Friday, October 30, 2020

VOTING RULES

October 30, 2020

I feel compelled to comment on the confusion around the rules for nationwide elections as demonstrated by the spade of legal challenges and court rulings pertaining to the process of electioneering in the different States in America.

We all understand that the Constitution, in its very first Article gives the legislature of each State the right to prescribe the times, places and manner of holding elections, but we now find that the resulting wide variety in rules governing national elections causes uncertainty, disputes, and possible protest and violence. Our confidence in free and fair elections is not well served under these conditions.

I would argue that uniform adoption of the following rules would enhance the process.

·       Election Day is a National Holiday

·       Votes can be cast in person, by mail or hand delivery, or by dropping the ballot in an official drop box

·       Mail-in ballots will be provided only upon request

·       Ballots will be received on Election Day from 6:00 AM until 8:00 PM only at official polling stations.

·       Prior to Election Day, ballots will be received by mail or hand delivery at Board of Election offices or at official drop boxes.

·       Early voting starts 21 days prior to Election Day and stops 2 days before Election Day.

·       Mail-in ballots must be postmarked no less than 2 days before Election Day and received at the Board of Election offices no later than Election Day. Special provisions can be made for military personnel and other government representatives serving overseas.

·       All Boards of Elections will start processing and counting ballots 10 days prior to Election Day.

These simple, uniform rules would ensure that all eligible voters would have ample time and opportunity to cast their ballot in a most convenient way. It would also ensure that the outcome of the election is not unnecessarily delayed because of extended deadlines and diverging admissibility rules between the States.

Preferably, these rules would be adopted voluntarily by the legislatures of all 50 States of the Union, but if that is not feasible, they could be adopted in the form of a Constitutional Amendment.

Friday, October 23, 2020

2024

 October 23, 2020

This will be the last column I’m writing until after the November 3 election. The final presidential debate was held last night and did not deliver any October surprise. It felt like a draw and it probably has not changed any minds. There isn’t much to do with the 2020 election that I have not already written about and with less than two weeks to go in that campaign, I leave it alone, convinced as I am that the outcome has already been baked in with more than 50 million votes already cast and no evidence that anything has been able to cause a dramatic change in the polls, which have been remarkably consistent through all the upheaval we have witnessed so far this year. I truly believe that this election has already been decided, even though the votes have yet to be tallied and we are still in the dark as to the outcome. It still can go either way, but the voters who have not yet submitted their ballot, some 100 million of them, have made up their mind if they will vote and who they will vote for if they do. So, the outcome is pre-ordained. We will just have to wait and see what the oracle of Delphi proclaims.

Therefore, while this time around there is some serious validity to the overused statement that ‘this is the most consequential election of my lifetime’, let’s leave 2020 for what it is and look ahead at the election of 2024, which, after all, is only 4 years away and will be significant in many ways, including the absence of an incumbent. As much as DJT claims to be entitled to a third term, if he wins this year and is still alive in 2024, a third term will stay reserved for FDR only. And with DJT out of the way, Biden, if still alive in 2024, will almost certainly not be renominated by the Democrats even if he would run for a second term, which is unlikely.

The 2024 election will also be significant for the fact that it will have to sort out if the Trump ambush of the Grand Old Party was a one-time hiccup experienced by the Republicans or a lasting takeover of American conservatism. In the same vein, it will force the Democratic Party to sort out if it will position itself center-left in the American political theater or at the far left. We will get a hint of the direction the Democrats will move in the 2022 mid-term election.

To get a view of what we will be facing in 2024, I’ll review three possible outcomes of the 2020 elections:

1.       Trump wins and the Congress stays as it is today

2.       Biden wins, but the GOP keeps control of the Senate

3.       Biden wins and the Democrats control both houses of Congress

I rule out the possibility that Trump wins a second term, but loses control of the Senate. The ‘coattail’ effect of a Trump victory would almost certainly preclude that scenario from developing.

1.       Trump wins and Congress stays as it is today.

This scenario will signal a complete takeover of the Republican Party by the populist Trump fraction and a stunning rejection of the moderate center-left wing of the Democratic Party by the voters. It is a disaster scenario for the health of the American democracy, as it will be seen as a mandate for an authoritarian President on steroids with all the shackles of any Congressional oversight and constraint removed. Assuming that the Democrats will hold on to their majority in the House of Representatives, Trump will continue to rule primarily by executive order and further dismantle the regulatory network that protects our environment, public health, and social support system. He will be given another four years of judicial appointments to further fill the bench with conservative judges, build on his border wall and otherwise restrict immigration. No doubt, he will further distance himself from global institutions and alliances and may even take the USA out of NATO. Another four years of Trump will forever change America’s place in the realm of nations and leave America isolated, bereft of friends and allies.

For 2024, this scenario means that the Trump takeover of the GOP is complete and that the nominee for the 2024 Presidential election will be coming out of the Trump stable, possibly a Trump family member. The ‘Never-Trumpers’ will have to decide if there is still a home for them in the GOP or the time has come to split off and create a new center-right political party. Having been sidelined for eight years, the Democrats will have to scramble to keep their coalition together, settle on fresh new leadership and develop a winning formula for electoral victories down the road.

2.       Biden wins, but the GOP keeps control of the Senate

Although it will feel good to a majority of Americans that Trump has been moved out of the way (and into a world of criminal and civil legal jeopardy), this result will be a Pyrrhus victory for Biden and the Democrats as they will be denied a workable platform for the legislative initiatives they have developed in the platform on which they have campaigned. Assuming that Mitch McConnell will have won his re-election and been able to hold on to the post of majority leader, he will do everything he can to block any proposal coming out of the Democratic House of Representatives, not allowing Biden any wins on taxes, immigration, healthcare or the environment. The GOP strategy will be to convince the voters that the change they wanted could not and would not bear any tangible results, leading to electoral losses for the Democrats in the 2022 mid-term and the 2024 Presidential contest.

Biden will be a lame duck, relegated to governing, much like Trump has done, by executive order and unable to reverse the trend of filling the judiciary with adherents of the Federalist Society. The one area in which Biden would be able to achieve effective change is in foreign policy, where he can start the process of reconciling America with its traditional allies. Failure of the Biden administration to implement its agenda will strengthen the hand of the left wing of the Democratic Party and play in the hands of the GOP. Whether the GOP can take advantage of the Democratic slump will depend on its own capability to reconcile its internal differences between the Trumpers and the establishment Republicans.

3.       Biden wins and the Democrats control both houses of Congress

Only in this scenario will we have an administration that can methodically implement a legislative agenda of change, although it will have to depend on President Biden’s capacity to work across the aisle and get enough moderate Republicans on board with its agenda to secure 60 votes in the Senate. Democrats will, at least for the first two years, have only a slim 1-3 seat majority in the Senate and will have to get Republican support for their initiatives or be forced to trigger the fateful ‘nuclear option’ and eliminate the Senate’s filibuster rule. The Biden administration will be under pressure to move aggressively ahead during its first two years in order to be able to defend and consolidate their hold on Congress, which means that it will have to hold its coalition together and accommodate the left wing of the Democratic Party. In this context, highly contentious issues like Statehood for Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico and expansion of the number of Justices on the Supreme Court will come into play. How well the Biden administration will be able to navigate these troubled waters and come through the 2022 mid-term elections will decide who will represent the Democratic Party in the 2024 Presidential election. In the meantime, the GOP will have to decide if it will jettison the populist experiment with Trump and revert to its traditional conservative creed of small, fiscally responsible, government, free trade, open borders, and global alliances.

Whatever happens, it will be a whole new ballgame in 2024.

Monday, October 5, 2020

FILIBUSTER

I know I’m jumping the gun and may have to eat crow and retract my prediction, but today I’m confident enough in a Biden victory on November 3, that I shift to looking ahead at the realities that will face the Biden administration in his first (and likely only) term in office. After all, it would take more than a miracle to see the incumbent surviving (figuratively speaking) the NYT revelations on his federal income tax returns, his boorish behavior during the first presidential election debate, his own affliction by the virus that he has poo pooed from the start, all resulting in a 14-point deficit in yesterday’s NBC/WSJ poll. The authoritative election forecasting site FiveThirtyEight gives the incumbent only a 18% chance to come out victoriously.

When thinking about the weight of the responsibilities of the office of the President of the United States, we always wonder: “who would want this job”? Now more than ever. In the conclusion of their recently released book “After Trump, Reconstructing the Presidency”, Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith point out that “If the new president takes office in 2021, the nation will face one of the most difficult times in its history.”

The nation will come out of a bruising election campaign, following a most destructive and polarizing Trump presidency. Bauer and Goldsmith contend that “The country will still be coping with a persistent global pandemic and, in addition, it will be struggling with vast economic dislocation, searing national debates about racial injustice, immigration, voting rights, and a deeply polarized political culture.” To that, we should add the extreme inequalities, painfully exposed by the disproportional burden inflicted by the corona virus upon the least fortunate amongst us, both in physical, emotional, and economic terms. As before, these ‘least fortunate’ include first and foremost our racial minorities. Such are the conditions facing the incoming administration on January 20, 2021. And the job will almost certainly fall in the lap of a 77-year-old career politician with not a great problem-solving record.

The dilemma for 2021, and the next administration, is the juxtaposition of the outsize scope and depth of the issues facing the nation and the record level of political polarization. The history of the Obama and Trump administrations shows that only at a time that Congress and the White House are controlled by the same party a major legislative initiative has a chance of passing and becoming law, and so only if it can pass as a measure of ‘budget reconciliation’, which requires only a simple majority in the Senate. This is the way the Affordable Care Act passed in Obama’s second year (before Republicans took control of the Senate) and the Trump tax law passed in Trump’s first year (before Democrats took control of the House of Representatives).

There is a better than even likelihood that, come January 20, 2021, the White House and both chambers of Congress are again controlled by the same party, this time the Democrats. But the matters most in need of legislative action, such as voting rights, immigration, climate change, healthcare, gun control, and the national debt, cannot be addressed by ‘budget reconciliation’ and will, therefore, under the existing rules require 60 votes to come up for debate and a vote in the Senate (the ‘filibuster rule’). We can safely rule out any chance that the Democrats could win the 13 Senate seats required to gain this filibuster proof majority for 2021 (as much as it is unlikely for either party to attain the 60-seat majority at any time in the foreseeable future in a 100 seat Senate). Thus, to govern effectively, Biden’s choice will be to find compromise solutions, for which he can obtain some Republican support, or to throw the ‘filibuster rule’ out of the window.

Even if the Democrats gain a majority in the Senate, chances are that they will still have to contend with Mitch McConnell (then as minority-leader), who has demonstrated to be a masterful tactician in keeping whatever control he has over the process. McConnell will be more than capable to string any talk of bipartisanship along until the midterm elections of 2022, betting that a lack of legislative success of the Biden administration may switch control of Congress again in the GOP favor. He has a record of allowing individual GOP Senators to engage in talks and negotiations with Democratic counterparts, without ever allowing them to bring their proposals to the floor of the Senate for a vote. Such maneuvering will put Biden under immense pressure from his party and public opinion to produce meaningful results in his first two years and before the next mid-term elections. And it may lead him to the conclusion that the only way for him to achieve results is by finalizing the process, started by Harry Reid, and continued by Mitch McConnell, of peeling the onion of the ‘filibuster rule’ and eliminating the qualified majority required in the Senate to advance legislation.

For good reasons, this choice facing the new president is dubbed the ‘nuclear option’. It will blow up the last remaining norm that sets the Senate apart from the House. It will be a choice with fateful, unpredictable, consequences for the future of our system of government. Biden will have to consider ‘what happens when the shoe fits the other foot and Republicans again gain control of Congress’.

On the other hand, he will be tempted to accept the risk involved in breaking with norms and traditions (including the risk of being chased out of office and/or lose control of Congress) for the chance of pushing through wholesale legislative initiatives, which have no chance of passing with the ‘filibuster rule’ in place, and could include offering Statehood to Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico and expanding the number of Justices on the Supreme Court (to compensate for Trump’s insistence on filling the Ruth Bader Ginsburg seat with a conservative nominee). Statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico would add four reliably Democratic seats to the Senate, putting a Republican Senate majority out of reach for a long time. 

Biden has, so far, steadfastly refused to answer any questions on how he might decide this matter, if he gets elected. Understandably so. To do differently, regardless of which way he would go, could easily cost him the election. Most likely he has not made any decision in this respect and will want to see what happens on November 3 and then after January 20, 2021. Will the GOP, after a resounding and humiliating defeat at the polls, be more or less willing to work with the Biden administration on addressing the nation’s most dire problems?

It would be better for our democracy if we can keep the ‘filibuster rule’ in place. The main purpose of the rule is to make sure that the Senate is a deliberative body that invites the majority to find accommodation with the minority by means of dialogue and compromise. Unfortunately, not much of that has worked under the leadership of the last two majority leaders, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell. Are we holding on to a pipe dream?

If the ‘filibuster rule’ falls by the wayside and the Senate is expanded with representatives of D.C. and Puerto Rico, there will be little rationale left for the bicameral system of our legislative branch. And the Electoral College would likely be next to be put in question (though getting rid of that will require a Constitutional Amendment). It will fundamentally and permanently alter the unique system of representative democracy put in place by the founders of the republic. We should think long and hard before embarking on that course.

Biden, and the Democrats at large, should preferably take the long-term view and consider that the demographics of our nation are trending inexorably in their favor. This reality is one of the reasons why the GOP is so focused on voter suppression.

The conclusion is that negotiations on a new voting rights bill should be a high priority for the incoming administration. They would serve as a barometer of the GOP willingness to reach across the aisle and work with the Biden administration and the Democrats on addressing the nation’s needs. If the Republicans decide for intransigency, God help us, it will leave Biden little choice but to pull the trigger and kill the ‘filibuster rule’. He will then be held accountable for toppling another monument of the glorious republic founded in 1776. But the real culprit will be our two-party stalemate and the immutable partisanship blocking the art and science of governing.