interviews
The Nationalization of U.S. Elections
by Dan Hopkins
December 31, 2020
This interview with Dan Hopkins, Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
What were the original assumptions in the Constitution about state-level loyalty versus national government loyalty?
It's a good question. The Constitution is now far enough back in our collective memories that I think it's really valuable to start by having some sense of what the U.S. was like at the time. There were some scholars who argued that the Constitution is well understood as a peace treaty between sovereign states about how they were going to govern their affairs.
In 1776 and even in 1787, when the Constitution was drafted, the U.S. was a collection of 13 quite different colonies. It took the Georgia delegation six weeks to travel to Philadelphia in order to participate in the Constitutional Convention. Different colonies had very different economies and different religious heritages. This was a quite diverse country and, thus, the Constitution was designed to protect substantial levels of state-level autonomy. I think it is really important to recognize that at the time, many of the people thought of themselves as Americans, but also to a certain extent, as New Yorkers or Virginians or Pennsylvanians.
When do you start to see a shift towards politics in the U.S. becoming more nationalized?
To some degree, it's an ongoing process that has unfolded in fits and starts over our 200-plus year history. I do think that the Civil War is a critical turning point. In the run-up to the Civil War, you see many more implications of state-level identities. I'm a Georgian, I'm a Virginian. And obviously, the Civil War pitted state against state.
It's generally been the case that the Republican party has been more likely to invoke federalism. Of course, the exemplary issue is the issue of civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Even in more recent times, the Republican party has advocated for there being less of a role in the federal government asserting itself to protect the rights of African-Americans, especially, but not only in the South. I think it's fair to say that if you've heard a state rights argument in the last 50 years, it's more likely to be coming from the Republican party.
There's also an element in which as power shifts, we see changes. When the Republicans control the federal office, sometimes it's Democrats who say, "Hey, it's important to let California write its own laws with respect to clean energy or car emissions standards." At the same time, the extent to which we see Republican states moving to block sanctuary cities, for instance, is surprising.
If you're a principled federalist, then presumably cities shouldn't be punished for diverging.
In general, I see very few principled federalists in American politics. I think that all too often in contemporary American politics, federalism is just the clothing we use to dress up certain arguments instead of being a principled approach to a range of policy problems.
What factors contribute to a nationalized political landscape?
I actually think there's a relationship between the transformation of campaign finance, the transformation of voting, and the transformation of what's getting covered in our newspapers. There's a unifying element to all of this.
Let's look at campaign finance first. In many of the most competitive 2020 Senate races, large majorities of money came from out-of-state donations. What does that do to the candidates, and how does that affect the way constituents perceive elections?
I think that the nationalization of the campaign finance structure is an example of our nationalized set of divisions. What we're trying to do is refract these highly nationalized divisions through our federalist system. And the result often distorts representation in critical ways. One of the key facts about campaign finance has been that as late as 1992, two-thirds of all donations to federal candidates, to members of Congress, were coming from within the state that they represent. 20 years later in 2012, only one-third of all dollars were coming from the states that people represented.
The danger is that the representatives and senators increasingly have one constituency where they get their votes, but a separate constituency from where they get their money.
That is not how our system was designed to work. It was not designed for members of Congress to spend four hours a day raising money from people who are not their constituents.
And simultaneously, there has been a collapse of local media. I wonder how the decline of local news plays into this landscape?
When the internet first became a sizable presence, there was a hope that it might actually lead to a proliferation of local news. With the internet there are very, very low production costs, so, theoretically, I could put up a newsletter about my neighborhood. But in fact, as you said, the rise of the internet and the rise of cable television led to this dramatic concentration of our attention on a very, very small number of nationalized news sources. Partly that's because the news media would target us based on where we lived. The Philadelphia Inquirer targeted a set of people who wanted to know about life in and around Philadelphia.
But more recently we instead see that the business model for many media companies is to compete based on who voters are and who readers are and who consumers are, rather than where they live.
Rather than providing me with information specific to Philadelphia, they will identify me as someone who likes the National Football League or cares about politics.
That has led to the fragmentation of our media environment. One of the real losers in this has been people's attention to state and local politics. State and local politics have never been on the top of people's priority lists. It used to be that if I were reading the Philadelphia Inquirer, as a by-product of learning what the Eagle's score was, I also learn a little bit about who my mayor was or who my governor was. And nowadays, since I can go right to ESPN or I can go right to Fox News, I can skip over all that state and local information.
In a world where state and local politicians want to be well-known, they're much more likely to attach themselves to a lightning rod federal issue than they are to actually dive into the challenging, complex issues that face their local community.
Which really allows issues to be manipulated. When we focused on immigration, something I found interesting was how much immigration was used as a campaign tool in Ohio or Maine. It’s easy to make a border terrifying when you don’t live near one. Do you feel like campaigning has changed based on the ability to take issues that don't have anything to do with your constituents, but are made to look like they have everything to do with constituents?
Yeah, absolutely. One of the real challenges with a nationalized political environment is that it encourages attention to issues that are evocative and emotionally charged and often have to do with specific groups of people, but ultimately do not have clear policy effects. I think one prominent example of this is not long after President Trump was elected he attacked football players who refused to stand for the National Anthem. I think it's a very instructive case because he wasn't proposing any policy. This was purely about symbols.
I worry that in the nationalized political environment, it's very hard to put together a political coalition that speaks to auto workers and nurses in the suburbs of Detroit, and retirees in Maricopa County. This is a very diverse country. One of the easier ways to knit together a political coalition is to reach for these divisive, identity-oriented issues, even if that's not actually what's going to motivate the policies that you're proposing.
I do think that there's been a real connection between the way in which our politics has nationalized and the way in which our politics has become more identity oriented.
It's these kinds of identity charged issues that can have an intuitive meaning to people in places from Montana to North Carolina.
Has your work clarified your opinion about how national politics should work? What do you advocate for moving forward in terms of policy and campaigning?
I certainly think that voters do better when they have the information that they need, and I think that we are missing an opportunity to really use our federalist system, because there are so many different kinds of issues that face the different communities in our country.
If we are trying to force all of those issues onto a single divide between Democrats and Republicans, we're going to miss a lot of critical issues.
I think some of the disaffection with contemporary politics stems from the fact that many of us deal with problems in our day-to-day lives that are not represented by the Republican-Democrat divide.
I do want to be wary of nostalgia — or suggesting that some earlier period of history was markedly better. Yes. I worry a lot that today's voters just don't know much about state and local politics, but state and local politics wasn't always vibrant and democratic in previous generations, right? As a social scientist, I think part of my job is to lay out trends. I do think that nationalization is something that we should forecast as being a major part of our politics moving forward.
I also think that there are some policy changes on the edges that I would advocate for that I think would help reinforce the connections between places and voters, and to make better use of our current federalist system. For instance, I think campaign finance matching, so that every dollar you get locally is amplified, is a great idea. I think that could encourage politicians to lay down roots in the specific communities they represent and to spend less time trying to raise money from Manhattan or Dallas.
I think we should also do everything in our regulatory capacity to help promote, protect, and foster high-quality, non-partisan coverage of states and localities.
As a country that is hemorrhaging reporters who cover states and localities I do think that given how many important decisions are made at the state and local level, as a society, we have a real stake in the quality of local news media. There are fewer statehouse reporters, there are fewer city hall reporters, and there are fewer people who are tracking state and local politics to hold our politicians accountable. I think that has been underappreciated, and one of the real dangers in contemporary American democracy.
interviews
Everything Must Go
by Alec Karakatsanis
June 23, 2020
This interview with Alec Karakatsanis, Executive Director of Civil Rights Corps and author of Usual Cruelty, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you introduce us to the work that the Civil Rights Corps does?
Alec Karakatsanis | Civil Rights Corps is a small nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC. We seek to use litigation to change the brutality that is inflicted on people, predominantly people of color, by the criminal punishment bureaucracy. We have led a lot of the fights around the country challenging the cash bail system. We have also done work around prosecutorial misconduct, on the militarization of police and some work around the indigent defense system.
More broadly, we are an abolitionist organization that is trying to get our society to think critically about the purpose of the criminal punishment bureaucracy. We push people to think about what kinds of divestment we can make from the current system, and what kind of investment can be made in other areas to help communities flourish.
Has your work changed since the protests began after Geroge Floyd’s murder?
I think it's important to take a step back and think about what our jail and prison system looked like a few months ago in order to understand this moment.
This is the staggering number of people the police are ripping away from their communities and putting into a bureaucracy of cages, courts, lawyers and police officers. Almost all of these jails are places of unspeakable horror. Virtually every one that I have visited over the country is covered in mucus, feces, blood, mold and urine. They are incredibly overcrowded and cramped. There is a total lack of hygiene or adequate medical care.
When COVID hit, our work gained a new urgency. Suddenly a viral pandemic was threatening to sweep through all of these horrific facilities. We reoriented ourselves. We brought a number of big class action lawsuits in major cities on behalf of human beings confined in jails. We challenged the jail's utter failure to protect the people inside. These are extraordinary stakes for our clients and their families. To give one example, after we filed our lawsuit in Chicago, seven people died of COVID in the Cook County Jail.
In the last few months, a lot of our work has shifted towards trying to tell the story of what's happening inside these facilities. Most people have no window into them. They don't know the extent of the brutality inflicted upon people every single day.
What was the original ask from your organization? Mass clemency? Medical release?
There's really two different asks. One is basic improvement of conditions - soap and hand sanitizer, basic ventilation, and basic protocols for responding to medical emergencies more quickly.
Adjustments within the prison, within the facilities.
Yeah. We also want as many people released as possible, so that medically vulnerable people aren't confined in a place that could kill them.
People can't socially distance in jails and prisons, so the infection is spreading like wildfire. That is horrible, not only for those who are incarcerated and their families, but also for the broader public. If you have a contagion in the jail, with the churn of people going in and out of jails, chances are that it's going to be transferred back out into the community. That is a critical realization - that there are public health consequences from throwing human beings away into cages.
Part of our legal strategy is to really force people to think: Do we have a really good reason to take this woman away from her child and put her in a cage during a viral pandemic? If we don't, did we have a really good reason before the viral pandemic? Those are the kinds of questions that we've been trying to ask with our litigation and push into the broader cultural conversation. Especially in this moment, as people realize that these jails are disproportionately full of Black people, people of color, poor people and people with mental illness.
I wanted to talk more about the criminalization of poverty. How do you explain how our current criminal justice system functions to generate revenue from the poorest people in the country?
Various interests profit off of people at every stage of the process. There are all kinds of financial incentives to punish people.
The police are basically paid to make arrests.
There is also this thing called civil forfeiture, which basically allows the police to seize, keep, and sell private property. When they arrest you, without you being convicted of a crime, they can take the cash out of your wallet or confiscate your car.
Early in my career as a public defender, I was involved in a case where the police were stopping people on the streets and taking their money, or claiming the car someone was driving wasn't theirs and taking the car. They would then send these people a letter and say you're welcome to challenge the seizure, but you have to pay us 10% of the value of the property that we took. That is just for the privilege of challenging it. If you're too poor to afford your car payment, you can’t afford to pay 10% its value to get it back. We succeeded in getting that system struck down as unconstitutional, but it is still going on all over the country.
So the police have all these ways of making money, but then it gets even bigger.
How so?
Prosecutors have these things called diversion programs, which means they say if you pay them x amount, they won’t charge you, they will dismiss your case. Rich people can pay, and the system makes money off of them. Poor people can't pay, and they get prosecuted.
Of course, there is the multibillion dollar cash bail industry.
And in many places, if you can't afford to pay the fines and fees that you owe after your traffic conviction or your criminal conviction, you're put on probation. You owe a monthly fee for probation every month, around $30 or $40. When you are on probation, they can drug test you any time they want - every drug test costs you $20.
People get trapped in a cycle of debt. The scheme looks like this - you get a $200 speeding ticket. If you can't afford to pay it, you are put on on probation. Now you owe a private probation company $40 a month - plus your original ticket. Let's say you can only pay $20 toward that. You would never be able to fully pay that off. We saw this in Ferguson. When I went to Ferguson after the death of Michael Brown, the city of Ferguson averaged 3.6 arrests per household. Almost all of those arrest warrants for unpaid debt to the city for this kind of like scheme that I've just described.
Can you sort of simplify the cash bail system?
Historically, bail was an unsecured money bail - meaning that you only owed money if you didn’t show up. Around 1900, we saw the rise of the for-profit commercial money bail industry in the U.S., and with it, the rise of secured money bail. A secured money bail means that you have to pay money before you are even let out of jail.
That's what you sort of see play out on TV. You're arrested, you're brought in and you're told you're free to go back to your family if you hand us some money. Of course, most people who are arrested in this country are very poor and have no hope of paying that money. That is where for-profit bail business comes in. If you pay them 10% of the bail, they will pay the rest. It's kind of like an insurance policy. The companies get paid back in full when you show up to court, but you never see that 10% again.
There are really two problems with the cash bail system. Number one, most people are too poor to pay even 10% of the bail set. If you are charged with a $10,000 money bond, you would have to have a thousand dollars in cash laying around. So, you are just stuck in jail just because you are too poor. Number two, if you can pay, you are paying into a for-profit money bail industry. Take the city of Los Angeles.
And that's just one police department in one American city. The cash bail system monetizes your personal liberty.
Who profits?
That money goes into the hands of the for-profit American money bail industry, which is really controlled by a small group of insurance companies. Prosecutors and the courts, as I mentioned, also benefit every time someone pleads guilty, because they usually pay a fine or a fee that goes back into the court system. They want to coerce as many guilty pleas as possible.
And if you can't afford to pay bail, are you allowed to be held indefinitely?
Well, when we say “allowed,” our team is working to show that it is unconstitutional to keep a human being in a cage just because they can't make a payment. We struck down this system in California two years ago. But you are right, that's exactly what's been happening. If you can't make a payment, you're kept in jail, even though you're presumed innocent until your case ends. And if you want to take your case to trial, it can take a long time.
It’s been central to trying to release people from prison during COVID. One of the profoundly disappointing things is that there's been virtually no change in state prison populations or the federal prison population as a result of COVID. But there has been a significant decrease in local jail populations, largely because places have paused their cash bail schedule. Meaning that for most nonviolent offenses you would be released without having to pay money. In California, it is estimated that that measure reduced the jail population by 20,000 people – in California alone. As of tonight (6/10) around 7:00 PM, it looks like the courts are going to reinstate the cash bail system, which is horrific and inexplicable.
So, in normal circumstances, you just wait until trial comes and hope?
Well many people can't wait. They can’t be away from their children. They can’t be away from their family and their life. And they're told, ‘if you plead guilty today, we'll let you out or we'll give you a much shorter sentence.’
What kind of choice is that? Either you can sit in jail for another seven, eight months until the courts are ready for your trial, and risk a really long sentence, or you can take the deal and plead guilty today. That's why many people, including innocent people, plead guilty every single day in this country.
Can you talk about the relationship between police and prisons?
The police are not raiding Yale and Harvard University for drug use, they're rating poor neighborhoods a few miles down the road. They're not raiding the homes of wealthy Americans for tax evasion, they're raiding the homes of poor people.
95% of all police arrests in this country are for things that the FBI says are not serious violent crimes. We know that there are hundreds of thousands of violations of the clean air and clean water regulations by large corporations every year. We don't devote any police resources to investigate that. Instead we post police officers up in poor neighborhoods and ask them to arrest people who are in possession of a plant that they're not supposed to possess. These are the kind of choices we've been making for a long time with our policing system.
The number one arrest in most jurisdictions is marijuana possession, and it is disproportionately arrests of Black and poor people. In many jurisdictions, the number one arrest driving on a suspended license. There are 13 million licenses that are suspended in this country, not for violations, but for owing the courts debts like those I was speaking about earlier.
Our legal system and the police are choosing certain offenses to prioritize, while allowing others to get away with criminal activity. These are just distributive choices that have disparate impacts across race and class.
Police are choosing who goes to prison, with explicit knowledge about how they’ll be treated.
No question.
I don't think most people appreciate what the consequences can be. Minor arrests can result in people not being able to get a job for the rest of their life. Even if you're fortunate enough to be avoid the problems rampant in jails - sexual assault, infectious diseas, physical beatings, reentry can be very difficult because of all the consequences that our society puts on people with a criminal record.
Professionally, personally, economically.
At the beginning of this, you said your organization is an abolitionist, non profit organization. How do you see the defunding of these institutions working together? Do you feel like it's something that needs to be approached simultaneously or separately?
I think it's simultaneous. I think we need to be talking about removing resources from this entire bloated system. The criminal punishment bureaucracy is five times bigger than it ever was in this country's history until 1980. It's five to ten times bigger than it is in other comparable countries. There's no need for this bureaucracy. There's no evidence that it does anyone any good. There would be outrage if we were to scrutinize the punishment system and its return on investment by the same standards that we scrutinized schools, or medical clinics, or healthcare.
What are we getting from this? Think of the trillions of dollars we spent on the drug war. We’ve caged tens of millions of people in this country. We've separated tens and millions of children from their families. We've surveilled everyone's cell phone. We've sprayed pesticides all over Latin America. Yet drug usage rates are the same or higher in many places in this country.
The people who run the system aren't stupid. It's not like they don't know all of these things. So the only reasonable conclusion is that the purpose of these systems wasn't to reduce drug use, it was something very different.
We must significantly divest from them and then invest in the things that communities need - theater, music, art, poetry, athletics programs for children, in addiction treatment, and in safe places to live. I think it's obvious to anyone who thinks about it honestly, for just a few minutes, that we need to divest from this entire bureaucracy.