Let’s Send J.D. Ford To Congress

For the last couple of terms, Indiana’s Fifth Congressional District has been “represented” (note quotation marks) by Victoria Spartz. I will refrain from characterizing the Congresswoman, since I live in Indiana’s Seventh Congressional district (where I am very happy with my own Congressman, Andre Carson). I’ll just link to a 2025 Town Hall meeting at which her constituents–in a district she’s helping to turn from Red to Purple–roundly booed her performance in office.

I will also share that I was delighted when, a week or so ago, J.D. Ford announced he’d be running against Spartz. J.D. is one of the more thoughtful members of Indiana’s terrible state legislature. (I know–being “more thoughtful” than the MAGA culture warriors who dominate that body is faint praise…But J.D. has been an informed and hardworking member of the Indiana Senate since he was elected to that body in 2018.)

When I saw the announcement, I dug through my past posts to retrieve what I had written when J.D. first opposed then-incumbent Mike Delph. As he prepares to run against an equally unsuitable incumbent, I thought I would share that post.

At a recent candidate forum, J.D. Ford–who is running against Mike Delph–made what should have been one of those “duh, yeah, we learned that in high school civics” observations: when businesses open their doors to the public, that constitutes an obligation to serve all members of that public.

There is a reciprocal relationship–a social contract– between business and government. The government (which collects taxes from everyone in its jurisdiction, no matter their race, religion or sexual orientation) uses those tax dollars to provide services. Those services are an essential infrastructure for the American businesses that must ship goods over publicly-financed roads, depend upon police and fire departments for safety, and (in some cities, at least) public transportation to bring workers and customers to their premises.

As Ford noted, business that want to discriminate– who want to pick and choose which members of the public they will serve–are violating that social contract. They want the services that are supported by the tax dollars of all segments of the public, but they don’t want to live up to their end of the bargain.

Where Ford (and I) see fundamental fairness, Mike Delph (surprise, surprise!) sees religious intolerance.

“I was saddened to hear him express such intolerance for those of us that hold deep religious conviction,” Delph told The Star. “Religious liberty is a fundamental American ideal.”

Let’s call this the bull*** that it is.

If your religious beliefs preclude you from doing business with gays, or Jews, or blacks, then don’t open a retail establishment. Don’t enter into a contract knowing that you will not honor its terms.

Religious liberty allows you to hold any beliefs you want. It allows you to preach those beliefs in the streets, and to refuse to socialize with people of whom you disapprove. You have the right to observe the rules of your particular religion in your home and church, and the government cannot interfere. But when you use religious beliefs–no matter how sincere–to disadvantage people who are entitled to expect equal treatment, when you use those beliefs as an excuse not to uphold your end of the social contract, that’s a bridge too far.

It would be wonderful to have an Indiana Congressional Representative who clearly understands that basic constitutional principle.

Important as that is, my enthusiastic support isn’t based only that essential understanding.

During his time in the Indiana Senate, Ford has demonstrated the ability to get things done, even as a member of the minority. He’s served as Caucus Chair of the Indiana Senate Democrats, and during the 2024 and 2025 legislative sessions, served on a variety of committees, including Education and Career Development, Elections, Ethics, Family and Children Services, the Health and Provider Services, Local Government, and Rules and Legislative Procedures committees.

And unlike Spartz, who has a reputation for public outbursts and confrontations with colleagues and staff,  and for a management style politely described as “dysfunctional” (a style that has contributed to high levels of staff turnover and general lack of effectiveness), J.D. has modeled appropriate legislative behavior.

He’s also a really nice guy.

Fifth District voters– if you send J.D. Ford to Congress, you won’t have to yell at him in Town Hall meetings….

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I Have A Litle List…

Given the fire hose of illegality, unconstitutionality and immense stupidity coming out of the Trump administration on a daily if not hourly basis, people might be forgiven for failing to notice the effort to access and amass all kinds of data.

But control of data is important–and the nature of the information the administration is stockpiling is chilling.

As the Bulwark recently reported, the administration isn’t just compiling lists of immigrants in order to unleash ICE on them. It is busy collecting a wide variety of other information– lists of people with developmental disabilities, lists of “dissidents”—and lists of Jews.

The administration’s effort to collect such data may seem counter-intuitive; after all, it has been busy deleting and censoring any information that it finds inconsistent with its efforts to promote White Supremacy. (As a political science friend recently pointed out, the only campaign promise Trump has kept is his promise to MAGA to re-institute racism.) In addition to its ideologically-motivated elimination of statistics on climate change, hunger, trade and sexual orientation, it has methodically deleted photos of nonwhite people who have excelled in various areas, and even photographic evidence that nonwhites have served in the military from government websites. 

But now it’s becoming clearer that some of the most disturbing developments don’t involve data the administration is suppressing, but rather data it’s collecting—in some cases illegally—and the ways those data can be weaponized against perceived enemies.

It isn’t only nonwhite folks who are being targeted, it’s any group that MAGA fears and/or hates. The administration has actually sued the University of Pennsylvania because that institution has refused to hand over a list of its Jewish faculty, staff, and students. (Penn quite correctly has refused, but last year, Barnard complied with a similar demand.)

As the Bulwark article points out–and as every Jew knows–there are good historical reasons to worry when an authoritarian  leader is trying to compile a registry of Jews–especially when that leader has referred to Jews as “disloyal,” and that leader’s coalition has many outspoken Jew haters and Holocaust deniers.

It isn’t simply an effort to compile a list of individuals that MAGA considers “Other.” The administration’s war on diversity–on people and places that aren’t lily-White “Christian” enclaves–extends to entiire Blue states–states that Trump obviously considers enemy territory. The AP has recently reported that executive branch agencies have been ordered to compile a list of monies being sent to Blue states.

President Donald Trump’s budget office this week ordered most government agencies to compile data on the federal money that is sent to 14 mostly Democratic-controlled states and the District of Columbia in what it describes as a tool to “reduce the improper and fraudulent use of those funds.”

The order comes a week after Trump said he intended to cut off federal funding that goes to states that are home to “sanctuary cities” that resist his immigration policies. He said that would start Feb. 1 but hasn’t unveiled further details.

The obvious purpose of these lists–the only reason to acquire this data–is to differentiate between those MAGA considers “real Americans” (Whites, certain “Christians,” residents of Red states) and those who must be considered enemies. Other.

There are a number of recent “remakes” of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I have a little list…”  In all of them, the chorus is the same: “They never will be missed”….

Shades of Joe McCarthy.

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The Crime Rate

One of the most successful political tools employed by MAGA bigots is fear–fear of dark-skinned people, and especially fear of crime (which, of course, they attribute to those dark-skinned folks). When I venture into suburban areas, I frequently encounter people who express shock that I actually live in my city’s core. Aren’t I afraid? Can I walk the streets? Implicit in those inquiries are two assumptions–a frequently voiced belief that downtown areas are crime-ridden, and a more masked belief that “those people” who populate city centers are criminals.

Facts, apparently, are irrelevant. In a recent column, our Chief of Police noted that crime in downtown Indianapolis represents all of six percent of all crime in our city–a statistic that accounts for my complete lack of wariness when I walk (yes, walk) to the grocery, the dentist, the bank…

My city isn’t the only urban area that is safe.

It turns out that, despite the racist rhetoric of Trump and his enablers, American cities are not hell-holes. (At least they weren’t until ICE was loosed upon them.) As The Atlantic has recently reported, America is currently experiencing a remarkable improvement in public safety. Moreover, that improvement has occurred despite a police-staffing crisis. “In August, the FBI released its final data for 2024, which showed that America’s violent-crime rate fell to its lowest level since 1969, led by a nearly 15 percent decrease in homicide—the steepest annual drop ever recorded.”

Preliminary 2025 numbers look even better. The crime analyst Jeff Asher has concluded that the national murder rate through October 2025 fell by almost 20 percent—and all other major crimes declined as well. The post-pandemic crime wave has receded, and then some. According to Asher’s analysis, Detroit, San Francisco, Chicago, Newark, and a handful of other big cities recorded their lowest murder rates since the 1950s and ’60s. “

According to Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton who studies urban violence, America’s cities are as safe as they’ve ever been in the history of the country.

What is puzzling is that this low point in violent crime has accompanied a downturn in police employment–there were 6 percent fewer officers at the beginning of 2025 than at the beginning of 2020, according to a survey by the Police Executive Research Forum, thanks to retirements and departures.

There are many plausible explanations for the recent crime downturn: sharper policing strategy, more police overtime, low unemployment, the lure of digital life, the post-pandemic return to normalcy. Each of these surely played a role. But only one theory can match the decline in its scope and scale: that the massive, post-pandemic investment in local governments deployed during the Biden administration, particularly through the American Rescue Plan Act, delivered a huge boost to the infrastructure and services of American communities—including those that suffered most from violent crime. That spending may be responsible for our current pax urbana.

As a researcher at the University of Chicago put it,  ARPA sent billions of dollars to local governments to use as they saw fit. It turned out that “Investing in education, police, librarians, community centers, social workers, local nonprofits. Local-government employment rolls increased almost perfectly inverse to the crime rate.”

The article described the turn-around in Baltimore, a city that had experienced high crime rates for years, and noted that the approach used in Baltimore was only one “of scores of alternative public-safety ideas that were funded through ARPA.”

Cook County, home of Chicago and the nation’s second-largest county, put roughly $36 million into efforts such as Healing Hurt People Chicago, a trauma-recovery program for crime victims. Mecklenburg County, home of Charlotte, North Carolina, used ARPA to fund a “youth peace summit” and advertise a gun-lock-distribution program. Some ARPA money also bolstered police and sheriff’s departments directly.

The article emphasizes that the monies local governments directed explicitly to crime reduction represented a small percentage of ARPA funds supporting other uses, like summer jobs for teens, blight reduction, and green spaces.  The largest category of ARPA spending was in “government operations”—funding local services and putting people back to work.

It turns out that when local governments have sufficient funding to support more extensive local infrastructures, crime declines. As one mayor put it, “There are so many factors that influence those crime statistics—parademic-response time, jobs programs, conflict-resolution techniques at violence-interrupter organizations, investments in neighborhood conditions. A thousand fathers for that victory of crime reduction.”

The last of ARPA grants will be gone this year. (Many have already been cut by the Trump administration.) We’ll soon see what really works to reduce crime–unleashing the ICE Gestapo on urban people of color, or adequately funding local governments.

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It’s The Structure, Stupid!

James Carville famously coined “It’s the economy, stupid!” reminding Bill Clinton to focus on economic issues. Unfortunately, given the civic illiteracy of most Americans, an exhortation to focus on the nation’s structural flaws would be met with confusion rather than recognition.

In my Law and Public Policy classes, I emphasized those underappreciated structural issues–the effect of such things as the Electoral College, gerrymandering and the filibuster on democratic deliberation and policy formation. This essay from Lincoln Square may mean that recognition of our underlying problem is spreading.

The essay calls for an honest evaluation of the incentives and disincentives built into our governing structures, and recognition of the fact that economic and social stress will reveal both the strengths and weakness of those structures.

Not all of those problems are governmental. The essay begins by describing distortions of our current information environment–distortions to which I frequently allude.

In the United States, stress is filtered through an information environment that does not clarify reality but actively distorts it. A significant share of Americans consume content labeled “news” that does not perform the function of news. Rather than explaining policy, demystifying institutions, or holding power accountable, this content is engineered to provoke emotional arousal—disgust, resentment, fear, and a sense of embattled identity. Fox News is the clearest and most consequential example, not because it is merely biased or provocative, but because it pioneered a durable model: partisan infotainment optimized for outrage, monetized confusion, and political alignment.

The effect is not simply misinformation. It is misdirection.

As the essay quite accurately notes, this misdirection is amplified by social media.

Of course, it isn’t only the Wild West of the Internet. As the essay reminds us, America has a history of excluding entire populations from our social contract–pairing a rhetoric of democracy with a practice of authoritarianism.

And governmental design decisions compound over time. Constitutional mechanisms were built to restrain the “passions of the masses”–aka democracy. So we have a Senate where equal power is exercised by  states with dramatically unequal populations, a House of Representatives that has kept 435 members despite the quadrupling of the population, gerrymandering that allows representatives to choose their voters… And a Supreme Court, “always undemocratic by design” that has become an “active amplifier of minority rule, weakening democracy’s capacity for self-defense.”

As the essay quite accurately notes, these are not incidental flaws. 

The Electoral College sits at the center of this architecture. Its defenders invoke balance and federalism, but its operational effect is to concentrate political attention on a handful of “swing states.” The very existence of swing states is evidence of democratic distortion. National policy—on climate, trade, war, and public health—is effectively decided by a narrow slice of voters in seven or eight states. Politicians are not incentivized to ask what is best for the country as a whole; they are incentivized to ask what will move a few thousand persuadable voters just enough to reach 51 percent.

And then there’s an imperial Presidency that has steadily accumulated power and a Congress “weakened by polarization and perverse incentives” that “no longer serves as an effective counterweight.” The Presidency has morphed into an executive office increasingly resembling an elected monarchy. (We the People may say “No kings,” but we’re a bit late to the dance….)

The essay goes on to document the real-world consequences of these structural flaws.

We like to believe that America is “Number One,” but compared to other democratic countries, “Americans live shorter lives, experience higher rates of preventable mortality, and endure greater levels of violence. Inequality is extreme enough that life expectancy can differ by more than a decade—and in some cases approaching two—within the same metropolitan area.” We  spend more per capita on healthcare than any other advanced democracy but produce worse outcomes– a “result of a value-extractive system that inserts intermediaries to capture profit, rationing care by price, complexity, and employment status. 

Education, childcare, and family policy follow the same logic. In peer democracies, these are treated as civic infrastructure. In the United States, they are treated as private burdens or market opportunities. Higher education is prohibitively expensive. Childcare costs rival housing. Paid family leave is not guaranteed. These choices shape long-term social cohesion—and political behavior.

Desperation is fertile ground for demagoguery.

In a paragraph that truly “says it all,” the author writes that what matters is how societies are designed: “how resources are allocated, who controls those allocations, and whose lives are deprioritized when scarcity is treated as inevitable.”

If and when we emerge from our Trumpian nightmare, we must correct the systemic flaws that got us here. It won’t be easy.

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No Right Without A Remedy

One of the lessons one learns in law school is that there cannot be a right if there is no available remedy.

When you think about it, that makes sense. If I have a right to do X, and you prevent me from doing X, I should be able to sue you. if there is no way to punish you for interfering with my ability to do X, the “right” is non-existent–a fiction.

Which brings me to the Minneapolis murder of Renee Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross.

A recent essay in the New York Times was co-authored by two giants of the constitutional legal community, Erwin Chemerinsky and Burt Neuborne. In that essay, they addressed the question whether Good’s family has a remedy–whether they can even bring a lawsuit against an ICE officer who shot an unarmed mother of three, muttered “Fucking bitch,” and walked away.

Had Good been shot by a state or local officer, there would be no question. For 150 years, a law known as “Section 1983” has permitted suits against those acting “under color of state law.” The Civil Rights Act of 1871 expressly made it a crime for state or local officers to violate a person’s rights. As the authors note, that act also allows “civil suits for monetary damages or injunctive relief against any state or local employees who, in the course of their work, violate the Constitution or federal laws.”

If a city adopts an ordinance that violates the First Amendment, a citizen can sue the city under Section 1983. If a police officer uses excessive force, which the Supreme Court has held violates the Fourth Amendment, the victim can sue the officer under Section 1983. Section 1983 suits account for a significant part of the workload of federal courts.

When I was Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, we routinely brought cases under Section 1983. (A related federal statute that is equally important allows the recovery of legal fees if such a lawsuit is successful–without such a provision, only wealthy people could afford to vindicate their rights.)

Section 1983 only applies to officials acting under the authority of state law. The Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd was sued under that section. But the ICE officer who killed Renee Good is a federal employee–he cannot be sued under Section 1983. And it turns out that there is no federal law authorizing suits against federal officials who violate a citizen’s constitutional rights.

In light of this, in 1971, the Supreme Court came up with a fix of its own: allowing people whose constitutional rights have been violated to sue for monetary damages without needing a federal statute.

In that case, the Court said the plaintiff could sue directly under the Fourth Amendment–and for a decade the court followed that precedent.

But after 1980, the court sharply shifted course. Not once since then has it allowed Bivens suits (as they came to be known) to go forward. In case after case, the court has precluded people whose rights have been violated from suing even when they suffered great injuries….

The Supreme Court repeatedly has said that if Congress wants to authorize such suits, it can enact a law, similar to Section 1983, that allows suits against federal officers who violate the Constitution. Such a law is important to ensure that those whose rights are violated can receive a remedy, including compensation for their injuries. Civil liability is also a crucial way of deterring wrongdoing.

There is no credible argument for continuing this state of affairs. Passage of a law mirroring Section 1983, but for federal officials, would simply level the playing field. There is no reason to exempt federal lawbreakers from rules that apply to their state and local counterparts–no reason to protect federal actors who knowingly violate the constitutional rights of citizens. (It’s important to note that a right to bring suit isn’t a right to win such lawsuits–there are legal and factual defenses available that protect officials against ill-founded accusations.)

As the law now stands, Jonathan Ross may escape liability for an action that would clearly be illegal if he was employed by  local or state police. The absence of a remedy for Good’s family is the absence of a right–in this case, a right not to be murdered by an agent of the federal government. (And it was murder, as anyone who viewed the multiple videos available could clearly see.)

The essay concludes with a call for a “Renee Good Act” that would close this gaping loophole. I can think of few things more appropriate than passing such a law and naming it after Good.

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