Democrats Scare Me

I am really worried about what will happen when the Democrats eventually get control of the White House and both houses of Congress. American politics being what they are, this will happen eventually, probably in 2024. What they are currently proposing makes me very nervous. The Left in general and Democrats in particular have proposed a number of changes to be sure that they remain in control for a generation of more.

The first thing they are likely to do is the nuclear option: abolish the filibuster in the Senate. That only takes a majority vote and it allows them to proceed with their agenda with a 50-49 majority. They can even manage on a 50-50 majority and a Democrat Vice President to break ties.

Once they eliminate the filibuster they will start changing the rules to give themselves an advantage across all of the branches of government. Here are the things they have suggested:

Eliminating the Electoral College. The proper way to do this is to amend the Constitution but they will not do that. Instead they will make an end run around it by passing an law authorizing the Interstate Popular Vote Compact. This grants a state's electors to the winner of the popular vote rather than to the winner of the state. It will be a long fight to get enough states to pass this for it to take effect but Congress can smooth over the biggest obstacle - the Constitution forbids states from making compacts between themselves without Congressional approval.

Packing the Supreme Court. Currently the number of seats on the court is fixed by law at nine and the court leans conservative 5-4. There have been numerous suggestions for adding seats to the court with 15 being the most common suggestion. That would give the liberals a 10-5 advantage.

Packing the Senate. This is fairly simple. They will admit Washington DC and Puerto Rico as states. Both of these lean heavily to the left so they will get four more Democrats in the Senate. This will also give them a couple of seats in the House.

Packing the House. This one is a stretch but it's been proposed in the Washington Post. The 14th amendment has a clause that allows for a state to be punished for disenfranchising by reducing their representation in Congress. The theory here is that voter ID and purges of inactive voters only exist to keep minorities from voting so any state that has done this will lose representatives. The legal justification for this is very shaky and they would have to finish their court-packing before this hit the Supreme Court. I don't really think they will try this one but I included it since it has been brought up.

All of these are possibilities. I fully expect one or more of them to be attempted in the foreseeable future. The Interstate Popular Vote Compact has already passed a few states.

None of these are ends to themselves. They are just ways of changing the rules so that they will have a permanent majority. Once that happens then the changes will really start. More on that later.

Can Identity Politics Be Liberal?

A recent piece in Vox maintains that liberalism needs identity politics. A close examination of the piece shows the opposite.

It begins with a reference to a 30-year-old piece by the late University of Chicago philosopher Iris Marion Young :

In 1990, Young published a classic book titled Justice and the Politics of Difference. At the time, political philosophy was dominated by internal debates among liberals who focused heavily on the question of wealth distribution. Young, both a philosopher and a left activist, found this narrow discourse unsatisfying.

In her view, mainstream American liberalism had assumed a particular account of what social equality means: "that equal social status for all persons requires treating everyone according to the same principles, rules, and standards." Securing "equality" on this view means things like desegregation and passing nondiscrimination laws, efforts to end overt discrimination against marginalized groups.

This is an important start, Young argues, but not nearly enough. The push for formally equal treatment can't eliminate all sources of structural inequality; in fact, it can serve to mask and even deepen them. Judging a poor black kid and a rich white one by the same allegedly meritocratic college admissions standards, for example, will likely lead to the rich white one's admission — perpetuating a punishing form of inequality that started at birth.

In this example, Young very cleverly conflated two attributes then ignored one of them. Let's assume that the premise is correct, that a rich white kid would be admitted before a poor black one but why bring wealth into it at all if this is about race? What about a rich black kid and a poor white one? Or two rich kids, one black and one white? Or a black and white kid who are both poor? Or two middle class kids? The assumption is really that rich kids will be admitted before poor ones coupled with the implication that black kids are always poor.

There's a word for assuming that someone who is black must be poor: "prejudice". It's a harmful one, also. 40% of black families are middle class compared with 42% of all families. It's the largest income group for blacks. Yes, twice as many blacks are below the poverty line as the general population (21% and 11%) but that's still half as many black families as are middle class. Even if you add in working poor (25% of black families) you still have the majority (56%) of black families middle class or above.  So Vox is justifying identity politics by perpetuating a racial slur - that backs are automatically poor.

Identity politics also eliminates any discussion of why more blacks are poor than whites. It looks at the percentages by race and assumes institutional racism is the sole cause. That creates a helplessness among minorities. "The system is stacked against you and there's nothing you can do to fight it."

But, it's been well-established that two-parent families are wealthier than single-parent families. And black families are much more likely to be single-parent. What if the two are connected? What if the prevalence of black poverty has more to do with the destruction of the black two-parent family? There's no room for that in identity politics.

So how is this liberal?

The Vox article goes on to name other disparities:

• The median black family's wealth is one-tenth that of the median white family.
• The average American woman spends over 11 more hours per week doing unpaid home labor than the average man.
• LGBTQ youth are about five times more likely to attempt suicide than (respectively) straight and cisgender peers.

These are all misleading on one way or the other.

The first bullet point is because of a handful of billionaires at the top end of wealth are disproportionately white. If you discount them then the wealth gap closes significantly.

The second point is grossly misleading. According to their source, the reason women do more of the housework is because men are spending much more time at work.

As for the third point, it's been well-documented that 50% of youth on hormone treatments for gender transitioning try to commit suicide. If, as the statistics imply, it's the drugs that cause suicidal urges then no amount of identity politics will help these people. It's a medical issue, not a societal one.

So Vox is misrepresenting the world as an excuse for more identity politics. I already mentioned the problem with assuming that blacks are poor. There are other problems with grouping people into easily-identifiable groups and treating them differently. Once you decide that this is acceptable then it's inevitable that you start having disparate treatment. Identity politics advocates assume that they will always be in control of this and that it will always work in their favor. That is not always the case.

Look at Mayor Bloomberg's Stop and Frisk policy. It's a perfect example of identity politics gone wrong. As Bloomberg himself explained, the biggest cause of murder in New York City was minorities. So he advocated treating all of them as potential suspects and checking them for weapons as often as possible (up to a million times a year at its height). The justification for this is that it helped the minority communities since the most common victim was also a minority.

Identity politics institutionalizes racism disguised as helping "marginalized" groups. If convinces members that all of their problems come from a system designed to crush them and teaches them to see racism/sexism/etc. where none exists. None of this is liberal and it only helps the liberals by creating a mob mentality intent on change that they hope to channel.

Joe, Liz and Bernie's Bad Night

The 2020 New Hampshire primaries were last night and the front-runners from last Summer all had terrible nights.

First there is Joe Biden. En ended up losing a fight for 4th pace with Liz Warren. His support is in the single digits. He's trailing in fund-raising. He looks old and sounds confused. The impeachment was aimed at Trump but hit Biden, informing a lot of people about how his family got rich from their association with Joe. He's never been a good candidate. In three runs for president he's never finished above 4th place. He's counting on South Carolina to save him but Super Tuesday is less than a month away and brings Bloomberg and his billions. Joe will probably be out of the race within the next month.

Then there's Liz Warren. She managed to beat Biden for 4th place but her support is still in the single-digits. She had to cancel a half-million dollar ad buy in Nevada after her poor showing in Iowa failed to produce the expected donations bounce. Her slogan "I've got a plan for that" evaporated after she released her plan for universal health care. It was too expensive and the funding had too many rosy projections. She withdrew it promising to come up with something by 2024 if Congress doesn't deliver a plan before then. She's also been caught in too many lies. Her voice grates. She's been basing her appeal on "I was discriminated against decades ago for being a woman so I deserve to be president." That appeal coming from a rich, privileged white woman didn't work for Hillary Clinton and it's not working for Warren. Warren should have placed second in New Hampshire just from being a fellow New Englander. That she didn't shows that she has limited appeal and will soon be out of the race.

It may seem strange to include Bernie Sanders on this list. He won the New Hampshire primary but it was an ugly win. He got half the votes in 2020 as he got in 2016. In 2016 he finished 22 points ahead of Hillary Clinton. In 2020 he beat Pete Buttigieg by 1.3%. Everyone knew that Bernie would win this primary but it was far closer than anyone expected. Still, it's enough that a Stop Bernie movement has formed in the Democratic Party. Bernie is far enough ahead to alarm the party but he's not so far as to be unstoppable. Had Bernie repeated his 2016 win then the party might be coming to terms with him as front-runner. Instead his narrow victory has them looking for alternatives to support. Regardless, I expect Bernie to be in the race until the bitter end.

Could Trump Have Been Stopped in 2016?

Writing in the National Review, Never-Trumper Jim Geraghty is warning that the Democrats have to stop Bernie Sanders by uniting under a single candidate. While this is written as a warning for the Democrats, it's mainly an examination of how a candidate he hates managed to win the primaries.

As Geraghty sees it, good and decent Republicans could have saved the party if only the huge pool of candidates had stepped aside and allowed support to coalesce around a single acceptable candidate, probably Ted Cruz. While it's true that Trump won the nomination with only 46% of the vote, it's a stretch to think that another candidate could have beaten him.

Let's start with polls. RealClearPolitics has a list of polls for Trump, Cruz and Kasich during the primaries. As of this point (early February) four years ago they stood with Trump at 39%, Cruz at 18% and Kasich at 8%. So, if Kasich had dropped out and thrown all of his support to Cruz, Trump would still be ahead. That's how it was for all of January and February. Of course there were other candidates in the race and it was not clear that Cruz and Kasich would be the last hold-outs.

Things got more interesting in March. For a lot of March, Cruz and Kasich combined did have more support than Trump. By April Trump was right about equal to Cruz and Kasich combined and that's how the race ended. So if one of them had dropped out and thrown all of his support to the other and none of his supporters voted for Trump instead, then Trump might have been defeated. But that's a lot of "ifs". A big one is assuming that Cruz would prefer to see Kasich as president over Trump. I do think it's a given that Kasich would prefer anyone to Trump including Hillary Clinton but he was convinced that the RNC would somehow fix things so Trump was not nominated and, as the last candidate standing, he'd get the nomination. I suspect he didn't care much for Cruz, either. For that matter, I really wonder if Geraghty would have been any happier with President Cruz than with President Trump?

Any idea that Trump could have been stopped vanishes when you look at the statistics. Trump won 41 primaries and 1,441 delegates. Cruz won 11 primaries and 551 delegates. Rubio (who dropped out early and endorsed Trump) won three primaries and 173 delegates. Kasich only won Ohio and only had 161 delegates. The anti-Trump would have had to win a whole lot of primaries to beat Trump.

And it should be pointed out that most Republicans did not share Geraghty's hatred from Trump. Of the 2016 Republican clown car, Only Jeb! and Kasich didn't endorse Trump when they dropped out (Cruz waited until after the convention. The idea that they would all drop out early in order to stop Trump founders on those endorsements.

So, is the Democratic Party in danger of having the same thing happen with Bernie? It's too early to tell but there are crucial differences. Bernie is currently the front-runner but that's been fairly fluid. All of the candidates are below 30% which leaves a lot of room for them to grow. In contrast, Trump was a clear front-runner in nearly every poll for months before the first primary. He began 2016 around 35% while everyone else was below 15%. So, where Trump was the clear front-runner in 2016, there is no such front-runner in 2020, only the candidate who is slightly ahead.

A Bad Week to be a Democrat

Democrats started the week on a bad note - the Senate vote against calling further witnesses for the impeachment trial of President Trump. Then things got worse.

Monday was supposed to be the BIG DAY when the primaries finally started. All 144 candidates had been hitting the state for months. Sanders and Warren had private jets to fly them back and forth from Iowa to the Senate impeachment trial and back (Warren was caught getting off of a private jet and hid behind a campaign staffer). This was going to be the moment that added some clarity to the race and defined who really was winning and losing. Iowa was ready with new rules that called for three separate counts to make the process more transparent and and app that would relay the results to the state headquarters. The press and pundits eagerly waited for the first results to come in. And waited and waited and waited. Press time came and went. People gave up and went to bed. As of Wednesday morning exactly 0% of the vote had been counted. Both Sanders and Buttigieg released incomplete counts showing that they were the winners.

It seems that the new app hadn't been tested and had failed. The party had counted on the app and didn't have a phone bank large enough to act as a reliable fail-over. Communications were confused and garbled. Eventually they told people to bring pictures of the vote count to the headquarters to be counted by hand. By 5 pm they only had 70% of the vote counted.

Tuesday was the State of the Union Speech. It had been carefully timed so that the President would be in the middle of the impeachment trial when he gave the speech in hopes that he would have a melt-down. It didn't work. President Trump gave a high-energy positive speech. He did miss a handshake with Speaker Pelosi after he handed her the official State of the Union document but that was fair - she'd slighted him in her introduction. While Trump was recounting accomplishments she was looking anywhere but at him. At the end of the speech she pointedly tore it up then was pictured waving the halves with a smile on her face.

By Wednesday it was clear that Pelosi had partially stolen the show from the President but not in a good way. She came across as the one who had a melt-down. Three House members, including a Democrat, filed complaints. The most serious was the one filed by the Democrat. There is a statue against destroying or mutilating government documents. Remember, the State of the Union is the signed report that the President is constitutionally mandated to send to Congress. That's what she tore up. The speech itself is a theatrical event appended to the report in the early 20th century.

Sharp-eyed people watching a replay of the speech noticed that Pelosi had done a test-tear of the document while people were distracted. That's when she divided the document into three piles so it was a planned action rather than a spontaneous reaction to a "dirty speech" as she had claimed.

And on Wednesday the Senate voted to acquit the President. It was no surprise that Mitt Romney voted with the Democrats on the first count, abuse of power. It was more surprising that he voted with the other Republicans to acquit on the charge of contempt of Congress.

And Iowa finally released some more vote counts. Then they issued corrections.

On Thursday Iowa finally released 99% of the vote but admitted problems in the count that may lead to recanvassing the entire state. Both Sanders and Buttigieg claimed victory. Bernie supporters are claiming that the whole mess was caused purposely to distract from Sanders's win. Some have blamed Buttigieg's campaign, pointing to an unrelated financial relationship between them and Shadow, the company that wrote the app. What is sure is that the prestige that usually comes from winning Iowa has evaporating in the long-drawn out count. Candidates and reporters have moved on to New Hampshire. This hurt both Sanders who got the most votes and Buttigieg who got the most delegates. Both can claim victory but no one cares. Warren, who placed third in a primary no one cares about, had to cancel a half-million dollar ad buy after she failed to get an expected bounce in fund-raising from Iowa.

As of Thursday, the Democratic Party continues to be fractured while President Trump looks stronger than ever. The House has announced further investigations but after Pelosi's document-tearing she can no longer claim that this is anything but partisan bickering. At the same time the Senate has announced its own investigation into the Bidens. If they should turn up anything incriminating at all then President Trump will claim total vindication.

The Democrats must be wondering what bad news Friday will bring?