Eight + Eight States

We live in a nation where all treaties and presidential appointments subject to Congressional confirmation are handled by one house of Congress, the Senate. Our form of representational democracies is based on the “New Jersey Compromise,” whereby our Forefathers relegated the House of Representatives, where all appropriations bills must originate, as the population-based federal legislative body, and the Senate as the land-based legislative body (two Senators per state regardless of size). Our forefathers were mostly farmers and very suspicious of city folk. Slaves were not citizens, and virtually 100% of our citizens were white.

Today, 85% of our population is urban. By 2040, based on some pretty simple projections, the majority of our population will be non-white and most of the United States population will be in 16 states. By 2040, 34 states – with about 40% of the population – will control 68 seats in the Senate, and 60% of the United States will control 32 Senate seats. Think about it. Most of all that red above is wide open space with sparse populations!

“The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service of the University of Virginia analyzed Census Bureau population projections to estimate each state’s likely population in 2040, including the expected breakdown of the population by age and gender. Although that data was released in 2016, before the bureau revised its estimates for the coming decades, we see that, in fact, the population will be heavily centered in a few states.

“Eight states will have just under half of the total population of the country, 49.5 percent, according to the Weldon Cooper Center’s estimate. The next eight most populous states will account for an additional fifth of the population, up to 69.2 percent — meaning that the 16 most populous states will be home to about 70 percent of Americans.” Washington Post, July 12^th.

The Big Eight: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia. The Next Eight: Ohio, New Jersey, Michigan, Arizona, Virginia, Washington, Massachusetts and Colorado.

It is pretty clear, without much in the way of deep diving into the facts, that the United States is rapidly becoming a nation where a white minority, through the most basic governmental structures built into our legal system, will dominate a much, much larger non-white majority… unless something big happens in the next few years. And we all know that when a government is so completely unrepresentative, history has repeatedly illustrated how such political systems collapse. We also know that American political incumbents have become the masters of marginalizing voters who disagree with them.

Voter ID laws are back as the 2013 Supreme Court (Shelby County vs Holder) released states with voting discriminatory practices from federal supervision. Voting rights for minorities can be complicated by moving polling stations, purging them from voter rolls for technical violations or just plain stopping them from voting at all. Rich people and organizations can push political agendas with well-funded and uncapped political campaigns (per the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs. F.E.C.). Gerrymandering has never been so pervasive, openly flaunted as the right of the incumbent political victors, and slip-sliding through the courts with no clear end in sight. North Carolina is reeling from seemingly massive election fraud in two neighboring counties. The lame duck GOP governors in two GOP-legislatively-dominated states, North Carolina and Wisconsin, signed into law statutes to disempower the incoming newly-elected Democrat governors. Michigan about to follow-suit! In 2016, a president was once against been elected against an opposing candidate who generated a larger popular vote. The minority party, in terms of members, controls the majority of state legislatures, governorships, the presidency and until this past election, both houses of Congress. Sounds really bad when you say it all at once. But it is bad!

Former FBI Director and Trump-foe, James Comey may not like the President, he may believe that Trump should never get a second term, but: “‘I hope that Donald Trump is not removed from office by impeachment because it would let the country off the hook, Comey told MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace, who was moderating the event. ‘And it would drive into the fabric of our nation a third of the people believing there was a coup. And we need a moment of inflection, where we all get off the couch and say, 'That is not who we are,' and in a landslide rid ourselves of this attack on our values.’ The former FBI director suggested that impeachment might ‘short-circuit’ the political process, and ‘we wouldn't have the moment of clarity we need in this country.’" CBSNews.com, December 10^th.

The NRA tells us that there are over 15 million AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifles out there and well over 300 million guns… and I suspect we can guess who owns most of those. If Trump were impeached, exactly what could happen from a reaction from his very-well armed “base”?

Never shy about dismissing millions of voters by unprovable claims of “voter fraud,” Donald Trump seems capable of twisting laws meant to protect our democracy into empowerment for his own autocratic ambitions. Every wonder about what would happen if Donald Trump felt sufficiently threatened to declare a national emergency? Huh? He can, you know… almost at the drop of a hat.

Writing for the January/February 2019 edition of The Atlantic, Elizabeth Giotein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice (at the New York University School of Law) explains: “The premise underlying [the President’s] emergency powers is simple: The government’s ordinary powers might be insufficient in a crisis, and amending the law to provide greater ones might be too slow and cumbersome. Emergency powers are meant to give the government a temporary boost until the emergency passes or there is time to change the law through normal legislative processes… Unlike the modern constitutions of many other countries, which specify when and how a state of emergency may be declared and which rights may be suspended, the U.S. Constitution itself includes no comprehensive separate regime for emergencies…

“The Supreme Court has often upheld such actions or found ways to avoid reviewing them, at least while the crisis was in progress. Rulings such as Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer, in which the Court invalidated President Harry Truman’s bid to take over steel mills during the Korean War, have been the exception. And while those exceptions have outlined important limiting principles, the outer boundary of the president’s constitutional authority during emergencies remains poorly defined…

“Unknown to most Americans, a parallel legal regime allows the president to sidestep many of the constraints that normally apply. The moment the president declares a ‘national emergency’—a decision that is entirely within his discretion—more than 100 special provisions become available to him. While many of these tee up reasonable responses to genuine emergencies, some appear dangerously suited to a leader bent on amassing or retaining power. For instance, the president can, with the flick of his pen, activate laws allowing him to shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the United States or freeze Americans’ bank accounts. Other powers are available even without a declaration of emergency, including laws that allow the president to deploy troops inside the country to subdue domestic unrest.

“This edifice of extraordinary powers has historically rested on the assumption that the president will act in the country’s best interest when using them. With a handful of noteworthy exceptions, this assumption has held up. But what if a president, backed into a corner and facing electoral defeat or impeachment, were to declare an emergency for the sake of holding on to power? In that scenario, our laws and institutions might not save us from a presidential power grab. They might be what takes us down.” In other words, ever wonder what an autocratic president might do who does not believe he does not have universal support from the people with a right-wing, well-armed radical base behind him if he wanted to avoid an election or simply wished to invalidate one if he loses? And exactly what would this could become?

              I’m Peter Dekom, and I suspect most of us just don’t take our fears out far enough to contemplate “what’s the worst that can happen?”… kind of like Americans just before the Civil War, huh?