Miami Herald

Anti-gerrymandering group defies odds with 2018 ballot drive

In this Nov. 2, 2017 photo Katie Fahey, president and treasurer of the ballot committee Voters Not Politicians, speaks to reporters at the Martin Waymire public relations firm in Lansing, Mich. The group has surprised by using an all-volunteer legion of petition circulators to gather at least 350,000 signatures for a 2018 ballot drive against partisan gerrymandering. David Eggert AP Photo

Associated Press     November 19, 2019       

Lansing, Mich. An all-volunteer group of activists has defied the odds by collecting hundreds of thousands of voter signatures for a 2018 initiative to overhaul redistricting in Michigan — without having to pay a dime for a signature.

It’s a rarity in state politics outside of anti-abortion ballot drives, which have had a large base of support within churches and crucial organizational backing from Right to Life and other organizations.

Voters Not Politicians, a ballot committee opposed to the partisan gerrymandering of congressional and legislative districts, is poised to turn in roughly 400,000 signatures by year’s end. About 315,000 valid ones are needed. An astounding 350,000 signatures have been gathered in just three months, thanks to a legion of at least 3,000 active and trained volunteers circulating petitions.

“Our circulators know what they’re doing and they take it seriously,” said the group’s president Katie Fahey, who wrote a Facebook post in the aftermath of the 2016 elections asking people to fight gerrymandering. “It shows the enthusiasm of everyday people wanting to make sure that this change actually happens.”

The Legislature and governor now control the once-a-decade redistricting process, which has led to seats that are drawn to guarantee as many comfortable, uncompetitive districts as possible. The majority party, which was the GOP after the 2010 and 2000 population counts, pads its advantage by translating its votes into a greater share of victories. The practice has been criticized for diminishing the number of centrist lawmakers and furthering political polarization, though some experts point to more influential factors such as people self-sorting into like-minded communities.

Under the proposed constitutional amendment , a commission of citizens would handle redistricting. There would be four Democrats, four Republicans and five members with no affiliation with either major party — drawn at random by the secretary of state. The panel would be prohibited from providing a “disproportionate advantage” to a political party, using “accepted measures of partisan fairness.”

Fahey said one reason the ballot proposal has struck a chord after the bitter presidential election is it lets people coalesce behind the concept of nonpartisan fairness, which “everyone can agree on” and “feel good about,” instead of rehashing arguments over their political beliefs with family and others. Donald Trump’s win in Michigan and Bernie Sanders’ victory in the Democratic primary here, she said, showed that voters wanted to change a “broken” political system.

“Redistricting and gerrymandering seemed like that fundamental issue where we could really start changing the system and trust it again,” said Fahey, who lives in Caledonia and works in the recycling and waste industry.

The drive’s early grassroots success, which was aided by social media and dozens of town hall events, has impressed even critics who oppose the measure.

“They’re making the petition management industry look bad. They’ve done for seemingly free what outfits charge a substantial amount of money to do,” said Bob LaBrant, a longtime Republican strategist and redistricting expert. “Their grassroots effort has been remarkable.”

He said a circulator was recently spotted with a table at a rest stop along Interstate 96 in Howell.

“Wherever two are more are gathered, they’ve been there,” LaBrant said.

As the ballot committee nears the end of signature gathering, its leaders are preparing for what’s next — a possible legal challenge and the campaign for votes in the face of what’s expected to be stiff resistance from GOP allies who see the plan as a partisan maneuver to help Democrats.

LaBrant and Eric Doster, who served as general counsel for the Michigan Republican Party for 25 years, helped to create the opposition Committee to Protect Voters Rights last month.

“Getting it on the ballot and getting it passed are two different things,” said Democratic consultant Howard Edelson, who isn’t involved in the redistricting issue but has worked on other statewide initiatives before.

Having raised $278,000 as of Oct. 20, Voters Not Politicians has hired a law firm along with a Lansing-based public relations firm with experience advocating for or against ballot initiatives.

LaBrant criticized the random selection process proposed by the amendment, saying commissioners would be “absolute neophytes … not having a clue about redistricting.” They would have to rely heavily on the secretary of state for assistance, he said.

“The power behind the throne is going to be whoever is elected secretary of state,” said LaBrant, who suspects the measure was drafted largely with Democratic secretary of state candidate Jocelyn Benson — a respected election expert — in mind.

He said the proposal would downgrade a requirement to minimize breaks in county and municipal lines in favor of vague standards requiring that districts reflect “communities of interest” and that they not give a party a “disproportionate advantage.”

“You’re going to have these districts spoking out of urban cities into township and rural areas to basically kind of spread out the Democratic urban vote,” LaBrant said. “These districts are going to be not exactly compact.”

Organizers of the ballot drive, however, deny having partisan motivations and say their goal is to have a congressional delegation and Legislature that truly reflect the electorate. It’s no surprise that “political elites” are fighting the measure to keep their power, Fahey said.

Last fall, voters statewide split their ballots essentially 50-50 between Republican and Democratic state House candidates. Yet Republicans won 57 percent of the House seats, claiming 63 seats to the Democrats’ 47. That amounted to a double-digit “efficiency gap” — a measure of whether gerrymandering has helped a political party enlarge its power — one of the highest advantages among all states.

Jamie Lyons-Eddy, a former teacher from Troy who directs field operations for the initiative after being inspired by Fahey’s Facebook post, said getting people to sign the petitions has been pretty easy despite the potential for redistricting to be an unfamiliar, fairly complex topic.

Volunteers carry custom clip boards with maps of oddly-drawn, gerrymandered districts on the back to help explain the issue to would-be signers.

“The idea that voters should choose their politicians instead of the other way around is pretty straightforward,” she said.

Online:        Petition wording: http://bit.ly/2hIYy8j

The Nation

Republicans in Congress Think You’re an Idiot

The GOP tax bill should be toxic to everyone who is not ultra-rich.

By Robert L. Borosage        November 17, 2017

Paul Ryan walks to the House chamber, May 2017. (AP / Andrew Harnik)

Republicans in Congress must believe voters are dolts. Nothing else can explain the tax bill that just passed the House with 227 Republican votes and no Democrats. No rational person would make the choices that are in this bill. Even granting that big GOP donors want this legislation, and that cutting taxes and spending are the core Republican mission, this bill is ridiculous. Anyone who voted for it should be drummed out of Congress simply for the insult.

Consider the following facts:

• At a time when inequality has reached Gilded Age extremes, the Republicans will give fully one-half of the tax cuts to the top 1 percent. That’s not an economic strategy. That’s a plutocrats’ raid on the Treasury.
• Corporate profits are near record highs, and corporate taxes are declining as share of federal income, but Republicans hope to lard Big Business with the largest one-time cut in corporate taxes ever. Three-quarters of the benefits of the $1.4 trillion bill go to businesses—and those are permanent. The remainder that goes to individuals will end in eight years when Senate Republicans get done with it.
• Republicans actually voted to raise taxes on 36 percent of working and middle-class families. By 2023, only 40 percent of Americans would get a tax cut. (The Senate bill is worse, raising taxeson families earning $10,000–75,000 over the next decade, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation).
• Citibank, Wells Fargo, Apple, Pfizer, and many others have for years successfully evaded paying taxes on $2.6 trillion in profitsby cooking their books to report the profits as earned in foreign tax havens. Yet Republicans want to reward the companies for their past tax evasion and provide them a permanent discounted tax rate for tax-haven profits in the future.
• The cost of college is a national crisis—student-loan debt now exceeds credit-card debt—and Republicans just voted to add $71 billion to the cost of collegeover the next decade. Twelve million student-loan recipients will pay more, with the repeal of the deduction for interest paid on student loans. Graduate students will get taxed for the value of tuition that is provided by universities in their work-study programs.
• Disabled veterans and the long-term unemployed also lose in this tax bill: Republicans voted to eliminate the tax credit that gives employers an incentive to hire them. Thank you for your service.
• Republicans eliminated the deduction for high medical expenses that aids families dealing with the costs of long-term care, such as the elderly struggling with dementia. The disabled get hit too: The GOP legislation eliminated the tax credit that helped employers make their workplaces accessible to the disabled.
• The GOP aims to eliminate the estate tax, which applies only to fortunes over $5.4 million. They also want a lower tax rate for those who are passive owners of a “pass-through” business as opposed to those who actively are building the business.
• Republicans are perversely selective in the loopholes and deductions they choose to preserve or eliminate. Despite Trump’s promises, they protected the obscene “carried-interest loophole” that enables hedge-fund billionaires to pay a lower tax rate than nurses or cops. Instead, they moved to eliminate the $250 teachers can deduct of the money they spend out of their own pockets on classroom supplies.
• Corporations can continue to deduct the expenses associated with moving jobs outside the United States. But workers will not be allowed deduct moving expenses when their employers force them to relocate.
• Interest expenses in commercial real-estate transactions remain deductible. Republicans ensured that golf-course owners like Donald Trump retain the tax breakfor not building on their golf courses. But Republicans eliminated the tax credit for investment in impoverished rural and urban communities with more than 20 percent in poverty.

The trees are ugly, but the forest is even worse. At a time when we desperately need to rebuild America, Republicans have ignored real, pressing unmet public needs to shovel more money to the rich and corporations. If this bill becomes law, it will force immediate cuts across the board, including a $25 billion cut to Medicare. As soon as they finish raiding the Treasury for the big corporations and the wealthy, Republicans will start railing about deficits and push for more cuts in everything from education to Head Start. That isn’t just corrupt. It is criminal.

Robert L. Borosaage is a leading progressive writer and activist.

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The Washington Post

The Russia investigation’s spectacular accumulation of lies

President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. communicated with WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign. Here’s what the messages say. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

By Michael Gerson, Opinion writer            November 16, 2017

I spent part of my convalescence from a recent illness reading some of the comprehensive timelines of the Russia investigation (which indicates, I suppose, a sickness of another sort). One, compiled by Politico, runs to nearly 12,000 words — an almost book-length account of stupidity, cynicism, hubris and corruption at the highest levels of American politics.

The cumulative effect on the reader is a kind of nausea no pill can cure. Most recently, we learned about Donald Trump Jr.’s direct communications with WikiLeaks — which CIA Director Mike Pompeo has called “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia” — during its efforts to produce incriminating material on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. But this is one sentence in an epic of corruption. There is the narrative of a campaign in which high-level operatives believed that Russian espionage could help secure the American presidency, and acted on that belief. There is the narrative of deception to conceal the nature and extent of Russian ties. And there is the narrative of a president attempting to prevent or shut down the investigation of those ties and soliciting others for help in that task.

In all of this, there is a spectacular accumulation of lies. Lies on disclosure forms. Lies at confirmation hearings. Lies on Twitter. Lies in the White House briefing room. Lies to the FBI. Self-protective lies by the attorney general. Blocking and tackling lies by Vice President Pence. This is, with a few exceptions, a group of people for whom truth, political honor, ethics and integrity mean nothing.

What are the implications? President Trump and others in his administration are about to be hit by a legal tidal wave. We look at the Russia scandal and see lies. A skilled prosecutor sees leverage. People caught in criminal violations make more cooperative witnesses. Robert S. Mueller III and his A-team of investigators have plenty of stupidity and venality to work with. They are investigating an administration riven by internal hatreds — also the prosecutor’s friend. And Trump has already alienated many potential allies in a public contest between himself and Mueller. A number of elected Republicans, particularly in the Senate, would watch this showdown with popcorn.

But the implications of all this are not only legal and political. We are witnessing what happens when right-wing politics becomes untethered from morality and religion.

What does public life look like without the constraining internal force of character — without the firm ethical commitments often (though not exclusively) rooted in faith? It looks like a presidential campaign unable to determine right from wrong and loyalty from disloyalty. It looks like an administration engaged in a daily assault on truth and convinced that might makes right. It looks like the residual scum left from retreating political principle — the worship of money, power and self-promoted fame. The Trumpian trinity.

But also: Power without character looks like the environment for women at Fox News during the reigns of Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly — what former network host Andrea Tantaros called “a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency and misogyny.” It looks like Breitbart News’s racial transgressiveness, providing permission and legitimacy to the alt-right. It looks like the cruelty and dehumanization practiced by Dinesh D’Souza, dismissing the tears and trauma of one Roy Moore accuser as a “performance.” And it looks like the Christian defense of Moore, which has ceased to be recognizably Christian.

This may be the greatest shame of a shameful time. What institution, of all institutions, should be providing the leaven of principle to political life? What institution is specifically called on to oppose the oppression of children, women and minorities, to engage the world with civility and kindness, to prepare its members for honorable service to the common good?

A hint: It is the institution that is currently — in some visible expressions — overlooking, for political reasons, credible accusations of child molestation. Some religious leaders are willing to call good evil, and evil good, in service to a different faith — a faith defined by their political identity. This is heresy at best; idolatry at worst.

Most Christians, of course, are not actively supporting Moore. But how many Americans would identify evangelical Christianity as a prophetic voice for human dignity and moral character on the political right? Very few. And they would be wrong.

Many of the people who should be supplying the moral values required by self-government have corrupted themselves. The Trump administration will be remembered for many things. The widespread, infectious corruption of institutions and individuals may be its most damning legacy.

CNN – American Opportunity

Here’s what happened to teachers after Wisconsin gutted its unions

by Lydia DePillis, CNN Money        November 17, 2017

Britta Pigorsch was a sophomore in a high school outside of Madison, Wisconsin, when Act 10 passed the state legislature in 2011.

She already knew she wanted to be a teacher. But the legislation, which gutted collective bargaining rights for public sector unions and slashed their benefits, galvanized her further.

“It angered me,” said Pigorsch. “I thought: Well, I could either not go into education, or I could go into education and be a voice that stands up for it.”

Now 22 years old and soon to receive her teaching certificate from the University of Wisconsin, Pigorsch faces a vastly changed landscape.

Along with diminished leverage with school boards, teachers have seen lower pay, reduced pension and health insurance benefits and higher turnover as educators hop from one district to another in search of raises, a new report finds.

With the Supreme Court preparing to hear a case that could make paying dues to unions voluntary for public sector employees — like they already are in right-to-work states — Wisconsin’s experience could soon confront teachers across the country as well.

In the five years since Act 10 was passed, median salaries for teachers in the state have fallen by 2.6% and median benefits declined 18.6%, according to an analysis of state administrative data by the left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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In addition, 10.5% of public school teachers in Wisconsin left the profession after the 2010-2011 school year, up from 6.4% the year before. The exit rate remains elevated, at 8.8%.

As a consequence, the report found, Wisconsin’s educational workforce is less experienced: Teachers had an average of 13.9 years experience under their belt in the 2015-2016 academic year, down from 14.6 years in 2010-2011.

Teachers aren’t just moving out of the state or out of the field entirely. A higher percentage of teachers are also moving to other districts: From 2015 to 2016, the percentage who did so jumped from 1.3% to 3.4%, according to the report.

“In a climate right now where we see the only way an educator could get a pay raise is moving to another district, that’s a natural outcome,” said Christina Brey, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Education Association Council, which represents grade school employees.

That’s particularly difficult for rural districts, which can’t afford to pay more to retain good teachers. The report found that teachers in rural areas werethe most likely to move districts, and the average level of experience among teachers in those areas had fallen the most: One out of four rural teachers had taught for fewer than five years in 2015-2016, up from 17.6% in the year before Act 10 passed.

“Rural schools oftentimes are seen as starting grounds, where newer teachers can put in a year or two before moving to a wealthier area where they can get a pay raise,” Brey said.

So how has all this affected kids?

The report’s authors, David Madland and Alex Rowell, reviewed other research that suggested that as collective bargaining agreements expired, students performed slightly worse on standardized tests, particularly in already struggling schools.

But perfect measurement is difficult, since the tests have changed several times since Act 10 passed. The conservative, Madison-based John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy, which supports Act 10, argues that other metrics — such as graduation rates and the number of advanced placement tests taken — are trending upward.

“I think if this cataclysmic destruction scenario was going to play out, you wouldn’t be seeing such positive education news,” says Chris Richardson, the organization’s communications director.

Nobody disputes, however, that Act 10 had a devastating impact on Wisconsin’s unions, which went from representing 14.1% of workers in the state in 2011 to 9% in 2016.

The case currently pending before the Supreme Court, Janus vs. AFSCME, could make paying dues to unions voluntary for public sector employees. (Currently, in non-right-to-work states that allow collective bargaining for public employees, all workers covered by a union contract must pay dues.)

That would cut into the unions’ budgets and reduce their power, which could lead to the same weakening of pay and benefits that Wisconsin’s teachers have experienced.

But unions in other states have seen this coming for a long time. The unions weathered a similar case that deadlocked last year after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, and they have since taken steps to build confidence among their membership so they will keep paying dues even if it’s no longer required.

“As a result of the dress rehearsal that they got, they all in their own ways have taken steps to be as prepared as they can be,” says Michael Childers, director of the School for Workers at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s not like they haven’t seen this coming.”

In the years since Act 10 passed, Brey said her union has adapted by becoming more active on the local level, and offering more training and other services to make membership more appealing for teachers.

Meanwhile, Pigorsch is considering where to look for a job after she earns her certificate in January. Many of her peers, she said, have been warned off by older teachers who’ve become cynical about the changes to Wisconsin schools. She wants to stay and try to improve things in Wisconsin, but better pay and stronger representation are just across the St. Croix River in Minnesota.

“A part of me thinks I want to start my career feeling good about being a teacher, and being respected, and having the benefits that a union can give me,” Pigorsch said. “If the students from the state’s top teaching school don’t even want to teach in their own home state, I don’t think that’s a very good sign.”

Related: Why the world isn’t getting a pay raise

Related: Billionaire pulls the plug on DNAInfo, Gothamist after vote to unionize

The Other 98%

“The super-rich don’t need another tax cut.” — Nick Hanauer