WHEN the 102nd Congress convened in January 1991, the Georgia House delegation was comprised of nine Democrats and one Republican—Newt Gingrich. Eight of the Democrats were white (as, of course, is the Republican) and one was black. But more than a quarter of Georgia’s citizens are black, and, in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act following the 1990 census, two more black-majority districts had to be drawn.
ON the day he was inaugurated in 1971, the newly elected Governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, walked across the street from the State Capitol to the Atlanta City Hall to tell the then Mayor, Sam Massell, that the state government stood ready to assist the City of Atlanta in any way it could. Though it received scant attention outside the Atlanta area, this was an event of national significance. For Georgia was one of the very last states whose elected officials consistently played to the rural vote by refusing to help Atlanta significantly in coping with its urban problems. Governor Carter’s visit to city hall thus marked the collapse of the last bastion of true urban-rural conflict in American state politics, and the consequent evaporation of the last empirical justification for a myth that has been invoked again and again by those arguing for further centralization of power in Washington and for mechanisms that bypass the states to give federal aid directly to central cities.
THE issue of judicial activism is hardly new to American politics. Every Court since Chisholm v. Georgia (1793)-the case which led to the Eleventh Amendment— has found itself immersed in the animating political issues of its age. While there is a strong tendency in American political thinking to view the judiciary as an institution “exterior to the state” and removed from the “sweaty crowd” and rancid stuff of everyday political life, the fact of the matter is that, by the nature of its business, the federal judiciary is preeminently a political institution.
ONE of the little analyzed recent changes on the American scene is the rapid spread of legal gambling. As of this writing, 35 states have some form of legal gambling: 31 allow pari-mutuel betting at race tracks, eight have state lotteries, three permit off-track betting on horse races, three permit only charity bingo games, and one has casinos. Changes are coming rapidly. New Hampshire established its lottery in 1963, followed by New York in 1967, New Jersey in 1970, and Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan, and Maryland in 1971-73. New York passed a law in 1970 permitting off-track betting on horse races on local option, and in 1971 the New York City Off-Track Betting Corporation began operations. New Jersey began a daily lottery and Connecticut legalized off-track betting in 1972. In 1973, voters in Maine approved a lottery. In New York, the first stages of legislation to permit casinos have passed, and a referendum on casinos will be held this November in New Jersey. Moves to legalize gambling are under study in several other states, including Kentucky, Rhode Island, and Georgia.
The crisis in which our country found itself following the 2020 election was in many respects unprecedented. Yet it also built on a years-long pattern by which losing politicians have sown mistrust in our elections. We must now wonder if every candidate who loses a major election will refuse to concede and instead set out to raise money and build support on the back of unfounded claims of corruption. To avoid that prospect, we will need to come to terms with the scope of the problem, and that won't be comfortable for either party.
Conservatives tend to think the carbon tax — or indeed, any pollution tax — is an inherently progressive idea rooted in misguided confidence in bureaucrats. But in fact, proposals to tax or price pollution have, from their beginnings, been championed by friends of the market economy. The history of such ideas can help clarify the assumptions that underlie them and illuminate their appeal.
A recent book by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman relaunched a longstanding controversy over the progressivity of the American tax system. This has fueled a new wave of policy proposals on the left. But Saez and Zucman's conclusions are at odds with the facts of the progressivity and the redistributive effect of the U.S. tax-and-transfer system.