Voting Rights – Page 11 – The Wrongologist

The Disconcerting Truth About the Big Lie, Part II

The Daily Escape:

Bodie Island Lighthouse, Outer Banks, NC – 2021 photo by Greg Kiser

We’ve talked about the Big Lie but in truth, there’s more than one. The Reuters-Ipsos poll released last Friday found that 54% of Republican adults surveyed agreed with this statement:

“…the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was led by violent left-wing protestors trying to make Trump look bad.”

Only 30% of GOP respondents said they disagreed. Another 16% said they were unsure.

This is another Big Lie, like the one that Democrats stole the election from Trump. But Republicans remain believers in both. They think, as George Costanza said, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”

To help distance Trump and Congressional Republicans from the riot, GOP members of Congress began blaming the Capitol insurrection on Antifa, decentralized leftist activists with no national organization, who became a focus of Republicans during the 2020 riots surrounding George Floyd’s killing.

The reason why Republicans do not want an independent commission to investigate Jan. 6 is because many of the individuals who have already been arrested for their role in the riot explicitly said they believed that Trump had invited them to Washington to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Let’s set the record straight. Since the Capitol riot, 494 people have been arrested and charged with crimes. The vast majority of those arrested have ties to the Republican Party, not to Antifa or to Democrats. Why would anyone think that Democrats would attack the Capitol, trying to prevent their own candidate from being certified as president?

Congressional Republicans would have you believe that someone else decided to try overthrowing the government to make Trump look bad while Trump happened to be down the street telling his people to well, overthrow the government. Not credible.

This is the largest attack on our country since 9/11. And it came from within, not from foreign terrorists. Potentially, it was also more damaging. From Matt Sheffield at Flux:

“Following the 9/11 attacks, the main question on all Americans’ minds was who was responsible. Once it was determined to be al-Qaeda, the second question that demanded an answer was how U.S. intelligence agencies had failed to anticipate such a large-scale violent act. Shortly thereafter, both houses of Congress overwhelmingly approved the establishment of an official commission to investigate. In the House of Representatives, the bill containing the authorization passed overwhelmingly, 366 to 3.”

Contrast that with today when few, if any, Republicans will vote to investigate the riot.

Once again, as we said yesterday, if a majority of Republican voters continue to believe the Big Lie(s), it raises serious questions about the future of American democracy, including whether it’s possible to have a shared politics when a large percentage of citizens believe things are true that are easily proven to be untrue.

Democrats most likely will lose the Jan. 6 commission vote since there may not be 10 Republican Senators who’ll vote to bring the House-passed bill to a vote in the Senate. At this point, the Dems are more likely to have a big political hammer to hit Republicans with, than a commission to determine what really happened on that day.

In a last-ditch effort, the two Democrats who oppose changing the Senate’s filibuster rules begged Republicans on Tuesday to support the bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 riot. In a joint statement, Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) called the creation of a commission “critical” to prevent such an attack from occurring again:

“We implore our Senate Republican colleagues to work with us to find a path forward on a commission to examine the events of January 6th,”

If Manchin and Sinema are prepared to nuke the filibuster over this, Wrongo’s all for it. The commission and the voting rights bills hit directly at the GOP’s plans to weaken the electoral process and destroy our democracy. The Big Lie is the organizing principle of the Republican Party now. If this initiative by Manchin and Sinema fails, then perhaps the most effective way to save democracy is to continually tell the people the truth about January 6. Repeatedly using the subpoena power of the US House to investigate and provide the truth in the face of these Big Lies may be the only way forward.

And it may seem to be a fruitless task, but it’s worth the effort.

The Republican leadership must be made to confront their obvious lies. Because as George Orwell said:

“The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

And we can’t allow that to happen.

Monday Wake Up Call – May 3, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Sunset and wild Iris, over a flooded Tomici Creek, Gunnison CO – Spring 2019 photo by Matt Burt

The GOP is preparing an army of “poll watchers” to discredit elections, and GOP state legislatures are delivering in nearly 20 states.

“Bills in several states would grant new authority to poll watchers…to observe voters and election workers. Critics say it could lead to conflict and chaos at polling places and an improper targeting of voters of color.”

A new analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice found that as of April 15, lawmakers in 20 states had introduced at least 40 bills to expand poll watchers’ powers.

The Texas GOP is bringing back having trained partisans intimidate minority voters whom they consider possibly illegitimate:

“The red dot of a laser pointer circled downtown Houston on a map during a virtual training of poll watchers by the Harris County Republican Party. It highlighted densely populated, largely Black, Latino and Asian neighborhoods.

‘This is where the fraud is occurring’, a county Republican official said in a leaked video of the training, which was held in March. A precinct chair in the northeastern, largely white suburbs of Houston, he said he was trying to recruit people from his area “to have the confidence and courage” to act as poll watchers in the circled areas in upcoming elections.

A question at the bottom corner of the slide indicated just how many poll watchers the party wanted to mobilize: “Can we build a 10K Election Integrity Brigade?”

Republicans in battleground states are trying to make voting harder and more confusing. They’re making a concerted legislative push to grant more autonomy and access to partisan poll watchers, that is, citizens trained by a campaign or a party and authorized by local election officials to observe the electoral process.

Many questions: Who will train the poll watchers? Who will certify them? And importantly, who watches the poll watchers? Before this effort to make poll watching partisan, poll workers were trained by the county and certified by the county to perform the job. Without a standardized and transparent process, poll watchers are simply harassers violating voters’ privacy.

In Florida, an election bill passed last Thursday by Republicans in the state legislature specifies that partisan observers must be able see the ballots as canvassing boards work to authenticate voters’ signatures on absentee ballots. There are no limits on how many ballots poll watchers can challenge. Florida Gov. DeSantis has indicated he will sign the law.

There’s a long history of poll watchers being used to intimidate voters and harass election workers, often targeting communities of color. During the 2020 election, Trump’s campaign repeatedly exhorted its “army” of poll watchers to venture into Black and Latino cities and hunt for voter fraud.

There’s no evidence that justifies giving poll watchers expanded access and/or autonomy in their jobs. We should fight a system where a random citizen can watch you vote, and then complain. That should be expressly prohibited.

The Republicans have grounded their reasoning in the argument that their voters want more secure elections. That desire is driven by Trump’s repeated lies about last year’s presidential election, which included GOP complaints about insufficient poll watcher access.

Should we be worried that these a-holes will actually scare people away from the polls? Yes, some will be frightened away. A bunch of MAGA Hat yahoos will flood voting places and try to harass and terrorize racial minorities, students, and the elderly, anyone who they believe might be voting the wrong way.

And if the GOP has their way, it will be legal to do so.

Time to wake up America! The GOP plans to turn every state that they control into little banana republics. The solution is to keep them from controlling any battleground states.

To help you wake up, listen to Larkin Poe, a Nashville-based sister group, do a cover of “Layla”, from their album of cover songs, “Kindred Spirits“. You’ll love the slide guitar:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – April 4, 2021

The NYT has a great explainer about the new Georgia voting law. The Times summarizes:

“Go page by page through Georgia’s new voting law, and one takeaway stands above all others: The Republican legislature and governor have made a breathtaking assertion of partisan power in elections, making absentee voting harder and creating restrictions and complications in the wake of narrow losses to Democrats.”

Below are a few of the changes, with links to the appropriate section of the article.

On to cartoons. Baseball reacted by moving its All-Star game from Atlanta:

Georgia-headquarted Delta Airlines also wasn’t happy. They plan to help:

And it isn’t only Georgia:

The trial continues in Minneapolis:

Asian prejudice is about the people, not their products:

Saturday Soother – April 3, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Spring snow in Grand Canyon NP – March 2021 photo by indieaz

Here’s some good news amidst all of the negative DC political punditry. US manufacturing activity hit its highest level in 37 years last month. Manufacturing’s biggest problem right now is the same one that Wrongo’s new treadmill company had: making products fast enough to satisfy all of their current demand.

A little more detail: The overall ISM manufacturing index rose from 60.8 to 64.7, the highest reading since 1984. The new orders sub-index, an important leading indicator, also rose from 64.8 to 68.0, the highest reading since 2004.

The Economist says that CEO worries about weak demand for products has been replaced by fear of supply bottlenecks, from worldwide chip shortages to the freak traffic jam in the Suez Canal. They quote Chad Moutray, chief economist of the National Association of Manufacturers:

“…90% of members surveyed recently by the trade association were bullish about their businesses’ outlook for the next 12 months, the highest in two years. Two-thirds foresee revenues returning to pre-pandemic levels by the end of the year, as new orders, production and employment all pick up.”

The optimism is being backed by investment. Intel announced that it would spend $20 billion on two factories in Arizona. More from The Economist:

“Scott Davis of Melius, a research firm, reckons that capital expenditure at several dozen leading American industrial companies he follows, including icons such as Caterpillar and Stanley Black & Decker, are set to rise by 20% on average this year.”

Goldman Sachs forecasts that capital spending at S&P 500 firms will reach $740 billion this year, slightly above the $731 billion in 2019. For the first time in a while, Goldman Sachs says big American firms will spend more on capital goods, research and development than on dividends and share buy-backs.

Three factors are driving this positive news. First, America will be largely vaccinated by the summer, so the level of those unemployed should continue to drop, like it did last month, when 916,000 new jobs were added. This means that Americans will have more money to spend on cars, electronics and other goods. It’s not all roses, manufacturing jobs increased by 53,000. But, since February 2020, manufacturing is still down 515,000 jobs, or 4% of the total. As of now, over 60% of the total manufacturing jobs loss of 10.6% has been regained.

Second, much of the Biden infrastructure plan’s spending will wind up in the hands of private companies who will be performing all of that new infrastructure building. That’s the kind of trickle-down that causes economic growth.

Third, companies went to school on the impacts of tight, non-resilient supply chains. Some were surprised that bad Texas weather could slow production. Or, that Covid could stop their orders for PPE, and strain port capacity in Los Angeles. Stranded container ships in the Middle East and geopolitical tensions with China are making CEOs think more seriously about building networks that can withstand such shocks.

In the short term, this involves stockpiling components. In the longer run they are looking to bring production closer to home, which would also bolster American suppliers. More from the Economist:

“General Motors is hoping to build…a second battery factory in America. Intel’s planned Arizona [factories]…are a way both to guarantee deliveries of chips to customers in Detroit and beyond, and to “near-shore” the semiconductor giant’s own production.”

If people can just hang in there a little bit longer, we might just be able to avoid a whole lot more Covid deaths, and then have a very good year. Fingers crossed.

Time to put down your phones and settle in for a Saturday Soother, where we spend a few minutes escaping from the perils of the world. Here at the Mansion of Wrong, we had snow flurries on Friday, and the temperature barely got into the high 30s. That means a break from more spring yard work for a few days.

Let’s start by brewing up a yuuge cup of Dirty South – (As Dark As We Will Go) coffee ($14.99/12 oz.) from Atlanta’s Peach Coffee Roasters. Given the voting repression in Georgia, it seems certain that the outlook in the state for free and fair elections is substantially darker than this coffee.

Baseball’s opening day was Thursday. Some games were cancelled, while some played in snowstorms. When baseball has both indoor stadiums along with many in the warmer south and west, why are teams playing outdoors in 40°weather?

And, in honor of opening day, take a seat by a window and listen to “Field of Dreams” from the movie, performed live at the Tenerife International Film Music Festival. The music is composed by James Horner. The orchestra is conducted by Diego Navarro, artistic director of the festival. It is performed by the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra. This is a very nice way to remember an iconic film:

Remember the line: “Is this heaven? No, it’s Iowa.”

The Democrats’ Dilemma

The Daily Escape:

Bristlecone pine, Cedar Breaks National Monument – photo by Jessica Fridrich

Here’s the Democrats’ dilemma: They must pass legislation that protects voting rights and ballot access. Otherwise, they will allow the GOP to cheat its way to victory in 2022 and beyond, by subverting democracy to empower a minority, as they are doing in Georgia.

One aspect of Georgia’s new election law that nobody’s talking about is that the law replaces the elected secretary of state (currently Republican Brad Raffensperger) as the chair of the state election board with a new official appointed by the gerrymandered Georgia legislature.

It also allows Georgia’s election board to remove and replace any county election official it deems to be under-performing. That provision could be used to target Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold covering most of Atlanta, which came under fire after long lines plagued primary elections over the summer.

David Atkins says:

“The direct implications of the new law are alarming enough: conservatives with an interest in voter suppression could use their authority to disrupt election administration in majority-minority counties. The possibilities for mischief by a partisan legislature fearful of high turnout by opposed constituencies are endless.”

The Republicans sitting on bipartisan election boards were the reason that Biden is president. Next time, they will find reasons not to certify a close election. And as Jonathan Chait says: (brackets and emphasis by Wrongo)

“ [Republican] states that are rolling back democratic protections are not responding to demographic change nor to any change internal to their state. They are following the agenda of the national Republican Party. That agenda is spreading throughout the states, which are imposing voter restrictions almost everywhere their party has the power to do so. Restricting the franchise has become perhaps the party’s core policy objective.”

And the problem must be addressed immediately, since it will impact the 2022 and 2024 elections. Georgia’s Sen. Warnock must run again in 2022. His losing would put the remainder of Biden’s term in jeopardy.

That means that the Senate must pass some version of HR-1. Currently, the Democrats are taking an “all or nothing” approach to HR-1. That may be their opening shot, but some parts should be non-negotiable. Vox lists some important provisions: it establishes automatic voter registration for anyone interacting with designated government agencies; broadens access to mail-in voting for every eligible voter; and mandates that states accept ballots at drop boxes or polling places, and requires counting all ballots postmarked by Election Day.

Further, it establishes same-day online registration and nationwide early voting. It requires a paper trail for every vote cast. Critically, it ends partisan gerrymandering by directing states to use independent commissions in drawing Congressional maps. It also makes Election Day a national holiday.

Ezra Levin, co-founder of the Indivisible, says:

“The choice is the republic or the filibuster — there is no third option….We are at an inflection point in American history. Down one path is a Trump-inspired white plutocracy, and down the other is a representative democracy.”

But many believe some sections of the nearly 800-page bill may be unconstitutional. Rick Hasen of the Election Law Blog, writes:

“Some parts of it could well be found unconstitutional if it passed, such as a provision requiring states to re-enfranchise all people convicted of felonies who are not currently serving time in a correctional institution.”

The bill also contains controversial rules on campaign financing, including the creation of a public financing program for congressional candidates, new ethics rules for the Supreme Court, and a requirement that most candidates for president and vice president publicly disclose their tax returns.

None of those are key to the problem facing Democrats in states where Republicans control the legislatures. As written, HR-1 is unlikely to make it out of the Senate, so there are good reasons to tailor it both to survive judicial scrutiny, while also properly targeting the problems with voter registration, voting, and ballot counting.

That means whatever bill passes must have all 50 Democrats supporting it, and then, they must agree to end the filibuster to enact it. Therefore, the HR-1 wish list must be simplified and shortened. Democrats who object to ending the filibuster need to ask themselves if they genuinely want to facilitate Republicans in reclaiming Congress and the White House, in the name of preserving an arbitrary rule. The filibuster rule has been amended often in recent times: In 1974, 1975, 2013 and 2017. Time to do it again.

We can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. Today, it seems more likely that HR-1 won’t become law before the 2022 mid-terms than that it will, absent ending the filibuster.

Democrats can’t be left looking back at yet another missed opportunity to protect voting.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – March 28, 2021

A few quick thoughts on Georgia’s new voter suppression law. You may remember the day in 2013 when Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “Things have changed dramatically” in the South.

He had just authored the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, where the Court struck down the Voting Rights Act’s Section 4, that determined which states needed federal approval for changes to their election law. That made one of the law’s most important parts inoperative. Today, the new voter suppression law in Georgia is Exhibit A for why Roberts was wrong.

Biden carried Georgia in November, and Black voters turned out again in record numbers in January to elect Democrats Warnock and Ossoff, thus giving control of the Senate to the Dems. The response from Georgia Republicans was to pass a sweeping rewrite of the state’s election laws, making it harder for Democratic voters to vote and have their ballots counted.

The new law allows the GOP-controlled legislature to appoint a majority of members of the state election board. It gives the board the power to take over county election boards, making it easier for Republicans to challenge election results, or to decline to certify the results.

These are things that Trump tried and failed to get Georgia to do in 2020.

The not-so-funny thing is that should HR-1 (now S-1) become law, Roberts gets another chance to review the state of voting rights in America. Will he “atone” for his egregious error in gutting the original VRA? Don’t count on that. On to cartoons.

And now it’s a crime in Georgia to give water to people in line:

It’s easy to understand Republican priorities. They make access to BALLOTS more difficult, and make access to BULLETS easier:

There’s always another Boulder for Dems to worry about:

Mitch tries offering a compromise:

Of all the busters, only the filibuster has to go:

The Filibuster Must Go

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Owens Valley, CA – 2021 photo by tokalita

It has become obvious that the Senate Republicans plan to use the filibuster to block everything President Biden and the Democrats will try to do to make this country better. It means we’re looking at government gridlock for the next two years. Without some reform or elimination of the filibuster, we can only hope that Democrats can build a larger majority in the Senate. That’s unrealistic, given the political landscape.

As Wrongo has said:

“…the next 20 months will be a battle royal for control of the last two years of Biden’s term…”

For Democrats to do well in the 2022 mid-terms, it requires dealing with the Senate filibuster this year. Unless the Dems deal with it, a single Republican can continue to keep a bill blocked by doing nothing more than sending a memo.

The Republicans threaten that if the Dems eliminate the filibuster, the GOP will repeal or privatize Social Security and Medicare once they return to power.

At this point, Democrats should call the GOP’s bluff. If the GOP tries carrying through on their threats, they would be signing their political death warrants. And Democrats would simply promise to reenact those programs in full (possibly retroactively) once they returned to power.

While the above situation is sub-optimal, once the Dems are willing to call the bluff, the question is: What should they do about the filibuster? There are three choices: Eliminate it altogether, eliminate it just for another special case, as McConnell did with judges, or modify it by returning to a “talking filibuster”.

Eliminating it altogether seems unlikely with at least two Democratic Senators (Manchin and Sinema) saying they are against doing that. OTOH, maintaining it, while requiring an old-fashioned talking filibuster seems doable, since it’s supported by Biden, along with Sens. Manchin and Sinema.

A talking filibuster means that if the GOP ever achieves control of all three branches of government, while Democrats couldn’t prevent the enactment of the GOP agenda, they could make it front page news for several weeks while holding the Senate hostage in protest. In some cases, the minority might prevail, as Wrongo said here:

“When Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was minority leader, he used the filibuster in 2019 to block funding for construction of Trump’s border wall. Dems used it twice to impede passage of the Cares Act, forcing Republicans to agree to changes including a $600 weekly federal unemployment supplement. They used it to block legislation to force “sanctuary cities” to cooperate with federal officials, and to stop a prohibition on taxpayer funding of abortion.”

Wrongo also supports a limited removal of the filibuster for specific forms of legislation, like the new Voting Rights Act. As Sen. Ralph Warnock’s (D-GA) said in his maiden speech:

“…access to the ballot ought to be nonpartisan. I submit that there should be 100 votes in this chamber for policies that will make it easier for Americans to make their voices heard in our democracy. Surely, there ought to be at least 60 people in this chamber who believe, as I do, that the four most powerful words uttered in a democracy are, ‘the people have spoken,’ therefore we must ensure that all the people can speak.”

Passage of the Senate’s Bill S-1 (with changes) ought to be Biden’s highest priority. It is a key to preventing the efforts by Republicans to suppress the vote in the coming mid-terms. Meanwhile Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) has already threatened to filibuster S-1. That shows us all we need to know about the bill’s chances if the filibuster stays in place.

So, eliminate it for Voting Rights, or institute the talking filibuster. Going to a talking filibuster really doesn’t require anything inventive. It’s as simple as the Presiding Officer (VP Harris) announcing, after the failure of a cloture vote, “Debate will now resume on Senate Bill X,” rather than moving on to a separate Senate bill or adjourning.

Keep doing that for a week or two, and ultimately, a substantive vote on a possibly amended bill can be had.

Right now, the Senate’s rules are exactly what the GOP want: they were able to fill all the judicial vacancies left unfilled in the Obama years; plus, they filled all the new ones with right wing ideologues, all via simple majority.

Simply put, the Dems should enact laws that enable the kind of society we all want to live in. The Republicans have no vision for America. Their plan is to keep allowing corporations to skim what they can, while letting our infrastructure wear out.

They purposefully avoid legislation that could lead to an abundant future for America. And now, we’re worn out, hollow, and unable to pass laws to change our destiny.

The filibuster must go.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – March 21, 2021

Welcome to the first week of spring. Last week, 12 House Republicans voted against a resolution to award Congressional Gold Medals to the Capitol Police, the DC police and the Smithsonian Institution in recognition of those who protected the Capitol when it was attacked by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6.

They said they objected to the use of the term “insurrectionists” in the resolution. On to cartoons:

March brings on Republican madness:

They’re mad at a few other things too:

The fearmongering never ends:

The only caravan at the border:

Jim Crow lives in the Party of Lincoln:

Cuomo needs to go:

Getting Younger is Key to Democrats’ Future

The Daily Escape:

Canyonlands NP, UT – photo by Xymic

Like Biden, Wrongo is a member of the Silent Generation, but he always confuses the names and age groupings of the generational cohorts. Here’s the breakdown by cohort, age and number of each:

Silent Generation: Born between 1928 and 1945. There are about 23.6 million in the US
Baby Boomers:  Born between 1946 and 1964. There are about 68.7 million in the US
Gen X: Born between 1965 and 1979/1980. There are 65.1 million of them
Gen Y, or Millennials: Born between 1981 and 1994-1996. There are 82.2 million of them
Gen Z:  Born between 1997 and 2012-2015. There are 86.4 million of them in the US

Gen Z is now the largest demographic cohort, with Millennials just behind them. Boomers now represent 21% of America’s population, and Silents are 7%.

But Boomers and Silents still control our political lives. While true for both Parties, leadership in the Democratic Party skews really old: Biden is 78, Sen. Dianne Feinstein is 87, and House Speaker Pelosi is 80. Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is 81, Majority Whip Jim Clyburn is 80, while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is a relatively young 70.

NY Mag’s Eve Peyser:

“If you’re starting to get the feeling that the country is governed as a gerontocracy, you are correct. People over 50 make up 34% of the US population, but 52% of the electorate, according to Pew. And it’s not only political power that baby-boomers and the Silent Generation have a tight grip on: Americans over 55 own two-thirds of the wealth in this country.”

Here is a chart from Pew that shows the distribution of the new Congress by age:

There are 31 Millennials in the House, and only one in the Senate. According to another Pew survey, in 2018, the most common age for all Americans was 27, while the most common age for White Americans was 58! The over-representation of Boomers and Silents in Congress means that White interests are similarly over-represented in US politics.

This isn’t happening everywhere; it’s a distinctly American problem. More from Peyser:

“If you look at other countries, they’re not similarly controlled by older politicians. I think that the explanation here is the two-party system….[A multiparty system gets] young people involved in politics, voting, organizing, running things, organizational politics, [which] means that they are able to start accumulating institutional power.”

Democrats must let younger politicians have a crack at leadership. That was the point of Sen. Chris Murphy’s (D-CT) successful push in January for a change in the Senate’s rules to allow more junior Senators to chair better and more influential subcommittees.

It was also tried in the House. Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) pushed Pelosi and House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters (D-CA) to be more confrontational in some committee hearings. But Porter lost the argument and is no longer a member of that Committee. However, she remains on the House Oversight Committee, and like Murphy, she has a bright future.

The Democrats have a few other young stars that can become future national leaders. In 2016, Frank Bruni showcased a few in the NYT. Among others, he mentioned Stacy Abrams, Julian Castro, Pete Buttigieg, Hakeem Jefferies, and Gina Raimondo. Two (Buttigieg and Raimondo) are now in Biden’s cabinet, while Abrams and Jefferies are already powerful Party leaders.

Several House members, including Jamie Raskin, David Cicilline and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are emerging leaders who help skew the Party younger, but change will be slow. From Peyser:

“We have not yet reached the peak of Boomer culture. We’re going to see the highest number of people turning 65 in US history in 2023,”

By 2028, Millennials and Generation Z will make up almost exactly half of eligible voters. In other words, things will change, but only as the Boomer generation retires from politics, and when we actively help convert eligible voters into registered voters.

Increasing their number could pivot on the fate of HR-1 in the Senate. It would ease the way for more young people to participate in politics, since it requires every state to create systems for automatic, same-day and online voter registration. That could significantly reduce the biggest barrier to more young people voting in American elections: our complex registration system. So far, fewer younger voters have been willing, or able to navigate it.

Strategically, the Republicans will continue trying to suppress voting, while also trying to woo more Boomers to their side. Democrats will work to expand the voter rolls and also get them to turn out, particularly in swing states.

Younger voters are likely to be more progressive than the older Democrats. But even the oldsters in the Party will follow them, as Biden is doing today.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – March 14, 2021

Most Republicans say the American Recovery Plan isn’t necessary, that the economy is on its way back without additional intervention. They should read this report from the Associated Press: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“In a stark sign of the economic inequality that has marked the pandemic recession and recovery, Americans as a whole are now earning the same amount in wages and salaries that they did before the virus struck — even with nearly 9 million fewer people working.”

AP says that Americans earned $9.66 trillion in wages and salaries in February 2020 but by April, that figure had shrunk by 10%. It recovered to $9.67 trillion in December, last year. That’s just wages and salaries; it doesn’t include unemployment payments, Social Security, or other benefit payments.

Of the nearly 9 million jobs that have been eliminated by the pandemic, 40% have been in restaurants, bars, hotels, arts, and entertainment. Retailers have lost nearly 400,000 jobs while many low-paying jobs, such as nursing home attendants and home health care aides, have also been laid off.

Another reason why job losses have had zero impact on the nation’s total pay is that so many of the affected employees work part time. The average work week in the industry that includes hotels, restaurants and bars is less than 26 hours. The average for all industries is nearly 35 hours. The New York Fed’s research shows how concentrated the job losses have been. For people making less than $30,000 a year, employment fell by 14% as of December. For those earning more than $85,000, it has actually risen slightly.

The wage and salary data also help explain the big stock market gains, which have been led by companies whose products are being purchased by higher-income Americans, such as Apple iPads, Peloton bikes, or Amazon’s online shopping.

So clearly, the bottom 30% need help. Too bad Republicans can’t see it. After not voting for the Recovery Plan, they introduced a bill to repeal the estate tax. If it passed, it would provide a $1.7 trillion tax break to millionaires and billionaires! On to cartoons.

Why they wouldn’t vote for it: