Okay gotcha, that makes some sense. For years Washington State had a rule that you had to register party affiliation to vote in the primary. I understand the reasoning, but I don’t think voter affiliation is any business of the government’s, so I’ve never registered for any party.
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Exactly right. A case came up in the precinct I was working in, with a woman who needed help filling in her ballot. I can’t recall now if she couldn’t see, or couldn’t read. She was assisted by two polling workers, one who had declared for each party, so that, if one helper tried to steer her toward a particular candidate, the other helper would call foul.
Michigan does not require people to declare a party to register to vote. But some states do.
Steve
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Michigan’s primaries are partisan. They used to print up two separate ballots, so you requested whichever party’s ballot you wanted to vote at that election. Your selection was verbal, at the moment, so, unless someone was keeping a record they were not supposed to, your affiliation was not recorded, and you could switch between parties, as you wished, from primary to primary. Now, they have both parties listed on one ballot, with a big warning printed at the top that, whichever party you want to vote, vote only for that party’s candidates of your choice. ie no voting for an R for one office, than a D for a different office.
Steve
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This post goes into deeper highly METAR relevant (investment environment in one more year) but dangerously political territory, and so everybody please remain sane, civil, and on topic.
This
is an extremely informative, powerful, and interesting conversation that centers the coming struggle to preserve a Constitutional Republic. It features two very intelligent knowledgable characters from utterly opposite ends of both the social and political spectrums:
Stuart Stevens, one of the most powerful and successful of all GOP political operatives of the last 50 years (I knew him when we were both young and thought of him as my utterly wrong, dangerous, but “honorable enemy”) and
Michael Cohen, the Roy Cohn following ex-Trump warrior mafia style lawyer enforcer who is now a vulgar commentator on the other side.
If you want a taste of the heart of the conversation jump to 25 minutes in.
Stuart Stevens just came out with this book
which I am about to buy and read.
david fb
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Built in a time when “states” were more like disparate countries, kingdoms even, with wildly different rules and laws governing. Some states had state religions. Some accepted enslaving others as a normal thing. Different states had different needs: agriculture in the south, industry in the north, and so on. Even though they banded together to rid themselves of British rule, they were very different entities - unlike the “America” that we think of today. They were closer to the European model of individual countries than a unified cultural entity.
That’s why this “everything must hew to how the founders believed” without regard to the interleaving changes time, fortune, and circumstance have wrought is such nonsense. (One oft cited example: the most skillful user of a “gun” in colonial America could shoot perhaps three rounds per minute, and that after months, even years of training. Today any fool with an index finger and a bump stock can unleash 400 rounds per minute. That is not a casual difference.)
Likewise we have seen an “encroachment” on free speech (for example) with libel, slander, copyright, public nuisance, incitement and other laws as have affected the pure, 100% “freeee” mantra of some.
More to the point, it seems that the Court decides what it wants when it wants. It doesn’t rule on gerrymandering because elections are a “state issue.” Except when they’re not, like the 2000 Presidential recount in Florida, or the recent dust-up over civil rights gerrymandering in some southern states, or whether state courts have unchecked power over elections. Given the elections are the bedrock upon which the rest of democracy stands, it would seem a little consistency might be in order - and is therefore not “a feature”, but “a bug”. It just seems some bugs are more equal than others, eh?
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What hasn’t changed is human nature. Things such as power corrupts and the passion of mobs. Multiple power centers and levels, checks and balances need to be built in.
“A democratic government is such a dangerous machine that, even in America, we are obliged to take a great many precautions against the errors and the passions of democracy: two chambers, veto by governors, and judicial institutions.”
(Tocqueville)
DB2
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This is bad, but also not surprising. These people who believe that also believer literally that 2,000 year old books are also still relevant without any regard to the interleaving changes of time. I think it’s also why they don’t trust science, which is willing to change its mind and beliefs as new information comes to light. Its counter to everything they have been programmed for.
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That’s very reductionist. One doesn’t have to be a creationist to believe in the importance of the balance of power and checks and balances.
DB2
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The main “check” and crucial “balance” needed is suppression of rule by cabals of the corrupt wealthy over everybody else by mostly surreptitious means, as was written in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in – wait for it – 1776!
The crazy quilt of the electoral college was a compromise that, like counting slaves in the census only for purposes of further empowering their owners in slave states, bribed enough of the small states to join to make the effort worthwhile.
Gerrymandering has been with electoral politics since Eve and Adam left Eden, but has only become dangerously poisonous in the modern era as computers have made the line drawing exercise amenable to deadly perfection.
david fb
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I’m thinking more along the lines of the hard-line approach to the Second Amendment, or the clinging to the out-dated Electoral College, examples like that.
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Not surreptitious, since bribery of elected officials was made officially legal. And yet, every time a shareholder proposal is made, at any company I have had stock in over the years, for the company to disclose who they bribe, why, and how much they paid, management tells the “owners” that information is none of the 'owner’s" business.
The “Citizens United” decision is ripe for overturn. The decision rested on management being the “spokesman” for the group: employees and shareholders, but management does the bribing without the informed consent of the members of the group, so how can management be the “spokesman”?
Steve
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I think I am going to bookmark the above link for those that continue to rail against Citizens United. Should be required reading.
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There is no such thing as “settled law” in Shiny-land. The overturn of “Roe” should demonstrate that.
Before that, a Texas sodomy statute was overturned, by retwisting the twisted logic that was used to uphold it, years before.
SCOTUS upheld “separate but equal” in 1896, then overturned it with a series of other decisions starting with “Brown” in 1954.
Steve
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Read the link and then come back and comment. You might have a different perspective. Hint it really isn’t about whether or not it is “settled law.”
No, it didn’t. It rested on the notion that corporations are protected by the First Amendment when it comes to the corporations’ speech. Not the speech of their employees or shareholders - the corporations themselves are protected from government censorship. A continuation of a fairly long line of precedents that date back to (mostly) the Civil Rights Era, when hostile southern state governments tried to impede the NAACP and northern newspapers from promoting civil rights by regulating their speech on the grounds that the corporate entities lacked First Amendment protections. The Warren Court was having none of it, with William Brennan (the leader of the Court’s liberal wing) strenuously arguing that these corporations had First Amendment rights as corporations. See, for example, NAACP v. Button:
There is very little serious disagreement, even within SCOTUS, that corporate entities have First Amendment rights. Whether it’s the New York Times, Inc., the Sierra Club, the NAACP or the ACLU, NBCUniversal, Random House - whomever. The government cannot censor speech simply because the speech is published by, paid for, or on behalf of a corporate entity. The debate in Citizens United was about whether that principle prohibited any regulation of speech based on the corporate identity of the speaker, or whether some regulation could be applied to certain types of corporations consistent with the Constitution.
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For the short version, read the Wiki article quote from the decision.
The court found that BCRA §§201 and 311, provisions requiring disclosure of the funder, were valid as applied to the movie advertisements and to the movie itself. The majority ruled for the disclosure of the sources of campaign contributions, saying that
> prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters. Shareholders can determine whether their corporation’s political speech advances the corporation’s interest in making profits, and citizens can see whether elected officials are “in the pocket” of so-called moneyed interests … This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.
That is my point. Management insists their bribes be completely opaque, no informed consent by employees or shareholders before the fact, no accountability after the fact.
Steve
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The fact that you bolded that section tells me you did not read the link.
To quote my link:
Our inability to trace campaign donations to their source — the dark money issue — is the result of the lack of federal regulations to make disclosure mandatory. And such regulations are legal; the Court said as much in Citizens , with eight of nine justices agreeing on that point! The only thing standing in the way of transparency is congressional stonewalling. In 2010, Republican senators defeated a disclosure law 59 to 39, which would have made it more difficult for donors to use legal loopholes to hide their identities.
Citizens United did not rule on so-called dark money and in fact, the vast majority of the court at that time agreed that disclosure would be Constitutional if passed via Congress.
And SCOTUS stated that Congress can say otherwise, but must make a law doing so. Citizens United had no bearing on that disclosure. Until there is a law, management is correct.
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Would those be the same luminaries that defeated the legislation to hold investment advisors to a fiduciary standard?
Steve
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I don’t know and I fail to see how that is in anyway relevant to the topic.
Since you are no longer responding on the topic of Citizens United, should one assume that you now think differently?
That has been the court’s out for a number of years now “we opened this can of worms, by overturning laws and precedents, but it’s not our job to address the consequences”. The court could have easily ruled that the informed consent of the other stakeholders was required for management to start bribing elected officials, with the other stakeholder’s money, but it didn’t. Without informed consent, taking of the other stakeholder’s money is theft. Management’s insistence that their bribing activities be secret is an implicit admission that the other stakeholders would not consent, if they knew what management was up to.
Steve
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