Foiled by the Grey Lady again. Drat. The Republicans engaged in procedurally dubious, middle-of-the-night ramming through of their 2017 tax bill. Political hypocrisy is undying. Bush the Younger’s 2001 and 2003 tax giveaways cleared the Senate through reconciliation as did this turkey, yet the Republicans hyperventilated in 2009 when Mr. Obama availed himself of the process to enact the Affordable Care Act and the GOP cried foul again when Mr. Biden resorted to it for the American Rescue Plan.
Anyway, the wee-hour shenanigans afforded another opportunity to hiss at the GOP’s Swiss Army Knife policy: Tax cuts yesterday, tax cuts today, tax cuts forever!
Jim Tankersley, Thomas Kaplan, and Alan Rappeport, “G.O.P. Scrambles to Push Tax Bill Through Senate,” The New York Times, 2 December 2017, A1, A12 (www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/us/politics/senate-tax-bill.html).
Would that the GOP’s passage of “tax reform” under cover of darkness could be read as political farce, not as an act of stark political cynicism. Nothing now obscures the GOP’s obeisance to plutocratic donors. No one need any longer take the Republican Party’s claim of principled fiscal responsibility as anything beyond politically useful but empty Pablum. How can Congress, as a coequal branch, blunt President Trump’s worst impulses when its majority party cannot restrain its own baser instincts and in fact tolerates Mr. Trump’s dangerous antics so that its donors can be satisfied?
Virginia’s off-off-year elections in 2017 were in the news as a barometer of popular sentiment after nearly a year of Trumpian rule. The Commonwealth was especially suited for this test. It had voted Democratic in three consecutive presidential contests, had two Democratic senators as well as a Democratic governor; however, its statehouse remained in Republican hands. A wave-category outcome sufficient to fracture GOP control of the House of Delegates would signal disenchantment with Queens’ Gift to the World, especially as a result from south of the Mason-Dixon line, the lone jewel of the old Confederacy a chagrined Sun President had been unable to duct tape onto his diadem.
The Democrats had a good night. Ralph Northam became governor, Justin Fairfax lieutenant governor, and Mark Herring attorney general; the Great Embarrassment lay in the future. The Democrats made substantial gains in the House of Delegates. The Republican advantage shrank from twenty-two to a single seat, then jumped to two seats when drawing of lots determined the winner of a putatively tied district. Had fortune smiled on the Democrat, the party would have wrested away control of the chamber. Nevertheless, there were encouraging changes. The incoming class of Democratic delegates boasted the nation’s first transgender state legislator (Danica Roem), a Democratic Socialist (Lee Carter), and much diversity beyond that. A friend from Manhattan, she of the senior women’s book club, expressed it best: “Thank you, Virginia!”
The letter below comments on The Richmond Free Press’s election coverage. The pleasing outcome did not bestow laurels on which to rest. The GOP would mobilize to pad its bare majority and deploy every tool available, including underhanded ones. Margins are fragile in a state gradually shifting its party allegiance. When the letter was composed, control of the House of Delegates remained uncertain. To satisfy my curiosity, I fed raw numbers from the House of Delegates races into Excel and discovered that the Democratic candidates in aggregate had taken nearly ten percent more votes than the Republicans statewide but could still conceivably fall short of a majority of seats. That’s what happened and that’s the crux of the matter.
Nonetheless, the hope engendered in Virginia in 2017 would be realized in 2019.
Jeremy M. Lazarus, “Virginia Elects Democrats to Top Posts, Other Offices,” The Richmond Free Press, 9-11 November 2017, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/nov/10/its-sweep/).
Jeremy M. Lazarus, “House of Delegates to Become More Diverse,” The Richmond Free Press, 9-11 November 2017, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/nov/10/house-delegates-become-more-diverse/).
“‘There Is No Space for Complacency,’” The Richmond Free Press, 16-18 November 2017, A9 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/nov/17/there-no-space-complacency/).
With the indictments in late October 2017 of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, as well as the guilty plea of “coffee boy” George Papadopoulos for false statements to the FBI, it became more difficult for GOP luminaries to call the Mueller investigation baseless. This did nothing to whet their appetite to hold forth publicly. The fear of offending The Grand Pooh Bah was well ingrained a year into the Trump era.
The Washington Post detailed the evasions concocted by the Republicans and their craven reluctance to face the press. The letter comments on these proclivities sarcastically.
Karoun Demirjian and Sean Sullivan, “GOP Leaders’ Strategy: Avoidance,” The Washington Post, 31 October 2017, A6 (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/tablet/v1.1/20171031/A06_RE_EZ_DAILY_20171031.pdf).
“The GOP’s Disheartening Response,” The Washington Post, 3 November 2017, A20 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gops-disheartening-lack-of-courage/2017/11/02/f362e084-bf4b-11e7-9294-705f80164f6e_story.html).
Editors have been gentle in tweaking my submissions; however, a phrase was dropped from this letter, probably because it’s pretentiously obnoxious. The obnoxiousness warrants its preservation. Here’s the unredacted sentence:
“GOP senators and congressmen, many of whom doubtless see Churchill or Thatcher in the mirror during their morning ablutions, offer a dispiriting spectacle. . .”
Virginia has off-year elections for statewide offices and state legislative seats. Kentucky does this too. This depresses turnout, probably a feature, not a bug. The only upside to this custom is that it makes the Commonwealth a gauge for the electorate’s mood; more about that later.
The off-off-year elections also ensure an extra season of bloviating punditry. As the 2017 election neared, The Richmond Times-Dispatch printed an unsigned editorial asserting that the US Supreme Court could not and should not do anything about gerrymandering of federal and state legislative seats. The newspaper adopted this stance just as litigation arising from toxically, almost comically, gerrymandered Wisconsin reached the high court. Interesting timing, that.
The Supreme Court’s decision hinged on the whims of Anthony Kennedy, who had long dithered by braying about his need for a precise measure of the bias driving gerrymandering. This reads to me as motivated obtuseness. He balked yet again and soon afterward retired, his work done. The Supreme Court’s present composition likely will make this the final opportunity for the high court to address the issue. It’s just another step in the normalization of minority rule. Sigh. For whatever it’s worth, The Richmond Times-Dispatch gave me another gold star. Be still my heart.
“Gerrymander Is Awful. The Supreme Court Isn’t the Answer,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 5 October 2017 (https://richmond.com/opinion/editorial/editorial-gerrymandering-is-awful-the-supreme-court-isnt-the-answer/article_fc6ab70e-8ec9-5d09-b92c-928ae9f71023.html).
“Today’s Gerrymandering Is Undemocratic,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 22 October 2017, E2 (https://richmond.com/opinion/letters-to-editor/cod-oct-22-2017-todays-gerrymandering-is-undemocratic/article_45384630-bf60-500e-924b-6f9faa241a30.html).
Nearly a year after the 2016 election, it emerged that Virginia was among a score of states whose voting systems had been assailed by Russian hackers. The Commonwealth emerged from this unscathed. That was the good news. The bad news in my view was that the Russians represented the least of the concerns about voting going forward. This letter to The Richmond Free Press responds to this news and briefly catalogues the GOP’s efforts not just to discourage eligible voters from pulling the lever but also to excise segments from the electorate with surgical position. Some of the news from that time now seems prophetic, especially the poll suggesting that half of GOP voters would accept suspension of the 2020 election if The Fabulist in Chief falsely declared that fraudulent voting would make a fair election impossible.
Ronald E. Carrington, “Voting Systems in Va., 20 Other States Targeted Hackers in 2016,” The Richmond Free Press, 28-30 September 2017, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/sep/29/voting-systems-va-20-other-states-targeted-hackers/).
The good news reported by Mr. Carrington – failure by probable Russian hackers to affect Virginia’s 2016 election results – should not blind the Commonwealth’s voters to the perhaps more insidious threat to the ballot box from within, conservative efforts to disenfranchise segments of the electorate.
President Trump’s narcissistic, delusional assertion that millions of “illegal” voters deprived him victory in the popular vote last November spurred his empanelment of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, its very name a paragon of Orwellian doublespeak. Mr. Trump placed at its head Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a man whose name is synonymous with voter suppression and who in 2016, in dogged pursuit of the voter-fraud unicorn, tossed triple the number of ballots in Kansas as in demographically similar states (The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 27 September 2017). Mr. Kobach, moreover, champions the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, a project ostensibly aimed to improve accuracy of voter rolls but believed to target minority voters disproportionately.
Fear that Mr. Trump and Mr. Kobach’s electoral “vision” will spread nationwide is not unfounded as the notion of carving demographic slices from the electorate gains traction in conservative circles. The loathsome Ann Coulter’s call to rescind the Twenty-Sixth Amendment and raise the voting age to thirty seems less like fringe lunacy when considered in the context of an August poll in which more than half of GOP voters would support, at Mr. Trump’s behest, suspension of the 2020 election because of his false claim of widespread illegal voting (Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes, “In a New Poll, Half of Republicans Say They Would Support Postponing the 2020 Election If Trump Proposed It,” The Washington Post, 10 August 2017 [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/08/10/in-a-new-poll-half-of-republicans-say-they-would-support-postponing-the-2020-election-if-trump-proposed-it/]).
The backdrop to Mr. Trump and Mr. Kobach’s undercutting of confidence in elections is the effort in many GOP-controlled states to discourage participation by traditionally Democratic constituencies – minorities, the young, the poor – by restricting early voting, imposing needless voter-identification requirements, and providing inadequate voting equipment for urban precincts. The GOP, furthermore, strives to make Democratic votes worth less through partisan gerrymandering unprecedented in scope and efficacy, an abuse now under review by the US Supreme Court. These antidemocratic measures threaten to overwhelm commendable attempts to expand the electorate, such as Governor McAuliffe’s restoration of the franchise to ex-felons, a restriction at its inception largely conceived to constrain minority voting.
The ballot box remains the best avenue toward social and economic justice. A vigilant and aggressive defense of voting is now especially urgent.
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was the gift that kept on giving, until he didn’t. His elevation to Generalissimo El Trumpo’s – apologies to Ted Rall – cabinet left his Senate seat open. The GOP primary to fill it was a freak show. Yet, it was more than a freak show. It was a syllabus of the Republican Party’s vices and the race grew more perverse as it proceeded. The revelation of “Judge” Roy Moore’s alleged high regard for young, delightfully young, women came later. On the plus side, the GOP tomfoolery opened the lane for Doug Jones to secure the seat, a good, albeit temporary, outcome. The Washington Post passed on this missive too. I can’t image why, he mutters to himself once again ironically.
Robert Costa, “Trump’s Fraying Relationship with GOP Colors Ala. Special Election,” The Washington Post, 14 August 2017, A1, A4 (www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/trumps-feuding-base-faces-showdown-in-alabama-senate-race/2017/08/13/b37a6f24-7ed6-11e7-83c7-5bd5460f0d7e_story.html).
Perhaps the special election for the US Senate seat in Alabama would be a sadly amusing farce were it not an image in microcosm of the maladies besetting the GOP: a religious bigot and homophobe (former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore) vies with a Tea Party zealot (US Congressman Mo Brooks) to unseat a hard-right apparatchik (US Senator Luther Strange) installed by a rank family-values hypocrite (former Alabama Governor Robert Bentley) to serve in place of an unqualified and ethically compromised US Attorney General (Jefferson Beauregard Sessions) who may have perjured himself in his confirmation hearing, each candidate kowtowing to Mr. Trump for his endorsement, each candidate posturing as more Trumpian than Trump. This reality is made sadder by the probability that the Republican Party primary may as well be the election itself in deep red Alabama. With candidates and a political culture such as these, how can President Obama’s forlorn wish for the breaking of the GOP’s “fever” ever be realized?