The Tennessee Waltz

Tennessee, the adopted state of imperialist President James K. Polk and racist President Andrew Johnson, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, and the site of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, expelled two black state legislators named Justin - Justin Jones and Justin Pearson - for peacefully protesting for gun control in the well of the state House of Representatives in Nashville in the aftermath of a school shooting in the city over a week earlier.  A third representative, a white female Democrat named Gloria Johnson, who also protested against guns, was also up for expulsion but kept her seat.  And not because she wasn't a man named Justin.

American state legislatures have done a lot of dumb things, such as criminalizing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, restricting the teaching of black history, banning gender-affirming care for transsexual children, and banning the playing of Randy Newman's "Short People" on the radio  (the last one is a law in Maryland - really), but this is the topper.  The Republican supermajority, beholden to the gun lobby and refusing to do anything about it, has just punished two black men in the Tennessee legislature for calling them on it by throwing them out.  They've sent a message to anyone opposed to them that there is a price to pay for expressing opposition to their agenda.  The Tennessee House Republicans may have let Gloria Johnson off the hook now, but the expulsion of Jones and Pearson has made it clear to her that she'll be next if she pulls this stunt next time.

This has happened even as an untold number of demonstrators - many if not most of them young people - descended on the Tennessee legislature demanding action on assault weapons because it made more sense than writing their legistors a bunch of e-mails.  Not only are Tennessee Republicans refusing to listen to them, they're likely to have them arrested  and cleared out just like the young people of the now-forgotten Occupy Wall Street movement who were cleared out of Lower Manhattan.  Once they're out of the way, life will go on and no one will care.

Lawrence O'Donnell says that, while it may not look like it, the forces of good are winning.   Not likely, not in this lifetime; every time America looks like it's making progress, a long, dark period of backsliding is inevitable.

Power Failures

Not the sort I've been having for nine years and change.

In Wisconsin, the Republican-controlled legislature passed - and outgoing scumbag governor Scott Walker signed - legislation limiting the power of incoming Democratic governor Tony Evers, making it illegal for Evers' administration to rescind a state suit against the federal health care law, and limiting early voting in an attempt to help Trump win the state again in 2020.  Evers asked Walker - pretty please, with sugar on it - to veto the legislation.  Yeah, right.   Walker responded by saying no to Evers with a bottle of elderberry wine.  With a touch of arsenic.  And similar efforts are afoot to undermine incoming Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan as well.

And then there are the new Democratic attorneys general in those states having their power reduced . . .

No matter how many state legislative seats the Democrats won in the 2018 midterms - 336, by one count - they still don't control enough state legislatures, and the newly elected Democratic governors in this cycle are more often than not susceptible to being failures as many of them will have to deal with GOP legislatures that will seem them damned before helping them run their states.  The Republicans are hell-bent on negating elections and rigging the system to keep themselves in power, or at least give them the upper hand in perpetuity.  The Democrats have to get smarter in winning back power in the states (and this goes for Win Back Your State) if they want to control more state legislatures.  Yet, even as Democrats won seats of Republican-leaning U.S. House districts by nominating candidates far more moderate than the Democratic base, this strategy translated into far less success at the state level - if indeed it was consciously employed at the state level.  Perhaps they should have nominated more moderates who could compete in Republican-leaning state legislative districts.

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, where the Republican legislature turned Democratic governor Roy Cooper into a virtual figurehead and restricted voting rights in the name of stopping voter fraud, Mark Harris may have gotten himself involved in a voter-fraud case concerning absentee ballots in his race against his opponent Dan McCready for the seat for North Carolina's Ninth U.S. House District.  The local election board has refused to certify the results showing a Harris win, and a new election may be ordered.

Harris is the Republican candidate. 

Quo Vadis, Martin?

I watched the election returns come in this past Tuesday night looking for clues as to whether former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, who backed numerous state and local candidates all across the country through his Win Back Your State PAC, would run for President in 2020.  With the knowledge that Win Back Your State was as much about building up O'Malley nationwide as it was about building up the Democratic base, my metric was simple; if the Democrats did well, he would run, and if they didn't, he would choose not to run.

The result on Tuesday night was mixed.

While the Democrats did gain 32 seats in the House and are likely to gain more as votes are counted and certified, and while they flipped seven governorships, they were less successful with state legislatures, Win Back Your State's main focus.  They gained about three hundred seats, but Republicans still control about three-fifths of the state legislative chambers.  The bright side?  The Democrats go into 2019 controlling the governorship and both legislative houses in fourteen states, a net gain of six.  But that's still far short of what the Democrats need to produce meaningful change at the state level.  O'Malley didn't concentrate his efforts on the U.S. Senate as much as he concentrated on the state legislatures, the governorships, or U.S. House seats, and with good reason; the Senate map favored Republicans from the start, and the GOP may end up adding at least two additional seats.  And Democratic hopes of retaking the Senate may be a long shot for years to come, given the growing Republican power in the smaller states, as Dylan Matthews of Vox.com explains.

And then there's O'Malley's home state of Maryland.  Democrats retained control of the legislature, called the General Assembly, but Republican governor Larry Hogan won re-election and gets another four years to undo O'Malley's legacy.  O'Malley spent practically zero time in his home state, but then the Democrats didn't need his help to maintain control of both houses of the General Assembly.  But former NAACP president Ben Jealous, Hogan's Democratic opponent, sure could have used his help.  O'Malley's decision to keep his distance from Jealous, whom he did not back for the Maryland Democratic gubernatorial nomination, reflects badly on the former governor.  While I suspect that O'Malley did not back Jealous because he believed he was going to lose, some wags have opined that the real reason O'Malley kept his distance from Maryland is because he's still deeply unpopular as an ex-governor, and that his support for Jealous or other Democrats would have hurt rather than helped them.  And truth be told, O'Malley's failure to secure then-Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown's election as his successor in 2014 despite Brown's consistent lead over Hogan in the polls was likely the first blow against his 2016 presidential hopes.  Democratic leaders looking for an alternative to Hillary only had to see the 2014 election results in Maryland - and O'Malley's plummeting approval rating - to shake their heads and look elsewhere.

O'Malley helped Democrats make great strides in state elections, to be sure, but so did other political action committees. Win Back Your State deserves credit for its efforts at building up the party, but other groups will also take credit, diluting O'Malley's stature. 

Also, there are the unknown variables involving O'Malley's competition. All eyes are on Beto O'Rourke possibly running for President in 2020 after his loss in the U.S. Senate race in Texas to Ted Cruz.  There are several other possible candidates, many of whom have been getting the sort of repeated media exposure that O'Malley can only envy.  Of course, Beto may not run, and some high-profile Democrats considering at presidential run, such as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand, have embarrassed themselves in the public eye - Harris and Booker with their grandstanding during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings that ended up helping the Supreme Court nominee win confirmation, Gillibrand for her naked power play against Al Franken - while other prospects such as Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are seen as past their prime.

What O'Malley may have going for him this time is something I alluded to in my earlier comments about the 2018 elections.  I noted that progressives who were nominated for office, including Jealous, lost decisively and that the Democrats have been warned not to nominate a progressive presidential candidate.  Except that earlier Democratic efforts at moving to the center - in presidential and down-ballot elections alike - have also fallen short.  O'Malley represents a third alternative, a platform with progressive policies - infrastructure, opposition to the death penalty, expanded homosexual rights, a tough line on guns - with an approach to building consensus and getting things done that centrists can admire.  That third way didn't get any attention when he ran against progressive Bernie Sanders and the centrist Hillary Clinton, but maybe after four years of Donald J. Trump, O'Malley's political philosophy may get another look from rank-and-file Democrats.

In short, O'Malley's chances of running for President in 2020 are, well, 50-50.  My take is that he can still run and he can still win - but it won't be easy. 

So, Governor, are you in, or are you out?  Where are you going? 

I await the answer.

Election Returns - 2011

The results of yesterday's elections are in, and my faith in the American democratic process is . . . well, if it's not renewed, at least it's not completely and utterly beyond redemption. 

In Ohio, a ballot measure that would have restricted collective bargaining rights failed (by a margin of 61 to 39 percent), as did the ballot measure in Mississippi that would have declared a fertilized egg a person. Also, in Maine, a new law to ban same-day voter registration on Election Day was repealed, and Arizona State Senate President Russell Pearce - the author of the state's racist anti-immigrant law - was forced out of office in a recall.

In Kentucky, Democratic Governor Steve Beshear was re-elected by running away from President Obama's policies, while Mississippi elected another Republican - Phil Bryant - to succeed Haley Barbour as governor.  Republicans in Virginia gained power in the state legislature, while Democrats kept control of both houses of the New Jersey state legislature.  So I guess it was kind of a wash.

And you can hold your comments my post yesterday regarding Louisiana's gubernatorial election, rendered unnecessary by its open primary.  I give up, I just can't keep up with Louisiana's procedures for statewide elections.  I don't know how they're run, although not very well, obviously.