Can the Blue Wave Breach the GOP Wall?

Stoking anger over Democrats’ treatment of Brett Kavanaugh, dangling another tax cut, announcing an executive order to supersede the Constitution’s citizen-by-birth amendment, sending troops — first 800, then 5,200, now Blue Wave?: August 21: Pundits saying Democrats fell short of a wave seemed to have forgotten what we report here. Voter suppression and the most severe gerrymandering in history certainly acted as a breakwater against the wave. And little mention that Democrats were also running against a roaring economy.
    

15,000 — to stir fear of a Honduran invasion with “unknown Middle Easterners”
— President Trump has been pulling out all the stops to bring Republicans to the polls to keep Democrats from taking control of the House of Representatives.

But Republicans have put together a much stronger strategy. Since taking over governorships and state legislatures in the 2010 midterms, which coincided with the decennial census that gave them the power to redraw electoral maps to their advantage, Republicans have erected a formidable wall of obstacles designed to suppress the Democratic vote. Gerrymandering those maps to pack the most undesirable voters into the fewest districts has been maximized more than ever thanks to computer software. And according to the Brennan Center for Justice, 23 states, predominantly controlled by Republicans, have enacted new voting restrictions since 2010: 13 states have more restrictive voter ID laws, 7 with strict photo ID requirements; 11 have laws making it harder for citizens to register; 6 have cut back on early voting days and hours; and 3 made it harder to restore voting rights to people with past criminal convictions. A running battle has been waged in the courts to try to counter the worst of these laws, but there is no keeping up.

the fraudulent fraud scare

The common thread in all these election laws is the requirement that voters have identification with their photograph on it. The claim is that this is to prevent the fraud of a voter impersonating someone else, a solution to a problem that doesn’t
exist. Many studies prove this. A 2012 investigation by the News21 journalism project looked at all kinds of voter fraud nationwide, including voter impersonation, people voting twice, vote buying, absentee fraud, and voter intimidation. It confirmed that voter impersonation was extremely rare, with just 10 credible cases. The most comprehensive study, conducted by the Loyola Law School, found that among one billion votes cast in all American elections between 2000 and 2014, there were 31 cases of impersonation fraud.

The fraud myth has been so successfully spread by the right-wing that an ABC News poll found that 46% of registered American voters believe that voter fraud occurred “somewhat” or “very” often. Among those who said they’d be voting for Trump, two-thirds held those beliefs.

Fraud, of course, was never the reason for photo ID. The fraud scare was to mask the real intent: to make voting difficult for groups that tend to vote Democratic, namely those in the lower-income stratum who tend disproportionately to be blacks and Hispanics. They are more likely not to have a photo ID and will have difficulty getting one. They may not be able to get time off from work. They may not afford the lost wages in order to go to a government facility such as a motor vehicles office to fill out forms and wait on line while their application is processed.

And if they do persevere, states adopting strict identification laws then make it difficult to qualify. To register, a few such as Kansas, demand proof of citizenship. Wisconsin wants even copies of birth certificates from the authorities of the state where born rather than whatever copy one might have in a personal file. Students being another group that leans Democratic, many states refuse to accept student identity cards, even those issued by the states’ own colleges.

There is cost associated with all these requirements, making them something of a throwback to the Jim Crow era when impediments such as poll taxes and literacy tests kept blacks from voting.

What makes it blatantly evident that photo ID laws are meant to block unwelcome voting groups and have nothing to do with fraud is that no photographic identification is required for absentee ballots. It’s no coincidence that absentee ballots are used mostly by whites.

throwing open the gates

It is one of the Supreme Court’s worst decisions. In 2013 in a typically partisan 5-4 vote, the conservative wing killed two key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. To counter election abuses, the Act had required nine states — almost all in the South — and parts of seven others to first obtain permission from the Justice Department before making changes in their voting laws. In Shelby County v. Holder the Supreme Court ended this “pre-clearance”, with Chief Justice Roberts writing that “things have changed dramatically”, that the litmus tests of the old law no longer fit.

Things hadn’t changed but were about to — and dramatically. Within two hours of the decision, Texas moved to enact a voter identification law that had been blocked only the year before under the Voting Rights Act. Alabama and South Carolina followed suit. One day after the court’s decision, North Carolina put forth a law that would require photo identification, cut back early voting by a week, end same-day registration, increase contribution limits, allow secret money to influence elections, and ban registration drives on Sundays, an after-church tradition for blacks.

All such measures curtail practices mostly convenient to blacks and other minorities who have less freedom than others to register and vote on workdays. Another stratagem is to close polling places in predominantly black or Latino counties. The greater distances and the longer lines at fewer places is designed to discourage people from making the effort. Freed of pre-clearance dictates, Republican states in the 2016 election cut 403 polling places in Texas, 103 in Louisiana, 66 in Alabama, 140 of 200 sites in Arizona, 27 in North Carolina. What will we learn about closures after the 2018 elections?

Court battles ever since.

The Obama administration sued Texas for its restrictive new law. Its requirement of a driver’s license, a military ID, or a passport would disenfranchise some 600,000 mostly black and Latino voters. After losing in a federal appeals court, Texas took its case to the Supreme Court which, as happened in so many cases, sent the case back to the state to fix. But one month in office, the Justice Department under Jeff Sessions dropped its objections and allowed the strict Texas law to proceed.

A federal court decided North Carolina‘s law had been designed “with almost surgical precision” to depress black voter turnout. The Supreme Court agreed. Republican Party officials retaliated by advising local election boards to choose polling places and voting hours inconvenient to minorities and other Democratic-leaning constituents. A proposition on the midterm ballot asks North Carolina voters whether they want photo ID enshrined in the state’s constitution. Its primary sponsor says, “Our state must not tolerate anyone’s vote being threatened because lawmakers failed to prevent fraud”. An extensive audit by the state board of elections of the 2016 election found that, out of almost 4.8 million votes cast, there was one fraudulent vote that probably would have been avoided with a photo ID law.

Court cases against gerrymandered election districts have hardly made a dent, so widespread has become the practice. This spring the Supreme Court passed up three chances to at least set rules to prevent partisan mapping that results in near guarantees which party will win each electoral district. (The court has stepped in only when gerrymandering indicates a strong racial bias).

In Michigan, which Donald Trump won by a slim 11,000 votes out of 4.8 million cast, gerrymandering gave Republicans 9 of 14 seats in the House and a 27 to 11 advantage in the state senate.

In Wisconsin in 2014 and 2016, a 52% majority somehow won for Republicans 63 and 64 of the 99 seats in the state legislature.

Examples like these are legion in the United States. This page has covered gerrymandering repeatedly from as far back as 2012 in “Will Your Vote Count in the Coming Election?” to most recently ” Gerrymandering Is Here to Stay, and the Left Is Locked Out” .

Suits were filed for two of the gerrymandered Wisconsin districts, but in July the Supreme Court turned them aside, resorting to the all-too-frequent dodge that the plaintiffs lacked standing in one, and had waited too long to bring their case in the other.

The Court sidestepped any definitive ruling in Maryland gerrymandering cases, sending them back to the state.

In May of 2017, a federal court told North Carolina to redraw its maps of two congressional districts which it said had been designed to cordon off the black 2C two-thirds held those beliefs.

Fraud, of course, was never the reason for photo ID. The fraud scare was to mask the real intent: to make voting difficult for groups that tend to vote Democratic, namely those in the lower-income stratum who tend disproportionately to be blacks and Hispanics. They are more likely not to have a photo ID and will have difficulty getting one. They may not be able to get time off from work. They may not afford the lost wages in order to go to a government facility such as a motor vehicles office to fill out forms and wait on line while their application is processed.

And if they do persevere, states adopting strict identification laws then make it difficult to qualify. To register, a few such as Kansas, demand proof of citizenship. Wisconsin wants even copies of birth certificates from the authorities of the state where born rather than whatever copy one might have in a personal file. Students being another group that leans Democratic, many states refuse to accept student identity cards, even those issued by the states’ own colleges.

There is cost associated with all these requirements, making them something of a throwback to the Jim Crow era when impediments such as poll taxes and literacy tests kept blacks from voting.

What makes it blatantly evident that photo ID laws are meant to block unwelcome voting groups and have nothing to do with fraud is that no photographic identification is required for absentee ballots. It’s no coincidence that absentee ballots are used mostly by whites.

throwing open the gates

It is one of the Supreme Court’s worst decisions. In 2013 in a typically partisan 5-4 vote, the conservative wing killed two key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. To counter election abuses, the Act had required nine states — almost all in the South — and parts of seven others to first obtain permission from the Justice Department before making changes in their voting laws. In Shelby County v. Holder the Supreme Court ended this “pre-clearance”, with Chief Justice Roberts writing that “things have changed dramatically”, that the litmus tests of the old law no longer fit.

Things hadn’t changed but were about to — and dramatically. Within two hours of the decision, Texas moved to enact a voter identification law that had been blocked only the year before under the Voting Rights Act. Alabama and South Carolina followed suit. One day after the court’s decision, North Carolina put forth a law that would require photo identification, cut back early voting by a week, end same-day registration, increase contribution limits, allow secret money to influence elections, and ban registration drives on Sundays, an after-church tradition for blacks.

All such measures curtail practices mostly convenient to blacks and other minorities who have less freedom than others to register and vote on workdays. Another stratagem is to close polling places in predominantly black or Latino counties. The greater distances and the longer lines at fewer places is designed to discourage people from making the effort. Freed of pre-clearance dictates, Republican states in the 2016 election cut 403 polling places in Texas, 103 in Louisiana, 66 in Alabama, 140 of 200 sites in Arizona, 27 in North Carolina. What will we learn about closures after the 2018 elections?

Court battles ever since.

The Obama administration sued Texas for its restrictive new law. Its requirement of a driver’s license, a military ID, or a passport would disenfranchise some 600,000 mostly black and Latino voters. After losing in a federal appeals court, Texas took its case to the Supreme Court which, as happened in so many cases, sent the case back to the state to fix. But one month in office, the Justice Department under Jeff Sessions dropped its objections and allowed the strict Texas law to proceed.

A federal court decided North Carolina‘s law had been designed “with almost surgical precision” to depress black voter turnout. The Supreme Court agreed. Republican Party officials retaliated by advising local election boards to choose polling places and voting hours inconvenient to minorities and other Democratic-leaning constituents. A proposition on the midterm ballot asks North Carolina voters whether they want photo ID enshrined in the state’s constitution. Its primary sponsor says, “Our state must not tolerate anyone’s vote being threatened because lawmakers failed to prevent fraud”. An extensive audit by the state board of elections of the 2016 election found that, out of almost 4.8 million votes cast, there was one fraudulent vote that probably would have been avoided with a photo ID law.

Court cases against gerrymandered election districts have hardly made a dent, so widespread has become the practice. This spring the Supreme Court passed up three chances to at least set rules to prevent partisan mapping that results in near guarantees which party will win each electoral district. (The court has stepped in only when gerrymandering indicates a strong racial bias).

In Michigan, which Donald Trump won by a slim 11,000 votes out of 4.8 million cast, gerrymandering gave Republicans 9 of 14 seats in the House and a 27 to 11 advantage in the state senate.

In Wisconsin in 2014 and 2016, a 52% majority somehow won for Republicans 63 and 64 of the 99 seats in the state legislature.

Examples like these are legion in the United States. This page has covered gerrymandering repeatedly from as far back as 2012 in “Will Your Vote Count in the Coming Election?” to most recently ” Gerrymandering Is Here to Stay, and the Left Is Locked Out” .

Suits were filed for two of the gerrymandered Wisconsin districts, but in July the Supreme Court turned them aside, resorting to the all-too-frequent dodge that the plaintiffs lacked standing in one, and had waited too long to bring their case in the other.

The Court sidestepped any definitive ruling in Maryland gerrymandering cases, sending them back to the state.

In May of 2017, a federal court told North Carolina to redraw its maps of two congressional districts which it said had been designed to cordon off the black vote. When the redrawn maps were submitted, Common Cause and Democratic voters sued again and the Fourth Circuit appellate court agreed with them. The state took its cases to the Supreme Court which ducked these too, tossing them back to the appellate panel which again rejected the state’s maps on constitutional grounds. But now, two years into this duel, that court has allowed the unconstitutional maps to be used in the November election because time is too short.

In Texas, a federal district court ruled that voter maps the Republican state legislature had drawn were discriminatory against Latino voters. The maps had already been disallowed in 2012 by a Washington DC court, but Texas reinstated them as soon as the Supreme Court eviscerated the 1965 Voting Rights Act’s pre-clearance requirement. The state took the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court which, this June, accepted the unconstitutional maps for use in November.

Republicans have had the power to design the voting districts in 31 states where they control the legislature. In our broken system, the party in power in the legislature is given the tools to keep itself in power. The only check in our check and balance scheme — the justice branch — has shown that it doesn’t want to be involved. That won’t change with a fifth hard-right justice now installed on the Supreme Court. It seems assured that gerrymandering is now so enshrined in the the United States as to be a virtual 28th amendment.

throwing them out…

Ohio has a different strategy. Residents who haven’t voted recently are sent a postcard telling them if they do not respond and then fail to vote in the next four years, the state will cancel their registration. It has purged more than two million of its voters from the state’s rolls this way.

At least six other states have similar laws but Ohio is the most aggressive, pursuing voters as soon as they skip an off-year election and then a midterm, which most voters do given America’s shamefully low turnout rates. The Obama administration challenged, saying this approach runs afoul of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and its purpose of expanding the voter rolls, and that federal laws as well prohibit states from removing people from voter rolls “by reason of the person’s failure to vote”. Voters should be removed only on discovering they have moved or altered their status, such as committing a felony. Once again, the claim is that purges disproportionately target minorities likely to vote Democratic. In Ohio’s three largest counties, for example, voters in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods have been purged at twice the rate of Republican areas.

Then the Trump Justice Department took office. It switched sides and filed a brief with the Supreme Court against the Obama administration suit and in support of Ohio. In June the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 in Ohio’s favor.

…and holding them back

Georgia‘s Secretary of State Brian Kemp may have taken inspiration from Ohio. His purge has taken the form of putting 53,000 registration applications on hold, sitting in his office, subject to a system he instituted called “exact match”, which means if there’s a wrong letter in an address, say, such that it doesn’t match information already on file, an applicant is placed on hold by Kemp and not even notified.

Bad enough, but here’s the rub: Kemp is running for governor, yet has held onto his position as secretary of state, an office that puts him in charge of the election — an election in which he is a candidate! It’s a conflict of interest like no other. His opponent is Stacey Abrams, who just happens to be black. It is she who has attracted these new voters that Kemp is sitting on: Georgia’s population is approximately 32% black, but of the applications in Kemp’s office 70% are black. With little time to go, civil rights groups are suing.

life sentence

Nationwide, six million

Our Obligatory Take on the Kavanaugh Hearing

Donald Trump said reversal of Row v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that gives women the right to abortion, “will happen, automatically” if he were to be elected president and get to appoint justices to the high court. That was October 2016 in a Chris Wallace interview. Two years later, he has the fifth vote in place, but only after a bitter fight for a more than controversial nominee whose presence on the court could diminish its legitimacy in the eyes of the public.

to be expected

Senators on the right decried the Democrats for ruining the life of both Brett Kavanaugh and his family by the last minute sabotage of leaking what Dr. Christine Blasey Ford wanted treated confidentially. Kavanaugh may have figured that, assuming what she said actually happened and though drunk at the time, he had some memory of it, that if it hadn’t come to light after 36 years, it never would. So he ran the risk of subjecting himself and his family to the process of discovery.

He must have known that, once he reached the gates of the Supreme Court, there would be a far greater likelihood of people coming forward
with reports of his drinking to the point of incoherence, and that that could lead to other troublesome recollections. And whereas there was no witness to Dr. Ford’s allegations save for an accomplice, even if he had been too drunk to remember it, Kavanaugh would certainly have known he was the talk of the Old Campus at Yale back then for shoving his penis at Deborah Ramirez.

Yet he took no steps to head off and defuse these incidents by apologizing and trying to explain them away as the regrettable boorishness of his growing up years long left behind. Instead, in his lust to wear the robe of the highest court, he elected to gamble on the embarrassment and humiliation of his wife and children that exposure would bring. It was he and no one else who decided the tack of denying everything, even to the point of lying under oath before Congress. His choices revealed reasons, apart from Dr. Ford’s claims, why many who followed his testimony thought he should not be confirmed.

mind made up

His choice was to come out swinging in his rebuttal statement in the special hearing after Dr. Ford’s testimony. You’ve probably heard it more than once, but for the record here are his first words:

“My family and my name have been permanently destroyed by vicious and false additional accusations. You [looking at the Democratic side of the dais] have replaced advice and consent with search and destroy. Since my nomination in July, there’s been a frenzy on the left to come up with something, anything, to block my confirmation…People have been willing to do anything to make any physical threat against my family, to send any violent e-mail to my wife, to make any kind of allegation against me and against my friends, to blow me up and take me down. You sowed the wind for decades to come. I fear that the whole country will reap the whirlwind. The behavior of several of the Democratic members of this committee at my hearing a few weeks ago was an embarrassment, but at least it was just a good old-fashioned attempt at Borking. Those efforts didn’t work. When I did at least OK enough at the hearings that it looked like I might get confirmed, a new tactic was needed. Some of you were lying in wait and had it ready…A long series of false, last-minute smears designed to scare me and drive me out of the process before any hearing occurred…You’ve tried hard. You’ve given it your all…But your coordinated and well-funded effort to destroy my good name and destroy my family will not drive me out…This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups…And as we all know, in the United States political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around.”

The animus toward Democrats and hints of a left-wing conspiracy, like the one from the right that Hillary Clinton thought stalked her, said that Kavanaugh, hoping to become a judge of the Supreme Court, had already passed judgment and might even have revenge in mind. At this writing, 2,400 law professors had signed a letter saying they did not think so politicized and biased a person as Kavanaugh should be elevated to the Supreme Court. There’s the risk that the people will no longer trust the court.

He had tried to convey a very different image in April of 2015:

“You have to check those political allegiances at the door when you become a judge. You have to shed them…It’s very important at the outset for a judge who wants to be an umpire to avoid any semblance of that partisanship. That’s the first, probably most fundamental thing.”

To offset the rancor and bias he exhibited before the committee, Kavanaugh reiterated this in a Wall Street Journal article just before the confirmation vote.

bodyguard of lies

The legal community, including the American Bar Association, was also troubled by what at least could be called mischaracterizations and others that could be called lies. Most were inconsequential but they were stated under oath, before the Congress of the United States, by a man who will now be a Supreme Court Justice.

Four people had signed affidavits or letters saying they did not recall what Dr. Ford alleged (wrote Mark Judge, present in the room according to Ford) or the party itself (which Ford said was unremarkable, with no reason to remember as nothing had happened to them). But Kavanaugh repeatedly said that the statements “refuted” that the incident or the party ever took place. This was distortion and misrepresentation.

He invented anodyne definitions for terms on his yearbook page such as “devil’s triangle” and “bouf” quickly contradicted as having sexual meanings in general use. The references to a girl named Renate at a sister school appeared 14 times in the yearbook pages of Kavanaugh and classmates. The mentions were to show affection, said Kavanaugh. “It was not related to sex”. But Renate knew what it meant. Apprised now of these yearbook entries, she called them “horrible”, “hurtful”. A classmate recalled a song Kavanaugh had made up and sang while in the school’s hallways that included the lyric, “and you wanna get laid, you can make it with REE NATE”. He said that the character in his friend Mark Judge’s novel about alcohol and drug abuse named Bart O’Kavanaugh was not he, even though he was nicknamed Bart in high school because of a teacher who had mistaken his first name. Even though he had signed a letter for a beach rental with “Bart”. These were lies.

Collins agonistes

Susan Collins (R-Me), in her 50-minute rationalization for voting for Kavanaugh, made it more comfortable for herself by imagining Kavanaugh might become another Anthony Kennedy, and hoping that there won’t be so many 5-4 decisions. She fantasized him as becoming a centrist, paying no attention to his politicized remarks we quoted above that hinted at revenge, nor to his far right judicial record.

But she excoriated whoever leaked the letter that was to have been kept confidential. Had it not been leaked would have been so much more convenient because the public would have learned nothing of Dr. Ford. Before complaining so stridently in behalf of Dr. Ford’s privacy, Collins might have noted that the doctor did voluntarily come before the committee, did she not? She could have refused.

profile in cowardice

Joe Manchin pretended to hold out but, as a Democrat running for re-election in the red state of West Virginia, he didn’t want to be seen as the deciding vote, so he waited until after Susan Collins’ speech before announcing his vote for Kavanaugh. He said he believes Dr. Ford, believes something surely did happen to her, but doesn’t think it was Brett Kavanaugh. Who then, senator? How would you know it was someone else, senator?

Donald Trump Jr. tweeted, “I bet he had another press release ready to go if Collins went the other way”. Now that the White House has Manchin’s vote, we’ll see them attacking him going into the midterms.

nothing to see here

The less-than-weeklong FBI investigation was of course a sham, interviewing only nine people. President Trump has said, “I think the FBI should interview anybody they want, within reason”, but there seemed to be no reason to contact a great many people because they might have information harmful to Kavanaugh’s cause. Deborah Ramirez had supplied a list of 20 to be interviewed; Christine Blasey Ford eight. None were contacted by the FBI. The Senate committee had complained that Dr. Ford had not turned over the notes of her polygraph exam (she had asked for an FBI investigation first). If that was of interest, why didn’t the FBI interview the polygrapher? There had been no pressure on Kavanauagh to take a polygraph test. When it was suggested, he had refused.

hail Caesar

Senate Majority Whip Jon Cornyn (R-Tx) has forgotten that the Senate’s role is to represent the people who send them to Washington. On the Senate floor he said about the vote to take the nomination to the floor,

“Today was important not only because it allowed us to move forward to conclude this confirmation process, but it was important because it showed the United States Senate will not be intimidated. We will not be bullied by the screams of paid protesters and name-calling by the mob”.

Who would conceivably protest unless they were paid? In a democracy we should quietly stay in our homes and accept whatever is decided in the imperium.

just for show

Republican senators repeatedly said that six FBI investigations had not turned up the slightest whiff of malefaction on Kavanaugh’s part, but made no mention that background checks generally stop at age 18 (and are initially based on references that the person being investigated provides).

Proof enough of the age-18 cutoff is that, had the FBI interviewed classmates, they would surely have turned up his reputation of being “frequently incoherently drunk” (per his freshman year roommate Jamie Roche). They would have quickly found Elizabeth Swisher saying “it’s not credible for Judge Kavanaugh to say that he has no memory lapses in the nights he drank to excess” or Lynne Brookes (a registered Republican for what that’s worth) saying, “there had to be a number of nights that he could not remember”. Drinking to excess, and in the early years of life, is neither a dispositive link to sexual assault nor disqualification from being a justice on the Supreme Court, but the two wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post in which they said, “No one should be able to lie their way onto the Supreme Court”. His drinking conduct not showing up at all in the six FBI reports says they weren’t looking.

truth test

As with Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez’ account was dismissed by Republicans on the committee because, in the New Yorker article that reported she had her notified Democratic senators, Ramirez admitted she had been drinking (dormmates were playing a drinking game) and she “acknowledged that there are significant gaps in her memories of the evening” of 36 years ago.

Interesting, though, how a bit of information can stand out to make something convincing. Ms Ramirez told The New Yorker that another male student “yelled down the hall, ‘Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie’s face’….And I remember hearing and being mortified that this was out there”. Ask yourself, if you were inventing an incident, a fabrication to hurt someone, would you have thought of that imaginative fillip to tack on? That had the ring of truth.

Brett Kavanaugh knew that it had more than the ring of truth. NBC News found that he and his backers had contacted former classmates ahead of the New Yorker story to ask them to go on the record in his defense. He’s not on trial, to be sure, but shouldn’t the principle against witness tampering hold as a general rule for a future Supreme Court justice? Another Yale classmate has tried to get to the FBI with copies of these hush messages, but has been ignored. Kavanaugh claimed it was Ramirez “calling around to classmates trying to see if they remembered” the incident.

president low life

Trump, who lacks any sense of decency or shame, and has been accused by 20-or-so women of offenses ranging from groping to rape, attacked Christine Blasey Ford at a political rally in Mississippi where genuinely deplorable Americans laughed and clapped in the stands behind him. You’ve heard and seen what he said, but here interspersed is what Dr. Ford had said in the hearings to make him a liar to boot:

“Thirty-six years ago this happened. I had one beer. Right. I had one beer. Well do you think it was..? Nope! It was one beer. Oh good. How did you get home? I don’t remember. How did you get there? I don’t remember. Where was the place? I don’t remember. (Ford: “In a house in the Bethesda area”). How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. (Ford: “Thirty-six years”). What neighborhood was it in? I don’t know. (Ford: “In the Bethesda area”). Where’s the house? I don’t know. (Ford: “Somewhere between my house and the country club, in that vicinity”). Upstairs, downstairs, where was it? I don’t know. (Ford: “At the top of the stairs. I can sketch a floor plan”). But I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.”

What’s Causing All These Socialists? That’s Easy. Capitalism

The younger generation of Americans is increasingly disenchanted with capitalism. That came to light a couple of years ago when the Institute of Politics at Harvard released a survey that
said more than half of respondents between 18 and 29 do not support capitalism, that one-third support socialism. Only 19% of that age group declared themselves to be capitalists.

The socialism they have in mind does not likely fit the dictionary definition, which calls for the transfer of ownership of the “means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc.” to the people. Rather, they are attracted by the Scandinavian model of universal healthcare, free education, a strong safety net but, let’s not forget, high taxes.

It won’t come as a surprise that it’s Democrats who yearn for this different form of government. Among all age groups, 57% of them have a positive view of socialism (compared to just 16% of Republicans). The percentage of Democrats who have a positive view of capitalism has dropped from 57% to 45% in just two years, says Gallup.

This has been brewing for a time. By 2015 a Gallup poll already reported that confidence in American institutions had “big business” second from the bottom, above only Congress, with only 21% expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in it.

What explains this turnabout? Who can deny that capitalism has made America the most successful nation in history, that free markets have brought millions out of poverty and into lives lived in comfort in a stable society? In the 75 years since World War II Americans have steadfastly believed that democratic capitalism was certainly more in their interest than the other models they’d seen — national socialism in Germany, fascism in Italy, communism in Russia.

So what gall that these millennials and privileged college students should criticize what has been handed to them, ignorant as they are of the toil and sacrifice that went into building the prosperous society that they enjoy without a word of thanks. Those nifty smart phones that the young find essential to life itself are the product of human endeavor “characterized by free enterprise, free markets, private investment, etc., that we call capitalism“, the National Review reminds them.

Except that these ingrates have seen the underside of capitalism. They’ve seen how it can overheat, careen out of control, and in the U.S. produce the highest degree of income inequality of any of the 34 OECD countries. They are aware that since the mid-1960s, after adjustment for inflation, worker paychecks grew by only $1.25 an hour, whereas almost all of the nation’s income gains each year now goes to the top 10%, and the top 1% now owns 20% of the nation’s wealth. They see that whereas in 1978 the CEOs of big companies took home 30 times the pay of their average workers, now the ratio is 271 to 1, says the Economic Policy Institute. That organization showed up the injustice of capitalism when in 2015 it reported that the top nine executives on Apple’s executive team received compensation packages equal to 90,000 Chinese factory workers. And those disenchanted with capitalism may have seen this headline in December: “Aetna CEO in line for $500 Million Payout”, and this would be upon his leaving Aetna after a merger. Compare that with Congress holding the minimun wage at $7.25 an hour since 2009, with no adjustment for inflation, and insisting the poor should work in return for food stamps and Medicaid. Socialism looks a lot fairer than that.

Those who argue for capitalism want to give the newcomers to the planet an education. The oldest among them were born into the Great Depression when “poverty was rampant — real poverty, not lack-of-a-flat-screen-television-set poverty” as the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard puts it. There were daily lines for bread. The unemployment rate hit 25%. World War II then struck. A number of Americans unimaginable today — 418,500 — died. That generation cannot believe today’s whining.

Overcoming such hardship, the United States went on to produce a dazzling array of products — refrigerators and freezers to replace “ice boxes”, washing machines to replace hand wringers, air conditioning to cool entire houses and offices, automobiles that have no rival in the improvement score-keeping, having replaced with quality and reliability cars that were once so prone to breakdowns, part failure and flat tires. And now we have personal computers of every sort, smart phones, the miracle of the Internet — the list of bounty knows no end.

The millennials never experienced life without them. So they take the positives for granted, while mostly seeing the negatives. They experienced the economy crashing in 2008 and a government that rescued the banks, a giant insurer, the car companies with a $700 billion bailout, but did almost nothing for the homeowners foreclosed by those banks, even families of military personnel serving overseas. They saw people treated as expendable, millions of their mortgages stacked into securities by investment banks, filled with loans that people could never afford to repay, the rating agencies paid to bless them with AAA quality anyway, each jumble then sliced into “tranches” to sell to an unsuspecting world until all came crashing down.

They saw neighbors lose their homes and their jobs under capitalism’s wild gyrations. They’ve been living in the fallout since. They famously lived with their parents, unable to afford skyrocketing rent much less house purchases. Marriage and children were postponed as unaffordable. Only now, 10 years later, are jobs easy to find.

But the younger generations are burdened with staggering debt from from a predatory college system that has cashed in on government-issued loans by raising tuitions far beyond the rate of inflation. In 1958, for example, Yale cost about $16,700 in today’s dollars. So how did tuition, room and board get to be $66,900?

With their low pay jobs, if they had one, the healthy among the young were not enthusiastic about the Affordable Care Act’s insistence that they buy insurance, but they probably went slack-jawed to then see government set about dismantling what at least was an attempt to create a healthcare system. And nothing to replace it, so bent on restoring the dysfunctional crazy quilt that preceded it were Republicans. Eyes turned to Denmark, or Sweden. Meanwhile, woebetide contracting an illness that calls for one of the drug companies’ miraculous products that cost from from $26,400 to $96,000 a year (to combat hepatitis C). Or how about $272,000 a year (not a misprint; that’s for cystic fibrosis, and it only modestly helps). Those are U.S. prices. The prices in other countries are a fraction. But, yeah, thanks for the smart phones.

downwardly mobile

Economist Raj Chetty at Harvard showed that capitalism is no longer succeeding for people as it once did, and our younger generations know it. For decades, American kids grew up and achieved a standard of living higher than their parents. But Chetty and his co-authors found that this is no longer true, that upward mobility has stalled. Whereas nine of ten born in 1940 exceeded their parents economically, only half of those born in the 1980s can make that claim. They’ve been hearing that, set back by the lost decade of the Great Recession that followed 2008, they’ll never catch up.

Political scientists Martin Gillens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern came out in 2014 with a renowned study in which they tracked 1,779 policy issues over two decades to see how well various groups influenced the actions of Congress and the executive branch. The results were startling. Economic elites and organized interest groups got their favored policies adopted about half the time; legislation to which they were opposed was defeated nearly all the time. Whereas:

“…the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy”.

That said corporate power had grown under capitalism to the point of oligarchy, with elected officials doing the bidding of big business and their lobbyists to win financial backing for elections, whereas the public has a negligible say in the affairs of the country.

Exhibit A: The tax cuts. Weren’t we planning finally to repair America’s crumbling infrastructure, Mr. President? Instead, young Americans saw tax rates for businesses, big and small, cut by a whopping 40%. The president himself will benefit hugely from the bill he signed that will allow his hundreds of real estate partnerships to be treated as “pass-through” businesses eligible for the 21% business rate rather than the 37% maximum for individuals, a bonanza of who knows how many millions of dollars. The tax cuts will save those in the top 1% an average of $51,140, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, whereas families earning between $48,600 and $86,100 will save just $930.

Moreover, the reduced tax rates for individuals expire after eight years whereas the cuts for businesses are permanent. The tax cuts continue to be very unpopular because the public sees the profound unfairness. They know they’ve been played.

And what are corporations doing with their huge tax windfall? Hiring more? Giving their employees raises? Some did, but more declared one-time bonuses rather than the ongoing cost of pay raises. What companies really did in the six months since tax reform took effect was buy back their own stock. Major American companies such as Apple, Wells Fargo and McDonald’s have embarked on a spree, spending over $700 billion to take chunks of their own stock off the market. That divides the value of a company by fe miracle of the Internet — the list of bounty knows no end.

The millennials never experienced life without them. So they take the positives for granted, while mostly seeing the negatives. They experienced the economy crashing in 2008 and a government that rescued the banks, a giant insurer, the car companies with a $700 billion bailout, but did almost nothing for the homeowners foreclosed by those banks, even families of military personnel serving overseas. They saw people treated as expendable, millions of their mortgages stacked into securities by investment banks, filled with loans that people could never afford to repay, the rating agencies paid to bless them with AAA quality anyway, each jumble then sliced into “tranches” to sell to an unsuspecting world until all came crashing down.

They saw neighbors lose their homes and their jobs under capitalism’s wild gyrations. They’ve been living in the fallout since. They famously lived with their parents, unable to afford skyrocketing rent much less house purchases. Marriage and children were postponed as unaffordable. Only now, 10 years later, are jobs easy to find.

But the younger generations are burdened with staggering debt from from a predatory college system that has cashed in on government-issued loans by raising tuitions far beyond the rate of inflation. In 1958, for example, Yale cost about $16,700 in today’s dollars. So how did tuition, room and board get to be $66,900?

With their low pay jobs, if they had one, the healthy among the young were not enthusiastic about the Affordable Care Act’s insistence that they buy insurance, but they probably went slack-jawed to then see government set about dismantling what at least was an attempt to create a healthcare system. And nothing to replace it, so bent on restoring the dysfunctional crazy quilt that preceded it were Republicans. Eyes turned to Denmark, or Sweden. Meanwhile, woebetide contracting an illness that calls for one of the drug companies’ miraculous products that cost from from $26,400 to $96,000 a year (to combat hepatitis C). Or how about $272,000 a year (not a misprint; that’s for cystic fibrosis, and it only modestly helps). Those are U.S. prices. The prices in other countries are a fraction. But, yeah, thanks for the smart phones.

downwardly mobile

Economist Raj Chetty at Harvard showed that capitalism is no longer succeeding for people as it once did, and our younger generations know it. For decades, American kids grew up and achieved a standard of living higher than their parents. But Chetty and his co-authors found that this is no longer true, that upward mobility has stalled. Whereas nine of ten born in 1940 exceeded their parents economically, only half of those born in the 1980s can make that claim. They’ve been hearing that, set back by the lost decade of the Great Recession that followed 2008, they’ll never catch up.

Political scientists Martin Gillens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern came out in 2014 with a renowned study in which they tracked 1,779 policy issues over two decades to see how well various groups influenced the actions of Congress and the executive branch. The results were startling. Economic elites and organized interest groups got their favored policies adopted about half the time; legislation to which they were opposed was defeated nearly all the time. Whereas%3