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Wisconsin: GOP Thinking of Impeaching Newly Elected State Supreme Court Judge

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2023 //
18

Democrats in Wisconsin celebrated the election last spring of a liberal judge to the State Supreme Court. Her election was decisive—she won by 11 points. Her election shifted the balance on the court to 4-3 favoring liberals. Justice Janet Protasiewicz made clear as she campaigned that she would support abortion rights and oppose partisan gerrymandering. Republicans claim that her campaign statements demonstrate she is prejudiced, which is grounds for impeachment. The legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, which is evidence of partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts in a state with a Democratic governor.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled Legislature is talking about impeaching a newly elected liberal state Supreme Court justice even before she has heard a case.

The unprecedented attempt to impeach and remove Justice Janet Protasiewicz from office comes as the court is being asked to throw out legislative electoral maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2011 that cemented the party’s majorities, which now stand at 65-34 in the Assembly and a 22-11 supermajority in the Senate.

Here is a closer look at where things stand:

Protasiewicz won election in April to a 10-year term on the Wisconsin Supreme Court beginning Aug. 1. Her 11-point victory gave liberals a 4-3 majority, ending a 15-year run with conservatives in control.

During her first week in office, two lawsuits were filed by Democratic-friendly groups and law firms seeking to overturn Republican-drawn legislative maps.

WHY IS THERE TALK OF IMPEACHMENT?

Republican lawmakers who have talked about the possibility, most notably Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, allege Protasiewicz has prejudged redistricting cases pending before the Supreme Court because of comments she made during her campaign. They also argue her acceptance of nearly $10 million from the Wisconsin Democratic Party disqualifies her.

The state Democratic Party is not part of either redistricting lawsuit, but supports the efforts.

The court has yet to say whether it will hear the redistricting challenges. Protasiewicz also has yet to say whether she will step aside in the cases, including the decision on whether to hear them.

If she does step aside, the court would be divided 3-3 between liberal and conservative justices. However, conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn has sided with liberals on major cases in the past, angering Republicans.

WHAT EXACTLY DID PROTASIEWICZ SAY?

Protasiewicz frequently spoke about redistricting during the campaign, calling the current Republican-friendly maps “unfair” and “rigged.”

“Let’s be clear here,” she said at a January forum. “The maps are rigged here, bottom line.”

“They do not reflect people in this state,” Protasiewicz said at the same forum. “I don’t think you could sell any reasonable person that the maps are fair. I can’t tell you what I would do on a particular case, but I can tell you my values, and the maps are wrong.”

She never promised to rule one way or another.

WHAT DOES THE LAW SAY ABOUT RECUSAL AND IMPEACHMENT?

On recusal, the U.S. Constitution’s due process clause says a judge must recuse if they have a financial interest in the case, or if there is a strong possibility of bias.

There are also state rules laying out when a judge must step aside from a case. Those generally include any time their impartiality on a case can be called into question, such as having a personal bias toward one of those suing, having a financial interest or making statements as a candidate that “commits, or appears to commit” the judge to ruling one way or another.

On impeachment, the Wisconsin Constitution limits the reasons to impeach a sitting officeholder to corrupt conduct in office or the commission or a crime or misdemeanor.

HAS A WISCONSIN SUPREME COURT JUSTICE EVER BEEN IMPEACHED?

The Wisconsin Legislature has voted only once to impeach a state judge who was alleged to have accepted bribes and heard cases in which he had financial interests. It happened in 1853, just five years after statehood, and the state Senate did not convict.

HOW WOULD SHE BE IMPEACHED?

It takes a majority vote in the Assembly to impeach and a two-thirds majority, or 22 votes, in the Senate to convict. Republicans have enough votes in both chambers to impeach and convict Protasiewicz.

If the Assembly impeached her, Protasiewicz would be barred from any duties as a justice until the Senate acted. That could effectively stop her from voting on redistricting without removing her from office and creating a vacancy that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers would fill.

Vos, the Assembly speaker, has said he is still researching impeachment and has not committed to moving ahead.

The day after Protasiewicz was elected, Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu seemed to cast doubt on the Senate proceeding with impeachment.

“To impeach someone, they would need to do something very serious,” LeMahieu told WISN-TV. “We are not looking to start the impeachment process as a regular occurring event in Wisconsin.”

WHEN COULD THIS GET CLEARED UP?

The court is under no deadline to decide whether it will hear the redistricting challenges. Likewise, Protasiewicz doesn’t have a deadline for deciding whether she will recuse herself. Both decisions could come at any point.

If the court decides to hear the challenges, it would then set a timeline for arguments. It is unclear when, if Protasiewicz remains on the case, the Legislature might proceed with impeachment proceedings.

Why would the Republicans move to impeach the Justice? Power. They have successfully gerrymandered their state and don’t want to lose their super-majorities in both houses, where they can veto anything that Democratic Governor Tony Evers proposes.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Politics, Wisconsin

Thom Hartmann: Why You Should NOT Vote Third Party

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2023 //
147

Thom Hartmann is one of the best political bloggers in the nation and a superb journalist. This is a very important article. In 2016, I pleaded with readers not to vote third party because Trump was clearly unhinged and ignorant. Jill Stein siphoned off enough votes to elect him. I’m still haunted by the infamous photo of Jill Stein sitting at Putin’s table with Michael Flynn before the election.

We can’t afford any more George W. Bush’s or Donald Trump’s, who were both brought to us by Democratic-leaning voters thinking they were doing the right thing by voting for third party candidates…

One of the most fashionable statements these days among progressive-leaning voters who pretend to great political insight is:

“I want to vote for the person I like themost, not some party or candidate that I only half-agree with.”

Its corollary is:

“You’re just trying to get me to vote Democratic because you support that party’s corruption. I won’t be intimidated: I’m going to vote for the best person to run the country!”

Often these types of statements are followed by:

“People in France and Israel can vote for any one of a dozen parties and nobody complains that they’re ‘throwing away their vote.’ This is America: we’re even better! So, I should be able to vote for anybody I want!”

Some people pushing this line simply don’t understand the difference between thepolitical systems of France/Israel and theUS. 

Others are cynical hustlers (this is true mostly of the talk-show and YouTube hosts trying to differentiate themselves by pushing this), trying to grab and hold an audience by being “edgy,” “iconoclastic,” or “a rebel with a cause.”

So, let’s review some political basics.

Whatever its genesis, this opinion — that ignoring our two-party system and “voting for the best candidate is a good thing” — is widespread. After all, intuitively it seems to make perfect sense. 

In a rational world, who would want to vote for anyone less than the best candidate? Unfortunately, though, America’s political system is not as rational as that of countries with proportional representation or ranked choice voting.

A 2022 Pew poll found people’s unfavorable view of both parties has gone from 6 percent in 1994 to 27 percent today. Similarly, 38 percent of Americans “wish there were more political parties to choose from in this country” and may be persuaded to vote for a third-party candidate.

So why is it that third parties don’t work in America, but they do in France?

The United States, in 1789, became the first modern democratic republic founded on thenotion of the leaders of a government, through elections, “deriving their just powers from theconsent of the governed.”

The Framers of the Constitution had never heard of proportional representation or themodern parliamentary system (more on that in a minute), so they went with a simple strategy that’s today referred to by political scientists as “first-past-the-post winner-take-all” (FPTP) or, sometimes, as “majoritarian” or “plurality” election systems.

Whoever gets the most votes becomes theelected politician, and everybody else gets nothing. If you voted with the majority, you’re represented; if not, you’re not at all represented by a person or party that shares your view.

America was an English-speaking country and, as a result, this system spread mostly throughout the English-speaking world and in former British or American colonies. Majoritarian FPTP systems like ours are used in Canada, the UK, India, Jamaica, Liberia, Singapore, Philippines, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Bangladesh.

As a result, most all of these countries are dominated by two parties who tend to pass control of the nation back-and-forth over time. (Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland use Ranked Choice Voting, an even more recent innovation which allows for more political parties; more on that in a moment.)

In such a system, third parties almost always act as spoilers, drawing votes away from the major party to which they’re most closely aligned. People who vote Green, for example, generally would have voted Democratic, thus reducing that party’s vote; people who vote Libertarian would have voted Republican with the same effect.

For example, in Florida in 2000, Ralph Nader on the Green Party’s ticket got 97,488 votes, while George W. Bush “won” Florida by 537 votes. 

It strains credulity to assert that the majority of Nader’s voters would have either voted for Bush or not voted at all, which is why when David Cobb ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2004, he explicitly told people in swing states not to vote for him but to cast their ballots for John Kerry instead.

Jill Stein had no such moral compunction with her Green Party candidacy in 2016. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin provided Trump’s margin of victory in theElectoral College over Hillary Clinton, and, in each of those states, Stein pulled more votes than Trump’s margin.

(In Michigan she got 51,463 votes and Trump won by 10,704; in Pennsylvania she won 49,678 versus Trump’s margin of 46,765; and in Wisconsin Stein carried 31,006 votes but Trump only won by 22,177.)

In other words, had liberals not voted for Ralph Nader in Florida in 2000, Al Gore would have become president and we never would have been lied into a war; had people in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin not voted for Jill Stein in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have become president and America would have been spared thetrauma of 500,000 unnecessary Covid deaths and the ongoing assault to our democracy.

This is apparently not lost on sour-grapes Jill Stein, by the way; she’s reportedly helping run Cornell West’s 2024 Green Party candidacy. It’s also not lost on the Democrat-hating folks at No Labels, who have pledged to put up a candidate for president (presumably Joe Manchin) in 2024.

In the 1950s, French sociologist Maurice Duverger published several papers on this odd quirk of FPTP systems and the way they turn aligned third-party candidacies into agents for the opposition party.

This simple reality — apparently unknown to those who advocate third party candidates — has since come to be known as Duverger’s Law.

So, why can France have so many political parties without damaging their political system but here in America third parties harm those they’re most closely aligned with?

This goes to the invention of what’s called “proportional representation.”

It wasn’t until the year the Civil War started, 1861, that British philosopher John Stuart Mill published a how-to manual for multi-party parliamentary democracies in his book Considerations On Representative Government.

It was so widely distributed and read that nearly all of the world’s democracies today — all of them countries that became democracies after the late 1860s — use variations on Mill’s proportional representation parliamentary system.

In Mill’s system, if a political party gets, say, 12 percent of the vote then they also get 12 percent of the seats in that country’s congress or parliament. A party that pulls 34 percent of the vote gets 34 percent of the seats, and so on. 

The result is a plethora of parties representing a broad range of perspectives and priorities, all able to participate in thedaily governance of their nation. Nobody gets shut out.

Governing becomes an exercise in coalition building, and nobody is excluded. If you want to get something done politically, you have to pull together a coalition of parties to agree with your policy.

Most European countries, for example, have political parties represented in their parliaments that range from the far left to theextreme right, with many across the spectrum of the middle. There’s even room for single issue parties; for example, several in Europe focus almost exclusively on the environment or immigration.

The result is typically an honest and wide-ranging discussion across society about the topics of the day, rather than a stilted debate among only two parties. 

It’s how the Greens became part of today’s governing coalition in Germany, for example, and are able to influence the energy future of that nation. And because of that political diversity in the debates, the decisions made tend to be reasonably progressive: look at thepolitics and lifestyles in most European nations.

In our system, though, if a party gets 12 percent of the vote — or anything short of 50 percent plus one — they get nothing. Whoever gets 50-percent-plus-one wins everything and everybody else gets nothing, which is why we always end up with two parties battling for thehigher end of that 50/50 teeter-totter.

Pretty much every democracy in the world not listed above under the FPTP label are using Mill’s proportional representation. But we don’t, which is why we’re stuck with a two-party system.

Australia and New Zealand have diminished the damage third parties can do to themain, established parties, by using a voting system called ranked choice voting. In a system like that I could have voted for Ralph Nader as my first choice in 2000, with Al Gore as my second choice. When it becomes apparent that Nader isn’t going to make it, my first choice is discarded by thesystem and my vote for Gore becomes theone that gets counted.

Over 300 communities in America are now using ranked choice voting (including Portland, Oregon) and it works great. Moving from FPTP to proportional representation would require amending the Constitution, though, so that’s not going to happen any day soon: ranked choice voting is a nearly-as-good alternative.

At the national level, though, the best way to solve the problem of some Democratic politicians not being as progressive as we’d like is to get active by joining theDemocratic Party and becoming a force for positive change within it. To stand up for public office and elect more progressives, something that can only be done within theDemocratic Party.

To not “throw away your vote,” but to help rebuild the institution that brought America Social Security, the minimum wage, the right to unionize, Medicare, Medicaid, free college, regulatory agencies that defend and protect the environment and working class people, support for people in poverty, and that built America’s first real middle class.

Yes, there are corrupt and bought-off politicians within the Democratic Party. Ever since the Supreme Court fully legalized political bribery with their Citizens Uniteddecision and its predecessors, there have been more than a few Democrats who have enthusiastically put their hands out. The most obvious and cynical ones call themselves corporate “Problem Solvers.” 

But voting for a third-party candidate and thus handing elections to Republicans won’t solve that problem: if anything it will make it worse, because the entire GOP has committed itself to being on the take and, as we saw with Nader and Stein, third-party candidacies often simply hand more power to the GOP. 

Try to find, for example, even one Republican who isn’t benefiting from the billions in oil dollars that have flowed through the Koch network over the years and is thus willing to do something about climate change. Republican governance and their fealty to the fossil fuel industry is literally destroying America.

This is why real progressives like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and Pramila Jayapal stay and work within theDemocratic Party. For progressives to take over the country, we must first take over the DNC.

In other words, get inside the Party and take it over! It’s what hard-core conservatives did with the GOP over the past 20 years, starting with the Tea Party movement, and it’s what progressives must do with the Democratic Party.

Cornell West is a great guy, but with our FPTP election system a vote for him for president in a swing state is effectively a vote for theRepublican nominee. No third-party candidate has ever won the White House, and none ever will until we have nationwide ranked choice voting.

So, the next time somebody tells you how they’re going to only vote for “the best candidate,” you may want to give them this little Civics 101 lesson, along with the phone number, website, or email address for their local Democratic Party. And get behind themovement to bring ranked choice voting to national elections.

We can’t afford any more George W. Bush’s or Donald Trump’s, who were both brought to us, in part, by Democratic-leaning voters thinking they were doing the right thing by voting for third party candidates

Categories Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Has the GOP Become a Party of Hate and Trolls?

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2023 //
29

Thom Hartmann, journalist and blogger, describes the loathsome identity of the Republican Party. It was once a sensibly Conservative Party that believed in local control and minimal government. It boasted leaders like Dwight D. Eisenhower, Howard Baker, Leverett Saltonstall, and Margaret Chase Smith.

What does the GOP believe today, other than cutting taxes for the richest?

Today, the GOP leaders peddle lies and conspiracy theories. On social media, they take turns smearing Biden (“the Biden crime family”) and retailing any charges they stumble across on the internet. I am appalled whoever I read any Tweet (X) posted by Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Jim Jordan, or other current GOP leaders.

You will not hear from any of them a hint of bipartisanship. It’s all hate, hate, hate. They call their opposition whatever names come to mind: socialists, Communists, radical left, fascists. Their words have no substantive meaning. They are intended to spread hate and fear.

Hartman explains why they stoke hate: They have no substantive ideas to improve people’s lives.

Hartmann writes:

So, Donald Trump says that if Judge Tanya Chutkan orders him not to reveal details of the prosecution’s case before they can be presented to a jury, including the names, addresses, and testimony of witnesses against him, he’s going to do it anyway and challenge the court.

And there’s little reason to believe he won’t do it: he’ll take what he’s asserting as his First Amendment right to troll and threaten witnesses against him all the way to the Supreme Court he packed with three rightwing crackpots. If nothing else, it may buy him enough time to get elected president and pardon himself before he’s convicted.

In this, Trump has raised vicious social media trolling into a form of electoral performance art. He’s become our troll-in-chief.

America has been under the sway of rightwing trolls before. When I was a child in the 1950s, Republican Senator Joe McCarthy was conducting an active witch-hunt for “communists” in the federal government. This was the era when Robert Oppenheimer lost his security clearance for, in part, declaring himself a “New Deal Democrat” and standing up to the witch hunters, as characterized in the new movie about his making the bomb.

McCarthy destroyed the lives of thousands of people, and many were imprisoned because of his efforts. Historian Ellen Schrecker estimates his victims at over 10,000. He — and his right hand man, Roy Cohn (who went on to be Trump’s mentor) — were classic trolls in the worst sense of the word.

Some of McCarthy’s efforts live to this day, including his insistence throughout the Army-McCarthy hearings on never saying “Democratic Party” but, instead, always saying, “Democrat Party.”

Similarly, McCarthy echoed the John Birch Society’s (JBS) argument that America is not a democracy but a republic, an argument that James Madison made — and then refuted — when he was trying to sell the US Constitution. McCarthy’s and the JBS’s apparent rationale was that “democracy” sounds too much like Democratic while “republic” evokes good feelings for the Republican Party.

Nelson Rockefeller, who would become Gerald Ford’s Vice President, got a dose of this with the John Birch Society-pushed Goldwater sweep of the Republican Party at their 1964 convention.

“It is essential that this convention repudiate here and now,” he said over boos and chants, “any doctrinaire, militant minority, whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan, or Bircher (pause for ‘republic not democracy!’ chants set off by his attacking the John Birch Society)…”

Today’s trolling, however, has gone beyond the fringes defined in that era by the JBS, Cohn, and the occasional McCarthyite wannabee. It’s become the core, the essential identity, of the post-Trump GOP.

From “rolling coal” trucks blowing poisonous smoke at Prius and EV drivers, to “Free helicopter rides for liberals” tee shirts invoking Pinochet’s murders, to hate groups and militia members showing up at school board meetings, today’s Republican Party has fully embraced hate and trolling.

“Owning the libs” is the main online sport of many Republicans today, as you can see by following the social media feeds or reading the hate mail of any high-profile progressives or Democrats.

In large part that’s because Republicans don’t have anything else to present to Americans as a positive national governing agenda.

Please open the link to read the rest of this excellent post.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Politics, Republicans

Two Democratic Legislators from Wisconsin Attended ALEC Meeting, Spill the Beans

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
10

Two Democratic legislators from Wisconsin joined the hard-right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to keep track of what their opponents were planning. They recently attended the 50th annual ALEC convention in Orlando, Florida.

ALEC has about 2,000 state legislators as members. ALEC writes model legislation on the environment, education, gun rights, and every other topic likely to be considered by state legislatures. The members take the model legislation back to their home state and introduce it after writing in the name of their state. ALEC is against gun control, against public schools, against environmental protections, etc. ALEC is funded by major corporations and acts as a voice for corporations that want no government regulation.

Erik Gunn is the deputy editor of the Wisconsin examiner, which first published this report.

Wisconsin State Reps. Francesca Hong and Kristina Shelton aren’t exactly the typical lawmakers to belong to the American Legislative Exchange Council — ALEC for short.

Hong, of Madison, and Shelton, of Green Bay, are staunch Democrats who have consistently voted against bills advancing the policies of the sort ALEC promotes. While the organization is legally nonpartisan and a tax-exempt nonprofit, it has become widely known as the birthplace of right-wing legislative proposals that find a home mainly with Republican state lawmakers around the country.

Last week, however, the two second-term Assembly members were in Orlando for ALEC’s annual meeting. It was Shelton’s second visit and Hong’s third. When they posted about their participation on social media, some followers wondered what they were doing in a crowd so ideologically at odds with their own political stances.

“I think it’s important to understand the agenda of the opposition,” Hong says. “And our current political reality requires us to know what the motivation is of our colleagues and where they’re getting model legislation from [along with] talking points, candidate training. These are all things that are available at ALEC.”

“It gives us an understanding of what’s to come,” adds Shelton — in the form of future legislation that members of the Republican majority might introduce. “And it helps us prepare as Democrats, organizing our own legislation and messaging. There’s no better way to prepare than to hear it directly from the folks on the other side….”

Hong and Shelton view themselves as carrying on a tradition among progressive Wisconsin lawmakers in joining ALEC, attending its events and going back home to report what they see and hear. Their predecessors are former state Rep. Mark Pocan, now a member of Congress, and former state Rep. Chris Taylor, now an appeals court judge.

Their name tags for the ALEC event simply identify them as Wisconsin state representatives, and Hong and Shelton say they don’t go out of their way to out themselves as Democrats — but they aren’t undercover, either…

As paying ALEC members (dues are $200 a year; conference fees are $750), they can’t be excluded on ideological grounds because of the group’s nonpartisan legal status, says Hong, who adds she has asked ALEC for its guest list “multiple times” but never received it.

Membership includes the opportunity to join two subject-matter task forces. Hong chose energy and environment as well as taxation and federalism. Shelton’s two were health and human development and education and workforce. Those sessions are where the details of proposed model legislation from the organization are outlined. They are also where the role of big business is most evident in helping to shape the organization’s proposals….

On education, Shelton says, the organization has heavily promoted school privatization proposals, including education savings accounts and universal private school vouchers, such as were included in a sweeping education bill in Arkansas, the LEARNS Act, enacted earlier this year.

“They’re no longer interested in sort of nibbling around the edges on school vouchers,” Shelton says. “They’re going all in — removing the income limits, moving to those education savings accounts, wildly expanding public investment for religious schools … [and] dismantling any sort of bureaucratic accountability measures.”

Hong says the education proposals have also been made with reference to the difficulties that employers have had filling job openings.

“The framing of it didn’t come off as full, ‘We’re attacking public schools,’” Hong says. “This is how we’re going to get more workers is to essentially make schooling and education’s sole purpose is to be producing workers.”

On economic and social policy, a persistent talking point was “about making poor people rich, not rich people poor,” she adds, while government assistance is “dragging down the economy” and “morally wrong.”

“They’re really digging into that narrative and saying that growing government to help those people is going to be the end of time,” Hong says.

To be sure, ALEC is just one of many organizations, from the AFL-CIO to the Sierra Club, that pursue policy change, sometimes constructing model legislation for that purpose. The difference, Shelton says, is that the group’s agenda doesn’t appear to her to be about policy so much as about political power.

“I think what’s different here is a sort of militant approach by those on the conservative right to not be as interested in actually solving the problems in the critical issues of working people,” she says, “but rather creating legislation to drive issues that they see as winning at the ballot box.”

Even so, a prevailing theme was diminishing the role of government and freeing corporations and business, the two Wisconsin Democrats say.

Categories ALEC, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Democrats, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, North Carolina, Privatization, Vouchers

Pennsylvania: Gov. Shapiro Signs State Budget, Vetoes Vouchers

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2023 //
8

Governor Josh Shapiro promised Democrats that if they passed the state budget, he would veto the voucher legislation so beloved by Republicans. Gov. Shapiro had previously declared his support for vouchers. Thursday, the governor kept his promise. He signed the state budget and vetoed vouchers.

Carly Sitrin of Chalkbeat Philadelphia wrote:

As promised, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro signed the $45.5 billion state budget without a state-funded private school voucher program on Thursday, ending weeks of drama about the proposal.

Budget negotiations had been stalled for nearly a month over the dispute about whether to create a $100 million statewide voucher program. With a one-vote majority in the House, Democrats refused to approve any spending plan that included vouchers — even one supported by Shapiro, a fellow Democrat.

In the end, Shapiro cut a deal to sign the budget and strike the voucher provision, much to the chagrin of Republicans who claimed the governor was turning his back on his own campaign promise.

“The people of Pennsylvania have entrusted me with the responsibility to bring people together in a divided legislature and to get things done for them – and with this commonsense budget, that’s exactly what we’ve done,” Shapiro said in a statement announcing the signing.

In his message announcing that he would use a line-item veto to eliminate vouchers from the budget, Shapiro said the proposal — called the Pennsylvania Award for Student Success Scholarship Program, or PASS — remains “unfinished business.”

“This budget is a first step towards a comprehensive solution that makes progress for our children over the long term, and I look forward to continuing this work with both chambers as we discuss additional programs to help our children including PASS,” Shapiro wrote.

PASS would have expanded the state’s school choice offerings, which currently include the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit and Education Improvement Tax Credit.

Critics in Philadelphia claimed that an earlier version of the program could have upended the city’s public school system.

Nathan Benefield, senior vice president of the conservative Commonwealth Foundation that has backed voucher programs, said in a statement Shapiro’s veto “while not unexpected, is disappointing and unnecessary.”

Benefield said his organization will continue to push for vouchers and cast the program as Shapiro’s “chance to redeem himself, fulfill his campaign promises, and offer a genuine opportunity to thousands of low-income kids who deserve a better future.”

Advocates opposing vouchers celebrated Shapiro’s voucher veto, but also expressed disappointment that the Republican-led Senate has yet to approve some education funding.

Among the programs in the budget Shapiro signed Thursday that will still require Senate approval is so-called Level Up funding for the 100 school districts with the lowest spending per pupil, including Philadelphia. Level Up funding is in addition to the Basic Education funding that schools receive from the state and is included in the $45.5 billion budget Shapiro signed.

“It is disappointing that Senate leadership is standing in the way of releasing needed funds for programs included in their own budget, including Level Up dollars that benefit students in the most underfunded school districts,” the PA Schools Work Campaign said in a statement.

The advocates called it “ironic” that Senate Republicans are still holding up “funding for our students in the most underfunded schools specifically because they were unsuccessful in an attempt to institute a new private school voucher program that purports to help … these very same students.”

Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Jerry Jordan said in a statement that the union is “pleased” that Shapiro signed the budget without the voucher program.

”The misguided push to divert public dollars into private institutions was a distraction that diverts us from our collective responsibility to truly invest in public education,” Jordan said.

Categories Democrats, Education Industry, Pennsylvania, Privatization, Vouchers

Yes, There Is a Free Lunch, for Kids

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2023 //
13

The Lever reports that Michigan is the sixth state to guarantee free lunch for all public school students. At the same time, House Republicans seek to ban free lunches because there might be “fraud.” For example, little Johnny might swipe a second sandwich. Iowa, as we read earlier, has limited the number of items that may be purchased with food stamps. What is it with these Republicans? Why do they children and poor adults to go hungry? Why do they want to weaken child labor laws so teens can work dangerous jobs?

There Is Such A Thing As A Free Lunch

This week, Michigan became the seventh state in the country to guarantee free lunch for every public school student in grades pre-K through 12. The $160 million program is included in the state’s School Aid Budget,which passed in June with bipartisan support. The program will serve 1.2 million students, an estimated 283,000 of whom are food insecure, and offer two free meals a day.

The national push for free lunches has been surprisingly controversial. Republicans intent on cutting the social safety net at every turn have even directed their ire at hungry kids. The Republican Study Committee, a policymaking group for conservative House lawmakers, went so far as to declare banning universal school meals a 2024 priority, suggesting that it would allow “widespread fraud.”

Michigan’s expansion of universal free school meals follows California, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico and Vermont — and represents a heartwarming investment in public education after years of defunding.

Categories Democrats, Fraud, Funding, Health, Hypocrisy, Michigan, Poverty

Washington Post Asks Eight Left-Leaning Columnists About Biden

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2023 //
167

I enjoyed reading this candid conversation among left-leaning columnists at the Washington Post about Biden’s candidacy. The conversation was moderated by Chris Suellentrip, the politics opinion editor of the Post.

What do you think?

President Biden is 80 years old and is running for a second term, more or less unopposed, in the Democratic primary. So I gathered a group of our left-leaning columnists for a conversation over email and asked: How do you feel about that?

Has Biden failed to be a “bridge” to a new generation of leaders, as he pledged to be in 2020? Should he have declared himself “one (term) and done,” like a college basketball star? Should the party have held a competitive primary instead of clearing the field, as is traditional for an incumbent president? Is the fascination with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s not-gonna-happen campaign a sign of nervousness about Biden 2024 in some portion of the Democratic primary electorate? And will you change your mind about any of these things if someone other than Donald Trump is the 2024 Republican nominee?

Dana Milbank: If hand-wringing translated into votes, Democrats would never lose an election. I find their fretting over Biden’s age tedious — and probably exaggerated by the disinformation from the right portraying him as drooling and senile. The wandering speeches, the gaffes and the other traits people now assign to his advanced age are the same traits I observed when covering him in the 1990s.

As a Gen Xer, sure, I would have preferred if Biden had offered himself as a one-term anti-Trump savior and cleared the way for a new generation. But a competitive primary would only have turned him into Carter ’80. It’s also just as likely that a decision not to run for reelection would have had the effect of anointing Kamala D. Harris, who by virtue of being a woman of color would make it easier for Trump to foment a 2016-style backlash of racism and misogyny.

Would all this change if Trump (or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) isn’t the GOP nominee? Well, sure. I suppose if Asa Hutchinson were the nominee it wouldn’t matter as much whom the Democrats put up, because he wouldn’t pose the same existential threat to American democracy. But I’m not yet declaring victory for Hutchinson.

Jennifer Rubin: So Biden is 80. Live with it. He’s certainly sharp enough to have solidified and expanded NATO, snookered Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in the debt ceiling negotiations and racked up as impressive a first-term domestic record as any incumbent in memory. If inflation is less than 3 percent and job growth is still strong on Election Day, Biden will have pulled off the near-impossible soft-landing (with Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell as his co-pilot).

Paul Waldman: Of course Biden’s age is a concern, even if at the moment it’s only a theoretical one. The presidency is an extraordinarily demanding job, and it would have to be a pretty unusual 86-year-old (the age Biden would be at the end of a second term) who could handle it. But we haven’t yet seen any evidence of age having an effect on Biden’s decision-making or his energy. There are occasions when he appears old in public — a shuffling gait, a momentary inability to find the word he’s looking for — but that’s not the same as him not being able to perform the job.

For all the talk of building a bridge to the next generation, Biden was never going to serve one term and step down. He spent half a century trying to get to the Oval Office, and he won’t leave it voluntarily.

Perry Bacon Jr.: I am not thrilled that Joe Biden is running for a second term.

His approval ratings are significantly lower than Bill Clinton’s, George W. Bush’s or Barack Obama’s were at this stage of their presidencies, midway through their third years in office.

They are very similar to Trump’s numbers. In polls of a potential 2024 matchup, Biden is effectively tied with Trump. Biden would be the favorite against Trump (and probably DeSantis). But that’s because of how unpopular those two Republicans are, not Biden’s political strength.

I think the driving factor here is Biden’s age. People just feel like he is too old. I personally don’t see any evidence that Americans shouldbe worried about his health or mental capacity. But I hear concerns about his age all the time from people in my life who aren’t partisan Democrats. This concern about age shows up in basically every poll.

I think an incumbent Democratic president with Biden’s record who wasn’t 80 years old would be more popular and therefore have a better chance in next year’s election. And while I don’t think just any Democrat under age 80 (or 70) who was the party’s presumptive nominee would be polling better than Biden is against Trump, I think many younger Democrats would be stronger candidates in a 2024 general election.

For example, it seems pretty clear that if Democrats could agree, without a primary, that the party’s 2024 ticket would be Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (Mich.) as president and Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (Ga.) as vice president, that would be stronger electorally than Biden-Harris. Or say, Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.) and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.). What I mean is a ticket with a White person and a person of color, a man and a woman, two people who are generally in the mainstream of the party ideologically — and no one over age 70.

But there is no magic way to skip a primary, of course!

Ruth Marcus: Riffing off of how Perry phrased it, I wish Biden did not have to run for a second term. He is too old. No, he is not the drooler of overheated GOP imaginings, but he has slowed down, obviously and measurably. And 80 is too old, period, for the demanding job of the presidency. Let the torch be passed, etc.

Except for this: Biden needs to run. He (and Democrats) are correct about that assessment. If he were to have announced that he was stepping aside, the internecine warfare that would have erupted over Harris, the heiress apparent, versus everyone else, would have torn the party apart, or risked doing so, and opened the door too wide to risk a Republican president being elected.

And not just Trump. He is the biggest, most existential risk, and the primary driver of my “Biden must run” mentality. I used to believe Trump was a singular threat, and that there would not be Trumpism without Trump. But that was wrong. The forces he has unleashed are powerful and dangerous, and exist even in his absence from the scene. From my point of view, the risk to the Supreme Court alone is enough to justify doing whatever it takes to maximize the chance of a Democrat being elected (which means: Biden, Biden, Biden).

Eugene Robinson: Look, we all wish that Biden were, say, 60 instead of 80. But is there a younger Democrat who could have beaten Donald Trump in 2020? I doubt it. And is there a younger Democrat who could beat Trump in 2024? Maybe. I like Perry’s ticket of Whitmer and Warnock. But I don’t like the idea of taking another existential gamble with our democracy. If Trump is the GOP nominee, which seems likely, this will almost surely be another close election. We don’t have landslides anymore; and no matter how queasy Republican voters might be about four more years of Trump’s insanity, we should expect most of them to support their party’s nominee. It is unwise to count on the justice system to bail the nation out. On Election Day, Biden will be 82 and Trump will be 78. The “age issue” should be de minimus.

And, not incidentally, Biden has been a highly effective president who has instituted policies, at home and abroad, that I support. A president with his record deserves a second term — and congressional majorities to go along with it.

Greg Sargent: Improbably, Biden has been the guy with enough appeal to the middle needed to both beat Trump and to pass (parts of) a historically progressive agenda (bringing Bernie Sanders into the tent) while recasting it to the electorate (including affluent suburbanites who supposedly lean right economically) as sensible moderation. Biden seems uniquely well-positioned to not just beat Trump again but also to cement a broad, center-left ideological consensus with paradigm-shifting durability.

As for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., historically there have always been candidates who tap into disaffected pro-insurgent constituencies in the Democratic Party (Bill Bradley, Howard Dean, etc.). Kennedy represents a particularly ideologically heterodox and unbalanced version of this. It’s hard to imagine his support, such as it is, says anything meaningful or predictive about eventual support for Biden.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Early in the administration, I thought Biden wouldn’t seek a second term. He would find it appealing, I thought, to declare that he had achieved what he promised when he decided to run in the first place. He saved the country from a Trump second term, defended democracy, solved a bunch of big problems, restored the country’s standing abroad, notched a number of bipartisan victories and created an opening for a better kind of politics. Call it the Cincinnatus Option. He would spend the rest of his term being more praised than damned, the Republicans would have less interest in attacking him, and his popularity would go up because a lot of Americans (with their instinctive mistrust of politicians) would admire someone who could walk away from power.

That still sounds pretty good to me, but it’s not what happened. The reason it didn’t is, as Greg suggested, that Biden might be the only Democrat who can sit atop the various factions of the Democratic Party and bring them together.

If you ask yourself why Democrats are united behind Biden, why only cranks are running against him, it’s because Democrats across their various divisions agree that now is not the time for ideological Armageddon, which is what would happen if Biden stepped aside. And anyone who claims that a tough primary would be good for Biden should consider history. When they were incumbents, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were all weakened by primary fights (against Ronald Reagan, Ted Kennedy and Pat Buchanan, respectively), and they all lost in the general election.

Does Biden’s age create challenges? Of course. Especially against anyone other than Trump. At the margins, Biden’s age could cost him votes, and the margins matter. My hunch is that Biden’s camp will try to find subtle ways of making his age at least a partial asset by stressing his seasoning, wisdom, experience, etc. It won’t be easy, but they have to do some of this. His camp also made a mistake by not lifting up Harris early on and trying to turn her into an asset. They have realized this and are working on doing that now. Biden’s age means more voters will be looking at her as a possible successor, and her favorability ratings need to go up.

Rubin: It’s a relief to have an empathetic, decent human being in the White House. While it is fashionable to pine for someone new and young, with our democracy still frightfully fragile and with war raging in Europe, I don’t think a younger governor or senator would be a better choice. Biden can pass the baton in 2028. Maybe with age comes some old-fashioned sense of propriety, civic virtue, common courtesy and, dare we say, dignity. I’ll take it.

Milbank: I think the Biden-is-too-old theme is itself a demonstration that we’re all forced to live in a world shaped by disinformation from the right. We’ve been hearing from Fox News since the 2020 campaign (when Biden was hidden in his “basement”) about Biden’s “cognitive decline” and his struggle to “string two sentences together.” He has been routinely described since then as “senile,” as a man with “obviously declining mental faculties” who is “a cognitive mess, and he has no idea that today is Wednesday.” During the debt ceiling fight, Kevin McCarthy offered to bring “soft food” to the White House for Biden. After the debt deal, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) marveled that “Republicans got outsmarted by a president who can’t find his pants.”

There’s every reason to believe this “senile” old coot will outwit his Republican opponent in ’24.

Sargent: Democrats have won or outperformed in the last three national elections. Yet we’re still constantly running down rabbit holes into debates about why Dems suck so much at politics and how Trump continues to outfox them among working-class voters.

Democratic struggles with some working-class constituencies are real, but some proportion is in order here. MAGA continues to alienate a majority of the country.

Robinson: I’ve had a couple of occasions to spend extended periods of time with Biden, including a long chat on Air Force One, and I can attest that whatever else anybody thinks about him, he’s not senile. And I’ve seen him turn a scheduled quick half-hour of meet-and-greet with supporters into an hour-plus marathon, at the end of a long day, that exhausted aides half his age.

Dionne: Without formally breaking with either Clinton or Obama, Biden has moved the party’s policymaking past the consensus that influenced those earlier administrations. His appointments have given the party’s progressive wing a strong voice in areas such as labor rights, civil rights, trade and antitrust, even as he has kept the party’s more middle-ground legislators and voters on his side — by, for example, refusing to challenge the Federal Reserve’s efforts to contain inflation (even if the administration devoutly hopes it lets up on rate increases).

And the president’s economic record turns out to be very good. Inflation has come down much faster than Biden’s critics expected, and the country has so far avoided the recession many of those detractors predicted. It’s a long way between now and November 2024, but at least for now, Biden has the better of the economic argument.

The age issue is obviously one of the right’s favorite talking points, but from my own encounters, I share Gene Robinson’s view that a picture of Biden as some sort of doddering old guy is flatly wrong. Biden is especially sharp when he turns to U.S. foreign policy and makes a persuasive case that the United States is now in a much stronger position in the world, partly because it is building alliances across Asia to contain China’s power. Foreign policy won’t decide the next election, but voters who have a sense of security are more likely to support the incumbent.

But realism requires coming to terms with the age issue anyway. Like it or not, Biden’s age will be brought into play whenever he makes a miscue or garbles a sentence or stumbles or looks less forceful — even if whatever is going wrong has nothing to do with his age. Beneath the surface, the Biden forces know it’s something they have to struggle with, not because of what Fox News commentators will say but because of conversations among not particularly ideological voters over back fences and in neighborhood cafes.

Bacon: If the Democrats’ only potential options for the 2024 ticket were: 1) Nominate Biden without a real primary; 2) Conduct a primary in which Harris would likely win without any serious challenge; 3) Conduct a primary in which Harris carried the Black primary vote overwhelmingly but lost to someone with a heavily White base (say Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg), I can see why the party kind of informally opted for No. 1. After all, Harris wasn’t a great candidate in 2019, few Black voters backed Buttigieg in that primary and Biden has the electoral advantages of being White, male and the incumbent president.

But I suspect there were two other potential outcomes, if Biden had announced in January that he was not seeking a second term: 4) Harris wins against a crowded primary field and in doing so demonstrates she is a strong candidate for a general election, like Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016; or 5) Harris runs but another candidate (say, Whitmer) builds a broad coalition and decisively defeats her in the primary.

So I am frustrated that Democrats are running a candidate who in my view is too conciliatory and centrist in the face of a radicalized Republican Party, but also a candidate whose centrism and conciliation isn’t being rewarded by centrist/independent/swing voters with more approval and support. Biden’s age makes his reelection really dicey — something voters keep saying in poll after poll but the Democratic Party has decided to ignore.

All that said, Biden has been fairly good on policy and would be much better than any of the Republicans running. So I will be voting for him next November without any hesitation. I think he has been a better president than Clinton or Obama. He has been less centrist and cautious than I expected. He has embraced the progressive thinking that emerged from 2013 to 2020, instead of being stuck in old ways. He has appointed some great judges, most notably Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. He has also been very pro-labor and more skeptical of big business than other modern presidents.

The Democratic Party has moved in a more liberal direction — and Biden moved with the party. Great.

Waldman: The good news for Democrats is that, at the moment at least, they have so much going for them heading into 2024: a strong economy, a broadly popular agenda, and an opposition committed to a hateful politics that their base seems to want, but that a majority of the electorate finds repugnant.

Finally, you have the likely nomination of Trump, who cost the GOP the elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022. Everything that made people choose Biden over Trump three years ago — that Biden is a decent human being with conciliatory impulses who would govern in a responsible way — is no less true today than it was then. So for all the unease among Democrats (which Perry is absolutely right about), they’re in about as good a position as they could have hoped for.

Categories Biden, Democrats, Education Reform, Elections, Politics, Republicans, Trump

North Carolina: Why Tricia Cotham Betrayed Voters and Gave GOP a Supermajority

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2023 //
22

Last April, newly elected Democrat Tricia Cotham announced that she was switching from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. This was after she had campaigned as a supporter of abortion rights, an opponent of school vouchers, and a loyal Democrat. Her betrayal of voters in her blue district shook up the state’s politics, because it meant that the hard-right Republicans in the state legislature (the General Assembly) could override the vetoes of Democratic Governor Roy Cooper.

Everyone who saw the damage wrought by Cotham wondered why she did it. She claimed that Democrats didn’t appreciate her enough. That’s a strange reason to flip positions on big issues.

The New York Times reporters Kate Kelly and David Perlmutt found out why she switched: she was wooed by powerful Republicans, encouraged to run, and flipped knowing full well that she lied to her voters.

When Tricia Cotham, a former Democratic lawmaker, was considering another run for the North Carolina House of Representatives, she turned to a powerful party leader for advice. Then, when she jumped into the Democratic primary, she was encouraged by still other formidable allies.

She won the primary in a redrawn district near Charlotte, and then triumphed in the November general election by 18 percentage points, a victory that helped Democrats lock in enough seats to prevent, by a single vote, a Republican supermajority in the state House.

Except what was unusual — and not publicly known at the time — was that the influential people who had privately encouraged Ms. Cotham to run were Republicans, not Democrats. One was Tim Moore, the redoubtable Republican speaker of the state House. Another was John Bell, the Republican majority leader…

Three months after Ms. Cotham took office in January, she delivered a mortal shock to Democrats and to abortion rights supporters: She switched parties, and then cast a decisive vote on May 3 to override a veto by the state’s Democratic governor and enact a 12-week limit on most abortions— North Carolina’s most restrictive abortion policy in 50 years…

More perplexing to many Democrats was why she did it. Ms. Cotham came from a family with strong ties to the Democratic Party, campaigned as a progressive on social issues and had even co-sponsored a bill to codify a version of Roe v. Wade into North Carolina law…

Late in March, just a few days before switching parties, she skipped a pivotal gun-control vote, helping Republicans loosen gun restrictions in the state. After she became a Republican, she sponsored a bill to expand student eligibility for private-school vouchers, voted to ban gender-affirming care for minors and voted to outlaw discussions of race or gender in state job interviews.

“This switch has been absolutely devastating,” said state Representative Pricey Harrison, a Democrat from Greensboro.

Ms. Cotham received a standing ovation at North Carolina’s state Republican convention in June. She was invited to meet privately there with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and former Vice President Mike Pence.

“She’s a rock star among the Republican Party activists and voter base,” said U.S. Representative Dan Bishop, a Republican who said he encouraged Ms. Cotham to join his party and who stood behind her when she announced the decision.

There were clues that should have raised suspicions. In an earlier stint in the legislature, Cotham was loud in demanding greater accountability for charter schools. After she left the legislature, she was a lobbyist for the charter school industry. When she returned this year and flipped parties, she led the Republican demand to transfer control of charters from the State Board of Education to the General Assembly.

The move would, at first, shift independent oversight of charter schools from a board largely appointed by the governor to a board largely appointed by the General Assembly….

Cotham, a former teacher, has been a supporter of school choice. She was the president of a corporation that ran charter schools. Cotham is one of three chairs of the House Education Committee, a role she’s held since the start of the session when she was a Democrat, a rare position for a Democrat in the GOP-controlled chamber.

Real Democrats support public schools, not corporate charter chains or vouchers.

Categories Accountability, Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Hypocrisy, Lies, North Carolina, Republicans, Scandals, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson: Good News for Biden, Bad News for Trump

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2023 //
37

Heather Cox Richardson applies her excellent skills as a historian to analyze the news. Open the link to finish reading and to read footnotes.

More good news today for Bidenomics, as the gross domestic product report for the second quarter showed annualized growth of 2.4%, higher than projected, and inflation rose at a slower pace of 2.6%, down from last quarter and well below projections. Economic analyst Steven Rattner noted that as of the second quarter, “the US economy is over 6% larger than it was before COVID (after adjusting for inflation). At this point in the recovery from the Great Recession, 2011, the economy was just 0.7% larger than it had been in 2007.”

Both consumer spending and business investment, which is up 7.7% in real annualized terms, drove this growth. Business spending makes up a much smaller share of gross domestic product, but it drives future jobs and growth, and much of this growth is in manufacturing facilities. In keeping with that trend, the nation’s largest solar panel manufacturer, First Solar, announced today that it will build a fifth factory in the U.S. as alternative energy technology takes off. This commitment brings to more than $2.8 billion the amount First Solar has invested in the U.S. to ramp up production…

While many of us were watching the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., to see if an indictment was forthcoming against former president Trump for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a different set of charges appeared tonight. Special counsel Jack Smith brought additional charges against Trump in connection with his retention of classified documents.

The new indictment alleges that Trump plotted to delete video from security cameras near the storage room where he had stored boxes containing classified documents, and did so after the Department of Justice subpoenaed that footage. That effort to delete the video involved a third co-conspirator, Carlos De Oliveira, who has been added to the case.

De Oliveira is a former valet at the Trump Organization’s Mar-a-Lago property who became property manager there in January 2022. Allegedly, he told another Trump employee that “the boss” wanted the server deleted and that the conversation should stay between the two of them.

In the Washington Post, legal columnist Ruth Marcus wrote, “The alleged conduct—yes, even after all these years of watching Trump flagrantly flout norms—is nothing short of jaw-dropping: Trump allegedly conspired with others to destroy evidence.” If the allegations hold up, “the former president is a common criminal—and an uncommonly stupid one.”

This superseding indictment reiterates the material from the original indictment, and as I reread it, it still blows my mind that Trump allegedly compromised national security documents from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (surveillance imagery), the National Reconnaissance Office (surveillance and maps), the Department of Energy (nuclear weapons), and the Department of State and Bureau of Intelligence and Research (diplomatic intelligence).

It sounds like he was a one-man wrecking ball, aimed at our national security.

The Justice Department has asked again for a protective order to protect the classified information at the heart of this case. In their request, they explained that, among other things, Trump wanted to be able to discuss that classified information with his lawyers outside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, a room protected against electronic surveillance and data leakage.

Former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division Peter Strzok noted that there is “[n]o better demonstration of Trump’s abject lack of understanding of—and disregard for—classified info and national security. He is *asking the Court* to waive the requirements for classified info that EVERY OTHER SINGLE CLEARANCE HOLDER IN THE UNITED STATES must follow.”

The Senate today passed the $886 billion annual defense bill by a strong bipartisan margin of 86 to 11 after refusing to load it up with all the partisan measures Republican extremists added to the House bill. Now negotiators from the House and the Senate will try to hash out a compromise measure, but the bills are so far apart it is not clear they will be able to create a bipartisan compromise. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has passed on a bipartisan basis for more than 60 years.

The extremists in the House Republican conference continue to revolt against House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) deal with the administration to raise the debt ceiling. They insist the future cuts to which McCarthy agreed are not steep enough, and demand more. This has sparked fighting among House Republicans; Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo suggests that McCarthy’s new willingness to consider impeaching President Biden might be an attempt to cut a deal with the extremists.

As the Senate is controlled by Democrats, the fight among the House Republicans threatens a much larger fight between the chambers because Democratic senators will not accept the demands of the extremist Republican representatives.

The House left for its August recess today without passing 11 of the 12 appropriations bills necessary to fund the government after September, setting up the conditions for a government shutdown this fall if they cannot pass the bills and negotiate with the Senate in the short time frame they’ve left. Far-right Republicans don’t much care, apparently. Representative Bob Good (R-VA) told reporters this week, “We should not fear a government shutdown… Most of what we do up here is bad anyway.”

Representative Katherine Clark (D-MA), the second ranking Democrat in the House, disagreed. “The Republican conference is saying they are sending us home for six weeks without funding the government? That we have one bill…out of 12 completed because extremists are holding your conference hostage, and that’s not the full story: the extremists are holding the American people hostage. We will have twelve days…when we return to fund the government, to live up to the job the American people sent us here to do. This is a reckless march to a MAGA shutdown, and for what? In pursuit of a national abortion ban? Is that what we are doing here?

Categories Accountability, Biden, Democrats, Economy, Environment, Extremism, Funding, Republicans, Trump

Politico: Campus Towns Vote Overwhelmingly Democratic

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2023 //
13

Politico wrote recently about the powerful impact of campus towns. They typically vote Democratic, and they have a large impact on state elections. It’s long been known that education is a factor in voting. The most educated counties vote Democratic, and the least educated vote Republican.

Politico wrote:

Spring elections in Wisconsin are typically low turnout affairs, but in April, with the nation watching the state’s bitterly contested Supreme Court race, voters turned out in record-breaking numbers.

No place was more energized to vote than Dane County, the state’s second-most populous county after Milwaukee. It’s long been a progressive stronghold thanks to the double influence of Madison, the state capital, and the University of Wisconsin, but this was something else. Turnout in Dane was higher than anywhere else in the state. And the Democratic margin of victory that delivered control of the nonpartisan court to liberals was even more lopsided than usual — and bigger than in any of the state’s other 71 counties.

The margin was so big that it changed the state’s electoral formula. Under the state’s traditional political math, Milwaukee and Dane — Wisconsin’s two Democratic strongholds — are counterbalanced by the populous Republican suburbs surrounding Milwaukee. The rest of the state typically delivers the decisive margin in statewide races. The Supreme Court results blew up that model. Dane County alone is now so dominant that it overwhelms the Milwaukee suburbs (which have begun trending leftward anyway). In effect, Dane has become a Republican-killing Death Star.

“This is a really big deal,” said Mark Graul, a Republican strategist who ran George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign in Wisconsin. “What Democrats are doing in Dane County is truly making it impossible for Republicans to win a statewide race.”

In isolation, it’s a worrisome development for Republicans. Unfortunately for the larger GOP, it’s not happening in isolation.

In state after state, fast-growing, traditionally liberal college counties like Dane are flexing their muscles, generating higher turnout and ever greater Democratic margins. They’ve already played a pivotal role in turning several red states blue — and they could play an equally decisive role in key swing states next year.

One of those states is Michigan. Twenty years ago, the University of Michigan’s Washtenaw County gave Democrat Al Gore what seemed to be a massive victory — a 60-36 percent win over Republican George W. Bush, marked by a margin of victory of roughly 34,000 votes. Yet that was peanuts compared to what happened in 2020. Biden won Washtenaw by close to 50 percentage points, with a winning margin of about 101,000 votes. If Washtenaw had produced the same vote margin four years earlier, Hillary Clinton would have won Michigan, a state that played a prominent role in putting Donald Trump in the White House.

Name the flagship university — Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, among others — and the story tends to be the same. If the surrounding county was a reliable source of Democratic votes in the past, it’s a landslide county now. There are exceptions to the rule, particularly in the states with the most conservative voting habits. But even in reliably red places like South Carolina, Montana and Texas, you’ll find at least one college-oriented county producing ever larger Democratic margins.

The American Communities Project, which has developed a typology of counties, designates 171 independent cities and counties as “college towns.” In a combined social science/journalism effort based at the Michigan State University School of Journalism, the ACP uses three dozen different demographic and economic variables in its analysis such as population density, employment, bachelor’s degrees, household income, percent enrolled in college, rate of religious adherence and racial and ethnic composition.

Of those 171 places, 38 have flipped from red to blue since the 2000 presidential election. Just seven flipped the other way, from blue to red, and typically by smaller margins. Democrats grew their percentage point margins in 117 counties, while 54 counties grew redder. By raw votes, the difference was just as stark: The counties that grew bluer increased their margins by an average of 16,253, while Republicans increased their margins by an average of 4,063.

Back in 2000, the places identified as college towns by ACP voted 48 percent to 47 percent in favor of Al Gore. In the last presidential election, the 25 million who live in those places voted for Joe Biden, 54 percent to 44 percent.

Many populous urban counties that are home to large universities don’t even make the ACP’s “college towns” list because their economic and demographic profiles differentiate them from more traditional college counties. Among the missing are places like the University of Texas’ Travis County, where the Democratic margin of victory grew by 290,000 votes since 2000, and the University of New Mexico’s Bernalillo County, where the margin grew by 73,000 votes. The University of Minnesota’s Hennepin County has become bluer by 245,000 votes.

North Carolina offers a revealing snapshot of a state whose college towns have altered its electoral landscape. Five of the state’s nine counties that contain so-called college towns have gone blue since voting for George W. Bush in 2000. Back then, the nine counties together netted roughly 12,000 votes for Bush, who carried the state by nearly 13 percent. Twenty years later, those numbers had broken dramatically in the opposite direction — Biden netted 222,000 votes from those counties. He still lost the state, but the margin was barely more than 1 percent.

There’s no single factor driving the college town trend. In some places, it’s an influx of left-leaning, highly educated newcomers, drawn to growing, cutting-edge industries advanced by university research or the vibrant quality of life. In others, it’s rising levels of student engagement on growing campuses. Often, it’s a combination of both.

What’s clear is that these places are altering the political calculus across the national map. Combine university counties with heavily Democratic big cities and increasingly blue suburbs, and pretty soon you have a state that’s out of the Republican Party’s reach.

None of this has gone unnoticed by the GOP, which is responding in ways that reach beyond traditional tensions between conservative lawmakers and liberal universities — such as targeting students’ voting rights, creating additional barriers to voter access or redrawing maps to dilute or limit the power of college communities. But there are limits to what those efforts can accomplish. They aren’t geared toward growing the GOP vote, merely toward suppressing Democratic totals. And they aren’t addressing the structural problems created by the rising tide of college-town votes — students are only part of the overall phenomenon.

There is more, and it’s all encouraging to those who hope for a Democratic surge. Keep reading.

Categories Democrats, Elections, Higher Education, Republicans
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