As you might suspect, Gentle Reader, Curmie sees a lot of material from leftie sources—The Other 98%, Occupy Democrats, Robert Reich, and so on. There’s a general sense of gloating there about the results of Tuesday’s elections. And there’s a lot of scurrying around on the right, looking for someone to blame.
True, the headlines suggest a pretty clean sweep for
Democrats: the mayoral race in New York, the governorship in New Jersey, all of
the most significant races in Virginia, the ballot initiative in California to
counter Texas’s gerrymandering. Comments
on various posts suggest success in other places, as well: flipping the county
council here, turning a GOP supermajority into a simple majority there,
etc. And there don’t seem to be a lot of
stories about Republican gains. The
Trump administration is apparently being recognized for the cruel, incompetent,
and otherwise embarrassing regime it is, and down ballot Republicans are paying
the price. Good.
So there is indeed some cause for celebration, but Curmie
thinks a lot of the pundits on both sides are over-reacting. Those two gubernatorial races resulted in
Democrats succeeding other Democrats into office. And is it really a surprise that that
Californians tend to be liberals, or that Zohran Mamdani won against the likes
of Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa? The
only question was whether he’d get a clear majority in a three-way race. (He did,
at least apparently.) Yes, those were
legitimately the biggest stories, but it’s rather like being amazed that the
Dodgers made it to the post-season again.
Trump may be indulging in yet another narcissistic fantasy in
believing that the fact that his name wasn’t on the ballot was a contributing
factor in Republican losses, but he does have a point that the shutdown hurt
the GOP at the polls, because voters rightly blamed it on Trump, Johnson, et
al., despite their obviously desperate spinning that it was all the
Democrats’ fault. Had Johnson kept his
members in D.C. and even pretended to negotiate in good faith, it wouldn’t have
been quite as obvious that it was all a ploy to delay seating Adelita Grijalva,
thereby protecting a certain someone from confirming our suspicions about those
Epstein documents. Luckily (?) Johnson
is nearly as stupid as he is mendacious.
But.
A couple of those Dems elected in Virginia, for example, appear
to be pretty horrible folks; if and when they screw up (again), the “throw the
bastards out” cries will be coming from the other direction. Donald Trump is indeed petulant and immoral
enough to impose punishments on New York for electing Mamdani, thereby making it
more likely that he won’t fulfill some of his promises. Of course, hoping an elected leader fails is
a trait Republicans often accuse Democrats of exhibiting; it is, of course,
projection of their own outspoken desires.
(Does the name Mitch McConnell mean anything to you, Gentle
Reader?)
California’s fighting-fire-with-fire gerrymandering
initiative, albeit designed specifically to go into force only if Texas and
other states go forward with their corrupt and self-serving practices, is also
ethically suspect. The phrasing may be a
bit cliché, but Curmie really does believe that citizens should choose their
legislators, not the other way around.
But what really got Curmie musing on election results was
the list of constitutional amendments on the ballot here in his adopted state of Texas. There were 17 of them (!), all of which
passed, most of them comfortably. Curmie
voted against about half of them. You
can probably guess which ones: the those that were obviously designed as
handouts to wealthy folks, those that sure did seem like not so thinly veiled racism
or transphobia, those that were variations on the theme of outlawing Sharia Law
(forbidding things that had literally no chance of happening, anyway).
Sure, Curmie’s property taxes are likely to go down (or at
least not go up as much), and the funding for dementia research might well help
Curmie directly. Both his father and
paternal grandfather had Parkinson’s. (Curmie is OK and several years older than
his dad was when he first started showing symptoms.
This could all change, of course.)
That’s good news from a selfish perspective. But few if any of even the good proposals
require a constitutional amendment; legislation ought to handle it.
Those who voted against the ERA a couple of decades ago
because they believed it superfluous—those guarantees of equality were already part
of federal law, just not the Constitution, they claimed—are suddenly eager to
make every protection for the ultra-wealthy constitutionally protected. There was never, to the best of Curmie’s
knowledge, any real attempt to impose state taxes on inheritance, capital
gains, or securities transactions. Curmie
might think a couple of them would be a good idea, but they would have zero
chance of ever being enacted in this state.
Moreover, one of the cardinal attributes of the US
Constitution is its brevity. Texas’s
version is a little over 12 times as long.
And it does seem that the state legislature could spend their time on
important issues facing the state instead of worrying about, for example,
whether non-citizens could vote.
Important to note here is the fact that non-citizens already
can’t vote. It’s illegal in national
elections, and you can’t register to vote in Texas unless you’re a
citizen. Enshrining this amendment in
the state constitution is an exercise in masturbation. But it’s not simply the hollow sloganeering-as-policy
that’s disturbing. Several states allow
legally resident non-citizens to vote in local elections. This, frankly, makes sense. Their kids are going to those public schools;
they ought to have a voice in who’s on the school board. But any chance to be xenophobic is one to be
relished by too many Texans. Or, rather,
to give them the benefit of the doubt, they are swayed by simplistic slogans
rather than by thoughtful consideration.
And that is the problem. It’s not that a Republican-controlled
legislature wants to flaunt its prejudices and its subservience to the
ultra-wealthy—remember that literally every Republican Congresscritter voted against a proposal to raise the marginal tax rate by 2.5% on people making more than a billion
dollars a year. You read that right,
Gentle Reader, “billion,” with a “b.” The
median family income in the US for 2024 was $83,730. Such a family would take a little over 11,943
years (!) to get to a billion. Curmie
kinda thinks most folks could handle paying 39.5% on taxable income over $1,000,000,000. Remember, that’s just on the part that
exceeds a billion, not on the whole amount.
No, GOP pols’ ritual fellation of the billionaire class is a
problem, but not the problem. We
can expect no better from them individually, and certainly not collectively. The problem is that citizens here in
Texas, and one suspects elsewhere as well, not merely let them get away with
such behavior, but actually endorse it. They
probably would be as outraged as the rest of us if they actually thought about
things. But they don’t, and the Fox
Newses of the world will make sure they don’t.
Until that changes, the slide toward xenophobia and plutocracy will
continue unabated.
Sometimes Curmie considers Eeyore an optimist.
