Bessette/Pitney’s AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS: DELIBERATION, DEMOCRACY AND CITIZENSHIP reviews the idea of "deliberative democracy." Building on the book, this blog offers insights, analysis, and facts about recent events.
Cable news is now the top regular source for campaign news, with 36% of Americans say they are regularly learning about the candidates or campaign on those networks. The long-term decline in the number of Americans who get campaign news from local and network TV has steepened as a consequence of the fact that fewer people are closely following the campaign compared to four years ago when there were contested primaries in both political parties. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press' 2012 campaign news survey, conducted Jan. 4-8 among 1,507 adults nationwide, also found a sharp decline in the number of Americans who get campaign information from their local newspapers.
In previous campaigns, declining figures for traditional sources were at least partly offset by increasing numbers turning to the internet. But that is not the case in 2012, as the number regularly getting campaign news online has leveled off. This is largely due to a lack of interest in the early 2012 campaign among younger Americans, who have traditionally been the broadest internet news consumers.
Many of the newest internet tools for getting campaign information, including social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, are being used by a relatively limited audience.
Many of the newest internet tools for getting campaign information, including social networking, are being used by a relatively limited audience. One-in-five Americans (20%) say they regularly or sometimes get campaign information from Facebook and just one-in-twenty (5%) say the same about Twitter. Even among Facebook and Twitter users, most say they hardly ever or never learn about the campaign or candidates through those sources.
Note other stories referring to 2012 as "The Twitter Election." Do these data undercut this portrayal? Not completely: although relatively few rank-and-file voters rely on Twitter, it is an increasingly important medium for communications among reporters and campaign activists.
Social news website Reddit, Wikipedia and scores of other smaller websites that went dark in protest of anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA helped turn the inside-the-Beltway lobbying racket on its head, Reddit’s co-founder Alexis Ohanian told POLITICO.
The outcry from Internet users proved “that Americans actually still can dictate policy and not just lobbyists,” Ohanian said, during a visit to Washington this week.
Our chapter on civic culture lays out the breadth and depth of religious influence on American life. Our chapters on parties and campaigns explain how religious affiliation influences political behavior and how faith groups play a role in electoral politics. Such topics are especially relevant in light of the administration's controversial decision to make religious-affiliated universities and hospitals offer insurance coverage for contraception even if they object on religious grounds.
At Bloomberg, Mike Dorning and Margaret Talev report:
President Barack Obama ended months of internal White House debate by siding with a group of mostly female advisers who urged him not to limit a health-care law mandate to provide contraceptives, even at the risk of alienating Catholic voters in November, people familiar with the discussions said. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic and a two-term governor of Kansas, was joined by several female Obama advisers in urging against a broad exemption for religious organizations. To do so would leave too many women without coverage and sap the enthusiasm for Obama among women’s rights advocates, they said, according to the people, who spoke about the deliberations on condition of anonymity. Vice President Joe Biden and then-White House chief of staff Bill Daley, also Catholics, warned that the mandate would be seen as a government intrusion on religious institutions. Even moderate Catholic voters in battleground states might be alienated, they warned, according to the people familiar with the discussions.
President Barack Obama’s contraceptives edict has handed Republicans an election-year gift. But now, the president may have a problem with his own party, too.
A handful of high-profile Catholic Democrats are bailing on the president and joining the GOP chorus of critics. They’re arguing that the rule needs to be significantly softened if not, as Republicans want, scrapped altogether.
At this point, the Democratic defectors are few in number but tall in stature. They include two swing-state pols on the November ballot — Obama’s former DNC chairman, Tim Kaine, who’s running for Senate in Virginia, and Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey — as well as House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson.
His deservedly celebrated 2006 speech on religion and American public life was a deeply sophisticated and carefully balanced effort to defend the rights of both believers and nonbelievers in a pluralistic republic.
Obama’s speech at Notre Dame’s graduation in 2009 was another tour de force. His visit to South Bend was highly controversial among right-wing Catholics. Yet his address temporarily silenced many of his critics because it showed an appreciation for the Catholic Church’s contributions to American life — particularly through its vast array of social-service and educational institutions — and an instinctive feeling for Catholic sensibilities.
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Speaking as a Catholic, I wish the Church would be more open on the contraception question. But speaking as an American liberal who believes that religious pluralism imposes certain obligations on government, I think the Church’s leaders had a right to ask for broader relief from a contraception mandate that would require it to act against its own teachings. The administration should have done more to balance the competing liberty interests here.
One theme of our book is that the United States is different from other countries in certain important ways. One of these ways is our constitutional structure. In the New York Times, Adam Liptak writes that this difference is actually growing.
In 1987, on the Constitution’s bicentennial, Time magazine calculated that “of the 170 countries that exist today, more than 160 have written charters modeled directly or indirectly on the U.S. version.”
A quarter-century later, the picture looks very different. “The U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere,” according to a new study by David S. Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia.
The study, to be published in June in The New York University Law Review, bristles with data. Its authors coded and analyzed the provisions of 729 constitutions adopted by 188 countries from 1946 to 2006, and they considered 237 variables regarding various rights and ways to enforce them.
“Among the world’s democracies,” Professors Law and Versteeg concluded, “constitutional similarity to the United States has clearly gone into free fall. Over the 1960s and 1970s, democratic constitutions as a whole became more similar to the U.S. Constitution, only to reverse course in the 1980s and 1990s.”
“The turn of the twenty-first century, however, saw the beginning of a steep plunge that continues through the most recent years for which we have data, to the point that the constitutions of the world’s democracies are, on average, less similar to the U.S. Constitution now than they were at the end of World War II.”
There are lots of possible reasons. The United States Constitution is terse and old, and it guarantees relatively few rights. The commitment of some members of the Supreme Court to interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning in the 18th century may send the signal that it is of little current use to, say, a new African nation. And the Constitution’s waning influence may be part of a general decline in American power and prestige.
In an interview, Professor Law identified a central reason for the trend: the availability of newer, sexier and more powerful operating systems in the constitutional marketplace. “Nobody wants to copy Windows 3.1,” he said.
A few years ago, Liptak wrote an article pointing out that the United States has greater protections for free speech than just about any other country.
As it stands now, those of us who are lucky enough to be citizens by birth don't have to do much. Very little is asked of us. But let's imagine what the content of our citizenship might look like ifeveryone had to earn it.
Service. Under current law, undocumented Americans and nonresident noncitizens can earn citizenship if they enter the armed services - sometimes immediately upon completion of basic training. If service can justify citizenship, then perhaps citizenship should require service, whether military or civilian. National service as a prerequisite to citizenship would make the status more meaningful, and the country more cohesive.
Knowledge. One of the prime reasons for the Voting Rights Act of 1964 was the sordid history of Jim Crow literacy tests used by whites at the ballot box to screen out and intimidate black voters. (Even worse, those tests often required would-be voters to read aloud from the Constitution.) As shameful and discriminatory as those tests were, just imagine now if there were a sincere and universal requirement of civic knowledge in order to vote. Think how few non-immigrants would pass. Today, public understanding of our past and our system of government is pitifully low: As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has archly observed, far more Americans can name a judge on American Idol than a justice of the Supreme Court. Only a third can name all three branches of government. One simple remedy would be to update the citizenship test now given to naturalizing immigrants - and administer it to everyone. That would boost knowledge in a hurry.
Net Contribution. In the United Kingdom and a few other countries today, there is a point system for immigrants who want to become citizens, and points are awarded on basis of contribution to society. Why not institute a point system here -- for everyone? Do you give more than five percent of your adjusted gross income to charity? Points. Haven't done volunteer work in the community in a decade? Demerits. Indeed, we could have a scale of progressive contribution: The more wealth you have, the more you should be expected to contribute to the commonwealth - not through taxes only but also through time and deeds.
Periodic Renewal. As those who would end birthright citizenship might note, a date of birth is an arbitrary point at which to assume that someone is worthy of lifetime tenure as a citizen. But then, by this logic, so is the date that a person first earns citizenship. So to keep citizens from coasting, we should change the default setting and make the status revocable and renewable every ten years only by merit. If you don't qualify -- well, it's time to self-deport.
Policymakers turned college-going into a national priority because they thought educated citizens were better citizens — more civically engaged, politically aware, and democratic. While it’s true that college had always been a key training ground for democratic citizenship, it wasn’t until the 20th century that the federal government started to pump millions, then billions, of dollars into research and student aid. This was a remarkable transformation considering that for most of American history the federal government went out of its way to avoid getting involved in higher education, except at the nation’s land-grant colleges, which collected modest annual appropriations for agricultural research and operating expenses. This all changed during the middle third of the 20th century, when higher education and the federal government forged a durable partnership buffeted by cataclysmic wars, economic depressions, and mass social movements. It was at this time that the federal government extended educational opportunities to individuals in exchange for their service to the state. The best example of this was the GI Bill of 1944, which offered veterans portable financial aid to go to college in return for their wartime sacrifices, and the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which provided fellowships and loans to students who promised to earn degrees in defense-related fields of study, like math, science, and the foreign languages. Starting with the Higher Education Act of 1965 policymakers veered away from the reciprocal design that lay at the heart of these earlier programs, looking instead to grants, and especially to loans, to help students and their families pay for college.
What do the armed forces have to do with health care? The US military health care system is among the world's largest, serving more than 9.2 million people, including active duty personnel and families, retirees and their families, and eligible veterans. The following item, reposted from Autism Policy and Politics, explains one of the many issues arising from this system.
Last Tuesday, Scott Campbell stood up during the public comment section of a congressional briefing for H.R. 2288, the Caring for Military Children with Autism Act (CMKAA) and spoke about his lung cancer. Doctors discovered it during his retirement physical, requiring him to stay on active duty for treatment.
That active duty, following 28 years of service, allowed his son, a 13-year-old severely affected by autism, to continue his applied behavior analysis (ABA) treatments and to have them paid for by his military insurance.
"I was glad I got lung cancer," he said, letting the irony of his words seep into the room, "because it meant my son could get treatment."
Campbell was addressing a situation that affects military parents of children with autism across the country. ABA therapy, which is often recommended to to treat autism, is not covered under TRICARE standard, the basic military insurance. Military families must seek coverage under the Extended Health Care Option (ECHO) which is only available after enrollment in the Exceptional Family Member Program (EFMP).
Once enrolled, coverage caps limit ABA therapy at an average of 11 hours per week, less than the 25-40 hours that is often recommended for young recently diagnosed children. Furthermore, ECHO is not available to retirees, even those forced to retire due to injury or disease.
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The Caring for Military Kids with Autism Act would remove ABA treatment from ECHO, placing it under TRICARE Standard as medically necessary, removing the dollar cap on care, as well as making the therapy accessible to all eligible retiree dependents.
