Congress Struggling

 Many posts have discussed the state of Congress.

At AEI, Kevin R. Kosar and Scott Warren have a report titled "Congress Is Struggling to Govern. Are Electoral Incentives to Blame?"

Executive Summary

Congress performs poorly by most measures, and a mere 15 percent of the public approves of our national legislature’s performance. The public’s discontent is understandable. Legislators have failed to debate and craft policies to address important issues such as immigration, healthcare, and housing affordability.

This report examines whether electoral incentives are to blame for Congress’s performance.

It first traces the constitutional design of congressional elections—two-year House terms, staggered six-year Senate terms—and the framers’ theory that regular elections would produce accountable, virtuous representation. The growth of the federal government’s role and other developments have left the hopes of James Madison and other creators of the US Constitution feeling remote from today’s campaigns and elections.

The report then reviews decades of research on how modern elections actually shape legislative behavior: the near-constant campaign cycle, soaring campaign costs, the rise of primaries dominated by unrepresentative and ideological voters, shrinking numbers of competitive districts and states, and intensifying partisan competition for narrow chamber majorities.

Together, these forces push legislators toward fundraising, symbolic position taking, and party loyalty rather than substantive lawmaking and oversight. Electoral incentives do discourage good governance, and structural electoral reforms—particularly changes to primaries—have merit. Nonetheless, no single reform will fix Congress. Electoral pressures are only one of several factors shaping Congress’s performance, and there are profound normative disputes over what constitutes a well-functioning Congress.

Class Ceiling

Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. The effects of inequality reach many corners of American life.

Stansbury, Anna, and Kyra Rodriguez. “The Class Gap in Career Progression: Evidence From U.S. Academia.” Econometrica, 94, .no 4, (Econometric Society: 2026), 1345-1373. https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA23358

Unlike gender or race, class background is rarely a focus of research on career progression, or of DEI efforts in elite occupations. Should it be? In this paper, we document a large class gap in career progression in one occupation—U.S. tenure-track academia—using parental education to proxy for class background. First-generation college graduates are 10% less likely to be tenured at an R1, are tenured at institutions ranked 11% lower, earn 3% less, and report 5% lower job satisfaction, than their former PhD classmates (from the same institution and field) with a parent with a non-PhD graduate degree. Neither selection out of academia nor different preferences explain this gap; differential research productivity also plays little role. Instead, likely drivers are differences in cultural and social capital. We also find a class gap in career progression for PhDs who work in industry, suggesting this phenomenon generalizes outside academia.

McClatchy: Cutting Jobs, Agentifying the Enterprise

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

Mark Keierleber at Straight Arrow News:

Just last week, dozens of reporters with at least 17 McClatchy newspapers from coast to coast — including the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star and the Sacramento Bee — were laid off as the company pivots toward lifestyle content written by artificial intelligence chatbots.

At the Herald, which has won 24 Pulitzer Prizes, including one this year for reporting that led to sex-trafficking charges against Jeffrey Epstein, more than one-third of the editorial staff was let go as the struggling newspaper chain deals with a dwindling readership and a 41% decline in consumer revenue.

The email also recognized McClatchy employees with work anniversaries, including a reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky, who has been with the company for more than 40 years. That reporter was among the lucky ones. At the Herald-Leader, which has won three Pulitzer Prizes over the past four decades, McClatchy slashed the newsroom staff by more than half.

While McClatchy journalists blasted the layoffs as a devastating loss for local news, company executives framed them as necessary to compete against social media influencers — and survive industrywide woes. Newspapers nationwide have struggled for decades, and some 40% of all local U.S. newspapers have closed shop in the past decade, including more than 130 outlets in the last year alone.

But more than other news companies, McClatchy is leaning into AI as the answer to the existential threats facing the industry.

Even before the layoffs announced last week, McClatchy executives made clear they believe the future of the news industry is AI.

During a contentious, off-the-record virtual town hall in May, company executives said their business was in freefall — and positioned AI as its savior. Executives pleaded with skeptical journalists to get on board, and issued what appeared to be a threat: Embrace AI or get out of the way.

“We have a company-wide effort to agentify the entire enterprise,” McClatchy CEO Tony Hunter said during the town hall, a recording of which was obtained by Straight Arrow.

Erick Erickson on the Right Rot

A number of posts have discussed the conservative movement.  In the past decade, it has taken a bad turn.

Conservative Erick Erickson bravely takes on the rot on his own side of the spectrum:

A group of white guys have subtly inserted themselves into conservative institutions and church organizations. They all embrace racial grievances. To varying degrees, they embrace white nationalism, antisemitism, and even Nazi sympathies. They are getting added to conservative institutional boards, attempting to purge churches, and are desperate to indoctrinate young conservatives into fascist ideology. They even surround the Vice President of the United States. Some of them believe the United States is at a tipping point, and they want to push it over the edge and rebuild it in their image. You might think it does not affect you, but, in time, you will see their efforts in your church pews, in your kids’ brains, and in your politicians’ mouths. It begins with shampoo.

Charles Haywood made his fortune selling shampoo. He sold his Indianapolis hair care company in 2020, and he has spent the years since writing out, at length and under his own name, what he would like to do with your country. Rod Dreher, who is no man of the left, read Haywood’s online ramblings and described Haywood as pouring out vile from “deep in his Midwestern Führerbunker”.

In a document he calls the Foundationalist Manifesto, Haywood explained that his preferred government “will not be democratic.” The state “will have unlimited means,” because “properly viewed, the state is not constrained externally.” Women “will not be permitted to choose career over family.” Men “will not be permitted to choose not to have a family.” The state will seize the assets of “any citizen who views himself as a global citizen.”

That is not my characterization of his politics. Those are his words, from the manifesto that earned him a friendly sit-down with Tucker Carlson in September 2022.

Elsewhere he has speculated about serving as a “warlord” at the head of an “armed patronage network,” a model he says he drew from the groups of white settler farmers formed in southern African countries and colonies while black Africans were fighting for majority rule. Reviewing a biography of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, he wrote that his already favorable impression of the Spanish dictator had become positively glowing. He is not alone in that fixation. MAGA gadfly Jack Posobiec wrote a book called Unhumans, which Vice President JD Vance blurbed and which claims Franco and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet are models for handling the American left. Josh Abbotoy, the executive director of American Reformer, has written that America is going to need a Protestant Franco. It is not a coincidence, but an attempt to shift the Overton window toward dictatorship.

A crank with a blog is a crank with a blog. The problem is that Charles Haywood is not on the outside of the conservative movement. He has used his wealth to get inside it and reshape longtime institutions that build the future of the right, pushing those institutions toward his vision of pushing our constitutional republic to its breaking point so they can rebuild it the way they want.

Trump Attacks the First Amendment

Many posts have discussed freedom of the press.  Trump is attacking it.

Jim Rutenberg and Maggie Haberman at NYT:

The Justice Department has sent F.B.I. agents to reporters’ homes to serve subpoenas and, in at least one case, flashed a warrant to seize devices. The Pentagon has fired the editor and publisher of its traditionally independent newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and blocked access to other journalists who refused to sign pledges that would limit their reporting.

Regulatory agencies are using their powers to pressure media organizations over their content. The administration has stripped funding from public television and radio. Angry over stories he does not like, President Trump has sued major news organizations and the White House has taken control of the previously independent press pool that tracks the president, deciding which outlets can participate.

Almost 20 months into Mr. Trump’s second term, his long-running media clashes have grown into a sweeping campaign to control speech in America that stands out for applying so many levers, so fast, all at once.

Yesterday, Trump banned CNN, MS Now, and  POLITICO from the White House. He said:

I mean, there’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative — now if they want to write them, that’s fine, but I don’t have to let them into the people’s house.

Mister Measles and Chemtrails

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation. Among the most notorious peddlers of misinformation is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Joe Sommerlad at The Independent:

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has invited ridicule by announcing he is “looking at chemtrails” and their adverse impact on public health, reviving a long-debunked conspiracy theory.

RFK Jr was addressing the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense at an event in Washington, D.C., Thursday when he assured his audience “you have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House”. The health secretary, who chaired the organization from 2015 to 2023, also said he planned to bring “science transparency” to their concerns about inoculations.

Of the worst U.S. measles outbreak in 35 years, the RFK said: “We care about every child who dies from measles. They get headlines. I’d ask you to care about children who are dying or suffering or being injured by vaccine injuries.”

Then he added: “We’re also looking at chemtrails and the impact of emissions from aircraft, and those potential impacts on health.”

Kennedy was alluding to the chemical trails left behind by planes as they cross the sky, which are visible from the ground, resemble wisps of cirrhus cloud and evaporate harmlessly within minutes.

Constitution Day: Scalia on Originalism

Today is Constitution Day.  Many posts have discussed the Constitution.

Justice Antonin Scalia, October 18, 1996:

The argument is usually made in anthropomorphic terms, much like commentary on the part of people who talk about the stock market as resting for a new assault at the 4000 level. The modernists do the same thing with the Constitution. The argument is as follows:

"The Constitution is meant for a living society. If it could not grow and evolve with the society, it would become brittle and snap. You have to provide the flexibility."

This is a very plausible argument. It sounds wonderful, until you start to think, "Now, wait a minute. What is the real motive of these people who want to chuck away the old, original constitution? Is it really flexibility that they're looking for?"

What was the situation before Roe vs. Wade (1973)? If you wanted a right to an abortion, you had to create that right the way a constitutional democratic society creates most rights. You had to pass a law providing for and protecting that right. If you didn't want it, you had to pass a law against it.

The same was true of capital punishment. Existing law authorized capital punishment. If you wanted to abolish it, you needed to get a change in the law.

Regarding capital punishment, I have sat with three colleagues on the Supreme Court who think that capital punishment is unconstitutional, even though the Constitution mentions capital punishment. The due process clause--a clause you're all familiar with-- provides: "No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law..." What do you think the drafters of the clause were talking about? They were talking about the death penalty. And elsewhere in the Constitution, it says you shall not be sentenced for a capital crime without a grand jury indictment. What do think the drafters were talking about? They were talking about the death penalty, clearly approved in the text of the Constitution.

For the constitutional evolutionist, or modernist, it doesn't matter what the text of the Constitution says. For the modernist, everyday is a new day. And so, the death penalty, which might have been constitutional in the past, may very well be unconstitutional today. Now does that produce flexibility? Under the original disposition, if you wanted to have the death penalty, you enacted a law authorizing it. If you didn't want it, you repealed the law authorizing it. That's flexibility.

So, these people who go around talking about the need for growing and bending are uttering nonsense. What these people want is to impose a view of things on the whole soiety from coast to coast, and it is most quickly and most effectively done through the Constitution. And the easiest and quickest way to get something into the Constitution is to get it done via judicial interpretation. Rather than go the slow, difficult, and trouble- some route of getting a constitutional amendment drafted, formally proposed and rati- fied, persuade the highest court in the land to interpret the Constitution so broadly and loosely as to enable it read the desired policy into the Constitution