The Legislature That Won’t Stay In Its Lane

Indiana’s legislature is preparing for its 2026 session. Despite the Indiana Senate’s recent, surprising show of integrity in refusing to bow to Trump’s gerrymandering order, my expectations remain low. 

For the past several years, Rightwing Republicans (a large number of whom are White Christian nationalists) have enjoyed a super-majority in Indiana’s General Assembly. They haven’t simply ignored the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State, they”ve also demonstrated their total disdain for federalism–the constitutional division of authority that accords different powers to those managing local, state and federal jurisdictions.

Indiana’s legislators seem unable to grasp the fact that they are state legislators, not mayors and/or city counselors.

The Indianapolis Star recently shared research by the Indiana Coalition for Human Services, research that focused only on policies regarding the “social determinants of health.” The report included analysis of things like economic stability, health care and public safety, and the researchers found that roughly three dozen so-called “preemption” laws have been passed since 2010. Virtually all of those measures are examples of our radically Rightwing legislature stepping in to overrule policies our legislative overlords consider progressive or–horror of horrors–“woke.”

As Gary Snyder recently wrote on his “Snyde Report,” 

Indiana lawmakers keep insisting they believe in “local control,” right up until a city tries to do literally anything remotely progressive. A new report finds the Statehouse has quietly stacked more than 50 laws designed to block cities like Indianapolis from raising wages, protecting renters, regulating guns, or extending basic protections to LGBTQ Hoosiers — all in the name of making sure nobody accidentally improves quality of life without legislative permission. Since 2010, roughly three dozen of these preemption laws have been passed, part of a national trend where Republican supermajorities treat local governments less like partners and more like misbehaving children who need their policy toys confiscated.

The official excuse is “business-friendly uniformity,” but the results look a lot like wage stagnation, housing shortages, and two in five Indiana households unable to afford the basics where they live. Cities can’t raise the minimum wage, require affordable housing, or even ban puppy mills without the Statehouse swooping in to say no — yet lawmakers remain baffled by Indiana’s poor rankings on gun deaths, pollution, voter turnout, and overall quality of life. With a fresh wave of bills queued up to crack down on immigration, ban ranked-choice voting, police homelessness, and even let legislators impeach locally elected prosecutors, the message is clear: Hoosiers can have local government — just not local solutions.

My only quibble with that summary would be with its last sentence. Thanks to a legislature that refuses to stay in its own lane, Hoosiers don’t even have genuine local government–we just elect local “functionaries” who must obey the dictates of their legislative masters. As the Coalition for Human Services found, Indiana’s state lawmakers have repeatedly used the doctrine of preemption to target policies that could help lower-income Hoosiers and others in vulnerable groups, but sometimes, the reasons for preempting local government decisions don’t seem ideological–why, for example, did the legislature overrule at least 20 local ordinances meant to combat puppy mills? Is saving puppies “woke”? (My best guess: lobbyists and contributions from the owners of those establishments.)

In 2016, I was infuriated when Indiana’s legislators banned local governments from restricting the use of plastic bags at stores. The law prohibited local governments from banning (or taxing or placing fees on) plastic bags and similar single-use “auxiliary containers.” In a measure that clearly demonstrated that “home rule” is a fiction in Indiana, the law amended Indiana’s toothless home-rule statute to expressly bar local units of government from adopting “any prohibition, restriction, fee, or tax on items like plastic bags, paper bags, cups, boxes, or other one-time use packaging at stores.”

In Indiana, local governments retain that mythical “home rule” only so long as our legislative overlords approve of their “home rules.” Since our legislature is filled with MAGA Republicans who refuse to believe that climate change is a real thing, efforts by local folks to ameliorate environmental threats–even through such modest steps as banning the use of plastic bags–simply cannot be tolerated. 

When you live in a Red state, you soon learn that your legislature considers federalism–along with the protections of the Bill of Rights– optional.

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Is Social Media A Drug?

Paul Krugman recently compared access to social media to the legalization of heroin–to what would happen if heroin was sold without any restrictions on its marketing or use.

Heroin distribution and sales would quickly become a huge, multibillion-dollar industry. They would become a significant part of GDP, even though heroin harms and often kills those who consume it. Given the increasingly naked corruption of U.S. politics, the heroin industry would be able to purchase massive political influence, enough to block any attempts to limit the harm it does — the harm it knows it does, because heroin industry executives would surely be aware of the damage their products inflict.

Through massive political donations — enabled by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling – and de facto bribery enabled via cryptocurrency deals, the industry would be able to enlist the U.S. government as an ally in its efforts to block regulation in other countries. For example, U.S. officials might threaten punitive tariffs against countries that try to limit and regulate heroin use.

Krugman insists that this fanciful exercise–which may seem “extreme and implausible”–is actually a pretty accurate description of the social media landscape. As evidence, he quotes a report issued in 2023 by the U.S. Surgeon General’s office, titled “Social Media and Youth Mental Health.” (Krugman advises downloading it quickly, before RFK Jr. suppresses it.) That publication summarized the now-extensive evidence that children and adolescents who consume excessive amounts of social media sustain mental health damage.

It isn’t as though the tech “bros” responsible for these platforms are unaware of the damage being done.

In 2021 the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Facebook Knows Instagram is Toxic for Teen Girls, Documents Show: Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public.” In 2024 Meta finally introduced some relatively ineffectual limits on what teens can see.

The Journal reported that Meta’s own internal projections estimated it would earn 10% of its overall annual revenue – that’s $16 billion dollars– from advertising scams and banned goods. In other words, Meta’s platforms are knowingly pushing (and I use the word “pushing” intentionally) “fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.”

And where have our intrepid Senators and Representatives been while these facts have emerged? Evidently, the same place they’ve been hiding while Trump dismantles the federal government.

Krugman writes that last year Congress was on the verge of passing the Kids Online Safety Act, a law that would have been the first to impose any rules on social media. The Act initially had bipartisan support; some ninety-one senators had signed on. But then, Krugman reports, “Mark Zuckerberg and his billions came to town, and the legislation died.”

Once again, other countries have done what the U.S. won’t. The European Union passed the Digital Services Act, which–among other things–requires large platforms to self-police and refrain from engaging in a variety of activities, including “dissemination of illegal content” and matter shown to have “negative consequences” for “physical and mental well-being.” Australia has recently passed a law that would prevent anyone under 16 from having a social media account. (I’ll admit to skepticism about the ability to enforce this, but at least Australia is trying.)

A couple of weeks ago, under its Digital Services Act, the European Union fined Musk’s X 120 million euros, based on several violations of that Act, including the fact that X’s “Blue checks” are a fraud. (X claims that a blue check means that the poster’s identity has been verified. But in fact X sells them and makes no effort to verify identity.) X also refuses to provide information on advertisements sufficient for users to identify scams, and refuses to make its public data available to researchers.

Unlike the EU, the Trump administration is pulling out the stops to support our tech titans’ resistance to European regulation.

Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, has explicitly linked U.S. tariffs on European steel to demands that Europe weakens its digital regulations. If the EU tried to make comparable demands on the United States, we’d consider it an outrageous infringement on our national sovereignty. And I’m pretty sure that making this linkage violates U.S. trade law too. But rule of law is for the little people.

As Krugman argues, unregulated social media is a lot like unregulated drugs. Powerful social media billionaires are preventing us from protecting our children. They are also using that power to dictate U.S. foreign policy, “punishing our erstwhile allies for daring to limit their ability to push their product.”

America is now a digital narco-state.

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Costco–One Of The Good Guys

I’ve previously written about the very different approaches to doing business by the big-box retailers, Costco and Sam’s Club. I shop at Costco rather than at Walmart’s Sam’s Club because Costco pays its workers well, provides health care coverage to its employees, and shows in a variety of ways that it values its members. I still recall a conversation at the Costco check-out when I said something to my husband to that effect, and the cashier weighed in with an emphatic agreement, saying she’d previously worked at a Sam’s Club and that there was no comparison–she was compensated, and treated, so much better at Costco.

My choice of retailers was confirmed, in my view, when Costco responded to Trump’s anti-DEI push by telling the administration, in effect, to pound sand–that they’d continue their DEI efforts.

And now, Costco has filed suit against the Trump administration, demanding repayment of the added amounts the retailer has paid due to Trump’s ridiculous tariffs. As The New Republic has reported, the company has filed a lawsuit arguing that the tariffs were illegal; that the law under which Trump justified the tariffs was never meant to authorize their collection, and that “the pell-mell manner by which these on-again/off-again IEEPA duties have been threatened, modified, suspended, and re-imposed” was evidence of the validity of that assertion.

As the article notes, while other companies have filed similar suits, Costco’s stands out “not only because of the size of the company involved but because it illustrates how tariffs actually work—and exposes the Trump administration’s lies about them.”

The administration has responded to these suits by insisting that it would refund American importers if the tariffs were found illegal. (This was the concession that persuaded the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to deny issuance of a preliminary injunction, allowing the government to keep collecting them during litigation.) Costco alleges that the way the tariffs are collected (among other peculiarities of this situation explained at length in the linked article) makes that promise of refunds ephemeral absent a specific company’s lawsuit. Even if the tariffs are found to be unlawful, observers have opined that the administration is likely to stall the tariff rebate, according to academics following the debate. One expert has predicted that the repayment process will be “a political quagmire” and suggested that it’s likely Costco filed suit to protect itself.

Even some of the Supreme Court justices who have taken up residence in Trump’s pocket have signaled an unwillingness to find the tariffs lawful. Roberts has (correctly) called them a tax, and noted that taxation is a core power of Congress, not the executive branch. If Costco and the other companies that have sued win their cases, what the article calls “Trump’s scam” will collapse—and his administration may be forced to make those companies whole.

The Washington Post is also covering the litigation.

The warehouse club last week became the largest company — and the first major retailer — to sue the Trump administration, seeking a full refund for the levies it has paid this year. The Supreme Court heard arguments in November on whether President Donald Trump has legal authority to impose tariffs on goods from nearly all countries, and it is expected to rule in the coming weeks or months. If it rejects the administration’s case that tariffs are justified as an emergency, the companies could be entitled to hefty refunds.

The article also pointed out that Costco “is uniquely positioned to weather any backlash from Washington” thanks to its legions of devoted customer/members– a devotion that sets it apart from most other retailers, who are accordingly more reluctant to make waves by resisting the administration.

There’s a lesson to be learned here. Costco’s approach to the conduct of its business initially earned it the devotion of those legions of members, and now, its principled stances have generated increased support from that membership.

While the grassroots efforts to boycott Target for ending its DEI programs led to weakening foot traffic and diminished financial outlooks for consecutive quarters, Costco saw a boost. Net sales for the 2025 fiscal year (which ended Aug. 31) increased 8 percent over 2024 to $269.9 billion. Net sales for November were also up 8.1 percent over last year, reaching $23.6 billion, the company reported last week. 

It’s another reminder that We the People can punish cowardice and reward principled behavior.

 
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Why The GOP Is No Longer A Political Party

I have repeatedly insisted that the MAGA cult currently operating as the Republican Party isn’t just a far cry from the party of Lincoln, but an equally far cry from the once-respectable political party of my younger days. As regular readers of this blog know, I spent some 35 years in that earlier GOP–met my husband and made many lifelong friends while serving in a Republican administration, and won a Republican Congressional primary with an agenda that included support for reproductive choice and gay rights.

I still have that husband and those friends. None of them vote Republican these days. All of them are appalled by the racism and viciousness of what has replaced a once-respectable political agenda.

Recently, the Contrarian focused on the vast differences between the MAGA/Trump cult and the political party it has displaced. The article began by agreeing that today’s GOP is more properly seen as a cult than a political party, finding it composed of “Trump idolaters, followers, zealots, sycophants, or devotees” who lack not just a concrete policy agenda “but all other fundamental elements of a political party.” Today’s iteration is “an empty political shell based exclusively on fidelity to a decrepit, unhinged autocrat.”

A political party is properly defined as a group of persons “organized for the purpose of directing the policies of a government”. As the article asserts–and as any sentient American can see– the GOP members of Congress have shown zero interest in discharging their constitutional duties or entering into serious debates over policy.

What about a governing agenda? The article notes the complete absence of a consistent ideology.

“States rights”? Well, they rail against federal regulatory overreach, but they condone federal troops’ invasion of U.S. cities. Indiana’s right-wing governor has threatened his own Republican state lawmakers for not capitulating to Trump’s gerrymander demands, just as MAGA Texas Governor Greg Abbott leaned on his state legislators (at Trump’s behest) to pass a redistricting grab that Texas lawmakers disliked. And while the MAGA contingent nominally supports “law and order,” it cheers the pardon of Jan. 6 felons and the dismissal of those who prosecuted them. Invariably, policy inconsistencies (e.g., America First but start a war with Argentina, fiscal hawkishness but run up the debt) swallow any cogent dogma. The only consistency is subservience to Trump. (Recall that the “party” platform boiled down to “whatever Trump wants.”)

Likewise, unlike normal political parties, the MAGA crew has no minimum standards for membership. Racists, misogynists, xenophobes, conspiracy mongers, criminals, antisemites, insurrectionists, and adjudicated sexual assaulters are all welcome—indeed, they can rise to highest rungs of the party! The days when conservatives ejected the John Birch Society are long gone.

The article went on to describe the party of Lincoln, and the historic elements of the party platform–especially a provision in the platform of 1856 pledging to uphold the principles of the Constitution and the rights of the States–and contrasted that agenda with today’s Trumpers who have essentially signed on to “anything Trump wants,” irrespective of constitutional constraints.

Today, the formerly Grand Old Party has substituted White nationalism for the Declaration’s “all men are created equal.” It no longer respects the limits on executive power extolled in previous platforms. The party that decried “judicial activism” now celebrates a corrupt Supreme Court. The party of free markets has abandoned competition and genuine capitalism for corporatism and crony capitalism. And the party that once opposed Russian aggression cheers as Trump betrays our allies, commits war crimes and makes the world more dangerous.

I know that several of my more partisan readers will post comments to the effect that the GOP was always on the wrong side of liberty and equality. They’re wrong. As the linked article notes,

Let’s face it, the current crowd bears no resemblance to the party with a policy legacy that includes such achievements as the Emancipation Proclamation, the post-Civil War amendments, the Land Grant Colleges and Homestead Act, civil service reform, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the National Park system, the first food and drug safety act, the interstate highway system, the EPA, the peaceful integration of Germany at the end of the Cold War, and the Americans With Disabilities Act. Indeed, no doubt Trumpists would condemn all that as part of a “woke,” communist agenda.

We need to face the fact that America does not currently have two political parties. We have the Democrats and today’s iteration of the KKK.

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Rejecting “It Depends”

When I was teaching, I had a standard “introduction” lecture that I’ve referred to several times on this platform: I would tell my Law and Public Policy students that, yes, they would find me opinionated, but no, a difference of opinion would not affect their grades–that my goal was not to change their opinions or policy preferences, but to ensure that they left my class using two phrases more frequently than they had before: “it depends” and “it’s more complicated than that.”

In other words, I saw it as my job as a college professor to encourage increased recognition of complexity and ambiguity–to discourage knee-jerk ideology in favor of thoughtful exploration. In my opinion–then and now–education is the process of inquiry. The educated individual is aware of what s/he doesn’t know. Education–again, in my view–is vastly different from rote learning. Teaching is not a process of transmitting “givens” to receptive vessels–it consists of introducing students to the process of critical thinking and dispassionate analysis of what constitutes probative evidence and what doesn’t.

There isn’t a lot of critical thinking–at least, as I describe it– going on in America’s political life these days. I recently came across an essay in the New York Times that helped me understand the roots of the rigidity that permeates our national conversations. It was titled “The 77-Year-Old Book That Helps Explain the MAGA New Right.”

The essay focused on a 1948 book by one Richard Weaver, whose argument–according to the essay–laid the foundation, or basic contours, of the New Right’s closed approach. The book was titled, “Ideas Have Consequences,” an observation that has  become a popular catchphrase on the Right.

Dr. Weaver didn’t have just any old ideas in mind: The ideas he was concerned with were distinctively modern ideas, and the consequences of these ideas were devastating. They had caused nothing less than “the dissolution of the West.”

Weaver’s target was a philosophical concept called nominalism. Nominalism, which Weaver attributed to philosophers like Hobbes, Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers, rejects the existence of absolute truths — including transcendental moral truths. Nominalists rejected Plato’s notion of a universal objective moral reality.

Dr. Weaver insisted that nominalism was the source of all our woes. He wrote that, by challenging the idea of universal objective moral reality, “modern man had succumbed to individualism, relativism, materialism, historicism and politics as will to power.” Weaver–and today’s intellectuals of the Right–insist that, as a consequence, modern thought is inherently corrosive, and that we must restore a “transcendental moral orthodoxy” to our politics.

They seem quite sure that any “moral orthodoxy” will mirror their own “objective” conclusions…

As the essay points out, adopting Weaver’s approach would rather “obviously legitimate the repression of anyone who thinks about truth differently.” We can draw a straight line from Weaver to MAGA’s belief that “heritage Americans”–i.e. White Christians– who evidently are seen as having some sort of genetic access to those immutable “truths,” are the only people who can be “real Americans.”

As the author of the essay notes, there’s nothing wrong or anti-American about holding strong convictions grounded in tradition or religion. But–as she also reminds us– the American system was based upon the Enlightenment belief that “citizens are entitled to shape their own conceptions of the world.”

Genuine conservatives understand and respect the First Amendment’s commitment to the freedom of the individual conscience. They accept that religious freedom means living in a country where different people hold different beliefs, and that a commitment to free speech allows people to voice opinions contrary to their own.

MAGA folks are not conservative.

There’s general understanding that Trump and MAGA are authoritarian, but less recognition of how profoundly unAmerican that authoritarianism is.  MAGA folks approve of Trump’s approach to governing because it is consistent with what the essay calls a “closed philosophical mode” of “radical anti-modernism and moral and political absolutism.”  MAGA’s contempt for liberal democracy is rooted in its belief that they–and only they– are arbiters of Truth, and they see America’s constitutional commitment to pluralism and tolerance as threats to that Truth.

They are incapable of recognizing that discerning a truth (lower case) requires understanding that the world is complicated, and that what constitutes any given truth often depends upon recognizing and accounting for the multiple facts in which that “truth” is embedded.

MAGA folks firmly believe that they are in possession of immutable Truths; the only open question is how they are going to make the rest of us bend to their Truths.

Dialogue with such people is unlikely to be productive.

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