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Passed only by a single vote in the Senate, President Joe Bidens $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act may lay the basis for overcoming two deep-seated problems that have bedeviled the Democratic Party for decades.

The first is a half-century curse on Democrats ability to maintain unified control of the federal government. As I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed a year ago:

Since 1968, Democrats have controlled both Congress and the White House three times, and each one of those periods ended with a hard turn right. Altogether, the years of unified Democratic government add up to just eight out of the past 52: four when Jimmy Carter was president, and the first two years of Bill Clintons and Barack Obamas first terms. Carters presidency ended with Ronald Reagans election in 1980, Clintons first years with Newt Gingrichs Republican Revolution in 1994, and Obamas first years with the tea party insurgency in 2010.

Even before the pandemic, it was clear that if Democrats won control of both Congress and the presidency, they needed to prioritize early deliverables to the votersvisible material benefitsto avoid repeating the disastrous reversals in midterm elections the party suffered under Clinton in 1994 and Obama in 2010. The pandemic has made those early deliverables only more urgent, and the big relief bill is providing them. With their narrow majorities in both houses of Congress, Democrats will need all the help they can get to retain control.

But short-term measures ought to support a long-term vision, and the relief legislation does that too. Indeed, it advances a second goal that has eluded Democrats for a long time: rebuilding a bottom-up political majority, encompassing both low-income working people and the middle class.

One of the reasons that Clinton and Obama devoted their first two years in office to universal health coverage was its potential for promoting that kind of cross-class support. Universal coverage would help both the uninsured poor and many in the middle class denied protection for pre-existing conditions and facing unaffordable health costs. But although Obama succeeded where Clinton failed, the Affordable Care Act was slow in delivering benefits, and its limitations still prevent it from enjoying the broad cross-class support that Medicare enjoys.

More from Paul Starr

The Biden relief legislation has two key elements, improvements to ACA subsidies and child care tax credits, that extend benefits from the poor into the middle class. Both thereby try to avoid the political weaknesses of programs solely identified with the poor. But both have been enacted on only a temporary basis, and with no votes to spare in the Senate it will be an enormous challenge to make them permanent in a follow-up reconciliation bill before the 2022 election.

Under the ACA, people who enroll for coverage through the insurance marketplaces are eligible for premium subsidies on a sliding-scale basis. Until now, however, the law has cut off subsidies entirely at 400 percent of the federal poverty level ($51,040 for a single person). That cutoff point, or subsidy cliff, may seem reasonable enough, but many people with incomes just above that level face extremely high costs. For example, as Katie Keith points out at Health Affairs, a 60-year-old earning just over the 400 percent cutoff faces an average annual premium of $12,886, or about 25.8 percent of income, not counting out-of-pocket health costs, which may also be substantial. Consequently, many middle-class people dont see the ACA as offering them much financial protection.

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The Biden rescue plan, as Jon Walker has argued, finally attempts to make good on the promise of affordable insurance. For 2021 and 2022, it extends subsidies to people above the cutoff, limiting their premiums to 8.5 percent of income. It also increases subsidies at lower incomes; in fact, people with incomes between 100 and 150 percent of the poverty leveland anyone who received unemployment benefits during 2021will be eligible for a silver plan on the marketplace at no premium.

The expanded child tax credits are potentially even more significant as a cross-class measure than the improved health insurance subsidies. Most of the news coverage about the child tax credits has focused on the stunning point that they will cut child poverty nearly in half. But this may obscure the politically crucial fact that the child tax credits are not an anti-poverty program in the sense of being targeted exclusively, or even primarily, to the poor.

Like the expanded ACA subsidies, the relief plans child tax credits have cross-class benefits. The full credit$3,600 per child under age 6, and $3,000 per child from ages 7 to 17will begin to phase out only at incomes well into the middle class ($112,500 for single heads of household; $150,000 for married couples). Even with incomes up to $400,000, couples with children will get partial credits. Many low-income families who do not receive the existing $2,000-per-child credit because their earnings are too low will also benefit from the legislation because it makes the enlarged credit fully refundable, which means that even those without tax liability will be able to receive the credit.

Not only do the child tax credits have potential cross-class support; they also have potential cross-party support because many conservatives see them as a pro-family policy.

The child tax credits are effectively what other countries call family allowances. Some analyses have suggested that in supporting the tax credits, Democrats are reversing the position they took during the 1990s in seeking to end welfare as we know it. Thats true in one sense: The new benefits are not work-related. But, in another sense, the child tax credits are the fulfillment of the promise to end welfare as we know it. Like family allowances elsewhere, the Biden tax credits dont phase out when low-income parents take paying jobs, so they dont have the kind of work disincentive effect that means-tested welfare assistance has had.

Not only do the child tax credits have potential cross-class support; they also have potential cross-party support because many conservatives see them as a pro-family policyindeed, as a policy that supports more traditional families where the mother stays home with young children. The tax credits thereby avoid some of the ideological divisions that have erupted over public subsidies for child care ever since Richard Nixon vetoed child care legislation in 1971.

Nonetheless, the opposition to making the expanded ACA subsidies and child tax credits permanent will be intense. The opponents will claim that making middle-class people eligible for benefits is costly and unnecessary. They will cite data showing that the programs will be more progressive in the strict sense of directing benefits more to the poor if eligibility ends at low incomes. But by limiting benefits to the poor, the opponents will be inviting a return to all the old political and incentive problems of welfare.

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Can Democrats succeed in turning these temporary policies into a new foundation for social provision in the United States? For the immediate future, the answer will depend on the Democrats precarious majority in the Senate. In a New York Times op-ed the other day, law professor Paul Campos urged Justice Stephen Breyer to retire immediately because the death or incapacitation of a single Democratic senator over the next 22 months could return Mitch McConnell to the position of majority leader, once again able to obstruct a Democratic Supreme Court nominee. Campos pointed out that six Democratic senators over age 70 represent states with Republican governors who could replace them with a Republican; five Democrats represent states where vacancies would go unfilled for months until an election. A single loss in one of these states would also likely end hopes for progressive reform in this Congress, including the extension of the ACA subsidies and child tax credits.

With their tenuous Senate majority, Democrats ought to be in a hurry to do whatever they can on infrastructure, taxes, and other issues. They have already made the most out of the leastthe most substantial relief measure conceivable with the thinnest possible Senate majority. If they can turn that relief measure into a permanent transformation of social policy, it will be one of the most brilliant acts of liberal political magic we have seen in a very long time.

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The Precarious Greatness of the Biden Strategy - The American Prospect

Its Nimrat Kaurs birthday, today. The Lunchbox whos in Agra is happy to be with her family and friends and she shares her plans: Im actually at home with my parents and grandmother. We were shooting in Agra so I came here just the day before yesterday. I thought Id spend two or three days here and then go back to Mumbai. Actually, last year also I was here at the same time. We went to Nizamuddin Dargah as I like to do that the night before my birthday and yesterday evening, too we went there. And today, Im looking forward to have a nice evening celebration with my family, she says.'We'll have a tea party with my nani ji' Whats on the menu, we ask her? Oh, we will have a couple of cakes not just one as we are are making up for the last year, she laughs. The plan to have just going to have a nice evening tea party thing with my nani ji. Shes actually just moved opposite us and she got here only a few days back. Mums going to have a few friends over, so it will be a small family-and-friends do. We'll have just a few easy things on the menu like sandwiches and pizzas and which don't any cooking prep as my mother was helping my nani ji settle in so I wanted her to take it easy today, she adds.

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Nimrat Kaur: Cakes, pizza and sandwiches for my birthday tea party, today - Times of India

Virginias Republicans could find opportunities in this years elections to end a dozen years in the wilderness if not for their own dysfunction.

In Richmond, a Democratic administration is trying to extricate itself from the quicksand of a Parole Board scandal in which inmates serving life terms for murder were freed without proper notice or explanation followed by efforts to keep results of investigations into the boards actions from public view.

A newly Democratic General Assembly swiftly enacted a remarkably progressive agenda by Virginia standards that includes elimination of the death penalty. Too much too soon? The election will tell.

In Washington, Democrats newly (and narrowly) in charge of Congress and a new Democratic president will inevitably wear out their welcome as happens with all regime changes. Only once since 1973 have Virginians elected a governor of the same party as the sitting president.

Those are potentially fortuitous omens for the GOP in Virginia.

But beyond that, things get worrisome for the Republican Party of Virginia.

First, lets rewind.

Late last year, Virginia Republicans decided to pick their nominees for the 2021 election for governor and two other top statewide offices in a closed convention rather than a primary election open to every registered Virginia voter. Historically, the party has favored conventions, which attract only the most motivated (and usually conservative) activists willing to spend the time and money to travel across the state and sit through a day of speeches.

The convention decision didnt set well with state Sen. Amanda Chase. A firebrand Trump disciple from Chesterfield, she preferred a primary where the former presidents supporters might give her a plurality. Thats all she would need to secure the nomination in a primary compared to a party-run convention, where she would have to muster more than 50 percent of the vote.

Some in the party fear that Chase, who called the pro-Trump mob that sacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 patriots, would fare even worse with the states dominant urban/suburban electorate in Novembers general election than her ideological kinsman, Corey Stewart, did in 2018 when Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine won 57 percent of the vote.

Chase, a COVID-19 skeptic and the only senator who refuses to wear a mask during sessions, sued to overturn RPVs convention decision, arguing in court that jamming 10,000 people under one roof would be a coronavirus super-spreader. The judge dismissed her suit.

Shortly after that, RPV scrambled to find a suitable convention venue and approached Liberty University in Lynchburg about using its expansive campus parking lots for a May 8 drive-in state convention. It envisioned thousands of delegates participating remotely from cars idling on Libertys acres of blacktop for hours under a May sun. RPV announced the tailgate convention, and media reported it as a fait accompli. School officials, exerting a measure of independence from the GOP at a post-Falwell Liberty, said in a news release that no such agreement had been reached. RPV chairman Rich Anderson declared the plan dead in a March 5 memo to Virginia Republicans and described the party as fatigued by the process.

This has begun as a rough start for me because of forces that I essentially cant control, and that is confronting this age-old question within the party: convention vs. primary? said Anderson, a retired Air Force colonel and eight-year House of Delegates member who was elected to the post last August.

On Friday night, when the State Central Committee finally approved a May 8 unassembled convention at 37 separate locations across the commonwealth, less than two months remained to winnow a field of nine gubernatorial candidates down to one.

If Rube Goldberg had come up with a convention plan, hed probably fit in on State Central (Committee) right now, said Shaun Kenney, a conservative writer and former RPV executive director. Its the definition of an unearned goal: Youre turning around and kicking the ball into your own net.

Kenney is like many Republicans who dont embrace Trumpism and find themselves estranged from the party they long served. He voices weary dismay watching his party flounder.

Its not going to be a very transparent process and I dont think that at the end of it people are going to be very pleased with the outcome or the method, Kenney said.

Conventions with murky outcomes create divisions. Questions still linger over the final delegate vote count in the 2008 convention in which former Gov. Jim Gilmore barely edged then-Del. Bob Marshall for a U.S. Senate nomination, Kenney said. Hard feelings lingered, and a few months later Democrat Mark Warner won nearly two-thirds of the vote and the seat he still holds.

Last year, Republican social conservatives in the 5th Congressional District denied freshman Rep. Denver Riggleman nomination for a second term in a drive-through convention at a church on the home turf of self-described biblical conservative Bob Good in Campbell County. Good, a former Liberty fundraiser and Campbell County supervisor, won the seat in November.

They did it that way because they knew I couldnt be beaten on an open battlefield, said Riggleman, aretired military intelligence officer with a libertarian streak who in 2019 officiated the same-sex wedding of two campaign staffers.

In 2011, the party decreed that its 2013 gubernatorial slate would be elected in a primary, but that was before the Tea Party consolidated its grip on the SCC in 2012 and scrapped the primary for a convention. That effectively squeezed then-two-term Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling out of any chance at succeeding Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell. Ken Cuccinelli, a social conservative and attorney general, was the nominee, but lost that fall to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, the only time in 44 years the presidents party won Virginias governorship.

What Ive learned is that these decisions always depend on what I call situational politics. Theres never been a great deal of principled consistency in the Republican Party when it comes to making these kinds of decisions, said Bolling, who was on the last GOP ticket to win a statewide election in Virginia in 2009.

This time its all about preventing Amanda Chase from becoming the nominee, which I understand because shed be a disaster, said Bolling, who now teaches politics and government at the University of Richmond and George Mason University. Again, its about situational politics. Its not new, its just with the players in different positions.

Perhaps the bitterest GOP nomination fight was in 2019 between former Del. Chris Peace of Hanover and current Del. Scott Wyatt. In that battle, the SCC was forced to choose between a convention that Wyatt won and a firehouse primary that Peace won. The SCC chose Wyatt over the incumbent Peace, who had supported Medicaid expansion. Wyatt won the seat in a deeply conservative district.

Its guerilla warfare. I dont like to use military metaphors, but I dont know how else youd describe it. It is hand-to-hand, its people hiding behind trees, said Peace, now a lawyer in private practice.

Despite its nomination tumult and conflicts, the GOP could still have a shot in November given a nominee who can compete beyond rural Virginia in the affluent, populous suburbs. A case might be made for wealthy businessmen Glenn Youngkin or Pete Snyder. Former House Speaker Kirk Cox has an appealing bio as a 30-year public school teacher and youth baseball coach, but as Peace learned supporting Medicaid expansion in Virginia is a tough sell within his party.

The GOPs saving grace, Kenney notes, may be timing.

Nobodys watching all this dysfunction right now, he said. Its March. Nobodys paying attention to the Republican Partys internal fights.

Originally posted here:
After 12 years in the wilderness, Virginia GOP's miscues could torpedo a 2021 comeback - Virginia Mercury

Part one: A troubled history of racism, violence and repression

They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

On a cold and drizzly February night in 1870 a mob of Klansmen came for Wyatt Outlaw, the first Black town commissioner of Graham.

Wearing robes and hoods, and armed with torches, swords and pistols, some 20 men broke down the door of his home on Main Street. They demanded Outlaw show himself, threatening to burn down the house. They stomped on the head and chest of his 73-year-old mother, who lived with him and his two young sons.

As his boys screamed in terror, the men bludgeoned their father, marching and dragging him half-naked to the nearby Alamance County Courthouse Square. There they hung him from a tall elm tree facing the courthouse and slashed open his mouth as at least 60 men watched.

When the sun came up on Sunday morning, Outlaws body still hung outside the courthouse. Even his friends and family were frightened to cut him down. The mob had pinned a warning message to his corpse.

Beware ye guilty, it read. Both Black and white.

Outlaws crime? Daring to challenge white supremacy.

Outlaw was murdered more than 150 years ago, but his work is far from over. New generations of activists, organizers, educators and politicians are still battling white supremacy in Alamance County often at the site of Outlaws last stand.

No plaque, marker or memorial honors the remarkable life or horrific death of Wyatt Outlaw. Instead, outside the county courthouse where he was lynched, a 30-foot statue of a Confederate soldier towers stands as a monument to the seditionists he fought in life and the racist ethos that drove his murderers.

That statue was put there not after the Civil War but in the Jim Crow era, said the Rev. Ervin Milton, long-time pastor at the Union Ridge United Church of Christ in Alamance. Like so many other things at that time, it was a way for white people to say, We may have lost that war, but really we won.

Milton has been involved in the movement to remove the statue. He said its presence, towering over the site of Outlaws murder, continues to send a strong message.

Its an indication, as is Wyatt Outlaws story, that if you rise too far above where the powers that be want you, they will take everything from you, Milton said. Like Wyatt Outlaw, activists today have a lot of work to do and they still have so much to lose.

Protests at the Confederate monument have become so fierce and frequent that Sheriff Terry Johnson attempted to ban them a move struck down by a federal court. At demonstrations sheriffs deputies often form a protective phalanx around the statue. Some deputies have shaken hands and high-fived members of neo-Confederate groups.

Meanwhile, in October, the same force pepper sprayed and arrested demonstrators, clergy and even a reporter during a voting rights event that culminated at the monument.

Most of the folks there, weve been talking about Wyatt Outlaw more recently and raising the consciousness of it and trying to connect the dots between what happened with Wyatt and whats happening now, Milton said. This is, I think, the plight of rural America. While Burlington is a city and Graham is a city, they have in a sense that farm rural mentality the slaves and the sharecroppers and you need to stay in your place. And if you dont, there will be repercussions.

It is sad and infuriating that these battles are still raging, said historian Carole Troxler, professor emeritus of History at Elon University. But it is not surprising.

Troxler wrote what is widely considered the definitive account of Outlaws life, death and legacy for the North Carolina Historical Review. Like many of the disturbing episodes from in the states and nations past, Troxler said, Outlaws story has been neglected and distorted in ways that make it difficult to agree on what is actually history never mind learn from it.

Much about Wyatt Outlaws life is still unknown and uncertain, overshadowed by the details of his tragic death. He was widely believed to be the mixed-race son of a Black woman and white man raised largely by a white family whose patriarch specified he was not to be sold like the familys slaves or the wages of his labor kept by the family.

As an adult, he joined the Union army like some 100 other Black men from Alamance county, fighting Confederates in Virginia and Texas. He returned to Graham to become a businessman, community organizer, charismatic politician and founder of a local African Methodist Episcopal church. He organized newly freed Black men to vote, served as a constable and formed armed patrols of Black and white men to break up parties of Ku Klux Klan night riders.Outlaws killers were never brought to justice. Though 18 men were indicted in connection with the lynching, the charges were dropped when the North Carolina General Assembly moved to indemnify those accused of crimes as part of secret societies.

Outlaw was lynched the same year that the Klan murdered Republican State Senator John W. Stevens. The killings inspired William Holden, the Republican governor who first appointed Outlaw to the Graham town council, to crack down on the Klan. When conservative Democrats again took the majority, they reacted to Holdens anti-Klan crusade by impeaching and removing him from office.

Troxler has served three times on the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Commission, a body that has been notoriously slow to approve markers related to incidents of racial violence in the state. A marker commemorating Outlaws life and murder was once proposed, Troxler said, but the commission rejected it.

Instead, on South Main Street in Graham, there is a vague marker commemorating the Kirk-Holden War.

Racial violence in Caswell and Alamance counties in 1870 led to martial law, under Col. Geo. W. Kirk, impeachment & removal of Gov. W. W. Holden, the marker reads.

Thats both an omission and a distortion, Troxler said. The term racial violence obfuscates what actually happened, she said a wave of Klan murders designed to terrorize newly freed Black people and white progressives who challenged white supremacy. The term Kirk-Holden War blames Kirk and Holden, whose anti-Klan crusade defied a relentless racial and political terror campaign.

I think it should be called the Caswell-Alamance insurrection, Troxler said.

Racist terror unpunished

Centering the declaration of martial law and impeachment ignores the more terrifying truth of racist terror and the fact that it went largely unpunished.

The take-home from the Holden impeachment was anybody who had advocated white supremacy, who had opposed the registration of and the voting of Black men, even these Klansmen who murdered people, they just got a cleared reputation, Troxler said.

A truth that is too complex for a highway marker and too complex for many people to grasp today is that the violence during so-called Reconstruction was so intense in Alamance County because the area was deeply divided.

There was a lot of pro-Union and anti-slavery sentiment in Alamance County and the surrounding area before, during and after the war, Troxler said. Thats what helped to create such dramatic flash points.

It was a deeply divided area then and its deeply divided now, she said. But our history, the history we learn in school and that the average person knows, doesnt always reflect that.

Correcting the historical record even with highway markers and monuments is an important step, she said.

Historical marker discussions can be fraught and complicated, particularly when they involve shameful moments in the history of a place. But Troxler said she rejects the notion, often advanced in such debates, that a marker honestly exploring a places history of racial violence is a permanent negative mark on a community.

Thats a whole lot of hogwash, Troxler said. The whole nation is marked by it. Its not even just the South. We need to mark as many of these places as we can out of historical honesty and out of respect for people who have been taken advantage of by formal and informal policies of white supremacy. We owe it. The nation owes it.

Violence with a purpose and the problem of dismemory

The question of what the state and nation owes and how it should be repaid is the subject of Dr. William Daritys recent work. Last year, the Duke professor of public policy co-authored From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.

The book examines Americas history of racial violence and systematic exclusion of Black people from political, social and economic equality. Darity said the lynching of Wyatt Outlaw is the sort of original sin at the heart of the division we see in the state and nation today.

I think one of the difficulties people have is, its very hard to grasp the scope of this violence, Darity said. Its frequently said that the Wilmington Massacre, which occurs relatively late in the context of the 19th century, is the only successful municipal coup detat that ever took place in the United States. Absolutely not true.

There were two previous, successful coups by former Confederates and Klan members in 1870s Louisiana, Darity said the Colfax Massacre and the Coushatta Massacre.

And in our book we attempt to identify two or three more, Darity said. These were explicit attempts to drive elected officials out of office, frequently in the process murdering them.

The case of Wyatt Outlaw in Alamance County fits this profile. Though originally appointed as a town commissioner in Graham, Outlaw was later elected. As a town constable, he used the law to fight the Klan. Far from protecting him, his rise to positions of authority further inflamed white supremacists who wouldnt stand for the political and social elevation of Black men.

What we really need to talk about is the failure to achieve democracy, Darity said. The United States has long been undemocratic, particularly with respect to the status of Black Americans.

Its a problem that Darity explored in a paper written with Dr. Keisha Bentley-Edwards, a developmental psychologist and assistant professor of Medicine at Duke.

This is a process that repeats itself throughout our history, Bentley-Edward said. Theres this feeling that Black people are gaining power and this feeling that its undeserved power. And that gets at who gets to be an American citizen and all the rights that come with it.

There is a straight line to be drawn between Outlaws election and subsequent lynching and the reaction of the American right wing to the election of President Barack Obama, Bentley-Edwards said.

The backlash was immediate, Bentley-Edwards said. We have Obama elected and thats when you have the Tea Party folks get active and groups later in alignment with President Trump, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. You have this rise of these groups with this promise to preserve American rights for Americans. But who is considered American?

The lynching of Wyatt Outlaw and like so many such crimes in that period signaled the beginning of a Confederate reclamation project, Bentley-Edwards said. The rolling back of voting rights, rights to free assembly and due process occurred across the South. Those who had fought to preserve the Confederacy now worked to dismantle reconstruction and put Black people back in their place.

Youre seeing it again now where you have the big push of Black folks in Georgia and across the country who have organized and activated their voting rights, Bentley-Edwards said. And now youre seeing laws across the country to put greater restrictions on voting. When theres a rise in people asserting their citizenship, you always see this.

Its a cycle that has been costly for Black people in America.

Darity traces the racial wealth gap in the country to the failure of the federal government to provide formerly enslaved people with the 40 acres they were promised in the aftermath of the Civil War. At the same time, Darity said, the government allocated upwards of 280 million acres of land to approximately 1.5 million white families under the homestead acts in 160-acre lots.

But on an even more basic and horrifying level, the Outlaw case shows that Black Americans werent just denied land and financial opportunities available to white people. When they organized to change that system through the electoral process, they were murdered in ways that sent an unmistakable message: the penalty for opposing white supremacy is terror and death.

The deprivation of that property, the deprivation of Black access to the electoral process which might have made it possible to ensure that the promise of this nation was kept that was made possible by intense waves of violence, Darity said.

That violence was purposeful, that violence was extensive, and we need to know that, he said.

The Black congressman and Civil War hero Robert Smalls calculated 53,000 Black people were murdered by white people between 1865 and 1895. Historians are increasingly convinced that number is probably correct, Darity said. That number and what it represents is vital, Darity said.

Those murders were not matters of personal conflict, Darity said. These were political murders.

The refusal to face that part of our history leads directly to the continued advancement of Lost Cause ideology, Darity said, and the inability to deal productively with the past and shape a working future.

The key idea here is a term my co-author Kirsten [Mullen] coined in the process of working on the book the phrase we call dismemory. Darity said. This process creates a false memory. This of course has political ramifications. Our explanation for how the world got to be where it is today is one that is grossly distorted.

In a state where the General Assembly passes laws to protect Confederate monuments erected in the Jim Crow era against the local communities and institutions that increasingly want to remove them, historical accuracy matters.

I think we have to engage in the struggle of making sure we have an accurate story of the historical record, Darity said. I think thats absolutely crucial in coming to an understanding and agreement about what should be done to address this record.

Any real discussion of the issue has to involve reparations, he said something many people all along the American political spectrum do not want to discuss.

Theres been an important struggle that has occurred in the past and there is still a very great struggle that lays ahead of us to tell the American story in the most accurate way, Darity said. I think what is positive in the American story is that theres an aspiration thats built into many of the nations documents. They deliver a message about what this country could be like. But it has never fulfilled those aspirations.

For Troxler, the Elon professor, the modern problems in Alamance County are enormous but so are the aspirations.

Shes meeting with church groups and activists now to talk about Wyatt Outlaw, the true history of the county and how it can inspire the next steps forward, however big or small.

Theres been some suggestion that the new high school in the country be named for Wyatt Outlaw, Troxler said. Which I think would be brilliant.

Milton, the Alamance County pastor, said acknowledging Outlaws life and the horrible truth of his death is an essential first step.

In this community, I think the notion people have about talking about racism is, Lets not do it, and say we did. Milton said. Lets assume it didnt happen. Lets not talk about the history of slavery, of sharecropping, the history of lynchings and stories like Wyatt Outlaw.

But if you cant talk about these things, you cant face them, Milton said. And thats how you get where we are today.

View original post here:
PW special report - The battle for Alamance: A look at the past and present of one of North Carolina's most divided counties - ncpolicywatch.com

Sunshine Week is organized by the News Leaders Association to promote open government.(Photo: News Leaders Association)

Its the gift that keeps on giving for Wisconsin Republicans. A decade ago, they secretly carved up the state in agerrymander so extreme that even 10 years later many voters are disenfranchised.

It was a neat trick: Take power from the people, give it to yourself,send the people the bill. The cost of redistricting a decade ago:$3.5 million, most of it going to high-priced lawyers.

Congressional and legislative lines will again be adjusted starting this yearto account for changes in population. This time, that work should be done in public.

OPINION: Ten years ago, when Wisconsin legislators drew voting maps in secret, it cost taxpayers $3.5 million. We need a more open process.

In his budget proposal, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers urges that the process be conducted in the open, that legislative records be retained for 10 years, and that legislative action on redistricting comply with Wisconsins open meetings law.

True transparency would help ensure fairer maps, but I wouldnt stop there. The entire process needs to be reformed. In Iowa, a nonpartisan state agency draws up the maps for an up-or-down vote in the legislature. That has resulted in less partisanship and better government in our neighbor to the southwest. For years, bills to do something similar in Wisconsin have failed to get a hearing.

RELATED: Tired of elections that don't seem fair? Iowa has a better way

RELATED: Documents were deleted from Republicans' redistricting computers

Gerrymandering got its name from Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts, who signed into law a redistricting plan in 1812 designed to keep his party in power. The Boston Gazette called it "The Gerrymander: A New Species of Monster."(Photo: FILE)

Gerrymandering drawing legislative boundaries to subvert the redistricting process is as old as the republic. Crafty political operatives, Democratand Republicanalike, have done it.

But rarely has the redistricting been as corrupted as it was in 2011 when Republicans went for the kill.

They set up shop across from the state Capitol and drew up highly partisan maps in a clandestine process so secretive that even their own lawmakers had to sign a document vowing they wouldnt talk about the maps. There was strong evidence that documents related to redistricting were withheld from the public or destroyed.

Republican leaders wanted to keep these things from you for a reason: They feared that voters would revolt if they knew the exact contours of their work.

Gerrymandering transfers power from citizens to legislative leadership from you to people like Assembly Speaker Robin Vos. It gives more power to well-heeled donors, too, the people Vos and others beg money from.

It gives Republicans who toe the line complete job security. Coddledin safe districts, the only way they canlose is if a well-financed opponent decides to take them on in the primary.

Many voters have no real choice.

It's Wisconsin-nice machine politics, perhaps not quite as crude as in Chicago but leading to the same place: corruption.

Its one big reason government doesnt work very well in Wisconsin. Its a reason the Legislature sat on its hands last year without offering a comprehensive COVID-relief bill. Or why Republicanlegislators could keep fighting a sensible mask mandate for months during the deadliest pandemic in a century, even though large majorities of voters in Wisconsin favor mask-wearing.

But you cant really blame these Republicans. Why should they care? They know they cant be held accountable.

In 2018, the Journal Sentinels Craig Gilbert found that the GOP gerrymander was so skillful that even though the sitting Republican governor, Scott Walker, lost by about a percentage point to Evers, he still carried 63 of the states 99 state Assembly districts. Gilbert found that 64 of the 99 districts were more Republican than the state as a whole.

In other words: Nearly a decade later, Republicans still enjoyed a baked-in 64-35 advantage in the state Assembly.

Thats some cake. And they got to eat it, too.

RELATED: Scott Walker's eight years as governor ushered in profound change in Wisconsin

Their gerrymander locked in a conservative revolution in Wisconsin that began with the Tea Party wave election of 2010. With their power secure, Republicans could do almost anythingthey wanted.

They could try to gut the state open records law on the Fourth of July in 2015 a move turned back by an infuriated public. Or, in the same bill, sneak in language that made it easier for a foreign pipeline company to use the state's power to condemn private property languagesuggestedby the company's lawyers.

And, as Walker was leaving office, they could limit the power of his Democratic successor.

There is no modern parallel in Wisconsin for such a broad use of raw political power.

Now, Republicans are ready to slice thecake again. They have agreed to spend $1 million or more this year in taxpayer dollars for the legal battles to come. If they have their way, theyll keep the process just as secretive.

That shouldnt happen. This process should be open, records should be kept, and any redistricting actions should comply with the state open meetings law.

"There should be statewide pressure on our state elected officials to conduct redistricting with a maximum amount of transparency," says Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, which advocates for open government. (Disclosure: I am a member of the council).

Demand better. Tell elected officials that you believe in transparency and expect it from them.

Put an end to this corruption.

David D. Haynes iseditor of the Ideas Lab and leader of the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin Editorial Board. Learn more about the Editorial Board and its members. Email: david.haynes@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DavidDHaynesor Facebook.

Sunshine Week was launched in 2005 by the American Society of News Editors now News Leaders Association and has grown into an enduring initiative to promote open government. Sunshine Week this year is March 14-20. Learn how you can get involved atnewsleaders.org/sunshine-week-about

If you want to contact your lawmakers, you can find them here.

Here's how to contact the leaders of the Assembly andSenate:

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), (608) 266-9171, rep.vos@legis.wisconsin.gov

Senate Majority Leader Senator Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg),(608) 266-2056, Sen.LeMahieu@legis.wisconsin.gov

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Opinion: A decade ago, Wisconsin Republicans locked in their power through gerrymandering. Open up this secretive process to the public. - Milwaukee...