Category: Politics
How Jim Crow Holds Florida
In denying the right to vote to criminals, even after they have been released from prison, the US is an outlier with respect to much of the world. Let alone allowing ex-cons to vote, numerous countries permit inmates to vote from prison, including Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Sweden. Among US states, only Maine and Vermont let everyone vote, including prisoners.
With America’s skyrocketing prison population, felony disenfranchisement affects an increasing fraction of the US population. While it denied suffrage to about 1 million Americans the in the early 70s, 3 million were disenfranchised by the mid-90s, and nearly 6 million are disenfranchised today. Across much of the south, upwards of 7% of the adult population cannot vote because of past convictions.
Relative to the irrevocable, lifetime disenfranchisement that the Constitution permits (for the moment), states are generally much more liberal about allowing convicted criminals to vote after they’ve completed their sentences, if not parole or probation. As usual, it’s regressive southern states who are the most unforgiving, with a few effectively disenfranchising convicted criminals forever.
Disenfranchisement disproportionately affects blacks. Across the country, about 8% of blacks, and some 13% of black men cannot vote – compared to about 2% of all other adults. Florida is the worst case of all. In 2011, its GOP governor gave the state the most extreme felony disenfranchisement law in the country. With just 6% of the US population, Florida is home to 25% of all of America’s disenfranchised. 20% of all blacks in Florida – and about 35% of all black men – cannot vote. One neednt wonder at the GOP’s zeal for felony disenfranchisement. In its absence, Florida would not be a swing state – it would be solidly democratic.
US AG Eric Holder has been pressing states to reform these outmoded laws – many of which date back to Reconstruction, a living remnant of the Jim Crow south, whose purpose was, then and now, to suppress the black vote. Felony disenfranchisement is an ugly anachronism, with no place in a modern law or governance.
Refs:
https://www.aclu.org/maps/map-state-criminal-disfranchisement-laws
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement#Other_European_countries
http://www.fairvote.org/research-and-analysis/voting-rights/felon-disenfranchisement/
http://www.demos.org/blog/2/13/14/racist-history-behind-felony-disenfranchisement-laws
Nearly 6 Million Americans Can’t Vote Due to Felon Disenfranchisement Laws
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Acts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Amendments
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
The Constitutionality of Felony Disenfranchisement:
In the aftermath of the US Civil War, with southern states excluded from Congress and yet subject to military rule, northern states changed the Constitution to protect its citizens’ voting rights – somewhat. The 15th amendment, which became law in 1870, is short and simple:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
18 months previously, northern states had ratified the 14th amendment. Section 2 is a fine bit of 19th century prose:
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
It sprawlingly ties together many areas of law, including apportionment, the legal status of “Indians”, federal and state elections, voting rights and criminal disenfranchisement. That’s a good thing, because it mutually binds, one to another, numerous rights, capacities and effects, forcing courts to interpret them with respect to one another. The bad of it is that it implicitly allows for the unfettered disenfranchisement of convicted criminals. The 15th amendment meanwhile only prevents states from denying the right to vote for 3 specific reasons – leaving other bases for disenfranchisement valid, including not just crime, but gender.
There is hope. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richardson_v._Ramirez
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_v._Underwood
n.b. The Reconstruction amendments were drafted, voted up by 2/3 majorities in both houses, and passed on to the states for ratification while southern states had no representation in Congress, were yet subject to military rule, and were effectively territories – not states – governed from Washington, D.C. Their readmission to the Union – and with it, the restoration of their Congressional delegations – was conditioned on their ratification of the these amendments.
Democrat In, Deficit Gone – Again
The latest projections have the US budget deficit falling to 3% of GDP in fiscal year 2015, which started this past Wednesday, October 1st. 3% is the magic threshold for deficits. Under that level, they are theoretically sustainable forever, because the US economy, on average, grows by that amount every year.
On inauguration day, January 20th, 2009, the Obama administration inherited a projected budget deficit of $1.2 trillion for fiscal year 2009. (“FY 2009” began October 1, 2008, while Obama was still a senator.) Fiscal stimulus packages and other legislation passed soon thereafter added an additional $200 billion, to create what would become FY 2009’s largest-ever deficit in US history ($1.4 trillion). As a fraction of US GDP (9.8%), it was and is the largest deficit since WWII.
It’s remarkable how much the US fiscal outlook has since improved. Following FY 2009, the US experienced three more years of trillion-dollar deficits – albeit each year’s deficit was smaller than that of the year before. The deficit for FY 2014, which ended on Tuesday, September 30th, is expected to be less than $650 billion. It’s projected to shrink to about $450 billion in FY 2017, when Obama leaves office – about 2% of GDP. (For the past several years, actual deficits have proved smaller than Congressional Budget Office projections.)
To put this in historical perspective, consider that between FYs 1982 and 1993, Reagan and Bush ran precisely one deficit of less than 3% of GDP – and six that were 4.4% or greater. But under Carter and Clinton, every deficit was less than 3% of GDP. Half of Bush Duh’s eight years saw deficits surpass 3%, culminating in FY 2009’s record-setting $1.4 trillion in his last year in office. The pattern could not be more apparent. During the 32 year period 1977-2009, the annual US budget deficit was less than 3% for all 12 years that Democrats held the White House – but over 3% for 14 out of 20 years that conservative Republicans held it. And under Obama the deficit has only ever shrunk.
Obama’s fiscal stewardship is impressive. CBO now projects Obama will become the first two-term president in US history under whom budget deficits will shrink year-over-year, every year. (Bill Clinton and Andrew Jackson came close, each with declining deficits in their first seven years in office.)
The icing on the cake is what finally pushed US deficits under the 3% threshold: Medicare. Under the ACA, growth in healthcare costs have fallen to their lowest rate ever recorded, and Medicare is leading the way, with the public insurer returning slower cost-growth than private insurers.
The Obama administration has returned the US from typical conservative Republican fiscal irresponsibility to moderate Democratic sensibility – enduring conservative recriminations all along the way. It’s the same thing Clinton experienced while he was turning red ink into surpluses. Just as Al Gore cast the tie-breaking vote to enact the tax increase that put the US on track for the Clinton boom and balanced budgets, so Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid used a side-door reconciliation scheme to enact the ACA, which was the last step the US needed to get under the 3% threshold – without a scintilla of GOP support.
The Pox on Both Your Houses of Congress
Congress is dysfunctional because a significant fraction of Congressmen lack the requisite education, training, judgment and-or intelligence to acquit themselves of the task of modern governance. Their inadequacies are attributable to an electorate that lacks the wherewithal to choose good representatives. Ultimately, the fault lies not in our reps, but in our voters.
Taking the time to learn about current events; forming cogent, coherent opinions on disparate subjects; and, finally, evaluating candidates for office in light of that information – according to their positions, their acumen, their character, and other factors – is extremely time-consuming. Given the miniscule consequence of a single vote, one’s time is more profitably spent advancing one’s own private affairs. An individual vote, well or poorly cast, has so vanishingly tiny an effect, that it is quite rational to not be troubled over it – to leave educated voting to those with the time and inclination.
The good news is that this is not a problem for democracy. An enormous proportion of the electorate can rationally choose to remain ignorant to the issues, free riding on other citizens’ educated decisions at the ballot box, and better candidates should nonetheless prevail. That’s because, all things being equal, ignorant voters cancel each other out by casting votes randomly for one candidate or another – their votes split nearly equally. And thus a very tiny fraction of educated voters, whose voting is not random, should tip the balance in favor of the better candidate. Indeed we’re fortunate that democracy can function in environments with exceptionally low signal-to-noise ratios: even if just 1% of all voters are informed, elections should still produce good results.
But the wheels come off the bus if ignorant voters are biased. If they, as a group, err in a particular direction, their errors will not cancel out – and the number of educated voters required to tip the balance in favor of better candidates increases dramatically. With 99% of all voters ignorant and splitting 50-50, a 1% informed minority is mathematically sufficient to choose superior candidates. However if ignorant voters are ever so slightly biased, such that their votes dont randomly split 50-50, but shake out at 51-49, e.g., the proportion of informed voters required to obtain the desired result triples from 1% to 3%. And as you ratchet up bias and ignorance by tiny degrees, the proportion of informed voters required for a healthy democracy escalates dramatically – bias can readily become insurmountable, and elections will be determined not by the knowledge and insight of the few, but by the direction of the bias of the many.
And that is the nature of the pox on both houses of congress. Its name, of course, is conservatism. A decades-long bombardment via nauseatingly familiar outlets has rendered many electoral districts across a vast swatch of country so thoroughly biased, that the knowledge of the few can longer be heard above the biased din of the ignorant – and those districts are sending increasingly poor representatives to Washington. It is no coincidence that this phenomenon is concentrated in the US south, which for two centuries has lagged behind the north in development, education, and most other socio-economic measures. Likewise it’s no coincidence that liberalism, education, wealth and better Congressional representation occur together on the coasts and across much of the midwest.
American democracy, by the most rudimentary observation, still functions well enough on the national scale. Since 1992, liberal Democrats have received the most votes in every presidential election except 2004 – when an incumbent Republican narrowly won while the US was fighting two wars. But on the district level, gerrymandering now guarantees a voice to the biased ignorant. The US Congress, by any measure, is more dysfunctional today than it’s been in 150 years. The cure will only come when the thrall of conservatism holding not quite half the country is broken.
Ref:
These themes are thoroughly explored in “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies” by Bryan Caplan – a maddening but worthwhile read.
Executive Orders
If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, conservatives should rest easy – they are free of the hobgoblin threat. For them, on odd-numbered days, Obama is a weak leader, overwhelmed by Putin and paralyzed over Syria; on the evens, Obama is a dictator, ramming through the ACA via a backdoor reconciliation, conducting an unauthorized war in Libya, and ruling the country by executive order.
In foreign affairs, among policy experts, Obama is in fact lauded for taking a measured approach amidst turmoil in the Middle East, where the US must steer between the rock of democratically-elected Islamists, and the whirlpool of old-school Arab authoritarians. And he’s praised for his steady management of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, despite a lack of support from cowed European allies.
As for Obama’s use of executive orders, quantitative measures are imperfect, because many orders are on mundane, uncontroversial matters. But the image of Obama-qua-dictator, issuing executive orders on a daily basis, is at odds with the most basic facts. To date, Obama has issued 183 executive orders, putting him on track to conclude his presidency with 266. His average of 2.77 executive orders per month is lower than any president since the 19th century. (Grover Cleveland averaged 2.35 per month during his 1st term, 1885-89.) Obama’s totals are significantly lower than other recent 2-term presidents: Reagan issued 381, Clinton issued 364, Bush Duh issued 291.
Remarkably, the only executive order from Obama that Congress has seen fit to challenge is one delaying implementation of an ACA provision that requires corporations with more than 50 employees to obtain health insurance for their employees. It can hardly be questioned that Obama could have used his prosecutorial discretion to not enforce the provision anyway. But an executive order is a far more efficient tool to achieve the same end, since companies can rely on it and plan accordingly, and not be forced to operate under the threat of enforcement. One must also note that the House voted to repeal the entire ACA 54 times, revealing that Congress has no objection to the substance of Obama’s policy; their issue is strictly procedural. Finally, given that the delayed provision should go into effect in 5 months, the case will likely be mooted before the courts can resolve it. Bottom line: the House’s objection to even this one executive order is no more than an election-year dog and pony show. If that’s the worst executive order they can find, the unavoidable inference is that Obama has not overreached.
Obama’s restraint is all the more notable in light of the fact that this Congress is among the most unproductive ever, abandoning the president to manage one crisis after another on his own. Case in point: shortly after voting to sue the president over his executive order on the ACA, the House again failed to work out a legislative compromise to address the flood of children across the southern border from Central America. Congress’ subsequent message to the president: he should manage the situation with executive orders.
In the storied history of executive orders – over 13,000 issued since the Washington administration – only 2 have been struck down in courts. The first time it happened made for one of the greatest Constitutional crises of the 20th century. In 1952, while US troops were fighting in Korea, a labor dispute in the US was threatening the supply of steel needed for the war effort. With labor and ownership far apart, a strike imminent, and supplies to the US Army jeopardized, Truman seized control of the nation’s steel mills via an executive order. The Supreme Court struck it down. Truman, in his memoirs, expressed shock at their decision. Hugo Black, the Justice who authored the opinion, felt so bad about it that he invited Truman over to his house for dinner afterward.
Obama’s use of executive orders is quite in line with the practice of US presidents since the 18th century. The big change is with Congress, which now prefers posturing to legislating. And while legislation only issues when Congress is in session and comes to an agreement, the executive has no such luxury – his administration must govern in real time, without pause, whether Congress deigns to lead, follow, or fail to get out of the way.
Refs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngstown_Sheet_%26_Tube_Co._v._Sawyer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_executive_orders
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101369574
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/03/us/clinton-order-discouraging-striker-replacement-is-voided.html
A Cynic’s New Suit
While impeaching Bill Clinton over a blowjob remains the gold standard for absurdity and cynicism, the House GOP plan to sue Obama is impressive. This same House GOP that’s now voted 54 times to repeal the ACA will next sue the president for partially delaying its implementation. You cant make this stuff up.
Starting this year, the ACA requires corporations with more than 50 employees to provide health insurance. Obama unilaterally gave a one-year extension, and will not enforce the provision until 2015. This move was sensible because insurance markets should mature more over that time, making compliance less burdensome on companies in what remains a tepid recovery. It’s the sort of legal fix that Congress would have taken care of itself in years passed – but today’s radical GOP would prefer to see the ACA fail, instead of making uncontentious changes to improve it.
And that’s why the GOP is unhappy to see part of its most hated law put on hold. Of course, procedure is important, and Obama’s changing of the law via executive order merits scrutiny. But one cannot help but note that this is a strange executive act for the House GOP to sue over – the irresistible inference being that they couldnt find anything better; and that they think their constituents are too dumb to pick up on the details.
The lawsuit is emblematic of the GOP’s plan to resist the president on every issue, even on issues they agree on. In 2010, e.g., John McCain was a co-sponsor of a Senate resolution to establish a deficit reduction task force – Mitch McConnell was an outspoken supporter. After some deliberation, President Obama also came out in support of the resolution. At which point, McCain and McConnell did something rather curious – if by “curious” one means “revolting” – they did an about-face, and with their GOP colleagues, they killed the bill. Never mind that they thought it was good law – good for their constituents, good for the country. As long as Obama supported it, they would not, cynically sacrificing a measure they had previously lauded on the Senate floor.*
Then there’s McConnell’s famous remark that – in the face of the worst economic crisis in 80 years – his number one priority was to make Obama a one-term president. And so obstructionism for its own sake has become the GOP’s highest policy objective. Seemingly unsatisfied with sitting on their hands while one crisis after another passes without legislative action, the House GOP would next see to it that the executive branch also does nothing. Or perhaps Boehner cannot resist making literal the metaphor sometimes used to describe him – as he moves ahead with his empty suit….
Refs:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/166838/congress-job-approval-starts-2014.aspx
* this anecdote is discussed in It’s Even Worse Than It Looks by Mann and Ornstein – a fascinating and infuriating read.
Carlton Thurman's Liberal Field Guide 