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Candidates Aren't the Only Things on the Ballot. Here Are Some Issues

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Candidates Aren't the Only Things on the Ballot. Here Are Some Issues Candidates aren’t the only things on the ballot. Here are some issues worth paying attention to. Karen Tumulty | Washington Post | Oct 21, 2020 We should take a moment from our white-knuckled obsession with presidential horse race polls and the suddenly close Senate contests that could flip control of the chamber next year to remind ourselves that candidates aren’t the only things on the ballot in 2020. Almost entirely lost in the campaign coverage is that voters in 32 states will be making their will known on 120 initiatives, according to a tally by Ballotpedia. These measures range across the spectrum. Some, such as questions in Alaska and Massachusetts, seek to tamp down negative politics by putting in a “ranked choice” system in which voters list their candidate preferences in order rather than choosing one. It is an increasingly popular idea that advocates say would force people running for office to focus more on building coalitions and less on destroying each other. Other initiatives, such as those in Missouri and Virginia, ask whether their citizens want to join more than a dozen states that have established redistricting commissions to cut down on gerrymandering. Amid the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has brought a larger reconsideration of racial barriers, California is considering Proposition 16. The measure would bring back affirmative action, a reversal of what the state did in 1996, when 54.6 percent voted to amend the state constitution to prohibit government institutions from considering race, sex or ethnicity in public employment, public contracting or public education. Proposition 16’s prospects are unclear; if it fails, the affirmative action ban would stay in place. Also on the ballot across the country are at least 20 statewide and local initiatives that would deal with criminal justice — from measures in Columbus, Ohio, and Portland, Maine, that would establish civilian review boards to investigate claims of police misconduct, to a proposed constitutional amendment in Michigan that would require a search warrant for law enforcement to gain access to anyone’s electronic communications. Here’s why you should pay attention to these sorts of questions, even when they are being decided upon thousands of miles away from where you live: “Initiatives are much better at predicting the future than individual races,” says Grover Norquist, the veteran conservative activist who heads the anti- tax group Americans for Tax Reform. Among the ones that Norquist has his eye on this year is California’s Proposition 15, which would partially repeal a radical 1978 initiative known as Proposition 13 that put a lid on property taxes in a state of soaring real estate prices, squeezing local government of revenue. This year’s measure would leave the cap on homeowners’ property taxes, fixed to what they paid for their houses, but would tie what commercial ventures pay to the actual market value of their properties. By one estimate, it could raise taxes by as much as $11.5 billion a year, starting in 2025. Polling suggests the outcome for Proposition 15 is hard to predict, in part because California voters are more consumed by the national presidential race and the covid-19 pandemic and have not yet given the initiative much attention. State and local experiments that succeed tend to catch on elsewhere. And sometimes, the reverse is true. After a string of ballot initiatives in 2004 and 2008 banned same-sex marriage, the backlash changed the social climate around the issue. Prominent politicians such as then-President Barack Obama and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton — following the lead of then-Vice President Joe Biden — reversed their previous stances against legalizing gay marriage. In fact, what gave the LGBTQ community the nationwide right to marry was a series of court decisions that deemed the state laws, including the ban put into place by California’s 2008 Proposition 8, which was passed by a margin of more than 4 percentage points, to be unconstitutional. In its landmark 2015 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that gay couples should be allowed to marry, no matter where they lived in the United States. This is an election unlike any we have ever seen, and as high as the stakes are in the candidate contests, it’s worth remembering that other things will also be decided in just under two weeks, or whenever the results finally come in. In the dry language lower down on ballots across the country — which many voters may decide to skip entirely — are issues that could shape their lives, and perhaps all of ours, for many years to come. ■ I Was Reagan’s Solicitor General. Here’s What Biden Should Do With the Court. Joe Biden should be open to enlarging the number of justices. But first, he should see if the conservative majority overplays its hand. Charles Fried | New York Times | Oct 19, 2020 | OPINION Joe Biden got it exactly right in expressing an ambivalent openness to pushing for legislation — entirely constitutional — enlarging the number of Supreme Court justices, if Democrats win the presidency and the Senate in November. Such a move would make blazingly clear what some of us hope is not quite true: that the court is a partisan political institution, a conception that would invite further rounds of enlargement in a different political moment. But to paraphrase Churchill, such a maneuver is a bad idea, except for all the alternatives. Here the alternatives boil down to just one: a predictable, reactionary majority on the Supreme Court for perhaps as long as another generation. I write reactionary, not conservative, because true conservative judges like John Marshall Harlan II are incrementalists, not averse to change, respectful of precedent and unlikely to come into the grips of radical fantasies like eliminating or remaking the modern regulatory-administrative state. But with the seemingly inevitable rise of Amy Coney Barrett to the court, this impending six- person majority is poised to take a constitutional wrecking ball to generations of Supreme Court doctrine — and not just in matters of reproductive choice. Just look at the record. In the 2018 Janus labor law case, Justice Samuel Alito took the first long step to undoing years of legislation that allowed majority unions to compel not membership, but payment of dues — an arrangement first found constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1977. And his decision was based on constitutional grounds — protecting First Amendment freedoms — so a legislative remedy is no longer possible. The infamous Citizens United decision in 2010 — again in the name of the First Amendment — precluded meaningful legislation to discipline campaign finance commanded by rich and secretive forces. This effectively disabled a regime first enacted in 1974 but with roots in legislation reaching back to the time of Teddy Roosevelt. In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts — he of the “balls and strikes” — precluded on constitutional grounds judicial intervention to prevent blatant partisan gerrymandering. And he was the author of an uncompromising four- person dissent that would forever preclude referendum-installed, nonpartisan state commissions to redraw congressional districts, outside the power of state legislatures. He also wrote for a four-person plurality (Justice Anthony Kennedy would not join him) in the 2007 Parents Involved decision that “the only way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race.” And perhaps most consequential of all, in 2013, Chief Justice Roberts invoked the irrelevant and arcane “equal footing doctrine” to invalidate a section of the Voting Rights Act, first enacted in 1965 and re-enacted as recently as 2006. It had been the bulwark against the gross voter suppression schemes that then immediately popped up and have wreaked havoc in subsequent elections. All of these frankly reactionary decisions are incurable by legislation because they were said to be based in the Constitution. And every one of them favors, and was favored by, partisan Republican interests and was decided 5 to 4 by Republican-appointed justices. As for the few moderate decisions of the last few years — the citizenship question on the census, the health care mandate in the Affordable Care Act said to be a tax, the ban on LGBTQ employment discrimination — they can all be undone by legislation. So there is a lot at stake. But before going forth on any enlargement plan, a Biden administration would do well to see if the Supreme Court might not heed the lesson of history. Consider the well-known episode indelibly judged as President Franklin Roosevelt’s “failed” court packing plan. Mr. Roosevelt waited to propose his “Judicial Procedures Reform” legislation until 1937, after his first four years in office during which the reactionary Supreme Court majority relentlessly obstructed desperately needed experiments to combat the Great Depression. President Roosevelt’s move is viewed as a rare failure by a master politician. But was it? Immediately after his proposal was unveiled, the court ruled 5 to 4 that the Wagner Act, restructuring American labor law and relations, was constitutional, and a spate of pro-New Deal decisions followed. The very threat of court packing and the passage of time made this “nuclear option” unnecessary. Let’s see whether the current Supreme Court majority overplays its hand. If it does, then Mr. Biden’s nuclear option might not only be necessary but it will be seen to be necessary. But for now, let him not overplay his hand. Charles Fried, a law professor at Harvard University, served as the solicitor general of the United States under President Ronald Reagan from 1985 to 1989. ■ No country is an island in the climate crisis Birth of the UN shows dramatic change is possible when world powers face a shared existential threat Huiyao Wang | Financial Times | Oct 15, 2020 | Opinion The writer is founder of the Center for China and Globalisation and a counsellor at the state council in Beijing Statistically, the over-70s don’t do well with Covid-19.
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