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"Morning Joe" is in mourning. The deceased is the Republican Party of balanced budgets and international restraint.

MSNBC host and former Congressman Joe Scarborough announced last week that he was leaving the Republican Party. In an impassioned piece for The Washington Post, Scarborough cited Donald TrumpDonald TrumpTrumps attack on one class of immigrants wont make America great Fox News personality: GOP healthcare plan says ideology is less important than victory' Mar-a-Lago asks to hire more foreign workers MOREs actions and Republican Party leaderships silence as the basis of his decision:

The wreckage visited of this man will break the Republican Party into pieces and lead to the election of independent thinkers no longer tethered to the tired dogmas of the polarized past. When that day mercifully arrives, the two-party duopoly that has strangled American politics for almost two centuries will finally come to an end. And Washington just may begin to work again.

Welcome to the (anti-) party, Scarborough! You are joining the roughly 45 percent of Americans who are abandoningthe Democratic and Republican Parties or never joined them in the first place. Not only are our ranks growing, but political scientists and pollsters are finally acknowledging that independents are not apathetic fence-sitters but engaged Americans concerned about how the parties and partisanship are ruining our country.

But if Ive learned anything about American politics in my 20 years as an independent activist and advocate for electoral reform, its that nothing automatically leads to anything. There are no straight lines in politics. Change is not inevitable. The parties work hard to muffle the impact of this exodus towards independence. Independent voters might comprise 45 percent of the country, but the parties still make the rules.

And heres rule No. 1: Independent voters must accept that they are second-class citizens in our democracy.

Joe Scarborough announces he's leaving Republican party: report https://t.co/Uw0cLwKAsZ pic.twitter.com/iZX5riu5DP

Independent voters in many states cannot register to vote as independents they must choose from derogatory voter registration language like unenrolled or decline to state. Independent voters are not allowed to serve as poll workers in states like New York its a job only Democrats and Republicans can apply for. Independent candidates are locked out of participating in the presidential debates and have to gather many more signatures than party candidates to have their names appear on the ballot.

Independents in dozens of states pay taxes for primary elections that they are barred from. The two forms of gerrymandering that dominate our country partisan gerrymandering and bi-partisan gerrymandering share a common commitment to protecting the parties at the expense of the voters, especially independents. The Federal Election Commission is comprised of three Democrats and three Republicans which guarantees deadlock instead of two Democrats, two Republicans, and two independents, which the current statute allows for and would produce functional oversight of the electoral process. Local and state boards of elections are run by Democratic and Republican appointees.

We do need to elect independent thinkers no longer tethered to tired dogmas, as Scarborough suggests. That is true. And we need to free independent voters from the iron maiden of partisan election laws and practices that keep them from fully participating.

Want to fix American politics? Open up the primaries https://t.co/Cq85lfcmAg

Implementing open primaries is where I start. Its simple and popular. Let all voters vote in all elections. Dont make party membership a condition for participation. Dont let the parties private, non-government organizations decide who can and cannot vote in publicly funded elections. If we can break down this barrier, the American people will be better positioned to take on the dozens of other ways the parties hold on to old dogmas and insulate themselves from independent voices, from change and from progress.

My hope is that Scarborough takes his independence seriously and uses his location in the media to publicize the growing chorus of voices calling for the full enfranchisement of independent voters. While just five years ago the conversation about reform was limited to money in politics, there is a surge of new leaders and organizations who recognize that the party control of the process itself must be disrupted. There are hundreds of articulate, passionate, committed and accomplished independent leaders and reformers working around the clock to reform our political system. The country needs more opportunities to hear from them!

Dont mourn Joe. Join the fight to unleash the power of independents.

John Opdycke is president of Open Primaries, a national election-reform group.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

Originally posted here:
Independent voters have second-class status in American ... - The Hill - The Hill (blog)

Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates saysPresident Trump's comments rippingAttorney General Jeff SessionsJeff Sessions8 things you might have missed in latest Trump interview Trump has confidencein Sessions, White House says Your income paid for welfare fraud from sea to shining sea MORE's recusal from the Russia probeis a violation of the Justice Department's independence.

"POTUS attack on Russia recusal reveals yet again his violation of the essential independence of DOJ, a bedrock principle of our democracy," Yates tweeted Thursday.

POTUS attack on Russia recusal reveals yet again his violation of the essential independence of DOJ, a bedrock principle of our democracy.

"Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else," Trump said.

Sessions recused himself from the federal investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow inMarch, after it was revealed that he failed to disclose to the Senate two meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak while he was a surrogate for Trump's campaign.

Trump abruptly fired Yates earlier this year for refusing to defend in court his original executive order restricting entry to the U.S. for refugees and people from certain Muslim-majority countries.

The former acting attorney general has slammed the Trump administration before for ignoring legal and political norms, saying its behavior should be "alarming to us as a country."

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Sally Yates: Trump attack on Sessions violates 'bedrock principle of our democracy' - The Hill (blog)

Donald Trumps reaction to the news that he is being investigated for possible obstruction of justice was to send out a twitter message claiming that: You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history led by some very bad and conflicted people!

Bad and conflicted people?? Trump is being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a man who served honorably as Director of the FBI under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He is an extremely capable, independent, and ethical public servant.

Among Trumps many problems is his fragile ego, his propensity to shoot from the hip, and his inability to keep his mouth shut (or twitter off!) He created this situation by speaking and tweeting evidence of his wish to obstruct the FBIinvestigation into possiblecollusion between his campaign and the Russians.

It appears that Trump is trying to create a false justification for ordering Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to fire Mr. Mueller as independent counsel. Perhaps he thinks he would then be able to order Rosenstein to appoint someone who is loyal to his highness.

Trump is a very immature and unstable person who has the power to seriously undermine our democracy. So far, Congressional Republicans are allowing him to act more and more like a spoiled child who cannot tolerate any restrictions on his behavior. When will they finally wake up to the fact that he is behaving like an autocratic dictator, not the president of a democracy?

Virginia Washburn

Grand Beach

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A danger to our democracy - Harborcountry News

Buchanan has developed a hidden programme for suppressing democracy on behalf of the very rich. It is reshaping politics. Illustration: Sbastien Thibault

Its the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century. To read Nancy MacLeans new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America, is to see what was previously invisible.

The history professors work on the subject began by accident. In 2013 she stumbled across a deserted clapboard house on the campus of George Mason University in Virginia. It was stuffed with the unsorted archives of a man who had died that year whose name is probably unfamiliar to you: James McGill Buchanan. She says the first thing she picked up was a stack of confidential letters concerning millions of dollars transferred to the university by the billionaire Charles Koch.

Her discoveries in that house of horrors reveal how Buchanan, in collaboration with business tycoons and the institutes they founded, developed a hidden programme for suppressing democracy on behalf of the very rich. The programme is now reshaping politics, and not just in the US.

Buchanan was strongly influenced by both the neoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and the property supremacism of John C Calhoun, who argued in the first half of the 19th century that freedom consists of the absolute right to use your property (including your slaves) however you may wish; any institution that impinges on this right is an agent of oppression, exploiting men of property on behalf of the undeserving masses.

James Buchanan brought these influences together to create what he called public choice theory. He argued that a society could not be considered free unless every citizen has the right to veto its decisions. What he meant by this was that no one should be taxed against their will. But the rich were being exploited by people who use their votes to demand money that others have earned, through involuntary taxes to support public spending and welfare. Allowing workers to form trade unions and imposing graduated income taxes were forms of differential or discriminatory legislation against the owners of capital.

Any clash between freedom (allowing the rich to do as they wish) and democracy should be resolved in favour of freedom. In his book The Limits of Liberty, he noted that despotism may be the only organisational alternative to the political structure that we observe. Despotism in defence of freedom.

His prescription was a constitutional revolution: creating irrevocable restraints to limit democratic choice. Sponsored throughout his working life by wealthy foundations, billionaires and corporations, he developed a theoretical account of what this constitutional revolution would look like, and a strategy for implementing it.

He explained how attempts to desegregate schooling in the American south could be frustrated by setting up a network of state-sponsored private schools. It was he who first proposed privatising universities, and imposing full tuition fees on students: his original purpose was to crush student activism. He urged privatisation of social security and many other functions of the state. He sought to break the links between people and government, and demolish trust in public institutions. He aimed, in short, to save capitalism from democracy.

In 1980, he was able to put the programme into action. He was invited to Chile, where he helped the Pinochet dictatorship write a new constitution, which, partly through the clever devices Buchanan proposed, has proved impossible to reverse entirely. Amid the torture and killings, he advised the government to extend programmes of privatisation, austerity, monetary restraint, deregulation and the destruction of trade unions: a package that helped trigger economic collapse in 1982.

None of this troubled the Swedish Academy, which through his devotee at Stockholm University Assar Lindbeck in 1986 awarded James Buchanan the Nobel memorial prize for economics. It is one of several decisions that have turned this prize toxic.

But his power really began to be felt when Koch, currently the seventh richest man in the US, decided that Buchanan held the key to the transformation he sought. Koch saw even such ideologues as Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan as sellouts, as they sought to improve the efficiency of government rather than destroy it altogether. But Buchanan took it all the way.

MacLean says that Charles Koch poured millions into Buchanans work at George Mason University, whose law and economics departments look as much like corporate-funded thinktanks as they do academic faculties. He employed the economist to select the revolutionary cadre that would implement his programme (Murray Rothbard, at the Cato Institute that Koch founded, had urged the billionaire to study Lenins techniques and apply them to the libertarian cause). Between them, they began to develop a programme for changing the rules.

The papers Nancy MacLean discovered show that Buchanan saw stealth as crucial. He told his collaborators that conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential. Instead of revealing their ultimate destination, they would proceed by incremental steps. For example, in seeking to destroy the social security system, they would claim to be saving it, arguing that it would fail without a series of radical reforms. (The same argument is used by those attacking the NHS). Gradually they would build a counter-intelligentsia, allied to a vast network of political power that would become the new establishment.

Through the network of thinktanks that Koch and other billionaires have sponsored, through their transformation of the Republican party, and the hundreds of millions they have poured into state congressional and judicial races, through the mass colonisation of Trumps administration by members of this network and lethally effective campaigns against everything from public health to action on climate change, it would be fair to say that Buchanans vision is maturing in the US.

But not just there. Reading this book felt like a demisting of the window through which I see British politics. The bonfire of regulations highlighted by the Grenfell Tower disaster, the destruction of state architecture through austerity, the budgeting rules, the dismantling of public services, tuition fees and the control of schools: all these measures follow Buchanans programme to the letter. I wonder how many people are aware that David Camerons free schools project stands in a tradition designed to hamper racial desegregation in the American south.

In one respect, Buchanan was right: there is an inherent conflict between what he called economic freedom and political liberty. Complete freedom for billionaires means poverty, insecurity, pollution and collapsing public services for everyone else. Because we will not vote for this, it can be delivered only through deception and authoritarian control. The choice we face is between unfettered capitalism and democracy. You cannot have both.

Buchanans programme is a prescription for totalitarian capitalism. And his disciples have only begun to implement it. But at least, thanks to MacLeans discoveries, we can now apprehend the agenda. One of the first rules of politics is, know your enemy. Were getting there.

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A despot in disguise: one man's mission to rip up democracy - The Guardian

It also seems clear that the failed coup attempt has helped Erdoan to solidify his power and use it to push his political agenda. Photograph: AP

A year after Turkeys failed coup attempt, Recep Tayyip Erdoans regime faces a dilemma: first it fears any kind of street-based movement. Erdoans harsh response to the Gezi Park protests in 2013 or the protests that were brutally quashed in the Kurdish cities of south-east Turkey last year are examples. Yet with the presidents power built on a friend-or-foe dichotomy, he also needs a street-based legitimacy. Witness the weekend ceremonies marking the anniversary of 15 July in which he whipped up public support for punishing coup plotters with the death penalty and talked about ripping the heads off so-called traitors.

And as a result of disabling parliamentary opposition and governing by decree under a continuous state of emergency it is not possible for him to prevent oppositional street-based movements from erupting. Last weeks justice march led by Kemal Kldarolu, chair of the opposition Republicans Peoples party, (CHP) which brought at least 1.5 million people for a final rally proves this point.

Erdoan and his followers come from a tradition of political Islam that is often accused of seeking to impose sharia law by stealth. Beyond this, Erdoan has given Turkey a worse record than China or Iran for jailing journalists and activists. Since July 2016 he has pursued a crackdown which has seen more than 50,000 people detained and nearly 170,000 people placed under investigation. It is fair now to say that democracy and its institutions in Turkey are dying by the day.

It also seems clear that the failed coup attempt has helped Erdoan to solidify his power and use it to push his political agenda. He is entrenching it via the institutions of Islam, notably the mosques. The directorate of religious affairs has become an apparatus of Erdoans political initiatives. Of course, mosques have been the carriers of rightwing politics in Turkey throughout history, but traditionally claimed to be supra-political and unbiased.

After last years events they no longer even pretend to be neutral. To underline this, look at some statistics on the Islamisation of the country: since Erdoan came to power, thousands of new mosques have been built, including the one inside the compound of Erdoans vast new presidential palace which is, incidentally, four times bigger than Versailles. Tens of thousands more students are attending religious schools than there were in 2002 when Erdoan came to power, according to the Education and Science Workers Union of Turkey. In effect, Erdoan is using Islamism for power.

Turkey has always been a divided nation but the rise of Erdoan since 2002 has fuelled polarisation

But it wasnt long ago that Turkey was seen as a model democratic state in the Islamic world. So, what has happened? Erdoan started his political career as a traditional Islamist and rebranded himself a conservative democrat politician by founding the Justice and Development party, the AKP. For years, explaining Turkeys democratic path seemed such an easy task. There was the persistence of an authoritarian tradition associated with Kemalism (the secularist founding ideology of the Turkish Republic led by Kemal Atatrk) which the military embodies. According to the mainstream liberal narrative on Turkey, all that was needed for Turkish democracy to flourish was the emergence of a force strong enough to curb the power of the military. Erdoan seemed, to western liberal observers, to be the answer.

Furthermore, a common narrative claims that Turkish military top brass were strictly secular and that this led them to stage coups at various times. They spoke out against Erdoans non-secular policies which prompted a political crisis in 2007. In 2010, a constitutional referendum gave Erdoans government more control over the judicial system. Prosecutors were given extraordinary powers to prosecute secular high-ranking officers in the military. The Turkish military has not been secular in the same sense since then. A number of new officers who have filled vacant positions allegedly had ties with the Gulenist movement, now the number one suspects for the failed coup.

Any lingering hopes that Erdoan would eventually return Turkey to the path of democracy have wilted following both the coup attempt and the referendum in April which allowed him to expand the executive power of the presidency. A French political scientist, Alain Rouqui, advances the term hegemonic democracy to describe regimes such as Erdoans Turkey. He suggests these are not liberal democracies, because the rights of the minorities and the rule of law are not respected; but neither are they dictatorships as elections are held thus political alternation remains possible. Erdoan once declared that democracy was a vehicle, not a goal implying that one could disembark at any point.

On the other hand he does not seem quite capable of transforming society to meet his political needs. In the recent referendum, Turkeys relatively urban cities including Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir as well as the Kurdish south-east region, largely voted against his presidency. Although just 33% of those in the cities voted against, these cities contribute 64% of Turkeys GDP and, in effect, sustain the economy. A poll by Ipsos for the Turkish affiliate of CNN International on the referendum result reveals that 87% of those who voted no consider the election process to have been unfair. And 77% of the yes voters think it was fair. Turkey, therefore, is split down the middle.

Meanwhile, the economy is deteriorating. Investment, tourism and the currency all continue to suffer. Foreign companies are reluctant to make long-term investments, uncertain how long Turkey will remain in a state of emergency. No wonder Bloombergs Misery Index, which combines countries 2017 inflation and unemployment outlooks, recently placed Turkey in fifth place, after Venezuela and Greece.

Thousands of educated Turks are seeking ways to flee and find another life in dignity and peace where they might secure the basic protection of law, citizenship, healthcare or social support. So what lies ahead for those citizens who remain? Turkey has always been a divided nation but the rise of Erdoan since 2002 has fuelled polarisation in the country. Indeed he has turned polarisation ethnic, sectarian and cultural into a political strategy. The opposition seems weak and divided.

Moreover, Turkey has never had a truly free press. It has a long tradition of censorship, especially around the combustible politics of its religious and ethnic minorities.

On the other hand, Erdoans crackdown has to be short-lived. He needs to show potential coup plotters that the cost of rebelling can be prohibitively high. Yet, plunging the country into a permanent state of suspicion, purges, economic uncertainty and military weakness is not in his interests either. The increasingly authoritarian president should know that the failed coup had underlying causes that will not go away by themselves.

Excerpt from:
Turkey's democracy is dying but this brutal crackdown can't last - The Guardian