Have State Legislatures Gone Rogue? And Joshua Yaffa on Evan Gershkovich

Just a month ago, the story of two lawmakers expelled from the Tennessee legislature (https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/behind-the-expulsions-of-two-state-representatives-in-tennessee) captured headlines across the country. Their offense wasn’t corruption or criminal activity— instead, they had joined a protest at the statehouse in favor of gun control, shortly after the Nashville shooting (https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/after-the-nashville-school-shooting-a-faithless-remedy-for-gun-violence) at a Christian school. Earlier this week, Representative Zooey Zephyr, of Montana, was barred from the House chamber after making a speech against a trans health-care ban. In the past few years, in Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, legislatures have worked to strip powers from state officials who happen to be Democrats in order to put those powers in Republican hands.  Jacob Grumbach, a political-science professor and the author of “Laboratories Against Democracy (https://www.amazon.com/Laboratories-against-Democracy-International-Perspectives/dp/0691218455),” talks about how state politics  has become nationalized. “If you’re a politician, and you’re trying to rise in the ranks from the local or state level in your party,” he notes, “your best bet is to join the national culture wars”—even at the expense of constituents’ real concerns.



Plus, the contributing writer Joshua Yaffa talks with David Remnick about Evan Gershkovich, the first American reporter imprisoned in Russia on charges of espionage since the nineteen-eighties. “Evan was not sanguine or Pollyannaish or naïve about the context in which he was working,” Yaffa notes, but he returned to Russia again and again to tell the story of that country’s descent into autocracy.