Has the Republican Party Rejected Democracy?

As the Democrat presidential veer to the left, the Republican Party has veered far right and, as a column in the New York Times, suggests looks to a form of authoritarian rule to maintain its power.  Indeed, in today's GOP, the goal is to thwart the will of the majority of voters and restrict the voting of anyone outside of its increasing racist and religiously extreme white base. The GOP tools to accomplish this?  Voter ID laws, gerrymandering, using legislative rules to block bills that otherwise have popular support - think Mitch McConnell - and outright intimidation. Frighteningly, while today's GOP bears no resemblance to the party I and my family once belonged to and actively supported, far too many Americans refuse to open their eyes to what the GOP has become.  Those who do, seemingly embrace minority rule and the shredding of American institutions.  Here are some column highlights:

A number of observers, myself included, have written pieces in recent years arguing that the Republican Party is no longer simply trying to compete with and defeat the Democratic Party on a level playing field. Today, rather than simply playing the game, the Republicans are simultaneously trying to rig the game’s rules so that they never lose.

The aggressive gerrymandering, which the Supreme Court just declared to be a matter beyond its purview; the voter suppression schemes; the dubious proposals that haven’t gone anywhere — yet — like trying to award presidential electoral votes by congressional district rather than by state, a scheme that Republicans in five states considered after the 2012 election and that is still discussed: These are not ideas aimed at invigorating democracy. They are hatched and executed for the express purpose of essentially fixing elections.

The idea that one party has become so radically different from the other, despite mountains of evidence, is a tough sell.  It’s a hard sell to make for one very simple reason: It doesn’t have a name, this thing the Republicans are trying to do. It’s not true democracy that they want. But it’s also a bit much to call them outright authoritarians. And there’s nothing in between.

Or is there?

A couple of weekends ago, I tripped across a 2010 book called “Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War,” by Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way. If you pay close attention to such things, you will recognize Mr. Levitsky’s name — he was a co-author, with Daniel Ziblatt, of last year’s book “How Democracies Die,” which sparked much discussion. “Competitive Authoritarianism” deserves to do the same.

What defines competitive authoritarian states? They are “civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but in which incumbents’ abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-à-vis their opponents.” Sound like anyone you know?

But today, incredibly, the phrase has begun to bring to mind the United States of America. I literally gasped as I read certain passages, notably the part about the important role of a strong party in winning elections and in controlling legislatures. “Legislative control is critical in competitive authoritarian regimes,” the authors write. They list four reasons. You can bet Mitch McConnell knows every one of them, and probably a couple more. For one, there’s President Trump. Think of his efforts to do things like politicize the institutions of the executive branch, to try to turn the Department of Justice into his personal law firm. Think of his threat in 2016 that he would honor the results of the election “if I win,” and his recent musings about staying beyond two terms. Think of his commerce secretary’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the census, which would benefit the Republicans electorally. These are all manifestations of competitive authoritarianism. Second — and maybe even more so — there’s the Republican Party. The gerrymandering enabled them to maintain their House majority during the Obama years even as Democratic House candidates were winning more votes. But there’s much more. “Recent Republican behavior — from the 2016 stolen Supreme Court seat to the legislative shenanigans that followed gubernatorial defeats in North Carolina and Wisconsin to voter suppression efforts across numerous states — suggests a party whose commitment to democratic politics has weakened,” Mr. Levitsky said.
 “The fact that the Republican Party has grown increasingly authoritarian poses a greater threat to American democracy than Donald Trump.”

Is SCOTUS Putting Self-Preservation Ahead of Ruling for the Far Right?

Some recent actions by the U.S. Supreme Court must be disturbing to the ugly underbelly of the Republican Party that thought the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Court assured them of victory on a number of issues not popular with the larger public.  Some have viewed the Court's actions as a way to preserve its popular respect and legitimacy even if some of the issues will likely come back before it in the future. How the Court rules on the Trump/Pence regime effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census - which is designed to cause an under count of non-citizens in mostly blue states - will be telling as to whether self-preservation remains the Courts guiding hallmark.  A column in the Washington Post looks at recent rulings that in the wake of the Virginia redistricting decision against Virginia Republicans have avoided hot button issues and punted them back to the lower courts.  Here are column excerpts:

The justices of the Supreme Court know how to keep out of trouble. That’s the takeaway from the order the court issued on Monday, sending back to the lower court a new case about another baker who wouldn’t bake a wedding cake.

The case, Klein v. Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, was a near-exact replica of last year’s Masterpiece Cakeshop case. Like the owner of that Colorado bakery, the husband and wife owners of Sweetcakes by Melissa in Gresham, Ore., claimed that their religion prohibited them from designing and baking a cake to be used in celebrating a same-sex marriage. To do so, the owners explained in their petition to the Supreme Court, would amount to “complicity in sin.” In fact, they said, the very reason they baked wedding cakes was to “celebrate weddings between one man and one woman.”

Like Colorado, Oregon has a public accommodations law that bars business from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. Acting on the complaint of a lesbian couple, the official in charge of enforcing that law imposed a $135,000 fine to be paid to the couple as “compensatory damages for emotional, mental and physical suffering.” The Oregon Court of Appeals upheld the order, and the Oregon Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal.

On Monday, instead of adding the case to their docket, the justices vacated the lower-court decision and told the Oregon Court of Appeals to reconsider the case “in light of” last June’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision. Objectively, that disposition makes little sense. The Supreme Court didn’t actually decide the constitutional issues in Masterpiece Cakeshop. . . . The decision was, in other words, a punt. It has no “light” to shed on the Oregon dispute.

I think that what finally prevailed was an institutional instinct for self-preservation. Why re-enter this battle at this moment? Cases granted this spring will be argued in the fall, to be decided next spring with the political season at its height and the court itself under a bright election-year spotlight. The court already has plenty to do next term, with three cases granted on whether federal law protects gay and transgender people against discrimination on the job. The conflict between private conscience and public duty is age-old. The court has time to resolve it in future cases. In fact, another such case will soon be on the way to the Supreme Court. This month, the Washington State Supreme Court reinstated a ruling against a flower shop owner who, because of her “relationship with Jesus Christ,” told a gay couple, longtime customers, that she could not design a flower arrangement for their wedding. The justices had vacated that ruling and sent the case back to the state court last summer for reconsideration in light of Masterpiece Cakeshop. The state court, deeming Masterpiece Cakeshop irrelevant, reissued its original opinion almost word for word.

What I discern as the Supreme Court’s instinct for self-preservation was also on display last month in an abortion case from Indiana. The state was appealing a ruling that invalidated its law banning abortions for reasons of the race, sex or disability of the fetus, a law enacted in deliberate and flagrant violation of existing abortion precedents. The state’s appeal, Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, went to conference an astonishing 15 times over five months. Ultimately, the court denied the appeal, noting in an unsigned opinion that because the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit is the only court to have considered such a law, “we follow our ordinary practice of denying petitions insofar as they raise legal issues that have not been considered by additional Courts of Appeals.”

On a court deeply divided on the subject of abortion, that disposition was unanimous. . . . If I read that message correctly, we can expect the same outcome when the states that are now busy banning abortion appeal to the Supreme Court from the lower-court rulings that will inevitably strike down the new laws. (But to be precise, my prediction holds only until Election Day 2020, when the justices will be free from whatever constraint they now feel about taking a step likely to incite a public backlash against the Republican Party.)

These reflections on the court’s instinct for self-preservation lead me to a final question: What to do about the census case? As the world knows, the deeply contested question of the validity of the Trump administration’s plan to ask about citizenship has become even more fraught with revelations from the computer files of a recently deceased Republican redistricting specialist, Thomas Hofeller. The documents appear to validate the conclusion reached by Federal District Judge Jesse Furman, whose ruling against the Trump administration is before the justices, that the administration’s purported good-government reason for adding the citizenship question was a pretext. The real reason, the documents indicate, was to provide a statistical basis for entrenching Republican power by disregarding noncitizens in the population counts for future redistricting.

Those plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, have now asked the justices for a “limited remand” that would send the case back to the District Court “to allow exploration of where the truth lies.”

But there is another option, suggested by the plaintiffs in a final footnote to their latest brief: Just dismiss the appeal. The procedure is known as a DIG: “dismissed as improvidently granted.” The justices use it once or twice a term, usually when a case turns out, on further reflection, not to be what they thought it was when they granted it.
For the time being, it’s a reminder that the court knows how to get itself out of a tight spot when it needs to. A DIG requires no explanation. Its effect is to wipe the Supreme Court slate clean, as if the appeal had never even reached the court. A DIG here would leave Judge Furman’s opinion in place and would enable the professionals in the Census Bureau, who strongly objected to adding the citizenship question, free to go about their business counting us — all of us. If I’m right about these recent signals that the court knows how to save itself, now is the time.

The out come of the census case will be telling and clearly signal whether the Court puts its own legitimacy ahead of all else. 

SCOTUS Kills Off Virginia’s Racial Gerrymander

Earlier this week the United States Supreme Court rejected the appeal by House of Delegates Republicans to the judicial striking down of the Virginia GOP's carefully drawn voting districts.  These districts were aimed at minimizing the strength of minority voters and thereby protecting the Virginia GOP from the reality that increasingly Virginians do not want what the Virginia GOP is peddling, namely racism, homophobia, slavish prostitution to the gun lobby and a general opposition to anything progressive in nature. While SCOTUS used the issue of standing as a means to reject the appeal, the result is nonetheless the same and the odds of Democrats winning control of both the Virginia Senate and the House of Delegates has increased.  Many would argue that the Virginia GOP's solution is to update its agenda to reflect 21st century concerns, a task made impossible by the GOP's increasingly hideous base of racist, white supremacists, religious extremists and general misogynists.  One can only hope November, 2019, deals the Virginia GOP a blow that will send it into minority party status for years to come.  A piece in Slate looks at the SCOTUS ruling: 

The Virginia House of Delegates’ racial gerrymander is officially dead—killed off by a 5–4 Supreme Court ruling on Monday that seems to clear the way for a potential Democratic sweep of the Virginia Legislature in November.

Although Monday’s decision in Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill slays a gerrymander, it revolves around a more mundane issue: Who has the ability to defend that gerrymander in federal court? When Virginia voters first filed a lawsuit alleging that multiple House districts were drawn illegally along racial lines, the state attorney general defended the map. Eventually, a federal court found “overwhelming evidence” that the state had “sorted voters into districts based on the color of their skin,” violating “the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause.” It appointed a special master to redraw 11 House districts and adopted his proposals, ordering the House to adopt his new map for the 2019 election.

Throughout these proceedings, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, a Democrat, defended the House’s unconstitutional districts. He did so because a Virginia law tasks the attorney general, and him alone, with the job of defending the state’s interests in court. After the federal court struck down the old map, Herring decided his job was done: He had defended the gerrymander since 2014, when the case began, and didn’t want to appeal the latest ruling to SCOTUS. But the House (and, specifically, its Republican speaker) had intervened in the case and did want to appeal. So it asked SCOTUS to reverse the district court and restore its old map.

On Monday, the Supreme Court held that the House lacked standing to appeal the ruling against its gerrymandered districts. Practically speaking, that means the 2019 election will take place under the new maps—a relief, since Virginia just held primary elections under these maps last week. Writing for the majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg first cited the Virginia statute giving the state attorney general (and not the House) the ability to “represent the state’s interests.”

Ginsburg then wrote that the new maps inflict no concrete injury on the House, depriving it of the right to appeal the district court’s decision. The court-imposed plan, she wrote, merely changes the House’s composition. But House districts already “change frequently”—after each census, at a minimum—and any ensuing electoral difficulties “are suffered by individual legislators or candidates, not by the House as a body.”

[U]nder Virginia law, redistricting authority resides in the full General Assembly; the House and Senate must both vote to adopt any redistricting plan. Because the House “constitutes only a part” of the General Assembly, it does not have standing, on its own, to appeal the decision invalidating its districts. In other words, “a single House of a bicameral legislature lacks capacity to assert interests belonging to the legislature as a whole.”

Ginsburg’s opinion was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch.

All 11 districts invalidated by Monday’s decision were flagrantly gerrymandered to capture minority communities, trapping a huge number of black voters in a few non-competitive districts. The new map creates more diverse and competitive districts, handing Democrats a major victory. Right now, Republicans hold a 51–49 majority in the House; under the new, fairer map, Democrats seem likely to seize the chamber in November. They’re also favored to take the Senate—and since the state has a progressive . . . . governor, a legislative sweep would create a Democratic trifecta. That would give Virginia Democrats control over the 2020 redistricting process, preventing Republicans from drawing another round of gerrymanders to last another decade.

Virginians who want to move Virginia forward need to make sure they are registered to vote and go to the polls come November.  We have the potential for a new day in Virginia that we cannot afford to lose. 

Virginia GOP Hit With Major Blow in Gerrymandering Case

One of the ways in which the Virginia Republican Party has managed to retain control of the Virginia House of Delegates is through deliberate gerrymandering of districts.  Now, in a case that has been pending for a few years, the courts appear poised to order the redrawing of up to 26 districts due to their illegal, racially motivated design.  With the entire General Assembly up for reelection in November, 2019, the outcome of the case could be devastating to Virginia Republicans if 26 gerrymandered districts are redrawn.  Rather than push policies that win a majority of voters' support, the Virginia GOP has increasingly tried to suppress minority votes and when all else fails, gerrymander districts to maintain control  As a piece in Think Progress notes, that game plan may be about to totally unravel.  Here are article highlights:

Virginia’s House of Delegates is one of the most gerrymandered bodies in the country. In 2017, Democrats won the statewide popular vote in Virginia’s legislative races by over nine percentage points. Nevertheless, Republicans still held a 51-49 majority in the House of Delegates, thanks to gerrymandering.

But Virginia Democrats may actually get to compete in something approximating free and fair elections next year, thanks to a pair of documents handed down by a federal court on Friday.

Both documents arise from a case entitled Bethune-Hill v. Virginia State Board of Elections. This case, which was originally filed in 2014, alleges that 12 of the state’s House of Delegates districts are unlawful racial gerrymanders. . . . two members of a three-judge panel eventually concluded that 11 of the state’s districts are, indeed, illegal gerrymanders.

The case is currently pending before the Supreme Court, but the Court appears mostly interested in a tangential question regarding whether the Republican-controlled House of Delegates is allowed to appeal the case. Notably, the Supreme Court did not stay lower court proceedings that will redraw Virginia’s gerrymandered maps.

In the first of the two documents handed down on Friday, the three-judge panel considering Virginia’s gerrymander also refused to stay its map-drawing proceedings.

The second document is a report by Bernard Grofman, a University of California, Irvine political scientist that the court charged with devising plans to redraw Virginia’s maps. Grofman’s report is 131-pages long, goes into considerable detail about the state’s districts, and offers a few alternative plans. The punchline, however, is that Grofman anticipates that the court will need to redraw between 21 and 26 of the state’s House of Delegates districts.

So it appears likely that a significant chunk of Virginia’s maps will look quite different in 2019 than it did in 2017. That’s likely to be good news for Democrats. While it remains to be seen what the final maps will look like, the current maps are so egregiously gerrymandered than any alterations are likely to benefit the Democratic Party.

And that, in turn, raises the possibility that the increasingly blue state of Virginia could become a haven for progressive ideas. Virginia has a Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, but Northam has thus far been hobbled by a Republican legislature. If Democrats perform as well in 2019 as they did in 2017, but with slightly less gerrymandered maps, Northam could soon find up himself with a much friendlier state legislature.

The GOP's Effort to Disenfranchise Minority Voters Through Judicial Appointments

Trump's racist judicial nominee, Thomas Farr. Photo: Alex Brandon/AP/REX/Shutterstock

I have written for years now about Republican efforts to disenfranchise minority voters , first through gerrymandered districts and then through "voter ID laws" fighting non-existent voter fraud.  Now, it has moved to deleting voters from the voter rolls as we witnessed in Georgia.  But even more insidious is the Trump/Pence effort to put avowed racists and white supremacists on the benches of the federal courts where they will have lifetime appointments and can use judicial rulings to undermine minority voting rights. Thankfully, the nomination of one of the most foul individuals selected by Der Trumpenführer was blocked this week by two Republicans, but many other racists and homophobes have slipped through  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the scuttled nomination of Thomas Farr who illustrates the type of individuals Trump is seeking to pack the courts with.  This effort ought to frighten decent people everywhere.  Here are article highlights:

Senator Tim Scott announced on Thursday that he would oppose the judicial nomination of Thomas Farr, who President Donald Trump had tapped to become a United States District Judge for the Eastern District of North Carolina. The news ended a suspenseful four days of deliberation for Scott, whose decision cited Farr’s past efforts to undermine black suffrage. His opposition — paired with Arizona Senator Jeff Flake’s — effectively killed Farr’s bid, which would have secured the Raleigh-based lawyer a lifetime on the federal bench.

Farr’s abysmal record on black voting rights is well-documented. As a lawyer for United States Senator Jesse Helms — who, in 2001, Washington Post journalist David S. Broder described as “the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country” — Farr was the “coordinator” of a racist 1984 “ballot security” initiative spearhead by the North Carolina GOP. It included a “postcard mailing to voters in predominantly black precincts which was designed to serve as a basis to challenge [them] on election day,” according to a 1991 Justice Department memo.

His campaign sent 125,000 mailers to black voters falsely claiming they were barred from the ballot box unless they had lived in that precinct for at least 30 days, and would face jail time if they voted. The result was his successful reelection against then-Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, a black man.

The DOJ recommended the North Carolina GOP be sued for its conduct that November. But Farr’s efforts to thwart black voters continued well into the 21st century. In 2013, he represented the Republican-controlled state legislature defending a voting law that a federal appeals court eventually overruled, saying it had “[targeted] African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” The law imposed stringent voter ID requirements, curtailed election day registration and early voting, and ended other procedures favored by black voters, . . . . Tellingly, legislators had enacted the law almost immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act that year, allowing several North Carolina counties to change their voting laws without federal “preclearance” for the first time since 1965. 

It should surprise no one that none of this was disqualifying for the Senate GOP. On the contrary, the vast majority still backed Farr’s nomination, with only a handful besides Scott and Flake signaling their reservations in light of his record. This is a feature of modern conservative politics, not a bug. The moral stench engulfing Republicans’ efforts to suppress nonwhite votes is detectable from Georgia to North Dakota. But black political participation has alarmed racist white North Carolinians for far longer.

Efforts to suppress black political power may have been bloodier before, but they are not new. The legacy Farr would have advanced on the bench — and the GOP support he amassed en route — is enough to sour any relief generated by his narrow failure.

That black North Carolinians have endured such a history only to have Republicans subject them to a man like Farr is remarkable, and even more so considering said history’s enduring relevance. Anti-black voter suppression may have narrowed its scope and obscured its intentions in light of strengthening civil rights legislation of late, but for decades, its most effective means — physical violence — was sanctioned gladly by a kleptocratic white elite.

North Carolina’s black population share has fallen dramatically since the era of the coup, from 49 percent in 1897, to 44 percent in 1900, to 26 percent in 2000, to just over 18 percent today. But the progressive resurgence and ballot access reforms that helped Barack Obama carry the state in 2008 and 2012 spurred Republicans to tighten their grip on power, using means both brazenly partisan, racist, and anti-democratic. The GOP’s redistricting efforts in 2010 paid special attention to North Carolina, gerrymandering the state so ruthlessly that, in the 2018 midterms, Democrats won just three seats in the U.S. House of Representatives to Republicans’ 10 — despite the parties garnering a comparable share of the statewide vote. . . .

This history should matter when considering a nomination like Farr’s. The racist and anti-democratic urge that propels efforts like those he spearheaded in 1984 and advised in 1990, on behalf of Helms, further delegitimizes the electoral process and should be disqualifying. In reality, it is often rewarded. Georgia’s gubernatorial race saw suppression architect Brian Kemp claim victory after seeking to disqualify black voters and refusing to recuse himself from oversight, as secretary of state, in an election where he was a candidate. That Farr came up short attests to Tim Scott’s brief flirtation with morals, as his party’s only black senator. But that may not matter in 2019, when Republicans control two more senate seats and Trump can re-nominate.

4th Circuit Panel Strikes Down North Carolina’s Gerrymandered Congressional Districts

4th Circuit Court of Appeals building, Richmond, Virginia.

With its base shrinking due to (i) the dying off of aging white voters, (ii) the growing minority population, and (iii) the toxicity with which the GOP is viewed by growing numbers of younger voters, the Republican Party has  relied on gerrymandered districts dating from eight years ago to cling to control of many state legislatures and the House of Representatives.  Here in Virginia, these districts have been struck down at the state level and several congressional districts have been ruled unconstitutional.  Now, for a second time all of the congressional districts in North Carolina have been ruled as unconstitutional and, depending on the ultimate outcome, could change voting districts for the 2018 midterm elections and help shift control of the House to Democrats.  The Washington Post looks at the unanimous ruling handed down by a three judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals (the opinion can be viewed here).  Here are excerpts:

A panel of three federal judges held Monday that North Carolina’s congressional districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered to favor Republicans over Democrats and said it may require new districts before the November elections, possibly affecting control of the House.

The judges acknowledged that primary elections have already produced candidates for the 2018 elections but said they were reluctant to let voting take place in congressional districts that courts twice have found violate constitutional standards.

North Carolina legislators are likely to ask the Supreme Court to step in. The court traditionally does not approve of judicial actions that can affect an election so close to the day voters go to the polls.

But the Supreme Court has just eight members since Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s retirement last month; a tie vote would leave the lower court’s decision in place.

The North Carolina case is a long-running saga, with a federal court in 2016 striking down the legislature’s 2011 map as a racial gerrymander. The legislature then passed a plan that left essentially the same districts in place but said lawmakers were motivated by politics, not race.

The Supreme Court told the three-judge panel to take another look at the North Carolina case in light of the high court’s June decision in a Wisconsin partisan gerrymandering case, in which the justices said those who brought that case did not have legal standing.

But Judge James A. Wynn Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, writing Monday for a special three-judge district court panel, said plaintiffs did have standing under the decision in Wisconsin’s Gill v. Whitford, which he said reinforced the judges’ earlier views that the congressional districts were drawn with improper partisan goals.

He proposed several unusual ideas: appointing a special master to draw new districts, holding general elections without party primaries or even turning the November elections into a primary and holding the general election sometime before the new Congress convenes in January. . . . . Wynn and his fellow judges called for immediate briefing from the parties about which remedy to pursue. Wynn said it should be clear that such partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional.

“A common thread runs through the restrictions on state election regulations imposed by Article I, the First Amendment, and the Equal Protection Clause: the Constitution does not allow elected officials to enact laws that distort the marketplace of political ideas so as to intentionally favor certain political beliefs, parties, or candidates and disfavor others,” he wrote.

Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California at Irvine, said the case has national implications.

“If the lower court orders new districts for 2018, and the Supreme Court deadlocks 4-4 on an emergency request to overturn that order, we could have new districts for 2018 only, and that could help Democrats retake control of the U.S. House,” he wrote on his blog.

The combined cases are Common Cause v. Rucho and League of Women Voters of North Carolina v. Rucho.

Virginia GOP Congressman Goodlatte's Son Donates to Democrat

The thankfully retiring GOP Rep. Bob Goodlatte - a blight on Virginia.

Like Liberty University and Regent University, Congressman Bob Goodlatte is a blight on Virginia's image and reputation as newly progressive and up and coming state.  If there is a wrong side on any issue, the always reactionary and partisan Mr. Goodlatte can be counted on to be on the wrong side of the issue.  Thankfully, Goodlatte is retiring and will cease to be a blight on the Commonwealth.  Whether or not Democrats can capture Goodlatte's west central Virginia 6th congressional district - gerrymandered, of course to favor Republicans - remains to be seen, but the public spat between Goodlatte and his son is a microcosm of the battle for Virginia's soul between the racist, ignorance embracing, backward looking rural areas and the progressive, forward looking urban areas.  The irony is that while voters in rural areas whine against government handouts to those who are undeserving, these regions are in fact supported by the urban areas of Virginia (just as red states are the ones most on the federal dole). If one wants to know why rural Virginia has difficulty attracting new, progressive businesses, look no farther than its residents and their reactionary and bigoted beliefs.  But back to Goodlatte.  Over the weekend Goodlatte's own son donated the maximum allowable to the Democrat seeking to win his father's open seat.  Here are article excerpts from a piece in Politico: 

A high-ranking Republican lawmaker's son donated the "maximum amount" to a Democrat running to replace his father.

Bobby Goodlatte, the son of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), made the surprise announcement on Twitter Sunday night. Goodlatte is retiring after 13 terms in Congress.

"I just gave the maximum allowed donation to Jennifer Lewis, a democrat running for my father's congressional seat. I've also gotten 5 other folks to commit to donate the max. 2018 is the year to flip districts — let's do this!" Bobby Goodlatte wrote on Twitter, where he describes himself as a product designer and angel investor based in San Francisco.

Lewis said she was surprised by Goodlatte’s public donation when she woke up Monday, calling it a “very exciting morning, to say the least.” The maximum individual donation is $2,700, according to the Federal Election Commission.

The Lewis campaign raised more than $15,000 in donations after Bobby Goodlatte announced his support, spokesman Josh Stanfield said.

Bobby Goodlatte plans to help out with the Lewis campaign heading into the November midterm elections, Lewis said. His donation has inspired others to follow suit and give money, though Lewis did not say how many donations her campaign had received Monday. Bobby Goodlatte did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Later in the day, Bobby Goodlatte laid into his father after news broke that FBI agent Peter Strzok had been fired.

"I’m deeply embarrassed that Peter Strzok’s career was ruined by my father’s political grandstanding. That committee hearing was a low point for Congress. Thank you for your service sir. You are a patriot," Bobby Goodlatte said in a tweet Monday afternoon. Strzok drew criticism from conservatives earlier this summer when an inspector general investigation unearthed text messages Strzok wrote that were critical of President Donald Trump.

Regardless of his son's criticism, Goodlatte’s district is a challenge for Democrats. Trump carried the central Virginia district with nearly 60 percent of the vote in 2016, and Mitt Romney did the same in the 2012 presidential election. Goodlatte received two-thirds of the vote that year.

Republican nominee Ben Cline starts with a base of support in the district after 16 years in the state House of Delegates. Cline had previously served as Goodlatte’s chief of staff. He has outraised Lewis more than 5-to-1 through June 30, the end of the most recent FEC reporting period. Cline’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Bobby Goodlatte's donation comes as Democrats across the country edge toward flipping the House and gaining a majority. Lewis beat three Democratic competitors in the state's primary election in June, grabbing 48 percent of the vote.

“I truly believe we will win in November. We’ve been having these conversations with folks where, yes, you may have never voted for a Democrat before, but if you want health care for you and your kids, if you want a living wage for you and your kids, if you want income equality and affordable housing,” Lewis said. “These are the things people are talking about. We’re seeing very good success from canvassing.”

Goodlatte's office did not respond to a request for comment.

Will Democrats Retake the House of Representatives?

GOP's Barbara Comstock - VA 10th District - She needs to be sent into retirement. 

With election day 2018 a little more than three (3) months away, despite the daily distractions of Trump's deranged and/or lie filled tweets, the Manafort trial and the ongoing Russiagate investigation, more and more focus is on the political prize of the control of the  House of Representatives.  If Democrats win control, some of Trump's most egregious efforts can be blunted, hearings and subpoenas can be held and issued, and spending and budget bills will originate under Democrat control.   Moreover, oversight of federal agencies - which Republicans have failed to do - can perhaps rein in the Trump/GOP effort to create a new Gilded Age.  A lengthy piece in the Washington Post looks at the coming election - where many believe the Democrats are favored to win control - and analyzes the hurdles the Democrats must overcome.  Here are excerpts:

Democrats are likely to win back control of the House of Representatives. That's the conventional wisdom in Washington about November's midterm elections.

“Democrats remain substantial favorites for House control,” wrote David Wasserman, a nonpartisan election analyst for the Cook Political Report, last week.

We explained why here. The short version is: Voter energy on the left is palpable, Republicans are defending vulnerable seats, and their historic level of retirements is only making their exposure worse. Plus, Republicans are in power, which history suggests voters will try to counterbalance this November.

Not surprisingly, Republican operatives working to keep control of the House disagree with some of that reasoning.

Here's why Republicans are hopeful they can hang onto their majority:

1. Special elections are just that, special. There's no denying Democrats have had extraordinary success in special elections in the Trump era.

Democrats have picked up more than 40 state legislative seats across the nation since President Trump was elected, some deep in Trump country. They won a Senate seat in Alabama last fall. This spring they flipped a congressional district in Pennsylvania — again, deep in Trump country. On Tuesday, they could take a deep-red Ohio congressional seat. That could trim the target number of seats Democrats need to take back the House this November from 23 to 22. Republicans argue that each one of those scenarios was unique.  . . . . Democrats will have to decide how to spread their resources across some 60 potentially competitive races. (Though so will Republicans, for that matter.)

2. Republicans feel good about their most vulnerable incumbents. If Democrats are going to win a wave election, they need to start with the lowest-hanging fruit. And Republicans don't think that will be so easy.

There are a couple open seats that are gimmies for Democrats to pick up, notably two in Pennsylvania and one in New Jersey. . . . Other top races to topple Republicans will play out in the New York City, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles and Seattle media markets.In other words, Republicans calculate that a wave is going to cost Democrats significant money and energy to build up. That being said, the Cook Political Report is out Friday with one stat that underscores just how exposed House Republicans are this election in defending those seats: It ranks 60 Republican-held seats as vulnerable, compared to just five for Democrats.

3. There are structural barriers for Democrats to overcome.Gerrymandering is a big one. Republicans swept into control of state legislatures in 2010 in time to take charge of drawing electoral districts after the 2010 Census. Democrats have been locked out of power in the House ever since.

Voters are also increasingly self-sorting into congressional districts in a way that gives Republicans an advantage to control Congress. Democratic-leaning voters cluster in cities, while conservative voters spread out in rural areas across the rest of the state. The result is that Democrats' votes are essentially diluted by living in areas that would vote for a Democrat for Congress anyway.

Some independent analysts think Democrats will need to win the popular vote by seven to 11 percentage points just to get a bare majority. While seven points is firmly in doable territory — for a wave election at least — 11 points is a historically large margin.

4. The economy is chugging along, and there are no major international disasters. Republicans openly acknowledge that they're at a disadvantage this election because they control all major levers of government. That means they've been able to pass a tax-cut bill, but it also means voters who aren't happy with their health care or the impact that tariffs are having on their industry can reason it's Republicans' fault. . . . wage growth remains sluggish — and everything is below Trump's vocalized expectations, as The Post's Philip Bump notes.

Will Gerrymandering Backfire for Republicans in 2018?

For more than a half dozen years Republicans have held on to a majority in Congress and in many state legislatures through gerrymandering that carefully drew districts to ensure Republican majorities.  But often, to maximize the number of districts with Republican majorities, the actual party majority in favor of Republicans was slim: 52 to 55% in numerous districts.   In normal years, this thin majority was enough to allow Republicans to skate to easy victories.  So far, 2018 is proving to NOT fall into the "normal year" category (neither did Virginia's 2017 election that saw 15 Republicans in the House of Delegates go down to defeat).   As a story in Politico notes, Republicans may now be poised to lose a number of their thin majority districts as Democrats are energized and out to take revenge on Trump and the larger GOP.  Here are story highlights:

Republicans redrew congressional districts across the country in 2010 in an attempt to consign Democrats to a semi-permanent House minority.

But in 2018, the long-successful GOP insurance policy is at risk of backfiring in a big way — not only carving a path for a takeover, but possibly allowing for bigger Democratic gains.

In many states, Republicans maximized gains in the House by spreading GOP voters across as many districts as possible. Typically, that left Democrats with around 40 to 45 percent of the vote in those districts, making them difficult under normal circumstances for the minority party to contest.

But this election year is anything but normal. Many of the once-secure 55-45 Republican districts are very much in play, even in states that have not had competitive congressional races since 2012, the year new maps were installed. And North Carolina and Ohio — where Democrats chose nominees in primaries on Tuesday — are turning into the prime examples.

[A] half-dozen Republican districts that could become fierce battlegrounds this fall, including the fast-changing suburbs of Cincinnati, Charlotte, Columbus and Raleigh. President Donald Trump won less than 55 percent of the vote in each of the seats in 2016 — and some of the Republican incumbents have been caught by surprise by the ferocity of their competition. . . . . “because of the way the maps have been drawn and the environment that Republicans are facing, you have a whole bunch of Republicans who have never been in a competitive race in their life, who are running [in one] right now.” “In a normal year, you're safe in these seats, but in a time like this, Democrats are within striking distance,” Jackson continued. “This is when gerrymandering backfires.” Pittenger’s district [in North Carolina] could end up being the biggest gerrymandering backfire of 2018. The Republican lost his primary Tuesday night to Mark Harris, a conservative pastor who cast the three-term congressman as a part of the “Washington swamp,” effectively tapping into the anti-establishment anger driving the GOP base in a seat where Trump, Mitt Romney and John McCain all got between 53 percent and 56 percent of the vote in recent presidential elections.

But Harris, who lagged behind Pittenger in fundraising, now faces Democrat Dan McCready, a veteran and businessman who has vowed not to support House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for speaker and banked more than $1.2 million in cash on hand in preparation for November. Harris’ campaign had $70,000, according to his pre-primary FEC filing.

Trump won North Carolina’s 9th District, which stretches from the Charlotte suburbs to Fayetteville, with 53.5 percent of the vote in 2016. But the area is stocked with suburban, college-educated voters — a cohort that trended away from Republicans over the past year.

[I]ncumbents in safely drawn seats can also be out of practice. “You win every two years, and you put it on cruise control, then before you know it, you’re in an environment you’re not ready for,” said Chip Gerhardt, a Republican consultant in Ohio.

Let's hope the story proves right and many Republicans to their surprise go down to defeat. 

LGBT Rights Held Captive By A Gerrymandered General Assembly

Recently at a post funeral reception for a long time friend I encountered someone I had known well back in my days of a Republican activist.  We spoke and the individual at one point asked what it would take to get me back in the Republican Party.  Not wanting to be disruptive, I said that for now I preferred no not be officially a member of either party - which is technically true even though all my efforts over the last 18+ years have been working for Democrats. Meanwhile, I thought to myself that short of extended torture or some unlikely total transformation of the GOP (which would at a minimum have to include a complete expulsion of the Christofascists and a total denunciation of all things Trump), I'd never be an active Republican again.  My former GOP colleague is not a bad person, but sadly is so immersed in the right wing news bubble and social activities centering on Republican women's' clubs that she is blind to what the GOP has become.  On Thursday, LBGT Virginians were dealt a vivid reminder that today's GOP is all about hate and bigotry.  A cabal of five Republicans - two from Hampton Roads: Barry Knight and Jason Miyares - killed every pro-LGBT bill in the Virginia General Assembly.  They were able to do so thanks to the gerrymandered districts that still dominate in Virginia. No Republican has won statewide office in Virginia in nearly a decade, yet Republicans continue to hold small majorities in the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates which allows them to control committees and kill progressive legislation.  An op-ed in GayRVA looks at the disturbing reality and reminds us that LGBT Virginians and progressives need to be more organized and engaged than ever.  Here are highlights:

Remember all those pro-LGBTQ bills that got introduced back at the beginning of this year’s General Assembly session? Almost all of them are dead now. In the last 24 hours, no less than four bills were killed in House Of Delegates subcommittees. What the hell is going on here?

At the beginning of this session, we were all riding a wave of positive energy. Democrat Ralph Northam won a 9-point victory over his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie, to take the office of Virginia Governor with a clear mandate. The huge swing in the General Assembly further underlined this mandate, with a 32-seat Republican advantage being erased as a dozen or so Republican incumbents were defeated by Democratic challengers. Suddenly, things were almost equal, with both houses of the Genera Assembly under Republican control by a one-vote margin in each.

So what happened? In as few words as possible: the House Of Delegates happened. In spite of all the potential progress we were poised to achieve as a community, bills intended to ensure several important facets of LGBTQ civil rights were defeated at the subcommittee level, with less than a fifth of the House shutting them down before anyone else ever got to vote on them.

These aren’t just minor things, either. Five different bills and resolutions intended to cover sexual orientation and gender identity under state hate crimes statutes. . . . . A variety of bills, including Del. Mark Levine’s very wide-ranging HB 401, attempted to finally prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ people in employment, housing, and a variety of other situations. Even 30th District Senator Adam Ebbin’s SB 202, which strove merely to make a permanent law of the protections for LGBTQ state employees that have been enacted through Executive Orders by the last two governors, was shot down in subcommittee in the House of Delegates — after it had already passed through the entire Senate.

In the end, this all comes down to gerrymandering, which, it appears, might be the most important LGBTQ issue of all here in Virginia. Back at the beginning of the week, at Equality Virginia’s Day Of Action, we heard from 69th District Delegate Betsy Carr about how important an issue gerrymandering is to her, and the House Resolution she’d proposed to reduce gerrymandering. At the end of the week, with all three of the bills Equality Virginia was there to talk about dead, the fact that her anti-gerrymandering resolution is still alive as yet can offer us what might be a tiny scrap of hope.

But regardless, something needs to change — something big. After a Democratic governor swept into office on a 9-point victory mandate, and over a dozen seats in the House of Delegates flipped to Democratic control, the fact that LGBTQ rights are still treated as a non-issue by our state’s legislature is reason for the joy we felt at the beginning of this session to turn to righteous fury. Maybe it’s time for a lawsuit of our own against the Virginia State Board of Elections.

[A]ll of us have representatives who need to hear a whole lot more about this. It’s our responsibility to blow these people up, to make them listen to our needs and let them know that we won’t take this sort of injustice lying down. Call your US Senator, call your Congressperson, call the governor — call somebody. You can find contact info for your US representatives at https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members. Do it. Give ‘em hell.

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Pennsylvania Supreme Court Strikes Down Pro-GOP Congressional Gerrymandering

7th Congressional District of Pennsylvania is a pretty egregious example of a partisan gerrymander

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court just dealt a blow to Republicans that the pro-GOP, "conservative justice of SCOTUS will be hard put to undo. Specifically, the Court struck down all of Pennsylvania's horrifically gerrymandered congressional districts as unconstitutional under the Pennsylvania Constitution for a variety of reasons.  For background, Article VII, Section 9 of the Pennsylvania Constitution provides as follows:

Townships and wards of cities or boroughs shall form or be divided into election districts of compact and contiguous territory and their boundaries fixed and changed in such manner as may be provided by law.

Even a cursory glance at a map of the now invalidated congressional  districts would show that they failed to comply with this principle and also raised serious equal protection and other issues.  Interestingly, Article II, Section 6 of the Virginia Constitution reads in relevant part as follows:  

Every electoral district shall be composed of contiguous and compact territory and shall be so constituted as to give, as nearly as is practicable, representation in proportion to the population of the district.

As was the case in Pennsylvania, a number of Virginia state election districts fail to meet this requirement (see the map below).  (Virginia's congressional districts were revised three years ago after some very struck down for racial gerrymandering.)  Should a similar challenge be brought in Virginia? In theory yes, but given the Virginia Supreme Courts long history of wrongly decided rulings - think Loving v. Virginia, Massive Resistance cases, etc. -  one cannot be certain that a ruling like that handed down in Pennsylvania.  But I digress.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the landmark Pennsylvania ruling.  Here are article highlights:

All eyes have been on the U.S. Supreme Court to decide at some point this year whether state redistricting decisions could be so partisan as to violate voters’ constitutional rights, absent some showing of racial discrimination. In the past, purely partisan gerrymandering was considered kosher as a political decision that courts had no basis to challenge. That’s now under question, in part thanks to new methods for measuring the impact of redistricting on voting rights. But now, in a state whose Republican legislators have become legendary gerrymanderers, a state court acting on its state Constitution has suddenly overturned a congressional map and is demanding immediate compliance, upsetting GOP midterm plans:

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Monday ruled that the state’s congressional map went so far to benefit Republicans that it violated the state constitution.

The Pennsylvania congressional map has been notorious since its first use, in 2012, when Republicans won (and have subsequently held) 13 of the state’s 18 House seats despite losing a majority of the popular vote. Republican legislative leaders made no bones about their skill in screwing over Democrats. That didn’t much matter until now, when the Pennsylvania Supremes have ruled that extreme partisan gerrymandering violated both equal protection and “free expression” provisions of the state Constitution. Because the decision was made on the basis of the state, not the U.S., Constitution, SCOTUS is very unlikely to intervene to save the bacon of Pennsylvania Republicans. If there is any federal recourse against the decision, it could involve the remedy the Pennsylvania court imposed. The judges gave state lawmakers only until February 9 to draw up a new map, with the governor having only until February 15 to submit it to the court, which will draw its own map if the state fails to make its deadline. The speedy timetable is intended to make it possible for the state to hold congressional primaries in May as is currently scheduled. It also reflects the fact that with today’s redistricting software, it really doesn’t take that long to redraw maps. But that’s still a tight window, and with a Republican legislature and a Democratic governor, an agreement could be difficult to reach.

Any map that complies with the ruling will likely cost the GOP one or more House seats at a time when they are already in danger of losing control of the chamber.

Less partisan lines could give Democrats a chance to win back as many as half a dozen seats that had been lost to them over the past decade. It could also give the party a major boost in its quest to take back the entire House of Representatives in November.

North Carolina Congressional Map Ruled Unconstitutionally

Back in 2016, a panel of federal judges struck down several of Virginia's congressional districts for being unconstitutionally gerrymandered.  The change in districts resulted in one long time Republican congressman to decide not to run for re-election in his district and ultimately Democrats picked up a congressional seat.  Now, something similar has happened in North Carolina where all of the GOP drawn districts were ruled unconstitutional.  The panel of judges gave the North Carolina legislative assembly a short period to redraw the districts even as the judges go about redrawing the districts themselves.  With the midterms just 10 months away, the ruling could cause Republicans to lose seats in November if they must run in non-gerrymandered districts.  Two of the pillars of Republican electoral success have been (i) disenfranchising minority and Democrat leaning voters, and (ii) gerrymandered districts that throw seats to Republicans overall even in cases where they win a minority of votes statewide.  A glance at the GOP drawn map shows how ridiculous some of the districts were in fact.   Here are the highlights from the New York Times:

A panel of federal judges struck down North Carolina’s congressional map on Tuesday, declaring it unconstitutionally gerrymandered and demanding that the Republican-controlled General Assembly redraw district lines before this year’s midterm elections.

The ruling was the first time that a federal court had blocked a congressional map because the judges believed it to be a partisan gerrymander, and it deepened the political chaos that has enveloped North Carolina in recent years.

“We agree with plaintiffs that a wealth of evidence proves the General Assembly’s intent to ‘subordinate’ the interests of non-Republican voters and ‘entrench’ Republican domination of the state’s congressional delegation,” Judge James A. Wynn Jr. wrote in a 191-page opinion that another judge joined in full.

Later in the ruling, Judge Wynn, . . . . added that the judges believed that Republicans in the Legislature had been “motivated by invidious partisan intent.”

Although the judges said that the state could not conduct its 2018 congressional elections with the existing map, they said they would allow the General Assembly to try again.

The judges gave lawmakers until Jan. 24 to propose a “remedial plan,” but cautioned that the court would begin preparations to issue a map of its own if it found the new district lines deficient.