Looking Back on The West Wing

Past posts have discussed politics and the entertainment media.

Becca Rothfeld at WP  writes about the old TV show The West Wing:

“In Bartlet’s America,” wrote the New York Times’s James Poniewozik in a thoughtful reappraisal last year, “voters reward you for fighting lies and fearmongering with facts and reason. Good intentions and great oratory win the day. Well-meaning people reach across the aisle and reason with their colleagues. Politics is an earnest battle of ideas, not a consuming war of all against all.”

But “The West Wing” is a vastly more cynical show than many of its admirers remember, which why it is also a more compelling work of art than many of its skeptics assume. It is not, in fact, a paean to good government and the dedication of White House bureaucrats, nor is it an homage to good-faith debate or a portrait of political rationality. Rather, it is an honest and often quietly wrenching exploration of the Machiavellian maneuvering that corrupts even the most well-meaning people in politics.

White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer), Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) and President Bartlet — spend most of the show fretting over PR disasters and comparatively little time worrying about matters of political substance. In the episode after Bartlet brushes CJ off, Sam tries to persuade an official from the Office of Management and Budget to recalibrate the poverty index — not because he believes the agency’s calculations are wrong, but because the new measure would deem an additional 4 million people impoverished, which would look bad for the administration. In another episode, Josh agrees to append a provision to a health care reform bill — not because he thinks it is a good idea (indeed, he has not researched the proposal) but because the addition will persuade a recalcitrant senator to sign on. When Bartlet’s staffers take a more active role in shaping legislation, it is almost always by negotiating with politicians on the president’s behalf and almost never by advocating for policies on their own merits.

Oaths and the Judgment of HIstory

Many posts have discussed oaths of office.

William H. Pryor, Jr., Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, writes at The Public Discourse:

Today, judges still take the same oath that Chief Justice Marshall swore. Judges swear before God to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States wherever it leads. We do not swear to follow a prediction or speculation about what future generations will favor.

When modern society substitutes the so-called judgment of history for the historical standard of the oath of office, it raises almost unanswerable questions. How will history “judge” any public official? And how often will any public official’s work matter to any legal historian?

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When someone argues that the so-called judgment of history matters in some case, he betrays his desired result in a high-profile controversy regardless of what the judge’s oath to uphold the law requires. But asking how future generations will view us is a fool’s errand. The person who asks that question is only projecting his hope about what future generations will think. Yet no one knows whether future generations will be wise or wicked. Nor do we know whether they will be any less divided in their views than previous generations have been.

The most abominable opinions in the history of the Supreme Court were written by jurists who probably thought they stood on the right side of history. Roger Taney probably thought so when he penned Dred Scott. Yet his notorious opinion helped lead to the Civil War. Oliver Wendell Holmes undoubtedly thought he was on the right side of history when he wrote, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” in Buck v. Bell. But Americans thankfully have since abandoned state-enforced eugenics. Harry Blackmun probably thought history would look kindly on his opinion in Roe v. Wade. A half-century later, the Supreme Court overruled it as an “egregious” mistake. And in each period, the jurist’s peers celebrated those opinions.

Congressional Output

 Many posts have discussed the state of Congress.

Paul Kane at WP:

With fewer than 40 bills signed into law as of Monday, the House and Senate set a modern record for lowest legislative output in the first year of a new presidency, according to data maintained by C-SPAN and Purdue University.

Despite that lack of productivity, the Senate held more roll-call votes (659) than any odd-numbered year of this century, with almost 60 percent of them focused on advancing President Donald Trump’s nominations to the executive and judicial branches.

The House, meanwhile, set a 21st-century record for fewest votes cast (362) in the first session of a two-year Congress. It held barely half as many votes as in 2017, which was Trump’s first year in office and when Republicans held the majority.

Perhaps not surprisingly, an unusually large number of House members — 24 Republicans and 19 Democrats — have decided to leave the chamber either to retire or run for other office. That places the chamber on pace to set a 21st-century record for retirements in one Congress, according to C-SPAN and Purdue.

Congress did pack a lot into the One Big Beautiful Bill:

Such strategy has accelerated with each new president and his congressional majority. In 2001, George W. Bush and his GOP allies pushed through a massive tax cut on the fast-track process known as reconciliation, averting a potential filibuster in the Senate. Still, the Congress managed to send 107 other laws to the president’s desk for his signature that year.

In 2017, Republicans passed a massive tax cut through reconciliation plus sent an additional 75 pieces of legislation to Trump’s desk before Christmas.

This year’s Congress also has a massive policy bill but otherwise only about half the output of Trump’s first term. Only in 2023, with a split Congress and the Biden-Harris White House already focused on a presidential election, were fewer laws passed in the first year of a Congress, according to 32 years of data kept by C-SPAN and Purdue.

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One area in which Republicans became more productive was in eliminating federal regulations via the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress a certain amount of time to consider new regulations and, with fast-track procedures, vote to eliminate them.

The act rarely had been used since its passage in 1996, but recent Republican majorities have relied on it.

The process, of course, takes time away from legislation that could be considered on the House and Senate floors. 

     

Unchurching

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life. That role appears to be fading.

Rafael Contreras at Axios:

The U.S. is undergoing its fastest religious shift in modern history, marked by a rapid increase in the religiously unaffiliated and numerous church closures nationwide.

Why it matters: The great unchurching of America comes as identity and reality are increasingly shaped by non-institutional spiritual sources — YouTube mystics, TikTok tarot, digital skeptics, folk saints and AI-generated prayer bots.
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Nearly three in 10 American adults today identify as religiously unaffiliated — a 33% jump since 2013, according to the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).That's quicker than almost any major religious shift in modern U.S. history, and it's happening across racial groups, an Axios analysis found.

About four in ten Americans ages 18 to 29 identify as religiously unaffiliated (38%), an increase from 32% in 2013, PRRI said.

Driving the news: The religious shift has made it harder for political parties and candidates to reach voters, Sisto Abeyta, a Democratic political consultant based in New Mexico with the Nevada-based firm TriStrategies, tells Axios."We have to find (religiously unaffiliated voters), engage them and answer their skeptical questions, rather than just go to a church and pass out campaign literature," Abeyta said. "And they're growing in numbers."
It costs campaigns about $1.40 to reach out to a single religiously unaffiliated voter, compared to $ 0.45 per faith-based voter, he said.

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Between the lines: The racial makeup of Christians within each party is vastly different, and that is shaping the influence of faith voters on Democrats' and Republicans' platforms.Within the Republican party, the largest group is white Christians (68%) and only 12% identify as religiously unaffiliated, per PRRI.

Among Democrats, Christians of color (35%) and religiously unaffiliated (34%) make up the bulk of the party.

Zoom out: The shift in religious activity also is leaving behind a trail of "church graveyards," or empty buildings that are now difficult to sell or have been abandoned.These churches once served as community gathering places for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, voting precincts, or town halls, leaving a void.Megachurches show signs of stability but not enough to reverse overall declines.

Reflecting on Covid

Many posts have discussed COVID and pandemic preparedness.

Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, In COVID's Wake:  How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton University Press, 2025), 197, 199, 294.

The central message of this book is that several tenets of basic rationality evaporated under the stress of the Covid onslaught. One of the greatest failures, as we have shown, was the failure to weigh the expected costs of policy against the expected benefits. Such failures were evident in government advising processes, as well as outside government in news media coverage and academic analysis. These failures occurred despite the public health field’s substantial investment in developing pandemic plans before 2020.  These pre-2020 pandemic plans correctly anticipated many of the costs and ethical dilemmas that emerged during the Covid pandemic response. But such considerations played  little role in informing discussion about what to do in 2020. Previously untested, unproven policies were implemented  wholesale across society in earnest hope of benefits, heedless of costs.

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 The pandemic response also raises some other troubling concerns about the quality of democratic deliberation involved. Pandemic policy seems to have been driven by a profound form of short-term bias. Any benefits of the policies in delaying infection and death were top of mind for policymakers. For many months, national newspapers, cable news outlets, and even local news led their daily coverage with the latest num-bers of Covid infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. Meanwhile, in almost all cases, the costs were much less vis i ble and experienced at some delay. Many of  these second-  and third-order costs—for education, mental health, cancer diagnoses, social disorder—unfolded only over lengthy timelines and emerge clearly only in hindsight. Clearly, democracies are likely to struggle with any policies having  these features, as political incentives for elected officials are to attend predominantly to the short term and to discount the long term.

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Experts, including scientific experts, play an important role in the policy  process, but it is also of necessity a  limited role. Experts must stay in their lane, so to speak. We must be more willing to engage in  political deliberation, including or especially with  those on the other side of the political spectrum. American democracy is defined deeply by polariza-tion based on having (or not having) a four-year college degree; educational polarization, in turn, has the unfortunate but unmistakable effect of placing the weight of the experts on one side of the partisan divide. A rebalancing of the role of experts could help address that tendency. At minimum, we have relearned that it is important to listen to more than one kind of expert in formulating policy on complex, society-wide issues. We must also not forget that experts tend to come from well-off positions in society and can be oblivious to their class biases

Religion and Christmas Messages

Many posts have discussed Christmas.

 Ashley Ahn at NYT:

The Trump administration celebrated Christmas on Thursday by posting a series of religious messages from official government accounts, using language that drew criticism from those who pointed to the country’s separation of church and state.

While many lawmakers in both parties posted universal messages of love, joy and peace on the holiday, a number of cabinet members and agencies made references to Jesus and the religious meaning of Christmas.

“Today we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote. “May His light bring peace, hope, and joy to you and your families.”

Posts by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Homeland Security Department and the Labor Department followed in a similar vein.

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One of the most extensive Christmas messages was posted by the Homeland Security Department on Christmas Eve. It read, “We are blessed to share a nation and a Savior,” and included a video that featured images including the American flag, Christmas trees, Santa Claus, President Trump and a Nativity scene, along with the words “Remember the miracle of Christ’s birth.”

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The Homeland Security post also drew strong responses online. Alex Nowrasteh, senior vice president for policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said: “Americans don’t share a religion. Our state is secular.”

Timothy Sandefur, the vice president for legal affairs at the conservative Goldwater Institute, said, “Whatever this department of the federal government may say, I appreciate and respect my Jewish fellow Americans.”

Laura Kennedy, a former ambassador who worked in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, said: “I am a Christian. I am also a proud American because our laws were designed to prohibit a national religion.”

Flat Fees and California Public Defenders

Many posts have discussed the American legal system.

Anat Rubin at CalMatters:

Nearly half of California counties pay private lawyers and firms to represent poor people in criminal cases, and most of them, like San Benito, do it through what’s known as a “flat-fee” contract, meaning they pay a fixed amount, regardless of how many cases the attorneys handle or how much time they spend on each case.

It’s a far cheaper alternative — at least in the short run — to operating a public defender office with government lawyers, and it’s created a second-tier justice system in rural stretches of the state: Seven of the eight counties with the state’s highest jail and prison incarceration rates have flat-fee contracts.

These arrangements so clearly disincentivize investigating and litigating cases that they’ve been banned in other parts of the country. But they have flourished in California, which provides no funding or oversight of county-level public defense.

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The nation’s first public defender office opened its doors in Los Angeles in 1913, the result of a decades-long advocacy effort led by Clara Shortridge Foltz, the first woman to be admitted to the bar in California. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court established a right to an attorney in state court criminal proceedings in 1963, more than a dozen California counties were operating their own public defender systems.

But as other states funneled money to government-run public defender offices, California left its system in the hands of the counties. Elected officials in many of those counties would eventually opt for the cheapest path — a flat-fee contract.

In 1984, only nine of California’s 58 counties relied on contractors for their primary public defense systems, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report published that year. Today, that number is 25.

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Much of the effort to ban flat-fee contracts has focused on the ways in which the model discourages investigations, one of the most critical components of criminal defense.

Defense investigators review police reports, visit crime scenes, chase down video surveillance footage and interview witnesses — work that most attorneys are not trained to do. They often find evidence that challenges the prosecution’s case and affects the outcome of a trial or the terms of a plea deal.

A recent CalMatters investigation found that poor people accused of crimes in California are routinely sent to prison without anyone investigating the charges against them, significantly increasing the likelihood of wrongful convictions.