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Voting Rights Bill Puts Democrats on a Crash Course With the Filibuster - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...democrats-voting-congress.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • When they passed a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill this month, Democrats in Congress sped past their Republican opposition, using the budgetary reconciliation process to present a case study of what happens when they don’t bend over backward for G.O.P. buy-in.
  • But at the hearing today, he relished the opportunity to drive home the divide between Democrats and Republicans on this issue. “Today, in the 21st century, there is a concerted, nationwide effort to limit the rights of citizens to vote and to truly have a voice in their own government,” Schumer said, later chanting, “Shame! Shame!” at Republican lawmakers.
  • But Democrats see an opportunity to press their case for filibuster reform with the For the People Act, a sweeping bill that would establish core national voting rights standards and create independent, nonpartisan commissions to handle the congressional redistricting process.
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  • Of course, it’s not yet certain that Senate Democrats will even unify in support of the bill. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who votes against his party with some regularity, is the lone Democrat who didn’t sponsor it, and he has yet to signal unequivocal support. If he does get behind it, he would have to work to roll back the filibuster as well (something that he and at least one other Democratic senator, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, haven’t yet gotten behind) in order to make that support mean anything.
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Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem. - The Washington Post - 4 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQAxCVUlT_print.html conservativism Republican ideology partisan science
shared by Javier E on 03 May 12 - Cached
  • We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
  • The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
  • When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
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  • It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.
  • While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.
  • What happened?
  • the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.
  • the forces Gingrich unleashed destroyed whatever comity existed across party lines, activated an extreme and virulently anti-Washington base — most recently represented by tea party activists — and helped drive moderate Republicans out of Congress.
  • The Norquist tax pledge has led to other pledges, on issues such as climate change, that create additional litmus tests that box in moderates and make cross-party coalitions nearly impossible.
  • Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.
  • In the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our time in Washington,
  • Democrats are hardly blameless, and they have their own extreme wing and their own predilection for hardball politics. But these tendencies do not routinely veer outside the normal bounds of robust politics. If anything, under the presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the Democrats have become more of a status-quo party. They are centrist protectors of government, reluctantly willing to revamp programs and trim retirement and health benefits to maintain its central commitments in the face of fiscal pressures.
  • No doubt, Democrats were not exactly warm and fuzzy toward George W. Bush during his presidency. But recall that they worked hand in glove with the Republican president on the No Child Left Behind Act, provided crucial votes in the Senate for his tax cuts, joined with Republicans for all the steps taken after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and supplied the key votes for the Bush administration’s financial bailout at the height of the economic crisis in 2008. The difference is striking.
  • Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” he wrote on the Truthout Web site.
  • political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have long tracked historical trends in political polarization, said their studies of congressional votes found that Republicans are now more conservative than they have been in more than a century. Their data show a dramatic uptick in polarization, mostly caused by the sharp rightward move of the GOP.
  • We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.
  • Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?Also, stop lending legitimacy to Senate filibusters by treating a 60-vote hurdle as routine. The framers certainly didn’t intend it to be. Report individual senators’ abusive use of holds and identify every time the minority party uses a filibuster to kill a bill or nomination with majority support.
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Voting Rights Bill Puts Democrats on a Crash Course With the Filibuster - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...democrats-voting-congress.html history US Politics policy voting
shared by clairemann on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A debate over Senate procedure seems likely to come to a head, with a divided Democratic Party pushing to expand voting rights and Republicans standing firmly in the way.
  • When they passed a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill this month, Democrats in Congress sped past their Republican opposition, using the budgetary reconciliation process to present a case study of what happens when they don’t bend over backward for G.O.P. buy-in.
  • The bill isn’t eligible for reconciliation and is almost certain to meet gridlock in the Senate, given the threat of a filibuster from Republicans.
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  • “Today, in the 21st century, there is a concerted, nationwide effort to limit the rights of citizens to vote and to truly have a voice in their own government,” Schumer said, later chanting, “Shame! Shame!” at Republican lawmakers.
  • “It is a contradiction to say we must protect minority rights in the Senate while refusing to protect minority rights in society,”
  • Some expressed outrage over the legislation’s proposal to end the mandatory 3-3 partisan split on the Federal Election Commission, a move that Democrats have said was necessary to promote reform.
  • “This bill is designed to corrupt the election process permanently, and it is a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said.
  • Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, argued that the bill was trying to fix a voting system that didn’t need fixing, a position that seemed to go against prominent Republican narratives that the 2020 election was supposedly tainted by voter fraud.
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Opinion | An Appalled Republican Considers the Future of the G.O.P. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...klein-podcast-yuval-levin.html filibuster moderation Politics crisis culture compromise congress
shared by Javier E on 05 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Ezra Klein: There used to be this idea that it was the Democratic Party that was chaotic and unpredictable in who it would nominate, in whether or not it would listen to its own governing or organizing institutions.
  • And now it’s Republicans where this anti-institutional force has overwhelmed the institutions. Do you think that’s true, and if so, why is it that Republican institutions are proving weaker?
  • Even people who get elected to high office on the right tend to be sort of inherently anti-institutional in the way they approach their voters. And I think it’s a problem.
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  • And that, I think, has encouraged the kind of anti-institutional mind-set that, in some ways, is always there. Populism is always anti-institutional, and there’s always been a populist element of the right. But the American right, at its origins, was in the business of defending the institutions.
  • sometimes that meant defending the institutions from the people running them.
  • Think about William F. Buckley’s first book. He was just out of Yale and wrote a book called “God and Man at Yale,” which was basically an argument for saving the great universities from the professors
  • I think that when conservatives think about universities now, they’re more inclined to think that there is no saving these institutions — we have to attack these institutions.
  • on the whole, the culture of the right has become much more hostile to the establishment.
  • Yuval Levin: I think that our politics has never really been intended to function as a pure majoritarian politics. One of the most important insights built into the constitutional system is that a functional republic, to be stable, has to not only enable enduring majorities to have their way but also protect durable minorities — large ones. And that means that there are all kinds of structures in the system that compel accommodation, that require differing factions to work together if they’re going to achieve anything.
  • I don’t think conservatism can do its job in a free society in opposition to the institutions of that society. I think it can only function in defense of them.
  • a conservatism that becomes anti-institutional looks like a mob attacking the Capitol
  • Yuval Levin: Creating alternatives to [mainstream institutions] is quite a challenge. To start a new elite university is not a simple matter. It’s not unimaginable.
  • It’s just very hard to do.
  • Yuval Levin: I do think that’s true. I would say one important force that’s played a role here is the increasing capture of our core mainstream institutions by the left. The core institutions of American media, the academy, culture are abjectly left-leaning institutions. That has meant that to resist the left is to resist these core institutions.
  • To Levin, the problem is that the Republican Party, in hock to these institutions, has become untethered from the tangible stakes of politics. “The question for us in the coming years is whether we can move a little more in the direction of a politics of ‘What does government do?’ and less of a politics of ‘Who rules?’” he said.
  • And so I think conservatives have found that rather than create alternative institutions, they’ve created critical institutions. They’ve created institutions that exist to attack the left’s institutions. And there’s an audience for that, but that’s not really mainstream work. That’s not a place to just get your news when you just want news.
  • I think a politics where a narrow majority could just advance its agenda and then see what the public says at the next election is not a good idea for American society in this moment. I think we are much better served by a politics that compels some work across party lines in order to get anywhere.
  • Congress has always been designed that way. Congress was not intended to be like a European Parliament, where the majority rules for as long as the public will let it. It is a place where the country works out its differences
  • that requires these supermajority institutions
  • I think it is very important that our system requires some cross-partisan accommodation, frustrating as it is for those of us who have policy ambitions. I think that the contribution of that to the health of our political culture is absolutely essential, especially now.
  • the filibuster was not an idea of the founding fathers. They did not want a supermajority requirement in Congress. They thought about that and rejected it.
  • one way of framing what you’re saying here is that a system that requires more accommodation to get things done is going to encourage compromise and understanding between the parties
  • well, look around. We have more filibusters than ever and more polarized politics than ever. More party line votes than ever. Less cooperation than ever.
  • I feel like if your view on this were right, politics would look better right now. And these various blockages we have would encourage compromise. But instead, the more blockage we have, the less compromise we seem to get.
  • The question is, what gives us a chance to arrive at a more legitimate and a more sustainable set of political arrangements?
  • I think, ultimately, it is a good thing for a very narrow majority to have to get some support from the minority for its big ideas if those are going to endure.
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Sinema Says She Will Not Support Changing Filibuster - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sinema-voting-rights-bill.html us politics voting senate fillabuster
shared by clairemann on 13 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, declared that she would not support undermining the Senate filibuster to enact new laws under any circumstances.
  • she believed that a unilateral Democratic move to weaken the filibuster would only foster growing political division.
  • “These bills help treat the symptoms of the disease, but they do not fully address the disease itself,”
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 13 Jan 22
       
      is she being too idealistic?
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  • the House approved the new measure on a party-line vote of 220 to 203 after a heated partisan debate in which lawmakers clashed over the state of election laws across the country.
  • Ms. Sinema has been under pressure from her colleagues to drop her opposition to a rules change, but her refusal to reverse course appeared to doom the bills in the Senate.
  • Democrats said the legislation was urgently needed to offset efforts taking hold in Republican-led states to make it more difficult to vote after Democratic gains in the 2020 elections and former President Donald J. Trump’s false claim that the vote was stolen.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 13 Jan 22
       
      the legislation is reactionary - could it backfire when the senate become R?
  • “There are people who don’t want you to vote and they are using every tool in the toolbox to make it harder,”
  • Democrats of “hijacking” the space agency measure to push through legislation that they said represented federal intrusion into state voting operations to give an unfair advantage to Democratic candidates.
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The Morning Plum: Why the battle over filibuster reform matters - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...over-filibuster-reform-matters nullification democracy congress paralysis majority legislation
shared by Javier E on 13 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • the broad strokes of this debate are overwhelmingly clear.
  • It is plainly true that Republicans have effectively turned the Senate into a 60-vote, super-majority body for even routine business, in a way we haven’t seen before.
  • It is plainly true that Republicans are obstructing Obama nominations (such as Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) for the explicit purpose of preventing the agencies themselves from functioning, rather than just out of objections to the nominees themselves.
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  • these things matter. What’s at stake is the functioning of our democracy, and whether all of this should simply be accepted as a new normal. It shouldn’t.
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South Korea Government Accused of Using Defamation Laws to Silence Critics - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rea-critics-press-freedom.html south korea government laws
shared by zachcutler on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • SEOUL, South Korea — In late 2014, months after 304 people died in the sinking of a South Korean ferry
  • Was Ms. Park, the flier asked, now cracking down on her critics in an attempt to keep that scandal from coming to light?
  • Last year, the United Nations Human Rights Committee warned against South Korea’s “increasing use of criminal defamation laws to prosecute persons who criticize government action.” Freedom House, a rights group based in Washington, criticized “the increased intimidation of political opponents” under Ms. Park, who took office in 2013.
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  • An opposition lawmaker, Park Jie-won, said the indictment had embarrassed the country. “It’s prosecutors who should be indicted for defaming South Korea,” he said
  • Charges that her administration was suppressing political rights sprang up almost as soon as Ms. Park — whose father, the military dictator Park Chung-hee, ruled South Korea with an iron fist during the 1960s and ’70s — assumed office.
  • The government’s use of the laws against critics predates Ms. Park’s presidency. During the five-year tenure of her predecessor, Lee Myung-bak, 30 such cases were filed, 24 of them criminal and six civil, according to People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, an influential South Korean civic group.
  • Attempts to amend the defamation laws have also been unsuccessful. Last month, the Constitutional Court struck down a proposal to ban defamation charges in cases where the supposedly defamatory comment circulated online is true
  • Bills that would bar government officials from filing defamation cases have stalled in Parliament.
  • “I can never support this attempt to place a dog collar on the people,” Eun Soo-mi, an opposition lawmaker who was once tortured by the spy agency, said during a 10-hour filibuster against the bill, which was approved but has not yet become law.
  • Such rulings aside, critics argue that South Korean prosecutors and judges have largely failed to protect the public’s rights, often because they want to earn the favor of politicians who can promote them.
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The Suffocation of Democracy | by Christopher R. Browning | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...suffocation-of-democracy democracy authoritarian fascism illiberal history
shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.
  • Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.
  • Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.
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  • Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.
  • If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.
  • Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.
  • Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives
  • In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist.
  • The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power
  • the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.
  • Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.
  • Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy.
  • In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.
  • The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics
  • To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway.
  • Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights
  • In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.
  • the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures
  • No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.
  • Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.
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Opinion | Why America Can't Fix Its Gun Violence Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-gun-violence.html
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  • We know what causes America’s gun violence problem. Why can’t we seem to do anything about it? Here are some of the most popular and persuasive explanations.
  • In the minds of many gun control proponents, American life has become — or perhaps always was — a zero-sum game in which one party’s freedom to exist in peace has lost out to another’s prerogative to kill. In this view, mass death is simply the cost gun owners are willing to inflict on the country for the right to bear arms.
  • he different stories Americans tell themselves about the roots of gun violence preclude shared understanding: As long as they disagree about the cause of the problem, they will disagree about how to fix it. “Given the significant proportion of citizens who own guns,” the authors conclude, “the prospect for policy changes that address gun‐related causes of mass shootings is unlikely.”
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  • Already a counter-majoritarian institution, the Senate was made even more so by the rise of the modern filibuster in the 20th century, which allows a minority to block majority-supported legislation. That means most substantive legislation must get 60 votes in the Senate to pass — often an exceedingly difficult threshold to reach.
  • It was a statement that exemplified a common strain of thought among gun control proponents, one that casts the N.R.A. as the sine qua non of our national deadlock on the issue. As my colleague Nicholas Kristof has explained, the N.R.A. used to be a more moderate organization: It favored tighter gun laws in the 1920s and 1930s, and as recently as the 1960s supported — albeit more grudgingly — some limits on guns.
  • “The N.R.A. is powerful for precisely the reason most potent progressive organizations are powerful,” David French has written in National Review. “Like those progressive counterparts, the N.R.A. is an effective part of a larger community, and it is effective precisely because it persuasively expresses the will of its members and allies.” In his view, the N.R.A. does not manipulate people into supporting gun rights; rather, it reflects and channels the desires of people who already do
  • Gun control proponents often argue that the Second Amendment was meant to protect the right of state militias, not individuals, to bear arms. This interpretation is disputed by gun rights proponents, but not exclusively: The historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who favors the Second Amendment’s repeal, has argued that it was expressly designed to enshrine not only the right but also the obligation of individual colonial settlers to violently appropriate Native land and to control Black populations, both free and enslaved.
  • This interpretive turn has led to calls for the Second Amendment’s repeal, including from the retired justice John Paul Stevens. Justice Stevens was one of the four dissenters in the Heller case, whose ruling he believed could be overturned only with a new constitutional amendment that voided the second. Doing so, he wrote in The Times in 2018, “would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.”
  • But none of them — not universal background checks, not red flag laws, not even a ban on assault-style weapons — would confront the core issue: America simply has too many guns.That is the view of Mr. Lopez, who contends that stamping out gun violence would require a Green New Deal-size plan that offers solutions at the scale of the problem. “If the key difference between America and other countries is how many more guns the U.S. has, then something has to be done to quickly reduce the number of firearms here,” he writes. “It could mean banning more types of guns — perhaps all semiautomatic weapons or all handguns — and coupling that with an Australian-style mandatory buyback program, which the research supports.”
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Opinion | One Old Way of Keeping Black People From Voting Still Works - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...filibuster-voting-rights.html politics US culture policy
shared by cartergramiak on 05 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • This is the story of how a bill to save the vote and preserve a semblance of democracy for millions of Americans died at the hands of an intransigent, reactionary minority in the Senate, which used the filibuster to do its dirty work.
  • “In many parts of our country where the colored population is large the people of that race are by various devices deprived of any effective exercise of their political rights and of many of their civil rights,” Harrison wrote. “The wrong does not expend itself upon those whose votes are suppressed. Every constituency in the Union is wronged.”
  • Southern Democrats were livid, calling Lodge’s proposal an unconstitutional “force bill.” In the Senate, John W. Daniel of Virginia charged that it would “strip the states” of their “ancient and confessed right to determine the qualifications of their voters” as well as “the prerogatives of a state to choose and the right of each House to judge of the election, the return, and qualification of its members.”
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  • Division among Republicans allowed Democrats to take the initiative. They delayed debate on the bill until after the November midterm elections, where Democrats won control of the House. When, in December, Republicans moved to open debate, Democrats objected again. “We are acting in a great deal of haste to propose at this time repressive measures for the passage of a repressive and coercive force bill for the people,” said Senator John Reagan of Texas.
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Congress, the Presidency, and the Difficulty of Majority Rule - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618183 congress presidency majority rule anti-democratic bias US governance
shared by Javier E on 06 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • any project of reform needs to take something into account: Congress is no bargain either as a representative institution.
  • Despite the overall unpopularity of the post-Trump Republican Party, it is favored to retake the House of Representatives in 2022, because elections to the House systematically overrepresent Republican votes.
  • Here’s a way to dramatize how extreme the bias is. Compare the House elections of 2010 and 2020. In 2010, the Republicans won 51.7 percent of all votes cast; in 2020, the Democrats won 51.5 percent—almost exactly the same proportion. But in 2010, the Republican 51.7 percent converted into 242 seats, a decisive majority. In 2020, the Democratic 51.5 percent converted into 222 seats, a narrow margin.
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  • Analysis of district-level voting patterns suggests that Republicans enjoy an inbuilt 2.1 percentage-point advantage in contests for the House majority. Joe Biden won the national vote by 4.6 points in 2020. He won the median House seat, Illinois’s Fourteenth Congressional District, by 2.5 points.
  • Not since the mid-1990s have Republican senators represented a majority of American voters. The 50 Democratic senators elected in 2020 represent nearly 42 million more Americans than the 50 Republicans.
  • Shifting power from an overmighty presidency to a Congress that overindulges reactionary minorities will do democracy no good. The post-Watergate reformers recognized that logic, and joined their limits on the presidency to an attempted modernization of Congress.
  • the reformers of the 1970s understood the architecture of American democracy. Power flowed from Congress to the presidency precisely because the presidency was the most accountable branch of the federal government. If the flow was to be reversed, Congress needed to be democratized. This same problem presents itself with even greater force in the 2020s.
  • In an important new book, Kill Switch, Adam Jentleson offers a harrowing portrait of how anti-majoritarian dysfunction has paralyzed the U.S. Senate.
  • The Senate is defended by a sequence of rationalizations: It’s good that a Wyoming vote counts 68 times more than a California vote. It’s good that garnering 59 out of 100 votes does not suffice to enact laws. It’s good that any one legislator is able to disrupt the proceedings. These rationalizations have proved contagious. If minority rule is good sometimes, why not more of the time?
  • As the Senate has deviated further and further from majoritarian norms, the House and the state legislatures have followed. Among the great merits of Jentleson’s Kill Switch is that it reminds us how recent this trend is.
  • In the era of the 67-vote filibuster, the tools of minority rule were used to defend racial segregation, a cause that even its supporters did not like to defend openly.
  • The 60-vote Senate has become an accepted fact of American politics, along with presidents who lose the popular vote, and state legislatures where 45 percent of the vote is converted into 55 percent of the seats, or more.
  • The Framers’ constitutional design balanced majority rights as they were understood at the time—the rights of a majority of those persons possessed of full citizenship who voted in state and House elections—against a federal Senate to protect the rights of smaller states and a judiciary insulated from passing political passions
  • it’s one thing to respect regional and cultural minorities; it’s another to let those minorities impose hostile preferences upon an unwilling majority, year in, year out, with every exit from federal minority rule blocked by even more obdurate systems of minority rule at the state level.
  • Jentleson offers a program for reform that begins with the outright elimination of the filibuster. But without constitutional change more radical than anything contemplated today, the Senate will always remain counter-majoritarian—and Senate reform can accordingly take the country only so far toward the reanimation of the majority-rule principle.
  • the House, often falsely complimented as the “people’s House,” is the part of the government most in need of democratic change. Change to the House depends on change to the anti-majoritarian state legislatures that redraw congressional districts—and that change depends on renewal of the voting-rights laws the federal courts have so weakened over the past decade and a half.
  • In the meantime, the federal and state executive branches are the tools most available to the disempowered majority.
  • America got the imperial presidency in the first place in great part because of the defects of Congress. From free trade to civil rights, the post-1945 presidency would act to do things in the broad public interest over the truculent obstruction of Congresses dominated by narrow and backward-looking minority interests.
  • But presidents, even the greatest of them, are not magicians. Since 2010, the U.S. political system has been ever more extremely biased toward its narrow and backward-looking ideological minorities. Weaken the executive branches, federal and state, and you privilege those ideological minorities.
  • don’t overcorrect, and don’t overdo it. Under present rules and conditions, the executive power, state and federal, is the least antidemocratic power in the American political design.
  • The only hope for bringing majority rule to the rest of American politics is voting-rights enforcement by the federal Department of Justice—and maybe some forward-thinking governors—against the probable resistance of the U.S. Senate, the Republican-dominated federal courts, and the minority-rule state legislatures.
  • The presidency and the governorships have not always advanced the cause of majority rule in the past. They will not always do so in the future. But at this moment, that’s precisely what they’re poised to do. The enemies of the majority-rule principle understand that fact. The friends of majority rule should absorb it too.
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Biden to sign order expanding voting rights on Bloody Sunday anniversary | Joe Biden | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ing-rights-selma-bloody-sunday biden politics US culture policy gop voting
shared by carolinehayter on 08 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Joe Biden will sign an executive order expanding voting rights on Sunday, the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when police brutally attacked a voting rights march in Selma, Alabama.
  • Republicans have advanced more than 250 measures in state legislatures which aim to restrict voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
  • The most significant will instruct federal agencies to offer voter registration opportunities if a state requests so
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  • “If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide,” he said. “Let more people vote.”
  • House Democrats last week passed HR1, a bill that contains some of the most sweeping measures to expand voting rights since the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Amid the increasing efforts to restrict voting rights, there are increasing calls for Democrats to get around the 60-vote filibuster in the US Senate in order to pass the measure.
  • The US constitution gives the president little power over voting rights. The executive order Biden will sign will therefore implement relatively modest but potentially consequential changes.
  • “We cannot let them succeed
  • Offering voter registration opportunities at agencies could boost registration rates among populations where it currently lags.
  • Another provision in the order requires the Department of Justice to provide people in federal custody – including those on probation – with voter registration information and “to the extent practicable and appropriate” to facilitate voting by mail.
  • Biden’s order also directs the attorney general to establish procedures to help formerly incarcerated people get identification they can use to vote.
  • The order also instructs the federal government to study how to improve voting access for people with disabilities and how each federal agency can improve voter registration opportunities.
  • It directs officials to come up with a plan to improve vote.gov, the federal website for voting information. Biden will also establish a Native American voting rights steering group and instruct the Office of Personnel Management and Department of Defense to study how to improve voting access for federal employees and the military as well as Americans overseas.
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Revolt by Texas Democrats heaps pressure on Washington to act on voting reform - CNNPol... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html US Politics Republicans Democrats Voting Rights
shared by yehbru on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • their last-ditch effort may only temporarily stall the effort and underscores how the deadlock in Washington is making it easier for Republicans to act on Donald Trump's election fraud lies to stack the deck in future votes.
  • The Lone Star State drama came after the GOP-led Senate in Washington blocked an independent commission into the January 6 insurrection and attack on American democracy last week and after House Republican leaders failed to meaningfully punish Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for comparing mask wearing to the Holocaust.
  • The Texas imbroglio may be the first sign of a more aggressive counterattack against Republican restrictive voting bills that are proliferating from Texas to Florida and Arizona to Georgia as well as many other states.
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  • Democrats effectively succeeded in running out the clock on this year's legislative session by depriving the Republicans of a quorum needed to pass the bill in a late-night session
  • Among other steps, the bill makes mail-in voting more difficult, bans after-hours and drive-through voting that helped Black and Latino voters in the Houston area cast their ballots in 2020. It prohibits early voting on Sundays -- a popular practice for Black churches -- before 1 pm and makes it easier to overturn an election.
  • "When you are pushed to extremes you respond to that with extreme(s)," Moody said on CNN's "New Day" on Monday.
  • Some Democrats may see hope in the fact that Manchin was angry and disappointed that Republicans used the filibuster to kill off the bipartisan January 6 commission. But he has so far given no indication that he will temper his desire for bipartisan action.
  • More evidence of Republican efforts to build on Trump's election fraud lies are causing some Democrats to wonder how much longer it will be politically feasible for Biden to pursue deals with a Republican Party that appears bent on locking them out of power.
  • "Let's be clear. If 10 Republican Senators cannot even vote for a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection, 10 Republican Senators will not vote for anything meaningful to improve the lives of the American people. We must abolish the filibuster & act now," Sanders wrote.
  • If the infrastructure deal fails, that event may come to be seen as the moment when a more partisan White House approach became inevitable.
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If Democracy Is Dying, Why Are Democrats So Complacent? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618964 democracy threat right-wing authoritarian 2021 crisis politics policy
shared by Javier E on 24 May 21 - No Cached
  • If you’ve followed recent Democratic messaging, you’ll have heard that American democracy is under serious attack by the Republican Party, representing an existential threat to the country.
  • If you’ve followed Democratic lawmaking, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the threat is actually a rather piddling one. The disconnect, in this case, isn’t attributable to Democratic embellishment, but to inexcusable complacency.
  • When it came to the third, Biden was both pointed and emphatic, tying the events of January 6 and the broader effort to delegitimize November’s election to a wider crisis of democracy. “Congress,” he declared, “should pass H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and send them to my desk right away.”
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  • In his first address to Congress, last month, President Joe Biden established three basic themes—each one invoked in a language of crisis and political urgency: “The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”
  • Suffice it to say, a concerted right-wing effort really is under way to limit popular democracy and suppress votes.
  • So what are Democrats doing about it? In a legislative sense at least, a cogent and comprehensive response is already in the works, in the form of the two bills cited by Biden in his congressional address. If realized, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and H.R. 1 (also known as the For the People Act) would constitute the most sweeping acts of democratic reform undertaken in decades. The latter alone would establish automatic national voter registration, independent redistricting commissions for House seats to prevent gerrymandering, expanded mail-in voting, and a number of new measures to reduce the overbearing influence of organized money.
  • If Democrats plan to match their rhetoric with action, they must train public attention not only on the existential problem of the Republican assault on voting, but also on the need to eliminate the main obstacle to countering that assault. This means doing whatever it takes to bring holdout senators onside, in private or in public.
  • Even with the filibuster removed or substantially modified, H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act would still face barriers to becoming law. But to simply accept these barriers is nonsensical, the product of a fraudulent and conservative “realism” that is really defeatism by any other name.
  • What, after all, is more important: the death of democracy, or the preservation of a Senate tradition that has been leveraged for decades to protect conservative minority rule?
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Biden Set to Call for Big Spending on Stimulus and Vaccines - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-economy.html Biden spending vaccine
shared by xaviermcelderry on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • on Thursday is expected to outline proposals for trillions of dollars in government spending to combat the coronavirus pandemic and its effects on the economy, with an initial focus on large-scale expansions of the nation’s vaccination program and virus testing capacity.
  • Plans for the first package also include a significant increase in spending on vaccine deployment, testing and contact tracing, Mr. Deese said, and Mr. Biden will seek enough money to allow most schools to open, in an effort to increase labor force participation.
  • Transition team officials would not say on Wednesday how expensive Mr. Biden’s proposals were likely to be or whether he would announce a cost estimate on Thursday. Last week, Mr. Biden said he expected his full agenda would cost “trillions” of dollars.
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  • Mr. Biden has said he will work to build Republican support for his plans, and he will need 10 Republican votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster. But top Democrats in the House and Senate are preparing to pivot quickly to a parliamentary process known as budget reconciliation in the event they can get only a simple majority in the Senate. Republicans used the procedure to bypass a filibuster and approve Mr. Trump’s signature tax cuts in 2017.
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