|
FOCUS: William Barr Is Orchestrating a Slow-Rolling Coup |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 05 May 2019 10:41 |
|
Pierce writes: "This is a tiny, slow-rolling coup against the constitutional design."
William Barr. (photo: Getty Images)
William Barr Is Orchestrating a Slow-Rolling Coup
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
05 May 19
Jerry Nadler threw down the gauntlet after the attorney general flouted congressional subpoenas, but he's dead wrong about what the future might hold.
 o, the Attorney General of the United States, having presumably reassembled his gizzard after Senator Kamala Harris took it apart for him on live television, spit in the eye of the constitutional order by refusing to honor a pair of subpoenas from the House Judiciary Committee—one for an unredacted copy of Robert Mueller's report on the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 election, and one for his own sorry ass to sit in another chair in another committee room. This was a remarkable moment, and one that none of us ever should forget. This is a tiny, slow-rolling coup against the constitutional design.
As HJC chairman Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, put it:
Every member of this Committee—Democrat and Republican alike—should understand the consequences when the executive branch tells us that they will simply ignore a lawful subpoena. If left unchecked, this act of obstruction will make it that much harder for us to hold the Executive Branch accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse, or to enact legislation to curb that kind of misconduct—no matter which party holds this chamber or the White House at a given moment. The challenge we face is also bigger than the Mueller report.
If all we knew about President Trump were contained in the four corners of that report, there would be good reason to question his fitness for office. But the report is not where the story ends. In the days since the Department of Justice released a redacted version of the report, President Trump has told Congress that he plans to fight all of our subpoenas. The average person is not free to ignore a congressional subpoena—and neither is the President. His promise to obstruct our work extends far beyond his contacts with the Russian government and allegations of obstruction of justice. The President has also prevented us from obtaining information about voting rights, ACA litigation, and his cruel family separation policy, among other matters.
The challenge we face is also not limited to this Committee. In recent weeks, Administration witnesses have simply failed to show for properly noticed depositions. The Secretary of the Treasury continues to ignore his clear statutory obligation to produce the President’s tax returns. The President’s private attorneys sued Chairman Cummings in his personal capacity in an attempt to block the release of certain financial documents.
Ladies and gentlemen, the challenge we face is that the President of the United States wants desperately to prevent Congress—a coequal branch of government—from providing any check whatsoever to even his most reckless decisions. The challenge we face is that if we don’t stand up to him together, today, then we risk forever losing the power to stand up to any President in the future.
Nadler is correct in his assessment of the current situation, and he is certainly right on the law. Legally, given an unbiased court, Barr and the White House he serves don't have legs to waddle on. However, and alas, he's dead wrong on what the future may hold.
Let us assume, for the moment, that one of the Democrats wins the presidency in 2020, but that the Republicans retain their hold on the Senate and, somehow, regain their majority in the House. You just watch how fast that Congress recaptures its ability to "stand up" to President Biden, or President Warren. You just watch those subpoenas fly. There will be leaks and hearings and grand juries until hell won't have them. No precedent based on their absurd truckling to a criminal president will be deemed valid. In fact, they will turn it back on the Democrats. Look, they will say. Look at how y'all tormented poor El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago. All of this will have the full weight of the wingnut media apparatus behind it, and there will be more than a few respectable journalists and onetime Never Trumpers who will chime in to blame the Democrats for "overreaching."
Watch it happen. Call me Kreskin.
So, I'm not that exercised when Nadler says he's going to make "one more good faith attempt" to get Barr to do what he is constitutionally required to do. This is all going to wind up in court anyway, and the more good faith attempts that Nadler can demonstrate to a judge that were made, the better. In the meantime, we'll always have Congressman Steve Cohen and his chicken. Nothing says we can't have a little fun with this.
 |
|
Climate Change Has Its Political Moment |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35861"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, The New Yorker</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 05 May 2019 08:21 |
|
McKibben writes: "On Wednesday, the British House of Commons, led by the Conservative Party, voted to declare that the planet was in a 'climate emergency.'"
Bill McKibben. (photo: rightlivelihood.org)
Climate Change Has Its Political Moment
By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
05 May 19
 n Wednesday, the British House of Commons, led by the Conservative Party, voted to declare that the planet was in a “climate emergency.” The day before, a CNN poll found that, in the United States, Democratic voters care more about climate change than about any other issue in the upcoming Presidential election: more than health care, more than gun control, more than free college, more than impeaching the President. Having followed the issue closely since I wrote my first book about climate change, thirty years ago, I think I can say that we’re in a remarkable moment, when, after years of languishing, climate concern is suddenly and explosively rising to the top of the political agenda. Maybe, though not certainly, it is rising fast enough that we’ll get real action.
This is not, in fact, the first climate moment: there have been a few times during the past three decades when it appeared as if our political leaders might seriously engage with the issue. The first was in 1988, when the NASA scientist Jim Hansen’s testimony to Congress took the problem public. People were shocked to learn that the Mississippi River was so drought-diminished that barge traffic had slowed; Time named “Endangered Earth” its Planet of the Year; George H. W. Bush, running for President against Michael Dukakis, promised to battle the greenhouse effect with “the White House effect.”
Another moment came in the mid-aughts, with the release of Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” The film’s graphic findings produced what seemed like a bipartisan groundswell: Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection produced ads pairing political odd fellows, such as Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson, sounding the alarm. In one ad, Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi sit side by side on a couch, in front of the Capitol. “We don’t always see eye to eye, do we, Newt?” Pelosi says.
“No,” Gingrich replies. “But we do agree our country must take action to address climate change.”
Neither of those moments, though, produced real change. Bush did nothing; Gingrich, running for President in 2011, called the ad “probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years.” Congress never acted, and the temperature kept rising.
But this third climate moment is rooted in broad movements, not élite opinion, and so it feels different. Right now, a group of young people is touring the country pushing for action on a Green New Deal, the legislation introduced earlier this year by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey, which would push for the rapid decarbonization of America’s energy supply. Polls show surprisingly widespread public support for it, and various versions are being introduced in cities and states across the nation, as well as in other countries. The Climate Mobilization Act, the most ambitious plan of its kind in a large city, passed in the City Council, two weeks ago, and Mayor Bill de Blasio signed it into law on Earth Day. Meanwhile, much of central London was shut down for a week by a group called Extinction Rebellion, which camped in the streets, Occupy-style (and had the good sense to eventually leave to fight again another day). And, perhaps most remarkably, school students around the world have been staging daylong strikes, following the lead of Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teen-ager who in recent days has met with the Pope and addressed both the European Parliament and the British Parliament.
Many streams contributed to this tide. Ten years of movement-building, often led by those most at risk, laid a foundation. (The young people of the Sunrise Movement, who have championed the Green New Deal, cut their teeth in the campus fossil-fuel-divestment movement.) Scientists sharpened their analysis. (Last year’s report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was the first to set a deadline—of 2030—for being fully under way with the fundamental transformation necessary to meet the targets set in the Paris climate accords.) Donald Trump’s foolery heightened apprehensions. (One senses that even some of his most loyal supporters doubt that global warming is a “hoax manufactured by the Chinese.”) And nature itself provided the strongest boost: flood after drought after firestorm, in every corner of the planet, pierced public consciousness. Last November, Americans saw a town called Paradise literally turned into hell within half an hour, and suddenly they had a glimpse of what climate change looks like.
So, what now? Movements will continue to ramp up the pressure. Groups such as 350.org (which I helped found) are confident that adults will shortly start responding to the calls from Thunberg and her peers to back them up with strikes of their own. That kind of pressure is already getting results; even before the new polling, Democratic candidates were pledging their support for dramatic action. Several, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, have come out strongly against allowing federal land to be used for oil and gas drilling—a “Keep It in the Ground” stance that, until a few months ago, was mainly the province of activists.
Such strong steps are clearly required. Having wasted three decades, we now have no choice but to move decisively, cutting our carbon emissions by five, six, seven per cent a year, or more. That will be as hard to achieve as was, say, the retooling of the American economy to fight the Second World War.
Or, actually, harder. We know now that the fossil-fuel companies knew all that was needed to be known about climate change back in the nineteen-eighties. (They even began raising the height of drilling rigs to compensate for the rise in the sea level that they knew was in the offing.) But they didn’t share that news. Instead, they kept the country in a debate about whether global warming was real, even though they knew that to argue otherwise was a lie. And that lie cost us what may have been the crucial three decades.
In recent years, fossil-fuel companies have sidled in the direction of scientific truth, but they’ve continued to fight efforts at actual change. Citizens in Colorado added to last year’s ballot a proposition intended not to block oil or gas drilling but merely to keep new rigs farther from homes and schools. Proposition 112 was well ahead in the polls, but oil and gas companies spent some forty million dollars to defeat it, outspending the other side forty-to-one and turning the referendum into one of the costliest in the history of the state. The industry, of course, also uses its money to support politicians. Koch Industries, part of whose vast holdings are in the coal and oil industries, is the second-largest private company in the country, and last year its PAC was the largest political spender in the sector. It was recently reported that, in the last quarter, Senator Susan Collins’s reëlection fund received five times as much in contributions from fossil-fuel executives in Texas—fifty thousand dollars—as from her constituents in Maine. (She is viewed as one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the Senate, heading into 2020.)
Sooner or later, though, the companies will feel enough pressure to make a move—probably when a Democrat takes control of the White House, especially if Republican control of the Senate also begins to wobble. (Perhaps it could even happen under a reëlected President Trump—just a few years ago, he was signing on to ads much like the one Gingrich endorsed.) Whenever it happens, that’s when things will get interesting. The first card that the industry is likely to play—indeed, it has already hinted as much—is support for a modest carbon tax, perhaps forty dollars a ton. In return, it would demand an end to effective regulation from the E.P.A. and liability for the damage its product has already caused. (Microsoft recently put its muscle behind just such a plan, by the Climate Leadership Council, which would give the industry a get-out-of-jail free card.)
A modest carbon tax, had such a deal been struck in 1989, would have mattered a lot. It would have rejiggered a million spreadsheets, nudging the ocean liner that is our economy onto a new compass reading not too far off our heading—but one that, over the years, would have steered us into relatively safe waters. And even at this late date there’s no intellectual argument against putting a price on carbon—most economists are for it. All things equal, it is a good idea. But there’s also no way that such an approach alone can do the trick: were we to rely on carbon taxes to cut emissions at the rate required now, they would need to be so high that no political system could sustain them. (The I.P.C.C. study said that, at the high end, carbon taxes might need to reach five thousand five hundred dollars a ton to squeeze the last drops of fossil fuel out of the economy.)
The oil companies can live with a modest tax because it’s a way to extend their basic business model for a couple more decades, which is, perhaps, the best they can muster in a world in which engineers are cutting the cost of a solar panel by a per cent or two every month. And, for the companies, it’s infinitely preferable to the Green New Deal—not to mention the growing pack of lawsuits from cities large and small, demanding cash to build sea walls; New York City’s plan to divest its pension funds from fossil-fuel companies; and thousands of protesters in kayaks mobbing their rigs as they try to set off to drill in the Arctic.
It would also have appeal for the many politicians who care at least a little about climate change and who have despaired of a deal ever emerging. Their response is likely to be: don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good; you have to start somewhere. The problem is that the ultimate negotiation is being carried out with science, which adamantly rejects compromise. It doesn’t even really negotiate. It’s not interested in who gave what contribution to whom: it just takes the carbon we produce and makes the oceans ever more acidic. To answer that, at this point, means, in policy terms, a Second World War–scale mobilization to deploy renewable energy and a commitment to stop new exploration and development of fossil fuels. It means an explicit acknowledgment that their age is over, and that the transition to clean energy is our top priority.
Political reality is always important, but in this case there’s something more crucial—call it just plain reality. It dictates that every step we take from here on pay heed to the underlying science, above all to the shrinking time we have left to make any real difference. After thirty years of standing still, baby steps won’t do us a bit of good, and a misstep may cost us our last chance.
|
|
|
Is Elizabeth Warren's College Plan Really Progressive? Yes |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50725"><span class="small">Ganesh Sitaraman, Guardian UK</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 05 May 2019 08:20 |
|
Sitaraman writes: "Last week, a number of commentators and thinktank analysts pounced on Senator Elizabeth Warren's plan to cancel student debt for 95% of Americans, provide universal free college at public schools, increase Pell Grants, end federal support of for-profit colleges, and invest heavily in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs)."
Elizabeth Warren. (photo: Andrew Harrer/Getty Images)
Is Elizabeth Warren's College Plan Really Progressive? Yes
By Ganesh Sitaraman, Guardian UK
05 May 19
Some have argued that Warren’s plan isn’t progressive because middle-class and upper-middle-class people benefit from it. But that is misguided
 ast week, a number of commentators and thinktank analysts pounced on Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan to cancel student debt for 95% of Americans, provide universal free college at public schools, increase Pell Grants, end federal support of for-profit colleges, and invest heavily in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Their criticism: the plan isn’t “progressive” because middle-class and upper-middle-class people benefit from it.
As I read these critiques, it struck me that although these commentators use the phrase “progressive”, they mean it in a narrow way that is not only misleading when applied to the Warren plan, but also at odds with how the new generation of economic progressives think about public policy. Let me explain. (And full disclosure: I have been a longtime adviser to Senator Warren).
Critics of the plan, at times, seem to use the term “progressive” to mean that benefits go to those at the bottom of the income distribution and not at the top. Think of this as akin to the phrase “progressive taxation”, in which tax rates are lower for the poor and higher for the wealthy. This is fine so far as it goes – except that the critics gloss over the fact that the proposal is paid for by a 2% wealth tax on people with more than $50m in assets. In other words, a fraction of the top 1% is paying for the entirety of the plan. On this definition, then, the plan is obviously – and extremely – progressive, because it puts the burden on the wealthiest people and gives benefits (debt cancellation, Pell Grants, free college, HBCU investments) to the vast majority who are not wealthy.
But the critics also suggest that if any significant amount of benefits go to middle-class and upper-middle-class people, then the plan is also not progressive. This is where things get confusing. The critics can’t mean this in a specific sense because the plan is, as I have said, extremely progressive in the distribution of costs. They must mean that for a policy to be progressive that it should benefit the poor and working class more than it benefits the middle and upper classes. This is a bizarre and, I think, fundamentally incorrect use of the term progressive.
The logic of the critics’ position is that public investments in programs that help middle- and upper-class people isn’t progressive. This means that the critics would have to oppose public parks and public K-12 education, public swimming pools and public golf courses, even public libraries. These are all public programs that offer universal access at a low price (or free) to everyone. And I can assure you that middle-class and upper-middle-class families visit national parks, send their kids to public schools, and check out books at the public library. On the critics’ theory, these are all “regressive” because middle-class people benefit – and in some cases might benefit more than poor and working-class people from their use.
Perhaps the critics believe that these public institutions (and indeed, all public institutions of this type) are regressive and are bad public policy. But I doubt most people who identify as progressive would take that view – and indeed, many progressive economic policymakers would be quite hostile to it because progressives have long supported the creation of public goods. Schools, libraries and pools are all more than a century old, as are public utilities in electricity and water. Other public investments – like the national highway system – benefit everyone as well.
Progressives support public funding for these goods because they offer universal access to all people in our society, thereby expanding freedom and opportunity. They improve the economy in countless ways. And they stitch us together as a democratic society, both offering us places to encounter those who are different from us and giving us a shared set of institutions to debate about in the public sphere.
The critics might respond that they do not object to building public institutions but simply to debt cancellation for middle-class and upper-middle-class families, and that this aspect of the Warren plan is regressive. But this response shows that the critics have missed the point completely. The system of higher education financing has failed America. It has burdened a generation in debt, it has excluded millions from access to post-secondary school training and enrichment, and it has put the economy in a straitjacket.
The aim of a higher ed plan whose wide scope covers debt cancellation, universal free college, expanded Pell Grants, end federal support of for-profits, investments in HBCUs, is to make a fundamental structural change to how higher education works in this country. It is an attempt to clear out the failed neoliberal philosophy of debt-fueled education, and instead move towards a robust public higher education system. Some kind of post-high school training or education is now necessary for almost everyone, and so our democracy should offer it for free to everyone – regardless of race, wealth or geography – just like we do for K-12 education. And that ambition is quintessentially progressive.
|
|
Democrats, Want a Lesson in Political Hardball? Look to Abraham Lincoln, Who Rigged the Senate. |
|
|
Sunday, 05 May 2019 08:19 |
|
Millhiser writes: "There's a lesson here for modern-day Democrats. The history of the American statehood process is the history of political factions selectively admitting new states in order to bolster their own fortunes and harm those of their opponents."
The Great Union Prize Fight, Caricature, 1861. (photo: NY Historical Society/Getty Images)
Democrats, Want a Lesson in Political Hardball? Look to Abraham Lincoln, Who Rigged the Senate.
By Ian Millhiser, ThinkProgress
05 May 19
The Great Emancipator has a lesson for today's Democrats about how to play constitutional hardball.
nce upon a time, nobody lived in Nevada.
In 1860, the year Abraham Lincoln was elected president, Nevada was a desert wasteland with fewer than 7,000 residents. Indeed, the Silver State didn’t even exist on the day of Lincoln’s election. Two days before the lame-duck President James Buchanan left office, he signed legislation carving off part of Utah Territory, which stretched across most of modern-day Nevada, about a third of Colorado and some of Wyoming, to form part of what we now know as Nevada. Congress would soon pass two more bills expanding Nevada at Utah’s expense.
This largely forgotten act of line-drawing enabled one of the most consequential gerrymanders in American history. Because the virtually unpopulated Nevada became its own territory, Republicans could admit it as a state just four years later. That gave the Party of Lincoln two extra seats in the Senate — helping prevent Democrats from simultaneously controlling the White House and both houses of Congress until 1893.
Nor was this selective admission of the Republican state of Nevada an isolated case. Among other things, the reason why there are two Dakotas — despite the fact that both states are so underpopulated that they each only rate a single member of the House of Representatives to this day — is because Republicans won the 1888 election and decided to celebrate by giving themselves four senators instead of just two.
There’s a lesson here for modern-day Democrats. The history of the American statehood process is the history of political factions selectively admitting new states in order to bolster their own fortunes and harm those of their opponents. The American West, with its wasteland of states with two senators and approximately zero residents, was shaped by this brand of constitutional hardball. And if Democrats do not embrace it today, they risk being doomed to the political abyss.
By 2040, according to a University of Virginia analysis of Census population projections, about half of the country will live in just eight states — which means 16 senators for one half of America and 84 for the other half. Meanwhile, according to Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden, partisanship closely correlates with population density — “as you go from the center of cities out through the suburbs and into rural areas, you traverse in a linear fashion from Democratic to Republican places.”
So America is fast approaching a tipping point where one party will enjoy a permanent supermajority in the United States Senate — and with it, permanent control over the federal judiciary. Democrats have no choice. They must embrace the Party of Lincoln’s tactic of selectively admitting new states, or they must perish.
Two senators, no residents
Had the Democrat Buchanan understood what chopping up Utah would mean for the nation’s future, he probably would have vetoed the bill creating Nevada Territory. At the time, Mormons were overwhelmingly Democratic. Yet the carving up of Utah Territory isolated most of these Mormons and allowed Republicans to dominate Nevada and Colorado. That, in turn, allowed Republicans, who controlled Congress for much of this era, to admit Nevada and Colorado as Republican states in fairly short order. Utah would remain a territory until 1896.
It’s hard to blame President Lincoln for signing the 1864 legislation turning the barren Nevada desert into a state. America, after all, was caught in a civil war. If unionists lost their majority in the Senate, the new majority could force a surrender. War often requires leaders to take actions that would be unconscionable during peacetime. Inter arma enim silent l?g?s.
But there’s no question that Lincoln’s decision to sign the Nevada legislation was a gross departure from ordinary practice. As Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal explain in a 1999 paper laying out much of the history of statehood admissions in the United States, Congress typically would not consider a territory’s petition for full statehood until that territory reached a certain population threshold — “the norm for eligibility was sufficient population to reach the current quota for a House seat.”
In 1864, when Nevada became a state, that quota was about 125,000 residents. Nevada, with a population of less than 7,000 in the most recent census, did not even come close to crossing that threshold. Indeed, as Charles Stewart and Barry Weingast note in a seminal paper laying out the history of statehood admissions in the later half of the 1800s, “had Nevada waited until the standard population criterion had been met . . . it would not have entered the Union until 1970.”
Indeed, it’s difficult to justify admitting any western territory during this period in American history. “In the 1860 census only 1 percent of the nation’s population lived in the territories,” Steward and Weingast note. And yet Nevada was the first of several Republican territories admitted to the Union largely to bolster Republican electoral prospects.
Republicans also tried to admit Colorado around the same time that Nevada became a state, although this attempt was thwarted because the would-be state’s residents rejected a proposed state constitution. The GOP tried again shortly after Lincoln’s death, only to have this effort thwarted by President Andrew Johnson’s veto. They finally succeeded in 1876, after Republican President Ulysses Grant signed the Colorado bill into law.
Yet Colorado never met the traditional criteria for statehood during this entire saga. According to the 1870 Census, Colorado Territory had fewer than 40,000 residents.
These shenanigans made it possible for the GOP to engage in more of the same down the road. In 1888, for example, Congress considered omnibus legislation admitting several western territories as states. Though both parties agreed that new states should be admitted, they disagreed on whether the Democratic territory of New Mexico should be admitted or not. Republicans also wanted to split the GOP-friendly Dakota territory into North and South Dakota, thus giving them an additional two seats in the Senate.
Ultimately, Republicans got their way because they defeated Democratic President Grover Cleveland in the 1888 election, and took back the House of Representatives to boot. With no chance of blocking the GOP’s preferred outcome after President-elect Benjamin Harrison took office, Democrats gave up the fight. There are still two Dakotas. New Mexico did not become a state until 1912.
Yet it’s worth noting that, in 1888, while the omnibus statehood admissions bill was under debate, Democrats controlled both the House and the White House, and Republicans only enjoyed a two-seat majority in the Senate. Thus, if Nevada and Colorado statehood had not given Republicans four extra seats in the Senate (Nevada sent a single Democrat to the Senate from 1881-1887, but otherwise reliably chose Republican senators until the twentieth century), Democrats would have controlled Congress and the White House in 1888 and would have been able to admit Dakota and New Mexico on their own terms.
Where to go from here
The Party of Lincoln was able to manipulate statehood admissions with relative ease, largely because the United States still had so much territory that remained unrepresented in Congress. Today, such territory is scarce. Beyond the District of Columbia, which should be admitted as at least one state as soon as Democrats take control of Congress and the White House, the rest of the continental United States is already part of one state or another.
Offshore territories such as Puerto Rico offer one option, but these territories have their own politics and often have their identities distinct from the United States. While a plurality (48 percent) of Puerto Ricans told pollsters in 2018 that they would prefer that their island become a state, large minorities opposed this option. In a 2012 referendum, only 45 percent of Puerto Rican voters chose statehood (though many voters left the statehood question blank).
It’s far from clear, in other words, which American territories — if any — would accept statehood if it were offered.
There is another option — one that also stretches back to the Lincoln administration. In 1861, shortly after the Civil War began, 35 Virginia counties rebelled against the rebellion. The unionist counties met in Wheeling, declared itself to be the lawful government of Virginia, and eventually were admitted back into the Union as the state of West Virginia.
As a constitutional matter, this maneuver was dubious. Though the Constitution permits new states to be carved out of old states, it may only happen with “the consent of the legislatures of the states concerned as well as of the Congress.” President Lincoln recognized the Wheeling loyalists as the legitimate government of Virginia — and Congress acquiesced by seating two senators appointed by the Wheeling government as the legitimate senators from the Commonwealth of Virginia.
The Wheeling government then acted as the Virginia legislature, passing a law acquiescing in its own divorce from the traitorous parts of Virginia. And so West Virginia was born.
Modern-day Democrats would not need to play similar games to split large blue states like New York and California into multiple new states — assuming, of course, that their state legislatures are willing to play along. The legislation creating ten Californias or eight New Yorks, moreover, could potentially be paired with an interstate compact that places at least some of the state government’s core functions in a unified California or unified New York government.
This solution will be perceived as radical, and it will undoubtedly trigger massive resistance from Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court. But if the alternative is allowing half the country to control 84 percent of the Senate, splitting blue states is a more democratic choice than doing nothing.
It’s also painfully clear that few Democrats have wrapped their head around the coming Senate malapportionment crisis.
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) became Minority Leader in 2007. It took six years before Democrats realized that the only way to confront his obstructionism was to change the Senate’s rules so that the minority caucus could no longer block President Obama’s nominees. Fundamentally altering the makeup of the Senate is a much more consequential change than a new Senate rule. It is likely that elected Democrats will take at least as long before they wake up to the threat Senate malapportionment presents to American democracy.
But they are also running out of time. The next time Democrats win a majority in the Senate — if it happens at all — could very well be the last. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, Democrats may have as few as two years to act before they permanently lose control of the Senate, and with it, the Supreme Court and the Constitution.
Should they choose to act, moreover, Democrats should know that admitting new states for political reasons is entirely normal in American history — and it was a tactic pioneered by America’s greatest president.
|
|
