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State of Disunion
So, there are going to be two responses to President Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday. One, the official Republican Party response, will be delivered by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), also known (at least to this blogger) as the only Republican with a strong chance to win the presidency in 2016.
The second response could foreshadow the reason why Rubio might not be the next president. That response, on behalf of the supposedly defanged and doomed-to-irrelevancy Tea Party, will be given by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky).
Let’s put aside, for a moment, this question: How is it that the opposition gets to make two televised responses to the president’s remarks on the State of the Union? And instead, let us consider what these dueling rebuttals say about the state of the opposition.
In short, there is such a cleavage, at this point, between establishment Republicans and the conservapopulists, that they can’t even get together on a single response to a president that they all despise. This does not bode well for their prospects for unity in upcoming elections.
One of the things that worked against the Republicans in 2012 was the fact that the Kamikaze wing of the party—disaffected Tea Partiers and other assorted fringe kooks— couldn’t get behind Mitt Romney until his nomination became inevitable. One after another, the assembled collection of third-rate goofballs (such as Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum) rose to challenge him and finally succumbed to his monetary and institutional advantages. But the months-long spectacle severely damaged the party’s brand among moderate voters and ultimately, it could be argued, helped sink Romney’s chances by forcing him to pander to the wingnuts, thereby losing him the middle—and the election.
The establishment is now trying to fight back, but having set this mess in motion, the Republican leadership is now finding out how difficult it is to put the goofpaste back into the tube. That’s why the Republicans will have dueling rebuttals tomorrow night.
The bottom line is this: the fact that Sen. Paul is giving a Tea Party speech is a clear signal that the conservapopulists are not going to go gently into the good night which Karl Rove and his colleagues have all planned out for them. You see, Rove and other intelligent Republicans have learned the lesson of the 2012 election—that the spectacle of a Republican Party full of nutballs like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock scared the crap out of centrist voters and drove them, grudgingly, into the arms of the Democrats.
But the Tea Party folks don’t share that view.
In Ayn Rand Paul World, Mitt Romney and the Republicans lost in 2012 because they weren’t conservative enough, and heroes such as Akin and Mourdock were viciously slandered and taken down by the evil liberal, “lamestream” media.
The reason the Tea Party types believe this ridiculous tripe—although most objective observers see it, rightly, as delusional—is because, for the most part, Tea Partiers only talk politics with other Tea Partiers. They reinforce to each other their collective delusion that a majority of Americans think the same way they do—and because they don’t talk very much with anyone who doesn’t think that way, they’re shocked when the electorate rejects their ideas, and they assume that the Democrats must have stolen the election.
The Republican Party has created quite the dilemma for itself. Having invited the kook wing into the party, in a grab for the low-hanging fruit of its votes, the Republican Party has alienated moderates and made itself dependent on the Tea Party. Having seen moderates alienated by the Tea Party, the Republicans can’t compete if the Tea Partiers stay on the sideline. But without the middle, which the Tea Party has alienated, the Republicans also cannot win.
The smarter move, better in the long term, is to kick the Tea Party out of the tent and try to get some moderates back into it. It’s a far better growth strategy, as Rove and other establishment Republicans clearly recognize. But the Tea Party isn’t going along with the plan. It not only likes being inside the tent—it believes it built the tent, with its one-time electoral triumph in 2010, and it is entitled not just to be inside the tent but to run it.
I believe it was Lyndon Johnson who said that it was better to have a troublesome faction inside the tent, pissing out, than to have it outside the tent, pissing in. The trouble for the Republicans is that the Tea Party, wild and undisciplined, is inside the tent and pissing everywhere—outward onto moderate voters, and inward all over establishment Republicans who would actually like to win another election in their lifetimes. The GOP has created a monster that it can no longer control, and it is now in the unenviable position where it loses if the Tea Party stays or leaves.
And if the Republican Party can’t get control of this situation, tomorrow night’s Rubio-Paul split could be an ominous preview of things to come—perhaps a divisive GOP presidential primary in 2016, or maybe even a shattering of the party that could see both men in the general election, splitting conservative votes, and both getting squashed by the Democratic nominee, a la 1912. Get your popcorn ready.
The Latest on GOP Electoral Vote Shenanigans
Various news sources over the past few days provide indications that Republican schemes to rig the electoral vote in future elections may have hit some roadblocks in two key states.
In Florida, reports indicate that GOP House Speaker Will Weatherford opposes the change from a winner-take-all system to a system that would award electors based on congressional districts. Although Republicans dominate the Florida legislature (76-44 in the House and 26-14 in the Senate), chances are zero that any bill will move forward in the House without the Speaker’s blessing.
In Virginia, numerous reports indicate that at least two Republican state senators and GOP Gov. Bob McDonnell oppose such a change. With the State Senate evenly divided, 20-20, any Republican defections would likely kill the proposed legislation.
Now, consider this for a minute. Why do you think it is, in states like Florida and Virginia, that the Republicans appear to be backing down on a scheme that would guarantee Republicans a majority of their states’ electoral votes, regardless of whether Republican presidential candidates actually win the states? Well, it’s pretty simple: at least some Republicans still believe that a Republican presidential candidate can win those states in future elections. To split the states’ electors, in Florida and Virginia, could eventually come back to work against the GOP. (Had such a system been in place in those states in 2000, Al Gore would have become president.)
Although Virginia appears to be trending Democratic at the presidential level, it is still close enough that a very strong Republican candidate could win it (or a weak Democrat could lose it). And we all know that Florida persists in being an up-for-grabs state that either side can win. In fact, President Obama barely won it in 2012 (and it was so close that it was the only state I predicted incorrectly). So for Republicans to split those states’ electors may one day deprive a Republican of victory in a close election. It would be a stupid move, and I expect that Republican legislators in Ohio will come to the same conclusion and keep the current winner-take-all format in place. (President Obama only won Ohio by about two percentage points in 2012, which means that Ohio remains a couple points more Republican than the nation as a whole, as it has been consistently for most of the last century; in a 50-50 presidential election, such as 2000, Ohio is a near-certainty to go Republican.)
While it is undoubtedly a relief to hear that Florida and Virginia may not move forward with this plan, we should still be concerned about a move to fix the elections in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the other three states that went Democratic in 2012 but remained under the control of Republican governors and legislatures. President Obama easily won each of those three states in 2012, and none of them have gone to a Republican presidential candidate in a generation. (Pennsylvania and Michigan barely went for George H.W. Bush in 1988, and Wisconsin last supported a Republican for president in 1984. That would be Ronald Reagan, who captured 49 states that year and barely lost the 50th, Minnesota, which voted for native son Walter Mondale by about 4,000 votes.)
In short, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin have consistently been more Democratic in presidential elections than the nation as a whole for a long, long time. For example, the last time Michigan’s vote went more Republican than the national vote happened in 1976, when the state voted for Michigan native Gerald Ford. In a 50-50 presidential election, these states are all but certain to vote Democratic.
The reason it is still a very real possibility that Republicans may change the electoral allocation in one or more of those three states is because they see no realistic chance that their presidential candidate will win any of them at any time in the foreseeable future. As a result, unlike the situation in Florida, Ohio, and Virginia, Republicans have nothing to lose by fiddling with the electors in Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin.
The GOP proposals in these states are heinous—an absolute insult both to the concept of equal voting rights for all citizens, and to the very idea of democracy itself. Because the GOP has drawn those states’ congressional districts in such a way that Republicans are disproportionately represented in each state, their proposed reforms would virtually guarantee that any Republican presidential candidate would win a majority of the states’ electors, despite losing those states by significant margins.
Michigan would be the most egregious case. President Obama won the state by nearly 10 percent, but under the current Republican proposal, Mitt Romney would have taken nine of the state’s 16 electoral votes, and Obama would have won seven. In Pennsylvania, where the president won statewide by about five percent, Romney would have gotten at least 12 electoral votes, possibly 13, and Obama would have received no more than eight, possibly just seven. And in Wisconsin, where the president won the state by more than five percent, the electors likely would have split 5-5.
Now, let’s take a look at what might have happened in the 2012 election if this scheme had been in place in just Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. As it happened, President Obama defeated Governor Romney by nearly five million votes nationally, and the president won 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206. Under the GOP election-rigging proposal, the electoral vote spread would have shrunk to Obama 306, Romney 232.
Now, let’s say the president’s reelection had been slightly closer—say, perhaps, that he had won by four million votes nationally, rather than nearly five million. That certainly would have flipped Florida, with its 29 electors, to Romney, and quite probably Ohio, with 18 electors, as well.
So, let’s reset here: if the president had won the election by four million votes, rather than nearly five million, and the Republican electoral-vote scheme had been in place in just Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, our electoral college result would have been: Romney 279, Obama 259. In short, Mitt Romney would be president today, despite losing the national election by four million votes.
Now, yes, it has happened that the winner of the popular vote has lost the electoral vote before. It happened in 2000, when George W. Bush became president despite losing the national vote to the aforementioned Al Gore. But that was a rare exception, as were the prior instances of this odd occurrence, which happened in 1888, 1876 and 1824. In all of those cases, except the strange, multi-candidate election of 1824, the national popular vote was so close that one could consider them a statistical tie. For example, Gore’s popular vote victory over Bush in 2000 was about half a million votes, roughly one-half of a percentage point. (The margin for Gore would have grown only slightly even if many Democratic votes in Florida hadn’t been discounted in the final tally.)
But the proposal the Republicans are attempting to advance today would render the popular will of the nation’s voters almost entirely irrelevant. Barring a landslide victory by the Democrats—something on the scale of the 2008 election, which President Obama won by nearly 10 million votes—the Republicans would win every presidential election, even while receiving significantly fewer votes than the Democrats. Landslide election victories don’t happen very often in America—which is why they are remarkable when they happen.
With Republicans having already fixed the U.S. House of Representatives—where they retained control in 2012 despite losing the total accumulated House vote by more than a million votes nationally—and probably being positioned to reclaim the Senate in 2014, the only missing puzzle piece would be the presidency. If they push through their democracy circumvention plans in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, they might nail that last puzzle piece down as well. If this happens, we could see Republicans win the presidency, the House and the Senate in 2016, even if more voters vote for the Democrats in all three cases.
At that point, America ceases to be a democracy and, furthermore, loses all moral authority as the leader of the free world. How can we claim to be a beacon of democracy when our system sets it up for one political party to hold power regardless of how the people actually vote? As Russian president Vladimir Putin noted—in a joint press conference with President George W. Bush, no less—in Russia, the president is the person who wins the most votes. Period. But this would no longer be the case in America.
As noted previously on this blog, there is nothing to stop the Republicans from enacting this legislation. They have the Constitutional right to do it (although my wife, a lawyer who knows the Constitution inside and out, suspects the voters of those states may be able to sue on grounds of disenfranchisement, but I think we know how the current U.S. Supreme Court would probably rule on that). That’s why the 2014 elections in these states are of crucial importance. If Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin go through with this scheme, the voters of those states will have only one chance, in 2014, to put Democrats in charge of the legislatures and governorships so they can overturn these laws before the 2016 election.
The national Democratic Party needs to begin investing heavily now in these states and make a serious push to win them in 2014.
Sen. Tom Harkin: On Fiscal Cliff, "No Deal Is Better Than A Bad Deal"
As we appear to be headed over the so-called “fiscal cliff” tomorrow, barring a last-minute deal, I’ve got to say that I think it’s a lot of ado over very little. What the “fiscal cliff” entails, if we go over it, is largely a return to the Clinton-era tax rates for everyone, which will be inconvenient but not debilitating. I’m not looking forward to paying more in taxes, but I’m happy to cough it up if it will help balance the budget and pay our nation’s bills.
Going over the so-called cliff also results in steep cuts to defense spending, and frankly, we are long overdue to become more efficient in our military spending. We’ve been making billionaires of defense contractors for far too long, buying high-priced hardware that the military itself doesn’t want and isn’t asking for. We already have more and newer military hardware than just about the rest of the world put together; unless we’re expecting to every other country in the world to get together and invade our shores, we’re spending way too much on defense.
I recognize there are other concerns, and my biggest concern is the significant scaling back of federal unemployment benefits. I would hope we could address that separately, along with targeted tax cuts for people who actually need to buy food and clothes rather than another yacht.
But has it crossed anybody’s mind that the reason this thing has turned into such a big deal is because we have overhyped it so much? I keep hearing about how it’s going to tank the economy, but I’m not convinced of that. We had these tax rates in place in the 1990s, and the economy boomed, and that was largely because we were finally behaving responsibly — we were taking in more in revenue than we were spending, which convinced investors to invest in America and its economy.
At this point, the thing I’m most worried about is that President Obama and the Democrats will agree to a bad deal rather than waiting a few more days and cutting a better deal from a position of strength. I agree entirely with the comments of Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who was quoted by the Associated Press this morning as saying the following:
“No deal is better than a bad deal. And this looks like a very bad deal the way this is shaping up,” said Harkin.
He suggested instead letting tax rates revert to the higher levels that existed when the economy was strong under President Bill Clinton, adding, “I ask, what’s so bad about that?”
I’m with Senator Harkin on this one.
Stacking The Electoral College: Republicans, Unable To Win, Prepare To Cheat
In recent weeks, I have been tracking an alarming story that now appears to be moving from the realm of conjecture to reality. Today, National Journal ran an article on how Republicans are orchestrating a scheme to steal the next presidential election if they can’t win it legitimately. Their plan: to split the electoral votes in three states they have been unable to win in the last quarter-century, in order to help elect their presidential candidate in 2016 regardless of whether he actually wins the most votes.
First, a little background is necessary. As most people who closely follow politics understand, the president of the United States is not elected by the direct votes of the voters. Instead, every state is allocated a certain number of “electors,” roughly in proportion to their share of the nation’s population, chosen by the popular vote of each state. In 48 of the 50 states, the candidate who wins the largest number of votes wins all the electoral votes in that state. For example, Barack Obama won approximately 63 percent of the vote in New York, and will therefore receive 29 electoral votes from that state, while Mitt Romney will receive none; conversely, in Texas, where Romney won about 58 percent of the vote, Romney will get 38 electoral votes, and Obama will receive zero. In the remaining two states, Maine and Nebraska, the electors are allocated so that the statewide winner gets two electoral votes, and the winner in each Congressional district gets one. The result, in all but four of the 48 elections that have been held since the popular vote has been officially tracked and recorded, is that the candidate with the most votes has won the presidency.
The Constitution of the United States provides that each state may choose its electors in any manner it sees fit, which is why Maine and Nebraska can allocate their electoral votes as they do, while the other states allocate them so that the winner of the state gets all the electoral votes.
Now, according to National Journal, Republican legislators who currently control the legislatures and governorships in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, are preparing to introduce legislation in 2013 that would award Republicans most of their states’ electoral votes, even while the Republican candidate is losing each state badly. No Republican presidential candidate has won Michigan or Pennsylvania since 1988, or Wisconsin since 1984, but had this proposal been in place this year, Romney would have captured a substantial majority of the electoral votes in each state despite losing them all by at least 5 percent of the total votes cast (and by just under 10 percent in Michigan). There is also discussion of doing enacting the same scheme in Florida, Ohio and Virginia, all of which Obama won in each of the last two elections. However, the possibility that the GOP may actually win any or all of these states may make this less likely than it is in Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, where Republicans haven’t won the presidential vote in a generation.
The reason Republicans are singling out these six states is very simple: aside from West Virginia, which has a Democratic governor and legislature but voted for Romney, these are the only six states in America that voted for a presidential candidate of one party, but in which the governorships and legislatures are controlled by the other party. They understand that if they go forward with their plans, the net result will be a large pickup of electoral votes by Republicans. The Democrats cannot respond by changing the rules in states that typically vote Republican, because all the states that typically go Republican in presidential elections (except West Virginia) are also controlled by Republicans at the state capital. So while the six aforementioned states would give a majority of their electors to Republicans, even as Republicans are losing those states, the so-called “red states” would continue to give ALL of their electors to Republicans.
Let’s take a look at what would have happened in 2012 if the Republican plan had been in place in all six states. It’s actually pretty simple: Barack Obama, despite outpolling Mitt Romney by nearly 5 million votes nationally (approximately 66 million to 61 million), probably would have lost the White House. In the six states where Republicans are considering changing the rules, Obama won 106 electoral votes to Romney’s zero. Under the newly proposed rules, despite winning the most votes in all six of those states, Obama would have lost the majority of the all-important electoral votes in each one of those states. Under the proposed GOP scheme, Romney would have won potentially as many as 70 of the 106 electoral votes in those states; he came up 64 electoral votes short of winning the White House. The math—and the Republican intention—is simple: to gain (and keep) power regardless of whether they actually win elections or not.
It should now be abundantly clear to anyone who can count that the Republicans do not care what the voters want. They have lost the popular presidential vote in five of the last six elections, and in four of those five elections, they have lost by large margins: four million votes or more. Rather than changing their policies and attempting to appeal to more voters, the Republicans instead are attempting to rig the system so that they can win regardless of who actually gets more votes.
The worst part of all of this is that there is nothing to stop them. The Constitution is very clear: states can allocate their electors as they wish. The GOP controls the legislatures and governorships in each of these states. If the Republicans introduce this legislation in any or all of these states, it will become law, and they will almost certainly win the presidency in 2016, regardless of how badly they might actually lose the election.
There is only one way to prevent this obscene, absurd tragedy from occurring, and it is admittedly a long shot: Democrats have to win the governorship and both chambers of the legislature in each one of these states in 2014. Only then can they overturn any of these laws that may be enacted over the next year or two. But the Republicans who control these states have drawn the district lines in such a way that it is almost impossible for Democrats to win the legislatures in these states. It is a heavy lift, because what is happening here is a complicated scheme that most voters will not understand. But Democrats are going to have to try, because if this is the way it’s going to be, it will be nearly impossible for them to win the White House ever again, even if they consistently win the most votes.
The most important political objective for the Democratic party in the next two years is to take control of the governorships and legislatures in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Virginia and Wisconsin. Every other political objective pales in comparison. Every dollar, every staffer, every volunteer that the Democratic Party can spare must be devoted to this purpose. Failure in this effort will allow the Republicans to stack the deck so that they will control the presidency no matter how the voters actually vote.
This isn’t about what is right or wrong. It’s about power. The Republicans want power and will do whatever they must do to get it and keep it, even if that means stacking the deck and rendering the actual votes of the people completely meaningless. Democrats only have one chance to stop them: everything depends on 2014, and that includes democracy itself.
Gun Apologists: Stupid Excuses, Bad Analogies and Trite Talking Points
I wrote a post on the gun issue (“Our Deadly Love Affair With Guns“) less than two weeks ago, after a professional football player killed his girlfriend and himself in Kansas City. I’m not going to repeat the same arguments now; if you want to see what I think about America’s problem with guns, that post sums it up very well.
But in the wake of yesterday’s horrific, senseless massacre of 20 children between the ages of 5 and 10, as well as seven adults, today I just want to deal with some of the absolutely idiotic excuses, analogies and talking points I have encountered in the last 24 hours on this issue.
I was talking with a friend around lunchtime yesterday, and we started throwing out some of the ridiculous things we expected to hear from the gun apologists. The first one we came up with was this: “Well, if the teachers/the principal/the janitors would have had guns, this never would have happened (or fewer kids would have been killed).” Naturally, I’ve seen that argument quite a bit since yesterday. It was completely predictable, because that’s what the gun apologists always say after the occurrence one of these increasingly frequent gun massacres in a public place. OK, sure, it’s possible that an armed teacher might have killed the killer before he got off more than a few rounds. It’s also possible that said teacher, possibly scared to death and perhaps not a gun enthusiast, would have done more harm than good, and that a bunch of kids may have been caught in the crossfire. A grade school should not be the Wild West; the answer to gun violence is not more guns. The answer is to ensure that there are fewer guns and that they are not easily accessible to lunatics.
So, from Trite Talking Point #1, let’s move on to our first Really Bad Analogy (which also doubles as Trite Talking Point #2). In a Facebook discussion, some fellow chimed in on a friend’s thread by saying that people die in car accidents, so you can’t single out guns, because people using cars sometimes get killed too. Well, no. The purpose of a car is to transport one or more individuals from place to place. If somebody dies in a car, it is almost always accidental. Very few people ever take it into their heads to use a car as a weapon. Guns, on the other hand, are designed to cause physical harm; that is the purpose of a gun. A person who procures a gun does not do so for any other purpose but to shoot it. And guns, being a bit smaller than a car, and able (unlike vehicles) to hurl bullets at a distance, are more easily hidden, can get into more places, and are easier to kill people with. Even if some nutjob decides to start killing the USA in his Chevrolet, he can’t take a car into a school, a church, a supermarket or an office building. It won’t fit through the door. To kill, intentionally, with a car, almost never happens and isn’t nearly as easy as killing intentionally with a gun.
And by the way, there is one other area where this ridiculous analogy does not hold: car usage is heavily regulated. There are laws governing how a car is used, and people who violate those laws risk losing their driving privileges. Unsafe or unwise usage of a gun does not necessarily result in a person facing any legal sanction at all, unless somebody ends up injured or dead. You want to drink and drive? If you are caught, you’ll be arrested and possibly lose your license—just for being drunk behind the wheel. When was the last time somebody got arrested for handling a gun while drunk (without, of course, killing or wounding somebody first)?
Let’s go now to Trite Talking Point #3, which is also our first Stupid Excuse: more gun regulation won’t make any difference; killers will just use other weapons. This excuse for inaction is ridiculous, and I’ll demonstrate why.
Let’s say the psycho who shot up all those kids in Connecticut yesterday had entered the school with a knife instead of a gun. What are the differences between the two weapons? Well, first of all, if you have a gun, you can kill from a distance. If the killer stands in the door of a classroom, he can start plugging people from there, and nobody will be able to get past him without getting shot. But if he goes in with a knife, he first has to get close enough to a victim to actually use the knife; it also takes more time than shooting (which is very fast) and makes the assailant more vulnerable to being tackled or otherwise impeded by the other adult in the room. Additionally, and this is very important: with a knife, an attacker can only attack one victim at a time. He may get one victim, maybe even several, but the others are going to run, and since the knife-wielder has no gun, and can’t kill at a distance, he can’t possibly stop all of them.
I keep hearing, from the gun apologists, about the 22 kids in China who got stabbed a few days ago. But you know what? Those 22 kids all lived. Every one of them is alive. Their parents will get to see them grow up. There’s a reason why the fictional Sgt. Jimmy Malone, in his famous speech in The Untouchables, says “They pull a knife; you pull a gun … ” That’s because it’s easier and more efficient to kill with a gun than it is to kill with a knife. For any individuals to whom this isn’t obvious, all I can say is any such people are lucky that breathing is an involuntary exercise. If they had to think about it, they’d suffocate.
OK, let’s plow forward and deal with Bad Analogy #2. One argument that gun-control advocates make is that other comparable countries have far fewer gun deaths than the United States, which in a typical year has about 10,000 deaths related to guns. Sometimes it’s around 9,000, other years closer to 11,000 or 12,000, but it’s usually right around that 10,000 mark. Other western democracies, such as Britain or Canada, usually have anywhere from 50 to a couple hundred gun deaths in a given year.
Of course, yesterday, a gun apologist on Facebook countered that argument with this: most of these countries are smaller than Texas, so the comparison is invalid. Well, no, that’s actually a really bad analogy, because the point isn’t that a country like Britain, with one-fifth of the U.S population (but many more people than Texas, by the way) has fewer gun deaths; that is to be expected. The point is that if you compare apples to apples and look at it on a per-capita basis (number of gun deaths per 100,000 people), the U.S. total is off the charts. Britain, with 60 million people, has about 50 gun deaths in a given year. The United States, with slightly more than 300 million people, has about 10,000. All things being equal, either Britain should have 2,000 gun deaths a year, or the United States should have about 250. On an apples-to-apples basis, we have about 40 times more gun deaths per capita than Britain every year. Do we have 40 times as many evil or crazy people, per capita, than the United Kingdom has? No. But we do have 280 million guns.
Well, that’s a pretty good sampling, but I’m going to close here with Stupid Excuse #2: we can’t do anything about guns because the Second Amendment guarantees everyone’s right to a gun.
Well, let’s start with the text of that amendment:
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
You’ll notice, if you read that 27-word sentence carefully, that its mandate (” … the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed”) is conditional; the right to keep and bear arms is predicated on, and justified by, the security needs of the state. In the 18th century, when the founders adopted this amendment, there was no large, standing army; average citizens could be called upon at any time to defend their country or community. I could make a very strong case here that the current strength and structure of the United States armed forces obviates the need for every American to be armed and ready to fight off an invasion or insurrection.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has chosen to interpret this amendment much more loosely than I do, and my point, although I consider it to be correct, is also moot. So let’s move on to another argument that might hold up a little better:
Every Constitutional right has limits.
For example, let’s look at an amendment to the bill of rights that most Americans hold absolutely sacred: the First Amendment.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Does anyone care to argue that this amendment, and the rights contained within, are not limited? Then I’d like to ask you to do a series of experiments:
1) First, strip naked at the corner of Wacker Drive and Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago while chanting verses from your religious text of choice.
2) Then, put your clothes back on (please) and catch a cab to the nearest theater. Buy a ticket, walk in, and halfway through whatever Harold and Kumar are doing at White Castle, start screaming that the theater is on fire.
3) Next, assuming you have not yet been arrested, go home and start blogging about how you’ve got a great plan to shoot the president, and while you’re at it, go ahead and post that the local school board leader likes to have sex with 12-year-olds.
4) After you’ve finished with these contributions to the world of journalism, go out into the middle of the street with a picket sign and block traffic.
Oh, wait—you mean you can’t legally do any of these things? But the First Amendment is clear, isn’t it? Congress cannot make any law that prevents free exercise of religion, speech, press or assembly, right?
Yes it can, as the Supreme Court has previously ruled—if, and only if, the free exercise of those rights creates a clear and present danger to others. If you shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, when there is no fire, and people get hurt, you have broken the law and can be prosecuted, as you can if you threaten the life of the president, libel somebody, or obstruct vehicular traffic, for example. Can anyone seriously argue that the potential misuse of a gun does not also create a clear and present danger to others? If we can limit the First Amendment, generally considered the most sacred of them all, on grounds of basic common sense and public safety, why are we prevented from using common sense and public safety to limit the Second?
I go back to what I wrote on December 3rd: America has a gun problem. What are we going to do about it? Will the horrifying school shooting in Connecticut and the tragic deaths of so many young children wake us up? If it doesn’t, what exactly will it take? Do we have to come to the point where some nutcase takes a gun into a maternity ward and starts killing newborns? Or are we going to strike a blow for common sense and public safety now?
How Obama Can Throw The GOP A Curve
United Nations ambassador Susan Rice took one for the team today, formally withdrawing from consideration to be Secretary of State after weeks of unending attacks by a swarm of Republican Senators led by John McCain (R-Arizona), Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire).
The criticism of Ambassador Rice, based on what I can see, was completely unwarranted and unjustified. The statement she made after the Benghazi tragedy was based on what the intelligence services gave her to work with. Perhaps she can take some small comfort in knowing that this really had nothing to do with her. This was strictly about politics. Unable to turn the tragedy in Libya into electoral defeat for President Barack Obama last month, the Republicans went after Rice in part so they wouldn’t come away completely empty-handed; they wanted a scalp, and they got one.
But this is also about ensuring that Sen. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) becomes the next Secretary of State, so that his Senate seat can be opened up for a special election, possibly helping Sen. Scott Brown (R) return after his decisive loss to incoming Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D).
As much as I respect and admire Sen. Kerry, a great public servant and true American hero, I almost hope the president picks someone else, just to demonstrate that these kinds of antics by McCain and his fellow travelers will not produce the results they want. It would be terribly unfair to Kerry, whose qualifications for the job are unquestionable, but then, what’s happened here has been terribly unfair to Susan Rice, too.
Wouldn’t McCain, Graham, Ayotte and every Republican in Washington be taken completely by surprise if President Obama nominated outgoing Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) as the next Secretary of State? It is hard to imagine Lugar wouldn’t be unanimously approved, and nobody in America is better qualified for the job. He also has a history of working together with President Obama, who spent a great deal of time as a Senator accompanying Lugar on overseas trips to help lock down loose nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union.
We’d get a terrific Secretary of State who would inevitably be confirmed with the support of both Republicans and Democrats; there would be no chance that the Republican tactics would be rewarded with the return Scott Brown to the Senate; and Obama would send a message to the Republicans that he cannot be played.
Well, it’s just a thought.
Our Deadly Love Affair With Guns
In the wake of the highly publicized gun deaths brought about by a Kansas City Chiefs football player who killed the mother of his child and then committed suicide, I’ve been thinking seriously about the issue of gun violence in America.
I’ll be honest: I don’t know what the right answer is on this issue. I am not a gun owner myself, but many of my male relatives are avid hunters and own plenty of guns. None of them have ever used any of their guns improperly, and I have no doubt that the same is true of the vast majority of gun owners.
That said, the statistics clearly demonstrate that this country has a serious problem with gun violence and gun-related deaths as compared to almost every other country on earth, and certainly as compared to other modern, advanced democracies. There are only a handful of countries that average more gun deaths, per 100,000 inhabitants, than the United States, and most of these are countries that have severe drug violence (such as Mexico and Colombia) or persistent civil unrest.
I’ve done some research online, and in recent years, U.S. gun homicides and accidental gun deaths average more than 4 out of every 100,000 Americans in a year’s time. This is compared to less than one-tenth of a person per 100,000 in England; slightly more than two-tenths of a person per 100,000 in Scotland; slightly more than half a person per 100,000 in Australia and about half that rate in nearby New Zealand; about 1 person per 100,000 in Canada; and just slightly more than that in Ireland.
I’ve often heard it said that “Guns don’t kill people; people do,” and that you can’t blame guns for the actions of bad people or those who are mentally ill. However, on a per-capita basis, we have anywhere from four to 40 times more gun deaths per year than other socially and educationally advanced countries that are very similar to us historically and culturally. Does that mean we have four to 40 times as many bad people or crazy people as our contemporaries? I don’t think so.
While banning guns is not the answer (and clearly unconstitutional), other post-industrial democracies are having much more success avoiding gun deaths than we are. We need to be having some discussions as a country as to why this is and what we can do. Can we make it harder for the wrong people (those with criminal backgrounds or a history of mental illness) to get guns? Can we at least regulate guns that have an exclusively military purpose? Let’s face it, folks, you don’t need an Uzi to shoot Bambi—unless you’ve got a taste for some Bambi McNuggets. And a shooter who needs to reload occasionally will be able to shoot a lot fewer people before he is stopped than he could shoot with an automatic weapon.
Unfortunately, because of the National Rifle Association (NRA), and its skillful lobbying and public relations efforts, we as a country are now afraid to even broach the subject of gun violence. Our politicians, both on the right and on much of the left, have been so cowed by the NRA (and its vast reserves of campaign cash) that even suggesting we might have a gun problem in this country has become politically problematic. As a result, we have closed our collective eyes to the fact that, statistically speaking, we clearly do have a problem. So the problem persists, and every time we have a highly publicized gun tragedy, we move on without even talking about how we can avoid similar tragedies in the future. This is shameful, cowardly—and bordering on criminal neglect.
America isn’t the only place where there are gun massacres. There have recently been mass shootings in Germany and Norway, for example, but those were notable because they happen so rarely. Here, we’ve gotten to a point where we barely even notice whenever we have a new Virginia Tech or Northern Illinois or Columbine or Tucson.
We’ve got a problem. I’m not entirely sure how we should deal with it, but we at least need to start by admitting a problem exists. We can’t just continue to bury our heads in the sand and hope that if we ignore it, it will go away. America has a problem with gun violence. What are we going to do about it?
Looking Ahead: The 2014 Elections Probably Mean Losses For Democrats
Let me begin this preview with a note of humility: when the 2012 election season began, it was widely reported that President Obama was going to have serious trouble getting reelected, and that the Republicans were odds-on favorites to recapture the U.S. Senate. As we know, President Obama won reelection by margins that, when all the votes are counted, will not be that far off his sweeping 2008 victory, and Republicans not only failed to take the Senate but actually lost a net of two seats.
The preceding disclaimer should demonstrate that likelihoods are not guarantees, and that any preview of an upcoming election two years out is a risky proposition. Who could have foreseen, in 2010, that Republicans would lose not one but two Senate races because their nominees in those races would make idiotic comments about rape?
That said, all indications right now point to 2014 being a tough year for Democrats and a good one for Republicans.
First, although Democrats did spectacularly well in 2012, there were still some indicators that should cause concern. President Obama became the first president in U.S. history to win reelection with a smaller percentage of the popular vote than he won in his first election, and only the third reelected president to receive fewer electoral votes in his reelection campaign. The first was James Madison in 1812, in the midst of an unpopular war with Britain. The second was Woodrow Wilson in 1916, but that comes with a big caveat: his sweeping 1912 victory was due entirely to President William Howard Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt splitting the GOP vote and, thereby, helping deliver 40 states to Wilson. And although Democrats did pick up a net of eight seats in the U.S. House, they left another dozen on the table that they could have won if they had performed just a percentage point or two better. So, yes, the Democrats did well in 2012, but their performance was not nearly as strong as their results in 2006 and 2008, when there were true Democratic waves.
Secondly, just as in 2010, Democrats are far more exposed in U.S. Senate races than Republicans are. The Democratic class of 2008, which netted their party an eight-seat pickup in the Senate, faces its first reelection test. Democrats are defending 20 of the 33 seats up for election, and of the 13 Republicans who are up, it is hard to find even one who looks vulnerable now. Perhaps Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) may face a tough race; he struggled in each of his last two elections and may be ripe for an upset, but even that is a longshot for Democrats; it is a certainty that McConnell will raise stunning amounts of money. But no fewer than eight Democratic Senators will face difficult challenges in 2014, and perhaps as many as 10. If Republicans net six seats, they will reclaim the chamber. It is true that Democrats faced longer odds in 2012 but still prevailed—and in fact increased their majority in the Senate. How likely is it that they can defy the odds two cycles in a row?
Third, Democrats will have a hard time hanging on to a number of the U.S. House seats they captured in 2012. Of 33 House races decided by less than six percentage points this year, Democrats won 20 and Republicans only 13. Additionally, Democrats won two seats—in Florida’s 26th District and Illinois’ 8th District—by double digits, but this was largely due to the implosion of Republican incumbents David Rivera and Joe Walsh, respectively.
We have seen, as we saw in 2010, that Democratic turnout in midterms can lag significantly as compared to presidential election years. If Democrats fail to turn out their voters in the 2014 midterms, it is not hard to see Democratic losses of 10-20 House seats and 4-8 Senate seats.
Couple the potential for a falloff in Democratic turnout with the likelihood that Republicans will continue to obstruct the process—thereby denying President Obama and the Democrats significant victories—and the prospects for a Republican turnaround in 2014 look strong.
Then there’s history. Since the founding of both of the current major political parties, there have been 11 midterm elections under presidents serving their second terms. In 10 of those 11 elections, the president’s party has lost seats in both the House and the Senate—on average, 34 House seats and six Senate seats. The only exception was the 1998 midterm election, in which Republican investigations of President Bill Clinton backfired and cost the GOP a modest net loss of four House seats. Let’s have a look:
1874
President Ulysses S. Grant (R)
Republicans lost 93 House seats
Senators were not elected by popular vote at this time.
1906
President Theodore Roosevelt (R)
Republicans lost 28 House seats
Senators were not elected by popular vote at this time.
1918
President Woodrow Wilson (D)
Democrats lost 19 House seats and 6 Senate seats
1926
President Calvin Coolidge (R)
Republicans lost 10 House seats and 6 Senate seats
1938
President Franklin D. Roosevelt (D)
Democrats lost 71 House seats and 6 Senate seats
1950
President Harry S. Truman (D)
Democrats lost 29 House seats and 6 Senate seats
1958
President Dwight D. Eisenhower (R)
Republicans lost 48 House seats and 13 Senate seats
1966
President Lyndon B. Johnson (D)
Democrats lost 47 House seats and 4 Senate seats
1986
President Ronald Reagan (R)
Republicans lost 5 House seats and 8 Senate seats
1998
President Bill Clinton (D)
Democrats picked up 4 House seats and broke even in the Senate
2006
President George W. Bush (R)
Republicans lost 30 House seats and 6 Senate seats
In short, every indicator demonstrates that Democrats should lose big in the upcoming midterm elections. As we saw this year, and in 1998, what is expected to happen doesn’t always necessarily occur. But Democrats must be prepared to work very hard if they want to avoid the usual midterm losses that almost always happen to the party of a president at his second midterm.
For Republicans, Democrats, The Wrong Lessons Are Too Easily Learned
Today I read a story about a dispute between different exit pollsters over whether or not the Republicans lost the Cuban vote in Florida.
The fact that Republicans are arguing over whether they won or lost the Cuban vote in south Florida, a week after an election in which they got their heads handed to them, tells us all we need to know. The Republicans have far bigger problems than whether they won or lost the Cuban-American vote in Florida. Rather than trying to determine how the Titanic failed to avoid the iceberg, the GOP is arguing over where the deck chairs were placed. Brilliant.
The Titanic metaphor is apt, because the Republican Party, as currently constituted, is a complete shipwreck. It hit the iceberg with the botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and has been sinking, in terms of the public’s confidence, ever since. The party suffered a triple whammy in 2005, with Katrina, the Terri Schiavo controversy and the ill-fated attempt to privatize Social Security; the 2006 midterm election wave that delivered Congress to the Democrats for the first time in 12 years resulted directly from what occurred in 2005.
Then, after the economic meltdown at the end of the Bush administration, the Republicans got whipped again in the 2008 elections. Their brief revival in 2010, from today’s vantage point, appears to have been more of a last gasp than a recovery. Two years after that fleeting triumph, they lost to a president suffering the highest unemployment rate of any reelected president since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, and still, their loss to the Democrats wasn’t even especially close. Additionally, they lost a net of two Senate seats in a year in which they were defending only 10 seats to their opponents’ 23; and if it hadn’t been for the massive gerrymandering in key states in 2011, they may well have lost the House, too. Democratic House candidates, cumulatively, received more votes than Republican House candidates nationwide.
The Republicans are clearly in free fall at this point, and they seem to have no understanding of why this is the case or how to fix it. The party’s establishment wing and its populist wing are at loggerheads, especially now that it has dawned on the rank-and-file that the Wall Street crowd has been using them as pawns for years. But the GOP populists have the wrong formula for reviving the party’s fortunes. The Tea Party element is preaching that the Republicans lost either because they weren’t conservative enough, while many Republicans of all stripes, both populist and establishment, believe they were not clear enough in their messaging. Neither hypothesis is correct. The Republicans have never been more right-wing, not even when they nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964, and they conveyed their rabid conservatism loudly and clearly at every turn. Voters in 2012 did not simply reject the Republican sales pitch; they rejected the Republican product.
The Republican asylum burned to the ground on November 6th, and now the inmates and the guards, rather than figuring out how to rebuild the building, are getting ready to fight to the death to determine who will preside over the ashes. Democrats are gleefully heating up the popcorn and getting ready to enjoy the spectacle.
But Democrats had better not get too comfortable. While the Republicans clearly appear to be learning the wrong lessons from this election, there is always the danger that Democrats will do the same. Democrats must understand that victory does not mean, necessarily, that the country has embraced their entire agenda. The fact is that the Republicans lost this election much more than the Democrats won it. The voters compared their two options, found the former unacceptable, and grudgingly took a gamble on the latter. And while it is true that astute Democratic carpet-bombing of Mitt Romney and the GOP team helped the voters make that choice, the Democrats couldn’t have pulled off that political Dresden if the Republicans hadn’t handed them all the ammunition they needed.
If Democrats don’t justify the voters’ choice, and don’t avoid the massive turnout dropoff of two years ago, the nation’s electoral fortunes will swing back to the Republicans in 2014, just as they did in 2010. The Democrats need to put down the popcorn and go back for a second helping of elbow grease.
Election 2012: Eight Lessons
I am still working on tying everything together from the 2012 election into a singular theme, but for now, I just want to make some brief observations:
1) That demographic revolution Democrats have been talking about? It’s here. Non-white voters made up approximately 28 percent of the electorate. The Romney team and right-leaning pollsters like Rasmussen and Gallup were modeling for 25-26 percent, and that’s why they were stunned when Obama won. Increasing percentages of non-white voters is the new normal. The Republican Party must adapt, or die.
2) The state-by-state polls showing Obama ahead in virtually every battleground state? Yeah, they were pretty much right on target. (Except, of course, for Rasmussen. Rasmussen still skews to the right and will continue to have credibility issues as long as it’s wrong, which is quite often. But most credible polling turned out to be right on the money or pretty close to it.) So all of you poll deniers out there: Are you convinced yet? Or are you going to continue denying things like, oh, math and science?
3) Gallup is no longer the gold standard in polling. Honestly, it hasn’t been for quite some time, but this election should prove the deathblow to its credibility. In perhaps the most embarrassingly bad performance since, well, Gallup in the 1948 Truman-Dewey miscall, the supposed leading pollster in America went into the final week showing a significant Romney lead, and still had him winning at the end despite a sudden, dramatic tightening after suspending polling due to Hurricane Sandy. Even Rasmussen, always notoriously right-leaning, never showed a seven-point national lead for Romney as Gallup did. Gallup’s numbers on the race were reflective of nothing resembling reality, and this organization either needs to right the ship or—pardon the pun—Gallup off to the glue factory.
4) The pundits, particularly on the right? Completely disgraced. George Will and Peggy Noonan, formerly voices of reason, blew every shred of credibility they had in predicting a near-landslide for Romney. And then there was Dick Morris, but the good news for him was that he didn’t have any credibility to lose. But even some pundits who are usually relatively even-handed were sucked in to the fallacy that this was a dead-even race, and that’s in part due to all the smoke the Obama team blew for months and months, lulling Team Romney and the press into a completely false narrative.
5) Women actually do make up their own minds about what’s important to them. We saw a lot of female Republican politicians and Ann Romney go on television to say that reproductive choice issues really weren’t all that important to women. Well, it turns out that a lot of women actually do care when politicians attempt to tell them what kind of reproductive decisions they can and can’t make. And guess what, folks—quite a few women who would never choose to have an abortion themselves still don’t like the idea that politicians might want to make that decision on their behalf. Oh, and contraception? Stay away from that one, OK? This is 2012. That issue was settled for most people a long time ago. Even among Catholics, an estimated 90-plus percent use contraception at some point in their lives, and if you don’t believe that, ask yourself a question: When was the last time you saw a family with eight kids at Mass?
6) Stay away from rape. The next politician who mentions rape in any context (other than it is a horrible crime and must be severely punished) is not just a bad choice on women’s issues, but also too stupid to hold office. Just about any candidate who brought up this topic got beat. If the lesson here isn’t obvious, I don’t know what is.
7) Irrational hatred is not a viable electoral strategy. Much of the wacky wing of the GOP has spent most of the last four-plus years demonizing President Obama. What did it get them? Well, it got them somewhere in the ball park of 48 percent of the vote. Many on the right were so convinced that the country was dead-set on firing Obama that they neglected the need for a strong candidate or any raison d’etre beyond firing Obama. They just figured any Republican would beat him. Well, a lot of people hated George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon and Franklin Roosevelt. What did they all have in common? They all got reelected, three of them in landslides. Learn this lesson and learn it well: A president vilified by his opponents almost always gets reelected. It’s the presidents who people feel sorry for who get beat.
8) Failure to acknowledge reality does not change reality. Many Republicans were stunned when Romney lost (including, by various accounts, Romney himself and his entire team). But all the scientific polling pointed to an Obama victory all along. The signs were clear for anybody who was willing to see them. There was never a single day, during the entire election cycle, when the state-level polling showed Romney anywhere near the lead in the electoral-vote count. Many leading Republican politicians pooh-poohed the notion of a “gender gap,” but it was there all along, and it was there on election day; 55 percent of women voted for Obama. Many on the right (including the Romney team and, by its own admission, Rasmussen) believed young voters and non-white voters would not show up in anywhere near the numbers they showed up in 2008, but they formed a larger share of the electorate in 2012 than they did in any previous election. As Robert J. Ringer noted in his landmark book Winning Through Intimidation, failure to acknowledge reality and use it to your advantage ensures that reality will work against you. That is exactly what happened to the Republicans in 2012.