#5 - The Filibuster
The 60 vote requirement to break a
Senate filibuster is the equivalent of 9 stolen elections. Instead of the majority needing 51 votes to pass legislation, they need 60. The
filibuster's original purpose - preventing the hasty but perhaps
unwise action of the majority - has been distorted and abused in an unprecedented fashion in the past several years after the election of Barack Obama. When
first conceived, the filibuster required Senators to actually speak about the
legislation under consideration. The primary purpose of the now
non-talking filibuster as wielded by Senate Republicans today has
been to block Presidential nominations (both judicial and executive)
and to block legislation supported by the majority of the American
people (e.g., universal background checks for gun purchases). Since
Republicans lost the Senate in 2006, there have been 425 cloture
motions. Cloture motions only represent the attempts to break the
filibuster. Sometimes the majority will not even get that far. The
Senate can change its own rules. Eliminating the filibuster
altogether would be the right (democratic) thing to do. Failing
that, there should be limits placed on debate. Senators need to talk
to the issue and after a given number of hours of debate be required
to give an up or down vote.
#4 - Congressional district
gerrymandering
One man/woman, one vote, right? Well,
thanks to the magic of gerrymandering of Congressional districts by
state legislatures, that isn't always the case. Boundaries are often
redrawn to give an advantage to the party in power in the state.
Republicans have been excellent at it, taking full advantage of the
most recent census and their victories in the 2010 elections. As noted on the PolicyMic website: "The Republican State Leadership
Committee (RSLC) has an agenda. It has been costly but its goal is
simple: Get more congressional seats without actually winning them.
This wildly undemocratic goal has been successfully pursued in seven
states: Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia,
Florida, and Ohio." In the current version of the 113th
do-nothing Congress, Republicans hold a 34 vote majority. Yet
nationwide, Republican House candidates received fewer votes
than the Democrats in the 2012 elections. So how did they end up
with ~54% of the House seats when they had less than 50% of the vote?
I've created this chart from the PolicyMic post that goes some way
towards explaining it.
| State | Dem Popular vote | Rep Popular vote |
House seats Dems | House seats Reps |
| North Carolina | 51 pct | 49 pct | 4 | 9 |
| Michigan | 52 pct | 47 pct | 5 | 9 |
| Wisconsin | 51 pct | 49 pct | 3 | 5 |
| Pennsylvania | 50.65% | 49.34% | 5 | 13 |
| Florida | 48 pct | 52 pct | 10 | 17 |
| Ohio | 47 pct | 53 pct | 4 | 12 |
| Virginia | 49 pct | 51 pct | 3 | 8 |
The next step in the Republican plan is
to try to pass "electoral college" legislation in states
they control but which have typically voted for Democrats in national
elections. This scheme would award electoral votes according to who
wins the Congressional district rather than the popular vote across
the state. Had this been the case in 2012 with the gerrymandered
districts, we would be talking about President Romney's policies
today even though Obama received more than 50% of the popular vote
nationwide.
#3 - SCOTUS' Citizens United
ruling on corporate "free speech"
SCOTUS' infamous Citizens United
decision gave corporations the status of persons - at least as far as
freedom of speech goes. The decision eliminated the ban on political
spending by corporations and unions. As summarized on the Center for Public Integrity's webpage on the subject: "The Citizens United ruling,
released in January 2010, tossed out the corporate and union ban on
making independent expenditures and financing electioneering
communications. It gave corporations and unions the green light to
spend unlimited sums on ads and other political tools, calling for
the election or defeat of individual candidates." A companion
ruling several weeks later in Federal court (SpeechNow.org)
decided that limits on individual contributions to groups that make
independent expenditures are unconstitutional. It further allows
non-profits and so-called "social welfare organizations" (
aka 501(c)(4)), such as business leagues, to keep their donor lists
secret. And what was the result? "The 2012 election was the
most expensive and least transparent presidential campaign of the
modern era." The flood of super-PAC and "social welfare
group" money was astounding. And it was mainly spent in
opposition to candidates. 266 Super-PAC's spent $546.5 million
dollars during the 2012 Presidential election cycle. More than half
of the Super-PAC money ($290 million) was spent trying to defeat just
one candidate - Barack Obama. Then there is the "dark money"
from social welfare organizations and non-profits. Dark money is
so-named because unlike PAC's, these organizations do not have to
reveal their donors. Overall, dark money spent on the 2012
elections totaled $300 million. The financing of election campaigns
is totally out-of-control thanks to these Supreme Court and lower
court rulings. Several states have begun working on a
Constitutional Amendment that would overturn Citizens United.
This appears to be the only way out of the morass - both on a national and state
level. It's obvious that there will be no relief from the current
Supreme Court, who saw fit in their wisdom to overturn a 100 year-old
Montana law limiting individual campaign contributions in February
2012.
#2 - SCOTUS destroys the Voting Rights Act
This has been previously blogged (June25, 2013 SCOTUS: R.I.P. Voting Rights Act) so I'll just sum up a few
salient points here. Justice Ginsburg's dissent said it well:
"The sad irony of today’s decision lies in its utter failure
to grasp why the VRA has proven effective," Ginsburg wrote. "The
Court appears to believe that the VRA’s success in eliminating the
specific devices extant in 1965 means that preclearance is no
longer needed." The provision has proven "enormously
successful" in increasing minority registration and access to
the ballot and preventing a "return to old ways," Ginsburg
said. Even in jurisdictions where discrimination may not be overt,
"subtle methods" have emerged to diminish minority turnout,
such as racial gerrymandering. With the House in Republican hands
and Mitch "Mr. Filibuster" McConnell leading the Senate Republicans, Sections 4 and 5
will not be rewritten by Congress in the foreseeable future. The decision has unleashed what MoJo blogger Kevin Drum describesas a "GOP feeding frenzy". The North Carolina legislature
recently passed the worst voter suppression law in the
country. For a complete listing of the provisions of this incredible attack on the right to vote see Ari Berman's post on the Moyers & Company website. Berman's post points out that "Six Southern states have passed or implemented new voting restrictions since the Supreme Court’s decision last month invalidating Section 4 of the VRA, which will go down in history as one of the worst rulings in the past century." The right to vote is the most fundamental and
distinguishing feature of a democracy. A constitutional Amendment
guaranteeing all citizens the right to vote is needed if we are to
ensure democracy's survival.
And the #1 threat to American democracy
is....state voter suppression laws.
For the most part, Republican voter
suppression laws did not succeed in the 2012 elections - certainly
not in their main objective: to defeat Barack Obama. Aimed at
denying the vote to traditionally Democratic voters, these laws were
a combination of overly restrictive voter ID laws, reductions in
early voting days, limitations on voter registration drives, and
elimination of or severe restrictions on provisional balloting - what
happens when you show up at the wrong polling place. These throw
backs to the now unconstitutional poll taxes of yesteryear were
overcome by a combination of judicial action in state and Federal courts and
executive action (enforcing Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act) and a massive
turnout effort on the part of Democrats. And a good thing they were.
Based on the Brennan Center for Justice's October 2011 analysis, the laws in
place by year end 2011 would have made it "significantly harder
for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012."
States implementing these restrictive voter ID and registration laws
"will provide 171 electoral votes in 2012 – 63 percent of the
270 needed to win the presidency." This figure of 171 electoral
votes was revised upwards to 189 in a March 2012 update. Democracy escaped
Republican clutches this time but in 2014 and 2016, we may not be so
fortunate. North Carolina recently enacted the most
restrictive voting law in the country in the aftermath of SCOTUS'
gutting of the Voting Rights Act. (If you haven't gone to the Moyers & Company website, here's another chance - North Carolina really has passed a most incredible law.) Five other Southern states have done likewise. And if
someone without Obama's drawing power and organizational savvy
becomes the Democratic candidate, the laws will certainly have their
desired effect. The best short-term hope to blunt this blatant
attack on voting rights will be the Administration's challenging of
the voter ID laws. They'll need to spend a lot more effort on this
now that SCOTUS has effectively destroyed the Voting Rights Act .
Many of the problems affecting our
democracy are rooted in our election laws and the way we finance
public elections. Under the current system, money wins elections.
Period. Public financing of all Federal elections has no chance of
being enacted for now. Nor is there any chance of bi-partisan
reform of existing laws passing the obstructed 113th Congress. So,
in the meantime, we need to take our gains, limited as they are by
the Citizens United decision, and defend our rights, as difficult as it may be, wherever we can. In the end, it
may be down to a constitutional amendment to protect the right to vote - this most basic
right of a citizen of a democracy.
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