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Scozzafava Drops Out; Name Will Remain on Ballot

After the race’s final poll showed Assemblymember Scozzafava (R) a distant third to her Democratic & Conservative opponents, she dropped out, but her name will remain on the ballot.

It’s beyond too late to reprint ballots in those counties of the 23rd using new paper ballot scanning machines (8 of 11), but the lever machines in Clinton, Essex, and part of Oneida counties could presumably be retooled, albeit at great cost, in time for the election. In any event, they won’t be: state law doesn’t so require.

So the question remains what effect if any Dede’s continued presence on the ballot will have. We should assume that upwards of 10% of voters — her die-hard supporters — may still vote for her, out of protest (she was, until recently, incredibly popular). That leaves 10% to swing to either Owens or Hoffman. But do we expect Dede’s residual voter base to reflect her principles and vote for Owens, the remaining candidate closest to her in ideology, or would pulling a lever (or signing a ballot) for a Democrat be too much of a mental shift?

Tales of Hoffman, Entr’acte

Yes, I’m sticking with the opera theme.

Last night, finally, saw Doug Hoffman, third-party candidate endorsed by Sarah Palin, meet his opposition, including Republican Dede Scozzafava, the woman he’d pledged to endorse. The results weren’t pretty. The highlights, both in Part 3, reveal a candidate visibly out of depth on local issues (on water rights, he spouts platitudes while Scozzafava & Owens explain specifics), and plainly with an eye towards a national career first, while the district remains a distant second. We’re all well versed in the idea that “earmarks” — or district “pork” — are too often corrupted. Congressmen score overpriced rewards for political gain, and the taxpayers are left picking up the check. Fine — that does happen  (“Bridge to Nowhere”). But “pork” exists for a good reason, and part of a representative’s job is improving her district, responsibly. By swearing off all earmarks, Hoffman is making a promise he can’t possibly keep; threatening military families dependent on local Fort Drum; and foregoing, as Scozzafava points out, a chance to not improve, but build the north country’s infrastructure for the first time. Dede’s pushback nails the point — Hoffman isn’t just about “principle before party.” He’s “principle before district.” It’s a sad commentary on democracy when an irresponsible, dangerously uninformed candidate can poll in the 30%s.

Hopefully those numbers will change. But the race is going to be tight — so tight that upstate Democrats have already requested that the New York state courts supervise the use of old-style “lever” voting machines (a somewhat ringing endorsement for the states’ new, partially-deployed paper ballot/optical scanner system), and that all machines used be impounded immediately following the election, pending a likely recount.

As an interesting sidenote, should a recount be required, and irregularities emerge, they will not be capable of either correction or serious analysis in Essex, Clinton, and Oneida counties. All or part of each county still uses the state’s old “lever” machines, which do not produce a paper trail, but only recite final vote totals. Lost votes on lever machines are irretrievably, truly lost, a fact that, we can hope, won’t shortly become significant.

Pelosi’s House Health Care Bill Includes Millionaire Tax

From the New York Times, Pelosi’s proposed healthcare bill clocks in at 1990 pages and under $900M and, by CBO estimates, will shrink the deficit over the next decade, owing partially to a new surtax on individuals earning more than $500 thousand, or couples earning over $1 million. Recall that we used to have a top marginal tax bracket around that number, but it disappeared in recent times, along with other progressive elements of the tax code. Let’s preliminarily halt cries of “socialism” by debunking the myth that this is anything new.

Tales of Hoffman, Act II

Doug Hoffman, Sarah Palin’s candidate to fill the congressional vacancy in New York’s 23rd district, ducks another debate, while his opponents clash in Plattsburgh. As the moderator made clear, Hoffman was in Plattsburgh that night, with nothing on his schedule, but chose to stay out of the fray. Truly, Mr. Hoffman is not your average politician. This audio just became available today; updates as I listen.

UPDATE: through Twitter, of all things, we hear Hoffman had a prior commitment to a NY Right to Life “town hall,” but will debate tonight. I don’t really think it’s a whole lot better for a congressional candidate to choose a “red meat,” hyper-partisan, culture war function over speaking to his constituents about local issues, but I suppose if you’d prefer to be represented by an ideologue, you now have a choice.

Update #2: The Question:

“National power brokers are focusing on this election. How will you prevent this from distracting attention away from local issues?”

Bill Owens: “I always represent The District.” Scozzafava: “My loyalty is to only one audience, and that’s the residents of the 23rd congressional district. One of my opponents, Mr. Hoffman, has signed all sorts of pledges that really do not look out for the best interests of the residents of this area. Who’s he playing to? [. . .] I wish the third candidate was here as well, so we could all answer the questions together, instead of being inundated with 30-second commercials that are distorting and telling lies. The issues are too important and there’s too much at stake.”

And that’s it, isn’t it? Hoffman is running a Modern Campaign in the Rove model — smears, distortions, and no clash on the issues. This election isn’t just a referendum on the direction of the Republican Party; it’s a chance to choose between functional, issue-oriented politics, and the same old culture war rhetoric. The former deserves to lose — hard. But will it?

Credit Where It’s Due

Lately, we’ve noted a few worrying slides to the right amongst our conservative brethren — the truly baffling ascendance of Doug Hoffman, a tea partying politician whose greatest accomplishment is letting Glenn Beck talk at him; the party’s increasing captivity to far right interests; etc. But to the GOP’s credit, Dick Cheney, of late Vice President, has aligned himself and his operation with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, the candidate in Texas’ Republican gubernatorial primary who’s more moderate, capable, and less likely to secede from the Union. The endorsement also puts him at odds with ex-Governor Sarah Palin.

All of these are good things. There’s a lot to disagree with Sen. Hutchinson on, but she’s an intelligent, informed stateswoman, and if opposition we must have, we should be glad to have someone closer to her than Rick Perry. Like it or not America needs a conservative party — one-party government doesn’t work over the long term, in either direction. But we as Democrats, and the American people as a whole, deserve a conservative party willing to debate issues, rather than one bent on whipping up conspiracy theories or distorting points of reasonable disagreement beyond recognition. Cheney’s move, and Hutchinson’s candidacy, are both steps in that direction, and shouldn’t pass without recognition.

House Resolution Would Perpetuate “9/12 Project” Counting Errors

A House of Representatives resolution (H.R. 870), sponsored by Rep. Price (R-GA) and doomed to go no-where, would formalize Glenn Beck’s latter-day egregious miscounting of the tea party protesters’ infamous march on Washington. The resolution parrots the Glenn Beck of 9/13 by putting the number of protesters at “hundreds of thousands… as high as 1,700,000,” but ignores Glenn Beck’s actually accurate same-day estimate of 60,000. Awkward.

Was Brown v. Board Wrongly Decided?

Scalia thinks it was. Except, he doesn’t. Irresponsible, slapdash journalism notwithstanding, America’s second most conservative — and, arguably, most intelligent — Supreme Court justice stands quite firm in his defense of the case that created the modern civil rights movement and, thereby, modern America. But this vignette in journalistic ethics raises a more interesting question: we all know Brown v. Board, by terminating the practice of racial segregation in schools, was the morally right decision for the Supreme Court to make. But was it legally sound? This question deserves to be asked. After all –

However apparent the injustice of [segregation] may be, we have only to consider whether it is consistent with the constitution of the United States. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 553 (1896) (Harlan, J., dissenting).

Well, let’s see.

Despite the seminal place Brown v. Board has attained in our jurisprudence, it was by no means a slam-dunk decision (don’t let the unanimous opinion convince you otherwise). Seeking to bring to a successful conclusion a fifty-plus year campaign for racial equality, the newly-minted Chief Justice Warren worked long and hard to build a consensus opinion, but the resulting opinion seems to rest more on sociology than true constitutional interpretation. Contrary to popular understanding, Brown v. Board never explicitly rejected the idea that “separate but equal” satisfied equal protection — it simply concluded, after examining extensive expert reports, that separate can never be equal, at least in the context of education:

Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority. Any language in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to this finding is rejected. We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 494 (1954).

That Brown‘s ultimate significance has become, in legal circles as well as public discourse, “segregation is always illegal,” is a happy coincidence, but not, strictly speaking, what the opinion says, and deliberately so. An outright reversal of Plessy would’ve been earth-shattering. Brown‘s half-step is a concession to history: while the framers of the Equal Protection Clause did, in fact, probably intend their text to forbid segregation (a discussion for another day), the practice of segregation grew contemporaneously with the South under Reconstruction, as schools were built and rail lines restored. This organic history makes it very difficult indeed to parse the distinction between the America the Fourteenth Amendment was built to create, and that which it actually did create. Consequentially, an analytical approach built on originalism would be somewhat inadequate to the task, which Warren acknowledges, before changing the question to address whether segregation is fair to modern eyes.

In approaching this problem, we cannot turn the clock back to 1868 when the Amendment was adopted, or even to 1896 when Plessy v. Ferguson was written. We must consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the Nation. Only in this way can it be determined if segregation in public schools deprives these plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws. Id. at 493.

So, let’s summarize — “separate” can still be “equal”; but not in the context of education; and, decisions about the meaning of “equality” should be reckoned by modern, rather than 19th century notions of fairness. This is an elegant, beautifully written opinion, and unequivocally right, but there’s a lot to question here, from a conservative perspective. If a liberal justice today leaned on sociology to answer controversial culture war issues, she’d be pilloried; if the same justice argued that “fairness” should be judged by modern values, her name would surely be cursed from here to WorldNetDaily. They may not want to admit it, but from a conservative perspective, there is an argument that Brown was wrongly decided.

Of course, no politician who wants to be taken seriously would ever admit as much, even if they would disagree with Brown‘s reasoning being used today, to decide more present issues in equal protection law. By any reasonable rubric, Brown was rightly decided in 1954, but conservatives are still fighting its major premise, fifty years later. That should say a lot.

Call Your Senator, Demand a Public Option

The expected but still infuriating news that Sen. Lieberman (??-CT) will join a filibuster of Sen. Reid (D-Nev.)’s health care bill should have reduced you to a white-hot ball of rage. That’s good; use it! Call your Senators now and demand a public option in the final bill. Here in New York, apparently, calls are roughly half-and-half. Call now to tip them in the right direction.

Tales of Hoffman

Doug Hoffman — member of the 9/12 and “Tea Party” movements, sits by while talk radio giant Mark Levin calls Assemblymember Scozzafava”Arlen Specter in drag,” claims that President Obama is “taking away our liberties, taking away our rights,” pulls out of a debate at the last minute, and generally doesn’t so much “have ideas” as an uncanny ability to sit quietly while Glenn Beck talks at him.

Pure class. I defer to Assemblymember Duprey (R) for more:

This is a campaign for Congress — not an audition to be a talking head on a cable news program. Doug Hoffman doesn’t live here, he doesn’t understand our local issues and, regardless of his campaign’s theatrics and false polls, he knows he is completely unelectable. Make no mistake about it — Doug Hoffman is a spoiler, and by staying in this race he will jeopardize a seat the Republican Party has held here since the Civil War. It’s high time that Hoffman puts the good of this community over his personal ambition and endorses our Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava.

The Opt-Out as a Trap in the Making

If the stimulus proved one thing, it’s that Republicans can’t really walk the walk on fiscal conservatism: they’ll vote against increased government spending, and promptly pocket the cash (e.g., Phil Gingrey, R-GA). The opt-out public option risks creating the same atmosphere: conservatives will stand against it on principle, but be punished at the polls for denying their lower-income constituents a shot at affordable, quality healthcare. And, should the public option compete favorably against private plans, resulting in lower prices, the difference in red states will be palpable, with all of the electoral consequences that implies.

If we believe in the public option, this is an experiment progressives should readily embrace, as a chance to prove, once and for all, that government programs can create a happier, healthier citizenry (as if, say, the highway system wasn’t proof enough). Admittedly, results come at the expense of the citizens of those states that do opt out, but it won’t be Democrats making those calls.  The Republican desire to avoid the opt-out experiment — thus ducking the “difficult” choice between helping one’s constituents and “standing on principle” — speaks volumes.

[I]t is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country. — Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.