Saturday, September 28, 2019

It Isn't Just About the Ukraine


Trump told Russian officials in 2017 he wasn’t concerned about Moscow’s interference in election

Access to a memo of the meeting with Russian officials was limited to all but a few officials. The White House’s classification of such records is a focus of the impeachment inquiry.
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The Clark Kent Look


Post eye exam I am moving forward. Rather than E. John I thought it best to go for the Clark Kent look, the quick use of the glasses for incognito purposes. Less conspicuous than the piano player, I can hide behind the Clark Kent look with greater effectiveness. Blend into the crowd, coming and going in stealth. We'll see how it works.
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Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon - Book Review

This novel, published in 1929, is said to be the first detective novel.  Hammett is given credit for inventing the detective persona, the cool, casual, fly by the seat of his pants detective trying to help desperate clients.  His Sam Spade certainly fits this persona.

I assumed there were other Sam Spade books.  No, this is the only one.  Good story, though convoluted.  I do not anticipate getting into the detective genre.

  • "I don't mind a reasonable amount of trouble." Sam Spade

     "You always think you know what you're doing, but you're too slick for your own good, and some day you're going to find it out."

     "People lose teeth talking like that." Spade's voice was still amiable though his face had become wooden. "If you want to hang around you'll be polite."

     The Levantine.

     "I'm going out and find her even if I have to dig up sewers.  For God's sake, let's do something right."

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Sunday, September 22, 2019

King Trump

Ukraine call points to a president convinced of his own invincibility
The push by President Trump and his personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to influence the newly elected Ukrainian leader reveals a president apparently eager to wield the power of the United States to taint a political foe, confident that no one could hold him back.
By Philip Rucker, Robert Costa and Rachael Bade ● Read more »
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Friday, September 20, 2019

Whistleblowing


Whistleblower complaint about Trump involves Ukraine, say people familiar with the matter

The complaint involved communications with a foreign leader and a “promise” that President Trump made. Two and a half weeks before the complaint was filed, Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Giuliani admits to asking Ukraine about Joe Biden after denying it 30 seconds 
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Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Trump's Win Not a Fluke

New study: Trump's Electoral College win was no fluke — and is likely to happen again

Republicans likely to win 65 percent of close elections where they lose the popular vote, according to new analysis


IGOR DERYSH
SEPTEMBER 18, 2019 10:00AM (UTC)
Republicans are expected to win 65 percent of close presidential races in which they lose the popular vote as a result of the Electoral College and the blue-state concentration of Democrats, according to a new working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin looked at the probability of “inversions” in presidential elections, where the popular-vote winner loses the electoral vote. These inversions happened in 2000 and 2016 and twice in the 1800s, meaning that the candidate with the most votes has lost 8 percent of the time in the last 200 years. 
Using statistical models that predicted an inversion in the 2000 and 2016 races, the researchers found that the probability of the popular vote winner losing the electoral vote is about 40 percent in races decided by 1 percent (about 1.3 million votes) and roughly 30 percent in races decided by 2 percent (2.6 million votes) or less.
But these probabilities are “not symmetric across political parties,” the researchers say. Over the past 30 to 60 years, this asymmetry has favored Republicans. The statistical models used in the research predict that in the event of an inversion, “the probability that it will be won by a Republican ranges from 69 percent to 93 percent.”
“But conditional on a narrow popular vote loss for Democrats, modern Democratic candidates have had about a 35% chance winning the Presidency via inversion,” the researchers wrote, meaning that Republicans have a 65 percent chance of winning all future narrowly decided elections.
“If elections continue to remain close,” as they have in recent races, the researchers wrote, “inversions will occur with substantially higher frequency” than they have in the past.
The researchers pointed to the Electoral College system and the high concentration of Democratic votes in blue states as the driving force behind this trend. “Democrats have tended to win large states by large margins and lose them by small margins,” the researchers explained, creating an asymmetry in the winner-take-all Electoral College system that favors Republicans. In 2016, for example, Hillary Clinton won California by about 3.5 million votes while losing Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by less than 80,000 votes combined.
“Feasible policy changes — including awarding each state’s Electoral College ballots proportionally between parties rather than awarding all to the state winner — could substantially reduce inversion probabilities, though not in close elections,” the researchers concluded.
Michael Geruso, who led the research, told HuffPost that only scrapping the Electoral College system, rather than reforming it, would eliminate the growing chance of inversions in presidential races.
“The only change that would cause the Electoral College to always elect the winner of the national popular vote would be to change the system to have a national popular vote,” he said.
Another researcher, Dean Spears, told the outlet that the paper shows that Trump’s 2016 win was not a fluke, and the chances of a repeat are only increasing.
“I think a lot of people think that there was something special or improbable about the 2016 election. That with the politics of these times, 2016 was somehow a fluke. One of the important things that we learned is that that’s not true,” he said. “Not because it was unlikely, it was an inversion because an inversion is likely in a close election.”
Following Trump’s win, Hillary Clinton called for abolishing the Electoral College while Trump declared the system was “actually genius” despite calling it a “disaster for democracy” after President Obama won in 2012. 
Abolishing the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment, which would have to be approved by three-fourths of Congress and three-fourths of the states, an unlikely scenario given the Republicans’ recent embrace of the system.
A growing number of states have signed on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Sixteen states with a combined electoral vote total of 196 have pledged to award all their electoral votes to the popular vote winner once the compact reaches the 270 electoral votes necessary to clinch the election. 
John Koza, the founder of the group behind the compact, told the New York Times that eliminating the Electoral College would not just be more democratic but also allow more states, beyond the closely contested battleground states, to have a voice in the presidential race.
“The visible public problem right now with the electoral system is that the candidate who came in second gets the White House,” he said. “But the real problem is that very few states get the attention of the presidential campaigns.”
Fourteen of the 2020 Democratic candidates have called for abolishing the Electoral College, though not former Vice President Joe Biden or Sen. Kamala Harris. 
“Every vote matters,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said at a rally in Mississippi earlier this year. “And the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting. And that means get rid of the Electoral College.”

IGOR DERYSH

Igor Derysh is a New York-based political writer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.
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Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Constitution Day


In awareness that this is Constitution Day---the Constitutional Convention finished its work on September 17, 1787---I reread Hamilton's Federalist #68 in which defends the so-called Electoral College.
Much talk and wailing these days about revoking our method of selecting the President. Perhaps it is time to do so. I leave it others to make the case.
One thing I have learned in studying history is that all history must understood in context. In the context of the Convention in 1787, the Electoral College made sense. Some historians say that the adoption of the EC had a racial motive in giving the slave states extra votes. It is certainly true that the slave states were given extra votes. Having not read the Farrand and Madison accounts of the Convention, I know of no direct evidence that this is the case, but it certainly might be true. I do not personally know the evidence enough to make a judgement.
The Constitutional Founders did not trust "the people." Certainly Alexander Hamilton did not. It made sense to them to have the voters choose presumably wise "electors" who would vote their consciences and arrive at a disinterested conclusion. Also, it was widely assumed that the decision in most cases would wind up in the House of Representatives anyway. Direct election did not make sense for not only not trusting "the people," but also the fact in that time with a country mostly rural and stretching from Georgia northward, possible candidates would not be widely known after George Washington.
Perhaps it is time to make changes, although I suspect the possibility of doing so is slim and none in the real world. With demographic changes you would think that Democrats would benefit from direct election, but things could always change. I recall after Bush beat Kerry in 2004 that some Democrats were talking about the Democrat candidate might need to win by carrying a plurality of states with enough electoral votes. Things can change and unexpectedly in politics.
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Piling on the Electoral College

CHIP SOMODEVILLA / GETTY
Before we get to the Electoral College, can we talk about Alexander Hamilton?
As a political figure, Hamilton was volatile, mercurial, choleric, vindictive, conniving, disloyal, and incontinent; those personal flaws eventually led to his death in a duel with Aaron Burr. We remember him because he was also smart, creative, dashing, and decisive. And if you’d had a case in front of a New York court, he’d have been the lawyer to hire. Brilliant doesn’t do justice to his advocacy skills.
But an advocate is what he was. If he were a car salesman today, he could convince you that you really don’t want the backup camera in your family minivan, because this baby here knows not to back into walls.
It’s in that context that we should read his panegyric, from “Federalist No. 68,” to the “mode of appointment of the chief magistrate of the United States” by the electors, a “small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, [who] will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.” The electors, he assured us, will be “men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.”
I love The Federalist. It is like a particularly well-done brochure for a Las Vegas timeshare, written to sell more than to inform. Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay had one job: to ensure that the draft Constitution was ratified. The alternative, to these patriots, was disaster—the division of the new nation into hostile confederacies, and possibly the transformation of some or all of the states into clients of the European powers. There was no chance of a do-over; it was this Constitution or nothing. For this reason, The Federalist insists that every word, every comma, of the Constitution added up to the best of all possible rules in the best of all possible worlds.
However, the authors knew the document’s flaws. When Madison sent a copy to Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson discreetly replied: “In some parts it is discoverable that the author means only to say what may be best said in defense of opinions in which he did not concur.”
As long as George Washington was on the ballot, the electoral system worked fine. But when Washington retired in 1796, it hobbled his successor, John Adams. The original Constitution made the electoral-vote runner-up the vice president—Adams’s defeated opponent, Thomas Jefferson. Poor, gallant Adams could have used a friend at No. 2 but instead got a cunning foe. In the next election, in 1800, the system turned on Jefferson; because he and his running mate, Aaron Burr, got the same number of electoral votes, the election went to the House of Representatives, leading to 35 ballots over seven days—and very nearly to civil violence by outraged Jefferson supporters.
After that debacle, Congress proposed the Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804. It requires electors to vote for one president and one vice president. But it didn’t fix the real flaw: the electoral system is grossly undemocratic and devised in large part as a protection for slave states, which feared being outvoted in a popular-vote system. In fact, after Adams, what contemporaries called “the slave seats” ensured the dominance of slave-master presidents for the next quarter century. Then, in 1824, it gave us the first president to lose the popular vote, the unfortunate John Quincy Adams.
In 1876, the system almost restarted the Civil War; a Republican-dominated “electoral commission” awarded a one-vote victory to the popular-vote loser, “His Fraudulency” Rutherford B. Hayes. In 1888, electors gave us another loser president, the forgettable Benjamin Harrison. More recently, in 2000 and 2016, the system produced popular-vote losers who rank among the worst presidents in American history. The misfire in 2016 was especially painful, in part because the beneficiary, Donald Trump, was so plainly unfit for office and in part because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, the largest margin of any electoral-college loser in history.
Turns out the U.S. really needed that backup camera; without it, “we the people” are still backing into walls. But so smooth was that handsome salesman that generations of Americans keep insisting everything is fine.
In fact, between the 2016 election on November 8 and the scheduled electoral vote on December 19, a number of commentators assured Americans that it was for moments like this that the Founders had so wisely decided against a backup camera. The idea, they said, was that electors were to block unfit candidates. They could break their pledges to vote for their state’s winner, scatter enough votes that neither candidate would get a majority, and throw the election to the House, where high-minded lawmakers would surely choose someone other than Donald Trump. These mythical electors were called “Hamilton electors,” and the language of “Federalist No. 68” was deemed the “true” meaning of Article II of the Constitution.
In Colorado, which Clinton carried, one elector tried to vote for Ohio Governor John Kasich instead of Hillary Clinton; state officials discarded the vote, removed the elector, and referred him for prosecution on state charges. In Washington, three Clinton electors voted for Colin Powell and one for the Native American activist Faith Spotted Eagle. Under state law, their votes were recorded, but the secretary of state fined each elector $1,000 for violating the Washington elector-pledge law.
In May, the Washington State supreme court upheld the fines, reasoning that “the Constitution does not limit a state’s authority in adding requirements to presidential electors, indeed, it gives to the states absolute authority in the manner of appointing electors.” In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit issued a contrary decision, holding that Colorado’s actions violated the federal Constitution because
While the Constitution grants the states plenary power to appoint their electors, it does not provide the states the power to interfere once voting begins, to remove an elector, to direct the other electors to disregard the removed elector’s vote, or to appoint a new elector to cast a replacement vote. In the absence of such a delegation, the states lack such power.
I think the Tenth Circuit got it right. Electors aren’t state officials; precisely because they are such odd figures, staying close to the text of the Constitution is best. The text doesn’t tell us what an elector is (though we know he or she can’t hold any other federal office); it does tell us what states can do (control how electors are selected)—but it does not grant states any power after that. There is no context for any unwritten powers. Beyond the text is only chaos.
And that leads us to my problem with “Hamilton electors.” First, as noted above, I don’t think Hamilton believed the high popalorum he was selling in “Federalist No. 68,” and if he did, he was wrong. The Princeton political scientist Keith E. Whittington recently demonstrated that electors have more or less always functioned as party agents, not independent figures. I cannot imagine that any voter in 2016 went to the polls eager to give some unnamed fellow citizen a free choice among Clinton, Trump, Bernie Sanders, Kasich, Ron Paul, Powell, and Faith Spotted Eagle.
When Trump won the electoral contest, the republic was in danger. Would it have been saved by an Electoral College that sabotaged or reversed the result? Citizens should support such an electoral démarche, I think, only if they would also support a military coup to block Trump. Either alternative would inflict near-mortal damage on our system of elections.
Meanwhile, the residue of the Hamilton idea is a system more, not less, prone to misfiring. In the event of a near-tie next year, I can imagine that a losing candidate, or powerful forces backing him or her, would use bribery, threats, violence, and blackmail to try to flip one or two electors. The Constitution should not be read to empower such corruption, or to open the door to such chaos.
The electoral system is a disaster; those concerned with its dangers would do better to support the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, under which states bind their electors to vote for the popular-vote winner. That has its own risks—a rogue legislature might try to violate its pledge. But they pale beside the Hamilton alternative.
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