Columnist George F. Will, Ex-Republican, Goes After Jeff Sessions

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By guest columnist Al Rodbell

George Will gave up his long time registration in the Republican party when it chose their nominee for the Presidency, and unlike many others who protested this at the time, he has not backed down an inch. This is in contrast to the Bush family who all sent Trump their congratulations, and most egregiously Mitt Romney who fawned over him, along with so many other former “neverTrump” Republicans. This has freed Will from any party ideology or concern about how he appears to a target audience of its members. O.K. sure, he’s still a conservative, but unlike V.P. Elect Pence, it’s not first on his list of self identities.

I just came across this article in the Washington Post, where his convoluted writing is as difficult to digest as his ultimate message is enlightening. So, I’m just giving the link, as the headline is also confusing. But it is too important not to amplify here, as it describes something I will even coin a word for, “local fascism” in that unlike the usual meaning of the word that implies the denial of personal liberties coming from the top down, a Fuhrer or a Franco, the local version can occur within a police department, with cooperation from the local DA.

The subject is well described in the Wikipedia article: Civil forfeiture in the United States, giving the history, legal principles, and controversies, perhaps a bit too extensively. What George Will has contributed in his article is showing that Jeff Sessions, as Senator and more importantly, nominee to be the U.S. Attorney General supports this procedure and ignores it’s misuse — a means of police shakedown the extent of which can never be fully documented. Will is now able to do his columns with the freedom to show how both parties can be implicated, as he links an article that shows how Eric Holder’s leadership of the Department of Justice didn’t go far enough to limit the excesses.

Basically, in most states, a police officer can pull you over, and doesn’t have to use force, but just make an arrest, and if he decides that you LetsFixThisCountry dealt with the scourge of local civil forfeiture at length in this article “Law Enforcement Has a License to Steal from You” two years ago.
    

are not wealthy enough to defend a civil lawsuit, confiscate the car without a criminal trial and probably not even a civil one. Will chose to sacrifice ease of reading by making his article somewhat of a puzzle, a device to capture the readers attention that only one with a solid reputation can get away with. He starts by saying that Jeff Sessions (without using his name) is “very unhappy” with (any) criticisms of today’s civil forfeiture practices.

At a 2015 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on forfeiture abuses, (Sessions) said “taking and seizing and forfeiting, through a government judicial process, illegal gains from criminal enterprises is not wrong,” and neither is law enforcement enriching itself from this.

In the manner of the man for whom he soon will work (Donald Trump), this senator (Sessions) asserted an unverifiable number: “95 percent” of forfeitures involve people who have “done nothing in their lives but sell dope.”

This senator (Sessions) said it should not be more difficult for “government to take money from a drug dealer than it is for a businessperson to defend themselves in a lawsuit.” In seizing property suspected of involvement in a crime, government “should not have a burden of proof higher than in a normal civil case.”

Trump ran as the “Law and Order Candidate” which most of took as relating to his not taking “#blacklivesmatter as a problem to be solved, but an attack on those enforcing the law. If you dig into the Wikipedia article, and explore the linked Supreme Court decisions, you will see that even those that support the civil forfeitures are aware of their abuses and want to prevent them as much as possible. Police departments that fund operations on confiscations without due process proving criminal activity are using laws that made complete sense in 16th century on the high seas when a pirate ship was captured. These two points are from Wikipedia: Victims often have “long legal struggles to get their money back”. One estimate was that only one percent of federally taken property is ever returned to their former owners.

It’s good to have George Will, now an independent, using his talents to intelligently address issues that are not targeted to a partisan audience. This cycle of “confirmation bias” underlies the era of “facts no longer matter” and it’s good to see one talented writer who is bucking this.

Addendum:

The single dissent by Justice Paul Stevens in the case of Bennis v. Michigan is a clear explanation of how a valid principle has been misused. This paragraph sums it up:

“While our historical cases establish the propriety of seizing a freighter when its entire cargo consists of smuggled goods, none of them would justify the confiscation of an ocean liner just because one of its passengers sinned while on board. See, e.g., Phile v. Ship Anna, 1 Dall. 197, 206 (C. P. Phila. Cty. 1787) (holding that forfeiture of a ship was inappropriate if an item of contraband hidden on board was “a trifling thing, easily concealed, and which might fairly escape the notice of the captain”); J. W. Goldsmith, Jr. Grant Co. v. United States, 254 U.S. 505, 512 (1921) (expressing doubt about expansive forfeiture applications). The principal use of the car in this case was not to provide a site for petitioner’s husband to carry out forbidden trysts. Indeed, there is no evidence in the record that the car had ever previously been used for a similar purpose. An isolated misuse of a stationary vehicle should not justify the forfeiture of an innocent owner’s property on the theory that it constituted an instrumentality of the crime.”

>                       Al’s other essays can be found at AlRodbell.com.

Putin Would Like You to Forget About Russia’s Election Hacks

It was an adroit public relations ploy by Vladimir Putin, his decision to do nothing in retaliation against President Obama’s expulsion of 35 diplomats and a list of other penalties — and to even invite American diplomats’ kids to the Kremlin to celebrate the New Year and Russian Orthodox Christmas. Angry Obama, peace
loving Putin, if you choose to be fooled. The move was also to dim the memory Russia’s serious act of aggression against the United States, its cyber hacks into the American electoral process, attacks aimed only at Democrats, putting a bear claw on the scale to weight it in Trump’s favor.

But we’d rather not forgot Russia’s actions. They are just the beginning, now that Putin has discovered how easily it was to tamper with American democracy. Let’s review how this happened.

whodunit

All 18 government intelligence groups ultimately concluded that it was the Russians who breached the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign computer systems and gave WikiLeaks thousands of emails to release.

But the damage could have been averted were it not for a stunning tale of ineptitude between the FBI and the DNC told in a remarkable piece of reporting by Eric Lipton, David Sanger and Scott Shane of The New York Times. As far back as September 2015, an FBI agent named Hawkins called the DNC to warn them that their computer system had been compromised by a cyber-espionage team the Bureau called “the Dukes” that was linked to the Russian government. The FBI had for years been trying “to kick the Dukes out of the unclassified email systems of the White House, the State Department and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff”.

A technical consultant to the DNC named Tamene picked up the call. When he found nothing in the Committee’s system, instead of reflecting that he might not have the ability to track Russian malware, he ignored the warning, thinking it might be a prank. The article then recounts that the FBI called several times over the ensuing months during which neither Tamene nor someone from the DNC thought to visit the FBI to ask whether there was an actual agent named Hawkins, nor did Hawkins or others at the FBI think to visit the DNC half a mile across town to strike fear in their hearts about what was happening to their sensitive data and email.
“I did not return his calls, as I had nothing to report”, Mr. Tamene explained in an internal memo, not even when two months later in November Hawkins called the DNC to say that one of its computers was “calling home” — the embedded malware was sending material to Russia. Not until seven months had passed did the DNC bring in cyber experts to seal off the leak. By then a river of information had flowed to the Kremlin.

owning up

 Finally, in June, to get ahead of possible leaks, the DNC revealed to The Washington Post that it had been hacked. The next day an individual calling himself Guccifer 2.0 and claiming to be a Romanian said he had been the hacker, and to prove it posted on the web the Committee’s opposition research paper on Trump. That he rushed to come forward made it seem a diversionary tactic, like a killdeer leading a predator away from its nest. The Russians have been known to use intermediaries so as to provide themselves deniability.

 In July, three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks let loose 44,053 DNC e-mails with 17,761 attachments exposing the hostility of some DNC principals toward Bernie Sanders that forced the resignation of chairman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who was to have run the convention. WikiLeaks releases continued through the summer and into the fall.

 On October 7th, the National Intelligence Director James Clapper and Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson, representing 17 government intelligence groups, formally accused the Russians of being behind the break-ins, and that they had to have been approved by “Russia’s senior-most officials”. That same day, WikiLeaks released 10 years of e-mail from the files of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair.

 Early in December The Washington Post broke the story that the CIA had just met with key senators in a secure room in the Capitol building meant for presenting classified material to tell them its conclusion that the Russians had as their goal not only to erode Americans’ confidence in their electoral process, but that it was “quite clear” from multiple sources that they aimed to help Donald Trump become president by damaging the campaign of Hillary Clinton. The CIA had identified those who had given WikiLeaks the thousands of e-mails as actors already known by the agency to be only “one step” removed from the Russian government. At a press conference, President Obama left no uncertainty, saying, “I will let you make that determination as to whether there are high-level Russian officials who go off rogue and decide to tamper with the U.S. election process without Vladimir Putin knowing about it.”

trump backs russia

Donald Trump’s response was to attack the entire intelligence community. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction”, embracing the side of the most serious controversy of the Iraq War that tried to place all blame on the CIA. The statement continued:

“The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again’.”

The media made sport of that; in fact it ranked 13th from the bottom of the slimmest margins of victory in the nation’s 58 elections.

In an interview with Time magazine, Mr. Trump said about the Russians, “I don’t believe they interfered” in the election. The hacking “could be Russia, and it could be China, and it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey” or, as he said on another occasion, “someone “sitting on their bed who weighs 400 pounds”.

His response to Chris Wallace’s question about Russia committing the hacks on “Fox News Sunday” is worth quoting in full:

“I think it’s ridiculous. I think it’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it. I don’t know why they talk about all sorts of things. Every week it’s another excuse. If you look at the story and you take a look at what they said , there’s great confusion. Nobody really knows. Once they hack, if you don’t catch them in the act, you’re not going to catch them. They have no idea if it’s Russia, or China, or somebody, it could be somebody sitting in a bed someplace. I mean, they have no idea”.

Asked by Wallace why the CIA would put out this story, Trump continued:

“I’m not sure they put it out. I think the Democrats are putting it out because they suffered one of the greatest defeats in the history of politics in this country. Personally, it could be Russia. I don’t really think it is. Who knows. I don’t know either. They don’t know and I don’t know.”

Working from no information at all — he had already refused to sit still for the “presidential daily briefings” — he had nevertheless launched an outright dismissal of all U.S. intelligence agencies. In a kind of desperate ramble, even to the point of saying for a computer hacker to be caught, he must have fingers on the keyboard, Trump had gone over to the Russian side against the agencies on which he must rely for the next four years for knowledge of what secret threats may be emerging against the United States.

bear hug

Running interference for Russia , of course, has added fuel to the swirl of questions about Trump’s connections to the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin. Hadn’t he tacitly revealed his belief that Russia was doing the hacking when he said, “If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30000 emails that are missing”, thus inviting a foreign power to spy on his rival candidate for the presidency? Was that a signal to Putin when Trump said he might not come to the aid of NATO countries who fall behind in paying for their allotted share of military costs?

nothing?

At a rally in Florida in late October Mr. Trump had said, “I have nothing to do with Russia, folks, OK. I’ll give you a written statement. Nothing to do”.
 In 2008, son Donald Jr. told a real estate gathering that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” adding “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
 Several of the President-elect’s staff choices have had Russian connections, most notably campaign manager Paul Manafort, who was forced to resign that post when a ledger of a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine revealed secret payments to him of $12.7 million. NBC News reported that the FBI is looking into the foreign business ties of Manafort.
 Carter Page, picked by Trump as a foreign policy adviser, travels to Russia looking to make energy deals, but is being investigated by the FBI for allegedly meeting while in Moscow in July with two Russians in Putin’s circle who are on the sanctions list.
 Soon to be national security adviser, former general Michael Flynn, was paid by RT — a state run “English-language news channel that brings the Russian view on global news” — for a speech. “I get paid so much”, he said.
 Two days after the election, Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said “there were contacts” between Moscow and Mr. Trump’s campaign. “Quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives,” Mr. Ryabkov said.
Trump’s choice for secretary of state, Exxon-Mobil chief Rex Tillerson, wants to get rid of sanctions levied against Russia for its annexation of Crimea and its incursions into Ukraine because that would free up the company’s $500 billion deal that Tillerson negotiated.

And of course, what raised suspicion originally, the mutual admiration exchange with Putin. Trump reveled in Putin’s calling him “brilliant” last December (which Trump has inflated to “genius” on occasion), although the Russian word uttered by Putin refers not to intelligent but to someone who is bright and colorful. Mr. Trump called Mr. Putin “a strong leader” compared to Obama.

These warm regards have put the media on high alert for what might be going on, so when a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry wrote on Facebook, “This tale of ‘hacks’ resembles a banal brawl between American security officials over spheres of influence,” the media were quick to notice Mr. Trump’s echo a day or so later about American security officials — “They’re fighting among themselves” — when in fact they were in agreement and only differed in interpretations of findings.

Trump supporters have minimized the Russian attacks as something all nations do, pointing out that the U.S. has often meddled in other countries’ affairs. For them the hacks have made a stir only because they are being exploited by Democrats attempting to delegitimize his election. Trump tried to make that so with this mid-December tweet that implied accusing Russia of the hacks was a post-election invention for why Trump won.
That earned a “pants on fire” lie at Politifact; the administration had announced its findings about Russia a month before the election (see earlier timeline), a finding that gave Hillary Clinton the ammunition to call Trump Russia’s “puppet” in the debate that followed.

When asked “How much does Russia’s interference bother you” in a national NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in mid-December, 55% of Americans said “a great deal” or “quite a bit”. But when that result was split by party, 86% of Democrats said “a great deal” or “quite a bit” to that question, whereas only 29% of Republicans felt that way. There should be no partisan difference when the subject is an attack by a foreign power. That dramatic split makes for a powerful proof that Americans are highly susceptible to being told what to think.

the Siberian candidate

There are those who believe all of this can be attributed to Donald Trump’s desire to tamp down the heated relations with Russia, a welcome change in our angry posture against a country that poses an existential threat to the U.S. They would say that we should be unconcerned for Ukraine and countries in Russia’s sphere of influence. We should choose our fights more sensibly and hew only to those affecting America’s national interest.

But then there’ s this: Mother Jones‘s magazine’s investigative unit has learned that a former Western intelligence officer with almost two decades working on Russian intelligence matters was assigned to research Trump’s dealings in Russia and elsewhere by the firm where he now works. His findings would be for the firm’s corporate clients, but he came across information that he regarded as “sufficiently serious” to cause him to write a report for the FBI about “an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit”. Mother Jones said a senior U.S. government official vouched for the researcher as “a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the U.S. government”.

There’s a strong hint that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid knows of this matter. He sent FBI Director James Comey a letter saying, “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government…The public has a right to know this information.”

The report and added memos by the former intelligence officer to the FBI are based on conversations with Russian sources who told him — quoting from the report seen by Mother Jones — that the “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance”. Trump “and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals”. The ex-intelligence officer’s report said that Russian intelligence had “compromised” Trump during his trips to Moscow and could “blackmail him”. He says the FBI’s reaction was “shock and horror”.

Mother Jones editor David Corn says, “We don’t know the details. We don’t know whether the FBI found any legitimacy to the reports, but there have been a lot of business links, a desire to do business and be considered an important person in Russia”. Trump took the Miss Universe contest to Moscow in 2013 which he called “a big, big incredible event” that led him to claim to Fox News, “I know Russia well” this past May. Asked if he had met Putin, he demurred, but added: “I got to meet a lot of people.”

A Quartet of Trump Cabinet Choices

Andy Puzder for Labor Secretary

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If you want a cabinet position, write op-eds for The Wall Street Journal. How else could Trump have come upon Andy Puzder, the CEO of a restaurant chain whom Trump has appointed to be labor secretary. He’s not new to us, though. It has filled us with wonder to watch the Journal give Puzder extraordinary free access to its op-ed page — at one point we counted four submissions in one six month period — to advance the parochial interests of his company, which is always his context. His most recent essay complains that rising health-care premium costs are leaving consumers with less money to dine out, causing a restaurant recession. Eating out should have priority.

We’ve taken on his thinking in these pages more than once, most fully in “Minimum Wage Deniers Still Fighting Reality“. We have several times made the opposite argument for the minimum wage and have derided Puzder’s avarice at the expense of people. In his view, workers need to sacrifice so his restaurants can profit. No matter that those paid the federal minimum wage — it comes to $15,000 a year — must go on food stamps, Medicaid and other government programs to survive. No matter that we taxpayers pay for that and therefore are made to subsidize his restaurants.

As the media has now discovered by unearthing those op-eds, Puzder is against raising the minimum wage, against the healthcare act, against paid sick leave, and against paying for overtime. The Obama administration wants to make a long overdue inflation adjustment to $913 a week as the income level above which employees are considered managers, and below which level people must be paid for overtime. Puzder says workers prefer keeping at $455 a week the threshold above which they are considered managers. He thinks they’d rather forego overtime pay because they value the “prestige” of the “manager” more than the money.

He counters President Obama’s arguing for a $10.10 an hour wage with “Does it really matter if Sally makes $3 more an hour if Suzie has no job?”, a statement false for there being far more Sallys who would benefit from a minimum wage increase than there would be Suzies who lose their job, according to every study of the after-effects of minimum wage increases. The percentage of job loss is very low; the percentage whose lives are improved is great. (By the way, the federal minimum hourly wage had $7.25 of buying power when set in 2009, but that is now $6.43 owing to inflation, and with interest rates poised to rise, buying power will decline more rapidly).

For Puzder, even the minimum wage is apparently too much. The labor department found violations in 60% of his company’s restaurants (Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s), usually for failure to pay even the minimum and for short payment of overtime. He seems to be of a mind with Donald Trump, who said early in the campaign that wages are “too high” in the United States, and is notorious for short-paying his building suppliers.

He may clash with Mr. Trump over his advocacy of mass immigration. We will guess what he has in mind is a cheap pool of labor for his restaurants.

For that matter, the new labor secretary would prefer to get rid of people altogether. In an interview with Business Insider, he rhapsodized over robots: “They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex or race discrimination case… We could have a restaurant…where you order on a kiosk, you pay with a credit or debit card, your order pops up, and you never see a person”. So much for labor’s concerns at the Labor Department.

Tom Price for Health & Human Services

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For health secretary, Trump has chosen a House representative who has drafted a complete replacement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), leaving no doubt that he is allied with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who says, “I can tell you where we’re going to start” the new term. “With a process to repeal and replace Obamacare”.

Trump’s choice is Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon from Georgia, who has received $734,900 in campaign contributions from health, drug and insurance companies. His view of the passage of the ACA was “a dark day for America…our founders are weeping”. The Act was not to make people protect themselves with health insurance, “the true desire of those on the left is to gradually and enticingly move all Americans to Washington-controlled bureaucratic health care”, he said on the House floor in 2007 before Obamacare was enacted.

His solution is to upend the healthcare act with “free-market solutions” set out in his bill called the “Empowering Patients First Act”, which translates to leaving people to find and buy insurance only if they choose to do so and on their own. That eliminates the mandate — the requirement that people buy insurance or pay a penalty — and replaces subsidies with a mix of tax credits and tax-free savings accounts (applicable, however, only to people who have money enough to set aside). The federal government would offer funding to the states for “high risk pools” to help pay for the more seriously ill. That’s what income from the mandate was intended to pay for, so the cost would merely be shifted to taxpayers by a different route.

Companies with over 100 employees will not be required to buy insurance for employees in Price’s plan. Medicaid infusions from the government to the states would be cancelled. The Congressional Budget Office has made no estimate of the plan’s, so its claims of cost savings are blue sky.

With possible but uncertain exceptions — there are already plans to attach strings to coverage for pre-existing conditions — conservatives will thus turn the clock back eight years to restore much the same tangled health system that governments since Truman have tried to fix.

Recognizing that pulling the rug from under the over 20 million people who now have insurance under the ACA will cause howls, the Republican plan is to repeal but delay execution for two years until after the mid-term elections of 2018. That ruse is to hide from the public what is to come that could cost them their seats, but their real hope is that Obamacare’s growing premium costs will bring about their avidly wished for “death spiral” that will cause it to implode on its own. Having had no hand in it (and refusing to entertain any repairs), the Party will just successfully blame its failure on the Democrats.

Scott Pruitt to Head EPA

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The Attorney General of Oklahoma can finally stop suing the Environmental Protection Agency. Donald Trump has appointed him to run it, from which vantage he can reverse decades of policy extending back to when government environmentalism began: Richard Nixon’s signing of the Clean Air Act. He is to head an agency charged with the role of regulating the industry he has made a career of promoting because it will now become an agency that will promote it. Trump’s 100-Day Plan pledges to lift all restrictions on “job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal” (that last doesn’t exist). Pruitt is from the oil patch and a champion of unbridled fossil fuel use. He’s from a state wracked like no other by earthquakes from pumping hydraulic fracturing wastewater down disposal wells. No matter. The announcement of his appointment said “Mr. Pruitt will ensure that we conserve our natural habitats, reserves and resources, while unleashing an energy revolution that will bring vast new wealth to our country”. The two are in direct opposition. We await this miracle.

He has also sued, along with state attorneys general from other fossil fuel producing states, to block the EPA’s recently announced regulations to curtail emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas some 30 times more potent in its entrapment of heat in the atmosphere with leaks from fracking found to be the primary source, and to an extent that outweighs the benefits of natural gas vs. oil. “Scott Pruitt has a record of attacking the environmental protections that EPA is charged with enforcing. He has built his political career by trying to undermine EPA’s mission of environmental protection,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, quoted in The Washington Post.

Pruitt is against the government in general. He has also sued over Dodd-Frank financial reform, has sued to block Obama’s immigration plan, and in yet another suit has claimed that the Affordable Care Act’s requiring Catholic organizations to provide insurance that includes contraceptives to be unconstitutional.

Pruitt is a denier, calling the climate change debate “far from settled”. He joined a coalition of state attorneys general in its suit against the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, the principal Obama-era policy aimed at reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector. He will now be in a position to shut it down. It is not enough that states and their power companies can devise their own plans for how to meet EPA emission targets. This is still federal government abuse of power. Conservative doctrine says policy should rest with the 50 states, each to do as it pleases, which forecloses any national policy to combat climate change or pollution. The irony is that the President-Elect’s vows to restore jobs in the coal industry will go nowhere, nor perhaps will Pruitt’s attempts to kill the Clean Power Plan, because the power industry is already well down the road to either shuttering old coal plants or switching to natural gas.

Betsy DeVos at Education Department

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DeVos, a long time advocate of vouchers and charter schools, presumably will champion the conservative desire to make free choice of schooling the norm. This would bring a complete reorientation to the Education Department. The mission would no longer be support of public education, if Ms DeVos has her way. It is notable that DeVos, a billionaire, has never attended a public school.

In her home state of Michigan, she has lobbied for parents to be able to use public education funds to pay for schools of their choice. It is an understandable response to a public school system that is a national disgrace in the unending grip of the teachers’ union that has resolutely fought merit pay, the dismissal of poor teachers, and every new educational approach — all at the expense of students and to the detriment of the nation’s international standings. What’s different in DeVos’s campaign is that she has advocated not just for charter schools, which are independent but funded with public education money, but wants funding to go to for-profit charters and even parochial schools, the latter crossing the line between church and state. The effect is to drain funds away from the always strapped public school system. Just as with for-profit colleges, we would see private equity funds and corporations chase public dollars with money siphoned off for more costly administrators and advertising to attract students.

Her work has not even gone well in her home state of Michigan. The Washington Post calls her a “force behind the spread of charter schools… most of which have recorded student test scores in reading and math below the state average”. This piece from the Detroit Free Press takes a closer look and concludes the same.

The Common Core movement has marched alongside the charter movement, setting standards to elevate K-12 education, and DeVos has apparently been an advocate. But like Obamacare, carbon regulation, overtime pay and most everything Washington, conservatives want Common Core demolished, even though states are free to adopt or ignore its curriculum standards. So to get Trump’s nod we see DeVos as turncoat, saying at Donald Trump’s victory rally in Grand Rapids, “It’s time to make education great again in this country…finally putting an end to the federal Common Core”. Is “federal” a hedge? Not according to a website she immediately launched her appointment where she says, “Certainly. I am not a supporter” of Common Core. “Period.”

How the Electoral College Distorts Our Democracy

With Hillary Clinton’s majority in the popular vote now beyond 2,800,000, those who voted for her are thoroughly disillusioned by a system that doesn’t look like a democracy at all. They are discovering — the young among them for the first time — that America’s electoral system is rigged indeed, but by an ancient construct called the Electoral College.

The Founders wanted the slave states to join the Union so they acceded to counting slaves — who did not have the right to vote — each as 3/5ths of a person toward a state’s population tally, which awarded a state disproportionate extra votes in the Electoral College relative to non-slave states where only those eligible to vote would be counted.

The Founders also did not fully trust democracy. The Electoral College served as a barrier against the electorate choosing a populist. For that reason, the electors are not bound to vote in league with the voters in their state. They are free to vote as they please, although in present times, virtually none go rogue; they throw all their votes to the candidate that wins the majority in their state. Thus in 2016, in Donald Trump the college itself produced the opposite of the original intent by certifying a populist — defined as an anti-establishment iconoclast with policies designed to appeal to the common person rather than traditional party adherents. “The Founders selected the system in part to moderate the worst impulses of a concentrated majority”, says a Wall Street Journal editorial with no hint of irony. It was those who voted for Clinton who were evidently possessed by their worst impulses.
Demonstrators in Baltimore

hostage to the constitution

Instead of your vote for the presidency awarded directly, the Constitution prescribes that “Each State shall appoint…a Number of Electors” in your stead, and in 48 of the states, all of their votes are given to the winning candidate in those states. Only Maine and Nebraska apportion votes. As with the primaries, if you live in a state where a majority, however slim, vote for the other party, you might as well not exist. Your vote is nullified. You have been disenfranchised. Or you could say it has been stolen and given to the opposing candidate without your consent.

Nothing constitutionally prevents the electors in the various states from apportioning their votes like Maine and Nebraska, contrary to their states’ usual practice, nor prevents them from flipping their state’s vote to the other candidate altogether. A Change.org petition that had been signed by more than 4.3 million people at this writing asks them to do just that, urging Electoral College members to cast their votes for Hillary Clinton. It won’t happen.

flyover states

Because minority votes are not counted at all when all of a state’s votes are handed to the majority candidate, the effect of the Electoral College is for states with foreordained outcomes to be ignored. In 2012, candidates campaigned in only 10 states after the conventions, Romney bypassing Democratic strongholds on the West Coast and the Northeast, and Obama flying over the South and Plains states. The other 40 states never got to see the candidate who took their votes for granted. Why spend resources on states where the minority votes are tossed in the trash?

The same pattern repeated in 2016, with Trump ignoring Democratic strongholds such as California and his own, New York, although toward the end Hillary Clinton, believing herself to be ahead, did take a stab at a couple of Midwest states. The result is lower turnout in the states that only get to watch from the sidelines. Why bother to vote in states where your minority vote is tossed in the trash?

Far more serious is that the Electoral College contrivance makes possible going against the public will and taking the presidency from the candidate who has won the national vote. It happened three times in the 19th Century, lay dormant throughout in the 20th, then struck in 2000 when George W. Bush was declared the winner despite having lost to Al Gore by more than a half million votes, and now has repeated with virulence with Hillary Clinton predicted to gather some 2 million votes more than Donald Trump. This makes a joke of democracy .

The election of 2004 came close. Had 60,000 Ohio votes shifted John Kerry’s way, handing him all of that state’s Electoral College votes, he would have won the presidency despite Bush’s lead of some three million in the popular vote count.

NOT QUITE A DEMOCRACY.

There is widespread dislike of the Electoral College. But as did constitutional originalists such as Antonin Scalia, there are those who cling with idolatrous zeal to every word of this increasingly creaky document from two and a quarter centuries ago. And so, we have absolutists against any change such as Ted Cruz saying, “the founding fathers fought and bled for freedom and then crafted the most miraculous political document ever conceived, our Constitution”. Without the Constitution’s Electoral College provision, “You would not have any real representation of the people who are basically in the middle of the country”, is Utah Senator Orrin Hatch’s concern. “If it was just the large states, we’d be dominated completely.”

Each state is accorded electoral college votes equal to its number of House representatives and its two senators, so what Hatch is really saying is that small states should have greater proportionate weight than larger states. That’s so because their two senator votes are the same as the senator votes of the largest states. At the extremes, the two senator votes fatten California’s electoral count by about 4% but they triple Wyoming’s, which has but one representative. Ditto Montana, the Dakotas, Alaska, Vermont, Delaware and the District of Columbia. Next come five states with two House representatives and four college votes. For them, the senator bonus doubles their heft beyond their population’s proportion to the country. You could that these are the states’ superdelegates.

OUR OSSIFIED CONSTITUTION

There are now calls for a constitutional amendment to do away with the Electoral College, but amendments have become all but impossible in this polarized country, especially one that would require Congress members from the states listed above to vote for principle rather than self-interest. The steep climb that Article V dictates — endorsement by two-thirds of the House and the Senate and then ratification by three-quarters of the state legislatures — has become insurmountable in our now polarized country.

It didn’t used to be that way when there was a country unified in fixing what was not working. Testimony to that is that five amendments were adopted in just the 20 years of 1951 to 1971. That could have been six; a move to abolish the Electoral College in 1970 was filibustered out of consideration by small state senators.

WORKAROUNDS

There is something ludicrous about being so hog-tied by the hoary Constitution that schemes have been hatched to outwit it instead of fixing it. But contrivances have been put forth to do so, given the impossibility of a repeal amendment. States could agree to abolish winner-take-all and split their electoral votes proportionate to the popular vote for each candidate. But the bigger states doing so would, by splitting their votes, empower still further the bloc of small states that would hand all votes to one party.

More vigorous is the proposed National Popular Vote interstate compact. States collectively representing 30% of the Electoral College have so far banded together in an agreement that they will cast all their votes for the candidate who wins the national popular vote, a pledge to become effective once states representing half the college’s votes (270) sign on. Enough further states have pending legislation that would bring the total to 46%.

But all such schemes have problems. Voters would likely challenge their state if it swung all its electoral votes to the national winner when the majority of the state’s voters had voted for the losing candidate. Doesn’t that steal your vote just as does the Electoral College? Actually, it doesn’t, because your vote will have been counted in arriving at the national total. It’s more like a committee changing its vote to unanimous as an expression of unity once the actual vote’s outcome is clear.

The National Popular Vote also overwhelms the holdout states who do not join in the compact, especially the small states with their super-senators. Outsider states would probably build a case against the NPV that it’s somehow unconstitutional for a state to throw all its votes to the candidate that a majority of its citizens voted against.

These defects in our voting practices — they’re just the half of it. We haven’t even touched on gerrymandering and the raft of new state laws that were engineered to throw the vote to one party. Taken all together, it’s a stretch that we call this a democracy, and a wonder why Americans haven’t insisted that it be fixed.

The Invasive Species, Fake News

Stopping the Presses