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Ongoing US GOP Debacle Thread: Seditious Republicans march toward authoritarianism

WakeForestRanger said:

RE-districting was a huge part of the conversation within GOP circles during this timeframe. Thanks for posting. Look forward to reading.
 
More detail on the budget agreement here. I would say this more than confirms the adage that Republicans only care about deficits and debt when Democrats are running things. This is going to spell huge government borrowing and most likely increase interest rates. When the next recession hits, it's going to be hard to find ammunition to fight it.
 
The Great Republican Power Grab

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In the next few months, the Supreme Court is expected to rule, at last, on one of the most corrosive practices in modern American democracy — the drawing of legislative district maps to entrench the party in power, no matter how many voters might want a different result. Even as this behavior, known as partisan gerrymandering, has gotten out of control in recent decades, the court has refused to rein it in because, the claim goes, any possible fix lies with the political branches and not the courts.

That’s bunk. The justices will see why if they look at what’s happening in several states where lawmakers have been holding clinics in self-interested mapmaking.

Both Democrats and Republicans draw biased maps, of course — the two cases before the Supreme Court this term make that clear — but modern partisan gerrymandering is mostly the work of Republicans, who control a majority of governorships, as well as the legislative chambers in 32 states. Their efforts to lock in this advantage by any means necessary — including by kneecapping any institutions, including the courts, that try to stop them — are the work of a party that has become, as the political scientists Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann put it in 2012, “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” At stake are not just hundreds of state legislative seats, but also control of the House of Representatives, which Republicans currently hold by a 45-seat margin.

The most shocking case is playing out right now in Pennsylvania, where Republican lawmakers in 2011 created maps so skewed that when Democrats won a majority of the popular vote the following year, it translated into only five of the state’s 18 congressional seats.

Indefensible, right? That’s how the Pennsylvania Supreme Court saw it last month, striking down the maps for “clearly, plainly and palpably” violating the state’s Constitution, and ordering lawmakers to submit new, fairer maps to the governor by Friday. If they don’t, the court will substitute its own nonpartisan maps by Feb. 19, in time for the state’s primary elections in May.

Pennsylvania Republicans are furious. The president pro tempore of the State Senate, Joe Scarnati, refused to comply with the court’s order to turn over data concerning the state’s current district lines, arguing that the justices overstepped their authority. G.O.P. leaders appealed to the United States Supreme Court to block the order, but their request was denied on Monday by Justice Samuel Alito Jr.

When the Supreme Court speaks, that’s usually the end of the matter. Not this time. A Republican legislator this week moved to impeach the five Pennsylvania justices who voted to strike down the maps, on the grounds that they “engaged in misbehavior in office.” Pennsylvania’s judges are elected in partisan campaigns, and all five in the majority are Democrats. The two dissenters are Republicans.

Electing judges, as a practice, is a bad idea that should be done away with nationwide. Still, forcibly removing a judge for making decisions that offend the governing party is, to put it gently, not tolerable in a democracy. It’s a profound threat to the independence of the judiciary and the separation of powers. And yet, thanks to the turbocharged gerrymandering the state’s Republicans managed to pull off seven years ago, they have a large enough majority to do it.

Worse, they are far from alone in their efforts to rig the electoral process. In North Carolina, G.O.P. legislators in 2011 drew such biased districts — one election-law scholar called them the “most brazen and egregious” maps in the country — that they managed to win nine of 13 House seats, despite getting just 49 percent of the statewide popular vote.

Republicans now hold 10 of those 13 seats, but even that wasn’t enough for them, especially after 2016, when voters elected a Democrat, Roy Cooper, as governor and gave liberals a 4-to-3 edge on the State Supreme Court.

Almost immediately, Republicans struck back, stripping the new governor of many powers, attempting to redraw judicial districts, requiring judges to identify their party affiliation on ballots and reducing the size of the state’s Court of Appeals, in order to keep Mr. Cooper from replacing retiring Republicans.

In other words, if you can’t win the game under the existing rules, change the rules.

State and federal courts have ruled against many of these moves, and have invalidated Republican-created district maps and voting laws that were created to thwart black political power in the state. Most significantly, in January a three-judge panel of a federal court struck down North Carolina’s district maps for being “motivated by invidious partisan intent,” and violating the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. But the Supreme Court put that ruling on hold, which means the current Republican-friendly maps will almost certainly be in use for the 2018 midterms.

So this is where we are: Increasingly partisan actors, mainly on the right, are wielding high-end mapmaking tools to lock in their party’s majority for years or longer, then hobbling another branch of government that is trying to rein them in. And the Supreme Court still thinks gerrymandering can be fixed through the political process?
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WakeForestRanger said:
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Low level volunteer. Trump’s never heard of him.

Related:

https://politics.theonion.com/frustrated-hope-hicks-wishing-she-could-find-one-nice-g-1822879296

WASHINGTON—Heartbroken over the resignation of boyfriend Rob Porter from the Trump administration following reports that the now-former White House staff secretary had physically and emotionally abused his ex-wives, White House Communications Director Hope Hicks told reporters Friday she wished only to find one nice guy in the executive branch’s autocratic personality cult. “Every time I think I’ve found someone who shares my values in this legion of totalitarian sociopaths, they turn out to be nowhere near as good a guy as I first thought,” said Hicks, noting that the dating pool of single, oppressive pricks is fairly small, and connecting with a draconian tyrant who is also sweet and caring is increasingly difficult. “I just know the perfect, ruthless monster for me is out there somewhere in this fanatical hive mind of unfeeling narcissists—a selfish, vicious bastard who will sweep me off my feet. I just have to find the one for me.” As of press time, White House sources reported Hicks had been seen making eyes at a male colleague rumored to have good looks, kind eyes, and the appealing personality of a serial killer.
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That liberal rag, The Economist.
 
Not sure where to put this. I guess I’ll just put it here.

Single Mothers Are Not the Problem

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No group is as linked to poverty in the American mind as single mothers. For decades, politicians, journalists and scholars have scrutinized the reasons poor couples fail to use contraception, have children out of wedlock and do not marry.

When the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution formed a bipartisan panel of prominent poverty scholars to write a “Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty” in 2015, its first recommendation was to “promote a new cultural norm surrounding parenthood and marriage.”

The reality, however, is that single motherhood is not the reason we have unusually high poverty in the United States, compared with other rich democracies. In fact, we recently published a study in The American Journal of Sociology, using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, which demonstrates that reducing single motherhood here would not substantially reduce poverty.

Single-mother families are a surprisingly small share of our population. Among households headed by working-age adults, 8.8 percent of people lived in single-mother households in 2013 — the most recent year we were able to analyze. The share of people in single-mother households actually declined from 10.5 percent in 1980 and has increased only modestly since 1970, when it was 7.4 percent. True, compared with other rich democracies, America does have a relatively high portion of families headed by single mothers. Nevertheless, we still fall below Ireland and Britain and are quite similar to Australia and Iceland.

Because fewer people are in single-mother families than you’d think, even large reductions in single motherhood would not substantially reduce poverty. We can illustrate this in two ways. First, what would the poverty rate be if single motherhood in the United States was as common as it is in the typical rich democracy? Second, what would poverty in America be if single motherhood returned to the rate it was in 1970?

If single motherhood in the United States were in the middle of the pack among rich democracies instead of the third highest, poverty among working-age households would be less than 1 percentage point lower — 15.4 percent instead of 16.1 percent. If we returned to the 1970 share of single motherhood, poverty would decline a tiny amount — from 16.1 percent to 15.98. If, magically, there were no single mothers in the United States, the poverty rate would still be 14.8 percent.

What really differentiates rich democracies is the penalty attached to single motherhood. Countries make political choices about how well social policies support single mothers. Our political choices result in families headed by single mothers being 14.3 percent more likely to be poor than other families.

Such a severe penalty is unusual. In a majority of rich democracies, single mothers are not more likely to be poor. Denmark, for example, has chosen to provide universal cash benefits and tax credits for children, publicly subsidized child care and health care, and paid parental leave. Because of these generous social policies, single mothers and their children have a similar level of economic security as other families.

A common knee-jerk reaction against generous social policies for single mothers is that they pose a moral hazard and encourage more single motherhood. The problem with this argument is that it is overwhelmingly contradicted by social science. Did the 1996 welfare reform, which made social policies less generous for single mothers, cause a large reduction in single motherhood? No. Do rich democracies with more generous policies for single mothers have more single mothers? No. Do rich democracies with higher penalties for single motherhood have fewer single mothers? No.

Single motherhood is one of four major risks of poverty, which also include unemployment, low levels of education and forming households at young ages. Our research demonstrates a broader point about the risks of poverty. Poverty in America is not unusually high because more people have more of these risk factors. They are actually less common here than they are in the typical rich democracy, and fewer Americans carry these risks today than they did in 1970 or 1980. Even if one infers that risk factors result from bad choices and behaviors, Americans apparently make fewer such choices and engage in fewer such behaviors than people in other rich democracies or than Americans in the past.

The reality is we have unusually high poverty because we have unusually high penalties for all four of these risk factors. For example, if you lack a high school degree in the United States, it increases the probability of your being in poverty by 16.4 percent. In the 28 other rich democracies, a lack of education increases the probability of poverty by less than 5 percent on average. No other country penalizes the less educated nearly as much as we do.

More generous social policies would reduce the penalty for all four risk factors. In fact, increasing the generosity of American social policies would lower poverty more than increasing high school graduation or employment, and more than decreasing the number of people heading a household at a young age or the number of single mothers. Nor would reducing these penalties encourage people to drop out of high school, be unemployed, form households too young or become single mothers.

Ultimately, there simply aren’t enough single mothers to explain our high poverty. Even if they all married or never had children, poverty would not be substantially lower. We should stop obsessing over how many single mothers there are and stop shaming them.

Instead — even though we all get sick of hearing about how great Scandinavian countries are at handling these issues — we should be following the lead of countries like Denmark. If we did, we could reduce poverty among all American families, including those headed by single mothers. No amount of stigmatization could do the same. Rather than falsely claiming that single motherhood is a major cause of poverty, we should support single mothers in raising America’s children.
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Just heard about this article from a friend of mine. The lead author was one of our old profs back in the day.

This is the right thread for it. One of the most perplexing things about the GOP is how they manage to maintain a pro-life stance while demonizing single women who choose not to have abortions. They don't seem to understand that if they do repeal Roe v. Wade, the most obvious result would be more single moms.
 
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