.

THE METASTASIZED filibuster has

epitomized Republican minority rule but is only one tactic among many.

Thanks to extreme gerrymandering in the House and the original gerrymander of equal state representation in the Senate, even when Democrats win a majority of votes Republicans can control Congress. And thanks to the Electoral College, another anti-democratic feature of the Constitution, the winning Republican candidate lost the popular vote in both 2000 and 2016. In 2020, Joe Biden won his key Electoral College states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan,

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Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) by a total of less than 300,000 votes, but carried the national popular vote by more than seven million. The Electoral College also gives myriad state officials the opportunity to obstruct or overturn the verdict of the voters, a fate narrowly averted in 2020.

The more that Republicans find themselves in the national minority, the more they resort to such anti-democratic tactics as racial gerrymandering, selective closure of polling places, racially targeted voter ID requirements, phantom allegations of voter fraud, and extralegal purges of the voter rolls, as well as routine use of the filibuster. The broader story of democratic decay has been the subject of shelves full of books. To save yourself from having to read all of these, you cannot do better than to consult Michael Klarman’s magisterial article, “The Degradation of American Democracy—and the Court,” which consumes 260 pages of the November 2020 Harvard Law Review.

Unlike most law review articles, this one is written in narrative style and compelling prose. It deserves to be a short book.

Klarman adds telling details to the story that we all sort of know, and superbly connects the dots. His subjects include an introduction on how autocrats go about destroying democracy, and Trump’s similarity to other autocrats. For those who can stand to relive those awful days, Klarman reminds us of all the ways Trump set about destroying democracy. He then connects this to the deeper assaults on democracy, including voter suppression, the use of media devoted to Big Lies, the substitution of money for speech, and the Republican penchant for ideological and tactical hardball while feckless Democrats kept pursuing bipartisanship.

Not surprisingly, Klarman, as a professor of constitutional law, emphasizes the use of right-wing courts as abettors and enablers of democratic demolition. Most readers will be aware of the landmark cases, such as Buckley v. Valeo and its progeny in defining money as

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speech, ending with Citizens United, and Shelby County v. Holder in gutting the Voting Rights Act. But as Klarman recounts, these cases are just a small portion of how courts have systematically and insidiously helped Republicans destroy American democracy. In the 2008 case Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the court green-lighted voter ID requirements plainly intended to depress minority and Democratic voting. And in 2018, in Husted v.

A. Philip Randolph Institute, the high court allowed targeted purges of voter rolls. This direct complicity of the Supreme Court in partisan and racial voter suppression also has antecedents in the role of the courts in helping to preserve slavery, most notably in Dred Scott (1857), which denied free Blacks all rights of citizenship.

Klarman does leave out one important part of the story. Democracy is not just about what voters, legislators, presidents, and courts do. It’s about what citizens do. While Republicans and their judicial allies were systematically sabotaging the elements of electoral democracy, the citizen engagement that breathes life into formalistic process was also being weakened. More precisely, citizen participation was being weakened among non-elites. As I wrote in a piece for the Prospect called “Tocqueville for Toffs,” Alexis de Tocqueville’s admiring characterization of Americans of “all stations of life … forever forming associations” has ceased to describe regular people, while elites are networked as never before, producing disproportionate influence for the rich.

The definitive books on this trend—three of them over more than two decades—have been written

by Kay Schlozman and colleagues.

Their most recent work, Unequal and Unrepresented, documents the worsening of trends they first identified in their 1995 book Voice and Equality. Institutions of working-class representation, notably labor unions, have continued to be assaulted. Instruments of recruitment of lower-income people into political participation are far weaker than avenues for participation and

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influence of elites. Digital forms of political expression and participation are tilted toward elites. On every measure of political engagement, from registering and voting to contacting officials, the class gradient has only worsened, as has trust in public institutions. So even without the explicit assaults on basic democratic processes, our democracy was already softened up for the more deliberate blows.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT all this? The books offering remedy fall into two broad categories. One category provides a wide assortment of ideas for strengthening democracy, sometimes mindful of their political realism, but sometimes not. For instance, Alex Keyssar’s recent Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? is a brilliant history, analysis, and critique of one of the most undemocratic elements of our supposed democracy—and another antidemocratic device whose roots were partly racist, since direct election of the president would have prevented the South from counting the votes of slaves who could not vote. (Even in the Jim Crow era, when Black citizens were denied the vote in much of

Civic reformers should not be abashed about the goal of taking power and should become more effective at understanding how to attain it.

the South, the Old Confederacy still kept its full Electoral College votes.)

But as Keyssar ruefully acknowledges, getting rid of the Electoral College will be no mean feat, especially since so many states benefit from the status quo.

The Harvard political scientist Jane Mansbridge makes the case for broad use of citizen assemblies, both as a way of engaging people more directly in the business of governing, and to give citizens who think they have nothing in common the experience of realizing that once they get in the same room and thrash out practical problems, they find they have much in common with their perceived enemies. This idea is a cousin to the long-standing work by James Fishkin and others, showing that “policy juries” can reduce polarization and build trust. While this concept would surely enhance democracy in a civic sense, the question is whether it is powerful enough to overcome the crudely anti-democratic ploys of one of our two major parties.

Ganesh Sitaraman’s two books The Great Democracy and The Public Option (written with Anne Alstott) are filled with ingenious

ideas for strengthening the public sector and also bolstering our democracy. Sitaraman calls for national service, a revival of antitrust, and a greater recognition of the connection between economic equity and political democracy. He proposes public funding of journalism, better welcoming of immigrants, corporate reform, and financial democracy. These books are also filled with smart ideas for the strengthening of public institutions such as social banking, and demonstrate (in The Public Option) that true public institutions, such as public schools and public child care, are more efficient as well as more equitable than private ones trying to carry out public purposes.

Sitaraman is persuasive on the point that ideas like these would feed on themselves by restoring a virtuous circle of citizen engagement with government and citizen trust in government, as well as by enhancing democratic institutions directly. But the more that these creative ideas promise to enhance democracy and revive an effective public sector, the more fiercely Republicans will oppose them. The dilemma recalls the Depression-era

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line: If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs.

A second cluster of books looks more explicitly at the politics of engaging more citizens, and frankly electing more Democrats, both for partisan and ideological purposes and to garner enough votes to repair democracy itself. Upending American Politics, a collection of studies edited by Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo, undertakes a systematic examination of what went wrong on the ground in 2016, and what went right in 2018. One phenomenon that has advantaged Republicans, especially Trumpist ones, is the growth of extra-party organizations such as the Koch network that work hand in glove with Republican infrastructure. On the Democratic side, relations between the institutional party and independent progressive or “resistance” groups are more catchas-catch-can and sometimes fraught.

Nonetheless, it all came together in 2018 to produce big Democratic midterm gains. The lesson, Skocpol concludes, is to make the election of Democrats a broad project that welcomes a wide spectrum of support. If we can get that done and elect more Democrats, Biden’s leftward shift suggests that the policies will take care of themselves.

The connection between the repair of civic life and the election of progressives is addressed in Civic Power, a valuable review of the democracy literature by K. Sabeel Rahman and Hollie Russon Gilman. They are rightly skeptical of what they call the “good governance ethos.” They write: The fundamental problem with the good governance ethos is that it rejects the value and importance of political disagreement and contestation. This is what is most structurally insufficient about the attempts to revive democracy through civility, transparency, rationality, or anticorruption: these efforts at their core share a dislike of politics itself.

As a result, they conclude, goodgovernance reformers tend to ignore the deeper roots of democratic failure in America—deep disparities of wealth and opportunity that in turn lead to disparities of influence and power. There is a small subset

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of bipartisan policies that repair the civic fabric, such as nonpartisan districting commissions, that occasionally have received Republican support, though most have been created by referenda. In a very few states, such as Kentucky, Republicans have been willing to support measures that reduce barriers to voting, because they find it in their interest. But given the ferocity of the Republicans in undermining the most basic of rights, it is hard to make the general case that bipartisan civic reforms are the road to stronger democracy.

Civic Power is especially good at distinguishing between ideas that are potentially useful in enhancing democracy but wishful as a road back to the power needed to get them enacted.

Civic reformers, therefore, should not be abashed about the goal of taking power and should become more effective at understanding how to attain it. “Civic power,” Rahman and Gilman write, “rests on the ability of constituencies to organize into durable, and effective, mass-member organizations capable of exercising political power.” Much of the book is a nuanced discussion of which civic reforms enhance political power, and which strategies of organizing are effective. Today’s progressives are dedicated to enhancing democracy. Elect enough of them to power, and democracy reform will take care of itself.

It’s important to get this right.

Over the long run, it’s true that social factors such as the weakened avenues for engagement of working-class people and the double-edged impact of the internet and social media pose challenges to democracy. It’s also true, as I’ve argued in other articles and books, that capture of governments by elites and the destruction of an equitable social contract has caused people to lose faith in leaders and in democracy itself. But in the United States, the cruder and more deliberate assaults on the most fundamental elements of democracy are not a symmetrical weakening of “guardrails” by broad social forces; they are the partisan work of Republicans.

And yes, Democratic presidents as

well as Republican ones were partly complicit in the erosion of democracy, by expanding executive power, secrecy, and the surveillance state; taking the nation into undeclared wars; weakening the democratic accountability of large corporations; and letting donors speak louder than voters. Yet under Democrats, civil and voting rights were enlarged and defended; and the most fundamental democratic right of citizens, to vote leaders in or out, was expanded.

Today, the project of reclaiming and reviving democracy is necessarily a partisan one. Though civic innovations are valuable in their own sphere, today’s Republican Party is so thoroughly committed to destroying democracy that the necessary repair can begin only when the Republicans are annihilated at the polls and some kind of successor party that accepts democracy emerges. Given the degree of voter suppression, that epic defeat will require a successful Biden presidency whose benefits may convert independents and former Trump voters, as well as an unprecedented citizen mobilization to vote. One of our two major parties is likely to be committed to destroying democracy for some time to come.

Until a successor party emerges, the task of defenders of democracy is to assure that Republicans suffer crushing defeats—and to admit that this enterprise must be political before it can once again be civic. n

Other works mentioned in this review: Michael Klarman, “The Degradation of American Democracy—and the Court,” Harvard Law Review, November 2020 Kay Lehman Schlozman, Henry L. Brady and Sidney Verba, Unequal and Unrepresented Alex Keyssar, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?

Ganesh Sitaraman, The Great Democracy Ganesh Sitaraman and Anne Alstott, The Public Option Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo, editors, Upending American Democracy K. Sabeel Rahman and Russon Gilman, Civic Power: Rebuilding American Democracy in an Era of Crisis

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Wrestling With the New Deal

will itself become narrative ammunition for a new slate of arguments.

Fighting over famous dead people is just what intellectuals do, of course. But the hold that FDR maintains on American public discourse is extraordinary, even for an American president. The left does not wage magazine wars with itself over Abraham Lincoln or Martin Van Buren.

American intellectuals obsess over FDR because, as historian Eric Rauchway demonstrates in his admirable new book Why the New Deal Matters, he saved the American project itself, for better and for worse. The Great Depression that Roosevelt ended was not merely a collapse of gross domestic product and employment figures; it was a full-blown political crisis that toppled regimes around the world and called into question the very legitimacy of democratic governance. Under FDR, Rauchway writes, “democracy in the United States, flawed and compromised as it was, proved it could emerge from a severe crisis not only intact but stronger.” When we fight over the New Deal, we are really arguing about the very meaning of America.

The programs Roosevelt put together may not have met a Platonic ideal of modern progress, but they saved American democracy itself.

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n 2014, an up-and-coming writer named Ta-Nehisi Coates made a landmark case for reparations in The Atlantic, which took aim at, among other targets, one of the most revered figures in the liberal pantheon: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Detailing the failures of New Deal housing policy for Black America, Coates told readers that “Roosevelt’s New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow.”

Cardi B was nonplussed. “I love Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” the multi-platinum rapper told GQ four years later. “He helped us get over the Depression, all while he was in a wheelchair … if it wasn’t for him, old people wouldn’t even get Social Security.”

Intellectuals broadly affiliated with the American left have been fighting a quiet culture war over FDR for nearly a decade. Sometimes the battle is between the left and the

center, at other times among vying ultraleft fringes. Bernie Sanders admires FDR, even as some of the Vermont senator’s most ardent supporters denounce his hero as a capitalist sellout. Otis Rolley of the Rockefeller Foundation claims the New Deal made racial inequality worse; Marxist scholar Adolph Reed Jr. dismisses such reasoning as specious. Almost every month, a major progressive magazine publishes a take on FDR, and a flurry of responses ensue.

The waters have calmed since President Joe Biden redesigned the Oval Office by placing a massive portrait of FDR above the Resolute Desk.

For the next few years at least, Roosevelt will remain Officially Good.

Opinion writers are now devoting their energies to explaining the various ways Biden can prove himself as excellent and extraordinary as FDR. But in time, intellectuals will get back to squabbling, and Biden’s admiration for the 32nd president

When we fight over the New Deal, we are really arguing about the very meaning of America.

way’s third book on the subject, and at this point in his career as a scholar, he no longer needs to argue for the New Deal’s overall economic effectiveness. But a few numbers culled from his earlier work can aid the uninitiated. In the first three full years of FDR’s presidency, GDP grew by 10.8 percent, 8.9 percent, and 12.9 percent, respectively, a record that has been matched only once in subsequent decades—by FDR, during World War II. This extraordinary growth was not a statistical quirk.

Rauchway notes that the unemployment rate fell from over 20 percent to less than 10 percent as 6.6 million people went back to work.

FDR’s success with unemployment was a matter of mathematical dispute for years due to the ideological eccentricities of the official statisticians, who did not count those employed by the federal government as employed. And FDR’s war on unemployment did suffer a setback in 1936 when he changed course and decided to try and balance the

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federal budget. When that backfired, deficits were back, and by the time America had committed to entering World War II, domestic unemployment had essentially ceased to exist.

FDR was re-elected again, and again, and again for a reason.

The New Deal worked. The questions that remain for serious minds today are how it worked and who it worked for.

Rauchway seeks to answer these inquiries with deep dives into specific programs, a strategy that allows him to examine the way different regions and communities understood the issues posed by the New Deal at the time. This is a refreshing change of pace for anyone familiar with the comprehensive declarations of justice and injustice that dominate the New Deal Take Complex (The New Deal Was Racist/No, the New Deal Was Not Racist/It’s Time to Stop Talking About the New Deal).

In the process, even seasoned scholars will find much to learn.

Rauchway’s discussion of the “Indian New Deal” is particularly insightful. FDR’s Bureau of Indian Affairs canceled debts owed by Indian nations to the federal government,

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subsidized Indian cattle ranches, and spent millions building hospitals, schools, and sewage treatment facilities for local Indian governments, employing members of relevant tribes to perform the work.

These policies were popular. But New Dealers also often ignored input from tribal leaders about the way particular policies would work. As a result, one of the most wrongheaded New Deal agricultural programs—the mass slaughter of livestock—proved uniquely disruptive to Indian nations.

The New Deal succeeded in raising agricultural prices for distressed farmers and put an end to decades of structural financial strain, an achievement born of both macroeconomic stabilization and the implementation of sector-specific price policy. Killing livestock was part of this program; by reducing supply, prices would rise, making it more profitable to raise sheep, goats, pigs, or whatever else.

The policy was, at best, deeply inhumane. But as Rauchway details, for Navajo farmers the loss of goats, sheep, and other small herding animals “destroyed a traditional source of subsistence … leaving some families

hungry and even more desperate.”

The slaughter program forced many ranchers and farmers into wage labor, where despite successful New Deal efforts to create more employment, Navajo workers could expect to earn much less than white workers performing similar tasks.

The New Dealer responsible for these outrages, Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, was also, paradoxically, a staunch defender of Native American political autonomy. After hearing demands at a conference of Indian activists in Washington, D.C., in 1934 to halt the privatization of Indian lands and return them, to whatever extent possible, to tribal authority, Collier put the policy into practice in federal legislation.

A majority of American Indians and American Indian tribes supported Collier’s law, but the enthusiasm was far from uniform. Joe Irving of the Crow denounced the program’s end to privatization as “socialist,” while Navajo leader Jacob Morgan argued it would hamper Indian assimilation into American society. The Indian New Deal, as it was called, was popular with American Indians. It was also tremendously controversial.

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Roosevelt inaugurated a titanic shift in Black voting away from the party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

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Not every New Deal program is so riddled with nuanced conflict.

Coates, for instance, is unambiguously correct to note that the New Deal’s affordable-housing provisions reinforced segregation. The Federal Housing Administration and the Home Owners Loan Corporation declared Black neighborhoods a serious credit risk, relied on racist banks to issue new government-backed low-interest mortgages to low-income home buyers, and required loans in white neighborhoods to include “restrictive covenants” banning the sale of the home to a Black family. The Black homeownership rate doubled between 1930 and 1960 to 40 percent—but 70 percent of white families owned their homes in 1960, and they owned homes that were more valuable, precisely because Black families had been excluded from their neighborhoods.

But the New Deal meant more to Black America than housing policy.

Had it not, Roosevelt would not have inaugurated the titanic shift in Black voting away from the party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Even after President Herbert Hoover’s disastrous navigation of the Depression, Roosevelt lost the Black vote by roughly 2-to-1 in 1932.

After four years of the New Deal, he won the Black vote by nearly 3-to-1 in 1936. This was the beginning of a political realignment that persists to this day.

Roosevelt achieved this by improving the overall economic picture and easing the legal landscape for labor unions, which allowed the Congress of Industrial Organizations to bargain effectively on behalf of Black workers in the high-wage manufacturing sector of the upper Midwest. By the 1940s, Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practice Committee— established to enforce his Executive Order 8802 banning racial discrimination in the defense industry—was successfully pressuring Northern manufacturers into hiring more Black workers and raising their pay.

These victories largely excluded the South, where the overwhelming majority of Black adults were disenfranchised, and where the

FEPC’s efforts were effectively nullified by local white leaders. Rauchway examines the New Deal in the South through the Tennessee Valley Authority, a smashing success for rural infrastructure and public-works spending that brought an entire region into the 20th century by generating and distributing electricity.

The TVA also proved reluctant to hire Black workers and eager to assign those Black men it did bring on board to the lowest-status and lowest-wage positions available.

As Rauchway details, J. Max Bond, a Black TVA administrator specifically charged with overseeing Black employment, was so frustrated by the situation that he surreptitiously encouraged an NAACP investigation of the entire TVA project. Black literary scholar J. Saunders Redding took his own tour of the TVA and concluded, “Democracy’s taking an awful beating on the TVA,” but ultimately decided he was “not discouraged” because even under these discriminatory conditions, what was offered to Black TVA workers proved better than what he’d seen for other Black working-class communities.

Rauchway seems ambivalent about Redding’s assessment. It is included not to prove an ultimate moral summation of the TVA’s sins and virtues, but to demonstrate the controversy that even the New Deal’s most obviously objectionable elements engendered among the very peoples it wronged. After centuries of oppression and years of depression, the way forward for Black and Native leaders was not obvious in the 1930s. Knowing when to fight and when to leave well enough alone was not an easy calculation. Often people did not even agree on the direction in which progress lay.

Progress is by its very nature unsatisfying. When Germany surrendered in 1945, America did not speak of progress against Nazism, it declared victory. The New Deal’s triumph over domestic fascism proved so comprehensive that we have all but forgotten the threat ever existed.

But had the New Deal emerged victorious over domestic injustice, we would feel no need to fight over it.

Rauchway’s most engaging chapter

WHY THE NEW DEAL MATTERS

BY ERIC RAUCHWAY

Yale University Press

is devoted to the harrowing tale of the Bonus Army—a group of frustrated, unemployed World War I veterans led by an admirer of fascist Prime Minister Benito Mussolini who marched on Washington for weeks in 1932, only to be purged from the nation’s capital by another scion of authoritarian violence, Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Blatantly disobeying orders from President Hoover, MacArthur rolled tanks to disperse the veterans, an act of military defiance against civilian authority.

When Roosevelt was elected, his swift rejuvenation of American democracy rendered this showdown between rival would-be fascists a historical footnote. When a similar bonus army arrived to greet his administration, FDR responded not with tanks, but with economic relief, and a visit from his wife Eleanor.

American democracy at its best is only a shadow of the Platonic ideal.

But however we might critique individual decisions or programs, as Rauchway emphasizes, the threat of a far-right takeover in the 1930s was very real. The New Deal beat it back by reinventing American government, from the electrical grid to the course of rivers to Social Security to farm support to the buildings where we go to work and our children attend school. And in the process, it established a new democratic promise for the country: a commitment that the American government would and could be an expression of peaceful common purpose for all Americans. This promise was not fulfilled in the 1930s, but the world we live in today would be unrecognizable without it.

“The New Deal matters,” Rauchway writes, “because we all live in it; it gives structure to our lives in ways we do not ordinarily bother to count or catalog. When we imagine the end of the world as we know it, the world we are thinking might end is the one the New Deal built.” n Zachary D. Carter is a writer-inresidence with the Omidyar Network and the Hewlett Foundation. He is the author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.

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Cicely Tyson: A Shining Titan of Black Excellence In an exceptional memoir, one of the greatest actresses in American film deconstructs her craft and bears witness to history.

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his week, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences celebrated Cicely Tyson during the Oscars’ memorial tribute honoring the careers of film icons who had passed away since the last awards ceremony. It is fitting that Tyson died just two days after her memoir Just as I Am was published in January. Perhaps even more fitting, within days the long-awaited story of her life surged to number one on bestseller lists and, ultimately, into multiple printings.

At the ripe old age of 96, Tyson had finally committed the details of her life to the page, and so her job was done. She was free to move on, flowers firmly in hand, and with an ironclad grip on her legacy. The star of stage and screen had a career that spanned six decades and accolades

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that included three Emmys, a Tony, an honorary Oscar—the first for a Black woman—and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. The quiet, skinny girl born to immigrants from the tiny isle of Nevis in the West Indies died as she lived— asserting and reinforcing the importance of her work and her contributions to the history of Black arts.

Tyson, with an assist from author Michelle Burford, writes with clarity and frankness about her time both in and out of the spotlight. This portrait gives the star’s many decades the space to both breathe and surprise. From unflinching accounts of her parents’ tumultuous marriage to the trials of her own relationship with legendary jazz musician Miles Davis, Tyson mines every aspect of her life for meaning and significance,

The American Theater Wing honors Cicely Tyson at its annual gala in New York, September 2016.

ascribing her career choices to divine intervention, luck, and hard work.

This hefty tome exists because the legendary actress finally decided that she “[had] something to say” and the ebbs and flows of her life are so momentous as to be almost fictional.

Indeed, Tyson recounts how she was scouted by a photographer right on the streets of New York, as if living in the movie of her own life. Initially waylaid by a teen pregnancy and a subsequent unwanted marriage, Tyson had already lived a whole life before she was discovered as a model and eventually made her way to the stage. But when she finally arrived, she made her presence known.

Tyson describes the very intentional direction of her artistic career and painstakingly details her philosophy for choosing roles. She writes proudly of her star turns in Sounder, Roots, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Her experiences promoting Sounder, her first lead role, made her more aware of the bigotry that surrounded her when a white reporter admitted that he was surprised to feel empathy for the film’s Black characters. And so, in 1972, Tyson refocused her efforts on avoiding roles that leaned into stereotypes or indignities. The actor began taking roles she felt would venerate Black women and actively counteract the common assumptions about their humanity or lack thereof. In the TV drama East Side/ West Side, Tyson became the first Black woman in a starring television role—and the first Black TV actress to “reveal my hair in its bare-naked state.” That achievement helped spark the natural hair movement, and those tendrils remain in the cultural landscape today.

Alongside Tyson’s focus on roles that showcased the dignity of the women she knew and grew up with was a particular concern for respectability that has since fallen out of fashion. She recounts at length her distaste for the Blaxploitation films that blossomed in the 1970s, deeming them stereotypical fare that reveled in white America’s worst cultural assumptions about Black people. To her, Black artists and audiences could not and should not attempt to reclaim

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or reframe these stories of flashy, shameless criminals prone to vice. She believed, instead, that these movies revictimized Black people by encouraging them to applaud the limits of the racist white imagination, which could not see Black people as anything other than pimps and drug dealers. It’s an understandable perspective, but it discounts the achievements of actresses like Pam Grier, who was the first Black woman to star in an action film, 1973’s Coffy. However, viewed through the political lens of the early ’70s as the civil rights movement continued to reckon with the assassination of Martin Luther King, it makes sense that Tyson concentrated on work that she felt elevated the race.

However, Tyson’s preoccupation with respectability was most likely a reaction to her mother’s rejection of both her teen pregnancy and her choice to be an actor. A traditional Christian woman in the West Indian tradition, Tyson’s mother was very sensitive to perceptions of impropriety, especially given her husband’s tendency to embarrass her with his very public infidelity. When Tyson was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar in 1973 for her performance in Sounder, she lost to Liza Minnelli

who starred in Cabaret. But Tyson believed that proving her mother wrong and finally getting her blessing was the real achievement. On Hollywood’s biggest stage, she had at last received, “the affirmation of the dear woman who gave me birth.”

Finally, Tyson writes candidly about her relationships with her creative contemporaries and creates vivid portraits of performers who were people before they were legends. She is frank about her tempestuous relationship and marriage to an ailing and drug-addicted Miles Davis and her legal spat with Elizabeth Taylor over back wages. Tyson rose to fame alongside her cousin, the classical pianist Don Shirley, landed in the same acting class as Marilyn Monroe, and dodged Marlon Brando’s flirtations. She collaborated with James Earl Jones and Maya Angelou in Jean Genet’s The Blacks and observed Diahann Carroll’s long affair with Sidney Poitier.

Tyson breathes life into people who were as messy and scandalous as one would expect of young and passionate artists. In her lifelong quest to be a conduit for the human experience, she gives her colleagues and friends the space to be themselves.

Miles Davis and Cicely Tyson, Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, 1982

JUST AS I AM

BY CICELY TYSON

HarperCollins

Cicely Tyson’s story is long because it matches her impact. Clocking in at a little over 400 pages, every chapter and punctuation mark has been earned. Tyson leaves behind not just a record of her own life, but a living history of a generation of talented, creative, and enterprising artists.

But first and foremost, Just as I Am tells the stories of mid-20th-century Black American women and the hardships they faced as they labored to be appreciated for their intellectual contributions and their humanity—and how one actor sought to tell those stories: “I want to be recalled as one who squared my shoulders in the service of Black women, as one who made us walk taller and envision greater for ourselves. I want to know that I did the very best that I could with what God gave me—just as I am.” A shining titan of Black excellence before the term was coined, Cicely Tyson can rest easy knowing her job is done. n Cate Young is a podcast producer and film and culture critic based in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Jezebel, Vulture, and The Cut, among others.

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Parting shot

Nothing to See Here

BY ROBERT YASUMURA

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slaves really appreciated him. CRT is an approach that really only affects undergraduate and graduate students majoring in history. It isn’t indoctrinating Idaho State University students into the local chapter of the Black Panthers, which at ISU is the one Black student who happens to own a beret (his name is Carl). The MOST a non–history major might have to deal with CRT is: Student: The Civil War was about states’ rights.

Professor: Really? What specific rights did these states want?

Student: Um … well, the right to own slaves …

Professor: Any others?

Student: Damn you, critical race theory!

Now I have to reconcile myself with the past!

CRT is not being used in grade schools; Boise kindergarteners are mercifully safe. The closest to CRT one might hear in high school is a teacher saying, “Hey, slaughtering Native Americans was some pretty immoral stuff, am I right?” It’s really not controversial material at all … except in Trumpworld, where Republicans now make legislation based on Tucker Carlson’s A-block rant.

Don’t be fooled though. This isn’t the “Mr. Potato Head” controversy (“They’ve made Mr. Potato Head a gay Marxist! Now how am I supposed to teach my kid about gender norms and Ayn Rand?!”). Trump Republicans are genuinely scared of critical race theory. “Make America Great Again” isn’t just a hat that lets you know you shouldn’t hire someone for that job in human resources. MAGA is a fable, and it’s an agenda. The fable is that the

United States was best when white men had total control over everything; it was like an episode of Care Bears, but without that one sassy, darker bear. And the agenda is to get back to that mythical time, by any means necessary. Inconvenient facts like “Hey, it wasn’t totally awesome for Black people, women, or gay people” tend to ruin the project. Especially when told by one of those meddling teachers. n Robert Yasumura is a comedian in Los Angeles.

MICHAEL KUPPERMAN

ONE OF THE HALLMARKS of an autocracy is to go after the teachers. Teachers. Seriously, the people who get crappy pay for trying to put information in your child’s head. I don’t know if you’ve met your kid, but he’s an idiot.

I can’t even get him to stop kicking the back of my seat on an airplane. And yet some teacher takes that idiot child of yours and gets him to understand the themes in Huckleberry Finn. If I had to do that job, I’d search for a quiet spot to commit suicide.

Teachers, whatever their flaws, have the nasty habit of letting facts slip out. Facts like the Jews don’t have horns; Tibet is not legally part of China; Lord Xenu was not Galactic Emperor, nor does he command you to build a tax-exempt real estate empire.

Teachers also introduce seditious ideas, like the scientific method (“Do you have any actual data to back up your thesis that George Soros heads a vast global conspiracy? Then I’m gonna have to say this is not a good science fair project.”). Meanwhile, authoritarians are often doing some pretty heinous things, and justifying them with some pretty flimsy stories. The simplest of facts or the slightest bit of critical thinking can undermine an authoritarian narrative (“President Erdogan, I think we actually did kill a million Armenians.” “Hey man, stop killing my buzz, I’m trying to screw the Kurds over here!”).

That takes us to Idaho—the state you confuse with Iowa, but have never bothered to correct in your head because you’ve got better things to worry about. Idaho voted for Trump by more than 30 points in 2020.

They drank the orange Kool-Aid and went back for seconds. For their next act, Idaho has drafted a boatload of ultra-Trumpy legislation. Things like a “fetal heartbeat” law; a law against mask mandates; and a law that authorizes the killing of 90 percent of the wolves in Idaho (because, among other things, Trump hates wolves, the sharks of the land!). Among this raft of bills is a law that prohibits the teaching of “critical race theory” in public universities and grade schools.

Generally, critical race theory (CRT) just means paying attention to racism in history.

I know, shocking, right? It’s more complicated than that, but not by much. It’s really not a big deal, unless you’re a white supremacist who wants to pretend George Washington’s

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Back to School for All: Return, Recover and Reimagine

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

S

Here are 10 ideas to move us toward those goals:

chools must open this fall. In person.

Five days a week. With the space and health safeguards to do so. And my union, the American Federation of Teachers, is committed to making it happen.

1.

School is where children learn best, where they play together, form relationships and learn resilience. It’s where many children who otherwise might go hungry eat breakfast and lunch. Parents rely on schools not only to educate their kids but so they can work. An astounding 3 million mothers dropped out of the workforce during the pandemic.

3.

2.

The United States will not be fully back until we are fully back in school. And my union is all-in. I recently gave a speech detailing the steps necessary to return safely to full in-person learning, including building the support systems to help students recover socially, emotionally and academically, and overcoming the concerns and fears some parents have about sending their children back to school.

4.

5.

6.

We must address those fears. The AFT, with the NAACP and others, recently polled parents of public school students. Only 73 percent of parents—and only 59 percent of Black parents—said they are comfortable with in-person learning for their child this fall. But if the safety and education measures the AFT is calling for are in place, the comfort level jumps to 94 percent of parents, including 87 percent of Black parents. It’s clear that mitigation measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus create trust, as does collaboration between schools and families. COVID-19 vaccines have been real game-changers, and it’s great news that the Pfizer vaccine has been approved for 12- to 15-year-olds.

Launch the AFT’s “Back to School for Everyone” national campaign to underscore the importance of in-school learning.

Form school-based committees of staff, parents and, where appropriate, students to plan for and respond to safety issues and to conduct safety “walk-throughs” in school buildings.

Align health and pedagogical best practices by reducing class sizes to reflect the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 3-feet social distancing guidance. Eliminate simultaneous in-person and remote instruction.

Offer “office hours” and clinics for AFT affiliates and others to discuss ideas and get technical support.

Roll out camps and summer programs that provide academic support, help students get back into routines and encourage kids to have fun.

Promote community schools to build trust and remove obstacles to getting kids and families the support and services they need.

7.

Increase the emphasis on civics, science and project-based learning, to nurture critical thinking and bring learning to life.

8. Use funds from the American Rescue Plan to fill shortages of teachers, counselors, psychologists and nurses.

9. Launch a federal task force to rethink accountability—how we assess student learning and how to measure what really counts.

10. Engage stakeholders—families, educators and community partners—to ensure funds in the American Rescue Plan and other federal funds for schools are spent equitably and effectively.

We are all yearning to move forward after this difficult year. For our young people, that means being back in school, with their peers and caring adults, with all the supports they need.

Despite all the divisions in our country, there is a consensus around the importance of strong public schools. That is especially vital now, when we need our schools to provide access to a great, well-rounded education to spark kids’ passion for learning and help them recover socially and emotionally.

We have a rare chance to seed a renaissance in American public education. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not only to reopen and recover, but to reimagine our schools in a way that makes every public school a place where parents want to send their children, educators and support staff want to work and students thrive.

The United States will not be fully back until we are fully back in school.

But we must do more than physically return to schools, as important as that is to create the normalcy we crave. We must also put in place the supports to help students recover—socially, emotionally and academically. And we must reimagine teaching and learning to focus on what sparks students’ passion, builds confidence, nurtures critical thinking and brings learning to life—so all children have access to the opportunities that give them the freedom to thrive.

Photo: Brett Sherman

My union is all-in. We are pressing for those safety and education measures in schools across the country.

And we are dedicating $5 million to a “Back to School for Everyone” national campaign to connect not just with teachers and school staff but also with families and communities, to build trust and confidence in children returning to school, particularly those who have been learning remotely.

Weingarten speaking at AFT headquarters in Washington, D.C., May 13.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: twitter.com/RWeingarten Read Weingarten’s speech: aft.org/renaissance

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