NY Times. From Jamie Raskin to Chief Justice Roberts to a variety of election officials you have never heard of, these few quotes say it all.
“Public officials from Congress to City Hall are now regularly subjected to threats of violence. It’s changing how they do their jobs.”
“By almost all measures, the evidence of the trend is striking. Last year, more than 450 federal judges were targeted with threats, a roughly 150 percent increase from 2019, according to the United States Marshals Service. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated more than 8,000 threats to members of Congress last year, up more than 50 percent from 2018. The agency recently added three full-time prosecutors to handle the volume.”
AP News: “Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley sentenced DePape to 20 years for attempted kidnapping and 30 years for the assault, the maximum for both counts. The sentences will run concurrently. He also was given credit for the 18 months he has been in custody.”
Not all money in politics is bad. This was my conclusion after writing Beyond Campaign Finance Reform. A singular focus on the ways money “amplifies the voices of the super-wealthy few” ignores that it takes money to support the political organizing and mobilizing of working and middle-class voters, and it takes money to counteract the outsized power of economic elites. “Money invested in building sustainable political consciousness and voter engagement is money well spent from a democratic standpoint,” I wrote.
“Money invested in building sustainable political consciousness and voter engagement is money well spent from a democratic standpoint.”
Philanthropists are coming around to the same view. Increasingly aware of the centrality of political engagement and organization to reinforcing democratic norms and practices, the Democracy Fund is spurring democracy grantmakers to fund nonpartisan democracy work early in the 2024 election cycle, arguing in a series of announcements, op-eds, and blog posts that donors should not wait until this coming fall to pick their priorities and should instead move monies out the door now. Grants will fund efforts to “recruit and train community canvassers, organize voter registration drives, and combat disinformation and misinformation, among other election-related efforts.” As Joe Goldman, the Fund’s president, recently wrote in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, along with Laleh Ispihani, the executive director of Open Society-US, and Deepak Bhargava, the president of the JPB Foundation, “Nonprofit organizations perform essential election work in our democracy. In communities around the country, organizations help recruit poll workers, organize nonpartisan voter registration drives, combat misinformation, support local election officials, and work to ensure that the diversity of our electorate is represented in our election process.” This money is important to democracy but needs to be available early to be effective.
This All by April initiative follows the Democracy Fund’s January report, “Field in Focus: The State of Pro-Democracy Institutional Philanthropy.” The full Field in Focus report is rich in detail but also a rare and important window into the contemporary priorities of institutional grant-makers. It makes clear that institutional grant-makers, led by the Democracy Fund, have their eye on the right questions:
How can philanthropy better support the movement for a more inclusive, multiracial democracy?
And how should democracy work be defined?
The report makes clear that grantmakers also increasingly understand that democratic work goes beyond voter registration and election administration. Several areas of new and increased focus include ensuring an effective census and a fair redistricting process, promoting racial and social justice, preventing political violence and anti-hate efforts, and tracking and combating misinformation and disinformation.
While there is much to be commended about this turn in philanthropy, it is also worth observing the limitations that remain in their vision. Returning to where we started. Early funding is critical, especially for organizations working for and with historically marginalized voters. Nevertheless, the “boom-and-bust cycle” that grassroots organizations decry as destabilizing, the one driven by presidential election cycles, is a bug associated with the singular focus in the democracy reform community on nonpartisan actors as the solution to America’s democratic failures.
Early funding is critical, especially for organizations working for and with historically marginalized voters. Nevertheless, the “boom-and-bust cycle” that grassroots organizations decry as destabilizing, the one driven by presidential election cycles, is a bug associated with the singular focus in the democracy reform community on nonpartisan actors as the solution to America’s democratic failures.
In a functioning party system, the boom-and-bust cycle would not be an issue. Political parties would maintain a year-round presence at the state and local level, engaging and organizing the electorate, responding to their needs, and channeling the priorities of their civic allies. Community groups, unions, churches, and other peer-to-peer civic groups would be folded into the party and assured of financial support.
The democracy reform field’s focus on non-partisanship is a requirement of the Internal Revenue Code. But it is also an ideology, with deep roots back to the Progressive Era. It is a worldview that romanticizes individual voters (their interest in political knowledge and capacity for rational action) while eschewing party-centric paths to good governance and a healthy democracy. It is a worldview that romanticizes individual voters (their interest in political knowledge and capacity for rational action) while eschewing party-centric paths to good governance and a healthy democracy.
I am not suggesting that institutional philanthropy invest in political parties. That is far outside of what tax-exempt funds can or should be used for. But democracy-minded philanthropists can and should explore systemic reforms that can change the incentives shaping party behavior, with an eye toward creating a healthier party system. (In this regard, though perhaps the focus of a future post, they should be wary of systemic reforms that are candidate-centric.) They should leverage their money to create political institutions that make philanthropic investment in democracy significantly less necessary.
Democracy-minded philanthropists can and should explore systemic reforms that can change the incentives shaping party behavior, with an eye toward creating a healthier party system.
The Supreme Court has decided Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Assn. of America, Ltd., recognizing Congress has constitutional prerogatives to govern and structure the federal government as it sees fit. The case will no doubt mostly be discussed as an obscure case that put an end to the long conservative attack on the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Board. But it should also be acknowledged as a pro-democracy case–and those are few and far between these days. This Court is arrogant in its assertion of judicial supremacy, and when it comes to Congress, it routinely minimizes that branch’s constitutional powers. This impacts democracy because as Congress lays mired in gridlock, the administrative state is the main place governance is occurring. This decision upholds Congress’s power to financially insulate administrative agencies from Congress’s dysfunction. To be sure, it is doctrinally limited and will not put a stop to other developments likely to undercut congressional flexibility to structure agencies. Nevertheless, it should be recognized as an important separation of powers decision that appears to acknowledge Congress as a co-equal branch of government.
“Republicans put pressure on the U.S. Secret Service to move an expected protest area farther from the Republican National Convention in downtown Milwaukee[.]”
New Common Ground Democracy column, with this subtitle: “Until electoral reform occurs, the best way to protect democracy is for a bipartisan coalition to join together in a campaign against a would-be autocrat.” The reference to “traditional” Republicans is to this recent Washington Post opinion piece, which (while well-intentioned) fails to recognize that it will be impossible for the non-MAGA wing of the GOP to resuscitate itself without electoral reform according to Common Ground Democracy (in technical terms, Condorcet-based) principles.
Travis Crum (Wash U) reviews Joshua Douglas’ new book in the Washington Monthly.
“The Court v. The Voters: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights is essential for anyone who wants to understand the Supreme Court’s role in setting the rules of our democracy and what threats loom this year’s elections. As a professor of constitutional law and voting rights, I will recommend Douglas’s book to my students who are looking for a primer on election law. Here are five key takeaways from Douglas’s book.”
As I noted earlier on this blog, the Court was faced with a procedural mess (I called it a “train wreck”) in the LA redistricting case. Two different federal courts had issued two decisions which left LA with no valid congressional map in place. The first federal court said LA’s original map violated the Voting Rights Act; the second federal court said the new map LA enacted to remedy the VRA violation itself violated the Constitution.
Today, the Court stayed that second decision. The effect of that stay is the state’s remedial map — which creates 2 VRA districts rather than just the 1 the state had created initially — will be the map LA uses this fall.
The stay application apparently got tangled up with Purcell issues, but the Court didn’t have to say anything about Purcell even if it were going to issue the stay. The Court was up against some tight deadlines regardless of any issue about Purcell. It basically had two options:
The Secretary of State represented very forcefully to the Court that she had to know which map was in place by today, in order to meet the series of deadlines the state’s election laws rolled out from here on in. If the Court accepted those representations, then the case for issuing a stay was strong.
The other side disputed whether May 15th was such a firm deadline. If the Court thought there was a bit more play in the joints, then it did not have to issue the stay today. The Court could have given a couple more weeks for the next stage of the remedial process to play out (the lower court had stated it would have a remedial map in place by June 4th). Justice Jackson’s dissent disagreed that the May 15th deadline was so important, but didn’t explain why; she simply noted that the lower court had disagreed with the Secretary of State’s representation.
The majority could have said we aren’t in a position to second guess the Secretary of State’s representation that May 15th is a firm deadline by which a map must be in place in order to meet the rest of the election deadlines under the state’s laws. Because we accept that representation, we issue the stay. That would not require invoking Purcell or deciding how it ought to apply in this procedurally messy situation. Since I would imagine the Secretary of State’s representation did play a major role in the Court’s stay decision, the Court could have justified the stay, if it accepted the SOS’s representation, without bringing Purcell into the picture.
The Madisonian political philosophy upon which the U.S. Constitution rests did not supply the nation with a well-developed theory of electoral procedures. Instead, Madisonian philosophy concentrated on the separation of powers and other elements of constitutional architecture, including federalism, in order to prevent factions from subverting the common good. Subsequent history has demonstrated that Madisonian constitutional architecture, while necessary, is not sufficient for democratic government to operate in the interest of the people as a whole rather than on behalf of a faction and its own interests. Instead, it is necessary to supplement Madisonian constitutional architecture with a well-designed electoral system that accords with Madisonian values.
Maximum Convergence Voting, a method of electing a single winner when there are more than two candidates, is the method that most accords with Madisonian principles underlying the Constitution. Derived from the work of the Marquis de Condorcet, a French contemporary of Madison (and the Constitution’s other Framers), whose electoral theories Madison would have admired if he had studied them, Maximum Convergence Voting is the method that most avoids the election of a factional candidate and instead elects the candidate who achieves the greatest common ground among all the voters in the electorate. This essay describes how Maximum Convergence Voting operates, how it can take several different forms—including a Top-Three electoral system that is a variation of California’s existing Top-Two system (and Alaska’s existing Top-Four system)—and how it also can be used for presidential elections.
This paper, like my other recent work on electoral system design, is a preliminary sketch of ideas I am pursuing in a book on this topic. Comments, both on this specific paper and on the topic in general, are very welcome.
Joshua A, Douglas‘ new book, “The Court v. The Voters: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights” offers an accessible look at the erosion of voting rights and its implications for democracy. Focusing on nine major Supreme Court cases, Douglas demonstrates the erosion of meaningful protections for the right to vote before turning to offer some legislative proposals for reversing this course. There is a nice review in Salon. Very much looking forward to reading it.
AP News: The Georgia Supreme Court refused to issue a ruling, leaving the legality of Cobb County Commissioners’ electoral districts uncertain. The County is Georgia’s third-largest. While the Court agreed “that someone needs to issue a legally final ruling on whether county commissioners can override state legislators and draw their own electoral districts,” and one Justice urged the commissioners themselves to file for a declaration, a unanimous Court held that the “it would be improper to rule on the legal issue” where the plaintiffs lacked standing.
