Civics in the time of MAGA: Junior high kids get right what we adults have gotten wrong

So, I'm sitting here on a Thursday afternoon, watching a bunch of junior-high-school kids answering questions about American government and constitutional rights.
And the sad irony is they know more about it than at least 90% of the politicians and elected officials I cover on a daily basis.
It's called the National Civics Bee. It's like a spelling bee, but with civics.
And Thursday was the state finals, held at the downtown Wichita headquarters of the Kansas Leadership Center.
What made this a lot more fun than the usual 'bee' format was it was set up to allow for audience participation. Attendees (in a separate group) could play along with the competitors and test their own knowledge.
I talked with Chris Green of the Leadership Center and we both agreed it would be fun to invite some of our elected officials next year to see see how they stack up against the sixth-, seventh- and eighth graders in the contest. I wonder how many would accept the challenge.
The questions ranged from fairly easy, like . . .
Q: A new education reform bill was introduced in Congress and successfully passed through both the House of Representatives and the Senate. What is the next step before the bill can become law?
A: The president must sign the bill into law or take no action for 10 days, after which it will automatically become law.
. . . to the detailed and difficult, for example. . .
Q: In Federalist number 39, how does Madison distinguish between a federal and national government, and what does this distinction suggest about the nature of the Constitution as a product of the convention?
A: Madison claims that the Constitution is both federal and national, with the House of Representatives representing the national and the Senate representing the federal, suggesting that the constitution will balance power between the state and national.
(I got that one wrong. I picked the answer with the House representing the federal and Senate national).
In addition to the multiple choice, the five finalists had to read from and answer judges' questions on an essay they wrote on a current issue, ranging from saving rural hospitals to reforming state policy on driver's license revocation.
When all was said and done, Tanya Ramesh of Wichita won the competition, a $1,000 giant check, and a ticket to Washington for the national finals. Madeline Stewart of Overland Park took second and $500, while Zane Hoff of Salina got third and $250.
I thought the Civics Bee was one of the coolest events I've been to in a while, so I hesitate to even bring this up, but some of the questions probably need updating in this era of MAGA.
For instance:
Q: How did Afroyim versus Rusk in 1967 affect the government's power regarding citizenship revocation?
A: It limited the government's ability to to revoke citizenship.
Afroyim v. Rusk was a landmark case that ruled: 'Congress has no power under the Constitution to divest a person of his United States citizenship absent his voluntary renunciation thereof. '
The court's revised that stance since, to allow citizenship to be revoked (called denaturalization) if it was granted on false pretenses that would have prevented it in the first place, for example, terrorists or Nazi war criminals living under false identities.
Now, denaturalization has become a key part of President Donald Trump's ongoing efforts to deport as many non-white immigrants as possible, whom he accuses (echoing a former world leader named Adolf) of 'poisoning the blood of our country.'
During his first term, Trump created 'Operation Second Look,' a program to comb immigrant citizens' paperwork for misstatements or errors that would allow them to be denaturalized.
This term, his top immigration advisor, Stephen Miller, has vowed to 'turbocharge' Operation Second Look, which could also lead to denaturalization and deportation of American-born children of immigrants, under Trump's executive order that purports to end birthright citizenship.
Another Civics Bee question that caught my attention was this one:
Q: Which statement best reflects the application of federalism in the Clean Air Act, considering the following quotation, 'the Clean Air Act represents a partnership between federal and state governments to improve air quality and to protect public health.'
A: The federal government sets national standards, while states can implement stricter regulations based on local needs.
That's the way it's supposed to work. But it brought to mind a recent press release I got from Kansas 1st District Rep. Tracey Mann, taking a victory lap over Congress rolling back California anti-pollution regulations.
At the time, I remember thinking, 'What business is this of Tracey Mann's?' given that he represents a district that sprawls from Colorado to one county away from Missouri, where there are about four times as many cows as people and the largest city, Lawrence, would be a minor suburb of Los Angeles.
What he knows of the pollution challenges facing California I'm guessing would fit on a microscope slide, but he couldn't care less as long as he can own some libs and send out a press release titled: 'Rep. Mann Reverses Biden Green New Deal Policies.'
When I was growing up, we didn't have civics bees. We barely had any civics education.
Truth be told, most of what we ever knew about the workings of government came from 'Schoolhouse Rock,' three-minute educational cartoons sandwiched between Jonny Quest and Scooby-Doo on Saturday mornings. Cue the music: 'I'm just a bill, yes I'm only a bill, and I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill.'
I can't help thinking if we'd had civics bees back then, we wouldn't be in this mess we're in today.
So it lifts my heart to see these earnest young kids competing over who knows the most about the people and ideals that built America.
It gives me great hope that their future will be better than the present that my generation has handed them.

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Vox

33 minutes ago

• Vox

The economic theory behind Trumpism

For more than half a century, the American right has preached the virtues of free markets and low taxes and deregulation. But a new wave of conservative thinkers are now arguing that Republicans have been wrong — or at the very least misguided — about the economy. This new economic thinking represents a break from what we've come to expect from the American right. Its proponents argue for a new strain of economic populism, one that departs from the GOP's past allegiance to big business and focuses instead on the working class. The question is, is it for real? Oren Cass is the founder of the think tank American Compass and the editor of a new book called The New Conservatives. He's also one of the most influential advocates of this conservative economic populism. Cass thinks the Republican Party has been too captive to corporate interests and market fundamentalism, and that conservatism needs a major reset, one that embraces American manufacturing and empowers workers. I invited him onto The Gray Area to talk about this new right-wing populism, what distinguishes it from the left, and whether the Republican Party is serious about adopting it. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Back in 2018, you wrote: 'Our political economy has relied upon the insidious metaphor of the economic pie, which measures success by the amount of GDP available to every American for consumption. … But the things America thought she wanted have not made her happy.' Let's start there: What did we think we wanted, and why hasn't it made us happy? You're very perceptive to start there. We were just putting together this new book called The New Conservatives, which is an anthology of everything we've been doing at American Compass over the last five years. And I actually went back and grabbed that essay and made it a prologue to the book. Because exactly as you said, it is a starting point for the way I think about a lot of this. In my mind, what we saw go wrong in our economics and our politics is that we did come to think of consumption as the end unto itself. And to be clear, I love consumption as much as the next guy. I'm not saying we should go back and live in log cabins, but I think we assumed that as long as we were increasing consumption, as long as material living standards were rising, everybody would be happy and we could declare success. And it's important to say that, from a formal perspective, that is in fact how our economic models operate. Economists will tell you their assumption is that the goal of the economic system is to maximize consumption. And so that's where that economic pie metaphor comes from. Something that was so widely embraced across the political spectrum, across the intellectual spectrum, was this idea that as long as you're growing the economy, you're growing GDP, you don't really have to worry too much about what's in the pie or where it's coming from. You can always then chop it up and make sure everybody has lots of pie. And I think it's important to say that — and this is the point, that we got what we thought we wanted — it's important to say that that worked. That for all of the problems we have in this country, if you're only looking at material living standards, if you're asking how much stuff people have, how big their houses are, whether they're air-conditioned, even how much health care they consume, at every socioeconomic level, consumption is up. We did that. And yet I think it's also very obvious that that did not achieve what we were trying to achieve, that [it] did not necessarily correspond to human flourishing, did not correspond to a strengthening economy over time, that it certainly did not correspond to strengthening families and communities. And ultimately, it didn't correspond to a strong and healthy political system or democracy. And so there's obviously a lot of talk of, Okay, well, why isn't that right? Why did it go wrong? What do you do about it? The strange thing for someone like me is that American conservatism, certainly in my lifetime, has largely existed to reinforce the ideology you're rejecting here. Why do you think the political right has been blind for so long to the things you're fighting for now? There's a very interesting pivot point that you see around the time of the Reagan revolution. The coalition that Reagan assembled had these different elements. It had the social conservatives, who I would say are most closely aligned to a fundamentally conservative outlook on a lot of these questions. But then it brought to that the very libertarian free-market folks on the economic side, and the quite aggressive interventionist foreign policy hawks. And what all these folks had in common was they really hated communism and really wanted to win the Cold War and saw that as the existential crisis. But what happened is, within that coalition, a very libertarian free-market mindset was then imposed on the economic policy of the right of center, even when that was very much in tension with a lot of other conservative values. And you saw people writing about that from both sides. From one side, Friedrich Hayek, who is one of the ultimate carriers of this pre-market ideology, has a very famous essay titled 'Why I Am Not a Conservative,' emphasizing that what he calls faith in markets to solve problems and self-regulate was very much at odds with how conservatives looked at the world. And from the flip side, you had a lot of conservatives, folks like Yuval Levin, who prefer markets as a way of ordering the economy to other options, but recognize that markets are very much in tension with other values like family and community. And in some cases, markets even actively can undermine or erode the strength of those other institutions. Markets are also dependent on institutions. If you want markets to work well, you actually need constraints. You need institutional supports. And so that tension was always present. I think that the coalition made a lot of sense in the context of winning the Cold War. It made a lot of sense when markets in the middle of the late 20th century really did seem to be delivering on a lot of the things that conservatives really cared about. But I think it reached its expiration date and just lived on by inertia into the 2000s, into this era of radical embrace of free trade even with communist China and cutting taxes even in the face of big deficits. I can imagine a skeptical leftist hearing all of this and thinking it's just a rebranded democratic socialism. Why is that wrong? What makes this conservative? There's a real disconnect both on the ends and on the means. I think there's a very healthy contestation over what are the appropriate ends that we're actually building toward. And what you're seeing conservatives coming back to articulating a set of actual value judgments about, what do we think the good life consists of? I think there is a set of value judgments and preferences for, in many respects, quite traditional formations at the family level, at the community level. [For] saying that it is not merely a value-neutral choice — 'Would you rather get married and have kids or spend more money on vacations in Greece?' — that it is actually appropriate and necessary for the good society to say, No, one of these things is better than the other and more important and should be valued more highly. At the national level, you're also seeing a much more robust nationalism on the right of center. Conservatives recognize the importance of the nation and solidarity within the nation to functioning markets, to a functioning society, in a way that at least the modern left tends to resist in a lot of cases. Part of the case you're making is that there's an ongoing paradigm shift within American conservatism. When you look at what this administration is doing on the policy front, when you look at what the Republican Party is doing, do you see them moving in your direction? We're definitely moving in the right direction. On tariffs alone, [we could] spend a tremendous amount of time emphasizing the ways I think the problems that they're addressing, the direction they're trying to go, is the right one. On the specifics of how things are timed and what the levels are and so forth, what legal authorities you use for what, I have all sorts of thoughts on how it might be done better. But broadly speaking, to your question about the direction that things are headed, I think it's extraordinarily clear to me that the Republican Party and the conservative movement are shifting quite dramatically in this direction. One way to look at that is in terms of personnel. Trump has obviously been something of a constant over the last decade in Republican politics, but the distance from Mike Pence to JD Vance is pretty dramatic. The distance from [Secretaries of State] Rex Tillerson to Marco Rubio is pretty dramatic. The distance from the various secretaries of labor in the first term to a secretary of labor recommended by the Teamsters is pretty dramatic. Is it really, though? Rhetorically, yes. But substantively? If you want to know why I can't take this iteration of the GOP seriously, look at the domestic policy they just passed in the House. It's the same Republican Party. It's jammed up with a bunch of stuff that reflects conventional conservative priorities. It's not doing a whole lot to help working-class people. It's more tax cuts offset by more cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, which low-income people depend on. And the net result, as always, will be more upward redistribution of wealth. And on top of that, another $3 or $4 or $5 trillion tacked onto the deficit just for good measure. How can you look at that and feel like the GOP is genuinely pivoting in your direction? I've been extremely critical of the 'big, beautiful bill' — particularly of the deficit element — because I think if one is going to be a fiscal conservative, one has to not be adding to deficits right now. But a lot of the efforts to argue that things are not changing in the Republican Party strike me as a real disservice to people who are trying to understand where things are going. Elected political leaders are always going to be the lagging indicator of what's happening in any political party or political movement. They are by definition going to be the oldest, the ones who have been around the longest, the ones who have built their careers and ideologies and relationships around what was happening 20 or 30 years ago. And so if one wants to know what is passing in Congress today, then yes, you count the votes of the people in Congress today. If you want to know what's actually moving within a party or what's going to happen over a 10- or 15-year period, counting the votes today is just not what someone in good faith trying to understand the direction would do. The tariff regime, the trade war — that is a genuine shift. No doubt about it. It's not entirely clear to me how that helps poor and working-class people at the moment, but maybe I'm not seeing the whole picture. There's a very interesting economic debate to be had about whether it will work. I obviously have one very strong view. But it seems pretty clear to me that what they are trying to do is quite explicitly focused on the economic interests of workers. Another very interesting area — I mentioned some of the things that are going on on the labor front. One really interesting effort that's underway, and [Sen.] Josh Hawley is the leader of it, but Bernie Moreno, the new senator from Ohio, is the co-sponsor of it — they've taken the [proposed] PRO Act, which is the ultimate Democratic wish list of labor reforms, and they've chopped it up. And they've said, Look, some of these are perfectly legitimate and good ideas. Others of these we don't agree with. And we're going to start advancing the ones we think are good ideas. That's a dramatic shift in how you would see the Republican Party. I think you're seeing the same thing in the financial sector. There was a great example recently where a private equity firm that had bought out a bunch of paper plants was trying to shut down a paper plant in Ohio. And you literally had the Republican politicians out there at the rally with the union leaders, forcing a change and a commitment to at least keep the plant open for the rest of the year and try to find a transaction that would keep it open afterward. On family policy, in 2017 you had [then-Sens.] Marco Rubio and Mike Lee threatening to tank the entire tax cut bill to get an expanded child tax credit in it. Now it is an uncontroversial top priority that the child tax credit is not only kept at that level, but expanded further. And so even at the level of what is happening in legislation, it's clear that this is a very different party from 2017. If you look at who Trump has appointed, it's a very different set of appointments. If you look at the critical mass and sometimes center of gravity among the younger elected officials, the people coming into the Senate, it's a completely different set of priorities and policies from those who have been there for a long time. Like I said, I'm not convinced that the DNA of the party has changed, but I will grant that there are indications of a shift. I don't know what it's going to amount to, materially, but this is not the party of Mitt Romney. I think Trump has cultivated a very unique coalition, certainly much more working-class than the pre-Trump Republican Party. I don't know how much of that coalition is a function of Trump and how much of that coalition will fade when he fades. If the Republican Party does prove an unreliable vehicle for your movement, can you see a world in which you're working with Democrats? We do work with some Democrats. I think there are Democrats who are doing very good and interesting work. We recently had [Rep.] Jared Golden from Maine on the American Compass Podcast because he is the sponsor of the 10 percent global tariff legislation in Congress. One thing I always emphasize is that I think a healthy American politics is not one where one party gets everything right and dominates and the other one collapses into irrelevance. It's one where we actually have two healthy political parties that are both focused on the concerns and priorities of the typical American and are then contesting a lot of these very legitimate disagreements about ends and means. But based on what is happening in American politics today and the fundamental differences between conservatism and progressivism, I would expect that this is going to have the most success and salience and overlap in thinking on the right of center.

CNN

35 minutes ago

• CNN

Sweeping GOP budget bill illuminates the central fault line in the modern Republican coalition

The sweeping Republican budget bill advancing through Congress illuminates the central fault line in the modern GOP electoral coalition more starkly than any legislation in decades. The bill sharpens the GOP's long-standing tension between a political strategy that increasingly relies on financially squeezed working-class voters and an economic agenda that still funnels its greatest direct benefits to the affluent. The budget legislation makes that conflict unusually explicit because, for the first time in 30 years, the GOP has tied large spending cuts that will mostly hurt families below the median income in the same bill with big tax cuts that mostly benefit families above it. In the past, Republican tax bills 'where the benefits were more tilted toward the rich were not uncommon,' said Harris Eppsteiner, associate director for economic analysis for the Budget Lab at Yale University. 'But the thing that is unique here is that it is paired to cuts in the safety net that will leave folks at the bottom worse off.' More than any other single factor, Democrats are counting on a voter backlash against the budget bill — which passed the House earlier this month and is moving toward a floor vote maybe as soon as this week in the Senate — to power them to gains in the 2026 midterm elections. 'It's a powerful thing to be able to say they are cutting Medicaid and people's health care, popular programs, to fund a tax cut for the wealthiest people,' said Nick Gourevitch, a Democratic pollster. Congressional Republicans are already trying to build defenses against that argument. They are highlighting the aspects of the tax plan with the broadest populist appeal and presenting the bill's substantial cuts in Medicaid spending as a form of welfare reform that will preserve benefits for the neediest. Since the Ronald Reagan era, Republicans also have consistently shown that they can neutralize Democratic economic appeals to White blue-collar voters by painting the party as excessively liberal on cultural issues such as crime, immigration and LGBTQ rights. Yet the magnitude of what Republicans are attempting with this single bill will test that record. Simultaneously, according to nonpartisan analyses, the bill could strip health insurance from at least 16 million Americans and significantly cut food assistance — while also providing tax cuts worth over $100,000 annually to the top 0.1% of earners. Bobby Kogan, a former Senate Budget Committee aide who now analyzes fiscal policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, says that considering all its provisions, the legislation 'would be the biggest transfer from the poor to the rich in a single bill in US history.' An early skirmish between Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska and a liberal advocacy group is previewing how the debate may play out next year over what Republicans, adopting President Trump's terminology, are calling their 'One Big Beautiful Bill.' Unrig the Economy, the liberal advocacy group, has run radio and television ads in Bacon's Omaha district attacking him over his vote supporting the budget bill when it passed the House in May. 'He's actually cutting Medicaid so he can give tax breaks to big corporations and billionaires,' an Omaha woman identified as Audrey declares in the television ad. The argument that Republicans are taking health care from people who need it to fund tax cuts for people who don't is likely to be central in Democratic House and Senate campaigns next year. 'It is key that both House and Senate Democrats continue to implement this message as far and wide as possible,' the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wrote in a strategy memo released earlier this month. Bacon, one of just three House Republicans left in districts that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, has previewed the likely GOP response to those arguments in his pushback against the advocacy group's ads. He's emphasized the portion of the bill's Medicaid changes adding work requirements. 'We expect if you're an able-bodied adult without children that you should be seeking a job or getting the skills to get another job or as a minimum, volunteering 20 hours a week,' Bacon said in a press call with local reporters earlier this month. Republicans yoked the tax and spending cuts into one bill largely to satisfy hardline House conservatives who were complaining that the tax plan dangerously inflated the federal deficit and debt. But in choosing to pair the tax and spending cuts, the GOP conspicuously departed from its strategy for the tax cuts it passed under Presidents George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 and Trump in 2017. Each of those bills offered sugar without spinach: They cut taxes without reducing spending. The last time the GOP pursued tax and spending cuts in the same bill was in 1995, when the aggressive 'Republican Revolution' Congress led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich precipitated an intense fiscal battle with then-President Bill Clinton. In the debates over the earlier GOP tax cuts, Democrats argued that the plans primarily benefited the rich and, by depleting federal revenues, would eventually force cuts in programs for average families. But by choosing to cut taxes and programs simultaneously, Republicans this year have eliminated any conjecture, allowing analysts to assess the plan's combined impact on families at different points on the income scale. Those analyses have returned a consistent verdict on the bill's winners and losers. Both the Congressional Budget Office and the budget model developed by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, found that families on the lowest rungs of the income ladder would lose more from the spending cuts than they would gain from the tax savings; the CBO calculated that most families earning up to about $76,000 annually would come out net losers from the bill. Middle-to upper middle-class families, both analyses found, would see relatively small net benefits. Only those at the top would see big gains: CBO calculated the top 10% of earners would average about $12,000 in additional annual income from the bill, while the Penn Wharton model found that the top 0.1% would net over $103,000 annually. Kogan said that no previous legislation careened to such extremes on both ends. He's calculated that compared with the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' the 1995 Gingrich budget sought deeper cuts in programs for the needy but didn't provide such generous tax breaks to the rich; the famous 1981 Reagan budget plan (which was separated into two bills) cut taxes more for the rich, but programs for the poor less. With bigger program cuts than Reagan and bigger tax cuts than Gingrich, Kogan says, this bill redistributes wealth up the income ladder more than either of them. When congressional Republicans previously married tax and spending cuts into a single bill did not end well for them. In that 1995 confrontation, Clinton won the battle for public opinion, reviving his foundering presidency and propelling him toward an easy reelection in 1996. Clinton prevailed by stressing the argument Democrats are echoing today: Republicans are cutting programs that benefit average Americans to fund tax cuts for the rich. As in 1995, the GOP budget plan is facing widespread public skepticism. Substantially more Americans said they opposed than supported the bill in recent national polls by the non-partisan Pew Research Center and KFF thinktank, as well as in Washington Post/Ipsos, Fox News, and Quinnipiac University surveys. Though the Senate is considering changes to the House-passed legislation, both bills are built around the same two pillars: extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts for all earners and offsetting that cost primarily by cutting federal spending on Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. Both of those pillars stand on shaky ground with the public. In the Washington Post/Ipsos survey, a majority of Americans opposed extending the tax cuts for those earning over $400,000 annually. Both that survey and the KFF poll also found that significant majorities opposed health care cuts that would cause a significant rise in the uninsured. Only about 1 in 5 in the KFF poll said they expected the bill to help the middle-class; half thought it would hurt average families. The GOP's challenge in selling this package is even more complicated than in 1995 because of changes in their electoral coalition. Compared with that era, Republicans today are much more reliant on working-class voters without a four-year degree — not only the white voters in that category, but also increasingly the blue-collar minorities who provided Trump's most important gains in the 2024 election. That means many more GOP voters than in Gingrich's time rely on federal safety net programs. Looking at people who have purchased health care through the ACA, KFF found that more identify as Republicans than Democrats. Sixty-four House Republicans represent districts where the share of adults on Medicaid exceeds the national average. Republicans hold 13 Senate seats across the 20 states that have insured the most people under the Medicaid expansion funded by the ACA — which is the principal target for both the House and Senate cuts. Medicaid funding is especially critical to hospitals in rural areas, which now vote overwhelmingly Republican. Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster, says that targeting federal health care programs for such large reductions dangerously ignores the changes in the GOP's electoral base since the days when fiscal hawks such as former House Speaker Paul Ryan set the party's fiscal agenda. 'The GOP coalition is dramatically different today than it was 10 years ago,' Ayres said. 'This looks like a bill that could have come out of a Paul Ryan House of Representatives rather than a Donald Trump House of Representatives.' Neera Tanden, the former chief domestic policy adviser for former President Joe Biden and now the president of the Center for American Progress, frames the mismatch even more starkly: 'Republicans are testing the proposition that there is nothing they can do to working class people to make them lose their support,' she said. Republicans may face particular vulnerability among the newest addition to their coalition: working-class minority voters without a college degree. The Washington Post/Ipsos, Pew and KFF polls all found them expressing much greater concern about the bill than non-college Whites, who have been more solidly cemented into the GOP base for decades. In the KFF poll, over four-fifths of minorities without a college degree said Medicaid was very important to their community and nearly three-fifths said it was very important to their own families — far more than the share of non-college Whites who said the same. In both the KFF and Pew surveys, more than three times as many of those blue-collar minorities said they expected the bill to hurt than to help them. Against all these headwinds, Republicans have some potentially potent responses. The White House has reportedly shared private polling with congressional Republicans showing support for the bill's measures to end taxes on tips and overtime, and is also urging them to stress the plan's provisions punishing states that provide Medicaid to undocumented immigrants. In the KFF poll, two-thirds of Americans backed a work requirement for able-bodied adults receiving Medicaid, another central component of the GOP plan. Most voters were likewise receptive to the GOP case that reducing Medicaid spending on those adults would save money for the elderly, low-income children and people with disabilities. Jason Cabel Roe, a Michigan-based Republican consultant, believes that it would have been better for the party to split the tax and spending cuts into separate bills, partly to make it harder for Democrats to link the two. But Roe believes public concern about the federal deficit and debt gives Republicans more leeway than Democrats believe to cut government programs — as long as the targets look justified. 'Our argument is we are going to get people off the dole who don't belong there … and if we are able to find the savings through that strategy, I think we can weather this line of attack from Democrats,' he said. 'If there are real stories of people losing their Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans benefits, then we have a problem .' Yet as KFF President Drew Altman wrote last week, the KFF poll also found that many voters were moved by Democratic counter-arguments, such as pointing out that most Medicaid recipients are already working, disabled, or caring for a family member. Gourevitch and other Democratic strategists believe the party's enduring advantage on health care — one of the few issues on which the public consistently expresses more confidence in Democrats than Republicans — will give an advantage to their candidates in any campaign exchanges over the bill. As Tanden pointed out, voters react to changes in health care policy more viscerally than most issues — a dynamic that has previously burned both parties. Revoking health insurance for millions of Americans would be a tough sell for the GOP at any point. But Republicans are creating a much more volatile compound by adding to the formula tax savings for the affluent that make the distribution of winners and losers in their plan unusually visible. 'They are playing with live bombs here,' Tanden said.

Chicago Tribune

an hour ago

• Chicago Tribune

Mohammad Hosseini: Civilians like my family are caught in the crossfire between Iran and Israel

Ordinary people are in total shock and stress in Iran. The capital city Tehran, a megacity with more than 10 million inhabitants — and 17 million in the metropolitan area — has thousands of hospitals and other civilian facilities that can't be evacuated immediately. Many people, including my parents, have responsibilities that prevent them from leaving Tehran. Then there are many who have no other place to go. Those who have left Tehran are stuck on roads for hours on their way to nearby cities that are being inundated with the influx, and they face a shortage of food, fuel and other essential resources. In short, we are dealing with a nightmare in which even the official media that communicates emergency warnings and supports civilians has been a target. I was born in Iran at a time when the armed forces were fighting an Iraqi invasion, a war that lasted from 1980 to 1988. My only recollection of that horrible event is the sound of sirens. At school, our books told us that America and Israel are enemies: 'The Americans exploited us until 1979, and now that we are finally free of their tyranny and have finally pushed the Iraqis out, we should contain the American military offshoot, Israel, to fully push colonial interests out of our region.' This and other messaging that was much more radical — involving weekly chants of 'Death to America' and 'Death to Israel' during Friday prayers — were promoted by the state media. Nevertheless, the ordinary people of Iran have not acted on these sentiments and, based on anecdotes from visitors to Iran, are very welcoming toward Americans. Perhaps the biggest fear in Iran and Israel has been the prospect of a direct confrontation. On both sides, people have tried to moderate harsh rhetoric or encourage their political establishment to find peaceful solutions such as the 2015 nuclear deal. Nevertheless, hard-liners in both countries have remained resolute, telling the public that moderates are naive and fail to grasp the true nature of the threat. Iranian hard-liners have consistently pointed to the presence of American military bases in the region as a major source of danger. Meanwhile, Israeli leaders have argued that, given Iran's support for regional proxies, it is better to strike first than to risk destruction, as captured by the doctrine 'rise and kill first.' This time, though, we are all afraid that the current conflict will go on for weeks before one of the parties backs off. Many Iranians and Israelis who have left their country have family and friends back home who are caught in the crossfire. My retired parents are both taking care of their moms. My maternal grandmother has Parkinson's disease and cannot do much. My paternal grandmother has severe arthritis with significant cartilage damage and bone issues in her back, which have made her completely immobile. Health care services are overwhelmed or short-staffed, and chaos is rising in both countries. In Israel, empty supermarket shelves and uneven distribution of bomb shelters are causing stress to rise among its residents. In Iran, the internet has been shut down nationwide, and international landline calls have been blocked since Wednesday, cutting off citizens from contact with loved ones. Having heard explosions in recent days, my mom told me in one of our last calls that she is reminded of when the nearby Imam Khomeini Hospital was hit by a missile in 1987. She had left her children at home to buy groceries and was on her way back when the attack happened. 'When I heard the blast, I dropped everything and ran,' she recalled. By the time she reached home, the windows were shattered, and her ears were still ringing, a problem she continues to suffer from. She walked into the house and found my sister and me with wet pants, crying. There are many stories like this one, and many far worse, but more importantly, new ones are unfolding as ordinary people in both countries are terrorized by the conflict. Indeed, the outcome of this conflict, whether a fragile ceasefire or a regime change in Iran, is likely to be disastrous for the Iranian and Israeli people. In the case of a ceasefire, it would leave behind weakened governments that, despite decades of propaganda, failed to protect their citizens. On the other hand, regime change could plunge Iran into chaos, triggering a protracted, uncertain process of drafting a new constitution, forming a stable government and rebuilding public trust, a process that may ultimately fail. Consider the ongoing instability in Libya. In Israel, hard-liners would tighten their grip on all facets of the political establishment, push Arabs back and destroy any chance of building a democratic society. A ceasefire would at least prevent further bloodshed in both countries and give grassroots communities a chance to regroup and heal the trauma of the war. Further escalation, on the other hand, would cause only more death and destruction and limit opportunities for reconciliation.