Many have been rightly alarmed by the Trump Administration’s commitments to terminate programs related to scholarship and science, aspects of k-16 education, environmental and climate research, and national and community service. The critical response from citizens has been appropriate and welcome. But it’s also valuable to recognize the limits on any administration’s ability to change federal priorities, the degree to which valuable programs enjoy bipartisan support in Congress, and the extraordinarily inept record of the Trump team so far.

All of those factors are evident in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2017. The bill is 1,665 pages long, and it is written as a set of dollar figures plus instructions (“riders”). Because these aren’t presented as changes compared to last year, it is hard to see what Congress has done. But as far as I can tell, most of the changes have been in the direction of more funding for education, culture, science, and even climate science.

The National Institutes of Health, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Endowment for the Arts all see increases (source). NEH’s research funding is modestly cut, while support for the State Humanities Councils goes up. (My friend Elizabeth Lynn has explained how the State Councils are responsible for the NEH’s political fortunes since the 1970s.) The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is fully funded (source).

EPA faces a one percent overall cut. The Department of Energy’s research budget and the National Science Foundation see increases. Climate research within DoE is boosted. “The Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service all would see more money under the bill, which included few policy riders for the agencies” (source). NOAA receives an increase, and the Climate Program Office within NOAA is held flat. The National Environmental Information Office and Regional Climate Centers have flat budgets.

Education as a whole is cut by 0.1%. Within Education, Title I funding rises; support for education research is trimmed.

The bill “restores year-round Pell Grant funding, a longtime priority sought by student aid groups since its elimination as a cost-saving measure in 2011. The deal also … provides modest increases to college readiness programs TRIO and GEAR UP, which were reduced significantly in the proposed White House 2018 budget plan” (source).

Normally, the president proposes and Congress disposes. In this case, the president has alienated enough potential allies, failed to fill enough key positions, and played his hand so badly that after he proposed, Congress just developed an entirely different budget on a fairly bipartisan basis. To be sure, next year could be worse; and some of the people responsible for implementing these programs will do their best to sabotage them. Still, the new budget deal ought to be an antidote to defeatism.

(See also “mixed feelings on the DeVos nomination battle,” in which I argued that the new Education Secretary will have very limited impact on policy.)

(Washington DC) News stories abound these days about Trump voters who are surprised that the president and his party may cut their benefits. For instance, Mae Bilodeau says she voted for Trump “precisely because she thought he would help the poor people of America who need services like [the local Legal Advice and Referral Center]. ‘He seems to be taking away from them more than helping them at this point,’ Bilodeau said.”

A good number of Trump voters even spontaneously announce a preference for a Canadian-style single payer system.

I learned a long time ago to think of US politics on a left/right continuum: pro-state on the left, anti-state on the right. Using that framework, I regarded Obamacare as a modest shift leftward. I assumed that President Obama would wish to move further left but had compromised (wisely, I think; others would say unnecessarily) by enacting the ACA. If I were enrolled in an Obamacare exchange, I would expect a Democrat to reduce my premiums or increase my benefits, simply by spending more money on the program. I would expect a Republican president to do the opposite: defund or repeal the law. My opinion of their positions would depend on my view of the government and the market.

But the Trump supporters quoted in these recent news reports do not use the left/right continuum as a heuristic. And that shouldn’t surprise us.  “Despite the centrality of philosophical concepts like liberalism and conservatism to mainstream political discourse, modern public opinion research has generally concluded that most citizens are unable to effectively use these concepts when making political judgments” (Frederico & Hunt 2013). Instead, at least some of Trump’s voters simply see him as standing on their side, and liberals as their enemies. I overheard two working-class white New England guys recently. One said, “The problem with liberals is they just hate people.” The other laughed. Many seem to have assumed that Trump would lower their premiums or improve their benefits. If Obama wasn’t doing either, that showed that he was a people-hating liberal, or perhaps just less competent than business-wizard Donald J. Trump would be.

This post could end with me tsk-tsking my fellow citizens for not using the ideological heuristic that I learned long ago to decide for whom to vote. And in fact, I believe Americans would be better off (overall) if they at least understood how to think in pro-state versus pro-market terms. That would certainly be far preferable to using race as a heuristic, as some may do.

Yet they may also be right to downplay the left/right spectrum. Consider the Kentuckian whom Sarak Kliff interviewed last December. She is reliant on the ACA, yet she had voted for Trump. She explained, “I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many peoples lives. … I mean, what are you to do then if you cannot pay for insurance?”

At the time, I tsk-tsked. But, to my surprise, it now looks fairly unlikely that the Republicans will repeal the ACA. This voter was right, and I was wrong. She saw herself as part of a coalition that won the election and would serve her interests. Ultimately, I believe that heuristic misled her, because she threw her support to anti-government conservatives who want to cut her benefits for ideological reasons, and she joined a coalition dominated by wealthy people who mainly want their taxes cut. But again, I am the one who was surprised to see ACA repeal in such trouble; her prediction was more accurate than mine.

Republicans tend to think that they have an anti-government or pro-market movement behind them. They are likely wrong. (CIRCLE’s research reveals a substantial shift of young white men who define themselves as “moderates,” not “conservatives,” to Trump in 2016.) The Alt-Right believes there’s a majority that is pro-welfare and also white-supremacist. I doubt that constituency is huge. But liberals should also doubt that they can win votes mainly by finding the right point on the left/right spectrum. Their main challenge is trust. As for voters, they may use a range of heuristics to assess candidates, but they would be wise not to ignore left/right ideology completely, because it explains why the GOP is trying to cut their benefits.

Right after the election, I posted a flowchart about “how to respond” that was (by my standards) quite widely shared. I hear anecdotally that it is being used by community groups for discussions.

Incidentally, the question is open-ended; it doesn’t say “How to respond to Trump.” People could use it if they believe the current situation is dire but not because of Donald J. Trump, or not merely because of him.

Last night, I had a chance to use the flowchart with a group of about 16 people in my own community (Cambridge, MA). That discussion encouraged me to make some minor clarifications to the text; see below. (And thanks to my colleague Alberto for the improved graphics.) I’m always open to suggestions for bigger changes.

The people who met last night would like suggestions for concrete next steps, resources, and organizations for each cell. We could even think through what each cell at the bottom means for various institutions: schools and colleges, philanthropies, news media, religious congregations and denominations, municipalities, and so on. If, for example, you work in philanthropy and you want to support ideologically diverse deliberations, what should you invest in? If you’re a k-12 educator who wants to teach deliberation, what should you do, and who will support you? Canvassing these options is a good exercise for a group.

Right now, I think many people are focused on how to sustain momentum. There was a burst of energy around the Inauguration, and some people perceive a dip since then. This challenge also arose at the recent “Civic State of the Union” forum with Mara Liasson, Bob Putnam, Shirley Sagawa, and me.

I offer two thoughts. First, relationships create the motivations and accountability that power movements. People don’t stay involved because of an issue, but because of the other people. Therefore, it is worth cultivating relationships by adding regular social interactions to political efforts. Get together for pizza even if you aren’t sure what to do politically.

Second, we have to be willing to take satisfaction, even joy, from politics. Yes, people are suffering and even possibly dying, and I am not one of those harmed. (My taxes could well go down under Trump.) Therefore, it can seem self-indulgent for people like me to take pleasure from resistance. Yet political engagement is an aspect of a good life, the nascent resistance is a beautiful thing to be part of, and if we engage out of sheer duty, we’ll falter sooner or later. I’d say: less guilt, more joy, and let’s stick together.

(See also taking satisfaction from politics in the face of injustice.)

I deeply oppose the Trump travel bans on two main grounds: 1) We should strive to admit refugees from the terrible war zones of the world, and 2) a policy that’s rhetorically linked to anti-Muslim motivations threatens the standing of Muslim citizens and residents of the US, as well as the religious equality and tolerance that should be important to all of us.

Nevertheless, I thought the revised travel ban was probably both legal and constitutional. One interpretation of the injunctions against the ban is that certain federal judges have overstepped their bounds because of objections to the policy (and the president) that I share, but that shouldn’t influence them in their judicial roles. I’d advance a different interpretation, however. These judges are relaxing some traditional norms and constraints because the Trump Administration has shed its commitment to norms that have constrained previous presidents. The resulting conflict is dangerous for the constitutional order but preferable to an alternative in which only the executive branch ignores key norms.

I’d have thought that the revised ban would be upheld for several reasons. First, Congress may regulate immigration by statute, but the law it has chosen to enact (8 U.S.C. § 1101) says:

Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.

Second, people who are neither citizens nor residents of the US are typically seen as having no rights under the US Constitution. Third, in a wide range of situations, courts don’t inquire into the motivations of policymakers when they assess legality and constitutionality. Finally, the argument that the revised order is a Muslim ban, and hence detrimental to US Muslims and every citizen’s religious liberties, could founder on the fact that of the ten countries with the largest Muslim populations in the world, only one (Iran) is on the banned list. The banned countries seem rather to be sources of refugees, and the president is not legally obliged to admit refugees, even if human rights and morality demands that.

Yet two federal judges have blocked the order, one with a nationwide injunction, and a Ninth Circuit panel has refused to reconsider its block of the earlier order.

Critics of the injunctions note that they seem to exceed precedents and they seem to rely on critiques of Trump as a person. Josh Blackman writes:

Judge [Leonie] Brinkema has applied a “forever taint” not to the executive order, but to Donald Trump himself. For example, the government defended the selection of the seven nations in the initial executive order because President Obama approved a law that singled out the same seven nations for “special scrutiny” under the visa waiver program. Judge Brinkema rejected this reasoning: “Absent the direct evidence of animus presented by the Commonwealth, singling out these countries for additional scrutiny might not raise Establishment Clause concerns; however, with that direct evidence, a different picture emerges.” That is, if Barack Obama selected these seven countries for extreme vetting, it would be lawful, because he lacks the animus. But because Donald Trump had that animus, it would be unlawful. … It will always a “Muslim ban” because of comments he made on the O’Reilly Factor in 2011, a policy he adopted in 2015, and abandoned after his lawyers told him it was illegal. She admits as much. “A person,” she writes, “is not made brand new simply by taking the oath of office.” Not the policy. The person. Trump.

Blackman thinks the courts are overstepping their bounds. See also David Frum on the “dangerous precedent” these injunctions could set. In his 9th Circuit Dissent, Judge Jay Bybee warns, “We cannot let our personal inclinations get ahead of important, overarching principles about who gets to make decisions in our democracy. For better or worse, every four years we hold a contested presidential election. We have all found ourselves disappointed with the election results in one election cycle or another. But it is the best of American traditions that we also understand and respect the consequences of our elections.”

Indeed, it’s worth worrying about what will happen if our courts start assessing individual presidents when they rule on legality and constitutionality. But this is my take (reminiscent of a piece by Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic):

The Constitution vests the various branches with powers and doesn’t say a lot about how they should be exercised. Like people playing a board game that has simple rules printed on the inside of the box, our officials have developed a long set of norms, some written as precedents and some unstated, to complement the basic rules. The board-game players know that no one will take an hour to decide on her move or start yelling insults during the game. Judges know that presidents will not single them out for abuse, deny the legitimacy of judicial review, blatantly lie and maintain their lies in the face of evidence, or say things–even informally–that undermine the basic principles of our republic, such as religious neutrality. Presidents, for their part, can count on judges to believe their assertions about national security and to read their executive orders charitably.

At least some judges believe that Trump is like a board-game player who is technically following the rules on the back of the box but violating the norms that make the game playable. So they are going to use their express powers under the basic rules to counter him and either force him to play by the norms or reduce his power. Even Judge Bybee (previously known to me only as an author of the “torture memos”), who dissented in the Ninth Circuit judgment, ended his dissent with a rather extraordinary coda:

Even as I dissent from our decision not to vacate the panel’s flawed opinion, I have the greatest respect for my colleagues. The personal attacks on the distinguished district judge and our colleagues were out of all bounds of civic and persuasive discourse—particularly when they came from the parties. It does no credit to the arguments of the parties to impugn the motives or the competence of the members of this court; ad hominem attacks are not a substitute for effective advocacy. Such personal attacks treat the court as though it were merely a political forum in which bargaining, compromise, and even intimidation are acceptable principles. The courts of law must be more than that, or we are not governed by law at all.

The prime danger is that Judge Bybee’s colleagues have judged Trump wrong and been biased by the abuse directed at them. But on balance, I think their response is for the best under these dire circumstances.