A few years ago the good people of Kentucky elected a Democrat governor. That's bad enough, but with Mitch McConnell in the hospital Republicans are now in a positive tizzy. They're afraid that McConnell might die or have to retire, leaving the governor free to appoint a Democrat to fill out his term.
Naturally this can't be allowed, even though it's been the practice in Kentucky for the past century. So the Republican legislature passed a law saying the governor has to choose a replacement of the same political party as the departing senator. Sherrilyn Ifill thinks this is corrupt, but over at National Review Charles Cooke says she's nuts:
So, a veto-proof supermajority within the elected Kentucky legislature passed a law that requires the state’s governor to choose an interim senator from the same party as the guy who was elected last time around, and this is an “attack on our democracy” that “makes voting irrelevant”?
This is profoundly ridiculous. Again: with an apparently straight face, Ifill is arguing that it is more democratic to empower just one of Kentucky’s elected officials to choose a temporary federal senator than it is for a supermajority within the elected state legislature....(You will be shocked to learn that Ifill makes no mention of the fact that the change Kentucky has made is already the law in a handful of other states, including in Hawaii and Maryland, where it presumably serves to “maintain perpetual Democratic political power.”)
I should hardly need to say this, but no one is arguing that one method is any better than the other in theory. What Ifill and others are complaining about is the Republican habit of playing Calvinball with this stuff. In Wisconsin, when a Democrat was elected governor, Republican governor Scott Walker had the gall to sign a bill taking away powers he himself had exercised for eight years. When Virginia became a state friendly to Democratic presidential candidates, Republicans tried to get rid of the winner-take-all system for electoral votes that they had been fine with since the beginning of the Republic. And of course, in the Senate Republicans routinely change the rules for judicial appointments depending on which party holds the White House.
This is Calvinball. There are lots of different rules that are fine in theory, but there's no excuse for changing them just because the opposing party wins an election. That's what we're complaining about.
The governator can take it to the max and nominate most wild crazy MAGA conspiracy theorist. Someone very unelectable.
But Rand Paul is already a Senator.
😂
Or, better. yet, just have an AOC or Bernie-style Kentucky Democrat register as a Republican, and have THAT person become the new Senator from the Great Commonwealth of Kentucky. Just to watch heads explode.
My first thought too-- Amy McGrath or whoever registers R first thing in the morning, appointment ceremony 10 minutes later. Reverse Calvinball. It's what you have to do when they pull crap like that. Do it often enough and they might eventually think twice about it.
I tried to find details of the legislation but was unsuccessful. One would imagine the GOP would have thought of this and so the law stipulates that the appointee must be a current office-holder. But who knows?
Not only is there a temporal requirement, the governor 'shall' appoint the new senator within 21 days. So no, no Merrick Garland style gotchas.
I am registered Republican: a true RINO. Why? Because, while I am in a blue state, I live in a red county. The Republican primary is the relevant election on the county level. Most of the people who get elected are Main Street Republicans: wrong on any social issue, but who understand that fixing potholes both is desirable and needs to be paid for. There is also a substantial Barking Mad faction. They have never in the twenty years I have lived here held a majority on the county council, but they have held two of five seats. The danger is real. So I consider it more important to vote against the Barking Mad guys in the relevant election than to have a vote nominating a Democratic candidate for a state or national office. That being said, I haven't voted for a Republican in a general election in decades.
Nice thought but as stupid as R's are, they aren't that stupid. Here's what the law says:
The appointee shall be selected from a list of three (3) names submitted by the state executive committee of the same political party as the Senator who held the vacant seat to be filled, shall have been continuously registered as a member of that political party since December 31 of the preceding year, and shall be named within twenty-one (21) days from the date of the list submission.
https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/acts/21RS/documents/0154.pdf
"and shall be named within twenty-one (21) days"
And if this doesn't happen?
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"... That's what we're complaining about."
Yeah, but you weren't complaining about it when the Democrats in Massachusetts repeatedly changed the rules about filling Senate vacancies to whatever they thought best served their interests at the time.
Fck off troll.
Wow. What an intelligent response.
Fuck off, Slaver apologist troll.
Translation: He's right, we started it. But hey, if we admitted that then we couldn't complain... so fuck off!
Do you ever not misfire, MF?
Haven't looked at Kentucky--but was gerrymandering involved in helping to super majorities? Kentucky is a red state--but getting to a veto proof majority still takes some work. It could be possible--McConnell won his last election with 57% of the vote, though Paul got almost 62%.
Given the sizable Republican majority statewide, it is almost constitutionally impossible in Kentucky to get anything less than Republican supermajorities in the state legislative chambers.
The Kentucky constitution prohibits any splitting of counties between state senate districts, except in the three largest counties. (See "Kentucky General Assembly" in Wikipedia.) But those three counties comprise less than thirty percent of Kentucky's population. All but one of the 117 unsplittable counties voted for Trump in the 2020 election by double-digit margins, so it's unreasonable to suppose that any senate district constructed from these counties can have a Democratic majority. And remember, those counties make up more than two thirds of the commonwealth's population. So Republicans have the edge in at least two-thirds of the senate districts. I don't know what they allow for the Kentucky House, but I'd guess it's similarly restrictive of county splitting.
Super convenient that “The Kentucky constitution prohibits any splitting of counties between state senate districts, except in the three largest counties.” The 3 largest counties also happen to be where most of the Democrats live. Nice that they made an exception to allow splitting them up across multiple districts so they lose electoral power.
(Yes I realize there are Supreme Court rulings requiring state senate districts to contain roughly equal numbers of people. But KY both drew the county boundaries and made the decision that those should be inviolateable except if they contain too many people. The 3 exceptions could be dealt with by subdividing them into more counties, for example, so that they become units small enough to not require splitting across multiple senate districts. I bet this is what KY would do if those counties instead contained lots of Republicans who were seeing their votes diluted by ‘packing-and-cracking’ line drawing like the Dems in those counties currently are.)
The splitting might just be because there are too many people in them to fit into one district. That doesn't mean games can't be played--but probably won't have huge effects.
That's right, there are way too many people in the big counties to put the whole county in one Senate district. (There are thirty-some senators.) I did check their map of House districts, and those split many more counties, because they have around 100 districts and there are a lot of counties that have more than one hundredth of the state's population. Kentucky's overall population is around 4.5 million.
Thanks.
It makes Bashear's win all the more amazing--though he was running against Bevin.
It shows how out there Bevin is, even die hard MAGA Kentucky voters are like, uh no.
Don't forget North Carolina. When Democrat Roy Cooper was elected in 2016, Republicans did the same thing.
Ref: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/north-carolinas-power-stripping-laws-mean-new-gov-roy-cooper
The most longstanding example of Republican Calvinball is their insistence, whenever a Democrat is president, that deficits are terrible and that the national debt is about to crush our economy, but when a Republican is president it's all an insignificant accounting procedure and doesn't matter.
Well, there was that time in the 18(70?)'s when Republicans created not one, but four states out of whole cloth to hang onto their majorities. DC/Puerto Rico statehood, of course, is a deed that cannot be countenanced.
Late 1880s-- Dakotas, Washington, Idaho. IIRC WA and ID were already separate territories but the statehood floor of only 50,000 (non-Indigenous) residents left the door open for mischief wrt to Dakota Territory. It was pretty blatant. Good point.
I saw an interesting factoid the other day, if you combined the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho they’d still have a lower population than Colorado
Yes, but I didn't say "earliest," I said "most longstanding." If the Republicans have continually been admitting clunks of underpopulated states since then, I haven't heard about it.
Republicans are going to Calvinball. They have no shame and they play to win all the marbles, country’s future be damned.
Unfortunately, to mix comic metaphors, Democrats are going to Charlie Brown. They’re always going to run for the football and assume Lucy is going to act in good faith in holding it there.
The younger Dems get this. But the party still has way too many old fossils who would rather be polite with their “friends across the aisle” than actually enact stuff that’s officially been on their party’s agenda for decades.
This.
It would be "uncivil" to play the game back to them.
Tsk-tsk!
Again, again, yet again: These are not strength moves! These are the moves of cornered vermin who have no cards left to play.
Although I got the general meaning more or less correctly from context, I had to look up Calvinball (I've vaguely heard of Calvin and Hobbes but never read it). Being of a certain age, and having typically nerdy SF interests, I might substitute fizzbin.
What is our educational system coming to? Calvin & Hobbes is part of the common western literature curriculum that everyone should be familiar with.
PS: C & H had a SF component as Calvin’s alter ego “Spaceman Spiff” regularly battled aliens.
What is our educational system coming to? From several references in my post, it is easy to deduce that my education predated Calvin &Hobbs (which I still know zero about except the name but research tells me first appeared in 1985). So please hold Colgate (1975) and Cornell Law School (1978) blameless for my ignorance. (And since there are many tone deaf people on the internet, please note that I am joking. Well, except I really do know zilch about Calvin and Hobbs and will nonetheless take original Star Trek any day.)
Excuse my snark. Recommend you read some Calvin & Hobbs if you get a chance; it takes a while to figure it out but it is about a young boys endless imagination and is very good. I was unsure if you predated or postdated C & H, which was published from 1985 through 1995.
Well, it's Tuesday, so the second card is not turned up.
1) Are the Republicans being complete jerks, changing the rules to benefit politically, of course! Welcome to hardball politics.
2) Do Democrats ever play the same game? Yes https://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/20/kennedy.letter/
3) I don't know if this is good news but the broader structure, a state that is majority one party but with a Governor of the other party, is becoming rarer and rarer.
4) In our partisan political world, we will see more hardball by both sides https://www.npr.org/2020/09/20/915060757/david-sirota-democrats-have-power-to-play-hardball-too
I would guess that increasingly Southern states will have Democratic governors but Republican state houses, as gerrymandering continues but states as a whole want science, education and health care for their families. So buckle your seatbelts. This is the new normal for a while.
Thanks for going all the way back to 2009 to find a counterpoint to cite in (2) above. Your concern for both sides has been noted, please troll off now somewhere else.
Austin
1) IF Larry Elder (right wing TV personality) had succeeded in the recall of Gavin Newsom, I am CERTAIN the Democratic super majorities in California, would have done the exact same thing.
2) Opportunity. As I mention above, these situations are rare. In the recent time, there have not been too many strong majority Democratic state with a Republican Governor.
3) Does not always happen. For example, Kansas (red state) has a Democratic Governor (Laura Kelly) and Maryland (blue state) recently (Larry Hogan) had a Republican Governor. I am not aware of any meaningful power stripping in the aforementioned examples.
The troll is 'CERTAIN' (the caps are his) that Democrats would have done the same in his counterfactual. I'd tell him to FOAD were it not for the fact that most everyone is aware that he's a troll.
They know they're on the way out and they will do anything possible to hold on to power. Amazing.
Yes, Kevin. Republicans should stop being bad people. Write a letter to the editor. That will surely show them.
Isn’t DeSantis trying to play Calvinball in Florida? Isn’t there a rule in Florida that would require him to resign as governor if he rungs for President and he’s trying to get that changed?
Democrat governor? Et tu Kevin!
So when is Charles Booker (e.g.) going to declare as a Republican so Beshear can appoint him to replace McConnell? Seems like a fairly simple, and legit by the criteria, solution. And what about appointing an Independent? Sure seems like a law to appoint someone of a political party has a couple of obvious loopholes.
See above comment on this, they thought of that
Recently many democrats have advocated for expanding the supreme court, having the presidency decided by the popular vote, and getting rid of the filibuster. Wouldn't those all be examples of Calvinball as well?
Expanding the supreme court is always a good idea. Making such important decision shouldn't be done by such a small number of people with life appointments. The right number is at least 30, something like 3-5 judges from each appeal cout.
I have no problem debating the merits of expanding the court. I was just pointing out that there hasn't been (that I was aware of) such democratic support to do so until the recent conservative majority.
The Slaver apologist troll wants us to do his research for him. Again. Didn't even know that at one point the SCOTUS had more than nine members. Sad.
So, so sad.
Not going to admit the SCOTUS has had more than nine members, eh? Do you have any idea why most people here consider you a troll? Strike that; of course you do.
So, so sad.
Atticus the supreme court was expanded a couple of times in the 19th century only being locked into the current nine by the GOP by the end of the 19th century so you are mistaken in your impression.
I’ve come around to the even better idea, do away with permanent Supreme Court justices altogether, instead for each case randomly pick 5 judges from the appeals courts.
For the hearings, that is what is needed. Then the actual decision should be done by a large number of judges, to remove "randomness" from the actual decision.
Interesting idea. I think logistics may present some problems though.
It may be hard for federal judges to disrupt their "regular" jobs to travel to DC and go serve for one case.
Don't trouble yourself with this one. I'll do his usual schtick of 'just asking questions' and ask whether or not all those expansions of the (vote) franchise weren't examples of Calvinball as well. Just asking questions, of course 😉
Ronald Reagan appointing Clarence Thomas to the bench was an example of Calvinball. Mitch McConnell refusing to allow hearings for Merrick Garland was an example of Calvinball. But you can bet our local Slaver apologist won't be asking questions about those two incidents.
Republicans. My rules for me and for you. Only my rules.
Lewis Carroll nailed it many, many years ago:
Want another of their oh-so-coy Calvinball plays? 'Parental Rights.' Or as someone else put it, the Heckler's Veto.