Tag Archives: states

it’s The Structure, Stupid!

A reader recently sent me a link to an article from Governing with a provocative title suggesting that the current crisis with democracy should be blamed on the states. The article pointed to a variety of problems that this blog and many others have frequently addressed, including the Electoral College, gerrymandering and vote suppression, and the structure of the Senate.

Despite the article’s title, the problems identified in the article can’t fairly be attributed to the states, although some of them (gerrymandering and vote suppression, certainly) are activities conducted by the states. The very real problems the article enumerates–and a couple it doesn’t–are more properly designated as structural. 

One of the problems with a population that is largely civically-ignorant is the widespread belief that we just need to elect the “right” people who support the “right” policies, and longstanding issues will be resolved. Very few Americans recognize the structural roots of our dysfunctions, and consequently, there are few, if any, efforts to address them.

The linked article identifies several of these structural impediments to a genuinely democratic system–defined as a system truly reflecting the will of the voting populace. I’m well aware that there are a number of scholars and pundits who are unenthusiastic, to say the least, about such a system; they remind us that the Founders were leery of “the people” and created impediments to what they characterized as mass prejudices and popular passions. (Indeed, the Bill of Rights is correctly identified as a counter-majoritarian document.) Most Americans today, however, give at least lip service to the notion that a democratic system, in which elected officials act in ways that reflect the expressed will of the majority, is the ideal.

We don’t currently have such a system, and as the linked article reminds us, the constitutional prerogatives of the states in our federalist system are largely to blame.

Consider all the ways states serve to frustrate the will of the people. First, the Electoral College, which votes state by state, has already installed five presidents whom the voters had rejected nationwide. The many additional near misses make frequent future recurrences a statistical certainty.

The U.S. Senate is even more counter-majoritarian. As of 2023, a majority of the U.S. population is clustered in states that together get only 18 of the 100 senators. The minority get the other 82.

We can blame the Founders for the Electoral College, but the clustering of the population is a more recent demographic reality–and even more damaging. That said, even among the Founders there were those who failed to understand why their “states’ rights” colleagues insisted on the equality of states, which were, after all, artificial creations, rather than the equality of the people who lived in them. As the article reminds us, Federalists like James Madison were bitterly opposed to what they saw as a grossly undemocratic Senate. “Ultimately, however, they accepted the proffered compromise (equally populated House districts, plus states as Senate districts), but only as an unavoidable concession to get the required nine state ratifications.”

One result of this empowerment of states rather than people has been a gradual shift of voting power to rural inhabitants at the expense of urban Americans. (One study found that a rural vote counts one and a third compared to a vote cast by a city dweller.)

As the article reminds us, states have used their prerogatives to suppress votes and–in states that allow initiatives–to overrule the results of popular votes. (In Indiana, which lacks a referendum or initiative, no rational observer would suggest that majority members of our legislature even try to reflect the will of the people.)

Making matters worse, in the U.S., changing structural defects is incredibly difficult.  That’s why the effort to eliminate the Electoral College is through an interstate compact rather than a Constitutional amendment. As the article reminds us, the U.S. Constitution has been described as the hardest in the world to amend.

It requires a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress, followed by ratification by three-quarters of the state legislatures (or a constitutional convention process that has never been used).

Winning a two-thirds vote in the already counter-majoritarian Senate is hard enough, but ratification by the states can be harder still. Only recently, states that represented just 22 percent of the U.S. population were able to block the Equal Rights Amendment, against the wishes of states representing the other 78 percent.

If and when we emerge from our current descent into fascism and autocracy, we need to address the structural issues that have facilitated that descent–including a thorough revamping of the Supreme Court.

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WTF?

Sorry for the inelegant headline, but…

We’ve all gotten used to hearing about the continued shenanigans of this corrupt administration: the purge of federal employees who earned Trump’s enmity by actually doing their jobs; the continued rollback of environmental protections; the cushy contracts with friends and supporters; etc.

We’d have had to be blind to have missed the central policy imperative motivating Trump–overturning anything and everything Obama ever did, no matter how sane, helpful or appropriate. That’s why one of the first things he did when he assumed office was dismantle the pandemic preparation task force Obama had established.

We’re also well aware of the incredible ineptitude of this administration. Governors and public health officials are pleading for coherent policies, for protective gear, for straight talk–none of which they are getting.

Okay. So we know he’s corrupt, insanely jealous of the black guy who preceded him, and totally ignorant of how government (and much else) works. But what explains this? 

At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall reports

Let’s talk about these seizures of PPE goods by federal authorities. There are a number of instances of this and as I noted in the post below a number of reasons why it might be happening. There are numerous cases where orders placed by states or hospitals have been canceled after they have been outbid by federal authorities or federal authorities have ordered vendors to sell to the federal government. According to Kaiser Health News, those compelled sales appear to be pursuant to an executive order President Trump signed on March 18th under authorities granted by the Defense Production Act.

But what I’m more interested in are reports of federal authorities confiscating physical shipments en route to states, local governments or regional hospital systems. The most publicized case of this came at some point in March when, according to Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R), a shipment of 3 million masks ordered through BJ’s Wholesale was seized by federal authorities in the Port of New York. Baker did not say which agency confiscated the goods or under what authority. That incident was what led to the widely reported and successful effort to fly goods in from China using the New England Patriots jet.

Another case happened just yesterday when the top county official in Somerset County, New Jersey, Freeholder Director Shanel Robinson, announced that a shipment of 35,000 masks had been confiscated by federal officials. According to this report in the Franklin Reporter and Advocate, “As of early in the afternoon of April 3, Robinson said that the county was told the surgical face masks would be delivered that day, but that the federal government had taken the N-95 masks.

Evidently, there have been a number of other, similar incidents reported, including what Marshall says is a “reliable report of a major non-governmental entity in the western United States having a major shipment seized by federal authorities at an airport in California.”

This is inexplicable–and just nuts. (Hence the “headline” of this post.) Every time Trump holds one of his briefing-cum-political-rallies,  he insists that the states are responsible for getting their own supplies and should only appeal to the federal government in emergencies. Why, then, would federal authorities be seizing shipments that states, local governments and major medical organizations have managed to locate and purchase?

As Marshall says,

In any case, we need to know more. States have been asking the federal government to take over the process of provisioning the country with these critical PPE goods. That at least would avoid states being forced to bid up prices by bidding against each other. After having FEMA swoop in and purchase ventilators that Colorado was in the process of buying, Gov. Jared Polis (D) said: “Either be in or out. [Either let] us know what we’re going to get and when we’re going to get them or stay out and let us buy them.” But these seizures of shipments are at best causing confusion for desperate states and hospitals. And they seem so haphazard that they are raising legitimate questions about whether they are being allocated to states in a preferential or politicized fashion.

If this was part of a legitimate FEMA effort to allocate supplies more equitably, the narcissist-in-chief would undoubtedly have bragged about it. So I repeat: WTF is going on?

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If All Politics is Local

So yesterday, the President-Elect held what may have been the most surreal, embarrassing, childish such event ever held by someone preparing to assume that office. If there was any doubt about the need for resistance–the need to assure that this manifestly unqualified “man” and his collection of appalling cabinet choices do as little harm as possible–that display should have put it to rest.

So remember–local action can throw sand in the Orange One’s gears.

In the wake of the election, several cities have confirmed their intent to provide sanctuary to undocumented immigrants, in defiance of Trump’s threats to withhold billions in federal dollars.

Vox reports that Colorado is currently exploring how to keep an Obamacare marketplace open in a post-Obamacare era, continuing to use the technology the state built as a way to make shopping for insurance easier.

Jerry Brown has made it abundantly clear that California will continue to fight climate change. Aggressively.

Meanwhile, sites such as Resilience are actively encouraging what they call “anti-Fascist” organizing.

Policy innovation is already taking place at the municipal level. The practice of sanctuary cities is just one example. City governments in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Greater Boston, Chicago are increasingly funneling resources into worker-cooperative development, and devolving fiscal capacity to the community through participatory budgeting— both of which have also empowered undocumented immigrants in the policy realm as well as in their day-to-day economic well-being.

These developments are limited, even within the context of the cities themselves, but they can be pushed much further. The way for this to be done is through anti-fascist coalitions. In many of these cities there exists a smattering of progressive and even left-wing forces. This election has provided the sustained impetus for such groups to come together beyond the level of protest and contestation we have been seeing in recent weeks.

Although several of the suggestions in the Resilience article are framed in unnecessarily inflammatory rhetoric and somewhat “out there” (and in my own opinion, highly unrealistic), the emphasis on local action has much to recommend it.

It’s great that several blue states will resist the incoming Administration, but many of us  live in Red states, where it’s easy to get discouraged. If we live in urban areas of those Red States,however, we do have options.  If you look at the vote distribution in the Presidential election, it becomes abundantly clear that city-dwellers decisively rejected Trump and Trumpism .

Those of us who live in urban areas, surrounded by others who reject the racism, misogyny and xenophobia of the incoming Administration, who believe in science and environmental protection and endorse the moral and economic imperative of an adequate social safety net need to map out our counter-insurgency.

We need to decide what measures we can take at the municipal level to counter Washington’s likely retreat from governance. And then we need to work hard to implement those measures.

Bitching on Facebook is no substitute for face-to-face civic engagement.

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