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It's easy to chastise governments for broken promises and voters these days are used to a few of them emerging after every election.

For many voters across Canada, a promise to change our voting system figured prominently during the 2015 federal election, with the prime minister infamously declaring that the first-past-the-post system was dead.

Now, two years into his mandate, electoral reform seems to be abandoned at the roadside.

Is the promise of a more equitable, fairer and more proportional method of electing our government truly dead? Does the chance to change our politics for the better disappear with an announcement in the foyer of the House of Commons?

You might be surprised to learn that in less than a month, our MPs will vote to decide whether to move forward on electoral reform, or leave it in the dust.

Acting on this cornerstone campaign promise, Trudeau established a House of Commons special committee on electoral reform (ERRE) composed of MPs from all five parties tasked with assessing the options for reform.

While the new mandate letter given to Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould in February falsely states otherwise, the report actually found an appetite amongst Canadians for a change to our electoral system.

Last December, the committee released a 333-pagereport, titled Strengthening Democracy in Canada: Principles, Process and Public Engagement for Electoral Reform,which illustrates clear consensus among experts that our system should be more proportional, consensus among Canadians on the need for more government co-operation across party lines, and consensus among parties on a process for changing the system.

NDP Democratic reform critic Nathan Cullen has been holding town-hall meetings in Liberal ridings across the country in an effort to resurrect electoral reform. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)

On May 31, the ERRE all-party committee's report on democratic reform will be brought to a vote in the House of Commons, to determine whether the issue will be carried forward or abandoned as Trudeau has indicated is his preference.

As the prime minister is fond of saying, it is the responsibility of our MPs to "be the voice of our communities in Ottawa." With over 80 per centof the Liberal caucus consisting of newly elected MPs, one would hope that they will take the time to engage their communities ahead of this pivotal vote.

While Trudeau was able to pull a 180 on the promise to change our electoral system, that doesn't mean that we should allow our MPs to do the same. Many Liberal MPs adopted and were elected on this promise as well. And MPs across party lines are feeling the pressure to carry through on this monumental promise in the upcoming vote.

Individual MPs have made their stance on democratic reform clear, from Skeena NDP MP Nathan Cullen, who is holding consultations and town halls across the country on the topic, toWinnipeg Centre Liberal MP Robert Falcon Ouellette, who sent out a newsletter to constituents promoting electoral reform the same week in February as Trudeau's announcement.

Another Liberal MP wrote an article publiclyapologizing to his constituents for the broken promise. It is clear that interest in the topic is not dying as the government moves to advance its agenda.

Defying the voting patterns of cabinet is often seen as an act of defiance, but has been increasingly common under theTrudeaugovernment as MPs have felt the confidence to express their views and those of their communities. We've seen this precedent in other matters, such as the recent vote on legislation aimed at preventing discrimination with genetic testing, when Liberal backbenchers defied cabinet's instructions and passed the bill with no substantive changes.

Many voters chose the Liberals because of their support for electoral reform, recognizing that their vote could better reflect their beliefs down the line. Some even voted strategically to remove Conservative MPs with the hopes that a new government would introduce a new electoral system that would eliminate the need for strategic voting next time around.

All Canadians deserve the opportunity to vote for the policies and visions that appeal to them with the expectation that their choice will be represented on the floor of the House.The vote to reopen the electoral reform debate at the end of May can bring us one step closer to a better form of representative democracy. All of our MPs, particularly Liberals who adopted this promise, need to listen to the wishes of their constituents and remember that acting on electoral reform is part of their mandate.

That's why Leadnow is reaching out to people across the country ahead of this crucial vote on May 31. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change our system for the better. The next two weeks present a critical window of opportunity for all of us to remind our MPs that they were elected to fulfiltheir election promises, even if their leader chooses not to stand by those commitments.

Drop by your MP's office or give them a call, write a letter and tell a friend to do the same. But most of all, remind them that when the 2019 election comes around, you'll remember how they voted in the House of Commonson May 31, 2017.

About the authors

Joseph Wasylycia-Leis is a long-time community organizer passionate about public engagement and social change. He currently works as the campus sustainability co-ordinator at the University of Winnipeg and has been a community organizer with the independent advocacy organization Leadnow since the 2015 federal election. He has previously worked with the Manitoba NDP.

Laura Cameron is a graduate student in the master's of Indigenous governance program at the University of Winnipeg. Heracademic work looks at Indigenous governancein the context of climate change impactand adaptation across the Prairies. Her volunteer work includesbeing an organizerwith Leadnow on a national campaign for electoral reform.

Original post:
Electoral reform: Window of opportunity opens to revive our democracy - CBC.ca

I am 62 years old. I was born right after the McCarthy era. I lived through the Cold War and nuclear scares. I lived through Vietnam protesting, the 1968 Democratic Convention and Watergate.

Right now I believe we are in a crucial period. I believe democracy itself is under attack and that people need to speak out. Some of it is so subtle that most Americans don't even realize that it's happening.

President Donald Trump is one of the big dangers. Whether he likes it or not, the American people get to know what he is doing. And not everyone gets their news from Twitter. But Trump is not the only issue.

A study of students a few years ago showed many college students thought there should be more limits to First Amendment rights. We are letting fears of terrorism give more power to government and law enforcement. The internet allows people to get slanted news from websites that offer only viewpoints they want to read and hear.

Maybe I'm being overly panicky. Maybe American democracy is too strong for my worries to overthrow it. But I think it's time for important people to speak up for democracy, and the news media is still the best way to spread the word. The McCarthy era and J. Edgar Hoover should be a warning that democracy is neither free not automatic. We sometimes need to fight for it.

Laurence Siegel, Manteno

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Our democracy is in trouble. It's time to fight. - Chicago Tribune

It was a few days after the start of the new millennium, and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was holding a reception at Spaso House, for decades the elegant residence of the American ambassador. Russias tumultuous Boris Yeltsin era had come to an abrupt, shocking end on New Years Day, when the Russian president who had brought down the Soviet Union and turned his country into a chaotic, fledgling democracy announced his resignation. His successor was the man he had named his prime minister just four months earlier, a man barely known to most Russians, let alone to the outside world: former KGB officer Vladimir Putin.

As Jim Collins, a soft-spoken career diplomat who was then the U.S. ambassador to Russia, made the rounds at that reception, querying guests as to what they thought of the dramatic shift atop the Kremlin, the overwhelming sentiment was relief. The Yeltsin era, which had begun with so much promise, had turned into a shambolic, deeply corrupt dystopia. Yeltsin, who had burst to prominence with a burly energyhis climb atop a tank in central Moscow to turn back revanchists who sought to save the Soviet dictatorship is one of the iconic moments of the Cold Wars endhad become chronically ill and increasingly fond of his vodka. A group of politically connected businessmen had raped the country economically and spirited most of their gains offshore. Its budget was busted, its civil servants unpaid. (I did a story then about a colonel in the Soviet Rocket Forces who killed himself because he could not afford to throw his wife a birthday party.) The once mightyand mightily effectiveKGB had to watch its best officers go off to work for private businessmen, leaving the state security services demoralized and increasingly corrupt. Russia was in chaos.

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Collins listened to the various opinions offered and then offered his own. They need someone, he said, who can get control of this place. In other words, he too was relieved that Yeltsin was gone.

We forget now, in the midst of the intensifying hysteria in Washington, D.C., about all things Russia, that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putinnow commonly portrayed as a cartoon villain by Western politicians and presshad a honeymoon period. Many people back then chose to disregard Putins career in the KGB and focused instead on the fact that he had been an energetic aide to the reform-minded mayor of his native St. Petersburg in the immediate post-Soviet era. Madeleine Albright, then Bill Clintons secretary of state, called him a reformer, and both sides of the political aisle in Washington were conned by Putin in the following decade. George W. Bush, desperately seeking Russian help in the post-9/11 war on terror, famously said he had looked into [Putins] soul. ("So have I, cracked Senator John McCain, "and I saw three letters: KGB.) As recently as the 2012 election, President Barack Obama mocked Mitt Romney for calling Putin a threat to the United States. "The 1980s called, and they want their foreign policy back, Obama cracked.

Outgoing Russian president Boris Yeltsin, center right, shakes hands with Russian prime minister and acting president Vladimir Putin, left, as he leaves the Kremlin in 1999. Sovfoto/UIG/Getty

That was one U.S. election cycle ago. Now, according to its critics, Russia is a mortal threat to all the West holds dear, and it attempted to intervene, largely through cyberspace, in the 2016 election. Americas most prized possessionits democracywas attacked in what McCain, speaking for much of the Washington establishment, called an act of war. The new Trump administration is beset by an FBI investigation into whether members of his campaign colluded with Moscow in an attempt to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House. Trump had to fire his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, for dissembling about what he said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition. Then, on May 10, he fired the man overseeing the FBIs investigation into Russia and the Trump campaign, Director James Comey, in part because he wouldnt publicly clear the president of having any ties to Moscow.

Suddenly, an undeniable whiff of Watergate-style crisis was in the D.C. air. But this scandal has a distinctive feature: As the multiple investigations unfold over the coming weeks and months, remember that this is not a homegrown scandal but one made in Moscow. Rarely, if ever, during the Cold War did Russia so effectively roil American politics.

Set aside, for the moment, whether this is a crisis or, as Trump would have it, a fake story manufactured by Democrats angry that they lost the election and peddled by their allies in the press. Less than two decades ago, Putin had inherited an exhausted, bankrupt country. Once a superpower, it wielded almost no geopolitical clout, not even in its own backyard. (The United States had humiliated Moscowand infuriated Putin, then running the Federal Security Service, the KGBs successor, for Yeltsinwhen it bombed Russian ally Serbia during the Kosovo war in 1999.)

Now Russia is again public enemy No. 1 in the United States, and Putin is on offense around the world. He is the primary backer of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, thanks to his audacious deployment of Russias military to combat the anti-Assad Islamic rebels. He annexed Crimea and sent Russian troops and special operators into eastern Ukraine, where they remain today. In the Far East, he is moving Russia closer to a military alliance with Beijing. And in Europe and the United States, Putins cyberwarriors are wreaking havoc.

How did Putin pull all this off? Out of the humiliation of the 90sremember, Putin has famously said that the Soviet Unions collapse was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th centuryhe had one essential insight. He knew Russias greatest asset was its vast natural resourcesoil and gas and minerals and timberall of which Yeltsin had peddled away to the oligarchs for a pittance. Putin realized it was critical for the Russian state to reacquire those assets. If the government controlled the countrys resourcesand in particular the oilit would again wield significant influence, particularly in Europe. Putin set about doing that.

Consider the case of Yukos, the oil giant acquired in the 90s by businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had paid about $150 million for a company that by 2004 would be valued at $20 billion . Starting in 2003, Putins government brought a series of tax evasion charges against Yukos and its management. Moscow sought $27 billion in back taxes, but thats not all Putin wanted. Yukos produced 20 percent of Russian oil, and Putin wanted it back. The government froze Yukoss assets and declined to engage in settlement talks; then, in October 2003, Khodorkovsky was arrested. (He would spend more than a decade in jail.) Moscow then seized Yukoss assets and eventually transferred them to a company called Rosneft, which was run by Igor Sechinlike Putin, a KGB alumnus.

The reacquisition of assets, either outright by the state or by private companies run by men loyal to Putin, had commenced. Putin was undoing what Yeltsin had done in the 90s. Today, much of Russias oil reserves are controlled by state-owned companies.

Putins timing could hardly have been better. In the 90s, prices for nearly all commodities had slumped. But after the turn of the century, a new and voracious consumer of commodities emergedChina, its economy growing by nearly 10 percent a year for several years running. Russia didnt sell much directly to China back then, thanks to the strategic wariness between the two that dated back to the Cold War. But that didnt matter. Chinas demand for everything from oil to timber to bauxite drove up global prices, and the Russian economy benefited enormously because of it.

Former Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky, center, stands behind steel bars in a court in Moscow, on August 3, 2004. Alexander Natruskin/Reuters

Human rights activists were outraged that Khodorkovsky was stewing in jail on trumped-up charges, but the average Russian didnt care. I remember visiting Moscow in 2007 and being struck by how it had been transformed since Yeltsins departure. In the 90s, most of the city had a dingy, low-rent feel. Now there were new retail stores everywhere and customers with the money to shop in them.

Putin got lucky that Chinas economic ascent coincided with his first decade in power, but he knew what he wanted to do with the money the commodities boom brought in. He shored up the states finances, and in the process, began rebuilding the state security services, the KGBs successor agencies, the ministry of the interior and the military.

He also recruited young, tech-savvy Russians to work for the motherlandsomething few of them would have even considered when I was there in the second half of the 1990s. And this raises an important point about Putins rise that most of the West, amid the current hysteria about Russia, misses. That countrys economic recovery, as well as the widespread sense that Putin was restoring order when there had been none, made him broadly popular at home. He was, you might say, making Russia great again, and most Russians loved that. That made it easier for Moscow to persuade those bright young people to become cyberwarriors for Mother Russia; the people who hacked the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clintons campaign arent Cold War relics. Theyre mostly millennials who give themselves funky online nicknames and gleefully wreak havoc.

Russia staged its first massive cyberattack against a foreign government in 2007. Estonia was the targetone of three former Soviet states in the Baltics that had claimed independence when the U.S.S.R. collapsed in 1991. Dozens of Estonian government and business websites were crippled for days by distributed denial-of-service attacks from Moscow, which had been angered by alleged discrimination against native Russians living in the country.

As Newsweek reported exclusively on May 12 , that same year, Russia hacked the presidential campaign of then-candidate Barack Obamaattacks that campaign officials were unaware of at the time. Once Obama was elected, Russian hackers targeted several top officials in his departments of state, energy and defense.

Moscow was just getting started. It launched another massive cyberattack in 2008 when Russian forces, as part of Putins efforts to secure what Russians call their near abroad, invaded Georgia. As David Batashvili, then a National Security Council staffer for the Georgian government in the capital city of Tbilisi, recalls, "All of our government and media websites went down just as Russian troops were crossing the border. It was a massive cyberattack and very effective.

Since then, Putin has made his cybermuscle an essential part of Russias influence globally. In late December, Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko said that in just the previous two months, central government institutionsthe ministries of defense and finance and the capital citys power gridhad been attacked 6,500 times, probes that NATO commanders worry could portend a further Russian military incursion into the country soon.

Russia, as weve seen, also uses cyberwarriors to disrupt political campaigns abroad, whether its hacking Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podestas emails or rummaging through the files of new French President Emmanuel Macron, whom Moscow also opposed. (Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate Macron defeated, was openly pro-Putin.) And German Chancellor Angela Merkel has already warned that Moscow will likely try to disrupt the German elections in the fall.

Its clear that Russia is meddling abroad, but its not clear if these intrusions are strategically smart. Political analysts in Moscow deride the notion that Putin was obsessed with defeating Clinton, as she once put it, but he did harbor an animus toward the Obama administration. He believed it helped foment anti-Putin demonstrations throughout Russia in 2011. While secretary of state, Clinton had criticized the legitimacy of Russias parliamentary election, and Putin said publicly that such interference in Russias political process was intolerable. Four years later, he let loose his hackers to work against her campaign for the White House.

The question now for Putin is whether the Russian effort to help defeat Clinton and elect Trump was worth it. Its already clearand will become clearer as the multiple investigations into this affair unfold in D.C.that Moscows cyberwarriors interfered with the election. Assume, for the sake of argument, that Putin ordered his intelligence services to collude with the Trump campaign, if not the candidate itself (although there is no evidence of that). Very little of that could be done in secret, and it will likely be exposed. And thats why Moscow-Washington relations, both sides acknowledge, are now at a post-Cold War low. Trumps meeting May 11 with Putins foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, coming as it did amid the intensifying anti-Russia hysteria in Washington, was an embarrassment for the president. He may have come into the Oval Office seeking better relations with Moscow, but politically he has a shrinking amount of wiggle room to do that.

President Donald Trump meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, right, at the White House in Washington on May 10. Trump welcomed Vladimir Putin's top diplomat to the White House for Trump's highest level face-to-face contact with a Russian government official since he took office in January, the day after he fired FBI director James Comey. Russian Foreign Ministry/AP

Diplomats say Putins near-term geopolitical goals are clear: Hes not backing down in Syria, and Moscows military presence there effectively precludes the U.S. from doing anything other than one-off strikes against Assads military assets (while diligently alerting Moscow about them beforehand). He also wants to see if he can leverage his position in Syria to gain concessions from the West on Ukraine. That is, he may offer cooperation in setting up safe zones in Syria in return for the elimination of U.S. and European Union sanctions against Russia triggered by his snatching of Crimea.

That hes even in a position to try to pull all that off is remarkable, given where Russia was on January 1, 2000: in chaos at home and in retreat abroad. But in the current environment, could the Trump administration, and its allies in Western Europe, make concessions to Putin on anything ? In Washington, Putin has managed to turn the Democratic Party, which since the early 1970s has consistently sought better relations with Moscow, into hysterical, the-Russians-are-coming! Cold Warriors. Many Republicans, instinctively mistrustful of Russia, are looking for a bunker to dive into as they hope this Putin storm blows over; theyll give Trump no cover if he tries to reorient U.S. foreign policy in a way that pleases Putin. And the president, increasingly isolated just four months into his term, is left to tweet bizarre threats and accusations.

Putin may have restored Russian pride, and a semblance of its Great Power status, but the former spymaster may well have overplayed his hand in trying to tilt the 2016 U.S. election to his preferred candidate. He may have gotten the result he wantedbut someday wish he hadnt.

Sean Gallup/Getty

Here is the original post:
Inside Putin's Campaign to Destroy U.S. Democracy - Newsweek - Newsweek

Outrage over gerrymandering and demands for electoral reform crop up after every election cycle from pundits and journalists whenever they see strangely drawn legislative district boundaries or a peculiar election result. The former occurs every ten years as states undergo the decennial rituals of reapportionment and redistricting. The latter occurs when a president wins the electoral vote and loses the popular vote. Yet, the root cause goes unaddressed.

In the wake of the election of President Trump, calls for reform of virtually the entire electoral process have arisen from all points on the compass: use redistricting commissions, amend the constitution to get rid of the Electoral College, loosen restrictions on voter registration, etc. Fact is, though, advocates of election reform frequently lose enthusiasm when they discover that reform may actually cost them a favorite incumbent. Furthermore, we find that incumbents not surprisingly are more than a little hesitant to call for reforms that might cost them their place in the legislature. Self-interest still guides politics.

Let me suggest that we lengthen legislative terms.

Ask any legislator and she or he will tell you that they like having districts tailored to their strengths so they can decrease if not minimize the cost of and time spent on the campaign trail. At first blush, this would seem about the most anti-democratic sentiment imaginable.

Thats a reasonable reaction in the abstract. But in reality, we need to admit that the legislators have a point. In Virginia, senate terms are four years. In the House of Delegates, they are two years. This is a common arrangement throughout the United States. Only five states have longer terms for the lower house of their legislatures: Alabama, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi and North Dakota have four-year terms. This means that in 44 states (not counting Nebraska that has only a one-house legislature), members of the lower house are in what amounts to a constant state of election campaigning.

In Virginia, the general election is in November. The corresponding 2017 primary election is in June. To get on the primary ballot, one had to file papers no later than March 30. The legislative session runs only through January and February. This means that legislators have barely more than one session to engage in legislation before they need to take on primary challengers in anticipation of a general election. Could this be too much democracy?

Not to mention, the American electoral process is incredibly expensive. Virtually every candidate has to run twice in the primary and in the general election every cycle. To campaign effectively in the election cycle, one must be out courting voters far in advance. So if our elected officials must spend at least half of their time in office campaigning to stay in office, it stands to reason that they might want to make it easier to hang on to the seat they invested so much time in winning. Cast in this light, its not hard to understand a legislators desire for a handcrafted district.

In essence, the urge to gerrymander districts at the peoples expense arises from the peoples desire to have primary elections and lengthy electoral processes. So why not make a minor modification: Make legislative terms longer and give our elected officials more time to spend on legislating and governing?

Incumbents would be less worried about constantly warding off challengers especially from their own parties in primaries if they could spend more time establishing a legislative record. Maybe they would not be so preoccupied with creating designer districts. By lengthening legislative terms, we would decrease the number and therefore the overall cost of elections. This might actually make for a better democracy.

In sum, this is a call for a little less democracy in favor of better quality democracy. The way our politics is constructed, Americans have sacrificed quality for quantity and the cost of this decision shows each election cycle.Everyone would win if this small reform were

Everyone would win if this small reform were affected. Voters would benefit from less gerrymandering and, perhaps, better Election Day choices. Incumbents would be able to focus on governing as well as campaigning. Challengers would have more time to build better platforms. Democracy would improve. From this perspective, a constitutional amendment to lengthen terms would probably be entirely uncontroversial.

Lengthening legislative terms may seem like a small measure, but it would have an extraordinarily positive impact on American elections.

Mark Rush is Stanley D. and Nikki Waxberg Professor of Politics and Law and Director of the Center for International Education at Washington and Lee University. His writing and research cover law, politics, elections, democracy and professional baseball and football. Follow him on Twitter @Mark_Rush.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

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Less democracy is better democracy Here's why - The Hill (blog)

When Michel Temer was permanently installed as president less than one year ago after the impeachment of elected President Dilma Rousseff, the primary justification offered by Brazilian media figures was that he would bring stability and unity to a country beset by political and economic crisis. From the start, the opposite has been true: Temer and his closest allies were a vessel for far more corruption, controversy, instability, and shame than anything that preceded them.His approval ratings have literally collapsed to single digits.

But yesterdays emergence of proof showing just how dirty and corrupt Temer is makes the situation utterly unsustainable. Leaks from the ongoing corruption investigation reveal that Temer was caught on tape in March endorsingan executives ongoing payment of bribes to maintain the silence of Eduardo Cunha, the formerly omnipotent, now-imprisoned house speaker who presided over Dilmas impeachment and belongs to Temers party. Temer had already faced allegations of deep involvement in bribes and illegal contributions, but that could be overlooked because unlike now no smoking gun existed.

Meanwhile, Dilmas 2014 opponent in the presidential campaign conservative Senator Acio Neves (shown above with Temer at the latters inauguration), whose party led Dilmas impeachment and now dominates Temers government was caught on tape requesting 2 million reals from a businessman. He was removed this morning from his seatby a Supreme Court ruling, had his office raided, and now faces immediate imprisonment. Acios sister was imprisoned this morning as part of the corruption investigation.

In sum, the two key figures driving Dilmas impeachment were just revealed to be hardened criminals, with documentary evidence audio recordings, videos, and online chats which all Brazilians will soon see, hear, and read. The exact type of smoking gun evidence that Brazils notoriously biased corporate media searched for with futility for years against Dilma was just discovered against the two key figures that drove her impeachment, one of whom they installed as president.

To say that this situation Temers ongoing presidency is unsustainable is an understatement. How can a major country possibly be governed by someone who everyone knows just months ago encouragedthepayment of bribes to keep key witnesses silenced in a corruption investigation? The sole rationale for Temers presidency that he wouldbring stability and signal to markets that Brazil wasagain open for business has just collapsed in a heap of humiliation and destruction.

At this point, Temers removal one way or the other seems inevitable. Although he is momentarily refusing to resign, his key allies are starting to abandon him. The media stars who installed him are now trashing him. There is open discussion everywhere about the mechanisms that will be used to remove and replace him.

Even for the sleazy power brokers of Braslia, getting caught on tape directly participating in blatant criminalityis disqualifying: not to stay in the House or Senate, but to serve as the symbolic face of the country to the world and, more importantly, to capital markets. Whats new is not that Temer is corrupt: Everyone knew that, including those who installed him. Whats new is that the evidence is now too embarrassing too sabotaging of their project to allow him to stay.

This always wasthe towering irony at the heart of Dilmas impeachment. As those of us who argued against impeachmentrepeatedly pointed out, removing the democratically elected president in the name of battling criminalitywas such a farce precisely because her removal would elevate and empower the most corrupt factions, the darkest criminals and bandits,and enable them to rule the country without having won an election.

Indeed, the empowerment of the countrys most corrupt factions was a key goal of Dilmas impeachment. As shown by yet another secret recording one revealed last year that captured the plotting of Temers key ally, Romero Juc thereal goal of impeachment (aside from austerity and privatization) was to enable those politicians most endangered by criminal proceedingsto use their new, unearned political power to kill the ongoing investigation (stop the bleeding) and thus protect themselves from accountability and punishment. The empowerment of the nations most corrupt politicians was a key feature, not a bug, of Dilmas impeachment.

The key question now as it was then is what comes next? Those of us who argued against impeachment repeatedly urged that if Dilma were really going to be impeached, only new elections whereby the citizenry, rather than the band of criminals in the halls of power, chose their new president could protect Brazilian democracy. The absolute worst option was to allow the corrupt line of succession in Braslia to elevate itself and then choose its own successors. That would ensure that political criminalitybecame further entrenched. As David Miranda and I wrote in a Folha op-ed in April of last year:

If, despite all this, the country is truly determined to remove Dilma, the worst alternative is to permit the corrupt line of succession to ascend to power.

The principles of democracy demand that Dilma Rousseff complete her term in office. If that is not an option, and if she is going to be impeached, the best alternative is new elections. That way, the population would assume its proper place as provided by the Constitution: All power emanates from the people.

Yet thats exactly what took place. What Brazilian elites fear and hate most is democracy. The last thing they wanted was to allow Brazils population to once again choose itsown leaders. So they foisted on them a corrupt, hated mediocrity who could never have been elected on his own, who indeed is nowbanned from running for any officedue to election law violations and he was tasked with imposing an agenda the country hated.

Brazils elite media and political class are now openly plotting the same scam. Many are suggesting that Temers replacement should be chosen not by the Brazilian people but by its Congress: one-thirdof whom are the targets of formal criminal investigations, most of whose major parties are rife with corruption. As we saw with Temers installation, allowing corrupt institutions to choose a countrys leaders is the antithesis of democracy and anti-corruption crusades. It ensures that criminality and corruption reign. The only debate should be whether direct elections should include not only Temers successor but also a new Congress.

Brazils democracy, along withits political stability, hasalready been crippled by the traumatic removal of the person who was actually elected to lead the country. That her successor has been exposed as a criminal exacerbates the tragedy. But it is not an overstatement to say that allowing the same corrupt factions to choose one of their own to replace Temer once again denying the right of the people to pick their president and instead imposing on thema leader who emerges fromthesleaziest precincts ofBraslias sewer would be its death blow.

Top photo: Michel Temer greets Sen. Acio Neves following Temersswearing-in ceremony as president of Brazil in Brasilia on Aug. 31, 2016.

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After Latest Bombshells, Only Michel Temer's Removal and New Elections Can Save Brazil's Democracy - The Intercept