The far right has a plan to remake America. They even wrote it down.

 

It’s not like we haven’t been warned. Should the Republican presidential nominee (likely Donald Trump) win the election next year, conservatives have been pretty clear about what they intend to do. In fact, explicitly clear.

Trump himself isn’t much on policy, of course. The 2020 Republican National Convention was notable chiefly because, at his behest, it made no effort to pass a party platform, effectively giving Trump carte blanche for whatever he wished to do in his second term.

But Trump’s all-too-personal vision for a second-term agenda is now leaking into the press. According to stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post, it begins with transforming the Justice Department into an instrument of his vengeance, initially against those first-term appointees Trump thinks betrayed him: former Attorney General Bill Barr, former chief of staff John Kelly, former Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley, and others who opposed his attempted seizure of power. Then comes filing charges against Joe Biden and his family, with the substance yet to be determined.

To this end, Trump is assembling a cadre of lawyers who supported his attempt to cling to the presidency, and who won’t be deterred from doing his bidding—as those wusses from the Federalist Society were—by the niceties of constitutional law. A leading figure among these l’état c’est Trump legal eagles is Jeffrey Clark, a Trump Justice Department official who during the plot to overturn the 2020 election countered a White House counsel’s argument that Trump’s putsch would lead to “riots in every major city” by noting, 

“That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act”—a law that allows the president to deploy the Army to quell protests. That exchange is quoted in the federal indictment of Trump for fomenting the January 6th insurrection. (The Post indicates that Trump is plotting to invoke the Insurrection Act on the first day of his presidency: January 20, 2025.)

At a recent campaign event in New Hampshire, Trump stumbled into a rationale for going after Biden, should he win the 2024 contest. “This is third-world country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” Trump said. “And that means I can do that, too.” If nothing else, that quote explains why Trump is seeking more lawyers like Jeffrey Clark.

But Clark’s current ambit isn’t confined to Mar-a-Lago. He’s also part of Project 2025, an initiative of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which, in collaboration with over 80 other far-right groups (including the Center for Renewing America, where Clark is a senior fellow and director of litigation), is laying out the tasks and recruiting the candidates that the next Republican president must employ to de-woke-ify America, banish liberalism, and extirpate modernity.

When the Post reported that Clark is leading a study on how to implement the Insurrection Act, a Heritage Foundation official quickly sought to assure the wider world that “there are no plans within Project 2025 related to the Insurrection Act or targeting political enemies.”

Oh really?

Earlier this year, Project 2025 published a 920-page manifesto called Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, laying out its agenda for Trump or any other Republican who should win the White House. The book consists chiefly of the world’s longest enemies list, with detailed instructions on how to target them, oust them, and reverse their policies, both real and imagined.

I’ve read every damn page of that book. Here’s what it says.

THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME Heritage has sketched out a blueprint for a conservative presidency. In 1980, the think tank aided another neophyte politician with revolutionary aspirations—Ronald Reagan—with a report, also called Mandate for Leadership, that stretched to 1,100 pages and covered virtually every nook and cranny of government. 

Heritage boasts that Reagan took up the majority of their proposals, including across-the-board tax cuts, “Star Wars” missile defense, inner-city “enterprise zones,” and a hard line with the Soviet Union. On the latter, Heritage claimed that “Reagan sticks so closely to the Heritage suggestions that [Mikhail] Gorbachev complains to Reagan about Heritage’s influence in the first few minutes of the [1986 Reykjavik] summit.”

A subsequent edition of Mandate for Leadership has been produced for every presidential election since 1980. This iteration, very much in the spirit of Trump, is lighter on policy and heavier on retribution. Its enemies list begins with the usual targets of right-wing ire: welfare recipients, lazy and liberal civil servants (since they’re liberal, one might think Heritage would be heartened by their laziness), anti-business regulators, environmentalists, and union bosses. 

But it expands from there to include more recent bȇtes noires: scientists, woke bureaucrats, woke educators, woke diplomats, woke generals and admirals, woke G-men, and anyone who doesn’t indulge the next Republican president’s every whim (an adaptation to the likelihood of a Trump nomination).

The particular frustrations Trump encountered when federal employees pushed back at his more lunkheaded notions loom large in Heritage’s assessment of the federal workforce, which the book’s editors describe as “largely underworked, overcompensated, and unaccountable.”

No matter what department or agency is under discussion in this volume, their officials’ and employees’ adherence to the president’s policies and piques should be their primary, if not only, task. When dealing with the State Department, the book advises, “the next Administration must take swift and decisive steps to reforge the department into a lean and functional diplomatic machine that serves the President.”

If that requires a purge, so be it. The authors advise the incoming administration to identify and interview every Treasury Department official who participated in its DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) activities and programs, and make such activity “per se grounds for termination of employment.”

Project 2025 sees a path to manipulating the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to ensure loyalists take control.

In a 900-page book, one occasionally encounters boilerplate affirming the importance of hiring qualified experts. Writing about the CIA, one author apparently on autopilot says that the administration must avoid selecting intelligence leaders “for their policy views or political loyalties.” But when fully conscious of who he’s advising, he gets down to the real stuff, writing, “The President-Elect should choose a Deputy Director who, without needing Senate confirmation, can immediately begin to implement the President’s agenda.”

That last part is critical. For Project 2025, speed is at a premium, lest career officials persist in doing their jobs. Besides, a Democratic Senate or even a Senate with a narrow Republican majority may resist approving a number of Trump’s more outrageous appointments. Jeffrey Clark as attorney general? Michael Flynn running Defense? All the more reason why deputy directors who don’t need Senate confirmation should take power immediately to begin Trump’s war on his so-called “vermin.” […]    

-Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect

For the entire article: https://portside.org/node/32855/printable/print

 

The Case That Could Destroy the U.S. Government

 

This Wednesday [November 29, 2023], the Supreme Court will hear a case that poses the most direct challenge yet to the legitimacy of the modern federal government. The right-wing legal movement’s target is the “administrative state”—the agencies and institutions that set standards for safety in the workplace, limit environmental hazards and damage, and impose rules on financial markets to ensure their stability and basic fairness, among many other important things. The case, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, threatens all of that. Terrifyingly, this gambit might succeed.

The case involves garden-variety securities fraud. George R. Jarkesy Jr., a right-wing activist and conservative-radio talk-show host, ran a pair of investment funds with $24 million in assets. But he misrepresented how the funds were run, paid himself and his partner exorbitant fees, and inflated the assets’ value. As punishment, the SEC fined him several hundred thousand dollars and prohibited him from working in some parts of the securities industry—very standard stuff.

Jarkesy responded with what can be described only as chutzpah. He didn’t just contest the SEC’s ruling; he alleged that the SEC’s entire process against him was unconstitutional. Among other things, he asserted that Congress never had the authority to empower the SEC and that the SEC adjudicator who punished him was too independent from presidential control.

In May of last year, Jarkesy’s arguments were accepted by two judges on the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In a 2–1 decision, the court agreed with Jarkesy, all but ruling the SEC’s entire existence unconstitutional. The opinion was so extreme that Judge W. Eugene Davis, twice appointed by Republican presidents—and elevated to the appeals court by Ronald Reagan—dissented vigorously.

Jarkesy’s most far-reaching constitutional argument is built on the “nondelegation doctrine,” which holds that there may be some limits on the kinds of powers that Congress can give to agencies. Jarkesy argues that, when Congress gave the SEC the power to decide whether to bring enforcement actions in court or in front of an independent agency adjudicator, it gave away a core legislative function. It thus violated the doctrine and engaged in an unconstitutional delegation.

This is wild stuff. Not long ago, a lawyer would have been laughed out of court for making such nondelegation claims. Today, they’d have a good chance of destroying the federal government’s administrative capacity—taking down its ability to protect Americans’ health and safety while unleashing fraud in the financial markets.

Whether Congress’s grant of authority to the SEC was constitutional should not be a close question. Congress has delegated expansive authority to government agencies since the dawn of the republic. Only twice in American history has the Supreme Court concluded that a delegation to an agency ran afoul of the Constitution—and both of those times, nearly 90 years ago, involved unusual statutes nothing like this one.

The SEC was created as an independent agency in 1934, after the financial crash of 1929, to thwart the sort of market manipulation that preceded the Great Depression; Congress has granted it additional powers over the years to continue protecting financial markets.

Responding to catastrophes and guarding against market manipulation is exactly the kind of work that Congress should empower the executive branch to do. Requiring Congress to legislate in response to every new fraud some crook might dream up would not be a good use of its time. And there’s no reason to think that delegating authority to police markets runs afoul of the Constitution.

This was, of course, irrelevant to the conservative judges who heard Jarkesy’s appeal. The Fifth Circuit majority concluded that Congress acted “unconstitutionally” without “an intelligible principle” by letting the SEC choose where to bring its enforcement actions. But of course, statutes routinely leave prosecutors and other enforcement agencies the discretion over how to proceed in their cases, without raising delegation concerns.

And for more than 75 years, the Supreme Court has recognized that other agencies can decide how to proceed in their policy-making activities—whether via case-by-case adjudications or general rule makings, for example—without even hinting at any delegation problems.

Jarkesy’s second claim—that the internal adjudicator who first heard his case held too much independence—is especially galling. These adjudicators should be independent; the alternative would be to put their regulatory powers at the political whim of whichever administration might be in charge. They have long enjoyed some protection from removal, in order to insulate them from threats of reprisal.

The Supreme Court has always recognized the need to maintain the independence of internal agency adjudicators: Even the conservative Chief Justice William Howard Taft, who wrote an opinion nearly 100 years ago extolling the benefits of presidential control of all government officers, was careful to carve out exceptions for adjudicator independence. But, apparently, Taft is no longer conservative enough.

Underlying the Fifth Circuit’s ruling is a deep misunderstanding of American history. Of the three judges who decided the case, the two in the majority seem to believe that government regulation of any kind is somehow un-American. Their opinion invokes the opening language of the Constitution, “We the People,” and then cherry-picks quotes from the Framers to support a stifling vision of federal power. For instance, they cite James Madison for the proposition that unless we keep the government’s powers strictly separated among three different branches, we will inevitably fall into tyranny.

But Madison goes on, in “Federalist No. 51,” to recognize that “some deviations … from the principle [of the separation of powers] must be admitted.” And Alexander Hamilton, in “Federalist No. 66,” goes further still, championing “partial intermixture.”

Besides, both Madison and Hamilton were interested first and foremost in establishing a powerful national government. That is, after all, why they had participated in what the legal historian Michael Klarman has called the “Framers’ coup” to get rid of the Articles of Confederation.

The Fifth Circuit’s claim that regulation and the separation of powers are incompatible is not simply bad history; like much of the rest of originalist jurisprudence, it is selective history served up to justify a preferred political outcome. In fact, as voluminous scholarship has decisively established, regulation was pervasive in the early republic. Congress has always depended on expansive delegations to govern the country.

Separation of powers was not understood to be a bar to effective government. Indeed, for the drafters and ratifiers of the Constitution, such separation was a pragmatic principle to ensure free and efficacious government.

That is why, far from impeding delegations, Congress made creative use of the separation of powers—such as in the establishment of the Sinking Fund Commission, enacted by the very first Congress, which mixed representation from the three branches to ensure the stability of the federal debt.

The Fifth Circuit’s misuse of history is symptomatic of much of the originalism practiced by judges affiliated with the conservative Federalist Society, who now hold immense power across the federal judiciary. Originalism’s ideology was born in sin; recent scholarship has argued that originalism first emerged to defend segregation following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

And, in any case, many conservative judges don’t even bother to make substantial originalist arguments anymore. A lazy hand-waving suffices instead. They sprinkle in a few historical quotations, refuse to engage seriously with historians’ findings, and then declare that their right-wing policy preferences are dictated by the authority of history.

Thus, Jarkesy’s challenge might succeed. Arguments like his have been rejected by federal courts many times already. But the federal judiciary has drastically changed in recent years, and the Supreme Court with it—opening the possibility of a new, friendly reception to these absurd legal claims. (The Court could also set aside these substantive questions and decide the case on other, more technical grounds.)

Were Jarkesy to win, he would help achieve what the conservative legal movement’s members have long dreamed of: the destruction of the New Deal. The SEC, Jarkesy’s target, is not just the most important regulator of the financial markets, it is also one of the crown jewels of the New Deal agencies. Republicans have had it in their crosshairs for nearly a century.

The consequences of Jarkesy’s success would be disastrous, especially for the American economy. The SEC enforces the basic rules that make stock markets work. Without it, stock issuers and dealers would lie—with disastrous results. One needs only to examine the rampant fraud, contagion, and meltdown in crypto markets last year to see what an unregulated securities market looks like.

More generally, if Congress cannot delegate to agencies, it cannot govern. Congress could never and has never written rules specific enough to anticipate all eventualities. This is why Congress delegated power to the SEC in the first place.

Finally, and most dangerous, ending independence for internal agency adjudicators would undermine the rule of law. Without independence, adjudicators would be beholden to the politicians who oversee agencies. Unscrupulous presidents would use agencies to punish their opponents and reward their allies. This would do more than turn regulators into political handmaidens; it would destabilize markets, stifle growth, and inevitably lead to financial crises.

Of course, if Republicans want to pursue this terrifying course, they can try. The country is still a democracy. The right way to abolish the SEC and undo the New Deal is to win a majority and pass a statute.

But Americans like having functional financial markets and bringing fraudulent hedge-fund managers to justice—just as they like eating unspoiled food and using effective and safe medication. The “administrative state”—that is, government regulation to protect the public—is rightly popular, as Republican presidential candidates, to their chagrin, keep discovering.

But Jarkesy, a fringe figure using fringe arguments, is trying to do an end run around the democratic process and win in the Court what right-wing activists have failed to achieve at the ballot box. The Supreme Court should reject this antidemocratic ploy rather than accept the Fifth Circuit’s fake history.

Noah Rosenblum is a professor at New York University School of Law.

The Atlantic

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Source URL: https://portside.org/2023-11-27/case-could-destroy-government

Uptick in Withdrawals Exposes the Inadequacy of Do-It-Yourself Retirement

 

For decades, employers have been steadily ridding themselves of the responsibility of funding and making payments to traditional defined benefit pensions in favor of 401(k)-type defined contribution plans. But are these individual account retirement savings plans providing sufficient retirement income for most Americans?

For millions of workers, that answer is “No.”

A survey of individuals in the 2020 U.S. Census showed just how deficient these plans are. Only a little more than one-third of workers (34.6%) participated in a defined contribution plan and the median account value of these retirement plans was a woefully inadequate $30,000. Only 13.5% of workers participated in a defined benefit plan that provides a guaranteed retirement income.

The data isn’t much better when total household savings are considered. In the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances for 2019-2022 (a measure of household savings), the median account balance was $87,000 for all households and $185,000 for households with workers nearing retirement (ages 55-64). In the household survey, only 54% of workers said they had a retirement account.

According to a recent report from the National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS), the generation that will begin to retire in the coming decade is significantly unprepared for retirement. NIRS found that Generation X (generally those born between 1965 and 1980) has a median retirement savings account balance of a paltry $40,000.

Even when people save money in their plans, they often don’t keep it there. For example, a new Bank of America surveyshows that of the 4 million participants who have accounts in the plans that BofA serves as recordkeeper, the number of participants taking a plan loan rose to about 75,000 (2.5%) participants in the second quarter of 2023, compared to about 56,000 (1.9%) participants in the previous quarter. The average plan loan balance was $8,550, BofA found.

Several other recent surveys have shown a similar trend of increasing hardship withdrawals. A survey by Fidelity revealed that the share of plan participants withdrawing money from their plan more than tripled between 2018 and 2023, rising from 2.1% to 6.9%. Another survey from Vanguard reported that hardship withdrawals doubled in a four-year span, climbing from a monthly rate of 2.1 transactions per 1,000 participants in 2018 to a rate of 4.3 transactions in 2022.

Participants who withdraw plan funds to cover non-retirement expenses, no matter how justified, are shortchanging their future. Every dollar withdrawn will no longer be in the account where it can grow tax deferred. That lost principle, combined with the loss of potential interest and investment gains over what could be years or decades, won’t be there for them when they need it in retirement. Some who withdraw assets could see their account balances reduced by thousands of dollars, tens of thousands or even more.

Even if a participant eventually repays plan loans to his or her account, the result is usually a significant reduction in their ultimate retirement account balance compared to what they would have had if the money had remained in the plan all along.

The American retirement nest-egg has been traditionally thought to rely on a three-legged stool, consisting of Social Security payments, personal savings and pension income. With employers increasingly terminating the defined benefit pension plans they have been offering their workers and replacing those vehicles with deficient and inadequate defined contribution savings plans, many workers, particularly those with inadequate incomes, will discover on reaching retirement that at least one leg of the stool has been partially, or even wholly, sawed off.

-Pension Rights Center

 by David Brandolph

"Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday" -Heather Cox Richardson

 

Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday…but not for the reasons we generally remember. The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest celebration together at Plymouth in fall 1621, but that moment got forgotten almost immediately, overwritten by the long history of the settlers’ attacks on their Indigenous neighbors.

In 1841 a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer.

This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slave-holding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.

And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.

Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.

In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion.

The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.

New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are gravened on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”

The next year, Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15 he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.

President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of Thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain.

In October 1863, President Lincoln declared a second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation. They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy.

Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming. And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever.

The president invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.

In 1863, November’s last Thursday fell on the 26th. On November 19, Lincoln delivered an address at the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He reached back to the Declaration of Independence for the principles on which he called for Americans to rebuild the severed nation: 

​​”Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Lincoln urged the crowd to take up the torch those who fought at Gettysburg had laid down. He called for them to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people.

“Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”

In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.

And in 1865, at least, they won.

-Heather Cox Richardson

In school board elections across America, voters offer stunning rebuke of culture war politics

 

First came the classroom culture wars. Now, the backlash.

Conservative activists pushing for parents to have more of a say in what their children are taught in school suffered a series of high-profile losses in Tuesday’s election, dealing a major blow to a movement that has advocated for book bans and restrictions on classroom discussion about issues of gender and race.

Voters in multiple states rejected local school board candidates backed by groups such as Moms for Liberty, choosing moderate or liberal candidates instead.

Just over a third of the candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty won their races on Tuesday. The Florida-based nonprofit, which has been at the center of many of the battlers over school curricula, said 50 of the 139 school board candidates it endorsed were elected. The group’s track record for the entire year is only slightly better. Overall, the group said 44% of the candidates it has backed this year won their races.

Tiffany Justice, one of the Moms for Liberty founders, said she feels good about the election results even though the candidates backed by the group lost far more races than they won.

Pointing to the candidates who did win, Justice said, “That means you have 50 liberty-minded individuals that are going to go serve on school boards, that are going to put the focus back on the basics in school, and they’re going to make sure that parental rights are respected.”

Another group, the 1776 Project, said 58% of the candidates it endorsed – many of them in conservative areas – won. “Considering the national environment, we view that as a strong result,” said Ryan Girdusky, the group’s founder.

Since the runup to last year's midterm elections, the GOP has sought to strengthen its grip on local elections by targeting school board races across the country. New right-leaning political action committees began pouring money into school board races in the last cycle – a trend that continued into 2023 and is expected in 2024 – aiming to not only flip control of who governs schools but change education on a national scale.

But teachers’ unions, education activists and others portrayed the less-than-stellar showing by Moms for Liberty and other like-minded groups on Tuesday as a repudiation of their far-right agenda.

“These results underline what families have been telling us for the last two years: They don’t want culture wars. They want safe and welcoming public schools where their kids can recover and thrive,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Jon Valant, an expert on education policy, predicted the outcome of this year’s races could influence future elections as well.

“It’s going to cause school board candidates down the road to seriously question whether affiliating themselves with some of these far-right groups is good for their chances of getting elected,” said Valant, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.

“I think a lot of them are going to come to the conclusion that it is not and that there’s too much risk that comes with associating with these groups,” Valant said.

Have voters had enough of the culture wars?

Local school boards in Ohio have become a battleground for the culture wars raging in schools. But voters signaled on Tuesday they’ve had enough.

In Stark County, which is in eastern Ohio, just one of nine candidates backed by Moms for Liberty was elected. The single successful candidate was an incumbent.

In the Cincinnati area, two of eight candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty won. Two others backed by a group called Ohio Value Voters also were elected. Ohio Value Voters controls a coalition that collects evidence from mostly anonymous tipsters that Ohio schools are indoctrinating children on critical race theory, comprehensive sex education and social and emotional learning.

In the Columbus area, several conservatives ran on culture war promises, including keeping transgender girls off girls’ sports teams, protecting parents’ rights, limiting diversity and inclusion efforts and curtailing sex education. Eight out of 10 of them lost.

Most of the candidates who campaigned on hot-button issues lost because “by and large voters aren’t looking for extremist candidates,” said Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association.

Iowa voters delivered a near clean sweep for progressive school board candidates in the suburbs of Des Moines and in other high-profile races around the state. Advocacy groups across the political spectrum and local elected officials from both parties weighed in this year on Des Moines' suburban school board elections, which are nonpartisan but have taken a heated political turn in recent years.

Only one of the Iowa candidates formally endorsed by Moms for Liberty won a school board seat. Voters also rejected a slate of four candidates endorsed by The Family Leader, an influential Christian conservative group led by Bob Vander Plaats. Nearly all candidates promoted by local Republican elected officials also came up short in the Des Moines suburbs.

Jenn Turner, chair of the Moms For Liberty Polk County Chapter, said recent Iowa laws impacting education made parents more comfortable with what is happening inside schools. Some of them stayed on this sidelines this election, she said.

"Students use bathrooms and locker rooms based on their biological sex. Boys cannot play in girls sports," Turner said. “And sexually explicit books were removed from classrooms and school libraries across the state, and gender identity cannot be taught in K-6 classrooms."

"Our opponents did a good job in misinformation campaigns, telling the public that ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and other classics were being removed, when in fact, only books that had graphic depictions of sex acts or books suggesting porn sites were removed," she said.

Elsewhere, Democrats won five seats and seized control of the school board from Republicans in the Central Bucks School District in Pennsylvania by defeating candidates recommended by Moms for Liberty.

In Loudoun County, Virginia, which has faced the ire of conservative activists over its policies on transgender students, critical race theory and other issues, Democratic-endorsed candidates won or were leading in six of the nine school board races. Three of the four candidates backed by Moms for Liberty were defeated.

School boards and the emergence of dark money groups

David Niven, a University of Cincinnati political scientist, said Tuesday’s elections mark the end of “the stealth school board candidate.”

The emergence of “dark money” groups, which don’t disclose their donors, and the involvement of political action committees and advocacy groups helping culture warriors win in school board races has changed how the races are run, Niven said.

“What we’ve seen in the past in Ohio is folks with pretty far-out-there views could run without that much scrutiny and, sort of a victim of their own success, they have these formal and organized efforts and adjacent efforts helping to know just who is who,” he said.

Before, “it was a lot easier to present yourself as a concerned parent or concerned taxpayer or civic minded and not ever be confronted with ‘Do you want to ban books?’ Or, ‘You want to alter the curriculum or inject police into the schools?’” Niven said. “And now the effort is so much more brazen that it’s kind of a double-edged sword. They’re working harder to do this, but they’re almost at cross purposes with themselves.”

Justice, of Moms for Liberty, said her group is looking to expand its influence by getting involved in state Board of Education elections. Eighty-three percent of the candidates the group backed in November’s elections were first-time candidates, she said. With 50 winning, that means the group has helped 365 people get elected over the past two years.

“The bottom line is this: We are helping a whole new group of people get involved in the civic process and to come and try to reclaim or reform public education,” she said. “Teachers unions have had a lock on school board elections for years. We’re the new kid on the block.”

Valant, however, said the election results could be a sign that voters are losing the appetite for turning school issues into extreme partisan battles.

“These cultural war battles have been a real distraction for last couple of years and, I think, have caused some real harm in schools,” he said. “My hope is that a definite consequence of this is that we’re going to see school board members thinking harder about the trade-offs that come from affiliating with some of these groups.”

Valant said he also hopes the election signals the country is on track to “turning down the temperature a bit” on the culture wars.

by Michael Collins and Laura A. Bischoff, USA TODAY Contributing: Zachary Schermele, Chris Higgins, Samantha Hernandez and The Associated Press

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: School board election results offer rebuke of local culture warriors

School fight: Culture wars have taken hold of school board elections. Students say their well-being is at risk.

In the classroom: Despite political pressure, US teachers lead complex history lessons on race and slavery

Battle against inclusivity: 'Parents' rights' groups labeled extremist: SPLC lists a key Florida group as anti-government

Turning back the clock: Will fights over curriculum usher in new era of segregated schools?