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The Global South's View of the Harris-Trump Race
Imperialism and hegemony still rule in the United States. But while Kamala Harris and the Democrats may have their flaws, the alternative of four years of Donald Trump is much worse.
Sep 15, 2024
As the U.S. elections come closer, there is growing pressure on many progressives in the Global South to make our voices heard in support of the candidacy of Kamala Harris. No act on your part is insignificant in these elections, we are told. The votes of your relatives in the United States could spell the difference in a very tight race.
The argument is fairly straightforward. Donald Trump is a threat to democracy in the United States and to the interests of the Global South as well. Harris and the Democrats may have their flaws, but the alternative, four years of Donald Trump, is worse.
Past Democratic administrations, the argument continues, may have failed to bring about a more equal society, rein in Wall Street and Big Tech, and make more progress in promoting the rights of minorities. But under the Democrats, there is at least the space to debate these failures and correct them, racism will not be given a free pass, the climate crisis will be given the urgent attention it requires, and fundamental democratic norms like majority rule in electoral contests will not be brazenly violated. Trump in power is very likely to push hard to bring the United States to the brink of authoritarian rule, if not fascism, and informally his administration’s ruling ideology will be unbridled White supremacy.
I have no quarrel with this assessment that a Harris victory would be in the interest of the majority of people in the United States. It is the claim that a Harris presidency would be better for the Global South than a Trump regime that I find questionable and worth an extended discussion.
Two Parties of Empire
Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have favored an expansive imperialism that has extended US corporate hegemony by force of arms. Both have mobilized the ideology of missionary democracy, or spreading the gospel of western democracy in what they consider the benighted non-Western world, to legitimize imperial expansion. And at certain historical moments, like during the debate to invade Afghanistan in 2001, both have manipulated democratic hysteria to advance the ends of empire.
The record speaks for itself. To take just the most recent examples, only one Democratic member of Congress, Barbara Lee, voted against the resolution authorizing the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite the absence of evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons, the majority of Democratic senators voted to commit U.S. troops to the invasion of Iraq in 2002. And it was a Democratic president, Barack Obama, that led the campaign that, in brazen violation of the principle of national sovereignty, overthrew the Qaddafi government in Libya in 2011, leading eventually to the state of anarchy that has prevailed since then in that country.
Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have favored an expansive imperialism that has extended US corporate hegemony by force of arms.
Of course, there have been some variations in the ways Democrats and Republicans have conducted their empire-building or empire-maintaining activities. Democrats have tended to be more “multilateral” in their approach. They have, in other words, invested more effort in marshalling the United Nations and NATO behind Washington’s imperial adventures than have the Republicans. They have also pushed the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to take the lead in economically disciplining countries of the global South. But the aim is simply to provide the U.S. moves with more legitimacy than would a unilateral exercise of U.S. power, that is, to clothe the iron fist with a velvet glove. These are differences of style that are minor and marginal in terms of their consequences.
Critics from the Global South have rightly pointed out that Obama’s elimination of Qaddafi with the approval of the UN Security Council may have had more “legitimacy” than Bush’s overthrowing of Saddam Hussein via his much denigrated “coalition of the willing,” but the results have been the same: the overthrow via the exercise largely of U.S. power of a legitimate government and the consequent disintegration of a society.
The Great Republican Exodus
Over the last few months, however, there has been an interesting phenomenon. More and more people who played key foreign policy roles in previous Republican administrations have declared their support for the Democratic candidate, first Joe Biden, now Kamala Harris. The most notable recent addition to the Democratic bandwagon is former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was one of the key architects of Bush Jr’s interventionist wars in the Middle East, who recently signed up to support Harris along with daughter Liz. More are expected to defect in the less than two months remaining before the elections.
There are two reasons why former foreign policy hardliners have been leaving the Republican fold. The first is that they can no longer trust Trump, who now has total control of the Republican base. In their view, Trump during his first term weakened the Western alliance that Washington created over the last 78 years by speaking badly of allies and demanding they pay for U.S. protection, declaring the Republican-sponsored invasion of Iraq a mistake, and crossing red lines that the U.S. Cold War elite put in place, the most famous being his stepping across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Korea to talk to Kim Jong Un. More recently, he has repeatedly suggested disapproval of U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine in its war with Russia, while his running mate JD Vance, wants to eliminate aid to Kyiv altogether.
Trump, these Republican deserters feel, is not interested in sticking to the cornerstone of the bipartisan consensus that the U.S. elite, despite their sometimes rancorous quarrels, have adhered to: expanding and maintaining a “liberal” empire via free trade and the free flow of capital—an order promoted under the political canopy of multilateralism, legitimized via an economic ideology of globalization and a political ideology of liberal democracy, and defended by a Western military alliance at the center of which is American power. They worry that Trump is playing to the not insignificant part of his base, pesonified by Vance, that is tired of bearing the costs of empire and see this as one of the key causes of America’s economic decline. They know that what makes “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) attractive to many people is its promise to build a Fortress America that is much, much less engaged with the world and focused on rebuilding the imperial heartland. They are apprehensive that under Trump, the multilateral institutions through which the United States has exercised its power, NATO and the Bretton Woods institutions, would be allowed to wither away. They fear that selective, pragmatic deal-making, like the one Trump tried with Kim Jong-Un, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin, would, instead, become the norm in U.S. diplomacy and unilateral military action rather than allied initiatives via NATO would be the principal means to coerce and discipline the Global South.
The other reason hardline Republicans are engaging in the once-despised practice of crossing party lines is that the Biden administration is now carrying out the kind of aggressive militarized foreign policy once associated with the Bush Jr administration in the Middle East in the 2000s. Biden has given full-throated support to Israel, which the hardline Republicans have sanctified as the only reliable ally in the Middle East, followed Bush Jr’s policy of isolating Russia by supporting Ukraine, reinvigorated NATO after Trump’s morale-sapping bad-mouthing of U.S. allies and expanded the alliance’s reach to the Pacific, and mounted the full-blown containment of China that Bush Jr and Cheney wanted to carry out but had to shelve owing to their need to win Beijing’s participation in their administration’s “war on terror.”
Biden has, in fact, taken the containment of Beijing beyond Trump’s approach of curtailing trade and technology transfers by carrying out the aggressive military encirclement of China. He has done what no other American president had done since the historic 1979 Joint Communique articulating Washington’s “One China Policy,” which is to explicitly commit Washington to a military defense of Taiwan. He has ordered the U.S. Navy to send ships through the 110-mile-wide Taiwan Strait to bait Beijing and deployed five of the 11 U.S. carrier task forces to the Western Pacific. Not surprisingly, his gestures have given the green light to worrisome bellicose rhetoric from the top military brass, like the statement of General Mike Minihan, chief of the U.S. Air Mobility Command, that, “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.”
That the Democratic party elite now has a monopoly of promoting expansive imperialism was in full display during Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech during the Democratic National Convention on August 23, when she accused Trump of abdicating American gobal leadership, seeking to abandon NATO, and encouraging “Putin to invade our allies” and “do whatever the hell they want.” Republican defectors like Cheney and daughter Liz could only cheer when Harris promised to make sure the U.S. armed forces would be “the most lethal fighting force in the world” and committed herself to making sure “that America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century.”
Two Paradigms of Empire…
In sum, what we have in contention on November 5 are two paradigms of empire. One is the old Democratic/Republican expansionist vision of empire that seeks to make the world safe for American capital and American hegemony. The opposing view, that of Trump and JD Vance, his vice presidential pick, considers the empire overextended and proposes an “aggressive defensive” posture appropriate to a superpower in decline. The MAGA approach would disengage from what Trump has called “shithole countries”—meaning most of us in the Global South—and focus more on walling off the core of the empire, North America, from the outside world by radically restricting migration and trade, bringing prodigal American capital back, dispensing with what Trump considers the hypocritical exercise of extending foreign aid and exporting democracy, and abandoning with a vengeance all efforts to address the accelerating global climate crisis (preoccupation with which he considers a fetish of effete liberalism).
As far as the exercise of force is concerned, the MAGA approach would most likely be in the Israeli style of periodic unilateral strikes against selected enemies outside the wall to keep them off balance, without consulting any allies or giving a damn for whatever havoc they cause.
If these are what are on offer in the November 5 elections, then it would be foolish for us in the Global South to take sides since both paradigms are detrimental to our interests.
From Helpless Hostages to Decisive Actors
Still, some say, you have to cut the Democrats some slack. In terms of their composition, Democrats and the Republicans are not, strictly speaking, twin sides of the same imperial coin. Owing to the constraints of the U.S. electoral system, there is a large contingent of progressives whose only political home is the Democratic Party. In terms of values, these folks are our allies. They have more in common with us than with their party’s elite, and they have been, for the most part, ignored and taken for granted by the latter, whose attitude towards them can be summed up as: “You have no choice but to support us.”
This view has merit. But the problem is that, so far, most of these progressive Democratic supporters have passively accepted Harris’ and the party elite’s imperial rhetoric and gestures, like Harris’ refusal to grant the rather modest request of giving a pro-Palestinian Democrat a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention
My sense is that the progressive bloc in the Democratic Party probably underestimates its strength. In the circumstances surrounding these elections in particular, they can transform themselves from helpless hostages to awful policies to significant actors that can force Harris and the party elite to think twice or thrice about embracing the rabidly imperialist platform that Harris enunciated at the convention—but only if they’re bold enough to act on their convictions, like Rep. Barbara Lee did in casting the sole dissenting vote against the war in Afghanistan, an act of great courage that history has vindicated.
Progressive Democrats should realize that the only way to get the party elite to listen and change tack is to organize themselves and like-minded voters to abstain from voting if Harris does not retreat from her imperial platform—which, in a tight race, could effectively throw the elections to Trump. If I understand it correctly, this was the approach that the Uncommitted Movement from Michigan originally planned to follow to force Biden to reverse his pro-genocide policy in Gaza. This strategy is risky, but it can work if the party elite gets the message that the progressives are determined to carry out their threat. Fortune has never rewarded the timid. This is the only way to get the party elite to begin to change course. Otherwise they will act like they’ve always acted, from Clinton to Obama to Biden, which is to take your support for granted and run over you.
Democratic Party progressives have less than two months to go until election day to organize and prove that a Harris presidency would represent less of a threat to the interests of the Global South than a Trump-Vance regime. Unless we get clear proof that Harris has backtracked from her rabid and bellicose imperial posture, we in the Global South would be well advised not to take sides in this dogfight between rival parties of empire.
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Lawmakers Move to Bar Foreign-Owned Corporations From Spending on US Elections
A new bill "closes a glaring loophole opened up by the Supreme's Court disastrous Citizens United decision which allows U.S. companies primarily owned by foreign entities to funnel money into our elections," said Rep. Jamie Raskin.
Jul 11, 2024
Democratic lawmakers on Thursday introduced bills to the U.S. Senate and House seeking to ban corporations that are at least 5% foreign-owned from federal elections spending, drawing praise from advocacy groups.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) introduced the Get Foreign Money Out of U.S. Elections Act to the Senate and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) reintroduced the same bill to the House, with each version gaining co-sponsorship by progressive lawmakers such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
The legislation would, if enacted, dramatically curtail the power of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized unlimited corporate spending on elections, as the vast majority of major corporations have at least 5% foreign ownership.
"Autocrats and oligarchs across the globe have continually tried to control the outcome of U.S. elections, diluting the voices of citizens and undermining American democracy," Raskin said in a statement. "Our legislation closes a glaring loophole opened up by the Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United decision which allows U.S. companies primarily owned by foreign entities to funnel money into our elections."
BREAKING: @RepRaskin and @SenWhitehouse are re-introducing a bill to stop foreign-influenced corporations from spending money in our elections. pic.twitter.com/hfrlIRHNHM
— Free Speech For People (@FSFP) July 11, 2024
The bill would ban firms with either 5% of foreign ownership in aggregate or 1% ownership by a single foreign entity from electoral spending. The Center for American Progress (CAP) argued for those ownership thresholds in a 2019 report, which found that 98% of S&P 500 firms it analyzed had at least 5% foreign ownership.
Foreign ownership of U.S. corporations comes in many forms. Shell USA is a subsidiary of the oil major headquartered in London, but in other cases foreign investment or ownership is less obvious. Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund has stakes in several U.S. companies including Uber. As of 2020, about 40% of U.S. corporate stock was owned by foreigners, according to CAP.
The Whitehouse and Raskin law would only apply to federal elections, but certain states and cities have started to take similar action. Minnesota passed effectively the same bill—using the 5% and 1% thresholds—last year, in what a state official called the "Mount Rushmore" of electoral reform bills. The cities of Seattle and San Jose have passed similar bills.
Such legislation appears to have strong public support: 82% of likely voters agree that "there should be new limits on U.S. corporations spending money in our elections if the corporations have any foreign ownership," according to a Data for Progress poll released Wednesday.
A number of advocacy groups—including CAP, Common Cause, Free Speech for People, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and End Citizens United/Let America Vote Action Fund—expressed support for the new bill.
Ben Olinsky, a senior vice president at CAP, called it "commonsense legislation" that closes "a dangerous loophole opened by Citizens United and prohibit[s] political spending by foreign-influenced U.S. corporations" in a statement.
Alexandra Flores-Quilty, campaign director at Free Speech for People, said in a statement that the bill "puts our democracy back into the hands of the people where it belongs."
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'Our Democracy Demands It': Rights Groups Cheer as Dems Revive Freedom to Vote Act
"We are in dangerous territory," warned one activist. "We must enshrine our democratic freedoms in federal legislation that would blunt the multipronged attacks on our democracy."
Jul 18, 2023
Democracy defenders on Tuesday applauded as Democratic leaders from both chambers of Congress came together to reintroduce the Freedom to Vote Act, which aims to improve voter access and electoral administration, boost election integrity, and increase civic participation and empowerment.
"Today’s introduction of the Freedom to Vote Act is the first step to injecting a renewed commitment to democratic principles," said Christine Wood and Allison Pulliam, co-directors of the Declaration for American Democracy coalition. "We believe every eligible voter should have their vote counted, every candidate should be able to run without caving in to big influence and big money, and every elected official should be beholden to constituents first."
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) joined the bill's sponsors—Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.)—and other Democrats for a Tuesday press conference, during which they condemned MAGA Republicans' attacks on U.S. democracy.
"These attacks demand a federal response," said Klobuchar. "The Freedom to Vote Act will set basic national standards to make sure all Americans can cast their ballots in the way that works best for them, regardless of what ZIP code they live in. This bill will ensure Americans can request a mail-in ballot and have access to drop boxes, have at least two weeks of early voting, and can register to vote on Election Day."
"It's past time for Congress to act and protect Americans' freedom to vote."
While the bill is unlikely to reach the desk of President Joe Biden—who is running for reelection—during this term, given the GOP-controlled House and divided Senate hamstrung by the filibuster, campaigners echoed Democrats' assertions of the need for the bill's reforms.
"It has been 10 years since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted voting rights, and two years since a president attempted to overturn the will of voters to remain in power," noted Public Citizen executive vice president Lisa Gilbert—calling out former President Donald Trump, who is seeking the GOP's 2024 nomination despite inciting the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
"Between the Shelby v. Holder decision and extremists in Congress and state houses—supported by wealthy interests who don't want democracy—we are in dangerous territory," Gilbert warned. "We must enshrine our democratic freedoms in federal legislation that would blunt the multipronged attacks on our democracy."
Stand Up America founder and president Sean Eldridge agreed, declaring that "it's past time for Congress to act and protect Americans' freedom to vote. As MAGA Republicans continue to erect barriers to the ballot box, particularly for communities of color, we need national standards to ensure voting access for every American, no matter where they live."
Cliff Albright, co-founder and executive director of Black Voters Matter, said that "the reintroduction of the Freedom to Vote Act is essential to overcoming the obstacles of new voter suppression laws we see taking shape every day in states like Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. In addition to the wave of voter suppression laws seen in 2021 and 2022, this year has seen hundreds of additional voter suppression bills attempted, and at least 11 states have passed such restrictions."
"Just yesterday, lawmakers in Alabama voted to advance a new congressional map that does not include a second majority-Black district, completely ignoring the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling that mandates the state's maps must include this majority-Black district," he pointed out. "The fight for our rights is playing out on the state level and continues to permeate our daily lives in the South. That is why national legislation that is pro-voter and anti-corruption is absolutely necessary at this moment in history."
A coalition of climate and environmental groups—Clean Water Action, Climate Hawks Vote, Earthjustice, Endangered Species Coalition, Greenpeace USA, Interfaith Power & Light, League of Conservation Voters, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, and WE ACT for Environmental Justice—also celebrated the bill's reintroduction.
"While we recognize that our democracy has never truly worked for all Americans, the Freedom to Vote Act will help move us closer to the mountaintop, where every American has equitable access to the ballot, and a brighter light will shine on the fossil fuel billionaires and corporations who pour big money into anti-environmental politicians and misleading ads hampering our ability to combat the climate crisis," the coalition said.
Trevor Potter, president of Campaign Legal Center and a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, highlighted that "the aims of the Freedom to Vote Act—prohibiting partisan gerrymandering, protecting the freedom to vote, and increasing the transparency of money spent in federal elections—are supported by a significant majority of Americans, regardless of party."
While opposition to the Freedom to Vote Act has mostly come from GOP lawmakers, some Democrats have helped block it. Early last year, Democratic right-wing Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), who is suspected of considering a 2024 presidential run, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), who switched from Democrat to Independent in December, teamed up with Republicans to kill a proposed change to the Senate filibuster that would have cleared the way for passing a voting rights package.
At the time, lawmakers were fighting to pass a megabill that included not only the Freedom to Vote Act but also the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, legislation named for a late Democratic congressman and civil rights icon. Some campaigners also emphasized the importance of the latter on Tuesday.
"Along with the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act's protections against racial discrimination, the Freedom to Vote Act has the best solutions available to strengthen our democracy for all," asserted Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. "Congress must advance the Freedom to Vote Act. Our democracy demands it."
Leslie Proll, senior director of the voting rights program at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, similarly stressed the importance of both bills.
"We urge both chambers of Congress to pass the Freedom to Vote Act so we can build a multiracial democracy that works for all of us," said Proll. "We also look forward to Congress reintroducing and passing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to restore and strengthen the Voting Rights Act."
Common Cause interim co-president Marilyn Carpinteyro on Tuesday sent a letter to all members of Congress on behalf of her group and its more than 1.5 million members and supporters "in strong support of the Freedom to Vote Act and in strong opposition to the 'American Confidence in Elections' (ACE) Act," which was introduced by House Republicans earlier this month.
"The ACE Act is a giant step backward and would silence the voices of everyday Americans by putting up barriers to voting and by allowing millions of dollars more in secret money to infiltrate our political system," Carpinteyro wrote. "To strengthen free and fair elections and help get big, secret money out of politics, Congress must instead pass the Freedom to Vote Act."
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In 'Very Big Deal for the Survival of Our Democracy,' SCOTUS Rejects Fringe Legal Theory
By ruling against the independent state legislature theory, said one activist, "the U.S. Supreme Court made clear that state courts and state constitutions should serve as a critical check against abuses of power by legislators."
Jun 27, 2023
Democracy defenders across the United States on Tuesday breathed a collective sigh of relief after half of the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority joined with the three liberal justices to reject a "dangerous" legal theory that could dramatically impact federal elections.
"The Supreme Court took an important and crucial step today in protecting our system of checks and balances," said Hilary Harris Klein, senior counsel for voting rights at Southern Coalition for Social Justice. "Today's decision will ensure that voters will continue to have the full protection of state constitutions against harmful and anti-democratic voter suppression and election manipulation."
Oral arguments for Moore v. Harper in December had some campaigners worried that at least five justices would embrace the independent state legislature theory (ISLT), whose proponents claim the U.S. Constitution only empowers state legislatures to regulate federal elections, without checks from state constitutions, courts, or governors.
However, in the case—which stemmed from a fight over North Carolina's congressional map—Chief Justice John Roberts, fellow conservatives Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, and liberals Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor rejected the ISLT. Right-wing Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
The elections clause of the U.S. Constitution "does not vest exclusive and independent authority in state legislatures to set the rules regarding federal elections," Roberts wrote for the majority. "When state legislatures prescribe the rules concerning federal elections, they remain subject to the ordinary exercise of state judicial review."
"When a state legislature carries out its federal constitutional power to prescribe rules regulating federal elections, it acts both as a lawmaking body created and bound by its state constitution, and as the entity assigned particular authority by the federal Constitution," he continued. "Both constitutions restrain the state legislature's exercise of power."
"Although the elections clause does not exempt state legislatures from the ordinary constraints imposed by state law, federal courts must not abandon their duty to exercise judicial review," Roberts added. "This court has an obligation to ensure that state court interpretations of state law do not evade federal law."
Both the majority opinion and campaigners pointed to precedent. Fair Elections Center litigation director Jon Sherman said that "for 233 years and counting, no court has ever found that state election laws are unconstrained by state constitutional requirements, because this is a fantasy that is antithetical to our system of government."
Elias Law Group partner Abha Khanna, counsel of record for the plaintiffs, called the 6-3 decision "a resounding victory for free and fair elections in the United States."
The ISLT "is a dangerous, fringe legal theory that has no place in our democracy," Khanna said. "In its most extreme form, the independent state legislature theory could have weakened the foundation of our democracy, removing a crucial check on state legislatures and making it easier for rogue legislators to enact policies that suppress voters and subvert elections without adequate oversight from state court."
The case was argued in the wake of former President Donald Trump—who is seeking the Republican nomination for 2024—and his supporters refusing the accept the results of the 2020 election, which led to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Notably, two of the three Trump-appointed justices, Barrett and Kavanaugh, rejected the ISLT.
While celebrating the new ruling as "a historic victory for the people of North Carolina and for American democracy," Bob Phillips, Common Cause North Carolina's executive director, also looked ahead.
"Today, the U.S. Supreme Court made clear that state courts and state constitutions should serve as a critical check against abuses of power by legislators," he said. "Now, we must ensure our state courts fulfill their duty to protect our freedoms against attacks by extremist politicians."
Campaign Legal Center senior vice president Paul Smith similarly said that "while the Supreme Court's ruling is a victory for democracy, the fight for fair maps in North Carolina and across the country is far from over," and vowed his group "will continue fighting for fair maps so voters can feel confident that they choose their representatives, not the other way around."
Common Cause vice president of programs Kathay Feng highlighted that there is also work to be done at the national level, saying that "now Congress must act and pass long overdue protections for voters, so that we can put an end once and for all to the persistent attempts to undermine and restrict our right to vote."
Since the election chaos of 2020, the U.S. Senate's filibuster rule, right-wing obstructionist Democrats, and Republicans reclaiming control of the House of Representatives have impeded the passage of national voting rights legislation, as GOP state legislators have continued voter suppression efforts across the country.
Still, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday pledged to keep up the fight, quoting the late civil rights icon and Democratic Congressman John Lewis, for whom a key voting rights package is named.
"Today those who support democracy, fair elections and the rule of law can stand a bit taller," Schumer said of the Moore decision. "There is still much work to do to protect American democracy. As John Lewis said, 'Democracy is not a state. It is an act,' which is why Senate Democrats will continue to fight for free and fair elections."
Campaigners in recent years have urged Congress to act on not only voting rights legislation but also Supreme Court reforms.
"Today marks a rare example of our politicized court falling on the right side of history," said Carrol Olinger, Fayetteville director at Action N.C., a Center for Popular Democracy Action affiliate. "This decision was too close of a call, and there was far too much at stake. It is essential to recognize that the need for crucial court reforms remains."
Take Back the Court Action Fund president Sarah Lipton-Lubet agreed. "The fact that this case wasn't laughed out of the court is a sign of how far we have fallen," she said. "Worse, the right-wing justices crowned themselves the ultimate arbiters of future state election disputes. Don't be surprised if we see Bush v. Gore 2.0 in 2024 or beyond."
"What rulings like this one actually highlight is just how afraid Roberts is of the momentum behind Court reform—and how far he'll go to try to quell our power," she added. "The bar for a 'victory' with this court is on the floor. We deserve better. We deserve a judiciary that puts the American people first. And we can only get it if we expand the court."
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'Debt Limit Chicken' Is a Direct Result of Anti-Democratic US House Elections
"Brinkmanship and crises aren't random accidents in our democracy—they are inevitable outcomes of an electoral system that incentivizes and rewards them," says a new Fix Our House report.
May 10, 2023
Amid rising fears that Republican lawmakers could soon force a catastrophic U.S. default, Fix Our House on Wednesday released a report arguing that "Congress lacks the incentive structure necessary to responsibly handle crucial tasks like raising the debt limit."
The release comes between a pair of meetings at the White House. After sitting down with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday, President Joe Biden told reporters they plan to come together again on Friday.
Biden and congressional Democrats are calling for a clean bill and stressing that GOP lawmakers took action on the debt ceiling three times under former President Donald Trump. However, House Republicans continue to hold the global economy hostage, demanding massive spending cuts that would affect working families—as demonstrated by their recent passage of the so-called Limit, Save, Grow Act, which would increase the debt limit by $1.5 trillion or until March 31, 2024, whichever comes first.
Some fearful of a default—or even coming precariously close to one, given warnings that the deadline could be as soon as June 1—have pushed the president to take unilateral action, but Biden on Tuesday downplayed perhaps the most popular option: invoking part of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to keep paying the nation's bills.
"Just like in 2011 and 2013, Washington will hopefully find a way to avoid disaster. Whatever happens, one thing is certain: Brinkmanship and crises aren't random accidents in our democracy—they are inevitable outcomes of an electoral system that incentivizes and rewards them," states the report from Fix Our House, which advocates for proportional representation.
The report—Debt Limit Chicken: Why Washington Plays Games With Disaster—criticizes "the winner-take-all election rules that make performative conflict easy and compromise difficult" along with calling for the creation of "a more functional electoral system that would disincentivize Congress from playing death-defying stunts with the full faith and credit of the U.S."
"The overwhelming majority of congressional districts are not competitive between the two parties," the report explains.
Citing another recently released Fix Our House publication, the document details that "90% of House elections last fall were decided by a margin greater than five percentage points. About 83% had a margin greater than 10 points. Landslides are normal; the average margin of victory in 2022 was 27.7% for Democrats and 30.2% for Republicans."
Although both parties have been accused of gerrymandering, since Republicans won narrow control of the House in the wake of redistricting last November—leading to a 222-213 divide in the lower chamber—experts have highlighted how current political maps served the GOP, and may continue to do so if they are not challenged in court.
The new report includes a section dedicated to the "five families" of the fractured House GOP: the Republican Study Committee, Republican Main Street Caucus, Republican Governance Group, Freedom Caucus, and Problem Solvers Caucus.
"As with the rest of the House, the overwhelming majority of the members of the five families don't face competitive general elections," the publication points out. "The average margin of victory for the members of each major caucus was a blowout election."
"In uncompetitive districts, the potential to be primaried is a much greater concern than a general election challenge," Fix Our House Co-Founder Lee Drutman said in a statement Wednesday. "That motivates representatives to focus on pleasing their voting base and disincentivizes compromise for fear of appearing too weak on 'the enemy."
"This problem is unique to America's outmoded system of single-member districts," Drutman added, "and it's only getting worse as urban-rural polarization makes it even harder to draw competitive districts."
As the report puts it, "gerrymandering is a huge problem," but it is not the only barrier to having 435 competitive districts.
"Rural voters are increasingly trending more to the right, and urban voters more to the left," the document says. "Voters are increasingly moving to places that better reflect their ideology. Red areas are getting redder, and blue areas are getting bluer."
"Even if the most fair-minded saints were drawing our congressional district maps, we would still have mostly uncompetitive districts," the report stresses. "And within the current system that we use to elect Congress, nothing can be done about it."
The report also emphasizes that "winner-take-all single-winner districts are not inevitable, and they are not in the Constitution."
In fact, "the Constitution specifically empowers Congress with the ability to change how its elections work, something Congress has done many times," the publication continues, urging federal lawmakers to pursue proportional representation.
Used by 80% of the world's democracies, proportional representation "disincentivizes binary conflict and showmanship and instead incentivizes coalition-building and compromise," the report states.
As the document explains:
Put simply, proportional representation is a system where a political party's share of votes in an election determines how many seats it holds in the legislature. Instead of each district electing one representative, a state divides into larger regions that each elect several representatives. The size of Congress—435 members—can be increased, or it can remain the same.
In a proportional system, voters can support multiple candidates, and each party wins seats in proportion to its share of the votes cast. For instance, if a region elects three representatives and the vote is 65% for Republicans and 35% for Democrats, it would elect two Republicans and one Democrat.
The existing U.S. system incentivizes "the us-vs-them conflict at the heart of the debt limit issue," the report concludes. "Thanks to the ever-escalating doom loop of polarization and dysfunction, the problem is worse than ever and will only grow more intractable. If we want to address this systemic problem, we need to look at systemic solutions."
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Why the Rest of the World Should Get a Vote in the Greatest Reality TV Show on Earth - the US Election
I've been watching so closely, I am now able to tell Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio apart almost 50 per cent of the time, though it’s still like watching the Chuckle Brothers trying to lead a fascist rally.
Feb 19, 2016
We're only halfway through, and I'm already sick of the US presidential race. As reality television goes, it's a hackneyed format. The narrative is childish and simplistic. And suppose I want to watch a bunch of interchangeable thuggish white men and the occasional token minority making terrifying pronouncements to a pounding rock soundtrack. In that case, I'll stick on a Tarantino film.
American commentators often point out that the whole two-year, multibillion-dollar pageant is a great way to distract the entire US electorate from the real-life daily process of democracy. Imagine how the rest of us feel. We're not even allowed to vote and help decide which candidate gets to go home with all those fabulous prizes, which include a free plane and the largest military arsenal the world has ever known. What can I say? It's America. They have high expectations. In Britain, whoever Rupert Murdoch picks is usually excited to meet the Queen.
"The presidential race would be embarrassing even if it weren't supposed to dramatize the proper function of politics in the world's only democratic superpower."
I've tuned in for the past five series of this horror show, and I've got to say, it's getting tiresome. It picked up in 2008 when they made some genuinely progressive casting decisions. The 2012 one repeated a lot of the same material, but the writers' strike was on and the producers had to work with what they'd got. But in recent years, they seem to have broken entirely with the reality aspect and just attempted to glue us to the screens with unremitting horror and the possibility that one of the contestants might start screaming and try to eat the others.
The same thing happened on Big Brother, where the first few seasons were truly engaging, partly because they featured at least some ordinary people who occasionally forgot they were on television. But then they tried to boost ratings by filling a bunker with G-list celebrities wearing DayGlo spray tans who smiled all the time and tried to get them to have sex or kill one another on camera.
In both politics and entertainment, there's nothing wrong with a bit of shock value, as long as it isn't replacing actual content. The presidential race would be embarrassing even if it weren't supposed to dramatize the proper function of politics in the world's only democratic superpower.
America does seem, at times, to forget that it's on camera and the entire world can see when it strips naked and rants at itself in the mirror. Guys, everyone can see you seriously considering leadership by a man who calls global warming a "hoax" and wants to build a border wall out of Muslims.
I've been paying as much attention to the Republican race as I can stand, and I am now able to tell Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio apart almost 50 per cent of the time, though it's still like watching the Chuckle Brothers trying to lead a fascist rally. The candidates appear to be competing to deliver the most unhinged bigotry. Last season, it was enough to oppose a woman's right to choose. This season nobody will pay attention until you say you're going to make it illegal for women not to be pregnant and replace what remains of the health-care system with a single giant gun.
"Even limited voting rights for everyone affected by US foreign, environmental, and trade policy might restore a measure of sanity, or at least oblige the US to acknowledge the existence of several billion non-American human beings who would really prefer not to be blown up or underwater."
It was initially mildly hilarious to think that any of these swivel-eyed clowns might become the leader of the nominally free world, but that joke has been running for six years now, and it's not funny anymore. It's just scary. It's depressing and scary. It's boring and depressing and scary, and most viewers are bored and depressed and scared and unable to change channel, which is even worse, because it means that these cartoon monsters might even pull it off - like that time everyone voted for four screaming Finns in plastic goblin masks to win Eurovision just to see what would happen. That's how we got Boris Johnson. Who turned out to be serious about making London into a giant theme park for millionaires.
Under these circumstances, I am rather nonplussed by everyone asking me what I think of Hillary Clinton. What I think, along with most non-Americans, is that compared to the Republican choices, absolutely anyone at all is acceptable as long as they appear to be at least semi-hinged.
Americans do not appear to realize that, although it would be nice to get the more progressive of the two Democrats, what matters most to the rest of the world is that not a single member of the Republican line-up, the worst boy band in history, ever gets within 50 feet of the Situation Room (hey, I've seen The West Wing). What matters is that these people are not allowed to make decisions about climate change, or military intervention, or preferably any decisions at all apart from, perhaps, whether they would prefer milk or hot chocolate at bedtime because someone should take gentle care of them in a place where they are never allowed to engage in politics again. I'd call them lunatics, but it would do a disservice to the many people I know with mental health difficulties.
At this point, I, for one, would feel a lot safer if a lottery of the American public made the selection. But if we must pretend that this is democracy, there ought at least to be a chance for everyone affected to have their say.
The world is obsessed with the US elections because the outcome of those elections will have an impact on every person on Earth. So, let the world have its say. Why not? Even limited voting rights for everyone affected by US foreign, environmental, and trade policy might restore a measure of sanity or at least oblige the US to acknowledge the existence of several billion non-American human beings who would really prefer not to be blown up or underwater.
The world is burning. America is watching a creaky junior string quartet try to play Wagner. Let's give the species a chance to change the channel.
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