“America is back”

By Nicholas Kristof(Opinion Columnist)

“America is back” became President Biden’s refrain on his European trip this month, and in a narrow sense it is.

A Pew Research Center survey found that 75 percent of those polled in a dozen countries expressed “confidence in the U.S. president to do the right thing,” compared to 17 percent a year ago. Yet in a larger sense, America is not back. In some respects, we are sliding toward mediocrity — and that’s the topic of my column today.

Greeks have higher high school graduation rates. Chileans live longer. Fifteen-year-olds in Russia, Poland, Latvia and many other countries are better at math than their American counterparts — perhaps a metric for where nations will stand in a generation or two.

As for reading, one-fifth of American 15-year-olds can’t read at the level expected of a 10-year-old. How are those millions of Americans going to compete in a globalized economy? As I see it, the greatest threat to America’s future is less a surging China or a rogue Russia than it is our underperformance at home. Please read!

When a Political Party Comes Out Against Voting Rights …

It’s remarkable to see every single Republican in the Senate — every last one! — oppose voting rights legislation, even as Republicans in many states are trying to impede people of color from voting.

My own take is that the state-level Republican crackdown on voting may backfire for two reasons: First, the G.O.P. increasingly is made up of members without a college degree who may not try all that hard to vote themselves; and, second, the perception that Republicans are trying to block people of color from voting may galvanize them to vote. Over the last decade, apathy has been a greater factor than voter suppression in reducing turnout, and this could outrage people out of their apathy. So I’m not so sure that the voting obstacles will work as Republicans hope.

But another element of the Republican campaign is to make it easier for Republican officials in red states to simply overturn voting results that they don’t like. That truly is scary and undermines the legitimacy of America’s political system.

So What About Eliminating the Filibuster?

That’s the progressive solution to problems like the collapse of the voting rights bill. But this “solution” suffers the same problem as the voting rights bill itself: It just doesn’t have the votes.

My own take is that we should get rid of the filibuster, simply because it reduces accountability. It’s better, I think, to have less paralysis and to let a dominant political party get things done, one way or the other. I recognize that I will disapprove of those things when Republicans are in power, but then democracy swings into action and voters will (I hope) hold officials accountable. But preventing either party from doing anything controversial, except through budget reconciliation, doesn’t seem a path either to effective governance or to accountability.

I do wonder if the holdout Democrats will, after a series of Republican filibusters, be willing to curb the filibuster by requiring senators to speak continuously or by taking up Tom Harkin’s suggestion in The Washington Post that the number of votes for cloture (to end debate) should steadily drop, so that the legislative process is slowed but not complete
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June 23, 2021