Blue Mass Group

1. Incredibly, the Constitution as interpreted by Bush v. Gore (2000), lays out no limitation whatsoever on state legislatures as to the power to pull back (i.e., steal) the choice of electors from the voters.

A federal statute, 3 U.S.C. § 5, as interpreted by William Rehnquist, guarantees that the electors selected in the general election to represent a state will be counted in the Electoral College so long as they are selected under state laws that predate the election and are chosen at least six days before the Electoral College convenes on December 14, without specific requirements that they be chosen by the voters rather than state legislatures.

This is, in my opinion, both because of the idiotic basis of the decision in originalism, and because of the bald politics of that decision, which sped along the process of the delegitimization of judge-made precedent in this country, as commented upon below by John Paul Stevens in his dissent in that 2000 case.

So this would have to be litigated, in the newly stacked federal courts, no less.

The implications we have thus far heard discussed in the media – including in the excellent Atlantic piece yesterday – are merely assessments of the political viability of such an action.

As we should know by now after the Russian issue, Trump is an expert at plowing forward and getting Republican operatives and politicians to follow his lead, no matter how anti-democratic or mad, and getting away with it.

The silence thus far today in response to Trump literally saying “get rid of the ballots” and “there won’t be a transfer,” on the part of Republican governors, Secretaries of State, and state legislators, is the most chilling thing I have yet witnessed in the current struggle for the survival of American democracy.

“Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear.  It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
-Justice John Paul Stevens [Dissent] Bush v. Gore (2000)

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Still undecided on Question 2 for Ranked Choice Voting or don’t know how it works? Watch Elizabeth Warren and Maura Healey explain how it works and why it yields better campaigns and fairer, majority outcomes.

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If you have ever wondered why the Massachusetts legislature is opaque and lethargic, it is a function of the state’s electoral system. Legislators view themselves as immune to any kind of political pressure to get anything done because they are immune to political pressure. 

Consider these facts about Massachusetts elections:

• There are 218 seats (US Senate & House, MA Senate & House, Governor’s Council) on the state ballot in 2020. Prior to the primary, we had 345 candidates file for places on the ballot, roughly 1.6 candidates per seat.
• The September primary eliminated 61 candidates, including nine candidates seeking the MA-04 congressional prize, who were sent home a week before Labor Day. Ballots are now being printed with 284 candidates seeking 218 seats, roughly 1.3 candidates per seat. 18 seats have no Democratic candidate on the ballot, while 152 seats have no Republican. The Green-Rainbow and Libertarian parties are recognized under state election law, and we print primary ballots for these parties in every precinct in the Commonwealth, yet the only candidate on any of these ballots is running for state representative in the Twelfth Worcester district.
• In 28 districts, where Democrats had a primary with multiple candidates, the September 1 primary eliminated all competition, creating an uncontested race in November. This included five districts in which Democrats had three or four candidates on the primary ballot. 
• Democrats had 161 candidates who were uncontested in the primary; 30 primaries featured two candidates. Only 9 races had three or more candidates, and 4 of these had winners receive more than 50% of the vote. The Republicans had 152 seats without a candidate, 60 races with one candidate, and only 6 races had two candidates. There were no Republican primaries with three or more candidates.

How do we fix this?
How do we bring better outcomes in a state that averages 1.3 candidates per seat on the November ballot? Move the primary to May? Adopt a top two primary, so we don’t eliminate all competition in the Democratic primary? Make voting and voter registration easier? Of course not. We put a Ranked Choice Voting question on the ballot.

Actually, we didn’t really put this on the ballot. Texas billionaire John D. Arnold provided the money to put this on the ballot. Mr. Arnold and his wife created Action Now Initiative, a 501(c)(4) organization based in Houston, Texas, that contributed $3,038,850 of the $5.6 million raised by Voter Choice Massachusetts. Voter Choice Massachusetts spent $274,356.81 to collect 111,268 certified signatures to put RCV on the November ballot, that’s $2.47 per signature.

Who is this dark money Texan?
John D. Arnold was an Enron trader, who took an $8 million bonus days before Enron’s bankruptcy. He used that bonus to start an energy trading hedge fund, Centaurus Advisors, LLC. He retired from hedge funding, and is now an advocacy philanthropist, dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into 501(c)(4) SuperPACs. His worth in excess of $3 billion, and gave more than $100 million for charter school advocacy. He spent $250,ooo of that money to support the ballot question to lift the Massachusetts charter school cap in 2016.

Professor Maurice Cunningham was on the Arnold’s money trail in 2018, when they created the Patients for Affordable Drugs Action Independent Expenditure Political Action Committee. The Arnolds were the only contributor to this SuperPAC, and all of their expenditures benefited the re-election campaign of Governor Charles Duane Baker III. 

In a state with an average of 1.3 candidates per seat, in a state badly in need of significant ballot reforms, why is Ranked Choice Voting the option in front of the voters? Because… Texas hedge fund guyJohn D. Arnold paid to put it there.

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From the Pew Research Center:

Overall, whites with a four-year college degree or more education made up 30% of all validated voters. Among these voters, far more (55%) said they voted for Clinton than for Trump (38%). Among the much larger group of white voters who had not completed college (44% of all voters), Trump won by more than two-to-one (64% to 28%)..

Roughly 35% of Americans have a BA or higher.   Prior to the pandemic, unemployment in the USA was under 4%, what economists view as virtually full employment, meaning that the majority of jobs in the USA do not require a college degree.

Democrats see that they got 57% of the college graduate vote in 2016.  Is their hope that more college degrees will result in more votes for Democrats? Is it their hope that the sheepskin on the wall has more influence on voters than the balance in their bank accounts?

Other Democrats are pushing to forgive the college loans.  Again, how does this get more votes?  Sure, maybe that 57% number will go to 60%, but how does this win the votes of the majority of voters who did not go to college and do not have college loans?  Democrats lost this demographic by a wide margin.  How is giving them nothing an incentive to win their vote?

On Biden’s own campaign website, it reads: 12 years of education is no longer enough for American workers to remain competitive and earn a middle class income.   Is the leader of the Democratic Party and our nominee for President of the USA really admitting that a majority of Americans do not deserve middle class wages and are not due the justice of a middle class lifestyle, even though they are working full time in many occupations that our recent pandemic have deemed “Essential”?  Has the world passed them by and is their only hope the possibility of a college degree.  Is the Democratic Party really willing to dismiss the majority of voters who either do not have a college degree or are employed at essential jobs that do not require a college degree and are deemed not worthy of a middle class life?

This is the very liberal elitism that drives so many away from the Democratic Party and into the arms of men like Trump.

As I am reading in The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel,  credentialism is the last acceptable prejudice. Call them people who “cling to God and Guns” or a “Basket of Deplorables”, will not win their votes.  Offering them free college will not win their votes.  Respecting their contribution to society, fighting for wage justice, and insuring that yes, a high school diploma and a solid work ethic is all one needs to live a middle class life in the USA is how to win their votes, and the White House, and the Senate, and all the rest.

As a footnote:  If worker pay had kept pace with productivity gains since 1968, today’s minimum wage would be $24 an hour.  In this world, a minimum wage worker in the USA would be making $48,000 a year.  A young couple in Wisconsin or South Carolina would have a family income of $96,000 a year, more than enough to support themselves and put money aside if they chose to have a family and have one of them work part time while the children were not yet in school.  This is not some fantasy.  This is not socialism or communism….this was the USA of the 1960’s and early 1970’s.

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the savior of the nation, is on fire this evening on the All In with Chris Hayes program on MSNBC.

I met her in 1986. In that 34 years, I have never once heard her more lucid and penetrating in her communication than this evening.

There is something so very beautiful about women shedding the shackles and limitations placed on too many of them early in life, and coming into their own as true forces of nature later in life, as did Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

It seems clear that Nancy Pelosi is fueled by righteous indignation at the criminal negligence of the Trump Administration that has led to 200,930 deaths to date.

Both she and Joe Biden are refusing take the bait of the Dark Eminence’s latest distraction: endless rambling on about his pending Supreme Court nomination.

Pelosi said, “The three issues in this election are healthcare, healthcare, and healthcare.“

But she didn’t stop there. She connected Trump’s response, or non-response, to COVID-19, to the ongoing corruption and dismantling of government in his broader administration. In other words, Pelosi made the connection between giving an ideology of total contempt for all government and all institutions the reins of power, and the massive death that we see all around us.

Imagine where this country would be if we had not taken back the most democratic branch of American government, the House of Representatives, in 2018. It was Pelosi herself, who masterminded candidate recruitment with her leadership team, who shepherded that campaign to the most massive victory in modern history.

If this nation is, in fact, to be saved at all, Nancy Pelosi will eventually be forever remembered as the savior of the American nation.

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