If the Georgia race had taken place in another country—say, the Republic of Georgia—U.S. media and the U.S. State Department would not have hesitated to question its legitimacy ... Kemp’s asterisk win suggests that the battle for voting rights, which many imagined was over and done with in the last century, is still very much in progress.
- Carol Anderson, Emory University
This week's featured post is "A Legislative Agenda for House Democrats".
This week everybody was talking about the midterm results
Early Tuesday evening, I was having 2016 flashbacks: The optimistic polls in Florida appeared to be wrong, and the first House toss-up race (Virginia-5) went to the Republican. The earliest returns came from Indiana, where Joe Donnelly was losing, dooming the admittedly unlikely Democrats-take-the-Senate scenario from the outset. The Blue Wave just wasn't happening.
Then things got better. Votes are still being counted (especially mail-in votes in California), so no one has a precise estimate of the national popular vote in the House races yet. But Wikipedia's running total currently has the Democratic margin at 6.5%. In 2010, an election everyone calls a Republican wave, the GOP won the House national popular vote by 6.8%. The Republican wave looked bigger, because it picked up 63 House seats that year compared to the Democrats' 34-44 seats this year. (538 is estimating a final total gain of 38 seats.) In 2010, the GOP wound up with 242 seats. Democrats will probably wind up somewhere in the low 230s. The difference? Gerrymandering. Republican control on the state level has allowed them to construct a large number of secure districts.
As it stands now, Republicans have 51 Senate seats and Democrats 46, with three (Florida, Arizona, and Mississippi) still to be decided. Arizona will likely go Democratic and Mississippi Republican (after a run-off). So the final Senate composition will likely be either 53-47 or 52-48. (It was 52-48 before Doug Jones won the Alabama special election last year.)
In the House, Democrats have 225 seats (already more than the 218 needed for a majority) and Republicans 200, with 10 still undecided.
As we wait to see if Bill Nelson and Andrew Gillum can prevail in the Florida recount, let's take a few moments to bid a very joyous good-bye to Kris Kobach, Scott Walker, Dana Rohrabacher, Dave Bratt, Peter Roskam, and Pete Sessions. Too bad Steve King couldn't join you.
and the subversion of democracy
This year, Georgia went all-out to keep non-whites from voting, with the result that Secretary of State Brian Kemp looks likely to move up to the governorship. Emory University Professor Carol Anderson writes in The Atlantic:
In the end, it looks like Kemp won. It’s impossible to know if his attempts to restrict the franchise are what pushed him over the line. But if the Georgia race had taken place in another country—say, the Republic of Georgia—U.S. media and the U.S. State Department would not have hesitated to question its legitimacy ... Kemp’s asterisk win suggests that the battle for voting rights, which many imagined was over and done with in the last century, is still very much in progress.
In September, "Cost of Voting in the American States" in Election Law Journal tried to quantify how difficult it was to vote in the various states in 2016. This graph summarizes the results:
The pattern is pretty clear: If you find it hard to vote, most likely your state -- Mississippi, Virginia, Tennessee, Indiana, Texas -- is governed by Republicans. (Virginia has since elected a Democratic governor, but he doesn't have a majority in the legislature. North Carolina might rank higher if the Supreme Court hadn't invalidated its voter-suppression law. It has since made another try.) The easiest states are more mixed, with red North Dakota and Iowa getting into the top five with blue Oregon and California and purple Colorado. (I think Fair Play is still a Midwestern value, though the South has lost it.)
This graphic captures just how gerrymandered Wisconsin's state legislature is:
In short, the people of Wisconsin have lost all control of their legislature. Republicans will hold power because that's just how it is. What the voters want doesn't matter any more.
Wisconsin's Republican state legislators are currently discussing whether to use their ill-gotten power to clip the wings of the voters' newly elected Democratic governor. Following the model of North Carolina after Democrat Roy Cooper won the governorship in 2016, a special lame-duck session of the Wisconsin legislature could pass laws limiting the governor's power, which current Republican Governor Scott Walker could sign before he leaves office.
Following that 2016 coup, the Electoral Integrity Project (which normally pays attention to third-world countries) stopped rating North Carolina as a democracy. Soon, Wisconsin may not count as a democracy either.
and the Justice Department
The morning after the election, Trump accepted Jeff Sessions' resignation as Attorney General and replaced him not with either of the two Senate-confirmed subordinates (Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein or Solicitor General Noel Francisco), but with Sessions' chief of staff Matthew Whitaker, who had previously been described as the White House's "eyes and ears" in the Justice Department.
The big thing this does is put a Trump loyalist in the role of overseeing the Mueller investigation. Trump has repeatedly whined that Sessions should have "protected" him, rather than following Justice Department regulations and recusing himself from an investigation into activities he had been involved with. Now Trump has an AG who will put him first and the law second.
NYT conservative columnist Bret Stephens comments:
Of all the ways in which Donald Trump’s presidency has made America worse, nothing epitomizes it quite so fully as the elevation of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general of the United States. Intellectually honest conservatives — the six or seven who remain, at any rate — need to say this, loudly. His appointment represents an unprecedented assault on the integrity and reputation of the Justice Department, the advice and consent function of the Senate, and the rule of law in the United States.
He lists the ways: Whitaker is "unqualified", "shady", "a hack", "a crackpot", "barely legal", and "dangerous".
It says something about how atrocious this appointment is that even Trump is now distancing himself from Whitaker, falsely claiming not to know him despite the latter’s repeated Oval Office visits. It’s the Michael Cohen treatment. When a rat smells a rat, it’s a rat.
A number of questions immediately arise:
- Is this legal? (Former Solicitor General Neal Katyal and George Conway say no: The appointment of an acting AG who has not been confirmed by the Senate "defies one of the explicit checks and balances set out in the Constitution, a provision designed to protect us all against the centralization of government power." Stephens says he's "not fully convinced" by this argument, which is why he called Whitaker "barely legal".
- Should Whitaker also be recused from overseeing the Mueller investigation, as Sessions was? Whitaker has a long history of public statements prejudging the Mueller investigation, and has connections to a major witness, Sam Clovis. Whether that legally adds up to recusal under Justice Department guidelines hasn't been determined yet, though seven major Democrats in Congress have asked the DOJ's ethics office to review the situation. It seems unlikely that Whitaker will recuse himself, whatever the rules say. Neal Katyal (who helped write the regulations defining a special counsel) also has an opinion on this: "But no one — and I mean no one — ever thought the regulations we wrote would permit the president to install some staff member of his choice from the Justice Department to serve as acting attorney general and thereby oversee the special counsel. Such a proposal would have been laughed off Capitol Hill within a nanosecond as fundamentally at odds with the most cardinal principle that no one is above the law."
- Assuming that the point of promoting Whitaker was to screw up the Mueller investigation, what can he do? Benjamin Wittes argues that he can't do much. We'll soon see whether he's right.
and the latest attack on the free press
CNN's Jim Acosta lost his White House press pass because he asked a question Trump didn't like. (He challenged Trump's false characterization of the migrant caravan as "an invasion".) When Trump said "OK, that's enough", a female intern tried to take the microphone away from Acosta, who held up an arm to fend her off (while saying "Pardon me, ma'am.").
Sarah Sanders later falsely accused Acosta of "laying hands on" the intern, and backed up her claim with a video that was later shown to have been doctored. (The speeded-up version makes Acosta's arm move look like a blow.) Trump has explicitly threatened to expel other reporters as well.
This is really fascist stuff here, and I don't think the White House press corps is reacting with the seriousness the incident deserves. Other reporters are certainly condemning the White House move, but they continue going in for briefings.
What the Acosta incident points out is that White House briefings have become Potemkin democracy. The administration spokespeople routinely lie, and if a reporter protests against being lied to, he or she will be ejected. By showing up, reporters become props in a propaganda exercise that falsely projects the appearance of a democratic government facing a free press.
and mass shootings
Less than two weeks after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, we had the Thousand Oaks country-music-bar shooting. I heard someone comment: "We should just leave the flags at half mast all the time."
Scientific American pushes back against the notion that nothing can be done.
The right gun laws do prevent shootings, research strongly indicates. And these laws do not mean confiscating everybody’s guns. ... Here are [four] life-saving laws and the data that supports them.
The laws:
- Require people to apply, in-person, at local law enforcement agencies for gun purchase permits.
- Ban individuals convicted of any violent crime from gun purchase.
- Make all serious domestic violence offenders surrender firearms.
- Temporarily ban gun possession among individuals who have had, in the past five years, two or more convictions for DUI or another crime that indicates alcohol abuse.
None of that would prevent law-abiding people from defending their homes or teaching their children to hunt or doing any other benign gun-related activity.
but I'm trying to figure out the lesson of the mid-term elections
Going into the midterms, there were two theories of how Democrats should try to win:
- Move to the center to appeal to moderate voters turned off by Trump.
- Move to the left to inspire non-voters to turn out.
The 2018 election results didn't settle that argument. In Texas, Beto O'Rourke ran a progressive campaign, got a huge voter turnout, and came closer to beating Ted Cruz than anyone would have thought possible a year ago. In Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema ran a centrist race (pledging to be "an independent voice" who would work across party lines) and appears to have won.
Five incumbent Democratic senators in red states -- Claire McCaskill, Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Donnelly, Joe Manchin, and Jon Tester -- ran as moderates: three lost and two won. (Manchin probably feels good about his vote for Brett Kavanaugh, but Tester is probably also happy with his vote against.)
In governors' races, Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams tested the expand-the-progressive-electorate theory and got very close, though it still appears that they came up short. But in Kansas,
A Democrat, Laura Kelly, reached out to Kansas’ sizable contingent of moderate Republicans and touted the endorsement of two former Republican governors and two former Republican senators.
She won. So progressives and centrists alike can point to successes for their side and failures for the other.
Looking ahead, I believe the best Democratic presidential strategy is to somehow go both ways. (That's my interpretation of Obama's 2008 win.) We need a candidate who excites progressives without scaring moderates.
Lawrence Lessig claims the midterms teach a third lesson: Focus on good-government reforms. He attributes Beto's attraction not to his progressive proposals, but to his commitment to refuse PAC money and rely on small donors. There's nothing left, right, or centrist about wanting to represent the voters rather than the big donors.
and you also might be interested in ...
Sunday was the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. World leaders gathered in France to mark the occasion, but Trump blew off a ceremony honoring American war dead because it was raining. Chief of Staff John Kelly managed to get there by car.
The incident points out a longer-term issue that belies Trump's claim to respect our military: He still hasn't visited troops in a combat zone, claiming he has been "very busy" (though not too busy to play golf most weekends). President Obama had only been in office three months when he visited troops in Iraq, and George W. Bush went to Baghram Air Force Base in Afghanistan on several occasions.
Many observers (most amusingly John Oliver) have pointed out the injustices involved in the cash bail system. This is why California will eliminate cash bail next October. But Michelle Alexander (author of the central book on mass incarceration of black people, The New Jim Crow) points out that some of the obvious ways to replace the bail system have unintended consequences and open up new possibilities for abuse.
Firoozeh Dumas is coming home from Munich and dreads bringing her daughter back to an American public school. It turns out that when a rich country values education more than low taxes, as Germany does, its schools can do amazing things -- without bake sales or students going door-to-door selling wrapping paper.
An update on European fascism: Warsaw has an annual fascist march. This year, Poland's president and prime minister were in it.
In February 2018, National Radical Camp, one of the groups involved in organising tomorrow’s march protested in front of Warsaw’s Presidential Palace demanding the President sign the so-called Holocaust Law — a controversial bill which outlaws blaming Poland or Polish citizens for crimes committed during the Holocaust. They shouted slogans such as “Stop Jewish occupation of Poland” and “Go back to Israel”.
The Guardian reports on Sunday's march:
Lining up in parallel columns, Polish soldiers stood side-by-side with members of the National-Radical Camp (ONR), the successor to a pre-war Polish fascist movement, and representatives of Forza Nuova, an Italian neo-fascist movement, as they were addressed by [President Andrzej] Duda at the march’s inauguration.
Poland is also considering a ban on "homosexual propaganda" similar to the one Russia imposed in 2013.
Better news: Poland's ruling Law and Justice Party lost big in local elections in major cities.
The results show that Law and Justice can count on only roughly a third of the vote in Poland. If next year’s parliamentary election were held today, the party would be pushed out of power.
In Hungary, though, the Orban government just gets more entrenched. Virtually all the major news outlets have passed into the hands of government allies.
[J]ournalists I met in Budapest were struck by how quickly the press had changed, and that all it took to break this pillar of democracy was a combination of money and fear. “It’s not Russia,” Csaba Lukacs told me. “No one thinks that someone will be shot. Everyone thinks that he will lose his job. It’s enough.”
and let's close with a post-election meditation
I've used this closing before, but I think it's timely this week. If you got too wrapped up in the election and need to pull back, try this guided meditation.
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