Civic Ignorance on America's 250th Birthday

Many posts have discussed what Americans do and do not know about their government.

Emily Ekins at Cato:

A new national survey from the Cato Institute, conducted in collaboration with Morning Consult of 2,253 Americans ahead of July 4th and America’s 250th anniversary, finds nearly half (46%) of Americans don’t know what America’s 250th anniversary commemorates. A little more than half (53%) correctly answered that it was the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

Despite civic ignorance, overwhelming majorities are grateful (86%) and proud (79%) to be Americans. Most also believe America is a land of opportunity (61%), and even more believe the American Dream (74%) is available to them personally. As the nation celebrates its birth, most Americans feel positive (76%) about the nation’s founding, and 70% believe its founding principles remain relevant today. In particular, overwhelming majorities believe the US Constitution is important for protecting our rights and freedoms (86%) and for enabling America’s prosperity (82%).

However, nearly 6 in 10 believe the country has moved away from the founding principles, and 56% worry the US could stop being a free country within the next 50 years. People believe corruption, concentrations and abuse of power, and ignoring founding principles could lead to the country’s demise. Americans support constitutional limits, dividing power, and checking the power of the president to maintain their freedoms. For instance, 58% say no political party should be trusted with too much power, 55% say the US Constitution should place firm limits on what the government is allowed to do, even if it makes it harder to solve problems, and 72% say the president should have to obey Supreme Court rulings even when he disagrees.

Yet, a significant minority is willing to bend the rules when it suits their advantage. Four in 10 Americans think it’s acceptable if a president they support stretched the Constitution to get what they want.

Another risk to the country is low substantive civic knowledge on basic governance questions. For instance, while 77% know George Washington was the first president, 58% don’t know what the main purpose of the US Constitution is, and 57% don’t know the reason we declared independence from Great Britain and created our government with limited powers.

Capitalism (52%) is viewed somewhat more favorably than socialism (37%). However, people are evenly divided on socialism, with equal shares who are favorable and unfavorable. Gen Z stands out with more who are supportive of socialism (53%) than capitalism (45%). The survey found the “Democratic Socialist” label can both help and harm a candidate about equally. While 39% said they’d be more likely to vote for a Democratic Socialist candidate, 40% said they’d be less likely, and 22% weren’t sure either way. Democrats (61%) and Gen Z (51%) reported they’d be likely to vote for a candidate with the Democratic Socialist label.

Gutting the Diplomatlic Corps

Many posts have discussed federal employment and bureaucracy.

Abigail Williams at NBC

The State Department declined to provide exact numbers. According to the American Foreign Service Association, around 2,000 U.S. diplomats have left the Foreign Service over the last year, either through layoffs or forced retirements, taking with them decades of institutional knowledge, experience in crisis response and highly specialized language skills paid for by the U.S. government.

Their departure from a workforce that was estimated to be more than 13,000 in 2024 leaves the U.S. at a critical disadvantage, current and former State Department officials say, at a time when the nation is facing an escalating number of foreign policy crises.

...

The leadership vacuum is large. The ambassadorship in Moldova is still vacant, along with more than half of ambassadorships around the globe, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where a worsening Ebola outbreak began. There is no ambassador to Ukraine, and seasoned diplomat Julie Davis, who has been leading the embassy in Kyiv while simultaneously serving as ambassador to Cyprus, is stepping down next month to join others in retirement.

...

In the Middle East, where the U.S. continues to navigate a war with Iran and the fallout with regional allies, half of the U.S. missions, including four Persian Gulf countries, are without formal U.S. ambassadors. Pakistan and Qatar, where officials have taken on critical mediating roles in negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, are without ambassadors.

The absences contributed to the frantic effort to evacuate thousands of Americans who became stranded, and withdraw personnel when Iran began retaliating across the region in March, current and former diplomats say.

Not good pic.twitter.com/yvodGttLpV

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) June 4, 2026

Profiting from Public Office

Many posts have discussed political corruption.

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen at Axios:

Imagine America put these questions to a public referendum:

1. Presidents and their family members, unlike other U.S. citizens, shall be granted lifetime immunity from federal audits and criminal investigations of their past tax returns.
2. Presidents and their family members can maintain active ownership of global business empires, profiting when government decisions directly benefit those specific businesses.
3. Presidents, while in office, can maintain massive personal crypto and stock portfolios that buy and sell hundreds of millions of dollars in industries directly regulated by their own administration.

How would you vote?It's hard to imagine more than single-digit support for any of these. Yet Trump is doing all three and paving the way for future presidents to do the same. That's why precedents by presidents often matter as much as laws themselves.

Between the lines: This is more than just a Trump problem. Look at the astonishing number of lawmakers trading and making money off stocks, often with insider knowledge of looming congressional action.

War and Algebra

Many posts have discussed war powers and the US military.

 Yonatan Touval at NYT:

This is the recurring illusion of overequipped leaders: Because they can map the battle space, they think they understand the war. But war is never merely a technical contest. It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war is about.

So the familiar errors appear. The war planners imagine that a regime can be decapitated into collapse, whereas external attack often does the opposite — binding a battered state more tightly to a society newly united by injury, humiliation and rage. They imagine that destroying conventional assets would settle the matter, as if legitimacy, wounded sovereignty and collective anger were secondary rather than the war’s actual terrain. Planners who took their adversary’s self-understanding seriously — rather than discounting it as propaganda — might have anticipated that an attack would not weaken the regime’s narrative but instead fulfill it. They might also have foreseen the paradox that systematic decapitation does not produce negotiators. It removes them.

The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz long ago recognized the delusion of reducing war to a kind of algebra. War, as he understood it, is never merely calculation. It is saturated with passion, uncertainty and political purpose. The algebra has grown more sophisticated. But the delusion is just as dangerous today as it was in the 19th century.

What this war exposes, then, is a failure not only of strategy but of literacy. Literature and history, at their most serious, train precisely the faculties these leaders lack: the capacity to grant that other minds are not transparent to us, and are governed by purposes not our own. A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.

Cultural knowledge, of course, rarely prevents the catastrophes of war.

Athens at the height of its golden age sailed for Syracuse and lost an empire. Thucydides spent the rest of his life explaining why. The generals of 1914 were cultivated, well-read men, but those qualities did not save Europe. What has changed is not that culture once prevented blindness and no longer does. It is that culture has increasingly ceded authority to systems that mistake information for understanding and speed for judgment.

RFK Stacks Vaccine Panel: Judge Smacks Him Down

Judge Brian E. Murphy: ORDER entered. MEMORANDUM AND ORDER on Plaintiffs' Motion for Preliminary Injunction. Plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary relief is GRANTED in part.(i) The Court STAYS the January 2026 Memo revising the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 705. (ii) The Court STAYS the appointments of the thirteen ACIP members appointed on June 11, 2025, September 11, 2025, and January 13, 2026. (iii) The Court further STAYS all votes taken by the now-stayed ACIP.(MBM) (Entered: 03/16/2026)

Federal District Judge Brian Murphy:

“Science,” like law, “is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge.”  Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark 29 (1997).  History is littered with once-universal truths that have since come under scrutiny.  Nevertheless, science is still “the best we have.”  Id.1   

“Procedure is to law what scientific method is to science.”  In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 21 (1967) (cleaned up).  Although sometimes seemingly tedious, “the procedural rules which have been fashioned from the generality of due process are our best instruments for the distillation and evaluation of essential facts from the conflicting welter of data that life and our adversary methods present.”  Id. 

For our public health, Congress and the Executive have built—over decades—an apparatus that marries the rigors of science with the execution and force of the United States government. One extraordinary product of that apparatus has been the eradication and reduction of certain communicable diseases through the development and use of vaccines.  In the words of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”), “[v]accines are one of the greatest achievements of biomedical science and public health.”2  Since the rise of vaccine development and usage in the early- to mid-1900s, “[t]he United States of America [has been] one of the pioneering nations to conceptualize and implement a robust immunization system that helped the nation tackle major epidemics.”3 

Since its founding in 1964, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (“ACIP”) has aided this endeavor by providing expert guidance on the clinical use of vaccines.4  The Department of Health and Humans Services (“HHS”), which indirectly oversees ACIP, formalized ACIP’s non-partisan, science-backed nature through ACIP’s governance documents.5  And Congress has, in turn, recognized the importance and value of having such independent experts involved in setting our national public health agenda by cementing ACIP’s role in the CDC’s issuance of immunization schedules, which—among other things—determines which vaccines are available to patients through insurers and government healthcare programs.6  This is all to say that there is a method to how these decisions historically have been made—a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements. 

Unfortunately, the Government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.  First, the Government bypassed ACIP to change the immunization schedules, which is both a technical, procedural failure itself and a strong indication of something more fundamentally problematic: an abandonment of the technical knowledge and expertise embodied by that committee.  Second, the Government removed all duly appointed members of ACIP and summarily replaced them without undertaking any of the rigorous screening that had been the hallmark of ACIP member selection for decades. Again, this procedural failure highlights the very reasons why procedures exist and raises a substantial likelihood that the newly appointed ACIP fails to comport with governing law. 

Today, faced with Plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary relief, the Court concludes that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed in showing that the reconstitution of ACIP and the January 2026 changes to the childhood immunization schedule violate the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”).  For the reasons stated below, the Court will grant Plaintiffs’ motion in part.  

Pete Hegseth and War Crimes

Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima at WP:

The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.

The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.

Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.

Customary International Humanitarian Law:

Rule 47.

Attacks against Persons Hors de Combat

Rule 47. Attacking persons who are recognized as hors de combat is prohibited. A person hors de combat is:

(a) anyone who is in the power of an adverse party;

(b) anyone who is defenceless because of unconsciousness, shipwreck, wounds or sickness; or

(c) anyone who clearly expresses an intention to surrender;

provided he or she abstains from any hostile act and does not attempt to escape.

 

Anecdote About Knowledge and the 2025 Elections

Many posts have discussed what Americans do and do not know about their government.

Robin Abcarian at LAT:

“We’re getting calls about polls being closed,” Kentucky’s Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams posted Tuesday on X. “They are closed because we do not have elections today. Kentucky votes next year. You cannot vote today in Kentucky for the mayor of New York City or the Governor of Virginia. Sorry.” (In a subsequent post, he mused about the importance of civics education.)

Dick Cheney in Congress

 Former Vice President Dick Cheney died last night.  In 2004, Bill Connelly and I reflected on our experiences with him as Congressional Fellows in his House Republican leadership office.

Some of the literature tries to reduce legislative leadership to institutional context. That is, leaders are purportedly just the creatures of procedures, colleagues, and parties in the electorate. Watching Cheney reminded us that there is more to leadership than followership. When Cheney spoke, people listened. What the press now calls his “gravitas” caused other House Republicans to heed him. He was both a creature and creator of his context. 

The Civil War historian Douglas Southall Freeman once explained a source of gravitas: “First, know your stuff. Know your stuff, just that. Know -- know your own branch, know the related arms of the service; you can't know too much if you are going to be a successful leader. And know the yesterdays” (Freeman 1979, 4). Colleagues deferred to Cheney because he knew his stuff. His executive experience gave him a profound understanding of “the related arms of the service.” He knew policy. And from his academic background and research on the speakership, he knew “the yesterdays.” Cheney’s example offers evidence that knowledge is power on Capitol Hill. 

...

Cheney was no “pander bear.” At different times, we both traveled with him to Wyoming, and heard him tell constituents what they did not want to hear. Pitney watched him explain to people in the small town of Rawlins that he opposed federal subsidies for rail service to southern Wyoming. Connelly saw him take on a bunch of angry ranchers who were losing grazing land to DOD needs. In a conversation with Connelly, Cheney manifested his familiarity with political science, explaining why he was not acting as a single-minded seeker of re-election. He said he did not want the job if it entailed pandering. 

He also noted that Wyomingites respect independence, something both of us witnessed. They respected him even when -- and perhaps because -- he did not pander to them. Clearly Congressman Cheney was a “trustee,” not merely an “agent” for constituent interests. He was more than willing to engage in blunt talk with constituents and colleagues alike. Economic theories of legislative behavior fail to capture such leadership. As James Q. Wilson noted, “whereas economics is based on the assumption that preferences are given, politics must take into account the efforts made to change preferences” (Wilson 1980, 363).

USAID

Daniella Medeiros Cavalcanti, et al., "Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis," The Lancet, June 30, 2025.

To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to evaluate the impact of USAID funding—including all areas of its humanitarian and development assistance—on mortality, both overall and disaggregated by age and cause, over the past two decades and with projections to 2030. Our findings show that USAID-supported efforts have helped to prevent more than 91 million deaths across all age groups, including 30 million deaths among children. High levels of USAID funding were associated with a 15% reduction in all- age and all-cause mortality, a 65% reduction in mortality from HIV/AIDS, a 51% reduction from malaria, and a 50% reduction from neglected tropical diseases. Substantial decreases were also observed in mortality from tuberculosis, nutritional deficiencies, diarrhoeal diseases, lower respiratory infections, and maternal and perinatal conditions. By age group, the most pronounced reductions were seen in children younger than 5 years (32%). According to the forecasting models, the current steep funding cuts— coupled with the potential dissolution of the agency—could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, averaging more than 2·4 million deaths per year. These deaths include 4·5 million among children younger than 5 years, or more than 700 000 deaths annually.

Stashing Away Residents of this Country

  The Trump administration is snatching people without due process.

 UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALSFOR THE FOURTH CIRCUITNo. 25-1404(8:25-cv-00951-PX)KILMAR ARMANDO ABREGO GARCIA; JENNIFER STEFANIA VASQUEZSURA; A.A.V., a minor, by and through his next friend and mother, JenniferVasquez Sura,Plaintiffs – Appellees,v.KRISTI NOEM; TODD LYONS; KENNETH GENALO; NIKITA BAKER;PAMELA JO BONDI; MARCO RUBIO,Defendants – Appellants.ORDER WILKINSON, Circuit Judge, with whom KING and THACKER, Circuit Judges, join:

Upon review of the government’s motion, the court denies the motion for an emergency stay pending appeal and for a writ of mandamus. The relief the government is requesting is both extraordinary and premature. While we fully respect the Executive’s robust assertion of its Article II powers, we shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court’s recent decision.

It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. 

This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear. 

The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process. 

...

 “Energy in the [E]xecutive” is much to be respected. FEDERALIST NO. 70, at 423 (1789) (Alexander Hamilton) (Clinton Rossiter ed., 1961). It can rescue government from its lassitude and recalibrate imbalances too long left unexamined. The knowledge that executive energy is a perishable quality understandably breeds impatience with the courts. Courts, in turn, are frequently attuned to caution and are often uneasy with the Executive Branch’s breakneck pace. 

And the differences do not end there. The Executive is inherently focused upon ends; the Judiciary much more so upon means. Ends are bestowed on the Executive by electoral outcomes. Means are entrusted to all of government, but most especially to the Judiciary by the Constitution itself.

The Executive possesses enormous powers to prosecute and to deport, but with powers come restraints. If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?∗ And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” would lose its meaning. U.S. CONST. art. II, § 3; see also id. art. II, § 1, cl. 8.

-- Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson 

* See, e.g., Michelle Stoddart, ‘Homegrowns are Next’: Trump Doubles Down on Sending American ‘Criminals’ to Foreign Prisons, ABC NEWS (Apr. 14, 2025, 6:04 PM); David Rutz, Trump Open to Sending Violent American Criminals to El Salvador Prisons, FOX NEWS (Apr. 15, 2025, 11:01 AM EDT).

2 telling things here:

1) White House crosses out “wrongly,” despite repeatedly acknowledging its error in court.

2) “who’s never coming back” is basically taunting SCOTUS. Signals the opposite of any intent to “facilitate” his return. https://t.co/Pn2ltL8lzX

— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) April 18, 2025

Deficit 2025

 Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt.

Fatima Hussein at AP:

The U.S. budget deficit has grown to more than $1.3 trillion in the first half of the 2025 fiscal year — the second highest six-month deficit on record, according to Treasury Department data released Thursday.

The deficit for October through March spans the administrations of President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump. The previous high in the four decades of recordkeeping was $1.7 trillion in the first half of fiscal year 2021, when the government was tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Treasury official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the data said the increased spending was in part due to a mix of expenditures, including cost of living increases to Social Security payouts, higher Medicare and Medicaid costs, increased disaster assistance to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Defense Department spending.

Jacob Bogage at WP:

Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.

Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.

“The idea of doing that in one year, it’s hard to grapple with how meaningful of a shift that represents,” said Natasha Sarin, president of the Yale Budget Lab and a senior Biden administration tax official.

Threats Against Members of Congress

Many posts have discussed political violence..

 Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair:

According to one source with direct knowledge of the events, North Carolina senator Thom Tillis told people that the FBI warned him about “credible death threats” when he was considering voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary. Tillis ultimately provided the crucial 50th vote to confirm the former Fox & Friends host to lead the Pentagon. According to the source, Tillis has said that if people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. (When asked for comment for this story, a spokesperson for Tillis said it was false that the senator had recommended the book in that capacity. The FBI said it had no comment.)

US Capitol Police:

The number of United States Capitol Police (USCP) threat assessment cases has climbed for the second year in a row. In 2024, the USCP’s Threat Assessment Section (TAS) investigated 9,474 concerning statements and direct threats against the Members of Congress, including their families and staff. The number of concerning statements and direct threats usually increases during election years.pol 

Here are the TAS case numbers for the last five years:

• 8,008 in 2023
• 7,501 in 2022
• 9,625 in 2021
• 8,613 in 2020
• 6,955 in 2019
• 5,206 in 2018
• 3,939 in 2017

 

Federal Hiring in 2025

Many posts have discussed federal employment and bureaucracy.

Brian Schwartz and Josh Dawsey at WSJ:

Since Trump’s victory in November, Trump’s team has rejected hundreds of applicants that it felt won’t be loyal enough to Trump, according to people familiar with the matter. The hiring scrutiny has applied to a range of jobs across agencies and seniority levels: more than in Trump’s first term, a White House signoff has been required on lower-level cabinet appointees, people with knowledge of the interviews said. And unlike the 2017 White House, a team on the transition vetted thousands of employees before Trump took office.

Applicants were asked if they ever made comments critical of Trump, worked for a politician who disliked Trump or supported causes or politicians not aligned with the president, according to a person with direct involvement in the vetting operation. Some questions aim to gauge an applicant’s support for the president by asking how long the applicant has backed Trump, the person said, and determine whether the candidate had given to any politicians or supported any causes that aren’t aligned with Trump.

Of particular interest to the vetting team is whether hires made any comments criticizing Trump over the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and his false claims that the election was stolen, the person said.

Potential hires have also been pressed about their policy views, sometimes on subjects that are unrelated to the jobs for which they are applying, some of the people said. They have been asked questions about their views on tariffs, whether Ukraine deserves more or less U.S. aid and whether the U.S. should be a member of NATO. The questions are intended to measure whether a job candidate’s worldviews match up with Trump’s, the people said.

Ellen Nakashima and Warren P. Strobel at WP:

Candidates for top national security positions in the Trump administration have faced questions that appear designed to determine whether they have embraced the president’s false claims about the outcome of the 2020 election and its aftermath, according to people familiar with cases of such screening.

The questions asked of several current and former officials up for top intelligence agency and law enforcement posts revolved around two events that have become President Donald Trump’s litmus test to distinguish friend from foe: the result of the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, according to the people, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

These people said that two individuals, both former officials who were being considered for positions within the intelligence community, were asked to give “yes” or “no” responses to the questions: Was Jan. 6 “an inside job?” And was the 2020 presidential election “stolen?”

...

One former senior intelligence official said that attesting to something you know to be untrue — as in the assertion that President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election — would violate the ethos of an intelligence officer. “I don’t understand how somebody could [answer untruthfully] and do their job,” said the former official.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” ― George Orwell, 1984

 

Knowledge of Government

Many posts have discussed what Americans do and do not know about their government.

Yale Youth Poll:

If you’re reading this memo, you probably know what the filibuster is. But it turns out that a plurality of Americans don’t! 

The good news is that voters do know which parties control which branches of the federal government. A majority of voters overall (and a plurality of young voters) were able to correctly identify that Republicans currently control the House of Representatives and Democrats currently control the Senate. Large majorities of both voters overall and voters under 30 correctly identified Republicans as the party that has appointed a majority of sitting Supreme Court justices.  

But when asked to identify the correct description of each process out of a list of three (including two incorrect options), there was a substantial age gap: young voters were much less likely than voters overall to identify the correct description of how the Supreme Court appointment, Electoral College, and constitutional amendment processes work. They were also less likely to identify the correct definition of “gerrymandering” than voters overall. A plurality of both young voters (48.4%) and voters overall (40.3%) said that they did not know which description of the Senate filibuster was most accurate.

More Russian Disinformation

 Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy. Russia and China are  prominent influencers.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken:

In addition to imposing sanctions, visa restrictions, and other measures, the State Department also designated the Russian state-funded and directed media company Rossiya Segodnya and five of its subsidiaries, including RT, under the Foreign Missions Act. As a result, these actors are now required to notify the State Department of all personnel working in the United States as well as their property.

We took these steps based on our conclusion that Rossiya Segodnya and these five subsidiaries are no longer merely firehoses of Russian Government propaganda and disinformation; they are engaged in covert influence activities aimed at undermining American elections and democracies, functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus.

Today, we’re announcing that these Kremlin-backed media outlets are not only playing this covert influence role to undermine democracy in the United States, but also to meddle in the sovereign affairs of countries around the world. Thanks to new information – much of which originates from RT employees – we know that RT possess cyber capabilities and engaged in covert information and influence operations and military procurement. As part of RT’s expanded capabilities, the Russian Government embedded within RT a unit with cyber operational capabilities and ties to Russian intelligence. RT’s leadership had direct, witting knowledge of this enterprise.

Russian Government actors incorporated the cyber capabilities of this unit within RT in the spring of 2023, which is focused primarily on covert influence operations around the world. Under the cover of RT, information produced through this unit flows to Russian intelligence services, Russian media outlets, Russian mercenary groups, and other state and proxy arms of the Russian Government. One of its projects is a large, online crowdfunding program in Russia, operating within RT and through social media channels, to provide support and military equipment – supplies, weaponry – to Russian military units in Ukraine. This includes sniper rifles, suppressors, body armor, night vision equipment, drones, radio equipment, personal weapon sites, diesel generators.

While the crowdfunding campaign is out in the open, what’s hidden is that this program is administered by the leaders of RT. Last week, our government revealed how RT launders information operations through unwitting Americans to covertly disseminate Kremlin-produced content and messaging to the American public. Today, we’re exposing how Russia deploys similar tactics around the world.I

Matt Bernardini at The Guardian:

Amid the recent crackdown on Russian influence in American media, a group of former Trump advisers and operatives have quietly helped build a pro-Russian website that frequently spreads debunked conspiracy theories about the war in Ukraine, election fraud and vaccines.

Working alongside contributors for Kremlin state media, the former Donald Trump policy aide George Papadopoulos, his wife, Simona Mangiante, and others have become editorial board members of the website Intelligencer, which is increasingly becoming a source of news for those in the rightwing ecosystem.

The growth of the website, which has not been reported on before, comes at a time when the US is seeking to crack down on Russian influence ahead of the 2024 election. Recently, the justice department charged two members of RT (formerly known as Russia Today) with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and money laundering for payments they allegedly made to “recruit unwitting American influencers”. It also placed sanctions on RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, and nine other employees.

Public Knowledge and the Constitution

 From the Annenberg Public Policy Center:

The 2024 edition of the Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey, released annually to celebrate Constitution Day on September 17, finds that:

• Nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) can name all three branches of government.
• Asked what specific rights are guaranteed by the First Amendment, nearly three-quarters of respondents (74%) name freedom of speech. The other four rights are recalled by far fewer people: the second most-often cited, freedom of religion, is named by just 39%.
• A little over half of U.S. adults know which party controls the Senate and which controls the House of Representatives.
• Over 80% of Americans support prohibiting Supreme Court justices from participating in cases in which they have “personal or financial interests.” Nearly as many people support creation of a formal ethics code for the court.

“Civics knowledge matters,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “Those who do not understand the rights protected by the Constitution can neither cherish nor invoke them; those who do not know which party controls the House and Senate may misattribute credit or blame for action or inaction.”

Cats, Dogs, Immigrants, and Myths

 Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.

Alicia Victoria Lozano at NBC:

The woman behind an early Facebook post spreading a harmful and baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating local pets that helped thrust a small Ohio city into the national spotlight says she had no firsthand knowledge of any such incident and is now filled with regret and fear as a result of the ensuing fallout.

“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee, a Springfield resident, told NBC News on Friday.

Lee recently posted on Facebook about a neighbor’s cat that went missing, adding that the neighbor told Lee she thought the cat was the victim of an attack by her Haitian neighbors.

Newsguard, a media watchdog that monitors for misinformation online, found that Lee had been among the first people to publish a post to social media about the rumor, screenshots of which circulated online. The neighbor, Kimberly Newton, said she heard about the attack from a third party, NewsGuard reported.

Newton told Newsguard that Lee’s Facebook post misstated her story, and that the owner of the missing cat was “an acquaintance of a friend” rather than her daughter’s friend. Newton could not be reached for comment.

Lee said she had no idea the post would become part of a rumor mill that would spiral into the national consciousness. She has since deleted the Facebook post.

Other posts have also contributed to the false allegations, including a photo of a man holding a dead goose that was taken in Columbus, Ohio, but was spread by some online as evidence of the claims about Springfield. Graphic video of a woman who allegedly killed and tried to eat a cat was also found not to have originated in Springfield but in Canton, Ohio, and does not have any connection to the Haitian community.

Local police and city officials have repeatedly said there is no evidence of such crimes in Springfield, but that hasn’t stopped the lies from spreading across the country and igniting a national frenzy that landed on the presidential debate stage this week. Former President Donald Trump and his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who was born less than an hour away from Springfield, have repeated the baseless allegations.

CRS 2024

A number of posts have discussed congressional capacity. The Congressional Resarch Service is especially important in this regard.

Kevin R. Kosar at The Hill:

Last week, the Library of Congress made an important announcement: The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is getting a new director. Karen Donfried will begin her 10-year term on Sept. 23. She takes over for interim director Robert Newlen, who has led the agency since July 2023.

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Congress heavily leans on CRS to inform the legislative debate. CRS staff provided Hill staff and legislators with 479 in-person briefings, 2,754 confidential memoranda, 22,212 telephone responses and 36,222 email responses, according to the agency’s 2022 report. The agency also wrote 1,093 reports and general distribution products for Congress and 9,652 bill summaries, which the Hill and all of America can find on Congress.gov.

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Like any new leader, she will have to earn the trust of staff. Doing that will require spending a lot of time managing by walking about and encouraging staff to explain what they do along with what is working well and what isn’t.   And then she will need to start remedying the troubles, which are many. For example, various technology issues hinder CRS staff’s capacity to serve Congress. Staff works on buggy software and their phones often do not work due to cellular dead spots in the Madison Building, where CRS is headquartered.   

Donfried also will have to address some of the management problems, which she will no doubt learn about during her listening tour. Poor leadership has driven away a lot of staff, as Congress learned at a hearing in 2023.  CRS too often has placed people who are highly expert in policy analysis in management positions despite them not being people persons. Those individuals will need to be replaced. She also will need to figure out how to position CRS in the 21st century. Fifty years ago, the agency had a quasi-monopoly on the provision of expert information and analysis to Congress. These days, it faces stiff competition from think tanks, foundations, interest groups and private research firms. 

As I see it, the way forward is for CRS to lean into its six core strengths: It is a nonpartisan organization with deep expertise and long institutional memory that can provide rapid responses to congressional requests with customized research products and services that draw on diverse, in-house knowledge.

Legislating After the Fall of Chevron Deference

  A number of posts have discussed congressional capacity, legislative productivity, and deliberation.

Michael Macagnone at Roll Call:

A Supreme Court decision Friday left an uncertain and more difficult path for Congress to shape how the federal government carries out laws on major issues such as environment, health, immigration and more, lawmakers and legal experts said. The opinion overturned a long-standing legal doctrine called Chevron deference, which required judges to defer to an agency’s interpretation when it comes to regulations about laws that are ambiguous.

Congress might have to pass more detailed laws in the future.

Just getting those new laws written could be a heavy lift, according to J.D. Rackey, a senior policy analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center and former staff member on the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. Rackey said Congress doesn’t currently have the staff or technical expertise to write more fine-tuned legislation. Frequently, committees don’t have enough staff or in-depth policy knowledge to write the kind of specific legislation that would survive the scrutiny of the current Supreme Court. “Even if you want a smaller government, if you want government to do anything, this ruling requires Congress to be much more proscriptive and to have the capacity to do so,” Rackey said. “Outside of the larger policy goals that any one party might have, any future lawmaking is going to be impacted with this decision.” Rackey pointed out that the House has recently “come around” to the idea that Congress doesn’t have the technical expertise to write rules, and he pointed to the more than 200 recommendations from the select modernization panel he worked on. Many of those have been implemented, he said, but “not enough to reckon with this reality. But it does set the institution on a path to being able to grapple with it. The process of writing legislation itself would also get more complicated, Rackey said, as legislators could no longer rely on agencies to make potentially fraught decisions. Getting to final results could mean longer negotiations, more tough votes, more days in Washington and more resources for members and staff.

Time to bring back the Office of Technology Assessment. 

Brain Drain on the Hill

Many posts have discussed the current state of Congress.

 Peter M. Weichlein at Newsweek:

Would you call an organization that has seen more than 50 percent turnover in upper management over less than six years a mess? I would, and so did a bipartisan group of almost 300 former members of Congress who, when asked in a recent survey to attach adjectives to the current Congress, landed on the following top five words: dysfunctional, partisan, polarized, divided, mess.

Since 2019, almost 250 members of Congress were replaced, either through retirement or election loss, and that number will obviously rise by the time the 119th Congress is sworn in. Already, more than 50 representatives and senators have announced that they are retiring or seeking other offices. That's experienced upper management and decades of institutional knowledge walking out the door.

The numbers are even worse at the staff level, where average tenure right now is less than 5 years. According to LegiStorm, which tracks congressional staff rosters and salaries, 55 percent more House staff members left their jobs in 2021 than in the preceding year. Does the date Jan. 6, 2021, ring a bell?

We're giving current and potential candidates for office every reason imaginable to consider other professional paths. Salaries for current members of Congress have remained unchanged for almost two decades. When one accounts for inflation, salaries have actually decreased 29 percent, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service.

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In 2023, Capitol Police opened over 8,000 threat assessment cases based on complaints filed by members, their families, and their staffs. That's an increase of about 400 percent over the past six years—while at the same time, almost 400 officers have left the Department since Jan. 6, 2021.