Don't Panic!

Everyone should read the recent New York Times column by law professor Ilya Somin, "How liberals learned to love federalism." Its subtitle: "The left was skeptical of giving power to the states. Until the Trump era." Its premise: During the Trump years, liberals are finding reasons to rethink their rejection, especially during the civil rights movement, of the idea that state and local governments ought never to overrule or block the initiatives of the national government.

Graphic from the article. Click to enlarge.

Why the change of heart by liberals? Because today, state and local governments are flexing their muscles to block Trump's right-wing initiatives. A case in point: Trump's efforts to put the kibosh on "sanctuary cities" for undocumented immigrants are being effectively resisted by the affected states and cities themselves.

"Americans of every political stripe," Somin writes, "have much to gain from stronger enforcement of constitutional limits on federal authority. One-size-fits-all federal policies often work poorly in a highly diverse and ideologically polarized nation." This is because strong federalism, with political power duly exercised at all governmental levels, acts as a kind of ballast whenever polarization tries to yank us too far to the left or too far to the right.

President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal moved us decidedly leftward toward bigger national government. But let's not forget that his first New Deal effort, the National Recovery Administration, was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously declared that the NRA law was unconstitutional. This happened in 1935, within two years of its 1933 passage. The Supreme Court declared that it infringed the separation of powers under the United States Constitution. Then, when FDR in 1937 tried to pack the Supreme Court with extra pro-New Deal justices, the Senate defeated his bill.

Somin's viewpoint can accordingly be extended to lauding the checks and balances afforded by having three coequal branches of the national government, including not only the president but also the congress and the judiciary. Somin writes:

Many cities, plus a coalition of seven states led by New York, sued to challenge the new conditions linking [federal grants to the sanctuary cities] to immigration enforcement. At least a dozen federal trial court decisions and four appellate rulings have gone against the administration, while none have supported it. Only Congress, these decisions have affirmed, can impose such terms on grants given to states and towns.

Note also the importance to federalism of not just the Supreme Court but also the lower tiers of the federal judiciary, such as the trial and appellate courts.

The takeaway from all this is that there is a long history of federalism's ability to offset lurches to the political left or to the political right such as we're seeing every day in today's headlines and Twitter feeds. So much of the political rhetoric we hear today is proclaimed out of a sort of panic mode that bodes the end of the world as we know it. The lesson of Somin's benevolent history of American federalism, summarized in two words: Don't panic!

Racism, Busing ... and Joe Biden

In the recent TV debate among 20 Democratic presidential hopefuls, Sen. Kamala Harris upbraided former Vice President Joe Biden for, among other things that imply Biden was never sufficiently "woke" about race issues, his opposition to federally mandated "busing" as a young senator in the 1970s.

Kamala Harris (on left) and Joe Biden

Harris's ploy worked well for her. Although Biden still is at the top of the presidential polls, he quickly lost ground to Harris, who jumped up in the polls to somewhere between second and fourth place, depending on the poll.

There is a front page article in today's Washington Post, "What a lifeguarding job on the black side of Wilmington taught Joe Biden about race," that gives an in-depth look at how the young Joe Biden learned to despise the racism in American life and history. By the time a few years later when he entered politics, Biden had personally earned the friendship, respect, and support of the black community in Wilmington, Delaware. The loyalty from that time persists today.

The talk of "busing" in the TV debate was probably less than comprehensible to many younger viewers. Nikole Hannah-Jones's recent article in The New York Times, "It Was Never About Busing: Court-ordered desegregation worked. But white racism made it hard to accept" explains all.

Illustration from the article.

"Busing" was a term used in the 1970s to refer to a last-ditch effort by anti-segregationists to force public schools to integrate. After the Supreme Court, in its unanimous decision in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, said segregated schools were unconstitutional, school boards and local governments in both the South and the North found a variety of ways to sidestep integrating their schools. Pro-integration forces in school systems responded by simply assigning black children to formerly all-white schools, and vice versa. Since the affected schools were not in the actual neighborhoods of the affected children, the children had to ride school buses to their new schools.

White families in particular — but also some black families — vociferously objected to the fact that "busing" was taking children away from their closest neighborhood schools. Objecting black families simply wanted their neighborhood schools to be brought up to white schools' standards of quality. But objecting white families assailed "busing" rather than admit that what they really hated was the fact that integration would force their children to sit next to black children in schools.

It's obvious, then, that those old battles about race have not really been won by the forces of justice and racial equity. (Nor are those who favor racial equity today necessarily on the same page as to how to achieve it.) In fact, as this graphic from the Hannah-Jones article shows ...

Click to enlarge.

... integrationist gains which had been achieved by "busing" and other means after 1968 were rolled back significantly after 1988. This sad fact was true in various parts of the country outside the Northeast. Even sadder was the fact that in the supposedly "blue" and liberal Northeast, there had been no integrationist gains in school systems in the first place.

Real Clear Politics 2020 Presidential Polls, No. 3

Last week, on June 26th and 27th, 20 of the Democratic presidential hopefuls squared off in a two-night, 10-candidate-per-night TV debate. As of today, July 2, Real Clear Politics shows (here) that the debate had a profound effect on how well the various contenders are polling. (See "Real Clear Politics 2020 Presidential Polls, No. 2" for how they were doing prior to the debate.)

Here's the crucial chart as of today:

Click to enlarge.

The crucial post-debate changes show up at the right edge of the chart. Joe Biden, though still on top, has dropped enormously. He's now polling at just 27 percent. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has shot way up from her earlier low support level to 13.4 percent. The reason for both those changes is the way that Harris took Biden to task during the debate for failing to support federally mandated busing and for having worked amicably in Congress with southern senators who were white segregationists.

The number two Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders, has likewise lost ground in the post-debate polls. Elizabeth Warren, for her part, is still just barely in the number three position, having impressed on the first night of the debate ... but Harris, from the second night, is hot on her heels at number four. The number five candidate, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, has declined in his post-debate support, even though I personally thought he did extremely well in the debate. All of the other Democratic candidates are coming in with less than three percent support apiece.