Tag: midterms

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initiative, referendum, and recall

The Good News

Trump, midterms, election, Democrats, Republicans, noncitizen voting, immigration

Republicans suffered a thumping by Democrats across the country, Tuesday, not only losing their majority in the U.S. House, but also losing the Senate — beaten badly in GOP strongholds including Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas.

Plus, Senate contests in Alaska and ruby-red Mississippi are still too close to call.

The only “conservative” bright spots? Ballot issues decided by the very same voters who booted the GOP and boosted Democrats. 

Take California’s Proposition 40. Puh-lease. Though the ever-envious left loves the idea of confiscatory taxation against people whose only crime is producing wealth, the actual votes of Californians have the Billionaire Wealth Tax losing by 11 percentage points. (If we can live long enough to see Golden State ballot tabulators actually finish counting, we may legitimately celebrate.)

Citizen Only Voting measures swept at the ballot box in five states: Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia. “The laws are expected to prevent any local jurisdictions from moving to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections,” NBC reported, “which some municipalities have sought to do in recent years.”

Yes, non-citizens are now voting — legally — in 24 U.S. cities in four states and the District of Columbia. In most of those cities, even non-citizens here illegally are empowered to cast a ballot.

Conversely, since 2018, more than 45 million voters in 20 states have had the opportunity to decide whether their state and local elections should be limited to American citizens. Thus far, Citizen Only Voting is 20-0. 

More sanity? Nebraska legislators placed a constitutional amendment on Tuesday’s ballot to weaken their term limits; more than 80 percent of Cornhusker voters said, “No.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability ideological culture national politics & policies Voting

What Was Applied

midterms, election, voting, Republicans, Democrats, Socialism, Islam, war,

Shellac seems to have entered English from India in the 1600s. The noun was derived from “shell” + “lac” — a resin secreted by the lac insect of South Asia, scraped from trees, refined into flakes and dissolved in alcohol to make varnish. 

It was ubiquitous in the 19th and early 20th centuries for furniture finishing, phonograph records, and sealing things.

In American slang, “shellac” came to refer to cheap alcohol and the adjective “shellacked” to being drunk. Shellac joined other slang terms for hooch like “varnish.”

From this latter meaning, “shellacked” morphed into “beaten up” or “trounced” — someone staggering after a fight looked much like someone staggering out of a saloon. By the 1930s, sportswriters were using “shellacking” freely to describe lopsided defeats. You’ll find it ubiquitous in boxing and baseball coverage of that era; political writers followed suit, saying a defeated candidate had “taken a shellacking.”

Yesterday, Donald Trump and the Republicans took the proverbial shellacking.

We’ve seen this sort of thing before. It’s not unheard of. Americans repudiate failed programs, and Trump, who promised to keep the American people out of war did the precise opposite of what got him elected in the first place. Only by grace extended from the American people could the application of the varnish be withheld.

Boy, that grace was so not extended! Overwhelmingly electing members of a party that includes actual “seize the means of production” communists was . . . graceless? 

A kind of justice, maybe.

This could be a warning to all: the awfulness of your opponents will not stay the hand of shellac . . . er, citizen correction.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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When Experts Are Wrong

crystal ball, experts, midterms, mid terms, 2018, election

Standard theory has it that “mid-term elections” serve as a “referendum on the President.”

In a typical article this weekend, a political scientist trotted out that common wisdom and then went on to say that “control of the referendum has shifted. It is now a referendum on leadership, on character . . . and that’s not good news for Donald Trump.”

My crystal ball is in the repair shop, but I have my doubts. The “experts” got the 2016 election so wrong in no small part because they were leveraging their expertise to influence the outcome more than understand the contest.

Academics, journalists and other Democrats want today’s votes to serve as a “referendum on leadership” because they yearn for their leaders and not Trump. 

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed and a Slate follow-up interview, Yale computer scientist David Gelernter explored the lack of “rapport between the left and what I consider the average American.” He also dismissed as absurd the idea that Donald Trump is racist — a mainstay of the Democratic critique of the president. What Trump is, instead, is “the average American in exaggerated form — blunt, simple, willing to fight, mistrustful of intellectuals” but completely without “constraints to cramp his style except the ones he himself invents.”

The Democrats, meanwhile, “have no issues” — except their hatred of Trump, argues Gelernter.

Thankfully, the mid-terms often serve as a check on the power of sitting presidents. But if “average Americans” hear the reasons to vote for the opposition party as all about how racist and xenophobic Trump is, it may work no better than in the last election.

Prophecy’s a tricky business.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Categories
term limits

My Simpler Solution

Merry Election Day! Despite this weekend’s proposal, in the New York Times, to “Cancel the Midterms.” The authors, David Schanzer and Jay Sullivan, begin by lamenting the predictable pattern of midterm elections, especially in second-term presidencies. And then they say the very existence of midterms — the mere possibility of the House and a third of the Senate reshuffling every two years — “is harmful to American politics.”

The main impact of the midterm election in the modern era has been to weaken the president, the only government official (other than the powerless vice president) elected by the entire nation. . . . The realities of the modern election cycle are that we spend almost two years selecting a president with a well-developed agenda, but then, less than two years after the inauguration, the midterm election cripples that same president’s ability to advance that agenda.


The nut of the argument comes down to the notion that it would be best to rig the game to avoid conflict and dispute for as long as possible so that an “agenda” — whatever that may be — can be firmly put in place.

It’s the very opposite idea of the Founding Fathers’, who were trying to set up a system of checks and balances to preclude big, barely popular change. And who feared a powerful executive.

The Midterm Cancellation proposal gets absurd towards the end, where the authors tack on legislative term limits — an awfully generous 24 years — to counteract the extended terms their proposal requires.

Counteroffer: let’s start with term limits. Real ones.

Break up the incumbency power in our sclerotic Congress; don’t rob the people of biannual input.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.