Stanford University Press Blog

The Specter of Dictatorship Still Haunts Us

How judicial augmentation of presidential power makes our democracy vulnerable.

DAVID M. DRIESEN

The exterior of the U.S. Supreme Court. Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

President Trump’s attacks on the press as enemies of the people and his call to “lock-up” his political opponent in the 2016 election made me realize that Trump’s election endangered America’s democracy. I felt the need to understand more deeply the nature of our vulnerabilities to democracy loss, which led me to study democratic decline in Turkey, Hungary, and Poland and write the Spector of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power ».

While President Trump has now left office, America’s democracy remains vulnerable and under attack. A comparative constitutional perspective helps us better understand the nature of the threats we face. In particular, The Specter of Dictatorship helps us appreciate the danger lurking in the Supreme Court’s support for increased presidential power.

Historically, elected authoritarian leaders have subdued democracies, in part, by taking full control over the executive branch of government, firing neutral experts and political opponents, and peopling the executive branch with their supporters. Once they have control, they use it to undermine the rule of law, tilt the electoral playing field, and shrink the space for public debate. For example, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, uses prosecutorial authority to protect corrupt supporters and unleash unjustified investigation of political opponents. His government uses partisan gerrymandering and restrictive voting requirements for expatriate Hungarians to cling to power. All of these countries use economic pressures to do in opposition media, and Turkey has supplemented that with jailing of opposition journalists. Centralized control over the executive branch facilitates this. The Supreme Court and some scholars, however, support the unitary executive theory, which endorses complete presidential control over the executive branch, even though it provides a proven pathway to autocracy.

Critical approaches to teaching health and human rights in a pandemic

The centrality of asking when does misfortune become injustice?

ALICIA ELY YAMIN

Toronto— Protesters holding a banner demanding housing for the homeless during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public Domain. Via Flickr.

 

We are pleased to present an adapted excerpt from When Misfortune Becomes Injustice: Evolving Human Rights Struggles for Health and Social Equality » .

The sweeping disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic has generated broad public concern with the connections between population health, health systems, and democracy, on the one hand, and between our neoliberal global order and the realization of health and other human rights, on the other.  Students across geographic regions and disciplines—law, public health, nursing, sociology, gender studies, anthropology, and the like— are grappling with how to understand the suffering we ourselves and close friends and family are experiencing, as well as diverse people across our societies and the globe—and  what are appropriate legal, political and economic responses? 

These questions are not new. Having spent a career interviewing the loved ones of women who died in childbirth, and others who have died painful deaths in abject poverty, including from HIV and untreated cancer, I have come to believe that how we understand the relevance of human rights to health is inextricably shaped by how we understand individual versus societal responsibility for the drivers of disparities in health, and in turn what is misfortune versus injustice.

Even before the pandemic, it was clear that there was a need to disrupt our traditional strategies in human rights to address the drivers of scandalous inequalities across global health.

When we reexamine what it means to say that something causes someone’s illness or condition, we are forced to look at what produces certain distributions of power and privilege within and across societies. For example, is the cause of enormously disproportionate COVID-19 mortality among people of color in the United States really due to individual biological differences and co-morbidities?  Or is it more accurate to understand them in light of structural dynamics and social determinants, such as unequal exposures as essential workers, and housing conditions, and poor access to public health and medical care in a marketized health system?   When we call on ourselves and others to ask these questions, it quickly leads to de-naturalizing both the biological individualism of the medical and health fields and to questioning prevalent narratives about poverty, inequality, and population health which so many societies take for granted in our neoliberal world.

Even before the pandemic, it was clear that there was a need to disrupt our traditional strategies in human rights to address the drivers of scandalous inequalities across global health.  So I wrote When Misfortune becomes Injustice » not as a traditional text but to encourage critical reflection about what is required of societies, and of our global governance, for diversely situated people to live lives of dignity , including effective enjoyment of  health rights. In the devastation wrought by this sweeping pandemic, it has become even more essential for students grappling with these questions not just to learn a fixed set of skills but to assess critically how we got here in order to devise transformative ways forward, and to connect human rights to broader struggles for health and social justice, including climate justice.

The digital arms race

Can viral videos inhibit police brutality?

RONALD NIEZEN

Photo from istock by Getty Images. Stock photo ID:1174040771. Credit:EvgeniyShkolenko

 

The viral video that captured George Floyd's death sparked global outrage and huge protests around the world. In the wake of his killing, more footage of police violence surfaced as people took to the streets during the Black Lives Matter protests in clashes with law enforcement.  At the same time, surveillance technologies have taken on a power of their own. States everywhere are trying to gather data about protesters and dissidents, using sophisticated tools of spyware and surveillance. Under the surface of the tragic events surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement and myriad sites of mass violence elsewhere, we are glimpsing a secret arms race. This is a contest between law enforcement and its supporting technology corporations on one hand and activists (in all their variety), investigative journalists, and justice-oriented tech experts on the other.

Hateful language and violent videos are vehicles for trauma as well as weapons of accountability.

Those of us who lived through the Cold War tend to think of arms races as contests between powerful states vying for military-technological supremacy. Increasingly, many of us now recognize that a new kind of digital arms race is happening in a shadowy underworld, this time between ambitious governments using hacking, spyware, and troll farms to gain advantage over others. But there is yet another digital contest happening, not in the world of intelligence agencies, but before our eyes as we watch videos of police brutality.

As a tool in this contest, videos depicting collective violence have their own violent power. Content moderation on social media platforms, for example, is very dangerous activity. Thousands working as content moderators for platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram experience high levels of stress and trauma from constantly witnessing violence and hate speech. The public experiences this too:  Social media-posed footage of police brutality--the death of George Floyd being arguably the most widely seen video of this kind--has been an unintended cause of trauma for activists and members of the Black community, and anyone else whose sympathies and curiosity led them to view it. The same powerful emotions these videos evoke are key to the way they provoke collective indignation. Hateful language and violent videos are vehicles for trauma as well as weapons of accountability.

HOW THE U.S. CAN SUPPORT IMMIGRANTS EN ROUTE TO CITIZENSHIP

Ming Hsu Chen on American membership and exclusion.

MING HSU CHEN

The Statue of Liberty in silhouette at sunset. Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay

 

This piece was previously posted on the Scholars Strategy Network.

For the last decade, U.S. federal immigration policy has focused on enforcement. Indeed, an anti-immigrant thrust undergirds many of the major domestic policies of the last thirty years – from the tough on crime initiatives of the 1980s, to the welfare and work reforms of the 1990s, to the anti-terrorism efforts following September 11, 2001. Most recently, powerful political forces have pushed ethno-nationalism as a strategy for protecting America during a public health crisis. Beyond so many tendencies to reject immigrants are the underappreciated roles immigration policy can play in integrating immigrants rather than excluding and deporting them.

Members or Not?

Compared to U.S. citizens, immigrants hold statuses far short of full membership in U.S. society. For many, membership is circumscribed by their legal status as noncitizens. There also social, economic, and political barriers to full membership, even for naturalized citizens. Many immigrants, including naturalized citizens, struggle with access to language instruction, face economic barriers in the workplace, and find themselves without a political voice or vote. Increasingly, many fear brushes with law enforcement or immigration authorities that may lead to detention or deportation.

U.S. immigration law, unfortunately, tends to draw boundaries and exclusions. Noncitizens sit outside the circle of membership, and in many areas the laws are not obligated to afford them the equality or fair treatment due to citizens. Rather than seeing immigrants as individuals who are, at present, partial members of the U.S. community, and in many instances moving toward possible full citizenship in the future, U.S. authorities tend to regard immigrants as the responsibility of someone else, somewhere else.

What William Barr Can Learn from Ramsey Clark

Lonnie Brown on William Barr, Ramsey Clark, and the necessity of independence

LONNIE T. BROWN, JR.

February 2019- William P. Barr being sworn in as Attorney General by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts with the participation of President Donald J. Trump. Public Domain. Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour. Via Wikimedia Commons.

 

In light of AG William Barr’s recent testimony before the House Judiciary Committee we present Lonnie T. Brown, Jr.’s January 2020 blog post for Defending the Public's Enemy ».

During his confirmation hearing, William Barr touted his ability to distance himself from politics and to safeguard the rule of law, declaring, under oath, that as attorney general he would be “truly independent." To many, Barr’s words provided comfort or at least hope that he would be guided by law and principle, not the president’s political agenda. However, since being confirmed, his actions have revealed the illusory nature of his sworn declaration.

Rather than exhibiting the fairmindedness and objectivity expected of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Barr seems to have established a de facto attorney-client relationship with President Trump, serving as his strident advocate and partisan defender. For example, in March, he zealously made the president’s case for “no collusion” by publicly recasting the substance and tenor of Robert Mueller’s report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

More recently, in a similar vein, the attorney general sharply criticized the findings of the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s investigation into Russian involvement in the president’s 2016 campaign. That report concluded that the FBI had adequate grounds to open the investigation and was not politically motivated. In a rather transparent effort to parrot President Trump’s “witch-hunt” narrative, Barr characterized the FBI’s investigation as having been based on the “thinnest of suspicions” that he personally believed to be “insufficient to justify the steps taken.”

My guess is that a large segment of the electorate, across the political spectrum, sees nothing wrong with or surprising about Attorney General Barr’s alignment with the president, or any attorney general’s close relationship with a president, for that matter. Such a rapport is by no means simply a Republican phenomenon. President Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder, for instance, once referred to himself as the president’s “wingman,” connoting that his job was to have the chief executive’s back.

COVID-19 Exposes the Racist Side of Breastfeeding

Understanding the history of formula and Black motherhood

ANDREA FREEMAN

Pet Milk ad featuring the Fultz quadruplets. Their doctor sold the rights to use the sisters for marketing purposes to the highest-bidding formula company.

“Four Little Babies.” Pet Milk, “Four Little Babies Become Four Little Ladies,” advertisement, Pittsburgh Courier, October 22, 1949, 5. Public Domain.

 

Breastfeeding is one of the defining acts of motherhood—and it is also one of the most controversial. Popular wisdom about its benefits differs drastically when mom is Black from when she is White. These differences represent a longstanding racial gap in breastfeeding rates that has become even more dangerous in the time of Covid-19.

A long history of discouraging Black women from breastfeeding has made their infants more vulnerable to the current formula shortage.

Formula flew off the shelves in the first few days of the pandemic due to panic buying and hoarding. Delays in freight transportation and formula producers’ lack of supply to keep up with increased demand compounded the problem. Now, when retailers restock, families buy more than they need, leaving nothing for those who come after them.

The situation is even worse for parents who get their formula through the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food supplement program, where Black women are overrepresented. WIC only allows participants to purchase a certain brand. If that one is not available, they are out of luck. Many program participants lack the transportation, resources, and time to shop at multiple locations. Families with limited or no access to good drinking water may also struggle now to find bottled water to mix with formula in local stores.

When there is no formula, all the options look bad. Watering down formula runs the risk of malnutrition. Some mothers can start or resume breastfeeding past the infant stage but not everyone, especially without help. Cow’s milk is a potential substitute, but it has also all but disappeared from shelves. Breastmilk sharing through informal networks or milk banks is another possibility but may be risky or expensive. Babies cannot digest solid foods until they are several months old.

The Famous Fultz Quads

The origin of America's first surviving set of identical quadruplets.

ANDREA FREEMAN

Pet Milk ad featuring the Fultz quadruplets. Their doctor sold the rights to use the sisters for marketing purposes to the highest-bidding formula company.

“Four Little Babies.” Pet Milk, “Four Little Babies Become Four Little Ladies,” advertisement, Pittsburgh Courier, October 22, 1949, 5. Public Domain.

 

We're pleased to present an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice » by Andrea Freeman.

Annie Mae Fultz could not afford to let anything go wrong with her pregnancy. Her doctor, Fred Klenner, had detected three tiny heartbeats inside her. It was 1946. Annie Mae was a tall, strong, thirty-seven-year-old half-Black, half-Cherokee woman from Tennessee.¹ Dr. Klenner, although originally from Pennsylvania, happily adhered to southern racial norms.² He had separate waiting rooms for Blacks and Whites in his downtown Reidsville, North Carolina, office. The old-fashioned decor of his practice matched his dated views. His segregated waiting rooms gave way to treatment rooms full of ancient furniture and unusual medical instruments.³ His walls displayed White supremacist literature and, later, a “Vote for George Wallace” poster.⁴ He vigorously defended Hitler as misunderstood to anyone who would listen.⁵ The local hospital where he delivered babies, Annie Penn Memorial, relegated Black mothers to the basement.⁶ Despite his unapologetic racism, Annie Mae had faith in Dr. Klenner’s medical abilities.

The neglected ward housed Annie Penn’s least valued patients and its oldest, shabbiest equipment. Annie Mae’s meager bedside boasted only bare-bones paraphernalia: a single-unit hot plate and a ten-quart kettle.

Annie Mae had plenty of challenges to overcome in the face of the growing lives inside her. A childhood battle with spinal meningitis had robbed her of the ability to hear or speak, rendering the possibility of a medical emergency, when urgent communication would be essential, even more frightening.⁷ On the tobacco farm where Annie Mae’s husband, James, a fifty-nine-year-old Black man known to all as Pete,⁸ toiled as a tenant farmer, there was no electricity.⁹ The family had no car, and the road leading out to the farm was rutted, long, and lonely. On Dr. Klenner’s advice, Annie Mae left her six children in their father’s care and moved into Annie Penn’s basement to wait out her delivery.¹⁰ To pass the long hours that followed on her hospital cot, Annie Mae conversed with her nurse, Margaret Ware, through gestures and lip-reading.¹¹

The odds that all three of Annie Mae’s triplets would survive were slim. Although any mother expecting triplets must come to terms with multiples’ low survival rate, Annie Mae confronted more obstacles than most. Advances in modern medicine that could have eased the birth process had yet to reach the basement. The neglected ward housed Annie Penn’s least valued patients and its oldest, shabbiest equipment. Annie Mae’s meager bedside boasted only bare-bones paraphernalia: a single-unit hot plate and a ten-quart kettle.¹²

What William Barr Can Learn from Ramsey Clark

Lonnie Brown on William Barr, Ramsey Clark, and the necessity of independence

LONNIE T. BROWN, JR.

February 2019- William P. Barr being sworn in as Attorney General by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts with the participation of President Donald J. Trump. Public Domain. Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour. Via Wikimedia Commons.

 

During his confirmation hearing, William Barr touted his ability to distance himself from politics and to safeguard the rule of law, declaring, under oath, that as attorney general he would be “truly independent." To many, Barr’s words provided comfort or at least hope that he would be guided by law and principle, not the president’s political agenda. However, since being confirmed, his actions have revealed the illusory nature of his sworn declaration.

Rather than exhibiting the fairmindedness and objectivity expected of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Barr seems to have established a de facto attorney-client relationship with President Trump, serving as his strident advocate and partisan defender. For example, in March, he zealously made the president’s case for “no collusion” by publicly recasting the substance and tenor of Robert Mueller’s report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

More recently, in a similar vein, the attorney general sharply criticized the findings of the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s investigation into Russian involvement in the president’s 2016 campaign. That report concluded that the FBI had adequate grounds to open the investigation and was not politically motivated. In a rather transparent effort to parrot President Trump’s “witch-hunt” narrative, Barr characterized the FBI’s investigation as having been based on the “thinnest of suspicions” that he personally believed to be “insufficient to justify the steps taken.”

My guess is that a large segment of the electorate, across the political spectrum, sees nothing wrong with or surprising about Attorney General Barr’s alignment with the president, or any attorney general’s close relationship with a president, for that matter. Such a rapport is by no means simply a Republican phenomenon. President Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder, for instance, once referred to himself as the president’s “wingman,” connoting that his job was to have the chief executive’s back.

Pushing the Bully off Your Shoulder

Author of How to be Sort of Happy in Law School Offers Seven Ways to Beat Imposter Syndrome

KATHRYNE M. YOUNG

CC0 via Pixabay

I have something in common with Kristen Bell, Maya Angelou, Tom Hanks, and Sonia Sotomayor.  Or perhaps I should say, I have someone in common.  He sits on our shoulder and whispers little insults: “You are so clueless.”  “Everyone can tell you’re out of place.”  His name is Imposter Syndrome, and he’s a real bully. 

He hung out with me every day when I was a law student.  I couldn’t speak in class or talk to a professor without his incessant yammering.  And even now, he shows up: in faculty meetings, at conferences, or when I’m about to speak to a big group.  “What are you even doing here?” he hisses.  Writing about him in How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School was a little helpful, actually—it turns out, he hates the spotlight. 

Contested Foundations

How 20th-century debates reveal enduring tensions at the core of the human rights project.

by MARK GOODALE

Excerpt from a letter from W.H. Auden to Julian Huxley.

In 1947 and 1948, the bold and controversial first Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Julian Huxley, together with Jacques Havet, the young first head of UNESCO’s philosophy sub-section, took steps that were intended to shape the conceptual framework of what became the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948. During these years, UNESCO put in motion an extraordinary process that was meant to reveal a cross-cultural consensus on the basic philosophical and ethical principles upon which a new global social contract should be based. This process—which involved soliciting opinions on the question of human rights by notables such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Gandhi—took place independently of the much more public one that unfolded somewhat later under the auspices of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights (CHR), which was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt.

UNESCO put in motion an extraordinary process that was meant to reveal a cross-cultural consensus on the basic philosophical and ethical principles upon which a new global social contract should be based.

The work of UNESCO on human rights during this period, the debates surrounding its conflicts with the CHR, the specific results of the cross-cultural survey it undertook, and the broader implications of this survey for the meanings and legitimacy of human rights, were all lost to a history that was dominated by the geopolitical logics of the Cold War. Nevertheless, new research has revisited the UNESCO human rights survey in light of ongoing debates over what a recent volume by Hopgood, Snyder, and Vinjamuri has described as “human rights futures”: the possibilities for and limitations to human rights among the contemporary disorder and violence that Samuel Moyn calls the “neoliberal maelstrom.”

The Origins of the U.S. Surveillance State

In the U.S., carrying out military interventions abroad has undermined freedom at home.

by CHRISTOPHER J. COYNE and ABIGAIL R. HALL

Photo by Jonathan McIntosh. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

The Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal continues to be front-page news. According to current reports Cambridge Analytica obtained private Facebook data, which it used to send pro-Trump material to targeted Facebook users. These reports have been met with outrage in Washington, D.C. The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation and U.S. senators have called for Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, to testify in front of Congress.

Calls by Congress for increased oversight to prevent private companies from surveilling people are extremely ironic given that they themselves recently renewed a section of the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which allows for the warrantless surveillance of Americans. Issues regarding the appropriate use of government surveillance are also at the center of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump administration. These headlines provide an excellent opportunity to consider the history of the U.S. government’s surveillance state, which matters for people across the world whose liberties are at stake as government power expands.

The origins of the present-day surveillance state can be traced back to the U.S. government’s military occupation of the Philippines in the late 1890s.

Caught in the Political Churn

DACA beneficiaries stand on unstable ground as March 5th deadline passes without action.

by ALEXIS M. SILVER

Demonstrators protest the recission of DACA in Los Angeles, September 5th, 2017. Photo by Molly Adams. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

On September 5th, 2017, the Trump administration announced the rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and set a date of March 5th, 2018 to begin phasing out the program. DACA, implemented under President Obama as an action of prosecutorial discretion in 2012, offers protection from deportation and work permits to approximately 700,000 young immigrants, often referred to as the DREAMers, who were brought to the United States as children. No new applicants were accepted after the September 5th announcement, and beneficiaries began to lose their protections as Congress failed to reach a bipartisan agreement offering a legislative replacement for DACA. However, in January and February of 2018, two separate federal courts in San Francisco and Brooklyn blocked the termination of the program, allowing beneficiaries to renew their protected status under DACA.

Despite widespread public support for DACA beneficiaries across the political spectrum, a legislative fix seems unlikely in the immediate future.

The protections provided by the court decisions offer beneficiaries some breathing room, but they are hardly a long-term solution. When the Supreme Court declined the Trump administration's request to take up the case directly from the lower courts, it ensured that the March 5th expiration date would not mark the definitive end of the policy, but it also foreshadowed a continuing battle over the ultimate fate of DACA. In the meantime, beneficiaries remain in a state of uncertainty as to what their futures may hold: a career and a sense of membership or civic disenfranchisement and the threat of deportation. Depending on where they reside, moreover, beneficiaries already have access to dramatically different opportunities.

The Dead Negev Doctrine

By manipulating law and geography Israel is dispossessing the Bedouins of their historic lands.

by OREN YIFTACHEL, AHMAD AMARA, and ALEXANDRE KEDAR

Photo by Physicians for Human Rights. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

"When will the state understand that we are here to stay? These are our lands for hundreds of years; everybody knew this—the Ottomans, the British and the Israelis. These lands are our soul, our life, our identity. Even if they demolish Araqib 100 more times, we shall return". (Sayach Altouri, Shaikh of 'Araqib, January 4, 2018).

These words were spoken at a special event convened in the small village of ’Araqib following the release of the shaikh from a short period of custody for "trespassing" on his ancestors land. It also followed the 124th demolition of their village by the authorities, and the reconstruction of its modest homes by the Bedouin residents.

’Araqib is but one of many flashpoints in the protracted conflict over land in the Negev, where dozens of indigenous Bedouin communities, numbering 110,000 people, are still living in localities that are not recognized or planned, with their residents subject to more than 1,000 house demolitions per year (that’s four times the number of demolitions that occur in the occupied West Bank). The indigenous communities, who have lived in the area for hundreds of years, are denied basic services such as water, electricity, roads or schools.

Borders and Barriers

Economically anxious countries are tightening borders and imposing trade barriers but to no avail.

by MANLIO GRAZIANO

Mexico-US border wall at Tijuana, Mexico. Photo by Tomás Castelazo. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikipedia.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was hailed as the beginning of the end of all walls and barriers separating individuals and peoples. Yet as of 2007, just eighteen years later, Europe and its Eurasian margins saw the creation of about 16,600 miles of new political borders, which means that for every mile of one dismantled border (the Berlin Wall), 107 miles of new borders have been built.

Why so? Because the new international disorder, precipitated by the dissolution of the Cold War, has led to more wars, more walls, and a more disunited world. It has also accelerated the shift of power from the old industrialized countries to the “emerging” nations: starting in the 1970s, the countries that used to dominate the world witnessed the rise of an increasing number of new international competitors. The top global companies of the Fortune 500 between 2001 and 2017 reveals the trend: the number of North American and European companies that make the cut have declined, while Asian-based companies (from China in particular) have steadily filled the breach.

For growing sectors of the American population and, more generally, the population of the old industrialized countries, this shift of power translates into uncertainty and fear. This is not necessarily because their living standard has worsened; on the contrary, in terms of per capita product, the United States is the ninth richest country in the world—a distinction it held in 1999 at the pinnacle of the economically robust Clinton years. But compared against its performance in 1999, the United States slightly closed the gap between itself and the other eight richest nations in 2016, when it experienced an increase in its per capita product relative to those countries. What these populations feel, fear, and know, however, is that their living standards cannot improve anymore, and that sooner or later they may very well worsen.

Many of those same countries eager to close their borders and expel foreign-born residents could stand to benefit greatly from immigration.

Taxing the Artist

What implications does the new GOP tax bill have for working artists?

by ALISON GERBER 

Photo by Mark Burnett. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

Today an opaque and as yet mostly unread GOP tax bill is hurtling towards the President’s desk. The media have mostly avoided a close look at the collective effects of the tax bill—the near-inevitable cuts to public services and national infrastructure that will affect all of us—and instead my feeds have been dripping for days with straightforward “ways to make the new tax bill work for you,” including a cynical guide to “hacking the tax plan” that promises to help you learn “ways to profit off the Republican tax bill.” A number of these pieces give the reader helpful hints on ways to turn themselves into business entities, as though setting up an LLC is something like getting a new set of business cards printed—do I go with a friendly diminutive like “Allie”, or the more formal “Alison”?—rather than a meaningful legal commitment with significant costs and responsibilities.

At the moment, it looks like artists’ abilities to end next year in the black will be tied up with one provision in particular: standardized deductions will double, but those who don’t file a Schedule C or set up a pass-through entity will lose the ability to deduct work-related expenses, a change that could hit performing artists especially hard. Musicians, dancers, and actors with steady gigs are often categorized as employees and receive W-2s; now it seems they’ll no longer be able to itemize and deduct expenses related to getting and doing those jobs, though most artists spend a significant proportion of their incomes on the costs of doing business (think: transportation costs; headshots; agents’ commissions; a dancer’s weekly supply of pointe shoes; that $19,000 tuba at the back of the orchestra and the extra $1,000 for the wheeled case its player needs to get it to work). Well, you might ask, why not just file a Schedule C? It’s not that easy, though.

It looks like artists’ abilities to end next year in the black will be tied up with one provision in particular: some artists may lose the ability to deduct work-related expenses.