Libertarian Rating of States

Many posts have discussed differences among the states, with special emphasis on California and Texas.

William Ruger and Jason Sorens at Cato:

This 2023 edition of Freedom in the 50 States presents a completely revised and updated ranking of the American states on the basis of how their policies protect or infringe on individual liberty.

This edition improves on the methodology for weighting and combining state and local policies to create a comprehensive index. Authors William Ruger and Jason Sorens introduce many new policy variables suggested by readers and changes in the broader policy environment (e.g., universal school choice and state laws that shape local zoning authority).

More than 230 policy variables and their sources are available to the public on this website. New policy variables include a battery of state‐​level land‐​use laws affecting housing, several new occupational licensing measures, a reworked household goods moving company licensing variable that focuses on the “competitor’s veto” element, qualified immunity limitations, and new abortion laws for the alternative indices. In this edition, the authors have updated their findings to

• Provide the most up‐​to‐​date freedom index yet, including scores as of January 1, 2023.
• Retrospectively evaluate how state COVID-19 responses affected freedom during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
• Refresh their analysis of how the policies driving income growth and interstate migration have changed—before and after the Great Recession and during the pandemic.

In addition to providing the latest rankings as of the beginning of 2023, the 2023 edition provides annual data on economic and personal freedoms and their components back to 2000 and for some variables, back to the 1930s.

To read the full report, visit Free​dominthe50S​tates​.org.

See in particular, the writeups for California (#48), Texas (#17), and Florida (#2) 

 

Getting Religion from Politics

Daniel A. Cox at The Survey Center on American Life:

More conservatives are looking for religious communities that also affirm their political beliefs. New research by Shay Hafner and Audre Audette found that politics has become a more salient consideration for conservatives when choosing a church. The authors point out that political considerations are especially important for evangelical Christians who are less concerned with denominational differences and more comfortable with overt political appeals.

These findings are consistent with recent polling. A 2022 Lifeway Research survey of Protestants noted the growing appeal of politically homogeneous congregations. Fifty percent of Protestants interviewed said they preferred that their congregation reflect their own political views while 41 percent disagreed, a modest increase from a few years earlier.

The salience of politics in religious communities is likely to grow given that such issues are more of a priority for younger worshippers. Lifeway’s report notes, “Younger churchgoers are more likely than older ones to prefer sharing a pew with someone of the same politics. Almost 3 in 5 of those under 50 (57%) want a congregation with people who share their political views, compared to 47% of those 50 to 65 and 41% of those 65 and older.”

The problem of politicized churches is obvious. It represents a clear challenge to the political system. The regular use of apocalyptic language in political arguments discourages compromise and reduces the possibility of finding consensus. Even if churches have been historically segregated by race and ethnicity, they have long been places where people of differing economic and political backgrounds could come together.

Politically polarized worship spaces represent a societal loss as well. Religious institutions are incredibly valuable sources of social capital. They give purpose, direction, and meaning and connect their members to a wider world. At a time when more Americans are withdrawing from civic life, religious communities are more valuable than ever. What’s more, adopting an aggressive political posture overshadows all the other work that congregations do for their communities and the people in them.

This "prayer" is much more sinister than many people may realize. In the NIV Bible, "strike down" means "kill" and "put to silence" means "destroy." https://t.co/EmuthuGOXi

— Jack Pitney. (@jpitney) October 7, 2023

Women in Congress

A number of posts have discussed the growing number of women in office.

 Katherine Schaeffer at Pew:

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Women in the U.S. Senate, 1965-2023

% of U.S. senators who are women

Note: Percentages are the share of women senators at the outset of each term of Congress.

Source: Pew Research Center analysis of Congressional Biographical Directory data.

PEW RESEARCH CENTER

At the start of the 118th Congress in 2023, there were 25 women serving in the U.S. Senate, just shy of the record 26 women senators sworn in on the first day of the previous Congress. (The count for the previous Congress includes Vice President Kamala Harris and former Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler. Both were sworn in on the first day and left the Senate shortly after.)

Of the 25 women senators:

• 16 are Democrats and nine are Republicans.
• 22 are White, two are Asian American and one is Hispanic. No Black women currently serve in the Senate, nor do any American Indian or Alaska Native women.

The first-ever woman in the Senate was Rebecca Latimer Felton, D-Ga., who was appointed to the seat as a political maneuver in 1922 and served just one day. Nancy Kassebaum, R-Kan., who served in the Senate from 1978 to 1997, was the first woman senator who was elected for a full term without having a spousal connection to Congress.

U.S. House

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Women in the U.S. House, 1965-2023

% of U.S. representatives who are women

Note: Percentages are the share of women representatives at the outset of each term of Congress.

Source: Pew Research Center analysis of Congressional Biographical Directory data.

PEW RESEARCH CENTER

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On the first day of the 118th Congress, 124 women were voting members in the House of Representatives, making up 28% of the chamber’s voting membership. In addition, four women serve as nonvoting delegates to Congress, representing American Samoa, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Of the women voting representatives sworn in on the first day of the session:

• 91 are Democrats and 33 are Republicans.
• 26 are Black, 18 are Hispanic, seven are Asian American, two are Native American and one is multiracial.

Jeannette Rankin, R-Mont., was the first woman to be elected to Congress, taking office in 1917. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is the only woman to have served as speaker of the House. She was speaker from 2007 to 2011, served as the minority leader in the Republican-controlled House from 2011 to 2019 and was elected speaker again from 2019 to 2023.

Democrats and Nones

Frank Newport at Gallup:

The magnitude of this religion gap has increased over the years, to the point where I think it is fair to say that a significant part of the explanation for the “rise of the nones” lies with changes among Democrats, not Republicans.

I looked at this relationship on a year-by-year basis using our annual May GPSS Values surveys, a valuable exercise because the same questions have been asked in basically the same survey context every May since 2001. The percentage of Republican nones has edged up over the last 10 years or so, but the percentage of Democratic nones has increased significantly more. In short, the relatively small partisan gaps in none identification seen two decades ago have increased substantially over the years. 

Local News: Green Shoots or Dead Leaves?

Could News Bloom in News Deserts?

By Howard Husock American Enterprise Institute

Key Points

• Due to the steady decline of print news in America, many Americans now live in news deserts, where there is no newspaper covering local issues. The absence of information on local news and local politics weakens our communities and our political process.
• Despite this trend, over 100 new papers or online local news sites have opened within the past several years. To stay in business, they have experimented with new approaches to staffing and funding.
• It may be time to expand the role of government or philanthropy in supporting local news, which produces countless benefits for communities but is rapidly disappearing.

Read the PDF.

REALITY CHECK.  Three years ago, Simon Owens looked into Patch, the most prominent effort to remedy the problem.

But as I read article after article about the company’s health, one number kept jumping out at me: its editorial headcount. Back during its AOL days, it employed around 500 journalists, with roughly one editor assigned to each hyperlocal site. Now, it has an editorial staff of 120, even though it’s more than doubled the number of local verticals. That means it employs one journalist for every 10 locations.

So what type of coverage does Patch actually offer? Out of all the journalists who wrote about its profitability, only Recode’s Peter Kafka touched upon the issue. “If your idea of a local news operation involves a team of reporters and editors that can exhaustively cover your hometown, you will be disappointed with Patch, which usually assigns a single journalist to cover multiple towns,” he wrote in 2019. “Those reporters then generate five to 10 stories a day, which means those stories are almost always generated quickly.” Patch president Warren St. John admitted to Kafka that “we’re not as deep as we aspire to be. We’re acutely aware of what we’re capable of and what we’re not capable of.”

...

Next, I went back to Patch’s homepage and then navigated to a cluster of sites around Tampa, Florida. Again, I opened 10 articles at random and then went through them one by one. Out of those 10 articles, only one article seemed to contain some original reporting, though it was sometimes hard to tell. An article about how Tampa doctors were utilizing telemedicine had several quotes from doctors in it, but when I Googled the quotes, I found that some came from press releases, while others may have come from an actual interview.

In fact, I noticed suspect sourcing on a few articles. Here’s a quote from my notes I made while reading an article about a local politician distributing unemployment applications: “At first I thought this maybe had some original quotes in it, but after Googling some of them I found them on other websites, which seems fishy. The reporter certainly isn’t going out of their way to say where the quotes are coming from.”

Special Access Programs

Former CIA chief of staff Larry Pfeiffer at The Bulwark:

According to the indictment against Trump, eight of the TOP SECRET documents may have had information about or derived from so-called Special Access Programs (SAPs). The sensitivity of these documents was so great that prosecutors were obliged to redact even the codewords on the documents. The implication is that even publicly acknowledging the codenames of these projects, without discussing their operations at all, was deemed a great security risk.

...

SAPs have three protection levels—acknowledged, unacknowledged, and waived. Acknowledged SAPs are ones whose existence is openly recognized and whose purpose may be identified publicly. Details of acknowledged SAPs remain classified and access protected by designated codewords. Presidential travel activities are often cited as examples—everyone knows the president travels, and often it’s public long in advance that the president will be in a certain place at a certain time: a U.N. meeting, a party convention, a State of the Union address, etc. What’s secret are the details of how the president will get to and from the events and how the Secret Service will protect him. Funding for acknowledged SAPs is generally unclassified.

Unacknowledged SAPs are those whose existence and purpose require greater protection. All information is classified, and funding is classified, unacknowledged, and not directly linked to the program. Under extremely limited circumstances, the normal reporting requirements of an unacknowledged SAP can be “waived” by the Secretary of Defense. Congressional oversight in those cases would be limited to oral notifications to the chair, ranking members, and staff directors of the respective appropriations and armed services committees.

To recap, of the 31 documents former President Trump is being charged with inappropriately storing at his resort hotel, eight may have contained information about or derived from our government’s most sensitive activities. In the wrong hands, the exposure of that information could risk the lives of U.S. and allied military and intelligence personnel, and foreign intelligence sources and their families—not to mention American civilians.

Political Diversity at Yale

Elite academia leans heavily to the left.

  The Buckley Institute has a report on political diversity at Yale:

The research found that among 4 relevant departments and the law school, 83% of faculty are registered as Democrats or have conducted political activity that heavily or exclusively supports Democrats; only 3.5% are Republican. According to a recent Gallup survey of Americans conducted in March 2023, only 25% of Americans identify as Democrats versus an equivalent 25% who identify as Republicans. Independents too are cheated. They comprise 49% of Americans but only 13% of Yale faculty researched.

With a ratio of nearly 24 Democrats to every 1 Republican, the Yale faculty’s political makeup diverges dramatically from that of the rest of the country. America’s future leaders are sadly leaving New Haven poorly equipped to lead the half of the country not represented in Yale’s faculty lounge.

Yale's free speech principles, as embodied in the Woodward Report, call for "the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable." Some semblance of ideological balance among the faculty, administrators, and students alike would help further this ideal.

Debt Limit Warning

 From CBO:

The debt limit—commonly called the debt ceiling—is the maximum amount of debt that the Department of the Treasury can issue to the public or to other federal agencies. The amount is set by law and has been increased or suspended over the years to allow for the additional borrowing needed to finance the government’s operations. On December 16, 2021, lawmakers raised the debt limit by $2.5 trillion to a total of $31.4 trillion.1 On January 19, 2023, that limit was reached, and the Treasury announced a “debt issuance suspension period” and began using well-established “extraordinary measures” to borrow additional funds without breaching the debt ceiling.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that if the debt limit remains unchanged, there is a significant risk that at some point in the first two weeks of June, the government will no longer be able to pay all of its obligations. The extent to which the Treasury will be able to fund the government’s ongoing operations will remain uncertain throughout May, even if the Treasury ultimately runs out of funds in early June. That uncertainty exists because the timing and amount of revenue collections and outlays over the intervening weeks could differ from CBO’s projections.

If the debt limit is not raised or suspended before the Treasury’s cash and extraordinary measures are exhausted, the government will have to delay making payments for some activities, default on its debt obligations, or both.2 If the Treasury’s cash and extraordinary measures are sufficient to finance the government until June 15, expected quarterly tax receipts and additional extraordinary measures will probably allow the government to continue financing operations through at least the end of July.

Family Dinner and Inequality

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

Daniel A. Cox at the Survey Center on American Life:

The family dinner was once a ubiquitous feature of American life, an experience shared across cultural, religious, and class lines, but it has disappeared in many households. Far fewer Americans report having regular meals with their family during their formative years. Baby Boomers were far more likely to have grown up having meals with their families than Millennials and Gen Zers. Only 38 percent of Gen Zers who are now adults report that their family ate together regularly growing up.

The disappearance of family dinner is not simply a function of generational changes in values and priorities. Increasingly, family dinners reflect the growing class divide in American society. In Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, Robert Putnam documents how the class divide in family dinners emerged during the 1990s and has expanded since. Today, college educated Americans are far more likely than those without a college education to have been raised in homes where family dinners were the norm. This wasn’t always the case.

Older Americans, regardless of educational background, report having eaten dinner as a family regularly during childhood. Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of Americans age 50 or older without any college education report that they had family meals every day during childhood, roughly as many (79 percent) Americans that age with a post-graduate education who say the same.

For younger Americans, the story is entirely different. Among Americans under the age of 50, education now strongly predicts whether one had regular family meals growing up. Only 38 percent of younger Americans without a college education were raised in homes that shared meals every day. In contrast, more than six in ten (61 percent) younger Americans with a post-graduate education say their family ate together regularly.

Violent Threats Against Lawmakers

 Stephanie Lai, Luke Broadwater and Carl Hulse at NYT:

Members of Congress in both parties are experiencing a surge in threats and confrontations as a rise in violent political speech has increasingly crossed over into the realm of in-person intimidation and physical altercation. In the months since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, which brought lawmakers and the vice president within feet of rioters threatening their lives, Republicans and Democrats have faced stalking, armed visits to their homes, vandalism and assaults. 

“I wouldn’t be surprised if a senator or House member were killed,” [Senator Susan]. Collins, a Republican serving her fifth term, said in an interview. “What started with abusive phone calls is now translating into active threats of violence and real violence.” 

In the five years after President Donald J. Trump was elected in 2016 following a campaign featuring a remarkable level of violent language, the number of recorded threats against members of Congress increased more than tenfold, to 9,625 in 2021, according to figures from the Capitol Police, the federal law enforcement department that protects Congress. In the first quarter of 2022, the latest period for which figures were available, the force opened 1,820 cases. If recent history is any guide, the pace is likely to surge in the coming weeks as the election approaches.

Ad Spending and the Decline of Print

 Many posts have discussed the decline of print newspapers.  Underlying that trend is the decline of print advertising.  (The old saying is that the business of for-profit media is selling eyeballs to advertisers.)  In an Axios profile of outgoing Meta president Sheryl Sandberg, Sara Fischer offers a telling graph:

From Pew:

The total combined print and digital circulation for locally focused U.S. daily newspapers in 2020 was 8.3 million for weekday (Monday-Friday) and 15.4 million for Sunday. Each of these numbers is roughly on par with the previous year, but they are still among the lowest reported: Total weekday circulation is down 40% since 2015, the first year available for this analysis. Similarly, total Sunday circulation has fallen 45% since 2015.

Case on Civic Education

Mark Walsh at Education Week:

Students asserting the right to an adequate civics education have lost their appeal of a federal court ruling that dismissed their suit accusing the state of Rhode Island of failing to prepare them for the duties of citizenship.

Like the federal district judge who had ruled in the case, now known as A.C. v. McKee, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, in Boston, lauded the student plaintiffs for their effort but ultimately concluded that their suit could not prevail.

“The students have called attention to critical issues of declining civic engagement and inadequate preparation for participation in civic life at a time when many are concerned about the future of American democracy,” a unaninous three-judge appeals panel said in an unanimous Jan. 11 decision.“Nevertheless, the weight of precedent stands in the students’ way here, and they have not stated any viable claim for relief.”

The lawsuit was filed in 2018 on behalf of 14 students, but was also a proposed class action on behalf of all public school students in Rhode Island. It alleged that state officials have failed to provide students with a meaningful opportunity to obtain an adequate education to prepare them to be capable citizens.