An explosion set by white men killed four black girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. White men beat and murdered black activists and their white allies during the civil rights era. Police sometimes gave the beatings in broad daylight. Later, white men beat up hippies for having long hair. Two white men in Wyoming pistol-whipped a gay student, Matthew Shepard, beating his face in before tying him to a fence post in freezing conditions and leaving him to die.
Some men cannot abide the idea that fellow citizens from marginalized — or just different — groups want to be treated like the rest of us. In the minds of easily threatened men, there’s a place for those people, and it is out of sight. There is no closet too deep.
Writing for Iowa’s The Gazette, Todd Dorman sees the Republican Party fully supporting that view while banning books:
Next year, don’t be surprised if you receive a mailer from a Republican lawmaker or GOP candidate espousing their support for public schools. We’ve seen them in recent years, with happy photos of politicians posing in schools, talking to teachers. Heartwarming.
But they’ll probably leave out the part about wanting to put teachers and administrators in jail.
Why? Because there are books in circulation portraying marginalized people like Matthew Shepard with humanity his murderers lacked.
“My warning to all the teachers and the administrators is you’re going to be in jail. Because this is distributing pornography,” Iowa state Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Brad Zaun told the conservative website The Iowa Standard. He’s promoting legislation to make it a felony offense for educators to permit what he considers obscene material.
Some of the books at issue are by LGBTQ authors sharing their difficult life experiences, hoping to help LGBTQ kids navigate their own lives. And yes, there are portions that discuss sex. Their target audience doesn’t include middle-aged white guys who serve under the Golden Dome of Wisdom.
“Sadly, book banning is as American as racism and demonizing immigrants,” Dorman laments.
But this new salvo in the culture wars is different. It’s hateful, vengeful and authoritarian. These lawmakers are essentially demanding that educators adopt their rigid worldview and antique understanding of human sexuality or maybe go to prison.
This sounds more like the World War I proclamation threatening to throw Iowans in jail for speaking German, among the darkest chapters in Iowa history.
But it checks two boxes on the national Red State Trailblazer to-do list.
It gives conservative lawmakers a chance to continue trashing LGBTQ Iowans, transgender kids in particular. Lawmakers have already prohibited public funded health insurance from paying for the medical needs of transgender Iowans. They’ve also filed numerous anti-transgender bills, including legislation barring transgender girls from playing sports, preventing the discussion of gender identity in classrooms and removing gender identity as a protected class in the Civil Rights Code.
I had to look up “Red State Trailblazers.” They include Mississippi’s Governor Tate Reeves, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts.
Naturally, the business community finds this ritual bad for business, so Iowa’s bills are on hold until 2022 when political pressures will build for Republicans to get tough on anyone not white, straight, or conservative.
Reynolds cited “failing schools” when she called for giving state-funded vouchers to parents who want to leave public schools. She’s the first governor in decades with no agenda for improving public schools.
Republicans have pressured university professors to toe the political line or potentially face legislation eliminating tenure. Professors who are too outspoken might draw the ire of lawmakers. Ames school officials were called before the House Oversight Committee where outraged Republicans demanded they explain a one-week Black Lives Matter curriculum.
The times conservatives have accused schools of “indoctrination” are too numerous to count.
Book banning, threatening to throw teachers in jail, using state power to punish a minority group and undermining the public education system are not the sort of actions you would expect from democratic institutions. Instead, our institutions are being used to impose one unyielding political and cultural perspective through lousy laws, disinformation and intimidation.
Because there’s no closet too deep for people who don’t conform. In parts of this country, that’s called freedom. For somebody.
I’m sure there will b e nothing corrupt about any of this. Trump is almost certain to run for president and all of these anonymous investors will certainly have his loyalty. And we have no idea who they are:
Donald Trump’s new social media venture said on Saturday it had entered into agreements to raise about $1 billion from a group of unidentified investors as it prepares to float in the U.S. stock market.
The capital raise, details of which were first reported by Reuters on Wednesday, underscored the former U.S. president’s ability to attract strong financial backing thanks to his personal and political brand. He is working to launch a social media app called TRUTH Social that is at least several weeks away. read moreReport ad
Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC.O), the blank-check acquisition firm that will take Trump Media & Technology Group Corp public by listing it in New York, said it will provide up to $293 million to the partnership with Trump’s media venture, taking the total proceeds to about $1.25 billion.
The $1 billion will be raised through a private investment in public equity (PIPE) transaction from “a diverse group of institutional investors,” Trump Media and Digital World said in a statement. They did not respond to requests to name the investors.Report ad
Trump Media inked its deal with Digital World to go public in October at a valuation of $875 million, including debt. The social media venture is now valued at almost $4 billion based on the price of Digital World shares at the end of trading on Friday. Trump supporters and day traders snapped up the stock.
Many Wall Street firms such as mutual funds and private equity firms snubbed the opportunity to invest in the PIPE. Among those investors who participated were hedge funds, family offices and high net-worth individuals, Reuters reported on Wednesday. Family offices manage the wealth of the very rich and their kin.Report ad
Some Wall Street investors are reluctant to associate with Trump. He was banned from top social media platforms after the Jan. 6 attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol amid concerns he would inspire further violence. The Capitol attack was based on unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud in last year’s presidential election.
“As our balance sheet expands, Trump Media & Technology Group will be in a stronger position to fight back against the tyranny of Big Tech,” Trump said in a statement on Saturday.
The deal also faces regulatory risk. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren asked Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler last month to investigsatethe planned merger for potential violations of securities laws around disclosure. The SEC has declined to comment on whether it plans any action.
Trump Media and Digital World said the per-share conversion price of the convertible preferred stock PIPE transaction represents a 20% discount to Digital World’s volume-weighted average closing price for the five trading days to Dec. 1, when Reuters broke news of the capital raise.
If that price averages below $56 in the 10 days after the merger with Digital World has been completed, the discount will grow to 40% with a floor of $10, the companies added. Digital World shares ended trading on Friday $44.97.
Trump had 89 million followers on Twitter, 33 million on Facebook and 24.5 million on Instagram at the time he was blocked, according to a presentation on his company’s website.
Investors attending the confidential investor road shows were shown a demo from the planned social media app, which looked like a Twitter feed, Reuters reported.
The Democrats could pass some laws to circumvent this, like requiring presidents to put their holding in blind trusts and releasing their tax returns but I haven’t head a word suggesting that’s what they plan to do. And short of that nothing will be done to prevent Trump from literally running his own media company out of the White House should he win again. Even Viktor Orban couldn’t pull that off.
He was a major figure in American politics for many decades, ran for president three times, helped pass a bunch of legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act, and also helped usher in the ugly, nasty turn that politics has taken since the 1980s.
This struck me as the best tribute to Dole today without whitewashing the dark side:
Bob Dole dedicated his entire life to serving the American people, from his heroism in World War II to the 35 years he spent in Congress. After all he gave in the war, he didn’t have to give more. But he did. His example should inspire people today and for generations to come. pic.twitter.com/8Iiy7ssGkD
Marcy Wheeler was on NPR this morning talking about the January 6th prosecutions and Roger Stone. It’s well worth listening to:
She explains the difference between the January 6th Committee’s approach and the DOJ’s approach. Basically, the 1/6 Committee are coming at it from the top down and the DOJ is building their cases from the bottom up. Fascinating.
Here’s a little more background on her blog about Oathkeeper Kelly Meggs, the guy who hunted Nancy Pelosi. It’s fascinating.
A group of white supremacists stormed through downtown Washington, D.C. on Saturday evening, bearing American flags and mildly menacing plastic shields while marching to the beat of a snare drum down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. But after chanting aggressively about their plans to “reclaim America,” their intended show of force stalled spectacularly when they lost their ride.
While the group had marched through the city with threatening chants about their plan to “reclaim America,” by the end of the night it was not even clear how they intended to reclaim their U-Haul.
The rally by more than 100 members of the “Patriot Front” group, held just blocks from the White House, sparked fear among many bystanders and immediately attracted the attention of law enforcement, who shadowed the group to forestall any conflict.
Members wore a uniform: white gaiters, sunglasses, blue jackets, khaki pants, and brown boots and hats. Some donned plastic shinguards, seeming to anticipate violence.
As Patriot Front’s leader Thomas Rousseau spoke beside the Capitol reflecting pool, bystanders booed. Asked about the reason for the march, Rousseau said, “Our demonstrations are an exhibition of our unified capability to organize, to show our strength—not as brawlers or public nuisances, but as men capable of illustrating a message and seeking an America that more closely resembles the interests of its true people.”[…]
Patriot Front was once known as Vanguard America but changed its name after a man affiliated with the group murdered a woman at the notorious Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Members with military experience often train each other in basic tactics ranging from a protest gear list (Marine Corps-issued combat boots and decontaminate wipes) to hand-to-hand combat. White nationalists like Richard Spencer have hired the group for their own security.
Nothing happened and apparently, some of them were left stranded without a ride. Yes, they seem pretty lame. But I think it’ a mistake to laugh them off. There are apparently millions of people in this country who agree with their philosophy even if they aren’t marching around and carrying flags. One of them is a former president and the presumptive Republican party nominee in 2024.
Well, they have 42 chapters. They have a website. Members all over the country. Their founder Thomas Rousseau who led them last night probably wouldn’t like you guys all claiming he is FBI. You can spend 5 minutes on google, or you can watch him here from last night if you want. pic.twitter.com/zMJplUVVun
When famed televangelist Marcus Lamb died this week at 64 after contracting covid-19, a who’s who of conservative Christian leaders sent out regrets. Evangelist Franklin Graham said Lamb is now “experiencing heaven.” National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference head Samuel Rodriguez called him a “faithful follower of Jesus … with a heart for the lost and broken.”
Absent was a painful truth: Lamb had led his global Christian network, Daystar, for months in spreading inaccurate information about coronavirus vaccines and instead promoting treatments that are not proven remedies. The vaccines, a May segment on Daystar said, falsely, are “killing your immune system.”
But the silence and unanswered questions by some Christian leaders, as well as Lamb’s family and network, sit atop what some experts say is a deep base of politics, conspiratorial thinking and a skepticism of anything that appears secular.
And that makes frank discussion of Daystar’s activism against vaccines, even in the face of death, unlikely.
Robert Morris, the Dallas-area pastor whose Gateway Church will host Lamb’s funeral Monday, declined to comment on the topic. He “has not and will not engage in the medical debate or dialogue regarding vaccines,” Morris spokesman Lawrence Swicegood told The Washington Post in an email. “Those are personal choices, and one should consult medical advice from their doctor to make their own choice. As a church pastor his sermons at Gateway Church address spiritual issues and biblical content.”
Daystar for months has hosted conspiracy theorists pressing unproven treatments for the virus, including some who framed vaccines and mandates as ungodly and satanic. Lamb and others featured on Daystar described the virus, vaccines and vaccine mandates as evidence of the devil trying to attack followers of a true God.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a spiritual attack from the enemy,” Lamb’s son, Jonathan, said on the network last month about his father’s covid-19 bout, Relevant magazine reported this week. “The enemy,” he said, is angered by the promotion of vaccine alternatives. “And he’s doing everything he can to take down my dad.”
Pollsters say the religious group most reluctant to get vaccinated are White evangelicals. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 25 percent of that group said in November that they “definitely won’t” get vaccinated, a number that’s stayed steady since March. However, the percentage who said they have received at least one shot has gone in that period from 35 percent to 63 percent, Kaiser found. About 14.5 percent of Americans are White evangelicals, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.
Curtis Chang, a divinity school professor who last year launched the Christians and the Vaccine project, said the repulsion among evangelicals to vaccines is multilayered — and in some ways new.
He goes on to say that evangelicals are naturally rebellious against all institutions. That may be true but you have to wonder about their loyalty to the institution of the Republican party. Still, their love of Trump is way beyond even that which indicates that they see him as some kind of Second Coming. In other words, conservative evangelical Christianity has become a cult. With a lying, libertine, con artist as its leader.
A prominent activist I know (only online) has left the country. He’s done his part for years to protect this democracy and in his retirement, seeing the country’s trajectory, he’d rather live somewhere else, and he has the wherewithal to do it. I get it. Best wishes.
Other friends have left to stretch their retirement incomes. One to Thailand, one couple to Ecuador, a third couple is moving to Canada and a fourth is considering Spain. (I hear Portugal is nice.) But more are considering bailing for reasons of political turmoil, I suspect. International Living after last year’s election reported that Americans are interested in leaving, “over the last five months, International Living has seen a surge of 1676% in traffic around ‘How to Move Out of the U.S.’”
And why? Perhaps yahoos like these who appeared Saturday evening at the Lincoln Memorial:
An enormous portrait of George Washington hangs alongside swastika banners and American flags at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1939 during the German American Bund’s Pro American Rally.
This is the Christmas card a Republican congressman is sending to friends and family:
"Hello, I'm from the Democratic Party and I'm here in Kentucky to tell you about some of the amazing things we're doing with broadband access, and…OH MY GOD!" https://t.co/mtyRNHat1z
But remember, the American Nazi movement from Madison Square Garden in 1939 went nowhere. IIRC, in Heather Cox Richardson’s Thursday Facebook live, she too noted that this is not the first time Americans have been terrified over where this country was headed and democracy survived. Of course, in the 1850s we were headed for the bloodiest period in American history.
Dan Pfeiffer urges readers to take a deep breath. “Democrats are a superstitious lot,” he suggests, always afraid of jinxing their wins. Some version of “are we doomed?” was the hottest topic suggested for Pod Save America‘s annual Thanksgiving Mail Bag Episode. Don’t make that a self-fulfilling prophecy, Pfeiffer warns (superstitiously):
If Democrats believe they are doomed, they will be doomed. Republicans are trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are three specific tactics Republicans will use to fulfill this prophecy:
Encouraging Dems to Retire: Let’s be honest being in the minority sucks — particularly in the House where there is almost no opportunity for the party out of power to have a substantive impact. For members contemplating retirement, the prospect of returning to the minority is enough to convince them to forgo the exhausting endeavor of raising money and stumping for reelection in a tough political environment. Thus far, 19 House Democrats have announced plans to retire after 2022 with several more sitting on the fence. While some of these folks are in safe seats, many are in battleground districts. Every open seat creates another opportunity for the Republicans. In general, it’s easier to defeat an unknown candidate than an established incumbent with a high name ID and a long-term relationship with the voters. Therefore, the Republicans want to push as many Democrats as possible off the fence and into retirement.
C.R.E.A.M: If Republican majority leadership appears likely, lobbyists and corporate PACs will start writing checks to Republicans in order to garner favor. The greater the likelihood, the bigger the checks. This is, of course, a searing indictment of our corrupt campaign finance system, but it is the reality.
Demobilization: Democratic success in 2022 — or any other year — depends on mobilizing the tens of millions of Americans who became engaged in the political process after Trump’s 2016 victory. If even a few sit out this election, we are doomed. The best way to get people to disengage is to convince them that their engagement is pointless. Why donate money, knock on doors, text back, or even vote if the outcome is predetermined? This is why McCarthy et al declare victory early, brazenly push voter suppression, and support gerrymandering. Convincing people that their voice doesn’t matter is a classic authoritarian tactic.
Based on the high number of House retirements, the polls, and the results in Virginia, it’s clear that Democrats are preemptively preparing for defeat. And that’s a very real problem.
Tell me about it. The three Democrats representing my county in the state House in Raleigh all announced this week that they would not run again next year. Panic set in. Candidate filing begins at noon tomorrow (Monday) and we need three candidates before noon on December 17.
We must do a better job of “hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst,” Pfeiffer writes, offering reasons for optimism:
Things Will Get Better Eventually: In elections, nothing matters more than the reality on the ground. The Virginia election could not have come at a worse time. Delta was still lingering, food and fuel costs were up, the supply chain and labor shortage issues were front of mind, schools opened while most kids were still unvaccinated. Just because things are tough now doesn’t mean they will still be that way when people cast their votes next year. Despite all of the news about the Omicron variant, it’s very possible the pandemic is better under control. More people are vaccinated, prices came down and the economy is roaring into next year. We can rest easy knowing there may be a sense of collective relief and jubilation that will benefit the president and the party that fixed the economy and controlled the pandemic.
Senate Map: The House map is going to be difficult. But while the Senate structure favors Republicans, the 2022 map is still decent for Democrats. We could not only maintain but expand our majority without flipping a single Trump state. In fact, all we need to do is turnout people who voted for Joe Biden last year. While that’s not easy, it is very doable.
Youngkin’s the Exception, Not the Rule: Given the rogue gallery of Republican Senate candidates and the general Republican preference for MAGA-types with very loose grasps on reality, Glenn Youngkin is likely to be the exception not the rule in the Republican field. Whether it’s Herschel Walker in Georgia, Tedd Budd in North Carolina, or Josh Mandel in Ohio, the Republicans seem likely to nominate a bunch of candidates unable or unwilling to replicate Youngkin’s deft tightrope act. In 2010, Democrats held the Senate despite losing 63 seats in the House. This was a result of Republicans nominating awful candidates like Sharon Angle in Nevada. In 2012, we held onto Senate seats in Indiana and Missouri — two states Obama lost handily — for similar reasons.
The Return of Trump: One misguided takeaway from the Virginia election is that running against Trump is a strategy doomed to fail. Running against Trump in the overly simplistic hackish way of the McAuliffe campaign should not be replicated, but it’s naive to think that Trump will not be a factor in the 2022 election. Trump never visited Virginia. He isn’t on Twitter. For all but the most politically engaged, the former president is nothing more than an afterthought. But that is unlikely to be the case in 2022 when he is actively campaigning up and down the ballot and the media is saturated with stories about his potential 2024 run. While Democrats still need a compelling message that incorporates Trump and Trumpism, his return to the political scene should light a fire in our voters and remind some Independents and other persuadable voters why they turned against the Republicans.
“While the odds may be long, the outcome is not predetermined,” Pfeiffer writes. “Every single one of us has agency in this situation.”
Another friend quotes David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs“: “A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist.” Hint: Don’t cease to exist.
Digby reposted ‘Fools, drunks, and the United States of America’ from James Fallows’ newsletter on Saturday. Fallows examines how this country growing both in size and population beyond the founders’ wildest dreams has taken us to “where the rules no longer reflect the check-and-balance, big-vs-small design conceived in the 18th century, and where practice is pushing those rules to their limit.” Our democracy now strains the definition of republican. Majority rule is no longer a rule but a guideline, and in many states mere window dressing.
Profound changes, Fallows observes, have driven “a shift from protecting minority rights, which a diverse society should and must do, to enabling minority rule, which ultimately means a denial of democracy.” One of our major political parties, headed toward a future as a permanent minority (if not demographic extinction) has abandoned the original principle of majority rule for rule as a minority. Its very name is now a political joke.
Recently, I tried provoking a Twitter conversation on the topic by poking Marc Elias of Democracy Docket:
.@marceelias: When do we begin suing states for violating enabling acts requiring them to establish governments in form "republican, and not repugnant to the Constitution of the United States and the principles of the Declaration of Independence" or Northwest Ordinance of 1787?
By “when do we” I meant the Department of Justice.
Fallows wrote:
Thus we have Democratic candidates for president winning the national vote in seven of the eight past elections—but appointing only three of the nine current members of the Supreme Court. Thus we have Senators representing less than one-third of the population blocking proposals supported by most of the public. Thus we have even worse failure-of-democracy structures in many state governments, for instance as laid out by political scientist David Pepper here. Thus we have the voting-restrictions and gerrymandering plans I needn’t detail but that we read about every day.
I’ve posted that Pepper video below as I don’t want readers to miss it.
What I referenced in my tweet is twofold. The Constitution requires the federal government to guarantee that each state have a government that is republican in form.
Article IV, Section 4
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
Secondly, the enabling legislation for admitting new states to the union requires them to adhere to that principle. The language varies slightly from case to case but derives both from the Northwest Ordinance of 1877 (passed under the Articles before ratification of the Constitution) and from Article IV, Section 4.
The Enabling Act of 1816 for admitting Indiana, for example. The new state (Sec. 4):
whenever formed, shall be republican, and not repugnant to those articles of the ordinance of the thirteenth of July, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven, which are declared to be irrevocable between the original states, and the people and states of the territory northwest of the river Ohio
Or the Alaska Statehood Act (1959):
SEC. 3. The constitution of the State of Alaska shall always be republican in form and shall not be repugnant to the Constitution of the United States and the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
There were a few states admitted between those dates. You may live in one.
I am not an attorney (clearly), but it seems that in a sense our republic is no longer constitutional. Or at least the governments of several states that pledged upon admission to govern according to the principle of majority rule and by the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence are in violation of their contracts, contracts the federal government is constitutionally obliged to enforce.
The question is which branch(es) of our tripartite government enforces them?
Scholars Gabriel J. Chin and Erin M. Hawley at the Constitution Center explain:
The Guarantee Clause also does not require any particular form of republican governmental structure. Thus, in cases such as Pacific States Telephone & Telegraph Co. v. Oregon (1912), the Supreme Court has refused to invalidate various forms of direct democracy permitted by state law, such as popular initiative and referendum, on the ground that they violate the Guarantee Clause. While these decisions were often on jurisdictional grounds, they are consistent with James Madison’s observation in The Federalist No. 43 that “the States may choose to substitute other republican forms.”
It is also clear that federal actions regarding states, authorized by other parts of the Constitution, do not ordinarily violate the Guarantee Clause, even if those federal actions prevent a particular state decision from going into effect. Under the Supremacy Clause, federal law will sometimes supersede otherwise valid state laws.
The question whether a Guarantee Clause challenge may be heard in federal court—that is, whether it is judicially enforceable—is a difficult one. In Luther v. Borden (1849), the Supreme Court held questions involving the Guarantee Clause nonjusticiable, meaning that any remedy for a violation would lie with Congress or the President, not the federal judiciary. Nearly one hundred years later, the Court sweepingly declared that the guarantee of a republican form of government cannot be challenged in court. Colegrove v. Green (1946).
More recently, however, the Supreme Court has left the door open to a Guarantee Clause challenge, intimating that the justiciability of such a claim must be decided on a case-by-case basis. Nevertheless, because protection against invasion or domestic violence is normally available only from Congress and the President, the structure of this section suggests that the political branches have at least the primary duty to carry out its obligations.
By more recently, the pair may mean suits brought against states over redistricting. In North Carolina’s Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering claims are nonjusticiable. The plaintiffs argued that partisan gerrymandering was a violation of the 1st Amendment, the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th, and Article I sections 2 and 4 of the U.S. Constitution.
But perhaps it is time somebody challenge whether some of these same governments are in violation of Article IV, Section 4.
After last week’s case from Mississippi challenging Roe, one could imagine a Republican state attorney general arguing with a straight face that so long as the state’s government has the “form” of a republican one, then the constitution (and the enabling act) is satisfied.
In 1858, Abraham Lincoln deplored the state laws discriminating against Black Americans, as well as immigrants in the North and West. He challenged Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who said that discriminatory state laws—including laws that protected human enslavement—were just fine so long as those few men allowed to vote liked them.
Lincoln held that our country aspired to equality and was falling short. Douglas believed that so long as the people who already had the vote (white men) continued to vote, Richardson told her Thursday Facebook live viewers [25:45], democracy was satisfied.
How satisfied are you?
New VIDEO/WHITEBOARD
Kids, families and schools are paying a tragic price for our lack of democracy in states, where common sense gun safety reforms are broadly supported, but rigged statehouses often do the exact opposite
US population density at the time of the first Census, in 1790, when the rules that still govern a very different country were set out. (Getty Images)
This astute observation by James Fallows is hugely important if we are to somehow find our way out of this mess we’re in:
An open and adaptable society has been and remains America’s glory and strength, relative to the rest of the world. That is what observing the U.S. from overseas for many years has taught me, along with reporting from inside the country for more years than that.
But an out-of-date structure of national government, which is very difficult to change but alarmingly easy to abuse, has become America’s great handicap.
I’ve always thought (and have often said) that only a country with so much in its favor as the U.S. enjoys, could withstand a system as flawed as the U.S.’s has become. The question is whether that luck can last.
This is not a remotely “new” issue or insight. Practically from the time the Constitution appeared, people had ideas for improving it. That is, after all, how we got the Bill of Rights. I have a whole bookshelf full of more recent calls to re-think the basic rules of American governance, with specific ideas about doing so. For instance, one by Rexford Guy Tugwell, nearly 50 years ago; or another by Larry Sabato, nearly 15 years ago; or one from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, just last year.
These tensions aren’t new, but they’re behind each day’s news. I find that awareness of them is useful in deciding what deserves most attention and worry, and why.
The main problem: A modern society, running on antique rules that are too hard to change and too easy to abuse
Nearly 80 years ago, during some of the fiercest fighting of World War II, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal wrote what became one of the most influential books of mid-20th century America.
It was called An American Dilemma, and its subject was the contradiction built into America society from the start. That was the tension between, on the one hand, the stated American ideals of democracy and equality, and, on the other, the American realities of race-based oppression and inequality.
The point may seem obvious, but Myrdal’s work had such clarity and power that it was cited a decade later in the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which overturned the “separate but equal” premise of segregated schools.
If Myrdal were around to explore the dilemmas and contradictions of modern America, he would still write about race. But he could also talk about the worsening dilemma of constitutional government. The nation reveres, as it should, the ideals that are timeless in a document composed more than 230 years ago. But the modern nation is trapped by many of the loopholes and specific provisions in that document, which through the years have become ever harder to correct and ever easier to abuse.
-Some parts of the compromises that went into the Constitution in 1787 were so blatantly mismatched to changing American realities that they were eventually changed, through the intentionally onerous process of Constitutional amendment.
-These included issues as sweeping as the Constitution’s embrace of slavery, which was ended only through the horrors of the Civil War, and the omission of women’s right to vote, which was finally recognized by the 19th amendment in 1920. And also issues as technical as how the President and Vice President are chosen. (Until the 12th amendment, the runner-up in the presidential election became the VP, which if in force in 2020 would have given us the Biden-Trump administration.)
-Some technical provisions that might have made sense in the 1700s persist as annoyances or oddities that no one has bothered to change. For instance, the requirement that presidential candidates be “natural-born” citizens, which had some logic for an infant country worried about foreign tampering but is just pointless nativism now. Or the denial of Congressional representation to the 700,000+ U.S. citizens who live and pay federal taxes in Washington D.C.
But some of the provisions have morphed, through time, into distortions of effective governance so profound that people in the 1780’s would never have considered them, if they had imagined circumstances like today’s. They’re what I want to focus on.
Mostly these add up to a shift from protecting minority rights, which a diverse society should and must do, to enabling minority rule, which ultimately means a denial of democracy. The likes of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, who had worked through grim scenarios of “how democracies fail” in The Federalist Papers, would have understood this immediately. A system that is not ultimately steered by its majority cannot survive as a democracy.
The shift away from ultimate democratic accountability has been driven by changes in realities, and in behavior and norms.
Changing realities…
(1) The first reality is the changing nature of big vs. small.
When the compromises at the heart of the Constitution were hammered out, two of the main axes were big states versus small states, and slaveholding states in the south versus non-slave states in the north.
A cold-eyed, mathematical deal-making precision went into these arrangements. Thus we have the stark “three-fifths of a person” clause of the Constitution, to bolster slave-state representation in Congress without allowing those enslaved people to vote. And thus we have the balance between the Senate and the House, with two Senators per state in one chamber, and a population-based delegation in the other.
But in those days, the big states were not that much bigger than the small ones. The most populous state at the time was Virginia. The least populous was Delaware. Those biggest-and-smallest rankings apply, whether you’re counting the states’ entire population, including slaves, or just the “free whites.” And the difference between the biggest and smallest populations was about ten-to-one.
The same was true on a larger scale. Taken together, the three most populous states also had around ten times as many people as the three smallest. It was in awareness of those proportions that the two-Senators-per-state deal was hammered out.
Today the most populous state, California, has around 70 times as many people as the least populous, Wyoming. Each of course has two votes in the Senate. Taken together, today’s three most populous states—California, Texas, and Florida—have about 45 times the population of the three least populous, which are Wyoming, Vermont, and Alaska. The three big states come to roughly 90 million people, versus roughly two million for the three smallest. Those 90 million Americans, and the two million, are each represented by six U.S. Senators.
There is no chance whatsoever, zero, that the practical-minded idealists who came up with “three-fifths of a person” would have agreed on anything like today’s Senate representation, if they had anything like today’s population extremes. But that was 234 years ago, and we’re stuck with rules from their times.
(2) There’s a related reality, much less often mentioned. It’s the ceiling on the size of the House of Representatives, which should be much larger than it is now.
When the country was founded, there were 65 members of the House. For the next century-plus, the size of the House increased after the Census every decade, as the size of the U.S. population did. But just before World War I, the number was capped at its current level, of 435. The U.S. population is about 90 times larger than it was at the time of the Constitution. But the House is not even 7 times as large.
Why does this matter, in governance terms—and apart from the pressures on individual Representatives? Because of the Electoral College.
As a reminder, Electoral College votes are a combination of each state’s Senate and House representation. As House membership expanded through the 1800s from 65 to 435, House seats became relatively more important in Electoral College totals, and Senate seats relatively less so. To spell it out, in the first presidential election, Electoral Votes based on Senate seats made up nearly 30% of the Electoral College total. In the first election after House size was frozen, they made up only 18%.
If the House were re-expanded, then the small-state-bias of the Senate would matter less and less, and the Electoral College outcome would more closely track the national vote. That does not automatically mean it would be more Democratic (or Republican) in partisan terms. Remember: the second and third most populous states are Texas and Florida. It means that the results would be closer to small-d democratic rule.
Again, no one drafting the Constitution foresaw a 70-to-1 difference in state populations. None of them imagined that, 120 years after they finished their work, their successors would stop enlarging the size of the House.
The United Kingdom reformed its Parliament in the 1830s because of the scandal of “rotten boroughs”—places whose voice in Parliament far exceeded their share of the electorate. But they had the advantage of no written Constitution to hold them back. The Senate is today’s rotten borough.
… and changing behavior
The second reality is a change in behavior and norms.
(1) The Constitution has no provision for the filibuster. With a few clear exceptions, like treaty ratification or impeachment, the Senate was set up as a straight majority-rule operation, just like the House.
The filibuster was first used in the 1800s; became a mainstay of segregationists in the 1900s; but was routinized only in recent times, starting mainly with Mitch McConnell 15 years ago. Turn to Adam Jentleson’s excellent Kill Switch for the evidence and the blow-by-blow.
As recently as the Bill Clinton era, for most votes on most measures, 51 Senators was what it took to get legislation passed. Now we take for granted that a Senate “majority” means 60 votes. Given the small-state bias of the Senate, that means that Senators representing around a quarter of the U.S. population can muster the 41 votes it takes to block an administration’s measures.
For instance: after the gun massacre of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, Barack Obama pushed hard in his State of the Union address for background checks and other gun-safety measures. Polls showed overwhelming support from the public, and more than 50 Senators—a bipartisan majority — voted for it as well. But Mitch McConnell exercised the filibuster, and the plan died.
This is not what the founders had in mind. They had seen enough of structural dysfunction in the Articles of Confederation years.
(2) Another important change in practice involves “separation of powers.” A basic concept of tripartite government—executive, legislative, and judiciary—is that each branch would have institutional loyalty, rather than purely partisan motivation. The Congress would rise above party to guard its powers against presidential over-reach, notably in the power to declare war. The judiciary would not be of any party, and would play an arm’s length role.
Isn’t it pretty to think so! For the past generation, we have not had three branches of government. We have had three arenas for the same partisan power struggle. The result is a system with all the drawbacks of parliamentary government, without its advantages. The drawback, to spell it out, is unchecked one-party rule. The advantage is government accountable to democratic will.
Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that of the scores of new democracies that have emerged in the past 50 years, not a one has copied the U.S. governance model.
(3) Then there is pushing things in to the hilt. To my mind, Bush v Gore was a modern turning point. On the one side, a recount in a state whose governor was one candidate’s own governor. Plus a recount team that turned out to include three eventual members of the US Supreme Court. (Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.) On the other side, a candidate who said this, soon after the Supreme Court ruled against him:
“I accept the finality of this outcome, which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”
It might not have been “smart” of Al Gore to go down without an open-ended fight. It is certainly not the path Donald Trump has chosen. But such willingness to concede is what democracy depends on. It is the lubricant that our creaky and structurally flawed system has required, and that it now lacks.
During the 2016 campaign, I wrote frequently about the “Vichy Republicans”—the members of the party who had fiercely mocked and denounced Trump before the nomination but then loyally stood with him.
In the wake of everything since, especially the January 6 insurrection, you could just say “Republicans.” It is wise for Joe Biden to decline comment on the latest reports that Trump knew he was infected with Covid when he showed up for their close-range, face-to-face debate last year. It is craven for party leaders to shrink from criticizing Trump for even that, even now.
A resilient society, a calcifying system
Where this takes us is the strain on a system where the rules no longer reflect the check-and-balance, big-vs-small design conceived in the 18th century, and where practice is pushing those rules to their limit.
Thus we have Democratic candidates for president winning the national vote in seven of the eight past elections—but appointing only three of the nine current members of the Supreme Court. Thus we have Senators representing less than one-third of the population blocking proposals supported by most of the public. Thus we have even worse failure-of-democracy structures in many state governments, for instance as laid out by political scientist David Pepper here. Thus we have the voting-restrictions and gerrymandering plans I needn’t detail but that we read about every day.
“Majority rule” should not inherently be a partisan issue, though the Republican party obviously now benefits from this imbalance—and may coldly believe that minority rule is the party’s main hope. For the country, it’s a question of governing viability. Democracies depend in the long term on democratic processes. The U.S. system is now structurally so anti-democratic that it survives only with something like public-spiritedness of all parties.
Which we can’t rely on.
The society has great powers of recuperation. About the system, I’m not so sure.
I’m being very rude by posting this here and I won’t make a habit of doing it. You really should subscribe to Fallows’ newsletter if you can. It’s great. But I wanted to share this incredibly important essay because it clarifies so much of our current problem.
He promises to discuss some of the possible solutions to this dilemma and I look forward to reading it. I’m afraid my imagination fails me
