Deutsche Welle | India: Liberals rise up against nationalism Deutsche Welle A recent mob attack on a train in India left a 15-year-old Muslim youth dead, presumably for carrying beef. The incident has prompted liberal Indians to brave criticism and raise their voices against so-called cow vigilantes and Hindu nationalists. |
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India: Liberals rise up against nationalism - Deutsche Welle
TheSpec.com | Liberals spell out rules on infrastructure cash TheSpec.com OTTAWA Provinces and territories that want a slice of new federal infrastructure money will have to prove it will accelerate economic growth. This is the demand under terms laid out by the Liberals for the government's long-term funding program ... |
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Liberals spell out rules on infrastructure cash - TheSpec.com
Liberal and conservative legal experts looking ahead to the next Supreme Court term are preoccupied with much different priorities, but both question whether the high court will decide the fight over President Trump's travel ban.
The issue of whether the travel ban litigation could become moot before the high court hears oral arguments is unresolved, but liberals also appear to be wondering who will be sitting on the high court next term. For liberals, rumors of Justice Anthony Kennedy's potential retirement and role on the high court still dominate their thinking about the future of the Supreme Court.
Erwin Chemerinsky, new dean of Berkeley Law at the University of California, said Thursday that the Supreme Court "is still the Anthony Kennedy court." Speaking at the National Constitution Center's review of the high court's most recent term, Chemerinsky noted that Kennedy "voted in the majority on 97 percent of all of the decisions," more often than any other justice.
"So for the lawyers who're here and watching, if you have a case before the Supreme Court, my advice to you is make your briefs a shameless attempt to pander to Justice Kennedy," Chemerinsky said. "If the clerk of the court will allow it, put Anthony Kennedy's picture on the front of your brief."
While Chemerinsky said he thinks Gorsuch may prove to be more conservative than the late Justice Antonin Scalia, whose seat Gorsuch filled in April, "if Justice Kennedy leaves the court, then we will have the most conservative court there's been since the mid-1930s."
Frederick Lawrence, Yale Law School professor who sat alongside Chemerinsky at the event, said the year has been characterized by "constitutional anxiety" for "constitutional lawyers, constitutional scholars and for citizens who care about the Constitution."
"I certainly will watch with my constitutional anxiety this October in the [travel ban] argument because I think ... there is so much vagueness in play in the joints here that when one finds oneself sort of hoping for mootness as the way out, it tells you the corners we're getting ourselves into," Lawrence said.
At the Heritage Foundation's review of the last term on Thursday, legal experts were similarly questioning whether the high court would resolve the travel ban dispute.
Will Consovoy, a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and a lawyer who argues before the Supreme Court, said "mootness is a real concern" in the travel ban case. He added that he thought the high court, more so than the lower courts that have reviewed the case, would look to say "can we create a durable rule here that's not going to devour the law, so to speak."
Trump's travel ban blocks nationals from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. for 90 days and refugees from all countries for 120 days.
Joseph Palmore, a former law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and co-chairman of the Appellate and Supreme Court Practice Group at Morrison Foerster, told the Heritage Foundation audience that the issue of mootness is clearly a top issue for the high court.
Asked whether the Supreme Court could hear the case even if it appears to be moot from the vantage point of those outside the justices' chambers, Palmore said that's a question that likely would lurk.
"The court might view it though as what's before us is this actual executive order and if it's moot then those issues could be fought another day, but I think ... there might be a competing urge to the extent that some justices are concerned with what they might see as the overbreadth of some of the court of appeals decisions," Palmore said. "Do they leave those in place because the Supreme Court case becomes moot or do those get vacated? There's a lot of complicated rules, what happens when a case becomes moot."
Palmore said he also is closely watching to see how Trump's campaign statements can be attributed as motivation to enact the travel ban if at all and whether the lower courts appropriately applied nationwide injunctions.
Palmore said the last pressing question is whether the dispute could return to the Supreme Court in the "next few weeks or even days" because of the disagreement over the scope of the injunction. The Supreme Court, in deciding to take the case, said that nationals from the six countries could visit the U.S. if they have "bona fide" relationships in the country.
The fight in the federal courts over the extent of the travel ban permitted by the Supreme Court began earlier this week.
Part of the problem? Drew Magary argues they care way too much about what Republicans think.
Yesterday the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee put out a bunch of limp potential slogans for their would-be takeover of Congress in 2018, and Twitter summarily took them to the woodshed for it. One glance at the options presented and you can tell that tell that the committee spent hundreds of man-hours and enormous sums of money just to throw RESIST & PERSIST into an online poll. You would think that after losing to Donald Trump, and then getting subsequently beaten in five special elections after the fact, that the Democratic party would re-evaluate both its ideals and its leadership. Instead, they decided to put their mental energy into bumper stickers.
Democrats have been relatively clueless since the day I was born. Lewis Black once said that America is ruled by a party of bad ideas and a party of no ideas, and that more or less holds true in 2017. Given the demonstrable evils of the Republican party, Democrats SHOULD win back Congress in 2018. A literal cadaver ought to be able to siphon votes away from those shitbags. But then again, Democrats should have beaten Trump as well, which means that the political hopes of a majority of Americans currently resides in the hands of a party that has all the strategic acumen of Elmer Fudd and, even worse, still doesnt realize its shortcomings.
I dont like grousing about this. For all of the Democrats obliviousness, theyre still a far superior option to the party that wants to burn poor people for fossil fuels, and I dont wanna be one of those Weird Twitter assholes who spends all day calling Hillary a bitch. But every day that Trump remains in power does lasting, perhaps irreversible damage to both the country and the greater solar system, and his only opposition remains the only group of people ON EARTH who could have possibly blown an election against him. If the past year wasnt an obvious sign that the DNC needs to change how it does business, then what would be? Do we all have to die first?
Just today, the New York Times gave column space to former Clinton operative Mark Penn, who stupidly argued that the Democrats need to be the party of the mythical American center, the exact same strategy that backfired on Clinton last fall. One of my GQ colleagues said that Democrats care wayyyyy too much about Republicans, and this op-ed goes a long way toward proving it. This dribble of think-tank strategery comes after Georgia Congressional candidate and eight-year-old boy Jon Ossoff lost a special election afteryou guessed itpositioning himself as a centrist. In fact, Ossoff decided against loudly denouncing Trump on the campaign trail, and instead released this actual ad:
It really is stunning how Democrats continually try to hit Trump in his least vulnerable spots. Hey, you folks who love the way Trump talks shit on Twitter: I promise you that I wont do that! Meanwhile, Trump rose to power by ginning up the fervor of a supposedly small voting bloc that believed (wrongly) that its needs were being ignored. God forbid Democrats take any lessons away from that. No, instead we get more whinging about working class white voters (God, enough of these motherfuckers!) and all their bullshit angst over crime and immigration. You think Democrats will be able to address that angst better than the golf blob currently occupying the White House? Who in hell is this party really serving if theyre so horny for the redneck vote?
"[The Democrats are] too meek to get what voters REALLY want, and thats because they are all strategy and no heart. They chase voters rather than lead them."
Yet, its hardly surprising that big-name Democrats would still see value in this kind of empty heartland pandering. Say what you will about Republicans, but at least their leadership genuinely represents their constituency. Thats the party of rich guys, and its RUN by rich guys. Those two entities are simpatico. Meanwhile, the Democratic party is still run by cocktail party vets like Pelosi while trying to serve people with whom Pelosi has little to nothing in common: poor people, minorities, etc. I genuinely liked Hillary Clinton as a candidate, but on the campaign trail she basically acted like a robot that was trying to learn empathy by observing humans. Oh, I see you humans call these tears. These tears mean that you are sad! They are, as constituted, the party of lip service.
Thats not good enough. Democrats fail again and again because (A) They want to reach the broadest possible audience, which means they reach no one at all, and (B) Leadership runs the party but is not OF it. Even firebrands like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are still relatively genteel white people from New England. They LOOK like Republicans, as do the Silicon Valley buttheads currently ruminating on ways to DISRUPT liberal politics. Why do you think people loved Barack Obama so much? Because Democratic voters actually felt like he was one of them (even if Obama was still too centrist and too damn deferential to monsters like Mitch McConnell). Theres no reason for Obama to be an anomaly among Democratic leadership. They have willed this disconnect into perpetuity.
My friend Jeb Lund once said that the reason Republicans succeed is because, in general, theyre better at giving their voters tangible things. You want a meaningless tax cut? They can get you that. You want immigrants rounded up? Theyre on it. Love guns? Heres seventeen! Big fan of war? Oh! Oh, Republicans will give you all the war you can eat. By contrast, Democrats will give you a VERSION of what their voters wanted that just happens to have been watered down roughly 98 percent by concessions to Republicans. Your health care will still be an expensive pain in the ass, but at least Democrats heart was in the right place. Theyre too meek to get what voters REALLY want, and thats because they are all strategy and no heart. They chase voters rather than lead them. You only need to look where that strategy has gotten them so far to know where its going to take them.
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Democrats Will Never Get Their Shit Together - GQ Magazine
The opposition party should embrace a sweeping reform agenda that embraces the promise of voting rights, competitive elections, and genuinely representative democracy.
Voters wait in line to cast Super Tuesday ballots in Austin, Texas, on March 1, 2016. (AP Photo / Tamir Kalifa)
American democracy is not working. We have a president who lost the popular vote by almost 3 million ballots, a Congress that reflects gerrymandered district lines rather than the will of the people, and a voting system that discourages rather than encourages the high turnouts that are needed to establish a genuinely representative democracy.
The Republican Party, which has benefited from this dysfunction, is in no rush to change things. Indeed, it has at its highest levels embraced the voter-suppression lies and scheming of charlatans such as Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and President Trumps Orwellian Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. So it falls to progressive Democrats, nonaligned independents, and third-party activists to take the lead in the struggle for democratic renewal.
For the Democrats, there are two ways to address the crisis. First, they can carry on as they always have and hope that they get better at being an opposition party within a fundamentally flawed system. Second, they could propose to reform the system in ways that would begin to realize the promise of competitive elections and popular democracy.
Congressman Don Beyer has chosen the bolder route. Last week, the Virginia Democrat proposed the Fair Representation Act, a plan to democratize congressional elections with a bold reform that could also be used to bring real competition to state legislative contests.
Agenda? Sure: End gerrymandering. Eliminate the Electoral College. Guarantee voting rights. Overturn Citizens United.
Explaining that polarization and partisanship, both among voters and in Congress, have reached dangerous and scary heights, Beyer says: The Fair Representation Act is the bold reform America needs to be sure every vote matters, to defeat gerrymandering, and ensure the House of Representatives remains the peoples House.
Rob Richie, the executive director of FairVote, which has worked with Beyer to promote the measure, says, The Fair Representation Act is the most comprehensive approach to improving congressional elections in American history.
FairVote argues that, Under the Fair Representation Act, all U.S. House members will be elected by ranked-choice voting in new, larger multi-winner districts. This system would replace todays map of safe red and blue seats that lock voters into uncompetitive districts, and elect members of Congress with little incentive to work together and solve problems
Heres FairVotes assessment of how the Beyer plan would work:
Smaller states with five or fewer members will elect all representatives from one statewide, at-large district. States with more than six members will draw multi-winner districts of three to five representatives each. Congress will remain the same size, but districts will be larger.
They will be elected through ranked-choice voting, an increasingly common electoral method used in many American cities, whereby voters rank candidates in order of choice, ensuring that as many voters as possible help elect a candidate they support. Under ranked-choice voting, if no candidate reaches the threshold needed to win, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. When a voters top choice loses, their vote instantly goes to their second choice. The process repeats until all seats are elected.
Using this approach, four in five voters would elect someone they support. The number of voters in a position to swing a seat would immediately triplefrom less than 15 percent in 2016 to just under half.
The districts themselves will be drawn by state-created, independent commissions made up of ordinary citizens. These larger districts would be nearly impossible to gerrymander for political advantageand would force politicians to seek out voters with different perspectives and remain accountable to them.
Thats a lot of democracymore than most partisan Republicans, and a good many partisan Democrats, are prepared to embrace.
But here is why Democrats should take the Beyer plan seriously: It focuses attention on the necessity of breaking the curse of gerrymandering while at the same time presenting the Democrats as a party that embraces competition rather than political gamesmanship.
The Republicans, with tremendous support from billionaire campaign donors such as the Koch brothers, have mastered the art of making elections noncompetitive. Americans hate the current system. They tell pollsters it is too owned by special interests, too mangled by money, too deferential towards political careerists, and too disrespectful toward voters.
The people are angry about gerrymandering. They want competitive elections and true representative democracy. (A 2013 Harris poll found that 74 percent of Republicans, 73 percent of Democrats, and 71 percent of independents object to the pro-politician, anti-voter methods of redistricting that now prevail in most states for congressional and legislative elections.)
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Combining support for the assault on gerrymandering that Beyer has proposed with support for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Courts Citizens United ruling (as proposed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and others in the Senate and House) and with support for a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to vote and to have that vote counted (as Wisconsin Congressmen Mark Pocan and Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison have proposed) would go a long way toward branding the Democrats as the party of reform that America needs.
By becoming the party of democratic renewalpromoting bold and meaningful changes that empower voters to end the malaise in Washington and state capitals nationwideDemocrats can make themselves the party of the future.
Americans are looking for just such a party. Lots of folks believe that neither old party can fill the political vacuumand they could be right. But Congressman Beyer has offered his party an opportunity to rise above partisanship and stand on principle. Democrats, who have struggled to chart their course following the disastrous 2016 election, have a chance to identify themselves as the party that is ready to give voters what they are crying out for: a more honest and competitive politics.
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Democrats Must Become America's Anti-Gerrymandering Party - The Nation.