All politicians must lie from time to time, so why is there so much outrage about George Santos? A political philosopher explains by Michael Blake

The idea that politicians are dishonest is, at this point, something of a cliché – although few have taken their dishonesty as far as George Santos, U.S. representative for New York’s 3rd Congressional District, who seems to have lied about his education, work history, charitable activity, athletic prowess and even his place of residence.

Santos may be exceptional in how many lies he has told, but politicians seeking election have incentives to tell voters what they want to hear – and there is some empirical evidence that a willingness to lie may be helpful in the process of getting elected.

If this is true, though, then why should voters care that they have been lied to?

As a political philosopher whose work focuses on the moral foundations of democratic politics, I am interested in the moral reasons voters in general have a right to feel resentment when they discover that their elected representatives have lied to them. Political philosophers offer four distinct responses to this question – although none of these responses suggest that all lies are necessarily morally wrong.

 

1. Lying is manipulative

The first reason to resent being lied to is that it is a form of disrespect. When you lie to me, you treat me as a thing to be manipulated and used for your purposes. In the terms used by philosopher Immanuel Kant, when you lie to me you treat me as a means or a tool, rather than a person with a moral status equal to your own.

Kant himself took this principle as a reason to condemn all lies, however useful – but other philosophers have thought that some lies were so important that they might be compatible with, or even express, respect for citizens.

Plato, notably, argues in “The Republic” that when the public good requires a leader to lie, the citizens should be grateful for the deceptions of their leaders.

Michael Walzer, a modern political philosopher, echoes this idea. Politics requires the building of coalitions and the making of deals – which, in a world full of moral compromise, may entail being deceptive about what one is planning and why. As Walzer puts it, no one succeeds in politics without being willing to dirty their hands – and voters should prefer politicians to get their hands dirty, if that is the cost of effective political agency.

2. Abuse of trust

A second reason to resent lies begins with the idea of predictability. If our candidates lie to us, we cannot know what they really plan to do – and, hence, cannot trust that we are voting for the candidate who will best represent our interests.

Modern political philosopher Eric Beerbohm argues that when politicians speak to us, they invite us to trust them – and a politician who lies to us abuses that trust, in a way that we may rightly resent.

These ideas are powerful, but they also seem to have some limits. Voters may not need to believe candidates’ words in order to understand their intentions and thereby come to accurate beliefs about what they plan to do.

To take one recent example: The majority of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, when he was trumpeting the idea of making Mexico pay for a border wall, did not believe that it was actually possible to build a wall that would be paid for by Mexico. They did not take Trump to be describing a literal truth, but expressing an untruth that was indicative of Trump’s overall attitude toward migration and toward Mexico – and voted for him on the basis of that attitude. 

 

3. Electoral mandate

The third reason we might resent lies told on the campaign trail stems from the idea of an electoral mandate. Philosopher John Locke, whose writings influenced the Declaration of Independence, regarded political authority as stemming from the consent of the governed; this consent might be illegitimate were it to be obtained by means of deception.

 This idea, too, has power – but it also runs up against the sophistication of both modern elections and modern voters. Campaigns do not pretend to give a dispassionate description of political ideals, after all. They are closer to rhetorical forms of combat and involve considerable amounts of deliberate ambiguity, rhetorical presentation and self-interested spin.

More to the point, though, voters understand this context and rarely regard any candidate’s presentation as stemming solely from a concern for the unalloyed truth.

 

4. Unnecessary and disprovable

The lies of George Santos, however, do seem to have provoked something like resentment and outrage, which suggests that they are somehow unlike the usual forms of deceptive practice undertaken during political campaigns. And this fact leads to the final reason to resent deception, which is that voters do not accept being lied to unnecessarily – nor about matters subject to easy empirical proof or disproof.

It seems clear that voters may sometimes be willing to accept deceptive and dissembling political candidates, given the fact that effective political agency may involve the use of deceptive means. Santos, however, lied about matters as tangential to politics as his nonexistent history as a star player for Baruch College’s volleyball team. This lie was unnecessary, given its tenuous relationship to his candidacy for the House of Representatives – and easily disproved, given the fact that he did not actually attend Baruch.

I believe voters may have made their peace with some deceptive campaign practices. If Walzer is right, they should expect that an effective candidate will be imperfectly honest at best. But candidates who are both liars and bad at lying can find no such justification, since they are unlikely to be believed and thus incapable of achieving those goods that justify their deception.

If voters have made their peace with some degree of lying, in short, they are nonetheless still capable of resenting candidates who are unskilled at the craft of political deception.

 

 

Why politicians keep misplacing classified documents byBy Robin Levinson-King BBC News

For top US officials, it appears the words "top secret" are sometimes treated as more of a suggestion than a rule.

Former US Vice-President Mike Pence is the latest in a long line of politicians to have classified documents turn up at his home.

Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are currently facing investigations into files found in their possession.

Mr Pence and Mr Biden notified authorities when the documents were discovered. The FBI raided Mr Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate to recover classified and sensitive material, including documents labelled "Top Secret", the highest security classification. The Justice Department has also alleged the Trump team deliberately obstructed their investigation.

 

But they are far from the first politicians to be found potentially mishandling sensitive material.

Many statesmen including Hillary Clinton and a former Canadian foreign minister have landed in trouble for not following security protocols.

"Misplacing classified documents is very common, happens all the time," said Tom Blanton, who runs the National Security Archive, an independent repository of government documents based at George Washington University. 

 

Should more documents be declassified?

While it is unclear exactly what was in the documents Mr Pence had in his possession, Mr Blanton said there is a wide range of information that can be classified. Some materials, like travel briefings, may be classified even if they contain mostly public information from news articles.

Such files are supposed to be declassified after a period of time, but because it does not automatically happen, there is inevitably a backlog - which is partly why officials are "drowning" in classified information.

Other classified documents, labelled "Sensitive Compartmented Information" (SCI), contain details that could expose intelligence sources.

Several documents marked SCI were found at Mar-a-Lago, Mr Trump's Florida home, according to photos released by the FBI.

Are Trump's documents different?

But the big difference between others' missteps, and Mr Trump's, is how the mistakes were handled after they were discovered, says national security legal expert Brad Moss.

• Trump team downplays sensitive files at Mar-a-Lago

"You notify the authorities, you make sure that the documents are properly returned to the relevant government entity and taken away from the unauthorised location. That's the way you're supposed to do it," he said.

"What you don't do is what Trump did, which was spend 18 months delaying, obfuscating, obstructing the inquiry."

 

Mr Moss said that it is not unheard of for people to end up in court if they are caught with documents they should not have.

Under the Espionage Act and other federal security provisions, any unauthorised retention, mishandling or transmission of documents violates the law. But authorities rarely prosecute, save for two reasons, Mr Moss said: Intent or obstruction.

If authorities believe a document was kept intentionally to sell, or leak, the person responsible could face serious legal consequences, as happened in the case of ex-CIA boss David Petraeus.

Petraeus was charged with giving classified documents to his former mistress and biographer. He reached a plea deal with the justice department, avoiding felony charges but getting sentenced to two years probation and a $100,000 fine.

Charges are also likely if the person responsible for the documents obstructs an investigation into their mishandling.

Embarrassing errors

But most of the time, the repercussions of mishandling classified documents are more political than criminal.

Who can forget the revelation in the autumn of 2020, weeks before the election, that Mrs Clinton had stored work emails on a personal server when she was Secretary of State? The FBI investigated, and she was cleared of criminal wrongdoing.

Although her aides were chastised for being "extremely careless", it was found she did not knowingly share sensitive information.

• UK Ministry of Defence documents found at bus stop
• David Petraeus and the fall of a general

American officials are not the only ones who can be accused of carelessness.

Maxime Bernier, Canada's foreign affairs minister under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, was forced to resign in 2008 after his then-girlfriend went on television and said he had left secret documents in her apartment. The press had a field day.

In 2011, UK minister Oliver Letwin was admonished when a picture emerged of him dumping government documents in the rubbish.

He apologised and an investigation found that none of the papers had been classified. Nevertheless, he was made to sign a pledge to change how he handled personal data.

Why does this keep happening?

Mr Blanton said that part of the problem is the sheer volume of classified documents that passes through top officials' hands. Many of those documents did not even need to be classified or should be automatically de-classified after a few years, he said, but "you get the sense people get blasé about it".

Another problem, according to Mr Moss, is that high-level officials - whether they are the president or a member of cabinet - are often not properly trained in security best practices in the same way that a senior aide may have been. And because of their status and security clearance, they are given unparalleled access to sensitive materials.

When civil servants make an error, they can have their security clearance revoked or be suspended or fired.

But telling the most powerful person in the room they are doing it wrong is easier said than done.

"Better training would fix it, but in reality, that'll never happen," Mr Moss said. "Once you get to that level of authority, you tend to take a very broad view of your powers, and the extent to which anybody can tell you how to do anything."

 

The plan to save Italy's dying olive trees with dogs By Agostino Petroni

A deadly and hard-to-detect disease has been ravaging the treasured olive trees of southern Italy for 10 years. A highly trained squad of super-sniffer dogs could save them.

 On  a sunny winter morning, the dog trainer Mario Fortebraccio slowly bends toward a line of potted olive trees and indicates it with his hand. Waiting for that signal, Paco, a three-year-old white Labrador, rushes through the row of plants with his head tilted, sniffing each pot at the root, the rhythm of his inhaling echoing through the greenhouse. The dog is carefully scouting for something humans can't sense.

"They don't do anything if there is no reward," Fortebraccio tells me with a smile. After a few seconds, having completed his task, Paco returned to the trainer, lifted his leg to urinate on a nearby plant, wagged his tail, and claimed a little crunchy treat.

At Vivai Giuranna, an extensive commercial greenhouse with over one million plants in Parabita, in the southern Italian region of Puglia, Paco is searching for Xylella fastidiosa, a type of bacterium that has been ravaging southern Italy's olive fields for the past decade. Paco and a few other four-legged colleagues make up the highly trained Xylella Detection Dogs team.

"These dogs have got something unique," says Angelo Delle Donne, the head plant health inspector for the government of the province of Lecce, who has been battling Xylella since it was discovered in Puglia in 2013.

 Xylella fastiodiosa is a bacterium that clogs the xylem (the vessels that carry water from the roots to the leaves) of trees and other woody plants and slowly chokes them to death. Spittlebugs, a common insect, spread the disease: when they bite an infected leaf, the bacteria move into their saliva, and the bugs transmit the disease when they feed on their next healthy plant.

There are no known cures for this disease, and once infected, the plant slowly dries up (though some infected plants manage to survive without showing symptoms). There are several strains of Xylella, and together they affect 595 plant species worldwide at the last count. Over the past century, Xylella has decimated orange fields in Brazil, vineyards in southern California, and pear trees in Taiwan. Then, 10 years ago, Xylella reached Puglia's olive trees.

 

With its 60 million olive trees, Puglia used to produce up to 50% of Italy's olive oil, but in just a few years, Xylella infected and killed 21 million trees, many of which were several centuries old.

Today, an endless sea of dead, grey tree trunks covers the lower part of the region, dotted with what's left of thousands of small-scale farms, olive mills, and greenhouses.

Mauro Giuranna, the owner of Vivai Giuranna, has personal experience of a Xylella attack. When plant inspectors found infected plants in his greenhouse, he had to dispose of about €1m ($1m/£900,000) worth of plants.

"We were too superficial [in countering Xylella] in the first years," Giuranna says. "There are no more monumental olive trees left."

He wishes controls had been tighter and faster. However, the regional governor President Michele Emiliano was initially sceptical about a link between Xylella and the rapid desiccation of olive trees.

The scientists working on trying to stop the bacteria were put on trial, accused of spreading the bacteria themselves (eventually, all charges were dropped). Italy was investigated by the European Commission for an inadequate response.

A spokesperson for Emiliano told Future Planet that he had never endorsed anti-scientific or conspiracy theories. "The President has launched an important action of listening to everyone, organising public assemblies, personally participating in all the events to which he was invited, to bring an issue as complex, dramatic and divisive as Xylella into the context of a civil dialogue," the spokesperson said.

 Italy's response has now improved since the early days after the infection, taking measures such as large-scale disease monitoring. However, Xylella keeps spreading through the region's olive fields.

"We are always chasing the disease," says Delle Donne.

 

As the bacteria keeps spreading northward at a rate of about 20km (12 miles) per year, popping up in other regions of Italy and Europe too, governments are concerned, while scientists and plant inspectors are racing to contain the disease and prevent it from spreading further. Once an infected tree is identified close to healthy trees, it has to be uprooted and any other trees in a 50m (160ft) vicinity are carefully inspected.

Nicola di Noia, an agronomist from Taranto and the general director of Unaprol, Italy's largest olive oil producers' consortium, understands the danger of Xylella well and loudly advocates for its containment.

"It is an unprecedented ecological, environmental disaster," he says. "We can't just get caught up in environmentalist passion. We have to be scientific."

In 2020, he thought of his past experience as a carabiniere (an officer for Italy's gendarmerie), working with molecular-detection dogs for uncovering drugs and explosives and remembered their incredible olfactory skills. What if they could detect Xylella too?

"We began looking for similar works done by dogs on plants," Di Noia says. And they found that a team of Californian experts had figured out a way to use smell to detect bacteria on citrus fruits.

Excited by the possibility, Di Noia spoke about this idea with the Ente Nazionale della Cinofilia Italiana (ENCI, the national organisation responsible for the recognition, standardisation, and registration of pedigree dogs in Italy) and with the head researchers on Xylella in Bari, Puglia's capital, at the National Research Council.

He put together the funds and decided to call in the cavalry – the Xylella Detection Dogs.

 

A dog's nose, in principle, works the same way as a human's does. As we inhale and exhale, receptors in the nose detect molecules in the air and send the information to the brain.

A dog's nose has a few different features that make the animal a super-smeller. Its front part of the nose serves to humidify the incoming air which aids olfaction, and the air is then pumped to the lungs, and in part, into an olfactory chamber packed with receptors to catch odorants. And that's where dogs outclass the human nose: dogs have 20 times more olfactory receptors than humans that send signals to their brains. When the dog exhales, the air goes out through the two side slits of the nose, not through the nostrils as we do: this is why dogs can sniff in a continuous cycle, catching large volumes of air and odorants.

"There are animals that see a lot more colours than we do," said Adee Schoon, an independent Dutch biologist who has been working with scent detection by animals for the past three decades. "If you take that analogy and use it with dogs, you can see that we are definitely odour-blind compared to dogs."

Most dogs can navigate the scent world in ways we cannot fathom, but it takes special individuals and a lot of training to become detection dogs. Schoon used to work with detection dogs in forensics, in particular rape cases for the Dutch police, to identify rapists by their semen. She says to think of detection dogs as highly trained specialists who recognised scents in the way humans recognise people's faces.

 

However, training a new dog is not easy and can take some time. According to Serena Donnini, a dog trainer for ENCI and the coordinator of the Xylella Detection Dogs experimental programme, there are some dog breeds, such as the springer spaniel, German shepherd, cocker spaniel, and Labrador, that, thanks to their larger nose and chest space, are more likely to become good super smellers and work longer shifts in a self-directed way, often pursuing a scent for hours. But that's not enough, Donnini says, because a dog's personality is important too: to pass all the exams to become a detection dogs, the animals must love to play and eat.

"This is important in order to develop a reward system," Donnini says. The more a dog loves to catch a ball, and the more they become obsessed with it, the more likely they'll look for it. "Until we have something that the dog wants so strongly that he would almost be willing to kill to get it, we can't move forward to train him."

A common object that Donnini and her colleagues often work with is a hollow rubber toy. After letting the dog initially play with it, trainers start hiding it to work on the dog's searching skills. Every time the dogs find the rubber, they receive a food reward.

"It must think, 'working here is great because I found my toy'," Donnini says. To the dogs, the rubber has a very specific odour, so the more the training advances, the more the trainer breaks the rubber into smaller pieces until they become the size of a lentil. The smaller the rubber fragment, the more the dog concentrates on finding it and speeds up its sniffing frequency. Once the dog is taught how to indicate it has found the toy by freezing, barking or sitting, trainers insert the target smell.

According to Donnini, there are different ways to do this, but there are two most common methods. The first is pairing – putting together target smell and toy, rewarding the dog when they find them, and slowly removing the rubber of the toy. The other is contrasting – here, no toy is hidden, but as the dog urgently looks for it, when it passes by the target odour, it receives a reward. The dog soon learns to signal when it recognises the new smell, receiving a reward.

 

Therefore, Donnini says it's crucial to train the dogs with the right scents, and this is where the scientists of the National Research Council play a fundamental role. To save trees from Xylella, that scent is the odour of an infected plant. Like humans, when plants get infected, their metabolism and scent change.

Donato Boscia, a plant virologist and the head of the Bari unit of the CNR Institute for Sustainable Plant Protection in charge of studying Xylella, has been providing Donnini with certified infected olive plants. Boscia's team is currently trying to figure out the specific molecules released by the infected plants that the dogs perceive.

"We don't really know, but we have to give the dog all the puzzle pieces so that he can create a precise smell image," Donnini adds.

To show the dogs' precision, Donnini lays out five small potted olive trees in a row in the yard of Forestaforte, an olive mill, and the research outpost of CNR in Salento. One of the plants carries a tag with a red dot, certified as infected with Xylella by Boscia's team. Dog trainer Fortebraccio signals to Ellis, his seven-year-old dappled white and brown springer spaniel, who sprints through the plants, freezes in front of the infected plant, and wagging her tail, returns to the trainer to claim her food.

No matter where the plant was positioned in the line, both Ellis and Paco could clearly spot and freeze in front of it.

 

Not all plants infected by Xylella show symptoms perceptible to humans, which is one reason it has proved so challenging to contain the disease. The dogs could help halt the spread at critical strategic locations such as greenhouses and ports. It's thought that it was through an imported coffee plant from Latin America that Xylella arrived in Puglia in the first place, according to one study led by Annalisa Giampetruzzi of the University of Bari Aldo Moro.

"It is precisely these [places] that have been the Trojan horse in which Xylella was introduced into a new area," Boscia says. They imagine trained dogs deployed in each entrance port that receives imported plants and others that would periodically scout the region's greenhouses.

"We need to train dogs to identify Xylella-infected plants regardless of the plant species where it is found," Boscia said. The researchers still do not know if the compounds that the dogs smell come from the roots or from the branches of the tree. They are still uncertain if, with the same training, they'll be able to simultaneously uncover the bacteria in a rosemary or an oleander plant.

According to Cristina Davis, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, who has been working for years to build instruments that can detect volatile organic compounds, that is a possibility. She explains that if, for example, there are 50 volatile compounds emitted by each different Xylella-infected plant species, it could be that a portion of those compounds are shared between all.

 "I think that there's a really reasonable expectation that you could train an animal like a dog or a sensor to be able to detect that over time," Davis says.

 In fact, in 2014, Davis and her team managed to use an advanced instrument, a differential mobility spectrometer, to spot citrus plants infected by the bacteria Candidatus Liberibacter.

As Italian scientists keep studying the infected plants, dogs could work as proof of concept to create an instrument that could help their Xylella search too. There is still a lot of work to be done, but the researchers hope the Xylella Detection Dogs will be another instrument to contrast the deadly bacteria.

Besides the dire impact of Xylella on the southern Italian territory, Di Noia worries about the quantities of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by the endless forests of dead olive trees as they decompose.

"It's a cost that we all have to pay, nationally and internationally, to contain an environmental disaster," Di Noia says.

 

7 Things to Know about the Debt Ceiling by Leonard Burman and William G. Gale

  There is a legal maximum on how much debt the federal government can accumulate—often called the “debt ceiling” or the “debt limit.” According to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the government will hit the current limit in a few days. Using a variety of accounting tricks (like temporarily diverting government pension funds), the government can postpone the day when it cannot pay its bills but only for a few months. Congress and the administration therefore face the following questions: whether to raise the debt limit, by how much, and what, if any, conditions to attach.

 Citizens and the media misunderstand the issues surrounding the debt limit. Policymakers often fuel this misunderstanding with misleading statements that distort the debate.

The issue is really quite simple. The debt limit doesn’t cause the debt any more than a thermometer causes a fever. Debt grows when spending exceeds revenues. That’s it.

Congress should abolish the debt limit and replace it with the simple, common- sense rule that automatically authorizes any borrowing necessary to implement any fiscal legislation that affects the federal deficit. This “Gephardt rule” was in place at various times in the past.

 Here are seven things to understand about the debt limit and why it is unnecessary and obstructive.

1.The debt limit has been raised continually for more than a century.  The first debt limit was established in 1917 to make it easier to finance mobilization efforts in World War I. Before that, Congress generally had to authorize each bond issue. The limit has been raised 78 times since 1960 including 20 times since 2001.

1. Congress usually raises (or suspends) the debt limit before it is reached. Along the way, the party out of power demagogues the debt limit, blaming the other party for its profligacy.
2. Raising the debt limit is not about new spending; it is about paying for previous choices policymakers legislated. Voters often incorrectly assume—and lawmakers often incorrectly assert—that a vote to raise the debt ceiling is a vote for more red ink. In fact, raising the debt limit is about paying for past choices. Debt limit debates are about whether Congress should authorize the government to borrow to pay for spending that Congress has already authorized. Oddly enough, when Congress authorizes new spending and new taxes, it does not automatically authorize the borrowing needed to make up any differ­ence. Arguing about increasing the debt limit is like having a person charge vacation expenses to his credit card and then debate whether he should pay the credit card company when the bill comes due.
3.  The uselessness of a debt limit is exhibited by the fact that only one other advanced country—Denmark—has a separate debt limit rule like ours. And they don’t use it as a political football.
4.  The limit (inappropriately) applies to gross federal debt. The debt limit applies to gross debt: the sum of net debt plus intragovernmental loans. Net debt is what the government owes the public—including investors, pension funds, and domestic or foreign central banks. It is the measure that economists consider to be important. Intragovernmental debt is what one part of the government owes another part. Because it is akin to your right pocket owing your left pocket money, intragovernmental debt is irrelevant to the nation’s fiscal health. Thus, gross debt is a legal concept with little economic significance. Sadly, the popular discussion—even among many so-called experts—sometimes focuses on gross debt, because the bigger number is more eye-catching (although net debt, at around $24.5 trillion, is still pretty big). At the beginning of 2023 about $6.8 trillion (approximately 22% of debt subject to the limit is intragovernmental debt.
5.  If debt hits the ceiling, the Treasury Department uses several accounting gimmicks to postpone the day of reckoning, but these typically last only a few months. At that point, the government would have to default on interest payments or other obligations—for example, military pay, Social Security and Medicare, tax refunds, or other safety net payments. The law is unclear about which claims are senior. Nor is it clear who has the right to determine seniority. Legislation could set priorities, but any such prioritization would be tested in court. And even if bondholders were paid, not paying all the claims would constitute default, just with a different name, and incur costs for the government.
6.  If the debt limit were not raised, the amount of spending cuts or tax increases that would be required would equal $1.5 trillion this year and $14 trillion over the next 10 years. For perspective, these figures are larger than total defense spending over the same periods of time. And if there were a default, interest rates would rise, increasing deficits and requiring even larger tax and spending changes.
7. The economic consequences of a large-scale, intentional default are unknown, but predictions range from bad to catastrophic. In1979, an inadvertent temporary partial debt default occurred because of an administrative error; it raised U.S. borrowing costs by $40 billion (in today’s dollars). This was an accidental default on a small batch of Treasury securities, but it spooked investors enough to raise interest payments significantly. An intentional, large-scale default has never happened because in the past it has been unthinkable. To do so now would be to play with fire and risk the United States’ charmed position as a “risk-free borrower” in global credit markets.

Why cop show Homicide: Life on the Street was revolutionary By Natasha Tripney

 The Wire is considered a high point in TV history, but it owed a lot to another series involving creator David Simon, writes Natasha Tripney – this gritty drama about Baltimore's homicide unit.

When the first episode of Homicide: Life on the Street aired on US network NBC on 31st January 1993, the crime drama looked like very little on TV at the time. 

The series was based on David Simon's book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets which documented his time spent with the homicide unit of Baltimore Police Department; Simon would go on to create The Wire, still regarded as one of the best TV dramas ever made, but having started his career as a reporter, he made his name with this vividly written account of his time shadowing a shift of homicide detectives in 1988 as they investigated murders. As with his book, the show captured the day-to-day reality and often grim humour of a group of people whose job puts them in regular proximity with death.

The Wire is rightly considered a high watermark for television, but its mixture of compassionate storytelling and social critique was already evident in Homicide – which marks its 30th anniversary this month. Though Simon's creative involvement with the show was limited, his reporting provided the inspiration. In addition to the Baltimore location, the two shows shared some of the same actors and crew, and even recycled some scenes from Simon's book – an incident when cops convince a gullible suspect that a photocopier is a polygraph is repeated in both shows.

The show was initially shot on Super 16mm with handheld cameras, creating a rough, yet propulsive visual style, peppered with distinctive jump cuts. Even the grainy black-and-white opening credits marked the show apart.  Most police procedurals at the time had a more polished look.

When Barry Levinson, director of Diner (1982) and Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), approached writer and producer Tom Fontana – who had a background in television and theatre – to help him bring the book to the screen, he told him he wanted to do a cop show with no car chases and gun battles. "It seemed like such a crazy idea, such a challenge, that I totally embraced it," says Fontana.

Homicide strove to be authentic. It was shot on location in Baltimore and the city, its harbour, rowhouses and corners would become an integral part of the show. The detectives in Simon's book were on-hand to provide advice. "We learned a lot from those fellows," says Melissa Leo, who played detective Kay Howard, and would later win an Oscar for her role in David O'Russell's The Fighter. Early on Simon took the cast to visit various drug hangouts around the city, recalls Kyle Secor, who played rookie detective Tim Bayliss. Even the filing cabinets in the squad room were filled with old police reports. The police department was being computerised, so the set designer was able to acquire them.

The cops In Homicide rarely drew their guns. They kvetched about the paperwork and the air conditioning. They fretted over their clearance rates and the number of unsolved cases listed under their name in red on the board that featured prominently in each episode. The dialogue combined musings on life and death, with digressions about the Lincoln assassination and which animal produces the biggest sperm. The characters prided themselves in the show on "speaking for the dead" but they were all complex and flawed. "This is a group of people who, every day of their lives, are dealing with dead bodies. You have to acknowledge the effect of that on them emotionally, spiritually, mentally," says Fontana. 

The central line-up

The eclectic cast featured experienced character actors – including Yaphet Kotto, known for the likes of Alien and Live and Let Die, and Ned Beatty, star of Network and Deliverance – alongside comedian Richard Belzer, as the acerbic John Munch (a character he would go on to play in several seasons of another NBC procedural, Law and Order SVU). Clark Johnson, who played the affable Meldrick Lewis, would go on to direct the opening episodes of both The Shield and The Wire, shaping the feel of the police drama of the next decade. Altogether, the ensemble was also notably ethnically diverse for the time.

More retrograde was the fact that the central line-up of detectives was initially going to be all-male, until Fontana and Levinson thought better of it, explains Leo. She landed the role of Howard, the only female cop in the Homicide unit. While many of the characters had direct parallels in Simon's book, this was not the case with Howard. Female detectives were rare. There wasn't a precedent for her, says Leo. The character was initially going to be called Kay Harvey, in a nod to Rick Garvey, one of the real-life detectives, who just like Howard had a perfect closure rate, but they decided against this as it was felt Garvey "could not possibly return to his workstation once he found out a girl was playing him," laughs Leo.

Leo was keen to avoid portraying her in a cliched way. Howard was diligent, ambitious and highly professional, more competent than her male partner.  There were also no rules about what a female detective should wear, she explains, "so we invented it". Howard often wore a shirt and tie, she says, "something I think is becoming on a woman – which is finally being understood".

While it was an ensemble show, Andre Braugher, who played Detective Frank Pembleton, an erudite, Jesuit-educated New Yorker with a complicated relationship with God, rapidly established himself as a standout. He had an electrifying screen presence, radiating charisma and energy. "I had never seen an actor like that on television," says Fontana. "His rhythms were so unique to him."

Secor's character, Bayliss, was thrown into the deep end on his very first case, the murder of Adena Watson, an 11-year-old girl – based on the real-life murder of LaTonya Wallace, one of the most upsetting cases in Simon's book. The detective in charge of the Wallace murder was there when they filmed many of those scenes. "It had a huge impact on his life, his relationships, and on the way that he approached his work," says Secor, something which informed the character of Bayliss.

"Bayliss had a very high standard in terms of what was right and what was wrong," says Secor. Bayliss' partnership with the formidable Pembleton developed over the series. "Andre was the greatest partner in the world," says Secor. "We saw ourselves as an old married couple." Frequently filming in cars at 2am deepened the relationship, and the on-screen chemistry between the pair is palpable, particularly when they're in the Box, the interrogation room in which some of the show's most memorable scenes take place.

Indeed, concerned about going over-budget with the first series, Fontana decided to write an episode, Three Men and Adena, set almost entirely in the Box. Bayliss and Pembleton have just 12 hours to get a confession out of the main suspect in the Adena Watson murder, an elderly fruit seller – an "araber" in Baltimore parlance – played by the legendary Moses Gunn.                                                                                                                                           Fontana read the interrogation transcripts of the Wallace case in preparation and the episode is as claustrophobic and intense as television gets, the balance of power between the three men continually shifting. On screen as in life, there is no satisfying resolution. The case remains unsolved. Fontana attributes the episode's power to the director Martin Campbell, who would go on to direct big-budget Hollywood films including The Mask of Zorro (1998) and Casino Royale (2006). "What he did was so subtle, but so smart. He never shot from the same angle twice, so you never get tired of being in that room for an hour." The episode won Fontana an Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Drama series.

After the first season aired, the show's future was, for a time, in jeopardy. "There was enormous resistance until I won the Emmy, and then suddenly, they said: 'we love this. We always loved it'," Fontana says. NBC renewed the show, but only for four episodes, instead of the first season's nine. "The number is supposed to go up, not down," he adds. "But they said take the four, or forget about it. They also insisted that we start having guest stars." Levinson called in Robin Williams, who he'd previously worked with, to play the grieving husband of a murdered tourist in the second season opener Bop Gun. Williams was cast against type in a downbeat, sombre role as a man navigating his sudden bereavement, appalled by the casual way the cops discuss overtime while his wife lies in the morgue. "It seemed to me to be a way to satisfy the network's demand for guest stars, but also be true to the insanity of our show," says Fontana.

The episode, Bop Gun, was co-written by Simon and his friend David Mills. It highlighted the discrepancy in resources allocated to a high-profile case – a "red ball" – compared to murders in poorer, black neighbourhoods, like that of the father of the young shooter. This was the first episode of television ever written by Simon and, afterwards, he has said, he turned down more lucrative offers to write for other shows in order to stay with Homicide and learn how television worked, eventually becoming script editor and a producer of the last two seasons. The episode was also directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal and featured his son, a very young Jake Gyllenhaal, as Williams' son. Memorable guest performances – from Elijah Wood, Peter Gallagher, Marcia Gay Harden, Steve Buscemi, among many others – would become a feature of the show.

Its fearless ethos

The writing was unafraid of moral complexity. "We wrote human beings who were at a moment of crisis that had brought them to the Box. What got them there and what would happen to them afterwards were the stories we felt compelled to tell," says Fontana.

Though not as explicitly political as The Wire, Homicide would explore corruption, incompetence and systemic failings in the police, as well as the societal impact of addiction and poverty in Baltimore. One episode showed the police banding together after a shooting in which another cop is potentially involved. Discouraged from investigating his fellow officers, an enraged Pembleton emotionally destroys a black man in the Box, extracting a confession from him, to give the bosses the result they want.

The loose, free-flowing shooting style proved exciting to the actors, allowing them to try different things. "We were given an enormous amount of freedom to play and bring the stories that David had found in his writing to life," says Secor, while Leo speaks fondly of "every single day that I spent in that squad room with that camera and that gang of men. It taught me so much."

It felt like the end of something and the beginning of something – Melissa Leo

Fontana made a point of talking to the actors about how they saw their characters developing. Leo refers to Fontana's genius in this respect, vis-à-vis "the inventiveness we actors were allowed to bring to it". Secor describes Fontana prompting him to make discoveries about his character: "Tom really gave me a lot of leeway in where this character was going." In later seasons Bayliss reveals that he was sexually abused as a child; he also starts exploring his sexuality and, by the end of the series, he openly identifies as bisexual, rare for a protagonist in a mainstream TV show, both then and now. "The network got a bit nervous about that," said Secor. Not everything made it to the screen. "What happened to that full-on kiss with Peter Gallagher?" he laughs, referring to an episode where his character is asked on a date by Gallagher's gay restaurant owner. But he received a lot of letters from people who related to what his character was going through, especially the scenes of him confronting, and later caring for, the uncle who had abused him. "That love/hate relationship had a big impact on people." 

The writers gave Braugher scenes into which he could really sink his teeth. "We'd say: this will screw him up. He won't be able to play this scene," says Fontana. "And of course, he always could, which only made us redouble our efforts to challenge him." Pembleton was eventually brought crashing down to earth by a stroke at the end of the fourth series. Braugher's portrayal of a highly articulate man left fumbling for words is typically nuanced and moving. "That was another interesting twist that was thrown into our relationship," says Secor. "Andre's character was always in the ascendant, and suddenly he needed help."

The network was less certain of Howard's character. She is promoted to Sergeant, but she becomes less prominent over the course of the show. "I know Tom went to NBC every year, fighting for Howard to stay in the unit," says Leo, but her character never returned after the fifth season. The way this was handled clearly still frustrates her. "They didn't know what to do with me. But I thank Tom Fontana for fighting to keep Kay on the show."

The show would evolve in other ways. "Over the course of seasons, we kept playing with it, trying stuff and changing the look of it," says Fontana. Later seasons would feature serial killers and snipers – even shootouts.

Even as it superficially started to resemble a more conventional procedural – with a more conventionally good-looking cast – Homicide continued to produce standout episodes. Sixth series episode, Subway, written by James Yoshimura, starred Vincent D'Onofrio as a man who is pushed under a subway train; conscious and lucid but fatally injured with less than an hour to live, he talks with Pembleton, as the latter tries to work out who is responsible. "That one was basically a two-character play," says Fontana.

Braugher would leave at the end of season six, having finally won an Emmy in 1998. The show was never quite the same without him, and the seventh season would be the last, though Braugher and all the original cast members, even those whose characters had died, would return for a 2000 movie that tied up loose ends, and allowed for one last wrenching scene between Bayliss and Pembleton.

When Homicide came off the air in 1999, the way television was made and consumed was changing. Fontana's next show, the exhilarating, experimental prison drama Oz, debuted in 1997, kicking off a wave of HBO original programming. The Sopranos would start airing in 1999 and Simon's miniseries The Corner would follow in 2000, before The Wire made its debut in 2002. In discussions of the history of prestige television, Homicide doesn't always get its dues, but it played a key role in that transition, paving the way for what came later. "It felt like the end of something and the beginning of something," says Leo.

Faucets in McCarthy’s district are running dry after years of drought. Constituents want him to do more By Ella Nilsen

Shortly after Benjamin Cuevas and his family moved into their new home three years ago in Tooleville, California, he realized something was horribly wrong.

In the middle of the day, the water pressure would drop completely. Cranking up both hot and cold could only coax a little drip out of the faucet.

Then there was the water itself, contaminated with chemicals from agriculture runoff and treated with so much chlorine that it turned his family’s black clothing gray in the wash. His daughter and her baby live in the house, and Cuevas’s wife only bathes her granddaughter in the bottled water they receive from the county for drinking.

Cuevas is not alone; the entire town of under 300 people faces the same water crisis. In many rural parts of the state, faucets and community wells are running dry after years of drought and heavy agriculture use pulls more water from the same groundwater residents use.

One local nonprofit told CNN that about 8,000 people in the San Joaquin Valley need thousands of gallons of hauled water just to keep their taps flowing – and that number is growing.

Newly elected House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has represented Tooleville for the past decade – though the small town is just outside his newly redrawn congressional district. The Republican lawmaker has long represented Kern and Tulare counties, and his redrawn seat adds portions of Fresno County.

Throughout his tenure, this region of California has spent more time than any other part of the country in exceptional drought – the US Drought Monitor’s most severe category – a drought scientists say has been made more intense by human-caused climate change. Recent rainfall has put a dent in the region’s surface drought, though experts have told CNN it will do little to solve the ongoing groundwater shortage.

Tulare, Kern and Fresno counties have endured more than 200 weeks in exceptional drought over the past decade, according to Drought Monitor data.

Multiple people CNN spoke to for this story said McCarthy and his office don’t often engage on this issue in the district, especially compared with neighboring members of Congress. And they wish he would do more with his power in Washington – especially now that he holds the speaker’s gavel.

McCarthy proposed an amendment this past summer to set up a grant program to help connect small towns like Tooleville with larger cities that have better water systems. The measure passed the House but died in the Senate. But as more and more wells go dry, McCarthy has made a point to vote against other bills addressing climate change and drought, including the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law.

“In my experience, he has never engaged with us on any of these kinds of emergencies,” said Jessi Snyder, the director of community development at local nonprofit Self-Help Enterprises, who focuses on getting hauled water to entire communities that have gone dry.

In a statement to CNN, McCarthy’s office said he has been “a staunch advocate on water issues in the Central Valley and California” since he was first elected to the House. McCarthy has joined his colleagues to “introduce broad legislative solutions every Congress related to this topic since our water situation continues to worsen,” his spokesperson Brittany Martinez said.

But McCarthy does not mention climate change when talking about his district’s drought, and his office did not respond to questions from CNN about whether he believes climate change is playing a role. Instead, he often blames the drought on state mismanagement of water and has called for new and larger dams and reservoirs to be built to capture rainwater during wet years.

Water experts in California say that’s missing the new reality.

“Part of what’s happening now is the reality that there is no more new water,” said Peter Gleick, co-founder and senior fellow of California-based water nonprofit Pacific Institute. “The knee-jerk response of politicians has always been build another dam; find more water. There is no new reservoir that’s going to magically solve these problems. It’s now a question of managing demand.”

‘We can’t ever get ahead of it’

When a call comes in from yet another community whose well has run dry, it’s a race against time for the staff at Self-Help Enterprises.

The Visalia, California-based nonprofit has a self-imposed deadline of just 24 hours to drive out to the impacted community with emergency tanks to keep water flowing for showers, laundry and cleaning, as well as with five-gallon jugs of higher-quality water for drinking.

“The team goes all hands-on deck,” Tami McVay, Self-Help’s director of emergency services, told CNN. “Everybody knows what their role is, and they just go get it done. And we move forward to the next one.”

These days, there’s always a next one. Snyder said the summer of 2022 marked “a new level of crisis” as entire small communities of 80 to 100 homes started running out of water, in addition to individual homes.

“It’s been a real struggle because it’s hard to provide a backup source of water to a whole community instead of one household,” she said.

More than 1,400 wells were reported dry last year, according to the state of California, a 40% increase over the same period in 2021. Self-Help staff see this in person on the ground. New families are flowing into their hauled water program, but none are leaving. During the dry, warm-weather months, McVay estimates her nonprofit fields around 100 calls a day, dropping down to about 30 per week in the winter months.

The punishing multi-year drought is what Brad Rippey, a meteorologist at the US Department of Agriculture, calls California’s “latest misery.” California has spent eight of the last 11 years in drought, with the last three years being the driest such period on record, state officials said in October. Human-caused climate change – which is raising global temperatures and making much-needed rain and snow less frequent in the West – is contributing to the severity, Rippey said.

“The impacts are multiplying. You have these droughts piling on top of droughts with cumulative impacts,” including wildfires, he added.

To supplement the dwindling groundwater supply in Tooleville, officials in Tulare County and nonprofits like Self-Help deliver five-gallon water jugs to the residents for drinking and 16,000 gallons of hauled water into tanks for washing their clothes, doing dishes and taking showers.

There’s so much demand in the warm months for the hauled water that a 16,000-gallon delivery lasted some communities just a few hours before needing to be refilled, Snyder said.

“We literally cannot pump the water out of the tanker trucks fast enough to fill the storage tanks,” she added. “We can’t ever get ahead of it; physics is against us. It’s nuts and really stressful.”

Competing for water

California’s extreme heat wave this summer pushed water usage even higher as residents watered grass and farms pumped more for crops. In Tooleville, Cuevas watched as the orange and lemon trees in his yard withered and died. Outdoor watering restrictions meant he couldn’t save his trees, even as some of his neighbors flouted the restrictions with noticeably green lawns.

“Everything just perished,” Cuevas said. “It’s not a good feeling to see other people enjoying [the water], while you’re doing your part.”

Seeing the nearby Friant-Kern Canal every day – which carries melted snowpack water from Northern California to Central Valley farms – is a nagging reminder of what his family doesn’t have.

“It’s terrible,” Cuevas told CNN. “Just joking, I’d say I’ll go out there and put a hose [in it] running right back to my house.”

As Cuevas’s own trees died, commercial farms in the area were still producing – although their future is also uncertain. Farms are also having to drill deeper wells to irrigate orange groves and acres of thirsty pecan and pistachio trees.

With this rush on groundwater, shallow residential wells don’t stand a chance. In West Goshen, a small town that sits outside McCarthy’s district in Tulare County, resident Jesus Benitez told CNN he burned through three well pumps – costing $1,200 a piece – during the warmer months when his neighbor, a farmer who grows alfalfa and corn, started irrigating his crops.

“They’ve got the money to go every time deeper and deeper in the ground; we don’t have that luxury,” Benitez said.

Two town wells in nearby Seville nearly ran dry this summer, said Linda Gutierrez, a lifelong resident who sits on the town’s water board. Across the street from the town’s wells is a pistachio farm, and when they start irrigating, the groundwater level plummets, she said.

But she doesn’t blame the farmers. Like many who live in the area, her husband is a farm worker. There’s a lot of pride in the region’s far-reaching agriculture, and many feel it should be sustained.

“You can’t not have farmers because you need food, but we have to have water in order to survive,” Gutierrez said. “There’s a very tricky balance to establish. Right now, if they don’t irrigate, we have water, but also a year from now we have no food.”

As big of a societal problem as drought and water shortages are, they are also intensely personal. Self-Help’s McVay gets emotional when talking about school children in the area getting beat up because they don’t have clean clothes or ready access to a shower.

“They don’t have water in their homes to take baths, or brush their teeth, or have clean laundry, and they’re getting bullied,” she said. “Being made fun of because they’re taking baths at the local gas station bathroom. It’s not fair – the stress that it causes the parents because [they] start to feel like they’re failing as a parent.”

‘He’s focused on that leadership position’

Multiple local and state elected officials and leaders of nonprofits focusing on water delivery in the San Joaquin Valley said McCarthy isn’t engaged enough on what they consider one of his district’s most dire crises.

McVay said outreach from McCarthy’s office on dry residential wells is “slim to none, and I am not saying that to discredit them at all.”

“I have had more conversations, more engagement and just more wanting to know how they can assist from Congressman Valadao and his office than probably any other on the federal side,” McVay added.

Snyder said Rep. David Valadao, a Republican representing neighboring Kings County as well as portions of Tulare and Kern, and his staff “will show up in a community at the time of a crisis” and are actively engaged on how they can support efforts to get people water.

Other members of Congress, including Democratic Rep. Jim Costa and Republican Connie Conway, who left office earlier this month, have also been more accessible and engaged on the issue, Snyder said.

“Kevin McCarthy, no,” Snyder added.

While McCarthy is popular in his district and influential among California and Central Valley Republicans, California state Sen. Melissa Hurtado, a Democrat who represents parts of the San Joaquin Valley plagued by drought, told CNN there are concerns that McCarthy’s ambition for House speaker has superseded his district’s needs.

“He’s focused on that leadership position instead of actually working on issues to address the impacts of his district,” Hurtado told CNN. “Quietly, the word out there is it’s been a while that he’s actually delivered something for the region, given his focus on the leadership position. Maybe that’s part of his greater vision for helping this region out.”

McCarthy’s office did not respond to questions about how he’ll use his position as House speaker to address climate change-fueled droughts in California and around the nation. Nor did it respond to the critiques about his lack of engagement.

“The Leader has consistently worked in a bipartisan, bicameral fashion to deliver this life-giving resource for the families, agriculture producers and workers, and communities in the Central Valley and throughout California, and our Republican congressional delegation heavily relies on his steadfast leadership and decades of expertise when crafting their own pieces of water legislation,” McCarthy’s spokesperson Martinez told CNN in a statement. “When Democrats have held the majority, they time and time again blocked the progress and innovation of their House GOP colleagues.”

In July, McCarthy spoke on the House floor about Tooleville’s plight, seeking to set up a federal grant program to help connect it and other small towns to larger cities’ water supply.

“In our district, the community of Tooleville has run out of water as the groundwater table drops and aging infrastructure fails or becomes obsolete,” McCarthy said at the time. “Tulare County advises me that if California’s droughts continue, more small and rural communities in our district with older infrastructure could meet the exact same fate.”

McCarthy’s measure authorized a grant program but didn’t contain any funding. And even though the bill passed the House, it died in the Senate, and it’s unclear whether it will come up again in the new Congress.

Connecting Tooleville’s water infrastructure with that of nearby Exeter has been a decadeslong pursuit that is finally close to happening thanks to a state mandate and funding. The project will mean more reliable and cleaner water for residents like Cuevas. But it’s expected to take eight years for the two systems to fully merge.

McCarthy is also co-sponsoring a bill with Valadao that would enlarge certain reservoirs and kickstart construction on a new reservoir in the Sacramento Valley. But some nonprofit leaders and local officials say these solutions would prioritize agriculture over residents.

“We need more solutions beyond storage and dams,” said Susana De Anda, executive director of the San Joaquin Valley-based environmental justice nonprofit Community Water Center. “[McCarthy] lacks understanding of the real critical problems we’re experiencing around the drought and our communities.”

Seeking to attract younger voters concerned about climate change to the Republican Party, McCarthy last year convened a Climate, Energy and Conservation Task Force to develop the party’s messaging and policies around the issue. And House Republican delegations have attended the last two United Nations climate summits.

But all indications suggest that addressing human-caused climate change is not going to be a focal point of McCarthy’s now that he has the speaker’s gavel. McCarthy and House Republicans have shown they don’t want to move away from planet-warming fossil fuels, and few in the party are willing to connect global temperature rise to worsening droughts and extreme weather.

McCarthy dissolved Democrats’ Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, and he has vowed to investigate Department of Energy grants for electric vehicle components, as well as alleged “collusion” between environmental groups and China and Russia to “hurt American Energy,” according to a recent statement.

“Our representatives don’t talk about climate change; it’s a real problem,” De Anda said. “Climate change is real. Our communities are the canaries in the coal mine. We get hit first.”

It’s part of the reason Cuevas is hoping to move away in a couple years. He’s hopeful the water situation will improve by connecting Tooleville to a larger town’s water system; otherwise, he’s afraid he won’t be able to entice another buyer due to the water issues.

“I’m happy I had a chance to buy it, but we are planning to move,” Cuevas told CNN. “Right now, if I try, I ain’t going to get nothing, not even what I paid for the home.”