Saturday, October 27, 2018

Permanent Minority Government: Some Form of Civil War Is Inevitable


One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Trump presidency is that it was attained with a minority of the votes cast for the office.  This is an indication of the biases built into the electoral college system which favors low-population states relative to high-population states.  The bias is even more pronounced in the Senate where states receive equal representation regardless of population.  A relatively small fraction of the population could control the Senate, thus controlling the passage of all legislation and determining the makeup of the Supreme Court.  This minority could also preclude any constitutional amendment that might threaten its dominance.  How such an enshrined minority control might play out over time is the topic of a thought-provoking article be Jonathan Taplin in Harper’s Magazine: Rebirth of a Nation.

Taplin begins with this eye-catching lede.

“Can states’ rights save us from a second civil war?”

That statement derives from a comparison of a potential future history with the past history that led to the secession of the slave states.

“Donald Trump’s presidency signals a profound but inchoate realignment of American politics. On the one hand, his administration may represent the consolidation of minority control by a Republican-dominated Senate under the leadership of a president who came to office after losing the popular vote by almost 3 million ballots. Such an imbalance of power could lead to a second civil war—indeed, the nation’s first and only great fraternal conflagration was sparked off in part for precisely this reason.”

The ability of the Republican Party to control the Senate even while being outvoted by the Democrats is based on being the dominant party in a number of low-population states.  To illustrate how powerful the arithmetic becomes because of the low population bias, Taplin quotes some analysis from David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report.

“If every state’s and district’s election results on Nov. 6 were a uniform eight-point swing in the Democrats’ direction from the 2016 presidential result, Democrats would gain forty-four House seats—almost twice the twenty-three they need to control the chamber. But with that same eight-point swing, the party would lose four Senate seats, leaving them six seats short of a majority.”

The Republican advantage in the Senate will only increase as urbanization continues in future years.  Taplin quotes these numbers attributed to Norman Ornstein.

“By 2040 or so, 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states. Meaning 30 percent [of the voters] will choose 70 senators. And the 30 percent will be older, whiter, more rural, more male than the 70 percent.”

Would 70 percent of the population be willing to be controlled by the 30 percent?  Taplin thinks it unlikely, which leads him to raise the specter of a second civil war, though not necessarily one waged with guns.

“These Republicans are increasingly alienated in part because we are approaching an age of extreme minority rule, and their party is advancing a set of policies that fewer and fewer Americans actually support.”

“A poll in July from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal showed that 71 percent of Americans believe that Roe v. Wade (guaranteeing a woman’s right to an abortion) should not be overturned. And yet Trump has said appointing justices who would help overturn Roe is a major priority. The same is true for the Supreme Court’s support of various states’ voter-suppression laws, including the conservative majority’s decision in 2013 to repeal key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Despite there being in the past three senatorial elections 15 million more votes cast for Democrats than for Republicans, the Republicans continue to rule the Senate and thus the Court.”

Taplin suggests that there is a peaceful tactic for waging war that could be quite successful at disarming this coming majority-minority split.  In fact, blue states are already using it to counter the repression under which they suffer from the red-state minority.  They are taking to the courts to argue that edicts emanating from Washington are impinging on the constitutional rights accorded to the individual states.  The long-term basis for escaping from minority control derives from the Tenth Amendment.

 “…the Tenth Amendment, which declares that any power not specifically reserved for the federal government is granted to the states.”

State attorneys general have been waging war on Republican edicts in the courts.

“Since Trump took office, twenty-two Democratic state attorneys general have sued the Trump Administration. Nineteen attorneys general sued to stop Trump from putting an end to certain Obamacare subsidies, eighteen sued to stop the rollback of environmental protections, and sixteen sued to reverse Trump’s decision to rescind ­DACA protections for young immigrants. Although these lawsuits are working their way through the courts, the Trump Administration has lost many of the early cases, including a suit in August 2017 in which a California judge ordered the EPA to enforce its own clean-air standards.”

“California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, has sued the Trump Administration thirty-eight times in the past twenty-two months and has won twelve victories in the lower courts. He understands these cases may go to the Supreme Court, where California would ultimately make Tenth Amendment claims. For Becerra, this is a long fight born out of an immigrant childhood. His father grew up in California in the 1950s, when restaurants posted signs with the words no dogs or mexicans allowed. Now Becerra is asking: Where does it say in the Constitution that the president or the federal government should control immigration or auto emissions? And, more profoundly, he’s posing the Jeffersonian question: Where does the power to govern reside?”

Using states’ rights as a political tool will seem uncomfortable for many liberals who have learned to associate the term with racism and suppression of rights, but there are plenty of precedents for its use.

“…there’s a long tradition of progressives using the Tenth Amendment as a political tool, most notably, and successfully, in the 1850s, to resist the Fugitive Slave Act. Many Northern states abolished slavery decades before the Civil War. Wisconsin pioneered unemployment insurance for its residents twenty-four years before the federal government; Wyoming allowed women to vote in 1864, more than fifty years before the Nineteenth Amendment enacted suffrage nationwide.”

And in recent years, many significant societal changes have emerged from “social experiments” conducted at state and local levels.

“…most major progressive reforms have been incubated and become law at the state level—commonsense gun control, tackling climate change, ensuring ­LGBTQ rights, marijuana decriminalization.”

Basically, what Taplin would like is for time to heal some of our wounds.  Let the blue states contend with the red states in terms of demonstrating the best form of governance, and over time perhaps a new consensus will emerge; political dispute will retreat to dealing with mere details because the existential issues will have been resolved.

Let us hope there is reason for optimism, because the alternatives could be dire indeed.


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