7-Opinion

S

ept. 25, 2015. One day after 

achieving his dream of listening 

to Pope Francis’s address to a 

joint session of Congress, the embattled 

Speaker of the House, former U.S. 

Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, gathered 

reporters for a surprise press conference. 

While he initially performed as a strident 

reformer for government accountability 

when he first was elected in the 1990s, 

Boehner grew into an establishment 

Republican. During his run, he became 

increasingly focused on making the 

government function despite being met 

with growing far-right obstructionists: 

the Tea Party. 

The far-right had vilified Boehner 

at every turn for the past five years, but 

their recent outgrowth, the Freedom 

Caucus, pushed his final nerve and forced 

Boehner to retire. Upon leaving, however, 

he did not fail to take some parting shots 

at those he referred to as “legislative 

terrorists” who are tearing apart the 

Republican Party. And, almost as a final 

show of independence, Boehner’s final 

piece of legislation, the Bipartisan Budget 

Act of 2015, passed the House with no 

Freedom Caucus votes, instead co-opting 

a coalition of moderate Republicans and 

Democrats in Congress who neglected 

the far-reaches of their respective parties. 

This act, however, was a brief veer from a 

larger overarching narrative of legislative 

radicalization by ideologues willing to 

hijack the legislative process. 

The Freedom Caucus began as 

nine Tea Party members who were 

emboldened by the 2014 midterm 

elections to form a group of “bright junior 

legislators who do not look kindly on an 

established leadership that has largely 

failed to achieve conservative goals it has 

promised the voters.” While they view 

themselves glowingly, the establishment 

of the Republican Party, specifically 

Boehner, viewed their cohesiveness 

and activism as intransigence and false 

prophecy. Despite this, their membership 

has grown to as high as 40 members and 

currently sits at around 36 (an estimation 

because the Freedom Caucus does not 

release its membership).

This original group of nine were even 

further to the right than many of their 

Tea Party contemporaries. They were 

willing to exercise their influence to make 

legislation more conservative at all costs, 

including killing bills that they disagreed 

with despite these bills having the support 

of the majority of Republicans. While 

their principles are up for debate among 

both caucus members and Republicans at 

large, the former largely functions as one 

voting bloc and has undoubtedly caused 

widespread frustration and dysfunction 

in Washington D.C.

While Freedom Caucus members 

cause major disruption in Washington, 

their home districts’ Republicans do 

not look very ideologically different 

than those of the average Republican-

controlled district. Common thought 

suggests that constituents’ ideology 

should be embodied by their member 

of Congress. However, given that 

Freedom Caucus members’ policies are 

significantly more conservative than 

the average Republican, the ideological 

similarities of Republican constituents is 

baffling. 

The House Freedom Caucus refuses 

to take responsibility for the division that 

they cause throughout the Republican 

Party. They instead find enemies in 

congressional leadership to blame, and 

they exert this blame through not only 

rhetoric but also their political action 

committee: the House Freedom Fund. 

This PAC, according to former U.S. 

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., is devoted 

to “sending principled conservative 

outsiders to D.C.” Functionally, they 

support 
mostly 
far-right 
primary 

challengers to establishment candidates 

in House elections.

In the 2018 midterms, the HFF was 

affiliated with 18 primary challengers, 

eight of whom won. This success rate 

for both the HFF and other far-right 

conservatives in Republican districts 

contributes to the overall polarization 

of 
Congress 
— 
it 
either 
forces 

establishment Republicans to move right 

to avoid a primary challenger or replaces 

incumbents with far-right newcomers. 

This ideological purity enforcement 

that the Freedom Caucus supports is 

systematically taking over the Republican 

Party and ultimately polarizes Congress 

because of progressive liberals’ scaled-

back yet significant movement to the left. 

This limits the choices of the 

American people and ultimately leads 

to increasing inefficiency in Congress 

until the entire institution grinds to 

a halt. In other words, the Freedom 

Caucus and some progressive groups are 

willing to sacrifice incremental action for 

ideological purity, and that harms all of 

us. It ruins everyday American’s faith in 

government and slowly pushes us to want 

to burn the place down. This mentality 

led to the election of former President 

Donald Trump, the birth of QAnon and 

the failed Jan. 6 insurrection, which is not 

going to stop unless we make it. 

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great 

Gatsby,” my favorite scene is when a 

strange car pulls into Gatsby’s driveway 

after he has died, flashes its lights and 

leaves. The narrator says, “I didn’t 

investigate. Probably it was some final 

guest who had been away at the ends of 

the earth and didn’t know that the party 

was over.” 

While it is such a simple statement, 

it makes a profound point about this 

country and our core values. Our 

greatest quality as Americans is 

innovation, which is sourced from a 

fundamental curiosity and a desire to 

improve our world. However, when 

hope is taken away from us, we cease 

exploring because we are no longer 

curious, which is when the party is truly 

over. 

I’ll be honest; I believe that the 

Republican party faces an existential 

threat. It’s neither Trump nor the 

Freedom Caucus members themselves. 

Republicans are threatened by so many 

people turning off their televisions and 

tuning out political processes because 

they have lost hope, contributing to our 

dangerous culture of polarization and 

diminished communication.

Polarization 
has 
spread 
into 

everything from watching the news 

— when we choose to consume it — to 

who we choose as friends. At the center 

of it all is a growing mentality that says 

we cannot get along if we do not agree. 

Slowly, this polarization has turned many 

of us — on some issue or another — into 

miniature voting terrorists who are more 

willing to watch the world burn than get 

along.

S

ince President Joe Biden took 

office and the United States 

Senate flipped blue, a lot of 

Democrats have thought about removing 

the filibuster, a procedure used in the 

senate to delay or block the vote on a 

bill, to ensure policymaking can actually 

happen. The way the filibuster currently 

works in the U.S. Senate is that without 

reaching a 60 vote cloture threshold, 41 

or more senators can hold up legislation 

by filibustering. This applies to almost 

all bills in the Senate and prevents 

legislation from reaching the president’s 

desk. If, as Americans, we are to remove 

the filibuster, it must be coupled with 

immense safeguards to ensure the 

continuation of democracy and rule of 

law. 

It is no secret that the Republican 

Party of today stands in stark contrast 

to Paul Ryan’s GOP or the party of 10 

or 20 years ago. Today’s GOP is heavily 

focused on protecting Trumpism and 

denying all the criticism surrounding 

that crowd. We have seen that they will 

go to great lengths to protect former 

President Donald Trump and his views 

at any and all costs insofar as they tried, 

unsuccessfully, to overturn what experts 

have dubbed the most secure election 

in our nation’s history. If Democrats 

remove 
the filibuster and the current 

version of the GOP ever returns to power, 

there could be dire and irreversible 

consequences for this country.

The first thing Democrats would need 

to do to prevent this is to ensure statehood 

for both the District of Columbia and 

Puerto Rico. This is for two reasons: It 

would tilt the Senate more to the left 

and it would act in the core interest of 

democracy. 

D.C. and Puerto Rico both have 

progressive possibilities that Democrats 

can utilize, the former especially so. It 

would be crucial for Democrats to gain 

the extra three or four Senate seats from 

these two new states to shore up their 

growing majority. With these states 

added, the flimsy one or two-seat majority 

that has become more common in recent 

years would turn more solidly blue, and, 

without a filibuster, the Democrats could 

ensure that policymaking is actually 

accomplished. 

However, 
without 
these 
two 

prospective states and their senators, 

we could be looking at a Senate run by 

Republicans committed to blocking 

any legislation Democrats try to 

promote, especially when coupled 

with the filibuster. Thus, it is incredibly 

important that if the filibuster is 

removed, it is coupled with D.C. and 

Puerto Rico’s statehood and subsequent 

congressional representation.

Their statehood will also ensure that 

democracy is perpetuated throughout 

the country. D.C. has about 700,000 

residents and Puerto Rico has another 

3 million. These are individuals who 

pay taxes to the U.S. government, yet 

do not have voting representation in 

Congress, which goes against one of the 

core values of this country: no taxation 

without representation. It is morally 

wrong to continuously take from these 

people without giving them what is 

rightfully theirs. This is an argument 

that Democrats can lean on if they 

need to find the right framing for this 

proposal.

The second biggest safeguard which 

should follow filibuster removal would 

be to reform voting rights and pass a 

new Voting Rights Act. Democrats in 

the House have taken great steps to 

make this a reality by proposing the For 

the People Act, which will be voted on 

soon. This proposal would create more 

transparency in donations, attempt to 

minimize big money interests’ impact 

on politics, require same-day voter 

registration in many places, allow 

congressional districts to be drawn by 

non-partisan committees and many 

other provisions to increase access to 

voting for all eligible individuals. 

Not only is this bill good in 

theory, but when polled, a majority 

of Americans had a favorable opinion 

on the proposal, with 68% of those 

surveyed across party lines saying 

they would be in favor and only 16% 

in opposition. It is clear that there is 

already public support for this change 

— the Democrats should capitalize on it. 

All of these measures have come 

in response to an unprecedented 

level of voter suppression attempts by 

Republicans across the country. As of 

Feb. 19, the Brennan Center for Justice 

found that there have been 253 bills — 

majorly spearheaded by Republican 

representatives — introduced to limit 

voting rights in 43 states in 2021, with 

some seeking to disenfranchise millions 

of eligible voters. This shows the levels 

to which some members of the GOP 

may go in order to retain power, namely 

stifling the voice of the people. 

The two aforementioned measures 

that Democrats in Congress could work 

toward without the filibuster would 

greatly change the party’s dynamics 

in the coming years. The Senate would 

be more firmly in the Democratic 

column for the foreseeable future as 

more people casting legal ballots leads 

to more liberal candidates winning, 

and they would have an advantage 

in the two new states. Republicans 

would be forced to move away from 

divisive Trump-fueled hate and back 

towards 
their 
laissez-faire 
policy 

platform, in hopes of recapturing their 

previously moderate voter base or risk 

losing power until a new generation of 

Republicanism is born. 

While there are potential risks 

of opening the door for Sen. Mitch 

McConnell, R-Ky., to regain control of a 

post-filibuster Senate, passing these two 

measures can ensure that actual policy 

making becomes the primary goal of 

politics in this country once again. 

I

magine turning your passion 
into your career. Maybe it’s art, 
music or sports; you might con-

sider academia in areas such as sci-
ence, history or math. Whatever it is, 
take a second and envision yourself at 
the highest professional level of that 
interest. Relish this thought.

Now imagine it’s been stripped 

away from you completely and sud-
denly. No warning — it’s gone. You’d 
be upset, right? For Eldrick “Tiger” 
Woods and those of whose Sunday 
afternoons he occupied, this is a new 
reality. In a car accident in which he 
plowed through a massive sign and 
wrestled with 50 feet of forest off a 
boulevard in Southern California, the 
likelihood that we see him back on a 
golf course hangs in the balance. 

In emailing with my high school 

teacher, he wrote about how 
Woods may finally achieve peace 
in giving up competitive golf. 
“Tiger,” as we know him, has been 
the pinnacle of the sport for the 
past twenty-five years and defined 
by the game since he was three 
years old. With that, my former 
instructor believes, comes a lack of 
freedom to enjoy life’s other expe-
riences and an absence of personal 

sanity that cannot be replicated by 
anything else.

While he may be right about the 

consuming nature of professional 
sports and the toll they take on their 
athletes, I reject the notion that a 
competitor is better off without 
competition. Within all of us, not 
just athletes, inherent qualities exist 
that predispose us to our preferred 
environments. To depart these com-
munities is to lose a piece of our indi-
viduality — an irreplaceable strain of 
our DNA.

Thus, we search for proper closure. 

Often, we fantasize about saving the 
day and riding off into the sunset with 
many stories to tell future generations. 
While this conclusion may seem ide-
alistic for many, it is this “Hollywood 
ending” that gives us something to 
aspire to, a pleasant thought to occupy 
the vacancy of the daily grind. I doubt 
totaling a Genesis GV80 in a 45 mph 
speed zone is the lasting thought 
Woods wants of himself.

If someone told me today that this 

was the last column I’d ever write 
for The Daily, I’d be utterly disheart-
ened. I love expressing my opinions 
through written words and have 
done it for the past five years of my 

life. It’s become ingrained in my life, 
though not at the same level of inten-
sity as how golf and Woods co-exist. 
Hence, I’d search for another cred-
ible, successful platform to voice my 
“hot takes.” 

However, for the class of 2024, we 

do know what this feels like. All of 
our quintessential senior high school 
moments went from postponed 
to canceled in a whirlwind and all 
we could do is watch them vanish 
before our eyes. Does it bring me 
peace knowing there is more ahead 
in life? Possibly, but I will always feel 
as though there are loose ends that 
are unlikely to ever be tied up in my 
hometown. Granted, starting college 
in a virtual setting hasn’t helped. 

Conversely, think about this year’s 

graduating class and the intern-
ships they had lined up this time last 
year. These pivotal opportunities are 
instrumental for after college, yet they 
were nearly impossible to coordinate 
during the height of the pandemic. 

I 

want to learn, but they aren’t 
teaching me. This thought 
echoed in my mind as I found 

myself drowning in yet another 
meaningless formula.

I am an economics major, and 

I’ve known that I wanted to be one 
since my junior year of high school. 
At the University of Michigan, 
many students think of economics 
as business-adjacent — we’re the 
“Rossholes” who couldn’t get into 
the Ross School of Business. To me, 
though, it is so much more. I fell 
in love with economics because I 
wanted to understand people and 
their decisions. I believe in economics 
as a tool for social growth, and that 
understanding how people behave 
and act is key to creating a high-
functioning 
society. 
Economics 

provides a way for people to learn 
how we interact with the world and 
with each other, which gives us the 
tools to fundamentally change the 
workings of society.

That said, the department of 

economics at the University has 

been beating this society-focused 
ideology out of its underclassmen 
students. Simply, the curriculum 
lacks accessibility, social thinking 
and a global outlook. Economics 101, 
a class taken by many students at the 
University of Michigan, provides an 
introduction to economic theories 
for students from every college, 
including the Business School and 
College of Engineering, as well as 
students from a myriad of majors in 
LSA.

The quintessential class for 

freshmen, Economics 101 has the 
unique opportunity to provide 
students with a new outlook on 
the society they are poised to 
enter. However, the applications 
of economics are not discussed in 
introductory 
economics 
classes 

and only rarely are discussed in 
the upper-level classes. They ruin 
this unique opportunity by using 
cut-and-paste formulas to explain 
economic theory instead of using the 
most basic logical theories to ground 
the class in reality. We should be 

learning about the applications of 
and reasoning behind economic 
theory to ground students in the 
practice of thinking using economic 
analysis. Instead, these classes 
dive headfirst into problems that 
often make it difficult for students 
with no economic background to 
understand why the answers are 
correct.

Is it really a wonder, then, why 

so many students complain about 
having to take economics classes 
when it is never shown to apply to 
their own majors and future careers. 
Engineers will understandably roll 
their eyes at supply and demand 
even though the analytic thinking 
required for economics could give 
them a different way of problem-
solving that can be applicable to their 
own lives. 

A

h, the suburbs. Strip malls 
abound. 
Neighborhoods-

upon-neighborhoods 
of 

cookie-cutter McMansions lining 
endless 
perpendicular 
streets, 

full of minivans driven by parents 
shepherding their children around. 
What’s not to love? A lot.

Okay, fine. The suburbs certainly 

have plenty of benefits. The main 
advantage that comes to mind is the 
sheer amount of space: huge houses, 
large parks, wide roads, etc. 

When people are (hopefully) 

confined to their homes during a 
pandemic, feelings of claustrophobia 
often arise — especially in cities 
where people have smaller living 
quarters. Recently, spacious suburbs 
have become more enticing to city-
dwellers. During this quarantine 
period, people have been moving in 
huge exoduses into the suburbs. 

As the populations of already-

shrinking cities continue to diminish 
faster than ever, it’s essential to 
address the question: Should we 
rethink negative opinions of the 
suburbs? Are suburbs the answer to 
our global problem of overcrowded 
cities? 

My answer? No. Suburbia isn’t 

a productive solution: not to the 
overcrowding and under-planning of 
cities, nor to public-health crises we 
are currently facing. 

When mentioning suburbs, it’s 

important 
to 
acknowledge 
the 

premise on which they were founded: 
racism and capitalism. Often, suburbs 
were built for white Americans in the 
1940s and 1950s. Many developers 
sought to capitalize on racial fears 
and the white flight by portraying 
living in the suburbs as more 
attractive to white buyers. White 
Americans with money –– especially 

veterans assisted by GI Bills — were 
eager to leave cities that struggled 
through the Great Depression and 
World War II. Cars were, and still are, 
an expensive necessity to navigate 
through neighborhoods and were 
only accessible to the middle and 
upper classes.

Suburbs 
are 
often 
built 

around 
exclusion, 
self-isolating 

into 
“acceptable” 
communities. 

Founded on exclusionary ideals, 
removing suburbia’s past from its 
present is tricky — racism is alive 
and dominant in our communities. 
De facto segregation, extremely 
rampant in the 1940s and 1950s, 
is still common today, even in the 
suburbs where we live. Metro Detroit 
and its surrounding suburbs are still 
one of the most segregated areas in 
America. Not even three years ago 
in Rochester Hills, a school disctrict 
that sends hundreds of students to 
the University of Michigan, a Black 
teen was shot at just for knocking 
on a door to ask for directions. This 
pattern of overt and fatal racism 
makes people of color feel extremely 
unwelcome in the suburbs.

It’s worth noting that the people 

currently 
fleeing 
major 
cities, 

such as New York City, come from 
incredibly wealthy neighborhoods, 
as this study shows. The suburbs 
frequently 
create 
barriers 
for 

entry and in communities where 
conformity is expected and cars 
are expensive but necessary for 
transportation, it can feel impossible 
to be accepted unless one is rich 
and white. Thus, the suburbs 
feel like a terrible solution to the 
overcrowding of cities as they 
exacerbate inequality. Currently, 
suburbia is not a productive goal for 
urban development.

But are suburbs safer during 

pandemics? It seems intuitive that 
since there’s more distance between 
people, transmission should be lower. 
However, that may not be the case — 
actually, quite the opposite. 

According to studies recently done 

by Johns Hopkins University and a 
slew of other publications, suburbs 
are actually more unsafe than cities 
since people in the suburbs have to 
travel further distances, have a lack 
of access to health care and take 
fewer risk. Additionally, countries 
reported to have the most controlled 
COVID-19 
outbreaks, 
including 

Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam, 
are incredibly densely populated. 
The density of their population 
didn’t seem to matter in relation 
to the outbreak — what did matter 
was the response from public health 
officials and the efficiency of their 
contract tracing. All of the countries 
mentioned above had efficient and 
effective public health committees, 
travel restrictions and smart, data-
tracking 
cities, 
which 
enabled 

efficient contact tracing. Lowering 
the human density of a city isn’t a 
solution to public health crises, but 
increasing public health and urban 
planning infrastructure is. Suburbs 
currently don’t have the public health 
resources nor the urban tracking 
systems in place to effectively combat 
COVID-19. So, what advantages can 
they actually provide?

Personally, despite all of these 

facts, a small part of me still longs for 
the open spaces of the suburbs.

Opinion
Wednesday, March 10, 2021 — 9
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

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MRINALINI IYER | COLUMNIST

SHUBHUM GIROTI | COLUMNIST

KEITH JOHNSTONE | COLUMNIST

SAM WOITESHEK | COLUMNIST

MEERA KUMAR | COLUMNIST

Mrinalini Iyer can be reached at 

iyermili@umich.edu.

Shubhum Giroti can be reached at 

sgiroti@umich.edu.

Keith Johnstone can be reached at 

keithja@umich.edu.

Sam Woiteshek can be reached at 

swoitesh@umich.edu. 

Meera Kumar can be reached at 

kmeera@umich.edu.

A rant against legislative terrorism

Keep reaching for your goals — you might get a hole-in-one

Should we rethink suburbia?

BRITTANY BOWMAN

Managing Editor

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The LSA Economics department is failing us all

How Democrats can safely end the filibuster

