Elizabeth Warren: “every vote matters…”

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is making headlines by calling for the elimination of the Electoral College.  As she told an audience in Jacksonville, Miss., a week or so ago: “Well, my view is that every vote matters, and the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting, and that means get rid of the Electoral College.”  Even more interesting was the response from the racially mixed audience: prolonged and enthusiastic applause.  America’s huddled masses are hungry – not for some shallow reform or other, which no one at this point believes will accomplish a thing, but for fundamental structural change.  They’re sick and tired of an absurd eighteenth-century constitution that hinders them at every turn and are yearning to breathe free.  Plainly, there’s a whiff of revolution in the air.

Otherwise, Warren’s statement can be safely dismissed as one of those games that bourgeois politicians play.  As a former Harvard law prof, she must know that the Electoral College is untouchable under anything like current circumstances.  The reason, of course, is the dysfunctional amending clause in Article V that gives absolute veto power to one-quarter-plus of the fifty states.  When you take the ten low-population states that would see their clout slashed in presidential elections by a half to two-thirds if the EC were abolished and combine them with the dozen or so swing states that would no longer bask in political attention every four years, then it’s clear that opponents would have no trouble winning over the thirteen states needed to stop any such change in its tracks.

To be sure, there’s also the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is being billed as a painless way of bypassing the Article V roadblock.  But it’s hardly a magic solution.  The idea behind it seems simple.  All it requires is that individual states pledge that their “electors” will abide by the popular vote as soon as states comprising a majority of the Electoral College sign on.  Once the 270-vote threshold is attained, the popular vote will be all that matters and the college’s role will be reduced to ratifying the popular will.  But Colorado is the only swing state to climb on board after more than a dozen years, while Rhode Island and Vermont are the only ones among the bottom thirteen of least-populous states.  No Republican states have signed up either since the scheme would almost certainly favor the Democrats.  So while the compact has racked up endorsements from states representing 181 electoral votes so far, it’s highly unlikely to reach 270.

There’s another problem as well.  Contrary to popular belief, the United States does not hold a presidential election every four years.  Rather, it holds fifty separate elections, 51 if you count the District of Columbia, all conducted by local authorities according to various different rules.  As a result, a popular vote in, say, Massachusetts is not the same as one in Florida or North Carolina.  If the national popular vote is to be determinative, the rules will have to be standardized to avoid lumping together apples and oranges.  But if tampering with the Electoral College is likely to run into a buzzsaw of opposition, transferring electoral power from the states to the federal government will run into even more.

The uproar from diehard Republican states is guaranteed to be overwhelming.  Excising the Electoral College is thus doubly or triply doomed.  Like everything else in America’s superannuated constitution – a wildly inequitable Senate, a gerrymandered House, a complicated legislative process that fairly invites gridlock, etc. – it’s effectively unchangeable.  But that’s why the Constitution has lasted for some 230 years: because it’s frozen in place.  Politicians will issue rousing calls for change from time to time, audiences will clap and cheer, and pundits will churn out the usual thumbsuckers demanding that something be done.  But then everyone will go back to sleep.  Lather, rinse, repeat – that’s how constitutional debate works in this country.

Nothing will change – except that something will.  The current situation is untenable.  Yes, even though the EC has overridden the popular vote two times out of the last five elections, the country may dodge a bullet in 2020, in 2024, or after.  Eyelids will once again droop as memories of 2016 fade.  But the damage will not go away.  The longer Americans surrender before such problems, the more they underscore their own impotence, and the deeper they will allow the rot to go.

There’s an interesting parallel here with the United Kingdom.  The U.S. Constitution and the centralized “Westminster” system are really just two branches of the same Anglo-American tree, ones that began diverging at some point in the mid-eighteenth century.  The British system may have seemed more efficient in the years since. But with its monarchy, House of Lords, and attendant class system, it’s just as hidebound and decrepit as the American branch, with voting inequities that are just as pronounced.  With its 55 electoral votes, for example, California gets one vote for every 539,079 citizens within the voting age, while Wyoming, with three electoral votes, gets for every 148,610.  That’s a ratio of 3.6 to one.  But the Isle of Wight sends the same number of people to Parliament, i.e. one, as the Island of Lewis and Harris in the extreme north even though it’s voting-age population is five times greater (i.e. 110,697 vs. 21,769).  The anomaly has led to two 2016-style election upsets in the last seventy years or so, one in 1951 and another in February 1974.  But instead of fixing it, British politicians have allowed it to fester.

Could this deep political passivity be part of the reason that Britain is now stumbling over a cliff thanks to Brexit?  More on that anon.

William G. Brownlow: The people’s hero now vilified as “Tennessee’s worst governor.

In my previous post, I noted that the post-Civil War constitutional amendments were “force bills” imposed on ex-Confederate states as a condition of their readmission to the Union and that in one case, i.e. Tennessee, passage was rammed through “literally at a gunpoint.”

Here’s a more complete account of this fascinating incident.  According to E. Merton Coulter’s William G. Brownlow: Fighting Parson of the Southern Highlands (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1937), Brownlow, Tennessee’s Radical Republican governor from 1865-69, wanted the state legislature to ratify the proposed new Fourteenth Amendment on July 4, 1866.   But he had a problem: a rebellion by die-hard pro-rebel forces in the lower house.  Determined to prevent a quorum, dissidents resigned on the spot or fled the capitol and went into hiding.  Brownlow first appealed for federal troops.  But when President Andrew Johnson, the crypto-Confederate who opposed ratification, turned him down, he looked to his fellow radicals in the lower house.

They rose to the occasion.  Under intense pressure, Speaker of the House William Heiskell issued arrest warrants for the absentees and sent Sergeant-at-arms William Heydt out into the countryside to serve them.  Heydt caught up with one member in the state’s eastern hill country and rounded another as well.  Returning to the state capitol in Nashville, he imprisoned both men in a committee room.  But when Heiskell, by now beginning to waver, declared that a quorum had still not been obtained, members overrode his decision, declared the two arrested members to be present, and then voted to ratify.  When a local judge ordered the prisoners to be released, they ignored him. When the judge then slapped Heydt with a ten-dollar fine, the legislature impeached him and removed him from office.

All of which made a mockery of the convoluted amending process set forth in Article V.  But the process is so asinine, so out of date, and so undemocratic that it deserves to be mocked, and Brownlow was a hero for doing it.  For his efforts, he has earned the undying contempt of racists who took control of the state in 1870 and have not relinquished it since.  They vilified him as “Tennessee’s worst governor” and “the most hated man in Tennessee history,” while, in 1981, a poll of fifty-two so-called state historians rated him the worst governor in Tennessee history.  In April 1987, someone hung a portrait of him in the legislative library, but it was quickly taken down.

No good deed goes unpunished, as they say.  But considering that the Posse Comitatus, the Christian Identity movement, and other ultra-rightists have long condemned the Fourteenth Amendment for granting civil rights revolution to non-white “mud people,” what would happen if such groups were to file suit against it on the grounds that it’s unconstitutional?  What would the ACLU do – condemn Brownlow for trampling on Article V, defend him, or argue that it’s all irrelevant because the amendment is by now settled law?

Michael Cohen: Fixer turned accuser

“Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

Thus spake Michael Cohen at Wednesday’s hearing before the House oversight committee.  Over at TRNN, Paul Jay took this to mean that fascism is bearing down on us yet again.  This fell wide of the mark, however, for at least three reasons.  One is that Trump, despite certain Mussolini-esque tendencies, is far from a genuine fascist, as Dylan Rileyrecently showed in the New Left Review.  Another is that the man’s isolation is so complete in Washington that it’s hard to imagine the military or intelligence agencies following him into the trenches should he attempt something crazy like overturning a presidential election.  The third reason is that authoritarianism is fully bipartisan at this point, meaning that it is no less likely to come from the anti-Trump forces at this point as from Donald himself.

Nonetheless, Jay is in the right ballpark, more or less.  In May 2017, acting CIA Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein held a series of crisis meetings following the firing of Jim Comey in which they discussed using the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove Trump from office – an act that amounted to an incipient coup d’état since it involved an obvious misuse of an amendment designed to deal with a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” not one who, in the opinion of the FBI, is all too capable of turning the country over to the Russians.

Then, just two weeks ago, Trump declared a state of emergency in order to build his Mexican wall, another incipient or quasi-coup since it marked the first time such powers have been used to short-circuit Congress’s constitutional control over the purse strings.  If we include Cohen’s warning that Trump will not go gently into that good night in 2020, then it’s clear that the system’s ability to insure a democratic transition is more and more in doubt.

What does it all mean? Simply that the ancient machinery is experiencing something akin to cardiac arrest according to the people who live under its aegis.  The breakdown has been in the works at least since Watergate, the scandal that saw the removal of a president of pronounced dictatorial tendencies without any attempt to repair the constitutional machinery that allowed him to accumulate such powers in the first place.

In fact, Watergate saw the opposite, a quasi-religious celebration of the Constitution as a kind of divine protector.  “My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total,” sang Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.  “I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.” She was a defender of the faith sallying forth in the name of the sacred scroll.

The results were all too predictable: an upsurge in constitutional piety even as a dangerous logjam continued to pile up on Capitol Hill.  All but destroyed by congressional infighting, Jimmy Carter gave way to Ronald Reagan, a thoroughgoing reactionary who raised political fantasy to an art form.  “He is a Prospero of American memories, a magician who carries a bright, ideal America like a holograph in his mind and projects its image in the air,” gushed Time Magazine in its Fourth of July issue in 1986.  “…Reagan, master illusionist, is himself a kind of American dream.  Looking at his genial, crinkly face prompts a sense of wonder: How does he pull it off?”  The constitutional machinery was so decrepit that magic was the only thing that would make it work.  The Bush I and Clinton administrations ushered in an era of non-stop wars: the invasion of Panama in December 1989, the first Persian Gulf war in August 1990, and then a dozen years of intermittent bombing raids on Iraq starting in 1991.  Bush II upped the ante by invading Afghanistan and Iraq, while Barack Obama, deferring to “Queen of Chaos” Hillary Clinton and her followers, upped it even more by unleashing death and destruction on Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the Ukraine.  The atmosphere on Capitol Hill meanwhile grew more and more poisonous as Newt Gingrich’s back-to-back government shutdowns in 1995-96 gave way to wars over Monica Lewinsky’s little blue dress, the battle over Barack Obama’s birth certificate, the Benghazi hearings, Russiagate, and now Michael Cohen.

Warfare abroad led warfare at home.  Imperial overstretch in places like eastern Europe and the Middle East became bound up with constitutional collapse at the center.  While Congress remained violence-free, the story was different out in the hinterlands as Trump campaign rallies regularly erupted in fighting and clashes between anti-fascists and ultra-rightists in Charlottesville in August 2017 led to more than thirty injuries and the murder of a 32-year-old socialist named Heather Heyer.

What does the future hold?  After four decades or so, the answer is obvious: an acceleration of the crisis until some sort of breaking point is reached.  This is the significance of Cohen’s statement last week: people know a crisis is coming, they can feel it in their bones, but there’s nothing they can do to head it off.

The situation is so similar to the run-up to the Civil War that even the Washington Post has taken notice.  Thanks to the three-fifths clause and a southern-controlled Senate, a surprisingly small number of large-scale planters – nationwide, just 338 planters owned 250 or more slaves[1]– were able to leverage their power so as to acquire a veto over the federal government.  Democracy was blocked, yet there was nothing that the democratic majority could do.  “We the people” couldn’t amend the Constitution to eliminate slavery because slave states controlled both houses of Congress, and they couldn’t reinterpret it because southerners dominated the federal judiciary.  Their sole remaining option was to attack the problem extra-constitutionally via civil war, which is what they did.

Today, the US is seeing a similar efflorescence of minority rule.  Gerrymandering and voter suppression have added to Republican clout in the House while widening state population discrepancies have resulted in a Senate that is ever more lopsided.  Thanks to equal state representation, the 53 Republicans who control the upper house represent just 48 percent of the population, while the 41 Republican senators capable of stopping a bill in its tracks under current filibuster rules account for as little as twenty.  The Electoral College triples the weight of lily-white bastions like Wyoming and the Dakotas, while the two-thirds/three-fourths rule in Article V means that thirteen states representing just 4.4 percent of the population can veto any constitutional amendment sought by the remaining 95.6.

Those numbers are bound to worsen in the coming decades as state population differentials grow.  According to projections by the University of Virginia’s Demographics Research Group, the ratio between the most and least populous states, currently 68 to one, will hit 79 to one by the year 2040, while instead of 4.4 percent of the population, the thirteen states capable of vetoing a constitutional amendment will account for as little as 4.2.  Democracy will shrink, yet, once again, there will be nothing that the huddled masses living in multi-racial giants like California or New York will be able to do within the existing framework.  Their only option, rather, is to bust free by creating an entirely new framework, not in accordance with the existing rules but according to new rules they formulate in the course of their revolt.

The 1860s provides a hint of how this would work.  The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, ratified between 1864 and 1870, not only abolished slavery and guaranteed the right to vote irrespective of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” but established a new relationship between  the individual, the states, and the federal government.  They tightened the bonds so that a loose confederation turned into something approaching a modern nation-state.  No less importantly, the amendments were not ratified according to the rules set forth in Article V, but, rather, were “force bills” that Radical Republicans imposed on the ex-Confederate states, literally at a gunpoint in one case, i.e. Tennessee, as a condition of their readmission to the Union.

The process didn’t go far enough, which is why southern racists and northern conservatives succeeded in eviscerating the amendments so as to thrust blacks back into a state of semi-servitude and impose a dictatorship of capital on the nation as a whole.  But at least it tells us something about a how a revolutionary process liberates itself from existing rules and regulations in the process of creating a new order.  Led by the working class, Americans will have to do something similar in response to the present impasse, although naturally it will have to be far more radical and sweeping.

[1]William Kauffman Scarborough, Masters of the Big House: Elite Planters of Mid-Nineteenth-Century South(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2003), 6.