Donald Trump has done something politically smart and substantively revolutionary. He is a Republican presidential candidate running against free trade and, effectively, free markets.
By putting trade at the top of the conversation he elevates the issue on which Hillary Clinton is the most squirrelly, where her position reinforces the message that she will say anything to get power
.. Donald Trump has done something politically smart and substantively revolutionary. He is a Republican presidential candidate running against free trade and, effectively, free markets.
By putting trade at the top of the conversation he elevates the issue on which Hillary Clinton is the most squirrelly, where her position reinforces the message that she will say anything to get power
.. Trump’s only hope is to change the debate from size of government to open/closed.
.. His only hope is to cast his opponents as the right-left establishment that supports open borders, free trade, cosmopolitan culture and global intervention. He would stand as a right-left populist who supports closed borders, trade barriers, local and nationalistic culture and an America First foreign policy
.. But where Trump fails, somebody else will succeed. And that’s where he’s substantively revolutionary. The old size-of-government question was growing increasingly archaic and obsolete. In country after country the main battle lines of debate are evolving toward the open/closed framework.
House Democrats’ Gun-Control Sit-In Turns Into Chaotic Showdown With Republicans
The House chamber on Wednesday became the site of an hours-long sit-in by dozens of House Democrats who defied the Republican majority and demanded that they hold a vote on a gun-control measure before a weeklong recess for Independence Day.
The Democrats — including senior party leaders — plunked down in the well of the chamber, effectively paralyzing all legislative business as they chanted, “No bill, no break!” They took turns making impassioned speeches against gun violence, interspersed with chants demanding a vote on measures to tighten the nation’s gun laws.
But shortly after the sit-in began, Republicans forced the House into recess, cutting off the microphones and the televised feed that broadcasts floor proceedings live on C-Span. Democrats refused to relinquish control of the chamber and enlisted new technology — the Periscope live-stream feature of Twitter — to overcome the Republican blackout.
C-Span picked up the feed and broadcast as if the House was in session, albeit with the unavoidably shaky camerawork by lawmakers using their cellphones.
.. Yet even by the hyperpartisan standards of modern Washington, it was a brazen disruption that underscored the outrage many lawmakers have expressed about the failure of Congress to act in the aftermath of numerous mass shootings.
.. Even if all Senate Democrats and the independents who caucus with them voted in favor, which is hardly assured, at least 14 Republicans would need to agree to reach the 60-vote threshold for advancing the measure. Ms. Collins still seemed far short of that number on Wednesday.
How redistricting turned America from blue to red.
Several other states had chosen to elect their representatives on a statewide basis
.. Henry’s maneuver represents the first instance of congressional gerrymandering, which is impressive considering that Congress did not yet exist.
.. is a system so rigged that it hardly matters anymore who’s running for office
.. “People call us a vast right-wing conspiracy,” Karl Rove told potential donors to the project at an early fund-raiser in Dallas. “But we’re really a half-assed right-wing conspiracy. Now it’s time to get serious.”
.. Levdansky tried to explain that the information in the flyers was false. The appropriation he’d voted for was to help finance a new library at Philadelphia University, and it amounted to just two million dollars. But the truth was no match for redmap.
.. All told, in 2010 Republicans gained nearly seven hundred state legislative seats, which, as a report from redmap crowed, was a larger increase “than either party has seen in modern history.”
.. he party in charge of redistricting tries to “pack” voters from the rival party into as few districts as possible, to minimize the number of seats the opposition is likely to win.
.. So skillfully were the lines drawn that in 2012—when President Obama carried Pennsylvania by three hundred thousand votes and the state’s Democratic congressional candidates collectively outpolled their G.O.P. rivals by nearly a hundred thousand votes—Republicans still won thirteen of Pennsylvania’s eighteen seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
.. “The 2012 election was a huge success for Democrats at the statewide level in Michigan,” they wrote. “Voters elected a Democratic U.S. Senator by more than 20 points and reelected President Obama by almost 10 points.” Still, Republicans ended up with the lion’s share of the state’s congressional seats—nine, to the Democrats’ five.
.. The science of gerrymandering is now so precise that most incumbents’ main fear is a primary challenge, and here the best defense is to play to the lunatic fringe. The net result, as many analysts have noted, is increasing polarization.
.. Daley takes this analysis a half step further, arguing that the control Republicans exercised over the latest round of redistricting is the very reason the Party has lost control over its members. The representatives who make up the House Freedom Caucus—the group that last year forced House Speaker John Boehner to resign—hail from districts so red that the biggest danger they face is being branded insufficiently immoderate.
How American Politics Went Insane
It happened gradually—and until the U.S. figures out how to treat the problem, it will only get worse.
.. . Donald Trump, he said, is “a chaos candidate, and he’d be a chaos president.” Unfortunately for Bush, Trump’s supporters didn’t mind. They liked that about him.
.. Trump, however, didn’t cause the chaos. The chaos caused Trump. What we are seeing is not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome.
.. Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time.
.. Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.
.. A radical who wanted to get into the Senate would need to get past the state legislature, which selected senators; a usurper who wanted to seize the presidency would need to get past the Electoral College, a convocation of elders who chose the president; and so on.
.. Unlike the British parliamentary system, the Constitution makes no provision for holding politicians accountable to one another. A rogue member of Congress can’t be “fired” by his party leaders, as a member of Parliament can; a renegade president cannot be evicted in a vote of no confidence, as a British prime minister can.
.. The middlemen could be undemocratic, high-handed, devious, secretive. But they had one great virtue: They brought order from chaos. They encouraged coordination, interdependency, and mutual accountability. They discouraged solipsistic and antisocial political behavior.
.. The system was hierarchical, but it was not authoritarian. Even the lowliest precinct walker or officeholder had a role and a voice and could expect a reward for loyalty; even the highest party boss had to cater to multiple constituencies and fend off periodic challengers.
.. Though sometimes arrogant, middlemen were not generally elitist. They excelled at organizing and representing unsophisticated voters, as Tammany Hall famously did for the working-class Irish of New York, to the horror of many Progressives who viewed the Irish working class as unfit to govern or even to vote.
.. Primary races now tend to be dominated by highly motivated extremists and interest groups, with the perverse result of leaving moderates and broader, less well-organized constituencies underrepresented.
.. only 17 percent of eligible voters participated in Republican primaries, and only 12 percent in Democratic primaries. In other words, Donald Trump seized the lead in the primary process by winning a mere plurality of a mere fraction of the electorate.
.. “This led to a plentiful supply of quality candidates willing to enter races, since the potential costs of running and losing were largely underwritten by the party organization.” The switch to direct primaries, in which contenders generally self-recruit and succeed or fail on their own account, has produced more oddball and extreme challengers and thereby made general elections less competitive.
.. Walled safely inside their gerrymandered districts, incumbents are insulated from general-election challenges that might pull them toward the political center, but they are perpetually vulnerable to primary challenges from extremists who pull them toward the fringes. Everyone worries about being the next Eric Cantor
.. Campaign-finance rules did stop some egregious transactions, but at a cost: Instead of eliminating money from politics (which is impossible), the rules diverted much of it to private channels.
.. “Stake out a position to the right of where his leaders will end up, criticize them for ignoring him and conservative grass-roots voters, then use the ensuing internecine fight to stoke his presidential bid.” No wonder his colleagues detest him. But Cruz was doing what makes sense in an age of maximal political individualism, and we can safely bet that his success will inspire imitation.
.. Smoke-filled rooms, whatever their disadvantages, were good for brokering complex compromises in which nothing was settled until everything was settled; once gone, they turned out to be difficult to replace.
.. TV cameras, recorded votes, and public markups do increase transparency, but they come at the cost of complicating candid conversations.
.. Pork-barrel spending never really cost very much, and it helped glue Congress together by giving members a kind of currency to trade: You support my pork, and I’ll support yours. Also, because pork was dispensed by powerful appropriations committees with input from senior congressional leaders, it provided a handy way for the leadership to buy votes and reward loyalists.
.. Congress has not passed all its annual appropriations bills in 20 years, and more than $300 billion a year in federal spending goes out the door without proper authorization.
.. Pathogens
donald trump and other viruses