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I recently visited friends in St. Louis and sadly found it to be a much different place from when I graduated from Washington University Law School nearly 50 years ago. I still have great affection for St. Louis and read the Post-Dispatch regularly. However, I continue to see Missouris serious problems dominate the headlines.

St. Louis leads the nation in murders, Missouri leads the nation in coronavirus cases per capita. It ranks 49th in state aid to public schools and 50th in tobacco taxes. Centene threatens to leave and calls Missouris Medicaid decision an embarrassment. St. Louis has grown 0% in the last decade (as goes St. Louis, so goes Missouri). And a 35-year-veteran police chief in OFallon resigned over Missouris new gun law.

Yet, Missouri elected officials exacerbate the problems. They spend their time declaring federal gun laws invalid, banning abortions after eight weeks, overturning Medicaid expansion, eliminating the motorcycle helmet requirement law, reducing funding for public education, and trying (but failing) to create Rush Limbaugh Day.

And that doesnt even include Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitts spurious lawsuits against China, Google, Facebook, federal immigration policies, the Pennsylvania presidential election results, and St. Louis County over its pandemic public health orders. Missouri has become the laughing stock of the nation, but these are no laughing matters.

Stephen Fishman Laguna Beach, Calif.

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Trump may have damaged democracy beyond repair; Missouri is embarrassing; and other top letters - STLtoday.com

In 2018 after his then-planetary-record net worth had hit $131 billion, yet right before the pandemic that would make his Amazon the alpha and omega of online shopping for so many American families Jeff Bezos admitted he had so much money the only thing he could think to do with it was to blast himself into space. He told a reporter that year: The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel ...

That is basically it.

Really, Jeff? Im thinking that some of Americas schoolkids you know, the ones in classrooms where students dont have the right textbooks but they do have asbestos or lead in the fountain water might have a few ideas on deployment. In fact, they might also have some idea for multibillionaire investor Warren Buffett, who famously complained that his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does, and then proved it by watching his wealth grow by more than $24 billion (with a B) in the mid-2010s but only paid $23.7 million (with an M) in federal taxes, or just a 0.1% rate.

Then theres the case of Tesla and SpaceX mogul Elon Musk, whose stocks exploded despite a global pandemic and its overlapping recession to make him currently the worlds richest man, even with the fact that according to an unconvincing Insider profile he doesnt care about money. Perhaps, but either he or his accountant cared enough in 2018 to file a return showing that Musk owed zero federal income taxes.

To paraphrase Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the rich are very different than you and me they pay a much lower rate of taxes. OK, you probably already had a hunch this was the case, but this month a major article from ProPublica based on leaked IRS documents finally proved it. The tax records from 25 of the wealthiest Americans found the real tax rate on their expanding wealth was just 3.4%, while the typical family paid 14% of its income to the IRS.

In theory, ProPublicas bombshell report couldnt have come at a better time right when Congress is considering a proposal backed by President Joe Biden that would increase taxes on the very rich and the large corporations that have done so well, even during a deadly pandemic, in order to pay for Americas many unmet needs, from fixing crumbling roads and bridges (and maybe some buildings?) to converting to clean energy to a chronic lack of child care. Getting corporations like Amazon one of 91 Fortune 500 companies that paid no federal taxes in 2018 and its billionaire founder Bezos to cough up their fair share could finance a lot of Bidens $4 trillion proposals.

In reality, virtually every Republican and a handful of moderate-or-maybe-conservative Democrats like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema have made it clear that significant new taxes on the rich or on corporations not even the high rates the wealthy paid in the 1950s and 60s when the U.S. economy was booming, but merely a return to the already low levies that existed in 2017 are a deal breaker. They insist that if America wants to stop bridges and other stuff from falling down, the dollars will have to be squeezed elsewhere.

This impasse comes at a moment when 245 years of always imperfect American democracy is now under attack on multiple fronts. On the left side of the political dial, theres rising and legitimate concern about a GOP-led assault in state capitals, including measures that in 2024 could allow lawmakers to anoint either Donald Trump or whatever Trump lite comes next as the 47th president, regardless of the actual vote. Thats horrifying, but the nations inability to make its billionaires pull their own weight a matter of fundamental fairness, supported by an overwhelming majority of voters suggests that the American Experiment folks are trying to save is, in the immortal words of rocks The Eagles, already gone.

READ MORE: Until we punish American greed, no coronavirus bailout will save our warped economy | Will Bunch

The ProPublica expos ratifies the notion that America is now a kleptocracy our political system so weakened by years of unlimited dark money campaign contributions by wealthy interests that Congress is trained to serve the interests of the donor class over not only the needs but the stated desires of its voters.

In a government so finely tuned to service the needs of the super-rich, it took an illegal act the self-appointed whistleblower who sent individual IRS returns of the wealthiest Americans to ProPublica to show the public how low their effective tax rate really is. My position on that maneuver is a complicated one. As a progressive who a) believes citizens privacy should be protected and b) finds past misuses of the IRS to target individuals, by the likes of Richard Nixon or J. Edgar Hoovers FBI, to be appalling, I condemn this leak. It was wrong. But once that information reached ProPublica, its journalists had an obligation to determine if the material was real and, more importantly, in the public interest. And clearly, it is.

The train of fundamental economic unfairness in America has been a long time coming. In 2019, an analysis by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman with the fitting title, The Triumph of Injustice, used official (and anonymous) IRS data to show how the tax rate paid by the 400 wealthiest American families declined from 56% in 1960 and 47% in 1980 when Ronald Reagan won the presidency to just 23% by 2018. That is less than the 24.4% paid by the bottom half of U.S. households. The road to this outrage took years of reducing top marginal tax rates, steep cuts in capital gains and estate taxes, slashed IRS enforcement and approval of tax shelters deliberate political acts by Congress and presidential administrations.

That stunning but not personalized finding failed to get a lot of attention. But in a celebrity culture that so recently elected a celebrity fascist as president, maybe the tabloid-style details of the ProPublica report how Bezos was able to claim in 2011 that despite a net worth of $18 billion hed lost money, even claiming a $4,000 child credit, or how Mike Bloomberg paid no federal taxes some years even as he pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into a 2020 bid to buy the White House could make a difference. The reporting also reveals loopholes like that one that allowed billionaire Trump backer Peter Thiel to use the Roth IRA vehicle meant to help middle-class Americans retire to instead build a $5 billion tax-exempt nest egg.

But the truth is Americans didnt need salacious details to believe the rich should pay higher taxes. Last year, a Reuters poll found 64% of Americans strongly or somewhat agreed that the very rich should contribute an extra share of their total wealth each year to support public programs. That included a majority of rank-and-file Republicans. Despite that strong support, Bidens initial plan to pay for his ambitious $2 trillion-plus infrastructure agenda was a modest one, focused mainly on the corporations that also dodge taxes. But merely proposing a corporate tax rate of 28% less than the 35% rate when Trump took office in 2017 was a bridge too far for Congress.

Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the lobbyists and donors behind his power like Business Roundtable president Joshua Bolten, who said policymakers should avoid creating new barriers to job creation and economic growth, particularly during the recovery called new taxes a nonstarter. But even moderate Democrat Manchin under heavy pressure from the oil-billionaire Koch family freaked out at the modest 28% corporate rate. So far, the desire of a majority of American voters for tax fairness cant match the clout of a donor class that in 2010 was given carte blanche by the Supreme Courts Citizens United ruling to pump dollars into the body politic.

The bipartisan infrastructure deal announced by Biden last week much less ambitious than his initial proposal, yet already on shaky political ground would actually aim to squeeze additional tax dollars from the Bezos crowd, not by higher rates but through aggressive IRS enforcement. If enacted, these audits are yet long overdue but lets also be clear that keeping tax rates for the rich at just a fraction of what they were before the Reagan revolution produced massive inequality is an act of rank political cowardice.

The Democrats may get another crack at this, if they proceed with the current plan to increase spending on the public good, for things like child care or climate action, through a budget reconciliation bill that could be passed with 51 votes. Even then, though, the party will have to work around Manchins and other moderates Koch-fried reluctance to do more than tinker around the margins of our massive tax unfairness. If so, the anger that has permeated American politics on both the right and the left which is rooted in this lack of equity will only get worse.

Over the rest of 2021, youll hear a lot about preserving the rotting foundation of U.S. democracy, by somehow pushing to end voter suppression and the increasing anti-democratic bent of the GOP. Meanwhile above the surface, the actual house is on fire from space-traveling plutocrats pocketing the funds that could make America a fair and livable place for the middle class. Saving the American Experiment is only an academic exercise unless it works for all the people.

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The real crisis for American democracy is our cowardly inability to tax the rich | Will Bunch - The Philadelphia Inquirer

Exterior of the German Constitutional Court. Photo: DPA Picture Alliance / Alamy Stock Photo

Recent months have seen a series of ground-breaking judicial decisions on climate change and, more broadly, environmental protection. In one of the most celebrated, the German Federal Constitutional Court held that the German Basic Law (constitution) limits the scope for political decision-making with regard to protection of the environment. According to the Court, environmental protection is elevated to a matter of constitutional significance for two reasons. First, a democratic political process is organised on more short-term lines based on election cycles, which places it at a structural risk of being less responsive to tackling ecological issues that need to be pursued over the long term. Second, because future generationswho it described as those who will be most affectedhave no voice in shaping the current political agenda.

In doing so, the Court placed the issue of democratic unenfranchisementthe absence of entitlement to exercise the right to voteand the lack of political voice of future generations at the heart of its reasoning.

The inability of todays children and as yet unborn future generations to input into decision-making around the environmentand hence the need for judicial intervention to secure their rights and interests in that contexthas been a consistent theme in the growing body of global child- and youth-focused climate change advocacy and litigation. This is evidenced by the claims submitted to courts by child and youth litigants and their representatives, as well as by campaigns and advocacy beyond the courtroom.

From Europe to Asia to Africa to Oceania, children and young people have stressed both their own exclusion and that of as yet unborn future generations from political decision-making that has crucial implications for the enjoyment of rights both now and in the future. This reflects a growing recognition that, in the words of the founding claim that led to a ground-breaking Colombian Supreme Court of Justice decision ordering the protection of the Amazon rainforest from deforestation: intergenerational equity does not only occur between the present generation and a future generation of people who do not yet exist, but also occurs between those who make decisions today and the generation of we younger people who will face the effects of the decisions that are made in the present.

The willingness of the German Constitutional Court to engage with democratic exclusion as a basis for judicially enforced constitutional constraint on the political process is not shared by all courts hearing climate changes cases. A Norwegian Supreme Court decision in December 2020 rejected efforts to prevent the government from issuing exploratory Arctic drilling permits. In doing so, the court stressed that since decisions in matters of fundamental environmental issues often involve political considerations and broader priorities, that was an argument in favour of such decisions being made by elected bodies, and not by the courts.

There is a strong argument that children and future generations inability to exercise either direct or indirect influence on the elected branches of government should serve as the basis of an enhanced role for the courts in protecting their rights in climate change litigation. This is consistent with the arguments made by American scholar John Hart Ely and others in favour of a representation-reinforcing role for judicial review. Where the primacy accorded to majoritarian democratic decision-making (and hence a more deferential or limited role for judicial decision-making) is based on an understanding that those affected by such decisions will be able to participate in or otherwise influence them, then that primacy will necessarily be affected where such participation or influence is lacking.

It has historically been assumed that the rights of children will be protected within democracy through political representation by other enfranchised groupswhether on the basis of shared interests, sympathy or empathy. While this assumption is questionable at the best of times (and is even more questionable when extended to as yet unborn future generations), it is particularly dubious where those who are presumed to ensure this virtual representation of children place a very different priority on climate change and environmental protection than children themselves do. In the UK, for instance, YouGov survey results revealed that while the environment was the second most important issue for voters in the 2019 election between the ages of 18-24, it came fifth and sixth for voters aged 50-64 and 65+, respectively. Given that in the UK, older voters are more likely to turn out to vote than younger voters, and given the growing relative weight of older people in the voting-age population, the scope for effective representation of childrens views by older voters seems limited.

The courts thus have a crucial role to play in ensuring that children and future generations exclusion from democratic decision-making does not result in the violation of their rightswhether now or in the future. While this is not a role that is limited to the issue of environmental protection, that context is proving a crucial testing ground for establishing the extent to which courts will enforce those groups rights in the face of opposition on the part of elected branches of government. And, ironically, even where such cases do not prove successful, they frequently serve to force the issue of environmental protection onto the agenda of democratic decision-makers in a way that might well not happen otherwise.

Hardly a week goes by without a significant case on environmental protection being either launched or decided, with cases involving the rights of children or future generations currently before courts in places as diverse as South Korea, Peru and South Africa. Different national courts of course operate within different constitutional and legal schema and traditions. This will necessarily affect their approach to the cases that come before them. However, a feature of all of the domestic systems in which these cases are decided is the unenfranchisement and ineffective representation of children and future generations in democratic decision-making.

Children and young peoples environment-related advocacy has demonstrated to the world their capacity for political agency and engagement. It remains to be seen, however, to what extent their ongoing lack of political power will advance judicial willingness to intervene to secure their rights in a time of environmental crisis.

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Democracy is failing to protect the environment for future generations. So the courts are stepping in - Prospect Magazine

Dangerous legislation banning the teaching of critical race theory in Ohio schools advances in the state legislature. House Bills 322 and 327 are ill-conceived and dishonest displays of right-wing ideology. Imitating other states, they closely follow sample legislation from organized national campaigns by Heritage Action for America, 1776 Project, and Citizens for Renewing America.

The bills authors and their sources (handbooks and toolkits) are ignorant of critical race theory and American history. They create straw figures to criticize with biased ideology. For example, Christopher F. Rufo, a leading propagandist, falsely asserts that reputable scholars are Marxists calling for the overthrow of capitalism. Claiming to defend children, they promote ignorance. They fear that children will gain an accurate, shared knowledge of the complicated American experience. They are anti-democratic and un-American.

The partisan effort to ban teaching about race is an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment free-speech rights of teachers and students. It is also unenforceable. There arent K-12 courses called critical race theory. They exist principally as required mainstream courses in law schools. More broadly, critical race theory is a general approach that views race and slavery as central to American history, an undeniable point.

We must oppose this attack.

Harvey J. Graff,

Columbus

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Assault on critical race theory is an attack on democracy itself - cleveland.com

Today the Monitor begins a periodic series of conversations with thinkers and workers in the field of democracy looking at whats wrong with it, whats right, and what we can do in the United States to strengthen it.

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in thePolitical Reform programat New America, a Washington think tank. This spring he was one of the main organizers ofa letter signed by nearly 200 democracy scholarscalling for greater federal protection of voting rights.The impetus for the effort was the Republican push in many states to pass new voting bills, including restrictions on voting methods preferred by Democratic-leaning constituents, the granting of new authority to partisan poll watchers, increased legislative control over local election officials, and fines for poll workers who make mistakes or overstep their authority.

The organizer of an open letter signed by some 200 scholars warning of threats to U.S. democracy talks about what makes for free and fair elections, and how to bolster the system going forward.

These changes are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections, the letter states.Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk.

In his book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, Mr. Drutman proposes increasing the number of major political parties in the U.S.The two-party system turns politics from a forum where we resolve disagreements into a battlefield wherewemust win andtheymust lose, he writes.

Today the Monitor begins a periodic series of conversations with thinkers and workers in the field of democracy looking at whats wrong with it, whats right, and what we can do in the United States to strengthen it.

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America, a Washington think tank founded in 1999. This spring he was one of the main organizers of a letter signed by nearly 200 democracy scholarscalling for greater federal protection of voting rights.The impetus for the effort was the Republican push in many states to pass new voting bills, whose provisions include some restrictions on voting methods preferred by Democratic-leaning constituents, the granting of new authority to partisan poll watchers, increased legislative control over local election officials, and fines for poll workers who make mistakes or overstep their authority.

GOP-led electoral changes in battleground states are, among other things, transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections, the letter states.Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk.

The organizer of an open letter signed by some 200 scholars warning of threats to U.S. democracy talks about what makes for free and fair elections, and how to bolster the system going forward.

Mr. Drutmans most recent book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America, argues that increasing the number of major political parties in the U.S. could diffuse the extreme partisanship that currently bedevils the countrys politics and produces legislative gridlock in Washington.

The two-party system with winner-take-all elections leads us to see our fellow citizens not as political opponents to politely disagree with but as enemies to delegitimize and destroy, he writes. It turns politics from a forum where we resolve disagreements into a battlefield where we must win and they must lose.

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

You were one of the primary organizers of the democracy scholars letter, warning of the deterioration of democracy in the U.S.How did that come about?

There is a real sense of anxiety among a broad community of scholars who have studied democracy for a long time, both domestically and around the world. And there are certain, pretty consistent patterns of democratic decline you can see if you study this stuff and understand what the basics of democracy are. What happens when one party stops believing in the idea that theres a legitimate opposition?

Theres a real sense of urgency, I think. And were having a lot of debate about voting reform, and we felt it was important for folks to know the context that people who think about this for a living can provide. It seems like many people are thinking about democratic collapse something like the way we were thinking about COVID-19 in January of 2020 the sense that it cant happen here because weve never had something like that, or that its something that happens in other countries.

But you know, the signs are there.

There have been a lot of open letters from different professions and academic disciplines over the last year or so. Do you think this will lead to concrete change? And if not, whats the purpose?

Maybe itll change votes; I dont want to rule out that possibility. But I think the point is to communicate a sense of the stakes and to articulate something that a lot of people are feeling in an authoritative, potentially forceful way.

You write that several states are transforming their political systems to the point where they no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Which states are those?

Were thinking about whats happening in Georgia and in Texas though the new voting law in Texas hasnt yet passed.

What is the definition of a free and fair system? Its a system in which all voters count equally regardless of which party they support, or their race or ethnicity, or any other characteristic. Where both parties have an equally fair chance of winning.

When you tilt the playing field decisively in one direction or another, and give power to partisan legislators to override and intimidate election administrators, that does not meet the conditions of a free and fair democracy. Its not a hard and fast line. But the trends are all in the direction of making free and fair competition harder, putting thumbs on the scale, in Iowa, Arkansas, Montana, and so forth.

The letter focuses on statutory changes, election procedures, vote certification, and other rules. But the impetus for many of these changes was former President Donald Trumps unfounded claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Whats the bigger danger to democracy bad rules, or people operating in bad faith?

Thats a good question. Its a little bit of both.

Democracy depends on both rules and norms. And you can have good rules, but if you have people who are intent on abusing those rules or changing them, theres only so much the rules can do. On the other hand, the rules can also put some hard constraints on what people can get away with.

Theres an argument that if a party is truly intent on election subversion, there are limits to what the rules can accomplish if that party has power. And we see that time and again, in countries around the world. Plenty of powerful parties break and bend and rewrite the rules. So that is a fundamental challenge. But at the same time, you wouldnt say we shouldnt have any rules, right?

Your most recent book is titled Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop.Why do two major parties in a big country create a doom loop?

We have in the U.S., really for the first time in decades, two truly nationalized parties with no real overlap. For the first time, its a really genuine two-party system. And the fight is over national identity. Its over the story of America. Its over who we are. And that has created this incredibly high-stakes conflict in which we have closely fought elections. Theres an incredible amount of demonization and negative partisanship, which is creating a politics in which winning elections is more important than preserving fair rules of the game.

Democracy is a system that relies on parties being able to lose elections and a set of rules surrounding elections that all sides agree are fair and impartial. When you lose that, it just becomes a matter of competing force. Democracy is a way of resolving disputes without violence. But if you cant agree on the rules, then violence becomes the way that you enforce things. And thats the dangerous trajectory that were on.

What you propose is taking this political polarization and diffusing it among more political parties? Is that right?

Yeah. Exactly.

Essentially, the problem is that [right now] the way that parties win is by being the lesser of two evils, and by demonizing their political opponents, because thats the unifying force in parties and it works. But youve never heard the phrase lesser of three evils for a reason.

If you look at multiparty elections, candidates and parties have to stand for policy. They cant just get by on attacking the other side as extremist and dangerous.

In a multiparty system, parties form coalitions and work together on different issues.If you want to have a sustainable political system, you need to have constantly shifting allegiances you cant have permanent enemies. And theres something about the binary condition that really triggers this kind of us-against-them, good versus evil, thinking.

There wouldnt necessarily be less overall conflict in such a political system, right? It would just be spread around say, between an ethnonationalist right-wing party and a conservative libertarian party, or between a progressive party and a center-left party?

Right, you have shifting conflict. Politics is about conflict, because the issues that we agree on are not political issues, and elections are not about the issues that we all agree on; they are about the issues that we disagree on.

With multiple parties, you can form different coalitions and you can have logrolls [the trading of favors], you can have positive sum deals. It changes the dynamic.

People might be more open to jumping between different parties as happens in other multiparty democracies and considering different ideas. And its not a threat to their identity. They might be more likely to encounter people from different parties in day-to-day life.

But theres plenty of evidence that democracies with single-member legislative districts and winner-take-all voting inevitablytend toward a two-party system. Is there a way around that?

Proportional representation. [Note: This is an electoral system in which the number of seats held by a political group in a legislature is determined by the percentage of the popular vote it receives.]

If you have single-member districts as we do, youre probably going to have two parties. But if you have larger districts, you can have proportionality, and you can have more parties. We can have multimember districts in the U.S. House; its totally constitutional.

Wouldnt an anti-democratic ethnonationalist party remain a force under this system? Thats what weve seen in Europe.

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They would be a powerful force, but they might break up into different groups, some of which are more anti-democratic than others. The dynamics would be different. Youd still have an ethnonationalist faction similar to the AfD in Germany. But the faction would be more isolated and it would be easier for the other groups to organize against it.

On their own, they would be a distinct minority. And they should be! Youve got to give the pro-democracy supermajority in America a chance to organize.

Read more:
The signs are there. Is US democracy on a dangerous trajectory? - The Christian Science Monitor