Our Elected Officials Are a Threat to Civic Knowledge

Grandstanding politicians are spreading disinformation and making us dumber.

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As senators began their opening statements prior to the first hearing for Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, Democratic Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono was flanked by large posters featuring photographs of individuals with serious diseases. Hirono said that in nominating Barrett, President Donald Trump was using a “hypocritical and illegitimate process” in “keeping his promise” to install the “deciding vote to take health care away from millions of people.”

Minutes later, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker speculated that in Barrett’s America, women who had miscarriages would be investigated to make sure they didn’t have abortions. Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris defended the Supreme Court’s legalization on same-sex marriage by saying “love is love,” a legal principle conspicuously missing from the Federalist Papers.

The entire spectacle—of senators peppering a conservative nominee with questions about whether she would take health care from people or make it harder for minorities to vote—distorts the public perception of the proper role of the legislative and judicial branches. The conflation of judicial opinions with policy preferences is why every Supreme Court nomination fight now resembles the intensity of a presidential election crammed into a few tense weeks.

And most of this disinformation isn’t spread by blogs, or bad social studies teachers, or even Russian Twitter bots. It is spread primarily by elected officials trying to wring votes out of a malleable electorate. In doing so, they are bleeding the public of basic civic knowledge.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Rajeev

    This is the Sarah Palin effect. The Republicans opened Pandora's Box in 2008 and they can't take it back. And now we have Donald Trump. The amount of disinformation being spread by Democrats now is a minor fraction (less than 10%) of the level of disinformation spread by Republicans during the Obama administration.

    As for Amy Coney Barrett everyone has a right to be afraid of what could happen to the ACA based on her additional vote. Just because she's likely to uphold part of it in this case doesn't mean that future lawsuits might not chip away at the affordable care act. And I'm not a lawyer so for all I know she might rule correctly in a suit that limits Obamacare. However, most average Americans don't have the luxury of debating policy when they are worried about getting themselves or their kids covered if they have a pre-existing condition or a condition that requires extensive treatment.

    As for voting rights, the repeal of the Civil Rights legislation was a low point for the Roberts court. The voter suppression efforts now show that many states are still in need of federal supervision to ensure they don't continue deliberate voter suppression that has been a trend for Republicans over the past 12+ years. While she may be qualified if she is not willing to protect the fundamental right to vote for all citizens than she fails in my basic test on upholding the constitution and American ideals.

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    Ckirk

    Since all the electorate can not possible be well informed enough to make all these decisions, every person in every positions needs to do their job according to what is right, not what is self serving.

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  3. AmRevHistorian

    To respond to the "sick burn" retort, some women DID vote because of the original US Constitution. The 1776 Constitution of New Jersey allowed any free person to vote who possessed fifty pounds in property. It said nothing about sex. As the work of leading women's historians like Rosemary Zagarri can attest, women did indeed vote in New Jersey from 1776 to 1807 when the Constitution of New Jersey was revised. To be sure, most women in New Jersey did not vote because they did not own any property. Most women were wives and married women did not own any property under the laws of coverture. So it was only wealthy single gals who could wield the ballot, so this was a few dozen widows.

    More interestingly, Article I of the US Constitution states "The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several States, and the electors in each State shall have the same qualifications requisite of electors for the most numerous branch of the State legislature." In most states, the most numerous branch is the state's house of representatives, aka the state assembly. In other words, because propertied single women in New Jersey could vote in state elections, they could vote for members of the US House of Representatives.

    Of course, it is also true that the Constitution says nothing about sex at all until the 14th Amendment. It has never been unconstitutional for women to vote, hold office, or even sit on the Supreme Court. The 19th Amendment did not allow women to vote; rather, it required that the states allow women to vote. Wyoming had been perfectly correct to allow women to vote as early as 1869. To be sure, negative (and incorrect) social views of women's intelligence, and laws that effectively took away a married woman's citizenship, kept women from aspiring to the heights that Judge Barrett is about to achieve.

    But don't blame an original interpretation of the Constitution. The American Revolution was far more revolutionary than we often give it credit for.

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      DougAz

      Then why were women and Blacks prevented from voting by white men?

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  4. Dipsy’s PAL

    Well said, albeit depressing, but I’d mildly contest your final point. Anyone watching the hearings would see ACB calmly, clearly and resolutely dismantle the attacks by D panel members. Her opening statement was particularly good, and showcased her teaching skills.

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    Scarlette Tarte

    I totally agree. The one thing that Trump has done is expose just how dumb so many Americans are.

    Or uneducated. Call it whatever you want. But it indicates we have a MASSIVE problem and it may be too big to turn it around.

    In other words, there are so many, it is extremely likely that we go down the tubes, under the weight of the stupid.

    I am not kidding. Stupid people are having kids, and those kids are not getting better educated than their parents.

    I suggest the Republicans start pushing birth control hard, as a "patriotic" thing to do, to save us from "teh stupid". I would say Dems too, but they already push birth control, and we all know that the liberals ARE more educated already. But there are plenty of dumb on the left as well.

    Seriously, we NEED to do something about this. Social media is not helping anyone get any smarter, either.

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      Jason Gibson

      I agree Scarlette. Education is everything. A republic only works if the people can make intelligent decisions. Ingesting culture is very important.

      Your second to last paragraph was a little uncalled for but it's kind of fun to stand shoulder to shoulder with you

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    tallcupofcoffee

    I hearted his article purely on the merits of the use of "bellicosity."

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    DougAz

    I agree!!
    Mitch McCommi
    Leningrad Lindsey
    Ben Sassey
    Tom Cottonmouth
    Ted Cruzin
    Marcy Rubio
    Devin aka the Cow Nunez
    Louis look I found nothing Gohmert
    Gym Jordan
    Trump family mob
    Kushner family mob
    William, I'm not John Mitchell, Barr
    A boatload of GOP operatives eg Chaylie Kirk
    Rudy the Red (Reindeer or Commi) Guliani
    Can't forget that RU Patriot Mikey Flynnski

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  8. Avatar photo
    Steven Anderson

    It seems like, with the amount of information available to voters about the basic functioning of government, they would be able to answer more questions. Perhaps it's the case that most of the time only a small amount of us actually know and care enough to make the system work.

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  9. Nathan

    If everyone stopped watching cable news - things would be a lot better

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    rlritt

    Can I ask why Republican politicians want to demolish the ACA? Its extremely popular. They were able to do away with a public option. And as a result literally millions more people have insurance that weren't able to get it before. And finally, gig workers and part time workers who can't get employer provided insurance can get their own at a reasonable cost. Sounds like its a win win. How will throwing people off their insurance and making it financially prohibitive for people to buy anything but employer provider group insurance make health care in this country better? I would really like to understand their reasoning.

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    1. CatoTheElder

      In my experience discussing this with others, the GOP objections seem to be centered ultimately on cost and quality. They believe, or at least claim to believe, that federal government involvement in the delivery of health insurance or health care will inevitably yield a system more expensive than a private system in a market they tout as free. Republicans then tend to natter on about the general ineptitude of government, as they see it, and how this will permeate the world of health care, to the foreseeable detriment of "the greatest health care system in the world". If the preceding bits haven't sufficiently scared their audience, they augment their argument with predictions of months and years of waiting for treatment of your cancer, your stroke, your heart surgery, etc., and "death panels", the soulless committees that will decide who gets what treatment, doling out death as necessary to keep costs down.

      Many Republicans and conservatives seem genuinely to believe that the ways in which Americans obtain health care (or fail to do) really are part and parcel of the greatest health care show on Earth. And it is, perhaps, but only in the same sense that P. T. Barnum recognized that there are suckers born every minute (though he probably never actually said so), willing to pay to see and keep the circus going. Firstly, there is no "system" of health care in the US. (There's also legitimate concern about whether federal government is granted authority by the Constitution to have much to do with the provision of health care, but that's for another time.) Instead of a system, Americans are presented with a hyper-complex agglomeration of systems, institutions, companies, subsidiaries, managers, associations, insurance types, insurance laws, and a veritable wild west of accounting and financial procedures. Most only see a tiny bit of the elephant at any time, and perhaps don't realize how out-of-whack the whole mess is. This narrow view starts with the majority of the citizenry who get their health insurance through their employer, who presents them with a menu of choices that often might as well be written in Chinese, given how poorly many people understand what's on offer. (In their defense, it's hard. The information is generally minimal, cryptic, and incomplete.)

      When it comes to GOP concerns about cost, it's hard to know whether to laugh or cry. The US as a whole spends approximately 18% of its annual GDP on health care. Let's compare this to other developed nations, with similar standards of living and per capita GDP: Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, France, Belgium, England, Norway, Australia, Japan, Canada, South Korea,...all spend less than 11-12% of GDP on health care--some much less. So much for the efficiency of the private free market. (Many on the right say this would be easily corrected if we allowed insurers to sell across state lines. This is...I'll be kind...wishful thinking in the extreme, I believe.) Oh, and within that "similar standards of living" phrase I used? Included in that is health care. I'd happily be treated for my broken arm, heart disease, or pneumonia in any of those nations with no fear that someone in Toledo is getting way better care than I am just because it's in the U S of A.

      The provision of health care is massively expensive, immensely complicated, and demands a constant attention to new information, technology, changes in population types and numbers, and much more. Pretty much every nation on the planet with a developed economy sees health care as something more or less like the common defense: everyone needs it, but individuals, with the exception Jeff Bezos and his poker buddies, cannot afford it. So rather than leave their citizenry to flail around in the "system" like a hooked tuna, and then die, too often bankrupt or nearly so, they've taken to regulating processes and markets and ensuring that everyone gets at least decent basic health care. Frankly, saying that we can't do it means one believes that we can't do the things that need doing to provide good health care to everyone as well or efficiently as, say, the Danes, the Aussies, the Finns, the Germans, the French, the British, the....

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        rlritt

        Well said.

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      Ruby Girl

      The reasons for the Republican opposition to Obamacare are complex, but certainly one aspect is how it was rammed through Congress and into law with little concern for the impact on people’s lives. Obamacare threw a bone to both the insurance companies and the hospitals, allowing them to shift more of their costs and thereby hide the ever rising prices for care. It also thereby shifted more power to the central government and brought us a step closer to a federal socialized medical system, while still allowing hospitals and insurance companies to make money and to force doctors into bigger systems where they have less power and control, which btw hurts patients. So yes, insurance under the ACA became more portable, but it did not control health care costs which continue to rise unabated. Which fuels more calls for socializing medicine. I suggest VA for all☝🏼! The federal government already owns more hospitals than anyone else.

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        rlritt

        You say it impacts negatively but many more people have insurance that didn't have it before. How is this a negative? Also, polls show that 72 % of Americans like the ACA. As for ramming it through the Congress, if the Republicans in Congress had been positive negotiators rather than obstructionists they could have been part of the solution rather than being all of the problem.

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          Ruby Girl

          It doesn’t address rising costs, thereby increasing the number of people who risk facing overwhelming medical charges. And insurance is no picnic. Trying to collect on what you’ve been promised is generally a nightmare. What if we paid out of pocket for most general stuff and saved insurance for the catastrophes, like we do with our cars and houses? (Rather than thinking the federal government is gonna swoop in and save us without making our taxes go up!! Magic!)

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        Ruby Girl

        I’m just trying to address the question of incentives. What would truly bring healthcare costs down? That’s the question one can only wish our elected representatives would address.

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          Matmos

          I too am curious about this. I spent a lot of time in Germany. They have a great medical system and medical costs are low. I had an emergency stay at a hospital. The ambulance ride cost $50 and a night in a hospital suite with balcony cost $80. Insurance is required, expensive and generally not provided through your employer, but it is priced at % of income rather than one-price-fits-all. No one there is going bankrupt on medical costs. There is state insurance and private insurance is also allowed. I suspect one difference from the US is the cost of malpractice insurance, but I am not sure what the other factors are that play into the difference in cost.

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            Ruby Girl

            This is very interesting. I wonder who owns the hospitals in Germany, and what role the central government plays if they don’t own the hospitals. We have such a get-rich-quick mentality in the US. This plays into businessmen growing ever larger hospital systems so that the top dogs can command ever larger salaries. It’s also behind the malpractice situation (My husband practiced Obstetrics for 30 years. The stories I could tell!!). Trial lawyers and clients are angling for huge payoffs, and so much of medicine in this country is defensive as a result.

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        2. David R

          Nothing. Other countries started from a lower baseline and controlled the growth of costs better (though one major way they did so was by offloading medical R&D costs on Americans), but significantly reducing health care costs is a fantasy.

          There are a lot of ideas about what could reduce the growth of costs, and some of them might even work here.

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      Matmos

      I am not of this opinion myself, but I gather that a major part of the opposition is the desire for small / local government. They do not want the federal government involved in the program. It is possible conservatives would think such a program was ok on a state by state basis.

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      1. Avatar photo
        Patrick O'Rouke

        I'll participate: because I don't think it is the best way to deliver healthcare to the American people. The root of this problem began when we started using the tax code to incentivize employers to offer health coverage. Without that, there is no problem for gig workers to obtain health insurance any more than it is a problem for uber drivers to get auto insurance.

        And whether our employer or the federal government is subsidizing our health insurance, it removes us from the actual cost of the products we buy. I'm convinced that the biggest reason healthcare costs are so out of control is because nobody knows what the hell anything actually costs.

        Let's use apartments in a crowded city as an analogy for what's going on here. The ACA-style solution to rising rents is to institute rent controls. The conservative solution would be to remove development limits to allow supply to increase and promote market competition. Hopefully this makes some sense.

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          Rajeev

          The problem with health care is that a free market system would not work. Logically, if you are unwilling to enforce healthcare payments (tax liens, arrests, etc.) then there is no market system which in this one case is the way it should be. If someone without insurance gets sick and ends up in the hospital it can cost a ton of money they can never pay so it gets passed to the insured to cover the costs via premiums. That's why prior to 2008 we had an unfair system where those who were uninsured (particularly those that could afford it) would pass on the hospital and doctor's costs to the insured.

          The reason we need an individual mandate is so that everyone that can afford it puts some skin in the game so if they get sick and owe a million dollars they would have paid into an insurance plan (or a penalty). Even if it was requiring just a catastrophic plan for everyone would be enough to fix the basic logic issue that we face and now have exasperated by removing the individual mandate.

          But when Republicans talk about free market solutions (with the exception of true Libertarians like Ron Paul and John Stossel) they are just blowing smoke. They know how healthcare works and they understand that "free market" solutions involve not treating those who choose not to purchase insurance and can't afford out of pocket emergency costs, which would never happen in our country nor should it happen.

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          rlritt

          Healthcare is still being delivered by private sector doctors and hospitals, its just that more people are insured so are able to avail themselves of the services. What is a better alternative to deliver healthcare?

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          Edward

          I agree that insulation from cost is distorts prices. However, your assertion that without subsidization of insurance nobody would have an issue getting it seems difficult to prove. Sure, insurance used to be cheap. Treatment for a heart attack used to be a few aspirin and bed rest. We live longer, use more advanced and expensive therapies, and also pay indirectly for the cost to research and develop new therapies.

          The idea of health care as a free market may have some merits but it remains plagued by all sorts of issues, and it's not clear how we would get from 'here' to 'there' anyway. Intense information asymmetry will remain. Emergency treatments are not elastic. Elective decisions are kind of elastic, but so are preventative decisions, and everyone loses if people decide to forego preventative care because they don't feel like it's important or can't afford it.

          Research on HSAs have found that with more skin in the game, people pretty much indiscriminately consume less care, regardless of whether that care is low- or high-value... that's to say, research confirms what we know, that people are not particularly informed as to what they should and should not be doing with their care, and when they make bad choices, the system as a whole pays for their emergent costs.

          Similarly, research shows that most people can't be bothered to actually do homework on quality or doctor shop when that information's available, contrary to the wishes of those (including me) who've hoped consumer-driven care will solve problems.

          In a free market system, no issuer or provider is incentivized to be preventative--they have no business guarantee they'll ultimately reap those rewards. In many ways, we struggle with this now, although the ACA mandated large swaths of preventative care be covered at no cost.

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            Patrick O'Rouke

            I'll happily agree to disagree on whether or not health insurance is a fundamental right that entitles others to my labor. That's kind of the root of most of our political debates whenever we actually decide to concentrate on policy. And there are even times where I'd fall in the same camp as you because I don't think the market can function effectively...common defense being the public good that holds the highest consensus.

            I also hold no ill will against someone who believes that people are too dumb (on the whole) to make choices when it comes to what coverage they purchase. No doubt we've got a lot of dumb people out there. The problem with asserting so much collective control over healthcare markets is that those same dumb people get to vote for the people who will make those choices. And when they're voting with my money, they're likely to be even dumber than when they're voting with their own money.

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      Todd T

      Because Republicans call it Obamacare. Their opposition rests in the name.

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