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Tracey Tapp | special to the Daily News

While being interviewed by the Daily News for the article "Taking it to the Streets" (July 20 edition), I was asked if we were afraid to protest. I was taken aback by the question. Why should we be afraid to carry out our responsibility to participate in our democracy?

Ive reflected a lot on that question since the interview. The fact is, some Progressives Northwest Florida members are afraid to be vocal about their views because it could hurt their business or negatively impact their children in school. And to be honest, we do think about our physical safety. Let that sink in. What has our country come to when you cant express political views without fear for your physical safety?

This fear is not unfounded. Bikers for Trump provide security for Congressman Matt Gaetz. And there is evidence they roughed up an attendee at one of his town halls. He also invited a local militia to protect him. Let that sink in. Do you want to live in a country where elected officials use non-government, para-military forces to rough up constituents that dont agree with their positions?

We are mostly women. Ask any staffer at the Pensacola office of Senator Rubio or Congressman Gaetz. Weve met with them every Tuesday for the last six months to participate in our democracy. We are unarmed. We adhere to the principles of non-violent resistance. We are not dangerous. This is true across the country. Let this sink in. Non-violent women are leading the resistance.

Despite this, the National Rifle Association recently released a video depicting us as violent and essentially inviting people to take matters into their own hands. So yes, in this 2nd Amendment loving area, we think about our safety. Let that sink in. You are being told lies about who we are and what our aims are. You are being asked to incite violence against women exercising their civil liberties.

Add to this the fact that state legislatures across the country are advancing bills to criminalize public protests. The basic tenants of our democracy free speech and the right to assembly are under attack. Let that sink in. Do you want to live in a country where criticizing the government is a crime?

Progressives Northwest Florida appreciates it when city governments help us secure permits for our marches and vigils. We appreciate it when the police help us understand and abide by the laws that govern civil discourse and disobedience in our country. And we especially appreciate it when they keep us safe while exercising these rights.

We want you to know we are here. And even if we are sometimes afraid, we are not going away. Let that sink in.

This guest column was written by Tracey Tapp, who lives in Fort Walton Beach.

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GUEST COLUMN: Is it dangerous to participate in democracy? - The Northwest Florida Daily News

The list of delegates includes powerful members of the presidents political movement, including Diosdado Cabello, a top lawmaker in the ruling Socialist Party who was involved in a failed coup attempt in the 1990s, and Cilia Flores, the presidents wife.

But the push to consolidate power also puts the country at a crossroads, one laden with risk.

As Mr. Maduro effectively steers his country toward one-party rule, he sets it on a collision course with the United States, which buys nearly half of Venezuelas oil. On Wednesday, the Trump administration froze the assets of, and forbade Americans to do business with, 13 Venezuelans close to Mr. Maduro, including his interior minister and heads of the army, police and national guard.

The administration is warning that harsher measures could follow, with strong and swift economic actions if the vote happens on Sunday, according to Mr. Trump. In a statement, he called Mr. Maduro a bad leader who dreams of becoming a dictator.

There is also the potential powder keg on Venezuelas streets. Infuriated by Mr. Maduros government, the opposition has mobilized more than three months of street protests that have crippled cities with general strikes, rallies and looting. More than 110 people have been killed, many in clashes between the state and armed protesters. Few know how protesters will react to newly imposed rulers.

Even the members of the new assembly themselves are a wild card. Their power will be so vast that they could possibly remove Mr. Maduro from office, some analysts note, ending a presidency that has been deeply unpopular, even among many leftists.

Its a crapshoot, a Pandoras box, said Alejandro Velasco, a Venezuelan historian at New York University who studies the countrys leftist movements. You do this and you have so little control over how it plays out.

Mr. Maduro contends that the government restructuring is necessary to prevent more bloodshed on the streets and save Venezuelas failing economy, which is dogged by shortages of food and medicine.

The president has refused to negotiate with street protesters, calling some of them terrorists and asserting that they are financed by outside governments trying to overthrow him. A new governing charter would give him wide-ranging tools to construct peace, he and leftists have said.

We need order, justice, Mr. Maduro said during an interview with state television this month. We have only one option, a national constituent assembly.

The turmoil gripping Venezuela illustrates the sweeping declines in popularity for the Venezuelan left since the death of its standard-bearer, President Hugo Chvez, in 2013.

It was Mr. Chvez who oversaw the last rewrite of the Constitution, in 1999, which was widely backed by the voters who had propelled him to office in the belief that the countrys rule book favored the rich.

That new Constitution and rising oil prices fueled a Socialist-inspired transformation in Venezuela. It helped enable Mr. Chvez to redistribute state wealth to the poor, nationalize foreign assets and make him popular with his supporters. The Constitution also left open the possibility of another constituent assembly in the future.

Now Mr. Maduro has taken that option at a time when the leftists are dogged by their deepest crisis in decades. This time, Venezuelans are seeing it less as a stab at reform than as an attempt by a struggling ruling class to maintain power.

Its a last-ditch effort to secure his base, Mr. Velasco said. Hes doing it at a moment of weakness.

Under the rules of the vote, the constituent assembly would take the reins of the country within 72 hours of being officially certified, though it is unclear to most people what would happen after that.

Some politicians have already suggested that governorships and mayors be replaced with communal councils. Top members of Mr. Maduros party have identified Luisa Ortega, the attorney general, who has criticized Mr. Maduros crackdown on protesters, as someone to be immediately dismissed.

Continued here:
As Venezuela Prepares to Vote, Some Fear an End to Democracy - New York Times

In such a system, even steps like Mr. Sharifs removal, which nominally reinforce accountability and the rule of law, can deepen decidedly undemocratic norms.

Though justice prevailed, so did perceptions that it is applied selectively. Though corruption was punished, so was, in the eyes of many of Mr. Sharifs supporters, defiance of the military.

The country has shown it can lawfully remove a prime minister, but it has also shown that voters, who have been allowed to decide only one peaceful transfer of power, still have their leaders selected for them. They are spectators foremost, and participants only occasionally, in their countrys democracy.

Many Pakistanis quickly noticed something that suggested Mr. Sharifs removal might perpetuate, rather than end, the undemocratic norms that have plagued Pakistan for decades.

The Supreme Court has pursued Mr. Sharif but sidestepped many of the other politicians and officials implicated in the Panama Papers leak that set off the investigation, leading to accusations that it was pursuing selective justice.

Moral of the story: when with the establishment, you will not be touched, Asma Jahangir, a prominent human rights lawyer, wrote on Twitter, adding, but if you disagree your grand mom will also be investigated.

This common perception that politicians serve their own interests and that accountability is deployed according to the whims of the elite matters. Those expectations help entrench such behavior as a norm, making it more likely to recur.

This problem extends beyond Mr. Sharif. Tax evasion rates in Pakistan are notoriously high, particularly among the wealthy. Transparency International, a corruption watchdog, ranked the country 113 out of 176 countries in its corruption perceptions index.

Though laws against corruption are strongly written, they are underenforced. And weak elected institutions are easily corrupted. Together, that means that nearly any leader is vulnerable to prosecution and removal if other institutions choose to single him or her out.

But each time they do so, they reinforce the belief impression that true power lies with the so-called hidden hands, powerful military and other elites who manipulate the system according to their own wishes, not with voters.

The decision in Mr. Sharifs case, which took a very broad view of the constitutional clauses requiring politicians to be honest and reliable, risks exacerbating perceptions that justice is often a means to a political end.

The clause under which he was removed essentially means all of Pakistan is ineligible, said Adil Najam, the dean of Boston Universitys School of Global Studies and an expert on Pakistans politics.

Accountability, in such a system, can also be a tool for targeting rivals. This weakens the expectation of punishment, which is supposed to deter future corruption, as well as the ability of healthy institutions to self-regulate.

Mr. Sharifs removal, even if it does discourage corruption, repeats a pattern that has recurred throughout Pakistans history and has been at the core of many of its worst problems. Unelected power centers, not voters, decide who rules.

Only one prime minister has left office in a democratic transition, in 2013. The rest have been removed by judges, generals, bureaucrats or assassins, Husain Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador to Washington, wrote on Twitter, calling it Pakistans 70-year tradition.

If Mr. Sharif had finished his term and faced elections again, that would have been a second peaceful transition, a milestone many political scientists see as a vital step in consolidating democracy.

You want elected officials to be judged by the population on the basis of their record, said Paul Staniland, a University of Chicago political scientist who studies Pakistan.

Ideally, Mr. Staniland said, successive elections would establish voters, not unelected bodies, as the final arbiters. Beyond being the point of democracy, this makes leaders accountable to the interests of their nation as a whole, rather than those of a few powerful elites.

Democracy fully takes root only when all aspects of the political system assume that final authority rests with voters and elections. For Pakistan, after so many coups and assassinations, persuading everyone of this would take time.

These interventions disrupt that, Mr. Staniland said, by sending the message that elites can continue assuming that they, not voters, still decide who rules.

Those interventions are possible because of an imbalance in the strength of Pakistans institutions. The military and courts are powerful and highly trusted by the public. By contrast, elected institutions, especially political parties, are weak.

The result is that instead of one institution checking another in ways that strengthen the democratic system, those institutions undermine one anothers already scant legitimacy, leaving the stronger unelected bodies to intervene again and again.

Individual checks like the removal of Mr. Sharif, however justified, chip away further at the legitimacy of those institutions. They remain just relevant enough to jostle for power, ensuring more such cycles, but too weak to actually clean out the system a recipe for instability.

With each such case, those institutions are also on trial. In a healthier democracy, finding a politician guilty proves the system works. In Pakistan, where elected institutions are often assumed to be corrupt, it can mean, in the eyes of voters, indicting the system as just as guilty.

Imran Khan, an opposition leader, has pursued Mr. Sharifs ouster for years, filing court petitions and leading public protests to press watchdog groups and now the Supreme Court.

The military also opposed Mr. Sharif, in part because he sought reconciliation with India, Pakistans rival. That does not mean the military played any role in Mr. Sharifs ouster. But it fed into perceptions that he was outside the good graces of Pakistans power brokers, leaving him vulnerable.

I could tell myself a happy story in which this marks the judiciary asserting the rule of law and getting everything on the right course, Mr. Staniland said. But I think thats pretty unlikely.

A more plausible reading, he added, is that justice is applied inconsistently and will be used to target parties and institutions that will then be unable to recover.

This has led to a norm, Mr. Najam said, of parties seeking to defeat one another not in elections but by creating the conditions for a military or judicial coup against them.

Without a break from Pakistans regular cycles of collapse, political institutions cannot grow stronger, and so cannot provide the real accountability and democracy that voters demand.

Pakistan has always been in this place, Mr. Najam said. Every democratic government in Pakistan that has fallen, and all of them has fallen, has fallen on the sword of supposed accountability.

The Interpreter is a column by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub exploring the ideas and context behind major world events. Follow them on Twitter @Max_Fisher and @amandataub.

A version of this article appears in print on July 29, 2017, on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Pakistan, Ousting Leader, Dashes Fair Democracy Hopes.

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Pakistan, Ousting Leader, Dashes Hopes for Fuller Democracy - New York Times

St Jamess Park in London. Photograph: Hannah McKay/PA

Your article (The insidious creep of Londons pseudo-public land, 24 July) raises an important and surprisingly neglected political issue. Public spaces streets, parks and squares played a major role in the development of democracy, serving as places where anyone, regardless of income or position, could meet, discuss, demonstrate and publicise their causes. The extent to which these spaces are disappearing and the effect on civic life deserves more attention.

Leafleting on the high street is a traditional way to publicise a campaign but is usually banned from the private space outside supermarkets and malls. Picketing is a valuable weapon against a bad employer but may not be possible where premises are inside a business park. Filming in such developments is subject to permission and often the payment of large fees, but it should also be worrying that representation and reporting in large parts of the modern city are restricted to those who meet the approval of property magnates and/or can pay high fees.

I hope your article will encourage more people to exert pressure for legislation to tackle the problem. Margaret Dickinson London

The Guardian is to be congratulated on revealing the extent of pseudo-public space in London and the issues it raises for its inhabitants and visitors alike. How we use land in the city and who benefits from it is a pressing one, especially with the London Plan currently under review by the Mayor.

While the expansion of pseudo-public space deserves attention, even more important is the scale of threat to green space and the green belt across the capital. This year CPRE London revealed a growing number of supposedly protected green spaces under threat in Greater London, with a sharp increase in planning permissions over the past two years. Despite the calls of the development lobby, we dont need to use our precious green spaces to meet the capitals desperate need for affordable housing. Our most recent report, Space to Build, shows that there is enough suitable previously developed land in London to accommodate more than 1m new homes.

We must be vigilant in standing up for the value of public, particularly green, space in our towns and cities so that they remain the civilised, shared places we all need to thrive. Neil Sinden Director, CPRE London

Try taking photographs on a major railway station these days and see how long it takes before youre challenged. Graham Larkbey London

Join the debate email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

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Our public spaces are crucial for democracy - The Guardian

In this hyper-partisan environment, parties are voting more in lockstep (major legislation like the Affordable Health Care Act passes on party-line votes), Congress faces greater turnover in big wave elections (as in 1994, 2006, and 2010), and local elections (like the recent spate of special elections) are increasingly contested on national rather than local issues. This is pattern is self-reinforcing, making for even more extreme partisanship and even deeper deadlock. The American political system seems to be caught in a straightjacket that gets tighter the more the public struggles.

Richard Hasen, alaw professor at theUniversity of California,wonderedin a 2013 article whether this called for drastic measures:The partisanship of our political branches and the mismatch with our structure of government raise the fundamental question: Is the United States political system so broken that we should change the Constitution to adopt a parliamentary systemeither a Westminster system, as in the United Kingdom, or a different form of parliamentary democracy?His formulation of the question, though, was too blunt. As he noted, any such constitutional change would be nearly impossible, especially given the gridlock that already exists. Thus, a Catch-22: The system is so broken that it needs to be changed, but there is no way to change it because the system is so broken.

One way to out of this paradox might to move toward something closer to a de facto parliamentary system, one that wouldnt require constitutional change. The Senate could remove barriers like the filibuster, which prevents a simple majority from effecting change. Democrats might want to hold on to the filibuster now because its a guardrail against Republican policy, but in the long run, the political system would be more effective and accountable.

Congress could also restore now disused procedures like regular order, which McCain drew attention to in Tuesdays speech.Lets trust each other. Lets return to regular order, he said. Weve been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle.As Peter C. Hanson of the Brookings Institution explains, regular order is the budget procedure for debating and passing individual appropriations bills in each chamber. Today this procedure has been replaced by the passage of huge omnibus packages at the end of the session, with little scrutiny and opportunity for amendment. A few procedural changes (including, as it happens, limiting the filibuster) could bring regular order back to life, making budgeting decisions much more orderly and rule-bound.

Another important restoration would be in congressional staffing, which was gutted by thenHouse Speaker Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. Prior to Gingrichs slashing, members of Congress had large staffs that helped them navigate the choppy waters of policy. Now, much of that work has been outsourced to think tanks, which are beholden to special interests. For Congress to act as an effective parliamentary body, it needs to more policy advisors on congressional staffs.

Congresscould also limit the power of the presidency, curtailing his ability to issue executive orders and to wage war without congressional approval. This would make the president more of a figurehead, with the real power residing in the House speaker and the Senate majority leader. In such a system, voters would, as in a parliamentary system, have a clearer idea of what policies theyre approving when they cast their vote in the booth.

A weak president and strong Congress is not incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. It existed in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, until Theodore Roosevelt came to power. During that period, presidents had sharply curtailed roles, mainly tasked with making appointments and administering the state while important policies were under the control of strong congressional leaders. Theres no reason why such a restoration of congressional power couldnt happen right now.

Much of governance inthe currentAmericansystemis opaqueespecially in periods of divided government, but not exclusively. For instance, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnells elaborate shell game with health care was designed to conceal the Obamacare repeal plan not only from public view, but from Democrats and even many Republican colleagues.If the existing system operated in a more parliamentary fashion, it would bring clarity to politics. As in the United Kingdom, political platforms would take on a much more meaningful role than a simple wishlist. They would be elaborate policy documents, with parties in power judged by their ability to fulfill their specific promises.

To be sure, a full parliamentary system would still be out of reach, because there would still be a bicameral legislaturethe House and Senate might not be controlled by the same partiesand the president would still have some power (although there could be constitutional amendments to limit even those, including the right of veto). Still, it would be more like a parliamentary system than what exists today.

It could be argued that these reforms are unnecessary given that the main problem with American democracy is Republican extremism. After all, the system worked fine in the brief period of Democratic unitary government from 2009-2011. But that was a two-year window that has only existed once in the last two decades. The greater norm is division or Republican unitary government.

Another objection might be that this reformed system would be less democratic than what exists now, a problem given that the current system already has many undemocratic featuressuch as the existence of the electoral college, and the Senates unequal representation. But surely the most undemocratic feature is the lack of public engagement, far lower in the United States than other comparable democracies (58 percent turnout in the last national election). A move towards a more parliamentary system might well increase political participation.

A governmental reform movement is perhaps the only way out of the current chaos. As American political parties act more like parliamentary ones, its time for the system to change accordingly.

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Why American Democracy Is Broken, and How to Fix It - New Republic