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But as the crowd tittered, Buttigieg offered a surprising reply. I dont think we should be laughing at it," he said. "Because in some ways, its no more a shattering of norms than whats already been done to get the judiciary to where it is today.

The comment turned into a bit of a moment for the then little-known mayor of South Bend, Ind. Lefty Twitter declared itself impressed. And the liberal news site ThinkProgress ran a piece under the headline, One Democrat in the race seems serious about governing, and its not Bernie Sanders.

The reaction spoke to a growing desire, in some corners of the party, for Democrats to play more of what scholars call constitutional hardball, using tactics that are technically legal, but break with decades- and even centuries-old traditions of fair play.

The idea is to match a Republican Party that has proven itself more than willing to push the bounds of acceptable behavior in recent years most famously refusing for the better part of a year to even consider Obama nominee Merrick Garland for a vacancy on the Supreme Court, then installing President Trumps pick, Neil Gorsuch, and building a 5-4 conservative majority.

Aaron Belkin, director of a liberal advocacy group called Take Back the Court, argues that the GOPs strong-arm tactics have effectively created a system of one-party rule virtually guaranteeing that the next Democratic president will fail.

The candidates, he says, can debate wealth taxes and health care expansion all they like, but it will all amount to nothing if the GOP uses the filibuster to kill progressive legislation in the Senate or a stolen court to nullify any ambitious legislation that finds its way out of Congress.

The house is literally on fire, he says. And no one is talking about it.

Belkin is among a small group of liberal activists who have been trying to make constitutional hardball a top issue in the Democratic primary; it was a Belkin associate who stood up at the Buttigieg event in Philadelphia earlier this year and asked the question about court packing. Others are pushing to end the filibuster and eliminate an Electoral College that tilts presidential elections toward smaller, generally conservative states.

The agitators have had some success. Several of the leading Democratic candidates have declared themselves open to these ideas. But most sound like theyre mollifying activists, rather than leading a revolt. And only Buttigieg has placed structural reform near the center of his campaign.

The Democratic establishment, it seems, is betting that it can put off a reckoning for now. And perhaps it can. But that could change if a Democrat wins the White House and runs into the sort of GOP obstruction that activists are warning about.

Then, the pressure will mount. A growing number of voters, their hopes for a post-Trump presidency dashed, will demand action.

And if the call is loud enough, Democrats will have to face a question theyve mostly avoided until now: Can you save a democracy by taking a wrecking ball to some of its most important institutions or do you risk smashing the whole edifice to bits?

MARK TUSHNET, A Harvard law professor, coined the phrase constitutional hardball in an obscure academic journal in 2004.

He says the increasingly aggressive use of the filibuster to block judicial nominations struck him as a noteworthy break from what had come before.

It was conventional wisdom in political science when I was younger, that I think this is Tip ONeills line in Congress, you get along by going along, he told me.

But if Tushnet put his finger on an important turn in American politics, his observations didnt get much traction until the end of the decade when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell built an explicit strategy of obstruction famously declaring that his top priority was to make Obama a one-term president.

Suddenly, the stakes seemed higher.

And while both parties had played hardball in the past, a worrisome imbalance seemed to be taking shape with the GOP more inclined to break the unwritten rules than their Democratic rivals.

In 2018, law professors Joseph Fishkin of the University of Texas at Austin and David Pozen of Columbia confirmed that imbalance in a sprawling paper titled Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball.

The authors ticked through the modern GOPs especially rich record of envelope-pushing from former House Speaker Newt Gingrichs effort to consolidate power in his office in the mid-1990s and dismantle other Congressional institutions, to a systematic gerrymandering initiative known as REDMAP, to the use of government shutdowns to win legislative concessions.

And they offered a nuanced analysis of why Republicans are more partial to hardball.

First, its a matter of worldview. While Democrats are committed to the idea of an active, functioning government, Republicans prefer a smaller, less intrusive state making them more amenable to government shutdowns.

Its also a matter of electoral incentives, as Pozen explained in a recent interview. Since the mid-1990s, Republican members of Congress have been more likely to face challengers from within their own party and those challenges tend to come from the right. That has obvious hardball implications, Pozen says. Youre more likely to upset norms in service of the cause if youre worried about being seen as not extreme enough.

Pozen says the composition of the party bases also plays an important role.

Democrats have a diverse coalition labor, environmentalists, people of color, educated whites. And while thats a strength, in many ways, it can make it hard to enforce the kind of party discipline required to, say, maintain a filibuster.

The Republican Party has a more homogeneous coalition. Its a more coherent, movement party, rather than a diverse-coalition party, Pozen says. It ends up being more unified and disciplined.

Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die, adds that the homogeneity of the GOP coalition much of it is white and Christian has led to a sense of vulnerability that encourages by any means necessary tactics.

Not long ago, he says, white Christians had a clear hold on political and economic power in this country. And as that hold loosens, they can feel threatened. "Many Republican voters believe that the country they grew up in is being taken away from them, he says. And that has pushed the Republican Party into a much more extreme position.

Mirroring the GOPs hardball tactics might seem like the sensible response. But Levitsky says theres real danger in Democrats engaging in a tit-for-tat.

A professor of government at Harvard, hes spent much of his career studying Latin America, and hes seen what happens when one party engages in hardball and another replies in kind: It can escalate into a sort of permanent warfare that does enormous damage to the institutions at the heart of a democratic republic.

Its a disaster, he says. At best it leads to dysfunctional government and at worst and weve seen this over and over again in Latin America it leads to the collapse of democracy.

Levitsky points to the Supreme Court. If Democrats pack it, he says, then Republicans are sure to add more seats when they regain power and on and on until the highest court in the land has lost all of its legitimacy.

Strong institutions are a really valuable thing, he says. And while its relatively easy to lose" them, Levitsky argues, its extremely hard to reconstruct them.

LEVITSKY MAKES A tough ask; the Republicans have been punching Democrats in the mouth for years and for the good of the country, theyre told they have to keep taking it.

For Belkin, of Take Back the Court, thats unacceptable.

The Republicans have already stolen the court, he says. Its much preferred to have a zig-zag in which they steal the court, and then Democrats unsteal the court, and then they steal the court, and Democrats unsteal it than to have unilateral surrender.

Brian Fallon, a onetime Hillary Clinton aide who now runs a group called Demand Justice focused on pushing the courts to the left, adds that a failure to respond to GOP hardball only encourages more of the same.

When you have one side that approaches political debates asymmetrically and is willing to play by a different set of rules, theyre going to win every time, he says. And they have no incentive to change their behavior until theres a credible threat on the table that the same will be done unto them.

He does worry about the sort of escalation that could put American democracy in a death spiral. But Fallon and some of the academics who have studied the matter see an opening for a third way using hardball tactics to achieve anti-hardball, pro-democratic ends.

For instance, when Democrats next win the House, Senate, and presidency, they could threaten to pack the Supreme Court and use that as leverage for a deal with Republican lawmakers aimed at de-politicizing the court.

Congress could impose 18-year term limits on the justices, as one popular proposal suggests, making it impossible for them to time their retirements and ensure that a president of their liking names a successor.

And if the justices terms ended at staggered, two-year intervals, the new system would guarantee each president regular appointments to the high court. That, in turn, would make each nomination less of a life-and-death affair.

This sort of reform could, of course, be undone by a future Congress. But a de-politicized court would probably appeal to the independents who decide elections, making it difficult for lawmakers to reverse course.

There are other ways to use hardball tactics for anti-hardball ends.

Democrats could eliminate the filibuster, for instance, and then use their newfound power in the Senate to push through legislation that strengthens voting rights. The idea is that the ends democracy-bolstering measures like automatic voter registration would justify the means.

It is an odd, and uncomfortable, way to save the republic. And like any form of brinksmanship, it would come with risks. But in a moment of brutal partisanship, it may take a bit of hardball to save us.

David Scharfenberg can be reached at david.scharfenberg@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @dscharfGlobe

Here is the original post:
Will Democrats break democracy in a bid to fix it? - The Boston Globe

In an interview with ProMarket, Goliath author Matt Stoller discussesthepolitical choices that led to thedownfall of the American antimonopoly movement and the addiction to powerlessness that threatens to undermine its rebirth.

It has become increasingly common in recent years to refer to the combination of rampant inequality and corporate impunity that characterizes present-day America as the Second Gilded Age.

Aside from vast concentrations of wealth and economic power, two of the New Gilded Ages main features are widespread anger and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 70 percent of Americans are angry because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power, like those on Wall Street or in Washington. Polls conducted before the 2016 election similarly showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans see the US economy andpolitical system as rigged.

The American antimonopoly tradition could provide an antidote to this pervading feeling of hopelessness. Americans who feel frustrated in the face of a political system captured by wealthy donors and industry lobbying might derive some hope from the successes of previous generations who stood up to the corrupting influence of big money in politics and concentrated corporate power.

In the last half-century, however, much of that history has been marginalized, forgotten, or distorted. Enter Matt Stollers Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (one of ProMarkets top 10 political economy books of 2019), which seeks to remind Americans of the pivotal role that antimonopoly used to play in their politics and the political choices that allowed the US economy to become so concentrated.

Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute (and frequent ProMarket contributor), has been at the forefront of the recent revival of American antitrust and is a key figure in the growingNew Brandeisian movement. To learn more about how the US was able to beat back nascent oligarchy and how it could do so today, we recently interviewed Stoller. In his interview with ProMarket, hediscussed thepolitical choices that led to thedownfall of the American antimonopoly movement and the addiction to powerlessness that threatens to undermine its rebirth.

[The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.]

Q: Youre one of the main figures in the recent resurgence of antimonopoly politics. Yet in this particular moment, with antitrust once again at the forefront of political discourse, you chose to write a book of history. Why?

How we understand ourselves and how we understand power contextualizes what is possible.

When I was working in Congress during the financial crisis, the stories that were in peoples heads about what was happening were based on what they thought about the past. The history that they knew gave them a sense that they couldnt do anything about the financial crisis except listen to the bankers. They had a set of stories in their heads about what America was. That set of stories was false, but in a sense it also controlled them. It controlled us, controlled me. I didnt know that we had had similar crises before, that we had a series of different responses, and that there were ideological battles over the nature of finance and politics in America. I didnt know that history.

Instead, I knew the false history, which said there werent any battles over ideology, that America was always capitalistwhatever that word meansand that politics is mostly about social questions, such as whether you support flag-burning or not. I was not able to see power, because my understanding of what politics really was and who we were as a people relied on a history that airbrushed important stuff out of the picture.

As I learned more about the origins of the laws and institutions that we were using to address the financial crisis, I realized theres a fake history here, and somebody needs to tell the story of what really happened. The point of writing Goliath was to say, Here are the battles that we had over ideology, over finance. Heres why we made the choices that we did. Heres how we were able to effectively defeat domestic fascism.

Q: What do you mean by false history?

The false history was created in the late 1940s, early 1950s, and solidified by people on the left, actuallymainly John Kenneth Galbraith, Richard Hofstadter, and C. Wright Mills. What they argued is that there was never any fight in America over banking power or corporate power, because monopolies are inevitable. There was just this progressive evolution of businesses into large, natural monopolies.

Politics, in that sense, didnt involve corporations or banks, just a cultural sense of our own status. Hofstadter said all the fights over corporate power that took place in the 19th century between railroad barons, bankers, and small farmers actually had nothing to do with railroads or banking power, but that farmers were just afraid of foreigners and immigrants and blamed it on railroads because they were anti-modern. Galbraith created this idea of affluence, where he said that America just automatically produces jobs, goods, and wealth because of these corporations that are natural and that its vanity by people to imagine they could do anything about the nature of the economic system.

In the same way, you see a lot of people say, Oh, those white, working-class people are Trump supporters. Theyre just a bunch of inconsolable racists, and theres no way to talk to them. I think on the right you see this as well: Oh, the leftists and the liberals are these irrational children that you cant talk to. I think both come out of this understanding of history where corporate power, political power, and financial power are not focal points.

Q: Goliath is a book of history, but it also reads in parts like a book about the present. Do you see parallels between the historical figures and cases you review, like Andrew Mellon or the A&P case, and America today?

I think todays very similar to what FDR called the informal economic government of the United States. There are a bunch of peopleprobably around 10,000who run the country. These people run the top 50 big companies, they run Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Walmart, Lockheed, Monsanto, and the top 100 private equity firms.

They go to the same conferences, they go to the same vacation houses. They read the same books, they know the same people, they sit on the same museum boards and same university boards, they donate to the same politicians.

In 1933, Ferdinand Pecora found something called The Preferred List, which was basically a list of people that JP Morgan was regularly bribing: top CEOs, Supreme Court people, military leaders, high-level people in both parties, and bankers. It was a list of people who informally ran the country. My guess is you could probably find something similar if you review the early investors in Uber, or the early investors in any hot new startup of the last 15 years, or just a list of McKinsey clients. Its probably a similar group: people like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, but also very connected political leaders, well-known celebrities, and private equity.

Q: The notion that monopoly power is antithetical to democracy was taken as evident for much of the 20th century. Then a philosophical shift occurred. The right-wing aspect of this shift has been thoroughly documented, researched, and written about in the past few decades, but where you seem to differ is in exploring its strong left-wing elements, from corporatists like Galbraith and Thurow to consumerists like Ralph Nader.

I think thats right. Whats interesting to me is that the left is less able to come to grips with what Ive written, and its because the left often doesnt see power. They dont see business. They dont see the military. They have a few slogans that they use, and thats it.

During the financial crisis, there was no obvious left-wing attack on corporate and banking power. There were a few protests that happened a few years after the crisis about foreclosures, but there really wasnt any sustained argument about how to run the economy or what to do about the banking system. The people that wanted to break up the banks were largely frustrated technocrats and professionals.

Q: The Obama presidency seems like the best example of this sort of depowered politics. You yourself are a harsh critic of the Obama presidency, particularly his handling of the crisis.

Yeah, but also its easy to focus on Obamas personality, and thats not what Im trying to do. The thing about the crisis of 2007-2009 is that unlike the crisis of 1929-1933, there really werent disagreements within the Democratic Party. In the late 1920s and the early 30s, there were fights and arguments among Democrats about what to do. This wasnt the case in 2008. There wasnt a sense of independent congressional fortitude. The political movements we had builtand I was part of building those movements in the early 2000sjust werent equipped to understand what was going on as a political crisis with which we could contend.

Q: Your current political identity, you said, has been forged while you were working as a congressional staffer during the financial crisis. What did the crisis reveal about the way the US is governed?

I think the financial crisis showed that we are in a moment of transition where we are afraid of having our elected leaders wield power. We promote private, unaccountable actors who wield power, but were also nervous about them. We basically decided to not govern. I think thats true everywhere in the world, except for China.

One of the consequences of refusing to govern could be weak democracies, and we do see the emergence of dictators and autocrats trying to take power. FDR said this in 1938: Weak democracies produce dictatorship.

Q: There was also an underlying assumption that successful businessmen like Jamie Dimon or Jeff Bezos were just better at governing because they werent some Washington bureaucrats.

I think that was the narrative from the 1990s to the financial crisis, but its not the narrative anymore. The narrative now is more like, You may not like Jamie Dimon or Mark Zuckerberg, but whos going to run these big institutions?

I think you see this problem in Europe, too, where the Europeans are desperately afraid of breaking up Big Tech. Their response is to say We need European champions, we need our European Mark Zuckerberg to take on the American Mark Zuckerberg. Which is the same dynamic: theyre actually afraid of democratically-elected officials running things.

We have to make a decision whether we want to live in a democratic society, and we havent made that decision. Were not run by autocrats yet, but were not run by democrats either. Theres a power vacuum, and thats what were all experiencing.

Q: One theme that runs like a thread through Goliath is the tension between technocracy and democracy.

I think thats right. I think theyre not always enemies, because technocrats can serve democratic ends. You want your bureaucracies run by people who are detail-oriented and believe in stability and order. But theres a kind of natural tension there, because this tendency for order creates a fundamental distrust of democracy, because democracy is about large groups of people being able to complain and make changes.

What happened from the 1970s onward is that the technocrats, the experts, the people that we were relying on for advice, decided that they shouldnt just be serving democratic ends and offering us advice about whats possible and helping us choose, but that they should, in fact, make those decisions.

I think thats where it gets dangerous, with economists essentially making political decisions while hiding the politics in math and models. You could see this very clearly in the mid-2000s, when millions of people were saying Hey, youre moving our jobs to China, we dont like that. Economists didnt think that was true until 2011 or so, when three economists wrote a paper called The China Shock. All of a sudden, economists had proven what millions of people were saying happened. Economists cant see things in real time because they dont listen to people, only to other economists.

Q: You mentioned economists hiding political choices inside their models. What are the political choices that economics today reflects?

They elevate the power of finance. A good example is that the Congressional Budget Office, whose job is basically to tell Congress whether legislation raises or lowers the deficit. The CBO scores bills in highly political ways but disguises that it does so, and Congress then votes on points of order based on CBO assumptions.

As an example, from 2010 they over-estimated the cost of spending on social priorities by keeping baseline interest rates far too high. A bill providing nutrition assistance for poor mothers or a bill to increase aid to the unemployed raised the deficit dramatically in their models, even though it didnt do so as much in reality. The reason why they got this so wrong, and did it knowingly, is because they were using the interest rate models that the rest of the financially driven economics profession used, from academic economists to Goldman Sachs.

By contrast, CBO scored a bill to push a bunch of bank liabilities onto the public balance sheet, the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, which deregulated derivatives, at basically zero. They dont have a model for a financial crisis, and its politically dangerous to go against the banking lobby, so they lied to Congress and told Congress that such a bill doesnt increase the deficit. They did it again in 2014 with a bill to get rid of a key part of Dodd-Frank.

This is autocratic. CBO shouldnt exist, or it should be split into a Democratic and Republican CBO and be under the budget committee so the political assumptions can be made explicit. Instead, economists have a club and lie to Congress that they have Godlike authority. Its not all their fault; while Republicans know this and lobby CBO to change their models in ways favorable to conservative ends, Democrats dont even know that this dynamic exists and proudly parade around how CBO scores their bills. Its pathetic.

Q: You previously described the 2020 presidential election as a contest between Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders and billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg.

Thats right. Bernie and Warren have some stylistic differences, which are important, but they effectively have the same philosophy. What theyre both basically saying is that billionaires are running our society: In some cases, theyre doing it by paying a lot of money to influence elections; in others, like Mark Zuckerberg or other huge players that are running infrastructure, they are actually structuring the elections themselves.

Either way, the question is whether we live in a democracy or a corporate state.

Q: Antimonopoly has entered the mainstream in a big way these past two-three years, but still attracts a lot of resistance. What are the main forces pushing back against reinvigorated antitrust?

Obviously, you have monopolists, particularly the big ones. Then you have the technocratic establishmenteconomics, liberal media eliteswho are profoundly happy with order.

Thats why you see so much panic about Trump, a bad president whos continuing and worsening a bunch of trends. Trumps a bad president but hes not a fascist, at least not yet. He hasnt started a war like George Bush did. Hes a real estate grifter who wants to steal money. Its not that complicated.

See the original post:
"The Question Is Whether We Live in a Democracy or a Corporate State" - - ProMarket

After the polling stations closed across Australia in May and the count rolled in, the public and pundits alike did a double take, and Sam Roggeveen asked, what the hell just happened?

Not everyone who was hoping for a Labor victory took the loss well. But if, as the sore losers claimed, the unexpected return of the centre-right Morrison Government shows that Australians are racist, greedy, mean-spirited and stupid, then it must have come over the electorate rather quickly.After all, this is roughly the same group of voters that elected Labor leader Kevin Rudd and his party to office in 2007, and his successor Julia Gillard to minority government in 2010. It overwhelmingly passed a same-sex marriage plebiscite in 2017.

Yet predictions aside, the issues mattered, and Aarti Betigeri saw a common generational theme between the campaign in Australia and the much larger election in India that was finalised on the same day in May.

Far from the general view that young people are apathetic, they are engaged and keen to be part of the political process Of the issues that affect young people, alongside the traditional concerns of jobs and education, there is a somewhat surprising new entrant: mental health.

Speaking of parallel elections, Indian company Adani and a controversial Queensland mining project featured heavily in Australiandebates, but according to Ian Hall, New Delhi was closely watching for broader reasons, too.

The big concern in New Delhi, however, is not Adani, but the attitude of whichever party will form a government in May towards India, China, and the region more broadly. India wants Australia to diversify its trade and security relationships, to resist Chinese pressure, and to deal effectively with alleged political interference by the Chinese Communist Party in our society and both parties.

Indonesia, meanwhile, didnt string out its vote across weeks but instead held what Ben Bland described as a simplymind-boggling display of democracy on a single day.

For Indonesia and its 193 million voters the answer lies in the vast number of polling stations, the use of a metal nail (not a pen or a machine) for voting, 1.6 million bottles of halal certified ink, and the practice of counting votes in public the worlds third most populous democracy is holding simultaneous presidential and legislative elections for the first time. It will be worlds biggest direct presidential elections (because the US uses an electoral college) and one of the most complicated single-day elections in global history.

Israel also went to the polls, and as Anthony Bubalo observed, the result initially appeared to deliver Benjamin Netanyahu another term in office.

In a few months he will overtake Israels founder David Ben Gurion as the countrys longest serving prime minister. To his most ardent admirers Bibi is King of Israel. To his equally passionate detractors, some of whom share his ideological outlook, he is mendacious and Machiavellian. The fact that he won this election with a corruption indictment hanging over his head explains as much about why people love him as why they loathe him.

Yet Netanyahus long-demonstrated political cunning appeared finally to have deserted him, with months of failed political negotiations later forcing Israelis to another election. Ian Parmeter.

Post-election coalition-haggling in the past has often taken weeks and longer, but in the end the politicians got there. This year was the first time since Israels founding in 1948 that they have failed.

While in Afghanistan, amid failing talks with the Taliban, Nishank Motwani and Srinjoy Bose argued that local elections hadbrought no peace.

Presidential elections in Afghanistan (2009, 2014, 2019) have failed to inject much-needed accountability and political stability.One viewis that elections undermine processes of political bargaining which are essential for political stabilisation, and derail elite cooperation.

Tunisia might appear remote and far distant from the power centres of the world, although as Merriden Varrall pointed out, events in 2010 at the beginningof the Arab Spring should have dispelled such a notion ahead of the latest election.

Tunisias broadly secular democratic forces have fragmented following the death of the countrys first democratically elected president, unable to reach consensus on a candidate, despite civil societyappealsfor some to step aside for the greater good.

Closer to home, Gordon Peake watchedas the people of Bougainville voted with near-unanimous voice to strike their own path as an independent nation.

Visible everywhere is the Bougainville flag: theupe,a hat of tightly wound straw used in male initiation ceremonies, against a backdrop of cobalt blue. The flag flies on lampposts, on the stumps of trees, from the backs of cars, at the trade stores I drove out of Buka town to places elsewhere on the island where, so limited is the reach of the government, Bougainvilleans are effectively going about their lives autonomously and independently already. A flag flew from every house.

Yet as Annmaree OKeefe observed, achieving the goal of an independent Bougainville is still has hurdles to overcome.

The people of Bougainville wont have the final word on independence. The next milestone will be endorsement of the result by the PNG government. The peace agreement itself gives little guidance on how this should be managed Bougainville will have to make considerable effort to become independence-ready and to fend off questions from the international community about the viability and sustainability of the newest small island state.

All the while, Britain haggled over Brexit, as much with itself and with the European Union. Lawrence Freedman wrote a series of articles across the year to guide readers of The Interpreter through the saga ahead of the eventual victory of Boris Johnson in December. But whatever the latest development, the same question Freedman posed in February kept haunting the year, and still does:

How did the United Kingdom get itself into such a political mess?

Continue reading here:
Best of The Interpreter 2019: A festival of democracy | The Interpreter - The Interpreter

BOSTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren sought to re-energize her White House campaign in a New Years Eve speech on Tuesday, warning that democracy hangs in the balance five weeks before nominating contests begin in early February.

In her home state of Massachusetts on the first anniversary of her campaign launch, Warren said President Donald Trump would try to cheat his way through yet another election if he is not removed from office after his impeachment by the Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives.

In the past 12 months, the president has become bolder with his lies and more brazen in his law-breaking, said Warren, who as a U.S. senator will vote on whether to convict Trump of improperly pressuring Ukraine for political favors. Meanwhile, the Republicans in Congress have turned into fawning, spineless defenders of his crimes.

The race for the Democratic nomination remains fluid as the calendar turns to 2020, with 15 Democrats still in the running and a majority of voters telling pollsters that they have yet to settle on a final choice. The nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire in early February will be critical tests of candidates viability.

Warrens address took place in front of a crowd of nearly 700 people at a church in downtown Boston known as a gathering place for revolutionary colonists in the 1770s.

We are a nation that fights back, she said. Fighting back is an act of patriotism.

Warren remains a top Democratic candidate in national opinion polls but her standing slipped in autumn after a months-long surge that briefly vaulted her to front-runner status.

She is in third place behind Joe Biden, the former vice president, and fellow U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, according to the website RealClearPoliticss national polling average.

Warrens momentum stalled under sustained attacks from more moderate Democratic candidates like Pete Buttigieg, the outgoing mayor of South Bend, Indiana, over her support for Medicare for All, the healthcare overhaul that would eliminate private insurance in favor of a single government-run plan.

In response, Warren has revised her rhetoric on healthcare, emphasizing her intention to phase in Medicare for All over several years to preserve choice for Americans.

She has also sought to return to the theme of economic populism that animated the early part of her campaign.

Warren, who has sworn off high-dollar fundraisers, argued on Tuesday that other candidates who kiss the rings of the wealthy are beholden to rich donors and corporate interests.

The billionaires, the corporate executives and their favorite presidential candidates have one clear goal: to convince you that everything you imagine is impossible, Warren said.

While she did not name any rivals, her remarks were likely aimed at Biden and Buttigieg, whom she has previously criticized for holding high-priced fundraisers.

In recent months, Warren has seen a slowdown in her fundraising pace. The campaign said last week it had raised just over $17 million in the fourth quarter with a few days to go, lower than the $24.6 million she raised last quarter.

Reporting by Joseph Ax and Amanda Becker; Editing by Peter Cooney and Alistair Bell

Read more here:
Warren warns 'democracy hangs in the balance' in New Year's Eve speech - Reuters

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

One hundred years ago, women won the right to vote in the United States. The womens suffrage movement took decades of organizing to achieve success, from the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, to mass civil disobedience and protest leading up to the adoption and ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Now, a century later, the right to vote is on perilous ground, with aggressive and systematic efforts to disenfranchise voters in states across the country.

Voter suppression has long been a central strategy of the Republican Party. In 1980, Paul Weyrich, a conservative Republican activist who founded right-wing institutions including The Heritage Foundation, said in a speech: I dont want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

States in the so-called Rust Belt, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, were critical to Donald Trumps win in 2016. In each of those states save Ohio, Trump won by less than 1 percentage point. Now, in Wisconsin, a county judge ruling in a case brought by a conservative organization has ordered that 209,000 people be purged from the voter rolls. The states Elections Commission has delayed the purge while the case is appealed. In 2016, Trump won Wisconsin by just over 23,000 votes.

2016 was the first election in which Wisconsins strict voter ID law was in force. The progressive advocacy group Priorities USA reported that the law suppressed the votes of more than 200,000 residents in the 2016 election. Voter ID laws that require people to present photo identification at polling places disproportionately prevent poor people and people of color from voting.

The largest drop-off was among black and Democratic-leaning voters, investigative journalist Ari Berman said on the Democracy Now! news hour, commenting on the report. They found that there was a much larger drop-off in Wisconsin than Minnesota, which does not have a voter ID law, that counties with a large African-American population had a larger drop-off.

The Associated Press published a report two weeks ago based on a leaked audio recording from a Nov. 21, 2019, meeting of the Wisconsin chapter of the Republican National Lawyers Association. Traditionally its always been Republicans suppressing votes in places, Justin Clark, a senior counsel to Trumps reelection campaign, was recorded saying. Lets start playing offense a little bit. Thats what youre going to see in 2020. Its going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better- funded program. He was talking about organized poll watching activities, where party operatives position themselves at Democratic-leaning voting precincts to challenge voters, demanding election staff verify their identity or bar them from voting. Clark later said his words were misinterpreted.

In Georgia, the Republican-controlled state government purged 100,000 voters from the rolls in December. The move was approved by a federal judge, dismissing a lawsuit brought by Fair Fight, an organization founded after the 2018 election by Democrat Stacey Abrams to promote fair elections in Georgia and around the country.

The 2018 Georgia governors race pitted Abrams against Republican candidate Brian Kemp, who was the secretary of state at the time, responsible for overseeing the election and maintaining the voter rolls. In July 2018, months before the election, Kemp oversaw what has been called the largest mass disenfranchisement in U.S. history, purging over 500,000 voters from Georgias list of 6.6 million registered voters. Kemp received about 50,000 more votes than Abrams, out of close to 4 million cast, and claimed victory. Stacey Abrams refused to concede, noting Kemps corruption of the election, but did not fight the results.

Despite the aggressive efforts by the right wing to suppress the vote, voting rights advocates are making progress. In Florida, voters passed Amendment 4, restoring voting rights to 1.4 million ex-felons. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill forcing those prospective voters to pay all fines and fees associated with their earlier convictions, significantly slowing the restoration of these returning citizens to the voter rolls. Many call it a poll tax.

In five Western states from Colorado to Hawaii, mail-in ballots have increased voter participation, reduced costs and provided an auditable, paper ballot trail to allow easy verification of election results. The National Vote at Home Institute is working to expand the practice state by state. And the National Popular Vote project is working with state legislatures around the country to allocate Electoral College votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote nationally.

Democracy is a constant struggle. From the suffragettes to todays voting rights advocates, securing the right to vote should be a common pursuit of us all.

Excerpt from:
The Struggle To Vote, From the Suffragettes To Today - Democracy Now!