Going For Woke

Via Vox.

I'm always pleased to see somebody I admire catching up with some ideas I've been cherishing for a while, even more so when they're using words I might well have used myself, as in this from Washington Post's Greg Sargent on dated concepts of the US working class:

In the emerging Democratic reading, the old vision of a White, male, breadwinning working class concentrated in burly jobs shapes much political analysis, but it’s a pundit fiction. With service, retail and health-care sectors growing as manufacturing and mining jobs dwindle, the new working class is far more ethnically and culturally diverse — and more socially liberal — than commonly supposed.

What he's commenting on is the remarkable string of progressive legislation that's been coming out of Michigan all year since Democrats captured the state legislature in spite of its gerrymandering, most recently when they repealed the state's "right-to-work" law, enacted in 2012 to combat unions by disallowing closed shops so that workers could benefit from union contracts without paying union dues. 

Rhode Island Reds

 

1844 editorial cartoon in support of democracy in Rhode Island, via Wikipedia.

Law professor Melissa Murray was on the radio pointing out the irony of the "independent state legislature theory" in the case of Moore v. Harper to which the Supreme Court granted cert. last week in what I guess was their last act of vandalism for the term. This is the case of the North Carolina Republicans claiming that the state supreme court had no right to throw out their 2020 redistricting map (it was so partisan that the court claimed it violated the state constitution) because the federal Constitution says state legislatures can do anything they want when it comes to federal elections, even if it's illegal in the state.

There are two relev­ant clauses. One is the Elec­tions Clause, which reads, “The Times, Places and Manner of hold­ing Elec­tions for Senat­ors and Repres­ent­at­ives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legis­lature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regu­la­tions.”

The other is the Pres­id­en­tial Elect­ors Clause, which reads, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legis­lature thereof may direct, a Number of Elect­ors.”

How you get from there to "the Legislature thereof" has supreme power to do whatever it wants I don't really know.

The "irony" Murray finds lies in the fact that the whole thing arose to public prominence because of concerns over election security in the 2020 election, and the idea that maybe state legislatures would have to step in to guarantee it, and yet now that the Supreme Court has decided to take up the case all those concerns have evaporated because it turned out there wasn't any evidence to justify them.

Except to me it's not ironic at all, since those "concerns" were bogus from the start. The "independent state legislature theory" has been around for a while (Chief Justice Rehnquist apparently evoked it in his concurrence in Bush v. Gore as a justification for Florida's deciding not to count all the votes), and though it's never attracted a SCOTUS majority, Alito, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch, endorsed it pretty decisively in a dissent in one of Trump's attempts to thwart the 2020 Pennsylvania election results:

Brooks Sights a Squirrel

David F. Brooks phoning it in ("Why Democrats Are So Bad at Defending Democracy"):

Paragraph 3:

As Yuval Levin noted in The Times a few days ago, it’s become much easier in most places to register and vote than it was years ago. We just had a 2020 election with remarkably high turnout.

Paragraph 7:

As my Times colleague Nate Cohn wrote last April, “Expanding voting options to make it more convenient hasn’t seemed to have a huge effect on turnout or electoral outcomes. That’s the finding of decades of political science research on advance, early and absentee voting.”

These two don't actually contradict each other from a strictly logical standpoint, in the sense that Levin probably isn't claiming there is any causal connection between expanded voting options and the 2020 turnout, and Brooks certainly isn't. But the interesting thing is that both points, Cohn's assertion that expanded voting doesn't affect turnout and Levin's that it doesn't not affect turnout, support Brooks's argument here, which is to deny the "myth" that there's a crisis across the US electoral system: In fact there is a crisis, Brooks agrees, but it's only in one part:

Laboratories Against Democracy

Drawing by Steve Benson/Arizona Republic, February 2010, via.

Our nation's laboratories of democracy, as Justice Brandeis called them, the state legislatures, don't seem very excited about democracy at the moment: downright hostile, in fact, according to some cool new reporting by Timothy Williams/NYTimes*: reacting to popular referendums by tossing them out, like South Dakotans' attempt to put some breaks on their legislators' socializing with lobbyists, which could have threatened the ALEC wine and cheese party:

The gatherings — 107 events in all during the Legislature’s 38-day session— are popular with lawmakers, but less so with the public.

South Dakota voters were sufficiently fed up in 2016 to pass a statewide ethics initiative that was meant to diminish the influence of lobbyists. But the Legislature in Pierre, the state capital, swiftly struck back: It repealed the referendum and replaced it with its own slate of bills, which critics denounced as a watered-down substitute — and a slap in the face to voters.

The Unbearable Epiphenomenality of Firearms

Genteel Victorian elite, via Petticoats and Pistols.

Shorter David Brooks, "Guns and the Soul of America":

Well, so according to fellow Canadian and fellow David David Frum, whenever there's one of these grotesque mass shootings, America's state legislatures jump into action to start passing gun laws, only not the way you might imagine. Instead of passing laws to make mass shootings less likely, they start passing laws to make guns easier to get, or easier to carry around. 

In fact Luca, Malhotra, and Poliquin 2016 found that a single mass shooting in a given state raises the number of firearms bills that will be introduced in that state's legislature that year by 15%, and the number of enacted laws that loosen gun restrictions instead of tightening them will be 75% higher, if it's a Republican-controlled state, though not a Democrat-controlled one.

Which really blew my mind, because how are you going to explain this result other than by saying that the Republican party and the National Rifle Association exploit every such shooting as an opportunity to poison the population with fear and the irrational sense that they'll be safer if they just own more guns, and bring them to more different places, like schools, bars, and churches? 

Which is obviously ridiculous, I mean, what could the Republican party and the National Rifle Association have to do with that?

So I think the first thing has to be that it's not about guns at all. Guns are merely an epiphenomenon. The reason Republican state legislatures pass so many more bills loosening gun restrictions after a horrifying gun tragedy must be postindustrialization. The more we keep postindustrializing, the more the voters will demand more restriction-loosening gun laws. That just stands to reason.

And what can we do about this situation? What I've been telling you forever, moar narrativium! We need a new story on the postindustrialization/populism front, like Theodore Roosevelt's new American nationalism, but like different. And I want mine with extra mayo, don't disappoint me.

I know you all hate Frum, but let's just say The Atlantic has much better editors than the Bush administration did and his work is a lot better than it was in the Axis of Evil days. I may disagree with what he says, but I will defend to the death his right to say he did his homework, if I think he did, which I do at least in this case.

Which I can't, as usual, say about David F. Brooks:

John Roberts is Stupid

Image via Bronx Banter.

Hahaha. On Ginsburg's beautiful opinion in the case of Arizona Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, holding that a popular referendum can require a state to get rid of gerrymandering in its decennial redistricting by means of an independent commission, in spite of the constitutional stipulation that

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations . . . .” Art. I, §4, cl. 1. R

The gerrymander-loving chief justice, Smilin' Jack Roberts, dissenting, decides to wax sarcastic, as quoted at the Political Animal, and extracted at slightly greater length from the opinion itself:

Leave no child unpunished

This is an old one already, via ThinkProgress: Republicans in the Tennessee state legislature are proposing to cut welfare checks by 30% for families whose kids are deemed to be making insufficient progress in school.

When [Sen. Stacey] Campfield introduced the legislation in January, he said parents have “gotten away with doing absolutely nothing to help their children” in school. “That’s child abuse to me,” he added. Tennessee already ties welfare to education by mandating a 20 percent cut in benefits if students do not meet attendance standards, but this change would place the burden of maintaining benefits squarely on children, who would face costing their family much-needed assistance if they don’t keep up in school.

I guess there are a number of things that might be called child abuse. But obviously only one way to respond: make sure that child gets less to eat.

Stacey Campfield, from Queerty.

Senator Campfield (R-Knox County) is the one who introduced the "Don't Say Gay" bill in the Tennessee legislature forbidding mentions of non-Levitical sexual acts in Tennessee schools (K-8), later modified into the "Tell the Parents" bill which requires teachers and counselors to inform the parents of any child who thinks he or she might be gay. No suggestion, as far as I know, of docking welfare payments to families with gay children.

Senator Campfield has a deep and abiding interest in non-Levitical intercourse, which he believes is the cause of HIV and AIDS:

In a January 2012 interview with Michelangelo Signorile, he stated "most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community – it was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall.... My understanding is that it is virtually – not completely, but virtually – impossible to contract AIDS through heterosexual sex...very rarely [transmitted]." He later quoted the odds of heterosexual vaginal transmission at 1 in 5 million. (Wikipedia)

Another of his bills, introduced back in 2007,

would require death certificates for aborted fetuses, which would be likely to create public records identifying women who have abortions....  “At least we would see how many lives are being ended out there by abortions,” Mr. Campfield said. The number of abortions reported to the state Office of Vital Records is already publicly available. (New York Times)

He is perhaps best summed up in the words of his pal Senator Mark Green (chaplain of the Republican senatorial caucus):

Oops, that's from Campfield's blog! Now I'm in for it:

Any unapproved quotation from this blog in any part shall be seen as admission by the user to its value as a commercial product and shall be billed at the rate of $1,000.00 per word or the highest rate allowed by law for the complete artice plus any and all legal expenses to collect this amount. 

Our fun-filled state legislatures

Sometimes a cigar is just an assault weapon.

Illinois had the tightest restrictions against carrying firearms in the country when a federal appeals court threw the law out, so their legislature was putting together a new one on Tuesday. Rep. Jim Sacia (R) was moved to speak in debate:

“Here is the problem in Illinois,” he said on the House floor. “I love you folks in Chicago. You’re the ones that have the problem, you have a runaway gun problem. Don’t blame the rest of us. This isn’t about Democrats, it’s not about Republicans. It’s because Chicago wants a warm fuzzy. ‘Let’s pass a bill that will eliminate assault rifles.’ Last year there were more people killed with hammers than with assault rifles.

“Here’s an analogy folks, I ask you to think of this. You folks in Chicago want me to get castrated because your families are having too many kids. It spells out exactly what is happening here.” (Raw Story)

Tell me Dr. Freud paid you to say that, just so he could prove his silly theory was correct.

As far as Rep. Sacia's penis (long may it wave!) is concerned, I'm pretty sure Illinois doesn't allow open carry. Put it back in your pants, Jim—oh, I'm sorry, was that your head?

We love you, Jim Sacia!

The above image represents Rep. Sacia receiving the kisses of the Humane Society, ASPCA, and Doudoubirds (who produced the picture) on March 9, 2012, after he moved to table a bill

aimed at criminalizing whistleblowers who expose animal abuse, unsafe working conditions, environmental destruction and other illegal and unethical activities on farms.

It was one of those deals where your friendly neighborhood American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) kindly writes it up for you, because of their concern for the embarrassment and humiliation an agribusinessman goes through when some busybody films him torturing animals.

What Doudoubirds and the others were too polite to note is that it was Rep. Sacia who had introduced the "ag gag" bill in the first place, on February 8, 2012. Looks like he just changed his mind all of a sudden, but he declined to explain why. Le cœur a ses raisons, etc., etc. Couldn't have had anything to do with his being up for reelection (really, he was unopposed).

On the question of the lethal blunt instruments, I think we all might want to ask ourselves how many times in the last year somebody used a hammer to kill four IHOP patrons (some members of the Nevada National Guard), 12 members of a Colorado Batman audience, six Sikh worshipers, or 26 people in a Connecticut elementary school, 20 of them first graders? See, a hammer is ideal for your intimate little date murder, for example, but it is not the weapon of choice for a templeful of Punjabis, all the males carrying daggers under their turbans, where the well-accessorized killer-about-town looks for something, shall we say, a little racier.

And remember, if you want to kill somebody with a hammer, a well-bred person uses a nail. It's neater. Jael and Sisera, Roman School, undated, from Wikigallery.