The history of the Republican Party over the past seventy years includes battles between the moderates within the party against the extremists to the right. During most of the second half of the 20^th Century and some of the 21^st Century, the moderates were able to seize the presidential nomination. But the far-right Donald Trump steamroller movement seems to have almost crushed the remaining elements of the moderates.

In 1952, the Republican Party was divided between the moderates favoring General Dwight Eisenhower and the deeply conservative (though barely extremist) element favoring Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. Eisenhower won the nomination in 1952 as well as the presidential election. The same thing happened four years later in 1956.

The GOP nomination in 1960 went to Eisenhower’s vice-president, Richard Nixon. At that time in his life, he was actually quite moderate, in part because he was constantly currying the favor of Eisenhower. It was not a certainty that Eisenhower would endorse Nixon until a day before the convention. Nixon was opposed by progressive New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, but the former vice-president won the nomination, carrying all eleven states with primaries as well as every other state that did not have a “favorite son” running. Nixon’s ease with winning the nomination did not carry over to the election as he was edged by Democrat John F. Kennedy.

1964 was the first year in which a true right-wing extremist won the Republican nomination. The nominee was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, as he defeated Rockefeller on the strength of his appeal to many voters who were angry about the progressive turns in the Kennedy-Johnson years. Goldwater became famous for uttering in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Goldwater wanted to undo much of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society as well as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But he carried very few moderate Republicans and was soundly defeated in November. That election, 1964, was the last time that Democrats won in a landslide.

1968 was one of the strangest and most disconcerting years in American history. Lyndon Johnson announced on March 31 that he would not seek renomination. Two other individual seemed to be likely candidates, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York. Kennedy was assassinated right after the California primary in early June. Johnson’s vice-president Hubert Humphrey ran as the “proxy Johnson” candidate. He did not enter any primaries, but with the help of Johnson in garnering support from the “party regulars,” Humphrey was able to win the nomination at the disjointed convention in Chicago where on-going violence was taking place in downtown.

On the Republican side, Richard Nixon was able to make a comeback, in large part because of the support that he had given Republican candidates across the country over the previous six years. He was opposed by newly elected governor of California Ronald Reagan and New York’s long-time governor Nelson Rockefeller. Nixon won ten of the twelve primaries and 61 % of the delegate votes. His politics fell somewhere between the progressive Rockefeller and the conservative Reagan. He won the election against Humphrey and third-party candidate Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Nixon governed moderately for his first several years, but as his anger rose, he became more and more conservative.

Even though the Watergate break-in occurred in 1972, it did not impact Richard Nixon’s reelection that year. He carried every state other than Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. He had no opposition in the Republican primary that year, and his election race against Senator George McGovern of South Dakota was a breeze for him. But he was initially worried that he would have to run against popular Maine Senator Edmund Muskie. The fact that McGovern bested Muskie for the Democratic nomination was due in part to the Nixon “plumbers” who created false and misleading information about Muskie, and they eventually trapped him into appearing very unpresidential in a press conference.

Once Nixon won reelection, his primary focus was on the Watergate cover-up. This brought out a great deal of anger and meanness on his part. It also was consistent with his notion of an “enemies list” and crafting domestic policies to undermine Johnson’s Great Society. By the time that Nixon resigned in August of 1974, his governance was quite conservative.

In 1973, after disgraced Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigned, Rep. Gerald Ford of Michigan became vice-president. He assumed the presidency upon Nixon’s resignation. He was faced with problems of inflation, recession, and an extended energy crisis. He was considered a moderate, in large part because he did not fervently support the right-wing Republican social agenda on abortion, gay rights, etc. Leading to the 1976 election, Ford was seen as vulnerable. He was challenged by the aforementioned former Governor Ronald Reagan of California. The contest was extremely tight as Ford carried 26 states and Reagan 24. Ford won 1,121 delegates and Reagan 1,078. Ford won the nomination, as a moderate, but Reagan had established himself as a national leader and was poised for 1980.

In the 1976 general election, Ford carried a great deal of Nixon’s baggage, including the fact that Ford pardoned Nixon for “all crimes committed or might have been committed.” Ford lost to energetic Democrat, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter.

Carter had a somewhat sluggish presidency as he faced many of the economic and energy problems that Ford did and he was further burdened by the fact that 51 Americans had been taken hostage by Iran during a califate revolution. The 1980 Republican nomination was going to be a prime plumb and Reagan was poised to secure in on behalf of the conservative wing of the party. He carried 44 states to the six carried by moderate George H.W. Bush, who Reagan accepted as his vice-president. Reagan defeated Carter in a landslide. Four years later, Reagan faced nominal opposition for the nomination and then prevailed in another landslide election, this time against former vice-president Walter Mondale of Minnesota.

The race for the 1988 Republican nomination was largely between two party regulars who fell somewhere between moderation and extremism. Vice-President George H.W. Bush battled Kansas Senator Bob Dole. Extremists to the right were represented by Rev. Pat Robertson of Virginia, but he carried only four states. Dole became quite upset with some of the accusations by Bush, whose campaign was managed by one of the greatest masters of dirty tricks, Lee Atwater. The Bush campaign dispensed of Dole rather early in the primary sweepstakes and went on to carry 42 states.

The Democrats continued a habit of choosing weak presidential nominees, this time former Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Atwater was incredibly skilled in embarrassing Dukakis, portraying Dukakis as being both soft on crime and weak as a military leader. Bush won in the third straight Republican landslide.

When Bush ran for reelection in 1992, he a tougher race. First, Atwater had died the year before from a virulent form of brain cancer, and his Democratic opponent was a strong one, former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. Bush was also challenged from the right within his own party by former journalist and Nixon speech-writer Pat Buchanan. Bush carried all 50 states and the District of Columbia and easily dispensed of Buchanan to win the Republican nomination.

In 1988, Bush had campaigned on a very conservative plank, “read my lips, no new taxes.” He had been able to fulfill that promise until 1992, reelection year. The federal government was running short on money and new taxes were in order. He walked back his pledge, albeit with sound reasoning. But it hurt him politically. Clinton was a breath of fresh air, particularly in the debates where he came across as much more human and compassionate than Bush. Clinton won the election in a three-way race in which eccentric businessman Ross Perot ran as an independent.

While Clinton had a difficult time getting legislation through Congress, he was still popular among voters. Two veterans of previous presidential races were the top contenders for the GOP nomination in 1996, Kansas Senator Bob Dole and Virginia journalist Pat Buchanan. In this case, the moderate, Dole, achieved an overwhelming victory, carrying delegates from 46 states, this, despite losing New Hampshire to Buchanan early in the cycle. Dole was a legitimate moderate who knew as well as anyone how Congress operated, something that was tough for Clinton to do. But Clinton started his campaign well before Dole won the Republican nomination and he carried 31 states plus DC for a 379 – 159 electoral victory. Clinton won the popular vote by a margin of over eight million votes.

The fight for the 2000 Republican nomination featured moderate Senator John McCain against conservative former Texas Governor George W. Bush. While Bush seemed to many to be too naïve and inexperienced for the job, he had an extremely skilled campaign staff, and he was able to capitalize on the growing conservative movement in the country. In the primaries, he won nearly twice as many votes as McCain and carried 45 states.

In the November general election, Democrat Al Gore of Tennessee, the sitting vice-president won the popular vote by over 500,000 votes. The electoral victor depended on the vote from Florida where there was considerable confusion and malfeasance, particularly with the use of “butterfly ballots” in Palm Beach County. At first it appeared that Gore would carry Florida; then Bush, whereupon Gore conceded. But as the Florida vote tightened up again, Gore rescinded his concession. Virtually all components of the Florida race were thrown into the courts which resulted in numerous precinct recounts. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered a decision that resulted in Bush winning the election. It was a 5-4 decision, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor later said that she thought that she made a mistake in her vote. But Bush won and what happened in the country was quite different from what would have happened with an Al Gore presidency.

Gore graciously accepted the Supreme Court’s decision, and Bush was inaugurated as president. It remains an open question as to what Bush and the Republicans would have done had the Court ruled in Gore’s favor.

It was on Bush’s watch that nine-eleven occurred. Many scholars believe that had Gore been president, he may well have paid more attention to the CIA’s warning about Al Qaeda during the first eight months of his administration and perhaps would have been able to prevent the attack from happening. Had nine eleven occurred on his watch, it is unlikely that he would have invaded Iraq for specious reasons as Bush did.

In 2004, Bush had the most nominal of opponents in the Republican primary. In the general election, he won the popular vote by over three million votes and the determinative electoral count, 285 – 251.

Most people remember the 2008 election because of Barack Obama’s nomination win over Hillary Clinton, and then his win of the presidency. But Republicans had a very competitive race for their nomination. Eventually Senator John McCain of Arizona won the contest, winning the races in thirty-seven states. But former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney won eleven contests and nearly five million popular votes to McClain’s ten million. Both McCain and Romney were seen as moderates.

Two other candidates in the race were former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee who was on the far-right of the evangelical wing of the Republican party, and Texas congressman Ron Paul who was more of a libertarian than a Republican. In 2008, the moderates in the GOP clearly carried the day.

2012 was another year in which the moderate wing of the Republican Party prevailed. Romney won going away with 42 states and over 52% of the popular vote. His nearest competitor was former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum who was an extreme right-wing religious candidate. Also on the race were Ron Paul again as well as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who in many ways was the father of the modern right-wing Republican Party.

Romney won the nomination but lost the general election to Obama. Even though Obama won reelection, he was being stymied with his legislative agenda, particularly with the obstinance of Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.

Charles Darwin would have liked the 2016 Republican race, as it was clearly an exercise of survival of the fittest. The fittest won the nomination and eventually the election, but as was clear to many when he first announced his candidacy in June of 2015, Donald Trump was not the fittest to govern.

He won the nomination against fifteen other candidates who took the stage on at least one of the televised Republican debates in the 2016 cycle. Most Republicans thought that Trump’s candidacy was a “joke,” but as more and more of the other candidates dropped out of the race, Trump became more of a concern, and then a favorite. The other candidates learned rather quickly that it was not wise for them to cross swords with Trump. He had ways of humiliating others while responding to attacks on him with more vicious rebuttals on his opponents. He dispatched in quick order with some of the previously favored candidates such as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Carly Fiorina, Santorum, Paul and Huckabee. Even before the primaries began, well-known Republicans such as former New York governor George Pataki, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, former Texas governor Rick Perry, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal. Some of those who dropped out were moderate (Kasich and Bush) but most were extreme right-wingers. The last person standing before Trump clinched the nomination was extreme right-winger Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Trump attacked Cruz by insinuating that his father had been part of a conspiracy to kill President John Kennedy, and that his wife was unattractive. When the Republican delegates assembled in Cleveland, Trump had nearly three times as many delegates as Cruz. Trump organized the convention to in many ways be a “hate-fest” as he and his supporters lambasted Republicans who did not agree with him as well as anyone with a ‘D’ (Democrat) after their name.

If the Trump – Clinton race has occurred in virtually any other democracy, Clinton would have won solidly, with nearly three million more popular votes than Trump. But this is the United States, and it has the anachronistic Electoral College. In that arena, Trump prevailed 306 – 225, and thus was declared the next president of the United States.

By 2020, Trump was so popular within the Republican Party that his only opposition was the not-well-known former governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, a genuine moderate. In the primaries. Weld won only 2.35 % of the vote while Trump essentially won the rest. Trump won the nomination and then went on to lose the general election to former vice-president and senator Joe Biden of Delaware by seven million popular votes, and in the Electoral College, 306-225, the same margin by which he had won four years previously. However, now, twenty months after the election, Trump still does not understand that he lost, nor do many of his supporters. That in itself exemplifies how far to the radical right the Republican Party currently sits.

The main difference in the 2022 Republican Party is that it’s virtually impossible to find a moderate Republican. Where are the Dwight Eisenhowers, Nelson Rockefellers, Gerald Fords, George H.W. Bushs, Bob Doles, John McCains and Mitt Romneys of the Republican Party? It seems that somewhere between the time that Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the 2016 Republican nomination in June of 2015 and the time that he won the nomination in July, 2016, it became virtually impossible to be a moderate in the GOP without getting verbally demolished by Trump.

Following the testimony of White House Chief-of-Staff aide Cassidy Hutchinson before the January 6 committee on June 28 of this year, it seems that Trump is not a shoo-in to win the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. But the mostly likely opponents are current “Trumpsters” such as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, former vice-president Mike Pence of Indiana, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. If there is a well-known moderate in the party, it would be Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney. In reality, her views on most issues are strongly conservative. Where she differs from the others is in her integrity, as show so vividly in her role as vice-chair of the Jan. 6 committee.

As we see from the chart above, Republicans have won eleven of the eighteen races since 1952. Had the winner been based on the popular vote, the split would be nine each. The Republicans have won the popular vote only once in the last eight elections (W. Bush in 2004). Theoretically the Democrats should be on a roll.

But Republican extremists seem to have captured the party, though it was only ten years ago when the party nominated a moderate (Romney in 2012). Under fair and equal rules, the Democrats may have a bright future. However, the conservative Supreme Court is actively undermining democracy, and at the present time, all bets are off.

The post Are moderate Republicans dying with a whimper; or will there be a resurgence? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The selection process of party nominees for president of the United States reveals many of the undemocratic components of the American political system. As we near the end of March, we have another slew of state caucuses. Only a tiny fraction of voters attends these burdensome meetings. For example, In the state of Nevada, there are nearly 1.5 million registered voters but only 11.984 Democrats and 74,078 Republicans engaged in the February, 2016 caucuses. That’s a participation rate of under 6%.

Democrats award delegates proportionally according to the popular votes of the candidates. But Republicans have numerous Winner-Take-All (WTA) states including large ones from March 15 such as Florida and Ohio. They have upcoming WTA primaries in Arizona, Wisconsin, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota. In Ohio, Governor John Kasich won 46.8% of the votes but collected 100% of the delegates. If this seems unfair, it is no different from the actual method that we have for electing our president on Election Day. We call it the Electoral College.

Three times in our nation’s history we have “elected” presidents who won the Electoral College, but not the popular vote. As FactCheck reports:

In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes won the election (by a margin of one electoral vote), but he lost the popular vote by more than 250,000 ballots to Samuel J. Tilden.

In 1888, Benjamin Harrison received 233 electoral votes to Grover Cleveland’s 168, winning the presidency. But Harrison lost the popular vote by more than 90,000 votes.

In 2000, George W. Bush was declared the winner of the general election and became the 43rd president, but he didn’t win the popular vote either. Al Gore holds that distinction, garnering about 540,000 more votes than Bush. However, Bush won the electoral vote, 271 to 266.

Most reformers would like to see changes to the way in which we elect or presidents. If we go back to our last presidential election, the record shows that President Barack Obama was reelected in 2012 by defeating Mitt Romney in the Electoral College by a vote of 332 to 206. Even though Obama won the popular vote by a single percentage point (50% to 49%), many consider the election to be a landslide, because Obama’s margin in the Electoral College was 62% to 38%.

What’s wrong with the way things are?

There are those who would like to see the Electoral College abolished. It has several clear shortcomings. First and most importantly, it is not based on the popular vote of the people. As recently as 2000, Democrat Al Gore received more than a half million more votes than George Bush. However, with the shenanigans in Florida, Bush won the Electoral College, 271-266. In a country that prides itself on one person-one vote, this was clearly a travesty.

Second, in recent elections, approximately ten states have been considered swing states. This means that there is considerable uncertainty about whether they will go to the Democratic or the Republican candidate. The remaining forty states are considered to be solidly for one candidate or the other. They are considered to be sure bets for one candidate or the other. This is what happened in 2012.

The three largest states in the country, California, Texas, and New York (actually tied in size with swing state Florida at 29 votes) were essentially ignored by the candidates, except for fund raising purposes. California and New York were solidly for President Obama; Texas for Governor Romney. The 82.6 million voters in these states, representing one-fourth of the population of the entire country, received virtually no visits from the candidates. There were no big rallies or parades in these states. The citizens had no value to the candidates, except for a few fat cats who provided money to the candidates’ campaigns, or the Super PACs that worked on their behalf.

Abolish the Electoral College?

The idea of abolishing the Electoral College has been around for a long time and it makes a lot of sense since we’re talking about a national election. However, the existence of the Electoral College is clearly stated in the Constitution. Article II, Section says:

The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed.

To change this would require a constitutional amendment. The process for that would be for an amendment to be proposed in either the Senate or the House and then have it approved by two-thirds of the members of each chamber. That is hardly the end of it; the proposed amendment must then be ratified by three-fourths of the states, meaning now thirty-eight of the fifty states. Amending the U.S. Constitution is a cumbersome process and has not happened since 1992 when the 27th Amendment was passed. It was a relatively minor one regarding congressional salaries.

Award electoral votes proportionally by state popular vote?

The other way to change how we vote for president would be for each state to change the way it instructs its electors vote. Forty-eight states require that all electors in their state vote for the candidate who received the largest popular vote in their state. The other two states, Maine and Nebraska, use a somewhat different system, which at most can only change one electoral vote for the entire state. However, if each of the states agreed to allot their electors proportionally to the popular vote in the state, we would have a completely different outcome from what normally happens in presidential elections. It would be very close to the outcome of a popular vote election:

2012 Electoral Vote: Obama 62%; Romney 38%

2012 Popular Vote: 50%, Romney 49%

2012 Proportional Electoral Vote by State: Obama 51%, Romney 49%

Beneath these numbers is the reality that with proportional electoral voting by state, the outcome would be just one percent different from the popular vote. It would be much closer to the will of the people than the present Electoral College. It would clearly be a much more democratic process. However, this method would only work if all fifty states agreed to allocate their electors proportionally. The likelihood of that would be less than that of passing a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College and replace it with the popular vote.

Some people have suggested proportional electoral voting in each state. However, the conclusion is that while it would advance the cause of democracy, it is not a realistic proposal. Until both the federal Congress and the state legislatures see the wisdom of amending the constitution to replace the Electoral College with the popular vote, we will continue to have both an undemocratic system and one in which one candidate can win the popular vote and another the Electoral College. There has to be a better way to build a democracy.

PROPORTIONAL ELECTORAL VOTES BY STATE, 2012

This story was originally published in 2012. It has been updated to 2016.

The post What if electoral votes were awarded proportionally? — updates appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Now that it’s 2016, it’s time to fact-check some of the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it predictions that President Obama’s critics made before his 2012 re-election. In an article published today, Think Progress highlights four big things that were supposed to happen by 2016, if Obama were re-elected. [Spoiler alert: They didn’t.]

1. Gas was supposed to cost $6.05 per gallon.

In March 2012, on the floor of the United States Senate, Mike Lee (R-UT) predicted that if Obama was reelected gas would cost $6.05 per gallon by the start 2015. Lee said that gas prices would rise 5 cents for every month Obama was in office, ultimately reaching $6.60 per gallon.

Lee was not alone. Newt Gingrich, running for the GOP nomination, predicted that if Obama was reelected he would push gas to “$10 a gallon.” Gingrich said he would reduce gas prices dramatically by reversing Obama’s energy policies. Gingrich flanked himself with campaign signs promising $2.50 gas if he was elected.

Today, the nationwide average for a gallon of gas is $2.00.

Some of the reasons for the decline in gas prices were beyond Obama’s control — including weak international demand and OPEC’s failure to reduce supply. Also driving prices lower was increased gas production in the U.S., which has doubled over the last 6 years. The policies that Lee, Gingrich and others criticized — the rejection of Keystone XL pipeline, more EPA regulation and limiting drilling on public land — have not gotten in the way of historically low prices.

2. Unemployment was supposed to be stuck at over 8%

In September 2012, Mitt Romney predicted that if Obama is reelected “you’re going to see chronic high unemployment continue four years or longer.” At the time, the unemployment rate was 8.1% and had been between 8.1% and 8.3% for the entire year.

What would breaking out of “chronic high unemployment” look like in a Romney presidency? Romney pledged that, if elected, he could bring the unemployment rate down to 6% by January 2017.

The unemployment rate currently stands at 5.0% and has been under 6% since September 2014. Since January 2013, the economy has created over 7.8 million new jobs.

3. The stock market was supposed to crash

Immediately after Obama won reelection in November 2012, many commenters predicted that the stock market was toast.

Charles Bilderman, the author of the “Intelligent Investing” column at Forbes, wrote that the “market selloff after Obama’s re-election [was] no accident,” predicting “stocks are dropping with no bottom in sight.” Bilderman said that the policies the Obama administration would pursue in his second term would “crash stocks.”

On Bloomberg TV, investor Marc Faber predicted that, because of Obama’s reelection, the stock market would drop at least 20%. According to Faber, “Republicans understand the problem of excessive debt better than Mr. Obama who basically doesn’t care about piling up debt.” Faber joked that investors seeking to protect their assets should “buy themselves a machine gun.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average currently stands at 17,425.03 and, despite a downturn in 2015, is up over 27% since Obama was reelected.

4. The entire U.S. economy was supposed to collapse

Rush Limbaugh predicted that “the country’s economy is going to collapse if Obama is re-elected.” Limbaugh was confident in his prediction: “There’s no if about this. And it’s gonna be ugly. It’s gonna be gut wrenching, but it will happen.”

The economic free fall would begin, according to Limbaugh, because “California is going to declare bankruptcy” and Obama would force states like Texas to “bail them out.” California currently has a $4 billion budget surplus.

Limbaugh added, “I know mathematics, and I know economics. I know history. I know socialism, statism, Marxism, I know where it goes. I know what happens at the end of it.”

Limbaugh said the economic apocalypse could take “a year and a half, two years, three years.” It’s been three years and two months since Limbaugh’s prediction.

The U.S. economy grew at a respectable 2% in the 3rd quarter of 2014, following 3.9% growth in the second quarter.

Happily, for Americans of all political persuasions, predictions for Obama-geddon didn’t pan out. In fact, we’ve actually had a pretty decent run. I shudder to think how things might have been–especially for people without membership cards for the top 1 percent club–had we elected Mitt Romney in 2012. And with today’s Republican field of presidential candidates, we could be in even deeper doo-doo if one of them makes it all the way. Any Democrat would be better than any of these clowns. As a very smart person [my sister] said here on Occasional Planet yesterday, make it your most important New Year’s resolution to vote in 2016.  And for gawd sake, vote for the Democrat.

The post It’s 2016: What happened to all those dire, Obama-geddon predictions? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Those of us who are politically engaged often get dozens of on-line political solicitations every day. There’s a basic formula to them:

This is even true of some of our finest progressive Democrats, such as Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Recently I’ve received some totally different correspondence from a member of Congress; Representative Lacy Clay (D), representing Missouri’s first district.

It’s a weekly edition of his newsletter called “Backbone,” which works to inform constituents and others as to what is going on in Congress. There is very little self-aggrandizement, but much valuable information from a reliable source inside the Beltway.  On Monday, September 30, 2013, Congressman Clay wrote:

House Republicans had a choice…pass the clean funding bill that the U.S. Senate sent over to keep the government functioning, or throw another Tea Party tantrum that makes a government shutdown almost certain, and brings the United States closer to defaulting on our debt.

With millions of jobs at stake and the economic recovery hanging in the balance, why are they wasting the nation’s time and the taxpayer’s money?

The truth is that the fight isn’t really between Democrats and Republicans, it’s between Republicans who want to do their job, and House GOP Tea Party members who prefer, in their own words, to employ a “Kill all the hostages” legislative strategy.

Clay goes on to write:

Here’s a link to a great story published in POLITICO that gives an inside view of the internal war that Speaker Boehner is facing.

GOP move on Obamacare all but ensures shutdowns
Read more:  http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/house-gop-budget-strategy-government-shutdown-97496.html#ixzz2gDpmH6he

You can read the newsletter in its reasonably sized entirety by clicking here:

Among other things, you might note that the newsletter:

1. Delineates the impact of a government shutdown.
2. Provides helpful information on how to learn more about and sign up for the Affordable Care Act.
3. Describes working on a settlement to provide justice to black farmers who were discriminated against until 1997.
4. Puts in a small and non-obtrusive “contribute” line.
5. Ends by Clay saying, “If you have interesting items or political news that you would like me to mention next time, please send them to me at backbone@lacyclay.org .”

The communication style of the newsletter offers way that all of us can do business with one another. But Representative Clay and other reasonable public officials need others who will engage in serious dialogue with them. Let’s hope that both parties work to nominate candidates who can reason, and who are not thoroughly self-absorbed.

The post My Congressman’s newsletter: refreshing, intelligent communication appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Recently, historian Taylor Branch said, “Everybody says partisan gridlock is poisoning America, but nobody asks how much of it, underneath, is driven by race and racial resentment?” Speaking on CBS’ Face the Nation, Branch was joined by NAACP president Ben Jealous who said, “You know, when I was a journalist in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 90s, my old publisher used to say, ‘The only problem with the New South is that it continues to occupy the same space and time as the Old South.’”

People in the know are not convinced that racism is dead in America, nor that the gridlock that Republicans have created in Congress emanates from different degrees of racial preference, if not prejudice.

The general consensus at the time of the 50^th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech was that the United States has made significant advancement in race relations over the past half-century, but that much still remained to be done.

However, at least one poll reports that race relations are declining. The NBC-Wall Street Journal reports:

Only 52 percent of whites and 38 percent of blacks have a favorable opinion of race relations in the country, according to the poll, which has tracked race relations since 1994 and was conducted in mid-July by Hart Research Associations and Public Opinion Strategies.

That’s a sharp drop from the beginning of Obama’s first term, when 79 percent of whites and 63 percent of blacks held a favorable view of American race relations.

President Obama weighed in on Branch’s assertion that partisan gridlock is driven in part by race and racial resentment. In an interview with Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff of PBS’s NewsHour, the President said, “The gridlock is connected to longstanding political views that [the government] helping those Americans who lack opportunities is bad for the economy.” He added that he doesn’t take it personally.

“There’s a line that’s drawn between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. And you know, that, I think, has been fairly explicit in politics in this country for some time.”

The President’s answer is not surprising; it would be somewhat unseemly and certainly unproductive for the President to say that he agreed that our partisan gridlock is driven by race. We have at least advanced to a point where it is no longer an effective first strategy for African-Americans to describe themselves as a victims. The President was smart enough to not do that. But the reality remains that race is a big portion of the obstinance that Republicans have about giving due diligence to President Obama’s proposals.

Certainly, for the past half-century, problems related to race have been accompanied with a great cultural divide that still exists in our country. The divide had a powerful fissure in the 1960s, when issues of race were intermingled with those of music, fashion, life-styles, and war. At the time, Republicans were generally called “conservative” because that was their view on most cultural, economic, and political issues. They did not like the change. The new voices of the counter-culture of the left became an irritant to them.

The current partisan gridlock driven by the Republicans is not exclusively due to their racial preferences. Rather, it is somewhat of a passive-aggressive response to a half century of the Left presenting a firmly rooted opposition to conservatism. Many Republicans feel distant from cultural changes in the country including “the new Hollywood,” new genres of music, racial harmony, gender equality, technology, modern science, and growing agnosticism and atheism. A somewhat threatening act in any of these areas can pose a threat to conservatives, one that they often generalize and hold against “those other people,” whom they may call hippies, non-believers, blacks, socialists or a host of other names.

The fact that our President is African-American is a threat to many conservatives, and they shut down in trying to cooperate with him. This has been the case even when he actually advocates a policy than originated with Republicans. There are also some Americans who felt good voting for Barack Obama, thinking that it would be good for the country to elect an African-American president. However, their goodwill may have lasted through the 2008 election, but not enough to support him while in office.

The cultural disparity between the two parties forms the basis of our gridlock. Taylor Branch and others are giving us a deeper view into the divide. A first step for all of us to take is to recognize the divide for what it is and acknowledge that race is a vital component of it. If we can move away from the “New Denial,” we will move further in advancing Dr. King’s dream.

[See companion article: Walking on the thin line of race.]

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During the 2012 presidential campaign in the U.S., it was easy to hyper-focus on our own election issues and to ignore elections in the rest of the world. But even if you wanted to find out how many people voted—and for which parties–in, say, the 2012 Ukraine election–you’d have a hard time getting the details. Now, there’s a site called Election Passport, where you can dig deep into the data from 80 countries.

Launched in August 2013, Election Passport is an online resource offering free access to a rich database of international election results. The site’s goal is to enable researchers and students to engage in high-level analysis of elections on countries for which data are not easily available.

From Andorra to Zambia, this site provides unusually complete data sets that include votes won by very small parties, independents, and frequently, candidate names that are difficult to locate. As an ongoing project, additional elections will be regularly added.

For most countries, especially those with elections held using the single-member plurality or block vote systems, the data include candidate names. The data are unusually complete for all countries, including very small parties and independents.

They’re not kidding about this being a research site, by the way. The data is presented raw, in Excel spreadsheets, whose headings you need to study closely if you want to get a handle on what it all means.

My own, quick, superficial dip into the website offered up some interesting tidbits. For example, in Ukraine, voters over the years have had the option of casting their ballots not just for the “Communist Party of Ukraine,” but also for groups known as the “Ukrainian Sea Party,” “Forward Ukraine, “The Peasant Party,” and even the “Fewer Words! Election Bloc.”  [Ah, the Monty-Pythhon-esque joys and variations of the parliamentary system. But I digress.]

Here’s another example: On the spreadsheet for Malaysia’s 2013 election for its House of Representatives, I found out that of that country’s 13,268,002 registered voters, 11, 257,147 cast ballots. That’s an 80 percent turnout, which puts the U.S. to shame.

Kudos to the American University political science professor—David Lublin—who created the site. Perhaps it will encourage citizens, students, reporters and researchers to look beyond the U.S. and become more aware of and knowledgeable about the wider world beyond our much-too-chauvinistic borders.

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You might think, if you are a leader of a political party, that you would seek as much air time on television and radio as possible. You might also think that it would be beneficial to your party if your candidates were able to penetrate the airwaves that traditionally are filled with information from and about opposing parties.

The operative word in the sentences is “think.” At the risk of sounding too judgmental, it strikes me that Republicans frequently have trouble rendering decisions that require real thinking rather than impulsive action based on beliefs that are likely founded on little or no reason.

Looking for a report on recent Republican actions that is “fair and balanced,” we got our latest information from Fox News.

The Republican National Committee has voted to boycott any presidential primary debates primary debates planned by CNN and NBC if they proceed with lengthy television features on Hillary Clinton, widely expected to be a 2016 Democratic candidate.

Okay, if I have this correct, the RNC (Republican National Committee) is going to try to prevent Republican candidates running for president from participating in debates sponsored by either CNN or NBC because those two networks will be presenting documentaries or docudramas about Hillary Clinton who may or may not be the 2016 Democratic nominee for president. Or as Fox further reports:

The RNC claims that a Clinton-themed documentary and a separate miniseries — in the works from CNN and NBC, respectively — will put a “thumb on the scales” in the upcoming 2016 presidential election.

The draft resolution, obtained by Fox News in advance and later voted on by RNC officials, calls on CNN and NBC to cancel what it describes as “political ads masked as unbiased entertainment.”

There are several assumptions that the RNC makes that are highly questionable. First they assume that the programs on Hillary Clinton will be slanted favorably towards her. We all know that she has plenty of baggage in the closet and it wouldn’t take much for either or both of the television networks to go for the ratings by promoting the films as “tell-alls” about Ms. Clinton. The RNC potentially could be biting the hand that feeds it.

Secondly, both CNN and NBC have millions of regular viewers. They may not tune in to watch a Republican debate on Fox but would likely watch it on more mainstream networks such as these two. But Fox reports:

Even before the Clinton dispute, Republican leaders favored plans to have fewer presidential debates with more friendly moderators. They believe their 2012 presidential candidates spent too much time beating up on each other in last year’s months-long primary season, contributing to Mitt Romney’s loss.

“Our party should not be involved in setting up a system that encourages the slicing and dicing of candidates over a long period of time with moderators that are not in the business of being at all concerned about the future of our party,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus told reporters.

The RNC may well be right that in the 2012 presidential debates Republicans spent too much time beating up on each other. But it is doubtful that such conduct had anything to do with the questions that were asked by reporters. The RNC may also be correct that the debate moderators are not concerned about the future of their party. However, the RNC fails to ask the obvious question, “Is it the job of debate moderators to concern themselves about the well-being of the Republican Party?”

Finally, it is not beyond the realm of possibility for a television network to incorporate a little bit of revenge into its decisions. Ideally CNN and NBC would not have any of their programming affected by a possible boycott, but it’s quite conceivable that anyone along the chain of command could work to shade these networks’ coverage as deliberately anti-Republican.

One of the key challenges for the Republican Party is to stop making decisions that actually sound like jokes and instead to actually be serious about public policy. They claimed that they learned a lot from their experiences in 2012 yet with decisions like the boycott, they make us all wonder.

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The fallout continues. States that previously wouldn’t have dared to impose voting restrictions that disenfranchised minorities–and, of course, Democrats–are back in business. Florida is one of them. The state’s Republican Governor, Rick Scott has now revived his plan to purge Florida’s voter rolls of people suspected of not being American citizens. He tried the same tactic in 2012,  but according to Talking Points Memo, that effort was:

 … filled with errors, found few ineligible voters and prompted lawsuits by advocacy groups that argued the purge disproportionately targeted minority groups, according to the Miami Herald. Florida’s list of registered voters suspected of not being U.S. citizens shrank from 182,000 to 2,600 to 198 before the 2012 election.

“It was sloppy, it was slapdash and it was inaccurate,” Polk County Supervisor of Elections Lori Edwards told the Herald. “They were sending us names of people to remove because they were born in Puerto Rico. It was disgusting.”

In the 2012 purge, eighty-seven percent of the people on the list were minorities, according to a Miami Herald analysis; 58 percent were Hispanic. According to the Miami Herald, election officials in most counties simply stopped moving to enforce the purge, saying they didn’t trust the state government’s list. (Two counties in southwest Florida have continued with the effort.) Over 500 of the 2,700 had been identified as citizens; 40 had been identified as non-citizens.  Forty.

The DOJ ordered the state to stop the purge in May [2012]. A civil rights lawyer for the DOJ argued that the effort appeared to violate both the National Voter Registration Act, a 1993 law that requires a 90-day period between any voter purge and and a federal election, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, under which Florida cannot make changes that affect voting in five of the state’s counties without DOJ approval.

But that was last year, before the Supreme Court shredded the Voting Rights Act, giving states a free pass to make voting more difficult in any way they chose, even if it impacted minorities [who just happen to vote mostly for Democratic candidates]. Regarding Florida specifically, the Supreme Court decision nullified a federal lawsuit in Tampa that sought to stop new searches for noncitizen voters. On the very day that the Supreme Court handed down its decision, Scott jumped right in, vowing to renew his voter-purge efforts.

Florida, as we all remember, has a dismal record on voting rights. The 2000 election was a significant low point. The state also attempted a voter purge that year. And, in 2012. Governor, Scott joined the Republican Party in a fundraising appeal that accused Democrats of defending the right of noncitizens to vote.

Did I mention that Governor Scott is up for re-election in 2014? That fact makes this a dandy time to start disqualifying voters who might cast their ballots for someone else.

According to the Miami Herald, Scott’s top elections official, Secretary of State Ken Detzner, is now creating a new list of suspected noncitizen voters by cross-checking state voter data with a federal database managed by the Department of Homeland Security.

The whole effort is rather inane: The number of illegally registered, non-citizens is clearly small, and not enough to swing an election. One Florida commentator–Chan Lowe, of the Sun-Sentinel— questions why, in today’s anti-immigrant atmosphere, a non-citizen would take the risk of registering illegally to vote:

..if you’re living here and are not a citizen, the last thing you want to do is tick off the authorities. And that’s if you’re a legal resident. If you’re an undocumented alien, you’d have to be insane to risk getting picked up because you registered to vote, of all things. It’s hard enough to get American citizens to vote in their own elections, because you can’t convince them that their single vote matters. Why would an alien think any differently

You have to wonder: Rick Scott surely knows that his voter-purge effort is going to yield very meager results. To me, it’s beginning to look more like a right-wing, dog-whistle campaign that signals to the base that Governor Scott is tough on immigration. You’d think that would be an awkward place to be in Florida, but perhaps not with Scott’s base.

Whatever his reasons, Scott’s eagerness to disenfranchise voters bears watching. And let’s not mistake it for an UNnintended consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder. This is apparently what the conservative majority on the Roberts court had in mind, and this is what we’re getting.

[Editorial cartoon: Jeff Parker, 2012]

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The Supreme Court has opened the floodgates: Less than a year since state legislatures, governors and secretaries of state in both the north and south tried to suppress minority voting via a bagful of dirty tricks, the Supreme Court has gutted the long-standing Voting Rights Act–which has long been lauded as one of the most successful pieces of civil-rights legislation ever enacted in the U.S. Ignoring what happened during the 2012 presidential campaign–remember Florida? Ohio? Pennsylvania?–the Supreme Court thinks that “our country has changed,” we’re post-racial [They’re joking, right?], and that we don’t need to make sure, in advance, that states don’t enact discriminatory voting laws. But the 5-4 Supreme Court majority essentially gives a free pass to any state that wants to do precisely that.. The laws might not stand forever, says the Court’s decision, but what the heck: States can enact them and worry about court challenges later. Great plan. Remember how well that worked for us before the Voting Rights Act?

That’s my take on it. Here’s how political cartoonists portray the Great Supreme Court Voting Rights Debacle of 2013.

[cincopa AELArOLhBx_z]

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Perhaps if it hadn’t been for the Bush v Gore Supreme Court case, we would give the Supremes the benefit of the doubt when it comes to rendering a case based on actual legal considerations, rather than political ones. Now, once again, they have presented us with a decision that, whether legally sound or not, just doesn’t pass the giggle test.

As the New York Times reported, “The Supreme Court on Tuesday (June 25, 2013) effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, freeing nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval.

The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, exactly 100 years after the  Fifteenth Amendment to the constitution made it unconstitutional to discriminate against African-Americans in exercising the right to vote. But the constitution is not self-enforcing; legislation has to be passed in order to carry out and enforce the mandates of the constitution. As part of the Civil Rights movement and the Great Society, Congress stepped up in 1965 and insisted that federal marshals ensure voting rights for African-Americans in those states that had historically discriminated against African-Americans.

Now the Supreme Court says that there is not sufficient current evidence that southern states would discriminate. Advocates of striking down the key provision of the voting rights act argued that the South has changed, and that such discrimination would not exist in sufficient numbers to make a difference.

But what does common sense say? It says that southern states are not ready to have full control over their elections. Consider that African-Americans make up 37.5% of the population of the state of Mississippi, more than in any other state. Yet in the 2012 presidential race, President Barack Obama received only 43.5% of the vote in Mississippi and he was soundly trounced by Mitt Romney who received 55.5%.

A cursory examination of these numbers shows that Obama received only 6% more votes than the total of African-American votes (Obama received over 95% of the African-American vote). The numbers play out that Obama received approximately 15% of the vote from Caucasian voters. There’s nothing subjective about this. Democrats in general have consistently lost southern states since 1968, the first presidential election year after the Voting Rights Act was passed.

The conservatives on the Supreme Court can argue all they want that the empirical evidence is on their side. But that’s simply not true. They are correct that there is a body of empirical evidence that helps substantiate their position, but this evidence is minimally relevant to the case. The irony of this decision is if the Supremes had sided with Al Gore in 2000, we would have a different make-up of the Court now and more just rulings. The shame continues.

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