Californians certainly shouldn’t. The pandemic demonstrated what things are essential in California, and what things we can live without. Among our superfluous assets: the designation of Sacramento as our capital city, and the various buildings occupied by our state government there.

In the biggest emergency of our lives, our elected officials managed to respond and govern with the Capitol, the seat of government, closed. Public employees in Sacramento-based agencies kept the government running while working remotely or from home.

Having the capital effectively closed didn’t diminish state ambitions. To the contrary, there was a historic expansion in state government and its goals, with new programs in health and homelessness launched on the fly, and the state budget growing at record speed.

And rather than limiting public access to state government, the absence of a capital brought regular people closer to our government than ever before. Suddenly, Southern Californians like me—who used to have to drive eight hours or get on a plane to attend a hearing or session in Sacramento—could participate online from our kitchens. Californians could join calls where decisions of great consequence, including about opening and closing public institutions, were made. Meanwhile, state officials including the governor, who are traditionally cocooned inside well-guarded Sacramento buildings, were forced to meet people outside in every corner of the state.

This pandemic decentralization served two of California’s greatest causes: equity and environmental protection. Before COVID, you needed resources—either in time to travel to Sacramento or in money to hire a lobbyist—to get yourself heard by the state government. The pandemic made it possible for officials to see and hear everyday Californians, especially in the working class, as never before. The pandemic closures also saw state employees reduce their greenhouse-gas-producing commutes, and limited the number of flights to and from Sacramento.

None of these changes, of course, should have required a pandemic to be implemented. This state is a global technology capital that long ago should have moved beyond the antiquated idea of having to gather its government in one city. But entrenched interests in Sacramento long resisted applying technology to state government in ways that might make it more accessible—until the pandemic forced their hand.

Now that the pandemic is winding down, Californians should rally together to make sure that power is never restored to the capital.

That won’t be easy. The powers-that-be in Sacramento, desperate to protect their money and prerogatives, are already demanding a return to the bizarrely centralized California governance that they call “normal.”

The Sacramento Bee, in an awful editorial, recently demanded that state workers return to the city’s downtown. Their self-serving reason: protecting local property tax, hotel tax, and parking revenues that the city of Sacramento needs to pay off ill-conceived public investments in downtown developments, including an arena for its miserable pro basketball franchise.

The editorial omitted the larger context: Sacramento’s rapid downtown growth is an artificially created bubble, built on the dysfunctional and overly centralized Prop 13 tax system. That system requires the rest of California to send its local revenues to Sacramento and then hire expensive lobbyists to try to return some of those dollars back home.

But if California ended Sacramento’s status as its capital, the biggest winner might be Sacramento itself. The no-longer-capital city would have the rare opportunity for a fresh start, including a more balanced economy. The loss of government jobs would take some pressure off rapidly escalating housing prices there. And the Capitol and state buildings left behind could be repurposed for housing or other offices. Thinking bigger, Sacramento could become home to a huge new Cal Poly or University of California campus that would allow those systems to serve more students—and produce more new economic possibilities for Sacramento than state office workers do.

Giving up on the idea of the capital could benefit the rest of California, too. And this goes beyond the billions of taxpayer dollars that could be saved by not constructing more unnecessary state buildings, like the new California Natural Resources Agency headquarters. While politicians will argue that they can get more done by meeting together in Sacramento, the truth is that elected leaders are far more effective and responsive when they are seeing their constituents more than their colleagues.

Offering Sacramento-based state workers incentives to relocate to poorer neighborhoods around the state would also put their stable incomes and pensions in the service of regional equity. Local governments would find it easier to cooperate productively with the state if more workers and offices were spread among our communities. And a state workforce extending into every corner of California should be more responsive to local concerns.

Of course, total decentralization is not possible. State legislators may well insist on holding some sessions and meetings all together. If they do, the location should rotate among different places, as my friend, the former deputy state treasurer and journalist Mark Paul, has suggested. To raise revenue, the state government could even put the right to host the legislature up for bids from different cities and counties—like with the Super Bowl or the Olympics.

California is too great and large of a place to have a single center or seat of power. The state government should be present, and accessible, wherever you can find one of California’s greatest assets—its nearly 40 million people.

The post Abolish the California Capital appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s why our current conversation about reopening public schools, after a year of COVID closures, is beside the point. So-called grownups are talking about when we might reopen, or the conditions under which we might restart certain schools or certain grades. But we never really answer the question of who—amid all the fear and politics—will pry open the schoolhouse door for every California child.

It won’t be the federal government. President Biden has effectively abandoned his pledge to reopen all schools in 100 daysthe first volume of a handbook for reopening, and the Centers for Disease Control continues to produce confusing guidance for whomever does the reopening, but neither has the authority to call class in session.

It won’t be state government. The Newsom administration loves to spin out new frameworks and matrices so that other levels of government can think about reopening. But if you really think this state will successfully execute a major logistical operation like school reopening, well… let’s just say there’s an unemployment check in the mail for you.

It won’t be our local governments forcing the reopening either. Our counties are consumed by their pandemic-era public health obligations. Our cities are criticizing or even suing school districts to demand schools reopen, but they lack the power to force classes back into session. Our school districts do have the power to reopen, and some are bringing back a few early grades, but for the most part, they’re caught between ever-shifting guidance from other levels of government, union opposition, and divisions among parents. Meanwhile, too many local school board members and superintendents, instead of fixing distance learning, are filling the hours with gaslighting communiqués, fruitless negotiations, or school-name changes.

Of course, our teachers’ unions, by far the most powerful political forces in this state, could force a reopening. But with their members able to work at home and still be paid, these labor groups just keep pushing back the timelines for return—until COVID is entirely gone, or all living beings in the Milky Way galaxy have been vaccinated, or the Rapture. Whichever comes first.

All these realities point to the same hard fact: California’s various educational constituencies are never going to come together and reopen all school themselves. If our state is ever going to resume universal public education, as required under its constitution, we Californians will have to outsource the task.

And given the scale of our state, there is only one entity that could pull this off.

It’s time to ping Amazon.

Outsourcing school reopening to Amazon isn’t a radical idea. To the contrary, it perfectly fits our state’s COVID-era strategy: leave the hard work to somebody else.

Take masking. Officials at all levels have talked, incessantly, about the need for everyone to wear masks and keep our distance—but no one in power has been willing to enforce these regulations aggressively. The tricky work of compliance has been left to store employees and entrepreneurs who are trying to save their jobs and businesses, and to everyday Californians foolhardy enough to confront their maskless neighbors to slow the spread.

A similar dynamic has emerged in vaccination. With the state and counties failing to turn their months of planning into an effective system for immunizing people, Gov. Gavin Newsom outsourced the job to the not-for-profit health insurer Blue Shield of California. This was achieved through an emergency authorization, without bids, and in the full knowledge that Blue Shield is not a health provider and has no real experience in putting shots in arms. What Blue Shield does have is skill in managing data, a statewide network, and a reputation for getting its way in California.

Outsourcing school reopening to Amazon follows similar logic. It’s not an education business, but it is great at data and operations. Amazon has the warehouses, supplies, and delivery network to get the right protective materials to the schools on time. (Maybe it could even pick up science-denying teachers from their homes and transport them to vaccination centers and then classrooms). Amazon also operates efficiently and cheaply—so a school reopening contract wouldn’t break state or local budgets.

But the real reason California needs Amazon for this chore is its scary ruthlessness, its willingness to ignore criticism and rules in the service of delivering on its promises.

Who will dare get in its way? Amazon owns the political class—just look at how it used donations and lobbying to win subsidies and tax breaks from state and local governments—so it doesn’t have to worry about politicians’ challenging its school reopening operations.

Amazon, famous for crushing small businesses that get in its way, also might be our best bet to shut down scofflaw retailers and other entities that, by not complying with COVID regulations, contribute to the community spread that might threaten school reopenings.

And Amazon, having fought unionization of its own employees nationwide, would probably revel at the prospect of putting California teachers and their unions in their place.

Because the company is so accustomed to being loathed, Amazon—worth a cool $1.65 trillion as of February 12—could be useful as a scapegoat for all of California’s anger and angst over school reopening. Instead of the state government and local school districts continuing to blast each other publicly, and instead of parents and teachers attacking each other over Zoom, we could all agree to blame Amazon.

I suspect Amazon would do this if asked. Amazon recently wrote President Biden to offer “to leverage our operations, information technology and communications capabilities and expertise” in this emergency. And given its diminished public reputation, including questions about how its treatment of warehouse workers during the pandemic, Amazon would likely seize such an opportunity to build some good will.

Few school leaders will admit this publicly, but they would be delighted if Amazon—or another outside entity—stepped in to handle reopening. Such an intervention might be the only way to save a California education system that is falling apart. School enrollment has seen record declines in the pandemic, and many families with school-age children are leaving the state. Even stalwart supporters of public schools are now talking up private schools or school vouchers.

In other words, California faces its own school choice: Outsource school reopening now, or watch its schools crumble as families outsource their children’s education somewhere else.

The post There’s Only One Entity Ruthless Enough to Reopen All California Schools appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The discussion dug deep into the complexities, contradictions, and cross-pressures of American federalism, and how states and the federal government push and pull each other on citizenship, immigration, and health care. While noting all the ways that states have infringed on Americans’ rights, panelists also said that advancing ideas and rights at the state level is vital to progress in this country, no matter which parties win elections, and no matter who is in the White House.

“You cannot ignore the states,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, founding director of the Center for Social Innovation, which is based at UC Riverside. “For people who think that somehow you can [make progress] just by taking over Congress and the presidency and even the courts, history shows otherwise … You have to build power and policy innovation in the states.”

The event’s moderator, The Nation contributing writer Richard Kreitner, started the conversation by asking whether an emphasis on states’ rights ends up leaving vulnerable people “behind enemy lines.”

Ramakrishnan said that any progressive concept of states’ rights must start with aggressive federal enforcement of the 14th Amendment, and its promise of equal protection of the laws. States can build new rights, and new dimensions of rights, on this “federal floor,” he said.

And when the powerful federal government is violating rights, it’s even more important for states to practice what he termed “progressive state citizenship” to check federal power and protect rights.

“If you don’t have federalism and you do have a lot of division along geographic lines,” said Ramakrishnan, co-author (with Allan Colbern) of the new book Citizenship Reimagined: A New Framework for State Rights in the United States, “you’re going to endow the presidency with so much power that it’s like a whipsaw action when each party takes over the presidency. That is really harmful to divided societies.”

Cornell University government professor Jamila Michener, a leading scholar of poverty and author of Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism and Unequal Politics, cautioned that people’s views of states’ rights can vary based on whether their preferred party is in power in Washington, D.C. Using Medicaid as an example, she explained how American federalism produces inequality, with people receiving different healthcare and having different rights as residents depending on the state in which they live.

“What happens to any of us in any place is relevant to what happens to all of us,” said Michener, who is co-director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity. “One of the moral challenges of the inequality that federalism breeds is precisely that: It feels like our human dignity is contingent on arbitrary geographic location.”

At the same time, she said, American federalism also “creates conditions of possibility” to make advances in states and in the nation as a whole. This means that people need to be working constantly in the states to organize and build power.

“If you’re interested in minimizing harm and minimizing suffering, and if you’re interested in and committed to a particular vision of people living with full dignity and having access to a certain set of rights, then even when the folks that you favor are in power, you don’t necessarily then sit on your laurels,” she said. “You keep building power, so you can set the terrain that pushes up that floor that is established on the federal level.”

Cynthia Buiza, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, said that California is a model of such power-building. Over the past 25 years, California has enacted a “constellation” of more than 100 policies that protect immigrants and make it easier for them to work, drive, and go to college. “The state,” she said, “recognizes the fundamental role that immigrants play.”

“California is a very interesting case study in federalism,” Buiza added. “It has managed, over the years, to decrease the pain and suffering of many vulnerable people.” But this past generation of progress is a departure from California’s previous history of limiting the rights of migrants and others. And, even with today’s protections for unauthorized immigrants, the situation of immigrant families is dire in the state due to oppressive federal policies, the pandemic, and a scarcity of housing.

“At a time when health care is so crucial for everybody, people are hesitating to go to the hospitals,” she said.

In response to questions submitted by audience members, panelists suggested that states have a role to play in combating climate change. Ramakrishnan said that states should recognize “the right to human capital” and address climate change as a threat to that right. Michener argued that climate change was both a rights and justice issue, since its impacts fall disproportionately on poor people and communities of color.

Buiza and Ramakrishnan were also emphatic that the possible election of Joe Biden shouldn’t slow down state-level efforts to defend immigrants and pursue other expansions of rights. Ramakrishnan pointedly noted that the Obama administration had opposed sanctuary policies in California. Both he and Michener sought to debunk one conventional argument—that the pursuit of progressive policies in California or other states would provoke oppressive policies in other states. Progressive immigration policies in states have generally been protected by courts, while more regressive ones have been thrown out, Ramakrishnan said.

Kreitner, the moderator and author of the book Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Perfect Union, asked whether the different policies of states helped hold the country together or are evidence that the country is splitting up.

Michener said that the divisions between states were being politicized, racialized, and institutionalized in destructive and increasingly visible ways. Americans, she said, must contend with these divisions. “Do I think it’s going to end well, with us remaining a singular polity that learns our lessons and then moves forward in a unified way?” Michener said. “No, not especially. But I’d be happy to be wrong.”

Buiza, herself an immigrant from the Philippines, noted that she had been to countries with separatist movements, including Indonesia, and that divisions should be taken seriously. But she believes that the United States is still very capable of solving national problems together, including the reform of its immigration system.

“I don’t know that there has been a final referendum on the American Dream,” Buiza said, “and if there is, I would like to know what it is—because right now, I still believe it.”

The post Why States Can Lead America Forward appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Then you might be a true patriot in the greatest American tradition.

Or do you cling to the hope of national unity? Do you believe that we must compromise to preserve our sprawling union of 330 million?

Then you might be part of the problem.

The frightening 2020 election is already disrupting how we think about America and California’s place in it—and thank goodness for that. Perhaps now, Americans might come to see national unity as a dangerous and destructive pursuit, and to recognize that embracing our divisions may provide the best hope for protecting our rights and building a better future.

This powerful argument fuels two smart new books. One is a revisionist American history, Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union by The Nation contributing writer Richard Kreitner. The other is a deep, California-inspired analysis of the present and future, Citizenship Reimagined: A New Framework for States’ Rights in the United States, by Arizona State University political scientist Allan Colbern and UC Riverside Center for Social Innovation director S. Karthick Ramakrishnan.

The two books share a crucial insight: that the federal government has never been a reliable protector of Americans and their rights. So progress and protection often result not from unity, but from different parts of the country going their own way. From fighting slavery to advancing women’s suffrage, from same-sex marriage to marijuana legalization, states have often led the way in extending our rights, often in the face of fierce federal opposition.

When Americans unify and govern themselves through national compromise, on the other hand, we have done awful things together—adopting a Constitution that enshrined slavery and shunned democracy, ending Reconstruction and launching Jim Crow, incarcerating minorities, granting ever-greater powers to presidents, and pursuing endless wars.

The good news is that we Americans—“an Obstinate and Ungovernable People, Utterly Unacquainted with the Nature of Subordination,” in the words of a British officer quoted by Kreitner—aren’t often cursed with national unity. Division, disunion, and cold civil war are our natural states, as befits a country that venerates its founding divorce filing, the Declaration of Independence.

“Secession is the only kind of revolution we Americans have ever known and the only kind we’re ever likely to see,” Kreitner writes.

Kreitner shows how breaking up the country—an idea typically associated only with the Civil War—has been sought by every region, across every American era, and even considered by major figures like Jefferson and Madison. He offers wonderful tidbits, from President Zachary Taylor’s 1849 opinion that California would be better off as an independent entity to the American diplomat George F. Kennan’s 1993 argument that the U.S. had become “a monster country” that should be divided into a dozen different republics. Our devotion to disunion is so great that, if you haven’t thought of splitting up the country, you probably don’t belong here.

“Paradoxically,” Kreitner writes, “disunion has been one of our only truly national ideas.”

From the Civil War to the civil rights movement, division and conflict have inspired Americans to make big changes. “Disunion startles a man to thought,” said the 19th-century abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who argued that the North should leave a Union fatally compromised by slavery. “[Disunion] takes a lazy abolitionist by the throat, and thunders in his ear, ‘Thou are the slaveholder!’”

How to use division in pursuit of a better America is the focus of Colbern and Ramakrishnan’s book, Citizenship Reimagined. These two scholars argue that, to counter toxic federal regimes and expand the rights and powers of regular people, states should exercise powers that we typically think of as federal.

They call this approach “progressive state citizenship” and say that the California of the past decade is a model. In particular, they point to a series of bills signed by Gov. Jerry Brown that expanded immigrant rights. These laws granted undocumented Californians the rights to work, drive, and access public services, while also defending law-abiding immigrants from federal overreach.

In this way, California is a turnaround story—in previous decades, the state practiced “regressive state citizenship,” eroding rights for immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities. For that reason, they caution that the nation needs robust enforcement of the 14th Amendment to ensure a “federal floor” of rights through which states can’t fall.

“Progressive state governments can provide rights and protections to citizens and noncitizens that exceed the federal floor, temporarily anchoring the country to progressive values and ideals during times of restrictive national regimes,” Colbern and Ramakrishnan write.

The pandemic, with the federal government’s failure forcing states to take on health and safety duties, may accelerate the trend of state leadership going forward, the authors suggest.

Since division is so powerful and productive in the United States, it’s quite possible that whatever conflict follows our current election may be far more consequential than the vote tallies themselves. After all, both campaigns prize unity, albeit in very different ways. President Trump explicitly urges authoritarian, anti-democratic, and violent measures to unify America by force, no matter the costs. And Joe Biden’s emphasis on bipartisan unity, and his desire to avoid bolder policies that might divide his broad coalition, explain why his candidacy feels hollow, even to many Americans who support him.

What the country needs is not another compromise that preserves false unity, but an honest reckoning with the costs and benefits of keeping the national marriage together. This means that everything—from a new constitution to the honorable and traditional American idea of independence and secession—should go on the table. Breaking up the country might even prove the least divisive way to make American life more just.

“If the day should ever come … when the affections of the people of these states shall be alienated from each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give away to cold indifference, or collisions of interest shall fester into hatred,” John Quincy Adams said in 1839, as quoted by Kreitner, “far better will it be for the people of the disunited states, to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint.”

The post Should We Embrace Our Divisions to Build a Better America? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s also a symbol of Sacramento’s porcine business model. As our state government hogs ever-greater authority for itself at the expense of California communities, our capital city, and its most powerful people control more of our tax dollars and more of our lives.

We are now living in the fifth decade of California’s great era of centralized power. Back in the 1970s, liberals seeking equality in local school funding and conservatives seeking local tax limits robbed California’s local governments of most of their fiscal and political power—and transferred that power to the state Capitol. In the 40 years since, the single greatest enterprise in Sacramento—pursued by governors, legislators, and political interests of various stripes—has been the ever-greater expansion of state government power.

Downtown Sacramento is a living monument to our centralized era. In response to state government’s ever-expanding power, our local governments and other interest groups had to spend more money to influence and elect Sacramento’s power players. This spending built an army of lobbyists, consultants, organizers, party officials, and media mavens, who turned once-sleepy downtown Sacramento into their campus, with office towers, restaurants, snazzy entertainment venues like the arena, and expensive baubles, including Piglet.

This army of statewide influencers also became major powers in the political life of the city—as donors, officeholders, campaign consultants, and lobbyists. Darrell Steinberg, perhaps the most accomplished state legislator of this century, is now mayor.

Understandably, such ambitious people wanted to do big things that would get noticed around the state—hence all the high-profile construction downtown. But as they made Sacramento less sleepy, they too often neglected the less glamorous tasks of meeting neighborhood needs and managing fundamental departments.

That neglect has long left crucial institutions in Sacramento (pop. 509,000) in bad shape. The city government has struggled in bad times (Sacramento was hit especially hard during the Great Recession) and in good (Sacramento has been especially deficient in meeting local housing demands, especially with the arrival of Bay Area refugees). The once-vital daily newspaper, the Bee, self-destructed and is now bankrupt. Even before COVID-19, the city’s largest school district was nearing collapse, with chronic mismanagement, faulty accounting, and falling enrollment putting schools at risk of—irony alert—a state takeover.

Under the shadow of COVID-19, these two Sacramento dynamics—greater statewide power, greater local failures—have accelerated. The pandemic has given the state government even more power over Californians (with individual cities now needing to wait for decisions on when to open their nail salons) while the outlook has darkened for the city.

The story of Sacramento City Unified School District is probably most damning, as it reveals an elite unwilling to face its failures honestly. For years, leading Sacramentans have ignored warnings from county education officials and even the state auditor that excessive spending—especially escalating pay and retirement benefits to teachers—was putting the whole district at risk.

Even as schools and neighborhoods languished, Sacramento obsessively pursued showy projects to make itself a “major league” destination for tourists and conventiongoers, with particularly risky investments in Piglet’s downtown neighborhood. And now that obsession threatens the city’s future.

The downtown sports arena, which opened in 2016, embodies the treat. While other California cities wisely stopped offering giveaways to the wealthy owners of pro sports franchises, Sacramento helped fund construction of the Golden 1 Center, because it wanted to keep the Kings. But because the city didn’t have the money itself, it borrowed $273 million—arguing that parking revenues would be enough to pay it back. The Bee newspaper served as chief cheerleader for this scheme.

If this was a weak financial proposition before COVID, it became even weaker with the pandemic, which shut the arena and made hardly anyone want to park downtown. Now there isn’t enough money to make bond payments.

If the city put its people first, it could re-negotiate with bondholders or simply default on the debt. But Sacramento officials have indicated that they may force their citizens to pay the price, by reducing services to cover the arena debt.

The arena scheme is hardly the only example of debt-fueled ambition run amuck. In 2018, the city sold $350 million in bonds to revive its convention center—long a loser—and to remodel a civic auditorium and a theater. Those bonds are supposed to be paid back from the city’s hotel tax revenues, which have now evaporated. City officials suggest that they could make those payments by pausing or cutting capital improvement projects.

All these failures raise questions not merely for Sacramento, but for the rest of California. Chief among them: How much longer are Californians going to put up with Sacramento making decisions about our regions and local communities when the capital city can’t even put its own people first?

Overthrowing our centralized state regime, and Sacramento’s power over us, will take popular revolt and systemic change. That might seem too heavy a lift to Californians, but as another Winnie the Pooh character, Christopher Robin, counseled, “You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

Perhaps we could start small. If we first topple Piglet, then we can overturn the California system Piglet represents.

The post The Shiny Sacramento Statue That Reflects California’s Failures appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Then show it. Defy your state and national governments—and refuse to get a “Real ID.”

There are bad ideas. There are very bad ideas. And then there is Real ID—a concept so dangerous and fraudulent that it deserves to be the target of a massive boycott by patriots of all stripes.

“Real ID” is the term for state driver’s licenses that meet federal guidelines approved by Congress during George W. Bush’s administration. The requirements are only now being enforced by the Trump administration. As of October 1, 2020, you will not be allowed to use a driver’s license to board a domestic flight—or to enter federal facilities or buildings where you would have to show ID—unless that driver’s license is a Real ID.

A Real ID driver’s license will have a star on it, but otherwise might not look much different than the one you already have. The difference is that you have to produce more documents to get one. These may include an original birth certificate, a social security card, a marriage license if your name has changed, two proofs of residence, and other documents to prove that you reside lawfully in the United States.

Such requirements may sound like they provide more security, but in fact the opposite is true. The acts of forcing people to submit more identification and then putting that personal information in databases actually introduces new risks. Real ID will make it easier for hackers and terrorists to steal our identities, and for governments and corporations to discriminate against us.

And by making Real ID a requirement for travel within the country, the American government is effectively creating an “internal passport” of the sort that oppressive regimes (including North Korea) use to limit their people’s freedom of movement, and to create distinct classes of citizens.

With state governments—including, disgracefully, California’s—now encouraging people to get Real IDs, the best defense is to refuse to comply. If enough Americans opt out, Real ID won’t be able to gain enough of a foothold to be a standard.

Those 100 million Americans without Real IDs, or some federally sanctioned ID like a passport, should refuse to get them. Those of us who have compliant IDs should refuse to present them, and insist on our right to access the airports and federal buildings our tax dollars pay for. Such defiance would create unbearable pressure on airlines, and on our governments, to back away from the rule.

And every patriotic American should be calling, texting, emailing, and annoying the hell out of every elected official and government worker they know until the Real ID is as dead as Stalin, the sort of person who would have appreciated it.

This American horror story started with 9/11, when hijackers used fraudulently purchased Virginia driver’s licenses to board planes, which they then flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. After that, states cracked down on driver’s license fraud and beefed up security measures, and the federal government boosted airport security. There haven’t been any hijackings since.

That should have been the end of it, but the American security state never stops pursuing more control over our lives. So Real ID—imposing onerous new requirements on state-issued IDs, including driver’s licenses—passed Congress in 2005, with little debate, since it was part of a bill that funded tsunami relief.

As states started considering how to comply with Real ID, they became alarmed. Issuing the IDs to all drivers would be costly and violate people’s privacy, without producing any demonstrable improvement in security. Under Real ID, states would be required to link their driver’s license databases together, effectively creating a national database that would be searchable by a federal government already engaged in mass surveillance of our calls and digital communications.

So many states, both blue and red, resisted implementation of Real ID, that the federal government issued a series of delays. When President Obama, a critic of Real ID, was elected, his administration essentially ignored the requirement.

But the xenophobic Trump administration has revived Real ID in 2017, claiming it was needed to protect the country against foreigners. The Department of Homeland Security applied pressure by setting an October 2020 deadline for all states to issue Real IDs. Most states quickly surrendered because of carrots (more federal money), sticks (the fear that their citizens would be unable to board planes, creating anger and economic costs), and the politics of looking weak on security. Three states—New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Oregon—have yet to issue Real IDs, though they have pledged to comply before the deadline.

With the states having caved, regular citizens are the last line of defense against Real ID and its many perils.

Real ID will abet the federal government’s already out-of-control discrimination against immigrants and their families. States like California, which offer driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, have to issue two different kinds of IDs, one Real ID and another that does not conform. This instantly makes a potential target of immigrants—and non-immigrants for that matter—who carry a non-compliant driver’s license. ICE will very likely compare DMV databases to Real ID databases to identify people who didn’t qualify for Real ID.

And that is only part of the problem. Real IDs could quickly become national IDs that might be required for getting a job, renting an apartment, arranging child care, picking up a prescription, boarding a train, making hotel reservations, entering national parks, paying with a credit card, or—eventually—exercising your right to vote. Before long, those who can’t get Real IDs will be second-class citizens.

The whole idea is discriminatory—against Americans. Under Real ID, an international criminal with a valid passport can automatically travel around our country as he or she wishes. But your neighbor who can’t find her certified birth certificate can’t fly Southwest to Phoenix to watch spring training baseball.

Real ID will be harder to get for women who changed their last name upon getting married; since they will have to produce more documents to account for name changes. There are also horror stories about naturalized Americans being denied Real IDs because of bureaucratic suspicions about their foreign birth certificates.

This national nightmare may start at the airports. The travel industry has estimated that 80,000 people would be barred from boarding a plane daily under current laws. Such an event would occasion serious disturbances at airports, and put airlines and the economy at financial risk.

The only thing worse than not having a Real ID might be having one. Real IDs have been called “hacker bait,” since they would give criminals and others another supposedly trusted identification to penetrate. Even worse, because Real IDs are machine readable, they would allow for even wider tracking of our movements and actions. And if you lose a Real ID—or it malfunctions—get ready for bureaucratic nightmares that would make Kafka blush. Newspapers will carry stories about people with Real ID problems who can’t access government offices to resolve them, because they don’t have Real ID.

Real ID will also tie California in knots. The vast majority of the state’s 27 million drivers don’t have Real IDs, and the dysfunctional DMV can’t meet the demand. And the federal government has already proven an unreliable partner in complying with Real ID. In 2018, California issued more than 2 million Real IDs—but then the Trump administration changed the standards for issuance without warning. (Fortunately, those Real IDs remain valid, but must be renewed at the higher standard.)

When I went on the California DMV site to inquire about what I would need to do to get a Real ID, the site told me not to get one until 2022, when my license is up for renewal. That’s because I have a U.S. passport, and can fly or enter a federal facility with that. But most Americans don’t have a passport.

For all these reasons (and more that I don’t have space to list), it’s high time that California and its political leaders stop being distracted by lesser threats—like facial recognition—and focus on protecting us from the immediate threat of Real ID.

The legislature and governor should stop the DMV from issuing any more Real IDs and pass legislation that bars California retailers, landlords, and other institutions from requesting or requiring Real ID. And our Congressional representatives should attach a repeal of Real ID to any and all must-pass legislation. This is a cause well worth shutting down the government over.

Defiance isn’t easy, but it’s our best available strategy in this case. It’s also necessary, because Real ID is incompatible with life in a free society.

The post It’s Unreal Just How Awful ‘Real ID’ Is appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As California builds its capacity to fight the Leviathan that is the Trump administration, does it risk turning our state government into a Leviathan of our own?

This unhappy question—about whether regular Californians and their communities may get swallowed up by the state monster we’re creating to fight the federal monster—occurred to me while I was reading Gary Gerstle’s powerful 2015 history, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government. The book breaks new ground by examining the history of governance in the United States by putting our 50 peculiar institutions—our states—at the heart of the narrative.

The key to understanding the American experiment, argues Gerstle, an American historian based at the University of Cambridge, is grappling with a nasty contradiction. The American Constitution and our federal structure have liberal origins: They are designed to limit government in the name of protecting liberty. But our states are governed by a different, more authoritarian theory: They can use their strong policing powers to coerce us in the name of the greater good. For most of American history, the states got away with terrible abuses against their people, Gerstle notes, because they were exempted from the Bill of Rights.

We typically associate the power of states with the South, along with the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow. But throughout its history, California has been aggressive in using, and often abusing, its state power—in our genocide of Native Americans, our discrimination against people of Asian origin or heritage, and our protection for those legendary corporate crooks, the railroad barons of Sacramento.

Indeed, even as the Golden State has changed, defending our state’s power has been a California constant. Gerstle quotes Stephen Field, the first U.S. Supreme Court justice from California, as embodying the “laissez-faire” view that states can do whatever they want. Field wrote in 1885, “Neither the Fourteenth Amendment, broad and comprehensive as it is, nor any other amendment, was designed to interfere with the power of a State, sometimes termed its police power, to prescribe regulations to promote the health, peace, morals, education, and good order of the people, and to legislate so as to increase the industries of the state, develop its resources and add to its wealth and prosperity.”

It wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that state power was finally curbed by the federal government, which grew to previously unimaginable size and power in response to the Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement.

Ironically, this expansion of federal power—as well as the rollback of state power—was championed by a former California governor, Earl Warren, when he was chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Under the Warren Court, the more expansive federal government stopped states from violating the rights of minorities, while building up social programs for the poor and middle class. But the new federal Leviathan also imposed unprecedented regulations on people’s lives (including restrictions on immigration) and ratified corporate power (which provided the money-fueling politics), as it created an imperial presidency and a fearsome national security state that engaged in constant warfare.

Our “era of near-permanent war,” Gerstle writes, “threw together in one government a judicial and executive apparatus devoted to expanding civil rights and civil liberties, and an equally vigorous national security apparatus driven by the imperatives of surveillance and secrecy.”

These contradictions, Gerstle argues, have contributed to today’s paralyzing political polarization. The federal government is so powerful that both political parties feel compelled to fight for every inch of power. Four years after Gerstle’s book, I’d add this irony: For all their disagreements, Trump and his Democratic challengers agree that they like the federal juggernaut. Their battles are over who controls it.

That’s why California’s fight against the federal government is righteous—and necessary. How could our state not resist when faced with a federal monster led by such a deranged and dishonest person? And it makes sense to build up the Golden State’s own capacities, and expand its own legal power, in the service of protecting our immigrants, our cities, our health care, our economy, and our environment from a Trump administration that lies about everything from the state of our streets to our elections.

But in so doing, we are turning our already powerful state into a one-party-controlled Leviathan of its own. Californians of all stripes should be scared. Power corrupts, and it’s inevitable that our state leaders will eventually turn this creation against us. Our state government is also profoundly vulnerable to hijacking. It’s not hard to see how powerful interests hostile to California could seize control—likely through manipulation of our dysfunctional ballot initiative process or of our top-two election system, which can produce perverse and anti-democratic results.

While the federal government is fighting an uncivil war against California today, I’d argue that in the long term, the biggest threat to California is its own state government, which was devoted to centralizing power long before Trump emerged.

In California, the left and the right have both worked to make Sacramento more powerful for more than a century. In the first half of the 20th century, progressives took power from local communities in the service of creating regulatory agencies and statewide political tools like the ballot initiative. In the second half of the 20th century, conservatives, in their pursuit of tax reductions and longer sentences against criminals, transferred power from local communities to Sacramento. In the 21st century, ascendant progressives have chosen to award more power to the state—all in the name of tackling worthy problems including poverty, pollution, and climate change.

Gerstle, as a historian all too familiar with the evil that states can do, is wary of newly powerful states, and argues for remaking the U.S. Constitution to put the federal government on firmer footing. But reading him, I had visions of an epic battle between the twin Leviathans of federal and state power, roiling the seas around every single citizen, and potentially swamping many communities and values that we hold dear.

Instead, Californians, and citizens of other states, should consider a different form of resistance. We must form a movement to restore local democracy and control, and defend ourselves against excessive power—be it in Washington, D.C., Sacramento, or in corporate corridors.

After a century of centralizing power at the state level, California’s local governments are too weak and resource-starved to address our most serious problems in housing and school quality. We must return power to these local sites. Our cities are full of smart and sophisticated people who could govern themselves better than the Sacramento mandarins. And a decentralized system would provide both greater diversity and greater protection from the excesses of state power.

One obvious lesson of the Trump era should be the danger—dare I say, the madness—of investing massive government authority in one person. The best bet for American democracy’s survival would be to return its authority to the local level, where politics can still be conducted through human conversation, not through social media blasts. Back in ancient Greece, cities were the primary units of democracy. They should be again.

Of course, first things first. We desperately need Sacramento’s Leviathan to protect us from the feds. But once that fight is won, Californians and their communities will need to come together to protect ourselves from Sacramento.

The post In Fighting the Imperial Presidency, California Is Creating a Monster appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.