Month: March 2021

Earlier this week I checked in with my former neighbor, the same woman who startled me by some years ago by stating that Mr. Trump was a great president because “He moved the embassy to Jerusalem.” After we shared the news about children and grandchildren and engaged in the typical “organ recital” of old people, I asked her what her thoughts were about January 6. I was wondering if her perception of Donald Trump had been altered by the events of that day. I appreciate that she is not the least bit guarded about her views. She did not disappoint. Without even acknowledging my question about January 6th, she declared, “Biden is ruining the country!” A bit addled by the shift, I asked for specifics, to which she responded, “I read the Epoch Times,” and launched into praise of the paper version of the ET–to which she now has a paid subscription ($16.90 per month). She actively promotes the Epoch Times to her relatives and friends. She was unaware that the Epoch Times is a world-wide digital and paper “news” outlet controlled and funded by the Falun Gong. The Falun Gong, founded by Li Hongzhi [his wikipedia entry is worth reading] in China in the early 1990s, is a rapidly spreading, extremely conservative, non-Christian religious movement that operates The Epoch Media Group. The underlying mandate of this propaganda Group is to spread conservative religious philosophy and vilify the Chinese government. Li Hongzhi moved permanently to the United States in 1998 under increasing pressure and persecution from the Chinese government. The Falun Gong and The Epoch Media Group are now based in New York City, from which they have world-wide reach. As a former Epoch Times editor told NBC News, the group’s leaders “believe that Trump was sent by heaven to destroy the communist party.” As a small example, Covid-19 is always designated in the ET as the “CCP virus” (Chinese Communist Party virus). My staunchly Evangelical Christian former neighbor is now an avid reader of a propaganda newspaper published by a Chinese religious cult claiming roots in Taoism and Buddhism and preaching racial purity. Her interest in my gentle efforts to suggest she might want to learn more about The Epoch Times before accepting it as God’s truth was demonstrated by her silence and the subtle glaze that fell over of her eyes as I spoke.

Right after reaction to my comments about the Epoch Times, my former neighbor brightened up with, “Liberals are trying to cancel Dr. Seuss!” a concept I had read about only that morning. I knew from prior conversations with her that even before the subscription to the Epoch Times her main sources of news and information were local Christian radio and her Evangelical Church. She does not watch Fox News or Tucker Carlson, suggesting that the supposed cancelation of Dr. Seuss is a story that has permeated right wing media far beyond Fox.

Apparently the idea that liberal authoritarians are about to invade your home and relieve you of your copy of “The Cat in the Hat” is the latest manufactured outrage percolating on Fox News and other right wing media. Barely noticed otherwise, the controversy deserves analysis because of its profound silliness, silliness in an attempt to fan outrage. I have copied below last Monday’s (March 8, 2021) article by Doug Muder in his Weekly Sift (subscription highly recommended) presenting the underlying facts that Tucker Carlson and others have tried to expand and distort into a full-blown scandal.

Keep to the high ground,
Jerry

Silly Season in the Culture Wars  (Click on this title to read the article with its illustrations and graphs embedded.)

by weeklysift
https://www.gocomics.com/johndeering/2021/03/05

If the only message you have is to stoke your base’s grievances, occasionally you have to make some up.

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This week contained a lot of important news, so you might imagine that conservative news networks would have a lot to talk about. You might even say they had work cut out for them.

• President Biden’s $1.9 trillion (with a T) spending bill was being debated in Congress, and the opposition message wasn’t getting through to the American people. In one poll, the proposal won support from 68% of Americans, including 37% of Republicans.
• The battle against the Covid pandemic had major developments: Biden announced that enough vaccine for all adult Americans would be available by the end of May, two months earlier than previously thought. Meanwhile, Republican governors in Texas and Mississippi were removing mask mandates and other pandemic-related restrictions from their economies, and others were thinking of following suit — despite the fact that daily case-numbers and death-totals are either worse or not much different than when those restrictions were announced. 
• The Senate has been holding hearings on the January 6 insurrection, including testimony from the FBI director.
• Police reform and voting rights bills passed the House. 
• Refugees are returning to our southern border. 
• A big-state Democratic governor is battling scandal.
• The Senate still has Biden nominees to confirm. Surely one or more of them has done something worth getting upset about.
• Biden is planning another trillion-with-a-T infrastructure bill to rebuild America in ways that Trump promised but never delivered on. 

Serious stuff. Worth calling viewers’ attention to. Some of it even invites a conservative spin.

But instead, right-wing hosts like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity filled entire segments of their shows with Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss, two purported examples of “cancel culture” that (1) are trivial by comparison to several of the issues I just listed, and (2) don’t stand up to even a small amount of scrutiny.

Let’s examine the reality at the root of these controversies.

Mr. Potato Head. Not quite two weeks ago, Hasbro announced that it was changing how it markets its Mr. Potato Head toys:

Hasbro is officially renaming the MR. POTATO HEAD brand to POTATO HEAD to better reflect the full line. 

In other words, Hasbro is de-centering masculinity: Instead of being an “accessory” to her husband, Mrs. Potato Head is now an equal member of the family. Horrors! Your daughter might get the idea that she can find her own place in the world, and doesn’t need a man to define her. And then the Hasbro announcement got even more sinister:

Launching this Fall, the CREATE YOUR POTATO HEAD FAMILY is a celebration of the many faces of families allowing kids to imagine and create their own Potato Head family with 2 large potato bodies, 1 small potato body, and 42 accessories. The possibilities to create your own families are endless with mixing and mashing all the parts and pieces.

So the toy is no longer hetero-normative. If they want, children can build a family with two Mommies or two Daddies. The branding no longer fights that. (Like that matters. I mean, you never cross-dressed Barbie and G. I. Joe, right? Sure. Me neither.) Of course, if you want a Potato Head Family with a Mommy, a Daddy, and a Tater Tot of your own gender, that still works too. (And you can still remove Daddy’s mouth, so he can’t yell at the Tot.) As best I can see, there are no losers here. https://tribunecontentagency.com/article/20210303edshe-b-tif/

Dr. Seuss. The Dr. Seuss situation is similar: A private enterprise is managing its brand in a way that hurts no one. 

When Theodore Seuss Geisel died in 1991, the copyrights on his works passed to his widow, Audrey Geisel, who lived until 2018. 

In 1993 she founded Dr. Seuss Enterprises, whose stated mission was to “protect the integrity of the Dr. Seuss books while expanding beyond books into ancillary areas.” 

Since then, DSE has done a pretty good job keeping Geisel’s flame burning. 

Dr. Seuss — who died in 1991 — was one of the top-earning dead celebrities of 2020, with $33 million in total earnings, according to Forbes. That’s up from $9.5 million in 2015. His estate actually earned more than any late celebrity except for Michael Jackson, whose estate earned $48 million.

So maybe they know their business, and their judgement deserves the benefit of the doubt. Tuesday, Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that six of its more obscure titles would no longer be published.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises, working with a panel of experts, including educators, reviewed our catalog of titles and made the decision last year to cease publication and licensing of the following titles: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo,McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer. These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.

None of these six was particularly popular.

“And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” one of the six books pulled by the estate, sold about 5,000 copies last year, according to BookScan. “McElligot’s Pool” and “The Cat’s Quizzer” haven’t sold in years through the retailers BookScan tracks.

For comparison, DSE sold over half a million of Oh, the Places You’ll Go!.

So what about these particular six books is “hurtful and wrong”? Unless you have copies lying around — and most people don’t, that’s what it means to be unpopular — it’s hard to judge for yourself. In situations like this, mainstream publications don’t want to call your attention to something just to demonstrate how hurtful it is. (And nether do I, so I’ll provide links you can chase if you’re curious rather than post the images themselves.)

The problem isn’t with the text of the books so much as the illustrations. None of them that I have seen is aggressively racist, like Nazi caricatures of Jews often were, but they contain demeaning stereotypes of Africans and Asians. (The anti-Japanese cartoonsGeisel drew after Pearl Harbor, though, are aggressively racist, as many cartoons of the era were. None of them are currently being published by DSE.) You’re not supposed to hate these books’ non-white characters so much as find them different and strange. (The theme of Mulberry Street is that you don’t have to go far to see bizarre things, like “a Chinaman who eats with sticks“.) And a lack of diversity doesn’t help: The monkey-like African natives in If I Ran the Zoo would be less problematic (though still far from acceptable) if they weren’t the book’s only black characters. 

(For what it’s worth, I’ll tell a story on myself: When I was three, I had pneumonia and my parents took me to the hospital. In the waiting room, I saw a Black family, maybe the first real-life Black people I had ever noticed. Dark skin was something I only knew from cartoons, when characters fell into mud puddles or got blown up with dynamite. “Mommy!” I announced (or so I’ve been told). “Those people are dirty.”)

If you’ve watched many old Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons — a lot of which have quietly been taken out of circulation — you know that none of this is unusual for the era. Explicitly non-white characters were rare, and the ones that do show up represent something “other”; you’re supposed to react to them, not identify with them. So the problem isn’t that Dr. Seuss was a bad man in the context of his time — in many ways his books were more progressive than their competitors — but that some of his work has aged badly.

What should be done about that depends on what you want Dr. Seuss to be in 2021. If he’s to be a historical figure — a leading children’s-book author of the mid-to-late 20th century — then his work should speak for itself. Leave it alone, and organize a conversation around it, as HBO Max did when it briefly withdrew and then re-launchedGone With the Wind. (GWTW is a spectacular example of 1930s movie-making, as well as a valuable artifact in the history of America’s attitudes towards race. So I encourage you to watch it. Just don’t imagine that its Lost Cause mythology is an accurate depiction of the Old South or the Reconstruction Era.)

But if Theodore Geisel’s legacy is supposed to be timeless — Audrey’s vision — if his work is supposed to live through our era and beyond, then it needs to be curated. Parents and grandparents should be able to trust the Dr. Seuss brand. When you sit down to read to your four-year-old, you should be able to pick up a Dr. Seuss book without worrying that you might put something bad into a developing mind.

That curation is precisely what Dr. Seuss Enterprises was doing when it removed these six books from its catalog. By taking this action, DSE is making it more likely that kids will still be reading The Cat in the Hat or How the Grinch Stole Christmas in 2050. 

The conservative policy vacuum. To understand the overblown response to the Potato Head and Dr. Seuss news, think back for a moment to Reagan Era conservatism. Whether you loved it or hated it — and even if you believed some ulterior motive was hiding in its background — you knew its defining principles:

• Bold foreign policy that maintains America’s military strength and isn’t afraid to use it.
• Free trade.
• Less regulation, lower federal spending, and lower taxes.
• Local self-determination with less central control from Washington.

That all went out the window with Trump. He liked to spend a lot of money on weapons, brag about American military strength, and occasionally threaten other nations with “fire and fury”. But he also pulled back from wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria; distanced the US from allies like NATO, Japan, and South Korea; and let Vladimir Putin do whatever he wanted wherever he wanted to do it. Mao was probably wrong when he referred to the US of his era as a “paper tiger“, but Trump’s America really was one.

Free trade was replaced by tariffs and trade wars. Some regulations went away — particularly those protecting the environment — but others he stretched to interfere more aggressively in the decisions of US and foreign corporations. Big spending (and big deficits) weren’t worth mentioning any more. And no president in my lifetime did quite so much to impose federal policy on cities and states that didn’t want it. (Last summer, only resistance from the Pentagon kept him from invoking the Insurrection Act and sending active-duty troops into American cities.)

As a result of this reversal, and the absence of any new guiding principles to explain it, today’s Republican Party no longer has a policy agenda. The 2020 Republican platform was to support Trump — period. When the GOP controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, it couldn’t decide what to do with that power, other than pass one big tax cut for rich people. It couldn’t even fulfill its promise to repeal ObamaCare, because that would leave a void that it had no idea how to fill. “Complain all you want that the covid-19 relief bill has been packed with all sorts of unrelated stuff from the Democratic wish list,” Megan McArdle wrote yesterday. “At least the Democrats have a wish list. What’s the Republican equivalent?”

Conservatism today is defined not by principles or programs, but by a Leader, an identity, and (most of all) an attitude: Conservatives are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it any more. Mad at “Them” — the libs, the Deep State, Big Tech, the blood-drinking pedophiles — who keep threatening and insulting them.

But the Biden administration is policy-centered, so to the extent that Biden is driving the national conversation, Republicans have little to say. If they wanted to oppose Biden on substance, they’d need to have a Covid relief proposal of their own. (Ten GOP senatorsdid make a laughably low-ball offer that they knew Biden couldn’t accept, but even they only represented themselves. The Republican leadership offered no proposal at all.) Or a coherent response to January 6 and the larger problem of domestic terrorism. Or an infrastructure plan. Or an immigration plan. Or something.

With no ideas to offer, they can only keep their base riled by promoting a never-ending string of “outrages”. Otherwise they’ve got nothing.

The cancel-culture freak-out. The essence of Trump’s message to his base (a message no other Republican is in a position to compete with) is grievance: Somebody is trying to take something from you, so you need a strong authoritarian leader to fight for you.

Some of these threats may be exaggerated, but they have at least a foothold in reality. Many Democrats really would like to take away assault rifles and other military-grade weaponry, or at least stop Americans from buying more. But the number proposing to “disarm” the country entirely is vanishingly small. Many Americans do compete for jobs with foreigners abroad and immigrants at home, though trade and immigration also create jobs and the balance is debatable. 

But other “threats” are almost entirely imaginary: Non-white races are trying to “replace” you. Gays and lesbians are conspiring to destroy marriage and the family. Liberals want to criminalize Christianity. Big Tech is trying to steal your voice. Covid is a conpsiracy to take away your freedom. It has become a formula: When the Right needs to energize its base, they invent some nebulous force — “Them!” — that is trying to take away something that should be yours. 

This week’s Seuss/Potato story has made this technique really obvious, because the frame fits so badly. Nothing is being taken away from anybody. Whatever you had hoped to do with Mr. Potato Head, you can still do. No one is coming for your Dr. Seuss books. And if you want more, you can buy more, except for a few books you probably had forgotten even existed. What’s more, the rights to those books never belonged to you anyway; if Dr. Seuss Enterprises thinks its brand is healthier without them, that’s up to them.

Conservative rabble-rousers did their best to pretend something else was happening. “They are banning Dr. Seuss books,” said Glenn Beck. They. Not the legal owners of the copyrights, or the organization created by Seuss’ widow to protect his legacy, but a nebulous “panel of ‘educators’ and ‘experts’.” 

How much more do you need to see before all of America wakes up and goes “This is fascism!”? This is fascism. You don’t destroy books. What is wrong with us, America? Go out and buy those books today. Find out if you can get them. Buy Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, because it’s the end of an era. It is the end of freedom in America.

Beck is so strongly attached to these six books — none of which are being destroyed — that he gets some of their names wrong. 

He wasn’t alone. On Fox & Friends, Donald Trump Jr. also warned about the sinister “they”, and seemed to imply The Cat in the Hat had been canceled.

There’s no place that they won’t go. This week alone, they canceled Mr. Potato Head, they canceled the Muppets. They’re canceling Dr. Seuss from reading programs. … I literally know The Cat in the Hat by heart without the book there because I read it so many times to my children.

(I almost forgot about the Muppets. Last month, Disney Plus began streaming all five seasons of The Muppet Show, making it more easily available than it has ever been. But Disney committed the unforgivable sin of putting content warnings on some episodes, like the one where Johnny Cash sings in front of a Confederate flag. But you can still watch it. No one has had the Muppets taken away from them.) 

Kevin McCarthy similarly implied that the most beloved Dr. Seuss books were being canceled — not by the organization charged with maintaining his brand, but by people who don’t like Dr. Seuss. He tweeted “I still like Dr. Seuss” and then read Green Eggs and Ham on Twitter. Why didn’t he read If I Ran the Zoo and show us the primitive African natives?

Tuesday morning, as Christopher Wray verified that white supremacist groups were involved in the Capitol insurrection and Antifa wasn’t, Ted Johnson noticed a subtle difference in what news networks were covering. 

The Washington Post provided the numbers:

Over the course of the past week, Fox News has spent 4 hours and 38 minutes on Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head and Biden’s comments about Neanderthals, according to a tally by the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America. That compared to 42 minutes from CNN and 39 minutes from MSNBC on those topics.

Fox News on Tuesday alone devoted an hour and nine minutes to Dr. Seuss — more than the combined amount it spent on the coronavirus vaccine and FBI testimony about the Jan. 6 insurrection.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-dr-seuss-obsession-numbers

So this is what conservative media has come to: If you have nothing to say to America, and yet you need to keep your base riled up, then you need to rile them up about nothing. 

weeklysift | March 8, 2021 at 8:56 am | Tags: framing, propaganda | Categories: Articles | URL: https://wp.me/p1F9Ho-7qs

As detailed in Monday’s post, the U.S. Constitution mandates that Enumeration of Persons (the Census) every ten years is to be used to apportion (or “reapportion”) among the States the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. (The number of seats was capped by federal law in 1911 [interesting link] and set in stone by a 1929 law that arose out of urban/rural tension reminiscent of current divides.) Reapportionment of House seats is quite formulaic, but, of course, its fairness depends on the accuracy of the Census. Every decadal Census I have experienced was posed as a civic duty, everyone pulling together to get it right. At least that was true until last year, when Mr. Trump and his administration tried, contrary to the plain words of the Constitution, to count only verifiable citizens and further meddle with the accuracy of the Census by shortening the data collection period, sensing a Republican electoral advantage in these maneuvers. 

I have heard, but cannot now reference, that the reapportionment of seats in the U.S. House will be officially set by the end of July, 2021. Most states will have it relatively easy; they will retain the same number of seats in the House. For those states redistricting will involve adjustment of existing Congressional District lines to allow for population shifts. States that have to add or subtract a whole District on account of population shifts and resulting reapportionment will face a more complex task. Within the federal guidelines laid out in the 1960s that were discussed in Monday’s post, the re-drawing of the Congressional and legislative district lines (the redistricting) is left, by the U.S. Constitution, to state-level decision-making . In most of the states the majority party in the state legislature retains the power to redistrict both the State’s legislative districts (LDs) from which those state legislators are elected and the Congressional Districts (CDs) from which U.S. Representatives are elected. Six states, including Washington and Idaho, have, by law, established some form of non-legislative redistricting commission.  Such commissions should better balance the interests of the two major Parties and reduce the temptation for a majority party in a legislature to grossly gerrymander in pursuit of power. (This wikipedia article offers a nice overview of states’ redistricting methods.)

Residents of Spokane County this year are subject to redistricting by two similarly structured, but entirely distinct redistricting committees. One committee at the State level is responsible for redistricting of Congressional Districts and State legislative districts (see map) and another, at the County level, is responsible for establishing the five new county commissioner districts where there have been only three, a change mandated by State law. The newly mandated and formed Spokane country redistricting commission is closely modeled on the Washington State redistricting commission. 

Washington State passed a state constitutional amendment establishing a balanced bi-partisan redistricting commission in 1983 with 61% of the people’s vote. Article II, Section 43 of the State Constitution specifies the composition and function of the commission. The commission is composed of four voting members appointed by the majority and minority leaders of both the State House and the State Senate. The four voting members nominate a fifth member to serve as a non-voting chairperson. None of the redistricting commissioners may have served as a state or county elected official or a state political party officer within two years of appointment to the commission. The commission has a staff of 20-30 people, including an executive director. The legislature appropriates the funds for the running of the commission. The WA State redistricting commission has its own website. I encourage a quick visit. To approve a redistricting scheme requires concurrence of three of the four voting members of the commission. If the four voting commissioners deadlock 2 to 2 the drawing of the CD and LD lines goes to the state supreme court. (In the first two cycles, 1991 and 2001, the commission avoided deadlock.)

There is much to recommend this system. It avoids lopsided gerrymandered redistricting by the majority party in power in the state legislature in the year redistricting occurs (“in years ending in ‘1’”), like the Republican legislative takeover in Wisconsin using REDMAP in 2010-2011. It requires that the two major partys’ representatives on the redistricting commission come to some sort of compromise–or else they abdicate their decision-making to the state supreme court. But make no mistake, this is a balanced bi-partisan and definitely NOT a non-partisan process. Both Republican redistricting commissioners and one Democratic commissioner on the 2021 commission are recent former state legislators, people who undoubtedly retain connections in the current legislature (Fain, Graves, and Walkinshaw). The fourth voting commissioner, April Sims, the second Democratic appointee, is the Secretary Treasurer of the Washington State Labor Council. Redistricting is fundamentally a partisan political process. The Washington commission helps balance the power between the two major political parties of the time–but it does not remove politics from the equation. Consider that the commissioners receive only a small per diem for their time and effort, including many hours of listening to citizen testimony. I pose that there exists no completely disinterested, non-partisan, Solomonic mortal willing to serve in such a position. 

The Spokane County Redistricting Commission is modeled after the WA State Commission. The details are specified in the Revised Code of Washington (RCW) by law passed by the WA State legislature in 2018 (which subsequently withstood a legal challenge in the WA State supreme court). RCW 36.32.053 details the qualifications to serve as a county redistricting commissioner and RCW 36.32.054 specifies the function of the commission. One key difference between the State and County commissions: If the County Redistricting Commission deadlocks 2 to 2 the decision falls (or rises, I suppose) to the WA State Redistricting Commission, NOT to the State supreme court. The members of the Spokane County Redistricting Commission have been chosen, but the choosing received little media attention. Democrats have chosen Spokane attorney and community advocate Natasha Hill, and Brian McClatchey, Director of Policy and Government Relations for the Spokane City Council. The Senate Republican appointee is Robin Ball and the Republican House of Representatives appointee is James McDevitt. Mr. McDevitt is a former U.S. Attorney for Eastern Washington (2000s). Earlier, he spent two and half years on Slade Gorton’s staff (late 1970s) when Gorton was Washington State Attorney General. After his retirement as U.S. Attorney in 2010, McDevitt interrupted his retirement with a four month stint as interim chief of the Spokane Police. Robin Ball is the owner and active manager of Sharp Shooting Indoor Range and Gun Shop on North Freya just north of Trent. Ms. Ball a business woman, a former chairwoman of the Spokane County Republican Party, and an ardent promoter of the Second Amendment. It is hard to think of a more partisan local Republican than Ms. Ball. As of this writing the four appointees have yet to appoint their fifth (nonvoting) member and chair person.

In the coming weeks and months, especially as the data from the 2020 census becomes available, these two redistricting commissions will gear up. They need input and observation. For residents of Spokane County the county redistricting commission may bear the most watching as it is charged with the total re-drawing of county voting districts that will affect the governance of the County for years to come. Stay tuned.

Keep to the high ground,
Jerry

P.S. For background on the proposal and passage of the state law mandating five district-based county commissioners for non-charter Washington counties with a population over 400,000 I recommend Daniel Walters’ December 10, 2020, article in the Inlander entitled “State Rep. Marcus Riccelli keeps remaking Spokane County’s governing bodies — and raising the ire of Commissioner Al French.” 

P.P.S. Redistricting of municipalities, school districts, and fire districts in the State of Washington is not covered under either of the commissions discussed above. Redistricting of these entities proceeds under another set of rules, probably within guardrails set by the the Revised Code of Washington. 

Last year there was a lot of talk about the Census and who gets counted. Trump and members of his administration (think Stephen Miller) tried to pretend it was proper to count only citizens and limit the time spent on making an accurate count. Now the counting is over and the States (and governmental subdivisions of States) have begun the process of redistricting, a process to which we should pay attention. This year’s process of redistricting is the foundation of our representation at all levels of government for the next ten years. 

The U.S. Constitution, in Article I, Section 2, specifies the process of “Enumeration” (Census) of “Persons” living in each State and apportionment (or re-apportionment) of Representatives to those States based on the Enumeration done every ten years. (Infamously, Article I, Section 2 also specifies slaves to be counted as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of this Enumeration and that “Indians not taxed” are not counted at all. Both clauses were superseded by subsequent Amendments and legislation, but the clauses remain.) The decadal Enumeration of Persons (Census) is used to determine the apportionment of the 435 voting U.S. Representatives among the states. How these Representatives are elected and whom they represent was originally left almost entirely to the States: “…the Electors [those eligible to vote] in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.” Until long after the Civil War that sentence left to each State how it wanted to 1) establish the qualifications for voters and 2) decide whether to elect Representatives at large from within its boundaries or divide itself into Congressional Districts. For example, until 1959 Washington State periodically elected some or all the Representatives apportioned to it using a statewide, “at-large” electionrather than assigning a specific geographical Congressional District. An Act of the U.S. Congress in 1967, 2 U.S.C. § 2c, required that States establish geographic, single Representative Congressional Districts (except for States having only one Representative, currently 7 States). Other details of Congressional Districts, for example, the principle of an approximately equal population per District, were established by Supreme Court cases in the 1950s and 1960s (for example, Wesberry v. Sanders, 1964). These cases were largely based on the Warren Court’s interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, one of the three (13th, 14th, and 15th) Amendments adopted in the wake of the Civil War.

In Wisconsin where I grew up in the 1950s and 60s, “Impeach Earl Warren” signs were not unusual, nor were loud denunciations of the Warren Court’s “judicial activism”. It is embarrassing to me to realize that it has taken me fifty years to understand exactly what these signs and denunciations were railing against. The 14th Amendment and its Equal Protection Clause had essentially lain dormant between 1868 and 1954. That span of time included the Jim Crowe era, essentially an extension of slavery under a new set of rules. In 1954, the first full year of the Warren Court all nine justices agreed in Brown v. Board of Education that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment made racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. That was the opening salvo in asserting the rights guaranteed under the the 14th Amendment and essentially ignored for 80 years. The U.S. Supreme Court under Earl Warren (between 1953 and 1969) first established the Equal Protection Clause as a basis for judicial review of redistricting (Baker v. Carr, 1962). The Court went on under the same reasoning to establish the principle of “one person, one vote” and applied it the size of Congressional Districts (Wesberry v. Sanders) and the size of state legislative districts (Reynolds v. Sims). Meanwhile, enlivened by the Warren Court, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by wide bipartisan voting margins in both chambers.

Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, like the 14th, are meant to have the same force as the original document. The whole clamor against the Warren Court was, at its base, about interpretation and enforcement of the 14th Amendment, an Amendment originally adopted to ensure that Americans enjoyed Equal Protection (including equivalent levels of representation in government) under the law. Little did I realize until just now that the Warren Court’s decisions and the Voting Rights Act shaped my perception of the America in which I grew up, an America whose first principle (I naively thought) was that all people are created equal and entitled to the same rights, including the right to equal representation. 

Those who cry “States’ Rights” argue in part for the supposed autonomy of a State legislature under Article I, Section 2 and the Tenth Amendment to determine Congressional Districts and state legislative districts as the state legislature sees fit, for example, regardless of the size of the included population and intentional disenfranchisement of voters by gerrymandering. States’ Rights enthusiasts rail against federal oversight mandated by the Voting Rights Act and the 14th Amendment that supports it. (Redistricting oversight was gutted by the Supreme Court decision Shelby v. Holder in 2013, a negation that could be reversed with passage of H.R. 1, the For the People Act–but, since all Republicans are adamantly opposed, still clinging to baseless claims of election fraud, H.R. 1 passing the Senate would first require doing away with the obstructionist Senate filibuster.) Modern States’ Rights advocates would never openly say so, but their argument around state autonomy in redistricting is a direct descendant of our legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, the “right” of States to subjugate certain classes of people. 

All redistricting is and always has been about political power, mostly the retention of political power. Riding on rhetoric about States’ Rights, Republicans approached the 2010 state elections as an opportunity to take over state houses and control redistricting in select States. With REDMAP (worth a read) and newly available mapping software the selected States (ones that retain legislative control over the redistricting process) were able to ensure preservation of a state house Republican legislative majority despite garnering far less than a majority of the total votes cast in the state.  Republicans’ REDMAP proved that computerized gerrymandering can be so successful in the right circumstances that the result draws unwanted attention. Best of all from the Republican perspective, the computer drawn districts were just subtle enough so the U.S. Supreme Court in Gill v. Whitford (2018) said they couldn’t decide whether the partisan gerrymandering of Wisconsin was extreme enough to be judged unconstitutional. The Supremes sent it back to the lower courts.

Bottom line: Redistricting is a battle between fairness to voters and politicians’ desires to gain and maintain power. Redistricting deserves our close attention, lest we find ourselves playing by a new set of disadvantageous district lines. 

I plan to follow this post with a deeper dive into apportionment and redistricting among the States and then focus on some of the specifics of redistricting in Washington State. Narrowing to one State is necessary because each State redistricts by its own set of rules. Until then, 

Keep to the high ground,
Jerry

This is an odd title for a news article: “McMorris Rodgers: Effort to block disinformation really tries to silence conservatives.” Written by Jim Camden, it appeared electronically in the Spokesman as “updated” on February 26, 2021. (I was unable to locate the article in the print version.)

McMorris Rodgers is the “ranking member” (gov-speak for “the most senior member from the minority party serving on a committee”) of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The full House Committee on Energy and Commerce has 31 Democratic and 24 Republican members. Energy and Commerce has six Subcommittees, among them the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. On February 24th the Communications and Technology Subcommittee held a hearing entitled “Hearing on ‘Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media.” The hearing was held and recorded on Webex (an electronic meeting platform similar to Zoom). You can watch the whole meeting on youtube.  As the ranking member of the parent Energy and Commerce Committee, CMR is also an “ex-officio” member of all of the subcommittees, that is, she is entitled to attend and speak at subcommittee meetings of her choosing. It is in this capacity as an “ex-officio” member of the Communications and Technology Subcommittee that she attended the “Fanning the Flames…” hearing. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), the chairman of Energy and Commerce also attended the hearing in his ex-officio capacity, suggesting that both felt this was an important meeting at which to be seen and heard.

The topic of the Subcommittee hearing was “Disinformation and Extremism in the Media,” essentially an inquiry into the origin of the demonstrably false stolen election narrative amplified by some media outlets, a narrative partly responsible for the Capitol insurrection on January 6th. The opening statement by Chairman Pallone (D-NJ) is clear: “Let me start by saying we’re all staunch defenders of the First Amendment and its mandate that ‘Congress make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.'” but, “Months of disinformation about the Presidential election results helped fan the flames for the attack on the Capitol on January 6 – an abhorrent, attempt to overturn a free and fair election.”

So does McMorris Rodgers want to engage in a discussion of media disinformation (a polite word for lies) about the integrity of our elections? No. No. No. She would find it inconvenient to consider the role of some media outlets in spreading lies about the election or the pandemic. She can’t discuss that. Instead, she leaps to change the subject, saying she is “deeply troubled” by the hearing’s “obvious attack on the 1st Amendment.” (27:30-33:00 in the Webex) She assails two Democratic committee members for a letter that requested information from certain media carriers about the carriers’ criteria for carrying media that pushed a demonstrably false narrative. You can read the letters here. The First Amendment is a prohibition against Congress making a law “…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” No one is making a law with these letters, these letters are requests for information. 

McMorris Rodgers is making a point to work straight out of the Republican election narrative. Don’t discuss the integrity of the elections based on the facts. Don’t allow even a hint that the January 6th insurrection was inspired by Trump’s ongoing Big Lie about election fraud, his claimed win, and the media outlets that continue to blare his falsehoods. No. No. No. Instead, change the subject to an imagined First Amendment freedom to spread whatever lie one wishes regardless of the consequences (but, shhhh, don’t ever admit it was a lie). Then go on a la Roger Stone and “attack, attack, attack” the very premise of having a discussion of the original topic. [1]

The most telling comment in McMorris Rodgers’ polemic opening speech at the subcommittee hearing (starting at 32:00) comes directly from her background as a devoted Evangelical schooled in Fundamentalist institutions: “We does it end? We’ve already seen the liberal ideology pushed in our schools, where we work, the books we read, who we communicate with, how we practice our faith. It’s frightening. And you know what the worst part is? People afraid of a woke and authoritarian system that is getting them fired, cancelled, and shamed. So they’re being silent. They have no voice. They can’t trust the broken institutions to protect them. This culture of fear is unjust. This committee should not be using fear to force everyone to be the same or be destroyed. It’s the abuse of power. And it’s the force of a state religion of liberal ideology. I embrace all of us to embrace our fundamental rights…” [2]

Wow, Cathy! With this grievance-based polemic you could have had a speaker’s spot on the Odal rune stage at CPAC last weekend. After four years of Trump’s denigrations, attacks, and threats of violence on anyone and everyone he disliked, your whiney, snowflakey claims of persecution ring hollow. Instead of changing the topic, how about discussing the actual issue of the hearing, the spread of disinformation and outright lies by some media? Or does that strike too close to home?

Keep to the high ground,
Jerry

[1] Roger Stone “…has described his political modus operandi as “Attack, attack, attack – never defend” and “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.” (wikipedia)

[2] I find it fascinating that CMR characterizes modern thought and norms on inclusion and tolerance not only as a terrible threat to her belief system, but as a “state religion”. Her brand of Evangelical theology has diverged from the Christianity in which I was brought up. 

The U.S. Senate is broken–and the Senators themselves have broken it with their adoption of the modern filibuster. The filibuster has deep roots, but they do not extend to the Constitution, only to an infamous vice president.

An argument that opened the door to a Senate filibuster was made in 1805 by Vice President Aaron Burr (then recently indicted for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel). Once the door was opened to it, the Senate filibuster grew over many decades of rules changes, to make the U.S. Senate the place where legislation goes to die. Burr argued to “clean up” the Senate rules by dropping something called “the previous question,” a motion to stop debate, stop consideration of amendments, and bring a bill to a vote. Before 1805 the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate played by the same rule book, but the House kept its “previous question” motion. In the U.S. House today a simple majority can force a vote on the bill at hand. In the House the retained “previous question” rule effectively prevents one or a few legislators from “talking to death” a bill under consideration even though a simple majority of Representatives are ready to vote on it. Not so in the Senate, where Burr’s argument prevailed, the “previous question” rule was voted out in 1806, and the filibuster became possible.

Historically, “talking to death” a piece of legislation is how the filibuster works. Without the “previous question” rule it became theoretically possible for a determined Senator or small group of Senators to prolong debate on a bill by holding forth on the floor of the Senate. The intent of filibuster is to force the majority who had wanted to vote for the bill to withdraw their favored legislation, motivated by exhaustion and disgust. In 1917, under pressure from President Woodrow Wilson, the Senate, disgusted by the blockage of legislation by the filibustering of 12 anti-war Senators adopted a cloture rule. A cloture rule (think “closure”) empowers some number of Senators to end a filibuster by voting to cut off debate. In 1917 the number necessary to bring closure to debate was set at 2/3 the number of Senators “present and voting.”  (Remember the “previous question” rule in the House, essentially a cloture rule that requires only a majority vote to end debate and trigger a vote on “the question,” in legislation under consideration.) Since 1917 the U.S. Senate has kept a closture rule but the number of Senators necessary to invoke cloture has been a moving target. In 1975 the Senators themselves voted in a rule that changed the number necessary to invoke cloture. Cloture then required the votes of 3/5 of the Senators “duly chosen and sworn,” that is, an absolute number (usually 60)–not just those present at the time. That 1975 rule change is the origin of the current Senate’s routine obstructionism based on the modern filibuster. 

Americans’ concept of the filibuster is shaped by the almost mythological 1939 movie, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” starring Jimmy Stewart. (Cathy McMorris Rodger’s once declared the film her all time favorite movie.) The high drama of the idealistic Mr. Smith’s filibuster wasn’t accurate in 1939 and is even less so today. Newly elected Senator Smith’s talking filibuster was presented as a wake-up call to a corrupt Senate, rather than the obstructionist tool the talking filibuster was in actual practice. 

Today a talking filibuster is a rare piece of drama. Instead, the filibuster in the U.S. Senate has become routinized and almost anonymous. All that a Senator needs to do is have their staff send an email threatening a filibuster. The mere threat effectively blocks legislation from coming to the floor of the Senate for debate, much less an actual vote on the bill’s merits. Thus, a Party with 41 votes, without even talking on the floor of the Senate, can obstruct consideration of all legislation it opposes, and the Senate moves on to other business that the Party with the 41 votes deems worthy of consideration. (Originally, the talking filibuster ground the business of the Senate to a halt, preventing it from moving on to consider other business. That obstruction was eliminated in 1970 with adoption of the “two track system.” “Under the two-track system, the Senate can have two or more pieces of legislation or nominations pending on the floor simultaneously by designating specific periods during the day when each one will be considered.” The two track system avoids the rancor, disgust, and total blockage of Senate business produced by an unpopular filibustering minority Senator. Whether by intent or accident, gradually accreted Senate rules now assure the minority of its ability to obstruct.

This minority obstruction in the Senate is likely a major cause of the public’s disapproval of the workings of Congress. Recent surveysshow disapproval as high as 82%. Campaign promises whither and die in the Senate, leaving voters to wonder why they bother to vote.  

Senators sometimes acknowledge the legislative constipation induced by the routinized filibuster by changing the rules to allow certain kinds of bills to bypass the artificial need for 60 votes. The five bill categories that bypass the 60 vote threshold are detailed here. The category most used (and lately in the news) is budget reconciliation.  Created in 1974 to help keep the government from being shut down by Senate obstructionism, budget reconciliation has more recently become the vehicle of choice for passing legislation through the Senate with only 51 votes. A whole set of additional arcane Senate rules govern the use of budget reconciliation, rules so arcane that the Senate Parliamentarian gets called upon to decide if a proposal fits under the rules. (The parliamentarian recently ruled, for instance, that the $15 federal minimum wage can NOT, under reconciliation rules, be crammed into the Covid Relief bill.) Precisely because budget reconciliation is the only feasible way for legislation to bypass the 60 vote requirement (and because reconciliation can only be used a maximum of three times a year) the reconciliation bill has become the vehicle for the passage of all proposed legislation when the majority party lacks 60 votes (i.e. most of the time). The result is huge, often incomprehensible, unreadable bills that further erode the public’s view of Congressional function. Notable recent examples of the use of reconciliation are the failed Republican effort in 2017 (for lack of a majority) to repeal the Affordable Care Act (remember John McCain’s famous thumbs-down) and the Republican party line passage the same year of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It is insane that the Senate can pass tax breaks for the wealthy with 51 votes but 60 votes are required to even consider H.R. 1, the For The People Act.

The modern-day Senate filibuster and the twisted lawmaking required to get around it make the Senate, already the most undemocratic institution in our governance, a legislative body subject to the veto power of determined minority that represent a small fraction of the American people. [1] 

The modern filibuster should be voted out of Senate procedure. A simple majority would suffice to do this (the “nuclear option”), a simple majority currently lacking on account of the reluctance of two Senators, Sinema (D-AZ) and Manchin (D-WV). Without jettisoning the filibuster–or at least getting rid of its modern incarnation as a costless email-born objection–Democrats have no chance of enacting most of what they have promised. I fear that if they cannot achieve more of their goals they will pay for it at the ballot box in 2022 on account of further voter disillusionment.

Keep to the high ground,
Jerry

[1] The current 50 Republican senators collectively represent 41,549,808 fewer Americans than the 50 Democratic senators (out of a total population of 328,239,523).

P.S. In an impeccably timed new book, “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and The Crippling of American Democracy,” Adam Jentleson lays out the Senate filibuster’s history current use. An interview with Mr. Jentleson entitled “The Racist History Of The Senate Filibuster” on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air is available in your browser or as a podcast. It is a lesson in civics and the anti-democratic nature of our governance. (The discussion of the book starts at 8:17 in the program, if you’re pressed for time. Ezra Klein, writer for the NYTimes, is an eloquent spokesman for putting the filibuster out of its misery. See The Senate Has Become a Dadaist Nightmare from the February 4th, NYTImes. Google “Ezra Klein” for additional interviews. I find his arguments very convincing. His debate opponents fight an uphill, losing battle.

P.P.S. Check out this graphical representation of numbers of Republicans and Democrats in Congress over time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_States_Congresses#/media/File:Combined–Control_of_the_U.S._House_of_Representatives_-_Control_of_the_U.S._Senate.png
Note: the graph fails to show the brief 60 vote Senate majority Democrats enjoyed in early 2009 when they passed the Affordable Care Act without the use of reconciliation, the last piece of major legislation passed without bowing to arcane rules made necessary by the use of the reconciliation vehicle.

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-NW corner of Georgia) has achieved a sort of national infamy for her support of “disproven far-right conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate,^[5] QAnon,^[6] false flag shootings,^[7][8] and 9/11 conspiracy theories.^[7] Additionally, before running for Congress, she supported the execution of prominent Democratic politicians.^[9] She also supported Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.” (wikipedia, with references). Revelations around her whacko beliefs led to the U.S. House of Representatives stripping Greene of her committee assignments by a vote of 230-199 on February 4 with 11 Republican House members voting with Democrats.

On account of the nationalization of the news coverage we in the Inland Northwest might complacently imagine that we must look thousands of miles diagonally across our country to find an elected official as deluded as Ms. Greene. On the contrary, as I wrote last Wednesday, February 24, the Inland Northwest may be a net exporter of conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists.

We gained unwelcome national attention last fall with incumbent WA State Republican Rep. Jenny Graham’s (LD6, SW Spokane Co. wrapping 3/4 of the way around the City of Spokane) dustup with Daniel Walters, reporter for The Inlander, after he brought attention to Ms. Graham’s sharing of QAnon conspiracy theories on Facebook. Regardless, Graham, as incumbent Republican State Representative, won the 2020 general election with 55% of the votes cast (the same percentage she garnered in the primary–before her QAnon dabbling was widely known). Are Republican voters 1) Oblivious to the news? or 2) Bought into conspiracy theories themselves? or 3) Vaccinated against voting for a Democrat by the conspiracy theories the Republican Party supports?

Matt Shea (now former State Rep. from LD4 (Spokane Valley north to Mt. Spokane) and Shea’s hand-picked successor, Rob Chase, garnered similar dishonorable mention in the same September 15th, 2020, Washington Post article as Jenny Graham. Regardless, LD4 voters sent Mr. Chase to Olympia with an even greater percentage of the votes, 62%, than Graham drew in LD6. Chase not only dabbles in Alex Jones style conspiracy theorizing, but, after he was elected to the legislature in Olympia, Chase announced the appointment of Cecily Wright as his legislative assistant. Ms. Wright, former chairwoman of the Spokane Republican Party, with her husband are locally notorious for warmly hosting nationally recognized white supremacist James Allsup to their monthly gathering in Spokane Valley of “Northwest Grassroots“. (See Spokane’s White Supremacists for additional information and links.)

Among these regional elected dabblers in fringe conspiracy theories none can hold a candle to the queen of whacko, Idaho State Representative Heather Scott from ID District 1 (Blanchard and Sandpoint north to the Canadian border). Her openness in espousal of fringe ideology is striking. Her wikipedia article, longer than most for a state representative, is a good place to become acquainted with her views, notoriety, and media coverage since her election in 2014. 

I’ve copied below part of an article published in the Bonner County Daily Bee on February 16, 2021, entitled “Scott talks gun rights, insurrection,” to offer a flavor of what passes for reality with Heather Scott:

A live meeting with constituents over Zoom had Rep. Heather Scott,, R-Blanchard, talking about gun rights, the federal prosecution of insurrectionists and warning those in the call against public education.

One of the biggest topics of the night, gun rights, was brought up in several questions throughout the video call.

Some constituents expressed concerns over whether President Joe Biden might sign an executive order restricting gun rights.

“I do not see any [executive orders] on guns, but apparently, Biden has made some comments that he wants Congress to take up gun legislation,” Scott said. “That’s what we’re all afraid of. They’re coming for our guns and I keep telling people, by the time they come for our guns it’s going to be too late.”

Scott encouraged those on the call to look into the Idaho Second Amendment Alliance, a group that describes itself as a “no-compromise” gun rights organization. Others, Scott said, are not.

“You can forget about the NRA,” she said.

In response to a question about “red flag laws” — laws that would allow police or family members to petition the state to temporarily remove firearms from someone deemed to be a danger to themselves or others — Scott said there are “many” attempts to push them through, which have been largely unsuccessful.

Still, Scott said, she believes there is an ongoing threat to gun rights.

Scott also discussed federal prosecution of insurrectionists at the Capitol building in Washington D.C. on Jan. 6, acknowledging the Sandpoint man who was arrested Friday in connection with the insurrection.

“I don’t know if he did something bad there or if he just went to protest, but he’s been [charged] with an insurrection. This is a huge problem,” she said. “We don’t have to agree with everything government says or does. And so — but they are going to start tightening the screws on American citizens and free speech.”

Although there are currently no federal offenses designated for “domestic terrorism” without connection to a foreign entity, Scott said she’s concerned that if one is added it would allow the government to infringe on citizens’ rights.

“The Biden administration says he’s going after domestic terrorists. The concern is they are going to get rid of that international tie to call you a domestic [terrorist],” she said. “What that will do is that will make every single person that says something they don’t like a domestic terrorist.”

Scott criticized Gov. Brad Little on multiple occasions, saying that he, and many of the state legislators are not truly conservative — and claimed many politicians to be influenced by globalism and corporate interests through lobby groups.

“The governor is part of the [National] Governors Association,” she said. “The National Governors Association, guess who they have a new partnership with? The World Economic Forum … It’s the globalists that are basically running the governors.”

Scott went on to make the unsubstantiated claim that the group, or globalists, were responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic and are planning a cyber attack.

“They are the ones that came out with COVID. And they are the ones that are coming out with a cyber attack,” she said. “They just said COVID is going to be nothing compared to the cyber attack coming.”

Throughout the meeting, Scott said she believes Idaho is not conservative, and that within the Idaho Legislature she estimates there are “probably three” conservatives in the Senate, and “maybe 20, 25,” in the House.

She also blamed other legislators for a lack of legislative progress; namely Republican representative Fred Wood, for not hearing bills by more conservative legislators.

“[He] will not hear any bills about vaccinations or the health districts or anything,” she said.

In response to questions about education, Scott said she believes college to serve only as “indoctrination.”

“I would not send my kids to college, I would find another route,” she said. “I feel the same way about public schools, unfortunately.”

One caller asked whether there would be “consequences” for Gov. Little banning hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 and the deaths from the virus during that time.

Hydroxychloroquine, which was touted as a treatment for COVID-19 by former President Donald Trump, despite a lack of evidence.

“It’s just not, it’s not going to get better,” she said. “We’re not going to just do this and it’s all going to be fixed. It’s going to take a lot more than that. And I hope it doesn’t take blood but I’m, I’m beginning to wonder.”Absorb that. “The globalists” are responsible for Covid-19 and are planning a cyberattack. That’s straight out of New World Orderconspiracism spouted from Fundamentalist (Evangelical) pulpits obsessing on End Times theology. More subtle but equally chilling is Scott’s declaration that public education serves only as “indoctrination.” This is from the mouth of a woman with a B.A. in Biology from the University of Akron, a credible institution of higher learning, a woman who worked as a fisheries and aquatic biologist for 15 years. When did she conclude that much of her earlier life consisted of “indoctrination”? What is her life story? Did she undergo a conversion experience to the Fundamentalist End Times theology that her comrade-in-arms, former WA State Rep Matt Shea now preaches from his new position as pastor of the Covenant Church? 

We in the Inland Northwest need not gaze toward NW Georgia and Marjorie Taylor Greene to see the mind rot afflicting our nation. This whacko ideas espoused by Ms. Greene took root long ago in fertile ground among the elected officials of our own region. Take note. Spread the word.

Keep to the high ground,
Jerry