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clairemann

Is Democratic Gerrymandering of New York's Congressional Delegation Hypocritical? | Mic... - 0 views

  • With census data now in hand and the 2022 midterm election just over a year away, states are busily redrawing their electoral maps to take account of population shifts since 2010. In some states, the task falls to non-partisan commissions. In most others, however, state legislatures redraw district lines, fully aware of the political implications. In a country in which the word gerrymander dates to the Founding (a portmanteau of Elbridge Gerry and salamander, after the shape of the district he engineered), it should surprise no one that state elected officials draw district lines that favor themselves and members of their own political party.
  • New York voters approved a plan to hand over redistricting responsibility to a bipartisan commission that would use apolitical criteria to draw fair maps. But then Democrats won supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature.
  • Given Democrats’ repeated complaints about gerrymandering by Republican-controlled state legislatures, Republicans and their allies will no doubt label the move by New York to respond in kind hypocritical. Is the charge fair? Perhaps, but as I shall explain below, not necessarily, and in the end, there are worse sins than hypocrisy.
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  • It can be hypocritical to call for a change in the law but to act in ways that would violate the changed law.
  • Nonetheless, it would not be hypocritical for Sheila herself to continue to drive on the left side of the road while Parliament considers her proposal. Indeed, it would be grossly irresponsible for her to start driving on the right side of the road before the law has changed.
  • The upshot is that it is sometimes but not always hypocritical to seek to change the law but continue to engage in behavior inconsistent with the change one seeks. Whether the charge of hypocrisy fairly applies in such circumstances depends on the nature of the law—to what extent it addresses freestanding evils versus solves collective action problems—as well as the grounds for seeking to change it.
  • Gerrymandering unfairly advantages the party in control of the state legislature, thereby undermining the right to vote and democratic principles. One might therefore think that someone who opposes political gerrymandering anywhere ought to oppose it everywhere. If so, New York legislators considering gerrymandering the state’s congressional districts to aid Democrats are indeed hypocrites.
  • Two years ago, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court held that federal courts could not adjudicate challenges to political gerrymandering.
  • Accordingly, even if one concludes that there is at least a soupçon of hypocrisy in the New York Democrats’ plan to gerrymander the state’s congressional districts, the only current alternative is worse. In this case, hypocrisy may be more than the tribute vice pays to virtue. It is itself a kind of virtue.
Javier E

Opinion | A World Without Partisan Gerrymanders? Virginia Democrats Show the Way - The ... - 0 views

  • Politicians rarely give up power voluntarily. They never give it up when they have free rein to lock it in for at least a decade, and exact long-overdue revenge against their political opponents.
  • But a group of Virginia Democrats did just that earlier this month, when they voted in favor of an amendment to the State Constitution stripping themselves of the power to redraw legislative district maps in 2021, after the decennial census.
  • Last fall, Democrats won majorities in both houses of the Virginia Legislature; with a Democratic governor already in office, they took full control of the state government for the first time in a generation. They had unlimited power to fashion the new maps in their favor, cementing their own grip on power just as Republicans around the country have done since the last redistricting cycle in 2011
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  • Some Republican maps are so biased that they have given the G.O.P. legislative supermajorities even when the party loses the statewide popular vote, which happened in Wisconsin in 2018. So it’s entirely understandable for Democrats who regain power to want payback — now.
  • And yet nine Virginia Democrats agreed to put down their partisan swords and join Republicans to support the new amendment, which would require that the state’s district maps be drawn by a bipartisan commission made up of lawmakers and regular citizens.
  • Republicans continue to find countless ways to block efforts to make voting fairer and more democratic. In Missouri, Utah and Michigan, Republican lawmakers are working to undo citizen-led ballot initiatives that were passed, in some cases overwhelmingly, by voters tired of being chosen by their politicians.
  • The Virginia amendment’s passage is all the more important in the present moment, when voters everywhere have been left at the mercy of self-serving state lawmakers, thanks to the Supreme Court’s refusal to intervene to stop even the most extreme partisan gerrymanders
  • The Democrats’ vote was a display of integrity and selflessness by members of a party with unified control of government.
  • what of those Republicans? Aren’t they to be commended for voting in favor of fairer maps? Sure, but it was an easy call once they were out of power, or knew they were about to be. The better question is, Where was their public spirit when they held an unthreatened majority
  • The ruling last June, by a 5-to-4 vote, asserted that redistricting was a political matter to be resolved by the states, not the federal courts. The justices thus enshrined one of the most corrosive and anti-democratic practices in American politics.
  • And when Republicans do lose at the ballot box, they respond not by trying to appeal to more voters, but by stripping power from duly-elected Democrats — essentially looting the shelves on their way out the door
  • This is the behavior of a party that neither trusts its own popularity nor accepts its opponents’ legitimacy, a fatal combination for a constitutional republic.
  • why play fair when the other side doesn’t? The answer is that the alternative is a race to the bottom, where voters of both parties give up because they know whatever box they check at the polls, the politicians have already made their choices for them.
  • In far too many parts of the country, that’s the reality today. Partisan gerrymandering is a key reason millions of Americans feel the government is rigged against them.
  • The more the public learns about it, the more they oppose it. Virginia voters support the new redistricting amendment, 70 percent to 15 percent; according to a January 2019 poll commissioned by Campaign Legal Center, which pushes for electoral reform, 65 percent said they favored districts with no partisan bias, even if it meant their own party would win fewer seats.
Javier E

The Suffocation of Democracy | by Christopher R. Browning | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
Javier E

The GOP's Laboratories of Oligarchy | The New Republic - 0 views

  • In the classic comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, the titular characters occasionally play a game known as “Calvinball.” The rules are simple: Hobbes makes them up as he goes. In one strip, the imaginary stuffed tiger declares mid-game that Calvin has entered an “invisible sector” and must cover his eyes “because everything is invisible to you.” The six-year-old boy obeys and asks Hobbes how he gets out. “Someone bonks you with the Calvinball!” Hobbes exclaims, chucking the volleyball at Calvin. And so it goes until Calvin, in the final panel, is dizzy and disoriented. “This game,” he notes, “lends itself to certain abuses.”
  • Now, one month later, GOP lawmakers in multiple states are using lame-duck sessions to hamstring incoming Democratic elected officials, either by reducing their official powers or transferring them to Republican-led legislatures.
  • Over the past decade, Republican lawmakers in North Carolina mastered the strategy of constitutional hardball to preserve their political muscle even as their electoral advantage shrank. The metastasis of this model today may be an even greater threat to the nation’s political health than Trump himself.
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  • Top Republicans in Wisconsin aren’t disguising the partisan aims of their legislation, which drew protesters to the state’s capitol building on Monday. “Most of these items are things that either we never really had to kind of address because, guess what? We trusted Scott Walker and the administration to be able to manage the back-and-forth with the legislature,” Scott Fitzgerald, the Wisconsin Senate’s majority leader, said in an interview with a conservative talk-radio host. “We don’t trust Tony Evers right now in a lot of these areas.”
  • This approach to governance was devastating enough in North Carolina. Its spread to other states is a grim sign for purple and red states. If Republicans are unwilling to be governed by another political party, one need not be a political scientist to understand how harmful that will be to democracy itself.
  • Gerrymandering is as old as the republic itself, and neither party’s hands are clean when it comes to drawing legislative districts for partisan advantage. What distinguished the post-2010 wave of Republican gerrymandering was its sheer aggressiveness. In Wisconsin, the GOP commands near-supermajorities in the state assembly and state senate despite drawing roughly even with Democrats in the statewide popular vote. North Carolina Democrats won nearly half of the statewide popular vote in congressional races but captured only three of the state’s House seats.
  • Democracy, both as a system of government and as a way of life, needs more than just legislation and constitutions to function. It also requires a shared understanding of the bounds of acceptable political action. Without that shared understanding, the laboratories of democracy, as Justice Louis Brandeis once put it, become breeding grounds for oligarchical rule
  • “The only permanent rule in Calvinball,” Calvin exclaims in one strip, “is that you can’t play it the same way twice!” That may work with an imaginary friend, but it’s a dangerous way to run a country
liamhudgings

Lawrence Lessig: How to Repair Our Democracy | JSTOR Daily - 0 views

  • Lessig has been an outspoken critic of the Electoral College, campaign financing, and gerrymandering, and is a frequent commentator on these issues.
  • In his book, Lessig proposes some solutions to these problems, including penalties on states that suppress voters, incentives to end gerrymandering, and “civic juries,” which would be a system to have representative bodies make decisions on behalf of constituents.
  • I don’t think there was any “golden age.” At any time we could have written a book about how institutions have produced unrepresentativeness.
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  • So you might step back and say Republicans should be happier with this system overall than Democrats are. But grassroots Republicans are as frustrated and disillusioned with this and as grassroots democrats
  • The problem is the way the system amplifies the power of the extremists.
  • if you think about the consequence of the inequality in the Senate and the consequence of the inequality in funding, those two things together pretty clearly benefit Republicans. When you think about voter suppression, the most dramatic examples that we see are examples that benefit Republicans. But the gerrymandering example is not benefiting either Republicans or Democrats.
  • We could change the way campaigns are funded, or at least the business model of how campaigns are funded, by adopting some version of public funding for national campaigns.
  • The second thing Congress can do quite easily is, using its power under the Constitution, it can ban partisan gerrymandering in the states.
  • The hardest problem to change, constitutionally, is the electoral college. I think that there’s that interpretation of the power of the states to allocate their electors proportionally at a fractional level. I think that’s constitutionally possible.
  • We’re not going to solve that, in the sense that we’re going to get to a place where we all know the same stuff. We need to think about solving it without trying to get everybody to the right place. We need alternatives to everyone being in the right place.
  • That’s why I talked about things like the civic juries that can help people decide issues
  • We should be really concerned that we fix the underlying causes of this, so we don’t produce a weakening of the commitment of the public to our democracy.
kaylynfreeman

Opinion | Why Are Republicans So Afraid of Voters? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • There is no “both sides do it” when it comes to intentionally keeping Americans away from the polls.
  • As of Sunday afternoon, more than 93 million Americans had cast a ballot in the November elections. That’s about two-thirds of the total number of people who voted in 2016, and there are still two days until Election Day.
  • For decades, Americans have voted at depressingly low rates for a modern democracy. Even in a “good” year, more than one-third of all eligible voters don’t cast a ballot. In a bad year, that number can approach two-thirds.
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  • Why are so many Americans consistently missing in action on Election Day?
  • For many, it’s a choice. They are disillusioned with government, or they feel their vote doesn’t matter because politicians don’t listen to them anyway.
  • This strategy has become a central pillar of the G.O.P. platform. It is behind the party’s relentless push for certain state laws and practices — like strict voter-identification requirements and targeted voter purges — that claim to be about preserving electoral integrity but are in fact about suppressing turnout and voting among groups that lean Democratic.
  • Just in the past four years, tens of thousands of absentee ballots have been sent to the wrong addresses, and hundreds of thousands of voters have been wrongly purged from the rolls.
  • But across the country, the group most responsible for making voting harder, if not impossible, for millions of Americans is the Republican Party.
  • “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
  • For many more, the main obstacle is bureaucratic inertia.
  • The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has greenlit the Republicans’ anti-democratic power grabs. In 2013, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, giving free rein to states with long histories of racial discrimination in voting.
  • The strategy also is behind the partisan gerrymandering that Republican state lawmakers have mastered over the past decade
  • Republicans are battling from coast to coast to ensure that casting a ballot is as hard as it can be.
  • In Nevada, the Trump campaign and the state Republican Party have sued to stop counting mail-in ballots until observers can more closely monitor the signature-matching process.
  • The effort has been turbocharged by President Trump, who has spent the past year falsely attacking the integrity of mail-in ballots.
  • That’s why, if either of these laws is going to pass, it will require, at a minimum, voting out Republicans at every level who insist on suppressing the vote.
  • Representative democracy works only when a large majority of people participate in choosing their representatives. That can happen only when those in power agree that voting should be as easy and widely available as possible. Yet today, one of the two major political parties is convinced it cannot win on a level playing field — and will not even try.
  • What would a level playing field look like? For starters, it would have more polling places, more early-voting days and shorter voting lines.
  • Black neighborhoods wait 29 percent longer to cast ballots than voters in white neighborhoods.
  • A fair election would mean giving all states the necessary funds to implement automatic voter registration and to upgrade old voting machines.
  • To help ensure that voting is easier for everybody, the federal government needs to take action. Currently, there are two comprehensive voting-rights bills in Congress, the Voting Rights Amendment Act and H.R. 1, also known as the For the People Act.
  • The second bill would, among other things, create a national voter-registration program; make it harder for states to purge voting rolls; and take gerrymandering away from self-interested state legislatures, putting the redistricting process in the hands of nonpartisan commissions.
  • When that tactic fails, Republicans turn to another tried-and-true one: voter intimidation. Frightening people, particularly Black people, away from the ballot box has a long history in the United States. Modern Republicans have done it so consistently that in 1982 a federal court barred the national party from engaging in any so-called anti-voter-fraud operations.
  • That’s about two-thirds of the total number of people who voted in 2016, and there are still two days until Election Day.
  • That’s about two-thirds of the total number of people who voted in 2016, and there are still two days until Election Day.
  • Republicans have been saying it themselves for ages. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, a leader of the modern conservative movement, told a gathering of religious leaders in 1980.
  • Last year, the court, again by a 5-to-4 vote, refused to block even the most brazenly partisan gerrymanders, no matter how much they disenfranchised voters.
  • 2020 is the first election in which Republicans can intimidate with abandon.
  • All the while, Mr. Trump happily plays the part of intimidator in chief. He has urged his supporters to enlist in an “Army for Trump,” monitoring polls. “A lot of strange things happening in Philadelphia,” Mr. Trump said during a recent campaign stop in Pennsylvania. “We’re watching you, Philadelphia. We’re watching at the highest level.”
  • He is only repeating what most Republicans have believed for decades: When more people vote, Republicans lose.
katherineharron

Opinion: What's really motivating Democrats in North Carolina - CNN - 0 views

  • As the nation draws closer to the 2020 election, the conversations that I'm having now remind me of the surge of energy and purpose that I witnessed in 2016. North Carolina voters, particularly Democrats, are motivated by the change that they've created and by the work that still needs to be done.
  • quality and well-funded public schools, expansion of Medicaid -- long overdue in our state -- to cover roughly 500,000 currently uninsured people, and a reckoning with the racism that has permeated our gerrymandered districts and the fabric of our everyday lives.
  • She quickly got busy mobilizing her community around the inequities she saw in the public school system and among the children she adored. These inequities included a lack of resources for teachers and students and a targeted effort that many say would effectively resegregate schools based on race and income, primarily through actions proposed by the state's Joint Legislative Study Committee
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  • Public education has been further weakened by gerrymandering in our state.
  • After witnessing this, James Gailliard, pastor of Word Tabernacle in Rocky Mount, began gathering signatures to literally write himself into the political process by running for the General Assembly in 2016. He told me that he wanted to "make a dent in that system."
  • Gerrymandering -- in which the party in power controls the drawing of electoral districts, tailoring them to its advantage -- has long been an issue in this state. In 2018, Republicans held the majority of North Carolina's congressional and legislative seats, despite winning less than half of the vote. Recent wins in state court could yield two or more Democratic congressional seats next month, which would increase the party's holdings to at least five of 13 districts.
  • . "Basically, they drew in every Black precinct in Rocky Mount and stuck in House District 7, along with every Black precinct in Franklin County. They left the rest of the population in District 25."
  • The Covid-19 pandemic has further exposed the vulnerability of many of our residents who do not have access to adequate health care, survive in substandard living conditions and now navigate joblessness without a full, just federal stimulus relief package. Many already were not making ends meet before the crisis. According to the US Census, the median household income in Wilson is under $43,000, and poverty is 21%.
  • However, hope is on the horizon here. The increased engagement I have witnessed this year from Wilson to Washington, DC, has helped me put that November morning four years ago into perspective.
Javier E

The Republican Party's 50-State Solution - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The sustained determination on the part of the conservative movement has paid off in an unprecedented realignment of power in state governments.Seven years ago, Democrats had a commanding lead in state legislatures, controlling both legislative chambers in 27 states, nearly double the 14 controlled by Republicans. They held 4082 state senate and house seats, compared to the Republicans’ 3223.Sweeping Republican victories at the state level in 2010 and 2014 transformed the political landscape
  • By 2015, there were Republican majorities in 70 percent — 68 of 98 — of the nation’s partisan state houses and senates, the highest number in the party’s history. (Nebraska isn’t counted in because it has a non-partisan, unicameral legislature.) Republicans controlled the legislature and governorship in 23 states, more than triple the seven under full Democratic control.
  • “How the Right Trounced Liberals in the States,” by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Theda Skocpol, in the Winter edition of the journal Democracy, documents the failure of the left to keep pace with the substantial investments by the right in building local organizations.
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  • Away from the national level, the commitment of conservative donors to support a power shift in state government illustrates the determination of the right to eliminate regulatory and legal constraints on markets where their money has proven most productive.
  • Attempts to control the White House have become far more risky with the rise of a strong Democratic presidential coalition. In 2012, conservative groups put $700 million in a bid to win the presidency, two and a half times as much as liberal groups, but Obama still won decisively.
  • The willingness of conservatives to weather difficulty and to endure prolonged delay has been demonstrated repeatedly over the past decades.
  • the result for conservatives is thatyour volunteers and paid activists come out of a values-based institution, which is essentially not a political institution. People are there because of their values. If you come to politics from a club or church or veterans hall, it reinforces the stickiness of your work, your willingness to keep at it even if you are tired.
  • When the State Policy Network was founded in 1986, it had 12 affiliated state-based groups and a goal of creating an “interstate freedom network” to spread “the growth of freedom across America until a permanent freedom majority is built.” Today, there are one or more affiliated organizations in every state.
  • An examination of IRS reports from all of these conservative groups shows total spending in just one year, 2013, of $142.2 million, with the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s $8.9 million the largest expenditure.
  • The complex transactions between the foundations in the Koch Brothers network obscure the dollar amount of their investments in state and local organizations. But the Koch Companies’ June Quarterly Newsletter notes that the Koch brothers “hope to raise $889 million by the end of 2016, about two-thirds of which will help support research and education programs, scholarships and other efforts designed to change policies and promote a culture of freedom in the United States.”
  • the right can tap into an embeddedstructure of community-based cultural, religious, social organizations — churches, Elks, veterans halls, gun groups, local business organizations, etc. — that are gathering places with offices, meeting halls, phones and computers that can be used by activist troops for logistical and operational support.
  • In 1973, as the Watergate scandal was closing in on the Nixon administration, conservatives financed the creation of two institutions: the Heritage Foundation to counter the left on national policy, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to foster state-based conservative lobbies, interest groups and foundations.
  • “progressives don’t have these community based, indigenous resources to educate, organize and mobilize troops anymore.” With the exception of unions, “we have fewer local places to gather and belong.”
  • In 2004, major liberal donors financed two new national groups created specifically for the 2004 presidential election — Americans Coming Together ($79,795,487) and the Joint Victory Committee ($71,811,666).
  • Despite the investment, the Democratic nominee, John Kerry, lost. At that point, the liberal donor community came to general agreement that the left needed a secure a permanent infrastructure at the national level to compete with such conservative institutions as the Chamber of Commerce, the American Enterprise Institute, Americans for Tax Reform and Heritage.
  • A year later, Democracy Alliance established its goal of building a “progressive infrastructure that could help counter the well-funded and sophisticated conservative apparatus in the areas of civic engagement, leadership, media, and ideas.”At a national level, the alliance has played a significant role in the development of such groups as the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank; Catalist, which builds and maintains voter lists; and Media Matters, which seeks to document and discredit “conservative misinformation throughout the media.”
  • It has begun to appear that the twenty-first century progressive brain is not as interested in clubs, communities and cultural sharing as the conservative brain is.
  • How, Stein asked, “could we have lost that? How does a communitarian world view lose its communitarian sense of self?”
  • the nature of political liberalism has changed.
  • The liberalism of the 1930s and 1940s was shaped by the Great Depression, and the response was, in many respects, communitarian: the strengthening of unions, the provision of jobs and government benefits to the poor and unemployed and the creation of a safety net to provide a modicum of security.
  • The left has, in part, shifted focus, with more stress on the values of self-expression and self-fulfillment, on individual liberation from the constraints of traditional morality, especially sexual morality — what my colleague Ross Douthat calls “The Liberalism of Adult Autonomy” or “the morality of rights.” Economic liberalism – despite progress on the minimum wage - has lost salience.
  • Instead of communitarian principles, the contemporary progressive movement — despite its advocacy of local issues like community policing — has produced a counterpart to conservative advocacy of free markets: the advocacy of personal freedom.
  • Insofar as liberals continue to leave the state-level organization to conservatives, they are conceding the most productive policy arenas in the country.
  • As left interests are being cut out of this process, the groundbreaking work is being done on the right. The losses for the Democratic Party and its allies include broken unions, defunded Planned Parenthood, lost wetlands and forests, restrictive abortion regulations and the proliferation of open-carry gun laws.
  • conservatives have overseen the drawing of legislative and congressional districts that will keep Republicans in power over the next decade. In this way, through the most effective gerrymandering of legislative and congressional districts in the nation’s history, the right has institutionalized a dangerous power vacuum on the left.
kaylynfreeman

The problem with changing the Electoral College (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

  • The Electoral College has been a controversial topic over the past few years. People tend to have very strong opinions about the institution, which, in most instances, comes down to who citizens believe is advantaged or disadvantaged by it. Ideally, a good electoral system should be neutral, where no party, candidate or region is advanced at the expense of another. Yet, this is among the chief criticisms we hear about our system.
  • This has recently led many to call for the abolition of the Electoral College in favor of a national popular vote. Yet, critics realize how resilient the institution has been, surviving nearly 800 attempts to amend or abolish it over the course of our nation's history. Most changes that have occurred have happened at the state level.
  • Because so many states are not competitive, many voters in these states may feel like their votes are wasted. This is reflected in President Trump's recent claim about the Electoral College system that "The Republicans have a disadvantage.
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  • In 2008, Barack Obama captured an electoral vote in Nebraska's second congressional district. In 2016, Donald Trump earned an electoral vote in Maine's second congressional district. This year, both of these congressional districts have received attention from the presidential campaigns.
  • All other states use the winner-take-all method, which awards all of a state's electoral votes to the ticket that earns a plurality of the vote in the state. This method can lead to some pretty disproportionate outcomes which most often work to amplify the difference between a candidate's popular vote total and electoral vote total.
  • First, it is important to recognize that the Electoral College process leads candidates to ignore a majority of states across the country
  • Concerns over gerrymandering have persisted in American politics for two centuries. The term is attributed to Elbridge Gerry and it refers to the practice of drawing legislative districts to favor one political party over others.
  • A second potential problem could be found in the role of third-party spoilers. It is conceivable that third parties or independent candidates could have strong showings in a few highly conservative or liberal congressional districts and ultimately claim a few electoral votes.
  • A third concern is that moving to a district selection process could lead to even more misfire elections --elections where the winner of the national popular vote does not win in the Electoral College.
  • These outcomes underscore the role gerrymandering by state legislatures would have on the presidential selection process. It also suggests why Reince Priebus supported having some states adopt the district plan when he was the head of the Republican National Committee in 2013.
Javier E

Opinion | The GOP has a lock on some states, Democrats others. It's not healthy. - The ... - 0 views

  • We have watched the national polarization that divides Americans in eerily equal numbers play out in vastly uneven ways, state to state. But talk of “red” and “blue” doesn’t capture either the full extent of the imbalance, or the knock-on consequences for the formation and pursuit of sound public policy.
  • It happened pretty quickly. In the early 2000s, three-fifths of the states saw reasonable political balance between the two major parties
  • Today, “trifecta” government, meaning one-party control of the governorship and both legislative bodies, has become the norm across the 50 states. In 40 states, containing 83 percent of the American population, one party enjoys trifecta dominance, and often by overwhelming margins.
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  • The roots of this phenomenon have been well studied. They include the cultural aggression of elite institutions and the predictable reaction to it, the nationalization of issues abetted by the collapse of local media and the pernicious effects of the antisocial media.
  • The gerrymandering that once exaggerated a dominant party’s political margin is no longer much of a factor; social clustering and these other factors have often done a more effective job than the political bosses ever did. In many jurisdictions today, one would have to reverse gerrymander, mixing geographies and crossing all kinds of legal boundary lines, to produce a truly competitive electorate.
  • Our campaign messages, as they had to, mostly centered on specific, new ideas: ethics reforms, access to health insurance, property tax caps, automatic tax refunds and many more, all couched in rhetoric stressing Indianans’ commonality as people, and the need for every part of the state to participate fully in its better future. Boy, is that passé.
  • Ideas fashioned not to stroke the erogenous zones of a riled-up minority of left or right, but to speak to the broader public in pursuit of a general election victory, evoke our common interest instead of our differences and antagonisms. But such campaigns rarely make sense these days.
  • In 2024, 30 states feature not only trifecta government but 2-to-1 majorities in at least one house. In that setting, both campaigns and governance look totally different than they do in genuine two-party polities.
  • Once in office, to make effective change, we had to engage with our Democratic counterparts, even in the years when we achieved full but narrow legislative control.
  • Political campaigns need not necessarily be dispiriting, narrowcasting mudfests. They can be vehicles, in fact the best possible vehicles, for floating constructive ideas to an attentive public. Ideas proposed by a successful campaign have a higher likelihood of enactment after the election
  • This year, our next governor ran a smart race and won his victory fair and square. The problem is that neither he, nor any of his competitors, had an incentive to offer their soon-to-be employers a sense of how Indiana could move forward.
  • What voters saw instead, besides attacks on each other, were political advertisements centered on “standing up to China,” taking on foreign drug cartels and closing the Mexican border. It became difficult to tell whether these folks were running for secretary of state or secretary of homeland security.
  • Wise policy and good government can and do emerge in lopsided states. But competition, always and everywhere, fosters innovation. In politics, it also compels a sensitivity and an outreach to the widest possible audiences.
  • The contours of the current system don’t conduce to those outcomes; until that changes, we have to hope for candidates who, elected by 5 percent of the state, somehow come to consider their duty of service to all the rest.
Javier E

How Did the Republican Party Get So Corrupt? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Why has the Republican Party become so thoroughly corrupt? The reason is historical—it goes back many decades—and, in a way, philosophical. The party is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start.
  • I don’t mean the kind of corruption that regularly sends lowlifes like Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic former governor of Illinois, to prison
  • And I don’t just mean that the Republican Party is led by the boss of a kleptocratic family business who presides over a scandal-ridden administration
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  • Richard Nixon’s administration was also riddled with criminality—but in 1973, the Republican Party of Hugh Scott, the Senate minority leader, and John Rhodes, the House minority leader, was still a normal organization. It played by the rules.
  • The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means.
  • Taking away democratic rights—extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters—is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.
  • Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering—in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats—so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results.
  • Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.
  • The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.
  • there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing
  • Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological.
  • The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order.
  • The first insurgency was the nomination of Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. He campaigned as a rebel against the postwar American consensus and the soft middle of his own party’s leadership. Goldwater didn’t use the standard, reassuring lexicon of the big tent and the mainstream. At the San Francisco convention, he embraced extremism and denounced the Republican establishment, whose “moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
  • the political opposition wasn’t just wrong—it was a sinister conspiracy with totalitarian goals.
  • During this first insurgency, the abiding contours of the movement took shape.
  • conservatives nursed a victim’s sense of grievance—the system was stacked against them, cabals of the powerful were determined to lock them out—and they showed more energetic interest than their opponents in the means of gaining power: mass media, new techniques of organizing, rhetoric, ideas.
  • Finally, the movement was founded in the politics of racism. Goldwater’s strongest support came from white southerners reacting against civil rights.
  • modern conservatism would never stop flirting with hostility toward whole groups of Americans. And from the start this stance opened the movement to extreme, sometimes violent fellow travelers.
  • It took only 16 years, with the election of Ronald Reagan, for the movement and party to merge. During those years, conservatives hammered away at institutional structures, denouncing the established ones for their treacherous liberalism, and building alternatives, in the form of well-funded right-wing foundations, think tanks, business lobbies, legal groups, magazines, publishers, professorships. When Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the products of this “counter-establishment” (from the title of Sidney Blumenthal’s book on the subject) were ready to take power.
  • But conservatism remained an insurgent politics during the 1980s and ’90s, and the more power it amassed—in government, business, law, media—the more it set itself against the fragile web of established norms and delighted in breaking them.
  • The second insurgency was led by Newt Gingrich
  • Gingrich liked to quote Mao’s definition of politics as “war without blood.” He made audiotapes that taught Republican candidates how to demonize the opposition with labels such as “disgrace,” “betray,” and  “traitors.” When he became speaker of the House, at the head of yet another revolution, Gingrich announced, “There will be no compromise.” How could there be, when he was leading a crusade to save American civilization from its liberal enemies?
  • Unlike Goldwater and Reagan, Gingrich never had any deeply felt ideology. It was hard to say exactly what “American civilization” meant to him. What he wanted was power, and what he most obviously enjoyed was smashing things to pieces in its pursuit. His insurgency started the conservative movement on the path to nihilism.
  • The party purged itself of most remaining moderates, growing ever-more shallow as it grew ever-more conservative
  • Jeff Flake, the outgoing senator from Arizona (whose conservative views come with a democratic temperament), describes this deterioration as “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.”
  • The viciousness doesn’t necessarily reside in the individual souls of Republican leaders. It flows from the party’s politics, which seeks to delegitimize opponents and institutions, purify the ranks through purges and coups, and agitate followers with visions of apocalypse—all in the name of an ideological cause that every year loses integrity as it becomes indistinguishable from power itself.
  • The third insurgency came in reaction to the election of Barack Obama—it was the Tea Party.
  • In the third insurgency, the features of the original movement surfaced again, more grotesque than ever: paranoia and conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence.
  • The new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes.
  • In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter.
  • Its leaders don’t see a dilemma—democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”
  • As Bertolt Brecht wrote of East Germany’s ruling party: Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?
Javier E

Judges Say Throw Out the Map. Lawmakers Say Throw Out the Judges. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • political attempts to reshape or constrain state courts have risen sharply in the last 10 years, Mr. Raftery said, propelled by polarization and a fading of the civics-book notion of governmental checks and balances.
  • “It ultimately boils down to this,” he said. “The courts are not looked on by some legislators as being an independent branch of government. For some, they’re looked on as an agency that needs to be brought to heel.”
  • This combative approach, some analysts say, mirrors the heated rhetoric about judicial bias and overreach that has become a staple of national politics.
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  • “This is Trumpism at the lower level,” said Bernard Grofman, an elections expert at the University of California, Irvine who redrew Virginia’s congressional map in 2015 following a federal court finding that districts had been racially gerrymandered.
  • “This is the view that if independent branches of government say things that don’t match what you say or do, you fire them; you impeach them; you malign them; you destroy them as best you can.”
  • The impeachment threat has drawn sharp criticism from some quarters. “Calling for impeachment — especially five of seven justices, especially when all five are Democrats — can’t help but look partisan,”
  • “We use impeachment to remove judges for serious criminal or ethical wrongdoing. This is a direct affront to the judicial branch’s power, not reasoned disagreement.”
  • That said, impeachment — or at least, impeachment threats and attempts — have become a common tool to pressure courts in recent years, said Mr. Raftery of the National Center for State Courts.
maxwellokolo

North Carolina's 'partisan gerrymander' could prompt supreme court action | US news | T... - 0 views

  • The last time North Carolina Republicans redrew the state’s 13 congressional districts, they made absolutely no secret of their ambition to rig the system and lock in a 10-3 balance in their favour – regardless of whether they or the Democrats won a majority of the votes in future elections.
  • The court ordered the legislature to come up with new, fairer maps within two weeks and said if they did not, a court-appointed expert would redraw the maps for them.
clairemann

Opinion | Why Your Ballots Are Boring - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Gerrymandering is the age-old practice of trying to fix the boundaries of electoral districts to make sure your side gets as much advantage as possible.
  • The bill now headed toward Senator McConnell’s dustheap would require states to establish independent redistricting commissions when they prepare new maps for their legislatures and congressional districts based on the 2020 census.
  • Check out its website for an index that will tell you, for instance, that in the fast-growing state of Texas, only 9 percent of the 2018 state legislative races featured a real contest. A large chunk didn’t have even a second contender.
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  • There are a few saintly lawmakers dedicated to reform, but plenty just concentrate on making the system work for them.
  • In one, your party has at least a 40 to 50 percent chance of winning six. In the other, it has no hope whatsoever of taking four; a 65 percent chance of getting two; and a 97.7 percent chance of winning the one in which you happen to be running.
  • Right now in Louisiana, voters are picking a successor to Cedric Richmond, who gave up his House seat for a job as a White House adviser. The district, which resembles a very long and thin dragon balancing a ball on its nose, seems drawn to squish in as many Democrats — particularly Black Democrats — as humanly possible.
anonymous

Opinion | Trump's Republican Party - The New York Times - 0 views

  • This usurpation of the Republican Party described by Mr. McCarthy boils down to two factors.
  • And demographics mean that the only way the party can remain in power is through minority rule — gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc.
  • Seen through this lens, Republican actions are logical and predictable. Today’s Republican Party won’t magically change; those who are repulsed and outraged have already left.
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  • Donald Trump was provided an opportunity to resurrect his self-tarnished image by demonstrating leadership, by mobilizing the federal government to address the challenges, and by using his pulpit to create social solidarity in the face of a shared misfortune.
  • such as strengthening the Voting Rights Act, enacting anti-gerrymandering legislation and limiting the filibuster — to ensure that the majority interests of the center right and left are adequately and proportionately represented.
  • Daniel McCarthy suggests that one reason for the Trump administration’s “setbacks” is “the bad luck that the Covid-19 crisis struck in a re-election year.” This particular pity party is unjustified.
  • Readers discuss an Op-Ed about the former president’s “iron grip” on the party. Also: Gun restrictions versus voting restrictions.
  • That he accomplished none of this — that he wasted this opportunity by denying the pandemic’s severity, bickering with public health leaders and touting the use of bleach — is a testament to his failings as a president and has nothing to do with bad luck.Timothy Christenfeld
  • ed right — the right to vote — they seem to favor these kinds of restrictions.The only difference I can see is whom the restrictions will affect.Jane L. LassnerNorwalk, Conn.
anonymous

Opinion | The United States Has Never Truly Been a Democracy - The New York Times - 0 views

  • But it’s hard to claim that the United States, at any point in its history, has been a democracy in the rigorous sense of the word. This is partly by design.
  • The foundations of the United States were defined by a struggle over how much democracy should be mitigated. It was terrifyingly radical to suggest that the people — even a very restricted group of people — might have a say in government, and the founders cautiously padded the rails to limit the power of the masses.
  • Over the two and a half centuries since, we’ve grown more democratic, expanding the franchise to women and people of color and instituting the direct election of senators by popular vote (the 17th amendment, ratified in 1913). But we’ve also taken steps away from pure democracy; initiatives making it more difficult for people to vote and gerrymandering are good examples of this.
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  • In 2014, a Princeton study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page found that the United States is an oligarchy, not a democracy, with policy driven by the economic elite and business interests.
  • Furthermore, studies and polls show that majority public opinion on many of the key issues of the day — abortion, gun control, universal health care — is nowhere near reflected in public policy decisions.
  • It’s hardly surprising that we haven’t yet perfected our system of government. Societies have been practicing democracy for a very short time relative to human history, and we’re still working out the bugs and persuading ourselves to commit to the difficulties. And democracy is still a terrifyingly radical idea — as much as we rhapsodize about government by the people, we are afraid to trust ourselves and much more afraid to trust anyone else.
  • Our recent stumbles are reminders that we still have work to do on our system of government. Democracy is not a unitary state that can be achieved, but a continuous process. We need to keep reinventing and refining government, to keep up with changes in society and technology and to keep it from being too easy for elites with resources to exploit.
liamhudgings

The man who rigged America's election maps - YouTube - 0 views

  •  
    Cool breakdown of gerrymandering, its effect in the US, and its racial motives. Based off of new info found by Tom Hofellers daughter.
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