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A string of antisemitic attacks has taken place over the last few days across Texas and in Austin. In the latest incident, several people in an Austin neighborhood received hateful letters at their homes. The letters received by Jewish residents in Hays County were sealed in a plastic bag filled with small rocks, Hays County Judge Ruben Becerra said Sunday, according to the Austin American-Statesman.  

The letters blamed Jewish community members for the novel coronavirus pandemic. “Every single aspect of the COVID agenda is Jewish,” the letters read. They also named Jewish scientists and pointed fingers at leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that are Jewish.

“Negative actions motivated in bias is an attack against an entire community and not just an attack on a single person,” Becerra wrote on Twitter. “This behavior is not acceptable.”

According to the Austin American-Statesman, Chabad of San Marcos, the only Jewish center in the county, offered guidance and support to members who were targeted.  

After receiving multiple calls from people who were upset regarding the incident, Rabbi Ari Weingarten said he is working with community leaders to “heal spirits” and remind them that “unity is key.” Since the eight nights of  Hanukkah begin Nov. 28, community menorah lighting events have been scheduled. “The message of Hanukkah is that light is stronger than dark and good prevails,” Weingarten said.

While the Hays County Sheriff’s Office said the letter distribution does not qualify as a criminal offense, it said it is aware propaganda is being anonymously distributed. The FBI, however, noted that is is prepared to investigate should the need arise.

“We are aware of the incidents and are in regular contact with local authorities,” the FBI said in a statement regarding the letters, according to the Hays Free Press. “If in the course of the local investigation, information comes to light of a federal violation, the FBI is prepared to investigate. “

According to the Anti-Defamation League in Austin, 17 antisemitic incidents have been reported in the past 10 days in Texas. This includes an incident in which Austin’s Congregation Beth Israel synagogue was set on fire Sunday night, While the damage was contained to the exterior of the building, fire officials said they are looking for a man seen carrying a five-gallon container then fleeing the scene in a car after starting the fire.

Additionally, in October about a dozen people displayed an antisemitic banner from the heavily trafficked North MoPac Boulevard overpass, and displayed similar posters in the East Sixth Street entertainment area, the Houston Chronicle reported. In the same week, an Austin school building was also vandalized with swastikas, homophobic slogans, and racist slurs.

Community leaders and others condemned the actions, including the Austin City Council and mayor.

“When we see acts of hate, they’re jarring. They’re hurtful, and they are scary. But they are not surprising,” Austin Mayor Steve Adler said, according to the Houston Chronicle. “Because there are people who do hateful and horrible, wrongful things.”

 “The danger is that hate spreads,” he cautioned.   

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Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has emerged as the favored candidate of multilevel marketing companies, and it’s not because of her statement handbags and dresses, as easy as it would be to imagine her recruiting a group of coworkers or friendquaintances to aggressively pitch said handbags and dresses over a few glasses of red wine. It’s because multilevel marketing companies, many of which come about as close as possible to being full-on pyramid schemes while remaining within the law, are worried about Democrats passing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act and see Sinema as a key ally in defeating it, Politico reports.

The PRO Act would, among other things, make it more difficult for companies to misclassify workers as independent contractors rather than employees. Independent contractors don’t have many protections and rights that employees have—little things like the minimum wage, overtime pay, Social Security contributions, and protections against discrimination. Multilevel marketing companies want to keep it that way because their entire business model is built around people working for them for very little—in some cases, even losing money.

Sinema is one of three Democratic senators who hasn’t signed on to the bill, with her fellow Arizona senator, Mark Kelly, who has said he wants changes to the independent contractor provisions, and Sen. Mark Warner, who has signaled support despite not having formally co-sponsored it. Even Sen. Joe Manchin is theoretically on board. 

Multilevel marketing companies are not traditionally big political givers, and especially not to Democrats. The DeVos family got its wealth through Amway, one of the early big names in the industry, and they are obviously huge Republicans. But the PAC for Alticor, Amway’s parent company, gave Sinema $2,500 in June. The bat signal definitely went out in June, because, Politico reports, three other multilevel marketers gave Sinema $2,500 apiece that month. She got other chunks of $2,500 from industry players in April and July. Aside from the DeVos family, several of these firms make few political contributions: two of the PACs that donated to Sinema haven’t given to any other federal lawmakers this year, and a third has otherwise only given to lawmakers in its home state of Utah.

In addition to her opposition to strengthening worker protections, Sinema has been a supporter of multilevel marketing, joining a virtual town hall put on by the Direct Selling Association and Isagenix in May 2020, and saying she would help them “succeed through these difficult circumstances.” The Direct Selling Association has described her as “One of the few Democratic Senators who supports direct selling.”

Come to think of it, if Sinema gets primaried out in the future, she could have a future as a real rock star MLM seller and recruiter.

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Tuesday and the handwringing that followed has undoubtedly been unpleasant. As Democrats on Wednesday tried to assess the magnitude of the post-election fallout, one astute observer chimed in with some good news.

“The 2022 election is not, in fact, being held yesterday,” wrote Twitter user Corrine McConnaughy, a Princeton political scientist. Many thanks to the Daily Kos reader who dropped that somewhere in my comments this week.

Let’s take a step back and try to parse what’s real (and what isn’t) as we move forward.

1. The headwinds of history are real

There’s just no escaping the fact that when one party controls the federal government, voters are going to take out any dissatisfactions they have on that party, deservedly or not. That dynamic was doubly true in Virginia, where Democrats also held a trifecta, controlling not just the executive, but the state House of Delegates and state Senate.

We can quibble about campaign messaging, and how much things came down to persuasion vs. base turnout, but the fact of the matter is that backlash reared its double-digit head in both Virginia and New Jersey. Joe Biden won Virginia by 10 points last year, while Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe lost it by roughly two points; Biden won New Jersey by 16 points, while Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy secured reelection by just two-and-a-half points—a net swing of roughly 12 and 14 points, respectively, against Democrats just one year later.

The data point more to political trends than to the specifics of each race, so Democrats can expect some of the same forces to be at work in next year’s midterms when, by historical standards, Republicans stand a good chance of picking up the House, and maybe the Senate.

On the bright side, nothing is inevitable and the Senate has historically proven somewhat less vulnerable to the wild swings often seen in the lower chamber.  

2. Things will change between now and next November

Assuming Republicans can recreate what happened in Virginia also assumes that time will come to a standstill and none of the atmospherics will change over the next year. It’s preposterous.

By next year, Democrats will hopefully have passed two meaningful bills that spur job growth, provide considerable support to families, and make historic investments in combating climate change. Indeed, the bipartisan infrastructure bill received final passage Friday evening, sending it to President Biden’s desk. Those legislative accomplishments alone will be a major difference.

The Supreme Court will have also weighed in on two crucial abortion cases that will almost surely deal a blow to the constitutional right of women to seek an abortion.

Biden’s approval rating, goddess willing, will likely be in a different and hopefully more positive place than the over seven points underwater where it is now. Biden has already delivered a lot to the American people, including record job growth, a soaring stock market, and a vaccine rollout that has largely made the pandemic a back-burner issue for a substantial majority of Americans.  

Nobody can say exactly what the political environment will be like at this time next year, but without a doubt, it will have changed.

3. Democrats need a positive education message and it’s ready-made if they pass the Build Back Better bill

It’s still unclear how decisive a factor critical race theory and the broader issue of education was in the Virginia election, but one thing is for certain—Republicans plan to run on it in 2022.

In fact, running on something that’s merely a stand-in for stoking racism and white identity isn’t new for the GOP, it’s a return to its roots. On Wednesday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy jumped at the chance to say House Republicans plan on unveiling a “parents bill of rights.”

Okay, fine. Here’s Democrats’ parental bill of rights: We believe every parent should be able to access quality, affordable education for their child; we believe every parent should have access to quality, affordable child care; we believe every parent should have the piece of mind to know they can care for their child if they fall sick without going into debt. That’s why we included universal pre-K, child tax credits, a cap on child care costs, and paid family leave in the Build Back Better bill.

Republicans’ new education focus is a decades-old tactic: They always return to making every issue one of division that pits white against Black and brown. It’s been their bread and butter since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Democrats need to find a way to make every issue that Republicans seek to distort about shared interests that include everyone. Democrats just happen to have already included the perfect rebuttal for the GOP’s new education ploy in the Build Back Better bill currently under consideration.

4. Glenn Youngkin was unique and will be uniquely difficult to recreate

I have written about this at some length, but just to reiterate, Youngkin—a self-funded private equity guy with no political baggage and no well-documented record of overt fealty to Trump—is going to be difficult for congressional Republicans to replicate.

Perhaps most importantly, virtually none of them will have the backbone to bar Trump from their district/state, as Youngkin did. Many of them will actually owe their primary wins specifically to Trump, who will do exactly as he pleases as the campaign plays out.

Finally, Youngkin, with his fleece vest and happy warrior persona, made himself accessible to suburban voters who turned away from Trump in 2018 and 2020. He walked a line that few—if any—Republicans in the Trump era have proven capable of walking. Most of Trump’s handpicked slate of radicals simply won’t have the temperament to pull it off, particularly in the Senate.

In short, Republicans will have a bunch of Larry Elders (the Trumpy GOP candidate in the failed California gubernatorial recall) trying to run like Youngkin. Notably, Gov. Gavin Newsom beat the GOP recall effort in California with a 24-point margin that was practically identical to the margins in his 2018 election. It’s not the size of the margin that matters so much as it is the fact that Newsom, just two months earlier, didn’t suffer any drag from the national environment that both McAuliffe and Murphy did.

Part of that was likely the motivating specter of an Elder administration along with Biden’s approvals being closer to 50% when early voting began in the Golden State, as David Lauter of The L.A. Times points out. Biden’s approvals currently sit at about 43%, which would be an historic low at this point in a presidency … except that Trump sat at 38% around this same time in 2017.

5. It’s not all about the base or all about persuasion, it’s both and now

High turnout is no longer synonymous with Democratic wins. Virginia saw record turnout, and Democrats still lost the governorship by roughly two points.

The New York Times‘ Reid Epstein writes:

In this week’s election, Mr. McAuliffe won 200,000 votes more than Northam did when he won the 2017 election in a blowout. He won nearly 600,000 more votes than he did in 2013 when he beat Kenneth Cuccinelli II to become governor. He beat his internal turnout targets in Northern Virginia, Richmond and the Norfolk area. Turnout was strong in Black precincts, college towns and the suburbs, all traditional areas of strength for Democratic candidates.

Despite McAuliffe’s turnout successes, Youngkin won about 550,000 more votes than his GOP predecessor, Ed Gillespie, did in 2017. Youngkin also improved on Trump’s numbers everywhere, including in rural, exurban, and suburban parts of the state.

Democrats can no longer rely on the notion that if they just turn out their base, they’ll succeed. They need to turn out the base along with winning over a healthy piece of the suburban bloc that helped boost them to victory in 2018, and elevated Biden to the White House in 2020.

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This week’s U.S. Supreme Court rocket docket hearing on Texas’s abortion ban demonstrated that the court might not be ready to turn citizens into vigilantes when it comes to enforcing their political wishes. That was an argument worthy of scaring Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who seemed to take to heart the amicus brief from the Firearms Policy Coalition, which argued that “it takes little in the way of creative copying for States hostile to the Second Amendment—New York, California, New Jersey, Hawaii, etc.—to declare that the ownership or sale of a handgun is illegal … and set up a bounty system with the same unbalanced procedures and penalties adopted by Texas in this case.”

Speaking of guns, the court also heard a challenge to New York state’s 108-year-old concealed handgun permit law, which requires that applicants show “proper cause” before getting an unrestricted license to carry. It’s looking like that law will go down, or at least be narrowed. Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to sum up much of the conservative majority’s view when he asked during oral arguments: “You don’t have to say, when you’re looking for a permit to speak on a street corner or whatever, that your speech is particularly important. So why do you have to show in this case, convince somebody, that you’re entitled to exercise your Second Amendment right?”

National polling continues to reflect support for sensible gun regulations, and abortion access and  – overwhelmingly rejects Texas-style bans. Large majorities, too. Yet we’ve got a Supreme Court majority on the far-right fringe of mainstream America. There’s increasing momentum to change that, though.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—one of North America’s largest labor unions—announced its support for expanding the court in comments to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, urging that panel to restore the court’s legitimacy. Writing for the group, International President Mary Kay Henry represents the “union of approximately two million working women and men.” That’s two million workers who “stand in the unique position of being the targets of a long-running, coordinated, and well-funded effort to strip them of their organizing and other rights via federal-court litigation.” What’s more, Henry writes, “many SEIU members, as BIPOC citizens, are also targets of an additional campaign to strip them of their voting rights. That anti-voter campaign, like the anti-worker effort, has found success with this Supreme Court.”

“We firmly believe that this democracy rests on a razor’s edge and came, within the last 12 months, very close to falling apart,” Henry tells the commission, in large part because the “interests of poor and working people have been largely shut out from government and the law, feeding the rise of anti-democratic forces to which people throughout history have turned in desperation.” Henry pleads with the commission to “not forget where we have been in the last twelve months” and to “not get lost in all the academic talk and mundaneness of Zoom meeting rooms.”

Henry makes a powerful argument for substantive reform, for the commission to not do the thing most presidential commissions do: “Please be wary of meaningless gestures at reform and of resistance to change that is camouflaged as seemingly reasonable restraint, and please interrogate what may be even your own inherent biases against change.” Such gestures include a reform the commission seems to be considering, instituting term limits, which is nibbling around the edges of a 6-3 majority that is intent on rolling back decades of progress. Spending valuable time and political capital on such a limited effort, that could ultimately be rejected by that extremist majority anyway, puts that idea “in the category of apparent reforms that may achieve nothing.”

“We believe it is long past time to expand the size of the Court,” Henry writes on behalf of the SEIU. “You have an opportunity to lend your credibility to serious suggestions that can lead to real change. Please do not waste it.”

As of now, wasting this opportunity appears that’s what the commission is inclined to do, scheduled to finish its work with a final report on December 15. The commission should recognize within itself what Henry warns it against, that its members are “blessed by power, prestige, and expensive educations, […] very good at cloaking their arguments in what sound like high-minded principles.”

Meanwhile, the effort to build a coalition in Congress to do the job the commission doesn’t seem to want to take on continues and strengthens. There are now 40 House members cosponsoring the Judiciary Act of 2021 to expand the court.

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There was a moment in the spring of 2021 when the steady growth of e-commerce actually reversed. For three months, Americans actually put down their laptops, mice, and smartphones and, like bears emerging from a very long hibernation, went out to enjoy the novelty of shopping for real things in real stores. Then the delta wave began, that mini-retail blip disappeared, and online sales resumed their relentless march toward gobbling up everything.

It probably comes as a shock to no one that in 2020 the United States set a record for retail closures, with 12,200 locations shutting their doors, according to commercial retail firm CoStar Group. But was that the effect of the pandemic, or was it something else? Because the record that 2020 broke was set in 2019, when 9,300 stores closed. That followed 2018, when 5,700 stores closed.

Some of the closures in 2020 might be more easily pegged to the pressures of the pandemic than others— clothing stores were more likely to turn out the lights than the grocery or drugstores deemed essential by authorities in many areas. Yet if you put 2020’s data on a chart next to that of previous years, it’s hard to even see the effect of the pandemic. 2020 was just another bad year for retail, in a a slide that’s been going on for decades.

In 1990 alone, 19 massive new shopping malls opened in America. It was the height of a retail build up that seemed unstoppable. More stores, more variety, more more. Decades later, when The New York Times reported on the state of American shopping malls, they noted that the empty corridors of what had been the glitziest, most upscale locations “looked as if a viral outbreak had removed all life from the place.” But that wasn’t the coronavirus at work, because The Times’ report came out in 2017.

Just like 2020 and 2019, 2017 was another record year for store closures. It’s not just malls that are emptying out, it’s shopping centers and shopping districts of all kinds. Of course, long before that came the gutting of America’s Main Streets, as big box stores—located carefully outside the tax boundaries of towns—sucked dry the “mom and pop store” dream.

A childhood haunting

Still, for a lot of people, seeing vast malls lying empty has its peculiar eeriness. When I first moved to St. Louis in 1981, there was a small shopping center—with just a handful of stores—at a place called Crestwood Plaza. Over the next decade, that location expanded into a huge mall with four “anchor stores,” including Sears and Famous-Barr. Thirty years later, I wandered through the empty shell of that mall, past closed theaters, empty fountains, and dusty bandstands. Two years ago, the whole place was demolished, as was another mall built in downtown St. Louis that once spanned three city blocks.

According to author Gillian Flynn, dead malls have a particular resonance with the people who once saw them as the centers of not just shopping, but socializing. “For kids of the ’80s especially, dead malls have a very strong allure,” wrote Flynn. “To see all those big looming spaces so empty now—it’s a childhood haunting.”

Well before the pandemic, I wrote about The Traveling Salesman Problem. By this, I don’t mean the classic mathematical puzzle, but the way trends in retail over the last half-century have eliminated whole swaths of jobs and businesses, all in the name of “productivity.” Much of America moved from a retail space once dominated by small stores and local outlets of a few national chains to big box stores and malls, to … dust. In the process, communities didn’t just lose those retail outlets, they lost all the jobs and infrastructure that supported that world.

My own father once owned three clothing stories—Rustic’s, which provided mostly women’s clothing; Rustic’s Also, for a younger crowd; and Factory Suits USA, which offered discounted menswear from Nashville factories. All of these were found on the same side of the street, in a town of with a population of just 3,000, and those three stores were just a few in an absolutely packed downtown. Those stores didn’t just employ clerks and salespeople on-site; they were supported by traveling salesmen, who stayed at the Dan Dee Inn and stopped for breakfast at the Corner Cafe—where my grandfather got up at 4 AM to start the coffee and fried biscuits.

Secondhand stores and payday loans

That era ended for my family in the 1980s, when Walmart and similar stores arrived, dropping their first hulking stores conveniently just outside the town’s borders, while huge malls sprouted in larger towns an hour down the road. A local store selling clothing, hardware, or most home goods became impossible to maintain in face of this competition. Those downtown stores gradually cycled through candy shops, theme diners, and specialty coffee spots, all in an effort to hold onto something that wasn’t available for cheaper inside a 200,000-square foot container, or in far more variety at a marble-clad shopping temple. Eventually, the small town stores edged toward their terminal condition—secondhand stores and payday loan offices. Which is itself a solid notch above the condition of many towns: completely empty.

But the era of Walmart and mega-malls was far shorter lived than the era that came before. Within a decade of that 1990 peak of 19 new malls, the building of new behemoths had completely stalled; a decade after that, malls were closing at a rate faster than they’d ever been built. That trend marched right on into the 2010s, riding not just a wave of mall failures but retail chains—Brooks Brothers, K-Mart, Sears, Borders, Pier 1, Toys ‘R’ Us—finding themselves on their way to becoming ex-retail chains. 

Ghost malls became a thing. So did a plague of empty big box stores. In many towns and small cities, a large percentage of the most accessible retail space—the space conveniently located along highways and near intersections—is now buried under empty malls and dead megastores, none of which have any real prospects of finding a new occupant. 

In rare occasions, some of these locations have been reclaimed as public spaces. In others, they’ve been converted into things like “antique malls,” the giant cousin of the secondhand store. But in most instances, they’re just drains on an area’s tax base, infrastructure, and property values.

All of this—the collapse of small towns, the rise and fall of shopping malls, the gradual whittling down of even the largest big box stores—all came before the pandemic. That 31% increase in retail closings in 2020 isn’t even close to the 63% increase that took place the year before.

Retail Apocalypse Redux

The Times’ 2017 article may be correct in pointing out that empty malls look like they’ve been hit by a virus, but the actual coronavirus had little to do with the retail apocalypse. The real cause has been, and is, the never-ending drive for increased profit margins that has driven the rise of e-commerce.

Going from 0% to 4% of sales between 2000 and 2010, e-commerce has made an almost maddingly persistent rise ever since. It was 7% of consumer sales in 2015, and 9% by 2017. It was 11% at the start of 2020. With the pandemic, it jumped abruptly to over 15%. Amid all this growth, there have also been a few months of decline in e-commerce as traditional retail—now measured in the form of those big box stores and surviving shopping centers—somewhat rebounded.

That rebound has generated a number of optimistic headlines this year. In addition to several months showing e-commerce decline, 2021 is actually expected to produce the lowest number of retail closings in the last five years.

But no one should expect that trend to continue. By the end of 2021, the marching line of ec-ommerce expansion is almost certain to once again begin growing its portion of consumer sales. And companies that held on through the pandemic are likely to find that the post-pandemic world is even less warm to in-person retail than during the already frosty pre-pandemic conditions. 

In the meantime, that same force is a big part of why the shelves at Target are bare, but the boxes from Amazon arrive full. 

Productivity is people

For decades, American businesses have pursued multiple versions of “lean” or “just-in-time” (JIT) business models. From lean manufacturing, to lean distribution, to lean retail, all of these are based on ideas gleaned from observing Japanese companies just before and after World War II.

These ideas took particular hold after the American auto industry found themselves losing huge portions of the market following the oil shock of the 1970s. All of this was against a backdrop that viewed Japan and its rapidly-growing economy in the way much of the U.S. sees China today: as a place with some kind of innate advantage in competing with American industry. In that atmosphere, business leaders resurrected observations about Japanese companies and turned them into holy writ that has since defined what “good business” means for at least two generations of American leaders.

In this ideology, ideas about keeping inventory on hand went out the window. So did ideas about the value of experienced workers who could handle their roles with flexibility. Instead, focus moved to management. It’s no coincidence that this is the era when salaries of CEOs and other top management began to explode, because the whole philosophy is one in which the plan with the fewest, cheapest workers is the best. For the last four decades, American companies have stayed true to that tune, treating every issue as something that can be addressed by better management, rather than by strengthening any other aspect of the system.

What companies tended to overlook is that Japan only went to this path because, at the time it deployed those rules in the 1930s, it was extraordinarily poor. Not only was Japan reeling from the worldwide Depression, it was also in the midst of a military buildup that saw it expending resources in all directions (it was also dominated by a political system that relied heavily on succeeding by assassinating the guy ahead of you in line … but that’s another story). 

Japan had no cash, no factories, and no natural resources. What it did have were millions of people who were, at the time, out of work, poorly educated, and viewed as disposable. Those were the conditions that drove the creation of the economic system that American companies would champion 50 years late—in a country that was wealthy, blessed with raw materials, and fortified by an experienced and well-trained work force. These U.S. companies brought in a system that was built on desperation, and discovered that it was uniquely powerful as a means of concentrating wealth into the hands of a few executives.

In the following decades, productivity—as expressed in terms of the profit generated from each worker—soared. And a system designed around impoverished workers with few opportunities created exactly that. Productivity is people. Or, more specifically, it’s the lack of people who have the authority and ability to create change.

Genuinely skeletal

Still, managers continued to be rewarded for squeezing human-shaped “inefficiencies” out of the system, And when brick and mortar stores were confronted with the challenge of e-commerce, there was only one solution they understood: They had to manage the holy shit out of this thing.

Under stress of trying to sustain an elaborate retail presence in the face of steady e-commerce gains, retailers have clawed for a winning formula, with terms like “destination retail” and “omnichannel marketing,” but all the marketing double-speak on the planet has refused to slow this steady decline. As a result, many retailers have gone way past “lean” or JIT and into the genuinely skeletal. In the effort to find a means of sustaining themselves, they’ve chopped a department here, outsourced a service there, and mercilessly cut, cut, cut back on people.  

One of the best examples of the effect might be that demonstrated, not by a retailer, but—perversely enough—by one of the companies on which e-commerce most heavily depends: FedEx.

As Bloomberg reports, rival shipping firm UPS maintains a cadre of relatively well-paid and highly experienced and unionized employees. UPS not only provides its drivers with solid pay and promotions, but provides benefits, including the kind of retirement package that most U.S. corporations long ago punted to the curb. 

In contrast, FedEx canned the majority of its “last mile” delivery service years ago, in favor of hiring independent contractors. Those contractors get fixed fees for deliveries, salaries, benefits, and pensions be damned.

But as the market for employees has been stressed during the pandemic, FedEx has repeatedly found itself facing staffing shortages and being forced to pay sharply higher prices for the deliveries it can get. Despite high demand and higher prices, FedEx has “leaned” itself into a situation where UPS outperformed it by almost $2 billion on nearly identical sales.

Fat and happy

For an on-the-ground example, see Costco. Throughout the pandemic, even as photographers snapped shots of the empty racks at other retailers, Costco has done a phenomenal job of keeping its stores operating not just as well as they did before the pandemic, but better. Same store sales are up 16% in the last year, and Costco managed this while at the same time increasing their own online sales by 44%. It’s done that, in part, by keeping employee turnover at a minimum, which comes from years of paying its employees well, offering them benefits, and respecting their health concerns during the pandemic. If “lean” companies are now finding themselves unable to keep the shelves stocked, Costco is fat and happy. 

But that experience is incredibly counterintuitive to what American businesses have done over the last four decades, and the lessons that every MBA in the country has been taught. In mimicking a system built in a period of extreme privation, companies traded well-paid employees invested in their work for disposable commodity workers and independent contractors, whose lack of knowledge wasn’t considered a detriment.

By treating workers as disposable, limiting opportunities, and constantly cutting away at benefits, companies created a system that maximized profit on the basis of productivity, even as it justified devoting an extraordinary amount of company pay to upper management. 

At the same time, these systems created companies that weren’t just fragile in terms of outsourcing manufacturing overseas or cutting back inventories to the minimum; they were “lean” in terms of knowledge. 

Over the course of four decades, all the wealth that used to be spread out among those traveling salesmen stopping for coffee, the people who both dealt with customers and did the books at small-town clothing stores, and workers found everywhere from assembly lines to accounting, moved into the pockets of CEOs. This redistribution of wealth happened not just because business was going through transitions that offered increased “productivity” through eliminating people, supported at every stage by improving technology, but because American managers were taught that this is the way it should be. 

Way Too Long, Definitely Did Not Read

The same business philosophy that encouraged American corporations to get “lean” is at least partly responsible for both the massive increase in income inequality, and the fragility resulting from corporations whose ranks have been gutted of business knowledge. As businesses transitioned from small store, to mall, to big box, to e-commerce, not only were workers eliminated, but worker knowledge was devalued in favor of “management skills.” Every problem became treated as something that could only be solved by management supermen making godlike decisions—and who, naturally, deserved godlike salaries.

But as physical retail has increasingly faced off with e-commerce, the management über alles approach has repeatedly failed. That failure is measurable in empty stores and empty shelves, though not in the empty pockets of CEOs, who continued to suck up Zeus-worthy salaries even as they were generating Hades-quality results. On the other hand, companies that have continued to pay workers well and treat them as part of the solution (i.e. UPS and Costco) have proven to be more flexible and durable in a crisis.

None of these realities were created by the pandemic. If the advantage that e-commerce holds over the “brick and mortar” world got another big underscore during the last two difficult years, so did the advantages of companies that are able to retain experienced workers.

Still, don’t expect most CEOs to read much into that second advantage. After all, Costco had revenues of almost $200B in the last year and the CEO isn’t even a billionaire. Clearly they’re doing it wrong.

This is one of a series of articles in Bodegaland: A vision of America in 2030. The intention is to not just examine trends in business, culture, education, and society, but to examine how the pandemic accelerated or altered those trends.

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Far-right “constitutionalists” have been around for decades now, particularly in rural America, where they have a history of recruiting vulnerable marks into their grift, which convinces the gullible that they can declare themselves “sovereign” people free from obligation or oversight from the federal or state government. They have left a long trail of human and community wreckage in their wake, from Jordan, Montana, to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

But along with everything else associated with the self-styled “Patriot Movement” in recent years, it has been spreading widely and insinuating itself more deeply within communities, especially as they increasingly elect “constitutional” sheriffs and other public officials. The city fathers in the small northern California town of Oroville this week, however, went even further: They declared Oroville its own “constitutional republic” independent of federal and state governments.

The resolution, which was approved Tuesday by the Oroville City Council by a 6-1 vote, declares the town a “Constitutional Republic City,” a designation it says enables the city to declare state and federal government orders it considers “unconstitutional” null and void. The move is largely in response to COVID-19-related restrictions and vaccine mandates, particularly those imposed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“I proposed it after 18 months of increasingly intrusive executive mandates and what I felt to be excessive overreach by our government,” said Vice Mayor Scott Thomson, the resolution’s main sponsor. “After the failed recall in California, our state governor seems to [be] on a rampage and the mandates are getting more intrusive. Now he’s going after our kids and schools.”

Local residents who supported the resolution turned out in large numbers. “We hope that becoming a constitutional republic city is the best step to regain and preserve our inalienable rights protected by the U.S. Constitution. What will be left if we do not have it? If we do not have bodily autonomy?” said one speaker who was moved to tears. “What else do they want me to let them do to my children? Where does it stop?”

The resolution’s advocates on the council offered a hodgepodge of rationalizations for the resolution’s language. A “democracy is run by people and republic is run by the laws of constitution,” Mayor Chuck Reynolds told the local Enterprise-Record newspaper.

“Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts,” Reynolds said. “A constitutional republic makes America a successful nation. Rights are by the people, for the people.”

“Constitutionalist” ideology preaches that the federal government is heavily constrained by the text of the Constitution, limited almost entirely to a national defense. Otherwise, they believe, the document prohibits federal land ownership, the ability to enforce civil rights, environmental, education, and other federal statutes. None of these ideological tenets have any basis in reality, especially not in settled law; like most far-right belief systems, it’s built on conspiracy theories and disinformation.

The Oroville region, located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, has been a hotbed of COVID denialism. In 2020, Oroville refused to enforce state prohibitions on indoor dining. This fall, Butte County chose not to recommend a mask mandate, even as COVID cases were surging at the local medical center. The county has a vaccination rate of about 48%.

Thomson told KRCR-TV in an email that “this has to do with the large amount of mandates that are affecting every aspect of our lives and our kids’ lives. The American culture and way of life is being challenged at its very core and perverted by radicalized politicians who have forgotten that, as a republic, the power belongs to the people. Our founders understood the dangers of those who would like to have more control over the people, and thus they set up our country with a firm foundation that separated the powers, by forming a Republic, and protected our God-given rights, in the founding documents in the US Constitution. America is already a Constitutional Republic, however, I put this declaration out for the agenda as a reminder and a statement that we the people in Oroville are not amicable to the tyranny of power-hungry politicians.”

“I assure you folks that great thought was put into every bit of this,” Reynolds said. “Nobody willy-nilly threw something to grandstand.”

However, even one of the council members who supported the resolution noted that it had “no teeth” and was simply a “political statement.” One member of the council noted that the city receives millions of dollar in federal support, and wondered: “Will Oroville be able to stand alone and sustain itself?”

Oroville’s city attorney, Scott Huber, quickly assured her: “I am quite certain that this would not result in any loss of funding for the city. In the event that it could in the future you could revise this and do what you will but this is not going to put it jeopardy any state or federal funding.”

Lisa Pruitt, a rural law expert at the University of California-Davis, told The Guardian that the empty gesture does not grant Oroville more power or the ability to ignore state law.

“It seems to make the people of Oroville feel better that their city council has made this gesture but as a practical matter it doesn’t make any difference,” Pruitt said.

This, in fact, is the problem with all “constitutionalist” interpretations of the law: They are fabrications—legalistic fantasies that have no basis in the operative U.S. codes, and have never been upheld or otherwise vindicated by any court in the country.

“A municipality cannot unilaterally declare itself not subject to the laws of the state of California,” Pruitt said. “Whatever they mean by constitutional republic you can’t say hocus pocus and make it happen.”

“Constitutionalists,” however, have been waving their magic wands uselessly in the air since they first started organizing as part of the far-right Patriot Movement of the 1990s. Drawing on ideas first proposed by the rabidly racist Posse Comitatus movement of the 1970s, outfits like the Montana Freemen created a legal conflict that culminated in an 81-day armed standoff in 1996.

This ideology also engendered the “Sovereign Citizen” movement, whose adherents, as the ADL explains, refer to themselves variously as “freemen” and “constitutionalists,” and strive constantly to separate themselves from the “illegitimate” government. Many renounce their U.S. citizenship, which they believe enslaves them to a “corporate entity.”

Over the years, “constitutionalists” have engaged in a number of armed conflicts with various authorities, particularly federal officials. In 2014, “constitutionalist” rancher Cliven Bundy engaged in armed standoff in Nevada over his grazing rights; then, in 2016, his sons led the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southern Oregon.

Among the main venues for spreading “constitutionalist” ideas in recent years have been Patriot organizations like the Oath Keepers and “Three Percent” militias. Both groups were heavily involved in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

However, “constitutionalists” also have been worming their way into positions of local authority through their successful recruitment of law enforcement officers, primarily through the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which also was heavily involved in the two Bundy standoffs. These extremists are good at creating an appearance of establishment normalcy, but inevitably, both their bigotry and their seditionist politics eventually manifest themselves.

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A man who sustained life-altering injuries in 2017 from being violently struck by a car driven by the man who ultimately murdered Heather Heyer took the witness stand in Charlottesville on Thursday as part of an ongoing trial against “Unite the Right” rally organizers. Thomas Baker said he now lives with chronic pain and limited mobility as well as the emotional effects from the crash. Baker told attorney David Mills, who is part of a team representing plaintiffs in the Sines vs. Kessler case, that a book falling to the floor can trigger a panic attack and memories of the event.

Baker expertly handled cross-examination from the likes of Richard Spencer (who hasn’t fared so great as his own attorney) and Christopher “Crying Nazi” Cantwell, the latter of whom became visibly upset when Baker said he did not see swaths of “antifa” carrying out violent attacks that August weekend in 2017. It got to a point that Judge Norman Moon stepped in to reiterate that Baker hadn’t seen any counterprotesters carrying bats when repeatedly pressed by Cantwell.

Baker made it abundantly clear that he knew participants of the “Unite the Right” rally were racist instigators willing to parachute in and terrorize the city of Charlottesville without a single care for its residents. He categorized them as bullies but admitted the word likely was too weak a descriptor.

Baker recalled members of the neo-Confederate League of the South barreling through counterprotesters with their shields and striking people with flagpoles as they made their way to a park where no actual rally took place. League of the South members pelted the crowd with objects and repeatedly raced back and forth to continue attacking counterprotesters as their nonevent soon became labeled an “unlawful assembly.”

Perhaps the most alarming testimony came from League of the South co-founder Michael Hill, who was made to recite a racist pledge he made in 2016 and did so with aplomb. Hill also readily admitted that his opinion hadn’t changed about the outcome of the “Unite the Right” rally, either.

Hill never apologized to Heyer’s family or to anyone impacted by the rally and has no plans to do so. He’s consistently defended convicted murderer James Fields, who fatally struck Heyer with his car and was responsible for Baker’s injuries as well as dozens of other people. And he isn’t alone in being an unabashed Nazi hellbent on violence in a trial that hinges on proving “Unite the Right” rally organizers’ very explicit intent to harm anyone who stands in their way. The trial continues next week, with a break on Thursday for a holiday. Defendants are expected to provide an estimate on Monday of how many trial dates they need to keep digging their own graves.

This post was originally published on this site

Leading Off

● Virginia: In a major setback for voting rights, Republican Glenn Youngkin narrowly defeated former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe in the race to become Virginia’s next governor, giving Youngkin the power to discontinue a practice begun by McAuliffe and his successor, Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, of using executive orders to expand voting rights for formerly incarcerated people. Republicans also appear to have gained a razor-thin majority in the state House, though there are multiple races that are still too close to call with the possibility that Democrats could salvage a 50-50 tie after absentee and provisional ballots are fully processed.

After winning the governor’s office in 2017 and gaining full control over the legislature in 2019 to obtain unified government for the first time in a quarter century, Democrats passed dozens of laws to expand access to voting, reform redistricting, and make the election process run more smoothly, progress that is now at risk from a Republican governor and state House. Democrats still narrowly hold the state Senate by 21-19 since it wasn’t up for election this year, but Republicans would only need to persuade a single Democrat to defect to reverse some of those changes after also flipping the lieutenant governor’s office, which breaks ties.

Among the most immediate effects of the GOP victory in Virginia, Youngkin could discontinue a policy that McAuliffe implemented in 2016 where he used his executive power to end lifetime disenfranchisement for those convicted of felonies by restoring voting rights to people who had fully served their sentences. Northam continued that policy and earlier this year extended it to restore voting rights to everyone on parole or probation, enabling more than 200,000 people to vote. (Only those still in prison remain unable to vote.) However, Youngkin could refuse to issue such executive orders and in doing so even resurrect lifetime disenfranchisement going forward. Before McAuliffe’s executive orders, this remnant of Jim Crow had left one in five Black Virginians permanently banned from voting, five times the rate of whites.​

Campaign Action

​Democrats had also passed a constitutional amendment that would permanently end felony disenfranchisement for everyone not in prison. However, because lawmakers have to pass that same constitutional amendment again after this year’s elections before it could go to voters for their approval, Republicans will likely be able to block its passage in the state House by refusing to allow a vote, even though it could still have majority support if a few Republicans were to vote for it as they did earlier this year.

In addition, Virginia (along with South Carolina) is one of just two states where legislators directly pick justices for state Supreme Court, which currently has a 5-2 conservative majority and could be critical for voting rights and fair redistricting. Over the next two years, two justices—one conservative and one liberal—will see their terms come to an end, giving lawmakers a chance to reshape the court in either direction. Both chambers vote together when selecting justices, so the fate of the remaining uncalled races will matter immensely for whether a Republican-majority state House could outvote the Democratic-controlled Senate. If the state House is tied 50-50, Democrats would have a one-seat majority, but a 52-48 GOP state House would give Republicans a one-seat majority instead.

Youngkin’s victory also means Republicans will eventually gain a majority on the state Board of Elections, giving them control over election administration, which the GOP could use to try to overturn a Democratic Electoral College victory in 2024. Youngkin has already joined in GOP efforts to undermine voter confidence in Democratic victories last year by demanding an “audit” of the 2020 elections even though Virginia already conducted such an audit that confirmed the results. And if Republicans are able to hold the House and capture the Senate in 2023, they would regain full control over state government and could use it to roll back nearly all of the voting reforms Democrats have passed in the last two years.

Election Recaps

● New Jersey: Conservative Democrat Steve Sweeney, who has served as president of New Jersey’s Senate since 2010, has lost in a major upset to Republican Edward Durr, but many Democrats—and progressive activists in particular—will be happy to see Sweeney gone, particularly since the party retained the governor’s office and control over both chambers of the legislature in Tuesday’s elections. Sweeney has long opposed many progressive priorities backed by Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, including a proposal to allow same-day voter registration, and it’s possible that a different Democrat leading the Senate could allow a vote on such a bill.

However, Democrats no longer have the three-fifths majority in the state Assembly needed to put constitutional amendments on the ballot in just a single year. They instead would have to pass any amendment twice—both before and after a state election—before it could go to a referendum, which might complicate their ability to pursue certain election reforms.

● New York: In New York, voters rejected two constitutional amendments that Democratic lawmakers placed on the ballot to expand voting access, along with a third that would have made several changes to redistricting. All three of the measures are currently failing with between 42% and 44% of the vote (with a majority needed for passage), though there are still uncounted absentee ballots that could narrow the eventual margin.

Of the defeated amendments, Proposal 3 would have allowed lawmakers to pass a same-day voter registration law—something currently forbidden by the state constitution—which Democratic leaders have said they’d go forward with had the amendment passed. Proposal 4, meanwhile, would have removed the excuse requirement to vote absentee. Last year, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order that allowed any voter to cast an absentee ballot because of the pandemic, but the passage of Proposal 4 would have laid the groundwork for the legislature to make excuse-free absentee voting permanent.

A third amendment, Proposal 1, would have also enacted several changes to the state’s redistricting laws that would have diminished the sway Republicans have over the mapmaking process but would have also enshrined a few nonpartisan requirements for future redistricting plans in the state constitution. However, since Democrats still hold two-thirds supermajorities in the legislature, they may nevertheless still have the numbers necessary to override the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission and draw their own legislative and congressional maps.

In a damning sign of political malpractice, the state Democratic Party spent nothing to support the three ballot measures while conservative opponents spent millions spreading lies that the amendments would increase fraud. Democratic Party chair Jay Jacobs, who for years was a steadfast ally of the now-disgraced Cuomo, claimed that Democratic lawmakers didn’t ask for help, something that prominent state Sen. Mike Gianaris vociferously disputed. Cuomo and his allies had long stymied progressives from enacting voting reforms until Democrats overcame the GOP gerrymander Cuomo had signed and flipped the state Senate in 2018.

Democrats have since passed a broad range of reforms to improve New York’s nationally criticized voting system over the last three years, and these two voting amendments would have been the culmination of that effort. Now, however, they’ll have to start the process all over again—and devote the necessary resources to ensure a better result—if they want to make these constitutional changes.

● Pennsylvania: Commonwealth Court Judge Kevin Brobson, a Republican, was elected Pennsylvania’s next Supreme Court justice after defeating Superior Court Judge Maria McLaughlin, a Democrat, by a narrow 51-49 margin. Brobson will replace Republican Justice Thomas Saylor, who will hit the state’s mandatory retirement age in December, meaning the 5-2 Democratic majority on the bench will remain unchanged.

The Democratic majority on Pennsylvania’s top court, in place since the 2015 elections, has been critical for voting rights and redistricting. Most notably, the court struck down the GOP’s congressional gerrymander and replaced it with a much fairer map in 2018. The justices also protected access to mail voting during the pandemic amid Republican efforts to restrict it. Barring unexpected vacancies, the soonest Republicans could take back the court would be 2025.

Redistricting

● Alabama: Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed Alabama’s new congressional and legislative maps on Thursday, a day after lawmakers in the GOP-run legislature gave them their final approval. The congressional plan preserves the state’s current delegation—which sends six white Republicans and one Black Democrat to Congress—by leaving in place just a single Black district.

According to Dave’s Redistricting App, the redrawn map packs an excessive number of Black voters into the 7th District, making it 55% Black, while ensuring every other district is at least 62% white and no more than 30% Black. Alabama could, however, easily create a second district where Black voters would be able to elect their preferred candidates, given that African Americans make up nearly two-sevenths of the state’s population, but Republicans have steadfastly refused to do so.

Black voters, with the support of Democrats, filed a federal lawsuit seeking to compel a second Black district almost immediately after Ivey signed the new congressional map, making it the second such lawsuit after an earlier one was filed in late September.

● Arkansas: A group called Arkansans for a Unified Natural State says it plans to gather signatures for a veto referendum to overturn the state’s new Republican-drawn congressional map, an undertaking that would also have the effect of suspending the map if the referendum qualifies for next year’s ballot. Organizers would need to collect 53,491 signatures from registered voters in at least 15 counties by Jan. 13. The group previously announced plans to qualify veto referendums for three other laws the legislature passed earlier this year but abandoned those efforts after failing to obtain enough signatures.

● Colorado: As expected, the Colorado Supreme Court has approved the new map adopted by the state’s independent congressional redistricting commission in September. Under the 2018 amendments that created the commission and its separate legislative counterpart, the court is required to assess any maps to ensure they adhere to criteria laid out in the state constitution and accept input from interested parties. The justices concluded that the map’s challengers did not meet the constitution’s high standard of review: whether commissioners engaged in an “abuse of discretion.”

Those challengers included Latino voting rights advocates, who argued that the state constitution provided greater protections for racial and language minority groups than specified in the Voting Rights Act. The court, however, agreed with the commissioners, ruling that language in the constitution does not afford such groups additional protections. The justices also rejected complaints from Democrats that the commission failed to properly prioritize the creation of competitive districts.

The end result is a map that could easily result in equal representation for Republicans and Democrats, despite the fact that the state voted for Joe Biden by a comfortable 55-42 margin last year. That’s because the new 8th District, based in the Denver suburbs, would have gone for Biden 51-46 and in fact would have voted for Donald Trump 46-45 in 2016. While this district has a large Latino minority, many of those residents aren’t eligible to vote. Only about 27% of the district’s voting eligible population would be Latino compared to the 66% that is white, and given traditional turnout patterns, the Latino share of the electorate would likely be even smaller.

Thanks to Colorado’s 2018 amendments, the legislature and governor no longer play a role in redistricting, meaning that the new congressional map is now law. The state Supreme Court is also reviewing the commission’s legislative proposals, but they’ll likely pass muster for the same reasons. While it’s possible that these maps could face further legal challenges through normal lawsuits, the Supreme Court’s interpretation of state law regarding the Voting Rights Act probably forecloses what would have been the most potent avenue of attack.

● Delaware: Democratic Gov. John Carney has signed Delaware’s new legislative maps, just a day after they were passed by lawmakers. Democrats currently control both the state House and Senate and will almost certainly remain in charge in this solidly blue state that voted for native son Joe Biden 59-40 last year.

● Iowa: Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed Iowa’s new congressional and legislative maps into law on Thursday, a week after lawmakers passed them almost unanimously. The congressional plan creates three red-leaning districts and one safely Republican seat, which we outlined previously in our other newsletter, the Morning Digest.

Despite the wide bipartisan support it received, the map could face a legal challenge according to redistricting expert Michael McDonald. Iowa law requires the drawing of “reasonably compact districts” that are “square, rectangular, or hexagonal in shape, and not irregularly shaped.” As you can see here, though, the new districts are anything but regular.

● Massachusetts: Republican Gov. Charlie Baker has signed Massachusetts’ new legislative maps, which passed both chambers last month almost unanimously. A recently introduced congressional map remains pending before lawmakers.

● Montana: The independent tiebreaker on Montana’s bipartisan redistricting commission voted with Republicans on Thursday to advance the GOP’s proposed congressional map. The plan could still be tweaked before the commission’s Nov. 14 deadline to adopt a final map but is likely very close to final.

The map divides the state into an eastern and a western district, with the latter the more competitive of the two. Compared to the GOP’s initial proposals, the western seat (which would be numbered the 1st) is about a point bluer and would have gone for Donald Trump by a 52-45 margin last year, making it about 3 points redder than Democrats’ preferred plans. The 2nd District, by contrast, would have voted 62-35 for Trump. By and large, the map bears the hallmarks of a nonpartisan plan that doesn’t seek to favor one party over the other.

● New York: In an item last week, we incorrectly stated that a new New York law aimed at curbing gerrymandering applied only to the 23 counties with their own governing charters. The law in fact applies to the entire state, at both the county and local level. Thank you to Jeff Wice for this correction.

● North Carolina: North Carolina’s Republican-run legislature passed new congressional and legislative maps on Thursday, meaning they are now law because redistricting plans do not require the governor’s approval under state law. All three are extreme GOP gerrymanders designed to lock the party into power for years to come, despite the state’s perennial tossup status.

With North Carolina gaining a seat due to redistricting, the congressional map would create 10 safely red districts and just three that would be safely blue, with one swing seat currently held by a Democrat that’s been trending hard to the GOP. By comparison, the map used in last year’s elections—which Republicans had to repeatedly redraw thanks to intervention by the courts—sent eight Republicans and five Democrats to D.C.

We delved into the details of the new districts, including where each incumbent could run, in our weekday newsletter, the Morning Digest. The new map notably undermines Black representation by making a Democratic-leaning district held by African American Democrat G.K. Butterfield whiter, turning it into a pure swing district that could elect a Republican favored by white voters in next year’s midterm environment. Republicans also split the three cities of the Piedmont Triad region among four different heavily white and Republican districts even though most of the area now is currently in one Democratic-held district that has a sizable Black population.

No state has seen more litigation over redistricting in the past decade than North Carolina, and that’s not going to change: An updated lawsuit has already been filed in state court over the congressional map in the same case that saw a state court block a prior GOP map in 2019 on the basis that partisan gerrymandering violates the state constitution. Separately, a new lawsuit has also been filed over the legislative maps. The chief attack on the maps centers on the fact that Republicans say they ignored racial data in drawing their lines, in contravention of the Voting Rights Act, with Republicans baselessly claiming that the VRA no longer applies.

● Ohio: Republicans in Ohio’s Senate and House have each released a draft congressional map, both equally extreme gerrymanders. The House version would likely send 13 Republicans and just two Democrats to Congress next year, while the Senate plan would do the same, albeit with districts configured differently.

● Texas: Three lawsuits were filed this week by Democrats and advocates for voters of color that are challenging various parts of the gerrymanders that Republicans adopted last month. Two of the suits were filed by Latino voter advocates, one in state court arguing that the state House map violates a state constitutional limit on splitting counties and another in federal court challenging the congressional, state House, and state Board of Education lines for racial discrimination. Meanwhile, Democratic state Sen. Beverly Powell and several voters filed an additional federal lawsuit arguing that the GOP’s redraw of Powell’s 10th District discriminated against Black and Latino voters.

Two previous federal lawsuits had already been filed in recent weeks, meaning there are now four federal cases and five in total.

● Wisconsin: A committee in Wisconsin’s Republican-run state Senate has passed the GOP’s proposed congressional and legislative maps, but they’re certain to be vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers due to their extreme gerrymandering.

Voting Access Expansions

● Congress: As expected, Senate Republicans, with the exception of Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, all voted to filibuster Democrats’ bill to restore the Voting Rights Act, known as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The vote blocked Democrats from beginning debate in spite of some compromises that West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and other Democrats made to bring Murkowski on board. We previously explained how this bill would restore and expand many of the VRA protections that the conservatives on the Supreme Court have repeatedly undermined, but unless Manchin and fellow centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema agree to curtail the filibuster, the bill stands no chance of overcoming GOP obstruction.

Voter Suppression

● Arkansas: Arkansas Republicans have appealed to the state Supreme Court after a lower court rejected their motion to dismiss a lawsuit challenging four voting restriction laws that the GOP enacted earlier this year. The good-government plaintiffs in this case are opposing laws that:

• Eliminate the ability of voters who lack ID to sign a sworn statement and instead strictly require ID for ballots to count;
• Require voters to return their absentee ballots to election officials by the Friday before Election Day instead of by Election Day itself—all but one other state sets that deadline on Election Day or afterward;
• Require a voter’s signature on an absentee ballot application to match their original signature on their voter registration form, even though voter signatures often change over time; and
• Effectively ban giving food or drinks to voters waiting in line to vote by restricting who may linger near polling place entrances.

● Texas: The Department of Justice is the latest party to file a federal lawsuit challenging parts of the major new voting restriction law that Texas Republicans enacted last month, which has already drawn several other lawsuits in state and federal court.

As we’ve previously detailed, the GOP’s law adds criminal penalties to a wide range of voting activities and includes measures that:

• Ban drive-thru early voting;
• Eliminate 24-hour early voting locations by setting limits on hours of operation from of 6 AM to 10 PM at the latest;
• Expand early voting in small, mostly white counties that are heavily Republican while limiting it in larger, more diverse counties that lean Democratic;
• Add new voter ID requirements for absentee voting;
• Make a felony for election officials to send unsolicited absentee ballot applications to voters or use public funds to help third parties to do so;
• Enable partisan “poll watchers” to potentially harass and intimidate voters while limiting their oversight by election officials by imposing criminal penalties for getting in their way; and
• Require people who are assisting voters with disabilities who aren’t the voters’ caregivers to provide documentation and take an oath that they will follow limits on assistance, which advocates argue is intimidating and burdensome.

Campaign Finance

● Ballot Measures: The Federal Election Commission voted 4-2, with Democratic Chairwoman Shana Broussard joining the three Republicans, to affirm that foreigners can donate to ballot measure campaigns in the United States on the nonsensical grounds that they are supposedly not elections under federal law (foreigners are still banned from giving to federal candidates). Just this week, Maine voters rejected a power transmission project that was the subject of the state’s most expensive referendum campaign in history after Canadian energy giant Hydro-Quebec and its allies spent $50 million in an unsuccessful effort to win the vote.

This post was originally published on this site

Greg Sargent/WaPo:

A dangerous myth about those big Democratic losses is threatening Biden’s agenda

Did Democrats take a big drubbing on Tuesday because they are trying to accomplish too much on behalf of our country?

To some centrist Democrats and opinionmakers, the answer is yes. If this idea gains traction, it could spook centrist lawmakers into making more demands to downsize President Biden’s agenda, fueling ideological conflict and causing important programs to be jettisoned.

You hear this argument everywhere. But it’s weakly reasoned and utterly without any real basis.

“Dems lost ground in an off year election where the party in power usually loses, fueled by the pandemic, so I’m right about this other thing” is a helluva drug.

OOT the BIF → BIL is now on the way to be Bilateral Infrastructure Law when it lands on the president’s desk. And that’s a BFD.

Manchin and Sinema took their Oscar turn on the red carpet. As for reconciliation? That’s the hard part but do not bet against Nancy Pelosi. It’s not unreasonable to think that no other Speaker could have done this. She even got the Problem Solvers caucus to solve a problem (she got 13 R votes last night, however many Rs were in the derided caucus). And she got the Rule passed to govern debate for the reconciliation bill on a party line vote. That’s a lot of wins.

Oh, and here is what is in the BFD bill, among many things:

Electric vehicles: The bill would provide $7.5 billion for zero- and low-emission buses and ferries, aiming to deliver thousands of electric school buses to districts across the country, according to the White House. Another $7.5 billion would go to building a nationwide network of plug-in electric vehicle chargers, according to the bill text.

It’s the chargers that are the BFD part.

Marcus H Johnson/Twitter:

The funny thing is people think the CRT discourse is something new. No, this is the same cultural-political fight going back 200+ years. Over the level of political power Black people can have in society. Black people gain something politically, there’s a conservative backlash. 

Abolitionist movement — secession.

Reconstruction — jim crow and state sanctioned vigilante violence. lost cause propaganda.

Civil rights/Voting/Immigration — southern strategy, modern gop realignment. tough on crime, conf monuments

Obama — Trump

BLM/Floyd Protests — anti CRT 

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It is Friday. It has been another week filled with names like Manchin and Sinema, along with words like “conservative” and “blame.” But we are on the precipice of having our government accomplishing something! It has been a tough week for progressives and the centrist discourse that the traditional media promotes, and has always promoted, is once again searching for surface-level answers to poorly thought out questions about our country’s deepest concerns.

Here are some stories you may have missed:

• Florida senator gets call telling her to ‘F**k off and die’ after asking surgeon general to mask up
• Tucker’s gaslighting campaign is about more than just justifying the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection
• Police reform measure fell short in Minneapolis, but this is why we still won
• Justice Department sues Texas over ‘unlawful and indefensible’ provisions in voter suppression law
• There’s no such thing as a bad day in court for Donald Trump when it comes to Jan. 6
• Election official says voter fraud lies caused two heart attacks in suit against Trump and Giuliani​​​​​​​
• Stocks soaring, record job growth, pandemic receding—Biden is succeeding as Democrats falter​​​​​​​
• Trial for Ahmaud Arbery murder begins with brutal video one defendant thought would prove his case​​​​​​​

And from the Daily Kos community:

• The NYT Editorial Board: It’s all the Progressives fault!
• A Far Right MN Man Ran For School Board As Anti-Vaxxer.  A Stint In ICU With Wife Changed His Mind.​​​​​​​
• Powerful new X-ray source shows amazing detail inside organs, including lung from a COVID death​​​​​​​