18 Jul 2024

E.J. Fagan: Despite Trump’s denials, he and Project 2025 are close

by | posted in: Politics | 0

Project 2025 is the staffing and policy planning organization led by the Heritage Foundation. It published “Mandate for Leadership,” a 900-page document of policy recommendations, for the next Republican administration. Project 2025’s numerous unpopular conservative policy positions, such as its proposal to ban most abortion procedures nationwide, have come under fire.

As a result, former President Donald Trump and his allies have attempted to distance themselves from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump posted on his social media website. “I have no idea who is behind it.” Others, such as U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance echoed the sentiment.

Despite what Trump says, it is fair to use Project 2025 as a preview for Trump’s second term. The Heritage Foundation is closer to Trump than it has been to any presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan.

The think tank, which was founded in 1973, formed in opposition to Richard Nixon’s and Gerald Ford’s administrations. It was filled with conservative insurgents, upset that their allies in the Republican Party got most of their policy advice from centrist experts.

Heritage quickly formed an alliance with another conservative insurgent, Ronald Reagan. During his 1980 campaign, the think tank published the first edition of “Mandate for Leadership.” It was wildly successful. Heritage claimed that the Reagan administration implemented at least half of its hundreds of policy recommendations across federal agencies.

It also made staffing a core part of its strategy to influence Republicans in government. Heritage credits its co-founder and former president, Edwin J. Feulner, as the originator of the phrase, “People are policy.” It maintained a Rolodex of conservative policy experts. It claims to have placed more than 200 staffers in policy positions during the Reagan administration.

Heritage’s strategy was successful because parties out of power have little time to do real policy planning. Campaigns release broad policy ideas for a few salient issues, but the federal government’s policy agenda is vast. Presidents, even those more interested in the details of policy than Trump, cannot supervise the vast majority of policy work that their thousands of appointees will spend their four years on.

After Reagan left the White House, Heritage remained one of the most influential conservative organizations on Capitol Hill but was often at odds with the administrations of George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Back in insurgent form, it often reserved its fiercest attacks for Bush administration proposals such as immigration reform.

That all changed when Trump was elected president. Heritage had drifted even further toward the far right under Jim DeMint’s leadership, but Trump needed allies in Washington. As I describe in my book, he appointed more people from Heritage than any other organization other than his campaign.

The new alliance worked. Heritage claims that the Trump administration followed more than 60% of the policy recommendations in the 2016 “Mandate for Leadership” in his first year, more than even the Reagan administration.

Project 2025 is just the latest incarnation of Heritage’s policy planning and staffing for Republican administrations. It published its longest and most detailed set of policy recommendations in years. By incorporating dozens of far-right organizations, it expanded Heritage’s efforts to furnish a second Trump administration with staff to implement them.

However, it is closer to Trump than ever before. Heritage brought in numerous top Trump administration officials to coordinate its planning, including a former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, John McEntee; former U.S. Office of Personnel Management chief of staff Paul Dans; and former Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought.

It is patently absurd that Trump and his allies are now trying to distance themselves from Project 2025. We should expect a second Trump administration to fulfill even more of Heritage’s policy recommendations than he did in his first term.

Given that the 2024 Republican Party platform is light on details, voters should read the 2024 “Mandate for Leadership” as the best guide for what they can expect if he is elected again.

E.J. Fagan is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is author of the book ” The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics.” He wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

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18 Jul 2024

Noah Feldman: The Supreme Court’s religious crusade found its soldiers

by | posted in: Adventure | 0

A new law in Louisiana requires every public school classroom to display the Ten Commandments. Similar laws are under consideration in Texas and Utah, as well as Oklahoma, where the state superintendent of education has ordered that the Bible be taught in all classes from fifth grade to 12th grade. In Ohio, kids are being bused from their public elementary schools to religious classes, then back to school, all during the school day.

Wait, you say. Don’t these initiatives violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution — the bit that’s supposed to keep church and state separate?

They may have, once. But that’s less clear following the conservative constitutional revolution at the Supreme Court — the one that has, in the last three years, overturned decades of precedent on abortion, guns and affirmative action.

The reason we’re seeing this raft of religious legislation now is a 2022 case called Kennedy v. Bremerton. In it, the court struck down the Lemon v. Kurtzman precedent that has guided interpretation of the establishment clause since 1971, as well as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s modification of the Lemon case, known as the endorsement test. Those decisions followed a set of rulings in the 1960s that ended prayer and Bible reading in public schools, which themselves led to efforts to circumvent the law with moments of silence and the like.

In Bremerton, the court’s conservative majority rolled back the clock. The opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch offered a new test based on “history and tradition” — the conservative justices’ favorite new doctrinal shiny object, which they also used in the precedent-overturning 2022 rulings of Dobbs (abortion) and Bruen (guns). The history and tradition approach lets the justices pick their preferred examples from the past and ignore countervailing evidence.

The Gorsuch opinion in the Bremerton case operated like a bat signal to conservative Christian activists all over the United States. Its message was simple: All bets are off. Go right ahead and enact laws and practices that would have been unconstitutional before. When they are inevitably challenged, the lower courts will have to start from scratch and try to ascertain what history and tradition requires; some of the cases will be decided by conservative judges interested in rewriting history; and ultimately, the Supreme Court will decide.

It is of course possible that the conservative majority will do the right thing and preserve the history and tradition of the last 50 or 60 years, which protected students in public school classrooms from being coerced into religious practices. But don’t count on it.

Take the Ten Commandments displays in Louisiana classrooms. If the justices were really attuned to the original meaning of the First Amendment, they would begin by recognizing that every American in 1791 agreed that the government unconstitutionally established religion if it coerced people to participate in religious activities or be exposed to religious teaching against their will. Subjecting children in government-funded schools to the unquestionably religious Ten Commandments violates the establishment clause as a form of coercion.

But the courts, including the Supreme Court, could go the other way. They could, for example, draw a tenuous distinction between displaying the Ten Commandments and reciting them. They could claim there is nothing coercive about being in a room with the Ten Commandments if no one makes you do anything in relation to them.

Or more radically still, the justices could repudiate the Supreme Court decisions from 1962 and 1963 that ruled school prayer and daily Bible reading in the public schools to be unconstitutional. After all, those decisions reversed more than a century of history and tradition in which both prayer and Bible reading were commonplace in public schools.

As for teaching the Bible, as in Oklahoma, the justices could ignore the obviously coercive effect of requiring children to engage in Bible study. They could claim that the Bible can be studied as literature or as part of the legacy of Western thought. Then they could create a presumption that teaching the Bible is legitimate unless shown to be expressly religious. Again, the history and tradition of Bible reading in public schools until the Supreme Court overruled the practice in the early 1960s could be mustered to support compulsory Bible teaching.

Then there is the Ohio program, funded by private religious donors rather than the state. The old name for taking kids from school during the school day for religious instruction is “release time.” In a 1952 case called Zorach v. Clauson, the court ruled that such release time programs were constitutional provided that they took place off school property. The opinion is notorious for justice William O. Douglas’s pronouncement that “we are religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” (Douglas, whose father was a Presbyterian minister, never spent a day in church as an adult — but when he wrote the Zorach opinion, he was hoping to become the Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and presumably wanted to appeal to a religious audience.)

Under either the Lemon test, which required government action to have a secular purpose, or O’Connor’s endorsement test, which said the government could not send the message of endorsing religion, “release time” was probably unconstitutional. Now that those precedents are gone, the Supreme Court could dust off Zorach and uphold the Ohio “release time” program.

The upshot is that there are going to be many more similar religious initiatives coming our way, and the lower courts are going to be pressed to decide them on the basis of solid constitutional analysis, not historical make-believe. The issues will be coming soon to a courtroom near you, and then to the big one in Washington, D.C.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.”

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18 Jul 2024

Donald Trump will accept Republican nomination again days after surviving an assassination attempt

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MILWAUKEE — Donald Trump takes the stage Thursday at the Republican National Convention to accept his party’s nomination again and give his first speech since he was cut off mid-sentence by a flurry of gunfire in an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania.

Trump’s address will conclude the four-day convention in Milwaukee. He appeared each of the first three days with a white bandage on his ear, covering a wound he sustained in the Saturday shooting.

His moment of survival has shaped the week, even as convention organizers insisted they would continue with their program as planned less than 48 hours after the shooting. Speakers and delegates have repeatedly chanted “Fight, fight, fight!” in homage to Trump’s words as he got to his feet and pumped his fist after Secret Service agents killed the gunman. And some of his supporters have started sporting their own makeshift bandages on the convention floor.

Speakers attributed Trump’s survival to divine intervention and paid tribute to victim Corey Comperatore, who died after shielding his wife and daughter from gunfire at the rally.

“Instead of a day of celebration, this could have been a day of heartache and mourning,” Trump’s vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, said in his speech to the convention on Wednesday.

In his first prime-time speech since becoming the nominee for vice president, Vance spoke of growing up poor in Kentucky and Ohio, his mother addicted to drugs and his father absent, and of how he later joined the military and went on to the highest levels of U.S. politics.

Donald Trump Jr. spoke movingly Wednesday about his father’s bravery, saying he showed “for all the world” that “the next American president has the heart of a lion.” But he toggled back and forth between talking about his father as a symbol of national unity and slamming his enemies.

“When he stood up with blood on his face and the flag at his back the world saw a spirit that could never be broken,” Trump Jr. said.

The convention has tried to give voice to the fear and frustration of conservatives while also trying to promote the former president as a symbol of hope for all voters.

The convention has showcased a Republican Party reshaped by Trump since he shocked the GOP establishment and won the hearts of the party’s grassroots on his way to the party’s 2016 nomination. Rivals Trump has vanquished — including Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — put aside their past criticisms and gave him their unqualified support.

Even Vance, Trump’s pick to carry his movement into the next generation, was once a fierce critic who suggested in a private message since made public that Trump could be “America’s Hitler.”

Trump has not spoken in public since the shooting, though he’s given interviews off camera. But he referenced it during a private fundraiser on Wednesday, according to a clip of his remarks recorded on a cellphone and obtained by PBS News.

“I got lucky,” he said. “God was with me.”

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18 Jul 2024

Tyler Cowen: Why is Sweden paying grandparents to babysit? The reasoning is … reasonable

by | posted in: Society | 0

At first glance, the policy sounds absurd, especially to many Americans: In Sweden, grandparents are now eligible for government subsidies to babysit their grandchildren. As a proud grandparent myself, I would be willing to pay to babysit my grandkids. (I don’t have to, but I would.) It would feel wrong to accept government money for my services.

And even in the Swedish context, the program seems excessive. The country has long had first-rate and well-subsidized child-care facilities, which is another reason not to pay grandparents anything, and Sweden already has high levels of government spending and taxation. Is this additional benefit — and expenditure — really what it needs?

But sometimes even apparently foolish ideas have compelling rationales — so compelling, in fact, that you begin to rethink whether they’re foolish at all. These are often the cases that require the hardest thinking.

If you look at Sweden’s policy closely, it adheres pretty well to some basic economic principles: namely, the notion of so-called Pareto improvements, which benefit all parties involved.

Start with the fact that Swedish parents currently receive extensive paid leave upon the birth of a child, and so it can be said they are already paid to look after their children. Whether or not you agree with that policy, it is longstanding and well-established. Take it as a given.

Now imagine that you are an ambitious Swedish doctor or lawyer, climbing the career ladder, and are self-aware enough to realize you do not always have entirely the right degree of natural patience necessary for parenting. In that case, you might prefer to go back to work following the birth of your child. Under the status quo ex ante, you could not work and draw your normal salary and still get the full child-care benefit, even though some child benefits are paid automatically.

There is thus a potential inefficiency in the system. You may stay at home just to get the money, even when an alternate arrangement might be better for everyone.

Now add grandparents to this equation. If the grandparents can be paid to take care of your child, all of a sudden the extended family as a whole doesn’t lose the money by having the parent go back to work. Instead, that money is transferred to the grandparents, so the work disincentive is diminished.

And economists will tell you that the parents and grandparents can do their own settling up. If the grandparents are well-to-do, for instance, and eager to spend time with their grandkids, they might funnel some of that money back to the parents or the child, either directly or indirectly. In some cases, on net, the grandparents may not end up getting paid anything at all.

In essence, you can think of this policy as a model designed to maximize gains from trade.

One side effect is that, to the extent the parent who returns to work is a high earner, government tax revenue will increase. That will help pay for the policy, partially if not entirely.

The logic for this policy may hold all the more for single parents. In that case, the costs of giving up work may be even higher, since on a single income climbing the career ladder and investing in future earnings will be all the more important. Enlisting aid from grandparents may also be more necessary, given the higher burdens on a single caregiver. A defender of the policy would cite these accommodative benefits, whereas a critic might allege they encourage single parenthood too much.

More broadly, fiscal conservatives might point out that the policy still costs some money upfront, while social conservatives might argue that it commodifies family relationships. The policy’s supporters, on the other hand, might note that it can help some people get back to work and also make the grandparents happier. The children might benefit too.

As for myself, I am still unsure whether this new policy is a good idea, though it has stronger virtues and benefits than I first thought. But I am all the more certain of one final lesson: Framing is everything. The very same policy, described in different terms, can sound eminently reasonable or badly out of whack. Keep that in mind next time you are tempted to render a quick verdict on someone else’s idea.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog.

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