Tag: argues

  • New book argues child care is a ‘societal imperative’

    New book argues child care is a ‘societal imperative’

    The other day, I came across an article about child care that felt so familiar I let out an exasperated sigh. Child care, the article announced, is now more expensive than college tuition and rent in most states. Many of us had just read another version of the article in March. And before that, in November 2024. Then there’s the one that dates back a little further — to 2013. 

    Many of these stories, which seem to come out on an annual basis, fail to mention that this is a problem that spans decades. The real news is that it hasn’t gotten any better, and many American lawmakers don’t seem to care enough to take action. 

    I asked Elliot Haspel his thoughts on this a few weeks ago when I interviewed him about his new book, “Raising a Nation,” which will be available Aug. 11. In the book, he presents 10 arguments — some of them well known and others less intuitive — for why child care needs to be a more supported part of American society. His book starts with an anecdote that echoes my observation on the dispiriting lack of momentum around the issue: In 1998, President William Jefferson Clinton stood in the Rose Garden and declared in an address that child care was essential to the nation’s economy. President Barack Obama made the same argument in 2015. President Donald Trump did the same in 2019. Yet as the years go by, little changes.

    “We have been having many of the same child care battles for a long time, for decades and decades and decades,” Haspel told me.

    Haspel’s arguments in “Raising a Nation” include “The Economic Case,” where he digs into how child care affects business productivity and the labor force; and the “The Patriotic Case,” where he presents parenthood as patriotic and argues child care is important for American democracy.

    He cites numerous worrisome examples of the consequences of insufficient policy and investment. In making “The Community Case,” for instance, he tells a jarring story from Montrose, Colorado, where the lack of child care has led to difficulties recruiting and retaining police officers. That, in turn, negatively affects the city’s crime rate and response time to emergency calls. And in arguing “The Antipoverty Case,” he highlights extensive research on how a lack of child care is a key theme for families who are unable to move out of poverty.  

    “Care is, in fact, just as important to our social infrastructure as having a public education system, having public libraries, having public parks,” he told me.

    As he writes, it’s clear why we haven’t made much progress as a nation, and why we remain behind nearly every other wealthy country in investing in child care: “We have never established that good child care belongs among the pantheon of American values.” 

    While Haspel’s book focuses more on why we need more robust child care policy than how we get there, he provides a few ideas for the latter: giving child care educators a wage that could support their own families, investing in stay-at-home parents and informal caregivers along with licensed care, and including before- and after-school care and summer care in the system. While those seem like lofty goals, Haspel argues it is indeed fully “American” to embrace such policies. Access to high-quality child care, he argues, is not an “individual family obligation but rather a societal imperative.”

    Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at 212-678-3562 or [email protected]. 

    This story about child care was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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  • Supreme Court must halt unprecedented TikTok ban to allow review, FIRE argues in new brief to high court

    Supreme Court must halt unprecedented TikTok ban to allow review, FIRE argues in new brief to high court

    Today, FIRE filed an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief in support of TikTok’s emergency application for an injunction pending review of a law that would force it to shut down absent divestiture of Chinese ownership. The Summary of Argument from the brief, on which FIRE is joined by the Institute for Justice and Reason Foundation, explains the law’s grave threat to free speech. 

    The nationwide ban on TikTok is the first time in history our government has proposed — or a court approved — prohibiting an entire medium of communications. The law imposes a prior restraint, and restricts speech based on both its content and viewpoint. As such, if not unconstitutional per se, it should be subject to the highest level of First Amendment scrutiny. Given the grave consequences, both for free speech doctrine and for the 170 million Americans who use TikTok to communicate with one another, this Court should at least hit the “pause button” before allowing such a drastic policy to go into effect.

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit correctly recognized the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, (“the Act”) as a direct regulation of speech. Exercising original and exclusive jurisdiction over TikTok’s constitutional challenge, the court held the Act “implicates the First Amendment and is subject to heightened scrutiny,” and assumed but did not decide strict scrutiny was warranted. . However, the court held the Act “clears this high bar,” granting deference to the government’s characterization of alleged national security concerns to conclude the Act was “carefully crafted to deal only with control by a foreign adversary, and it was part of a broader effort to counter a well-substantiated national security threat posed by the [People’s Republic of China].”

    Although the appellate panel was correct that the Act should be subject to the highest level of First Amendment scrutiny, it failed to actually hold the government to its burden of proof, and deferred too readily to unsupported assertions of a national security threat.

    Congress has not met the heavy constitutional burden the First Amendment demands when regulating speech, let alone banning an entire expressive platform. No published legislative findings or other official public records attempt to explain or substantiate why the Act’s severe encroachment on millions of Americans’ right to speak and to receive information is necessary to address a real and serious problem. Nor was there any showing the ban would effectively address the asserted risks.

    The proffered evidence of the law’s purpose reveals illegitimate intent to suppress disfavored speech and generalized concerns about data privacy and national security. These concerns fall far short of satisfying strict scrutiny, and the court’s extreme deference to governmental conjecture is unwarranted, misguided, and dangerous. Nor is the Act narrowly tailored to any compelling or substantial government interest, as the First Amendment requires.

    Constitutional intrusions of this unprecedented magnitude demand this Court’s full consideration before they take effect. This Court should grant Petitioners’ emergency application for an injunction pending review.

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