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WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) The United States went nearly two centuries with only one impeachment of a president Andrew Johnson in 1868 and that failed to remove him from office.

In the last half century, the pace has noticeably increased. In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned rather than face imminent impeachment. Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 on allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice, and now there is a hue and cry to impeach Donald Trump for collusion with the Russians during the campaign or for obstruction of justice as president.

No evidence of collusion has been made public and as for obstruction of justice, it is based so far on one remark noted by the participant in a conversation with only two people present, and the other person denies it.

Even if one were inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to former FBI Director James Comey and take his word against that of the president, an admonishment to let this go might prompt a comment from Comey himself that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.

The problem is Congress is full of people who arent reasonable. Despite the rejection of the political class by millions of voters who supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries and elected Trump to the presidency, these incumbents, abetted by the mainstream media, continue to play a game of politics instead of addressing the nations problems health care, jobs, standard of living, education, crumbling infrastructure and so on.

Whatever Clintons moral missteps, the use of the impeachment mechanism against him was clearly motivated by partisan passions and a perversion of what the framers intended as a last resort to remove a criminal from office.

If Trump is as unfit for office as his critics believe (and as he seems intent on demonstrating), then the appropriate way to deal with it, short of proven criminal activity, is to have Congress take control of legislation and for voters to turn Trump out of office after a drubbing for his supporters in midterm elections.

The Montana House special election this week pitting Democrat Rob Quist against Republican Greg Gianforte and the Georgia runoff vote next month between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel could provide a preview of what to expect in 2018 congressional elections.

In the toxic atmosphere of the Beltway Bubble, meanwhile, there are already frenzied calls for impeachment.

The political and media hysteria surrounding the Trump administration, veteran Democratic operative Ted Van Dyk wrote this week in the Wall Street Journal, lies somewhere on the repulsiveness scale between the Jacobin excesses of the French Revolution and the McCarthy era.

The obsession of East Coast media and congressional Democrats with Russia, to the exclusion of virtually everything else, is out of step with the concerns of voters in the rest of the country. In fact, it is starting to look like a smoke screen to obscure the fact that Democrats have no constructive answers to these real problems.

For all the misfortunes facing their foe in the White House, Democrats have yet to devise a coherent message on the policies that President Trump used to draw working-class voters to his campaign, New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin concluded in a story headlined Outside Washingtons Blazing Inferno, Democrats Seek an Agenda.

Martins story focused on Quists campaign in Montana in the special election to fill the House seat vacated by Ryan Zinke, Trumps interior secretary. Quist spends his time talking about affordable health care, not Russia, because high insurance premiums are a much bigger issue for Montana voters.

Journalist Nate Silver lists five factors from previous impeachment situations that determine how likely a Trump impeachment is. These are the seriousness of the alleged offenses, the partisanship of pivotal votes in Congress, the presidents popularity, the presidents relationship with Congress, party control of Congress, and line of succession.

Silver discusses each factor in detail, but the simple fact is that the three cases of impeachment including Nixon, who resigned under threat of impeachment, as well as Andrew Johnson and Clinton all came when the opposition party controlled Congress. Even a Democratic majority in the wake of the 2018 midterm elections might have trouble getting an impeachment vote through, Silver says.

However, Vice President Mike Pence being next in line might make it easier for Republicans to buck that historical precedent. If the theory is that you shouldnt hire a well-qualified understudy because he makes your job more vulnerable, then Trump made a mistake in picking Pence as his running mate, Silver opines.

All this prognosticating and calculating, however, ignores one salient fact 63 million citizens voted for Trump as president and delivered him a solid Electoral College majority. (The reductionism by some Democrats who insist that only 70,000 votes in three states made Trump president studiously ignores this fact.)

The best way to remove him from office is to vote for someone else when and if he runs for re-election. This is the way voters got rid of an unpopular Jimmy Carter and the senior George Bush (and discouraged Lyndon Johnson from even running again).

Bringing out the bazooka of impeachment at this early stage is second-guessing voters who just seven months ago elected Trump president, despite all his evident personality flaws and questionable business dealings.

At the very least, opponents should wait until criminal and congressional investigations produce hard evidence of real wrongdoing by the president himself, rather than a rush to judgment on the basis of anonymous and uncorroborated allegations.

It would be the ultimate political dysfunction, and perhaps the death knell for our democracy, if lawmakers routinely turned to impeachment in an attempt to subvert the will of the people for patently political motives.

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Opinion: Calls for Trump's impeachment are a perversion of democracy - MarketWatch

By Michael K. Miller By Michael K. Miller May 23 at 5:00 AM

The decline of democracies is not as dramatic as it used to be. Instead of military coups, the greater threat is the steady erosion of democratic norms by elected leaders. If done skillfully, leaders can consolidate power and weaken democracy while most citizens remain unaware.

Largely reacting to President Trump, a wave of news stories and essays have raised the alarm about threats to American democracy and declines in democratic support among young Americans. This is echoed by concerns about the spread of illiberal populism in Turkey, Hungary, Poland, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere.

Yet how real is this threat in the United States? No democracy nearly as wealthy or durable as the United States has ever broken down. Are these warnings a partisan reaction to the 2016 election or an appropriate note of caution before the country follows the path of Hungary and Venezuela?

Our new survey of democracy experts sheds light on these questions, and the results are concerning. These experts see significant warning signs for American democracy, especially involving political rhetoric and the capacity of political institutions to check the executive. On average they estimate an 11 percent chance of democratic breakdown within four years.

A survey of democracy experts

We polled democracy experts to evaluate the current level of threat to American democracy. We invited prominent scholars who study democratic breakdown as well as experts on countries that have faced democratic decline. A total of 68 responded from 233 invitations, for a response rate of 29 percent. Most of these scholars (64) responded between May 15 and 21, but four answered a pilot survey earlier in May, before the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey.

The survey, which we plan to repeat monthly, is part of a larger project called Authoritarian Warning Survey, in collaboration with David Szakonyi at George Washington University, Lee Morgenbesser at Griffith University and others. Our website also features democracy scholars reacting to current events. This survey complements similar projects at BrightLineWatch and the Upshot, but is unique in focusing on democracy experts and asking them to compare the United States to recent cases of democratic erosion.

The results

We asked about six categories that often present warning signs of democratic decline:

We asked about American political leaders behavior on these dimensions, but did not refer to specific leaders such as the president.

Respondents graded each category from 1 to 5, with higher values indicating greater threat: 1 = Behavior of a normal consolidated democracy, 2 = Moderate violations atypical of consolidated democracy, 3 = Significant erosion of democratic quality with potential for future breakdown, 4 = Critical violations that threaten near-term survival, and 5 = Non-democracy. You can think of these as Defcon ratings. The graph below shows the average response on this scale for each of the warning signs.

However, political rhetoric and constraints on executive power are the only dimensions for which more than a third of respondents believed that there had been significant democratic erosion or worse (a 3 or above). Indeed, respondents dont appear to be amplifying the alarm for effect: only 1 response out of 406 cited the highest threat category of 5 (for political rhetoric).

Experts see the greatest threat manifested in anti-democratic rhetoric, especially by the president. One respondent noted Trumps rhetoric around violence, us vs. them, and intimidation of judges and witnesses associated with investigations against him. Others pointed to verbal assaults, attacks that seek to delegitimize crucial democratic actors, and the lack of expressed respect for democratic values. Anti-democratic rhetoric is more than empty words, too: It can erode the norms holding democratic compacts together and often predicts later anti-democratic behavior.

Executive constraints were the second most-threatened from this list. A common pattern in recent cases of democratic decline such as in Venezuela, Turkey and Hungary is the steady concentration of power in executive hands, eventually eliminating independent oversight. One respondent, coding this a 3, cited presidential attacks on all other sources of independent authority in the U.S. government, including investigative (e.g., FBI) and judicial.

When asked to identify the most threatening recent event, many experts cited a lack of effective oversight by Congress. But the most common response was Comeys firing, which was mentioned by nearly half of these experts. Although only a very small number of respondents took the survey before the Comey firing, they perceived less threat on average than did the respondents interviewed after the firing (1.83 vs. 2.11, combining the six categories into a single average).

These experts also expressed concerns about the White Houses aggressive treatment of the media, although several conceded this was mostly rhetorical. Fewer pointed to elections, although some criticized Trumps claims of rampant voter fraud and potential moves to restrict voting rights in response. These experts generally did not see significant threats to civil liberties or uses of civil violence.

We directly asked respondents the likelihood of democratic breakdown (by their definition) within the next four years. Note that breakdown does not imply full dictatorship, only a sufficient erosion of democratic quality.

The responses averaged 11 percent, with a median of 7 percent. Responses ranged widely, from a low of zero percent to a high of 60 percent, although only eight answered higher than 20 percent. Unsurprisingly, the more these experts believed specific aspects of democracy were threatened, the more likely they believed a democratic breakdown was.

Conclusion

According to democracy experts, U.S. politics has shifted outside of typical behavior for healthy stable democracies but has not yet eroded to the point where democratic survival is immediately threatened. Nevertheless, they believe that there is a non-trivial chance of future breakdown and point to worrisome threats regarding anti-democratic rhetoric and institutional checks of the executive. American democracy has proven remarkably durable, but warning signs are flashing.

Michael K. Miller is an assistant professor of political science at George Washington University.

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A new expert survey finds warning signs for the state of American democracy - Washington Post

The Jerusalem Post

Shaked tells Eilat confab that unelected bureaucrats endanger our democracy The Jerusalem Post While Mandelblit took a somewhat understated tone in responding and tried to argue that he directs his staff members to do all they can to move in the direction elected officials want, he did say that at some point his job was to be a gatekeeper for ...

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Shaked tells Eilat confab that unelected bureaucrats endanger our democracy - The Jerusalem Post

Pixabay. Public Domain.

For some years now, we have been witnessing the emergence of relational, cross-over, participative power. This is the territory that gives technopolitics its meaning and prominence, the basis on which a new vision of democracy more open, more direct, more interactive - is being developed and embraced. It is a framework that overcomes the closed architecture on which the praxis of governance (closed, hierarchical, one-way) have been cemented in almost all areas. The seriesThe ecosystem of open democracyexplores the different aspects of this ongoing transformation.

The impact of digital platforms in recent years affects all areas and all sorts of organizations: from production to consumption, from political parties to social movements, from business to public administration, trade unions, universities or the mass media. The disruption they generate is cross-section and intergenerational. Undoubtedly, their outstanding assets at least from a discursive point of view , are self-management and disintermediation. Today, through technology, people can participate actively in processes related to any particular activity. This is why we often talk about digital platforms as tools for democratizing participation, overcoming as they do the traditional tyranny of space and time. If we analyze them in detail, however, and look at the organizations that promote them, we realize that the improvement in citizen involvement tends to vary, sometimes considerably, as does the logic behind their approach.

Cooperativism and digital commons

Fairmondo is a virtual market, similar to Amazon. A quick look at this platform originated in Germany may not be enough to realize the current relevance of this project, which happens to be one of the most paradigmatic projects in platform cooperativism (conceptualized and popularized by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider) or open cooperativism (conceptualized by Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation). In fact, Fairmondo is a digital cooperative owned by its users, who are also its shareholders.

The impact of digital platforms in recent years affects all areas and all sorts of organizations: from production to consumption, from political parties to social movements, from business to public administration.

The open source, innovation and the commons constitute its DNA. Launched in 2013, its development has been made possible by a series of microfinancing campaigns, which have raised hundreds of thousands of Euros. Although its dimension is global - more than 12.000 members and two million products - its logic is local. Fairmondo is now evolving into a federation of local cooperatives in each country where an organization gets started. Unlike Amazon, democratic governance is key to its operation.

We can distinguish different types of technological platforms, depending on what economic model they promote. So, for instance, the role of technology as a space for interaction between equals (P2P) can be linked to the emergence of the Collaborative Economy. In any case, as pointed out by Mayo Fuster, if we are to attempt a critical analysis, it is fundamental to ask what the business model is (basically, to distinguish non-profit from for-profit projects), what technology they use (closed or open source; that is, democratically replicable or not) and what access they allow to the knowledge that is generated (if the data are public or private). Another layer can be put on top of this trilogy: the governance of the platform - which is nearly always intrinsically related to the organization that promotes it. This is why, when ascertaining the democratizing role of any technological platform, it is essential to undertake a holistic analysis of its economic, social and political approach.

Reviewing each project critically is particularly relevant in a playing field where citizens no longer act as consumers of goods and services, but also as producers and suppliers of their own goods. Some digital platforms have already been denounced, in fact, by those offering services in this way for causing job loss and favouring insecurity. The Uber app is a good example. Nor can the derived social impact on the community be excluded from the assessment of their democratizing function. That is, for instance, the impact in terms of citizen relocation of the activity of Airbnb: in addition to observing the platform as a tool for exchanging dwellings among equals, we must analyze in detail its actual use and its social and economic impact.

In short, platform cooperativism or open cooperativism, whether it focuses on the social strength of cooperative values or on the need to reappropriate common goods, calls for a detailed critical review of the local activity of its digital platforms. This is a different approach from that of the global analysis of the impact of technology, which quite often hides the replication of models generated by undemocratic digital environments.

La Teixidora, a democratic digital platform

Being aware now of the risks of partial evaluation of the impact of technology and the key elements to be considered in analyzing it, let us return to our starting point: democratizing participation. Given the importance of local assessment of global digital tools, let us now see the case of the multimedia platform La Teixidora, which allows us to synthesize the aspects which, in our opinion, shape democratic participation.

Platform cooperativism or open cooperativism,whether it focuses on the social strength of cooperative values or on the need to reappropriate common goods, calls for a detailed critical review of the local activity of its digital platforms.

This initiative, launched in 2016 in Barcelona, organizes in real time a collaborative structure with the aim of mapping distributed knowledge generated in different parts of the city during conferences, meetings, workshops and other offline meeting formats related to technopolitics and the commons. To do this, it appropriates several open source tools (collaborative editor, wiki, content storage spaces) and uses a Creative Commons license which, while recognizing authorship, allows anyone to adapt the contents and even use them commercially. Two significant apps illustrate the value of its functionalities in relation to democratizing participation:

In short, through this platform, both processes have been able not only to contribute proposals, but also to form an open learning space. And by mapping participation, which makes these processes both of which are promoted by the Public Administration - transparent and accountable, thus improving their democratic quality. At the same time, the information and the learning from their use are helping to redesign the technological platform itself and adapt it to the needs of the communities involved.

As we have seen, although digital platforms tend to create spaces for interaction, with no intermediation, they differ widely different in nature and scope. This is why it is important to create analysis tools that allow critical review and correct classification. In this sense, as Matthieu Lietaert points out, while assessing the different types of digital platforms which are being generated in and around the Collaborative Economy, it is crucial to show their raison dtre and their impact. Corporate unicorn platforms, which involve private codes and licenses, reproduce socially unfair models, while open or cooperative platforms aim at finding spaces for social and economic transformation.

Technological sovereignty

What economic and social impact does a digital platform have? Who owns the software and the data generated by its use? Who governs it? What is the relationship between its users and owners? These are all relevant questions for the discussion of the role of technology in an open democratic ecosystem. In our view, if we do not take them under consideration, we risk providing ourselves with tools which reproduce hierarchical and opaque intermediation and governance models. This is why, as Bernardo Gutirrez says, the direction taken by some cities - especially the so-called "rebel cities" - is particularly relevant. On the one hand, the social and economic role of the new actors and also their governance model - is called for; on the other, technological tools for inter-municipal participation are promoted.

What economic and social impact does a digital platform have? Who owns the software and the data generated by its use? Who governs it?

It should come as no surprise that, in the context of the demand for greater autonomy for the cities - networked and willing to increase their resilience capacity through the recovery of their sovereignty (recognizing the worth of electricity and water sources and suppliers, for instance, and the traceability of foodstuffs) -, the technological dimension represents a new inevitable layer to be taken into consideration in the era of the Net Society - an ecosystem which, as Manuel Castells says, is currently redefining power relations.

Read more here:
Digital platforms and democracy - Open Democracy

Common Dreams

Democracy Watchdog Turns Up Heat on White House to Answer for ... Common Dreams 'The legal basis for the strikes was of significant interest to the American public and Congress' and more »

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Democracy Watchdog Turns Up Heat on White House to Answer for ... - Common Dreams