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Just the Facts. Part Two 

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The Democrats wrapped up last week the most creative and glitzy convention we can recall—by far. It was a convention in which the delegates seemed genuinely to be having fun that transcended the usual partisan enjoyment of a convention.

Monday, we relied on CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale and his staff, who evaluated the presidential debate in July, to point out the untruths that were spoken each night of the Republican National Convention.

Today we look at the work done by Dale and his staff in evaluating the Democratic National Convention. This entry will be shorter than Monday’s entry, not because there were no untruths of various degrees spoken at the DNC—-because there were—-but because there were fewer of them during the DNC, in good part because the Democrats have no match for the one-person nonstop generator of nonstop lies that the Republicans had.

But we are posting these evaluations because the personal discussions we have with others in the 70 days or so before the election are likely to rely on what was said during the political conventions.

Again, we offer these entries because words are cheap on both sides, because political commercials are more manipulative than they are honest, and because we hope this can be a reference for you in stating our own statements honestly and questioning honestly the statements of others.

And once again we remind you that The Washington Post and FactCheck.org (which is based at the Annenberg School for Communication Trust at the University of Pennsylvania), Politifact (part of the Poynter Institute which has a truth-o-meter than goes from zero to “Pants on Fire”), The Associated Press which has a webpage at Fact Check: Political & News Fact  Check, are among other fact checkers not only for politics but in some cases for other issues.

DEMOCRATS, FIRST NIGHT:

Democratic state and federal officeholders, including President Joe Biden, delivered some false, misleading or lacking-key-context claims on the first night of the Democratic National Convention on Monday.

Biden repeated misleading claims he has made in previous speeches about billionaires’ tax rates and foreign trade. He also overstated the extent to which his efforts to fight climate change are expected to reduce US carbon emissions in the next decade. He made an outdated claim about the number of Americans with health insurance. And he omitted key context about his administration’s infrastructure-building efforts, framing distant goals as if they were already achievements.

Speaking earlier in the night, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois denounced former President Donald Trump for having presided over a loss of jobs without mentioning the critical context that the losses occurred because of the Covid-19 pandemic that caused a global economic crash. A video played at the convention similarly left out important context on the respective job-related records of the Trump and Biden-Harris administrations.

Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow falsely claimed that the Supreme Court has made Trump “completely immune from prosecution,” significantly overstating the court’s recent ruling.

And Rep. Robert Garcia of California misleadingly described Trump’s widely criticized 2020 comments about the possibility of scientists studying the use of injected disinfectant as a Covid-19 treatment, wrongly saying Trump had instructed Americans to inject bleach.

Here is a CNN fact check of these claims and some other remarks made on Monday.

Biden on taxing billionaires

During his speech, Biden asked the audience if they knew what the average billionaire in the United States pays in taxes.

“We have a thousand billionaires in America. You know what the average tax rate they pay? 8.2%,” Biden said.

Facts First: Biden used this figure in a way that was misleading. As in previous remarks, including his State of the Union address in March, Biden didn’t explain that the figure is the product of an alternative calculation, from economists in his own administration, that factors in unrealized capital gains that are not treated as taxable income under federal law.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the alternative calculation itself; the administration economists who came up with it explained it in detail on the White House website in 2021. Biden, however, has tended to cite the figure without any context about what it is and isn’t, leaving open the impression that he was talking about what these billionaires pay under current law.

So, what do billionaires actually pay under current law? The answer is not publicly known, but experts say it’s clearly more than 8%.

“Biden’s numbers are way too low,” Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute think tank, told CNN in 2023. Gleckman said that in 2019, University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman “estimated the top 400 households paid an average effective tax rate of about 23% in 2018. They got a lot of attention at the time because that rate was lower than the average rate of 24% for the bottom half of the income distribution. But it still was way more than 2 or 3,” numbers Biden has used in some previous speeches, “or even 8%.”

In February 2024, Gleckman provided additional calculations from the Tax Policy Center. The center found that the top 0.1% of households paid an average effective federal tax rate of about 30.3% in 2020, including an average income tax rate of 24.3%.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Biden on carbon emissions

Speaking about his achievements on climate, Biden said his agenda made possible “cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030.”

Facts First: Independent analysis shows the US is off-track to meet an ambitious goal Biden set early in his administration of slashing US carbon emissions in half by 2030 – even with his climate law.

Biden’s climate target of cutting emissions 50-52% below 2005 levels (2005 was the historical peak for US carbon emissions) by 2030 was always going to be a tough goal to achieve. When the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022, analysis suggested it would get the US most of the way toward its goal – about a 40% reduction in carbon emissions. The thinking was that regulations from agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency would help make up the rest of the goal.

But a recent analysis from the nonpartisan Rhodium Group found that the US isn’t on track to hit Biden’s goal of slashing US emissions in half by 2030. Rhodium estimates the US is currently on track to reduce emissions anywhere from 32-43% by that date. However, the report says the US could surpass Biden’s goal by 2035 if there are no major changes to current policies, finding that the US would likely pick up the pace of decarbonizing its transportation, power and heavy industry sectors in the 2030s compared to the 2020s.

One big impediment to Biden’s goal is the fact that the EPA’s marquee climate rules regulating emissions from vehicles and power plants are facing an onslaught of legal challenges and a skeptical US Supreme Court. And an even bigger question mark is the 2024 election and whether Biden will be replaced by another Democrat with similar climate ambitions or former President Donald Trump – who has vowed to reverse much of Biden’s climate agenda.

From CNN’s Ella Nilsen

Biden’s claim about removing lead pipes from schools and homes

Biden, speaking about his bipartisan infrastructure law, said: “We’re removing every lead pipe from schools and homes, so every child can drink clean water.”

Facts First: This claim needs context. While the administration is spending $15 billion and working on federal regulations to remove all lead pipes from public drinking water systems over a decade, they may not be able to replace all pipes and service lines on private properties.

Lead drinking pipes can be found all over the country; some national estimates say the total number of lead service lines is around 9.2 million. Lead in drinking water is a major health concern for babies and young children, and Biden has made eradicating it a major priority. The Biden EPA proposed a major rule that, if finalized, would compel water utilities to gradually get rid of 100% of their lead pipes and service lines over 10 years.

The EPA estimates this effort will cost utilities $20 billion to $30 billion over that decade; $15 billion of that could be covered by the bipartisan infrastructure law, and there is an additional $11.7 billion available through the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund that could be used for lead removal as well. Cities with lead pipes, including New Orleans, are currently trying to locate all of their lead pipes.

Besides funding, the other issue is the EPA rule as currently proposed doesn’t cover lead pipes or service lines on private property. Replacing these smaller pipes on private property that go into homes could present an even more complex and costly challenge. Though the Biden initiative will make a major dent in replacing the country’s lead pipes, it’s unlikely to be able to replace every single one on both private and public property.

From CNN’s Ella Nilsen

Biden’s claim about trade ignores widening deficit under his presidency

In his speech, Biden said, “We used to import products and export jobs. Now we export American products and create American jobs right here in America.”

Fact First: This claim is misleading. So far this year, the United States has imported more goods than it has exported, leading to a seasonally adjusted trade deficit of more than $567 billion, according to figures from the US Census Bureau. 

In fact, the goods trade deficit has widened since Biden took office. In 2020, the nation’s goods trade deficit was $901 billion. After Biden’s first year in office, it increased to over $1 trillion and has stayed above that threshold every subsequent year.

The dollar’s strength has played a role in widening the goods trade deficit, making it more expensive for other countries to buy US-produced goods, and at the same time, cheaper for Americans to buy goods abroad.

From CNN’s Elisabeth Buchwald 

Biden on building electric vehicle charging stations

Speaking about his administration’s goal to create more clean energy jobs, Biden said IBEW workers were at work “installing 500,000 charging stations all across America” to power electric vehicles.

Facts First: This is more of a promise than a fact, but even so, it needs context. For a few reasons, it’s questionable whether the Biden administration will be able to meet its goal of installing 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations on US roads.

Installing 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations has long been one of Biden’s goals. The president initially proposed Congress spend $15 billion to make it a reality, but just half of that – $7.5 billion – passed as part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. The latest data from the Department of Energy shows the United States is still a long way from that goal; there are currently more than 180,000 EV charging ports operating at over 66,000 station locations around the US.

Though the administration has said that could be backfilled by private investment, that change in funding could hinder the administration’s ability to meet the goal. The federal government has spent the last few years sending money to states; states can now unlock more than $900 million in funding for fiscal years 2022 and 2023, which the administration estimated will “help build” chargers across approximately 53,000 miles of US highways.

Over the next five years, the full $5 billion will be spent to build out a network of EV chargers on major highways. Another pot of $2.5 billion in grant funding is also available for states to apply to; in January, $623 million in grant funding went out the door to help counties, cities and tribes around the nation install new charging stations for electric vehicles and long-haul freight trucks.

But it’s been slow going. States are still in the process of selecting companies to actually build the charging stations, meaning it could still take months or even years to fully see the impact of the money around the nation.

There is also a wide range in how much different types of chargers cost, and individual states have a lot of leeway in deciding what kinds of chargers will go on their roads. DC fast chargers can charge a car to mostly full in 20 minutes to an hour and are meant to go on major highways and roads. Another kind of charger known as an L2 charger can take hours to charge a car to full. But DC fast chargers are much more expensive, costing around $100,000 compared to around $6,000 for an L2, Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a senior resident fellow at the think tank Third Way, has told CNN.

From CNN’s Ella Nilsen 

Biden on number of people with health insurance

Biden touted his achievements in expanding health insurance coverage to more Americans.

“More Americans have health insurance today than ever before in American history,” he said at the Democratic National Convention.

Facts First: Biden’s claim is outdated. While it’s true that health insurance coverage hit a record high last year, fewer people were insured in the first quarter of this year than in the spring of last year – in large part because a federal law that prevented states from winnowing their Medicaid rolls lapsed last year.

Some 130 million Americans had public health insurance coverage, such as Medicare or Medicaid, in the first quarter of this year, but that’s down from nearly 138 million people in the second quarter of last year, according to the latest National Health Interview Survey. The loss outpaces the gain of just under 3 million people in private health insurance plans. (A small number of people have both types of coverage.)

At the same time, the number of uninsured Americans rose to 27.1 million in the first quarter of this year, up from 23.7 million people in the spring of 2023. That pushed the uninsured rate up to 8.2%, from 7.2%, over that time period.

One main reason why health insurance coverage hit a record high last year was because of a Covid-19 pandemic relief provision that barred states from involuntarily disenrolling residents whom they deemed no longer qualify in exchange for enhanced federal funding. That prohibition was lifted in April 2023.

Only 81.7 million people were enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program this past April, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That compares to 93.9 million people in March 2023, before the provision lapsed.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Biden claims Trump will do “everything to ban abortion nationwide”

Biden said Monday that “Trump will do everything to ban abortion nationwide. Oh, he will.”

Facts First: Biden is making a prediction that we cannot definitively fact check, but the claim does not reflect Trump’s most recent comments on abortion and needs context.

While Trump regularly boasts that he played a key role in getting the US Supreme Court to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that guaranteed abortion rights across the country, Trump says it should be up to the states to decide how and when to restrict abortion. Polls show that the majority of Americans are against a federal abortion ban.

Throughout this most recent campaign, Donald Trump has repeatedly ducked direct questions about his support for a federal ban on abortions, but he said in April that he would not sign a national abortion ban if elected to the White House again. That statement reversed what he said in 2016 when he was first running for the presidency and was the opposite of statements he made throughout his time in office.

Some scholars are concerned that conservative advisers to Trump have encouraged him to ban abortions by enforcing the 1873 Comstock Act, a method that could essentially create a federal ban without Trump needing to sign any legislation to do it.

The Victorian-era anti-vice law that is still on the books is not currently enforced. The law bans the mailing of “obscene” materials used to produce an abortion. Some scholars believe Trump could use the Justice Department to enforce a ban that would not just restrict people from sending the medication currently used in the majority of abortions through the mail, but would ban any kind of materials used to produce any kind of abortion.

Trump has not officially endorsed the enforcement of the Comstock Act, but it is a strategy some of his advisers have outlined as an option for Trump to restrict abortions nationwide.

From CNN’s Jen Christensen

California congressman’s misleading claim about Trump’s comments about Covid-19 and disinfectant

Garcia claimed, among other things, that Trump “told us to inject bleach into our bodies,” while criticizing Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis.

Facts First: Garcia’s claim is misleading. Trump never portrayed his ill-informed 2020 musings about the possibility of using disinfectant to treat Covid-19 as actual advice to Americans. Rather, Trump was talking about the possibility of scientists testing the possibility of using disinfectant as a treatment.

During a press briefing in April 2020, Trump expressed interest in scientists exploring the possibility of whether Covid-19 could be treated using disinfectants inside people’s bodies, “by injection inside or almost a cleaning,” or by deploying powerful light “inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way.” Trump’s comments were slammed by medical experts as highly dangerous, and they prompted urgent warnings from public health authorities and companies that sell household disinfectants. But he never actually said he was suggesting citizens go and use such products.

Trump made the ill-informed remarks after Bill Bryan, the acting undersecretary of science and technology for the Department of Homeland Security, outlined tests in which he said sunlight or disinfectants like bleach and isopropyl alcohol quickly killed the coronavirus on surfaces and in saliva.

When Trump jumped shortly afterward to the dangerous idea of injecting disinfectants inside people’s bodies, he was talking about experts somehow testing that idea. He said: “And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So we’ll see.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Durbin’s missing context on Trump’s jobs record

Durbin of Illinois, the Senate Majority Whip, claimed of Trump: “He lost millions of jobs in America.” Durbin said shortly after that, “He is one of only two presidents in the history of the United States to leave office with fewer Americans working than when he started.”

Facts First: Durbin’s statistics are correct, but he left out some critical context about them. While there was a net loss of about 2.7 million jobs from the beginning of Trump’s four-year term to the end, there was a net gain of about 6.7 million jobs under Trump until the Covid-19 pandemic hit the country about three years into his term.  

Nearly 22 million jobs were lost under Trump in March 2020 and April 2020 when the global economy cratered on account of the pandemic. The US then started regaining jobs immediately, adding more than 12 million from May 2020 through December 2020, but not enough to make up for the massive early-pandemic losses.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale 

Beatty’s claim about the Biden administration’s expansion of the child tax credit

Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty praised the Biden administration’s efforts to provide larger tax credits for families and lift more children out of poverty.

“Joe and Kamala have been expanding the child tax credit, and let me just tell you … cutting the poverty rate for our children,” she said.

Facts First: Beatty’s claim needs context. It’s true that the expanded child tax credit passed early in the Biden administration slashed the child poverty rate in 2021, but the benefit only lasted for the one year the temporary enhancement was in effect. Child poverty increased in 2022 to a rate roughly comparable to where it was in 2019.

The American Rescue Plan Act, which Democrats pushed through Congress in March 2021, increased the size of the child tax credit to up to $3,600 – from $2,000 – for eligible families, enabled many more low-income parents to claim it and distributed half of it on a monthly basis.

That helped send child poverty – as measured by the Supplemental Poverty Measure – to a record low 5.2% in 2021, a drop of 46% from 2020, when the rate was 9.7% according to the US Census Bureau. The child tax credit lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty in 2021, with the temporary enhancement accounting for 2.1 million of those kids, according to the Census Bureau.

The Supplemental Poverty Measure, which began in 2009, takes into account certain non-cash government assistance, tax credits and needed expenses.

But in 2022, child poverty soared to 12.4%, roughly comparable to where it was prior to the pandemic in 2019. It was the largest jump in child poverty since the Supplemental Poverty Measure began.

Earlier this year, the House passed a tax bill that would again expand the child tax credit temporarily, though the boost would not be as generous as it was in 2021. Senate Republicans blocked it from advancing in their chamber earlier this month.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Harris campaign video showcasing Trump’s ‘lies’ on the economy misses context

In a prerecorded video from Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign team, a staffer shared claims Trump has made about the economy seeking to disprove them.

“Let’s take a look at his track record on jobs before Covid, as compared to the Biden-Harris administration. What do you know? Hardly the most successful ever,” the staffer said as a screen displayed average monthly job gains under Trump from January 2017 to February 2020 compared to average monthly gains during the entire Biden-Harris administration.

“And about his supposed manufacturing miracle, Trump talked a big game, but actually lost 178,000 manufacturing jobs. And just to be clear, it wasn’t just Covid here either. Manufacturing jobs were already on their way down before the pandemic.”

Facts First: The numbers the campaign staffer shared are correct, but they lack crucial context. It’s unfair to compare the average monthly job gains Trump achieved up until March 2020 to that of the Biden-Harris administration. That’s because the average monthly gains achieved under their administration were propped up by some of the gangbuster job reports that came just as the economy was recovering from the pandemic. For instance, in July 2021, 939,000 jobs were added in just one month.

And while it’s true 178,000 manufacturing jobs were lost when Trump was president, Covid-19 did in fact play a big role. In the immediate months before the pandemic, manufacturing jobs were declining very slightly. From November 2019 to February 2020, 36,000 manufacturing jobs were lost. That hardly compares to the roughly 1.4 million manufacturing jobs lost from February 2020 to April 2020. That so many of those job losses were able to be recouped by the time Trump left office is noteworthy.

From CNN’s Elisabeth Buchwald

Rodriguez’s claim on Trump wanting to terminate the Affordable Care Act

Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez on Monday accused Trump of still wanting to kill the Affordable Care Act.

“Now, Trump is promising to terminate the Affordable Care Act,” Rodriguez said at the DNC.

Facts First: Rodriguez’s claim does not reflect Trump’s recent comments on the Affordable Care Act. He did appear to express renewed support for terminating the law in one social media post late last year, but he has since said he wants to improve it, not terminate it.  Most recently, he has said he will keep the law unless he can come up with an unspecified “better” plan.

Repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act was one of Trump’s top priorities in his 2016 presidential campaign and first term. However, even though Republicans controlled Congress and the White House the following year, they failed to unite behind a plan to do so, ending any serious attempts to completely overhaul the landmark health reform law, popularly known as Obamacare.

The former president revived the debate over the law’s fate in November 2023, when he wrote on his Truth Social platform that he’s “seriously looking at alternatives” and that the failure to terminate it “was a low point for the Republican Party, but we should never give up!”

Trump quickly walked back his comments, posting a few days later that he doesn’t “want to terminate Obamacare, I want to REPLACE IT with MUCH BETTER HEALTHCARE. Obamacare Sucks!!!”

In April, Trump said in a video posted to Truth Social: “I’m not running to terminate the ACA as crooked Joe Biden says all over the place. We’re going to make the ACA much better than it is right now and much less expensive for you.”

And at a North Carolina rally last week, he said: “(Vice President Kamala Harris) goes around saying, ‘Oh, he’s going to get rid of the health.’ No, no, I’m going to keep it unless we can come up with something that’s better for you and less expensive for you. Otherwise, we’re not doing it.”

However, Trump has yet to release a proposal on how he would make the Affordable Care Act better and less expensive.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Michigan state senator makes false claim about Trump immunity

During a speech at the DNC about Project 2025, McMorrow said that the conservative blueprint for a second Trump term aimed to greatly expand the power of the presidency “like no president has ever had or should ever have.”

The Democratic lawmaker went on to say that if anyone wondered if those potential new powers were legal, “Thanks to Donald Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court, he’s now completely immune from prosecution – even if he breaks the law.”

Facts First: McMorrow’s comment about the case Trump v. US is false. In their decision last month in the historic case, the six conservative justices granted Trump some immunity from prosecution, but not blanket immunity, as the former president had sought. The court said Trump could not be criminally pursued over “official acts,” but that he could face prosecution over alleged criminal actions involving “unofficial acts” taken while in office. 

“The President enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official. The President is not above the law,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the conservative majority.

And while Trump appointed three of the justices who helped make up the six-justice majority, the other three, including Roberts, were appointed by previous Republican presidents.

The federal judge in Washington, DC, overseeing special counsel Jack Smith’s election subversion case against Trump must now examine the allegations against the former president to determine which ones are covered by the newly granted immunity.

From CNN’s Devan Cole 

DNC video leaves out context about Trump abortion comment from 2016

A video about abortion rights that was played at the DNC on Monday featured a short clip of former Trump agreeing, in a television interview, that women who get abortions should be punished.

Facts First: The video left out some important context: Trump made this comment more than eight years ago and retracted it hours after he made it. In an interview in April 2024, Trump declined to express an opinion on the idea of a state deciding to punish women for getting an abortion after it is banned, returning to his campaign refrain that abortion policy is now a matter for each state to decide.

Trump made the comment featured in the DNC video at an MSNBC town hall during the Republican presidential primary in 2016. Trump said that “there has to be some form of punishment” for abortion. When host Chris Matthews asked, “For the woman?” Trump responded, “Yeah, there has to be some form.” When Matthews pressed further, Trump said he didn’t know what the punishment should be.

Hours later, after facing widespread criticism, Trump issued a statement in which he said women should not be punished for getting abortions.

“If Congress were to pass legislation making abortion illegal and the federal courts upheld this legislation, or any state were permitted to ban abortion under state and federal law, the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman,” Trump said in the statement. “The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb. My position has not changed – like Ronald Reagan, I am pro-life with exceptions.”

The next day on Fox News, Trump said, “It could be that I misspoke” during an abortion discussion he claimed was “convoluted.” He said that “if, in fact, abortion was outlawed, the person performing the abortion, the doctor, or whoever it may be that’s really doing the act is responsible for the act, not the woman, is responsible.”

In an April 2024 interview, Time magazine asked Trump if he is “comfortable if states decide to punish women who access abortions after the procedure is banned,” such as after a 15-week cutoff date. Trump said, “Again, that’s going to be – I don’t have to be comfortable or uncomfortable. The states are going to make that decision. The states are going to have to be comfortable or uncomfortable, not me.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

                                                           

 

Why Speaker Johnson Wants a Fake Law

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House Speaker Mike Johnson admits he doesn’t KNOW that there is a problem with non-citizens voting but he wants a law banning them from doing it.  “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number. This legislation will allow us to do exactly that — it will prevent that from happening. And if someone tries to do it, it will now be unlawful within the states,” he said.

Intuition?

Wouldn’t you think that the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives would know this country has had a law since 1996 that bars non-citizens from voting in federal elections?

Johnson started talking about the potential law after a recent visit to Mar-a-Lago, whose resident golf course champion told Iowans heading to their caucuses in January that immigrants are Democratic political tools:

“That’s why they are allowing these people to come in — people that don’t speak our language — they are signing them up to vote.  And I believe that’s why you are having millions of people pour into our country and it could very well affect the next election. That’s why they are doing it.”

—-Which is a load of equine byproduct.

Rebecca Beitsch and Rafael Bernal, writing for The Hill political newsletter in Washington, talked to people who easily refute Speaker Johnson’s claim that “it’s not something that is easily provable. We don’t have the numbers.”  Johnson could have talked to the same people, but who needs facts when your politically-shaped intuition can be used to malign a big segment of our population and the opposing party as well?

The Hill reporters went to Senior Counsel Eliza Sweren-Becker with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting Rights & Elections Program. “We actually do have the numbers, and we know that noncitizens don’t vote illegally in detectable numbers, let alone in large numbers,” she told them.  The Center has data from 42 jurisdictions. The study showed only 30 SUSPECTED BUT NOT CONFIRMED noncitizen votes in the 2016 General Election. There were 23.5 million votes cast in those jurisdictions, 0.0001 (one ten-thousandth) of a percent of the votes cast.

There are those who will dismiss these findings because they come from a center named for Supreme Court Associate Justice William Brennan, considered part of the court’s liberal wing during his 34 years on the court.

So they asked one of the experts at the Libertarian Cato Institute, who called Johnson’s intuition one of the “most frequent and less serious criticisms” about migration.

President Janet Murguia of UnidosUS, the biggest Latino civil rights organization in the United States, says Johnson’s intuition “doesn’t count for anything—doesn’t mean a lick” because Johnson admittedly has no proof.

“Many of our organizations have scoured for any signs of voting that has been irregular or done by folks who are not qualified. There just hasn’t been any evidence. So he can have intuition all he wants, but that does not mean it’s true. It does not mean there is evidence, and it does not mean it’s factual.”  She challenged Johnson and his friends to produce specifics and data.

The Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Nanette Diaz Barragan accuses Johnson of finding “another way…to appease the crazies on the right because he’s on the chopping block right now and he’s got to do something to feed them some red bait.”

Johnson’s proposed law would force voters to show they are citizens of the United States to get a ballot. One of the drafters of the questionably-necessary bill, Texas Congressman Chip Roy, maintains, “the most fundamental thing you can do to destroy the rule of law and to destroy our republic is to undermine faith in our elections.” He says a system to guarantee that only citizens vote in federal elections is needed despite the 1996 law doing exactly that.

Documents such as birth certificates, passports, or naturalization papers would fill that bill, but the Brennan Center has found 5-7% of Americans—millions of people—do not have what Sweren-Becker calls “the most common types of documents used to prove citizenship.”

Murguia says conservative organizations have been looking into this issue for sometime, especially voting by undocumented people, and, “they just can’t report any great number, if any at all.”

The conservative Heritage Foundation has numbers Johnson could have gathered if he wasn’t so busy listening to his intuition. The Foundation’s records dating back about forty years show only about fifty cases of voting by noncitizens, which includes visa holders or legal permanent residents, not just people here illegally.

Politifact, a political fact-checking site run by the Poynter Institute, a journalism research organization, got no response from the Trump campaign when it asked the campaign to justify his Iowa claim about Democrats loading the voter rolls with illegal immigrants.

But it, too, has numbers that Johnson doesn’t seem to think exist as well as some examples where authorities actually recruited noncitizens to register to vote. In Colorado, for instance, the Secretary of State before than 2022 midterm elections, sent postcards to about 30,000 drivers license holders encouraging them to register before learning they were non-citizens. He had to send an “oops” postcard to all of them and then worked with county clerks to make sure nobody in that group did try to register.

South Carolina federal prosecutors in 2020 charged 19 people with casting ballots they were not entitled to cast in the 2016 election.  Three cases were dismissed and sixteen people pleaded guilty.  Sixteen people out of more than 4.5 million who voted legally.

And in Georgia, one of the ex-president’s least-favorite people, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said two years ago that investigators had found all of 1,634 non-citizens had tried to register to vote during the last TWENTY-FIVE YEARS.

The Hill notes that then-Governor Rick Scott of Florida announced before the 2014 midterms that 180,000 foreign nationals were going to be purged from the voter rolls. That number was reduced to only 2,600. Then it was cut to 198.  Finally, only 85 names were eliminated. And how many prosecutions were there?   One.

One, out of the 180,000 that Scott claimed were problems. That person was Josef Sever, who faced as much as five years in prison for falsely claiming to be a citizen, or as much as one year if he cast a ballot. Convictions also can result in deportation and might preclude any later opportunities for citizenship. Sever got five months in prison, a light sentence because the judge knew Sever was going to be deported.

Forget facts.  Forget that there really are numbers that Johnson claims don’t exist. Forget that we’ve had a federal law on this subject for 38 years. Forget that we heard this one-note song from our former President and his cronies eight years ago when he claimed he would have won the popular vote were it not for three-million votes cast by illegal immigrants (not one of which apparently voted for him).

It was a bogus claim then. It’s a bogus piece of intuition now. But Johnson and other Trump sycophants are going to beat this dead horse as much as they can because our former president wants them to do it.

When Johnson and others start spouting about the need to protect voting integrity, an important question to ask is, “from whom?”

Fake Law, Part One of a Series

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(In this week before the primary election, we are reluctantly embarking on a series of daily observations of campaigns and campaign non-issues that do little to enhance public confidence in the process. We are sorry to be as pessimistic as we might seem. Perhaps the survivors of the primaries will be more responsible in their general election campaigns.

The situation seems to us be so dire that we will not have our regular Tuesday visit with the toy department of journalism—sports.)

FAKE LAW

It makes good headlines.

But it’s a fake issue.

It rallies the core.

But it’s a fake issue.

It paints a false portrait.

And it’s a fake issue.

It misleads voters.

Because it’s a fake issue.

It makes people think there’s a big problem.

But there isn’t.

It tries to capitalize on fear.

But it’s a lie.

And it’s one of the reasons Democrats in the Missouri Senate staged a record-setting filibuster in the last week of a legislative session that was characterized by filibusters from a small group of Republicans who have tried to run the chamber.

The legislation involved was a proposal making it harder to amend the state constitution. A bipartisan vote shut down debate and sent the bill to a committee that would work on compromises that might let it move forward in the last two days of the session.

The fact that Republicans and Democrats did something together put the Senate’s problem children into a tizzy.  Freedom Caucus ringleader Bill Eigel, who apparently thinks one has to disagree disagreeably to succeed in today’s politics, warned Senate colleagues that the caucus would object to any compromises that changes what the FC demands.

And what the FC demanded was passage of a bill that would become partly fake law.

If you’re keeping score, this is the proposal that says no change can be made in the state constitution, even if the statewide vote approves the change, unless voters in five of our eight congressional districts approve.  It’s a Republican effort to keep the heavy Democratic vote from the metro areas, and the Columbia area, from offsetting the conservative outstate votes.

It also contains “fake law” provisions prohibiting non-citizens from voting on constitutional amendments—-something already forbidden by Missouri and federal law.

But it sounds good in an election year.  Democrats kept the bill from going to a final Senate vote, complaining the language was included just to deceive voters. Eigel said those characterizations were “completely unfair” and the measure presented “a great opportunity” to keep non-citizens from voting.

—Except the ban already is on the books.

Democrats in the Senate, with Republican leaders refusing to take parliamentary action to shut down debate, chewed up three of the precious last five days of the session in a filibuster that lasted 51-plus hours.                    .

The demagoguery on this issue is going to be with us through November, regardless of any legislative action because MAGA Republicans, in particular, want to use it to beat Democrats—i.e. Joe Biden—over the head on immigration issues.

A few days ago in Washington, House Speaker Mike Johnson unveiled the proposed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. Don’t be surprised if a House committee decides to “investigate,” giving majority members of the committee opportunities to condemn the actions or inactions of the administration to keep illegal immigrants from voting.

Another new committee, in the Missouri House, is going to investigate crime by illegal immigrants, another opportunity to make sure the issue’s political value is not wasted before the election. It has been expanded to include crimes AGAINST immigrants, a fair thing to consider.

We’ve all watched this kind of political circus on other topics.

And that’s what this harping on immigrant voting is.  Political circus.

What it is NOT is an issue. We’ll tell you why in our next entry.

Decision 

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(Originally this entry was called “Discussion” because it addressed—when written last week—that President Biden might decide to pull out of the presidential race.  I didn’t post it because I was going to be out of town through the weekend and didn’t want the comments outdated before they were posted.  We’ve done some editing to account for the decision yesterday that President Biden would withdraw from the race and endorse Vice President Harris to for President.

Rather quickly the public dialogue about the Democratic ticket for November seems to have reached an important stage.

The matter of President Biden’s mental and physical health has become secondary to the DISCUSSION about his mental and physical health.

We are pretty sure that some sophisticated polling is being done about whether TALK is robbing the Democratic Presidential Campaign of its ability to focus on issues.

Republicans are no doubt relishing the distraction because they are talking about their issues, their ticket clearly assembled and aggressively spreading the GOP word regardless of its truth.  Nothing internal is stopping the Trump bandwagon at this point, certainly not Democrats.

The Democrats are limited in talking about their issues because they have one issue right now and it’s a giant one and it is completely internal. The public, including THEIR public, has nowhere to go.

(Events have rendered the original paragraph’s speculation about whether the party would go with Vice-President Harris. That speculation has been fully answered as we revise this. Now back to the original narrative.)

Who should be her running mate?  She’s about 60, about average for a President.  But an aggressive running mate in the 40s would send an interesting message to many voters who have not been entertained by two geezers calling each other liars.

Plus a running mate in the 40s could dilute whatever advantage among young voters that the Republicans have by running someone who is 39 as their Veep.

(There was some historical stuff in the original post about presidents who had decided not to seek another term but we will hold those until later.)

As we drove home from Indianapolis last night and early this morning, we spent some of that time listening to the coverage on the satellite channels for CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News.  While CNN and MSNBC had their talking heads discussing possible Harris VP choices and understanding what’s next for the Democratic Part, FOX already was Full Doberman in attacking Harris.

And we thought in those long, dark miles (we got home at 2:30 this morning) about how the complexion of this contest has suddenly changed.

Now, the old man with questionable mental health is the Republican candidate.  The shoe is on the other foot and the GOP is stuck with it.

The outlook for Democrats has changed dramatically and all of the sudden they, and Kamala Harris, have control of the spotlight and they’re suddenly gifted with a convention that can have an impact far greater than they had expected.

The immigrant issue now has a new dimension because the presumptive Democrat nominee is from a state that has been dealing with Mexican immigrants for almost 400 years, since Juan Cabrillo led an expedition into the area in 1542.  AND Harris’ mother is an immigrant from India and her father is an immigrant from Jamaica.

She would be a formidable debate opponent for Donald Trump who has given her a derogatory nickname.  But he’ll need something more than a nickname for her when he meets her on a debate stage. You can be guaranteed that a Trump-Harris debate would not degenerate into a discussion of golf scores. One does not become a federal prosecutor and then the Attorney General of California without some sharp edges.  By now, he should have some appreciation for the skills of prosecutors.

President Biden’s decision within hours awoke the sleeping Democratic Giant and now it is Mr. Trump and the Republicans who should be nervous.

And finally, this occurred early this morning.

This race will offer widely contrasting issues of character—-and when all else fails for the undecideds who might make the fractional difference in the polls and at the polling places, character might be the deciding factor.

Contrast President Biden’s response to the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump.  He called Trump, referring to him in public remarks as “Donald,” not making any dismissive and derogatory comments but only expressing sympathy and respect.

Then consider Mr. Trump’s response to the Biden withdrawal: “Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President and is certainly not fit to serve—And never was!”  And he ranted on from there, showing once again a distinct lack of character.

And white nationalists who have made Mr. Trump their totem have been presented with a real quandary—The daughter of a Hindu woman born in India and a Jamaican husband, and who is married to a Jew and attends a black Baptist Church in San Francisco now look at Mr. Trump’s chosen running mate, J. D. Vance and they have a fit about Vance’s wife, Usha, who was born in India. Podcaster Nick Fuentes asked, “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”

Trump supporter and J6 veteran James Foxx, has complained, “JD Vance gets tapped as VP and immediately there’s a Hindu prayer at the RNC. Next we’ll see Sen. Mike Lee and JD Vance team up to convince Trump to let in 10 million Indian immigrants. Green cards on diplomas!”

A few days ago we had a competition between a couple of old coots who were about as exciting as a nursing home checkers game.  And all of the sudden, a new head nurse has roared into the parking lot in her Corvette.

Things are about to change.

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Salting the Mine

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Out in the Old West, there were stories told of people who wanted to sell a worthless gold mine to a gullible individual by putting a little gold dust into a shotgun shell and then shooting the gold into some of the mine’s rock, making it appear that there was gold waiting to be mined.

It was called salting the mine.

A few days ago, Philadelphia radio station WURD fired one of its talk show hosts who admitted she used some questions supplied by the White House in an interview with President Biden.  Andrea Lawful-Sanders has lost her job because she let the White House get away with it. .

She admitted on CNN that the White House sent her eight questions to ask when the interview was scheduled after the Thursday night debate disaster. She said she “approved” four of them.

WURD CEO Sara Lomax said in announcing the firing, “WURD Radio is not a mouthpiece for the Biden or any other administration.” She said the station’s trust by its listeners  to “hold elected officials accountable” had been jeopardized.

A second local radio host, this one from battleground state Wisconsin, has admitted he was given five questions.  But Earl Ingram has told ABC News he was not able to get through all of them in the limited time scheduled for the interview.

This story deserved to be made public.  This practice is not unusual.  There were times when the Missourinet newsroom got calls from campaigns suggesting we should interview their candidates.  In this case, a spokesman for the Biden campaign admitted to FOX News Digital, “It’s not at all uncommon practice for interviewees to share topics they would prefer. These questions were relevant to the news of the day.”  She maintained that acceptance of the questions did not determine whether the interview went ahead.

One night, when a presidential election was very tight, we got a call about 7:10 from one of the campaigns wanting to know if we wanted to interview its candidate about the importance of getting out and voting.  The person calling apparently was not aware that Missouri’s polls had closed ten minutes earlier and sounded shocked when he was told, “Mr. _____ never wanted to talk to us during the campaign and we’re sure not interested in talking with him now.”

“You mean, you don’t want to talk to the next President of the United States?” came the incredulous response.”

“What did I just tell you?”

“Oh.  Ohhhhhh—kay?”

The Missourinet had no patience—-and the current generation of reporters at the network is the same way—with people who want to salt the political mine, who think news reporters should be their mouthpieces.

Sadly, there are those willing to put candidates on the air on radio or TV just because they can—-and they lob a few softballs at them or ask the supplied questions because the interview makes great promotion material regardless of the informational value.

Candidates love “free media” and rely on outlets to become their mouthpieces.  And it’s easier to become a mouthpiece than it is to try to nail a candidate with a touch question that’s not part of the script.

It might be promotable but it’s not honest and the fallout from the Biden “salting” after the debate is deserved.

This stuff happens and it is painful to even discuss it openly because it justifies the thinking by some people that the media are controlled by whatever political ideology is different from theirs.

I don’t believe that.

I do believe there is too much talk and not enough hard reporting in my lifetime industry, which is why I also believe it is important for citizens to avoid focusing on a single information source. At our house we wander around among CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and we occasionally take a look at One America Network and Newsmax, the blatantly pro-Trump organs. And we check in with the traditional three networks from time to time.

We have our opinions and we like to think we have formed them independently because we evaluate competing ideas.

I would love to interview our ex-President.

I would introduce him as “Mr. Trump,” not “President Trump” because I believe in Harry Truman’s comment that when he left the White House he was “promoted” back to being a common citizen.  Some offices and some ranks are left in the office or should on a hanger in the back of the closet when a person retires from them or is excused from them.

We’re straying from our topic.

The temptation to accept an interview offer with someone who thinks they are important or someone who wants to be important comes to reporters all the time. Good reporters make it clear they, not the interviewee, are in charge of the interview and they are free to challenge answers or bore in when a straight answer is not given to a straight question.

And sometimes they should just say “No,” and enjoy the astonished reaction from the other person who has been thinking the talk show host or the reporter is just some clay to be manipulated.

I rather enjoyed doing that, in fact.

If you wanted to be interviewed on my air, I controlled the rules, not the candidate.  And to be honest, there were times when we covered an event or did an interview and put nothing on the air because nothing newsworthy was said.  We did not waste our listeners’ time because somebody had caused us to waste ours.

 

 

A “Day” in the Life of the Senate

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This Senate Journal for Monday, May 13, 2024 also is the journal for Tuesday and Wednesday because of a record filibuster, led by Democrats demanding so-called “ballot candy” be removed from a resolution saying no constitutional amendment could be adopted unless it carried in a majority of the state’s eight congressional districts, even if the overall vote was favorable. Democrats, already opposed to the resolution, objected to language added by the House duplicating existing law but making the proposal more appealing to the public—the “ballot candy” opponents wanted removed.

This might be dry reading to those who are not as immersed in state government as your obedient servant has been for most of his life.  We are doing this to place these events in a better record than the Senate Journal provides.

The journal for the “day” that turned into the “fifty-hour filibuster” led by the ten Democrats in the 34-member Senate is covered on pages 1059-1061 of the daily journal (the daily journals are compiled at the end of the session into one large volume, thus these page numbers pick up with the journal page number of the preceding day).  The rest of “Monday’s” journal is made up of messages from the House telling the Senate it has approved its own bills, has changed Senate bills and needs Senate approval of the changes, requests for conference committees to work out differences between the two chambers on various bills, and other routine legislative business.

Because the House of Representatives’ rules limit debate time, filibusters do not occur there.  But the Senate has no such restrictions and a parliamentary procedure called “moving the previous question,” which—if approved—immediately ends debate and calls for a vote, is seldom used.

Because the journal is a record of actions, not a by-word recording of the debates, the only indication that a filibuster occurred is the listings of the names of those who presided over the chamber at various times. The number of names is an indication of the extensive length of the filibuster.  The fact that there are no journals for Tuesday and Wednesday is another indication.

Legislative “days” are not calendar or clock-determined.  A legislative day ends with adjournment. In this case, a “Monday” lasted until Wednesday on the calendar while, for journal purposes, the legislative day was still Monday.  Adjournment in this case did not occur until some Republicans crossed party lines to join the Democrats in sending the bill back to the House with a request for a conference.  The House on Thursday rejected the Senate’s request, telling the Senate to pass the House Committee Substitute.   Senate leadership knew that the minority Democrats would resume their filibuster if the bill was returned to the floor unchanged and would run out the clock at 6 p.m. on calendar Friday.  Because there was no use spending the last day of the session in a filibuster, the Senate adjourned after a ten-minute session Friday.

We have consulted the Senate archived recording of this long “Monday” to ascertain the exact amount of time the filibuster consumed.  We have done this because this event was unprecedented in Missouri legislative history and smashed a previous unprecedented 41-hour filibuster a few days earlier by the right-wing Senate Freedom Caucus.

Monday, May 13, 2024:   Sponsor Mary Elizabeth Coleman moved that the Senate adopt House Committee Substitute for Senate Substitute Number 4 for Senate Committee Substitute for Senate Joint Resolutions 74, 48, 59, 61, and 83.  That sounds complicated but it represents the path the bill had taken to that point.

There were five similar resolutions on this issue filed in the Senate.  A Senate Committee combined those resolutions into one but not before the entire Senate had debated the bill and three substitute versions were voted down, leaving the fourth that gained enough voter for passage.

The amended and combined Senate resolution went to the House where a House Committee substituted its version. The House passed the revised bill.  The changes had to be approved by the Senate before the proposition could be put on a statewide ballot.

Monday, May 13 was the first day of the last week of the 2024 legislative session. Democrats, outnumbered more than 2-1, knew the clock was their greatest friend when it came to getting this proposition changed or killed.  They launched a filibuster that blocked a vote that surely would have sent the issue to the November ballot.

Our legislature records its debates and archives them.  We went to the May 10 audio journal and tracked how much time was spent on this bill in each day.  The Senate archive recording resets to 0:00 at the end of each 24 hours.

Day One, Monday, May 13.

0:00:00—The Senate begins its “day” with a prayer from Reverend Stephen George.

0:04:52—Senator Mary Elizabeth Coleman moves Senate approval of  HCS/SS4/SCS/SJR 74, 48, 59, 61 and 83.

0:06:15—Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo makes substitute motion to send the bill back to the House and to ask for a conference committee to work out the differences between the House version, which had “ballot candy” added to it, and the Sente version.  This is the beginning of the filibuster.

“Monday” part one (Monday-Tuesday on the traditional calendar): 24 hours, of which 23 hours, 53 minutes and 45 seconds were spent filibustering the resolution. Running filibuster time: 23:53:45.

“Monday” part two (Tuesday-Wednesday on the traditional calendar): all 24 hours were involved in the filibuster. Running filibuster time: 47:53:45

“Monday” part three (Wednesday on the traditional calendar); 02:15:36  Roll call vote begins.  Roll call results announced: 02:18:06. The motion to send bill back to the House passed 18-13, with eight Republicans crossing party lines. The filibuster is official ended.

02:24:41: The Senate adjourns until Thursday morning.  “Monday,” the longest known “day” in Missouri Senate history, has finally come to an end.

Total filibuster time: 50:11:51

Total time of “Monday, May 10, 2024” in the Missouri Senate: 50:24:41.

Miserable, Just Miserable

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The Missouri Constitution establishes a definite date each year for adjournment of the Missouri General Assembly.  This was one of those years when adjournment couldn’t happen soon enough.

This miserable session will be remembered as the session that a handful of Republican senators calling themselves the Freedom Caucus ran into the ground because a majority of their party didn’t buy their demands.  They accused the majority of their majority party of being RINOS, a nickname our former president likes to apply to any Republican who does not love him. There is considerable reason to consider far-out clusters such as this as the real Republicans in Name Only.

This will be remembered as the Session of the Filibuster.  The Freedom Caucus kicked off the session with a lengthy discussion of Senate procedure, filibustered for eleven hours trying to force colleagues to act quickly on bills making it harder for citizens to create laws through initiative petition. That led President Pro Team Caleb Rowden to strip four members of the Freedom Caucus of their committee chairmanships and (this seemed to be the most terrible punishment to some of them) took away their parking spaces in the Capitol basement.  Senators Bill Eigel, the ringleader of the caucus, Rick Brattin, Denny Hoskins and Andrew Koenig lost their prestigious positions, after which Eigel stopped action in the Senate for four more hours so he could question several Senators who seemed to support Rowden’s action.

Rowden calculated in late January that the Senate had been in floor session for 17 hours and 52 minutes in 2024. He said the Freedom Caucus had filibustered “things of no consequence whatsoever relative to a piece of policy” for 16 hours and 45 minutes of that time.

And it only got worse. But in the end, the filibuster bit the Freedom Caucus—uh—in the end.

As the session reached May and the crucial last couple of weeks, including the week in which the state budget had to be approved, the caucus stopped things cold for 41 hours—believed to be the longest filibuster in Missouri legislative history—because its priorities were not THE priority of Senate leadership.

But that filibuster record was to be broken in the final week when Democrats and some Republicans fed up with the Freedom Caucus’s behavior got in the way of final approval of the resolution changing the way the state constitution can be changed. Those who had lived by the filibuster died by the filibuster.

The final filibuster lasted FIFTY hours and change. It succeeded where the Freedom Caucus belligerency failed. The Freedom Caucus’ bull-in-a-china shop philosophy of government was repudiated by a Senate that seemed to, in this case at least, rediscovered bipartisanship. But the damage done by this group could not be reversed.

The 2024 legislative session was the least productive in modern memory—or even ancient memory, for that matter.  Only 28 non-budget bills were passed.

That beats the record of 31 in the 2020 session.  But remember, that was the Pandemic Session when the legislature did not meet for several days then operated on a limited basis for several other days.

Eigel disavowed responsibility for that miserable record.  “A lot of bad things that didn’t happen this session didn’t happen because of the people standing behind me,” he said in a post-session Freedom Caucus press conference. His words probably didn’t carry any water with Senators and Representatives who had worked hard and conscientiously on bills that would have done GOOD things only to see them disappear into the ongoing mud fight in the Senate led by Eigel and his band.

Eigel has dreams of becoming Governor.  Denny Hoskins thinks he’d be a peachy Secretary of State. Andrew Koenig thinks being State Treasurer would be wonderful. Rick Brattin just hopes to get elected to another term in the Senate.

There are some folks who have watched them this year who hope they still don’t have parking places in Jefferson City in 2025.

The 50-hour filibuster deserves a closer look. We’ve taken that look to establish the exact length of it so that future observers will know when they have witnessed an even more regrettable example.

Incidentally, it is believed the longest filibuster by one person in Missouri history was Senator Matt Bartle’s futile effort to block some gubernatorial appointments in 2007. He held the floor for seventeen hours.

How to be a Leftist With One Word

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The word is “Democracy.”

The denigrating reference to one of the most honored words in our American existence was stunning when I read it.

“Democracy” seems to have become a bad word for some people.

The Jefferson City newspaper had an article yesterday about whether our city council elections should become partisan political elections again.  The City Charter adopted three or four decades ago made council elections non-partisan.  But in last month’s city elections, the county Republican committee sent out postcards endorsing candidates.

All of them lost.

A new political action committee established to oppose a Republican-oriented committee that killed a library tax levy increase last year had its own slate last month. All of the non-GOP candidates won, which prompted a leading member of the GOP-oriented group to comment in the paper that the new PAC, as the paper put it, “used leftist buzzwords like ‘transparency’ and ‘Democracy’ on their website.”

Friends, when things have gone so far out of whack that “Democracy” is nothing more than a “leftist buzzword,” our political system is in extremely perilous condition.   And if the same side considers “transparency” to be something that is politically repugnant, it appears that a substantial portion of our political system has abandoned one of the greatest principles of our national philosophy—-that government of the people, for the people, and by the people should not hide what it does from its citizens.

City councils are the closest governments to the people.  Elections of members of city councils should focus on the issues that most directly affect residents of wards and cities, not on whether candidates can pass party litmus tests or mouth meaningless partisan rhetoric.

The Jefferson City newspaper spent weeks publishing articles giving candidates’ opinions on the issues that confront citizens living on the quiet (and some noisy) streets of the city. Voters had ample opportunities to evaluate candidates on THEIR positions, not whether they were an R or a D.

Bluntly put, the county Republican committee did not respect the non-partisan system that has served our city well for these many decades.  And to have one of its leading characters dismiss words such as “transparency” and—especially—“Democracy” as “leftist buzzwords” is, I regret to say, a disgrace.

Why Let Others Decide? 

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The latest effort to let other people decide what’s best for the rest of us is at large in the Missouri Capitol.

It is bill designed to take away some more of our voting rights. I say “some more” because of two obvious incidents from our past, within the last thirty years or so, in which we as voters gave away our right to vote.

First was term limits.  In 1992, voters statewide decided you and I could not vote to retain our state representative or our state senator, no matter how well they had represented us, beyond a certain number of years. We, as a people, forfeited our right to vote for a third term for a senator we trusted or our right to vote for a fifth term of a representative who had responsibly served us.

(Hypocritically, in the same election, voters elected many incumbents to terms beyond the limits they also approved).

Later, voters statewide decided to ban any city from imposing an earnings tax other than the cities of St. Louis and Kansas City—and voters there would have to approve continuation of those taxes every five years.  No other cities were seriously considering such a tax at the time, but that decision precluded any city from asking voters to think about one.  Again, othrers have decided you and I can never have a chance to vote on this issue in our towns.

Now a movement is afoot to make it harder to change our constitution. And this one is even more dangerous because it could declare a majority vote doesn’t count.

The Senate already has passed this bill that says the constitution would not be amended, even if the proposal carries by a majority statewide, unless it has a majority in more than half of the state’s congressional districts.  That means it must be approved by voters in five of our eight congressional districts we now have and will fail even if the statewide results show majority approval.

If you vote on the prevailing side, your vote is worthless if the issue gets a statewide majority but gets a a majority in only four of our congressional districts.

So much for one-person, one-vote. My vote and your vote might not carry the same weight as the vote of someone in a more reluctant congressional district.  Our votes will not be equal.  We might win the majority but the majority will not rule.

If it is such a good idea, why are elections for legislators run on the same principle?  Why shouldn’t someone have to carry a majority of the precincts in their district, not just get the most votes overall, to get elected?

The proposed constitutional change is a Republican idea and Republicans don’t want voters in the Democratic congressional districts in our metro areas and, probably, the more liberal district that includes Columbia, to post majorities that more than offset votes in conservative areas of Missouri.

Can anyone name any other election law that says voters in some places don’t count even if they are in the overall majority?

Doesn’t sound very “American.”

Fortunately, this idea will require a simple majority to defeat it when it does on the statewide ballot, assuming voters realize that they are once again being asked to give away a right to decide issues on the basis of all votes being equal.

Our constitution already has too many things in it that should be state laws subject to updating as needed as our society changes.  Many of those things have been put in the constitution because the legislature refused to enact them as statutes.  We might have a chance to make that same mistake with a sports wagering proposition because the legislature annually fails to pass a more responsible sports wagering law.

There are ways to make it harder to turn legislative failures into constitutional amendments that reduce the opportunities our elected representatives and senators have to enact public policy.  This proposal is not an appropriate way to do that.

The bill is Senate Joint Resolution 74. It will soon be on the House floor for debate.  We will serve ourselves well if we tell our Representatives that our vote should be equal to the votes of others on proposed constitutional changes.

Sauces for geese and ganders should be equal.  So should votes for legislators and for constitutional amendments.

BONUS:  SCOTUS SAYS TRUMP CAN STAY; MISSOURI PRECEDENT

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We interrupt today’s regular entry to bring you this perspective on the big news of the morning, so far:

The United States Supreme Court today unanimously ruled that Colorado cannot keep Donald Trump off its presidential primary ballot. All nine judges wrote separate opinions explaining why states cannot determine who will run in national elections based on Section three of the Fourteenth Amendment, which Colorado and some other states had cited to kick Trump off the ballot for taking part in an insurrection.

The Supreme Court says the authority to enforce that section that bars those involved in insurrections from holding office rests with Congress, not the states.

Would Congress do that?  Some of those disappointed in today’s ruling say a Congress that works the way a Congress is supposed to work would be far more likely to do it than today’s dysfunctional bunch.

Today’s ruling has a Missouri precedent, sort of.

In the early 1990s, when Missouri and 22 other states made the mistake of enacting term limits on members of their legislatures, an effort also was made to limit the amount of time members of Congress could serve. The Arkansas Supreme Court threw out the law in that state and U. S. Term Limits took the case to the Supremes, where justices voted 5-4 in 1995 that the requirements for service in the United States House and the United States Senate are established in the U. S. Constitution which trumps state laws or state constitutions.