There's a book on Bookshare which is all about the movement in the US and I
read it back several years ago after the author was interviewed on Democracy
Now. These practices of sterilizing people whom society defined as unfit,
existed throughout the US. The book was about one that ended up being reviewed
by the Supreme Court. But apparently, according to some of the latest news
articles, these practices haven't stopped. The most recent news story is about
a licensed practical nurse who is a whistle blower about hysterectomies being
performed on immigrants without their consent. They would require treatment for
an ailment and be forced to sign a paper in English which they didn't
understand while they were extremely ill, and some of them, barely conscious,
and these surgeries would then be performed. But this kind of thing was being
done to poor women here, a century ago.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Andy Baracco
Sent: Friday, September 25, 2020 2:57 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Minority Rule in America
I believe that in the 1930s there was a eugenics bill introduced into the CA
state legislature that had to do with children with congenital disabilities,
but it did not pass.
Andy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, September 25, 2020 6:27 AM
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Minority Rule in America
Then I must be confusing what I heard. It must have been people in other
kinds of detention. What I heard was an interview with someone who'd done
either a film or a book about California's long history of Eugenics. It was
California from which Hitler turned to get details which he later used for
his program. I should start writing down everything I hear, but I don't have
the eneegy. The other day I learned how Noam Chomsky remembers so many
facts. He has a photographic memory which has not deteriorated even though
he's in his 90's. I'm 83 and my memory is like a sieve.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Andy Baracco
Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2020 5:10 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Minority Rule in America
Immigration matters are under Federal juristiction.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2020 1:20 PM
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Minority Rule in America
In that bluest of the blue, LatinX women who are detained in centers for
undocumented immigrants are being sterilized without their consent.
Prisoners who fought wildfires for $1 an hour, upon release from prison, are
not permitted to become fire fighters as free citizens.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Andy Baracco
Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2020 3:34 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Minority Rule in America
They'll probably come out of CA, which is the blueest of the blue.
I would suspect that Governor newsom could be a Presidential candidate in
2024 or 2028.
There are rumors that Mayor of LA Eric Garcetti is on Biden's list for a
cabinet position.
Andy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl Jarvis" <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2020 8:43 AM
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Minority Rule in America
Right on!!!
We are not facing a possible end to our democratic Republic. We are
in the middle of the struggle. Already the Military/Industrial
Corporations have the upper hand. This current election could seal
our fate. Even if Biden were to win, his hands would be tied by the
overwhelming numbers of conservative federal judges, and the
gerrymandered control of the US Senate. Even as we wait for the
election federal programs are being cut, or their budgets are being
reduced, or their directors are being replace with Trump sycophants.
And the best Americans can do is vote for Joe Biden...where oh where
can we find us a strong FDR type of leader? And where are the strong
state and local leaders?
Carl Jarvis...checking out the local caves in the Great Olympic Mountains.
On 9/23/20, Andy Baracco <wq6r@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Well, I have Pressing issues in my life that put Belarus on the back
burner.
BTW, I visited Belarus when it was part of the USSR..
Andy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2020 6:45 PM
Subject: [blind-democracy] Minority Rule in America
You might want to listen to today's episode of Moderate Rebels to learn
something more realistic about Belarus than you're hearing from our media
and briefly, in this article.
Miriam
Minority Rule in America
By Matthew Yglesias, Vox
23 September 20
Our various undemocratic institutions are reenforcing each other in a
deadly
spiral.
On a blustery November day, I found myself on the Boston Common with what
turned out to be a very small group of protesters. Our view was that Al
Gore, who had clearly gotten more votes than his opponent, should be
seated
as the next president of the United States.
It didn't happen, and in fact, the line of argument we pursued - that
democratic legitimacy ought to count for something - wasn't even taken up
by
the Gore campaign or Democrats. They instead pursued a legalistic argument
that was denied by a 5-4 majority of conservative Supreme Court justices.
Two decades later, we're staring down the barrel of exactly what I worried
about that November: not an old Constitution with some funny quirks, but a
self-reinforcing spiral of minority rule.
It's time to start doing something about it.
Hardball on a tilted playing field
When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared it was too close to the date of a
presidential election to hold hearings on the confirmation of a successor.
When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, McConnell
clarified
that the rule only applied to situations in which the Senate majority and
the president are of opposite parties, and that naturally, a replacement
for
her should be confirmed as quickly as possible.
The hypocrisy is, of course, galling to liberals who are also frustrated
by
the prospect of defeat. But for all the talk of Merrick Garland's "stolen"
Supreme Court seat, McConnell wasn't cheating. He was playing what
Georgetown University Law Center professor Mark Tushnet calls
constitutional
hardball, "practices - legislative and executive initiatives - that are
without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional
doctrine
and practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with existing
pre-constitutional understandings."
And while you may not like hardball, to an extent, that's the point. This
is
a country with elections, and the idea is if politicians' deployment of
hardball tactics becomes unpopular, they'll lose their elections and
things
will change.
McConnell's actions were unpopular. Polls showed that voters believed the
Senate should have held hearings on confirming Garland to the Court. And
when the votes were counted in November, Hillary Clinton got more than
Donald Trump and Democratic Senate candidates got more votes than
Republican
ones. But the GOP retained a Senate majority, Trump became president, and
Neil Gorsuch sat on the Supreme Court.
The problems with the current American political situation only really
come
into view when you zoom out to the whole landscape. Every electoral system
has its quirks, and elected officials are entitled to throw some elbows if
they think it's important. But McConnell's hardball isn't a fair game -
his
ideas don't need to be popular to win, and his unfair advantage in one
arena
extends its power into other arenas.
The circle of entrenchment
Thurgood Marshall did not want a Republican to nominate his successor. But
in 1988, George H.W. Bush won a historically unusual third GOP term, as
Ronald Reagan's successor. And Justice Marshall's health gave out in
October
1991, when he had to step down for medical reasons. This was not yet the
era
of constitutional hardball in the US Senate, so a Democratic-controlled
body
confirmed Clarence Thomas to succeed him. Thomas's confirmation was nearly
derailed by sexual harassment allegations, but even if the body had
handled
Anita Hill's charges more responsibly and blocked Thomas, some other
conservative would have gotten the job.
Nine years later, a 5-4 conservative Supreme Court majority that would not
have existed had Marshall retained his health for one more year cut short
the vote-counting in Florida and ensured that George W. Bush would become
president. One of the five, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, was heard to tell
friends that fall that she preferred a Republican president because then
she
could retire with her succession in GOP hands. And retire she did in 2005,
creating the vacancy now held by Justice Samuel Alito.
O'Connor's fellow moderate conservative, Anthony Kennedy, also
strategically
retired in 2018 - choosing his timing not only so that a Republican could
pick his replacement but so as to help GOP Senate candidates in a tough
midterm fight.
Public perceptions of the Supreme Court are often dominated by abortion
politics, where O'Connor and Kennedy often sided with the left. But the
fact
that both justices preferred GOP-selected replacements is a reminder that
there are many other issues on the docket, and their own view is that on
most matters, they leaned to the right.
That was true on the decisive Bush v. Gore litigation. It was also true of
Kennedy's siding with the right on voting rights, gerrymandering, and
campaign finance issues.
Control of the courts allows Republicans to further tilt the electoral
playing field. Waging judicial politics on a tilted playing field allows
Republicans to control the courts.
Minority rule politics
In 2018, the Democrats won such a landslide in the popular vote that they
were able to overcome the 3-4 percentage point skew of the House map. But
the Senate map gives rural areas 2.5 times the voting power of big cities,
meaning Democrats need to win Senate races by 6 to 7 points.
This puts Democrats at a disadvantage. But the problem is actually more
serious than that. The House gerrymanders, for example, while large are
clearly not insurmountable.
But even when they are surmounted, what you get is a House where the
pivotal
members represent seats that Donald Trump won even while he lost the
popular
vote. This impacts not just electoral outcomes but actual governance. If a
majority of the House represented anti-Trump districts, then the House
would
be politically empowered to act aggressively to check Trump's abuses of
power. But since the Democratic majority relies on Trump crossover voters,
Democrats have hesitated to move aggressively with oversight or to use the
power of the purse to back up the rule of law.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's gamble, which is not too far-fetched, is that
Trump is just too unpopular. By this thinking, if Democrats just put their
heads down and talk about basic policy issues - health care, the pandemic,
the minimum wage - they can hold their majority and Joe Biden can win the
presidency.
But it's a big gamble. Trump would almost certainly be reelected even if
he
loses the popular vote by a point or two, and could conceivably be
reelected
while losing by three. In the 2018 Senate races overall, Democrats won a
large majority of the votes but lost seats. So on the one hand, there's a
risk Pelosi's gambit fails, Trump retains power, and, having established
all
manner of abusive precedents, proceeds to consolidate it. But there's also
the risk that even if Pelosi's bet pays off, Democrats will be unable to
govern.
Constitutional hardball in defeat
In the 2018 midterms in Wisconsin, Democrats swept narrow victories in the
statewide races and secured 53 percent of the votes cast in elections for
the lower house of the state legislature. But because of gerrymandering,
the
GOP won more than 60 percent of the seats. And knowing they'd be insulated
from public backlash, the legislature held a special lame-duck session
during which they stripped power from the state executive branch and
reassigned it to themselves. Something similar happened in Michigan that
same year, and in North Carolina two years earlier.
This is another case where minority rule begets minority rule.
Once the minoritarian legislature becomes comfortable with its exercise of
power, it starts gobbling up the other institutions not despite its lack
of
democratic legitimacy but because of it. Only because the US Senate is so
egregiously malapportioned does it make sense for McConnell to trample so
blatantly over public opinion and the president's traditional
prerogatives.
If Republicans retain a Senate majority despite a Biden win, which is a
very
plausible outcome, they may well do the same on the whole panoply of
executive branch appointments. We're accustomed to seeing the president as
the main driver of his Cabinet, with the advise and consent function
limited
- even by an opposition Senate - to smoothing off only the roughest edges.
But it used to be the case that presidents could get Supreme Court
appointments through an opposition-held Senate. Will there be a housing
and
urban development or health and human services secretary in 2021 if
Republicans hold a Senate majority? Absent filibuster reform, will any
legislation pass at all even if Republicans are consigned to the minority?
Of course, even faced with gridlock, a president can wield executive
authority. But will six conservative Supreme Court justices allow any of
it?
Given the extent of the tilted maps - 2 to 3 points in the Electoral
College, 4 in the House, 6 to 7 in the Senate - Republicans could probably
hold majorities almost all the time if they wanted to. But they choose to
play their hand more aggressively than that, moving forward boldly with
unpopular policy initiatives and then obstructing during periodic defeats.
Someone should do something about it
Neither Joe Biden nor Senate Democrats seem inclined to pursue these
measures yet, but if Democrats win a Senate majority this fall, there is a
partial solution at hand:
End the filibuster so a Senate majority can govern.
Admit DC, Puerto Rico, and ideally the US Virgin Islands as US states.
Adopt tough legislative curbs on partisan gerrymandering.
Expand the lower courts, at a minimum, as a way of improving the operation
of the federal judicial system and putting the Supreme Court on notice to
behave itself.
In a pinch, you add seats to the Supreme Court itself. Either way,
Democrats
need to get out of the funk of thinking of these moves as outrageous norm
violations. The actual issue is that the American democratic tradition
carries within it two overarching norms that are contradictory. One is
adherence to the Constitution and to the rule of law. The other is
adherence
to the concept of political equality - that all citizens are equal and
ought
to have their interests and views considered equally by the political
system.
This latter idea is not part of the original constitutional order, but is
implicit in the Declaration of Independence, in the 14th Amendment, in the
landmark Baker v. Carr case requiring "one person, one vote" in state
legislative districts, and in much of our political culture. McConnell's
own
statement on Ginsburg's passing invokes the concept of popular
sovereignty,
arguing that "Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in
2018 because we pledged to work with President Trump and support his
agenda,
particularly his outstanding appointments to the federal judiciary."
But of course Americans did no such thing. Most voters preferred the
opposite outcome. What gives McConnell his power is not the will of the
people but the lines on a map. If Democrats win, they would have not only
the power that McConnell currently wields but also the genuine popular
mandate he pretends to have - and they should use it.
The harder question is what to do if, this November, most people vote
against Trump and against McConnell and they win anyway. Twenty years ago,
before I was a journalist, I thought the answer was to take to the streets
-
an idea that at the time found little support among elite political
actors.
In the desperate year of 2017, Democrats did turn to mass resistance
outside
the electoral system as a political tool, but after the midterms, they
dropped it, to their detriment. It was protests that toppled Mariano
Rajoy's
corrupt right-wing government in Spain in 2018, Park Geun-hye's corrupt
right-wing government in South Korea in 2017, and Sigmundur Davķš
Gunnlaugsson's corrupt right-wing government in Iceland in 2016. And it is
mass protests in Belarus that may topple a corrupt and authoritarian
government there.
So far, few in charge of anything in America seem to be thinking along
these
lines. But after a summer of uprisings and sporadic rioting, it's worth
remembering that while patience is a virtue in politics, charging ahead
with
unworkable ideas is not.
People are upset about the direction of the country, and rightly so. If
institutions block change through electoral means, then anger will unleash
itself in other forms. It would be much better for the country for that to
be smart, well-designed acts of civil disobedience led by responsible and
strategically minded people. But if responsible leaders won't lead, then
irresponsible ones will.
