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Most mornings I spend my commute listening to the New York Times podcast The Daily. Managing editor Michael Barbarohosts an informative, well-produced look at the major news themes of the day, and it tends to feature some of the papers best reporters and analysts. This morning, Barbaroand domestic-affairs correspondent Sheryl Gay Stolberg examined an interesting alleged contradiction: Few states benefited more from Obamacares Medicaid expansion than Kentucky, yet its Republican senators are leading the charge for Obamacare repeal, including for Medicaid reform. How can that be?

The exchange had echoes of a long-voiced Democratic complaint. How can working-class Republican voters keep voting against their interests? After all, dont they know what Medicaid does for them? Moving beyond Medicaid, dont they know that higher taxes mean better social services? Dont they know that voting for GOP politicians means enriching the fat cats, at everyone elses expense?

Hidden within todays podcast was a clue a critical clue showing why GOP voters make the decisions they make. Stolberg said that coal-industry job losses had been abysmal, crushing at the same time that roughly 400,000 Kentuckians had taken advantage of the Medicaid expansion. And shes right. The Lexington Herald-Leader reported last year that coal jobs in the state had fallen to their lowest level in 118 years to a mere 6,900. Magnifying the crisis, a coal-mining job pays so well that its virtually impossible to replace that income without significant retraining and (often) relocation. You cant move from the mine to Walmart and maintain the same standard of living. People do, however, move from the mine to Medicaid and at least have health insurance.

And so were left with an odd definition of interests. For years the Left has unapologetically waged regulatory and rhetorical war on coal, implementing policies that were most assuredly not in the economic interests of Kentuckys mining families. But now those same families are going to let bygones be bygones and rally around a second-rate welfare program advanced by the same movement? Some will. But some will quite reasonably look at a bigger picture and distrust the party that helped bring them to penury.

Lets move beyond Kentucky and its coal. Family dissolution is perhaps Americas foremost driver of poverty and dependency. The rules are simple. Follow the success sequence graduate high school, get a job, get married, and then have kids and your poverty rate is extremely low. Deviate, and the problems magnify. Now, between the two parties, which one has centered its appeal around married parents with kids and which party has doubled down on single moms? Even worse, the Democrats far-left base has intentionally attacked the nuclear family as archaic and patriarchal. It has celebrated sexual autonomy as a cardinal virtue. Then, when faced with the fractured families that result, it says, Here, let the government help.

Thus we have the 2012 Obama campaigns celebrated Julia, the single woman who never needed a man. Like nuns marrying Christ, single moms were bound to big government, and to the many bountiful benefits it provides. Yet the fracturing of the family is not in the best economic interests of women. Sure, some of those women will let bygones be bygones and rally around the party that most celebrates the sexual revolution while expanding public assistance. Others, however, will reasonably look at a bigger picture, one that asks whether government dependency helps perpetuate the larger and worse crisis besetting Americas families.

Moreover, since when is a vote a mere economic decision? Should every family sit down at their supper table, open their calculator apps, and do simple math based on each partys government giveaways? Are you really telling a family that values religious liberty, abhors abortion, seeks a more decisive approach to jihadists, and believes good citizens should be armed citizens that theyre voting against their interests if their senators policy will increase their insurance premiums?

Its not that simple, and wealthy progressives the very people who are most likely to advance the argument that working-class Republicans vote against their interests understand this all too well. Why? Because they dont apply this kind of crude economic calculus to their own votes. Wealthy liberals routinely vote for higher taxes to fund public schools, state and federal welfare programs, and other government benefits that theyll never use. Why? Because they are trying not just to maximize personal benefit but to create a particular kind of society that they believe is most conducive to human flourishing. Theyre not simply thinking about themselves and thats to their credit.

Its time for progressives to understand that conservatives have the same mindset, just filtered through a fundamentally different ideology. David Brooks argued in a July 4 column on this same topic that most Americans vote on the basis of their vision of what makes a great nation. Hes absolutely correct, and our interests depend on the complex interplay between our faith, our families, and our communities. For example, is a person who enjoys more religious freedom but has less economic stability better off than a person whose liberty is diminished but has reliable health insurance? All too many progressives think theres an easy answer to that question. Theyre wrong.

Our interests are inextricably linked to our values, and millions of Republicans long ago decided that progressive political values no matter how well-intentioned ultimately harm the nation they love.

READ MORE: Conservatism in the Era of Trump The GOPs Ideological Earthquake and the Aftermath The Trump Tipping Point for Conservatives?

David French is a senior writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney.

More:
Stop Saying Republican Voters Are 'Voting against Their Interests' - National Review

I would like to ask Nancy Roberto, where was the outrage when images of President Obama being lynched, having his throat cut or burned alive were daily flooding the internet? When gun-toting, flag-draped patriots compared him to Hitler? Was she concerned then with what his little daughters felt seeing them? Where were the well-behaved Republicans then?

Her cry for Republican outrage illustrates perfectly the hypocritical double-standard that Republicans live by. Sure, scream, cry out, exhibit plenty of outrage as long as it benefits them. Her outrage against a progressive, liberal agenda reflects totally the business as usual attitude of the GOP tax cuts for the rich, no health care for the poor, discrimination against minorities of all kinds, a backwards, destructive agenda which threatens a socio-political and economic dark age for the nation, and its current poster boy is certainly not a leader in any sense of the word.

If Connecticuts Republicans are constantly amazed at why the state remains blue, its suggested quite well in her letter. The level of unfairness and seeming downright antagonism towards anything liberal would only open the door towards turning Connecticut into a more difficult place to live then it is now. It is not wanted here.

Wheres the outrage, Nancy Roberto? Well, whats good for the goose is good for the gander. You want it you got it.

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Barry Hatrick

Milford

Original post:
Letter to the Editor: Republican outrage 'hypocritical' - New Haven Register

Seattle can serve as a model for the rest of the country most Americans favor campaign-finance reform.

THESE days we cannot have electoral reform without a lawsuit. So is the case in Seattle with its innovative way to fund local campaigns. Under the system, every Seattle resident is provided with four $25 vouchers to give to candidates for local office who agree to various campaign-finance restrictions. A new lawsuit challenges this program under the First Amendment. The court should reject that challenge.

Seattles Democracy Vouchers program is a smart way of limiting big money from influencing elections. It allows everyday individuals to help fund campaigns. Candidates who do not have wealthy backers or a large personal war chest now have a chance to compete on a roughly even playing field. Candidates who opt-in and accept the vouchers must follow various campaign-finance limitations and disclosure rules. The voucher system is good for democracy.

Perhaps more significantly, Seattle can serve as a model for the rest of the country. Most Americans favor campaign-finance reform. The Democracy Vouchers program provides a way for everyday individuals to help achieve that reform. If it works well, then other localities, and eventually states, may follow suit. If states are laboratories of democracy, then cities like Seattle can be test tubes of democracy, trying out novel ways to fix the worst problems in our democratic system.

Joshua A. Douglas is a law professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law who specializes in election law, voting rights and constitutional law. He is the co-editor of Election Law Stories.

Local innovation in election procedure is vitally important to understand the best ways to run our voting process especially in the current political environment. Congress and polarized state legislatures are unlikely to pass meaningful electoral reform in the near future. It is up to cities around the country to try out innovative, democracy-enhancing measures to improve our election system.

For example, some cities in Maryland allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in local elections, creating a culture of democratic engagement among our youth. Now other places are considering this reform. Benton County, Oregon, along with the state of Maine, will try out Ranked Choice Voting, a new way of choosing candidates in which voters rank the candidates in order of preference. A few California cities have adopted independent redistricting commissions to draw local lines. And some places in addition to Seattle are passing honest-elections platforms to improve the financing and ethics of local elections.

The election-law community is watching the Seattle experiment carefully to see what we can learn. We should champion these efforts and allow them to flourish so that the best ideas can spread.

Thats why the court should defer to Seattle and reject this legal challenge. When considering local-election laws, courts should defer to cities that pass democracy-enhancing measures, reserving strict judicial review for when a city seeks to limit who may participate in the democratic process. Seattles campaign finance voucher program is a classic democracy-enhancing move: it opens up democracy to more individuals to donate to campaigns and more candidates who will have the chance to compete. The case for judicial deference is even stronger given that Seattle voters themselves approved the measure.

The system also likely does not violate the First Amendment. Any public subsidy for education, health care, or anything else that might involve expressive activity entails taking public tax money and using it for a public purpose that someone may disfavor. That does not mean that the government is compelling speech. If this public financing measure fails, then likely all public financing is unconstitutional. But the U.S. Supreme Court has long approved public financing as a means to root out corruption in elections.

Seattle is the courageous city that has tried out a new way to fix a big problem: the immense amount of money, particularly from wealthy interests, that infiltrates our elections. The court should let that local democracy-enhancing experiment play out.

Go here to read the rest:
Seattle's campaign-voucher system is good for democracy - The Seattle Times

Donald Trump arrives at Hamburg Airport on July 6, 2017.

U.S. President Donald Trump just sought to redefine the West.

In a speech to cheering crowds in Warsaw on Thursday, Trump described the Wests values in terms of religion and culture and called for the defense of its civilization against radical Islam. It amounted to a manifesto for his foreign-policy vision.

The address included repeated invocations of God, faith, tradition, national sovereignty and family. It made only passing reference to what are usually cited as core Western values: the rule of law, democracy and freedom of speech. Religious tolerance did not get a mention.

The people of Poland, the people of America, and the people of Europe still cry out We want God, said Trump. We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives.

Its an outlook fervently shared by the presidents hosts, Polands Law & Justice Party. Last year, Polish President Andrzei Duda took part in a religious ceremony that officially recognized Jesus as the King of Poland. And the worldview Trump outlined in Warsaw also chimes with that of his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. The two leaders will meet for the first time on Friday at a summit of the Group of 20 major economies in Hamburg.

But while popular among eastern Europes conservatives, Trumps reinterpretation of Western values will set him further apart from more liberal G-20 leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, already alienated by the presidents opposition to climate-change targets and free-trade agreements.

Some of Trumps comments were less out of step with Washingtons traditional priorities. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a habitual critic of the president, said he was encouraged by relatively strong language attacking the Russian interventions in Ukraine and Syria, as well as by Trumps statement of support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organizations Article 5 clause on collective defense.

The speech contained both conventional foreign-policy rhetoric and nativist undertones, said Erik Brattberg, director of the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. Its basic message was that the U.S. remains the indisputable leader of the West, he said.

Trump stuck to his theme after leaving Poland. THE WEST WILL NEVER BE BROKEN. Our values will PREVAIL. Our people will THRIVE and our civilization will TRIUMPH! he tweeted after landing in Hamburg.

Much of the address in Warsaws Krasinski Square was devoted to a recounting of Polands struggles against Russia and Nazi Germany, in particular the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. But in an earlier briefing, a White House official had singled out the role of faith and the need to defend Western civilization as key messages.

It was very Huntingtonian, former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said of the speech.The Polish government has reason to be very pleased with it, because it very much echoes their philosophy.

Sikorski was referring to the 1993 Foreign Affairs article by Harvard scholar Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations? In the article and a later book, Huntington argued that the Wests ideological contest with the former Soviet Union would be followed by a growing struggle between religious blocs.

Many leaders have seen in Huntingtons thesis a warning of what to avoid rather than an agenda to pursue -- an important distinction when addressing immigration, for example, or combating Islamist terrorism. By contrast, some of Trumps current and former aides, including chief strategist Steve Bannon and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, have embraced the idea that a fundamentally Christian West is at war with Islam.

Bannon laid out his view last year in a now-famous contribution via video link to a Vatican conference. He said the Judaeo-Christian West had become too secular and fallen into crisis as a result. Were at the very beginning stages of a global conflict against Islamo-fascism, Bannon said.

Flynn made a similar point in a book he co-authored the same year, which argued that were in a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people, most of them inspired by a totalitarian ideology: Radical Islam.

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Trump identified bureaucracy alongside terrorism as the twin threats the West must defeat. That reference is likely to be seen in Poland, and elsewhere in Europe, as directed at the Brussels-based institutions of the European Union. The EU launched an investigation into Poland in 2016, citing threats to the rule of law that it said were incompatible with EU values, such as suppression of judicial independence and media freedoms.

There was no mention of those allegations in Trumps speech. A White House official said his remarks should not be interpreted as an attack on the EU.

Still, the presidents strong praise for the conservative government in Poland can be seen as a snub of Angela Merkels Germany and the EU, with whom Warsaw has an increasingly strained relationship, Carnegies Brattberg said.

In Poland, there are many whod take Merkels side of that argument, against Trumps.

For me, talking about Western civilization without mentioning rule of law, democracy and human rights isnt possible, said Jerzy Stpie, a former head of Polands constitutional court, which has been involved in a protracted battle with the Law & Justice government. Im not sure how President Trump defines Western civilization, but for me these attributes are indispensable.

Here is the original post:
Trump Just Redefined Western Values Around Faith, Not Democracy - Bloomberg

Despite his campaign comments to the contrary, President Donald Trump will apparently meet Friday for the first time with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Germany.

If Trump fails to stand up to Putin and forcefully raise the issue of Russian interference in our elections, the Kremlin will conclude that he is too weak to stand up to them at all. That makes his statement todaythat no one really knows who was behind the hacking and dumping of Hillary Clinton's emailsmore than discouraging. Far from putting America first, if he continues to cling to this personal fiction, he will be elevating Russian interests above all others.

On the agenda should also be Russia's continued destabilization of Ukraine, Russia's propping up of Bashar al-Assad, and a clear declaration that the U.S. will not turn a blind eye to any potential Russian support of the Taliban or increased trade with North Korea.

There is little evidence, though that Trump plans to confront Putin on any of these serious matters. Instead, he may seek little more than the exchange of pleasantries and the usual claims of a fabulous meeting.

This would be a historic mistake, with damaging implications for our foreign policy for years to come. Because what the Russians have in mind goes well beyond interference in one election, or the restoration of Russian dominance in what it considers to be its sphere of influence into a profound challenge to a rules-based international order that has been of incalculable benefit to freedom-loving people around the world.

Last summer, what began as a Russian effort to gather foreign intelligence on candidates for the presidency of the United States became a very different kind of enterprise when Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to weaponize the data stolen by his intelligence services. Putins dumping of private stolen emails in an effort to influence the U.S. election was a breathtaking escalation of Russian interference in our internal affairs. It is vital that we understand both why he chose such a provocative course, and the new threat that the Russian government poses to the very idea of liberal democracy.

There is no question that Putin despised former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over her support of pro-democracy protesters who gathered by the tens of thousands in Moscow streets years earlier to protest his governments fraud and corruption. Putin was terrified by these mass protests and believed he saw the hidden hand of the Central Intelligence Agency behind them.

Putin understands innately that the only real threat to his regime will come from the streets, not from an election process where opposition leaders are continually jailed or killed, and where the state controls all the major media. Putin was more than aware Clinton would continue her strong support of sanctions over Russias invasion of Ukraine, and those sanctions are a keen threat to the regime specifically because they have slowed the Russian economy and made the prospect of popular opposition to Putin even greater.

Apart from opposing Clinton, there was every reason for the Russian government to prefer Donald Trump, who over the course of the campaign belittled NATO, celebrated Brexit and a further weakening of Europe, expressed a common purpose with Russia in Syria notwithstanding our very different interests on the survival of the Assad regime, and most significantly, made clear his willingness to revisit our economic sanctions on Russia.

But we would make a grave mistake to assume the Russian intervention was solely about hurting Clinton or helping Trump, or even its main object. Above all, Putin wanted to tear down American democracy just as he is assaulting other liberal democracies around the world. We are in a new battle of ideas, pitting not communism against capitalism, but authoritarianism against democracy and representative government. America must not shrink from its essential role as democracys champion.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we lived in a world in which the number of people living in free societies was ever increasing. The triumph of liberal democracy in Europe seemed certain, and around the world, democratic change was often plodding but seemed inexorable.

Today, even with welcome victories for candidates like Emmanuel Macron, we may be at an inflection point in which we can no longer be assured that the number of people around the world who will enjoy the freedoms of speech, assembly and religion will increase. It may, in fact, contract. Putins autocratic model is on the rise in places like Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Egypt, the Philippines and elsewhere.

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The narrative Putin wishes to tell is that there is no such thing as democracy, not in Russia nor in the United States, and our commitment to human rights is mere hypocrisy. Putins aims are served when Trump baselessly accuses President Obama of illegally wiretapping him or when the President lashes out at a secretive deep state allegedly working against him.

Of all the praise heaped undeservedly on Putins leadership, none would have pleased him more than when Trump was asked during the campaign why he could not criticize Putin's assassinations of reformers and journalists, at home and abroad. Trump responded, Well, you think our country is so innocent?

The Trump Administration has decided that democracy and the promotion of human rights will no longer be a top priority and instead we will put America first. This fundamentally misapprehends the degree to which the success of democracy around the world is a core American interest.

When the President complements Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on a massive campaign of extrajudicial killing, he is not advancing American values or interests only causing the rest of the world to turn away. We fought two world wars to make the world safe for democracy, because we recognized, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., that a threat to democracy anywhere was a threat to democracy everywhere.

America is not a victim, as the President so often paints her, but the most powerful nation on earth and the greatest beneficiary of a liberal world order established at tremendous cost in American blood and treasure. That is a legacy to cherish and to defend.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Read the original post:
Schiff: Putin Aims to Take Down Liberal Democracy. To Put America First, Trump Must Stand Up to Him - Daily Beast