Tag Archives: politics

Jennifer Rubin Quits the Washington Post and Starts New Media Outlet

16 Thursday Jan 2025

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , ,

Jen is a long-time friend. Once a member of my congregation in Los Angeles, I happily officiated at her marriage and had hopes that she would eventually rise to become the President of my synagogue’s Board of Trustees. But, she left LA for the Washington, D.C. area 20 plus years ago for a position at a law firm in Virginia and eventually became a prolific blogger at The Washington Post. She is a brilliant thinker and writer, and the list of writers (below) to her new Media Outlet called “The Contrarian” is exceptional.

I hope you will subscribe. I did so immediately upon receiving her email. Since then, Jen’s and Norm Eisen’s new media platform and outlet have been covered widely in the media. Details and links to subscribe are below in Jen’s initial email:

“Friends, relations:

Please excuse the group email. After 14 years at The Washington Post I quit today. Bezos’s decision to sacrifice journalism at the altar of self-interest (how many billions are enough??) meant I could no longer stay at The Post. I have felt muzzled for some time, and recent events pushed me over the edge.

That’s why I couldn’t be more excited to announce the launch of a new independent media outlet: The Contrarian. With a large group of friends and colleagues we have started a platform that will be unabashed, unvarnished and irreverent. It will have political opinion, commentary, interviews but much more – cooking, film, books, and even dogs!

You can find the first edition of The Contrarian here, alongside our launch video here. For those on social media please follow on Bluesky (account below).

Every weekday, you will receive at least two pieces of content: a daily morning column written by me [Jen Rubin], followed by a piece by Norm Eisen or one of our brilliant contributing Contrarians. Those voices include Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, Andrew Weissmann, Andy Borowitz, Asha Rangappa, Barbara McQuade, Bob Kagan, David Litt, Esosa Osa, George Conway, Harry Litman, Ilan Goldenberg, John Dean, Jonathan Alter, Joyce Vance, Katie Phang, Karen Agnifilo, Kim Lane Scheppele, Professor Laurence Tribe, Lavora Barnes, Michael Podhorzer, Nancy Gertner, Olivia Julianna, Renato Mariotti, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Stephen Richer, Tom Joscelyn, and many more to come.

Please check it out, subscribe and take a few minutes to send to friends and family. I really need your help. This is a labor of love (and a little scary). Thanks in advance.

With love and appreciation,

Jen – http://contrarian.substack.com/  

BlueSky: – @contrariannews.bsky.social – @jenrubin.bsky.social

Jennifer Rubin, Editor-in-Chief – The Contrarian”

The Threat Assessment Against Israeli Democracy

31 Tuesday Dec 2024

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , ,

Orly Erez-Likhovski, the Director of the Israeli Religious Action Center (IRAC – the social justice arm of Israel’s Reform Jewish Movement), several weeks ago offered a power-point threat assessment on Israeli democracy by the most extreme right-wing Israeli government in the history of the state. Orly spoke to those of us on the International Advisory Council for the Israel Movement for Reform Judaism and gave me permission to post what she said. I added language only for the purpose of clarification.

Orly is a brilliant Israeli and American lawyer who has brought about significant legal achievements in Israel including making illegal gender segregation on public transportation, ending the Orthodox monopoly on state-funded salaries to rabbis, filing (and winning) the first ever class action suit regarding exclusion of and humiliating practices against women in Israeli society, and disqualifying racist candidates from running for seats in Israel’s Knesset (Parliament).

Orly cited the important work of Kim Lane Scheppele, an American scholar of law and politics at Princeton University, who describes 8 means to dismantle liberal democracies from within and cement authoritarian rule. Scheppele has studied Turkey, Hungary, and the United States (see her essay – “Autocratic Legalism” in The University of Chicago Law Review – https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/autocratic-legalism). Orly suggests that Scheppele’s analysis is applicable to what is taking place in Israel today:

  1. Winning democratic elections followed by an attack against democratic institutions (e.g. the judiciary, the media, the prosecutor’s office, the tax authority, and the election commission);
  2. Dismantling the mechanisms that restrict the ruling government;
  3. Controlling the Parliament through intimidation of its members thereby turning it to irrelevance as an independent government branch;
  4. Subordinating the courts to the government through so-called “reforms”;
  5. Gaining control over media outlets and spreading “fake news”;
  6. Placing loyalists in key positions throughout the government and in the media; 
  7. Delegitimizing opponents of the government by calling them traitors;
  8. Changing election laws to ensure future victory.

Introductory notes:

Understanding Israeli politics, political parties, and Israel’s “parliamentary democratic government” is challenging because there is no rigid constitution in Israel, though there have been continuous efforts to write one since the earliest years of the state. Many laws still on the books are founded upon Ottoman and British Mandate law that were in use before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. To take the place of a written constitution, Israel passed since 1950 fourteen “Basic Laws” (i.e.  laws which are supposed to be of a higher status than regular laws but in fact can be enacted and changed like any other law). Most of these laws deal with the various branches of government. Two basic laws constitute Israel’s “Bill of Rights” but again – they can be changed by a simple majority in the Knesset. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Laws_of_Israel).

Here is Orly’s power-point presentation:

Israeli democracy is already weak and vulnerable:

  • There are no checks on the power of the Israeli government, except by the courts.
  • Israel’s separation of powers is thin since the government controls the Knesset through its coalition majority (i.e. the current extreme right-wing government has 68 Members out of a total of 120 MKs (57 percent).

There are no democratic mechanisms of checks and balances in Israel that exist in other democratic countries:

  • No 2 houses of parliament;
  • No regional elections;
  • No federal system;
  • No presidential veto power;
  • No international courts that the government must adhere to.

The right-wing Israeli government’s narrative and the assault on the courts:

  • The current right-wing government advocates against the independence of the Supreme Court claiming the Supreme Court is too active in striking down laws and government decisions, thereby preventing the elected government from implementing the will of the people.
  • The reality is that only 24 laws have been struck down by Israel’s Supreme Court in the past 30 years. The Supreme court is exceptionally cautious and will intervene only in exceptional circumstances.
  • The claim that the courts do not allow the government to implement the will of the majority disregards 2 critical characteristics of a democracy: the separation of powers and the protection of human rights, especially minority rights.

2023 – The “Judicial Coup”:

  • In December 2022, the government, led by PM Benjamin Netanyahu, took power.
  • In January 2023, the government’s Justice Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Yariv Levin announced the intention of passing a series of laws dramatically weakening Israel’s democracy, especially in limiting the government’s Judicial Review in the following ways:
  1. Taking away the Supreme Court’s ability to strike down Basic Laws that conflict with Israel’s democratic principles (meaning, any law could be shielded from judicial review simply by giving it the title “Basic Law”).
  2. Severely limiting the Supreme Court’s ability to strike down “regular” laws.
  3. Giving the Knesset the power to override a court decision and reenact a law that previously had been struck down by the Supreme Court.

Changing the process of nominating judges:

  • Today, to assure non-partisan balance, new judges are nominated by a committee comprised of 3 Supreme Court Justices, 2 Government Ministers, 2 Members of Knesset, and 2 lawyers. 7 of the 9 members of the committee are required to nominate a Supreme Court Justice. The Chief Justice of the Supreme court is nominated by a majority of the above and traditionally the most senior justice has been chosen to be Chief Justice.
  • However, the “Judicial Coup” aims to give the ruling coalition complete control over the judicial selection committee that would include 3 politically appointed ministers, 3 government coalition MKs, 3 justices, 2 opposition MKs, and for any nomination, 6 out of 11 majority would suffice.

The Attorney General (AG) and Legal Advisors of Government Ministries:

  • Currently, the AG is nominated by a professional selection committee. The AG is the ultimate authority regarding the legality of governmental actions. The AG’s opinion about the legality of the government’s actions binds the government. The AG represents the government in the courts. The same is true about legal advisors to the government ministries who are all subordinated to the AG and not to government ministers.
  • The “Judicial Coup” would allow the government to disregard the legal opinions of the AG and of legal advisors altogether and to choose a private lawyer to represent the government in court.

The “Reasonableness Doctrine”:

  • The Supreme Court can intervene in administrative decisions judged “unreasonable” (i.e. arbitrary, capricious, having bias, and showing conflict of interest). The Supreme Court rarely rules that a government decision is “unreasonable” (averaging only 1.6 times/year since 1995).
  • The “Judicial Coup” intended to prevent the Supreme Court from declaring any governmental or ministerial decision “unreasonable”.

What happened to the “Judicial Coup” legislation?

  • Before October 7, 2023, due to the unprecedented nearly year-long public protests of hundreds of thousands of Israelis across political parties and religious streams, all but one of the components of the “Judicial Coup” legislation failed to become law. The only component of the “Judicial Coup” legislation that the Knesset approved (in July 2023) is abolishing the “Reasonableness Doctrine”.
  • However, in January 2024, the Supreme Court struck down this law that abolished the “Reasonableness Doctrine” (sitting for the first time in Israel’s history in a full panel of 15 judges – suggesting how important the Supreme Court Justices understood this government action to be). This was also the first time the Supreme Court ever struck down a Basic Law. It did so on the grounds that the government’s action contradicts fundamental values in Israeli democracy (i.e. separation of powers and the rule of law).

The current government continues to promote a “Judicial/Regime Coup” post-October 7 – Why change the law if we can ignore it?

  • Court packing – Since October 2023, 3 liberal justices (of the total of 15 Supreme Court Justices) retired at the mandatory retirement age of 70. The right-wing Justice Minister Yariv Levin refuses to convene the judicial selection committee to nominate 3 new justices because he does not have the votes to appoint the right-wing judges that he wants.
  • Chief Justice of the Supreme Court – Justice Minister Levin refuses to follow the seniority rule and to obey court orders that have called for the appointment of a new Chief Justice, for the same reason above. The most senior judge who would become Chief Justice is a liberal, and Levin, consequently, has refused to act. For the first time in Israeli history, Israel has an interim Chief Justice.
  • Ethics of Judges – There is an attempt to have the Knesset nominate a Commissioner in charge of judges’ ethics, thus providing for the political removal of judges.

The Attorney General (AG):

  • The government wants to disregard the AG’s opinions. For example, ignoring the Supreme Court ruling regarding the draft requirement of Ultra-Orthodox Jews to serve in the army or the illegality of providing State subsidies to Ultra-Orthodox men who avoid army service.
  • The government employs a private attorney to represent it in the courts thereby side-lining the AG altogether.
  • There has been intensive incitement and threats against the AG (Gali Baharav-Miara), who was appointed in 2022 by former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Justice Minister Gideon Saar. She has been summoned by extremists in the current government to a government “hearing” and there are numerous right-wing calls for her to be fired simply for doing her job and upholding the law (although the government lacks the authority to do so).
  • The current government passed a law to force senior legal advisors to government ministries to retire, thus enabling it to appoint legal advisors who will act as “yes-men”.

Politicization of the Police:

  • National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir is a racist follower of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. In a democracy, there should be a high wall between government ministers and the professional operation of the police. Ben Gvir has crashed that wall, and he intervenes regularly in police work (e.g. investigations, arrests, and nominations that include promoting violent officers).
  • There is selective enforcement of laws – harsh treatment of anti-government protesters as opposed to lenient treatment of extreme right-wing violence against Palestinians.
  • There is a petition pending before the Supreme Court challenging the law that allows the minister to intervene in police investigations.

Attack on Academia:

  • A bill is being presented to the Knesset that would force universities to fire professors based on expressions of “supporting terror,” but without due process, thus enabling political persecution without having to bring evidence or secure a conviction.
  • Universities that fail to fire such professors will be denied state funding.
  • A similar law regarding teachers in schools was already approved.
  • The person in charge of enforcing this law would be the government’s right-wing Education Minister Yoav Kisch, thereby dramatically restricting free speech.

Attack on the Media:

  • The right-wing government is presenting favorable regulation of pro-government TV stations such as Channel 14 (Israel’s equivalent of America’s “Fox News”).
  • The government strives to weaken media outlets critical of the government (e.g. the Public Broadcast Authority, Haaretz, and Galei Tzahal – the official radio station of Israel’s army).
  • The government is striving to turn regional radio stations (most privately owned by moguls connected to the government) into state-wide stations as a favor to owners.
  • The government is striving to change the rating system of media stations (as implemented by an independent, not-for-profit organization that measures viewership data to determine ratings for television channels and programs) to be controlled by the government.
  • After October 7, 2023, the government passed a law allowing the government’s Communications Minister to shut down media outlets – Al Jazeera was shut down in April 2024.
  • A new bill will grant the government more sweeping powers – allowing the government to shut down internet sites.

Bills against Palestinian Citizens of Israel:

  • A law is being proposed that will make it easier to disqualify Arab Political Parties and Arab candidates from running in elections for the Knesset thus ensuring a majority for the current right-wing government in future elections. Twenty percent of Israel’s total population is Palestinian-Israeli citizens. Only once was an Arab Political Party (Ra’am) part of a ruling Israeli government coalition (in 2021-2022). Eliminating Arab Parties from the Knesset would tip the balance of the total 120 Knesset members to right-wing control of the government. Israeli law requires that much evidence must be presented to support disqualifying a political party or a candidate on the basis of terrorism. This new law would only require bringing “one case” or “one statement” to disqualify said party or candidate, while in order to disqualify racist right-wing parties one would need to present a heavy case of evidence.
  • The government is striving to abolish the need for the state attorney’s approval of police investigations on incitement offenses. It is certainly legitimate to investigate support for Hamas’s attack against Israel on October 7, but it is another matter to investigate someone who publicly expresses concern for Palestinian well-being in Gaza as a consequence of the war. This law would have a chilling effect on Palestinian free speech in Israel. There is already selective enforcement for incitement offenses against Palestinians since October 7, 2023 and this would make the situation worse.
  • Efforts are being made to prevent the General Security Service from using administrative custody towards Jews accused of terrorism and allowing it only to be used against Palestinians accused of terrorism.

Additional Dangers:

  • Civil Service – changing the way the non-partisan Commissioner of Civil Service is nominated to gain governmental control over the nomination.
  • Bar Association – weakening the Israeli Bar Association in order to influence its representatives on the committee nominating judges.
  • Rabbis’ Law – adding hundreds of state paid rabbis, all of whom are Orthodox men chosen by the government, thereby deepening the Orthodox monopoly and discrimination against other non-Orthodox religious streams (e.g. Conservative, Reform, etc.).
  • Rabbinical Courts – promoting a bill that will give rabbinical courts jurisdiction over civil matters (currently they have jurisdiction only over matters of marriage and divorce), thereby promoting a theocracy over Israel’s democracy.
  • Military Draft – promoting a bill that will grant exemption from the military draft to Ultra-Orthodox Jews, contrary to Supreme Court decisions.
  • Settler Violence against Palestinians – extreme Jewish settlers’ violence against Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank which is not treated in an equivalent manner to Palestinian violence against Jewish settlers.
  • West Bank Status – the civil responsibility for the West Bank is being transferred from military officers to people affiliated with the extreme right-wing Finance Minster Betzalel Smotrich thus paving the way for de jure annexation of the West Bank into Israel.

What is IRAC (the Reform Movement’s Israel Religious Action Center) doing in the face of such dangers?

  • In the Knesset, our lawyers are attending committee meetings, filing position papers, and opposing dangerous bills that would harm Israeli democracy.
  • Our Israeli Reform movement is participating in public campaigns to raise awareness to all the above dangers.
  • We are working in cooperation with other Israeli NGOs and human rights organizations to create a stronger impact and effective messaging against all threats to Israel’s democracy.
  • We are protesting alongside hundreds of thousands of Israelis from across the religious streams and political parties who regard seriously the dangers posed against Israeli democracy by the current extremist government and refuse to be silent.
  • In appropriate cases we are challenging all the dangerous policies and laws in court.

We must remember the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. – “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people.”

We will not be silent but act to preserve Israel as a Jewish and democratic State.

Want to learn more? Sign up for IRAC’s weekly newsletter – the Pluralist!

 

Biden, Trump, the Politics of Revenge and Blanket Pardons

24 Tuesday Dec 2024

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

I have listened to both sides of the argument (legal and moral) about whether Joe Biden should issue blanket pardons to all office holders, journalists, and everyone else that Trump and his revenge-retribution sycophantic machine expects to target, including such American heroes as Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, the entire January 6 Congressional Commission, many journalists and traditional media organizations such as MSNBC, ABC etc. etc. etc.

For the sake of our democracy, free speech, freedom of the press, and the personal well-being of the targets of Trump’s sickening promises and campaign, I hope that President Biden will issue across the board pardons to the above before he leaves office to spare these good Americans so targeted the expected enormous financial expense that defending oneself will be required, their physical safety, and their good names.

American democracy has its flaws, to be sure, but our national aspirations are built upon freedom of speech, freedom of the press, an independent judiciary, separation of powers, and generally our constitutional order and democratic institutions and norms and should not be sullied by the likes of Trump any more than possible. President Biden can stop some of Trump’s awful blood-letting before he leaves office.

If you have access to President Biden and/or to your Senators and Congressional Representatives, please use whatever influence and agency you have to try and compel President Biden to issue these pardons before it is too late.

The negativity and unethical basis of revenge that lurks in the dark side of the human character has been commented upon by many over the centuries. Here are a few thoughts worth considering:

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” -Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

“Revenge is always the weak pleasure of a little and narrow mind… Revenge is sweeter than life itself. So think fools.” -Decimus Junius Juvenalis, known in English as Juvenal (b. 55 C.E.)

“Those who plot the destruction of others often perish in the attempt.” -Thomas Moore (1779-1852)

“Little, vicious minds abound with anger and revenge, and are incapable of feeling the pleasure of forgiving their enemies.” -Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

UPHOLDING US LAW TO HOLD NETANYAHU ACCOUNTABLE IS PRO-ISRAEL

08 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

This blog was posted by J Street on Friday, December 6

By Rabbi John Rosove and Sam Berkman

We wish we weren’t here. We wish October 7 had never happened. We wish all the hostages were home and that all had survived. We wish thousands of Palestinians had not fallen victim in this terrible war. We wish the fighting would stop and Israelis and Palestinians could know freedom and security–peace. But that’s not where we are today.

As this devastating war rages on, it’s time to confront a hard truth: Supporting Israel doesn’t always mean unquestioning endorsement of its government’s actions or the automatic provision of foreign aid. True support sometimes requires breaking from convention. Simply supplying military assistance – without tackling the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – may temporarily mask the symptoms for Israelis, but it won’t deliver lasting peace and security. 

Ignoring those deeper issues undermines the US-Israel relationship and risks the lives of Israelis and Palestinians alike—a reality we’ve seen tragically play out over the past year.

This was the context for the US Senate’s vote last month on a series of resolutions to disapprove certain arms sales to Israel—measures that were largely symbolic, as the deadline to block the sales had already passed. While the resolutions failed, as expected, the vote sent a clear message of dissent of how the Netanyahu government has conducted the war in Gaza, its disregard for US laws, and the Biden administration’s handling of the conflict.

Nearly 14 months into this war, over 100 hostages remain in Gaza. Israeli security experts – including Israel’s recently ousted Defense Minister – have said that continuing the war in Gaza serves no strategic purpose. Meanwhile, President Biden’s repeated appeals for Netanyahu to take stronger action on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza have largely gone unanswered. 

Israel has had no greater friend over the last year than President Joe Biden, a self-proclaimed Zionist. From visiting Israel during wartime to providing critical military aid and even moving US military personnel and equipment into the region, Biden has consistently demonstrated America’s unwavering support for Israel.

And what has this loyalty yielded? Reports suggest that Netanyahu’s government is closer to advancing plans for rebuilding Israeli settlements in Gaza than securing the return of the hostages. Even most Israelis believe it is more important to secure a hostage deal now than continue the war.

So what more can be done? How do we help those Israelis who desperately want to break the stalemate and end the war, bring home the hostages, stop the suffering in Gaza, and set forth on a path toward regional peace and stability?

The answers do not lie in the empty rhetoric offered by those who opposed the Senate resolutions. Paying lip service to platitudes of peace while giving Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing government carte blanche hardly seems like the course of action a good friend to Israel should take.

Last month’s vote revealed something important: Leveraging US law to promote a shift toward policies that benefit Israel’s long-term security is not anti-Israel—it is profoundly pro-Israel.

Nineteen senators, all pro-Israel, stood up for US law and for their principles in the face of the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Among those who voted a symbolic ‘yes’ to disapprove the sales were the second-highest ranking Democrat–the Senate Majority Whip, four Democratic leaders, the incoming ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vice presidential running mate. Notably, three of these senators are Jewish. 

All 19 senators have long condemned Hamas and the horrific October 7 attack and reaffirmed Israel’s right to defend itself. They have called for the release of all hostages. They have voted for tens of billions of dollars of security aid to Israel throughout their careers. None of them are calling for anything approaching an arms embargo, and all of them endorse continued support for Iron Dome and other defensive systems.

Such resumes do not reflect an anti-Israel fringe. These are serious lawmakers who represent mainstream positions, including those within the American Jewish community– a recent poll of Jewish American voters found that 62 percent support withholding certain offensive arms to press for a ceasefire and hostage deal.

The positions taken by these courageous senators, which were couched in the spirit of supporting Israel, challenge traditional thinking in American politics and within the American Jewish community. But it is precisely this strategy we must embrace if we are committed to a future where Israel remains secure, vibrant, democratic, and Jewish, living in peace with its neighbors. 

We applaud these legislators, and we will continue to push for an Israel that reflects our highest Jewish and democratic values—and for US policies that champion this vision.

Doing this is many things: It’s American. It’s democratic. It’s Jewish. It’s pro-Palestinian. It’s pro-peace. It’s pro-Israel.

Upholding US Law to Hold Netanyahu Accountable is Pro-Israel

What Trump’s Plans for Eliminating the Department of Education Means for America and American Politics

17 Sunday Nov 2024

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , ,

“America has split, and flipped, by education levels. Democrats have largely lost the working-class voters who elected Barack Obama, and college-educated professionals are shifting away from the Republican Party.”

So reports Axios (by Erica Pandey – November 11, 2024) on the percentage of Americans who voted for Donald Trump who do not have college degrees and the percentage of Americans for Kamala Harris who do.

By the numbers: College graduates made up 43% of the electorate, and 55% voted for Vice President Harris, per exit polls.

  • 56% of voters without degrees voted for President-elect Trump.
  • The states below that level are almost all reliably red, and the states above it are almost all reliably blue.
  • And several of the states that hover right around the middle are closely watched battlegrounds.

See Axios article – https://www.axios.com/2024/11/07/college-degree-voters-split-harris-trump

As Trump prepares to eliminate the Department of Education, it becomes clear what his and the right wing’s attempt to dumb-down America mean generally and specifically on matters of race and gender – namely, to keep America divided between red and blue states and to sway swing states into red states in order to create a permanent right-wing red state dominated federal government.

Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, explains in her “Letters to an American” the history, purpose and specifics of funding that the Department of Education provides for K-12 students. Controlling what and how students learn and don’t learn by allowing states alone to set the standards for public education serves the extreme right wing of the MAGA Republican Party that relies on voters with less education to elect its state and federal leadership.

I can only hope that after 4 years of the Trump presidency that the next president (should he/she be a Democrat) will reestablish the Department of Education, federal funding of K-12 schools for a variety of important purposes, and the open and inclusive values that are the mission of thhe the Department.

Here is Dr. Richardson’s piece from yesterday (November 16, 2024):

“One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states. 

In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do.

The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.

It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.

The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. 

A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first  Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science. 

But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition. 

In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.

After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”

The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values. 

When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the Covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.

Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault. 

In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies. 

When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination. 

After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.

When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” 

During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.

But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars. 

There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.

In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/11/12/trump-close-education-department-proposal-explained/
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/11/15/trump-abolishing-education-department-may-hurt-students-with-disabilities/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/09/26/home-schooling-vs-public-school-poll/
https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/evangelical-homeschooling-and-the-development-of-family-values
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/19/936225974/the-legacy-of-education-secretary-betsy-devos

Click to access full_issue_of_the_1619_project.pdf

Moms for Liberty Is Waging War on LGBTQ and Race-Inclusive Books
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/4/6/23673209/trans-students-sports-participation-biden-title-ix/
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-10-02-0162

Click to access a-nation-at-risk-report.pdf

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/nation-risk-and-re-segregation-schools

X:

SteveRattner/status/1856816905379532870

DGComedy/status/1848389872165306824

Addressing a Case of Anxiety

27 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

The polls are making me crazy. I know I’m not alone. I’ve written in this blog about my incredulity that so many millions of Americans continue to support Donald Trump and that current Republican office holders who can’t stand Trump refuse out of cowardice to say so publicly.

Many have sought to explain Trump’s appeal, including Ezra Klein most recently in a thoughtful verbal essay a week ago on his podcast and, following that, by an in-depth interview with NYT’s journalist Maggie Haberman who, among journalists, knows Trump better than most. It ought to be clear to everyone by now who he is, the danger he poses to our democratic institutions, and who Kamala Harris is too.

Understanding that no candidate for public office is without his/her flaws and weaknesses, Kamala Harris has hers as well, though for middle-left Democrats she has shown herself to be a strong, honest, empathic, smart, pragmatic, experienced, competent, and charismatic leader based in broad liberal democratic values, supportive of the US Constitution and rule of law, and of America’s traditional place in the international order.

Given Donald Trump’s enormous weaknesses as a candidate and as a man and his utter lack of empathy, I’ve struggled to understand why he remains so competitive in the polls. In any former election before the so-called “Trump Era,” his behavior and character would have been disqualifying for the presidency.

David Plouffe, Kamala Harris’ Senior Advisor, explained that since September, nothing substantial has changed in the polls. Harris and Trump are historically close and Harris’ lead in the key swing states is within the margins of error. Plouffe and others say, however, that we would rather be us than Trump, that Kamala is a far better candidate with better policies that positively will impact the economy and the lives of more Americans, and will preserve the United States’ role internationally. Harris also has a far better ground-game and has more money than Trump to make her case.

James Carville wrote an opinion piece in the NY Times last week in which he argued why he is certain that Kamala Harris will win the election just as the historian Allan Lichtman has argued since she became the Democratic standard-bearer in July.

This past week on the MSNBC Podcast How to Win 2024 with former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill and former RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Steele sought to allay the anxiety that so many of us Democrats feel (we are a nervous bunch, to be sure). He explained that the polls are being skewed by the deliberate infusion of hundreds of MAGA leaning polls to jack up the confidence of Trump supporters that can drive his base to the polls and lay the groundwork for Trump’s denial of the results if/when he loses the election.

Steele’s argument calmed me down a bit, as well as the recent revelations of General John Kelly in his NYT’s interview with Mike Schmidt, and the news that 200 former Republican office holders and members of past Republican administrations are voting for Kamala Harris. And then there are all the celebrity endorsers such as Beyoncé’s appearance with Kamala in Houston, Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, Michelle and Barak Obama’s barnstorming in swing states, a plethora of strong cutting-edge Harris ads flooding social media, and Harris and Walz appearing everywhere in interviews and rallies.

It’s difficult, nevertheless, not knowing how this election will turn out given the enormous stakes. That’s the source of my anxiety and fear. I’ve tried to contain my anxiety by distracting myself with other things, in remembering that turn-out and only the final poll (i.e. the vote) matters, and that the advantages are with the Harris-Walz campaign.

Here are a few thoughts by others that have helped me address my fear and anxiety in these final days. I hope they might help those of you who feel as I do as November 5th approaches:

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” -Dale Carnegie, no relation to Andrew Carnegie, (1888-1955)

“I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.” -Rosa Parks (1913-2005)

“Read to children. Vote. And never buy anything from a man who’s selling fear.” -Mary Doria Russell, science-fiction writer (b. 1950)

“Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.” -Jodi Picoult, American novelist (b. 1966)

“Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.” -Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Remember to vote and be sure everyone you know votes – hopefully, for the Harris-Walz ticket. If you are willing and able to volunteer to get out the vote, go to Pod Save America’s non-partisan “Vote Save America PAC” at https://votesaveamerica.com/

PS – The Washington Post did a deep dive into policy preferences between Harris and Trump without identifying whose policies they were. The result was overwhelming support for Kamala Harris’ policies – see https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/trump-harris-policy-quiz/?utm_campaign=wp_week_in_ideas&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_ideas

Thoughts in the Pews

06 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

This Rosh Hashanah I spent much of my time in synagogue thinking about this past awful year in the life of the Jewish people and the State of Israel – the October 7 Hamas massacre, the hostage-taking, the ensuing war, the destruction in Gaza, the 18,000 missiles launched by Hezbollah against Israel, Iran’s April attack, the extremist Iran-based Houthi attacks, Israel’s military response against all these Islamic extremist terrorist groups seeking the destruction of Israel, and the dramatic rise in anti-Israel, anti-Zionism and antisemitism in America and around the world. I’ve been weighing and evaluating what this traumatic year will mean for our liberal Jewish and Zionist identity and values and what we might commit to doing in the New Year.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that this has been the most horrific, frightening and sad year in the life of the Jewish people since the end of the Holocaust. The most inspiration I have drawn from the events of this year has been the response of Israel’s civil society in support of the hostage families and the young soldiers and reservists who left their homes, families and businesses and did whatever was asked of them in defense of the Jewish people and State. I’ve been inspired as well by the loving and positive response of world Jewry to our Israeli brothers and sisters, and by President Biden’s and America’s support of Israel’s right to defend itself, and also by his and his administration’s concern for Palestinian civilians who have suffered so severely in Gaza as a consequence of this war.

Haviv Rettig Gur, an Israeli commentator on The Times of Israel Daily Podcast, suggested this past week that Rosh Hashanah this year may well be the inflection point for Israel that we’ve been waiting for, when Israel and its enemies take a turn, find a way to end this current conflict, to the return of the hostages, and to determining the next steps that will lead to greater regional stability and peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian people on a path to a two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to an expansion of the Arab nations in the Abraham Accords.

He noted that Rosh Hashanah is a holiday unique among all the major holy days in the Jewish calendar year. The other major Jewish festivals of Sukkot, Pesach, and Shavuot begin with a new moon. Rosh Hashanah begins in darkness, without a full moon, beneath a firmament of stars the lights of which come to us from a far earlier era in the history of the Milky Way Galaxy. These High Holidays, beginning in darkness and moving towards an expansion of light as the crescent moon reaches its fullness on Sukkot, call upon the Jewish people to begin again, to seek moral and spiritual enlightenment, to emphasize the sacred character of life, to reaffirm our faith in the best of the human condition and in our innate ability to solve our many personal and societal problems, and in the hope that change and goodness can come in this New Year.

To those amongst our people who have thrown up their hands in disgust by the killing and destruction in Gaza and by the corrupt leadership of the most extreme right wing government in the history of the Jewish State, I understand the rage and despair. I have felt it too. But I ask for caution before you step away from the State of Israel and the Jewish people as some are now doing. The founding and development of Israel is arguably the greatest accomplishment of the Jewish people in the past two thousand years. Yet, this year has been a test for many Jews, and some have turned their backs on Israel and Jewish life. This is not the time to turn away. Since the anti-judicial reform movement that took place during the year before October 7 (and still threatens Israeli democracy as long as this current government rules), Israelis have turned to us Diaspora Jews for our moral and emotional support. After October 7, our solidarity with Israelis has meant much to them. They tell us so in ways I’ve never heard before. Israelis are concerned for us too and our well-being as antisemitism has grown in America and in many European capitals. We Jews there and here are one family, and though there are Israeli Jewish extremists with whom I don’t identify in any way, there are hundreds of thousands of Israelis with whom I do identify very strongly, with love for and pride in who they are and who we are as Jews who share common liberal Jewish and Zionist values.

This is the time for us Diaspora Jews to reinvest in ourselves as Jews, as supporters of Israel, and in who we are as a people. It isn’t enough any longer to be merely so-called “cultural Jews” or “culinary Jews.” Many American Jews have turned away because they don’t believe in the God of Jewish history and tradition. But, Jewish faith in God is only a portion of what characterizes the Jewish people in the modern era. If you don’t believe in God or in the religion of the Jewish people, there is still so much more to what constitutes Judaism and Jewish peoplehood that is appealing and self-affirming – our common history, a shared historic Homeland, an ethical tradition, the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages of Yiddish, Ladino and Aramaic, the Jewish arts of painting, sculpture, film, dance, song, and literature, and the long list of Israeli and Jewish accomplishments and inventions that have enhanced Israeli and modern Jewish life and the world as a whole. In all of that, we have a right to feel a deep sense of pride as Jews – but only if we know what our people has accomplished and what liberal Jewish values characterize us.

I encourage everyone to set as one goal in this New Year to read Jewish history, to learn about Zionism and Zionist thought as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and as our people’s social justice movement. Contemporary Jewry, by and large, does not know nearly enough Jewish history or about the content of our classic religious, theological, and philosophical texts from the Hebrew Bible through the writings of our rabbis, sages, philosophers, mystics, Enlightenment, and Zionist thinkers. Encourage the young people in your families, from post-bar and -bat mitzvah age to university age to take courses on Judaism, Zionism, the history of the State of Israel, and Jewish ethics, history, and tradition. A Jew cannot know his/her path in life without knowing from whence they’ve come as a people and why we are who we are and what we value.

This ten-day period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur has the capacity to restore and reinvigorate our sense of our Jewish identity, to realign our Jewish moral compass, to refocus and renew our support for our Israeli brothers and sisters, and to gird ourselves for more uncertainty in the Middle East and in America.

As we come together on Yom Kippur this coming week, I hope for the end of this war, the immediate return of the hostages to their families, the safety of Israel’s soldiers and innocent Palestinians too, for the victory of the IDF against Israel’s enemies, for our strength in standing against antisemites on the left and the right in America, and for peace with security for all peoples at war not only in the Middle East but in Ukraine and everywhere around the world.

Gmar tov u-l’shanah tovah u-m’tukah.

May we be sealed in the Book of Life and be graced with a good and sweet New Year.

44 Years Ago

29 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

On the morning of Rosh Hashanah in 1980 (5741), I delivered a sermon about the central theme in the national conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs to a packed sanctuary of 1,400 congregants. As a fledgling 30 year-old rabbi at Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco, I had no idea what my congregants were thinking. I was a rookie rabbi then speaking about what was – and still is – one of the most hotly debated issues in the world. As I spoke, I watched their faces and eyes, and I paid attention to their body language as I moved through my text. I knew that what I was saying was controversial, but I didn’t know if they were with me or against me. I would find out immediately after the service ended.

My first instinct was to push things further than I did – to call for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But that was 1980 and no one was doing that except a few of my friends who were left-wing Labor Zionists (and not congressional rabbis) and a small minority of Israelis. I was told that I’d lose my job if I gave the sermon I really wanted to give.

44 years later, as this awful war between Israel and the terrorist organization Hamas continues and the hostages languish in tunnels beneath Gaza, and recent polls show overwhelming distrust and fear felt by Israelis towards Palestinians and Palestinians towards Israelis, and as Israel fights the Iran-created and -controlled terrorist organization Hezbollah in Lebanon that has fired 8000 precision rockets at Israel since October 8 last year, and a wider war threatens all the peoples of the Middle East, I could lift much of what I wrote then and give a similar sermon this year, with adjustments given the passage of time and events.

In my newly published book “From the West to the East – A Memoir of a Liberal American Rabbi” I tell the whole near-violent story of what happened that day 44 years ago, and I explore and go deeper into what I’ve learned throughout my 45-year career as a liberal rabbi in San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles. I talk about family, faith, human rights that I’ve championed (and the blow-back I’ve so often received), travel, Israel-Palestine (of course), and everything in-between.

If you have already purchased my book – thank you. If not, I invite you to do so now. It is filled with many dramatic stories that I’ve experienced; and I share my encounters with many remarkably wise and consequential people who have helped to shape my ideas and attitudes.

My Memoir is available on Amazon or through the publisher – see links below. If you are moved by the book, please consider posting a review on Amazon.

If you would like to reach out, I’d love the chance to speak with your community in person or virtually about my story and the moral, religious and political challenges confronting us all in these difficult and challenging times.

I hope that this New Year 5785 will be for you and all those you love one of good health and well-being,  and that the Jewish people and all peoples of the Land will know peace and security in the New Year and the hostages will be returned home.

L’shanah tovah u-m’tukah.

Publisher – https://westofwestcenter.com/product/from-the-west-to-the-east/

Amazon – https://tinyurl.com/2s43mj4p

Central Conference of American Rabbis Statement Condemning Donald Trump’s Dangerous Antisemitic Campaign Rhetoric

24 Tuesday Sep 2024

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

Introductory Note:

The Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) is the Reform Movement’s Rabbinic association of more than 2000 ordained Reform Rabbis who serve the Jewish people in a variety of positions worldwide. I have been a member of the CCAR since I was ordained by the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion (the Reform movement’s rabbinic seminary) in New York in 1979. I am gratified by the following statement of condemnation of Donald Trump’s antisemitic rhetoric and I urge that this statement be disseminated widely not only to the Jewish people, but to all those who may be taken in by Trump’s outrageous statements about the role of Jews in American society today in our relationship to this American election and to the people and State of Israel.

This CCAR statement is limited to what Trump said most recently in relationship to the election and Jews and does not note past statements, such as his calling “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville, Virginia when referring to Neo-Nazi demonstrators who carried torches and shouted outside a Reform synagogue “Jews will not replace us”. It also does not refer to Trump’s ongoing misogyny, racism and hostility to black and brown immigrants. Senator Rafael Warnock (d. Georgia) put it well when he noted in response to Trump’s antisemitic rhetoric on Sunday morning that there is so much hate in Trump’s heart that it constantly flows outward.

Note below that the CCAR does not take partisan political positions (as this statement says clearly), and when I served as the Senior Rabbi of Temple Israel of Hollywood in Los Angeles and before that in congregations I served in Washington D.C. and San Francisco, I did not do so either because both Democrats and Republicans were/are members of my congregations and I respect those who think differently from me regardless of political affiliation. However, I made an exception one time in 40 years – in the 2016 presidential election in which I endorsed Hillary Clinton for president against Donald Trump because it was clear to me then that Trump’s hatred of large numbers of Americans based on race, gender, ethnicity, and religion and his threat to American democratic traditions and norms disqualified him from serving as President of the United States.

Here is the CCAR’s Statement.

September 23, 2024

The Central Conference of American Rabbis is grateful that both major candidates in the 2024 United States Presidential Election, Vice President Kamala Harris and Former President Donald Trump—together with their running mates—have taken strong stances in response to antisemitism. Antisemitism is a significant and growing problem in the United States, finding a welcome home at both the extreme right and left of the political spectrum.

At the same time, the Central Conference of American Rabbis strongly condemn Former President Trump’s repeated claims that Jewish Americans who vote for Vice President Harris would do so only because they suffer from mental illness and that American Jews would be to blame if Former President Trump did not prevail.[i]

The former claim fails to recognize that Jewish Americans, like all voters, have a variety of issues, both domestic and internal, which inform whom they will support this election. We also denounce the claim that Second Gentlemen Doug Emhoff is not a good Jew.[ii] Jews practice Judaism in a variety of ways and it is not the role of our leaders to judge and disparage how people practice their religion.

We are most troubled by the inflammatory claim that American Jews will be at fault if Former President Trump does not win the election. Falsely claiming that Jews, who represent less than 3% of Americans, will single handedly determine the winner of the election plays into age-old antisemitic lies about Jewish power. Former President Trump’s rhetoric relies on what Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt has called the “antisemitic conspiracy myth” that Jews enjoy disproportionate power and exercise outsized control in and beyond America.[iii] This dangerous rhetoric seeks to target the Jewish community at a time of heightened antisemitism. It is part of a disturbing pattern of Former President Trump attacking those who disagree with him.

It should go without saying that American Jews, no matter which party they support, are loyal Americans. While we condemn these baseless attacks, we also encourage all Jews to vote in the upcoming election and to support non-partisan get out the vote efforts. Our democracy depends on the participation of all citizens of our country. 

Rabbi Erica Asch, President
Rabbi Hara E. Person, Chief Executive
Central Conference of American Rabbis

Why the Electoral College Should be Abolished or Effectively Nullified

22 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

I love reading about American and world history, but the Electoral College system that elects the President of the United States has always confused me. This past week, Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, laid out clearly the history of the Electoral College. Before I quote her complete missive below, I want to explain for those (like me) who have found the workings of the Electoral College so confusing, how it works and why the national Republican Party is so fixated on eliminating one Electoral College vote in the State of Nebraska in order to even more advantage the Republican Party over the Democratic Party than is currently built into the Electoral College system thereby denying the principle of one person-one vote that is the hallmark of democracy.

How does the Electoral College work?

Each state is granted 2 votes in the Electoral College for each State Senator plus votes equaling the total number of congressional districts in the state (e.g. the largest State of California has 54 Electoral College votes including 2 Senators and 52 congressional seats; the smallest State of Wyoming has 3 Electoral College votes including 2 senators and 1 congressional seat). 270 Electoral College votes are needed to win the presidential election and if neither party receives 270 Electoral College votes, the election for President is decided in the House of Representatives with each state delegation having one vote. In such a case, the largest State of California, with a population of 39,128,162, and the smallest state of Wyoming, with a population of 586,485, would each have 1 vote. A majority of states (26) in the House is needed to win the presidential election. Senators would elect the Vice-President, with each Senator having a vote. A majority of Senators (51) is needed to win.

What is so important to the national Republican Party about Nebraska’s one Electoral College vote?

There are more Republican Party dominated States than Democratic Party dominated States which is why the national Republican Party has put so much pressure on the Nebraska State Legislature to fold the one “blue” congressional district into the winner-take-all Electoral College count for that “red” State, thus eliminating the “blue” congressional district from the Electoral College. For the same reason, the Republican Party refuses to give residents in the territory of Puerto Rico the vote in American presidential elections, even though Puerto Rico is an American protectorate and has a population of 3,268,802, more than the population in 20 States. The District of Columbia (with a population of 678,972) is also not a State, but its citizens do vote in the presidential election. D.C. is given 1 electoral vote for its 1 congressional district but no electoral votes for 2 Senators (which it does not have), as opposed to the smallest state of Wyoming that has 3 electoral votes (2 senators and 1 congressional representative). DC and Puerto Rico are both dominated by the Democratic Party.

How can the Electoral College be abolished and turn the Presidential election into the winner of the popular vote?

To abolish the Electoral College and allow the country to directly elect the US President would take a constitutional convention. Under Article 5 of the Constitution, an amendment must be proposed by a two-thirds vote of both Houses of Congress, or, if two-thirds of the States request one, by a convention called for that purpose. The amendment must then be ratified by three-fourths of the State legislatures, or three-fourths of conventions called in each State for ratification.

To do this, obviously, is a far stretch given the strong resistance of the many small states (though some small states are “blue”, far more are “red”). Reaching a two-thirds vote of the States is next to impossible as the “red” states would be forced to give up their un-democratic advantage over large populated “blue” states should there be a tie in the Electoral College (269 votes each), and they would never do that.

Is there an alternative to changing the Constitution and making the presidential election based on the popular vote as is the case with every other election for every other office in the United States?

Yes – it is called “The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact” in which States pledge to award all their electors to the winner of the national popular vote regardless of whether that State voted for the winner. To date, 16 states and the District of Columbia have joined the Compact for a total of 205 electoral votes. Once additional states, with a total of 65 more electoral votes (enough to reach 270 votes), join the Compact, it will go into effect and the next President will be effectively the winner of the national popular vote. To see which states have agreed to join, see https://citizenstakeaction.org/how-to-fix-the-electoral-college/.

I hope the above clarifies how the Electoral College is a corruption of democracy. Here is Heather Cox Richardson’s excellent review of the history of the Electoral College and how the framers of the US Constitution came to this unique system of electing our nation’s most important and powerful leader.

“On September 16, CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten wrote that while it’s “[p]retty clear that [Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala] Harris is ahead nationally right now… [h]er advantage in the battlegrounds is basically nil. Average it all, Harris’[s] chance of winning the popular vote is 70%. Her chance of winning the electoral college is 50%.” Two days later, on September 18, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) skipped votes in the Senate to travel to Nebraska, where he tried to convince state legislators to switch the state’s system of allotting electoral votes by district to a winner-take-all system. That effort so far appears unsuccessful. 

In a country of 50 states and Washington, D.C.—a country of more than 330 million people—presidential elections are decided in just a handful of states, and it is possible for someone who loses the popular vote to become president. We got to this place thanks to the Electoral College, and to two major changes made to it since the ratification of the Constitution. 

The men who debated how to elect a president in 1787 worried terribly about making sure there were hedges around the strong executive they were creating so that he could not become a king. 

Some of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention wanted Congress to choose the president, but this horrified others who believed that a leader and Congress would collude to take over the government permanently. Others liked the idea of direct election of the president, but this worried delegates from smaller states, who thought that big states would simply be able to name their own favorite sons. It also worried those who pointed out that most voters would have no idea which were the leading men in other states, leaving a national institution, like the organization of Revolutionary War officers called the Society of the Cincinnati, the power to get its members to support their own leader, thus finding a different way to create a dictator.

Ultimately, the framers came up with the election of a president by a group of men well known in their states but not currently office-holders, who would meet somewhere other than the seat of government and would disband as soon as the election was over. Each elector in this so-called Electoral College would cast two votes for president. The man with the most votes would be president, and the man with the second number of votes would be vice president (a system that the Twelfth Amendment ended in 1804). The number of electors would be equal to the number of senators and representatives allotted to each state in Congress. If no candidate earned a majority, the House of Representatives would choose the president, with each state delegation casting a single vote.

In the first two presidential elections—in 1788–1789 and 1792—none of this mattered very much, since the electors cast their ballots unanimously for George Washington. But when Washington stepped down, leaders of the newly formed political parties contended for the presidency. In the election of 1796, Federalist John Adams won, but Thomas Jefferson, who led the Democratic-Republicans (which were not the same as today’s Democrats or Republicans) was keenly aware that had Virginia given him all its electoral votes, rather than splitting them between him and Adams, he would have been president. 

On January 12, 1800, Jefferson wrote to the governor of Virginia, James Monroe, urging him to back a winner-take-all system that awarded all Virginia’s electoral votes to the person who won the majority of the vote in the state. He admitted that dividing electoral votes by district “would be more likely to be an exact representation of [voters’] diversified sentiments” but, defending his belief that he was the true popular choice in the country in 1796, said voting by districts “would give a result very different from what would be the sentiment of the whole people of the US. were they assembled together.” 

Virginia made the switch. Alarmed, the Federalists in Massachusetts followed suit to make sure Adams got all their votes, and by 1836, every state but South Carolina, where the legislature continued to choose electors until 1860, had switched to winner-take-all. 

This change horrified the so-called Father of the Constitution, James Madison, who worried that the new system would divide the nation geographically and encourage sectional tensions. He wrote in 1823 that voting by district, rather than winner-take-all, “was mostly, if not exclusively in view when the Constitution was framed and adopted.” He proposed a constitutional amendment to end winner-take-all.

But almost immediately, the Electoral College caused a different crisis. In 1824, electors split their votes among four candidates—Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and William Crawford—and none won a majority in the Electoral College. Although Jackson won the most popular votes and the most electoral votes, when the election went to the House, the state delegations chose Adams, the son of former president John Adams.

Furious Jackson supporters thought a developing elite had stolen the election, and after they elected Jackson outright in 1828, the new president on December 8, 1829, implored Congress to amend the Constitution to elect presidents by popular vote. “To the people belongs the right of electing their Chief Magistrate,” he wrote; “it was never designed that their choice should in any case be defeated, either by the intervention of electoral colleges or…the House of Representatives.” 

Jackson warned that an election in the House could be corrupted by money or power or ignorance. He also warned that “under the present mode of election a minority may…elect a President,” and such a president could not claim legitimacy. He urged Congress “to amend our system that the office of Chief Magistrate may not be conferred upon any citizen but in pursuance of a fair expression of the will of the majority.”

But by the 1830s, the population of the North was exploding while the South’s was falling behind. The Constitution counted enslaved Americans as three fifths of a person for the purposes of representation, and direct election of the president would erase that advantage slave states had in the Electoral College. Their leaders were not about to throw that advantage away.

In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery (except as punishment for a crime) and scratched out the three-fifths clause, meaning that after the 1870 census the southern states would have more power in the Electoral College than they did before the war. In 1876, Republicans lost the popular vote by about 250,000 votes out of 8.3 million cast, but kept control of the White House through the Electoral College. As Jackson had warned, furious Democrats threatened rebellion. They never considered Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, whom they called “Rutherfraud,” a legitimate president. 

In 1888 it happened again. Incumbent Democratic president Grover Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes out of 11 million cast, but Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison took the White House thanks to the 36 electoral votes from New York, a state Harrison won by fewer than 15,000 votes out of more than 1.3 million cast. Once in office, he and his team set out to skew the Electoral College permanently in their favor. Over twelve months in 1889–1890, they added six new, sparsely populated states to the Union, splitting the territory of Dakota in two and adding North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming while cutting out New Mexico and Arizona, whose inhabitants they expected would vote for Democrats.

The twentieth century brought another wrench to the Electoral College. The growth of cities, made possible thanks to modern industry—including the steel that supported skyscrapers—and transportation and sanitation, created increasing population differences among the different states.

The Constitution’s framers worried that individual states might try to grab too much power in the House by creating dozens and dozens of congressional districts, so they specified that a district could not be smaller than 30,000 people. But they put no upper limit on district sizes. After the 1920 census revealed that urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans, the House in 1929 capped its numbers at 435 to keep power away from those urban dwellers, including immigrants, that lawmakers considered dangerous, thus skewing the Electoral College in favor of rural America. Today the average congressional district includes 761,169 individuals—more than the entire population of Wyoming, Vermont, or Alaska—which weakens the power of larger states.  

In the twenty-first century the earlier problems with the Electoral College have grown until they threaten to establish permanent minority rule. A Republican president hasn’t won the popular vote since voters reelected George W. Bush in 2004, when his popularity was high in the midst of a war. The last Republican who won the popular vote in a normal election cycle was Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, in 1988, 36 years and nine cycles ago. And yet, Republicans who lost the popular vote won in the Electoral College in 2000—George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore, who won the popular vote by about a half a million votes—and in 2016, when Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by about 3 million votes but lost in the Electoral College to Donald Trump. 

In our history, four presidents—all Republicans—have lost the popular vote and won the White House through the Electoral College. Trump’s 2024 campaign strategy appears to be to do it again (or to create such chaos that the election goes to the House of Representatives, where there will likely be more Republican-dominated delegations than Democratic ones).

In the 2024 election, Trump has shown little interest in courting voters. Instead, the campaign has thrown its efforts into legal challenges to voting and, apparently, into eking out a win in the Electoral College. The number of electoral votes equals the number of senators and representatives to which each state is entitled (100 + 435) plus three electoral votes for Washington, D.C., for a total of 538. A winning candidate must get a majority of those votes: 270.

Winner-take-all means that presidential elections are won in so-called swing or battleground states. Those are states with election margins of less than 3 points, so close they could be won by either party. The patterns of 2020 suggest that the states most likely to be in contention in 2024 are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, although the Harris-Walz campaign has opened up the map, suggesting its internal numbers show that states like Florida might also be in contention. Candidates and their political action committees focus on those few swing states—touring, giving speeches and rallies, and pouring money into advertising and ground operations. 

But in 2024 there is a new wrinkle. The Constitution’s framers agreed on a census every ten years so that representation in Congress could be reapportioned according to demographic changes. As usual, the 2020 census shifted representation, and so the pathway to 270 electoral votes shifted slightly. Those shifts mean that it is possible the election will come down to one electoral vote. Awarding Trump the one electoral vote Nebraska is expected to deliver to Harris could be enough to keep her from becoming president.

Rather than trying to win a majority of voters, just 49 days before the presidential election, Trump supporters—including Senator Graham—are making a desperate effort to use the Electoral College to keep Harris from reaching the requisite 270 electoral votes to win. It is unusual for a senator from one state to interfere in the election processes in another state, but Graham similarly pressured officials in Georgia to swing the vote there toward Trump in 2020.”