Public Policy and Governance – Page 84

Another Reason To Get Rid Of The Electoral College

A few days ago, Heather Cox Richardson–a historian who writes Substack’s popular “Letters from an American”–reported on several aspects of the Trump coup effort. Among the various efforts she itemized was the following

Over the past several days, news has broken that lawmakers or partisan officials in various states forged documents claiming that Trump won the 2020 election. This links them to the insurrection; as conservative editor Bill Kristol of The Bulwark notes, false electoral counts were part of Trump’s plan to get then–Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count a number of Biden’s electoral votes on the grounds that the states had sent in conflicting ballots.

Interestingly, on December 17, 2021, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity that in four states there were an “alternate slate of electors voted upon that Congress will decide in January.” McEnany talked to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol yesterday.

Over the past few election cycles, the history and operation of the Electoral College has come under increasing scrutiny. And the more closely this odd element of our electoral process is examined, the more anti-democratic and positively dangerous it looks.

Whether, as several constitutional scholars insist, the Electoral College was a concession to the slave states, or as its defenders contend, it was an effort to give added electoral heft to smaller states–it It currently undermines democracy and–as Richardson’s report illustrates–facilitates the efforts of those who would overturn the will of American voters.

Structurally, there is a great deal wrong with the Electoral College. For one thing, it substantially advantages white rural voters. Research suggests that–thanks to the current operation of the College– every rural vote is worth one and a third of every urban vote. Small states already have a significant advantage by virtue of the fact that every state–no matter how thinly or densely populated–has two Senators.

No other advanced democracy in the world uses anything like the Electoral College (and as political scientists have noted, there are good reasons for that). And for those who fashion themselves as “originalists,” it’s worth pointing out that our current version of the Electoral College is dramatically different from the mechanism as it was originally conceived and even as it was later amended.

According to law professor Edward Foley, who wrote a book on the subject, the changes made to the College by the Twelfth Amendment in 1804 rested on the assumption that the candidate who won a majority of the popular vote would be elected. Those who crafted the Amendment failed to foresee the emergence of third party candidates whose presence on the ballot often means that the winner of a given state doesn’t win a majority, but a plurality of the vote.

These issues aside, the main problem with the Electoral College today isn’t even the undemocratic and disproportionate power it gives rural voters and smaller states. It’s the statewide winner-take-all laws, under which states award all their electors to the candidate with the most popular votes in their state– erasing all the voters in that state who didn’t vote for the winning candidate.

Forty-eight states have winner-take-all rules. As a result, most are “safe” for one party. The only states that really matter in any given federal election are “battleground” states — especially bigger ones like Florida and Pennsylvania, where a swing of a few thousand or even a few hundred votes can shift the entire pot of electors from one candidate to the other.

Winner-take-all has an even more pernicious effect–it disincentivizes voting by people who are in their state’s political minority. If your state is red and you are blue, or vice-versa, it’s easy to convince yourself your Presidential vote is meaningless, because it is.

Winner take all rules are why Democratic votes for President simply don’t count in Indiana and Republican votes for President don’t count in New York. Even if the margin is incredibly thin, the candidate who comes out on top gets all of that state’s electoral votes. If the votes were apportioned instead—if a winner of 51% of the popular vote got 51% of the electoral vote, and the candidate who got 49% got 49%, it wouldn’t just be fairer. It would encourage voters who support the “other” party in reliably red or blue states to vote, because–suddenly– that vote would count.

Joe Biden had to win the popular vote by five percentage points or more — by more than seven million votes — to insure his win in the 2020 election. That’s not only an unfair and undemocratic burden–it’s insane.

Now we learn that–in addition to its multiple anti-democratic effects–the College facilitates cheating. It really needs to go.

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America’s TASS

Remember TASS? It was the media arm of the Soviet Government–the Russian News Agency, owned and operated by the government.

Fox News–or as those of us resistant to its messaging like to call it, “Faux News”–isn’t technically owned by the GOP. But it might just as well be; it is the not-so-unofficial arm of the radical lunatics who are now fully in control of a once-reputable political party. This assertion doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone outside the cult, but recent revelations are, if anything, more troubling.

Not just troubling, actually–horrifying.

As The Washington Post and other media outlets have reported, the wacko pundits of Fox had arguably more influence over Trump than members of his official cabinet (not that those cabinet members had been plucked from the gardens of competence…). New revelations from books written by former staffers are eye-opening.

Stephanie Grisham, former press secretary to President Donald Trump, remembers the challenges that came from so many Fox News hosts having the direct number to reach Trump in the White House residence.

“There were times the president would come down the next morning and say, ‘Well, Sean thinks we should do this,’ or, ‘Judge Jeanine thinks we should do this,’ ” said Grisham, referring to Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro, both of whom host prime-time Fox News shows.

Grisham — who resigned from the White House amid the Jan. 6 attacks and has since written a book critical of Trump — said West Wing staffers would simply roll their eyes in frustration as they scrambled to respond to the influence of the network’s hosts, who weighed in on everything from personnel to messaging strategy.

Trump’s staff, allies and even adversaries were long accustomed to playing to an “Audience of One” — a commander in chief with a twitchy TiVo finger and obsessed with cable news.

Investigations into the insurrection have uncovered text messages that illustrate just how closely these unelected, unhinged ideologues were connected to the White House during Trump’s Presidency.

As the violence in the Capitol was occurring, several Fox News hosts sent texts to former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, texts that, as the Post reports, “crystallize with new specificity just how tightly Fox News and the White House were entwined during the Trump years, with many of the network’s top hosts serving as a cable cabinet of unofficial advisers.”

A former senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid details of private discussions, said Trump would also sometimes dial Hannity and Lou Dobbs — whose Fox Business show was canceled in February — into Oval Office staff meetings.

A report from The Week also reported the extent to which Trump relied on Fox pundits for policy decisions.

Alyssa Farah, a Trump White House communications director, said the goal of Trump’s staff was to “try to get ahead of what advice you thought he was going to be given by these people,” because their unofficial counsel “could completely change his mind on something.”

Farah said Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Pirro, and Fox Business host Lou Dobbs had the most influence on Trump. Michael Pillsbury, an informal Trump adviser, told the Posthe saw the biggest impact from Dobbs, whose show was canceled last February. Trump began embracing lawyer Sidney Powell and other election fabulists after watching them on Dobbs’ show, and he was inclined to believe their patently false claims in part because he was seeing on TV, he added.

“It taught me the power of the young producers at Fox, and Fox Business especially,” Pillsbury told the Post. “These young producers who are in their mid-20s. They come out of the conservative movement, they’ve never been in the government. They are presented with these reckless, fantastical accounts. And they believe them and put them on for ratings.”

During the four years of the Trump Administration, sane Americans frequently felt we were living in “never-never land”–that what we were witnessing was just too bizarre to be real. (According to multiple reports, our allies shared that level of disbelief.)

I guess when you inhabit a culture that puts a premium on click-bait, a culture that equates celebrity with merit, wealth with competence (remember that wonderful line from “If I Were A Rich Man”? “When you’re rich, they think you really know…”) and dismisses expertise and knowledge as “elitist,” you lose your anchor to reality.

To the best of my knowledge, even TASS never sank to the level of a Lou Dobbs or Tucker Carlson.

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Just Watch This Interview!

The Indiana legislature has begun its session, and the usual “culture warriors” who dominate that body thanks to Republican gerrymandering are already posturing about covid mandates and suggesting legislation that will incentivize and reward vaccine denial.

Despite GOP rhetoric about “freedom,” and the party’s steadfast, “pro-business” opposition to most regulation (Republicans pander to business through low tax rates and by turning a blind eye to pollution and other anti-social business behaviors), several lawmakers are proposing to overrule individual business owners who require their workers to be vaccinated.

This video sent to me by a reader shows the utter stupidity–and danger–of such intrusions into what should be decisions made by private businesses.

You really need to watch at least the first five minutes of this interview with the head of OneAmerica, an insurance company headquartered in Indianapolis. He makes two extremely important points:

Some businesses–his among them– need to have their employees return to the office, but large numbers of vaccinated employees are unwilling to do so if any of their co-workers will be unvaccinated;
Insurers are finding that death rates among working-age Americans have skyrocketed--they are 40% higher than actuarial tables and prior experience would predict, and the pandemic is responsible, both directly and indirectly. (Not all these deaths are from contracting Covid; many are the result of hospital overcrowding that has prevented or delayed needed care. Etc.)

You need to WATCH THE VIDEO.

The GOP politicians who are feeding anti-vaccine mythologies and rewarding dangerously anti-social behaviors are making a mockery of freedom (we are “free” only if we agree with them, evidently).

Their proposed tax give-backs/bribes cannot hide the fact that they are waging war on business– and in the process, killing Americans.

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Fear Itself…

FDR famously declared that ” the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” It was 1933, and the country was still reeling from the Great Depression.

Almost 100 years later, the U.S. is dealing with a pandemic, but otherwise most of us are in far better shape than people were in 1933. (For that matter, there’s an argument to be made that if it wasn’t for the people holding an “unreasoning, unjustified” fear of vaccines, the pandemic would be largely behind us.) Our sour national mood is almost entirely attributable to a political environment characterized by fear–a fear that has led to Congressional gridlock and refusal to deal with reality.

A friend recently sent me the results of a poll conducted by Axios–results that puzzled her. The poll showed heightened levels of fear across the political spectrum, but far higher among those identifying as Republicans. She had a reasonable reaction: yes, rational Americans have reason to be fearful of Republicans’ persistent attacks on democratic institutions–but what do the Republicans fear? And why is fear so much higher among them?

Whatever they told the pollsters, I’m pretty sure that what most of today’s Republicans really fear is demographic change and the loss of White Christian privilege. It’s that fear that is motivating their frenzied attacks on democracy and “one person, one vote.”

There’s an enormous amount of research corroborating that conclusion. Over the past decade, as popular culture and media outlets have paid more attention to their demographic decline, Americans who equate “real Americanism” with being White and Christian have seen headlines describing the waning of their share of the population; in 2017, numerous outlets headlined the fact that the country’s White Christian population had dipped below 50% for the first time.

Or, as one 2019 headline put it, “White Christian America ended in the 2010s.”

The author of the article, Robert P. Jones, heads up the Public Religion Research Institute. He wrote

Of all the changes to identity and belonging, the century’s second decade has been particularly marked by a religious sea change. After more than two centuries of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance, the United States has moved from being a majority-white Christian nation to one with no single racial and religious majority.

When I first identified this shift mid-decade in my 2016 book “The End of White Christian America,” I noted that the percentage of white Christians in the general population had dropped from 53 percent to 47 percent between 2010 and 2014 alone. Now, at the end of the decade, only 42 percent of Americans identify as white and Christian, representing a drop of 11 percentage points.

Jones recited the statistics: since 2010, the number of White evangelical Protestants has dropped from 21 percent of the population to 15 percent. Today they are roughly the same size as their white mainline Protestant cousins (15 percent vs. 16 percent, respectively).

In 2017, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that, for the first time, there was an absolute decline in the country’s white, non-Hispanic population. In other words, whites not only lost ground as a proportion of the population, but in actual numbers; there were more deaths than births. The U.S. Census Bureau now predicts that the U.S. will no longer be majority-white by 2045, and among children at every age below 10, whites are already a minority.

Research tells us that White Christians have become deeply anxious about the future and unrealistically nostalgic for the past. That anxiety and nostalgia “has fueled support for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda, and not just among white evangelicals.”

Solid majorities of each white Christian subgroup voted for Trump in 2016 and, in the Public Religion Research Institute’s most recent American Values Survey, nearly 9 in 10 (88 percent) white evangelicals and approximately two-thirds of both white mainline Protestants (68 percent) and white Catholics (65 percent) oppose impeaching and removing him from office.

White Christian America’s attraction to Trump has little to do with his personality or character — a slim majority (52 percent) of white evangelicals, for example, say they wish his speech and behavior were more like previous presidents — and everything to do with something more important: their belief that “making America great again” necessarily entails restoring white Christian demographic and political dominance.

These are the fears that motivate today’s GOP base–its opposition to immigration and hysteria over “Critical Race Theory,” among other things, and its determination to retain social dominance and privilege no matter how unconstitutional or unChristian the means and no matter how damaging to the nation.

Fear is a potent motivator but a very bad navigator.

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I Needed This

There’s a lot of gloom and doom out there–and plenty of reasons for despair. But I keep thinking back to the disruptions of the 1960s, and the then-widespread belief that the country was coming apart, that the riots and eruptions and emergence of a nonconforming youth culture were harbingers of ongoing and unstoppable social disintegration.

Actually,if I can be forgiven the metaphor, those disruptions were akin to labor pains–signaling the birth of a different set of social arrangements and understandings.

The chaos of the Sixties gave birth to massive social change, and although it was uneven, much of that change was positive. Isn’t it possible that the nastiness we are experiencing right now is similar–that it marks a hysterical effort by a minority of the population to foreclose changes that most Americans would consider improvements?

Rebecca Solnit has recently suggested precisely that, in an essay in The Guardian, titled “Why are U.S. Right-wingers so angry? Because they know social change is coming.”

While their fear and dismay is often regarded as rooted in delusion, rightwingers are correct that the world is metamorphosing into something new and, to them, abhorrent. They’re likewise correct that what version of history we tell matters. The history we tell today lays the groundwork for the future we make. The outrage over the 1619 Project and the new laws trying to censor public school teachers from telling the full story of American history are a doomed attempt to hold back facts and perspectives that are already widespread.

In 2018, halfway through the Trump presidency, Michelle Alexander wrote a powerful essay arguing that we are not the resistance. We, she declared, are the mighty river they are trying to dam. I see it flowing, and I see the tributaries that pour into it and swell its power, and I see that once firmly grounded statues and assumptions have become flotsam in its current.

Solnit points to replacement of monuments to the Confederacy and Columbus with statues of people like Harriet Tubman, to the renaming of streets and buildings and other public places–and she notes that “those angry white men with the tiki torches chanting, in Charlottesville in 2017, “You will not replace us” as they sought to defend a statue of Gen Robert E Lee were wrong in their values and actions but perhaps not in their assessment.”

The replacement of statues is symbolic of the far greater changes that have occurred within the lifetimes of many of us. Solnit enumerates several of the most consequential:

We are only a few decades removed from a civilization in which corporal punishment of children by parents and teachers was an unquestioned norm; in which domestic violence and marital rape were seen as a husband’s prerogative and a wife surrendered financial and other agency; in which many forms of inequality and exclusion had hardly even been questioned, let alone amended; in which few questioned the rightness of a small minority – for white Christian men have always been a minority in the United States – holding almost all the power, politically, socially, economically, culturally; in which segregation and exclusion were pervasive and legal; in which Native Americans had been largely written out of history; in which environmental regulation and protection and awareness barely existed.

Solnit compares our current unrest to an effort to push water back behind the dam. Despite the fact that the Right has thus far succeeded in protecting economic privilege and has won preliminary battles against voting and reproductive rights– she is convinced that the Right cannot, in the end, win the war.

While the right has become far more extreme and has its tens of millions of true believers, it is morphing into a minority sect. This has prompted their desperate scramble to overturn free and fair elections and other democratic processes. White Christians, who were 80% of the population in 1976, are now 44%. Mixed-race and non-white people are rapidly becoming the majority. On issues such as climate, people of color are far more progressive; if we can make it through the huge backlash of the present moment, the possibilities are dazzling….

Birth can be violent and dangerous, and sometimes one or the other of the two involved die. There is no guarantee about what is to come, and the shadow of climate chaos hangs over it all. We do not have time to build a better society before we address that crisis, but it is clear that the response to that crisis is building such a society. So much has already changed. The river Alexander described has swept away so much, has carried so many onward.

At risk of torturing a metaphor, we can–we must— work to midwife the birth of a better, fairer society.

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