Two articles on ranked-choice voting and the New York City primary here and here.
DOJ Possibly Investigating Former Directors of the FBI and CIA
Glenn Thrush and Julian Barnes reporting here.
From the article:
The Trump administration appears to be targeting officials who oversaw the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, examining the actions of the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan, according to people familiar with the situation.
John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director and a harsh critic of his Democratic-appointed predecessors, has made a criminal referral of Mr. Brennan to the F.B.I., accusing him of lying to Congress, officials said. The bureau is also scrutinizing Mr. Comey for his role in the Russia investigation, other officials said, although the exact basis for an inquiry remains unclear.
Even if it is unclear whether the moves will lead to charges, they are among the most significant indications that President Trump’s appointees intend to follow through on his campaign to exact retribution against his perceived enemies. That includes people leading the investigation into what he has repeatedly denounced as the “Russia hoax” nine years ago and officials involved in two failed federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump during the Biden years.
Crypto, Lobbying, & Trump
David Yaffe-Bellany and Kenneth Vogel of The New York Times provide an interesting account of how crypto lobbyists won over President Trump. Here are some key excerpts:
Just over a year ago, while sitting around a table in an ornate meeting room at Mar-a-Lago, David Bailey and a group of top Bitcoin executives made a pitch to Donald J. Trump.
They were looking for a savior.
For years, cryptocurrency companies had endured a sweeping crackdown in Washington — a cascade of lawsuits, regulatory attacks and prosecutions that threatened the industry’s survival.
Since Mr. Trump’s election, the price of Bitcoin, the most valuable cryptocurrency, has skyrocketed to over $100,000, enriching executives who supported his campaign. Crypto advocates who were shunned in Washington during the Biden administration now enjoy astonishing access to the Trump White House, which has quickly unwound the regulatory crackdown. And the federal government has embraced sweeping pro-crypto policies that could upend the U.S. financial system for decades.
All of that resulted from one of the great lobbying free-for-alls in recent history. For months, industry executives, paid lobbyists, campaign operatives, and Trump business partners and family members orchestrated a diffuse but stunningly effective influence operation that turned Mr. Trump from an outspoken Bitcoin skeptic into crypto’s most important supporter.
Virtually every step of Mr. Trump’s transformation has been steered by the industry. Lacking much knowledge of its intricacies, Mr. Trump embraced crypto when he saw it could generate huge profits for himself or his political groups, while outsourcing the details to industry advisers with their own business ambitions, according to documents and audio recordings, as well as interviews with more than 50 people involved in Mr. Trump’s crypto plans.
Now he is deeply enmeshed in an industry his administration regulates — one that was founded as a renegade alternative to the big banks. He and his sons unveiled their own crypto business last fall, the start of a blitz of new ventures that has grown to include four Trump-branded digital currencies and even a Bitcoin mining company.
At some points, the only meaningful check on the industry’s power has come from rival crypto interests jockeying against one another to influence Mr. Trump. The competition has at times resembled a bidding war.
Major Supreme Court Campaign Finance Case, NRSC, Likely to Be Heard By Supreme Court at Its December Sitting
See this letter from the court-appointed amicus.
Second Circuit Unanimously Reverses Conviction in Mackey (“Ricky Vaughn”) Case, Finding Insufficient Evidence of a Conspiracy to Deprive People of Their Right to Vote By Tricking Them into Voting By Text
You can find the court’s opinion at this link. The sole basis for the reversal was lack of sufficient evidence that defendant Mackey had conspired with others to deprive people of their right to vote.
The Court did not address the substantive scope of section 241 or address the First Amendment issues with convicting people of depriving others of the right to vote by fraud. I filed an amicus brief with Protect Democracy and the Yale Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic on these issues.
I explained those issues in this post:
and in this piece at Slate.
So resolution of these constitutional and statutory issues will await another day.
Raderstorf & Parsons on Proportional Representation
Protect Democracy’s Ben Raderstorf and FairVote’s Mike Parsons have written this piece on the lessons that today’s reformers can learn from the wave of electoral systems reform that swept through American cities between 1915 and 1950, when many cities adopted and repealed PR.
Read the whole thing! But here are some excerpts on the lessons one can learn from :
So four lessons from this historical debate to take forward:
One: Focus on the end goals — pluralism and representation
Every reform is an instrument to an outcome, not an end in itself. Even as we argue and debate and experiment, let’s not miss the forest for the trees. American democracy is under threat because a calcified two-party system supported by winner-take-all elections are advantaging extremists and has put an unpopular autocrat back in the White House.
Two: Stay experimental
Because we don’t know exactly how different reforms will interact with the particular idiosyncrasies of American politics, we should be building a diverse portfolio of reform efforts with a reasonable degree of experimentation among proven systems as an explicit goal. Over-investment in any specific reform strategy, be it party-list or STV or otherwise, risks catastrophe if the bet goes bad. Alternatively, every reform that tries something slightly different gives us more data about how proportional representation works in the real, 21st-century United States.
Three: Find ways to channel — not resist — parties and factions
Political scientists almost unanimously agree that political parties are a necessary feature of a healthy democracy, as much as many Americans dislike them (the parties, we mean, not the political scientists). They’re the basic organizing function that keeps politics from descending into chaos. So one key question for reformers is this: How can we tap into widespread frustration with the parties as they are today to enact reform while proposing ways to help them function better in the future to sustain reform? Party-list advocates can learn from the adoptions of the Progressive Era just as STV advocates can learn from the repeals.
Four: Beware the election reformer’s dilemma
Finally, regardless of what happened back in the early 20th century, it’s worth approaching reform with a degree of humility regarding what will work, what won’t, and why. This is in part due to “the election reformer’s dilemma”:
The people who are most excited about electoral reform at the outset often approach politics from a different perspective from the voters the reform is intended to serve.
Almost by definition, those of us who are excited about electoral reform on its own merits are not anywhere close to the average voter. Election reformers tend to be far more politically engaged than the majority of the electorate. Many have more free time to engage in politics, or even count reform or politics as a full-time job. Some of us may follow the latest research produced by political scientists (or be political scientists ourselves). And some of us may be personally willing — even excited — to vote in multiple elections a year and have fairly detailed preferences and political views, including on individual candidates, ballot issues and so on.