Matt Robison
Why Democrats need more than 270 Electoral College votes to avert a crisis
In the post-Labor Day sprint to the election, predictions of each side's chances will be built on an assumption that's so reasonable and so commonplace that no one gives it a second thought: that "victory" means achieving 270 Electoral College votes.
<p>It doesn't. The goal line has moved.</p><p>Instead of defining winning as one candidate edging across the 270 line, we have to think about something a lot more profound and disturbing – what it will take to avoid catastrophe? And make no mistake: we are surprisingly close to one, and the odds of avoiding it are a lot lower than the odds of getting to 270 would suggest.</p><p>That is because potential catastrophes include not just the prospect of Donald Trump winning, but also the real possibility of a complete breakdown of the American political system.</p><p>One definition of a successful democracy is the ability to conduct exercises of power – especially transfers of power through elections – in which the losing side accepts the result. This depends on three factors.</p><p>One is a political process that keeps election winners close enough to the mainstream of public opinion that the losing side can bear losing. But that is not happening. New dynamics in our politics mean that Trump can maintain a political existence so far outside the mainstream that more than half of America finds him intolerable. The rise of <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/05/negative-partisanship-explains-everything-215534">negative partisanship</a>, where hatred of the other side becomes the main political motivator, has helped make Trump <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/07/politics/trump-base-analysis/index.html">historically popular among Republicans</a> while being reviled by <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx">Democrats</a><a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx"> and intensely disliked by </a><a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx">independents</a>. The majority of voters <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/biden-leads-trump-most-issues-except-chief-one-voters-n1236888">dislike Trump's approach on every issue except the economy</a>, frequently by wide margins, and find his <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/opinion/trump-ukraine-whistle-blower.html">behavior</a> largely <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/03/05/few-americans-express-positive-views-of-trumps-conduct-in-office/">unacceptable</a>.</p><p>The second is the trustworthiness of the elections themselves. Trump has done <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/08/28/906676695/ignoring-fbi-and-fellow-republicans-trump-continues-assault-on-mail-in-voting">everything he can</a> to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/us/politics/people-voting-twice-trump.html">undermine the credibility of the vote</a> and portray the entire election as rigged. Unfortunately, it has worked: recent polls have <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll-exclusive/exclusive-republicans-democrats-agree-on-one-thing-doubt-about-fair-election-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKCN24W26S">found</a> that half of the country – including 80 percent of Republicans – now believe that there will be widespread fraud, especially in mail-in voting.</p><p>The third is that there is no critical mass of support for violent alternatives to the democratic process. But Trump has <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/08/31/908137377/trump-defends-kenosha-shooting-suspect">defended</a> acts of politically-motivated violence (as long as they are on his side), following on a long history of encouraging <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/us/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton.html">"second amendment people"</a> to punish his political rivals, gun-toting extremists to <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/back-trump-comments-perceived-encouraging-violence/story?id=48415766">"LIBERATE"</a> their states from Covid lockdowns, rally supporters to <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/back-trump-comments-perceived-encouraging-violence/story?id=48415766">rough up opponents</a>, and police to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/05/29/when-the-looting-starts-the-shooting-starts-trump-walter-headley/">shoot</a> protestors who are, after all, his political opponents. While <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-biden-condemn-violence/fact-check-joe-biden-has-condemned-violent-protests-in-the-last-three-months-idUSKBN25V2O1">Biden has denounced violence in all forms</a>, it is clear that political tensions are at close to the breaking point – so it is not a stretch to see the losing side explode despite, or because of, the exhortations of their candidate. That's especially true if Republicans steeped in gun-culture are the ones who come up short.</p><p>With these pillars of democracy becoming fully cracked, the possibility of a complete collapse of the American system of government is now very real. Top experts <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/07/democrats-have-to-win-two-battles-to-unseat-trump-heres-how-they-can-do-it/">see a number of ways</a> that this election could totally fall apart. In his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Will-He-Go-Election-Meltdown/dp/1538751887"><em>Will He Go?</em></a>, Amherst College professor Lawrence Douglas lays out three such pathways to a total meltdown. In another study, <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/07/25/nation/bipartisan-group-secretly-gathered-game-out-contested-trump-biden-election-it-wasnt-pretty/">a bi-partisan group of experts examined</a> four different election <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/will-democrats-accept-election-loss-new-report-says-no">outcomes</a> – a resounding Biden victory, a narrow but clear Biden victory, a narrow Biden win based on a close margin in only one state, and a convincing Trump victory. They found that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/09/03/trump-stay-in-office/?arc404=true&amp;utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_campaign=wp_main">only the first would lead to a likely handover of power without significant turmoil</a>. Three out of four would lead to system-shaking problems; two out of four would lead to a total standoff with no clear way out.</p><p>Which brings us back to the goal line in this election. In all but a clear Biden win – one based on sound margins <em>across multiple states</em> – we face the actual prospect of a systemic breakdown, possibly one that cannot be resolved.</p><p>This means that it will probably take Biden winning by three or more states' worth of Electoral Votes. Yes, this is a somewhat arbitrary measure. Winning by one state <em>could</em> eventually work (experts thought that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/09/03/trump-stay-in-office/?arc404=true&amp;utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_campaign=wp_main">Biden would ultimately prevail in this scenario, but only after major upheaval</a>). And winning by three or more is no guarantee.</p><p>But that is around the spot where voters can start to feel reasonably safe from catastrophe. The post-November 3 battle will be shaped by two forces – public perceptions and litigation (for more on how Democrats can win both, see <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/07/democrats-have-to-win-two-battles-to-unseat-trump-heres-how-they-can-do-it/">here</a>). We already know that because <a href="https://files.www.lawandpolitics.org/content/vol-xxvii-no-4/Foley_Color_116.pdf">absentee and provisional ballots tend to break toward Democrats</a> (a dynamic that election scholar Ned Foley dubbed "Blue Shift"), it is likely that Trump will appear to be ahead on November 3 (now called <a href="https://www.axios.com/bloomberg-group-trump-election-night-scenarios-a554e8f5-9702-437e-ae75-d2be478d42bb.html?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&amp;stream=top">"Red Mirage"</a>). As we saw in the Florida 2000 mess where Bush ended election night ahead, public perceptions could become badly skewed by early tallies. And we also know that there will be an immediate Republican legal assault to discount mail-in ballots in closely contested states – if we are waging that war in only one tipping point state, it will take just one bad set of judicial rulings to turn the entire election.</p><p>Simply put, each additional state in the winning column would not only reinforce the public credibility of a Biden win, it would also dramatically decrease the chances that rogue election officials or partisan court rulings can swing the outcome. As a thought experiment, if you are a Democrat, ask yourself if you would have accepted the 2016 result if it were based on one close state. The fact that there were three giving Trump his winning margin – even though they were razor thin – made an enormous difference.</p><p>What does this all mean in terms of how we think about the election? The most important thing is that the chances of success are a lot lower than it looks according to popular forecasting models right now. Most currently predict a 70 percent to 86 percent chance of Biden surpassing the 270 threshold (<a href="https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president">here</a>, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2020/08/new-statesman-s-2020-us-presidential-election-forecast-explained">here</a>, <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/">here</a>, and <a href="https://projects.jhkforecasts.com/presidential-forecast/simulator">here</a>). But the number of model results that fall into the "avoid catastrophe" range is actually 15 to 20 percent lower. A forecast that predicts only a 75 percent chance of Biden reaching 270 Electoral Votes should be troubling enough. But that same forecast saying that we face little better than a 50-50 chance of avoiding catastrophe is downright sobering.</p><p>It also changes how we think about "tipping point" states. If Biden achieves a win that depends on one or two close results, there is a big difference between the margin resting on states like <a href="https://www.270towin.com/maps/1R688">Florida</a> with its unified Republican control, governorship in the hands of Ron DeSantis--who won after running an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1YP_zZJFXs">ad</a> teaching his children about undying love of Trump), and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/opinion/florida-felon-voting-court.html">penchant for trying to manipulate the voter rolls</a>--versus states like Pennsylvania and Michigan that are in Democratic or mixed partisan hands and have a much better record of playing it straight. For another thing, Nate Silver recently <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fivethirtyeight-politics/id1077418457?i=1000490010118">said</a> that the outcome in Texas may not matter that much because it is unlikely to be <em>the</em> tipping point state. But if we understand that 270 isn't good enough, states like Texas could matter a great deal.</p><p>None of this is intended to be disheartening. It is intended to apply some clear-eyed realism. This is what America is up against. We have to at least know what we're dealing with.</p>
Here's how we ended up with the Electoral College — and why it 'embarrassed' some founders - Alternet.org ›
'Hijacking the democracy': How Republicans could steal the election via the Electoral College - Alternet.org ›
Electoral College Republicans in Wisconsin and Nevada express confidence that Biden won: report - Alternet.org ›
Here's why audio of Trump saying he knew COVID-19 was a killer is much worse for him than calling fallen troops 'suckers'
Last week's revelation that Donald Trump – a man who invented a medical condition to escape military service – had called Americans who died for our country "losers" and "suckers" seemed like a flaming political disaster. Now comes a series of recordings that confirm that Trump knew how deadly and contagious Covid was but intentionally downplayed the danger while opposing steps that would have helped bring the virus under control. Twice in one week, Democrats have held their breath and once again thought that, maybe, just maybe, this time Donald Trump had finally crossed a fatal line.
<p>The reality is, the "losers and suckers" story probably won't hurt Trump. The Covid story probably will.</p><p>The two issues are superficially similar. Each confirms something terrible that the public already knew or suspected about the president. But the Covid news is different in three key ways that combine to give it real punch.</p><p>First, the revelation is on tape. As we've seen in previous political storms, that can make a difference. The most famous recent instance was perhaps Mitt Romney's <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/secret-video-romney-private-fundraiser/">declaration</a> that "47 percent of the people…are dependent upon government [and that he could] never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." But there are many other examples, from then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's <a href="https://youtu.be/CrDZ_Jt_KOs">statement that he was a DC resident</a> to Virginia Governor George Allen's <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2011/06/allen-apologizes-for-macaca-moment-056212">"Macaca moment"</a> to then-candidate Barack Obama's <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/obama-exclusive-audio-on_b_96333">"cling to guns or religion"</a> stumble.</p><p>In each instance, the tape was critical. It drove a story about the candidate on its own with very little added commentary needed, and one that fit into a framework that was believable to the public. Voters are used to opposing campaigns trying to drive a negative narrative about the other side, and they have become somewhat inured to attack ads. Tapes add essential credibility and punch, which is why "trying to catch a candidate" in their own words has become the gold standard of effective campaign messaging <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/recorded-mitt-romney/story?id=17266676">according to Democratic strategist Doug Thornell</a>.</p><p>Of course, having the goods on tape does not always guarantee that an issue will have political bite. As my colleague <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/09/trump-calling-fallen-soldiers-losers-and-suckers-is-a-story-about-his-character-that-probably-wont-hurt-him/">Joshua Holland points out</a>, in 2016 Trump's favorability remained unchanged in the 10 days after the "Access Hollywood" tape emerged. And the opposite can also be true: not being on tape does not make it safe to say bad things. Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" remarks <a href="https://twitter.com/rubycramer/status/774426188274102272">were reported as a transcript</a>, but still resonated.</p><p>That is where the second factor comes in: it makes a big difference that "losers and suckers" was ultimately about Trump, and Covid is ultimately about all of us. As Holland <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/09/trump-calling-fallen-soldiers-losers-and-suckers-is-a-story-about-his-character-that-probably-wont-hurt-him/">argues</a>, by the time Trump was bragging on audio about his ability to do anything he wanted to women, people were well aware of his awful (and even criminal) behavior. That behavior certainly affected <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/list-trumps-accusers-allegations-sexual-misconduct/story?id=51956410">many people in horrible ways</a>, but the story was ultimately about Trump's personal conduct and morality, not about how he would approach all women (as much as Democrats tried to claim – correctly as it turned out – that his behavior indicated how he would act on policies that affect women). Trump's comments about the military fall into the same category: insulting the sacrifice of fallen soldiers essentially confirms that Trump is a horrible human being. And by now, that is what journalists call a <a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/11/22/dog-bites/">"dog bites man" story.</a></p><p>By contrast, Covid is having a disastrous impact across the whole of American society. It is about us, not him. His actions <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/19/faster-response-prevented-most-us-covid-19-deaths/">have had real consequences in terms of death and suffering</a>. The other significant "on tape" moments cited above also targeted large swaths of Americans: 47 percent in the Romney comment, almost <a href="https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nation-of-small-towns.html">two-thirds of Americans</a> in Obama's, half of Trump's supporters in the case of Clinton.</p><p>Finally, there is the third difference: the Covid news turns the focus of the campaign from a completely polarizing issue to relatively stronger territory for Democrats that unifies both progressives and moderates, and therefore from favorable ground for Trump to favorable ground for Biden.</p><p>In recent weeks, there has been exhaustive media punditry about whether the Trump strategy of focusing on violent protests was working. Some, like <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/how-biden-loses/615835/">George Packer in the Atlantic</a>, claim that the issue was inflicting a potentially fatal wound on the Biden campaign. Others, like <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-law-and-order-message-isnt-resonating-with-most-americans/">Geoffrey Skelley at <em>FiveThirtyEight</em></a>, assert that the lack of significant movement in polls and voters' <a href="https://morningconsult.com/2020/09/02/public-safety-biden-trump-polling/">preference for Biden's approach to both public safety and race relations</a> shows that the issue is not resonating with voters beyond Trump's dedicated base.</p><p>Neither perspective is quite right. The Trump campaign does not expect the focus on protests to be fatal or to change the mind of lots of voters. The point of the Trump strategy is to focus voter attention onto an issue that is <em>polarizing</em>. <a href="https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/7kvpozbozh/econTabReport.pdf">Polling </a>finds that Americans are now evenly split on whether recent protests are "mostly violent" or "mostly peaceful" (down from a majority seeing them as peaceful earlier this summer) with more than two-thirds of Democrats seeing mostly peace while two-thirds of Republicans perceive mostly violence. (A recent analysis of protests since the murder of George Floyd found that <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/04/us/blm-protests-peaceful-report-trnd/index.html">93 percent of them had been peaceful</a>.) That is a potentially helpful pattern for Trump. We have seen similar polling effects recently: the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation drove <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-final-look-at-where-voters-stand-on-kavanaugh-before-the-senate-votes/">very similar proportions</a> of Republicans and Democrats to opposite sides, and was <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/07/gop-credits-kavanaugh-effect-for-senate-wins-against-red-state-democrats.html">likely a significant factor in helping Republicans hold on to the Senate in 2018</a>.</p><p>That is the essence of the Trump strategy. The fact that his national approval rating has been <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/">stuck in a narrow band ranging from 40 percent to 44 percent</a> for most of the past four years shows that voter impressions of him have largely settled. He is unlikely to make significant inroads with swing voters at this stage of the game. His best chance, perhaps his only chance, is to "bring Republicans back home," which is a natural effect down the stretch of a campaign and why <a href="https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2008/dec/01/barack-obama/elections-tighten-almost-every-time/">14 of the past 16 presidential races have tightened in the final weeks</a>.</p><p>An issue like violence at protests is not intended to appeal to swing voters. It is intended to raise the profile of an issue that sends people back to their partisan corners, drawing a sharper dividing line between the parties and forcing Republicans to make a starker choice. Trump is betting that when faced with that choice, the Democratic alternative will seem to be too far across the partisan chasm, and he will thereby be able to eke out enough Republican votes to stay competitive in swing states and pull off another paper-thin win as he did in 2016.</p><p>But now, with 54 days before November 3, the focus is back on an issue that is much better for Biden: the pandemic is more salient to voters and it brings together independents and strongly partisan Democrats. It is of course true that all issues are polarized for strong partisans these days – and Trump's Covid response <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/coronavirus-polls/">is no exception</a>. But voters see Covid as a <a href="https://navigatorresearch.org/public-opinion-on-coronavirus-navigator-update-39/">much more important concern than crime and violence</a>, and all but <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/coronavirus-polls/">partisan Republicans disapprove of Trump's response</a>. It is not an issue where Republicans see a stark choice and will rally to defend the President's approach.</p><p>None of these three factors on its own would make the Covid news a game changer. In combination, having an issue on tape that impacts the majority of Americans' lives and moves the focus away from a polarizing wedge issue gives Democrats a real chance to grab the momentum back.</p>
The developing eviction crisis is a stealthy form of voter suppression
In the past week, Democrats' fears about the Trump administration's open assault on the United States Postal Service (USPS) have gone from a simmer to a boil, prompting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to rush the House back to Washington to vote on an emergency intervention.
<p>But amidst all of this well-deserved focus on the Trump-engineered postal meltdown, it is vital to recognize that this is just one part of the election heist underway. In fact, there is a potentially even more dangerous and insidious phase of the scheme about to unfold in the coming weeks. It's dangerous because unlike the broadly-felt impact of the postal service mugging, this one is even more narrowly targeted at Democrats, and insidious because the collateral damage to American lives will be deeper and more painful.</p><p>That next phase is a massive epidemic of evictions.</p><p>To be clear, Democrats should absolutely be freaking out about the sabotage of the Postal Service. The USPS is <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkyv4k/internal-usps-documents-outline-plans-to-hobble-mail-sorting">removing 20 percent of letter sorting machines – literally throwing them in the dumpster</a> – in order to slow down mail processing during a pandemic that is <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/08/13/election-2020-voters-are-highly-engaged-but-nearly-half-expect-to-have-difficulties-voting/">pushing significantly more Americans to want to vote from home</a>. Mail was already going to be dangerously hindered and disrupted around the election. Now, USPS has said that key swing states <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/mail-voting-rules-key-swing-states-leave-ballots/story?id=72374784">Michigan and Pennsylvania are poised for delays so severe</a> that both will have substantial numbers of uncounted ballots under current election deadlines. And to make sure that voters find it even harder to work around these barriers, <a href="https://twitter.com/MaritsaNBCMT/status/1294276619356368896">postal workers have even been ordered to remove ballot collection boxes</a>.</p><p>And this is definitely a Trump plot. Despite clear evidence in <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/117/25/14052">studies</a> that voting by mail <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/20/what-are-arguments-against-voting-by-mail/?utm_campaign=wp_the_5_minute_fix&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=newsletter&amp;wpisrc=nl_fix">does not help Democrats more than Republicans</a> (for instance, more absentee voting would <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/10/opinion/us-coronavirus-vote-by-mail.html?campaign_id=39&amp;emc=edit_ty_20200813&amp;instance_id=21231&amp;nl=opinion-today&amp;regi_id=14450357&amp;segment_id=36005&amp;te=1&amp;user_id=e37ce79c86fde00792a95a6a293a7bfd">not have changed the results of 2016</a>), Trump believes that because Democrats' interest in voting by mail is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/08/11/only-1-in-5-republicans-say-theyre-likely-vote-by-mail/">higher </a>than Republicans', postal disruptions will help him more. The fallout for Americans, such as <a href="https://connectingvets.radio.com/articles/usps-delays-veterans-affairs-mail-order-prescriptions">veterans whose prescriptions are perilously delayed</a>, is collateral damage he's willing to accept.</p><p>But the real hammer blow in the plot is just getting started.</p><p>The <a href="https://www.cbpp.org/research/housing/extend-cares-act-eviction-moratorium-combine-with-rental-assistance-to-promote">CARES Act in March included a moratorium on evictions</a> in most federally subsidized housing through July 24. Republicans' proposal for Covid relief <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-republican-coronavirus-aid-plan-excludes-evictions-moratorium-n1235108">conspicuously did not continue it</a>. In negotiations, they <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/lawmakers-say-they-cant-return-home-without-coronavirus-deal-while-white-house-aides-are-split-on-use-of-executive-powers/2020/08/04/b19e7404-d688-11ea-b9b2-1ea733b97910_story.html">hand-waved at the idea of an extension</a> (without providing any actual funds for rental assistance), then gave confusing up-is-down <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/07/26/gop-stimulus-package-extend-federal-eviction-moratorium-kudlow-says/5515532002/">misdirection</a> about their true intentions (including Trump's <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/11/trump-executive-order-evictions-coronavirus-393978">meaningless executive order</a> on evictions), and ultimately refused to pass a new relief bill at all.</p><p>These Republican maneuvers now leave <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/24/28-million-americans-face-eviction-because-they-cannot-afford-rent.html">28 million Americans</a> riding a wave of evictions that is poised to crash. And who are these renters?</p><p><a href="https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/ahr2011-3-demographics.pdf">Largely young, minority, and urban</a>—reliably Democratic-leaning constituencies. <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/19/more-u-s-households-are-renting-than-at-any-point-in-50-years/">Two-thirds of households headed by people</a> under age 35 rent, versus only 20 percent of seniors over 65. A <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/19/more-u-s-households-are-renting-than-at-any-point-in-50-years/">majority of Black and Latinx-headed households rent</a>, twice the rate of white-headed households. The <a href="https://www.cbpp.org/research/housing/extend-cares-act-eviction-moratorium-combine-with-rental-assistance-to-promote">same proportion holds for the most at-risk renters who are already behind on their payments</a>: they are twice as likely to be Black or Latinx. And all of the <a href="https://www.rentcafe.com/blog/rental-market/market-snapshots/change-renter-vs-owner-population-2006-2016/">biggest cities</a> are dominated by renters.</p><p>If you wanted to aim a space laser to pick off Democrats across America <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_America:_The_Winter_Soldier">like in a Marvel movie</a> – and if you couldn't aim only on the basis of race – it would be hard to do much better than by aiming at renters.</p><p>Holding aside the staggering human cost of all of these evictions, and looking purely at the electoral consequences, putting millions of Americans out of their homes will likely have two highly disruptive effects on the election that would be concentrated among Democrats.</p><p>One is utter chaos for people who are trying to vote by mail. Layered on top of the USPS disruption already underway, evicted voters would face additional confusion and delays in requesting, receiving, and returning absentee ballots. Officially, it can take USPS <a href="https://help.updater.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001663591-How-long-does-it-take-for-my-mail-to-be-forwarded-">7-12 days to process mail forwarding requests at baseline and 10 business days for mail to be redirected</a> to your new address. And that was before all of the scrambling and Trump-engineered postal bedlam. But the reality is that USPS traditionally does not commit to <a href="m">any estimated delivery time for forwarded mail</a>, because delays can be much longer. And that is assuming that <a href="https://www.quora.com/How-much-time-does-it-take-USPS-to-forward-a-first-class-mail-to-my-new-address">state laws allow absentee ballots to be forwarded, that institutions like Boards of Elections are able to handle returned mail</a>, and that evicted people would even have immediate forwarding addresses where they could receive absentee ballots (many will not or may change addresses multiple times). For many voters, the time <a href="https://www.quora.com/How-much-time-does-it-take-USPS-to-forward-a-first-class-mail-to-my-new-address">added in each leg of the mailing process</a> means that there would be no practical way to get ballots returned in time to meet state deadlines.</p><p>The second issue is disenfranchisement for people who try to show up to vote in person. Voters who change their address must submit changes <a href="https://www.usa.gov/change-voter-registration">before state election deadlines</a>. Most voters will have absolutely no idea that they have to do this. And if they have been evicted, they may be voting in a new precinct, or even a new town or state. Hence, a significant number will miss deadlines, will show up in the wrong place, or will show up in the right place but not have identification that matches their old address to comply with state <a href="https://www.vote.org/voter-id-laws/">voter ID laws</a>.</p><p>In theory, states are supposed to allow voters in this situation to cast <a href="https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/provisional-ballots.aspx">provisional ballots</a> for the board of election to sort through later. But in practice, this is far from a sufficient corrective. For one thing, people whose lives have been massively disrupted by eviction and who are scrambling to keep their households together are likely to have a harder time voting in the first place. Upon learning that they face additional barriers to update their official address or to haggle with election officials, many may simply not go through the effort. For another, election experts are already deeply worried about <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/07/democrats-have-to-win-two-battles-to-unseat-trump-heres-how-they-can-do-it/">"blue shift"</a> – the tendency for <a href="https://files.www.lawandpolitics.org/content/vol-xxvii-no-4/Foley_Color_116.pdf">absentee and provisional ballots to break toward Democrats</a>. Trump has already been laying the groundwork to question any vote not tallied in-person on or before Election Day. So the prospect that millions more Democratic-leaning votes would become provisional – a mess understaffed state election officials would have to sort out while being intimidated by the President of the United States – should be terrifying for anyone hoping to avoid a Constitutional crisis.</p><p>Some may believe that it's unfair to ascribe a sinister motive here because Trump and his Senate Republican allies would not intentionally allow millions of Americans to be evicted just to give themselves a political advantage. But this was the same sentiment that we heard before Trump admitted that he is attempting to sabotage mail delivery for that exact purpose. And also before we learned that he had asked various foreign powers to <a href="https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/12/politics/trump-ukraine-impeachment-inquiry-report-annotated/">dig up dirt on his opponents</a>, do trade deals <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-asked-chinas-xi-to-help-him-win-reelection-according-to-bolton-book/2020/06/17/d4ea601c-ad7a-11ea-868b-93d63cd833b2_story.html">targeted to help him in swing states</a>, and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/05/politics/trump-emails-joke/index.html">broadly interfere on his behalf in our election</a>. And before it was revealed that Trump didn't care if a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-not-solve-coronavirus-crisis/2020/07/26/7fca9a92-cdb0-11ea-91f1-28aca4d833a0_story.html">pandemic raged in blue states, only if it hit people in the red and purple states</a> that he needed in November. And before that, when <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-mail-voting/2020/08/13/3eb9ac62-dd70-11ea-809e-b8be57ba616e_story.html">Trump fought with every fiber of his being against $3.5 billion in election assistance that states still need</a> to make this year's vote run smoothly.</p><p>Here's a simple rule: <em>everything</em> that Trump is doing right now is for the purpose of putting his thumb on the scales of an election that <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/2020_elections_electoral_college_map.html">he will otherwise lose if voters get to actually have their say</a>. There is no other goal, no other plan. So if you see Donald Trump and his congressional cronies pushing millions of Americans to eviction, you can be sure that they are 100 percent aware of the electoral consequences, and that they want them to happen.</p><p>This is very real, and it is happening right now. It is good that Speaker Pelosi is trying to deal with the postal crisis. At the same time, Democrats cannot ignore the bigger picture. There are many fronts in this war, and they have to fight on all of them with the same urgency.</p>
Here's how a Biden presidency could erect new guardrails and prevent the next Trump
Last week, Joshua Holland highlighted an under-appreciated facet of Joe Biden's candidacy: his unique opportunity to "fascist-proof" the presidency and prevent a repeat of our long, national Trump nightmare. Given Biden's rare openness to being a transitional, one-term president--and against the backdrop of his experience as a Senate lifer--Biden may have the rare motivation and self-discipline to do America an historic service by reversing decades of incremental power-grabs by an increasingly "imperial" executive branch, thereby restoring the checks that our framers intended us to have on an out-of-control president.
<p>This is not some abstract, late-night dorm room issue – the accrual of power in the hands of a venal, authoritarian president has had real consequences to real people. Trump has weakened our <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/opinion/trump-intelligence-national-security.html">defense</a>, targeted the <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2019/12/16/trump-administration-knew-family-separations-harm-migrant-children/">vulnerable</a>, enriched the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2019/10/10/trump-tax-cuts-helped-billionaires-pay-less-taxes-than-the-working-class-in-2018/#134a00fa3128">powerful </a>(including himself) at the expense of middle- and working-class families, and <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/05/heres-a-rough-estimate-of-what-donald-trumps-negligence-in-the-face-of-covid-19-has-cost-us-so-far/">directly caused more than 100,000 American deaths while costing the country trillions of dollars</a> in lost output. Every American reading this has been directly harmed by our system's failure to put limits on Donald Trump.</p><p>So how would hitting the constitutional reset button work? Reining in the president requires re-asserting the intended role of Congress (and the Judicial branch) under the Constitution's separation of powers. The catch is that if we are going to dial back the power of the executive, there has to be a functional legislative branch to receive it. It does America little good to remove authority from one Napoleonic fool and distribute it to a cabal of self-serving partisans like Mitch McConnell. That doesn't solve the problem, it merely spreads it around.</p><p>That is why the first step in the rebalancing process has to be passing a pro-democracy reform bill. It is the only way to make Congress work better. "Political dynamics on the outside drive the procedural dynamics on the inside," explains Ryan McConaghy, who led issue strategy and message planning for Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer and the Democratic Caucus. "So you can tweak process and Senate rules and even the laws all you want, but if you don't deal with the underlying incentives and the way we run our democracy, elected leaders will keep behaving in the same old ways and we'll end up right back in the same place. The bottom line is that if you want a better product out of Congress, you have to focus on the forces that shape behavior before anyone even steps onto the House or Senate floor."</p><p>Distortions in American democracy have seriously slanted that playing field. In 2018, Democrats won by <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/06/politics/latest-house-vote-blue-wave/index.html">8 points nationally</a> and received 10 million more votes. Yet they ended up with only a slim House majority after <a href="https://www.apnews.com/9fd72a4c1c5742aead977ee27815d776">partisan gerrymandering cost them 16 seats</a>. <a href="https://www.carnegie.org/topics/topic-articles/voting-rights/11-barriers-voting/">Barriers to voting</a> and a river of <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/dark-money/basics">dark money</a> (dark money spending <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/dark-money/shadow-infographic.php">rose by a factor of 50</a> between 2004 and 2012--to above $300 million--and by 2015 was ten times higher than that) fuel an electoral ecosystem that allows candidates outside the mainstream to thrive and remain competitive in races where voter preferences would never otherwise allow it. These factors shield candidates from having to broaden their appeal. And increasingly in recent years, Republicans especially have been able to subsist almost entirely by <a href="https://time.com/longform/donald-trump-2020/">stoking outrage to drive turnout on their side</a>. By fixing anti-democratic distortions, candidates (disproportionately Republicans, but in fairness it would apply to everyone) would find themselves with less and less room to hide inside safe partisan niches, and greater need to broaden their appeal beyond their base.</p><p>House Democrats already have a reform bill assembled. The <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1/text">For The People Act of 2019</a> addressed voting rights (making election day a federal holiday, getting rid of partisan gerrymandering, expanding voter registration, etc.), ethics (forcing candidates to release their taxes, for one thing) and campaign finance (voluntary public financing for campaigns, small donor matching, reining in Super PACs). There are more things to do. The pandemic has shown the urgent need to upgrade vote-from-home solutions, and the <a href="https://apnews.com/4014bb5735da1a3a7dfd8f8a481dab02">death of John Lewis has reminded Americans of the need for a renewed Voting Rights Act</a> – but Democrats have a basic blueprint ready to go in January 2021, assuming they win the presidency as well as majorities in both chambers of Congress.</p><p>There is an important consequence to note here: taking this critical step to fix our politics "on the outside" will almost certainly require one big fix on the "inside": finally getting rid of the Senate filibuster. Republicans are <a href="https://www.salon.com/2020/07/21/trump-is-trying-to-rig-the-election-right-before-our-eyes_partner/">demonstrating in real-time</a> once again that they fear expanding access to voting and restoring voting rights protections, as it may force them out of their safe political enclaves and could cause some short-term electoral pain (the irony being that Republicans would actually be a healthier, stronger, and more competitive party long term if compelled to broaden their appeal beyond their current base). So they would almost certainly filibuster.</p><p>In turn, Democrats will almost certainly conclude that <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/02/saving-our-democracy-has-to-be-job-number-one-if-democrats-win-big-in-november/">pro-democratic voting and civil rights reforms are the indispensable key to their entire agenda</a>—to healthcare and climate policy and racial justice and to the future of our democracy. They <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/07/why-senate-filibuster-could-be-gone-2021/614278/">will find it unacceptable</a> to allow those reforms to be blocked, and will very likely conclude that the filibuster must finally go. To be sure, there remain some misgivings inside the party (Democrats have found filibustering useful as recently as last month in <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/24/politics/senate-police-reform-bill/index.html">blocking Republicans' weak police reform bill</a>), but ultimately, that probably won't matter. In fact, Senate insiders contacted for this article confirmed that filibuster reform is already "hot right now" in Democratic thinking, and that forward-thinking leaders are already "moving" behind the scenes.</p><p>After securing a reform law and creating a more level and democratic playing field, Democrats can then focus on returning some of the Constitutional birthright of power back to other branches of government. Three areas in particular stand out.</p><p>A central, constitutionally-granted congressional check on the executive branch that is in dire need of a refresh is the power of oversight. <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/why-democrats-congress-should-use-inherent-contempt-force-trump-officials-ncna1058861">Stonewalling by Trump administration officials</a> has gone essentially unpunished because the <a href="https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34097.pdf">three options open to Congress to stop it are all fatally flawed</a>. Criminal contempt relies on the Attorney General pursuing a prosecution – and good luck with that under most Attorneys General, let alone William Barr. Civil contempt takes years to wind through the courts, as the <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/07/appeals-court-rules-mcgahn-must-testify-392562">ongoing litigation intended to compel testimony by former White House counsel Don McGahn</a> shows. And inherent contempt requires the congress to <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/why-democrats-congress-should-use-inherent-contempt-force-trump-officials-ncna1058861">send a sergeant at arms to arrest someone</a> and lock them in a room in the Capitol basement (yes, that is real). The politics of that maneuver make it unpalatable at best.</p><p>But congress has the ability to expand its power here in a durable way with a President Biden on board. For one thing, Congress should <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/opinion/sunday/trump-barr-justice-department.html">make the Department of Justice an independent agency</a>, like the Federal Reserve Board or the Federal Communications Commission. This would not only provide some protection against another William Barr – who has demonstrated that a sufficiently corrupt figure in his position can <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/opinion/sunday/trump-barr-justice-department.html">turn major functions of the DOJ into an arm of the president's campaign</a> – but it would also strengthen Congress' ability to deliver criminal contempt citations with teeth. And if they want to sharpen those teeth further, they can strengthen the fines and the potential jail time for those found guilty of contempt, and set up specific standards for the DOJ to rapidly review and assign contempt citations to prosecutors. In short, Congress can give itself all the tools it needs to provide real oversight.</p><p>It can also fully reclaim the <a href="https://history.house.gov/institution/origins-development/power-of-the-purse/">"power of the purse"</a> which Congress has dithered and deadlocked away. Under the 1974 Congressional Budget Act, both chambers of congress are supposed to pass a budget resolution to set a framework for overall spending, and then pass a dozen separate appropriations bills that actually give detailed amounts and instructions for each program and action that federal agencies want to undertake.</p><p>But in most of the years since the Tea Party wave of 2010 (and even in many before that), Congress could <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/16/congress-has-long-struggled-to-pass-spending-bills-on-time/">never agree on a budget resolution</a>, even under unified Republican control, and it got so far behind on individual appropriations bills that it rolled most or all of them together into an "omnibus." Frequently unable to pass anything at all, Congress resorted to <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/20-years-of-congresss-budget-procrastination-in-one-chart/">"continuing resolutions"</a> to keep government funding flowing on autopilot, sometimes for a full year. These have increasingly been driven by total collapses of the process that have led to <a href="into%20a%20shutdown%20every%20two%20years%20on%20average">government shutdowns every two years</a>, on average. These budget meltdowns have handed much more leverage to the executive to determine how our dollars are spent, which is an enormous source of power.</p><p>A President Biden could do some things around the edges to incentivize getting the process back on track, but most of the repair work here has to come from within Congress. One thing they should try is restoring <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earmark_(politics)">earmarks</a> – funding specifically directed by congress, usually to a project in a member's state or district. Notorious <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0410/6-outrageous-political-earmarks.aspx">cases of waste and stupidity in the 2000s</a> led first to earmark reforms in 2007, and then finally to total abolition in 2011. But that only had the effect of giving more power to the executive branch. As even some <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/12/27/congress-in-2019-why-the-first-branch-should-bring-back-earmarks/">conservative Republicans pointed out at the time</a>, if Congress isn't directing where tax dollars go within programs, an executive branch bureaucrat is. It is in many ways far more democratic and transparent to have more of our tax dollars directed by the people we actually vote for, and subject to televised debates on C-Span. And of course, the traditional political function of earmarks is to give members of congress in both parties a vested interest in passing appropriations bills, since they usually have something riding on it back home. Returning that grease to the wheels would help get Congress moving on exercising its spending authority again.</p><p>The third area involves the third branch: the judiciary. Presidents have accumulated far too much power via their ability to appoint judges to the federal courts (the judicial appointment process has also had a pernicious feedback effect on our underlying political condition: Republicans who at baseline rely almost exclusively on mobilizing their base to win elections also have a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/us/politics/supreme-court-trump-biden.html">base that is much more attuned to judicial appointments</a>, which feeds back into incentivizing Republican senators to take a hard line on the most extreme judiciary possible).</p><p>Trump is a perfect example – he has been able to fundamentally alter the balance of power in the courts in a way that will long outlast him. Among the 13 appellate courts, <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/01/28/judicial-appointments-in-trumps-first-three-years-myths-and-realities/">Trump has shifted Republican-appointed judges from holding 40 percent of the seats to an outright majority at 54 percent</a>. Trump has also flipped 3 of those 13 courts to Republican-appointed majorities, meaning that 7 of the 13 Courts of Appeals are now controlled by jurists picked by the GOP. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/us/trump-appeals-court-judges.html">Comprehensive analyses</a> have shown Trump judges to be much younger, far more partisan, less respecting of precedent and socially conservative than those of any other president. Former Trump advisor <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/the-weekly/don-mcgahn-trump-courts.html?module=inline">Steve Bannon called</a> this group of Trump judges "a Kafkaesque nightmare" for the left, because "Donald Trump is going to be in their personal lives 10, 20 and 30 years from now."</p><p>Congress can dilute this kind of disproportionate influence from any one president by expanding the number of slots on appellate courts, instituting <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/30/opinions/supreme-court-term-limits-law-roosevelt-vassilas/index.html">judicial term limits</a>, and creating staggered vacancies to give presidents an even number of appointments per term.</p><p>There are also many other smaller steps that Democrats could take. They could expand on the recent bipartisan law to <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/02/13/805594383/senate-approves-legislation-to-limit-presidents-war-powers-against-iran">dial back presidential war powers</a>. They could <a href="https://www.lawfareblog.com/congress-should-limit-emergency-powers-all-presidents">limit presidential emergency powers</a>, which Trump unlawfully abused to fund a border wall. And they could <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/08/joe-biden-may-be-uniquely-positioned-to-fascist-proof-the-presidency/">rein in the president's ability to make recess appointments</a>.</p><p>But at the heart of anything they do has to be a commitment and a vision from Joe Biden. <a href="https://www.history.com/news/did-george-washington-really-free-mount-vernons-slaves">While a complicated figure</a>, George Washington did give our country the unalloyed and unparalleled gift of voluntarily limiting his own power by walking away from the presidency. Joe Biden now has a chance to renew that bequest. And, if the stars align, he may be the rare president who takes it.</p>
The push to reopen schools is sheer madness — here are 4 key steps to doing it right
In the indelible 1983 cold war movie The Day After, the federal government convenes a group of farmers after a nuclear war to instruct them on how to start growing crops again. A hapless government official suggests that they simply "take off the top 4 or 5 inches" of contaminated dirt. An incredulous farmer responds that even if this were physically possible for the 150 to 200 acres each farmer owns, it would create a literal mountain of dirt. What hole do you toss that mountain into, he asks? How does that leave topsoil for growing anything?
<p>In other words: how am I supposed to do that?</p><p>That is the classic question that that has sent countless bright ideas to the scrap heap, because it illustrates the chasm between a top-down policy prescription and the details of how to make it work. 'How am I supposed to do that?' is the key phrase that former <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-Depended/dp/0062407805">lead hostage negotiator for the FBI Chris Voss</a> uses <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKGf2IDFfak">to start breaking down a hostage-taker's impossible demands</a>.</p><p>It also gets at the massive disconnect underway in the current school re-opening "debate" — debate being in quotation marks because it's been more like two sets of people yelling right past each other.</p><p>On one side are a mix of Trump administration officials, Republican elected leaders, and well-meaning but exhausted parents who are trying to jawbone, bribe, or blackmail schools into re-opening with <a href="https://www.future-ed.org/roadmaps-to-reopening-states-guidance-to-schools-on-meals-masks-and-more/">simple-sounding policy prescriptions</a>: Buy personal protective equipment (PPE), distance the desks, enforce mask-wearing, put kids in <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-childcare/prepare-safe-return.html">"pods,"</a> install plexiglass, and clean more often. And their threats have teeth: the recent Senate Republican Covid relief bill <a href="https://www.future-ed.org/what-congressional-covid-funding-means-for-k-12-schools/">proposed</a> only giving money to schools that provide in-person instruction, and some states are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/01/schools-reopening-coronavirus-arizona-superintendent/?arc404=true">assessing financial penalties</a> on schools that do not. It's re-open now, <em>or else</em>.</p><p>On the other side are a mix of teachers, public health officials, and well-meaning but exhausted parents who are basically asking: How are we supposed to do that? How do we remake the ventilation and build all of the physical barriers in spaces that need to be separated inside already-crumbling schools that for years have faced an <a href="https://nonprofitquarterly.org/us-education-faces-growing-backlog-of-school-building-repairs/"><em>annual </em>$46 billion shortfall for school maintenance</a>? If we don't have enough physical space in the school for distancing and it's too hot for outdoor classes, how do we secure alternative space (often <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/19/us/parent-alternatives-school-fall/index.html">in competition with parents looking for space for DIY alternatives to traditional schools</a>)? How do we buy the needed equipment in a short period of time with uncertain sources of funding and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/07/08/ppe-shortage-masks-gloves-gowns/">rolling shortages across the country</a>? How can we <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/07/us-schools-reopen-kids-social-distance/614713/?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&amp;utm_content=20200731&amp;silverid-ref=NTEyMTgyMDcyNTQ3S0">make the kids wear masks</a><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/07/us-schools-reopen-kids-social-distance/614713/?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&amp;utm_content=20200731&amp;silverid-ref=NTEyMTgyMDcyNTQ3S0"> and stay apart</a> given their <a href="https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Families/FFF-Guide/The-Teen-Brain-Behavior-Problem-Solving-and-Decision-Making-095.aspx">still-developing frontal cortexes</a>--and when <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/23/most-americans-say-they-regularly-wore-a-mask-in-stores-in-the-past-month-fewer-see-others-doing-it/">one-third</a> of the adult population refuses to do so consistently? How do we get all this done when staff and teachers are <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/14/890716897/teacher-recovering-from-covid-19-says-school-reopening-is-tough-decision">getting sick</a> or <a href="https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/5/9/21252608/older-teachers-heath-concerns-coronavirus-return-to-schools">don't want to return to buildings</a>?</p><p>The implausibility of pulling all of this off was devastatingly illustrated by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/01/schools-reopening-coronavirus-arizona-superintendent/?arc404=true">Arizona School Superintendent Jeff Gregorich</a>: "I've been in the building every day, sanitizing doors and measuring out space in classrooms. We still haven't received our order of Plexiglas barriers, so we're cutting up shower curtains and trying to make do with that…11 percent of my staff [has] gotten Covid, and we haven't had a single student in our buildings since March. Part of our facility is closed down for decontamination, but we don't have anyone left to decontaminate it unless I want to put on my hazmat suit and go in there… A bunch of our teachers have told me they will put in for retirement if we open up this month… More than a quarter of our students live with grandparents… There's no way it can be safe…If you think anything else, I'm sorry, but it's a fantasy."</p><p>The re-opening and almost immediate re-closing of schools that <em>The New York Times</em> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/us/coronavirus-students.html">reported</a> in Indiana, Mississippi, and Georgia just this week shows what a colossal dissonance remains between federal re-opening directives (including the proposed funding in the next round of Covid-19 relief that is supposed to support it, if it ever gets passed) and the practicality of life on the ground.</p><p>So how do we climb out of the chasm? How, at the end of the day, are we actually supposed to do this? There are four ways to bridge the disconnect.</p><p><strong><em>Reset the timeframe</em></strong></p><p><a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/07/heres-why-re-opening-schools-before-next-spring-will-be-a-disaster/">There are massive advantages to delaying physical re-opening</a> until the spring. We currently find ourselves facing a version of "the cube problem" – a <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1128436-prelude-to-foundation">riddle</a> that asks whether a group of people can lift a metal cube with their bare hands--say, one that's a foot across and weighs 500 pounds. In theory the answer should be yes, because with ten people everyone only has to heave 50 pounds. But in practice the answer is no, because they simply can't all squeeze around the cube at the same time.</p><p>Similarly, we are finding that in theory, schools might be able to get the needed materials, make physical changes, find alternative spaces and so forth in time to re-open this fall. But in practice they simply can't wrap their hands around solving all the problems they face at once. They need more time.</p><p>Equally as important, resetting the timeframe would help us be a lot smarter about what to focus on. Nine months into the discovery of this coronavirus, we are still learning a lot in each passing week about how it works and how best to mitigate its risks.</p><p>For example, the guidance from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on school re-opening lists <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/disinfecting-building-facility.html">stringent cleaning and disinfection practices</a> among necessary safety protocols. This has a real impact. It means that schools need enough healthy janitorial staff (with teachers and administrators likely pitching in) to do daily cleaning, and would probably have to reduce school hours to get it done.</p><p>But emerging science suggests that a lot of this cleaning amounts to what <em>The Atlantic </em>calls <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hygiene-theater/614599/?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&amp;utm_content=20200731&amp;silverid-ref=NTEyMTgyMDcyNTQ3S0">"hygiene theater"</a> – helpful for making people <em>feel</em> safer, but less important than other measures for actually preventing viral spread. The <a href="https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/ROM20678.pdf">Democratic Senate school safety proposal</a> specifically calls out "cleaning, sanitizing and disinfecting educational facilities" as one of the key uses of the $175 billion that it provides for K-12 schools. But the hard science on whether all of this is actually worthwhile (and if so, which parts of it) is still being done.</p><p>At the same time, there is also <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/why-arent-we-talking-more-about-airborne-transmission/614737/?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&amp;utm_content=20200731&amp;silverid-ref=NTEyMTgyMDcyNTQ3S0">growing evidence</a> that addressing ventilation is a more important area of focus. This is a major challenge in the school context. Half of our 120,000 school buildings <a href="https://www.nafahq.org/dealing-with-schools-ventilation-problems/">have indoor air quality problems</a>. The Government Accountability Office estimates that <a href="https://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/GAOReportSchoolFacilities6420.pdf">36,000</a> schools need to update or replace air systems, and overall, <a href="https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/07/31/schools-ventilation-air-flow-filter-coronavirus">90 percent of schools are under-ventilated</a>. Relatively inexpensive portable HEPA filters in classrooms <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/why-arent-we-talking-more-about-airborne-transmission/614737/?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&amp;utm_content=20200731&amp;silverid-ref=NTEyMTgyMDcyNTQ3S0">could be one alternative</a> to time-consuming and expensive whole-building air system upgrades, but determining where they are needed, whether they are actually effective in those spaces, and then buying enough of them is not going to get done by Labor Day.</p><p>And of course, an additional advantage to a delay is that different areas of the country can time their physical opening to hit more of the sweet spot for weather and maximize outdoor classes.</p><p>The objection to pushing back the re-opening timeline has been that we need to support parents now. That downside remains very real and very challenging. However, I <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/07/heres-why-re-opening-schools-before-next-spring-will-be-a-disaster/">previously addressed</a> the fact that most current re-opening plans actually won't help most parents, and suggested measures to support working families directly through the fall and early winter. Others have provided similar tangible proposals for <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/07/how-help-parents-without-fully-reopening-schools/614836/?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&amp;utm_content=20200731&amp;silverid-ref=NTEyMTgyMDcyNTQ3S0">how to help parents prior to re-opening schools</a>. So, a reset is difficult but possible, and certainly preferable to a rushed and risky re-opening.</p><p><strong><em>Treat the underlying cause</em></strong></p><p>We are not trying to solve a school problem; we are trying to manage a public health crisis. Closed schools are only a symptom. Re-opening schools has been pushed as a way to get things back to normal. That is backwards. We have to get things back to normal so that we can re-open schools.</p><p>Much has been made of the fact that other countries have re-opened schools safely. But that only underscores the need to put the horse before the cart by getting this Covid outbreak under control first. Not only are those countries that have re-opened schools a distinct minority in the world (<a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/30/open-schools-exception-not-rule-387507">143 countries have not</a>), but they also <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/07/heres-why-re-opening-schools-before-next-spring-will-be-a-disaster/">differ from us in many important ways</a>, the most significant of which is baseline infection rate. The US is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/21/trump-wants-compare-us-coronavirus-problem-other-countries-he-may-want-rethink-that/">about 10 times worse</a> off than the European Union in confirmed infections per million residents, and in terms of the mismatch between infection rates and the tools to control them, the US is possibly in the worst shape in the developed world. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/health/covid-contact-tracing-tests.html">Low testing capacity and lag times on results have rendered attempts at contact tracing almost worthless</a>, meaning that two of the top weapons that public health officials wield in other countries have mostly evaporated across much of the US.</p><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/opinion/coronavirus-schools-reopen.html">Writing in <em>The New York Times</em></a>, top experts <a href="https://hcmg.wharton.upenn.edu/profile/zemanuel/">Ezekiel J. Emanuel</a>, Saskia Popescu, and <a href="https://smhs.gwu.edu/emed/education-training/fellowships/ems-disaster">James Phillips</a> said that "schools should open only in places that have fewer than 75 confirmed cases per 100,000 people cumulatively over the previous seven days, and that have a test positivity rate below 5 percent." Only one-quarter of states have even reached that threshold to attempt in-person schooling.</p><p>The authors of this and other re-opening frameworks suggest these kinds of detailed rule sets to judge whether schools can operate safely. But there's an even more fundamental question that underlies them all: Is the government of your state or city taking the pandemic seriously enough to start in-person schooling?</p><p>Here's a rule of thumb: if your governor or mayor is allowing bars to open while schools are closed, the answer is no. If local political leaders take the necessary and painful steps to get infection rates under control, then you can start to talk about schools.</p><p><strong><em>Get flexible </em></strong><strong> </strong></p><p>This is a simple one. Senate Republicans' punitive proposal extorts schools into re-opening and that sets up a bizarre <a href="https://www.yourdictionary.com/catch-22">Catch-22</a>, 2020-style: You can't get funds for safety if you don't re-open, but you can't re-open unless you get funds for safety. It conditions two-thirds of funding <a href="https://www.future-ed.org/what-congressional-covid-funding-means-for-k-12-schools/">on schools submitting – and then sticking to – a detailed in-person schooling timeline</a>. But even the states that are planning to hold physical school classes in the coming months are planning for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/us/school-closing-coronavirus.html">interruptions, rapid shutdowns, and an adaptable hybrid remote learning plan</a>. Schools that have started in-person instruction have <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/us/school-closing-coronavirus.html">already had to shut down again due to infection</a>, and every day brings news of schools <a href="https://www.al.com/news/2020/08/first-schools-reopen-in-alabama-this-week-many-more-scrambling-changing-plans.html">"scrambling"</a> to stretch their re-opening schedules or shift their plans entirely as the local situation evolves.</p><p>It is easy to make school re-opening a partisan issue, and that serves no one. But this is a case where one party's approach is simply more practical. The Senate Democratic <a href="https://www.help.senate.gov/ranking/newsroom/press/senators-murray-schumer-democrats-introduce-430-billion-coronavirus-relief-bill-to-address-national-child-care-and-education-crises-as-democrats-urge-republicans-to-act-on-bold-covid-19-relief-">position</a> better matches reality by supporting a mix of in-person, remote, and hybrid learning, without pre-judging what that mix needs to be, either today or in the years to come. With an uncertain future and <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/07/heres-why-re-opening-schools-before-next-spring-will-be-a-disaster/">given the benefits of leveraging learning technology in a smart way</a>, hybrid schooling with robust online options are here to stay. We need to embrace a more flexible approach.</p><p><strong><em>Play the movie</em></strong></p><p>When I was a graduate student in public policy, one of my professors took our class through an exercise. He asked us whether we would have advised President Clinton to send US troops to stop the Rwandan genocide. We all answered, "absolutely." Ok, he said, I'm a movie guy, so play me the movie of how that would work. And then he peppered us with questions. Rwanda is the size of Maryland, so how do you cover all the areas where violence is happening? What does that look like? Are you sending in troops to all the rural villages? How are troops stopping violence? Are they knocking on doors, confiscating potential weapons like sharp metal objects? Machetes? A lot of those tools are used for farming…so are you taking those away?</p><p>His point was not to oppose intervention. His point was that in order to make any high-level policy successful, you have to think about how it will play out on the ground. You have to do the hard work. And that's what we need to do on schools.</p><p>The starting point is to remember (especially given Republican – and some Democratic –opposition to federal leadership on education) that this is not a schools problem, it is a health problem…as well as a logistics problem, an information technology problem, and a construction problem. The federal government has expertise and resources to help across those domains.</p><p>Instead of forcing schools to submit a detailed re-opening timeline, we should flip the equation on its head. Don't make them tell the federal government what they have. Allow them, to tell the federal government what they <em>need</em>. And then, if we were serious about this, we would appoint a school re-opening czar with broad interagency powers to get it for them.</p><p>School districts, and even states, are not in a position to navigate the byzantine federal agency system. But buried within that labyrinth are lots of resources that can make things work. Need outdoor teaching space? Deploy the National Guard and Army Corps of Engineers to set up <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/why-arent-we-talking-more-about-airborne-transmission/614737/?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&amp;utm_content=20200731&amp;silverid-ref=NTEyMTgyMDcyNTQ3S0">partially-open tent schools</a> and to assist with in-school physical construction. Want to buy HEPA filters but <a href="https://twitter.com/Poppendieck/status/1286300608836907009">can't under CDC guidance</a>? Direct the CDC to fast-track a guidance update. Need PPE? Use the Defense Production Act and arrange a pipeline from federal stockpiles direct to school districts. Need teachers to supplement the ones who can't come to school or to create smaller class pods? Create matchmaking with <a href="https://www.teachforamerica.org/">Teach for America</a> programs. Need cleaning, classroom prep, meal preparation and distribution, laptop distribution, etc.? Deploy Americorps volunteers. Lacking broadband or computers for under-served students? Coordinate with corporations for donations and incentivize rapid system upgrades in targeted areas.</p><p>Could this become a bit of a shopping list exercise? Yes, absolutely. But do we really have a problem with that? The backlog of school maintenance is a national disgrace, and addressing it in the course of supporting school re-opening is an investment that has been <a href="https://schools.forhealth.org/">shown</a> to have <a href="https://iaqscience.lbl.gov/vent-school">lasting benefits for student achievement</a>. Besides, if are spending hundreds of billions of dollars, we should want strong federal involvement to make sure they are being spent effectively</p><p>All of which leads to a final, related point: this is not a time to <a href="https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/226950.html">let a thousand flowers bloom</a>. Every school may have a unique set of needs. That does not mean that every school should develop a totally unique set of solutions. The 13,000 school districts in this country rarely collaborate on best practices, and that needs to change in the face of a pandemic: the federal government has a role to play in disseminating emerging best practices quickly and putting them in place efficiently. Especially as we develop new approaches on portable air filtering, <a href="https://www.livescience.com/uv-light-kill-coronavirus.html">UV lighting</a>, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/german-researchers-trained-dogs-sniff-out-covid-19-coronavirus-infections/">Covid-sniffing dogs</a>, or more effective remote teaching methods, we should not simply outsource the spread of good ideas to superintendents armed with Google.</p><p>Is all of this harder than simply taking a fire and forget it approach? Yes. But it is worth it. Getting this done requires taking the patience, effort and attention to detail to get it right. We have to take the time. We have to do the work.</p>
Democrats have to win two battles to unseat Trump — here's how they can do it
We have learned from conflicts ranging from World War 1 to Iraq that it is entirely possible to win the war and lose the peace.
<p>In politics, nowhere was this more evident than in the 2000 election pitting George W Bush against Al Gore, where the race was essentially tied on Election Day. We know that a <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-election-results-studies/index.html">full recount would have resulted</a> in a Gore win, but the race was lost in the aftermath. Republicans proved more adept and ruthless in post-election maneuvering, while the Democrats pursued a timid and ultimately losing strategy.</p><p>Joe Biden and the Democratic Party now face an election that is again poised to be not one battle but two: a traditional race toward Election Day, and a fight <em>after </em>Election Day to count the votes and protect the result. That Donald Trump will attempt an all-out assault on the integrity of the vote is almost a foregone conclusion. He questioned the legitimacy of the count when he won the Electoral College in 2016, and is already <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/07/how-trump-is-trying-to-rig-the-election-right-before-our-eyes/">openly trying to rig the result</a>. There are multiple ways that – absent a clear and convincing Biden victory – Trump might lose the election and still win via post-election skullduggery.</p><p>For example, Trump and Republicans can try to invalidate or sway the counting of mail-in votes via litigation and pressure on election officials, turn <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector">"faithless electors"</a> in swing states to reduce Biden's Electoral College margin below the critical <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College">270 threshold</a>, leverage the process in congress for certifying the Electoral College vote, or appeal to the Supreme Court to intervene in a contested result.</p><p>Several authors have gamed out these scenarios (<a href="https://amoreperfectunionforum.com/blog/2019/7/1/world-war-t">me included</a>), but the definitive work in this genre – which might be termed democratic reality horror – comes from Amherst College professor Lawrence Douglas in his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Will-He-Go-Election-Meltdown/dp/1538751887"><em>Will He Go?</em></a> Douglas lays out three shockingly realistic pathways for Trump to win after losing, roads which could ultimately lead to a total constitutional meltdown.</p><p><a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/07/25/nation/bipartisan-group-secretly-gathered-game-out-contested-trump-biden-election-it-wasnt-pretty/">A bi-partisan group of experts who conducted a wargame exercise</a> around these kinds of maneuvers found them all too real, and all too hard to fix once the disaster starts to unfold. So Democrats need to start preparing right now to win not just the first battle, but also the battle that will follow unless Trump loses by a significant margin.</p><p>There are steps that Democrats can take, and are already taking. And it is important to note that these measures are not only pro-Democratic but pro-<em>democratic</em>: if Trump is truly the winner, each of them would be equally protective of the integrity of the vote for Republicans and the legitimacy of the election. This matters for those who care about American democracy. A Trump second term is a likely disaster. A failed presidential election and constitutional crisis is a certain one. This is not just a fight against Trump. It is a fight for our whole system of government.</p><p>Here, then, are the "Democracy Dozen" – twelve steps that those who care about protecting our constitutional government from a Trump assault can take:</p><p><strong>1) <em>Prepare the public for a "blue shift" </em></strong></p><p><a href="http://files.www.lawandpolitics.org/content/vol-xxvii-no-4/Foley_Color_116.pdf">Absentee and provisional ballots tend to break toward Democrats</a>, a dynamic that election scholar Ned Foley dubbed "blue shift." For example, in 2018, Arizona's Democratic Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema gained 71,000 votes during post- Election Day counting. With an unprecedented scale of Covid-driven mail-in voting, it is likely that this Election Day will really be an election month. Trump may appear to be winning several key states on election night before all the votes are actually counted. This sets up weeks of opportunities for Trump to question the count or attempt to shut it down outright – both of which <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/416183-trump-says-florida-elections-should-be-called-for-scott-desantis">he tried during the 2018 Florida election</a>, claiming that state-mandated automatic recounts were just "unethical liberals [trying] to steal this election." Since we've seen how an apparent lead on election night (Florida 2000) can become settled in the popular mind and create an uphill climb for Democrats, the Biden campaign should undertake a dedicated campaign of public and media education to set expectations in advance. The public needs to know that this election will take weeks to unfold, and that a result requires that all votes be counted.</p><p><strong>2) <em>Organize a 20-state legal protection strategy</em></strong></p><p>Democrats led by veteran attorney <a href="https://www.democracydocket.com/about/">Marc Elias</a> are currently <a href="https://www.democracydocket.com/our-cases/">waging legal fights in 29 states</a> to push back against voter suppression and ensure access to mail-in voting. They need to be equally prepared for the litigation that will come after Election Day. Fortunately, the 2000 Florida experience delivered important lessons about legal preparations, while the marathon <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/us/politics/06minnesota.html">2008 Minnesota Senate recount</a> (which Elias led for Democrats) caused senate campaigns to prepare a full post-election vote count legal strategy as a standard operating procedure. This year, Democrats will need to enter Election Day prepared for legal battles in the <a href="https://www.270towin.com/maps/consensus-2020-electoral-map-forecast">20 most competitive states</a>. They will need legal teams experienced not only with election litigation, but also specifically versed in the highly-confusing <a href="https://www.rollcall.com/2020/06/01/old-law-could-leave-2020-presidential-race-in-stalemate/">Electoral Count Act of 1887</a>, the law on the books dealing with how to handle controversies in counting a state's Electoral College votes.</p><p><strong>3) <em>Monitor everything</em> </strong></p><p>As <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/experts/myrna-perez">Myrna Pérez</a> of the Brennan Center for Justice has <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/politics-podcast-the-u-s-isnt-prepared-for-a-pandemic-election/">pointed out</a>, there is still going to be a substantial amount of in-person voting this year despite the pandemic, and it may be the preferred means for communities of color. Democrats will need to redouble their usual efforts, even in the midst of the pandemic, to monitor activities at polling stations and document vote-suppressing activities and disruptions. In addition, Democrats should try to insert language in the current Covid economic relief legislation to prevent the Trump administration from deploying extreme tactics, such as deploying ICE agents on raids or at polling locations in key states on Election Day to intimidate or harass Latinx voters.</p><p><strong>4) <em>Prep the coup states</em> </strong></p><p>In 2018, Republican-controlled legislatures in Wisconsin and North Carolina met after the election to curtail the power of incoming Democratic governors in a blatant partisan power grab. Following a national election, it is certainly conceivable that states with unified Republican control of government and a close election result could attempt to change their laws for appointing electors to the Electoral College <em>after</em> Election Day. While these attempts would surely be subject to litigation, the fact that courts have <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/07/06/885168480/supreme-court-rules-state-faithless-elector-laws-constitutional">given deference to state legislatures in setting the means of appointing or replacing electors</a> means that the outcome of any court cases would be uncertain. Pivotal states like Texas, Ohio, Arizona, Georgia, and Florida fall in this category. Some have legislative rules, including quorum rules, that may allow Democrats to prevent such efforts – these kinds of maneuvers have actually been necessary fairly recently (see the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Eleven">Texas Eleven</a> in 2003). While these tactics are far from desirable, if used to prevent what amounts to a constitutional coup, Democrats should be prepared.</p><p><strong>5) <em>Tell voters to vote early</em></strong></p><p><a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/07/how-trump-is-trying-to-rig-the-election-right-before-our-eyes/">Marc Elias has pointed out</a> that due to manufactured Postal Service funding shortfalls that have slowed mail delivery, "in states where voters can request absentee ballots within seven days of Election Day, it's highly unlikely that voters will be able to return mail ballots on time. And in states where voters can request absentee ballots within three days of Election Day, it will be basically impossible for some voters to return mail ballots on time." The simple, albeit partial, solution? Democrats need to put on a full-court messaging press to voters about the importance of voting early, and well before the deadlines.<strong> </strong></p><p><strong>6) <em>Fund the postal service</em></strong></p><p>See above. This is an issue to fight hard for in the Covid relief bill.</p><p><strong>7) <em>Fight the hacks </em></strong></p><p>Speaking of issues to fight for, the security of election systems remains deeply compromised. We know that Russian hackers have previously penetrated election systems in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Will-He-Go-Election-Meltdown/dp/1538751887">all 50 states</a>. Security experts estimate that we need $2 billion to upgrade election systems. With under 100 days to go before the election, there is a limited amount that Congress can do to prevent malicious interference by hackers, but even getting started on security reviews and implementing the most obvious patches could help.</p><p><strong>8) <em>Organize "Protect the Count" Rallies Now</em></strong></p><p>In 2000, Republicans organized the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot">"Brooks Brothers Riot,"</a> a cadre of Republican operatives flown in to disrupt a meeting of election canvassers in Miami-Dade County, Florida (among the organizers was Roger Stone). It worked: the count was shut down two hours later. This time, Democrats cannot be caught flat-footed. They should be prepared to assemble volunteers to gather outside counting locations, show public support for the process, and make it impossible for Republicans to ambush election officials.</p><p><strong>9) <em>Get John Roberts' Attention</em></strong></p><p>Somewhere along the way, most election standoff scenarios reach a moment where the Supreme Court may get involved. Given the Republican-appointed majority on the court and the history of <em>Bush v. Gore</em>, analysts usually (and rightly) assume that this avenue gives Trump an advantage. However, John Roberts has shown that he is keenly aware of the institutional credibility of the court and the <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-supreme-courts-big-rulings-were-surprisingly-mainstream-this-year/">weight of evolving public opinion</a>. As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/opinion/supreme-court-daca-lgbtq.html"><em>New York Times</em> Supreme Court Analyst Linda Greenhouse put it</a>, the Roberts message to Trump has been "don't take the Supreme Court for granted." Democrats shouldn't either. They should be prepared to organize mass demonstrations to pressure John Roberts into seeing that another <em>Bush v. Gore</em> result for Trump would imperil our constitutional system and that the credibility of the court would collapse.</p><p><strong>10) <em>Assemble a Constitutional Coalition</em></strong></p><p>In 1974, senior Republican lawmakers <a href="https://apnews.com/ff1504ddaa5446e5903d4e883e79ff51">approached President Richard Nixon to tell him that it was over</a>, and he listened. There is little chance of that working with Trump. Nonetheless, it would still be worthwhile for Democrats to start reaching out to prominent Republicans, especially former generals who have served under President Trump, who might serve as elders to support a safe, constitutional resolution to any standoff. Republican leaders who oppose Trump like Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Cindy McCain, and George W. Bush could provide important public validation for a close Biden victory. Former generals and Trump cabinet veterans like James Mattis, John Kelly, and H.R. McMaster could provide an even more vital service: working with current pentagon leaders to forestall any attempt by Trump to illegally make use of the military to keep himself in office.</p><p><strong>11) <em>Tear down that red wall</em></strong></p><p>Both the House and Senate have a role to play in certifying the results of the Electoral College, and both present opportunities for Trump to contest or overturn the results of the election. Control of the Senate's role in this process provides an important backstop. As Lawrence Douglas put it: "if Democrats are able to control the Senate, Trump could create chaos and civil unrest, but ultimately I don't think he would be able to create a constitutional crisis." As of today, the chances of Democrats <a href="https://cookpolitical.com/ratings/senate-race-ratings">being in the majority</a> as of the January 6, 2021 certification date appear to be at least 50-50, <a href="https://bookies.com/news/senate-races-odds-tracker">if not better</a>. But Democrats should leave no stone unturned. They should conduct initial discussions with Mitt Romney before the election about what he considers out of bounds actions by Trump to hold on to power. And while Republican support for Trump has seemed almost impenetrable so far, Democrats should continue pushing their Republican counterparts on what the bounds might be.</p><p><strong>12) <em>Put a thumb on the scale in key House races </em></strong></p><p>If no candidate achieves an Electoral College majority, the presidential election goes to the US House of Representatives. But it's a weird process. Each state gets only one vote, which means that having the majority of representatives in a state means you control the vote from that state. Currently, Republicans hold a 26-23 (with one state tied) advantage in state majorities, meaning that Trump would win an election that went to the House. However, states like Florida, Montana, Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fa6iq7MN40HIvob9li5z545pJhd1tQVgZ7GSn0kikLc/edit#gid=0">have ultra-slim state majority margins</a> and also feature House races that are <a href="https://cookpolitical.com/ratings/house-race-ratings">highly competitive</a>. The upshot? Flipping as few as three key House seats would flip three states, and thereby give control of the majority of state delegations to Democrats, meaning that Biden would win any election that ended up in the House. While they are investing in all of these competitive races, Democrats should put an added emphasis on winning the ones that would give this extra layer of protection.</p>
Democrats missed a crucial opportunity to take a victory lap - Alternet.org ›
Step one: Defeat Trump — but now comes the hard part - Alternet.org ›
Here's why re-opening schools before next spring will be a disaster
We are sprinting toward a large-scale, real-time experiment on America's health and safety.
<p>The push to re-open schools is on. And it is a mess. The <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_098.asp">13,000</a> school districts across the country have had to navigate shifting state and federal guidance, evolving evidence, and rapidly rising Covid-19 case counts. In recent weeks, <a href="https://equityschoolplus.jhu.edu/reopening-policy-tracker/">forty-three distinct state approaches</a> to schooling this fall have emerged. Almost all of them envision a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/coronavirus-schools-reopen-fall.html">hybrid model of online and in-person learning for K-12 kids</a>. And most have a significant in-person component.</p><p>The desire to re-open is understandable, if not laudable. Notwithstanding the <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/07/07/coronavirus-donald-trump-urges-governors-reopen-schools-fall/5390294002/">political factors</a>, many parents, doctors, and psychologists have argued that getting kids back in school at least part-time should be a top priority.</p><p>But the reality is that the arguments for re-opening rest on thin evidence and assumptions that range from hopeful to totally unrealistic, while conflating the benefits of pre-pandemic schools with the partially re-opened reality that we would see this fall if we push ahead. Combined, the case for re-opening teeters on collapse.</p><p>Simply put, it is far from clear that putting millions of American children and teenagers back into schools will be safe, lead to better educational outcomes, provide the support that working families need, or prioritize the right investments.</p><p>The case for re-opening schools for in-person instruction rests on four basic arguments. Each of those arguments is worth a closer look.</p><p><strong>Argument #1: families need support so parents can go back to work. </strong>The links in this logic chain are brittle, if not broken. The first issue is <em>who</em> exactly would be able to go back to work under current re-opening plans. Almost all schools will have students attending <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/coronavirus-schools-reopen-fall.html">in-person only part-time</a>, which most districts are prepared to cut back if local infection rates climb.</p><p>This state of partial coverage and week-to-week uncertainty is a total mismatch with the majority of parents who have jobs that do not allow them to control where and when they work. <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/flex2.nr0.htm">According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics</a>, 71 percent of wage and salary workers report no ability to work from home, and 43 percent report no flexibility on when they can start and stop working (it is <a href="https://www.epi.org/blog/black-and-hispanic-workers-are-much-less-likely-to-be-able-to-work-from-home/">worse for people of color</a> than white people). While employers have been trying to increase job flexibility, there is only so much they can do – it's impossible to drive a bus, fix a power line, or care for a nursing home patient from home.</p><p>For the majority of workers, a part-time and shifting schedule of kids at school offers as much coverage as a mesh umbrella. In a widely-circulated New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/business/covid-economy-parents-kids-career-homeschooling.html">essay</a>, Deb Perelman noted that "my children will be able to physically attend school one out of every three weeks. At the same time, many adults — at least the lucky ones that have held onto their jobs — are supposed to be back at work…these two plans are moving forward apace without any consideration of the working parents who will be ground up in the gears when they collide."</p><p>"That sets up families for a lot of impossible choices, choices that are felt most among families that are low-income," Katherine Gallagher Robbins, child care and early education director at The Center for Law and Social Policy, <a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/coronavirus-online-school-working-parents">told FOX Business</a>.</p><p>But this is just a starting point for problems. According to CDC guidance, huge swaths of families should consider excluding themselves from a return to school entirely due to household members with <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/people-with-medical-conditions.html">co-morbidities that significantly increase their risk</a>. According to an analysis by researchers at the <a href="https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/press-release/about-4-in-10-adults-in-the-u-s-are-at-greater-risk-of-developing-serious-illness-if-infected-with-coronavirus-due-to-age-or-underlying-health-conditions/">Kaiser Family Foundation</a>, 41 percent of Americans are at higher risk for serious illness or death, either due to age or pre-existing health issues.</p><p>That is to say nothing of the likely vastly increased number of day-to-day absences that will have to occur if we follow proper medical guidelines. The CDC says that any school re-opening should require <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-childcare/schools.html#anchor_1589932065842">kids and teachers to stay home when sick</a>. But as any parent will tell you, if you kept your kid home every time she or he had run-of-the-mill cold and stomach bug symptoms – a runny nose, cough, slightly elevated temperature, tiredness, or upset stomach – they would rarely actually go to school.</p><p>And what happens when people (especially teachers) get any <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/symptoms.html">suspected-Covid symptoms</a>? Current medical <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/if-you-are-sick/quarantine.html">protocols</a> call for quarantine of potentially exposed people for fourteen days. If these practices are applied with any honesty and consistency, classrooms and whole schools could easily exist in a rotating lockdown mode. Schools abroad have limited such interruptions by establishing <a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/coronavirus-online-school-working-parents">"bubbles" of student groups</a> so that the rest of the school can continue functioning, but those countries have much lower rates of infection so the chances of a particular bubble having to quarantine are much lower. In some US states, schools could easily have multiple bubbles popping at the same time.</p><p>How can a parent commit to an employer that they will be available if they are relying on schools to look after their kids under these conditions? It could be argued that having coverage for your kids two days a week is better than zero days a week, except there's really no obvious solution for the other three days (if you have access to, say, nearby grandparents, is it wise to have kids shuttle from their schools one day to your elderly parents the next?), and there is no guarantee that you will even consistently get the two days you think you have.</p><p><strong>Argument #2: this is safe. </strong>There are two questions here: the health and safety of children, and the health and safety of everyone else – parents, teachers, and the extended community.</p><p>The good news is that the evidence is fairly solid on how rarely kids get sick from this coronavirus and how dangerous it is to them. The consequences for children are not zero: the CDC has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/with-coronavirus-science-still-iffy-us-schools-hope-to-reopen-for-566-million-k-12-students/2020/07/09/10cba7d4-c203-11ea-b4f6-cb39cd8940fb_story.html">tracked 29 deaths in children under age 15</a> among the 130,000 total in the US, and we continue to know little about the longer term health consequences of Covid infections in children. But the risk is well-enough established that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/upshot/epidemiologists-decisions-children-school-coronavirus.html">70 percent of the 304 epidemiologists surveyed by the New York Times</a> said that they would send their own children to school this fall.</p><p>The bad news is that the evidence on how often kids transmit the disease to everyone else is still very preliminary. As Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/with-coronavirus-science-still-iffy-us-schools-hope-to-reopen-for-566-million-k-12-students/2020/07/09/10cba7d4-c203-11ea-b4f6-cb39cd8940fb_story.html">told the Washington Post</a>: "The data that is clear is that children do not get serious consequences of infection compared to adults. That's a fact. Everything else is less secure. It is more anecdotal."</p><p>As Brown economist Emily Oster has <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/parents-need-facts-kids-covid-19/613744/?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&amp;utm_content=20200708&amp;silverid-ref=NTEyMTgyMDcyNTQ3S0">shown</a>, we simply do not have reliable data to go on yet. Most of what we do have is based on <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/24/882316641/what-parents-can-learn-from-child-care-centers-that-stayed-open-during-lockdowns">reports from U.S. child care facilities</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/schools-reopening-coronavirus/2020/07/10/865fb3e6-c122-11ea-8908-68a2b9eae9e0_story.html">other countries' experiences</a>, which are mixed and may not fully apply to the US. Indications from countries like Germany and Sweden are encouraging. Indications from Israel are much less so. Almost half of all of that country's new infections last week <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/israeli-data-show-school-openings-were-a-disaster-that-wiped-out-lockdown-gains?source=twitter&amp;via=desktop">were contracted in schools</a>.</p><p>Moreover, we remain very unclear about what aspects of other countries' approaches are both beneficial and replicable in the US. We do not know if constant testing, consistent mask-wearing, careful distancing, physical barriers in schools, phased opening, or all of those factors in combination is important. Suffice it to say, our ability to do many of those things, let alone sustain them, remains highly questionable (<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/schools-reopening-coronavirus/2020/07/10/865fb3e6-c122-11ea-8908-68a2b9eae9e0_story.html">researchers cite</a> the failure to keep these measures going as one possible cause of Israel's problems).</p><p>We also do not know if our far greater ethnic diversity (non-white US populations appear to be at <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/racial-ethnic-minorities.html">greater risk of both getting sick and experiencing severe illness</a>) and much higher overall infection rates would make a US school re-opening different. <a href="https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&amp;areas=usa&amp;areas=deu&amp;areas=isr&amp;areas=fra&amp;areas=bes&amp;areasRegional=usny&amp;areasRegional=usca&amp;areasRegional=usfl&amp;areasRegional=ustx&amp;cumulative=0&amp;logScale=1&amp;perMillion=1&amp;values=cases">Relative infection rates in EU countries</a> cited as re-opening models are 20-40 times lower than ours, while Israel with its much choppier school re-opening experience is currently almost the same as ours."</p><p>At this point, we can say with confidence that if our kids are back in schools, they are themselves likely to face a level of risk that is low enough to be tolerable for most families. There is very little that we can say with scientific confidence about the health and safety for everyone else.</p><p><strong>Argument #3, it's better for kids. </strong>Kids learn in schools. It's where they make friends. Highly influential guidance issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) <a href="https://services.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19-infections/clinical-guidance/covid-19-planning-considerations-return-to-in-person-education-in-schools/">asserted</a> that the importance of in-person learning is "well-documented."</p><p>But the actual evidence for the necessity of being physically present in school is a lot fuzzier, if not totally contradictory. According to Susanna Loeb, professor of education and public affairs at Brown University and the director of the university's Annenberg Institute for School Reform, <a href="https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/03/23/how-effective-is-online-learning-what-the.html">there is some evidence that in-person learning is better on average than online learning</a>. But <a href="https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf">a meta-analysis of all available research from the U.S. Department of Education</a> found the opposite, concluding that, "on average, students in online learning conditions performed modestly <em>better</em> than those receiving face-to-face instruction."</p><p>Not only is the jury still out, it is still hearing the case. As Dr. Loeb <a href="https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/03/23/how-effective-is-online-learning-what-the.html">wrote</a> earlier this year: "only a little research has assessed the effects of online lessons for elementary and high school students."</p><p>The AAP is only able to make their declaration about in-person versus online learning with so little public questioning because what we all have in mind – with a good deal of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_bias">recency bias</a> – is the crash effort this past spring to erect online learning programs on the fly as an emergency stopgap. It was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/us/coronavirus-education-lost-learning.html">hardly successful</a>. But much of the "online learning" this spring started with setting families loose on a list of websites and emailing home some worksheets. In many cases, it never progressed much beyond that. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/us/coronavirus-education-lost-learning.html">Fewer than 20 percent of schools actually provided virtual classroom instruction</a>, let-alone the kind of interactive learning tools that are the gold standard of remote learning.</p><p>As just one example of what that gold standard can do, consider <a href="https://www.waterford.org/about/">Waterford.org</a>, a Utah-based not-for-profit that develops interactive education software aimed at kids in the pre-K-6 range. They operate a program called Upstart across 15 states that is particularly successful in teaching early literacy and math. <a href="https://www.waterford.org/research/">Data have consistently shown</a> that children in the program show the same or better academic gains (as well as, interestingly, social-emotional development) as children enrolled in high-quality public and private preschools. The US Department of Education has been <a href="https://www.waterford.org/news/waterford-wins-eir-grant-to-bring-waterford-upstart-to-five-states/">working to expand the program to more states</a> as fast as possible, and Upstart was <a href="https://blog.ted.com/8-big-bold-ideas-for-global-change-unveiled-in-session-4-of-ted2019/">chosen as one of 8 big, bold ideas for global change</a> by <a href="https://audaciousproject.org/">The Audacious Project</a>.</p><p>And if you are thinking that this only works for rich, white kids, the opposite is true. The program is aimed at poor, rural, nonwhite populations, and has been equally effective in inner-city Philadelphia, rural Appalachia, and the Mississippi Delta. Upstart even provided a laptop, solar panel for power, and satellite internet connection for a child on a remote Indian reservation. Dr. Benjamin Heuston, Waterford's CEO, says that the program is all about using the best available technology and putting it in the hands of teachers to make them as effective as possible: "We started by asking why wouldn't we use 21<sup>st</sup> century tools to solve 21<sup>st</sup> century problems? This is all about giving teachers and parents the best modern tools to do their job."</p><p>This is not to argue that all online learning tools are equally effective or immediately scalable to all <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372">56.6 million K-12 students</a> in the US (though <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/">Khan Academy</a> videos are widely available and have been shown to be effective in <a href="https://cdn.kastatic.org/downloads/2018_LBUSD_Efficacy_Study_Research_Brief.pdf">improving math performance across populations</a>). But it is not quite right to assess remote learning on the basis of schools' noble but shambolic scramble this spring, nor to assume that students have to be physically in the school to learn from teachers.</p><p>We should also be leery of the assumption that school in the fall will be the same experience that we are used to. It won't. Teachers will be physically distant – whether at the front of a class or over video – and so will peers. It is unclear if kids will get the same psychological and social benefit of interacting with their friends if they are doing it from six feet away, behind masks, in carefully controlled settings that avoid large group interactions, and in pre-arranged bubbles.</p><p>Finally, it is important to address the AAP's point that a lack of access to support services in schools could lead to negative outcomes for many students. This is no small matter: our kids get everything from psychological counseling to hot meals through our schools, and these are critical considerations. However, access to school services does not require reopening all of the schools. School districts have taken a <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/4/17/21220016/school-lunch-coronavirus-meal-programs">number of approaches</a> to preparing and distributing lunches to the <a href="https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp/nslp-fact-sheet">30 million</a> kids who receive them. Other services can be provided remotely, in settings outside the school, or in small, targeted groups of students. Clearly, these are not ideal solutions and do not provide the same level of support as before the pandemic. But given that almost all school re-opening plans only have students in schools part of the time anyway, schools will need work-arounds for delivering these services no matter what.</p><p><strong>Argument #4: We are prioritizing the right investments. </strong></p><p>In order to re-open schools safely, CDC guidelines assume physical modifications in schools to enforce physical distancing, limit group sizes, and provide adequate ventilation. They assume consistent mask-wearing and the availability of testing when needed.</p><p>But many school districts <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/us/schools-reopening-trump.html">do not have the funds or time</a> to modify their physical infrastructure. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/health/coronavirus-masks-ppe-doc.html">"Grave" shortages of personal protective equipment</a> are flaring across the country, calling into question whether there will be enough for schools. Lack of lab capacity is <a href="https://khn.org/news/as-covid-testing-soars-wait-times-for-results-jump-to-a-week-or-more/">slowing test results</a> so significantly that public health personnel and patients cannot get the information they need fast enough to do meaningful contact tracing and isolation.</p><p>The more fundamental issue is that – and this cannot be stressed often enough – all of these investments must be made in service of a <em>part-time</em> re-opening plan. Except for a handful of places, in most of America, our kids will be doing the majority of their school online this fall. Two of the largest school districts in the country just <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/13/trump-schools-reopen-big-districts-360106?nname=politico-nightly-coronavirus-special-edition&amp;nid=00000170-c000-da87-af78-e185fa700000&amp;nrid=0000014e-f0fd-dd93-ad7f-f8fd33b50001&amp;nlid=2670445">announced</a> that they will start the year with distance learning only.</p><p>That means remote learning needs to be the first priority, not an afterthought once we figure out how to arrange kids' desks. As Dr. Heuston put it: "so much of the effort so far has focused on how to get kids into the schools for thirty or forty percent of the time, and so little has been put into how to make the rest of the time – the majority of the time – as beneficial as possible."</p><p>So much of the focus has been on building a bridge back to what used to be, rather than looking forward to what should be. But student achievement was <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/research/2018-brown-center-report-on-american-education-trends-in-naep-math-reading-and-civics-scores/">sputtering</a> and working families were gasping to keep up well before the lockdowns. "Covid created many new problems, but it also shone a bright light on challenges our government has long failed to address," said Julie Kashen, director of women's economic justice for The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. "School schedules already did not match work schedules. The United States, unlike the rest of the world, chose not to invest in child care or paid leave over the last several decades, leaving women to bear the brunt of caregiving responsibilities. That didn't change during the pandemic."</p><p>So perhaps instead of spending <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/us/schools-reopening-trump.html">tens or hundreds of billions of dollars</a> simply to get back to a pale imitation of where we were, we should be devoting more time and resources on trying to get where should be.</p><p>Dr. Heuston of the Waterford Institute says that he can provide a laptop, internet connection and coaching to students and teachers at an upper bound cost of $2,000 per student, though he notes that true costs at scale would be a fraction of that, because many kids already have internet access and the cost of coaching is less when partnering with school districts and their teachers. At about four million students per grade level in the US, that means that we could provide a high quality remote learning tool (and there are many others besides Waterford) to all elementary school students for $20-$50 billion, or about 1-3 percent of the cost of the CARES Act passed in March.</p><p>Whatever inequalities exist among school districts, they are exceeded by inequalities among families (low poverty districts only <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/property-taxes-and-unequal-schools/497333/">spend 15.6% more</a> than high poverty districts). In order to level the existing disparities in opportunity and in measured achievement between affluent kids and those from low-income households, students must have equal access to the same high-quality learning environment. The traditional school model – for myriad reasons including funding – has not achieved that. Enhanced learning leveraging technology shows more promise to do so.</p><p>And again, one more time, remote learning is <em>happening</em> this fall. It will be the majority of schooling for the majority of our kids. Shouldn't we be prioritizing that in our thinking?</p><p>***</p><p>There's an alternative to rushing re-open schools with insufficient planning and an unrealistic expectation of the benefits while a pandemic rages out of control across states.</p><p>Right now, Congress is considering another aid package. We have already spent <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/finance/economy/493218-cbo-projects-cares-act-will-cost-176-trillion-not-22-trillion">$1.76 trillion</a>. But economists believe that the long-term risks of spending at this level (and borrowing during a period of such low interest rates) in terms of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/05/what-2-trillion-coronavirus-bailout-is-really-going-cost/">the national debt are limited</a>, and pale in comparison with the need to keep the economy going now.</p><p>So why not do it again? Why not keep our economy on intensive federal life-support for an additional 4-6 months at a similar cost? If the point of re-opening schools is to get people back to work so that we can re-open the economy, and if rapid re-opening is a prime cause of this summer's <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/us/coronavirus-united-states.html">Sunbelt Resurgence</a> of Covid, why does anyone think that a national enterprise of widespread and rapid economic re-opening is a good idea?</p><p>It is true that many aspects of the CARES Act were <a href="https://www.epi.org/blog/despite-some-good-provisions-the-cares-act-has-glaring-flaws-and-falls-short-of-fully-protecting-workers-during-the-coronavirus-crisis/">clunky, wasteful, and poorly designed</a>. But with five months of lessons learned under our belt, we could do better. We could also provide the funds that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/07/13/cities-states-cares-act/">state and local governments desperately need</a>. We could provide <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/advisor/2020/05/14/a-working-parents-guide-to-paid-family-leave-in-the-families-first-coronavirus-response-act/#4980c31a7996">expanded long-term paid leave</a>, in addition to <a href="https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/cares">unemployment insurance and aid to small businesses</a>. We could provide targeted assistance to larger businesses. We could expand the refundable <a href="https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/earned-income-tax-credit">Earned Income Tax Credit</a> to provide more support to people with kids who are able to work only limited hours. We could invest in ensuring broadband access to every student. Really, the only limit to what we can do is what we impose on ourselves based on partisan politics.</p><p>Just as important as buying ourselves more time is what we do with it. There is <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-coronavirus-drug-vaccine-status/">a significant chance that by next spring</a>, we might have one or several Covid <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/german-biotech-sees-its-coronavirus-vaccine-ready-for-approval-by-december-11594373400">vaccines</a>, <a href="https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/coronavirus-treatment-whats-in-development">therapies</a>, or <a href="https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-07-10/injection-prevent-coronavirus-feds-manufacturers-fail-to-act">preventive treatments</a>. Former Obama health administrator Andy Slavitt recently <a href="https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1280283199445311488.html">tweeted</a> a "slew of good news" based on discussions with scientists, leaving him somewhat optimistic about a "light at the end of the tunnel." Cautions abound, and even if these medicines are partially effective, rolling them out widely would take years. But the prospect of treating teachers as "essential workers" and giving them the enhanced protections they deserve – along with vulnerable family members back home – is worth the effort.</p><p>And we could be shifting to a more thoughtful, strategic, long-term approach to school in the Covid Age--not just returning to the classroom but renewing and reinvigorating our schools. Rather than spending every available dollar planning a partial re-opening and building plexiglass shields in classrooms, states and school districts could focus on a phased buildup of remote learning plans (our 13,000 school districts might even talk to one another and share best practices). By the start of the Spring students, teachers, and school administrators would be far more accustomed to a robust remote learning environment (and we could move more classes outside through the summer, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/what-to-know-about-the-coronavirus-and-summertime-activities/2020/06/19/6a4417c6-ae74-11ea-8f56-63f38c990077_story.html">where they are much safer</a>, and likely save on physical construction costs in schools), and there would be sufficient time to understand how to pair online tools with in-person classes in an effective, complementary way going forward. We can also start the longer-term project of considering how to invest in the kinds of child care and after school coverage that actually supports parent work schedules.</p><p>This is far from a perfect solution for families, students, or communities. But the re-opening plans on the table today are much worse for everyone, and do not offer the upside of investing in a long-term where we may be living with this pandemic for some time, and where we need to provide more effective, modern education for our kids and more balanced support for families.</p><p>We don't have to stay on the course we are on. We still have a chance to do something better.</p>
Republicans are winning their shadow war on America's government
In America's cold civil war, it's easy to focus on the pitched battles for the presidency and congress and, aside from occasional Supreme Court decisions that manage to penetrate our consciousness, forget an entire third branch of government. That's because the fights over the political branches are surface operations while the battle for the courts is most akin to submarine warfare.
<p>But glossing over the judiciary branch is a mistake. It is immensely powerful, not only because it can shape and even override the actions of the Congress and the president, but also because judges and prosecutors <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/where-policy-is-made-soto_n_207570">make decisions</a> in literally thousands of cases every day that impact Americans' lives and shape the contours of our democracy.</p><p>And in this particular theater of political war, the Republican Party of Donald Trump is flat-out winning.</p><p>Between judicial appointments and the corruption of the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, our entire system is being hit with a one-two punch.</p><p>The Supreme Court is the highest profile entity in the judiciary, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. <a href="https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/court-role-and-structure">Underneath the Supreme Court</a> there are 13 courts of appeals, and below them 94 district courts. Most of the time, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2019year-endreport.pdf">it is those lower courts that have the final word</a> on questions of federal law, particularly the appeals courts: Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor once said they are <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/where-policy-is-made-soto_n_207570">"where policy is made."</a> Every year there are about 300,000 civil case filings and 90,000 criminal case filings in district courts. Of all of these, federal appeals courts see only a small fraction, at about 50,000 filings a year. And of those, the Supreme Court sees only about 7,000 filings, and <a href="https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/educational-resources/about-educational-outreach/activity-resources/about">only hears</a> about 100-150 cases.</p><p>Trump has substantially shifted the calculus of those courts, and therefore the disposition of those cases. Of the 870 federal judges who make decisions in the lower courts, Trump has <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/05/05/how-close-is-president-trump-to-his-goal-of-record-setting-judicial-appointments/">now appointed about one-quarter</a> of them, disproportionately at the court of appeals level and enabled by Mitch McConnell's <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/06/04/senate-obstructionism-handed-judicial-vacancies-to-trump/">barely constitutional maneuver to refuse to confirm Obama appointees</a>, which created a glut of vacancies.</p><p>And while Trump may <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/01/28/judicial-appointments-in-trumps-first-three-years-myths-and-realities/">not have broken records</a> for the number of judges he's installed in the judiciary, they have made a big difference in the balance of power. Just as with the metaphorical scales of justice, small margins on one side can determine the outcomes of thousands of cases. And at the ultra-important appellate level (which, remember, has the final word on 85% of the cases that reach it), <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/01/28/judicial-appointments-in-trumps-first-three-years-myths-and-realities/">Trump has shifted Republican-appointed judges from holding 40% of the seats to an outright majority at 54%</a>. Trump has also flipped 3 of those 13 courts to Republican-appointed majorities, meaning that 7 of the 13 Courts of Appeals are now controlled by jurists picked by the GOP.</p><p>Also, it's not just how many judges he's appointed, but who they are. The notion that Republicans nominate the youngest and most conservative possible judges to maximize their impact is <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/01/28/judicial-appointments-in-trumps-first-three-years-myths-and-realities/">true</a>: the median age of a Trump appointee is a full four years younger than it was under Obama. And while it is hard to know how conservative a young judge will ultimately turn out to be (see Souter, David), <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/us/trump-appeals-court-judges.html">comprehensive analyses</a> have shown Trump judges to be far more partisan, activist, and socially conservative than those from any other president (a surprising number of <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/ABA_ratings_during_the_Trump_administration">Trump's appointees have also been unqualified or under-qualified</a>, implying that the most important credential in this administration's eyes is being a right-wing warrior).</p><p>This combination of youth and zealotry led former Trump advisor <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/the-weekly/don-mcgahn-trump-courts.html?module=inline">Steve Bannon to call</a> this cohort of Trump judges "a Kafkaesque nightmare" for the Left, because "Donald Trump is going to be in their personal lives 10, 20 and 30 years from now."</p><p>While it's looking like a <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_biden-6247.html">pretty decent bet</a> that Trump will be a one-term president today, if he squeaks into another one and simply matched the average pace of appointments of other two-term presidents over the last 40 years, it would leave America with almost half of our district and appellate court seats being occupied by Trump judges.</p><p>Overall, Trump's enduring influence on the courts would go from significant to overwhelming. Betting markets currently see<a href="https://www.nydailynews.com/sports/gambling/sns-actnet-2020-presidential-race-donald-trump-joe-biden-odds-20200623-6lxgl52ydneejfpo2rjfv2pzl4-story.html"> about a 1/3 chance</a> of a Trump second term. If there were a 1/3 chance of a tornado destroying your house in four months, you would move.</p><p>But this is just one hand in the one-two punch. Attorney General William Barr is the <a href="https://www.yourdictionary.com/haymaker">haymaker</a>.</p><p><a href="https://www.justice.gov/jmd/organization-mission-and-functions-manual-attorney-general">The Attorney General</a> is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, directing prosecutions, advising the president on legal matters, and interpreting the laws that govern executive agencies. He or she has vast power over how our laws are applied.</p><p>Congressman Steve Cohen (D-TN) recently introduced a <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/1032/text?r=40&amp;s=1">resolution</a> to impeach Barr which lays out his flagrant abuses of those powers, stating that Barr "has taken deliberate actions that violate the rights of the American people, assault the principle of impartial administration of justice, and undermine the constitutional structure of separation of powers across three co-equal branches of Government."</p><p>The document reads as an indictment, stunning in the way it sorts Barr's actions into coherent buckets of lawlessness. Barr impaired the function of the Congress by <a href="https://www.rollcall.com/2020/06/02/nadler-seeks-to-punish-barr-for-not-testifying/">preventing testimony and withholding information</a> to cover for administration misdeeds. He <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/barr-misled-the-publicand-it-worked/588463/">misled the public in his sham summary of the Mueller report</a> and by <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-whistleblower-barr-explaine/explainer-barr-investigates-the-investigators-of-russian-meddling-idUSKBN1WN2FN">lying about Russian interference in the 2016 election while inventing claims of spying</a> on the Trump campaign. Barr abused his office by <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/10/politics/justice-department-rudy-giuliani-ukraine/index.html">conspiring in Rudy Giuliani's smear campaign</a> targeting former Vice President Joe Biden.</p><p>He "obstructed justice, undermined the American people's confidence in the criminal justice system, abused the authority of his office, and violated the principle of equal justice under law by repeatedly providing favor to the friends and political allies of President Trump," including <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/nyregion/geoffrey-berman-william-barr-michael-cohen.html">Michael Cohen, Roger Stone and Michael Flynn--and by removing Geoffrey Berman as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York</a>. Barr <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/06/24/barr-roger-stone-mueller-doj/">ordered investigations</a> of the marijuana industry based on his own conservative politics, and of the auto industry for opposing Trump's attempts to loosen emissions standards. And he violently abridged the First Amendment rights of US citizens in<a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/barr-lafayette-square-trump-protest-remarks"> ordering the dispersal of a peaceful racial justice protest in Lafayette Square</a> with tear gas.</p><p>Most subversive of all, Trump's judiciary left hand and right hand know very well what the other is doing, and often work in tandem. Barr ordered prosecutors to drop charges against Michael Flynn, and a <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/24/dc-circuit-orders-flynn-judge-to-dismiss-charges-337751">Trump appointee wrote an appeals court decision</a> backing him up. Barr made false claims about voting by mail to help Trump suppress voting, and the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/us/wisconsin-election-voting-rights.html">Supreme Court curtailed absentee balloting</a> during a pandemic.</p><p>All of this would not be such a glaring problem if it were not for the fact that the judicial branch has never enjoyed such relative power, due to the rot in the other two branches. Congress under Mitch McConnell has become <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/25/a-productivity-scorecard-for-115th-congress/">almost entirely incapable of passing legislation</a>, devolving its policymaking power almost entirely onto executive agencies that <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/01/who-becomes-the-democratic-nominee-probably-matters-a-lot-less-than-you-think/">Trump has packed with a collection of grifters, buffoons, and hacks</a>. Most of Donald Trump's own major policy initiatives – the wall, the ban on Muslim travel, ending Obamacare – are litigated by the courts. When Justice (then Judge) Sotomayor said that federal appeals courts are where policy is made, she was assailed on the right for advocating judicial activism. She wasn't; she was describing (and predicting) today's political reality.</p><p>Put it together, and there is little question that the Trump Republican movement is absolutely crushing the war for the judicial branch. So what can Democrats do?</p><p>All rescue plans depend on a Biden presidency and Democratic Congressional majorities. The first and most vital step is to <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/02/saving-our-democracy-has-to-be-job-number-one-if-democrats-win-big-in-november/">"save Democracy first"</a>: enact campaign finance, ethics, and voting reforms through Congress to limit the political manipulations that have allowed an unrepresentative, highly conservative political minority to dominate our government and impose its will on our judicial system.</p><p>Second, the Department of Justice should be made an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/opinion/sunday/trump-barr-justice-department.html">independent agency like the Federal Reserve</a> to sever the link between unethical presidents and future Barr-like henchmen. In that vein, President Biden would do well to name a reformer as Attorney General, someone who will not only exercise independence and uphold high ethical standards, but also address whether an evolution in law enforcement and <a href="https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/05/30/the-problem-with-the-justice-department">prosecutorial culture</a> is needed at the Department, especially in light of the well-documented need for police reform.</p><p>Third, the entire nature of the federal bench needs to be reconsidered. There was a great deal of discussion during the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/policy-2020/voting-changes/supreme-court-packing/">Democratic primary about "packing" the Supreme Court</a> by expanding the number of Justices. But in addition to creating a <a href="https://fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/c3i/defcon.htm">Defcon 1</a> level political fight, the case counts above show that what may be needed is a more far-reaching reform that touches all levels.</p><p>As a start, Congress should amend current statute to give Supreme Court Justices an <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/30/opinions/supreme-court-term-limits-law-roosevelt-vassilas/index.html">18-year term limit</a> (as 49 of the 50 state courts of last resort have) with staggered vacancies to allow each president two appointments per term. <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/2/16/11024096/life-tenure-judges">No other Democracy gives judges life tenure</a>, and increasing life expectancy means that judges today serve far longer than the Framers envisioned. Although the Constitution gives federal judges lifetime tenures, there's nothing in it that prevents them from being rotated from the Supreme Court onto a lower court when their terms end. As future Chief Justice John Roberts <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/courts/reports/2019/05/08/469504/structural-reforms-federal-judiciary/">wrote</a> in 1983, "setting a term of, say, 15 years would ensure that federal judges would not lose all touch with reality through decades of ivory tower existence." It would also limit the impact of fleeting opportunities to appoint extreme justices.</p><p>Where Democrats holding congressional majorities should consider "packing" – i.e., expanding – the slate of judges is on the courts of appeals. It is hard to undo the raft of Trump appointments. But the impact of the one-time Trump-McConnell judicial heist should be diluted by expanding the pool of judges.</p><p>The battles of the last three and a half years have mostly been lost, and much of the damage has been done. The wounds of the war for the third branch of government will linger in this country. But it is not yet over. There is still a chance to turn the tide.</p>
How Trump is laying the groundwork for a shadow presidency - Alternet.org ›
Will Trump maintain his grip on the Republican Party even if he loses big in November?
Joe Biden currently holds a commanding lead over Donald Trump. He's ahead by almost ten points in Real Clear Politics' polling average (Hillary Clinton's lead at the same point four years ago was five). And his national lead is reflected in the swing states, as a raft of state polls show Biden ahead everywhere from sunbelt states like Florida and Arizona to the critical rustbelt trifecta of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
<p>None of this is to say that the race is over – 14 of the last 16 presidential elections tightened down the stretch, the swing states are a lot closer than the national average, and polling <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/17/trump-polls-biden-324210?nname=playbook-pm&amp;nid=0000015a-dd3e-d536-a37b-dd7fd8af0000&amp;nrid=0000014e-f0fd-dd93-ad7f-f8fd33b50001&amp;nlid=964328">may be more prone to errors than usual right now</a>. But it is time to start thinking seriously about what will happen to the Republican Party if Donald Trump loses decisively in November?</p><p>Do breakaway efforts like the never-Trumpers' <a href="https://lincolnproject.us/">Lincoln Project</a> and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/james-mattis-denounces-trump-protests-militarization/612640/">denunciations</a> from high-profile former Trump cabinet members foretell a fracture of the party, with a significant share of Republicans disavowing Trump, or will they quickly coalesce again in 2021? Will the GOP face enduring rejection by younger voters and college-educated whites over the Trump legacy, or will the party quickly bounce back from a shellacking at the polls? Will the party chart a genuinely new path to deal with increasing demographic diversity and the progressive Gen Z voters coming into the electorate, or will they continue to depend on their higher-turnout but more <a href="https://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-party-affiliation-among-demographic-groups/">homogenous older base</a>?</p><p>A look at recent history is instructive. And it suggests a relatively swift rebound to the same basic trajectory, positions, and overall messaging that we see today, followed by some big unknowns</p><p>In 2004, Republicans were riding high, having won the presidency and both chambers of congress. Presidential guru Karl Rove was gushing about a <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/republican-leader-envisions-100-year-majority">long-term conservative reign</a> while party leaders openly envisioned a <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jul-21-na-gop21-story.html">"permanent majority."</a> Then, the slow-rolling disaster of the Iraq war, an overreach on privatizing Social Security, and the mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina cratered <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx">George W. Bush's standing</a> and <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/24655/party-images.aspx">the Republican brand</a> nosedived to almost its 30-year floor.</p><p>For Republicans, the fall was truly epic, and the low point was truly low. Democrats took over both chambers of Congress in 2006 and Barack Obama completed the sweep by winning the presidency in 2008. George W. Bush went from the <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approval-ratings-gallup-historical-statistics-trends.aspx">highest recorded approval rating on record</a> post-9/11 to the public opinion doghouse, actually scoring consistently lower overall approval than Donald Trump (though Trump has surpassed Bush in <em>dis</em>approval and outrage generation, registering much higher "strong disapproval" numbers).</p><p>Clearly, the conditions for a reckoning were ripe. So did Republicans undertake a major overhaul? Not at all. The party stuck with the program, but redefined itself around antagonism to Obama. Senate Republicans drew a sharp line that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/us/politics/12stimulus.html">significantly limited the scale of the American Relief and Recovery Act</a>, stalled the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/us/politics/23cong.html">House-passed climate change bill</a> and rallied against the Affordable Care Act so effectively that Democrats were forced into <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/06/25/lets-recall-why-the-affordable-care-act-is-so-messed-up/">dubious legislative contortions that continue to hobble the law to this day</a>.</p><p>Meanwhile, to reinvigorate the party base, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/freedomworks-rich-donors-armey-kibbe-super-pac/">channeled millions of dollars into seeding the "TEA Party" campaign</a> against health care reform that successfully turned into a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/us/politics/08townhall.html">summer of raucous town hall protests</a>.</p><p>By the eve of the 2010 elections, the Republican identity had recrystallized and the brand had rebounded: the GOP received <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/24655/party-images.aspx">higher approval ratings</a> than Democrats, while Obama's approval rating had <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/116479/barack-obama-presidential-job-approval.aspx">dropped around twenty points</a> with independents en route to his party's midterm <a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131046118">"shellacking."</a> The GOP had successfully redefined itself as a party of opposition, <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2010/10/the-gops-no-compromise-pledge-044311">pledging zero compromise</a> with Democrats and focusing its messaging around a Democratic president in basic "if he's for it, then I'm against it" terms. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell summed up the party's goals and platform <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2010/10/the-gops-no-compromise-pledge-044311">succinctly</a>: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."</p><p>When Republicans subsequently suffered another reversal in 2012 in the form of Mitt Romney's defeat (Republicans were surprised, <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/11/why-romney-was-surprised-to-lose-his-campaign-had-the-wrong-numbers-bad-assumptions-and-underestimated-barack-obamas-campaign-team.html">expecting a very different electorate</a> to turn out), they made a more serious attempt at soul-searching, performing an <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/03/what-you-need-to-read-in-the-rnc-election-autopsy-report/274112/">"autopsy"</a> to determine whether fundamental changes were needed. The resulting <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2013/03/18/reince-priebus-gives-gop-prescription-for-future/">report</a> called for tactical adjustments along with one key strategic change: adopting more moderate views to appeal to racial minorities, especially by embracing immigration reform.</p><p>The tactical changes stuck (<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/12/19/114510/how-obamas-team-used-big-data-to-rally-voters/">Democrats were stronger in the digital world of 2012,</a> Republicans are stronger <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/opinion/trump-digital-campaign-2020.html">today</a>), but the strategic changes quickly evaporated, <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/01/marco-rubios-drift-to-the-right-on-immigration-continues.html?utm_source=nym&amp;utm_medium=f1&amp;utm_campaign=feed-part&amp;mid=twitter_dailyintelligencer">backfiring hard on the relatively small number of Republicans who embraced them</a>. Barely two years after the autopsy report was issued its strategic impetus was dead, and future President Donald Trump launched his campaign by calling Mexicans "rapists" and making a southern border wall his signature political issue.</p><p>The parallels to 2020 are obvious. The 2008 scenario of a wildly unpopular Republican incumbent, a resurgent Democratic congressional majority, and a national crisis that required significant government intervention led not to Republican dissolution, but rapid consolidation. The hard look in the mirror after 2012 led to improvements in campaign methods, but no moderation.</p><p>There are of course relevant differences today. One is the evolution in the current composition of the party itself, led by a <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/248525/non-college-whites-affinity-gop-trump.aspx">surge in support from non-college educated white male voters</a> paired with heavy losses among suburban voters, voters with college degrees, and white women. Trump won the suburbs by<a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/03/trump-suburbs-reelection-nixon-296980"> 4 points in 2016</a>, but Republicans then lost 37 of the 69 suburban congressional districts they held in the 2018 midterms; Trump won white working-class women by 27 points in 2016 <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/19/18129448/suburbs-midterms-2018-democrats-republicans-congress">but entered this year tied with Biden among that group</a>. These effects have concentrated the party's appeal in a narrower slice of the electorate, and would seem to elevate the need for a major pivot if the party hopes to broaden its appeal again.</p><p>But for the most part, signs point to a rerun of the 2009 playbook: Republicans will likely have a more conservative group in congress (their <a href="https://cookpolitical.com/ratings/senate-race-ratings">most vulnerable incumbents</a> are relative moderates), <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/16/mitch-mcconnell-gop-leader-senate-control-322289?nname=playbook&amp;nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&amp;nrid=0000014e-f0fd-dd93-ad7f-f8fd33b50001&amp;nlid=630318">under</a> the same leadership, and representing a party base that is continually <a href="https://immigrationforum.org/article/american-attitudes-on-immigration-steady-but-showing-more-partisan-divides/">more anti-immigration</a>, socially <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/275792/remained-center-right-ideologically-2019.aspx">conservative</a>, and ready to be re-incited by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/opinion/negative-partisanship-democrats-republicans.html">negative partisanship</a>.</p><p>A number of prominent Republican insiders were interviewed for this article, and several were granted anonymity to allow them to speak candidly. All of them accepted this basic immediate future scenario – that Republicans are likely to immediately position themselves in January 2021 as a party of conservative counterpunchers to a President Biden, ready to jump on every opportunity to rile up their base and re-energize the party</p><p>Beyond that, they identified four big uncertainties that will affect the longer term evolution of the Republican party.</p><p>The first is the 800 pound elephant in the room: Donald Trump. On the one hand, Trump currently functions like the rug in "The Big Lebowski" – he kind of <a href="https://thebiglebowski.fandom.com/wiki/The_Rug">ties the room together</a>, and he could continue to play an outsize role. "Trump obliterated the Republican Party 'swim lanes' in 2016 between conservatives, libertarians and the establishment, and created a whole new lane, the Trump lane," said a veteran operative of several Republican campaigns. "He's the glue for the new coalition in the Party, and a lot of the base is still highly responsive to it. So once the Party starts to get its feet under it in January, he could still matter a lot."</p><p>And indeed, there is no doubt that Donald Trump has almost unprecedented dominance over the major levers of intra-party power: connection with base voters, ability to generate media and communicate his message, fundraising prowess, and allegiance from the party apparatus. The loyalty of Trump supporters has been almost unbreakable: Trump wasn't too far off when he boasted that he could <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTACH1eVIaA">shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote</a> (for 62 percent of his supporters, that is <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/469058-poll-62-of-trump-supporters-say-nothing-the-president-could-do-would">literally true</a>). Trump is also likely to remain a media machine – he earned <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html">$2 billion</a> in free media coverage in 2016 alone, and if he wants to go around the media (or rev them up) to communicate, he will still have 82 million Twitter followers (30 million on Facebook) plus a direct contact list which <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/06/email-list-for-sale-2020-candidates-are-paying/">could reach 40-60 million</a> by the end of this election cycle.</p><p>Trump has also <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/10/trump-wont-be-outraised-again/">shattered fundraising records</a> and will likely end this cycle as the most prolific fundraising candidate in history, so his ongoing connection to his base promises a significant ability to steer future grassroots dollars. And in every sphere of Republican government and politics, the Trump takeover is almost total: in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/us/politics/trump-republican-party.html">state parties</a> and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/25/politics/trump-backed-candidates-republican-primaries/index.html">elective offices</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Risk-Michael-Lewis/dp/1324002646">executive branch agencies</a>, <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/11/08/trump-impeachment-republicans-congress-229904">Congress</a>, and the <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-bringing-in-loyalists-and-getting-rid-of-critics/">White House itself</a>. State party operatives are so deeply in thrall that even with all of the recent sour news, they still <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/15/trump-glide-reelection-republican-officials-316457">see a landslide coming</a> for Trump. Even if he loses, he will have a loyal cadre in key positions.</p><p>But granting the capacity for Trump to play a major role – either constructive or destructive – in shaping a post-2020 Republican party, will it amount to much?</p><p>"If Trump wants to be leader of the party he will be," said Stewart Verdery, a former high-ranking executive branch and senate official who is influential in Republican politics. "But most Republicans don't think he has an interest in running a Republican party if he's not President…he might be more interested in creating a media enterprise so he could become more of a super-charged Sean Hannity."</p><p>A current Republican candidate for federal office agreed, and suggested that Trump's future influence would be limited. "This year, I worried about a tweet from the President or him saying something against me in a primary. But 2018 showed that Trump's core supporters don't turn out unless Trump is on the ballot. So if I were running in 2022, I wouldn't worry too much about it."</p><p>A second question that Republican insiders raised was whether Republicans have crossed a Rubicon in terms of their image and ability to work productively with current Democratic leaders or the media again. "They may wonder if they can ever get a fair shake from the media or from Democrats – who they see as synonymous – and if there's no upside to playing ball with them, that may make them even more unlikely to try."</p><p>On the other hand, Republicans may conclude that they have to make some kind of effort to separate themselves from the Trump era and tone things down. "The question will be, if Trump loses, will a lot of the remaining Republican officeholders feel that they have to basically apologize for having supported the President in order for them to have an individual political future and in order for the Republican Party to be viable in the suburbs," said Verdery. "The answer may very well be yes." This will be especially true if Trump is badly beaten, coming on the heels of down-ballot losses over the last three years.</p><p>Third, there is the question of what the Democrats do. To be sure, Republicans are very likely to oppose almost everything. But their ability to turn that opposition into electoral fuel likely hinges to at least some degree on how aggressive Democrats are, much as in the case of the ACA.</p><p>Republicans interviewed for this article all believed that especially if the Senate flips and Democrats achieve unified control of the legislative and executive branches, there will be significant pressure to lean left on issues like immigration, taxes, and climate in ways that would be, in the words of one insider, "easy to demagogue." Threading the needle of meeting the sky-high expectations of highly progressive Democrats while avoiding handing Republicans obvious political gifts will be a monumentally complex task for a President Biden – one that may be impossible to achieve.</p><p>Finally, there is the question that probably weighs most heavily on the minds of the Republicans gearing up to run for President in 2024 (the current starting list includes Vice President Mike Pence, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, and Sens. Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz), and really any candidate facing a contested race in the next two cycles: is it possible to be a political successor to Trump without behaving like Trump?</p><p>On the one hand, the Republican operative argued that "Trump's political estate is uniquely nontransferable," because no one else can perform the proper alchemy of outrage into base energy. As former Republican Senator Judd Gregg <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/reality-check-many-of-trumps-early-vows-will-never-actually-happen/2017/01/26/2d56bfda-e3e3-11e6-879b-356663383f1b_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_4">said</a> of Trump's core supporters: "They're more interested in the verbal jockeying and the confrontational verbal approach than the results…so as long as he's poking a stick in the eye of the people his constituency feels are a problem, the rest [doesn't] matter." One can't simply separate the policy positions from the incendiary grenades – the grenades are the point.</p><p>But on the other hand, the dynamics of negative partisanship may be enough to compensate for the loss of Trump in the Trumpian base agitation formula. "Republicans will try to boil it all down to what the last four years would look like if Trump weren't so awful," the operative continued. "What has he actually done? Using that approach, they'll definitely do everything they can to inherit the legacy of Trumpsim without Trump...and it's probably going to work."</p><p>In short, an immediate post-Trump 2021 scenario seems relatively clear, but the longer term trajectory starts to get hazy fast especially considering some of the big, structural questions hanging over American politics for the coming decade. For example, will Democrats be able to <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/2020/02/saving-our-democracy-has-to-be-job-number-one-if-democrats-win-big-in-november/">enact reforms</a> to limit political gerrymandering and increase voter access? Do increasing numbers of black, Latino, and highly progressive younger voters really put Republicans on an ever-shrinking political iceberg, or are <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/can-democrats-count-on-demographic-shifts-to-put-them-back-in-power/">changing demographics a political mirage that will continue to dissipate</a> as voters age and racial self-identification evolves?</p><p>And can Republicans sow a new opposition campaign in 2021 to reactivate their base without reaping the whirlwind? After all, that's what happened last time: the TEA Party movement was a wild success right up to the point that it broke Republican lab containment, resulting in House Majority Leader Eric Cantor losing in a primary and a disastrous set of Republican nominees that kept the Senate in Democratic hands until 2015.</p><p>All of these questions represent genuine uncertainties. But there is at least a trail of breadcrumbs toward the path that Republicans will likely tread.</p><p>For example, while there is a lot of evidence that Trump will have the capacity to exert major influence, his presidency has demonstrated that he lacks the discipline to actually use that power effectively. His future interventions in Republican politics are apt to wax and wane around his perceived opportunities to promote his own image and self-interest. He may become a super-charged Hannity, but will have a hard time sustaining a guiding hand on the wheel.</p><p>In turn, this makes it likely that while Republicans will unite against a common Democratic enemy, they will have a hard time either shaking off the Trumpian image entirely or leveraging it to their advantage as a consistent base-motivation tool. Given <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/27/trump-brags-about-getting-republicans-elected-research-suggests-his-endorsements-cost-15-seats/">research </a>showing that Trump's endorsement is a bitter pill that has cost Republicans a net of 15 seats in Congress, a post-presidency Trump and the Republican Party could be facing an ugly divorce, ending up in an awkward joint custody of their core voters.</p><p>It also seems likely that Democrats will risk some 2010-style blowback. Joe Biden has already shifted <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/us/politics/joe-biden-trump.html">palpably left</a> both in policy and <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/07/02/joe-bidens-journey-left/">tone</a>, while <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/tuesdays-primaries-to-test-progressive-democrats-momentum-11592884860">progressive congressional primary challengers</a> have struck fear in longtime incumbents, thereby giving them incentives to shore up their progressive credentials. If they're perceived as moving too far, it would not only help Republicans consolidate, but also potentially create inroads to some of the suburban voters that they have shed in the past three years.</p><p>In this scenario, a great deal could therefore depend on Democrats' ability to enact voting reforms: reducing the <a href="https://apnews.com/9fd72a4c1c5742aead977ee27815d776">artificially-inflated number</a> of easy Republican districts would at least even the playing field once a President Biden gives Republicans something to rally against (of course, if Democrats gain enough state legislative control they could also abandon principle and enact some political gerrymandering of their own in a moment of penny-wise, pound-foolish retribution).</p><p>What ultimately emerges is a highly fluid future, chock full of dangers, toils, and snares across the political spectrum. Nothing will be easy to navigate. "What to do next is a dilemma for Republicans, but it's tough for Democrats too," said the Republican operative. "Having Trump papers over a lot of things for Democrats right now, but they can't get caught in the endless cycle of running against everyone as if they were Trump. It may look bleak for Republicans today, but it really could turn either way down the line, and 2024 will ultimately belong to the party that stays nimble and figures out its post-Trump strategy."</p>
A GOP staffer is disgusted by the party's attempt 'destroy democracy': report - Alternet.org ›
Here's a rough estimate of what Donald Trump's negligence in the face of COVID-19 has cost us (so far)
Donald Trump just hit us with the biggest tax increase in American history.
<p>To be clear, Congress didn't pass a bill. You won't see a blurb about it on your tax return. But it happened.</p><p>A <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tax">tax</a> is a cost imposed on your private resources by the government for its own purposes. This one came in the form of a series of disastrously bad choices related to our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Those choices were Donald Trump's—often relying on his son-in-law Jared Kushner's ill-informed advice--and they resulted in a massive, government-imposed cost on all of us.</p><p>The worst of those choices was the decision not to take action sooner. Epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell have <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/opinion/covid-social-distancing.html">show</a>n that if we had done everything else exactly the same but the White House had simply issued its initial <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/us/bishop-gerald-glenn-coronavirus.html">social distancing</a> guidelines just two weeks earlier — on March 2 instead of March 16 — "an estimated 90 percent of the cumulative deaths in the United States from Covid-19, at least from the first wave of the epidemic, might have been prevented."</p><p>Donald Trump is responsible for this, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOcY3XlzPzs">no matter what he says</a>. He was <a href="https://khn.org/morning-breakout/trump-was-warned-about-virus-threat-in-more-than-a-dozen-intelligence-reports-in-january-february/">being warned directly by advisers</a> that such measures would be necessary well prior to March 2. <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/t0225-cdc-telebriefing-covid-19.html">In late February, almost three weeks before he finally called for "non-essential" workers to shelter in place, </a>the respiratory-disease chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had gone public about the need for imminent school and work closures. Other countries had already provided a model for much more decisive action: <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52103747">seven countries</a> imposed national social distancing guidelines prior to March 2, and 53 did sometime before the US.</p><p>We know that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-response.html">Trump personally chose to ignore all this and downplay the severity of the crisis</a>, claiming that COVID-19 was no worse than the seasonal flu and insisting that the danger was being hyped to hurt his electoral prospects (see <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-response.html">here</a>, <a href="https://apnews.com/090600c299a8cf07f5b44d92534856bc">here</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/07/timeline-trumps-coronavirus-response-is-increasingly-damning/?utm_campaign=wp_the_5_minute_fix&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=newsletter&amp;wpisrc=nl_fix">here</a>, and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/04/04/coronavirus-government-dysfunction/?arc404=true&amp;itid=lk_interstitial_manual_13">here</a>).</p><p>By intentionally impeding our national response to COVID-19 for his own (perceived) benefit, Trump created an economic levy on every American family. Some of it will paid directly through future taxes, and some indirectly through higher costs and lower incomes.</p><p>So how much will Trump's negligence cost us?</p><p>To start with, all of the additional deaths impose a tangible cost on our society. Each of our fellow citizens is an economic engine of consumption, investment, tax revenue and production that affects the balance of trade. The aggregate of those people (and the businesses of which they are a part) is what makes up our Gross Domestic Product (GDP).</p><p>Any calculation of these costs is extremely complicated. But we can provide a pretty good estimate of what the lowest amount might be by starting with just the cost in lives lost. The economic value that we assign to a life is a topic of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/business/economy/17regulation.html">much debate</a> (one of the reasons that economics is called the "dismal science" is that economists get into seemingly coldblooded but ultimately important arguments like this). There are <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-value-of-life/">26 studies that the government uses for reference</a> on this issue that peg the figure as high as $24.5 million, but agencies have coalesced around a value of approximately <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-value-of-life/">$10 million</a> per life.</p><p>Official counts show approximately <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html">98,000</a> US deaths so far in the pandemic. But both <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac846c">national</a> and <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac846c">international</a> studies have demonstrated that COVID-19 is actually leading to 50-60 percent more people dying than official tallies have recognized.</p><p>Multiplying actual total deaths by the 90 percent that were readily preventable if Trump had acted two weeks sooner, and then by the $10 million cost per life, generates a starting cost to our economy of $1.32 trillion just in the last two months.</p><p>This alone already takes us into <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120626010803/https:/www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/tax-analysis/Documents/ota81.pdf">"biggest tax increase-in-history"</a> territory. In the past 50 years, the steepest tax hike was the "Revenue and Expenditure Control Act of 1968," which cost 1.74 percent of our 1968 GDP. The largest tax hike ever was a rise of 5.04 percent of GDP in 1942 that went to finance America's World War II effort. So far, the cost to our economy based on human lives lost alone is 5.71 percent of our <a href="https://www.bea.gov/news/2020/gross-domestic-product-fourth-quarter-and-year-2019-advance-estimate">GDP</a> in current dollars.</p><p>But there's more. We can also count a significant portion of the extra medical costs that we will incur, since most of the added spending will eventually get pulled from your pocket via higher insurance costs, taxes, deductibles, and premiums. A <a href="https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/pdf/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00426">single symptomatic COVID-19 case is estimated to cost a median of $3,045</a>. The math works out such that each additional 1 percent of the US population becoming infected costs us around $8 billion. We cannot know how many total infections we could have averted over the course of the pandemic by intervening two weeks sooner, but we do know that <a href="https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/8/20-1093_article">early action has a massive impact</a> and that a lower curve can decrease overall infections before a pandemic is effectively halted via vaccine. If we assume that total US infections would be just 10 percent lower if Trump had allowed us to act sooner, which seems both reasonable and conservative, it would have saved us an additional $80 billion.</p><p>From there, the costs continue to mount but become harder to calculate, so it is probably prudent to be cautious. For example, the <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2020/05/08/national-debt-how-much-could-coronavirus-cost-america/3051559001/">federal government has spent $2.4 trillion</a> on COVID-19 relief, which will go directly to our national debt (contributions to Social Security have also dropped so precipitously that the <a href="https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/covid-19-may-deplete-social-security-trust-funds-this-decade/">trust funds may run out six years sooner</a>, which would force the government to start borrowing hundreds of billions more within a decade to maintain benefits). We pay <a href="https://www.thebalance.com/interest-on-the-national-debt-4119024">interest on that debt, so increasing it by around 13 percent</a> will add some indeterminate and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/05/what-2-trillion-coronavirus-bailout-is-really-going-cost/">incredibly hard to evaluate</a> amount to our payments, likely in the range of tens of billions a year. So it is fair to tack on a highly conservative $20 billion to the Trump Tax bill. Again, this is a lowball estimate.</p><p>And of course, there are the headline-generating economic figures of recent weeks. The U.S. economy <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/08/economy/april-jobs-report-2020-coronavirus/index.html">lost </a>over 21 million jobs in March and April, driving unemployment up to 14.7 percent. <a href="https://apnews.com/9c131da2823fd4ec0823749920a3e9f7">Consumer spending declined</a> (likely as a result) 7.5 percent in March, and since that component makes up more than 2/3 of gross domestic product, GDP dropped at an <a href="https://www.bea.gov/">annual 4.8 percent</a> in the first quarter. But it's insanely complicated to try to tease out what portion of it was incurred because of Trump. Plus, some of that income, spending, and economic activity is not lost but delayed.</p><p>Suffice it to say that recent <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/24/coronavirus-pandemics-impact-on-the-global-economy-in-7-charts.html">manufacturing rebounds and much more limited GDP losses</a> in China so far are highly suggestive that our own economic losses, currently (at least) in the hundreds of billions of dollars, could have been more limited if we had been able to clamp down on infections early (and had been more competent at setting up enough testing and contact tracing, which Trump also got wrong). To again be extremely conservative, if we could have avoided just 0.1 percent of GDP losses this year by having a more limited outbreak, that would have saved our economy another $20 billion – money that will go missing from our pockets.</p><p>It is worth bearing in mind that this calculation does not even take into account some substantial long-term economic impacts. For example, the combination of Trump's failure to act decisively early, his refusal to coordinate a national re-opening strategy, and his baffling opposition to universal mask use (estimated to <a href="https://fox6now.com/2020/05/20/wearing-a-face-mask-can-reduce-coronavirus-transmission-by-up-to-75-percent-study-says/">decrease COVID-19 transmission by 75 percent</a>) is likely to result in a longer and deeper employment crisis. Extended joblessness can impose significant long-term costs: <a href="https://www.guernicamag.com/there_are_now_approximately_14/">depressing wages for those suffering prolonged unemployment by 20 percent</a> even up to 20 years later, and causing <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304248704575574213897770830">intergenerational wage loss for their children</a> of as much as 9 percent.</p><p>Lives lost, medical costs, interest on the added debt, and stalled GDP…it adds up to $1.44 trillion, a staggering 6.72 percent of GDP. That's a burden of roughly $12,000 on every American household. And that is just the toll so far, based on an ultra-cautious, lower-bound estimate of the economic damage – we are all of course all suffering untold physical, psychological, and social harms due to Donald Trump's pandemic failure, a price that is impossible to reckon.</p><p>But we know this much. Donald Trump has succeeded in achieving a lone superlative: handing every single American the highest government bill in American history.</p>
BRAND NEW STORIES