In Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal was inventive and determined, coming back each year to see how far he could push the boundaries of the law. In 2010, Louisiana mandated that women had to view an ultrasound two hours in advance of an abortion and barred abortion providers from being able to get malpractice insurance. Two years later, Jindal signed the Right to Know Act that required doctors notify patients of abortion alternatives and another law barring abortion after twenty weeks of pregnancy unless there was risk of bodily harm to the mother or congenital anomaly to the fetus. In June 2014, the government in Louisiana found a formula that would excite pro-life forces everywhere. A new law required doctors performing more than five abortions a year to register with the state, as well as requiring doctors to have admitting privileges at hospitals within thirty miles of their clinic. It dropped the number of clinics from five to two in the state. In 2015, they barred Planned Parenthood from performing women’s health services.101
In Kansas, Governor Brownback led the pro-life legislative members, and he moved quickly after the 2010 wave. The state enacted a law that declared that life begins at conception, banned abortion after twenty-one weeks of pregnancy, and shared scientifically questionable information on fetal pain. They enacted building codes for abortion clinics that were so strict that they could have shut down all but one clinic in the state, if they were enforced.102
Governor Walker had to survive a recall election and the battle with the unions, but he was able to sign legislation that barred health care providers from giving abortions to government workers. Of course, Wisconsin would take up the plan of ALEC and the pro-life groups. In 2014, it required ultrasounds twenty-four hours before an abortion, and required doctors have admitting privileges at a hospital within thirty miles of an abortion clinic. In 2016, Wisconsin defunded Planned Parenthood. And in 2015, Walker signed a bill that banned nearly all abortions after twenty weeks.103
In Pennsylvania, the governor supported the “Women’s Right to Know” Act. It required that women considering an abortion get an ultrasound and required that the abortion provider hand copies of it to the patient and let them hear the fetal heartbeat—“as long as it’s not obtrusive.” When asked whether the law goes too far, Governor Corbett offered, “You can’t make anybody watch, okay? Because you just have to close your eyes.”104
According to the Population Institute, eighteen states in total have a failing grade on access to abortion, maternal health care, and access to birth control.105
This strategy of what pro-life groups called “Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers,” or TRAP, laws, has radically changed the abortion landscape. Fully twenty-six states now require that clinics be turned into mini surgical centers at very high cost; four of the states require abortion providers have admitting privileges at a local hospital, which they never get. This process has left six states—North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Kentucky, Mississippi, and West Virginia—with one clinic.106
The GOP led a pincer movement nationally to impose a domestic “gag rule” that would effectively put Planned Parenthood out of business and to bar abortions in some states after the detection of a fetal heartbeat at six weeks, which would be as close as one can get to making abortion illegal. Georgia was the first to act, followed by South Carolina, Mississippi, and Ohio.107
Inventive women and doctors have turned to medically induced abortions and telemedicine, but inventive GOP states have limited the former and banned the latter.108
The federal courts paused some of the most dramatic steps, leaving it to the reconstituted U.S. Supreme Court to decide their fate. At the end of the Tea Party decade, the GOP is close to barring legal abortion in states where they govern.
SUPPRESSING THE VOTE
The GOP governors in the 1990s led the battle to bar undocumented immigrants from getting public services, particularly education. The House Republicans in the Tea Party wave would follow that by focusing on preventing undocumented immigrants from getting welfare, food stamps, and access to federal health care programs. With Obama’s election, the Arizona governor led the state effort to enforce America’s immigration laws, but lost in the federal courts in 2012. President Obama was in charge of America’s immigration laws for the time being.
But after the Tea Party wave elections in 2010, the governors moved to enact laws requiring voters show photo IDs at the polls, supposedly to discourage illegal voting, particularly by undocumented immigrants. Some added proof of citizenship requirements.
Immigration was the entry point, but there was no limit to how far the governors were willing to go. More than sixty voter ID laws were taken up by state legislatures in the 2011 and 2012 sessions, half introduced by ALEC members. The number of states that enacted stand-your-ground, right-to-work, and voter ID laws jumped from two to seven.109 It is unlikely Donald Trump would have carried Wisconsin and Michigan, where the African-American vote was down sharply, and perhaps not North Carolina either.
In Kansas, Secretary of State Kris Kobach provided the model with the passage of the Safe Act in 2011. The act required a birth certificate, passport, or similar document in order to register to vote. Kobach tried to block voting by young people who were registered by the Department of Motor Vehicles under federal law.110
The Tea Party governors moved to reduce the participation of minority and younger voters by requiring a government-issued photo ID at the polls, ending same-day voter registration, reducing early voting by one week, and requiring university students to vote where they had registered their car.111
In North Carolina, the state no longer accepted consular documents as valid ID for registering and voting. It moved aggressively to keep African Americans from voting by cutting a week of early voting and a Sunday when many vote, and eliminated same-day registration. In 2013, North Carolina required specific IDs that students and others could not get, eliminated preregistration for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, and allowed “challengers” at the polling places who were meant to intimidate voters. The federal courts were impressed with “surgical precision” used by the GOP to reduce the African-American vote.112
In Wisconsin, the governor dismantled the board in charge of assuring nonpartisan oversight of elections. And the legislature passed a strict voter ID law that kept 17,000 people from voting in Milwaukee and Dane County alone, and up to 300,000 people statewide in a race decided by a mere 21,000 votes.113 One report found that 11 percent of the population was deterred from voting in 2016.114 And when the Republicans acted in the lame-duck session, at the top of their list was to shorten “early voting” to limit voting in the minority communities and at the universities.115
AMERICA GAGGED ON CLIMATE CHANGE
In May 2014, the National Climate Assessment concluded, “Climate change is already affecting the American people in far-reaching ways,” including the “extreme weather events with links to climate change.” The report said, expect “prolonged periods of heat, heavy downpours, and, in some regions, floods and droughts,” which “have become more frequent and/or intense.” Sea levels were rising, oceans becoming more acidic, and 2012 was the hottest year on record in the United States. These changes were “disrupting people’s lives and damaging some sectors of our economy.”116
Using sixteen climate models to analyze different emissions scenarios, the assessment said, the conclusion is “unambiguous”: a half century of warming “has been driven primarily by human activity”—namely, “the burning of coal, oil, and gas and clearing of forests.”117
President Obama accepted the findings and concluded after the American Clean Energy and Security Act died in the Senate that he could make progress only by executive action and by international agreements.
GOP leaders were silent or rejected the conclusions. They didn’t need to be reminded that three quarters of Tea Party and Evangelical Republicans rejected any role for humans or fossil fuels in climate change. They didn’t need to be reminded how big a role the Koch brothers and the oil a
nd coal industry played in their campaigns.118
Almost immediately after the release of the National Climate Assessment, the House Republicans, with near unanimity, barred the Defense Department, against its wishes, from using any funds to implement the report’s recommendations. And for good measure, the House Republicans instructed the Defense Department to ignore any recommendations of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.119
It is hard to remember that most Republicans supported the Clean Air Act and other landmark environmental laws. That included conservative U.S. senators such as James Buckley and Alfonse D’Amato, even Mitch McConnell, but today’s Senate Republicans have largely embraced the new orthodoxy.120 And a few weeks into the 114th Congress, all but two Republican senators in the new Republican-controlled Senate voted to limit President Obama’s ability to negotiate at the U.N. Climate Conference in Paris in 2015 and quash his historic agreement with China on limiting greenhouse gas emissions.121
When candidates began auditioning for the 2016 presidential race, every one affirmed the new GOP orthodoxy on climate change: no human causation and therefore no reason for government action.
Senator Marco Rubio fell out with conservatives when he supported comprehensive immigration reform, but he tried to get back into the conservative mainstream by showing his scorn for all this PC climate change chatter right up front in his announcement speech: “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it,” the senator from Florida declared. A reporter pointed to the report’s conclusion that Florida was facing more damaging hurricanes. No, Rubio responded, “Climate is always evolving and natural disasters have always existed.”
And most important, government activism is ineffective and counterproductive: “I don’t agree with the notion that some are putting out there, including scientists, that somehow, there are actions we can take today that would actually have an impact on what’s happening in our climate”—though they “will destroy our economy,” with all the new regulations. Activist government is ineffective and counterproductive, so the country is powerless.122
The other 2016 hopefuls joined Rubio on the issue. Jeb Bush stayed in the GOP mix by denying the scientific consensus: “It is not unanimous among scientists that it is disproportionately manmade.” Scott Walker signed the “no climate tax” pledge, and Bobby Jindal declared we “must put energy prices and energy independence ahead of zealous adherence to left-wing environmental theory.” Rand Paul concluded that nobody “exactly knows why” the earth is warming, though Rick Santorum knew it went beyond the powers of scientists and humans: “The apostles of this pseudo-religion believe that America and its people are the source of the earth’s temperature. I do not.”123
Then on June 18, 2015, Pope Francis released his encyclical letter “On Care for Our Common Home,” which chided humanity for the “harm we have inflicted” on this earth. After consulting with “scientists, philosophers, theologians and civic groups,” Francis affirmed the “very solid scientific consensus” on the warming of the earth. He placed the blame not just on human behavior generally, but specifically on “a model of development based on the intensive use of fossil fuels.”
Pope Francis did not endear himself with Republicans when he urged leaders and social movements to disrupt “the worldwide energy system” that is endangering the poor most of all.
Jeb Bush responded quickly, embracing Catholic candidate John F. Kennedy’s formulation of the separation of church and state when Kennedy said, famously, he believed in an America “where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source.” Bush declared in a like vein, “I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope.” The devout Catholic Rick Santorum just attacked the pope: “The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science,” and “when we get involved with political and controversial scientific theories, then I think the church is probably not as forceful and credible.”124
Appeals from the pope and world and business leaders did not stop President Trump from announcing America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord in April 2017.
Then, it seemed America was hit with a biblical set of weather events, leading headline writers, commentators, governors, and meteorologists to search for language up to the scale of events: “NOAA: 2017 was Third Warmest Year on Record for the Globe,” “Louisiana Flood: Worst U.S. Disaster Since Sandy,” “Hurricane Harvey Projected to Be 2nd Costliest Storm in U.S. History,” and “Extreme Hurricanes and Wildfires Made 2017 the Most Costly Disaster Year on Record,” and the first Category 4 storm to hit in the Gulf Coast in October.125
Then, on October 6, 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that our earlier goal of containing warming to two degrees would be catastrophic, as summarized by The Economist: “Arctic summers could be ice-free once a decade,” virtually all the ocean’s coral might be “irreversibly wiped out,” and “an extra 420m people exposed to record heat.” The report called for greater partnering of government, nonstate actors, business, banking, and scientific institutions and accelerated investments in climate-driven innovation, the rapid adoption of disruptive technologies, and behavior changes that could slow the warming. In short, leaders had to embrace transformative changes to their economies to avoid calamity.126
Then, The New York Times displayed a graph across two thirds of the front page above the fold showing in as dramatic a way as possible that 2018 was the fourth hottest in 140 years. Those government scientists at NASA found “the five warmest years in recorded history have been the last five, and that 28 of the 19 warmest years have occurred since 2001.” What was so striking and surprising to the scientists was “the relatively sudden rise in temperatures and its clear correlation with the increasing levels of greenhouse gases.”127
Yet America was under the control of the Tea Party–dominated GOP that kept America gagged and powerless.
INEQUALITY AND MIDDLE-CLASS DECLINE: “THE CUPBOARD IS BARE”
In the spring of 2014, Thomas Piketty published the U.S. edition of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which used global economic data over centuries to establish definitively America’s soaring economic inequality, indeed, a “second Gilded Age,” where, Paul Krugman writes, the “incomes of the now famous ‘one percent,’ and of even narrower groups, are actually the big story.” Piketty argued, as well, that those with inherited wealth will dominate those who earned it, and both Europe and America are headed to a “patrimonial capitalism” where “the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.”128
America’s liberal economic circles were excited above all by the confirmation that the 1 percent was growing further apart from the whole country and taking all income gains. Liberals were also excited by the confirmation that America was in the second Gilded Age, because in America, the first Gilded Age had been followed by the New Deal, which had mitigated the excess, built safety nets, and empowered workers. Politics mattered. Piketty missed what was exceptional in the American experience that could produce a very different economic trajectory.
America’s exceptionalism begins with CEO income—which has played such a big role in the gains of the 1 percent and was pushed up by U.S. tax policies and changes in corporate governance.
Piketty demonstrated that American inequality today “is quantitatively as extreme as in old Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century,” but he also acknowledged that “the structure of that inequality is rather clearly different.” Two thirds of the top Americans’ wealth was from current income, not capital accumulation. Today’s economic titans are the CEOs and senior executives “earning” their “super salaries,” not rentiers living off inherited wealth and capital gains. The wages of the American 1 percent are up 165 percent since the early 1970s, a
nd that rises to 362 percent for the wages of the top 0.1 percent.129
The ratio between the compensation of the average worker and the CEOs of the top 350 American firms (ranked by sales) began to surge in the mid-1990s, interrupted dramatically by bursting bubbles, but headed to an unimaginable gap. The ratio in 2013 was 295.9 to 1.130
The pay of CEOs of the top firms increased 21.7 percent between 2010, when the recession ended for companies, and 2013. The CEOs of the 200 largest U.S. firms received a median pay package of $15.1 million, up 16 percent from 2011.131
In the period between 1940 and 1970, the average American CEO earned under $1 million. But changes in corporate governance and tax rates in the 1980s and 1990s produced an unseemly race to the top. The changes multiplied CEO compensation fifteen-fold, accompanied by surging pay in C-suites and on corporate boards. An analysis by The Wall Street Journal showed the median pay for CEOs reached $1 million a month in 2018.132
Wall Street bonuses totaled $27.5 billion and stock buybacks of $187 billion enriched CEOs, C-suites, and the richest 1 percent.133
CEO salaries jumped 17.6 percent in 2017 alone, and the ratio between CEO and average worker pay hit a staggering 312 to 1 ratio.134
The passage of President Trump’s and Republicans’ “tax reform” bill, which cut corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 21 percent and implemented other changes that favored particular kinds of investment, produced a surge in corporate profits in 2018.
Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz strengthens further the liberal case that the scale of American inequality “didn’t just happen”; “it was created.” The amount seized by the upper 1 percent was “a distinctly American ‘achievement.’”135
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