The Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison. Photo (cc) 2012 by Teemu008.
Democratic lawmakers in Wisconsin are considering three pieces of legislation to bolster local news that are borrowed from California, New Jersey and a federal proposal that hit a dead end several years ago. Erin McGroarty of The Cap Times breaks down the Local Journalism Package:
• One bill would fund 25 journalists to be placed in local newsrooms across the state. The reporting fellows would be chosen by University of Wisconsin journalism professors and outside experts, and would be paid a $40,000 salary for a year. This bears some resemblance to a program at UC Berkeley, where a $25 million appropriation is paying for reporting fellows to work at news organizations that cover underserved communities for five years.
• A proposed Wisconsin Civic Information Consortium would award grants aimed at “addressing communities’ information needs, bolstering media literacy and civic engagement, and supporting access to high-quality, consistent local journalism, especially among underserved communities.” The bill appears to be based on the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, which has awarded some $5.5 million to support 81 news and information projects over the past several years.
• Wisconsin residents would be able to claim a tax credit for up to $250 in annual subscription fees to local news outlets. Several years ago such a provision was part of a federal bill that also included tax credits for local advertisers and for publishers who hired and retained journalists. That bill went nowhere, but Congress is currently considering a new version that includes the advertiser and publishers credits but not the subscriber credits.
All in all, the Wisconsin measures are modest steps that could help ease the local news crisis, although they are no substitute for the hard work of news entrepreneurs on the ground. With Congress seemingly unable to do much of anything constructive, it’s encouraging to see some leadership at the state level.
Huey Long in 1935. Photo via the Harris & Ewing Collection at the Library of Congress.
One of the most important books of the Trump era was, and is, “How Democracies Die,” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. In it, the Harvard political scientists trace how healthy democratic societies are able to fight the contagion of authoritarianism — and what happens when they lose the ability, or the will, to hold the antidemocratic forces at bay.
Among other things, they describe how the Democratic Party machinery prevented the populist demagogue Huey Long’s rise to what might have culminated in the presidency back in the 1930s, in contrast to the Republican Party’s unwillingness to contain Donald Trump in 2016. They also tell us that Italy staved off a right-wing revival at one point when the mainstream conservative party aligned itself with the liberal party in order to freeze out right-wing extremists.
Now Levitsky and Ziblatt are back with a new book, “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point.” The Atlantic has a lengthy excerpt, and you should read it if you can. In the excerpt, the authors argue that our Constitution is broken, mainly because it is so difficult to amend. They point out that Norway, their lead example, adopted a constitution as undemocratic as ours in 1814 but amended it 316 times over the next 200 years in order to extend the franchise, eliminate provisions that had empowered a minority of voters over the majority, and the like.
The American requirements for amending the Constitution, by contrast, add up to a nearly insurmountable hurdle. In addition to a two-thirds vote by each branch of Congress, which is not unreasonable, the rules also mandate that three-quarters of the state legislatures approve amendments. As a result, we are stuck with undemocratic provisions such as the Electoral College, under which the president can be elected despite losing the popular vote, and the Senate, which super-empowers small states since every state gets two votes. Indeed, the 14th Amendment, which in some important respects reinvented the United States, never could have been passed at any time other than in the post-Civil War environment, when the North controlled the South.
“With the Republican Party’s transformation into an extremist and antidemocratic force under Donald Trump,” Levitsky and Ziblatt write, “the Constitution now protects and empowers an authoritarian minority.” They add:
In 2016, the Democrats won the national popular vote for the presidency and the Senate, but the Republicans nonetheless won control of both institutions. A president who lost the popular vote and senators who represented a minority of Americans then proceeded to fill three Supreme Court seats, giving the Court a manufactured 6-3 conservative majority. This is minority rule.
Currently the antidemocratic impulse is playing out in Wisconsin in a big way. Earlier this year, voters in Wisconsin elected Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Democrat, to the state supreme court, thus paving the way for the protection of reproductive rights and at least a partial reversal of the gerrymandering that has given the Republicans wildly disproportionate power in the legislature.
So what are Republican legislators going to do? They’re going to impeach her — except that they’re not actually going to remove her from office, since that would give Democratic Gov. Tony Evers the opportunity to replace her. Instead, they plan to leave her in limbo, still a member of the court but suspended from taking part in the court’s business. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie puts it:
It’s that breathtaking contempt for the people of Wisconsin — who have voted, since 2018, for a more liberal State Legislature and a more liberal State Supreme Court and a more liberal governor, with the full powers of his office available to him — that makes the Wisconsin Republican Party the most openly authoritarian in the country.
We are heading off a cliff, moving closer and closer to authoritarianism in direct contradiction of the will of the majority. And as Levitsky and Ziblatt point out, there’s not all that much we can do about it since we can’t fix the Constitution without the cooperation of those who are benefiting from keeping things the way they are. God help us all.
As a journalist, my inclination is to support public-records laws that guarantee maximum disclosure. As an ordinary citizen, it’s sometimes unclear to me exactly how far those laws ought to go.
You may have heard that Wisconsin Republicans have filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain private emails written by or to a history professor named William Cronon, whose blog has become a focal point in the battle over the rights of public-employee unions in that state.
Cronon may have to comply because he teaches at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, a state university and thus subject to Wisconsin’s strict public-records laws.
One strong argument against disclosure — and one invoked by Cronon himself — is the principle of academic freedom. That may well be how Cronon beats this, yet it strikes me as an easy way out. Why should a professor be exempt while, say, a $50,000-a-year career employee in the highway department is subject to having his private emails revealed in response to a FOIA request?
I should note that this does not affect me personally. Northeastern is a private university. But I don’t see why I should be safe from the long arm of FOIA while my colleagues at UMass are not.
Like Paul Krugman, I make some attempt to use my work email address for professional business and my personal address for everything else. But it’s mainly for my organizational benefit, and I’m not all that painstaking about keeping the two accounts separate.
I’m not sure what the answer is. It seems to me that some officials higher up the food chain ought to be subject to FOIA laws, but that ordinary employees should not. Of course, such officials’ correspondence with ordinary employees would be covered. But I shouldn’t be able to FOIA the email of anyone just because he or she happens to draw a government paycheck.
