This November, people who care about enhancing democratic principles have a few things to feel good about. But, in the toxic political environment that passes for “democracy” these days, no good deed goes unpunished. So, there’s bad news, too. Here’s the rundown:

Maine’s Clean Elections Initiative
On the hopeful side, Maine voters have approved Question 1, by a margin of 55 to 45 percent. The measure, designed to strengthen Maine’s previously enacted Clean Elections Act, includes the following provisions:

-Increasing funding for the Maine Clean Elections Fund from $2 million to $3 million by eliminating $6 million in “low-performing, unaccountable” corporate tax exemptions, deductions, or credits “with little or no demonstrated economic development effect”;

-Upping penalties for violating campaign finance disclosure rules;

-Adjusting political ad disclosure rules to require the disclosure of a campaign’s top three funders; and

-Allowing candidates to qualify for additional funds.

Summing up the intent of the new provisions U.S. Senator Angus King [I-ME] said that it ensures that “candidates throughout Maine can run for office without being reliant on special interests and big money donors.”

Seattle’s “Democracy Vouchers”
By a vote of 60 to 40 percent, Seattle voters passed a sweeping measure to enact public financing of the city’s elections. Huffington Post describes the initiative this way:

The measure will create a first-of-its-kind system of publicly funded “democracy vouchers” to be distributed to citizens to donate to candidates participating in the public funding system. Each citizen will be able to distribute four $25 vouchers to participating candidates. This goes along with a raft of other campaign finance, disclosure, ethics and lobbying reforms also included in the initiative.

The passage of these two measures is a good sign. Maybe voters are wising up to the disaster that is Citizens United, which enabled big money—via unlimited campaign spending by corporations, unions and wealthy individuals.

NJ Gov. Chris Christie vetoes automatic voter registration
Unfortunately, the Republican war on voters [specifically Democratic-leaning voters] continues. Earlier this year, the Democrat-controlled New Jersey legislature did the right thing by passing a bill to automatically register people who apply for drivers’ licenses or state ID’s. It also would have created two weeks of in-person early voting, and would have added on-line voter registration. The bill would have added an estimated 1.5 million new voters to the state’s rolls.

Unfortunately, Republican Gov. Chris Christie, after sitting on it for five months, vetoed the bill last week. It was the second time he vetoed a voting-rights-related bill in three years. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, Christie has previously said that he does not support making it easier for residents of his state to vote.

“In New Jersey, we have early voting that are available to people,” he said in June. “I don’t want to expand it and increase the opportunities for fraud.”

[Of course, study after study and investigation after investigation have concluded that voter impersonation is a rarity. The true fraud is the one being perpetrated on the people who should be eligible to vote without restrictions.]

New Jersey currently ranks 39th in the country in both percentage of eligible voters who are registered and percentage of voters who actually case a ballot, according to New Jersey Working Families. The state does not allow in-person early voting, but requires citizens who want to cast an absentee ballot early to apply for one at an election official’s office. New Jersey also does not permit online voter registration, something that is allowed in 33 other states.

It is incredible that a Governor would actively veto a law that would make the defining activity of democracy more available to citizens of the state. But apparently, rigging elections is more important than democracy, just as saying no to virtually anything associated with President Obama or other Democrats has become the modus operandi in many state legislatures and Governor’s mansions—at the expense of the citizens who are ostensibly being represented.

Wake up, people. We are at risk of permanently losing what’s left of our democracy–one vote-rigging law–and one vote-rigging Governor–at a time. Kudos to states and cities that are trying to turn the tide back in the propoer direction.

The post Democracy watch, Nov. 2015: Two steps forward [ME, WA], one huge step back [NJ] appeared first on Occasional Planet.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s highly publicized political woes are creating an economic and artistic surge for political cartoonists. Here’s a gallery of cartoons satirizing the latest headline- and eyebrow-raising [and public-opinion-poll-killing]  revelations in the continuing saga.

The post Chris Christie: A gift to political cartoonists appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I am addicted to the Chris Christie bridge scandal. In trying to figure out why this story has resonated so deeply with me, I happened upon a unique possibility. I believe it is my love for fictional political thrillers. The writer in me cannot help looking at this scandal as the plot of a novel. It’s not difficult to come up with twists that have yet to be discovered. The more I think about them, the more I feel there’s a lot more we have yet to learn.

Chris Christie, being an East Coast governor and Republican, never showed up on my radar until everyone noticed him. Just before the presidential election, and after hurricane Sandy’s landfall, Chris Christie abandoned Mitt Romney and started hanging out with President Obama. To me, it seemed a strange thing to do. Yes, I heard Christie say that he would do anything to help his state, but he was overly affectionate, so very chummy, and the timing was insane, if you were rooting for the Republican to win the election.

Fast-forward to the bridge scandal and it got me thinking. Christie is being painted as a vindictive man who cannot be crossed. Whether the bridge scandal is payback for a non-endorsement or something else, none of the theories has a positive spin for the governor of New Jersey. He has the appearance of a petty, small-minded man who will break any rule to get his message out: don’t mess with Christie.

He is also known as a micro-manager whose fingers are in every pie. Resembling Richard Nixon at the height of his paranoid thuggery, Christie never forgets a slight. It didn’t matter that his election was in the bag. Like Nixon, he could not ignore his own base nature. Or, as Chris Hedges wrote in Truthdig, “Christie is the caricature of a Third World despot. He has a vicious temper, a propensity to bully and belittle those weaker than himself, an insatiable thirst for revenge against real or perceived enemies, and little respect for the law and, as recent events have made clear, for the truth.”

How, in our imaginary novel, do we apply what we’ve learned in the bridge scandal to what happened at the end of the last presidential election? Mitt Romney had been receiving a lot of pressure from the east coast moneymen to make Chris Christie his running mate. This was the same money Mitt came from himself, so one would assume it carried a lot of influence. And yet, he went with Paul Ryan, a Midwesterner. It leaves us with a lot of questions. How did Christie feel about getting snubbed? And for a man like Christie, who had spent his life living in the land of vendettas and whose standard operating procedure was, “We don’t get mad; we get even,”[1] — how would he reconcile being passed over for a prize that big? His character tells us that he would not let it pass. Is it possible that Chris Christie’s behavior in the run-up to the election had more to do with revenge than hurricane relief. Perhaps hugs with Obama were a small price to pay for helping to lead Romney to a humiliating loss.

Or was it something even more Machiavellian? He may have killed two birds with one stone. By helping torpedo Mitt Romney’s bid for the presidency, Christie played a role in getting Barack Obama a second term. Had Romney won, it would most likely have been eight years until the next election. And then Paul Ryan, who would still be a young man, could try for his eight years. That’s 16 years of Republican rule that may have left the country desperate for some Democrats. Where would that have left Christie? He is an impatient man when it comes to power. He would not want to wait 16+ years. Instead, because Romney lost, he just had to wait the four years of Obama’s second term and then the field was wide open.

Christie has said on more than one occasion that he was willing to do anything in order to win whatever he had his sights on. Everyone knows his eyes are firmly fixed on the Presidency. Just what is he willing to do? Calling for some traffic problems seems small in comparison to sabotaging a presidential election. And yet, his abandoning Romney and cozying up to the President may have played at least some role in the reelection of Barack Obama therefore giving Chris Christie a clear shot in 2016… as long as no one figured out who he really was.

Let’s hope this is one book that does not have a happy ending for its villainous central character. Time for this petty despot to fade into a footnote.

——————————————————————————–

[1] Christy quote repeated by Richard Merkt on “Up w/Steve Kornacki” 01/11/2014

The post Chris Christie, paperback villain appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It took exactly one, tersely worded email to blow the lid off Chris Christie’s “Bridge-gate” scandal. The now infamous “Time for some traffic problems in Ft. Lee” email from Christie’s deputy chief-of-staff, Bridget Ann Kelly, to David Wildstein at the Port Authority set in motion the politically engineered traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge, the four-days of massive inconvenience to New Jersey citizens, and the potentially politically disastrous revelations about it.

Without that seven-word note [eight, if you count Ft. and Lee as two separate words], it’s likely that we’d know nothing about what happened behind the scenes.

So, why the hell did Bridget Kelly send that damning email?

To me, it’s all about old-school vs. new-school communications. In a previous world order, before email/Facebook/texting/Twitter, if you had something—especially something incriminating—that you wanted to tell a co-worker, you’d either pick up the phone and call his/her extension, or you’d walk across the hall to his or her office, or meet at an out-of-the-way café or bar or parking garage, and communicate face-to-face. (If you were an idiot, you might put your secret information in a memo and either send it through the office mail system, put a postage stamp [what’s that, again?] on it and drop it in a mailbox, or put it on your co-worker’s desk.)  But that’s old school, antiquated, quaint, slow—and, by the way, less traceable.

So, there it is: If Kelly and her co-conspirators had simply called each other, or had a secret meeting, or walked across the hall, the whole thing might have remained under the radar. It’s a lot harder to subpoena a phone conversation [unless, of course, you’re the NSA or the FBI or the FISA court, and I doubt that any of those organizations were giving a hoot—at the time– about the inner workings of Chris Christie’s office or of his politically vengeful mind.] Old-style incriminating memos—with no carbon copies [what are those?]—can be burned or otherwise destroyed, and with them—poof!—the evidence of conspiracy or other wrongdoings.

But new-school communications are the way it is. It’s easier. It’s faster, it’s freakin’ instantaneous. And that’s the way we like it—until something like Bridge-gate happens. I suspect that’s what occurred here.  Electronic communications are the default, the way most staffers like Bridget have been doing things since day one, and who can blame a generation raised on speedy, keystroke communications from using the technology that’s available?

Unfortunately, the need for speed makes it too easy to forget that technology is not always our friend: Richard Nixon fell in love with the idea of recording his conversations for posterity on an audiotaping system—state-of-the-art at the time—and look what happened to him.

But maybe there’s a lesson to be learned from all of this—even if you’re not doing something wrong. (One could speculate, of course, that Kelly et al didn’t think what they were doing was in any way nefarious or in need of concealment—maybe dirty tricks and political retribution were simply part of the atmosphere in the Christie administration—part of his no-nonsense, tough-guy cachet—and didn’t need to be hidden.) It might be helpful, even in seemingly innocent circumstances, to pause before sending and to consider whether what we’re about to say electronically might be better said face-to-face.

I’ll bet Bridget Ann Kelly is thinking that right now.

The post Old-school communications might have saved Chris Christie a lot of embarrassment appeared first on Occasional Planet.