Why Trump's Reign of Republican Terror Is Really Ending - The Daily Beast

Will future historians look back and declare 2022 as the year that Donald Trump’s spell finally began to lose its luster?

Reports of Trump’s political demise have been greatly exaggerated for years now. But this time feels different.

We saw hints of Trump’s political decline in late 2021, but his 2022 got off to a rocky start with a rally in Arizona that failed to recapture his old magic. My observation at the time was that Trump “needs new material, and fast, because if his Arizona rally shows anything, it’s that the old routine just doesn’t land anymore.”

Throughout the year, Trump’s problems only increased.

In February, he praised Vladimir Putin’s use of propaganda to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “genius.” There was nothing new about Trump praising Putin, but his assessment of Putin’s savvy strategy turned laughable when Ukraine’s strong resistance made Putin look weak.

Trump also bet on the wrong horses in the domestic political arena, as Republican backlash over Trump’s endorsement of Dr. Oz (who would go on to lose his U.S. Senate race in November) began to mount in early spring.

The trend of Republicans publicly criticizing Trump continued into the summer, with the Jan. 6 committee, which wisely focused on Republican witnesses testifying about Trump’s behavior.

There is little evidence that the hearings significantly changed minds about Trump. But around the time they kicked off in earnest, a Granite State Poll showed that, for the first time, Ron DeSantis had a lead over Trump among likely GOP primary voters in New Hampshire.

Next came the FBI’s search of Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. Ironically, the raid seemed to at least briefly help Trump and kill DeSantis’ momentum. But the rally-around-the-flag momentum that Trump received by playing victim to the deep state was short-lived. It also served to showcase some ugly fans inclined to target the FBI for violence, earning Republican rebukes.

In August, Trump’s biggest blow of the year was foreshadowed when Sen. Mitch McConnell acknowledged that concerns about “candidate quality” made it less likely Republicans would flip the Senate.

At this point, Herschel Walker, Trump’s hand-picked Senate nominee in Georgia, had already admitted to fathering illegitimate children; revelations that he also had paid for an abortion, as The Daily Beast reported, only added to the foreshadowing.

Unlike much of his presidency (where aides would stop Trump, slow-walk his orders, or otherwise water-down his craziness), McConnell and the GOP establishment acceded to at least some of Trump’s primary selections. This meant that Trump largely assumed responsibility for the 2022 midterm results (he has, of course, tried to claim otherwise).

Giving him what he wanted was tragic—for Trump.

The midterms turned out to be a repudiation of Trumpism, and the absence of a red wave was a breaking point for many Republicans. That’s right: Countless Republicans who were willing to stand by Trump through Charlottesville, two impeachments, a big lie, and an attempted coup, suddenly discovered that losing elections was a bridge too far.

Many right-wingers were also outraged by him calling Ron DeSantis “Ron DeSanctimious.”

Rather than being chastened or biding his time, Trump quickly launched his 2024 presidential campaign. Aside from the horrifically bad timing, it was a low-energy affair. Trump soon proceeded to celebrate Thanksgiving week by dining with anti-Semite Kanye West and white nationalist Nick Fuentes, leading to yet another round of criticism from fellow Republicans.

As Christmas approached, Trump unveiled a “major announcement”: The release of a $99 NFT. Everyone from Steve Bannon to QAnon criticized the grift. “We have a nation going down the toilet, and Donald Trump is selling Pokémon cards. No thanks,” Blaze TV host Chad Prather wrote.

The Jan. 6 committee voted on Dec. 19 to approve a criminal referral against Trump. And on the last business day of 2022, after years of wrangling, six years of Trump’s tax returns were finally released.

Any way you slice it, 2022 was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for Donald Trump. And there’s little reason to think 2023 will be any better.

After all, while Trump remains a clear frontrunner, DeSantis has emerged as a legitimate potential challenger for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. And pop culture figures like Kanye West and Elon Musk have supplanted Trump in the attention economy.

To be sure, Trump could play Harry Houdini once again in 2023. The Access Hollywood tape that emerged in 2016 and the Capitol Riot five years later earned lots of Republican outrage—only for him to somehow emerge stronger than ever.

But nothing we have seen in the last year or so suggests that he has the same energy or magic that allowed him to escape any accountability in the past.

After years of failing upward, gravity finally reasserted itself in 2022. The chickens, it seems, have come home to roost. Whether a fellow Republican can successfully step into the void remains to be seen.

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Opinion: Trump's tax returns are much to do about nothings - CNN

Editor’s Note: Edward J. McCaffery is Robert C. Packard Trustee Chair in Law and a professor of law, economics and political science at the University of Southern California. He is the author of “Fair Not Flat: How to Make the Tax System Better and Simpler” and founder of the People’s Tax Page. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN  — 

Hallelujah! The House Ways and Means Committee has released former President Donald Trump’s tax returns from 2015 to 2020. If nothing else, this will – let us hope! – release me from being asked about the release of Trump’s tax returns, as I have been for over six years now.

Edward J. McCaffery

There’s plenty we already knew. In 2020, the New York Times analyzed 20 years of Trump’s tax returns, including some of the ones released Friday. And earlier this month, the House Ways and Means Committee released two reports that found the Internal Revenue Service failed to audit Trump in the first two years of his presidency despite the IRS’ mandatory audit program for US presidents, and summarized in detail the top-line numbers for the full six years.

What we got from this latest data dump is thousands of pages of returns, exhibits, schedules and such. Dedicated accountants and journalists will pore over these documents and we are sure to see plenty of headlines like “Top 10 surprises in Trump’s tax returns” in the coming days and weeks.

But we have long known the basic story. Trump is a bad businessman who seems to lose money on everything from casinos to golf clubs, with steaks and vodka and even a so-called university in between. So the main reason he often pays so little, if any, in taxes, is that he often reports a loss. He also lost other people’s money and got big tax breaks for that.

President Joe Biden deliverers a Christmas address in the East Room of the White House on December 22, 2022 in Washington, DC.

Oliver Contreras/for The Washington Post/Getty images

Opinion: The 10 political questions that could determine the future of US politics

Trump has benefitted from the huge head start given to him by his father Fred Trump, which continued to pay dividends with large capital gains from the sale of inherited property in 2018 (leading to Trump paying some taxes that year – just under $1 million). And like his father, Trump emerges as an aggressive and rather crude tax avoider, using standard tactics like putting the kids on the payroll, writing off personal expenses, overvaluing in-kind charitable contributions and so on. Friday’s release has already shown, for example, that Trump did not donate his presidential salary to charities in 2020, as he had promised – he made no charitable gifts at all in 2020, when he paid no taxes.

Trump’s taxes often push the lines of propriety, and his company’s sometimes cross them, as we now know from the Manhattan DA’s criminal conviction of Trump Organization.

Nothing new there.

But sometimes nothing is the story, like the dog that does not bark. So here are some nothings we can resolve to do something about in 2023.

Nothing is what Trump paid in federal income taxes in 2020, and in many other years. Given his massive and mysterious income tax refund of nearly $73 million in 2010, Trump may not have paid net positive income taxes in his life. And he is not alone. Many billionaires pay no income tax, and many do so perfectly legally.

The final report released by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, is photographed Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022.

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Opinion: The January 6 report is a 'mirror test' for the American people

Nothing is also what the IRS did in regards to Trump’s tax returns during his first two years in office until the Democrats took power and forced them to do something starting in 2019.

That’s unacceptable. When the IRS fails to audit a prominent rich person, whom they have to examine – whether that’s because it’s too hard, they don’t have the time or for any other reason – why would the rich pay anything in tax at all?

That’s a trick question: the rich already have ways to pay nothing in taxes, see the first nothing above.

And the simple math of the matter is that if the rich pay nothing, then the not-rich pay everything.

Which leads to two final nothings.

Nothing is what Congress has done, over many decades of Democratic and Republican leadership alike, about getting the rich to really pay their fair share of taxes.

And nothing is what Republicans seem to want to give to the IRS, which lacked the resources to do something about getting the rich to comply with the law. That is crazy too.

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Maybe, just maybe, 2023 will be a better year for all. I can write nothing at all about Trump’s tax returns. And we can all celebrate Congress doing something (by providing nearly $80 billion to strengthen the IRS as part of the Inflation Reduction Act – a good start) about making the wealthiest Americans pay… something.

That would be better than nothing, and more helpful than yet another Trump tax return story.

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Opinion: The great debate about Pelé - CNN

Editor’s Note: Amy Bass is professor of sport studies at Manhattanville College and the author of “One Goal: A Coach, a Team, and the Game That Brought a Divided Town Together” and “Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete,” among other titles. The views expressed here are solely hers. Read more opinion on CNN.

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It would be a shame if all that was left to say about Pelé was an assembly of clichéd phrases trying to summarize an unparalleled life, an unprecedented career.

Amy Bass

Rodney Bedsole

But as news of his death at 82 began to spread throughout the world, it seemed as though there was nothing to write that hadn’t been written; nothing to say that hadn’t been said.

Just as Pelé — born Edson Arantes do Nascimento — never needed an introduction, he now needs no explanation, an athlete who transcended his sport and yet wore it on his sleeve; a Brazilian who transcended his country, and yet never left.

Growing up in poverty in Bauru, Pelé learned the game from his father, using a stuffed sock or a grapefruit as a ball. In 1958, at just 17 years old, he erupted on the international pitch, becoming the youngest to score in a FIFA World Cup match and, with victory over host Sweden in the final, he put Brazil on the global sports map – an international icon born.

DAVOS, Switzerland: Former Brazilian soccer star Pele, Director of Empresas Pele (L) talks during the World Economic Forum session "Can a ball change the world: the role of sports in Development" 26 January 2006 in Davos. AFP PHOTO FABRICE COFFRINI (Photo credit should read FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images)

Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

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Brazilian soccer legend Pelé dead at 82

Indeed, Pelé, observes historian Brenda Elsey in an essay about South American soccer, “transcended national identity to embody an image of Pan-African success,” perhaps especially when members of Santos FC toured Nigeria and Mozambique in the 1960s. “That the leaders of the Brazilian team also came from impoverished neighborhoods and difficult circumstances,” argues Elsey, “created solidarity with players across the Global South.”

While committed to country and team — he stayed with Brazil’s Santos FC for some 19 years, scoring 643 goals in 659 games (despite lucrative offers coming from the likes of Paris St. Germain and Real Madrid, and a scrapped deal from Inter Milan because of fan protests in Brazil) — he also existed as a singular figure, the greatest of all time with his unparalleled record of three World Cup championships (1958, 1962, 1970) and, according to Guinness World Records (and let’s be clear: his goal tally has always been up for debate, with friendlies and exhibitions thrown in), 1,279 goals in 1,363 matches.

In addition to dozens of other titles won in football, Pelé was Taça do Brasil (Brazil Cup) champion five consecutive times (1961, 62, 63, 64 and 65).

Domicio Pinheiro/Agência Estado/AP

Rather than fully retire once his time with Santos and the national team was done, he brought his talents to New York, playing for the Cosmos from 1975 to 1977, his celebrity bringing new fans and huge crowds to North American Soccer League matches.

While the league eventually folded, Pelé’s impact on American culture before and after his time with the Cosmos, whether starring in Pepsi commercials or visiting the White House, giving Johnny Carson a soccer tutorial or starring alongside Sylvester Stallone in the 1981 film “Escape to Victory,” was solidified.

For all of this, and so much more, christening Pelé as the greatest of all time, the GOAT, has been a comfortable practice for far longer than anyone on the current US Men’s National Team has been alive (by a whole lot of years).

TOPSHOT - Argentina's captain and forward #10 Lionel Messi (R) holds the FIFA World Cup Trophy following the trophy ceremony after Argentina won the Qatar 2022 World Cup final football match between Argentina and France at Lusail Stadium in Lusail, north of Doha on December 18, 2022. (Photo by Anne-Christine POUJOULAT / AFP) (Photo by ANNE-CHRISTINE POUJOULAT/AFP via Getty Images)

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Opinion: We witnessed the greatest sports championship game in history

And yet, over the last several weeks, after the conclusion of what has to be considered one of the greatest soccer matches in history — as well as one of the greatest championship finals in any sport — some pundits and fans alike have crowned Lionel Messi as soccer’s definitive GOAT, with the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Diego Maradona, and, yes, Pelé, somewhat fading into the background.

With Pelé’s death, that transfer of power is on hold, at least for the moment, giving us time not only to remember soccer’s original international superstar, the rare iconic athlete whose moniker is synonymous with the game he played, but to think a bit about what it means to be the greatest.

At one point in sport, being “the goat” was nothing any athlete wanted — it meant someone who botched a catch, forgot to tag up or dropped the ball at the worst moment. Now, in all of its shouty all-caps glory, a GOAT is the best there is and, most importantly, ever was, sparking fierce debate around a cast of characters from different sports and different eras: Wayne Gretzky, Babe Ruth, LeBron James, Mariano Rivera, Abby Wambach, Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, Allyson Felix, Michael Phelps, Babe Didrikson, Jack Nicklaus, Billie Jean King, Al Oerter, Margaret Court, Muhammad Ali, Simone Biles — and on and on and on.

Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) and France national football team forward Kylian Mbappe (R) and Brazilian football legend Pelé in Paris on April 2, 2019.

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At one point, Ali, whose self-appointed nickname was actually “The Greatest,” owned the rights to “G.O.A.T., Inc.,” which his wife Lonnie created in 1992. Ali then sold it for some $50 million to entertainment firm CKX in 2006, which bought an 80% interest in Ali’s name and likeness.

But the criteria for GOAT is unclear, at best, with deliberations and arguments about what it means to be the greatest arising after a spectacular victory, a retirement, or, yes, a death. Is the GOAT the most decorated? The longest ranked at number one? Is it about stats? Brilliance? Creativity? The most titles over time? The most titles in a year? The most titles in one day? The biggest paycheck? The most endorsements?

Fans hang a banner reading "Eternal king Pelé" outside the Albert Einstein Hospital where Brazilian soccer legend Pelé was hospitalized before his death in Sao Paulo, Brazil, December 29, 2022.

Stringer/Reuters

There are not, of course, any kind of actual, obvious, undeniable measures for the greatest of all time. Sports simply do not operate that way, especially when dealing with a figure such as Pelé, whose cultural and social impression is felt not just in soccer, but the world writ large. Yet while there might be no one way to delineate the greatest, conversations that ask, “Who is the GOAT?” might be as essential as they are absurd because of what they tell us about who we are and what we care about.

Any reference to Pelé as “one of the greatest” is “disrespectful,” tweeted soccer writer Fernando Kallás on Thursday. “If you don’t feel like referring to him as the GOAT, just stick to being sorry for his loss, talking about his accomplishments, bla bla bla. But don’t use his death to question his place as the GOAT.”

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Indeed, amidst the current and former presidents of multiple countries, plus the celebrities and fans, posting grief-filled testimonials about the legend, it was Neymar, perhaps Pelé’s greatest Brazilian heir apparent, who best summarized the whys of Pelé’s GOAT status forever and always. “Before Pelé, ’10’ was just a number…football was just a sport,” he posted to Instagram. “He turned football into art, into entertainment. He gave a voice to the poor, to black people, and especially gave visibility to Brazil….He is gone, but his magic remains. Pelé is ETERNAL!!”

Perhaps that, then, is the best we can do to declare a GOAT: life after the game is over — life after the, well, life is over. But Pelé, we must remember, was never “just” the GOAT. He was, and always be will be, O Rei — the King.

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Mac Jones on “dirty player” narrative: “Everybody has an opinion” - Yahoo Sports

Patriots quarterback Mac Jones met with reporters on Wednesday, for the first time since news emerged of a fine in the amount of $11,139 for a low block on Bengals cornerback Eli Apple. Jones was asked for his reaction to the narrative that Jones is “potentially a dirty player,” based on the hit to Apple and an incident in 2021 with Panthers defensive end Brian Burns.

“Everybody has an opinion and the biggest thing for me is focusing on being the best teammate I can be and earning the respect of the people in this building and the people I care about,” Jones said. “Obviously, I have respect for everybody around the league. It takes a lot to get to this league. There’s really good players out there, and we’re all playing hard and trying to win. At the end of the day, you have to keep that in mind. It’s a game and you want to just have fun, enjoy it and compete against each other. That’s something that I’ve always done and I know my teammates appreciate that about me. So, [I’m] excited about the opportunity this week. Obviously, a great team we get to go against. Another opportunity, you don’t know how many more you’re going to get with this group of guys. That’s what it’s all about, is the players in our locker room and on our team. Excited, great day of practice today and obviously need to build on it and stack up these days.”

It’s hardly a denial or a repudiation of the perception of dirty play. Most of the response, frankly, was non-responsive.

Jones also was asked whether he plans to appeal the fine. Again, he wasn’t very responsive in his response.

“Really just focused on this week and let everybody else handle that stuff for me,” Jones said. “I’m focused on this week and doing my job. That’s the important part, is every week you look at the game film of the game you just played and then you try to find out what you can do better. I’m kind of in that process right now of what can I do better and how can I execute my job better.”

While players routinely appeal fines, it’s hard to imagine this one having success. Jones blatantly violated the rule against low hits. The fine is warranted. And it won’t be a surprise if the league starts paying closer attention to Jones after apparently giving him the benefit of the doubt when he twisted the ankle of Brian Burns last year and stuck a foot in the crotch of Bears safety Jaquan Brisker at the end of a slide earlier this season.

Mac Jones on “dirty player” narrative: “Everybody has an opinion” originally appeared on Pro Football Talk

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Opinion | Can Elon Musk’s Tesla Really Last? - The New York Times

If you’re one of those people who bought Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency near its peak last fall, you’ve lost a lot of money. Is it any consolation to know that you would have lost a similar amount if you had bought Tesla stock instead?

OK, probably not. Still, Tesla stock’s plunge is an opportunity to talk about what makes businesses successful in the information age. And in the end, Tesla and Bitcoin may have more in common than you think.

It’s natural to attribute Tesla’s recent decline — which is, to be sure, part of a general fall in tech stocks, but an exceptionally steep example — to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the reputational self-immolation that followed. Indeed, given what we’ve seen of Musk’s behavior, I wouldn’t trust him to feed my cat, let alone run a major corporation. Furthermore, Tesla sales have surely depended at least in part on the perception that Musk himself is a cool guy. Who, aside from MAGA types who probably wouldn’t have bought Teslas anyway, sees him that way now?

On the other hand, as someone who has spent much of his professional life in academia, I’m familiar with the phenomenon of people who are genuinely brilliant in some areas but utter fools in other domains. For all I know, Musk is or was a highly effective leader at Tesla and SpaceX.

Even if that’s the case, though, it’s hard to explain the huge valuation the market put on Tesla before the drop, or even its current value. After all, to be that valuable Tesla would have to generate huge profits, not just for a few years but in a way that could be expected to continue for many years to come.

Now, some technology companies have indeed been long-term moneymaking machines. Apple and Microsoft still top the list of the most profitable U.S. corporations some four decades after the rise of personal computers.

But we more or less understand the durability of the dominance of Apple and Microsoft, and it’s hard to see how Tesla could ever achieve something similar, no matter how brilliant its leadership. Both Apple and Microsoft benefit from strong network externalities — loosely speaking, everyone uses their products because everyone else uses their products.

In the case of Microsoft, the traditional story has been that businesses continued to buy the company’s software, even when it was panned by many people in the tech world, because it was what they were already set up to use: Products like Word and Excel may not have been great, but everyone within a given company and in others it did business with was set up to use them, had I.T. departments that knew how to deal with them, and so on. These days Microsoft has a better reputation than it used to, but as far as I can tell its market strength still reflects comfort and corporate habit rather than a perception of excellence.

Apple’s story is different in the details — more about individual users than institutions, more about physical products than about software alone. And Apple was widely considered cool, which I don’t think Microsoft ever was. But at an economic level it’s similar. I can attest from personal experience that once you’re in the iPhone/iPad/MacBook ecosystem, you won’t give up on its convenience unless offered something a lot better.

Similar stories can be told about a few other companies, such as Amazon, with its distribution infrastructure.

The question is: Where are the powerful network externalities in the electric vehicle business?

Electric cars may well be the future of personal transportation. In fact, they had better be, since electrification of everything, powered by renewable energy, is the only plausible way to avoid climate catastrophe. But it’s hard to see what would give Tesla a long-term lock on the electric vehicle business.

I’m not talking about how great Teslas are or aren’t right now; I’m not a car enthusiast (I should have one of those bumper stickers that say, “My other car is also junk”), so I can’t judge. But the lesson from Apple and Microsoft is that to be extremely profitable in the long run a tech company needs to establish a market position that holds up even when the time comes, as it always does, that people aren’t all that excited about its products.

So what would make that happen for Tesla? You could imagine a world in which dedicated Tesla hookups were the only widely available charging stations, or in which Teslas were the only electric cars mechanics knew how to fix. But with major auto manufacturers moving into the electric vehicle business, the possibility of such a world has already vanished. In fact, I’d argue that the Inflation Reduction Act, with its strong incentives for electrification, will actually hurt Tesla. Why? Because it will quickly make electric cars so common that Teslas no longer seem special.

In short, electric vehicle production just doesn’t look like a network externality business. Actually, you know what does? Twitter, a platform many of us still use because so many other people use it. But Twitter usage is apparently hard to monetize, not to mention the fact that Musk appears set on finding out just how much degradation of the user experience it will take to break its network externalities and drive away the clientele.

Which brings us back to the question of why Tesla was ever worth so much. The answer, as best as I can tell, is that investors fell in love with a story line about a brilliant, cool innovator, despite the absence of a good argument about how this guy, even if he really was who he appeared to be, could found a long-lived money machine.

And as I said, there’s a parallel here with Bitcoin. Despite years of effort, nobody has yet managed to find any serious use for cryptocurrency other than money laundering. But prices nonetheless soared on the hype, and are still being sustained by a hard-core group of true believers. Something similar surely happened with Tesla, even though the company does actually make useful things.

I guess we’ll eventually see what happens. But I definitely won’t trust Elon Musk with my cat.

---

Quick Hits

Apple’s comeback story.

Microsoft’s reinvention.

Is the age of social media ending?

The biggest companies over the long run.

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Facing the Music

So there’s a new graphic novel about Tori Amos; the record company wanted to get rid of the piano! Here’s why that would have been a crime.

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Official budget scores concealed lame duck bills’ effect on inequality - The Hill

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The Senate side of the Capitol is seen in Washington, early Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022, as lawmakers rush to complete passage of a bill to fund the government before a midnight Friday deadline, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Modern legislative debates are often defined by the total “price tag”— the $550 billion infrastructure bill, $1.9 trillion Trump tax cut, or $938 billion Affordable Care Act. And the major “lame duck” session bill that worked its way through Congress before the holidays — a $1.7 trillion omnibus — was no different. 

The sheer size of this bill meant the stakes were incredibly high for Americans’ wallets — but the amount of new government spending alone doesn’t tell us the full story. That’s because official cost projections don’t measure to whom the spending or tax cuts will accrue. And given the current state of inequality in the US — with large disparities by income, wealth, race, ethnicity, geography, and gender — this is an especially glaring omission. Without this critical information, lawmakers are flying blind.

This year’s “lame duck” debates underscored why distributional analysis of major economic legislation is essential for effective policymaking. But because there was no official distributional analysis of any of the bills that vied for inclusion in the omnibus, policymakers did not know if or how they would exacerbate or mitigate inequality. The answer to this question is critical because the evidence is clear that extreme inequality drags our economy down.

To be sure, these are difficult questions to answer. But we know that when correctly resourced, our official budget scorekeepers are up to the challenge. The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) already produces a distributional analysis for some — but not all — tax bills, making empirically-based assumptions about how Americans across the income spectrum will react to tax code changes. Occasionally, nonprofit organizations will chip in with their own analysis — but they only rarely include race, and don’t have the extra layer of impartial validity that government-produced data offers.

The debate around the omnibus package showed how a lack of official distributional analysis leaves the door open for lawmakers to advance regressive policies. Take, for example, the retirement bill known as SECURE 2.0, which was included in the omnibus. This legislation combined provisions that will help Main Street — such as a refundable tax credit for retirement savings – with others that will deliver outsized benefits to the wealthy – like a rule change to allow older Americans to keep money in tax-sheltered retirement accounts for longer periods. And it will do nothing to reduce existing large retirement tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy. While we got an official estimate of SECURE 2.0’s cost in March, there was no distributional analysis, which means that we will never know just how upside-down the legislation’s reforms really are — and lawmakers will not have to answer for actively exacerbating inequality.

Proposals to delay enforcement of several corporate tax provisions present a similar challenge. Though ultimately excluded from the omnibus, we can expect Congress to debate these “tax extenders” again in 2023. When it does, we will receive an official estimate of the foregone revenue (possibly totaling nearly $500 billion over ten years), but we won’t be told who will benefit from these tax breaks. Some conservatives argue that they’ll incentivize investment and foster trickle-down economic benefits. But the Tax Policy Center disagrees, finding that 24 percent of the benefit will accrue to the top one percent of earners. Without an assessment by official scorekeepers, policymakers and the press will be able to largely ignore the distributional consequences. With corporate profits at record highs, the racial wealth gap showing no signs of receding, and workers struggling to keep up with rising costs, we can’t afford to get this wrong. 

Many had been understandably calling for the addition of an expanded child tax credit and earned income tax credit to make a tax extender package fairer, but we still don’t know how much in tax credits would be needed to compensate for the corporate provisions without a distributional analysis from JCT.

Even spending bills — which most immediately send dollars to federal agencies and not the public at large — are ripe for distributional analysis. The omnibus that Congress passed will send $1.7 trillion — more than 6 percent of GDP — to public and private individuals and institutions across the country over the next nine months. But while we know how much each agency will spend, we don’t know who will ultimately benefit: How much military spending will end up in the hands of large defense contractors and wealthy shareholders? How much transportation spending will benefit rural residents versus urban ones? These and countless other distributional questions continue to go unanswered. 

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It’s unfortunately too late to produce this analysis for the omnibus. But the good news is that the new Congress already has a blueprint for ending this willful ignorance. In 2021, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) introduced the Fiscal Analysis by Income and Race (FAIR) Scoring Act, which would require a distributional analysis for every major economic bill as part of the official budget score. Providing information on where costs and benefits of economic legislation fall would enhance the analytical rigor — and ultimately, the legitimacy — of legislative debates.

For decades, legislators have been required to obtain a budget “score” to determine how much their bills would cost taxpayers. It’s universally accepted that passing a bill without knowing the cost to the U.S. Treasury is irresponsible and unacceptable. But in today’s unequal economy, just knowing the price tag isn’t enough. The new Congress should update how we analyze economic legislation to better capture the true impact of future policies on all Americans. Our ability to foster strong, stable, and broadly-shared economic growth depends on it.

David S. Mitchell is the Director of Government and External Relations at The Washington Center for Equitable Growth

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Michael Martin of Springfield, Va., with UpVote Virginia, holds a sign that reads “End Gerrymandering Again!” and speaks with Nadine Seiler of Waldorf, Md., in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2022, as the Court hears arguments on a new elections case that could dramatically alter voting in 2024 and beyond. The case is from highly competitive North Carolina, where Republican efforts to draw congressional districts heavily in their favor were blocked by a Democratic majority on the state Supreme Court. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

The Supreme Court heard oral argument earlier this month in Moore v. Harper, a case that is critical to our democracy and the control of our House of Representatives. You would not have known it from the questions the Republican-appointed justices asked.

The issue before the court is simple. North Carolina’s Republican legislature enacted an extraordinarily egregious gerrymander of the state’s 14 congressional districts. By any measure it is an affront to democracy. One expert explained it would ensure that if Republicans receive 50 percent of the vote they would win at least 10 — or 71 percent — of the seats. Another expert showed that only .01 percent of possible maps generated by his algorithm would produce a disparity that extreme. The North Carolina Supreme Court had already found “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the gerrymander violates numerous provisions of the state’s constitution, including the fundamental right of North Carolina citizens to free elections and “substantially equal voting power.”

The speaker of North Carolina’s legislature and other legislative leaders appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court now deciding the case. They argued the statement in the Elections Clause of the U.S. constitution that “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature,” gives them exclusive authority to draw congressional districts without regard to the state constitution, and the state Supreme Court has no authority to overrule their decisions.

It was troubling that the U.S. Supreme Court even agreed to hear the appeal. The gerrymander itself is indefensible. And there is a long-established principle that federal courts do not question a state court’s interpretation of the state’s own constitution. The legislators’ lawyer himself said, “We’re not asking this court to second-guess or reassess” the North Carolina Supreme Court’s ruling on the state’s constitution. As for their Elections Clause argument, in the more than 230 years since that clause was adopted, the Supreme Court has never asserted that it authorizes state legislatures to draw congressional districts that violate the state’s constitution or are not subject to judicial review.

But in the three-hour oral argument, not a single Republican-appointed justice expressed any concern about the gerrymander. Quite the contrary, they appeared to normalize it. Justice Samuel Alito called it a “political controversy.” Justice Neil Gorsuch remarked, “So the political saliency point, I think, you know, depends on whose ox is being gored at what particular time” — as if an extreme gerrymander is not inconsistent with our democracy regardless of whose ox is gored.

These justices’ only concern seemed to be whether the North Carolina Supreme Court should be prevented from protecting our democratic system of government by requiring that congressional seats be fairly apportioned. For example, Chief Justice John Roberts asked, “Do you think the phrase ‘fair and free elections’” provides an adequate standard for the North Carolina court to apply — even though no one could argue the gerrymander here is consistent with any conceivable notion of “fair and free” elections.

Alito remarked that the North Carolina Supreme Court is elected and its members are “permitted by state law to campaign on the issue of districting” — without any explanation of how that could possibly change the fact that the gerrymander here is untenable. (If Alito’s point was that the election of the North Carolina court somehow undermines its integrity or legitimacy — that line of attack would be hard to square with his insistence to a Heritage Foundation audience two months ago that it “crosses an important line” when someone “in a position of authority” questions the legitimacy or integrity of the U.S. Supreme Court.)

Gorsuch commented, “About five, seven years ago, [the North Carolina Supreme Court] refused a political gerrymandering claim.” That, too, would not make its current ruling incorrect. (And if Gorsuch was suggesting that the North Carolina court was bound to follow that precedent, that would be utterly inconsistent with his position in the Dobbs ruling, six months ago, that he and the Supreme Court were not bound by 50 years of unbroken Supreme Court precedents recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, including a decision just two years ago.)

Justice Amy Coney Barrett questioned whether the decision of the North Carolina Supreme Court should stand if it was not “acting as a court but … more as a legislature.” Yet, there is no need to reach that question because the North Carolina court did exactly what a court should do to protect our democracy.

Alito even asked “would anyone have understood … in 1776” the analytical tests and methods the North Carolina court considered in concluding that the legislature’s gerrymandered map violates the state constitution — without explaining how that could conceivably matter.

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This case is vitally important because it goes to the heart of our democracy, not just in North Carolina but throughout the country. Three years ago, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the then five Republican-appointed U.S. Supreme Court justices on the bench at the time acknowledged that partisan gerrymandering is “incompatible with democratic principles,” but ruled over the dissent of the other four Justices that the court itself cannot prevent it. If the court now stops state supreme courts from preventing it as well, that will allow (or even encourage) a race to the bottom in many if not most of our 50 state legislatures that will undermine our democracy. It may hand control over our House of Representatives, which is central to our democratic system of government, to the party that engages in the most extreme gerrymanders, and it would reduce or eliminate the influence of those who will not, do not or cannot reciprocate.

If there is one lesson all of us (including the Supreme Court) should have learned over the last few years, and particularly on Jan. 6, 2021, it is that we cannot be complacent about our democracy. The Supreme Court made an enormous mistake in Rucho when it said it would not prevent blatant partisan gerrymandering — a practice retired Justice Anthony Kennedy aptly noted has been described as “rigging elections.” The court should take this opportunity to reverse Rucho. The court has no task or responsibility that is more important than protecting our democracy and the fundamental right of all Americans to participate equally.

Michael J. Dell is a New York lawyer who litigates and writes about constitutional issues.

Tags Election Day Elections Gerrymandering Neil Gorsuch North Carolina Samuel Alito SCOTUS Supreme Court Voting

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