Decoding “states’ rights” as the phrase is used now

When the SAVE Act is discussed, the reply is often that “states’ rights” are being brushed aside: Washington must not dictate how a state runs its elections. The echo is old. Before the Civil War the same words were used to defend a state’s right to keep people as property. Then and now the slogan is thinner than it sounds.

A democracy has a duty of care over the roll. Who may vote is not a local folkway like a county fair rule. It is the boundary of the political community. Australia learned that the ordinary way. Into the early 1980s a person did not have to be a citizen to vote; British subjects and permanent residents could sit on the roll. The Hawke government required citizenship and grandfathered those already enrolled. That is a world away from an undocumented registrant, or a system that treats photo ID as an outrage. A permanent resident is known to the state. An unverified ballot is not.

Used as a shield, “states’ rights” often means: do not look too closely at the practice. Slavery was defended that way. It was also a bad bargain next to open labour and capital. Rome, for all its cruelty, still treated bondage as a legal condition many people passed through. After Spartacus was destroyed in 71 BC—legions in the field, then some six thousand crosses along the Appian Way—Rome did not slam the legal door. A slave remained a res under the master’s power, but the peculium let skilled and urban slaves handle money as if it were theirs and buy freedom. Formal manumission could make a libertus a citizen with duties to a patron. Race was not the test. A Greek tutor and a mine slave were both servi.

South Carolina was already a different machine in 1738. The 1712 code treated Negroes, Indians (except allied free Indians), mulattoes and mustizoes as “absolute slaves” and “chattels personal,” status following the mother, unfit for English common law. After the Stono Rebellion of 1739 the Negro Act of 1740 locked the system: no independent plots or hire, no assembly, no writing, no drums, manumission only by act of the legislature, any white man empowered to stop a Black person off the plantation, killing a slave reduced to a fine. That code, not the older one, ran to 1865.

Rome answered revolt with steel and left the statutes elastic. Carolina answered revolt with a statute and closed the exits. A century later the Supreme Court, in Dred Scott (1857), could not find a free man free because of race. That is the fruit of a closed racial caste, not of “states’ rights” as a neutral principle.

The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70 after a Jewish revolt against Rome. It was not sacked because Jews were “one in six” in the city of Rome. Mixing that episode with Carolina’s Black majority only muddies the point. The point is simpler. When “states’ rights” means a state may keep an unverifiable roll, or once meant a state may keep a man as a chattel with no path out, the phrase is doing offensive work. Government that asks for proof of citizenship is not inventing a new tyranny. It is doing the duty the older slogan was written to dodge.

Rome and Carolina shared the word slave. They did not share the method. Citizenship and the ballot are the same kind of line. Either the line is real, or “rights” is only a costume for the practice you refuse to defend in plain speech.

THE PAYMASTERS NOW WRITE THE CHEQUES

A 2026 companion to a 2016 column on induction, lampoon and the funded press

Ten years ago I wrote that I had stopped sending letters to the local papers. They published abusive copy under my name and refused the letters that were not abusive — the ones that argued for small government and limited spending. I am not a social conservative. I am an economic one. When I spoke to the journalists they seethed. I said then that the problem was smaller than “the culture of the left.” It sat in how journalists were inducted, how they were trained, what the work pressures were, and who paid them.

The antecedents have not aged. They have been institutionalised.

In 2016 the paymasters were proprietors, advertisers and the social set that sets the newsroom temperature. In 2026 the Commonwealth has joined them as a direct employer of private newsrooms. That is not a metaphor. It is a line item.

Direct endowments

The Albanese government’s News Media Assistance Program now puts nearly one hundred million dollars in grants through the news sector. The centrepiece is the Journalism Assistance Fund: $67.6 million, GST exclusive, paid as a wage subsidy of $13,000 a year — $39,000 over three years — for each eligible full-time journalist producing “core news” online. Applications opened in November 2025 and closed in twenty-eight days because the money was gone. One hundred and eighty-five publishers were funded. More than two thousand journalists now have a slice of their salary underwritten by the taxpayer through to June 2028.

The largest cheques did not go to the bush weekly that cannot pay a cadet. They went to the mastheads that already cover Canberra. Nine, through Fairfax Media and Nine Entertainment, took about $16.1 million. Seven took $5.6 million. West Australian Newspapers took $4.1 million. The Conversation, Private Media, Capital Brief, The Daily Aus and Mamamia were on the list. Opinion and editorial are formally excluded from the eligible content. That is a neat distinction on paper. In a newsroom it is the same payroll.

There is more. A News Innovation Fund of up to $31.5 million. A $12 million News Media Relief Program before that. Thirty-three million over three years for the Australian Associated Press. A mandated $3 million a year of Commonwealth advertising into regional newspapers. And in August 2026 Parliament passed the News Bargaining Incentive: a 2.5 per cent charge on the Australian digital advertising revenue of Google, Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn unless they strike commercial deals with local publishers. The Treasury’s own papers put the flow at $200–250 million a year if the platforms deal, and more if they do not and the charge is collected and redistributed. The old Bargaining Code let a platform walk away by dropping news. The new law closes that door. The state now sits between Silicon Valley and the Australian newsroom as allocator.

Jobs in the communications portfolio

The public payroll around all of this has not shrunk. For 2026–27 the ABC is appropriated $1.288 billion from government, with average staffing of 4,454. SBS takes about $367 million from government, with staffing a little under 1,370. Together the two public broadcasters draw roughly $1.65 billion a year from the taxpayer. That is before a single Journalism Assistance Fund dollar is counted.

Inside the portfolio itself the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts is budgeted at 2,264 average staff in 2026–27, up from 2,172. The Australian Communications and Media Authority rises from 704 to 731. The portfolio as a whole sits at about 13,380. That is the official communications machinery — the people who write the grant guidelines, assess the applications, administer the bargaining incentive and explain why none of this is influence.

It is not only Canberra. Queensland’s government communications, media and marketing workforce has been counted at 1,260 — more PR officers than disability support workers in that state, and more than the number of working journalists the Australia Institute found living in Queensland. The Commonwealth has spent the last four years converting contractors into public servants and adding roles. Communications is one of the occupations that grows when government grows. Public relations professionals nationally are projected to keep growing faster than the labour force as a whole. The induction I described in 2016 now has a career path, a classification and a superannuation scheme.

What the 2016 column already knew

The left learned that lying about an opponent and lampooning him limits his success. That was true of Palin and Abbott. It was true of Kennett, Newman and O’Farrell. It remains the method. A conservative who talks about spending is still a cartoon. A government that writes the wage subsidy is a friend of public-interest journalism.

They also learned that a figure they support can be excused almost anything if the blame can be diverted. In 2016 the published letter was a call to arms dressed as an excuse note. The form has not changed. The subject has. Do not blame the grant for the coverage. Do not blame the minister for the masthead. Do not blame Islam, we were told then; do not blame the endowment, we are told now. The Communications Minister says the support is “not conditional on what stories are written,” and that to suggest otherwise is an insult to journalists. That is the same sentence every patron has used since Whitlam made the first introductions.

When Chinese cash helped roll Howard in 2007, I wrote that China had gone too far, and that there was nothing new about Carr or Dastyari — both bought and paid for, as the ALP had sought communist support since Whitlam. The Liberals, I said, probably had similar problems among the fifty-five bed-wetters. The phrase outlived the parliament. It is still the insult conservative factions throw at one another. What it named was hesitation: the habit of keeping options open until after they have ceased to be options. Turnbull did not temporise. He dithered. The party that replaced him has not recovered a reputation for limited government. It has recovered a talent for internal weather reports.

The Daily Mail headline I called a misjudgement of Malcolm Farr proportions was a small instance of a large habit: extract the line that flatters the room, bury the question that does not. Bolt was right to put the question then. The questions now are simpler, and still unwelcome. Who signs the journalist’s wage? Who writes the grant guideline that defines “core news”? Who sits in the communications portfolio and calls that independence?

Small government, still

I have not become a social conservative in the decade since. I still believe government should be smaller and spend less. A state that part-pays two thousand private journalists, fully pays four and a half thousand at the ABC, and staffs a communications portfolio in the thousands, is not a small state. It is a state that has decided the press is a service to be procured.

The local papers that would not print a non-abusive conservative letter did not need a grant program to teach them the lesson. They already knew which letters were safe. The grant program does not invent that instinct. It funds it, professionalises it, and calls the result diversity.

For some, in 2016, the Sex Party had more credibility. The joke has worn. Credibility now belongs to whoever is not on the payroll — and to the reader who still notices when the abusive letter is printed and the other one is not.

The same problem that exists for senators exists for presidents, only louder. There is no presidential WAR. There are mature, downloadable datasets and repeated expert surveys. What they measure is “how often did this person move the country in the direction the scorers already think is correct,” plus some contemporaneous popularity and some raw outcome numbers that a president only partly controls. “Was he any good?” remains a values question dressed up as a scoreboard.

What already exists

Historian and political-scientist rankings are the closest analogue to DW-NOMINATE plus interest-group scorecards. C-SPAN’s survey (ten equally weighted leadership categories, last run in 2021 after Trump’s first term) and Siena College’s (twenty categories, last full run 2022) are the two most cited. The top of both lists has been stable for decades: Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Theodore Roosevelt. Reagan sits ninth in the 2021 C-SPAN survey and lower (around 18th) in Siena 2022. Wilson has slid: he was routinely fourth-to-sixth in mid-20th-century polls and is now 13th in C-SPAN 2021. Trump’s first term landed 41st of 44 in C-SPAN 2021 and in the bottom three-to-five in Siena.

These surveys are not secret ballots of the American public. They are panels of academics and presidential specialists. The profession leans left; categories such as “pursued equal justice” and “moral authority” therefore move scores. Wilson’s drop tracks the heavier weight later generations placed on his resegregation of the federal civil service, the White House screening of The Birth of a Nation, and wartime civil-liberties statutes. Reagan’s relatively high C-SPAN placement reflects later credit for the 1980s recovery and the end of the Cold War; Siena’s lower placement reflects deficits, inequality, and Iran-Contra. Trump’s first-term scores reflect the same raters’ view of norms, rhetoric, two impeachments, and January 6 more than pre-COVID unemployment or the Abraham Accords. Public retrospective polls usually rank Reagan higher than the scholars do. That gap is data, not a rounding error.

Gallup (and successor) job-approval averages are the contemporaneous popularity series. Reagan averaged 52.8 percent over eight years, bottomed at 35 percent in the 1982 recession, and left office at 63 percent. Trump’s first term averaged 41 percent—the lowest of the polling era—and never reached 50 percent in Gallup. His second term, as of mid-2026, has also run well below 50 percent and remains the most polarized on record (Republican approval in the mid-80s, Democratic approval in single digits). Wilson predates regular Gallup; wartime support was high, then collapsed after his stroke and the Senate’s rejection of the League. Approval is not “goodness.” It is how the living public felt at the time.

Harder outcome series exist and are public: real GDP growth, unemployment and inflation paths, debt-to-GDP, stock-market returns, major legislation enacted, Article III judges confirmed, uses of force, treaties ratified. They do not self-interpret. Reagan inherited double-digit inflation and 7-plus percent unemployment, endured a sharp 1981–82 recession, then presided over a long expansion with inflation falling to the low single digits and unemployment to 5.5 percent; the publicly held debt roughly tripled. Trump’s first term saw the pre-COVID unemployment rate fall to 3.5 percent and a large corporate-rate cut; COVID produced a net job loss over the full term. Wilson’s first term produced the Federal Reserve, the income tax, the FTC, and the Clayton Act; the second produced wartime mobilization, the 1918–19 influenza interaction, and the 1920–21 depression. None of these numbers tell you whether the tax cut, the Fed, or the war was the right instrument.

Interest-group and think-tank scorecards (Heritage, ADA, etc.) exist for recent presidents the same way they do for senators. They grade against an explicit agenda. Useful once you have already chosen the agenda.

The three cases, measured rather than narrated

Wilson’s first-term legislative haul is large and durable: 16th Amendment, Federal Reserve, antitrust updates. His wartime leadership produced victory and then a peace settlement the Senate would not accept. His racial record and the Espionage and Sedition Acts are also durable. Later scholars lowered his rank as those last items received more weight; earlier scholars had treated the League vision as near-great even in failure. That is a change in the scoring rule, not new roll-call data.

Reagan’s measurable record is the disinflation, the 1980s expansion after the Volcker recession, the 1986 tax reform, three Supreme Court justices, and a defense buildup that coincided with Soviet overstretch and Gorbachev. The deficits, the rise in inequality, Iran-Contra, and the delayed federal AIDS response are also in the record. Historians still split on how much causal credit he deserves for 1989–91; the public has been more generous in hindsight.

Trump’s first term produced the 2017 tax law, three Supreme Court justices plus a large lower-court cohort, the Abraham Accords, territorial defeat of ISIS, no new major land war, and Operation Warp Speed. It also produced two impeachments (Senate acquittals), the COVID death toll and recession, the 2020 election challenge, and January 6. The second term is still being written; early 2025–26 data show heavy use of executive orders, tariff revenue, slower job growth than the late Biden years, and continued polarization. Historians have so far treated the first term as near-bottom; that judgment is only seven years old and was rendered by the same professional cohort that has been revising Wilson downward for different reasons.

What you would still need for a custom “performance” instrument

Exactly the same five choices required for senators, only the units change:

1. A benchmark. Party median is useless for a president. You must pick: real per-capita consumption, peace, original-meaning originalism on the Court, “did the institutions he created still exist and work fifty years later,” predicted median-voter preference, or something else. The data will not choose.
2. An action universe. Signed statutes only? Executive orders and national-security actions? Judicial appointments weighted by later doctrinal impact? Wars started versus wars ended?
3. Weights. A Supreme Court seat or a world war is not a highway bill. Closeness of the congressional vote, contemporaneous public attention, and later scholarly citation are possible weights; each embeds a theory.
4. Context. Inherited inflation, divided versus unified government, exogenous shocks (pandemic, oil shock, assassination of an archduke). Reagan’s 1982 recession and Trump’s 2020 collapse are not interchangeable with Wilson’s 1920–21 slump.
5. Non-statutory activity. Rhetoric that shifts the Overton window, administrative capacity, scandal frequency, and “did later events make the decision look wise.” The last one is retrospective philosophy, not measurement.

Party-unity and first-dimension ideology scores work for the Senate because the denominator is clear: “voted with the team when the teams disagreed.” A president has no such clean denominator. That is why the historian surveys persist: they collapse the missing scoring rule into ten or twenty subjective categories and average the professors.

The honest limitation is identical to the one that opened the Senate discussion. Once you leave “how often did the economy grow / how many judges were confirmed / how many wars were avoided” and try to score “were they correct,” you are doing political philosophy or intergenerational judgment. The voting records, the economic time series, the appointment lists, and the approval numbers are excellent and public. The evaluation rule is the part that does not exist by consensus, which is why we will still be arguing about Wilson’s League, Reagan’s deficits, and Trump’s norms when the next set of historians is surveyed.