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The Abstract
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> By Evan Mintz and Victoria Ludwin, Arnold Ventures
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The Abstract will be taking a break next week for Turkey Day, so we’re counting our blessings now and offering up a big heap of thanks for bipartisanship. On Monday, President Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF) — a $1.2 trillion bill targeted at building and maintaining roads, transit and internet access; replacing lead pipes; supporting electric vehicles; improving the electric grid; and cleaning up pollution (yet nothing specific for the Ike Dike).
Yes, Virginia (and Texas, New York, California, etc.), there is an Infrastructure Week.
Perhaps even more impressive than the underlying content of the bill is the fact that it passed at all. There have been calls for a national infrastructure bill dating back to the Obama administration. President Trump promised on the campaign trail that he’d pass a bill to make U.S. infrastructure “second to none” — but the outcome landed firmly on “none” after his team failed to put in the work necessary to earn congressional support.
Biden, on the other hand, had an entire war room dedicated to winning votes.
And this wasn’t just a win for Democrats. In the House, 13 Republicans voted for the bill even as six progressive Democrats voted against. In the Senate, the bill received approval from 19 Republicans — a broad coalition stemming from the fact that the underlying bill framework was crafted by a group of five Democrats and five Republicans.
“This is what can happen when Republicans and Democrats decide we’re going to work together to get something done,” said U.S. Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, who was among the Republicans sharing the spotlight with Biden on Monday.
That idea of working together is hard to come by in politics today — as we saw during a rancorous House debate Thursday night on the Build Back Better bill. The atmosphere was already tense after a Republican representative was censured for publishing a cartoon of himself killing a Democratic congresswoman, and the party-line vote on Friday morning just splintered things even further.
What makes it even more depressing is that the hostility seems so unnecessary. There is plenty of bipartisan agreement — at least on paper — around many of the policies covered in the bill, such as allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, guaranteed paid leave, and community violence intervention programs.
In fact, we routinely see bipartisan agreement on these sorts of issues at a state level.
But at the federal level you don’t get much bipartisan movement because the incentives don’t exist. Politicians don’t see the reward for passing popular programs. Instead, elected officials get rewarded for blocking the other side. Why risk working with the enemy if good policy makes for bad politics?
Some Republicans are already starting to agitate against Senate leadership’s support for Biden’s infrastructure bill, one House Republican who voted yes received death threats, and Trump has essentially declared war on anyone who voted for the measure.
They might end up getting their way. Compromise is viewed as a weakness in the primary elections where only extremist partisans show up — and gerrymandering turns primaries into the only election that matters.
Former Republican National Committee Communications Director Doug Heye even expressed concern that his party is acting like "we don't have to accept elections and policy doesn't matter, like penalizing people voting for an infrastructure bill."
It isn’t hard to imagine a political system where instant-runoff voting, nonpartisan redistricting, and high-turnout elections create an incentive for compromise. But alas, this is Thanksgiving. We’ll save the fantastical imaginary tales for Christmas.
— Evan Mintz, communications manager
Related: Listen to the latest episode of Deep Dive, where AV Co-Chair Laura Arnold talks to democracy scholar Larry Diamond and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang about solutions to our nation's partisanship and polarization.
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'It's Entirely About Being Able
to Turn a Profit'
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By Evan Mintz, communications manager
In October, a groundbreaking investigation by the Houston Chronicle found that local bail bond companies were cutting deals with pretrial detainees, often taking below-standard payments or making payment plans with little regard to a judge’s order. This exposé is just another piece of evidence pointing to how the money bail system is essentially broken.
In fact, across the nation, experts and journalists are rebutting fearmongering claims to expose how wealth-based detention promotes discriminatory practices while also failing to prioritize community safety or ensure appearance at court.
Why It Matters: In places like Texas, New Jersey, and New York, efforts to reform the pretrial system and eliminate money bail have been followed by a backlash that tries — without rigorous evidence — to claim that these reforms are responsible for a rise in crime. However, follow-up research and reporting inevitably deflate these false claims. The reality is that money bail does more to promote the bottom line of a for-profit bail bond industry than actually promote safe streets and functioning courts — all while discriminating against the poor and working class who can’t afford money bail.
“No one should be under the illusion that the consideration made by a bail bonds company is about public safety,” explained Micah Derry, bail reform campaign director for Arnold Ventures. “It’s entirely about being able to turn a profit.”
What’s Next: Fact-free fearmongering hasn’t stopped bipartisan coalitions from pursuing bail reform in places like Ohio and Michigan. Meanwhile, Harris County in Texas in pursuing a bail dashboard that will provide some transparency — and data — around cash bail.
“Bail for violent offenders has unfortunately become filled with mischaracterizations, and we need objective data to help people understand what’s actually happening,” said Commissioner Adrian Garcia, who previously served as Harris County sheriff. “Neighborhoods deserve a pretrial system that promotes community safety, ensures court appearances, and protects rights of victims as well as the accused — but all too often the bail bond industry puts profit first.”
Read the story >
Related: A local TV news station found that, despite the Harris County district attorney blaming judges, prosecutors play a key role in how some murder defendants get out on bond.
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‘It's Like You Want to Wake Up From a Bad Nightmare’
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By Torie Ludwin, communications manager
Jaime Murillo looked at Westwood College as a path to a career in the Chicago Police Department (CPD). That’s just what the recruiter at Westwood led him to believe; the television commercials for the for-profit school showed happy, successful graduates in police uniforms. No one bothered to clarify for Murillo that the school did not have accreditation and was not recognized by CPD.
What Happened: After Murillo took out $50,000 in student loans, he heard rumors that the CPD didn’t take Westwood graduates. After asking his professors, the administration, and even the dean of Westwood, he couldn’t get an answer, so he asked a friend in the CPD. That’s when he found out the truth: The credits and degree weren’t recognized by the police.
Why It Matters: Murillo is still paying off the debt — and not working as a police officer. In 2016, Westwood College closed after multiple state and federal investigations found that the school had misled students on job opportunities and credit transfers, and it used misleading advertising and enrollment practices. The U.S. Department of Education has ways to protect students, however.
What’s Next: This fall and winter, the U.S. Department of Education is holding committee meetings to reach consensus on the rules that govern federal student loans, how colleges access the money, and what recourse students have when they have been cheated. This process is called negotiated rulemaking, or NegReg. The Department has the power to strengthen rules to protect students like Murillo from being misled by predatory schools.
Read the story >
Related: Our series with Student Defense and filmmaker/photographer Alex Shebanow highlights student stories and how strengthened rulemaking on federal student loans can have significant impact.
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The Evolution of Policing
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By Evan Mintz, communications manager
"How, with 18,000 police departments in America, do we advance police reforms that strengthen accountability and increase transparency?"
That was the question that Walter Katz, Arnold Ventures' vice president of criminal justice, raised to a room of policymakers at the National Council of State Legislatures' 2021 Legislative Summit last week.
The answer, Katz said, lies in the fact that there are only 50 state legislatures. State lawmakers are in the best position to replace a patchwork of rules with best practices and regulations that reflect the high-risk nature of law enforcement.
Why It Matters: Policing suffers from opaque and discriminatory practices. According to an analysis by the Urban Institute, only 30% of residents surveyed in high-crime, low-income neighborhoods believe that police respect people’s rights. But despite these problems, people living in these communities consistently say that they want a police presence to respond to crime. Lawmakers have the opportunity — and duty — to implement policies that will ensure police are held accountable to those they're supposed to protect and serve.
What's Next: The Policing Project at NYU School of Law has crafted model legislation on data collection and transparency, use of force, pretextual stops, officer discipline and decertification. States are already starting to implement new policing laws. In the last year, at least 15 states have passed use of force standards. At least 14 states created a duty to report or document incidents. And at least 11 states authorized or required state officials or agencies to investigate, audit or prosecute incidents of serious use of force or specific misconduct. But change needs to reach all 50 states.
Read the story >
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A Roaring Success of a Study
— at Just the Right Time
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By Amanda Moderson-Kox, Director of Evidence-Based Policy
When a rigorously conducted study produces evidence at the moment policy is poised to change, the result is beautiful. In 2014, Bottom Line, a one-on-one advising program for low-income high school seniors that aids them in getting into and graduating from college, became subject of a randomized controlled trial (RCT). The blockbuster results from the study were released this year at the same time as the proposal for the College Completion Fund in the Build Back Better Act.
Why It Matters: The evidence shows that Bottom Line is a “ top tier” study — the only program of its kind proven to increase bachelor’s degree completion rates with “a statistically significant effect on improving … relevant outcomes based on strong evidence from at least one well-designed and well-implemented experimental study.”
The College Completion Fund, currently included in the House version of the Build Back Better Act, is specifically designed to fund evidence-based programs that support college completion. It includes a tiered-evidence funding approach, which means that it sets aside approximately 20% of the available funding for programs that meet a “top tier” designation.
The Bottom Line study, whose evidence shows that the program increases college graduation rates, is exactly what the College Completion Fund is looking to support.
What’s Next: The Build Back Better package, with the College Completion Fund (comprised in part of $500 million in grants for evidence-based retention and completion grants) is on its way to the Senate for further negotiations.
The Bottom Line trial will continue for another year of data collection, and it’s expected those findings will likely confirm what we already know: Bottom Line produces a sizable impact on the likelihood of bachelor’s receipt.
Read the story >
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By Juliana Keeping, communications manager
$1.67 billion
Additional costs to patients and taxpayers driven by 2020 price spikes on seven widely used medications.
$1.4 billion
The share of the above added costs attributable to just one drug, AbbVie’s Humira
Drug pricing watchdog the Institute for Clinical and Economic Research released an eye-popping analysis that underscores the urgent need for drug pricing reform, which on Friday did pass in the House as part of the Build Back Better plan. (Now we just need the Senate to preserve those historic provisions to lower drug prices.) The new analysis revealed seven widely used drugs added almost $1.7 billion in additional health care costs in 2020.
Notably missing: Any adequate clinical evidence that would justify the spikes on the seven widely used medications. The latest analysis is the third of its kind in as many years from ICER.
One drug rose above all the rest for saddling society with the tab for significant unsupported price hikes: AbbVie’s Humira. The blockbuster anti-inflammatory drug, with a 10% unsupported hike, added $1.4 billion in spending in 2020, the ICER analysis found.
(The world’s longstanding top-selling prescription drug raked in $21 billion in 2019 alone.)
It all serves to underscore what our president and CEO, Kelli Rhee, wrote recently in The Hill: “Failure to implement drug pricing reform will be a political and policy failure on a historic scale.”
Read the story >
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Criminal Justice
Health
- Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. have topped 100,000 for the first time, NPR reports. “This tragic milestone represents an increase of 28.5%” over the same period just a year earlier, said Dr. Deb Houry.
- Medicare Part B premiums are going up, the Associated Press reports, largely to cover the controversial drug Aduhelm, the new $56,000-a-year medication for Alzheimer’s disease.
Related: ‘We Have a Problem’: New Alzheimer’s Treatment Reflects Dysfunctional Drug Market
- Despite promising reforms to surprise medical billing, people with health insurance who require out-of-network care are still falling through the cracks — and being slammed with massive bills from highly profitable health systems, Axios reports.
- There are 1 million people who have simultaneous Medicare & Medicaid coverage — the “dual-eligible” population. Congress created Fully Integrated Special Needs Plans (FIDE-SNP) to address how tough it is to navigate both systems. The path toward seamless care for some of America’s most vulnerable citizens still needs tending, write AV’s Vice President of Health Care Arielle Mir and Director of Health Care Amy Abdnor, via Arnold Ventures and ATI Advisory.
- On the heels of #ThxBirthControl Day this week, a Democratic coalition of lawmakers reintroduced the Access to Birth Control Act, which would prevent people from being turned away at pharmacies when attempting to access birth control. According to the National Women’s Law Center, pharmacists in 24 states and the District of Columbia have refused either to fill birth control prescriptions or to provide over-the-counter emergency contraception.
Higher Education
- In the Albuquerque Journal, Senator Martin Heinrich explains the multi-generational impact of the College Retention and Completion Grants in the Build Back Better Act.
Democracy
- New polling for the Pew Research Center showing several distinct subgroups of political views across American voters, as Axios’ Stef Kight points out, will have implications for candidates in midterm elections as they gather support.
- Gerrymandering is out of control. A proposed North Carolina congressional map has districts that one opinion writer describes as “a sawed-off shotgun,” “a chicken leg quarter,” and “a flock of geese.” The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gave the state’s map a failing grade.
- Reid Wilson in The Hill notes the remarkable voter engagement in redistricting. “The number of Americans who have engaged with state legislatures and independent commissions working to redraw political boundary lines in the decennial redistricting process has hit vertiginous new heights as voters inundate mapmakers with proposals, suggestions and objections.”
- Politico also notes the significant attention on redistricting. “The idea that voters should pick their politicians, not the other way around, has become a rallying cry. This past decade saw an unprecedented level of redistricting reform effort, with voters in a half-dozen states passing ballot initiatives to create independent commissions or otherwise seek to make the process less partisan.”
Journalism
- Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder has 15 recommendations to address our mis- and disinformation crisis.
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By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, communications manager
From the opening scene of Storm Lake, as the newspaper’s mustachioed editor chain smokes through the dread of a looming deadline, you could sense that the film is a bittersweet love letter to a struggling American institution.
The documentary provides an authentic peek inside an American newsroom fighting to stay afloat amid a faltering commercial business model that is wiping out small mom-and-pop newsrooms like The Storm Lake Times, which have long served as the only voice for their rural communities.
The film’s protagonist, Art Cullen, is a venerated newspaper man who looks typecast for the part. With an unruly mop of a white hair and an ever-present pack of Marlboros, Cullen’s words are plain, but carefully chosen, painting a stark portrait of a town that has become a microcosm of the crises befalling the country. Shuttered family businesses that have depressed the local economy and diminished the paper’s advertising revenue. Family farms pushed out of business by big agricultural corporations uninterested in the health and wellbeing of Storm Lake. A scrappy newspaper that puts out a paper just twice a week and struggles to counter the disinformation spewed on social media and from the cable TV punditry.
“Apparently looking at their breakfast on Facebook is all the information people need to live as an informed voter in America,” Cullen says, as his brother, the paper’s publisher, laughs uncomfortably. “And that’s not how you sustain a democracy. You need people who can talk about facts, and deal in facts.”
Throughout the documentary, we witness the power of the local paper. Tucked between stories about the pork queen’s visit to the local school and a reprint of a grandmother’s pea soup recipe there are pieces that reveal climate change’s toll on Iowa’s farming, tough questions lobbed at Sen. Chuck Grassley about his stance on deportation, and an investigation into a COVID-19 outbreak at a Tyson plant. We see plainly how a vibrant fourth estate not only holds the powerful to account, but tells the vital stories that shape how a community thinks and feels.
By the end, as Cullen sits down to pen an actual letter to his son, Tom Cullen, a reporter at the paper, I was equal parts inspired by their unwavering fight, and frightened for a future without local newsrooms.
“Dear Tom… When James Madison wrote the First Amendment to the Constitutions, he had you in mind,” Cullen writes, in a note that gets printed in the paper. “The reporter is the cornerstone of an informed electorate and a functioning democracy. Tyranny prevails wherever the press is not free. Stand guard.”
Here, here, Art.
Also: On CNN, Bipartisan Policy Center President Jason Grumet discusses the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill as a win as members of both parties came together, although perhaps more slowly and with less strength than what could have been.
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- The California School for the Deaf, Riverside, is having an electrifying football season, steamrolling opponents for an undefeated season that has boosted morale in a town hit hard by the pandemic.
- Awards for the very first Natural Landscape Photography Awards were announced this week. They may seem different from many of the “Wow!”-inspiring nature photos that often dominate these contests because judges tried to reward photos that avoided post-processing and interpretation of images that don’t “respect the inherent truth of the scene experienced.”
- What does it feel like to honor your great-grandfather’s escape from a Native American children’s boarding school by running the same 50-mile path his ancestor did? Ask Ku Stevens, whose love for running and his family’s culture fuels his efforts to win a Nevada state title.
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Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving.
– Victoria and Evan
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Victoria Ludwin is a communications manager for Arnold Ventures’ portfolios on higher education, contraceptive choice and access, evidence-based policy, climate, organ donation reform, and democracy. Evan Mintz is a communications manager for Arnold Ventures’ criminal justice portfolio, with a focus on pretrial and policing.
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