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THREE LIES
Eleven years ago, Megan McArdle wrote an essay called “The Politics of Prevarication.” It was about Republicans’ efforts to undercut Barack Obama’s health-care plan.1 Her analysis deserves updating. Since that time, Republicans have elevated lying to an art form. In fact, this tactic got underway well before the advent of Donald Trump.
Republican legislators, in particular, have perfected what I like to call “bare-faced lies.“ They are uttered without diffidence or apology; indeed, with no disposition to offer reasoning or evidence. Indeed, there’s no care if it’s generally realized that what is being said isn’t true. Their purpose is to exercise their power as they wish, deploying a few fictions as window dressing.
Three such prevarications will be considered on the pages ahead. One is that the nation is under siege by a surge of “voter fraud.” Another is that Republicans are sedulously dedicated to “women’s health.” The third is that the party is committed to creating “well-paying jobs.”
Voter Fraud.Since at least 2011, the GOP has made resolute efforts to truncate the nation’s electorate. This can only be seen as purposeful reversal. Until recently, the nation has successively widened the franchise. Barriers based on gender, race, and age have all been altered or eliminated, with the last lowered from twenty-one to eighteen. Even literacy tests were proscribed.
Republicans have never been happy with these trends. Indeed, there’s a very basic reason: many don’t regard access to the ballot as a universal right. In fact, strictly speaking, they don’t see it as a right at all. Thus they can see situations where it could be reasonably suspended or denied, much like a driver’s license. The most striking example is denying the vote to inmates and persons on probation or parole, which in some states continues for the remainder of their lives. What this says is that the franchise must be earned, which most citizens do by steering clear of crime. According to the Sentencing Project, fully six million Americans have had felony convictions.2 In states like Mississippi and Kentucky, it’s one of every eleven of their adult residents.
At the same time, there’s a concurrent feeling that felons should be able to regain their vote after they have, as the phrase goes, paid their debt to society. In 2018, Florida held a referendum on restoring votes to former felons. A poll found 87 percent of Democrats favoring the measure. The general view was that Republicans would object. Yet as a surprise to some observers, fully 52 percent of them voted for it, which ensured its passage. (Shortly thereafter, the state’s Republican legislators undercut the public vote. It decreed that all former felons must pay back long-dormant court costs if they wanted the ballot.)
The last few decades have seen a spate of activity by Republican legislatures. One tactic is to set onerous obstacles for new voters who seek to join the rolls. Another enables the removal of persons already on the books, if they move or change their names or miss an interim election. Only afterward do they learn that their votes will no longer be counted or recorded. Such moves were initiated in Ohio, and were obligingly upheld by the Supreme Court’s five Republican members.3 States where the party holds control have also reduced the number of polling places and cut back on opportunities for early voting. Predictably, such measures are applied most sedulously in districts with palpable Democratic margins.
But the most common tactic in Republican states has been to require that everyone seeking to vote must produce a government-issued document with an embedded photograph. A driver’s license will suffice, as would a passport or a gun permit. Expressly not allowed are cards issued to students by state colleges or persons receiving food stamps. These omissions were not accidental. Those excluded are less prone to vote Republican; firearms owners are less apt to be Democrats.
Given our automotive age, most adults do possess a current driver’s license. But a lot of people don’t. A 2016 study, based on US Department of Transportation records, found that 14 percent of Georgia’s adults didn’t have one, nor did 18 percent in Oklahoma. In actual numbers, 1,993,107 Texans of voting age were in this category. A Department of Justice survey found that black residents of Louisiana were four times less apt than whites to have official documents with a photograph. And a University of Wisconsin study revealed that while 53 percent of black adults in Milwaukee didn’t have drivers’ licenses, this was so for only 15 percent of white adults elsewhere in the state.4 For voting to be a basic right, it must remain readily available. Demanding a license gravely undermines the concept of citizenship.
Of course, the legislators weren’t stupid. They allowed states to issue, on request, an alternative document. For this, though, one had to personally journey to a Motor Vehicles office, have your photograph taken, and fill out a lengthy form. In Wisconsin, to cite one state, you had to specify your hair color, height, and Social Security number. A fee was ordinarily charged. It could be waived, though only after proving that their incomes were below the poverty line, which means bringing in a batch of papers. All this was not for clearance to drive a school bus or an interstate truck. It was to be permitted to vote. (Nor was it clear what provision was made for housebound elders or patients in nursing homes.) Thus far, no states have made public—at least not on available websites—how many proxy cards have been requested or issued.
Since this requirement would be burdensome for a not-small pool of citizens, its Republican sponsors have felt it prudent to fashion a justification. The rationale for demanding an official card, they averred, was to thwart voter fraud. Thus the party framed an account pronouncing that elections across the country are routinely abused by men and women who vote under bogus names or addresses, or by using other people’s identities. Here they were abetted by their president, who claimed he came second in the popular count because several million people had illegally voted for his opponent. Having to present an official document with your likeness would prevent such deceptions. It’s how we keep hijackers from boarding airplanes.
The first step, taken in May 2017, was to create a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, to be chaired by the vice president. Almost its first move was to send an ultimatum to all states, demanding that they provide full access to their electoral registers, including Social Security digits. (No fewer than 136,787,187 people voted in 2016.) The purported aim of this massive inquiry was to unveil any miscreants who might have voted concurrently in several states.
Needless to say, states with Democratic administrations balked. But the most prominent refusal came from the elected secretary of state in Mississippi, long a Republican redoubt. “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico,” he proclaimed, citing his obligation to “protect the privacy of our citizens.”
Clearly, the commission had bitten off more than it could chew, let alone what it could digest. In January 2018, after a lifespan of 231 days, it dissolved and turned the issue of election integrity over to the Departments of Justice and, ominously, Homeland Security.
Still, the specter of voter fraud has not been allowed to die. Instead, the commission’s chores were farmed out to the Heritage Foundation, a tax-exempt think tank in large part funded by the Koch brothers. Its principal project has been to devise a Voter Fraud Database. In its first report, its analysts found 1,132 “proven instances of voter fraud,” arrayed along a time line with the first case in 1948. All the states had at least one offense, ranging from 14 in Alabama to 123 in Minnesota.
Whether 1,132 is a lot or a little, or just the tip of an iceberg, is a judgment call. What we do know is that a total of 972,912,497 votes were cast in the nine biennial elections from 2000 through 2016. If all the frauds were in that span—in fact, many were much earlier—the 1,132 came to one of every 859,463 of the ballots recorded in this period. And this ratio doesn’t include primaries or odd-numbered years, which would easily raise it to one in over a million.
The Brennan Center at New York University, another tax-exempt body, decided to give the Heritage research a close look. To start, it found that only 488 of the 1,132 cases occurred in the last ten years. So over half were more than a decade in the past, including the one in 1948. The Brennan analysts focused on offenses that photo identification cards are intended to address. It found that only ten of the 1,132 involved “impersonation fraud” where an individual signed in to vote using someone else’s name. Some of these were apparently caught before identity cards were used. Still, it can be agreed that the impersonators—all ten of them—would be more readily snared if they showed a card with the wrong name or photograph. Using the 2000–2016 voter roll, ten work out to one in each 97,291,250 ballots.5
The Heritage researchers also looked for instances where noncitizens voted. Here it did better, coming up with forty-one cases. One, from Texas, shows how severe the retribution can be. Rosa Maria Ortega, a noncitizen, was found guilty on two counts of voter fraud for voting in the November 2012 general election and at the 2014 primary. Ortega claimed she thought she was a citizen, and blamed her lack of education for the mix-up. But prosecutors pointed out that Ortega had previously noted that she was a non-citizen when applying for a driver’s license. A judge sentenced her to eight years’ imprisonment, after which she faces the possibility of deportation.
Would requiring a driver’s license for voting have caught or deterred the forty-one noncitizens? As it happens, foreigners can and do obtain this document. An Australian corporation may send a team of engineers to Idaho for a six-month assignment. Idaho will be pleased to grant them licenses on the same basis as domestic applicants. Nor will that document attest whether they are US citizens.
Another 174 cases—with 114 of them in Minnesota—could arguably be called fraud. In these instances, persons arriving to vote were truthful about their age, their citizenship, and their place of residence. But all had criminal records. Some didn’t realize that this disqualified them. Some others did and tried to vote anyway. Most never had their ballots recorded. All in all, the great majority of the 1,132 Heritage cases were not ballots that were illegally cast. They run a huge gamut, from charges of illicit assistance and irregular petition signing to outdated home addresses and improper interventions by election officials.
But then, Republicans have known all along that fraud has never been a problem, certainly not in the last half century. Their aim is not to thwart dishonest voting, but to keep certain groups of citizens from voting at all.
Women’s Health. A Republican goal has been that abortions should no longer be available in the United States. This pursuit has been extremely effective in buttressing its base. Not least, it has cemented an alliance between ardent Roman Catholics and evangelical congregations, who in earlier times were rancorous adversaries. The sects now join in championing “the unborn” and “right to life,” attesting to their conviction that human existence begins at conception.
By far the most effective of the Republicans’ tactics has been to force the closing of clinics where most abortion procedures occur. The great majority of these procedures are medically or surgically simple, and thus do not require hospital equipment or facilities. Hence the advent of freestanding centers, which usually offer an array of services, including prenatal tests and cancer screening. Planned Parenthood is the best known of such centers, and therefore a principal target.
Republican legislators habitually decry rules and regulations issued by government agencies, claiming that they stifle innovation, diminish profits, and are always burdensome. But when it comes to the above-mentioned clinics, animosity to interference is set aside. By now, antiabortion statutes are familiar. They require that clinics maintain the costly appurtenances of a hospital, such as surgical suites equipped for gastric bypasses or liver transplants. There are also provisos specifying widths of corridors, inventories of pharmaceuticals, even spaces for parking. The real aim, of course, is to impose enormous expenses of installation and upkeep on clinics, which their revenues cannot possibly cover.
Another hurdle is to require that all physicians who practice at clinics to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. Republican lawmakers are well aware that few hospitals will oblige, largely because they would rather not be identified with a controversial procedure. In truth, these rules have no rational purpose. If problems arise at a clinic—which is extremely rare—the patient can be sped to the nearest emergency room. In such situations, patients are treated immediately, without being asked if they had been referred by a privilege-carrying physician.
So here we have yet another Republican lie. It is their claim that all these directives betoken their solicitude for the health and safety of the women who arrive. The party has never been notably concerned with matters of health or safety. Its position is that citizens should purchase whatever care they choose from private providers. Nor is it particularly supportive of the women who rely on clinics, especially if they have been sexually active without the sacrament of marriage.
These laws have worked. Kentucky once had seventeen clinics offering the procedure. By 2017, fully sixteen of them had closed, not voluntarily, but due to the mounting costs of widening corridors and stockpiling drugs that were never used. How far Republicans care about women’s health was bared in a federal courtroom in 2016. During an interchange, Texas’s attorney general was asked what recourse there would be for women in his state if all of its remaining clinics closed because of the prohibitive costs of complying with these and other rules. He replied that they could journey across the border to adjacent New Mexico. But that state, he was reminded, didn’t mandate high-tech surgical suites, ostensibly to protect patients’ health. Was he counseling women to use facilities that were ostensibly less safe? Texas’s chief law officer did not offer an answer.
Republican strategy is also revealed by its position on Planned Parenthood. That philanthropy was founded almost a century ago, by patrician Republicans, who viewed its services as an extension of social work. (The family of both Bush presidents was particularly committed.) Adhering to that tradition, its clinics offer a wide range of services dedicated to women’s health and infant safety, like prenatal counseling. Abortion is only one of many of its services, and not the most common. But because that choice is offered, the GOP has cast Planned Parenthood as totally tainted and would deny public funding to any and all of its activities.
High Wages. A Republican mantra is that only its precepts will free the economy to generate decent jobs with generous paychecks. In the party’s formulary, if employers are fully free to pursue profits, they will be able to create well-paying positions. Capitalism, so conceived, is a win-win algorithm. Of course, successful owners and investors usually amass great wealth. But the entire nation also benefits from enjoying new products and expanded spending power. Republican economics accepts that there will be income disparities. But that is part of its everyone-wins equation. If all are to prosper, the truly talented must have a prospect of being rewarded. Hence too the party’s aversion to taxing the well-to-do. Here the hypothesis is that the more they are allowed to keep, the more will be invested in better jobs for everyone.
In fact, things aren’t going well with wages, at least for median Americans. For those at or close to the middle of the pyramid, the story is one of stagnation.
Here’s a snapshot of men in the workforce. In 2017, the most recent figures at this writing, a man at the wage-and-salary midpoint ended the year with earnings of $46,741. Yet this has barely budged from a generation earlier, when in today’s dollars, the 1973 median was $43,981. By contrast, things were very different in the prior quarter-century. From 1947 through 1972, men’s paychecks almost doubled, rising by 90 percent.
If seems safe to say that most workers would welcome higher pay, either in jobs they now have or to which they might move. However, there’s a catch here. It is that holding out the promise of high wages runs contrary to a basic capitalist concept. Here’s what I recall from Economics 102: employers offer as little as they need to, to recruit and retain workers with the qualities the jobs require.
This dictum applies from part-time servers at Burger King all the way to a pop star negotiating a multimillion-dollar tour. Simply stated, employers do not pay a dime more than they need to, which is why Republicans oppose labor unions, minimum-wage legislation, and benefits and pensions. The less paid to workers, the more can be allocated to for owners’ dividends and executive largesse. (Indeed, top management is one sphere where they to give themselves more than they would be paid if they tried to sell their talents in an open market.)
Hence all the resources deployed to eviscerate unions. In living memory, it is all but impossible to find a Republican platform or pronouncement that has supported unions in any form. (Even for police officers or immigration agents.) After all, collective bargaining can press employers to pay more than they would otherwise have to. If workers are forced on their own, it’s easier to address them singly and present them with the lowest possible wage. Employers also prefer having a surfeit of persons with the traits and skills they need. The larger the pool of applicants, the more desperate they will be and willing to settle for smaller checks. A recent example: the mantra that every high school student in the country should be required to learn computer coding. The reason is not, as is usually said, to attune them to the coming century’s careers. Rather, it accords with the Republican’s low-wage imperative. The more people who become skilled in software, the larger the catchment of candidates, and the less you have to pay them.
So workers who aspire to higher pay are being bamboozled by the GOP, whose business arm has no wish to add even an extra dime. Given its desire to depress wages, it is appropriate to wonder how far the party wants to take that aim. Will it extend to reducing the compensation, say, of lawyers and physicians and scientists? After all, it’s not just blue-collar jobs that can be done abroad: magnetic imaging can be analyzed by radiologists in Malaysia. The same applies to outsourcing due diligence, say, to attorneys in Romania. Moreover, whether at home or abroad, documents and spreadsheets can be deciphered, and medical tests analyzed, as accurately by software as they can by human beings.
Much has been said and written about how more of the nation’s income has been ascending to the top 1 percent and even smaller slivers of that tier. That is altogether true. Yet it’s also important to note that a by no means small segment of Americans has been doing quite well. Fully 28 percent of all households came away with $100,000 or more in 2016. At the top one-fifth of households—some 25 million families plus individuals living alone—the bottom income was a comfortable $121,000.
While most workers’ wages have stayed stagnant, that isn’t true for the top fifth. If we again look back to 1973, using 2015-value dollars, the top fifth began at a more modest $86,000. So its current $121,000 is 41 percent higher. Indeed, due to this upward flow of dollars to the top one-fifth, the remaining four-fifths now have smaller shares of the pie.
Thus far, these top one-in-five of American households have been shielded from the wage malaise. This tier provides a solid phalanx of voters who may be amenable to Republican policies. So it is in the party’s interest to keep this tier contented and comfortable. The party of the very wealthy needs an adjacent buffer as political buttress.
I believe police officers should get the benefit of the doubt. (California)
I do not support homosexuality or abortion as birth control. (North Carolina)
We hear every day about bizarre trends like suspending students for wearing the American flag on their T-shirts. (Georgia)
I believe in the death penalty as a method to stop killing. (Oregon)
I dislike big government. It’s interfering with my rights. (Alabama)
Racial quotas and affirmative action do a lot of harm for minorities. They don’t need these “programs.” (New York)
I believe in accepting immigrants who share our values and will assimilate quickly. (North Carolina)
With stricter gun control, criminals will still have access to them, which puts all American citizens’ safety at risk. (Alabama)
Terrorists are blending in with refugees, even after the examples in France and Germany show the danger. (Indiana)