Republican Madness Spiraling Into Open War On America

We all knew trump would never admit he lost. We knew trump would rail and rant about everybody else treating him unfairly, that he would claim he won despite all the numbers against him, that he would never concede.

What we didn't know was how deep into that denial and madness the rest of the Republican Party would follow. It turns out, they're willing to violate all the norms, all the laws, all the rights of all Americans just to score cheap political points and worst of all to tear the nation asunder. This latest lawsuit filed by the Texas Attorney General - and signed off with 17 other state Attorneys General, including the partisan hacks here in Florida - is the most blatant attack on America by the Republicans to date (per Mark Stern at Slate): 

This case, Texas v. Pennsylvania, is so ridiculous that it is not worth exploring its legal claims in any depth. Paxton’s suit asks the Supreme Court to throw out every vote in four states won by Joe Biden—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—then direct each state’s legislature to declare Trump the winner. This act would constitute the single biggest incident of voter nullification in American history. Paxton alleges that all four states illegally expanded mail voting, permitted egregious fraud, then concealed evidence that Democrats stole the election. There is no basis in truth for his factual claims and no basis in law for his legal theories. Indeed, it seems likely that Paxton, who is reportedly under FBI investigation for corruption, is more interested in obtaining a preemptive pardon from Trump than presenting a coherent legal argument.

What’s not as clear is why 17 state attorneys general, all Republican, decided to join Paxton’s humiliating crusade. Their brief, spearheaded by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, parrots Paxton’s false assertions about widespread fraud, urging SCOTUS to take up the case. They accuse the four defendant states of repeatedly violating the Constitution by allowing more people to vote by mail during the pandemic. And they claim that, by allowing voters to cure faulty absentee ballots, the states violated the equal protection clause. To remedy this alleged problem, they suggest, the Supreme Court must wipe out every vote cast in all four states, clearing the way for each state legislature to assign their electors to Trump.

The argument to nullify every vote cast in ONLY these states is selective bias on the part of the Republicans: They could easily accuse every Blue State of these charges and nullify theirs as well. They just want enough of the states to flip - or equally not submit Electoral Votes at all to force the results into the House where the Republicans hold a states delegation edge - so they can get their win and never worry about actually proving any of their false claims about fake voters. They want to appease trump's Id at all costs.

We are officially at the point where the Republican AGs are no longer interested in just suppressing the votes in their own states, they are desperate enough to suppress the votes in states they can't control.

Back to Stern:

How did we get here? To start, at least 13 of the 17 attorneys general on the motion are affiliated with the Federalist Society, a powerful and lavishly funded network of conservative attorneys. The Federalist Society has achieved unprecedented success under Trump: He has nominated its members to serve as judges, political appointees, and, of course, his own personal lawyers. A huge portion of election-related litigation over the last few months has been driven by Federalist Society members eager to toss out as many Democratic ballots as possible. All the while, the conservative legal movement has insisted that it is dangerous and unacceptable for anyone to criticize any attorney who chooses to support Trump in court...

Wednesday’s motion is a logical extension of this theory. The attorneys general who signed it are in the mainstream of the conservative legal movement. They are not lunatics. They have simply been given permission by their colleagues to do anything to help Trump retain the presidency. Asking the nation’s highest court to steal an election for Trump is not off limits because nothing is off limits. These attorneys general seem to think their states’ citizenry demands intervention on Trump’s behalf—mass voter suppression included. We can safely assume that these lawyers will continue to fight for the law of Trumpism long after Jan. 20. Remarkably, most of the states siding with Trump are members of the former Confederacy. We may soon experience a kind of cold Civil War, in which the Republican leaders of former Confederate states attempt to sabotage democracy in order to install a new GOP president in 2024. (On Wednesday, “Civil War” trended on Twitter and Rush Limbaugh advocated for secession on his radio program.)

If you follow Adam Silverman at Balloon-Juice, you'll note he's claimed we've been in this Cold Civil War for decades now. What we're at now is the 2020 equivalent of 1860, where the sides are forming up and the partisan demagogues on the wingnut side - the racist slaveowners then, the racist immigrant bashers today - are fomenting enough rage to make the war go hot.

So why even wait for 2024? trump is unwilling to leave office now and he's making damn sure the Republican Party that has sworn fealty to him is ramping up the likelihood of a political split of state against state.

In short, these Republican Attorneys General want open civil war, and they want it now. They want to finally seize the power of defining who gets to be an American citizen (anyone White and Male and Conservative) or not (anyone Black, Female, Young and Liberal). They want to roll back every legal right to vote to how things were in 1850 (before Blacks and Latinos could vote, before Women could vote, before 18-year-olds could vote). They want to certify that the courts - shaped by trump and Mitch McConnell's court-packing the past four years - will make their efforts to retain Minority Rule (and to punish everyone else for voting against them) are as legal as possible.

And while the Supreme Court may well dismiss this effort - it's a last-minute attempt to get a legal argument before SCOTUS before the Electoral College votes this Monday December 14 - we can't ignore the possibility that the majority conservative bench will answer to their Federalist Society overlords and give trump the excuse he needs to steal the election himself.

We can't ignore the damage this fight has already done. A solid majority of Republican voters openly buy trump's conspiracy lie that the Democrats stole the election from him, even with the reality that every court case arguing that lie failed to work. We are at the point where almost half the nation believes Biden is illegitimate all because a goddamned con artist told them so.

We can't convince those people otherwise. The Far Right voting base exists in its own wonderful Narrative bubble forged over the decades into believing Democrats are Un-American Monsters. Nothing - not the facts, not the courts requiring actual evidence of fraud and not finding one whiff of it, not their own family members and former friends who know they voted Biden - will shake them of that belief.

It's the kind of madness that festered in this country with the Sovereign Citizen movement, a cult-like effort to ignore existing laws to uphold their own "common" laws (which usually meant the Sovereign people get to do whatever the hell they wanted, seizing property under false liens for example, while everyone paid their costs). Only now it's a trump-led cult of MAGA truthers numbering in the millions, convinced that they alone are the true patriots and that everyone else is "antifa" and deserving of attack.

Even if this lawsuit fails, even if the Electoral College plays its role and elects Biden and Harris into office as President and Veep, this isn't going to end. This will continue to spiral downward into deeper madness until things are literally on fire due to trump's cruel whims and his fanbase's eager rage.

And by the way, while all of this is happening, the COVID-19 pandemic is still spiking upwards into millions of infected and with over 3,000 people dying within a day now. The pandemic is more lethal in a day than 9/11 was, and our Republican leaders from trump down to his toadying GOP Governors are failing to curb this disaster.

This is not going well, this will not end at all well.

Anniversary: The Vote Mattered Then, It Matters Now

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed this:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Before this, elections and thus political representation could only be done by men. Even though women counted in the Census towards the congressional apportionment, even as women came to own property and run businesses, even with women showing centuries worth of spilling the same blood, sweat, and tears as men.

The right to vote had long been a struggle even before the Constitution was made, with the feminists of the Revolutionary era calling for equal rights of women to vote and hold office. Even as the abolitionists were arguing for Blacks to be free, a good number of them also didn't see a reason to let women vote. The entitlement of patriarchy was pretty strong.

But the struggle grew, not just here but across much of the planet where any elective body existed. The suffrage movement was a universal one, and by the 1900s the Progressive reformers that had gained control of the United States policy making got around to getting the right to vote for women set in stone.

The struggle to get women elected into office took a while longer, with few winning their way into Congress well into the 1970s. Every so often there would be a wave of women candidates expanding the representation in office, but that wave would ebb and the number would never get to near-equal the number of men (in a planetary demographic where the male-female gender split is roughly half-and-half, it's a bit shocking to see we're STILL below a quarter of the Senate AND House of Representatives by 2020). 

What matters about voting is the power the voters have in choosing people who will enact laws and reforms that benefit their needs. In issues that matter most to women - equal pay at work, better social aid for family care, legal protections against harassment and rape and exploitation, equal access to higher education and career opportunities, better health care and the freedom of health care choices - they are not seeing enough women in leadership roles working to resolve those issues (and few male elected officials caring enough to resolve them as well).

Getting women to vote mattered in 1920 and earlier, getting women to vote matters today because there remains so much work left to be done to ensure equality and justice for all regardless of gender or race or orientation or faith.

It matters today because our overall right to vote is under attack more so than it has been since the 1960s, not just for minorities but for every demographic that is not Rich White Male.

A hundred years ago women won their power to vote in elections. This year, everyone needs to express that power to vote to stop the corruption of a vote-suppressing Republican Party before we - not just women but men - lose that power.

Get the damn vote out, America. Women as well as men.

trump Is Destroying the US Postal Service

The destruction of the United States Postal Service has been going on for the past few weeks - as trump's Acting Postmaster General DeJoy, yet another unqualified appointee who has personal financial conflicts of interest, has been eliminating services and sorting equipment - but today trump just... blurted it out (again), via Barbara Sprunt at NPR:

While President Trump has long railed against mail-in voting, falsely claiming it leads to rampant fraud, he appeared to confirm Thursday morning that he opposes Democrats' proposed boost in funding for the U.S. Postal Service because he wants to make it harder to expand voting by mail.

Trump gave that explanation during an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network after she asked why the White House and congressional Democrats are still miles apart on approving a new stimulus deal.

Trump said one major factor is the Democrats' push for an injection of funds into the U.S. Postal Service to expand voting by mail.

"They [the Democrats] want three and a half billion dollars for something that'll turn out to be fraudulent — that's election money basically," Trump said...

trump is going by a long-debunked claim that massive voter fraud happens, and that a lot of that fraud is through mail-in ballots. he's straight up lying, but it's the excuse he can use to suppress voter turnout any way he can for 2020.

In the process, trump and DeJoy are deliberately slowing down the sorting, sending and delivering of anything that's within the same rate service as the mail-in (also known as Absentee) ballots. Not only will that all get affected... but other essential shipments like medical supplies to ailing homebound, people in rural/long-distance places, and veterans are getting hit by this stunt. Medical supplies are getting delayed. Please raise your anger up a notch about that.

This is going to hurt more people than ever before... especially during a pandemic when in-person pickups are a serious risk.

trump's kneecapping of the Post Office is also part of an ongoing privatization push by Republicans to underfund if not abolish federal agencies and services they claim can be better done through the private sector... which by the by never works out. I digress, let's stick to this point.

Thing is, the Postal Service is one of the specific tasks spelled out in the bedrock foundation: The Constitution of the United States makes it clear in Article I, Section 8, Clause 7: "Congress shall have power to...  To establish post offices and post roads..." with the implication that it is Congress' duty to ensure people can send and receive mail, that businesses can ship and receive parcels, that the communications vital to the strength of the nation never wavers nor slows.

trump is intentionally saying Fuck You to all of that.

And trump along with his lackey DeJoy are both breaking the law. Via Cornell's online US Code:

18 U.S. Code § 1703.Delay or destruction of mail or newspapers

(a)Whoever, being a Postal Service officer or employee, unlawfully secretes, destroys, detains, delays, or opens any letter, postal card, package, bag, or mail entrusted to him or which shall come into his possession, and which was intended to be conveyed by mail, or carried or delivered by any carrier or other employee of the Postal Service, or forwarded through or delivered from any post office or station thereof established by authority of the Postmaster General or the Postal Service, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

trump is bragging that he's delaying the mail.

We could note that technically trump is not a Postal Service employee, but he MAY be considered an officer: one of the hats of the Presidency Loser of the Popular Vote is head of the Executive branch which oversees the Post Office. This law should well apply to DeJoy who is directly employed as an officer - the fricking Acting Postmaster General! - and his ass needs to be called to the U.S. House committee in charge of making sure the agency is running well.

This is a serious problem. For all the technological wonders of the Intertubes, our nation still relies on physical mail for much of our personal and professional lives. trump is threatening all of that because he's desperately trying to steal an election he dare not lose.

Call your Congresscritter today. Try 202-224-3121 and tell them your District (if you don't have that at hand, your mailing ZIP code should do). Be polite, the person answering is likely an unpaid intern and deserves your sympathy as much as trump deserves your rage.

Get the big guns out. Start the investigations into this and force trump to put OUR Postal Service back together again.

It's not just our voting rights at stake, it's our very lives.

The Numbers That Matter 2020 Edition

If anything keeps me hopeful, it's this: In the 2020 Election cycle trump honestly cannot win.

Some of the things to consider:

trump has done nothing to appeal to a broad range of American voters. Any administrative successes he's had revolve around unpopular actions - a massive tax cut for the super-rich that only benefited Wall Street, an aggressive push to build a border wall against Mexico, a harsh anti-immigration program that has punished families and children especially - or relied on a strong economy that was never that strong in the first place thanks to trump's tariff wars and failures to respond to the current pandemic.

In one of the odder things hurting trump now is the one thing trump relied on to win the Republican primaries and eke out an Electoral College win that November: Racism is now hurting trump at a time it's the only thing he's got. To quote David A. Graham at The Atlantic:

As pollsters are at pains to point out, polls are snapshots and not forecasts; Biden’s lead could dissipate, though this race has been unusually stable so far. Contrary to Trump’s protestations, Biden’s lead as it exists now is real—and given how hard it has been for anything to dent Trump’s carapace, it’s worth examining closely. Stranger still, the impetus appears to be race—something that has been both Trump’s Achilles’ heel and his secret weapon throughout his political career. For some reason, it’s affecting his political standing differently than it has before...

...Polls have consistently shown that Americans disapprove of his response to protests of police violence and believe that he has worsened race relations. In the New York Times/Siena poll, race relations (33 percent) and the protests (29 percent) are the only areas where issue approval lags behind his overall vote preference. In the Harvard/Harris poll, the same two areas earn Trump his worst marks of any issue, though they are still slightly higher than his expected vote.

Voters are right that Trump is worsening race relations and handling the protests poorly. In the past two days alone, the president has retweeted (and then deleted) a video of one of his supporters shouting “White power!” and another of two white supporters pointing guns at black protesters marching past their house...

But why? Perhaps it’s just a matter of what issues are most important to voters right now. There’s always been a sizable contingent of reluctant or conflicted Trump supporters. In 2016 exit polls, only 35 percent of voters said Trump had the temperament to be president, but he won 46 percent of the popular vote. These voters are a familiar staple of news coverage too—the ones who preface their support with “I don’t always like the way he phrases it” or “I wish he would tone it down a little, but …” Until now, these voters may have been able to overlook Trump’s other flaws because he was getting done things they liked. But the pandemic has frozen progress on nearly all of Trump’s policy priorities, insofar as they were still alive anyway. Even if voters approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, it’s no longer much of a positive benefit. And the profusion of news coverage has made issues of race impossible to ignore.

Alternatively, perhaps voters are shifting not just their priorities but their views. As the political scientist Michael Tesler writes, there’s evidence of real shifts in public opinion on race over the past six weeks or so. While views on policing are moving in response to a wide range of incidents, it’s clear that the Floyd case—brutal, senseless, and captured in excruciating clarity on video—has captured white attention in a way other deaths at the hands of police have not...

trump is losing voters among the groups who looked past his earlier racist antics or thought his being in the White House could temper his views. As trump's behavior worsened, however, it seems to have woken a growing number of those who were on the fence to jump off. Given how trump will continue to attack with racism and division, those numbers should get worse for him.

trump's national polling has always wavered in the low 40s, barely ever reaching 50 percent except in various Far Right trackers (and even then not for long). trump's appeal at a state-by-state level hasn't been on that hot either, and considering he's only in the White House due to a state-focused and broken-as-hell Electoral College system, trump does not have any good numbers at all.

Earlier I wrote the only number that mattered was trump's Republican Base: As long as he was as popular with them (in the high 80s-mid-90s) the party leadership wasn't going to do a thing to rein him in (it did not help the Republicans that they wanted a lot of it done anyway because they personally profited from it all).

Today the dynamic is different. To win a general election across enough states to secure the Electoral College, trump has to appeal to the middle-of-the-road, Independent voters to counter the numerical advantages Democrats have. Again, trump has done NOTHING that would appeal to the moderate middle voter set. Where he beat Hillary among No-Party/Indy voters 46-42 percent in the 2016 exit polls, he's trailing Biden with that voter group by about 21 points in the 2020 polls.

This is the other thing hurting trump: Biden is a genuinely more likable figure. Not just a more likable figure than trump - duh - but also a more likable figure than Hillary back in 2016. Where all the negative press Hillary accrued over 25 years as a public figure hurt her, Biden has no such disadvantage even with having a longer public career (and even with a number of faux pas on Biden's resume).

If we can look to what Stanley Greenberg says at The Atlantic about Biden's chances:

But this moment is very different. To start, during the summer and fall of 2016, Clinton never had the kind of national poll lead that Biden now has. She led by an average of four points four months before the election and the same four points just before Election Day. This year, after Biden effectively clinched the nomination, he moved into an average six-point lead over Trump, which has grown to nearly 10 points after the death of George Floyd and the weeks of protests that have followed. The lingering apprehension among Democrats fails to recognize just how much the political landscape has changed since 2016. We are looking at different polls, a different America, and different campaigns with different leaders...

The Clinton campaign’s worst blunder came in September 2016, when the candidate described “half of Trump’s supporters” as “deplorables” and walked right into the white working-class revolt against elites. Her primary campaign against Bernie Sanders had exposed a lack of enthusiasm for her in white working-class suburbs that Barack Obama had won. Her campaign hoped to make up for the lost votes with landslide wins among women, voters of color, and voters in big cities. White working-class voters noticed the lack of respect, and Trump ran up startling margins with them: He won these men by 48 points and women by 27, according to exit polls...

While Biden has said some gaffe-quality stuff about trump's voting base, the media's attempt to float it as a campaign-breaker went nowhere. For one, it happened far too early in 2020 and for another we've had four years to see that Hillary was right. Back to Greenberg:

But much more important than all of that is the sustained, unwavering, and extremely well-documented opposition of the American people to every element of Donald Trump’s sexist, nativist, and racist vision. Indeed, the public’s deep aversion to Trumpism explains why Biden has such a poll lead...

This is where my evaluation of Biden being a Passive-Positive character is going to be a boon to the Democratic Party. Biden's congenial and likable nature on the national stage can help keep that poll lead well into November.

There's a reason why trump and his Republican allies were so desperate to stir up fake scandals against Biden like forcing Ukraine to lie about investigating Biden's son for business dealings there. They were and still are hoping to swiftboat/mudsling Biden down to trump's level of known corruption and vulgarity.

I also wrote a long time ago about first-termers running for re-election back in 2012 when Obama was doing it. As long as the incumbent is genuinely popular with the majority of voters, the incumbent should win. trump is nowhere near genuine popularity and never has been.

So as I said at the beginning of this article, trump has no honest way to win the election in 2020.

Which is why we have every reason to believe trump and his Republican buddies are gonna cheat like hell. Via David Smith at The Guardian:

(Bill) Kristol, editor at large of the Bulwark website and director of the advocacy organisation Defending Democracy Together, said in an interview: “The special circumstances with Trump are his total abandonment of any constraints and even more important, perhaps, his having people around him who’ve abandoned any constraints on the way in which they’ll use the federal government, the executive branch, to say things, do things, pretend to do things.

“Richard Nixon did a little of that in 1972, and of course presidents always tout good news in the months before the election. But this time, it’s the degree to which you could have a real sustained effort to suppress minority voting and not make it easy for young people to vote..."

Voter suppression has haunted US elections for decades but the pandemic presents Trump with new opportunities. States are seeking a massive expansion of mail-in ballots so people do not have risk their health by queuing and voting in person. The president has intensified claims that this will lead to widespread cheating, even though several studies have shown that voter fraud is extremely rare...

His wild words are often backed by organizational muscle and action. The Republican National Committee has devoted $20m to opposing Democratic lawsuits across the country seeking to expand voting. Republicans are also reportedly aiming to recruit up to 50,000 people in 15 key states to serve as poll watchers and challenge the registration of voters they believe are ineligible.

Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York, said: “What we’re seeing in some primary states is the closures of polling places in African American dominated areas and mistaken purging of Democrats from the voter rolls. Some of this is anecdotal, but it is worrying all the same. And it will, no doubt, continue through the general election...”

What the Republicans are bound to do is reduce the turnout and discourage voters from showing at all, which gives the more extremist voters eager to do it - which favors the Far Right - more power at the ballot box. By shutting down polling precincts in poor and clearly minority communities - especially Blacks who vote as a 90-95 percent bloc for Democrats - they're definitely discouraging turnout.

The closer the GOP can make the numbers between trump and Biden, the likelier they can flip the mid-sized battleground states like Michigan (and big ones like Florida) same as they did against Hillary in 2016, and steal another Electoral College "victory" even if Biden gets 50 percent of the popular vote with a 6-8 million advantage over the less-loved trump.

This is where voter turnout is the one big key for Democrats and Left-leaning voters (and the sizabler anti-trump voting bloc that's grown since 2016). The only way to beat voter suppression is to show up and force your vote through. The best way to stop the Republicans from playing their rigged game of demographics and gerrymandering is to give Biden such leads in enough states that there's no way it will get "too close to call." They can't rig the machines enough to undercount or misvote every pro-Biden check that gets plugged in. They can't hide it if 500,000 people vote for Biden and pretend it was 250,000. There's only so much the GOP can do before enough people take notice and do something about it.

Get the damn vote out, America. To every anti-trump out there, this is your chance to throat-punch that Shitgibbon. To every Liberal, every Progressive, time to realize you're in the same damn boat and vote with unity. To every person horrified by trump's hatred and sexism, rise up and be counted, dammit.

Don't let the polls distract you. They should motivate us to show up and fulfill the hopes those polls are asking for. OUR NUMBERS MATTER. Let's do this.

Florida 2020: Voter Turnout Still a Must, Get Everyone Registered, Even If Republicans Are Being Assholes About It

One of my biggest personal interests in politics is civic engagement AKA voter registration and getting everybody to vote every election to get their voice hear.

I was thrilled in 2018 when my home state of Florida passed a state referendum amendment easing the right for ex-felons who've served their time to regain their power to vote. Previously there was a convoluted and unfair request process through the Governor's office that saw a decreased disinterest - especially with Republican governors - in granting voting rights to people who should be encouraged to re-engage our society. As long as the ex-felons served for non-violent crimes (violent ones had to stick to the petition process) they would get that right automatically.

So the state legislature and Governor - Republicans all - decided to be assholes about it and passed a law in 2019 curbing that Amendment by requiring the ex-felons had to repay all fines and debts - essentially a goddamn POLL TAX - before they could get re-registered. Considering 1) many ex-felons are poor to begin with and 2) those fees could range to thousands of dollars, this would have stopped them from regaining their civil rights.

All because Republicans are terrified of point 3) many ex-felons lean toward voting Democratic... and the number of them doing so would clearly tilt the partisan demographics of Florida a solid Blue for 2020.

Funny thing about that: The Republicans may have been too clever by half. Per Mark Joseph Stern's article in Slate:

After Floridians approved an initiative to restore voting rights to approximately 1.4 million people with felony convictions, Republican lawmakers immediately moved to sabotage the historic effort. The GOP-controlled legislature passed a law along party lines that effectively required a poll tax from a majority of those poised to regain their right to vote. The GOP’s brazenly partisan measure, however, appears to be backfiring. Democratic counties are taking advantage of a compromise buried in the statute to give residents their voting rights. Meanwhile, Republican counties are taking a hard line against suffrage—meaning a substantial majority of Floridians who do manage to register to vote are likely to be Democrats.

For more than a year, Florida’s politicians have been embroiled in a fight over Amendment 4, which 65 percent of Florida voters approved in 2018. Amendment 4 abolished a Jim Crow era law that permanently stripped the right to vote from anyone convicted of a felony. But Florida Republicans quickly kneecapped it, passing a bill that forced individuals to pay all fines and fees associated with their sentences before regaining their voting rights. This legislative assault on Amendment 4 threatened to take away the franchise from more than 1.1 million Floridians; the state is a pioneer of cash register justice, imposing a mind-boggling array of “user fees” on defendants to finance its criminal justice system.

Following immense backlash from Democrats and civil rights advocates, though, legislators added a conciliatory section to their bill. It allowed courts to modify “the original sentencing order to no longer require completion” of the initial sentence. In other words, courts can waive fines and fees imposed as part of a sentence. By doing so, courts can clear the way for former felons to complete their sentences and immediately become eligible to vote.

To implement this section, Florida’s four most populous counties created “rocket dockets” to waive fines and fees en masse. Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Hillsborough—which, together, make up more than a third of the state’s population—launched programs to identify individuals who owe fines and fees and fast-track their cases to the courts. A judge then waives their financial obligations (except restitution to victims) and provides them with a court order declaring their sentences complete. This order reestablishes their right to vote. Courts, prosecutors, and public defenders all support these programs, and celebrity activist John Legend helped to publicize them by sitting in on a “rocket docket” session. Local officials provide individuals with voter registration forms as soon as their fines and fees are waived...

..There is little doubt that GOP legislators opposed the amendment because they feared it would disproportionately enfranchise Democrats. But their bill has led to a bizarre system in which Democratic counties are reenfranchising their voters while Republican-majority counties are not. Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Hillsborough all overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016. They are Democratic strongholds in a state with notoriously close elections. In 2016, Trump beat Clinton by about 113,000 votes. Meanwhile, Miami-Dade hopes to grant about 150,000 former felons the right to vote. The reenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of voters in primarily Democratic counties may very well swing the 2020 election...

This doesn't automatically mean the Dems win and the GOP loses. Voter turnout still matters, even in solid Blue counties (some of which will be the centers of massive Far Right disinformation and voter suppression efforts no matter what). Those voters - every single one who has a vested interest in key Democratic issues like affordable health care (still), better wages, an end to trumpian corruption - have to keep involved with early voting, absentee balloting, handling long lines at the precincts, and keeping up with oversight and counting results to make sure every ballot is counted fairly and accurately.

This is all what 2020 is about, Floridians: GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT.

And for the Love of GOD, kick the cheating vote-suppressing Republicans out of every office we can.

Getting Down to the Wire 2018 Midterms

Dear Florida:

Make sure you are registered to vote. Check this link. Make sure you have a valid ID to go with your voter ID.

If you know you are supposed to be registered but have been knocked off the rolls, fight back.

You have the right to request a Provisional Ballot and a receipt for it if you are being challenged from voting.

You have the right to vote early to avoid the long lines that may occur at your precinct. You have the right to stay in line to vote once you get to your precinct before it's supposed to close (this is a major issue in large metros and few working locations).

You need to know when and where Early Voting in your county will take place, for Florida it is October 27 through November 3.

The General Midterms election is Tuesday November 6.

SHOW UP AND VOTE.

Show up and Vote Democratic up and down the entire goddamn ballot. NO REPUBLICANS.

Kick Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott the hell out of here. Keep Bill Nelson in the Senate.

Stop Ron "Slavery Was Great" DeSantis from getting anywhere near the Governor's office. Vote for Andrew Gillum to restore balance and defend the majority's interests for our state.

Vote for every Democrat in the Congressional and State Legislature seats out there. We've had 20 straight years of Republican dominance in this state and all we've got to show for it are broken schools, poisoned waters from our lakes and rivers to the oceans themselves, and a harshly underfunded Family Services program that's harming our children.

Get the damn vote out, Florida.

Don't let this Midterms be another year of no-shows. The interest levels are supposed to be up. Prove those numbers right, do better than what the polls are saying. VOTER TURNOUT BEATS VOTER SUPPRESSION EVERY TIME.

Get the damn vote out, Florida.

AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN.

The Sins of Minority Party Rule (w/ Update)

It should be noted that a majority of Americans do not support trump and his lackeys on their horrific child kidnapping plan along the U.S. border. And yet, Congress is dragging its collective feet on the matter because both the House and the Senate are under Republican control, and the Republicans are profiting from this overt racism.

It should be noted that a majority of Americans do not support massive tax cuts for the rich, yet the Republicans controlling Congress passed a massive tax cut bill last year that only profits the rich and has done NOTHING for our nation's middle-income and working classes. Worse, they are poised to pass another deep tax cut bill for the upcoming 2019 budget.

It should be noted that a majority of Americans want affordable health care, yet the Republican Party in charge of everything keeps pursuing a Kill Obamacare agenda that hurts everyone but plays to their Obama-hating voting base.

It should be noted that a majority of Americans are Independent voters but tend to (barely) vote Democratic. But the Republicans control much of the federal government and a majority of state legislatures/governors, meaning that much of the legislation being passed aren't what the majority of voters wants or needs.

To take notes from Steve M. over at No More Mister Nice Blog:

ONCE AGAIN, IT'S REPUBLICANS WHO ARE OUT OF STEP WITH THE REST OF AMERICA

CNN:
Two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the Trump administration's practice of taking undocumented immigrant children from their families and putting them in government facilities on US borders, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS. Only 28% approve. But among Republicans, there is majority support for the policy....

Quinnipiac:
American voters oppose 66 - 27 percent the policy of separating children and parents when families illegally cross the border into America, according to a Quinnipiac University National Poll released today.
Republican voters support the separation policy 55 - 35 percent, the only listed party, gender, education, age or racial group to support it...

I say this all the time: America is not primarily a conservative heartland that's besieged by a left-leaning minority living on the coasts and using elite status to tyrannize the majority. The major fault line in this country is between Republicans and everyone else in America. I'm not saying that this is a liberal country (although it is on a number of issues), but it is not a conservative country. Republican dominance of our government at the federal and state levels is largely an artifact of electoral gamesmanship and a highly effective conservative propaganda machine that successfully demonizes Democrats; it doesn't reflect majority support for Republican policies...

What's happening here is what's called Minority Party Rule. It's not about political rule of an ethnic or religious minority - although in some nations like Syria and Iraq it worked out that way - it's about political rule by a group that does not reflect the political will of the majority.

John Cole over at Balloon Juice once brought up a desire to talk about Minority Party Rule in America, although I haven't seen a thorough article posted yet. It's a complex argument to make and hard to stay focused on because the rage of the idiocy of it all takes over and you have to step away for an hour before continuing (this has been a blog post months in the writing)

Minority Party Rule in the United States is a headache because our electoral system is based on Winner-Take-All: whoever gets the most votes - even if it's not a majority of votes - just wins that seat. As a result in certain elections where a spoiler third candidate runs - Perot in 1992 and 1996 for the Presidency, the gubernatorial elections that left Maine with unpopular LePage - a candidate the majority of voters didn't want can end up winning.

The Presidential election process takes on an extra layer of the Electoral College where it's not who wins the overall popular votes but who wins enough states (with their Electoral values). This was how trump - garnering only 42 percent of the popular vote below Hillary Clinton's 45 percent - stole the presidency (well that and Russian sabotage, but that's a separate rage point).

If we witness Minority Party Rule overseas, it's usually in the form of dictatorships where the ethnic or religious minority had been granted undue control of the nation or had played factions among the majority against themselves. Those nations tend to have bad histories of human rights abuses and civil wars because the majority population flares up against the minority that rules through force and corruption.

Minority Party Rule itself isn't always a problem: Most parliamentary systems are multi-party and rarely does a majority party gain enough seats to rule without hassle. Most elections won by a plurality forces the large parties to form coalitions to create a government stable enough to rule until the next set election (some coalitions do fall apart over certain issues, in which case the government falls and emergency elections kick in). The system still is responsive enough to react to crises that should force the right leadership into making the right coalitions to keep things working.

But in the system we have - a Federal Republic (not an actual democracy) of checks and balances -
it's harder to hold a government accountable when ONE party holds the key to ALL branches of government the way the Republicans currently control the Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary. Especially when that control came not due to the majority supporting it but due to rigging and gaming the electoral process.

When you look at the current leadership in DC, you'll see a Republican Party led by the likes of Ryan, McConnell and trump who all know they do NOT need to answer to the majority - they need to placate their minority base - and so they govern as they please, even in the face of polling numbers that mark them as some of the most unpopular life forms in modern memory. All they have to do is stoke their base to turnout for the midterms, all they have to do is keep their deep-pocket funders rolling in their tax-free profits, and let gerrymandering and voter suppression do the rest.

The only thing holding a Minority Rule Party like that accountable is The Reality-Based World. Bad governance leads to mistakes, which leads to disasters, which leads to outrage and angry majority voters who finally get sick of it all and try their best to flip the bad actors out of power.

Sad thing about that is, by the time those disasters take place - think the Iraqi Occupation, think Katrina, think the CDO Housing Subprime Bubble - the damage has been done. Innocent people have suffered, honest lives lost.

And then, damn us all, the SOBs responsible for all that avoid criminal accountability and regain the chance to lie and bully and steal their way back into power again.

Which is why we're facing a new round of disasters - Say hello to the Republicans trying to gut healthcare and Social Security! Say hello to trump's Baby Jails for immigrant toddlers! Say hello to trade wars against Canada and our FORMER Euro allies! - that will consume this nation in darkness, debt, and despair.

We can't keep playing this back-and-forth of sane Democratic MAJORITY leadership and insane Republican MINORITY misrule.

We really can't.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. Fight back against gerrymandering. Get everyone you know registered to vote and balloting this midterms. It matters. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, OUR NATION AND OUR CHILDREN MATTER.

(Update 6/30/18): I still seem to be writing this out ahead of the Beltway curve. Dana Milbank at Washington Post is thinking along the same lines:

Republicans have been defying gravity for some time. As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait reminds us in a smart piece, they lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections. Electoral college models show Republicans could plausibly continue to win the White House without popular majorities.

Because of partisan gerrymandering and other factors, Democrats could win by eight percentage points and still not gain control of the House, one study found. And the two-senators-per-state system (which awards people in Republican Wyoming 70 times more voting power than people in Democratic California) gives a big advantage to rural, Republican states...

The backlash is coming. It is the deserved consequence of minority-rule government protecting the rich over everybody else, corporations over workers, whites over nonwhites and despots over democracies. It will explode, God willing, at the ballot box and not in the streets...

I dread it will explode, not from the majority fighting to take their power back but from the minority of Angry White Guys terrified of losing power they don't deserve.

Killing the Gerrymander: 2018 With the Best News Yet

Again, not a huge fan of the gerrymander.

Which is why the latest news out of North Carolina heartens me. Per David A Graham at The Atlantic:

Federal judges have yet again struck down North Carolina’s congressional districts as an unconstitutional gerrymander, dealing Republicans a blow and throwing the state’s maps into chaos just months before a pivotal midterm election.

A three-judge panel, including one circuit-court judge and two district-court judges, ruled Tuesday evening that the Old North State’s redistricting plan relied too heavily on partisan affiliation in drawing constituencies, violating citizens’ rights under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, the First Amendment, and Article I of the Constitution. The decision is the first time a federal court has ever struck down a redistricting plan as a partisan gerrymander...

As Graham notes, there are two other gerrymander cases on similar arguments in other courts, so we'll likely have to wait for this to get to the Supreme Court (where it could well die for partisan reasons /headdesk).

But this ruling is a huge fcking deal because unlike previous gerrymandering rulings - which focused on minority representation - this focused on Party representation: Between the difference of Republican, Democrat, and Independent/smaller Third parties. As Graham noted, earlier gerrymandering efforts based on race was shot down by the courts, so the Republican-controlled North Carolina state legislature "proudly used partisanship as their primary criterion in drawing new maps." They intentionally drew state and congressional districts to serve Republican needs:

“I acknowledge freely that this would be a political gerrymander, which is not against the law,” said Representative David Lewis, the chair of the state House redistricting committee. He also said, “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.” And he suggested the committee draw maps that would produce 10 Republican and three Democratic U.S. House districts, on the basis that he didn’t think it would be possible to come up with an 11-2 map...

The court came back and told Lewis and the other Republicans that guess what IT WAS AGAINST THE LAW:

Common Cause and the League of Women Voters both challenged the law, and their two suits were consolidated into one. The plaintiffs argued that the plan violated the Equal Protection Clause, because it discriminated against non-Republican voters; the First Amendment, because it discriminated against voters based on previous political expression; and Article I, because it interfered with the right of the people to elect their representatives...

“A partisan gerrymander that is intended to and likely has the effect of entrenching a political party in power undermines the ability of voters to effect change when they see legislative action as infringing on their rights,” Judge James Wynn, an Obama appointee, wrote for the court. “We agree with Plaintiffs that a wealth of evidence proves the General Assembly’s intent to ‘subordinate’ the interests of non-Republican voters and ‘entrench’ Republican domination of the state’s congressional delegation...”

Wynn was joined in full by Judge William Britt, a Carter appointee, and in part by Judge William Osteen Jr., a George W. Bush appointee who accepted the Equal Protection and Article I arguments but rejected the plaintiffs’ First Amendment claim...

This last bit is important. The judges did not split on two of the three arguments, meaning those arguments can work at the higher appellate (and Supreme Court) levels. The First Amendment argument is open to interpretation, but the Equal Protection and Article I arguments are etched deep into the legal underpinnings of voters' rights.

This partisan gerrymandering on the part of Republicans - in fairness, Democrats have been doing this in states like Illinois as well - is one of the big reasons why we're struggling against a federal government where the Party in power does not actually represent the majority of voters. Most Americans vote Democratic: However, the nature of geography and demographics (which is affected by gerrymandering) gave Republicans more seats in Congress.

If we can get rid of gerrymandering - if we can as a nation make it so that the House AND the Senate reflect the actual voter turnout and the issues they want resolved - we should get a Legislative branch of the federal government that genuinely reflects - and serves - the nation's interests. Only the geographic limitations - on the Senate, where small states are disproportionately represented - would be a problem from that point.

We'd still have elected officials who actually earned their electoral wins, not based on "safe" districts carved out to decimate the opposing party(ies).

Here's hoping.

You Will Get My Voter ID Card When You Pry It From My Cold Dead Hands

This weekend, I'm pissed at both trump and my state of Florida.

Well, yeah, I know I'm ALWAYS pissed about trump being the President Loser of the Popular Vote. And there are times I'm pissed with Florida having elected a goddamn MEDICARE FRAUD like Rick "No Ethics" Scott to governor.

But this weekend my German/Irish ire kicked up a notch because trump's horrific "Voter Fraud" commission sent requests to all 50 states to give up every voter registration data they've got.

Damn them.

The entire Republican Narrative of "Mass Voter Fraud" is a lie. And yet the GOP runs with this Narrative because it gives them political cover to suppress voters, specifically the poor, the minorities, and the college age voting blocs.

What the GOP can do with voter information like this - everything down to Social Security number - might range from targeted harassment to broad voter suppression by geography/district.

The good news so far is that most of the states are refusing to aid trump's faux committee by complying. As Kathy Gill notes at the Moderate Voice:

The following states have indicated that they will not provide the Kobach Commission with all of the information it requested on Wednesday. These states are either ignoring the request, complying with their state laws (the request is for more than publicly available information), or waiting for assurances on how the data will be used.

AK, AL, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, GA, IA, ID, IN, KS, KY, MA, ME, MN, MO, MS, NC, ND, NH, NM, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA (note: GOOD FOR YOU LOT!)

The following states have not received a letter:

AR, DE, HI, IL, MI

And these states have no decision or no comment:

FL, LA, MD, NE, NJ, SC, WV, WY

It's this last bit raising my ire. Florida should have only one response to this: on moral, legal, and common sense grounds, this state should tell the Republican Party to go fuck itself. We could have told them to go jump into the Gulf of Mexico, but Mississippi (!) beat us to it.

Here's the irony: a lot of Red States are telling this commission NO. Even they know this is a fool's errand, and that they'll be violating a shitload of their own laws. Even Kris Kobach's state Kansas forced Kobach to tell himself he'd have to give only the public domain info.

So what the hell are we waiting for, Florida? Sadly as Michael Van Stickler at the Tampa Bay Times reports:

Florida officials say they are considering a request for voter information from President Donald Trump's commission investigating alleged voter fraud in the 2016 election. The letter was from Kris Kobach, the vice chairman of the commission and Kansas' Republican secretary of state.

Gov. Rick Scott on Friday said he has not seen the letter that had been sent to Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner on Wednesday. But a spokeswoman for Detzner said the agency was reviewing the request.

This is a No-Brainer, Detzner. Write back to Kobach and trump and tell them NO DICE.

This Monday, bright and early, every Floridian needs to call the Department of State's office and insist our voter ID information remain unviolated. I certainly do not want trump to get ANY of my private information, and I sure as hell want to stop these false accusations about voter fraud.

Here's the number: 850-245-6500  and ask for Detzner and/or for the Elections office supervisor. BE POLITE BUT FIRM. Tell them you do not want your private voter information going to an unjust and harmful federal committee.

Get active, Florida.

Killing the Gerrymander: A Season of Hope

Update: Hello again to the Crooks & Liars audience coming here via Mike's Blog Round-Up! Thank you as always to Batocchio for inviting onto the list, and again to everyone here please visit, I have other rants and rampages to read at this blog.


For all my ranting on the sidelines about getting rid of the gerrymander, there is someone else out there - Hi, Paul! - doing the heavy lifting, and GOD BLESS HIM FOR IT.

Via Slate.com:

Both Democrats and Republicans deploy partisan gerrymandering to dilute votes for their opponents, creating one-party rule and, arguably, greater polarization. That’s bad for the body politic and a clear contravention of the Constitution. But as long as the courts refuse to step in, gerrymandering will continue to plague the country...

Now Paul Smith, one of the greatest legal minds in the country, is asking the Supreme Court to finally put a stop to it. And here’s the exciting part: He might actually succeed...

KEEL IT! KEEL THE GERRYMANDER!!!

Ahem.

...The difficulty in curbing partisan gerrymandering has not been in convincing judges that the practice is unconstitutional—the Supreme Court has found that it is—it’s convincing judges that they can fix it.

In 2004’s Vieth v. Jubelirer, which Smith argued, five justices agreed that partisan gerrymandering likely violated the Constitution. But one of these justices, Anthony Kennedy, wasn’t sure quite how to fix the problem, and so he voted with the conservative justices to toss out a challenge to a Pennsylvania gerrymander - without closing the door to future lawsuits. In a concurring opinion, Kennedy wrote that partisan gerrymandering seems to unconstitutionally “burden representational rights” by “penalizing citizens” because of their “association with a political party” or their “expression of political views.” Still, Kennedy insisted, courts should not intervene until they could articulate “principles of fairness in districting” - specifically, a formula to decide when the burden placed on representational rights crosses the line into unconstitutionality. Otherwise, he argued, the results from one gerrymandering case to the next would likely be disparate and inconsistent...

So Smith and his people figured out a formula:

This formula - called the “efficiency gap” - cites two types of “wasted votes” in the redistricting process: “lost votes” cast in favor of a defeated candidate, and “surplus votes” cast in favor of a winning candidate that weren’t actually necessary for the candidate’s victory. The efficiency gap is, in Stephanopoulos’ words, “the difference between the parties’ respective wasted votes in an election, divided by the total number of votes cast.”

When both Democrats and Republican waste roughly the same number of votes, the efficiency gap is near zero. That means voters on both sides had a fair shot at securing their desired representation. When a party gerrymanders its opponents into the minority, however, it will “waste” fewer votes than its opponents, causing the efficiency gap to rise. A historical analysis of elections across from the country since 1972 suggests that an efficiency gap of 7 percent will entrench the majority party’s power until new maps are drawn. Wisconsin’s Republican-drawn gerrymander has an efficiency gap of 13 percent, meaning a huge number of Wisconsinites are currently deprived of their representational rights solely because they are Democrats.

This formula may sound like an oddly technical method for ensuring basic representational equality. But the justices have waded into algebraic waters before. The court has long held that the Constitution enshrines the principle of “one person, one vote,” meaning districts should contain about the same number of people so that no vote counts more or less than others. But over several decades, it has had to decide what amount of deviation from the “one person, one vote” principle was constitutionally permissible. Ultimately, the court found that the deviation between the population of the largest and smallest districts in a state cannot exceed 10 percent...

So based on this efficiency gap formula, the Wisconsin gerrymanders at 13 percent goes well beyond the historical skewing, and can well violate the "one person one vote" axiom that judicial review relies on.

As the article noted, the district court already sided with Smith and the Efficiency Gap. There is demonstrated evidence of gerrymandering affecting the voters' ability to choose their representatives, and given the legal arguments against gerrymandering there's a solid chance that the Supreme Court - even this conservative one - would accept the evidence and rule in Smith's favor.

Getting this formula set to reconfigure electoral districting at a state and federal level would go a long way towards ensuring a more accurate representation of the voters across the nation. It would certainly force the political parties to be more responsive to the voters and less towards the mapmakers.

Here's hoping Paul Smith gets the Supreme Court to agree with him.

Here's hoping the gerrymander dies a quick death before 2018 (or at least 2020).

The Rigging

As a distant ironic echo, having Trump speak at Gettysburg seems a kind of blaspheme towards President Lincoln's sacred Address. Especially because where Lincoln spoke of a "new birth of freedom" for the nation united to the proposition that ALL men (and let's throw in women too) are created equal, Trump went Full Divider. Per the Washington Post:

But instead of laying out his vision for uniting the country, as President Abraham Lincoln once did here, Trump declared that the system is rigged against him, that election results cannot be trusted, that Hillary Clinton should have been barred from running for president, that the media is “corrupt” and that he will sue all of the women who have accused him of sexual assault.

It's not "that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain" type of motivational, I tell you what.

This is Trump during the final days of his campaign: Struggling in the polls, hammered in public for his sexual assaults and failed businesses, feeling alienated from a Republican leadership that never fully accepted him, and getting beat out in news coverage by the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians (OMG the two most jinxed teams in baseball playing for the World Series?! End Times, people, it's the Seventh Seal breaking...).

And Trump - unable to fault himself and oh so eager to fault everybody else - is taking a flawed and dangerous argument that "the whole thing is rigged." He can't consider the real possibility that he's not that well-liked or successful in the first place.

We've had talk, rumors, accusations of "rigged" elections before... but never this public, never BEFORE the actual election, and never by any of the major candidates themselves.

One of the things that keeps our nation going - politically, financially, socially - is our citizenry's faith in the nation itself. That we and our neighbors at some basic level respect the institutions we rely on - despite all our bitching and wailing - to do right by our rules and to perform fair and just between all sides of any problem.

Which is why it hurts our nation a lot when scandals and revelations show any level of corruption or ineptitude in any of our foundational systems. Granted, there are breakdowns and we should rail against them and seek reforms to fix those failures, but more often than not the system works... until enough people don't believe in that system anymore.

Trump is intentionally destroying that belief, specifically in the political and electoral systems that establish our nation's leadership (which affects our laws, our economic priorities, our national defense, our children's futures). He'd rather replace that faith with the idea that I, Trump Can Never Lose.

To that, Trump is claiming - will keep claiming - that the polls are skewed even after he'd openly crowed at rallies how he's led every one of them. Trump is claiming that the mainstream media - which just weeks ago gave him free unstoppable and in some cases fawning coverage - has always been "against him." Trump is claiming that Hillary shouldn't even be allowed to campaign: He's taking the wingnut claims of her "criminal behavior" to the logical - and uninformed/lying - conclusions.

On Trump's argument about voter fraud, he's taking the long-held argument of the Republican Party itself about such "fraud" being widespread. But when you look at the GOP's stance on such "fraud" you'll notice it always involves groups - Blacks, Latinos, poor, young, women - that habitually vote Liberal/Democratic. The GOP's been saying for years basically that "those" voters don't vote Republican, ergo "those" voters can't be trusted.

Those Republican claims of mass voter fraud, by the by, never hold up in courts of law, as they can't prove with any evidence of widespread or organized efforts to cheat at the ballot box: A clear sign that what the Republicans - and now Trump - are clearly trying to do is suppress the votes of those American citizens that they can't control.

And yet here's Trump rallying his followers over such false claims, guaranteeing that a sizable portion of that voting base - the Far Right - will never accept any result other than a Trump win as "legitimate."

"If *I* win." Trump straight out said that.

And so here's how Trump - and pretty much every Voter Fraud conspiracy nut - is getting it wrong (dear Lord, I'm linking to the National Review again):

As a factual matter, this is, of course, bunk. The electoral process, from bottom to top, is managed by citizens and governed by a dense body of election law. Vote-counting is heavily scrutinized by party officials and independent monitors, and irregularities are subject to legal challenge. The voting equipment used is tested prior to Election Day and carefully monitored before, during, and after. None of this is to say that voter fraud does not exist, or that errors don’t occasionally affect vote totals. But to “rig” an election at the national scale would require logistical know-how seen only in Hollywood capers. To think that the same Clinton campaign that had trouble putting away Bernie Sanders has now arranged to steal an election on a continental scale defies logic - to put it mildly.

For all the fear-mongering about machines, fake IDs, the dead rising to vote in select counties... that's all worthless rending of shirts and pulling of hair. It just doesn't happen on that scale.

I speak from personal experience. I lived in Broward County during the 2000 fiasco, and in 2002 our county was upgrading from the punchcards to the touchscreens. The Elections office asked for county employee volunteers to help out, so I did. I was assigned as a (paid) precinct supervisor to a corner of Coral Springs and trained on the new equipment.

The county had it so that the staff at these precincts had some balance between party affiliations: I was still Republican at the time so they had a Democrat among the (unpaid) volunteers. The precinct itself as I recall was mostly Republican anyway. I'm pretty sure I brought donuts for the staff.

The election itself - the Governor race, Congressional midterms - wasn't a large turnout one so we weren't too busy. Most people needed help walking through the new tech but we had few complaints. We ended up with a good turnout (it was over 50 percent of residents) and we had only one touchscreen not work for us (we still got people to vote on the others). We tallied the results, printed the receipts, posted one at the precinct door by law so the residents could confirm in general that the numbers weren't faked, and drove the equipment and sealed bags of the provisional ballots to the regional elections office near Deerfield Beach, waited in line for two hours to get that stuff secured with the official counters, and that was that.

There are few ways to cheat the system on a grand scale. We had signature proofing. We were a state that I think always required photo ID - at least when I started voting - so there was that. Hacking the electronic machines would have to happen on a large scale - and in the Elections office - which runs the risk of too many people knowing and blabbing. The one real problem - machines breaking down - is more a fault of state governments that refuses to adequately fund their own elections process (or intentionally refuses to allow more voting days/hours as a voter suppression tactic).

At worst, I could have had a fake voter show up to stuff a ballot at my precinct but he'd only do it one time: If he came back in we'd have known and got the security guard to detain him. So it'd have to take an army to do that kind of ballot stuffing, but that would well have tripped up by any of the safeguards - photo ID, signatures, address confirmation - we had in place. And again, something on that scale requires such coordination that too many people would know and too many would blab. The type of voter "fraud" you get is one where some poor soul isn't properly registered to the correct precinct or where some jerk tries to create voter IDs for other people (there was a case of this guy in the Midwest - Illinois? Indiana? - doing that. And he still got caught).

And yet Trump - and too many among the Far Right - would deny all of those safeguards exist or work. Trump - much like a Far Right consumed by fears of racial and religious takeover - would rather wallow in the safety of his own delusion that he's a victim of outside forces. And eager to blame the Others he's so easily vilified.

As such, Trump is intentionally keeping our nation divided through a process that requires us to unite through concession or acceptance of the results.

The last time that happened was with Lincoln, when the South refused to accept his winning the Presidency in 1860.

That's where Trump is leading us back to when he railed in anger and delusion at Gettysburg. Mocking everything Lincoln represents of the United States to this day.

So When We Map Out Districts For Voting, It Means We Count EVERYONE

The Supreme Court is not always divided by the partisan makeup of the Justices. Decisions do occasionally come down with a united vote bridging both the ones seated by Republicans and those seated by Democrats.

Such as today's ruling - Evenwel v Abbott - about how voting districts must adhere to the principle of "one person one vote". As described by Lyle Denniston over at SCOTUSBlog:

While virtually every argument used by the Ginsburg opinion in favor of basing representation on total population (because elected officials supposedly represent everybody and not just the voters) points toward a constitutional mandate, it turns out that the states actually are not bound by the Constitution to craft new election districts by starting with total population.   The only thing settled constitutionally now is that the states also are not required to divide up districts by using the voting population to be assigned to each, making them equal.  Should a state do it that way, the opinion seems to say, the Court will then face that issue.

Essentially the Court is telling us that they'll decide this matter again if a state DOES try to rewrite how they draw up districts by just the registered voters. Thing is, the way Ginsburg wrote this, the Court is dropping a huge hint that they'll side on having total population as the deciding factor.

Today's ruling makes it harder for states to, as the Washington Post's preliminary article about this case described it, redraw districts in more skewed gerrymanders that devastate major city populations: "A court ruling changing 'one person, one vote' to eligible voters (or some other metric) could flip many district sizes on their head. It would end up giving rural and more homogeneous districts more power than diverse urban areas, where there tend to be fewer eligible voters."

Say for example here in Florida: there may be 1.7 million people in Broward County/Ft. Lauderdale but only 1.1 million registered to vote. That's 600,000 people no longer counted towards carving out a district for the State Senate that has to draw out districts to fill 470,000 or so. Take away that 600,000 and Broward loses one full State Senate district to represent them. One less senator to represent a large county full of minority populations, young residents, and city residents relying on constant infrastructure repairs and upgrades. That would be a district that shifts outward to areas where there would be more registered voters - older and more rural - but fewer actual people.

The thing is, our elected officials are supposed to represent not just the ones who vote but everyone who resides within their scope of responsibility: everyone who lives in a State Representative's district, for example, even the ones who didn't vote for him/her. They're supposed to think of the children who are too young to vote, they're supposed to think of the poor who tend not to register to vote, they're supposed to think of everyone period when it comes time to pass legislation. In practice of course the Representatives heed their lobbyist buddies more, but the duty to the public remains...

Ginsburg spells that out specifically in her ruling (p.18):

As the Framers of the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment comprehended, representatives serve all residents, not just those eligible or registered to vote... By ensuring that each representative is subject to requests and suggestions from the same number of constituents, total population apportionment promotes equitable and effective representation...

It's this passage that drops the hint to states that messing with "total population apportionment" isn't going to impress her or most of her fellow Justices.

Oddly enough, this decision had both sides losing in some way: the plaintiffs were denied the chance to have districts drawn up in a way that favored conservatives across many states, but the defendants - Texas and the Obama administration - were also denied having a confirmed Constitutional requirement to use total population as the redistricting metric.

Granted, the decision wasn't really unanimous - Alito wrote a concurrence that still questioned the final decision, and Thomas argued that the whole matter of "one person one vote" should still be left up to the states. But Ginsburg's ruling is as near a united decision that we'll ever see from a 5-4 bench split (well, 4-4 since the US Senate won't even speak to Garland right now, but I digress).

What matters here is that this ruling, relying on previous court decisions, is creating the framework to argue for stronger "one person one vote" requirements to voting rights overall. I'd like to think this can be the framework to argue for universal voter registration, to ensure that all possible residents of age (27th Amendment, sorry 5-year-olds...) have this right and the ability to employ it. Or to argue against gerrymanders that defy that "one person one vote" by pointing out how gerrymanders waste votes rather than ensure them.

Here's hoping.

Notes Before the Madness Is Official

Some different thoughts on similar topics or maybe otherwise. I dunno. Read on, and judge my prose against the poetry of the age:

1) It's surprising how deadlines creep up on you when you're busy editing your political rants into a book format, but here we are with February knocking at the door and the Iowa Caucus the starting pistol for the actual marathon race for the White House to begin.

Just as a note, this is how the Iowa Caucus actually works, which is to say nowhere near as formal and accurate as a primary vote. One reason why I don't buy into the importance of the Iowa Caucus that much.

2) The other reason I don't buy into the Iowa Caucus is that it's just ONE state putting in a vote for candidates to each of the major parties. Just one state alone does not represent the mood or mindset of the nation as a whole. And yet our primaries and caucuses are skewed to one or a handful of states deciding one right after the other, voting on regional or extreme issues that matter in one state but not the others.

The order in which the states go is itself degrading: our most populous state is California, and yet it goes last in most election cycles. That's dangerous in a horse race style campaign where candidates who could prosper in those later states can't keep up and drop out before they have a chance. It's been rare for a race to go the distance: the Obama-Clinton challenge was a legitimate back-and-forth over delegates up to early June 2008, but that's been about it in recent times. Even in races where a runner-up kept at it  - such as Santorum in 2012 running behind Mitt Romney - the race itself was over by March because enough early delegates were garnered to cross the 50 percent+1 threshold.

The President of the United States is essentially the representative of the entire nation, not of Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina or Florida or Ohio or Texas or California. I still argue that all the voters in all the states (and territories) should have a say in who their candidates for the Presidency should be: I still argue we shouldn't start with Iowa alone, or New Hampshire alone, or even California alone. I still argue all fifty states should have a One Day Primary, in late May when all the candidates have had the chance to campaign all over and all the issues have been debated and everything vetted.

3) Considering points 1) and 2), this is why I'm underwhelmed about the importance of Iowa itself as a back-breaker among the early Primary/Caucus states. I mean, how many candidates who won Iowa went on to win the actual nomination in the last 40 years? (Note: the cutoff for this measure is usually 1972-76 due to changes in electoral reforms post-Watergate) As of 2012, the numbers seem bleak.

Personally, I've always found that it's been South Carolina that's been the firewall for Republican candidates. Winning Iowa and New Hampshire may be great for momentum, but if you're Republican and you can't win South Carolina, you're in trouble. Granted, the results in 2012 put lie to that theory of mine considering Newt won SC but still lost the nomination, but that's because Newt's a hypocritical jerkass who couldn't really win anywhere else (his other victory was his home state of Georgia)...

So, yeah, whoever wins Iowa, be it Trump or Cruz it doesn't matter much until the other states start chiming in, and the other candidates fight harder to win them...

4) And yet, despite being an underwhelming state, Iowa itself is remarkable THIS cycle because this will be the first state to actually put the Republican field to the test.

There's been few things that kept the Republican party leadership sleeping well at night since all those 2015 candidacy announcements. One thing has been the assumption that Likely Voters - the ones who answer the polling questions and show up for rallies - do not directly equal Actual Voters at the booth - because, you know, that takes time from work or family.

Serious poll trackers like Nate Silver have been saying for months that early Primary polling is skewed and untrustworthy:

Trump will also have to get that 25 or 30 percent to go to the polls. For now, most surveys cover Republican-leaning adults or registered voters, rather than likely voters. Combine that with the poor response rates to polls and the fact that an increasing number of polls use nontraditional sampling methods, and it’s not clear how much overlap there is between the people included in these surveys and the relatively small share of Republicans who will turn up to vote in primaries and caucuses.

But there’s another, more fundamental problem. That 25 or 30 percent of the vote isn’t really Donald Trump’s for the keeping. In fact, it doesn’t belong to any candidate. If past nomination races are any guide, the vast majority of eventual Republican voters haven’t made up their minds yet.

As Silver says, polling is one thing and actual results at the booth are another. It IS possible that 35 to 45 percent of Likely Voters in a state will say "Oh yeah Trump is MY GUY" and yet when push comes to shove only 20 percent actually do show up to vote. Or that the ones getting polled do not reflect the actual mood or viewpoint of everyone else in the state. Or that the poll respondents give the answers they THINK the poll-takers want to hear. A lot of that falls under what's called the Bradley Effect. It is possible people are just answering for Trump because A) he's the only name they remember, B) they're messing with the pollsters, C) he's a default answer because they honestly haven't decided on the field yet.

So what happens when the results might match? What happens if the answer is D) Trump DOES speak to their political outrage and they show up to vote that way?

Granted, turnout can be low and the projected numbers on that based on polling won't likely occur. But what if the percentages remain aligned between Likely and Actual? What happens if the 35 percent of poll respondents for Trump turn into 35 percent of the real-world vote count?

If that does happen, even in Iowa this Monday with its wonky caucus and its minor importance, expect to see rioting outside the RNC headquarters by Tuesday. Because it means the polls aren't lying, aren't skewed. That they are an accurate reflection of a voter base fearful of immigrants and foreigners, of a voter base willfully ignorant of the nuances of governance, of a movement within the foundation of the party itself driven by an anger that can no longer be contained.

It will mean that Trump is in charge of the entire circus that is a Year of Election, he's in the driver's seat of the GOP clown car.

5) And how will Trump end up in the driver's seat? It will be the Republicans' own damn fault.

The GOP started off looking at 2016 as a big year for them to win. They were looking at the trend of how control of the White House can shift from one party to the other every eight years - which isn't entirely true - and so figured with Democratic President Obama term-limited that a Republican would take his place.

This is why so many candidates - a record 17 names! - put their hats in the ring. Just ride that realignment cycle of voter dissatisfaction of Democratic rule into an easy win and reap the benefits.

And yet... right now they and the national punditry are looking at that field getting dominated by the likes of Trump and thinking "What the hell went wrong?" Even Tucker Carlson, self-appointed defender of uber-Conservative thought, is speaking this in public. Although Carlson is only fully correct on one point: the Conservative Establishment - hiding itself in its own echo chamber of think-tanks and talk-shows - doesn't understand its own voters anymore (his other points about immigration as an issue overlook the real issues of income inequality, personal debt among millions of families, and the fact that illegal immigration is actually dropping the last 3-4 years).

What's really happening here is something I alluded to earlier about the Republicans' self-defeating paradox in what they want from their political standard bearer: "...The Republicans have an Active-Negative agenda, yet they need a Passive-Positive - another Reagan with the charm and skill to avoid the issues and project a congenial persona - to sell it..." I noted in slightly greater detail:

Here's the problem I'm finding about the Republican Party: the party base - the Tea Partiers, the Second Amendment Fetishers, the small-government-drown-it-in-Grover's-bathtub crowds - seems so eager to want an Active-Negative type serving as their President.  They want someone who will restrict and slash government services, cut taxes on the rich (while raising taxes on the lazy poor), deregulate businesses to run amok in a Free Market free-range, shut down the borders against illegals, and wage war against The Dreaded Other despite the costs.  A lot of behavior that history shows falls to Active-Negatives under what Barber called the "I Must" mindset that drives A-Ns to Compulsive, unshakable agendas.

But at the same time, the party leadership recognizes that such A-N types are difficult to elect to office anymore...  So the party leadership is trying to manufacture, promote, or encourage the illusion that their "establishment" candidates - the likes of Jeb, or even what they tried with Romney last time - will run "positive" campaigns pursuing "reforms" on topics like education and immigration and job creation...

And that's not happening with Jeb, is it? Or any other Establishment candidate, even the likes of Rubio is having trouble polling in double-digits.

The ones that have polled well - even temporary faves like Carson and Fiorina - have been the anti-Establishment candidates of Trump and Cruz. The ones openly campaigning on the issues as Active-Negative types, shilling to the attitudes of No Compromise, with bullying as their method and destruction of the status quo (even what works) their intent.

They're polling well - and likely to win the GOP Primaries - because Trump and Cruz are going up against terrible Establishment candidates. I mean, on paper some of them are respectable - various Governors, a few Senators with long careers, varied experiences in the public and private sectors that normally would impress Republican voters - but on the debate stage and on the campaign trail turn into flat, boring, degrading personas that few people would want to meet at a high school reunion much less listen to at a rally. That's because in many respects, these Establishment candidates are by habit Active-Negatives and can't provide an honest contrast between fellow A-Ns.

With a Republican Party united behind essentially one message and platform - lacking diversity or disagreement among themselves over the issues that would provide honest contrast and choices between candidates - the choices are now over Personality, which candidate can project as a Reagan-esque Leader of Charm and Skill. None of them do (not even Trump or Cruz despite their numbers), none of them can present himself (herself) as another Reagan. They're all little Nixons in varying degrees of personalities and talking points, and nobody wants another Nixon.

Trump may have a stage presence similar to Reagan's, but Trump has none of the congeniality or warmth or wit that Reagan used. Trump is all bluster, all noise and braggadocio, quick with the insult but not the bon mot, which may rally the Far Right who enjoys such displays but will wear out its welcome among the average voters who seek better leadership qualities than that. On a stage littered with A-Ns, Trump's unique trait has been an unshakable confidence that few A-Ns actually possess.

This has been the result of the RINO Party Purge: driving out all progressive or moderate or centrist thought from the Republicans until only those who openly wholeheartedly accepted a Far Right agenda were in the ranks to rise up to this level of power. When your Party accepts and promotes only candidates who love an Active-Negative (restrictive and anti-government) agenda, Active-Negative candidates (like Nixon) are all you get.

They honestly do not have a contrasting personality that can go up against the Nativist Populist mood of the GOP Far Right base. They do not have someone respectable enough - with his own power base among more moderate voters within the party ranks that cannot be shredded by the Far Right Noise Machine that really controls the party now - to stand against Trump's wave of support and argue effectively for saner solutions.

6) Trump's refusal to show up for a Primary debate - hosted by the Far Right Noise Machine's foundation AKA Fox Not-News no less - can have serious repercussions if Trump does well (Second or better) in Iowa and especially if he wins in New Hampshire.

It will means A) Trump does not have to play by the Party's rules, and B) Trump does not have to suck up to the Far Right Noise Machine to win the Far Right voters, which will be a major break in the power that Noise Machine - Fox, Newsmax, National Review, all the other wingnut media in orbit around them - has wielded since the 1990s. It will mean NOTHING within the usual chains of command among the Conservative Republicans - the deep pocket backers, the party's internal bureaucracy, decades of protocol and etiquette - can contain or even stop Trump. Outside of straight-up cheating, that is. In this scenario, only Trump can destroy Trump before the nomination is locked up. And he may be too media-savvy for self-immolation.

And what happens if Trump wins and becomes the standard bearer for the GOP heading into November? Well, that's been considered and will need reconsideration when that dread day comes. We'll see.

So, to summarize: I'm not worried about Iowa all that much and not really concerned about Iowa. But like a fantastic car-wreck on the interstate, I cannot look away...