Outside the Beltway

Multiple indicators point to a decline in the representativeness of the American system.

Let’s not get overly dramatic about special elections.

The lack of common understandings and shared assumptions makes political conversations challenging.

Empowering authoritarians.

Our insistence on relying on an 18th Century understanding of electoral systems is our ongoing bane (if one values representative government).

Any “fair” drawing of districts will yield a GOP advantage over time.

Yes, partisanship is real. And it influences more than just voting behavior.

The fixes worsen the stated problem (more on Iowa and other states’ attempts to restrict voting).

Making it harder to vote in Iowa.

HR1 is a national approach to expanding voter access. State legislatures are trying to both expand and restrict the vote as well.

And what GOP opposition says about the party.

The politics of bait-and-switch.

A story that is both unserious and yet emblematic of our age in a serious way.

A CPAC speaker and the return of the problem of the Heritage electoral fraud database.

Yet another reminder about pathologies of US democracy.

The Senate parliamentarian has ruled against ramming it through in the COVID relief bill.

The reflections on the departed right-wing talk host continue.

The Senate’s last conservative Democrat is taking President Biden’s call for unity seriously.

America’s institutions are undemocratic but only some of them are a product of the Constitution.

Some reflections

The distance in accountability between the highest and the lowest must be shortened.

Of course, it depends on what case one thinks needs to have been made.

Some marginal Republican formers are thinking about maybe doing somethingoranother.

Specifically: the former confederacy and Democratic dominance.

Some political history,

Mitch McConnell is testing out his spine again.

Weeks of claims of rigged elections may well have cost the GOP the Senate.

The Republican Party is not really a thing.

Aung San Suu Kyi and her top officials are under house arrest.

The GOP, alas, is not going anywhere.

Let me point you to a reform proposal.

And no, there aren’t always “two sides to every story.”

American political parties are controlled by the primaries.

Every illegal immigrant would have a path to citizenship.

Will there be in-fighting? Yes. A break-up? No.

The GOP will almost certainly survive. But in what form?

Here we go again.

Trump tried to interfere in GA earlier than we knew.

Hashtag: You’re Fired.

Trump’s lack of fealty to truth and reality gives supporters an out (if they choose it).

AZ, GA, and Pa are on the table.

On the op/ed page of WaPo, the 10 living former U.S. secretaries of defense say things that shouldn’t have to be said.

The sitting president is asking GA officials to find votes despite the fact that the results have been confirmed thrice.

The absurd notion that the President of Senate is the arbiter and judge of the electoral vote.

It will be symbolic, but the symbol will be an anti-democratic one.

Granted, there are more than two. But from a political science/political history POV, these two stick out in my mind.

Wherein I detail evidence of fraud and take the Heritage Foundation’s database of fraud to task.

Or, more accurately, the lack thereof.