Here's how deceitful politicians dodge the truth
And how they can be stopped
I’ve said it before, Kim Reynolds is a smart politician. She won’t tell you the truth, but she’s a smart politician.
I’ve been thinking of this lately because of news stories about a federal judge’s dismissal of a lawsuit that challenged the Iowa governor’s decision to cut off additional pandemic-related unemployment benefits three years ago. (The decision is being appealed.)
You may have read about the suit. The news stories responsibly cited the legal and constitutional issues that led the judge to throw out the case in May. The judge said the plaintiffs didn’t have a “property interest” in the benefits and they had missed the window to file for an injunction.
In her response, Kim Reynolds ignored all the legalese. Instead, she went straight for talking points, praising Republican governors like herself for cutting off jobless benefits to deal with a labor shortage.
Republicans, she said, “stood up to protect the livelihoods of our citizens, getting people back to work when it was desperately needed.”
What she didn’t tell you is this: It didn’t work.
Reynolds and her fellow GOP governors actually hurt more people than they helped.
This issue was studied extensively back in 2021, and the evidence is clear.
In states that ended benefits, overall job growth was less than half what it was in states that maintained them.
Even as benefits were pulled away, the labor force participation rate nationwide didn’t grow. It fell. Iowa’s labor force participation rate, on the other hand, mostly grew in 2021, but that started long before the benefits were cut.
Only eight of the 26 states that ended benefits saw a drop in their unemployment rate. Iowa wasn’t one of them.
Economists told the GOP governors our labor shortage had little to do with pandemic-related unemployment checks, which were first approved under Donald Trump. However, with Joe Biden the president, Republican governors wanted to stop the flow of money, so they pounced.
One study of 18,000 low-income workers who lost benefits did find that in these Republican states, 26% of the folks who lost benefits went to work a few months later, which was a little bit better than the 22% who did so in states that maintained benefits. But, most importantly, the study found the vast majority of people who lost benefits couldn’t find work at all.
In other words, for every one person who left the jobless rolls, several others still couldn’t get a job even as Reynolds was taking much-needed money out of their pockets.
What’s more, this report from Harvard Business School, in 2022, makes clear that losing all that money hurt local economies, as people cut back on spending at area businesses.
In short, it was a political response that failed miserably in the face of a complex labor market problem.
It’s always been clear why this ploy wouldn’t work: In the summer of 2021, the pandemic was still raging, families couldn’t find childcare and in states like Iowa many people didn’t want to rush back to low-paying workplaces they still believed weren’t safe.
Kim Reynolds didn’t care. She wanted to help her corporate friends who complained they couldn’t find workers. At least not at the price they wanted to pay.
Still, even in the face of this evidence, Reynolds and the Legislature have continued to clamp down on the ability of Iowa workers to get unemployment benefits. But guess what’s happening to Iowa’s labor force now? It’s shrinking. That’s right, it’s shrinking, even as the US average has stayed roughly the same this year.
I wish there had been a follow up to the stories about the lawsuit’s dismissal that put Reynolds’ false claims to the test. But I understand why there wasn't. Most newsrooms, which face falling resources, are focused on writing the first draft of history, not exploring the history that's gone before. Even if it tells a more truthful story.
Still, this kind of accountability journalism is vital. Dave Busiek, a longtime journalist and now a colleague of mine at the Iowa Writers Collaborative, makes this exact point in his most recent column.
Busiek writes that reporters should rethink their approach to Donald Trump’s claims that President Biden is using the justice system to target him.
When Trump was convicted of 34 felonies by a New York jury, news stories carried the former president’s false claims that the system is “rigged” against him. And they rightly balanced those claims by pointing out that Biden doesn’t control the New York court system; that it was a jury Trump’s lawyers helped to pick that convicted him; and that even the president’s son, Hunter Biden, was being tried in court. (A federal jury convicted him this week.)
All of that is accurate, but in dealing with Trump’s false claims, it isn’t enough.
All it does is put the onus on Biden and the justice system, and it centers the reader’s thinking on Trump’s accusations when, in fact, Trump has his own history of abusing the justice system.
In other words, it wasn’t the whole truth.
As Busiek writes:
Trump pressured FBI Director James Comey in 2017 to drop the criminal case against his ally, National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, over his contacts with Russia. After Comey refused, Trump fired him. Then, Trump's Justice Department, led by Bill Barr, dropped the case even though Flynn had already pleaded guilty to lying to authorities.
Trump also pardoned a raft of political allies and friends—political fixer Roger Stone; the father of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner; his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort; and political advisor, Steve Bannon.
In addition, Trump told his White House counsel that he wanted to order the Justice Department to investigate Comey and Hillary Clinton. According to news reports at the time, the lawyer rebuffed him.
Even today, Trump promises, if elected, he’ll use the Justice Department to go after his enemies.
In assessing Trump’s claim that Biden is “weaponizing” the legal system, all of this is relevant. But in the aftermath of the guilty verdict, it was rarely mentioned.
It’s true that readers want the latest developments in a story. But what they really want is the truth. The whole truth. And the truth is that, today, the rightwing of the political spectrum, led by Trump, has revolutionized the art of lying; they’ve weaponized it. Just as they plan to weaponize the legal system to target their political enemies.
It is vital that the news media counteract this effect with not just the facts, but the truth. The whole truth.
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