Before

Tagged: voting

Political

The unbearable unnaturalness of being

The organization DC Vote has put up a documentary movie on its web site called “Un-Natural State.”  It’s worth the eight minutes.  (You can also get a teacher’s worksheet because the video apparently complies with Washington ninth grade history and government class standards.)

If you watch this video, you’re going to learn two shocking things.

First, that DC Vote thinks we should rewrite our Constitution so our government can be more like Venezuela’s.

Secondly, that there is a guy who is the United States Senator for the District.  I think it is so cute that Washington has a Senator!  And, he’s a white former New Yorker!

If you do watch it, let me know what you think.  The best part is when 35 seconds in, the narrator asks, “Are things really as they seem?”  It’s quite ominous; the shot of birds flying over the head is pure Hitchcock.

Political

Congressional skullduggery

I’ve been watching the battle over giving Washington, D.C. representation in the United States House of Representatives with some amusement.  If you don’t know about this, and you like political arcana, catch up.

As you might know, D.C. license plates proclaim it’s the land of “Taxation Without Representation.”  (That’s a great automotive statement easily surpassing New York City’s “Don’t Even Think of Parking Here” signs.)  People in Washington think they’re being cheated out of having a Congressman and two Senators, even though they’re free to move to a real State at any time.  They do have a non-voting representative, whose sole job seems to be House jester.

People in Utah also feel cheated out of a House seat, too, and they’ve been feeling that way ever since the 2000 census.  Why?  Because Utah, which has only three representatives, missed the cutoff for a fourth seat by about eight hundred people.  They claimed that the Census failed to count Mormon missionaries who were out of the country at the time; they also took issue with a statistical method the Census uses.  This bothered them enough to take their case to the Supreme Court, where they lost.  (North Carolina has the seat Utah wanted.)  This part of the story seems to be missing from the current coverage, and it explains why the Beehive State’s so into this idea.

Fast forward to today.  Somebody in Washington (or maybe it was Utah — I’m not sure) got the admittedly savvy idea that if we added one seat for D.C., which would probably go Democrat, we could add one seat for Utah, which would probably go Republican, and keep the balance we have.  Everybody wins — Utah’s pacified and Washington’s seat is still as worthless as it is today since it’ll always get canceled out!  What a great compromise.  (Never mind that it is unconstitutional to add seats for D.C. — more on that later.)

I read in the Post, however, that yesterday House Republicans attached an amendment to this bill.  Now, if the bill passes, the amendment repeals D.C.’s very strict gun laws.  This is an even more savvy political move than the original idea, in my view.  If liberal Democrats vote for it, hoping to give D.C. its representation, they repeal its gun control laws.  Some liberals will now vote against the bill because they’d rather keep the gun control.  Realizing this, the Democratic leadership stalled the bill.  Now Republicans can say they refused to support the constitutional right to arms.

All this manuevering puts me in the mind of my law review article (which I certainly hope can be described as “forthcoming” someday).  I wrote on legislative silliness, and one case in point was LBJ’s 1956 manuevering to get senators from the Pacific Northwest to support an amendment that weakened the civil rights bill so that the South would accept the bill.  In exchange for that support, he promised the Northwest his support for a series of federal dams — which actually passed the Senate.  The cunning part of this plan was, Johnson’s dam support was worthless because the House never passed the dam bill.  The President would probably have vetoed it anyway.  It cost nothing to keep his end of the deal, and in exchange, the Northwest gave LBJ his greatest legislative victory.

Republicans have the opportunity to pull the same trick here.  Suppose the combined D.C. voting and gun-rights actually passes.  It will immediately be challenged by some Republican somewhere, and one of two things will happen.  One possibility is the courts will strike down the part of the bill giving D.C. the vote, because D.C.’s not a State and the Constitution gives representation only to States; Utah, however, will probably keep its representative because Congress can change the number of seats at any time.  The other possibility is the whole voting part of the bill will go out the window, leaving the gun control repeal on the books.  Either way, Republicans win.

I can’t believe Democrats are falling into this trap, except that they are giddy with the intoxication of their big November wins.

The most interesting part of this is why it’s such a big deal for Utah right now.  There is another census coming up in three years.  At that point, the whole Congressional deck is reshuffled.  It would be impossible to predict at this time which State will be in Utah’s position — being the very next in line for a seat, if only the House had room for one more.  The thing is, though, there will always be that one State that just didn’t make it.  And because of the way the math works, it’s essentially random (but it is always most likely to be California).  All this work now, just to get a short-term gain that Utah, with its high growth rate, will almost certainly have outright after 2010 anyway, seems a little late.  Where was this idea in 2000?

Political

Why you should vote YES…

Reading the editorial page of the Columbus Dispatch is like being in an abusive relationship.  Just when you think you’re safe, you wake up, and out of nowhere you get brained.  Unfortunately, unlike a battered wife, I really have to admit that it’s all my fault and I don’t know why I keep going back to him.

This Sunday the Dispatch opposed Reform Ohio Now’s issues 2 through 5.  With all the thoughtful writing they’ve done on local city issues and on abuses of power, plus with the series of articles we’ve seen on Ohio’s lopsidedly gerrymandered legislative districts, I was sure they would back at least some of the issues.  Unfortunately, I’ll have to be lying to my friends that “I fell down the stairs,” because this hurt and I sure didn’t see it coming.

I was not whole-heartedly behind each issue.  In very brief, the issues are:

  • 2: absentee voting in advance
  • 3: campaign contribution limits
  • 4: end party-based gerrymandering of districts
  • 5: pass statewide control of elections to a board rather than the Secretary of State

I have been leaning toward opposing 2 and 3 and supporting 4 and 5.

Issue 2 allows people to vote up to 35 days before the date of the actual election.  I think this is a terrible idea.  While the idea of absentee voting seems nice, a lot can happen in the five weeks before an election.  As we allow voting farther and farther ahead, people are more likely to miss defining events on the campaign trail, and once your vote is cast, it can’t be changed.  Consider what happened last year in the 26th District where I lived: the Democratic primary was won by Mike Mitchell, who defeated his opponent by only 173 votes.  But (according to the paper on March 9, 2004) Mitchell had gotten a DUI citation just two days before the election.  He was also charged with going 70 in a 55 and driving on a suspended license.  (Unfortunately, this didn’t hit the news until it was too late.)  If people had known about this before they voted, I think he would have lost the election.  Early voting costs you the chance to make important last-minute decisions.

Issue 3 is campaign contribution limits; I honestly don’t have a strong position here and I don’t want to talk about it.  I think they are a mistake.

Issue 4, however, is the real jewel of this year’s reform package.  Under issue 4, anyone could submit a plan for the state’s legislative districts, and that plan would be scored for its political competitiveness.  The formula — which is insanely complicated (go read it) — gives higher points if a district is more evenly balanced between the two parties.  The highest overall point-getting plan generally wins and is chosen by an impartial board.  It’s more complicated than that, but it would end the system where last year Democrats won their Ohio House seats by an average of some 60 percent and Republicans by some 40 percent.  Gerrymandering used to be more of an art, but in the last go-round, computer mapping technology had advanced so much that these crazy unwinnable districts have been much easier to draw.  (I know, because I write mapping software.)

The gerrymandering in our state is really costing us, because the people who get elected just have to win their party primary, not appeal to a broad electorate.  In the case of the 26th District, by the way, Mike Mitchell went on to run unopposed in the general election, and he won.  (The Dispatch said that the “solution would be worse than the problem” and that “Democrats’ weak challenges to GOP officeholders have played a role in this problem.”  But it cuts both ways when Republicans don’t field any candidate at all.)

Issue 5 would take election oversight duties away from the Secretary of State and give them to a board of election officials.  Although a board might be less responsive, I think it would be a worthwhile step.  In Ohio in 2004, as in Florida in 2000, the Secretary of State was at the center of a heated, disputatious election, and the Secretary of State was also the chairman of the Bush campaign.  It presented a ridiculous conflict of interest.  I understand Florida has already stripped their SOS of election duties, by the way.

I think the Dispatch does have a good point to make about the complexity and specificity of the laws, saying that “they seek to write highly detailed, prescriptive language and untested policy into the Ohio Constitution.  Once there, fixing any deficiencies would require another statewide vote.”  While this is true, I am not exactly holding my breath for either party to voluntarily level the playing field.  Also, while issues 2 and 3 generally deal with regulation of elections and are probably better suited to being acts of the legislature, issues 4 and 5 are structural in nature and therefore do belong in our state’s constitution.  As an alternative, the broad outlines of issue 4’s formula might have been put into the constitution, along with the requirement of a more detailed enabling act to be passed by the legislature, so that the variables could be tinkered with, but I’m not comfortable with anything coming out of the Statehouse these days.

Our electoral system is fundamental to our functioning democracy.  Vote yes on issues 4 and 5!