Mi shebeirach

Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD) has been hospitalized. If he is unable to complete his term in the Senate (which goes through 2008), Gov. Mike Rounds (R) would appoint a replacement. Remember, Rounds is the one who signed the state abortion ban (recently repealed by a popular referendum), so he clearly wants a Senate who will approve Bush's wacko judicial nominees. If the replacement senator is a Republican, this will shift the balance of the Senate to 50-50 (assuming both independents continue to caucus with the Democrats), with Dick Cheney breaking the tie.

So all we can do is pray for Sen. Johnson's full and speedy recovery. Please add Tim ben Noach to your mi shebeirach.

Don't mess with Texas

Congratulations to Ciro Rodriguez, who has been elected in the runoff election in Texas's 23rd Congressional District! This makes it official: the new House of Representatives will have 233 Democrats and 202 Republicans. This means that the Democrats will have more seats than the Republicans have had at any time since 1949 (the famous "Do Nothing Congress") .

The never-ending story

The Democrats have an unquestioned majority in both the House and Senate of the 110th Congress, but the 2006 election isn't over yet in three districts. Here's a summary for those who haven't been obsessively following political blogs:

• Florida 13th District: We knew that electronic voting without a voter-verified paper trail would result in a crisis, and now that it's happened, it's no surprise that it happened in Katherine Harris's old district, with a candidate named Buchanan on the ballot. The campaign between Vern Buchanan (R) and Christine Jennings (D) was ugly, with the Republicans making harassing robocalls that voters thought were coming from Jennings. Based on the votes that were counted, Buchanan is ahead by 369 votes. However, the count includes about 18,000 undervotes -- ballots showing that the voter didn't vote for anyone in this race. Any "recount" would show an identical result, since there is no further information beyond the data stored in the electronic voting machines. These 18,000 ballots voted predominantly Democratic in other races, so it is likely that if their votes for the congressional race had been counted, Jennings would have won. The fight continues (again) in the Florida courts. The only fair outcome is to call a new election, along with legislation preventing this from happening again.
• Louisiana 2nd District: In Louisiana, candidates from all parties compete in an open primary on Election Day, and if no candidate receives a majority, there is a runoff in December. In this district covering most of New Orleans, the candidates in the runoff are incumbent Rep. William Jefferson (D), subject of a federal bribery investigation, and challenger Karen Carter (D). The seat will be Democratic one way or the other, but now that the corrupt Republican majority has been overthrown, the voters have the opportunity to clean up the Democratic party too and throw out the corrupt incumbent.
• Texas 23rd District: This was one of the districts redrawn in Tom DeLay's 2003 redistricting, and then it was redrawn again in August 2006 following the Supreme Court's ruling in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry that the district violated the Voting Rights Act. Since this was after the Texas primary, the re-redrawn districts had open primaries on Election Day, and the 23rd District, in southwest Texas, is going to a Louisiana-style runoff. Incumbent Rep. Henry Bonilla (R) goes up against former Rep. Ciro Rodriguez (D), a victim of DeLay's redistricting.

When the dust settles, the Democrats will hold 233-235 seats in the House, and the Republicans will hold 200-202.

Democracy in America

WOO HOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Democrats win EVERYTHING! Majorities in the House, the Senate*, and the governors! And the Republicans have been completely shut out, not picking up a single Democratic seat! Even in the Republican blowout of 1994, the Democrats still picked up a few seats.

(*Yes, Allen is eligible to request a recount, and Burns might or might not be, but based on their past statements, we can safely assume that they're not going to. "We'll need to move America forward as soon as these votes are cast." --George Allen, November 8, 2000)

This is the first election since I started voting that every candidate I voted for won. And Rumsfeld is resigning!

YIPPEE!!!!!! Let's make America live up to its ideals!

UPDATE: Goodbye Mr. Burns!

UPDATE 2: Allen concedes! It's over! Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.

A legendary figure in educational disbursement

With the revelation of ethics violations, the shit has hit the fan for NY State Comptroller Alan Hevesi. Gubernatorial heir apparent Eliot Spitzer has withdrawn his endorsement of Hevesi, and the New York Times has endorsed Hevesi's Republican opponent.

I already voted for Hevesi before these violations made the news. (I guess they had already made the news a little bit, but I had missed the story, since this wasn't a race I was following carefully. Oops.) I can't say I would endorse him now, and I did note that comptroller is the rare type of office where party affiliation doesn't trump everything else in deciding whom to vote for. (I'm also not entirely convinced that the state comptroller should be popularly elected. At the federal level, we don't elect the Secretary of the Treasury. But I could be swayed either way.)

However, I want to point out to people who haven't voted yet that there are other options if you don't want to re-elect Hevesi but also can't bear to vote for a Republican for statewide office.

1) Vote for a third-party candidate, such as Julia Willebrand (Green) or Willie Cotton (Socialist Workers). Yes, this is probably an ineffective protest vote, but there's less at stake than usual.

2) Vote for Hevesi anyway (preferably on the Working Families Party line), taking the gamble that he'll resign or be removed from office before he begins his next term. Heck, this might even happen before Election Day. This way, his replacement will be selected by the state legislature, which has a Democratic majority, so it's the only way to make it likely that the next comptroller will be a Democrat. (It's not ideal -- it's too bad that this story didn't break in time for there to be a competitive primary.) (Note to FL-16 voters: do not pursue this strategy. Just look at the names on the ballot.)

Information on Republican congressional candidates

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl
--AZ-01: Rick Renzi
--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth
--CA-04: John Doolittle
--CA-11: Richard Pombo
--CA-50: Brian Bilbray
--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave
--CO-05: Doug Lamborn
--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell
--CT-04: Christopher Shays
--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan
--FL-16: Joe Negron
--FL-22: Clay Shaw
--ID-01: Bill Sali
--IL-06: Peter Roskam
--IL-10: Mark Kirk
--IL-14: Dennis Hastert
--IN-02: Chris Chocola
--IN-08: John Hostettler
--IA-01: Mike Whalen
--KS-02: Jim Ryun
--KY-03: Anne Northup
--KY-04: Geoff Davis
--MD-Sen: Michael Steele
--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht
--MN-06: Michele Bachmann
--MO-Sen: Jim Talent
--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns
--NV-03: Jon Porter
--NH-02: Charlie Bass
--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson
--NM-01: Heather Wilson
--NY-03: Peter King
--NY-20: John Sweeney
--NY-26: Tom Reynolds
--NY-29: Randy Kuhl
--NC-08: Robin Hayes
--NC-11: Charles Taylor
--OH-01: Steve Chabot
--OH-02: Jean Schmidt
--OH-15: Deborah Pryce
--OH-18: Joy Padgett
--PA-04: Melissa Hart
--PA-07: Curt Weldon
--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick
--PA-10: Don Sherwood
--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee
--TN-Sen: Bob Corker
--VA-Sen: George Allen
--VA-10: Frank Wolf
--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick
--WA-08: Dave Reichert

Mah Rabu endorsements: local

We've made our endorsements for elections nationwide. I'll miss all the madness on Election Day, since I'll be in the Holy Land for my great-great-grandfather's 50th yahrtzeit. So I'll be voting absentee. Note to NYC voters who will be away on Election Day: you don't need to request an absentee ballot by mail; you can vote absentee in person at the Board of Elections office in your borough.

(Also, I can't type "election" without first typing "electron" by mistake. It's an occupational hazard.)

Here is the list of candidates for NYC. Apparently the Rent Is Too Damn High Party has been bowdlerized to Rent Is Too High. See their website for more details.

I plan to vote for:

• Governor / Lieutenant Governor: Eliot Spitzer / David A Paterson (Working Families)
• State Comptroller: Alan G Hevesi (Working Families)
• Attorney General: Andrew M Cuomo (Working Families)
• United States Senator: Hillary Rodham Clinton (Working Families)
• Representative in Congress (15th District): Charles B Rangel (Working Families)
• State Senate (31st District): Eric Schneiderman (Working Families)
• Member of the Assembly (67th District): Linda B Rosenthal (Working Families)

Then there are the judges. WTF. Here in Manhattan, we're electing two "justices" to the "Supreme Court" (which isn't actually the highest court in the state - that's the Court of Appeals - but is just a regular trial court, albeit higher than the NYC Civil and Criminal Courts, and county/city/town/village courts elsewhere in the state) and one judge to the Civil Court. There are two candidates for the two Supreme Court seats, each of which is nominated by both the Democratic and Republican parties. There is one candidate for Civil Court, running as a Democrat. There were no primaries for any of these seats.

This is not democracy. And maybe democratic elections aren't the best way to pick judges anyway; maybe it would make sense to have them appointed and confirmed as they are in the federal judiciary. But the status quo is much worse, because it creates the illusion of democracy without any of the substance. Judicial candidates are chosen by party bosses, with no accountability to the voters. (If judges were appointed, they would at least be chosen by elected officials.)

I refuse to participate in this sham, so I plan to cast a write-in vote in protest. Any suggestions on whom I should write in? Desh may have inspired me to write in my own name, but I don't think I'm qualified for the position of judge (though perhaps more qualified than these guys).

Mah Rabu endorsements: national

With the Congressional election just three weeks away, Mah Rabu is ready to make endorsements for all races nationwide:

DEMOCRATS FOR EVERYTHING

That is all.

The merits of the individual candidates don't matter one whit. There's a time when the voters can and should have input on the individual candidates. IT'S CALLED THE PRIMARY. (And I support making primaries more competitive, though maybe I'm saying that from a position of privilege, living in a one-party state.) In the general election, the only thing that matters is which party will hold a majority in each house of Congress. Everything else is insignificant in comparison.

I probably don't need to preach to the choir and argue for why we need to boot out the party that lied to the American people and the world so that we could enter a war that has killed over 2700 US soldiers and 600,000 Iraqis and cost over $300 billion and turned the formerly stable albeit authoritarian Iraq into a flaming cesspool of chaos that is now the breeding ground for terrorism that it never was before and made this country and the world immeasurably less safe and steadfastly refuses any congressional oversight into the administration's disastrous policies and called an emergency session to intervene into the private medical affairs of a terminally ill woman but left hundreds of thousands to suffer and die in New Orleans in order to further their criminally negligent conservative philosophy and voted to abrogate the centuries-old right of habeas corpus and voted to hand billions of tax dollars back to the extremely wealthy while impoverishing the federal government and the rest of the American people and supports a government that is bought and paid for by corporate lobbies and provides shelter to child predators while preaching "family values".

The Republicans have got to go.

And the Democrats are the only alternative.

Are the Democrats perfect? No. (Though they are better than the Republicans on every issue.) Is the two-party system perfect? Of course not. But we can't get rid of the two-party system by putting our fingers in our ears and pretending it doesn't exist. Let's first get the Republicans out of power, and then we can clean our own house.

If you think the voting records or positions of individual members of Congress mean anything whatsoever, then you're living in a pre-1994 fantasyland. Starting with Gingrich and continuing with Hastert/DeLay/Frist, Congress has moved toward a parliamentary system where the party leadership reigns supreme. We can argue (preferably in our spare time after November 7) about whether this is beneficial, but we can't deny that it's the way things are.

The party that controls Congress gets a majority on all the committees, and therefore gets to decide which legislation does and doesn't make it to the floor. Once a bill is on the floor, any "debates" are a sham, just posturing for the C-SPAN cameras. After a bill has been assured passage, individual Congresspeople in both the majority and the minority can decide to break with their parties to appear "moderate" for the voters back home. However, they're not really taking a principled stand, since these stands only happen when it won't affect the outcome of the vote.

So it doesn't matter, for good or for ill, whether an individual senator/representative has positions outside the mainstream of his/her party. Yes, Bob Casey (D-PA) is pro-coathanger-abortions, like his Republican opponent Rick Santorum. And yes, Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) is pro-choice, like his Democratic opponent Sheldon Whitehouse. But THAT DOESN'T MATTER. Even if the only issue you care about is reproductive choice, you should still support a pro-coathanger-abortion Democrat over a pro-choice Republican. If Casey is elected to the Senate, along with enough Democrats to take over the majority, then no bill restricting reproductive rights will ever make it out of committee. If Chafee is elected and the Republicans retain their majority, then there will be a speedy confirmation for the next Roberts/Alito-style Supreme Court nominee who tips the court towards overturning Roe v. Wade, even if Chafee himself gets to vote valiantly against the nominee and Cheney has to break a tie.

As Krugman said today, "The fact is that this is a one-letter election. D or R, that’s all that matters."

(Though if you support a Republican majority, then you probably shouldn't listen to raving lefties like me or Krugman! Don't worry about party affiliation - look at the individual candidates and vote your conscience!)

When the Democrats take over Congress, Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi has already stated the party's goals for the first 100 hours:

Day One: Put new rules in place to "break the link between lobbyists and legislation."

Day Two: Enact all the recommendations made by the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Time remaining until 100 hours: Raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, maybe in one step. Cut the interest rate on student loans in half. Allow the government to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices for Medicare patients.

Broaden the types of stem cell research allowed with federal funds _ "I hope with a veto-proof majority," she added in an Associated Press interview Thursday.

And it continues from there.

As important as it is to take over Congress, the importance of electing Democrats (prioritizing party affiliation over individual merits) goes beyond Congress. The Republican domination of the House of Representatives has been assisted by gerrymandering by Republican state legislatures, most notably in Texas, but around the country as well. With the Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of mid-decade redistricting, it is essential that Democrats control as many state legislatures as possible, so that the Democratic party is drawing the congressional lines.

Of course, Democratic majorities in state governments are important beyond redistricting. Chris Bowers of MyDD writes:

It is in the states where we build our benches for higher office, and our benches had been severely depleted since 1994. It is in the states where progressive legislation will first appear before it is adopted nationally, and even a Democratic Congress in D.C. won't be able to adopt much progressive legislation as long as bush is President. It is also in the states where voters maintain their core partisan identification, and where GOTV operations preside. It is also in the states where the control over much election machinery and congressional maps is held. Controlling the states is the backbone to any national governing coalition. In 2006, Democrats look set to take clear control of the states for the first time since 1994. As much as anything else, that will stop the conservative movement in its tracks, and help change the direction of this country.

As we saw in Florida in 2000 and then Ohio in 2004, partisan affiliation can matter even for seemingly nonpartisan offices like state Secretary of State. Therefore, the Secretary of State Project is working to elect Secretaries of State who will ensure fair elections and protect voter rights.

So the only offices for which I endorse giving even one thought to the individual candidates in the general election (rather than the letter after their name) are the less "political" state offices (like Comptroller), and local offices (such as mayor and city council, or the equivalent in your municipality) where the national parties may have less influence. I still don't think I could bring myself to vote for a Republican for any of these offices, but would seriously consider an independent or third-party candidate.

Otherwise, to reiterate, Mah Rabu's endorsement is

DEMOCRATS FOR EVERYTHING

There are two exceptions where I would endorse voting for someone without a "D" after his/her name, but both of these exceptions still work towards the goal of Democratic majorities in Congress.

1) If you live in Vermont, vote for Bernie Sanders (I) for Senate. Rep. Sanders is an independent candidate and self-described socialist, but has been endorsed by the Democratic party, and there is no Democratic candidate in the race. He will continue to caucus loyally with the Democrats.

2) If you live in New York, vote for the Working Families Party for the races in which they've endorsed the Democratic candidate. New York has electoral fusion laws, so a candidate can run on multiple ballot lines, and his/her votes on all lines will be added together. So a vote for the WFP is a way to send a message without doing anything destructive. As the WFP says on their website, "Eliot Spitzer knows that every vote he gets on Row E - the Working Families Party ballot line - is a vote for progressive change to solve problems with our schools, health care, housing and jobs." The WFP has explicitly expressed support for taking back a Democratic majority in Congress.

The Connecticut Senate race is not an exception. Joe Lieberman (Connecticut for Lieberman) has abandoned all ties to the Democratic party, and is drawing most of his support from Republicans. Though he made a name for himself attacking Clinton on "family values", he has defended Hastert from accountability in the Foley scandal. Most recently, he said "Uh, I haven't thought about that enough to give an answer" when asked whether he wanted the Democrats to take back the House.

It is a very real possibility that the Senate will end up 49-49-2 (with Sanders and Lieberman as the two independents). If this happens, given Lieberman's conduct toward the Democratic party, why wouldn't Lieberman decide caucus with the Republicans and hand the tiebreaker to Dick Cheney, or use this as a threat to extort concessions from the Democrats? Bowers discusses what this would mean.

If you're in Connecticut, vote for Ned Lamont, a real Democrat. (Or if you're a Republican and can't bring yourself to vote D, then vote for your party's nominee, Alan Schlesinger, because, um, Lieberman might caucus with the Democrats.)

VOTE OR DIE

Election special

This Tuesday (September 12) is the primary election in Mah Rabu's state of New York, so here are our long-awaited endorsements.

Governor:

Eliot Spitzer is going to breeze through both the primary and the general. There's not going to be any suspense; he's been crowned for over a year. But I'm going to endorse him anyway. As state attorney general, Spitzer has cracked down on corporate crime effectively.

He's certainly not perfect. None of the candidates is ideal on the school funding issue. But Spitzer is willing to go the farthest towards providing adequate funding for our schools. And any Democratic governor will be such a breath of fresh air after 12 years of Pataki that any of these complaints pale in comparison.

Both candidates support nonpartisan redistricting for the state legislature. This gets a big thumbs up. At present, New York is gerrymandered so that the State Assembly is eternally Democratic and the State Senate is eternally Republican, and most state legislators never answer to their constituents. Nonpartisan redistricting will make the state government more democratic (and probably more Democratic too).

I heard a chunk of the Spitzer-Suozzi debate, and was disappointed with both. Both candidates were evoking the "tax relief" frame, and arguing over who could cut taxes more. Why would you do that, in a Democratic primary in a blue state? Stop triangulating and start leading.

But there were more negatives (in that small chunk of the debate) for Suozzi. He said to Spitzer something along the lines of "All you've been doing is prosecuting. That's no way to run a state!". Spitzer responded more calmly than I would have, saying "Uh, I know that. The attorney general's job is to be a prosecutor. I know that's not the only thing, and that's why I'm running for governor."

More substantively, Suozzi was talking about how he balanced the Nassau County budget by standing up to the police officers' union. As a member of another public employee union, I'm certainly not going to vote for someone for union-busting and then bragging about it!

So Spitzer gets my vote. Finally, this blue state will be led by a governor who represents the state's progressive values!

Lieutenant Governor:

Senate Minority Leader David Paterson, my state senator until I moved a few blocks out of the district, is unopposed in the primary. In the Senate, he's been trying to buck tradition by abrogating the tacit non-aggression pact and turning the Democratic minority into an actual opposition party, so he'll be missed there.

Attorney General:

The two leading candidates are 2001 mayoral nominee Mark Green and 2002 gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo, each looking for a shot at redemption. I moved to New York in 2002, and I guess I didn't have a permanent address in time to register for the primary that year, so I wasn't around for either Green's or Cuomo's previous runs for office. So I'm not going to focus on the ugliness from either of those campaigns (though I did vote for both of their rivals later on - I voted for McCall in the 2002 general election and Ferrer in the 2005 general election). Instead, I'll focus on their records.

Green served two terms as NYC's first Public Advocate, and was an, um, advocate for the public. In contrast, Cuomo's tenure as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development was marked by cronyism and corruption.

Therefore, I endorse Mark Green to fill Spitzer's shoes as attorney general.

Senate:

I am harboring no delusions; Hillary Clinton will be re-elected. But I still intend to cast a protest vote in the primary.

Sen. Clinton supported the disastrous Iraq war. I endorse labor activist Jonathan Tasini, who wants to support our troops and bring them home. Tasini also supports universal health care, impeachment or censure of Bush and Cheney, and marriage equality.

I don't advocate protest votes in the general election; those are about pragmatism and getting your party elected, not about making a statement. So the primary is precisely the right time to make a statement. If Tasini gets a substantial vote total on Tuesday, it will send a message that the people of New York are opposed to their senator's support of the war. (Tasini garnered 44% of the vote in a primary among NY MoveOn members. Neither candidate reached the two-thirds threshold for MoveOn to make an endorsement in the primary.)

Clinton will, of course, sail to victory in November over her little-known Republican opponent. (I won't name the Republican candidates in the race; they don't get any free advertising from me. I'll let the NRSC waste its millions in the expensive NY media market if they want you to know the candidate's name.) But we can give her a mandate to bring home the troops.

Clinton is no Lieberman. She hasn't gone on all the talk shows to defend the Bush administration and undermine the Democratic caucus. So I'll vote against her in the primary, but I'm not worried about her reelection in the general.

But another reason to vote against Clinton in the primary is to put the brakes on the media narrative that she is the uncontested frontrunner for the 2008 presidential nomination. I swear that her frontrunner status is a creation of the media and the Republicans. The Republicans have been using a Clinton presidential candidacy to spook their base for years before she made any indication of running. And even if she's leading in the polls, that's hardly fair -- Clinton has 100% name recognition, while the average American who doesn't obsessively follow politics hasn't heard of the other candidates, being as how this average American only tunes in once every four years, and we're not even halfway there yet. I've never met anyone who was actually excited to vote for Clinton in 2008 (and accepting her nomination as inevitable doesn't count). So the other candidates' numbers will start to go up once people learn who they are. But only if they get a fair chance. If Clinton is the undisputed frontrunner from before day one, then we're back to the "electability" clusterfuck of 2004, where people are voting in the primary based not on who they want to vote for, but on who they think other people will want to vote for. We can help avert this now by taking some of the wind out of Clinton's sails.

***

All the other races in my corner of the City, County, and State of New York are uncontested: Rep. Charles Rangel, state Sen. Eric Schneiderman, and state Rep. Linda Rosenthal have no primary opposition.

There is a contested race for Democratic State Committee from my district between Debra Cooper and Elizabeth Starkey. I got two things in the mail from Cooper. She says "I'll push our Democratic Party to be liberal and loud about what the Republicans are doing wrong." Who can argue with that? And she has endorsements from Scott Stringer, Jerry Nadler, Schneiderman, and Rosenthal. From what I can ascertain online, Starkey seems to be the incumbent. Does anyone know anything about her? Is there an establishment candidate and an anti-establishment candidate, or anything like that? Which is which? And what does the Democratic State Committee do? In the absence of further information, I'll vote for Cooper.

A number of other states are also having primaries on September 12, most notably Rhode Island and Maryland. (The others are Arizona, Delaware, DC, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Wisconsin.)

For obvious reasons, I endorse Steve Laffey in the Rhode Island Republican Senate primary. According to Laffey's bio, when he took office as mayor of Cranston, the city was near bankruptcy and had the lowest bond rating in the country. He brought financial stability to Cranston, bringing the city's bonds back to investment grade in less than two years! Laffey "is a compassionate person who wants every child in Cranston to have the same opportunities that he did growing up, and he wants to see senior citizens feel safe and secure in the city in which many of them have lived for decades." If any Rhode Island Republicans are reading this, just think: Isn't it about time you had a real Republican representing you in Washington? Do the right thing Joanne. (That goes for Connecticut Republicans too. Support your party's nominee!)

As for the Maryland Democratic Senate primary, I'm not making an endorsement. Rep. Ben Cardin and former Rep. Kweisi Mfume are both solid candidates, so I'll leave the decision to the voters of Maryland, and support the nominee in the general election for Sen. Paul Sarbanes's open seat.

VOTE OR DIE