Lessons from two countries

I’ve been too busy to say anything about the recent US elections. That’s been for the best, though, because the time and distance gave me a chance to think about it beyond mere reaction—it’s allowed me to compare and contrast between my two countries.

One advantage of being bi-national is being able to look at both of one’s counties as an insider and outsider, simultaneously. Well, I think that’s an advantage, anyway, but it comes with a caveat: In elections, one can easily be disappointed by elections in two countries, and this is one of those years.

I can’t remember the last time I voted for a Republican candidate for any office in the US, state or federal—it would be decades. I mention that to make clear why there’s no way I’d be “okay” with the results of the US elections, no matter how much I understand why and how the results happened—and I DO understand, far better than most TV pundits and commentators, it seems, but that’s for another day.

The fact is, no matter how much I knew the results were pre-determined, I was nevertheless disappointed. In New Zealand, where the results were far less obvious, I was similarly disappointed (I’ve always voted for Labour in nationwide elections). But that’s where the similarity ends.

In the USA, Republicans are emboldened to try and govern as if they alone run the government. They’ve never been serious when using rhetoric about bipartisanship, and the next two years will be worse than since they took control of the US House back in 2010. Far worse, even.

In New Zealand, the National Party will continue to push its agenda as any party in government would: They don’t have to compromise on much of anything, and they won’t. If they moderate their agenda at all, it’ll be because they’re eyeing the 2017 elections. That’s not a slam, either: If Labour had won, it’d be the same situation. The big difference is that the party leading NZ government doesn’t pretend it will work with opponents, and usually doesn’t (except in certain circumstances, like war).

But in the USA, Republicans would have to get their ideologically driven legislation past President Obama. If he vetoes their bills—and he will sometimes—their juggernaut will be dead because the Republicans don’t have the votes to override a veto (two-thirds votes in both houses is needed, and they’re nowhere near that). I wonder how many times President Obama will have to veto repeals of Obamacare?

Here in New Zealand, we don’t have those sorts of checks and balances: If John Key and his National Party went rogue and started pushing through extremist legislation, there’s not much anyone could do about it. This has led some Kiwis to say we should have an upper chamber like other countries, but that’s absurd: Such a chamber would be an expensive way to change little if anything at all.

I think that the USA’s structure may actually encourage divisive partisanship: Having the executive and legislative totally separate invites bitter fights between the two branches, particularly when, as now, Congress is in the grip of hard ideologues who are intractably opposed to anything and everything the executive does. They know that their most extreme legislation will be vetoed (and killed) by President Obama, and that gives them license to pass extremist legislation with very little consequence (just as when Democrats controlled the Senate and Republicans could endlessly vote to repeal Obamacare—and they did—safe in the knowledge it would never get past the Senate). So, Republicans will be able to pander to their most frothing base (for votes and, even better, money) while not actually inflicting extremist laws on the country. From their perspective, it’s a win/win situation (unless their partisan games piss off centrist voters…).

In New Zealand, the executive and legislative are joined. If the government of the day wants to pass more extreme legislation, it requires the support of allied parties, but that’s not as hard as having to create an extraordinary majority as would be needed in the USA. On the other hand, that occasional need for support can lead to moderation of government proposals.

Ultimately, the main check and balance in both countries is the same: Elections. But here New Zealand is far superior to the USA.

New Zealand’s MMP system ensures that our Parliament precisely matches, as closely as possible, the will of the people. Its flaws would have been addressed had John Key not killed the proposed reforms and the entire reform process.

Even so, and despite its flaws, MMP ensures that we don’t end up with a Parliament run by a party only a minority of people actually voted for. In the USA, in contrast, very often the minority candidate—one who gets less than 50% of the popular vote, and sometimes dramatically less—can easily end up being elected to office. Because Congress has no proportionality, a party supported by a minority of voters can end up in charge. That just can’t happen in New Zealand unless the voter turnout is very low. But even there NZ is better, with voter turnout usually at least double that of the USA.

So, the USA’s constitutional structure offers some, if imperfect, protection from extremism, while in New Zealand it’s primarily our MMP electoral system, with elections held every three years, that provides that function. We can quickly and easily change the entire direction of the nationwide government, while in the USA, that’s very difficult to do. The USA’s system encourages bitter partisanship when the executive and legislative are held by different parties, but New Zealand’s system—and especially MMP—encourages more collaborative approach to government, even if sometimes only marginally so.

There are specific things that I think can and should happen to fix the USA’s problems, some of which are at least feasible (proportional representation is not one of them…). There are also things that can be done to improve New Zealand’s system (and upper house is absolutely not one of them). Those are topics for the future.

For now, and from my bi-national perspective, I think that at the moment the NZ system is better than the USA’s. Reform can make the USA’s system function again, but necessary reform is far more likely to happen in New Zealand than in the USA. For me, that’s the biggest tragedy of all, and it was underscored by the recent US elections.

So, yeah, I’m disappointed by elections in two countries this year. But at least I can clearly see how things in NZ could get better, while I’m far, far less optimistic about my homeland. And that’s the bitter lesson I learned from the two countries this year.

Thought for the day

Today is Election Day in the USA. This year’s elections are called “Midterm Elections” because they fall in the middle of the president’s term, and historically such elections have shockingly low voter turnout. The most motivated voters in midterm elections are usually those who oppose whoever the current president is, which is why the party holding the White House usually loses seats in Congress in the midterm elections.

I’ll have more to say about the elections once the results are known, but obviously I think that all US voters should vote Democratic, and also that all Democrats must vote.

A Democrat as a Democrat

In the 2012 US elections, I frequently wrote about Democrats being Democrats. The commercial above shows it’s still alive: Brad Schneider, US Representative for Illinois’ 10th District, talks about Democratic values and I think that’s a good thing.

Some of the sites where I’ve seen this video shared have focused only on the marriage equality endorsement, but that’s settled law in Illinois, so that was really a brief nod to expanding US policy. Of greater concern to me was Brad’s commitment to women’s rights and focusing on the middle class, not the richest of the rich as his Republican opponent will have to do according to party policy.

In short, Brad Schneider is a Democrat being a Democrat. That, to me, is always a good thing.

Complacent Americans

Thanks to social media, I often run across things I think are interesting, some of which inspire blog posts. Like this one.

On Facebook, my friend Dawn shared a link to a post on Gawker, “House Republicans Vote Along Party Lines To Sue Obama.” She included what she said was her favourite comment on the Gawker post:

The middle class is shrinking, unemployment is stagnant, there's a massive Ebola outbreak, people are getting shot everyday to the point that we don't even get sad about it anymore, everyone's fat, public education is in the shitter, over 65,000 bridges are in desperate need of repair across the country, our infrastructure is crumbling, veterans get treated like shit, there are major wars going on in at least three different countries right now that we are involved in, and what does Congress fucking do?

They sue the president for not fully going forward with a law that they shut down the government [over] and tried ever so desperately to repeal. And yet, we continue pay these clowns on average $174,000 per year to do nothing. We need a revolution, like yesterday.

This is a common enough sentiment among thinking Americans, and all over the political spectrum, actually. It’s probably a good idea for me to point out that “revolutions” don’t have to be violent—they can more metaphorical, a dramatic shift, a total break from the way things are done.

In my comment on Dawn’s posting, I explained why that “revolution” won’t be happening:

And yet they keep re-electing the very right wing nut jobs who are responsible, and they'll re-elect them again this November. Wake me up when American voters decide to actually DO something instead of moaning on the Internet.

Don't get me wrong: That comment you quoted is dead right, and millions of Americans would agree with it. The problem is that they won't DO anything to end the insanity. And, you know, one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. Americans really are insane if they actually think that re-electing the same nut jobs who are responsible for this bovine excrement can ever change anything.

But, hey, not MY fault: I vote for Democrats! -:)

There are, of course, systemic reasons why things can’t change: Wherever they were in charge, Republicans drew districts for Congress and state legislatures to ensure the maximum number of Republicans win election, along with the tiniest number of Democrats possible. Republicans want to be unimpeded by what ordinary people want; instead, they want unrestricted power, the ability to do whatever they—and their plutocratic and oligarchic masters—want done.

So, it would take a massive voter turnout to overcome all the huge advantages Republicans have given themselves, and let’s get real: Americans just aren’t very good about voting, particularly in non-presidential elections. In fact, the average turnout for US House elections between 1960 and 1995 was 48% [Source: Chart “Turnout in national lower house elections, 1960–1995”). Angry as Americans claim to be, I just don’t believe them: They’ll do nothing.

Ultimately, the real danger in this situation is that if Americans feel that their vote won’t change anything (and there are plenty of cases they can point to for validation of that viewpoint), they won’t vote and the dysfunctional system they claim to hate will roll on. If that situation goes on long enough, it could lead to authoritarian dictatorship or to actual revolution.

Still, I could be wrong: American voters might flock to the polls in record, even unprecedented, numbers to “throw the bastards out”. They might give Democrats super-majorities in Congress so that they and President Obama can spend the next two years undoing the damage caused by Republicans over the past six years. Americans could do all that, but they won’t. They’d rather moan on the Internet than actually fix the problem.

I dare American voters to prove me wrong.

Alarming big picture

Yesterday, Gallup released a new poll that found that in the wake of the Hobby Lobby ruling, approval of the US Supreme Court had plummeted among Democrats and soared among Republicans. There’s actually nothing new about that, but the big picture is alarming.

Overall, the percentage of Americans who approve of the way the Supreme Court is handling its job is pretty even—47% approve and 46% disapprove. This hasn’t really changed since last September, when the ratings were 46% approved and 45% disapproved.

However, when we look at partisan responses, there’s a much different picture: Republican approval has soared from 30% last September to 51% now. Among Democrats, approval plummeted from 58% to 44% (Independents didn’t change much at all). That’s kind of the headline story here, but it’s a little misleading.

In fact, this sort of thing happens all the time. After the Supreme Court installed George W. Bush as president in 2000, Republicans’ approval of the Court soared from 60% to 80% and Democrats’ plummeted from 70% to 42%. This same thing happens whenever the Court rules on an ideologically divisive issue: Those who agree express more approval—sometimes a LOT more approval—and those who disagree express less approval—again, often a LOT.

The bigger concern is the long-term trend. Gallup released a poll the end of June that showed that confidence in all three branches of the US Government as institutions has been in pretty steady decline for more than two decades (this is different from approval ratings, though surely people’s feelings about the incumbents must play a role in how confident they feel about the institution).

There have been some blips in the confidence levels for the presidency—after 9/11 and after Obama was first elected—but overall, the trend for all three branches is headed downward. Of course confidence in the US Congress has been in the toilet for years and is in danger of dropping below the margin of error.

While confidence in the Supreme Court and even the presidency remain more than four times higher than that of Congress, neither one enjoys the confidence of even a third of Americans. That’s an untenable situation.

Democracy cannot survive when the vast majority of the people have no confidence in their system of government, and sooner or later, something has to give. Since Americans overwhelmingly vote to re-elect the same people over and over, the break may come in some other way.

Radicals claim that revolution is the logical end, but that’s nonsense. Apart from the fact that it would be almost impossible to have a revolution in the modern USA, it’s not something that the majority—or even a large plurality—are ever likely to consider a good option.

Instead, there are three plausible options. First, voters could come to their senses and stop voting in losers. That won’t fix the Supreme Court right away, but this step would eventually fix that, too.

Second, dissolution: The USA could break up into smaller nations. There’s no appetite for this among anything more than a tiny minority, so this is hardly likely, either.

Gallup itself hints at a third possibility: “At this point, Americans place much greater faith in the military and the police than in any of the three branches of government.” Could a military coup and police state replace democracy? Also unlikely. If there was anything that could spark an armed revolt, that would be it.

However, this is very much a moving picture. Just because a thing is unthinkable now, doesn’t mean it always will be—but that includes the possibility of Americans actually “voting the bastards out”, which right now I think is the most plausible outcome.

Gallup says that these abysmal approval ratings “threatens and complicates the US system of government.” No single ideologically divisive Supreme Court ruling will change that for better or worse, or cause the eventual readjustment. Instead, the overall trend of rates of public approval for the Supreme Court are related to the major problems facing the US system of governance overall, and that’s what’s so alarming about the big picture.

The image of the US Supreme Court building at the top of this post a Creative Commons licensed photo by Wikiwopbop, published by Wikimedia Commons.

The end of ENDA

ENDA—the Employment Non-Discrimination Act—is dead for this session of the US Congress. That’s actually not news at all: Republicans declared the bill would never even come up for a vote in Committee, much less in the whole US House of Representatives. Even so, the bill’s finally dead because the good guys won’t play Republicans’ games any more.

ENDA would, if passed by Congress and signed by the President, provide protections for LGBT workers against discrimination in employment. That’s a very important goal considering how many US states offer NO employment or other civil rights protections for LGBT people. ENDA was first introduced 20 years ago, in 1994.

The version of ENDA passed by the US Senate in November of last year—with 10 Republican Senators voting for it—included a HUGE religious loophole, far bigger than applies to the protections contained in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Instead, it has the far broader religious loophole normally applied to specifically religious institutions (like a church) to allow them to discriminate based on their religion. To put it in perspective, organisations are not allowed to engage in racial discrimination because of their religious beliefs, but under the ENDA loophole, they could discriminate against LGBT people.

This has taken on a LOT more significance in the wake of the Hobby Lobby ruling: For-profit corporations are demanding the same religious loopholes to laws that genuine religious organisations get, simply because their fundamentalist owners claim their companies have “sincerely held religious beliefs”. In the wake of the ruling, fundamentalist leaders have demanded a huge religious loophole in the Executive Order that President Obama will soon issue barring discrimination against LGBT employees by businesses contracted to do work for the US Government (federal contractors).

So, most major national LGBT organisations have now dropped their support for ENDA. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund announced it was ending its support for ENDA, and Executive Director Rea Carey wrote an OpEd further explaining their reasons for that. Later, the American Civil Liberties Union, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, Lambda Legal, National Center for Lesbian Rights and Transgender Law Center, issued a joint statement announcing they were withdrawing support for ENDA [a PDF of the statement is available from the ACLU].

Among the few remaining supporters is the Human Rights Campaign, whose ways I have often found inscrutable. The National Center for Transgender Equality also still backs the bill, but will fight to narrow the religious loophole: “NCTE has long pressed to narrow ENDA's overbroad religious exemption, and will continue to vigorously oppose any attempt to cloak discrimination of any sort under the guise of faith. That is contrary America's values, including our tradition of religious freedom," as the organisation’s director of policy, Harper Jean Tobin, told Talking Points Memo.

Apart from HRC (whose motives for support I frankly don’t understand), the few organisations still supporting ENDA are apparently doing so only to use it as a lobbying and organising tool, which is fair enough. The bill can’t go anywhere in this Congress, so it makes sense for some of the good folks to use it as a way of building support for the new version that will be introduced in the new Congress next year. Chris Geidner of BuzzFeed suggests three reasons for the change in direction on ENDA, though he does get one thing wrong: It’s definitely not a “fight”, just differing tactical approaches.

The larger point here isn’t that ENDA has a religious exemption—all federal civil rights legislation does (whether or not I think that’s reasonable or rational is another matter entirely, and not relevant to this discussion). The issue here is simply that fundamentalists are demanding a religious exemption big enough to drive a truck through, and that’s unreasonable and unacceptable.

In the long run, the advancement of society will one day make this sort of legislation unnecessary. But just as the USA is decades away from becoming a truly “post-racial” society, so, too, it will be decades more before anti-gay prejudice goes away enough so that such laws aren’t needed. Until then, the USA needs to enact nationwide legislative protections, and ENDA—without the gaping fundamentalist religious loophole—is the best way of achieving that (although amending the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been suggested as another way). At the moment, however, it’s looking like it’ll become law after society has already moved on from its anti-gay prejudices, and that’s the real pity in this whole mess.

Wall of separation

I’ve always been a firm secularist—always. My parents brought me up to value the separation of church and state, so it’s no surprise I want a mighty and impregnable wall of separation. In the USA, it seems, that wall is about to collapse.

I haven’t published a post about the Hobby Lobby decision, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t write anything, because I did. Several times. But each attempt devolved into an angry rant, and I’m trying really hard not to publish such posts any more.

Fortunately, Roger Green posted about the decision and said many of the temperate things I said in my attempts. But I was curious about Roger’s take, as a person of faith, on the ruling being bad for people of faith and even religion generally. Roger’s now published his answer, “Why the Hobby Lobby decision is bad for people of faith”, and I think he does a great job answering my question.

I asked about it because most of the discussion about the case and its implications have so far come from fundamentalist protestants or atheists, and I wanted to see a viewpoint form the religious mainstream—the sort of thing I’ve been calling for over the past several years, as Roger notes. He added:

“I dare say some of us feel like we’ve been screaming but not being heard, because much of the mainstream press still uses the shortcut of defining the more ‘conservative’ elements of the church as the totality of the church. They use language such as ‘faith-based Christians’ or ‘Bible-believing Christians’, as though only a certain segment of us have ‘real’ faith or are informed by The Word. Ticks me off.”

Roger’s right, of course: Liberal and Mainline Protestant Christians have been speaking out and presenting their views, which are often completely the opposite of what the newsmedia report as being “Christian”. However, it’s the loudest voices that get attention, and radical right religionists are nothing if not loud! But they also say extremely controversial things (like, that being gay should be a crime, or maybe that gay people should be stoned to death—all of which well-known fundamentalists have actually said). So, we have very loud people saying outrageous things against the more measured, reasonable and rational tones of mainstream Christianity—is it really any wonder that only the radicals get covered?

Because the voices of reason are seldom ever heard, people—including politicians—get the idea that ALL Christians are radicals and they respond accordingly. This has many implications.

For religion, it means that mainstream people tune out of religion altogether. I’m convinced that one of the main causes of the rise of the “Nones”—people who report that they have no religion—in the USA is the rightwing radicalisation of religion. As I often point out, the “Nones” aren’t necessarily atheists, but instead are often people who reject all organised religion. That’s the radicals’ fault.

At the same time, this situation also encourages politicians to pander to the most radical elements of religion, much to the detriment of the American Experiment. The radical right has been highly successful in chipping away at not just the separation of church and state, but also the very idea that there OUGHT to be such a separation.

The radical right has managed to frame the debate as one in which their “religious freedom” is denied unless they completely get their way. For the moment, they’re focusing their rhetoric only on their opposition to abortion and to LGBT legal equality, but they won’t stop there.

The game here isn’t really that fundamentalists want to have their cake and eat it too—to be totally exempt from all laws the don’t like while also being able to dictate to government that it does as the fundamentalists order. No, what’s really going on here is that the fundamentalists believe they should be calling all the shots all the time, and what we’ve seen so far is only their earliest successes in their ultimate goal: To transform the USA into a fundamentalist Christian version of Iran, a “Christian” theocracy.

Dominionism, as it’s known, is at the core of most fundamentalist Christianity in the USA today, but even the few that don’t openly promote theocracy nevertheless demand the right to impose their beliefs on everyone else. “Religious freedom” applies only to them, of course.

So, from my perspective, the real issue here isn’t that fundamentalists and corporations owned by them insist on being able to impose their beliefs on everyone else in a manner that would be illegal for a secular business, it’s that this is only the first step.

The day after the Hobby Lobby ruling, prominent fundamentalists sent a letter to the White House demanding that, in light of the ruling, there should be a huge religious exemption in the Executive Order that President Obama will soon issue, one that would bar discrimination against LGBT employees by federal contractors, that is, companies doing business with the US Government. What they’re demanding is the right to discriminate against LGBT employees as long as it’s because of their supposedly “sincerely held religious beliefs.”

After the ruling, some companies also announced that they’ll refuse to cover ANY birth control, again, because of their supposedly “sincerely held religious beliefs.” Another step on the road to their goal.

The Hobby Lobby ruling has set off a new war over religious freedom in the USA and what it means. Can that phrase mean only the right of fundamentalists to do as they please? Or, does it mean the freedom from religion, too?

In the USA, the trend is clearly toward imposing the most restrictive and conservative religious views as the only ones entitled to freedom, and that can’t end well. Still, I have hope. The more that mainstream religious people speak out against the tyranny of the religious right, as Roger does, the better the chance of stopping them. But it will take all people of good conscience, religious and not, to vote against the radicals who would turn the USA into a fundamentalist christianist theocracy.

There’s still time to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and what it stands for, against the radical onslaught, but time may be running out. The wall of separation between church and state is cracking and crumbling; whether it falls or not will depend entirely on what the mainstream does—or doesn’t do.

Good news from my home state

Today (June 1 in the USA), Illinois’ freedom to marry law took effect. LGBT couples have been able to marry in Cook County (home of Chicago) since February 21, following a federal judge’s ruling, and 1600 couples got licenses since then. Now, couple is all the 102 counties in Illinois will be able to get marriage licenses.

This is a great day for my native Illinois, but when I lived there, this was something I never expected to see in my lifetime. Equality feels pretty awesome. It’s also nice to know that When Nigel and I visit, we’ll still be legally married.

Even so, the work isn’t quite done. The Republican candidate for Governor, Bruce Rauner, last year expressed his opposition to the marriage equality law, Now, activists are pressuring Rauner to publicly state his current position.

The concern is that with all the Republicans at the top of the ticket in Illinois opposed to the freedom to marry, if Rauner was elected he could work behind-the-scenes to block new legislation protecting LGBT families and erode the existing laws.

As I often remind people, all our progress could be wiped away with one bad election, and we’d have to start all over again. Elections have consequences, and voting matters.

But for now, for today, it’s good to just celebrate a good thing happening.

Worst political ad?

The video above is an attack campaign ad for South Carolina from the Republican Governors Association. It’s a contemptible political ad, but is it among the worst ever made?

The ad attacks Vincent Sheheen, the Democratic candidate for Governor in South Carolina. He’s a former prosecutor who now represents both civil and criminal clients in his private law practice. As ThinkProgress points out:

The implication of this ad is that Sheheen is somehow unfit for public office because he once provided legal counsel to people accused of crimes. Indeed, the ad lists several serious crimes, including sex offenses and child abuse, that Sheheen’s clients were accused of committing. It is likely that many of these clients are very, very bad people.

But in the American justice system, we do not presume that anyone is guilty of a crime until after they have received a trial where they were represented by counsel — indeed, we afford all criminal defendants a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Moreover, as the Supreme Court explained more than half a century ago, the right to a trial often means little unless criminal defendants enjoy the right to counsel. Without an attorney, Justice Hugo Black wrote in 1963, an innocent man “faces the danger of conviction because he does not know how to establish his innocence.”

Sheheen’s clients may very well have committed horrible crimes. But we do not lock people away in prisons in the United States until their guilt has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. This is how we protect innocent men and women from winding up in those same prisons alongside the guilty. [links in the original]

It’s disturbing that the Republican Party thinks that people accused of crimes—perhaps wrongly—shouldn’t receive a vigorous defence, yet their line of attack in this ad certainly implies that. As ThinkProgress noted in the link above, this isn’t the first time Republicans have gone down this road, putting their partisan ideology ahead of justice under law.

What this made me think of was two previous Republican attack ads also described as the “worst-ever” American political ads. The first was the “Willie Horton” attack ad [link goes to YouTube] from the 1988 presidential campaign of Republican candidate George Bush the First. The second was the even more disgusting “Hands” attack ad [link goes to YouTube] from Republican US Senator Jesse Helms.

The difference is that the two previous “worst-ever” attack ads were blatantly racist, while this new attack ad is far subtler about it, relying on viewers’ stereotypes about who commits crimes without actually saying or showing anything like the two previous ads did, an approach that gives them plausible deniability if they’re accused of racism. The Republican Party knows that many fair-minded people would give them the benefit of the doubt because the racism isn’t explicit as it was in the earlier attack ads.

The Republicans’ attack on the fundamental principle of “innocent until proven guilty”, combined with their subtle racism, certainly places this ad on the list of the worst American political ads, but I’d say that Helms’ “Hands” attack ad against Harvey Gannt is still the worst, and the “Willie Horton” ad is far higher on that list than this one is. But if this attack on fundamental principles of law shows what the “modern” Republican Party thinks about the very concept of “innocent until proven guilty”, then that’s very frightening, indeed.

I hope that this attack ad is as bad as the Republicans will get. Somehow, I just don’t believe it will be.