“‘We’ll See You at Your House:’ How Fear and Menace Are Transforming Politics”

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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.”

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“Arizona Republicans Set Up a Ballot Measure to Squash Future Ballot Measures”

direct democracy

Bolts Magazine: One more Republican legislative attack on ballot measures. The Arizona legislature seeks to make the process more difficult through a constitutional amendment imposing strict geographic requirements. These measures are highly problematic because ballot initiatives are one of the few options that voters have to circumvent gridlock, polarization, and political entrenchment.

What triggered this one? An initiative to protect abortion access in Arizona that has gathered more signatures than it needs to make the November ballot.

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“Historians and the Strange, Fluid World of Nineteenth-Century Politics”

third parties,

ERIK B. ALEXANDER AND RACHEL A. SHELDEN have published a blog post reflecting on the significance of their recent article, which I mentioned a few weeks back in a post on the history of third parties in the United States.

For more than half a century, historians have relied (often implicitly) on a model of organizing U.S. political history around distinct and separate “party systems,” pitting two competitive, stable, national parties against one another for long stretches of time between short bursts of realignment. In the context of the shifting political landscape of 1868, however, explaining the partisan politics of the Johnson impeachment through the party system model is the equivalent of forcing a square peg into a round hole.

They then apply this to Andrew Johnson’s impeachment vote.

How, then, are we to understand the partisan breakdown of the 1868 vote to impeach? If we conflate the Union Party with the Republican Party, was Johnson a Republican? He may have flirted with the Democrats in pursuing a revived Union Party, but he was not a Democrat. And while Democrats certainly supported Johnson’s vision for Reconstruction over that of the Republicans, they did not view him as a member of their party either. In other words, including Johnson in any kind of accounting of the partisan politics of impeachments is confusing at best.

. . . .

We argue that it is high time to shed the confines of that model. Nineteenth-century politics are better described as fluid, unstable, and federal, operating through a series of mechanisms—networks, newspapers, customs, and laws—unique to that era. Political actors used these mechanisms to address the most pressing ideological and constitutional conflicts of their era, often in concert with broader political activism. They could quickly organize new parties to address problems as they arose, and just as quickly discard parties when the issues were resolved (or when absorbed by another party). In this way, parties were deeply integrated into the broader fabric of American political life, rather than serving as its organizing structures.

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“RFK Jr. uses major cash infusion from his running mate to fund ballot access efforts”

campaign finance, third parties

Politico. RFK, Jr.’s campaign currently depends on money from his VP, Nicole Shanahan. In April, she contributed $ 8 million. Independent presidential candidate + wealthy donor as VP is a well-established pattern to avoid campaign contribution limits. In 1980, David Koch ran as the VP for the Libertarian Party for the same purpose. More interestingly, the article notes:

“Kennedy’s campaign received $843,000 from unitemized donors — those giving less than $200 — in April, down from $1.3 million from such donors in March. It was the lowest unitemized donor total for him for any month this calendar year.

Small donor money may not be necessary to fund Kennedy’s campaign if Shanahan keeps cutting big checks. But funds from donors giving only a little are also one gauge of grassroots support.”

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No, Trump’s not losing his right to vote this fall.

felon voting

Justin here. As the former President’s New York trial begins its denouement, I’ve fielded a growing number of questions about the application of felony disenfranchisement rules in the event that Trump were convicted. There’s vanishingly little chance that the former President will be prevented from casting a vote for himself this fall.

(As with so many issues in the administration of criminal justice of new salience for portions of the public, and with respect to Florida felony disenfranchisement rules in particular, I can think of a lot of reasons why they’d warrant public attention … but not because of a need or desire for more disenfranchisement faster.)

Here’s how it works.

Back in 2019, Donald Trump moved his permanent residence to Mar-a-Lago, which means he’s a Florida voter. (And cast ballots in Florida in 2020 – by mail for the presidential preference primary and state primary, and in person for the general election.)

Florida’s rules on disenfranchisement for convictions out of state apparently depend on the rules out of state. According to the Florida Department of State‘s website, other than convictions for murder or sexual offenses, “a felony conviction in another state makes a person ineligible to vote in Florida only if the conviction would make the person ineligible to vote in the state where the person was convicted.”

Meanwhile, in New York, a 2021 law amended the state code to disenfranchise a person convicted of felony only “while he or she is incarcerated for such felony.” (emphasis added)

So if Donald Trump were convicted of a felony in New York, and if that conviction came with a sentence of incarceration, I’m quite confident that there would still be a vigorous appellate process — lasting many months at a minimum — before any incarceration began, and before his right to vote in Florida were put in jeopardy.

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