Category: Banana Republicanism

Saturday Soother – October 9, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Truro, MA – August 2021 photo by Tom Baratz

(Wrongo and Ms. Right have temporarily relocated the house of Wrong to Truro, MA for two weeks.)

With all of the talk about debt limits and infrastructure, America hasn’t focused on Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) delaying the nomination of 59 would-be US ambassadors. He’s said he’ll block dozens more. From the NYT:

“Democrats call Mr. Cruz’s actions an abuse of the nomination process and the latest example of Washington’s eroding political norms. They also say he is endangering national security at a time when only about a quarter of key national security positions have been filled.”

Cruz has put sand in the gears of the nominating process by objecting to the Senate’s traditional practice of confirming uncontroversial nominees by “unanimous consent.” His delaying tactic means that each nominee requires hours of Senate floor time while other major priorities, including Biden’s domestic spending agenda, compete for the Senate’s attention.

Cruz has had help from some of his Republican colleagues. Only 12 State Department nominees have been cleared for a full Senate vote by the committee, because Republicans on the committee have assisted in the foot-dragging.

Cruz says that he’s doing this to protest Biden’s stand in favor of Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline project from Russia to Germany.  In May, Biden waived congressionally imposed sanctions on the project. Nord Stream 1 got started in 1997. Nord Stream 2 was finished last month. There has been criticism of both projects since the 1990s because they provide Russia with some leverage over European energy security, while also circumventing Ukraine, which operates a competing pipeline for Russian gas.

But the project helps Germany, and Biden decided to prioritize our relations with Germany.

Cruz isn’t alone. Noted Republican weenie Sen. Josh Hawley, (R- MO), is vowing to block all national security nominees over the Biden administration’s handling of Afghanistan. He wants Secretary of State Blinken, Secretary of Defense Austin, and national security adviser Jake Sullivan to resign.

Cruz also delayed the debt limit deal negotiated between the Dems and the Republicans this week. A deal emerged on Thursday in which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) agreed to support a short-term debt extension, giving Democrats time to pass a full extension in December.

The Parties had planned to let the fix go through with a simple majority vote, but Cruz overturned that arrangement by insisting on a filibuster, meaning that the deal needed to find 60 votes for cloture in the Senate. That caused McConnell to find ten Senate Republicans to vote for it. In the end, 11 Republicans voted for cloture, and then the Dems passed it on a party-line vote.

But EVERYBODY knows that ending the filibuster would be wrong because the filibuster ensures bipartisanship.

There isn’t a clearer example of how the Senate filibuster has become a tool, not to protect the minority, but simply to sow chaos. Today, it is used to stop Biden’s appointments, or to slow down his legislative priorities. Historically, it was used to block civil rights legislation.

Never before has the filibuster been used so cavalierly.

Democrats have discussed filibuster carveouts for the debt ceiling and voting rights. McConnell’s agreement to allow Republican votes for cloture on the debt ceiling was largely a message to Democratic Sens. Manchin and Sinema, showing that the system still works. He’s saying to them that they can count on McConnell and the Republicans when the Democrats can’t muster the votes they need if the vote is in the national interest. So they shouldn’t vote for a filibuster carve-out.

The clever McConnell has made Schumer’s job over the next few months even more difficult.

The weekend is upon us, so it’s time for our Saturday Soother. Tomorrow, we will be enjoying the Wellfleet Art & Oyster Crawl, where you walk between art galleries that offer wine and oysters to the an increasingly tipsy crowd of potential buyers of local art.

For you, take a few minutes to leave the machinations of Cruz, McConnell, and Schumer behind. Grab a seat by a window and listen to Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott play “Over the Rainbow” from 2020’s “Songs of Comfort and Hope“.

The album was inspired by the series of recorded-at-home musical offerings that Ma began sharing in the first days of the COVID-19 lockdown in the US:

While this performance is instrumental, here’s a sample of the lyrics:

When all the clouds darken up the skyway
There’s a rainbow highway to be found
Leading from your windowpane
To a place behind the sun
Just a step beyond the rain

Somewhere, over the rainbow
Way up high
There’s a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby

Facebooklinkedinrss

Amend the Electoral Count Act

The Daily Escape:

Great North Woods, NH – October 2021 photo by Michael Blanchette

Regarding Facebook’s outage: How did anti-vaxxers do their research without Facebook?

On to what’s wrong today: The Jan. 6 coup attempt didn’t succeed, but it came close. And those involved in the plot have learned from their mistakes. This means the country faces a growing risk of electoral subversion by Republicans and by Trump and his supporters.

We’re still learning the details behind Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, including his pressure on state officials, the Eastman memo, and the Oval Office meetings with Mike Pence, attempting to convince him to throw out certified vote totals from certain states during the Jan. 6 Electoral College vote tally. This attack to subvert the will of the American voters didn’t involve the Capitol rioters. It was held in the White House and led by Trump.

But the attempted coup isn’t over. There’s an organized effort by Republicans in many states to fill key, lower profile election jobs with people who will only certify elections that Republicans win. They’re proponents of Trump’s Big Lie and they’re trying to upend our democratic election process.

On Saturday, the NYT had an editorial about a reform that may be both the most urgently needed, and the easiest (relatively) to pass into law, reforming the Electoral Count Act (ECA):

“The Electoral Count Act, which passed more than 130 years ago, was Congress’s response to another dramatic presidential dispute — the election of 1876, in which the Republican Rutherford Hayes won the White House despite losing the popular vote to his Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden.”

The NYT says that the Electoral Count Act contains numerous ambiguities and poorly drafted provisions:

“For instance, it permits a state legislature to appoint electors on its own, regardless of how the state’s own citizens voted, if the state “failed to make a choice” on Election Day. What does that mean? The law doesn’t say. It also allows any objection to a state’s electoral votes to be filed as long as one senator and one member of the House put their names to it, triggering hours of debate — which is how senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley were able to gum up the works on Jan. 6.”

A few legal scholars have argued that parts of the ECA are unconstitutional, which was the basis of Eastman’s claim that Mike Pence could simply disregard the law and reject electors of certain key battleground states. But the NYT says:

“Nothing in the Constitution or federal law gives the vice president this authority. The job of the vice president is to open the envelopes and read out the results, nothing more. Any reform to the Electoral Count Act should start there, by making it explicit that the vice president’s role on Jan. 6 is purely ministerial and doesn’t include the power to rule on disputes over electors.”

Democrats could bring forward an amendment to the ECA. And it’s unlikely that Republicans would filibuster the vote on the amendment, so Democrats could pass it with a simple majority vote. Their amendment should clarify that the vice-president’s role is purely ceremonial. Further, the threshold for objections to state electoral vote counts could be made higher than just one Senator and one House member from the state in question.

Instead of focusing on the ECA, Senate Democrats hope to pass a version of the Freedom to Vote Act. The act would set nationwide voting standards to help counteract anti-democratic laws passed by legislatures in at least 17 states driven by partisan, conspiracy-minded election officials who could sabotage legitimate election results. The Freedom to Vote Act has four principal pillars:

  1. It sets national standards to protect and expand the right to vote.
  2. It would protect the integrity of elections and make it harder for partisan officials to subvert valid election results.
  3. It would prohibit partisan gerrymandering and empower courts to invalidate overly partisan maps, a needed change since many states have already begun their 10-year redistricting process.
  4. It would reduce the power of big money in elections by shining a bright light on so-called dark money campaign spending.

But there’s little chance of this bill’s passage through the Senate. From Sen. Angus King (I-ME):

“I don’t think the Republicans here are interested in short-circuiting what their brothers and sisters are doing in statehouses across the country,”

Maybe Republicans would also reject ECA reform if the Senate tried to change it. We’re in a world where what the majority wants is no longer what will happen politically.

And the window for fixing this is closing before our eyes.

Facebooklinkedinrss

The Continuing, Slow-Rolling Coup

The Daily Escape:

Stormwatchers II by Jamie Perry

There is a storm brewing. You can see it’s coming. It’s the danger our democracy faces from the Americans who would overturn our elections. After the Arizona recount found statistically zero difference with the officially certified 2020 vote, you would think that we could move past the Big Lie, and settle into no drama, mid-term elections in 2022, but that won’t be happening.

Several Republican-led states are conducting or threatening to conduct recounts in Democrat-leaning counties. They are still pushing both to undermine the 2020 presidential election results and change the way our future elections are run.

That effort to undermine elections has been fully embraced by the GOP and is gathering momentum at the state and county levels. Robert Kagan wrote in the WaPo on the dangers we face heading into the next few election cycles:

“Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.”

Read his whole article.

So, the failed Arizona recount hasn’t even been a speed bump for Republicans. MSNBC reported that Virginia Republican congressional candidate Jarome Bell went even further, tweeting:

“Audit all 50 states. Arrest all involved. Try all involved. Convict all involved. Execute all involved. #MaricopaCountyFraud.”

Really? Sounds harsh, but hey, that’s today’s Republican Party. Their only move is to threaten everyone with violence until we all shut up. Wrongo reminds us:

“…Reuters interviewed nine of the 15 declared Republican candidates for secretary of state in five battleground states  ̶  Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada….Only two of the nine candidates said that Biden won the election.”

Trump-lovers love conspiracies. They don’t trust the government. They don’t trust our election process. They don’t trust vaccine science. They believe Democrats are teaming up with Antifa to destroy all that Republicans hold dear. Their conspiracies always involve people who intend to harm them. That’s one big reason why they are continually arming themselves.

Kagan started his article with this sobering viewpoint:

“The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.”

The Big Lie is morphing into an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Kagan says the stage is set for chaos: Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to seize power.

Imagine if they’re armed.

The Eastman Memo, written by a conservative law professor, advised the Trump campaign in 2020 that Mike Pence could unilaterally overturn the election. Plan in hand, Trump urged Pence to reject the votes of the Electoral College, with the mob outside as the stick to compel Pence’s obedience. Pence tried to find a way to do Trump’s bidding, but in the end, he blinked.

Still, on Jan. 6, Trump had both a plan and a large violent crowd. That was a coup attempt, and he came very close to pulling it off. All that prevented it was a handful of state officials who showed courage and integrity, and the reluctance of a vice president to obey orders he believed were wrong.

It has always been theoretically possible to manipulate the voting rules to seize power. 2020 taught us that it’s now a real option, that with the right pieces in place, a coup can succeed. Trump is the first sitting president in American history to attempt to overturn a certified presidential election. Now, his Party has adopted his lies and are attempting to install on state and local levels, lackeys who support rigging election results.

The coup didn’t die, it rolls on, and the people who plotted it are still welcome inside “Beltway” society. Aside from the 600+ insurrectionists who broke into the Capitol, no one involved in planning and carrying out the coup has faced any legal consequences. They are still collecting their government pensions, their speaking fees, and their corporate consultancies. Some still appear on the Sunday pundit shows.

They launched what is tantamount to a civil war on our democracy, and that’s why Democrats should be focused on passing the Manchin-approved version of the voting rights bill as soon as possible. And by any means necessary.

After losing the White House and the Senate, Republicans are willing to rig voting in their favor. Protecting the integrity of America’s electoral system and the voting rights of its citizens should be priority #1, not because it helps Democrats, but because it will preserve our democracy.

Facebooklinkedinrss

It’s a Big Week for Democrats

The Daily Escape:

Early fall foliage, Long Pond, Rutland, MA – September 2021 photo by Jurgen Roth Photography

Charlie Sykes, talking about what will be a jam-packed week in Washington DC:

“This is going to be a helluva week. Democrats in Congress may not be able to save the Biden presidency, but they can destroy it…”

There are clear differences among Democrats on social spending priorities and the correct size of the pending human infrastructure spending bill. Several Democratic House members have vowed not to support both of Biden’s bills, unless they get what they want included. Along with threats by Sens. Sinema and Manchin not to stand with Democrats in the Senate, both House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Schumer can’t be happy trying to lead their fractious caucuses.

And among these efforts to thread the needle, are the twin crises of a Thursday cut-off of federal spending and a subsequent (possible) default on the nation’s debt.

Funding for the federal government is set to run out on Thursday at midnight. Senate Democrats will move a stopgap spending measure forward to position for a vote on the House-passed short-term funding bill. That would keep federal agencies open until Dec. 3, while suspending the debt limit until Dec. 2022.

Suspending the debt limit for another year is a great idea, but Senate Republicans are certain to tank that proposal. The likely scenario is that Senate Dems will remove the debt-limit provision and pass the bill with bipartisan support. Then, the House passes the bill, Biden signs it, and a government shutdown is averted for another two months.

But that leaves the debt-limit problem unresolved. We will reach that in early-mid October.

Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans won’t support an increase in the debt limit. They say that Democrats should lift the cap on government borrowing on their own, as a part of their reconciliation package. But that creates a political advantage for the Republicans. And besides, it could take weeks, enough time to bring the country close to defaulting on its obligations. And it isn’t certain that Schumer has the votes to pass it without Republican help.

Only one thing’s certain: No one knows what’s really going to happen.

On infrastructure, Pelosi announced that debate on the Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill would start on Monday. A House vote on it is slated for Thursday. House Democrats are also trying to make progress on the big reconciliation package.

Pelosi’s challenge is to keep progressives from walking away from the big bill and tanking the infrastructure bill. Democratic leadership also must appease Senate centrists about the size of the big infrastructure bill, which they say is too large.

House Democrats will meet late on Monday, (shortly after Wrongo posts this). Pelosi wants the members who’ve drawn lines in the sand about the human infrastructure bill (and who haven’t shown up for caucus meetings lately) to be there. From Politico:

“I urge the fullest participation of Members and hope that as many of us can be there in person as possible…”

These are strange days for Democrats. As a Sunday WaPo article said, “Political Suicide is not a Strategy”. In addition to the obsessive focus on securing the necessary votes in the House and Senate, the focus on the human infrastructure’s price tag is the essence of bad political messaging. Few Democrats stand up to say that the $3.5 trillion will be spent over 10 years, amounting to only 1.2% of GDP over that period.

Worse, focusing on the dollar amount takes attention away from the value in the bill for children, families, education, health care, housing, and climate. From Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT):

“When Democrats allow a debate to be only about a number, it’s like talking about a Christmas party and only discussing the hangover.”

The WaPo quotes Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) as saying that the discussion is getting things exactly backward:

 “We should work from what policies we want to enact, rather than an arbitrary number.”

No one can forecast how this will all work out. It would be dandy if Republicans supported the debt ceiling increase.

It would also be dandy if they accepted the results of the 2020 election, got vaccinated and stopped passing voter suppression laws. A rational and patriotic Party would do those things. But those are a bridge too far for today’s Republican Party.

So, Democrats are on their own. We’ll soon see if they can stand together as a team to avoid disaster and deliver on Biden’s promises.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Saturday Soother – September 25, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Turkey Pond – 1944 tempera painting on panel by Andrew Wyeth

(Sunday Cartoons will not appear this week, because Wrongo and Ms. Right are seeing a Broadway show on Saturday. It is our first visit to NYC in 18 months.)

From AZCentral:

“A months-long hand recount of Maricopa County’s 2020 vote confirmed that President Joe Biden won, and the election was not “stolen” from former President Donald Trump, according to early versions of a report prepared for the Arizona Senate.”

This is the end of the saga of a partisan audit of Maricopa County by the Cyber Ninjas, the Arizona Senate’s hand-picked outside auditor. Their ‘audit’ showed that Trump lost by a wider margin than the county’s official election results. According to their hand count, there were 99 additional votes for Biden, and 261 fewer votes for Trump.

The Republican majority in the State Senate had ordered the audit, which was financed by $5.7 million in donations from far-right groups. Even though the audit was run by Trump partisans who had unrestricted access to both ballots and election equipment, they failed to make even a basic case that the November vote was badly flawed, much less rigged.

You can read the three-volume report, but the headline is that Biden got more votes than originally reported.

Every challenge to the 2020 election results has shown that the election was reasonably well run and not stolen. It is a remarkable achievement that so many state and local entities managed to run a good election under such difficult and challenging circumstances as America faced in 2020. It’s doubtful that this result will stop the Big Lie from persisting in the fever dreams of Republicans.

You can make a case that the audit wasn’t about 2020 at all, but about 2024. And the intent wasn’t to prove election fraud. The goal was to further undermine the public’s faith in our electoral process. So, mission accomplished.

Finally, consider this: Reuters interviewed nine of the 15 declared Republican candidates for secretary of state in five battleground states  ̶  Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada. Ten of the 15 have either declared that the 2020 election was stolen or called for their state’s results to be invalidated or further investigated. Only two of the nine candidates Reuters interviewed said that Biden won the election.

Wrongo will write more about the continuing slow-rolling attempted coup by Republicans next week.

The weekend is upon us. Here on the fields of Wrong, a heavy rainstorm took down a few limbs and many leaves. A gopher is attempting to create a winter nest along the bluestone walkway that leads to the Mansion of Wrong. So Wrongo will be girding for battle with said interloper before heading off to Broadway. Wrongo guarantees this will not become another US forever war.

It’s the time of the week to unplug from the cacophony of global news and domestic politics, and to find a few moments of relaxation to help carry you through another hellish week to come. It’s time for our Saturday Soother.

Today, in honor of the official arrival of fall, grab a chair by a window, and take a few minutes to listen to George Winston play “Woods” from his 1980 album, “Autumn”. It’s an emotional backdrop to the change of season:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Saturday Soother – September 18, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Great Sand Dune NP – photo by Rick Randall

A disturbing story from Kaiser Health News (KHN):

“Republican legislators in more than half of US states, spurred on by voters angry about lockdowns and mask mandates, are taking away the powers state and local officials use to protect the public against infectious diseases.”

KHN found that at least 26 states pushed through laws that permanently weaken government authority to protect public health. The actions varied but included these:

  • In 16 states, legislators have limited the power of public health officials to order mask mandates, quarantines, or isolation. In some cases, they gave themselves or local elected politicians the authority to prevent the spread of infectious disease.
  • At least 17 states passed laws banning Covid vaccine mandates or made it easier to get around vaccine requirements.
  • At least 9 states have new laws banning or limiting mask mandates. Executive orders or a court ruling limit mask requirements in five more.

Here’s a map showing where these assaults on public health are happening:

Draft legislation created by the American Legislative Exchange Council, restricting the emergency powers of governors and other officials, has inspired dozens of state-level bills, according to KHN. In some states, governors can no longer institute mask mandates or close businesses, and their executive orders can be overturned by legislators.

This toxic stew has led at least 303 public health leaders to retire, resign or be fired since the pandemic began. That means 1 in 5 Americans have lost a local health leader during the pandemic, when many hospitals are full, and people are still dying in large numbers.

This is America in 2021: It’s vitally important to the freedom of True Americans™ that the government be prevented from doing anything to help or protect them, except for cutting taxes.

We live in a dysfunctional democracy, and that seems to be the way we like it. No evil deity could have done better at setting us up to fail.

There are two big ideas that are colliding in the weakening of state-level public health and the subsequent loss of public health officials. One is the doctrine of federalism, our system of government in which the same territory is controlled by two levels of government. The US Constitution has established a system of “dual sovereignty,” under which the States have surrendered some of their powers to the federal government, but also retained sovereignty in others.

These 26 states are using federalism, asserting their power over federal regulations and processes that are designed to keep people safe. It’s unclear what the federal government can do to reverse these actions.

The second big idea is: what are the foundational goals of government? The safety, health and longevity of our people should be the primary metrics for good governance. The decline in the quality of our governance shows clearly in the American people’s decline in both health and longevity.

Public health as a function has been in decline for decades. This attack on public health is the latest step in the systematic effort to discredit the profession, to box it in. Few in public health have direct power; most are working on social/environmental research, information sharing, and creating best practices in regulation of product and worker safety.

Our dysfunctional democracy got that way by catering to corporations and wealthy donors. Politicians are disinvested in the American people; they have disinvested from creating what should be a fair sharing of social gains.

This makes them anti-public health. To the extent they have any interest, it’s in public health’s policing powers, like the bounty hunter policy that’s been enacted in Texas.

But, today’s Saturday, and it’s a legal requirement for this column to help readers find a few moments to leave the clash of cultures behind and relax for at least a few minutes. Leaves are starting to fall on the fields of Wrong, and next week marks the end of summer. We’ve placed a few mums around the yard, and Wrongo got around to calling the shop that’s fixing his snowblower for an update.

To help you relax, grab a seat near a window and listen to Karl Davydov’s Opus 20, No. 2 “At the Fountain”. Davydov was a Russian cellist described by Tchaikovsky as the “czar of cellists”. Here, “At the Fountain” is played by cellist Jérémy Garbarg, accompanied by Samuel Parent, on piano.  Recorded at the Vuitton Foundation in December 2018:

In 1870, Count Wilhorsky, a Russian patron of the arts, presented Davydov with a 1712 Stradivarius cello. This cello is now known as the Davydov Stradivarius. It was owned by the great cellist Jacqueline du Pré until her death and is currently on loan to cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 12, 2021

When Wrongo was a kid living in CT, he got a 3-speed English bike, a Humber. One day while riding on the road in front of our house, a truck forced me onto the road’s sandy shoulder. The sand immediately grabbed the bike’s front wheel, stopping it dead in its tracks. Wrongo went headfirst over the handlebars and got up with a displaced fracture of his left wrist.

While Wrongo saw the accident coming, he couldn’t do anything to avoid the sand.

On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, is America being pushed onto the sandy shoulder of our road? We can still avoid a crash, but we’re facing quite a few threats that might push us off the road and into the gutter:

  • Losing our social cohesion
  • Continuing income inequality
  • Continuing racism
  • Increasing threats to the right to vote

Twenty years on, America is more at war with itself than with foreign terrorists. Our society and our democracy are threatened from within in a way that Osama bin Laden could never have managed.

Think about the Delta variant. One Party thinks that people should be free to acquire and transmit to others a deadly and extremely communicable virus. They also think it’s morally wrong for the government to engage in even the mildest coercion to push people to get vaccinated, because that coercion interferes with an individual’s liberty.

They think personal liberty is the highest social value in all circumstances except abortion. On to cartoons.

Our continuing learning disability:

9/11 aftermath:

Texas has only one star in its flag. That’s also its Yelp review:

New rodeo event in Texas:

America’s right wing is constantly sore about everything:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Lobbyists Are Hiring Democrats to Kill Tax Reform

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Acadia NP, ME – 2021 photo by Rick Berk Fine Art Photography

From the NYT:

“The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans are the nation’s most egregious tax evaders, failing to pay as much as $163 billion in owed taxes per year, according to a Treasury Department report released on Wednesday. The analysis comes as the Biden administration pushes lawmakers to embrace its ambitious proposal to beef up the Internal Revenue Service to narrow the “tax gap,” which it estimates amounts to $7 trillion in unpaid taxes over a decade.”

The Treasury Department estimates that its tax gap proposals could raise $700 billion over a decade.

This is crucial, since Democrats are counting on collecting unpaid taxes to help pay for the $3.5 trillion spending package they are drafting. The House is set this month to begin advancing the spending package, but liberal and moderate factions of DC Democrats are divided over how much to spend and how to offset the cost.

Republicans are unified in opposition to the legislation, and the US Chamber of Commerce has vowed to defeat it. Among the other players are the Business Roundtable and Americans for Tax Reform. And fronting for them is a former Democratic Senator, Heidi Heitkamp. They have unleashed a lobbying operation targeting a small number of moderate Democrats in Congress who hold the balance of power.

Democrats hold a fragile majority in both Houses of Congress. Any hope to enact an ambitious domestic reform program requires that all Dems be on board. Moreover, increasing taxes on corporations and the very rich will be heavy lifts, given the opposition.

From NY Magazine’s Jonathan Chait: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Last week, Democratic senator turned anti-tax lobbyist Heidi Heitkamp, who represented North Dakota for one term before losing in 2018, appeared on CNBC to make a surprisingly emotional appeal against President Biden’s plan to close a notorious loophole for the wealthy. The loophole, called “stepped-up basis”…[that] allows capital gains to escape any tax at all as long as the owners pass the asset on to their heirs before they sell it.”

It turns out that Heitkamp is one of several Democrats lobbying against the Biden tax plan. Chait cites former Democratic Congressman Nick Rahall, who published an op-ed in his hometown West Virginia newspaper advising Democrats that they:

“…can avoid alienating rural states by keeping family-owned businesses and farms in mind.”

Former Democratic Senator Max Baucus (MT) has also stepped forward to write an op-ed advising Democrats that their political fortunes hinge on maintaining low tax rates for wealthy heirs.

The NYT reported that Heitkamp was recruited to the anti-Biden side by superlobbyist John Breaux, a former Louisiana Democratic Senator and Congressman, who once confessed:

“My vote can’t be bought, but it can be rented.”

Washed up politicians all move on to their second act: Monetizing their influence.

Heitkamp told the NYT that she’s finding a receptive audience among potential swing voters in rural areas, especially owners of family farms, even though Democrats say those voters would never be affected by the proposed tax changes:

“This is very consistent with my concern about revitalizing the Democratic Party in rural America….You may want to do this…but understand there will be risk….”

Is her point that if Democrats don’t preserve the loophole that allows fabulous amounts of wealth to escape taxation when passed down to wealthy heirs, they might alienate hardscrabble rural voters?

Will Dems risk losing more of those voters if they put a crimp in the elites’ efforts to maintain entrenched and inherited privileges across generations? Whatever happened to the narrative that rural Real Americans™ voted for Trump to protest America’s rigged economy?

Rural people, like everybody else, want elected officials who will have their backs and fight for them.

We’ve had this kind of manipulation for the last 50 years. It’s how we got a society where some can buy $3 million weekend “cottages”, while so many other Americans line up at food banks or can’t get basic health care.

It’s true that enacting a big tax hike comes with risks: Corporations and the wealthy will fund a lot of Republican TV ads attacking Dems over it.

The risk is worth it. Otherwise, for every dollar in tax hikes Democrats concede to Republicans and the US Chamber of Commerce, they will have to give up a dollar in spending on programs like Medicare, Medicaid, or the child tax credit.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Census Data Shows Big Changes Coming

The Daily Escape:

Big Balanced Rock, Chiricahua National Monument, AZ – photo by Arnaud Barré

From the WaPo:

“For the first time in the history of the country’s census-taking, the number of White people in the United States is widely expected to show a decline when the first racial breakdowns from the 2020 Census are reported this week.”

The headline news includes these facts: For the first time, the portion of White people could dip below 60%, and the under-18 population is likely to be majority non-White. In 26 states, the number of Whites has declined. Up to six states and DC could have majorities of people of color.

In case anyone was wondering what was motivating all the Republican voting restrictions, this is it.

The actual data will be released later today. So there’s at least some chance that the WaPo and Wrongo are well, wrong about the census results. That’s unlikely, since the numbers have been moving in this direction for years. More from the WaPo:

“Estimates from 2016 to 2020 show that all of the country’s population growth during that period came from increases in people of color. The largest and most steady gains were among Hispanics, who have doubled their population share over the past three decades to almost 20% and who are believed to account for half of the nation’s growth since 2010. They are expected to drive about half the growth in more than a dozen states, including Texas, Florida, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada.”

The WaPo quotes William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The trend is projected to continue, with Whites falling below 50% nationally around 2045…[and] at that point, there will be no racial majority in the country. Between 2015 and 2060, the Hispanic and Asian populations are expected to approximately double in size, and the multiracial population could triple due to both immigration and births.”

America is heading into uncharted territory. Our older generations will be much Whiter than younger ones. Racial minorities will drive the growth in the US labor force as White Boomers retire. Frey calls what’s about to happen a “cultural generation gap”.

This could mean that both groups may compete for resources. For example, public spending on services for seniors versus spending on schools or job training.

The new data are also expected to reflect continuing ethnic diversification of the suburbs. Now, more minorities live in suburbs than live in cities. Frey says that the vast majority of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties and its more than 350 metropolitan areas became less White in the past decade.

All of this has tremendous implications for social cohesion. Cities and states that want to sustain economic growth will need strategies to attract minorities. That’s already happened in places such as Kansas, the Philadelphia metro area, Miami-Dade County, and Prince George’s County, MD.

How predominantly White boards of directors manage predominantly diverse management teams and workers could be a big challenge.

The data release comes amid concerns over its accuracy. The 2020 count had huge problems, including the Trump administration’s attempts to add a citizenship question and block undocumented immigrants from being counted. On top of that, the pandemic caused major delays for the survey.

This release also provides the first look at whether last year’s count missed significant numbers of minorities. Arizona, along with Texas and Florida, each fell short of expectations with smaller gains in Congressional seats than projected.

The big event is that release of the Census data kicks off this decade’s Congressional seat redistricting. The clock is now ticking for states to draw new Congressional maps. The fact that the data are already late creates a scramble among most states to finish their maps before primaries begin next year.

In addition to questions about data accuracy, get ready for a new round of “white replacement” tirades from the Right. Expect to see a revival of the debate over whether the undocumented should be counted in the Census. Expect a fresh wave of Right-Wing anger directed against America’s minority populations.

Our ugly politics will probably get uglier, at least for a while.

It’s ironic that Republicans are both completely resistant to more support for families, although they complain loudly about the declining share of the White population.

It isn’t only people of color who need better policies – like more parental leave; control of healthcare costs; housing affordability; and better and cheaper childcare. It’s also those Millennials and GenZ’ers who are of child-bearing age who can’t afford kids.

Protecting voting for all Americans is the most important priority for Congress. Particularly now, as it seems clear that Republicans are trying to bail on democracy.

Why? Because it’s hard to promote White supremacy to non-white people.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Monday Wake Up Call – August 9, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Zen Garden, Fields of Wrong, CT – 2015 photo by Wrongo

Some of Wrongo’s readers also follow Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College history professor who writes an extremely successful blog called “Letters from an American“. She has the gift of seamlessly moving from speaking about America’s history to today’s politics. Last week, she had a column that Wrongo thinks everyone should read.

In it, she gives us a quick review of what led up to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Here is a long quote:

“Fifty-six years ago today, on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The need for the law was explained in its full title: “An Act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution, and for other purposes.”

In the wake of the Civil War, Americans tried to create a new nation in which the law treated Black men and white men as equals. In 1865, they ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing enslavement except as punishment for crimes. In 1868, they adjusted the Constitution again, guaranteeing that anyone born or naturalized in the United States—except certain Indigenous Americans—was a citizen, opening up the suffrage to Black men. In 1870, after Georgia legislators expelled their newly seated Black colleagues, Americans defended the right of Black men to vote by adding that right to the Constitution.

All three of those amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—gave Congress the power to enforce them. In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to do just that. Reactionary white southerners had been using state laws, and the unwillingness of state judges and juries to protect Black Americans from white gangs and cheating employers, to keep Black people subservient. White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Black men and to keep them and their white allies from voting to change that system. In 1870, the federal government stepped in to protect Black rights and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan.

With federal power now behind the Constitutional protection of equality, threatening jail for those who violated the law, white opponents of Black voting changed their argument against it.

In 1871, they began to say that they had no problem with Black men voting on racial grounds; their objection to Black voting was that Black men, just out of enslavement, were poor and uneducated. They were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services like roads and schools, and which could only be paid for with tax levies.

The idea that Black voters were socialists—they actually used that term in 1871—meant that white northerners who had fought to replace the hierarchical society of the Old South with a society based on equality began to change their tune. They looked the other way as white men kept Black men from voting, first with terrorism and then with state election laws using grandfather clauses, which cut out Black men without mentioning race by permitting a man to vote if his grandfather had; literacy tests in which white registrars got to decide who passed; poll taxes; and so on. States also cut up districts unevenly to favor the Democrats, who ran an all-white, segregationist party. By 1880 the south was solidly Democratic, and it would remain so until 1964.”

Cox Richardson talks about how a debate raged over whether states or the federal government should control who is allowed to vote in elections. That eventually led to LBJ signing the Act.

She then brings us back to the John Roberts Supreme Court gutting most of the provisions of the Act. First, with the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, and in July, with their decision in Brnovich v. DNC. In the wake of the 2020 election, Republican-dominated states have increased the rate of voter suppression, and the Brnovich decision helps codify their moves. Read the whole thing.

So once again, America faces an existential crisis over voting rights and whether it is the states, or the federal government, that should decide who can vote in our elections. As Wrongo has reported, a recent Pew poll shows that more than two-thirds of Republican voters don’t think voting is a right and believe it can be limited.

There’s still some hope that a voting rights bill can pass before the 2022 mid-terms. That could restore the power of the federal government over the states to enforce them.

Time to wake up America! Without federal oversight of voting, America will slip back into voter suppression. We can easily return to an earlier time that denied voting rights to many Americans.

To help you wake up, listen to Son Volt’s song “Living in the USA” from their new album, “Electro Melodier”. Front man Jay Farrar wonders if we’ve misplaced our collective soul, and how we glue the pieces of a broken country back together:

Sample Lyric:

This land of freedom, all can live the dream they say
With voices crying out and sirens wailing away
Money flows through every back channel door
Cash crowns the king, there’s no limits anymore
Livin’ in the USA

Facebooklinkedinrss