#Voter Suppression and the Compromise of 1877 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kemetic-dreams · 3 years

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The phrase "Jim Crow Law" can be found as early as 1884 in a newspaper article summarizing congressional debate. The term appears in 1892 in the title of a New York Times article about Louisiana requiring segregated railroad cars. The origin of the phrase "Jim Crow" has often been attributed to "Jump Jim Crow", a song-and-dance caricature of African people performed by white actor Thomas D. Rice in blackface, which first surfaced in 1828 and was used to satirize Andrew Jackson's populist policies. As a result of Rice's fame, "Jim Crow" by 1838 had become a pejorative expression meaning "Negro". When southern legislatures passed laws of racial segregation directed against African people at the end of the 19th century, these statutes became known as Jim Crow laws.

Origins

Disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction era

In January 1865, an amendment to the Constitution to abolish slavery in the United States was proposed by Congress, and on December 18, 1865, it was ratified as the Thirteenth Amendment formally abolishing slavery.

During the Reconstruction period of 1865–1877, federal laws provided civil rights protections in the U.S. South for freedmen, African Americans who had formerly been slaves, and the minority of African people who had been free before the war. In the 1870s, Democrats gradually regained power in the Southern legislatures, after having used insurgent paramilitary groups, such as the White League and the Red Shirts, to disrupt Republican organizing, run Republican officeholders out of town, and intimidate African people to suppress their voting. Extensive voter fraud was also used. In one instance, an outright coup or insurrection in coastal North Carolina led to the violent removal of democratically elected non-Democratic party executive and representative officials, who were either hunted down or hounded out. Gubernatorial elections were close and had been disputed in Louisiana for years, with increasing violence against black people during campaigns from 1868 onward.

In 1877, a compromise to gain Southern support in the presidential election (a corrupt bargain) resulted in the government's withdrawing the last of the federal troops from the South. European Democrats had regained political power in every Southern state. These Southern, European, Democratic Redeemer governments legislated Jim Crow laws, officially segregating African people from the European population. Jim Crow laws were a manifestation of authoritarian rule specifically directed at one racial group.

Africans were still elected to local offices throughout the 1880s in local areas with large African populations, but their voting was suppressed for state and national elections. Democrats passed laws to make voter registration and electoral rules more restrictive, with the result that political participation by most African people and many poor European people began to decrease. Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, starting with Mississippi, passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disenfranchised most African people and tens of thousands of poor white people through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements. Grandfather clauses temporarily permitted some illiterate white people to vote but gave no relief to most African people.

Voter turnout dropped drastically through the South as a result of such measures. In Louisiana, by 1900, African voters were reduced to 5,320 on the rolls, although they comprised the majority of the state's population. By 1910, only 730 African people were registered, less than 0.5% of eligible African men. "In 27 of the state's 60 parishes, not a single African voter was registered any longer; in 9 more parishes, only one African voter was." The cumulative effect in North Carolina meant that African voters were completely eliminated from voter rolls during the period from 1896 to 1904. The growth of their thriving middle class was slowed. In North Carolina and other Southern states, African people suffered from being made invisible in the political system: "[W]ithin a decade of disfranchisement, the white supremacy campaign had erased the image of the African middle class from the minds of white North Carolinians." In Alabama tens of thousands of poor Europeans were also disenfranchised, although initially legislators had promised them they would not be affected adversely by the new restrictions.

Those who could not vote were not eligible to serve on juries and could not run for local offices. They effectively disappeared from political life, as they could not influence the state legislatures, and their interests were overlooked. While public schools had been established by Reconstruction legislatures for the first time in most Southern states, those for African children were consistently underfunded compared to schools for white children, even when considered within the strained finances of the postwar South where the decreasing price of cotton kept the agricultural economy at a low.

Like schools, public libraries for African people were underfunded, if they existed at all, and they were often stocked with secondhand books and other resources. These facilities were not introduced for African Americans in the South until the first decade of the 20th century. Throughout the Jim Crow era, libraries were only available sporadically. Prior to the 20th century, most libraries established for African Americans were school-library combinations. Many public libraries for both European-American and African-American patrons in this period were founded as the result of middle-class activism aided by matching grants from the Carnegie Foundation.

In some cases, progressive measures intended to reduce election fraud, such as the Eight Box Law in South Carolina, acted against black and white voters who were illiterate, as they could not follow the directions. While the separation of African Americans from the European general population was becoming legalized and formalized during the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s), it was also becoming customary. For instance, even in cases in which Jim Crow laws did not expressly forbid African people to participate in sports or recreation, a segregated culture had become common.

In the Jim Crow context, the presidential election of 1912 was steeply slanted against the interests of African Americans. Most African people still lived in the South, where they had been effectively disfranchised, so they could not vote at all. While poll taxes and literacy requirements banned many poor or illiterate Americans from voting, these stipulations frequently had loopholes that exempted European Americans from meeting the requirements. In Oklahoma, for instance, anyone qualified to vote before 1866, or related to someone qualified to vote before 1866 (a kind of "grandfather clause"), was exempted from the literacy requirement; but the only persons who had the franchise before that year were white, or European-American males. European Americans were effectively exempted from the literacy testing, whereas African Americans were effectively singled out by the law.

Woodrow Wilson was a Democrat elected from New Jersey, but he was born and raised in the South, and was the first Southern-born president of the post-Civil War period. He appointed Southerners to his Cabinet. Some quickly began to press for segregated workplaces, although the city of Washington, D.C., and federal offices had been integrated since after the Civil War. In 1913, for instance, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo – an appointee of the President – was heard to express his opinion of African and European women working together in one government office: "I feel sure that this must go against the grain of the white women. Is there any reason why the white women should not have only European women working across from them on the machines?"

The Wilson administration introduced segregation in federal offices, despite much protest from African-American leaders and white progressive groups in the north and midwest. He appointed segregationist Southern politicians because of his own firm belief that racial segregation was in the best interest of African and European Americans alike. At the Great Reunion of 1913 at Gettysburg, Wilson addressed the crowd on July 4, the semi-centennial of Abraham Lincoln's declaration that "all men are created equal":

How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic, as state after state has been added to this, our great family of free men!

In sharp contrast to Wilson, a Washington Bee editorial wondered if the "reunion" of 1913 was a reunion of those who fought for "the extinction of slavery" or a reunion of those who fought to "perpetuate slavery and who are now employing every artifice and argument known to deceit" to present emancipation as a failed venture. Historian David W. Blight notes that the "Peace Jubilee" at which Wilson presided at Gettysburg in 1913 "was a Jim Crow reunion, and white supremacy might be said to have been the silent, invisible master of ceremonies".

In Texas, several towns adopted residential segregation laws between 1910 and the 1920s. Legal strictures called for segregated water fountains and restrooms. The exclusion of African Americans also found support in the Republican lily-white movement.[

#african #african american #european #european american #jim crow #abraham lincoln #kemetic dreams

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 years

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 21, 20216 hr ago

Tonight, the House of Representatives passed a funding bill that would both keep the government from shutting down and prevent a default on the U.S. debt. The vote was 220 to 211, with all Democrats voting in favor and all Republicans voting against.

There are two financial deadlines looming. One is the need for Congress to fund the government. In late December 2020, Congress passed a huge bill that, among other things, funded the government through September 30. The new fiscal year starts on October 1, and if the government is not funded, it will have to shut down, ending all federal activities that are not considered imperative. This year, such activities would include a wide range of programs enacted to combat the economic crisis sparked by the coronavirus pandemic.

The second deadline is lifting the debt ceiling. That’s the amount of money Congress authorizes the government to borrow. Beginning in 1939, rather than approving individual issues of debt, Congress gave the government more flexibility in borrowing by simply agreeing to an upper limit that included all the different financial instruments the government uses. The debt ceiling is not connected directly to any individual bill, and it is not an appropriation for any specific program. It enables the government to borrow money to pay for programs in bills already passed. If the debt ceiling is not raised when necessary, the government will default on its debts, creating a financial catastrophe.

There is a long history behind our national funding systems. Until now, the U.S. has always protected its debt. After the Civil War, Democrats were determined to destroy the strong federal government the Republicans had built to fight the Confederacy. They tried to change the terms under which people had invested in wartime national bonds. Horrified at what would undermine confidence in the survival of the Union, the Republicans protected the debt in the Fourteenth Amendment.

The fourth section of that amendment reads: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

Former Confederates challenged the nation through financing once again, in 1879. In that year, in control of Congress for the first time since the Civil War, Democrats refused to pass appropriations bills unless those bills included their own policy priorities, especially the removal of the federal troops still in the South to protect black voting (it is a myth that federal troops left the South in 1877).

Republican leader and Union veteran James A. Garfield had fought the Confederates on the battlefields and recognized that destroying the government by starving it was no different from destroying it through arms. He urged President Rutherford B. Hayes to veto the Democrats’ appropriations bills, and Hayes did, five times. Democrats backed down, but not before voters turned against them. The next year, voters put Garfield into the White House.

In the modern era, shutdowns emerged as a policy tool after the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act moved control over budgeting from the executive branch to Congress. Disagreements over funding in President Jimmy Carter’s term had little effect on the country, since government systems continued during them under the assumption that funding would eventually materialize. That changed in the early 1980s, when legal opinions said it was illegal to spend money that hadn’t been appropriated.

Beginning in the 1980s, government shutdowns became a tool of Republicans determined to cut taxes and dismantle the active government in place since 1933. In November 1981, President Ronald Reagan furloughed more than 240,000 federal workers in a fight with Congress over budget cuts, but full-fledged government shutdowns began in earnest after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 1995 for the first time since 1954.

Demanding steep budget cuts in Medicare, public health, the environment, and education, House Speaker Newt Gingrich refused to compromise with Democratic president Bill Clinton, who opposed the cuts. Without funding, the federal government shut down all non-essential activity for a total of 28 days between November 1995 and January 1996: National parks shut down, government contracts ceased to operate, applications for visas and passports went unanswered. The crisis pushed Clinton’s poll numbers higher than they had been since his election.

In 2013, the government shut down again from October 1 to October 17 as Republicans tried to defund the Affordable Care Act. It shut down yet again for its longest stretch in 2019, after then-president Donald Trump demanded $5.7 billion in funding for a border wall from a Congress controlled by his own party.

To avoid shutdowns, Congress can pass a funding bill or a continuing resolution to give themselves more time to pass such a funding bill. That is part of what is in the bill the House passed this evening: funding until December 3.

The other part of the House bill is a suspension of the debt ceiling until December 2022, after the midterm elections. Congress has raised the debt ceiling more than 100 times since it first went into effect: 18 times under Reagan, and most recently in 2019 under former president Trump, when Democrats joined Republicans in suspending the limit until 2021. In that time, Republicans added about $6.5 trillion to the debt through coronavirus spending and tax cuts.

Now, though, Republicans are refusing to support an increase in the debt ceiling, trying to force Democrats to separate the continuing resolution that funds the government from the higher debt ceiling.

What is at stake is the nature of the American government. Republican lawmakers begrudgingly passed social welfare legislation to address the pandemic in the months before the 2020 election, but they are still keen on dismantling a government that regulates business, provides a social safety net, and promotes infrastructure. Creating debt to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans fits their belief that the economy and society are most efficient when successful men are able to run them as they see fit.

Biden and the Democrats are trying to counter that worldview with their own belief that the country will work best when the government guarantees everyone equal access to resources and equality before the law. After forty years of the Republicans’ austerity, achieving that equality, including rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, will cost money. At the same time, Democrats do not want to assume full responsibility for increasing the debt ceiling when much of the debt it covers was created by Republicans during the Trump administration.

Right now, neither side is indicating it will back down. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has voted to raise or suspend the debt ceiling 32 times in his career, including 3 times under Trump (who contributed about $7.8 trillion to today’s $28 trillion national debt), says he will not vote to suspend the debt ceiling and will try to hold his caucus against it. He says it’s the Democrats’ problem.

A default on the nation’s financial obligations has never happened before and would create an economic crisis echoing the destruction of the nation Garfield talked about in 1879. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says it “could trigger a spike in interest rates, a steep drop in stock prices and other financial turmoil. Our current economic recovery would reverse into recession, with billions of dollars of growth and millions of jobs lost.” Financial services firm Moody's Analytics warned that a default would cost up to 6 million jobs, create an unemployment rate of nearly 9% and wipe out $15 trillion in household wealth.

That Republicans are willing to risk yet another step that will make America look like a failed state is stunning.

But even if that’s not their ultimate goal, posturing and negotiations over finances are running out the congressional clock while the Democrats’ very popular signature issues—infrastructure and voting rights—languish.

—

Notes:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/debt-ceiling-limit-what-to-know/

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/09/us/politics/longest-government-shutdown.html

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/09/21/government-shutdown-house-passes-funding-debt-ceiling-bill.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/09/20/white-house-debt-ceiling/

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/09/mcconnell-insists-he-wont-help-democrats-raise-debt-limit.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/21/debt-limit-republicans-default-mcconnell-cruz/

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#political #Debt Ceiling #follow the money #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #history #Civil War

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azspot · 4 years

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Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity. The many gains of Reconstruction were met with fierce white resistance throughout the South, including unthinkable violence against the formerly enslaved, wide-scale voter suppression, electoral fraud and even, in some extreme cases, the overthrow of democratically elected biracial governments. Faced with this unrest, the federal government decided that black people were the cause of the problem and that for unity’s sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a compromise with Southern Democrats that would grant him the presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull federal troops from the South. With the troops gone, white Southerners quickly went about eradicating the gains of Reconstruction. The systemic white suppression of black life was so severe that this period between the 1880s and the 1920 and ’30s became known as the Great Nadir, or the second slavery. Democracy would not return to the South for nearly a century.

America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One

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blackfreethinkers · 4 years

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Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then.

In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes.” Ironically enough, there is some truth to an otherwise frighteningly numb claim. American elections have an acute history of racial entitlements—only they don’t privilege black Americans.

For centuries, white votes have gotten undue weight, as a result of innovations such as poll taxes and voter-ID laws and outright violence to discourage racial minorities from voting. (The point was obvious to anyone paying attention: As William F. Buckley argued in his essay “Why the South Must Prevail,” white Americans are “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” anywhere they are outnumbered because they are part of “the advanced race.”) But America’s institutions boosted white political power in less obvious ways, too, and the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.

Commentators today tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, in effect whitewashing history: Of the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and slavery were perhaps the foremost.

Of course, the Framers had a number of other reasons to engineer the Electoral College. Fearful that the president might fall victim to a host of civic vices—that he could become susceptible to corruption or cronyism, sow disunity, or exercise overreach—the men sought to constrain executive power consistent with constitutional principles such as federalism and checks and balances. The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.

But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy, succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms:

There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.

Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.

Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr. What’s less known about the election of 1800 is the way the Electoral College succeeded, which is to say that it operated as one might have expected, based on its embrace of the three-fifths compromise. The South’s baked-in advantages—the bonus electoral votes it received for maintaining slaves, all while not allowing those slaves to vote—made the difference in the election outcome. It gave the slaveholder Jefferson an edge over his opponent, the incumbent president and abolitionist John Adams. To quote Yale Law’s Akhil Reed Amar, the third president “metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.” That election continued an almost uninterrupted trend of southern slaveholders and their doughfaced sympathizers winning the White House that lasted until Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860.

In 1803, the Twelfth Amendment modified the Electoral College to prevent another Jefferson-Burr–type debacle. Six decades later, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, thus ridding the South of its windfall electors. Nevertheless, the shoddy system continued to cleave the American democratic ideal along racial lines. In the 1876 presidential election, the Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but some electoral votes were in dispute, including those in—wait for it—Florida. An ad hoc commission of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices was empaneled to resolve the matter. Ultimately, they awarded the contested electoral votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote. As a part of the agreement, known as the Compromise of 1877, the federal government removed the troops that were stationed in the South after the Civil War to maintain order and protect black voters.

The deal at once marked the end of the brief Reconstruction era, the redemption of the old South, and the birth of the Jim Crow regime. The decision to remove soldiers from the South led to the restoration of white supremacy in voting through the systematic disenfranchisement of black people, virtually accomplishing over the next eight decades what slavery had accomplished in the country’s first eight decades. And so the Electoral College’s misfire in 1876 helped ensure that Reconstruction would not remove the original stain of slavery so much as smear it onto the other parts of the Constitution’s fabric, and countenance the racialized patchwork democracy that endured until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

What’s clear is that, more than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern whites, the Electoral College continues to do just that. The current system has a distinct, adverse impact on black voters, diluting their political power. Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. Three of those states have not voted for a Democrat in more than four decades. Under the Electoral College, black votes are submerged. It’s the precise reason for the success of the southern strategy. It’s precisely how, as Buckley might say, the South has prevailed.

Among the Electoral College’s supporters, the favorite rationalization is that without the advantage, politicians might disregard a large swath of the country’s voters, particularly those in small or geographically inconvenient states. Even if the claim were true, it’s hardly conceivable that switching to a popular-vote system would lead candidates to ignore more voters than they do under the current one. Three-quarters of Americans live in states where most of the major parties’ presidential candidates do not campaign.

More important, this “voters will be ignored” rationale is morally indefensible. Awarding a numerical few voting “enhancements” to decide for the many amounts to a tyranny of the minority. Under any other circumstances, we would call an electoral system that weights some votes more than others a farce—which the Supreme Court, more or less, did in a series of landmark cases. Can you imagine a world in which the votes of black people were weighted more heavily because presidential candidates would otherwise ignore them, or, for that matter, any other reason? No. That would be a racial entitlement. What’s easier to imagine is the racial burdens the Electoral College continues to wreak on them.

Critics of the Electoral College are right to denounce it for handing victory to the loser of the popular vote twice in the past two decades. They are also correct to point out that it distorts our politics, including by encouraging presidential campaigns to concentrate their efforts in a few states that are not representative of the country at large. But the disempowerment of black voters needs to be added to that list of concerns, because it is core to what the Electoral College is and what it always has been.

The race-consciousness establishment—and retention—of the Electoral College has supported an entitlement program that our 21st-century democracy cannot justify. If people truly want ours to be a race-blind politics, they can start by plucking that strange, low-hanging fruit from the Constitution.

#ideas

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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Is Congress Made Up Of Democrats Or Republicans

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/is-congress-made-up-of-democrats-or-republicans/

Is Congress Made Up Of Democrats Or Republicans

How Are The Results Reported

Ryan Grim: The GOP Made A Titanic BLUNDER In Blowing Up Kyrsten Sinemas Vacation

The election results on this page are reported by the Associated Press . AP call the winner in a state when they determine that the trailing candidate has no path to victory. This can happen before 100% of votes in a state have been counted.

Estimates for the total vote in each state are also provided by AP. The numbers update throughout election night, as more data on voter turnout becomes available.

Isan Mix Of The House By State

As of July;30,2021:

State ranked in partisan order Percentage OH-11: Vacant following Congresswoman Fudge‘s resignation Mar. 10, 2021.OH-15: Vacant following Congressman Stivers‘s resignation May 16, 2021. Texas FL-20: Vacant following Congressman Hastings‘s death on Apr. 6, 2021. Georgia State ranked in partisan order Percentage

Annual Congressional Competitiveness Report 2020

Ballotpedia’s Annual Congressional Competitiveness report for 2020 includes information on the number of elections featuring candidates from both major parties, the number of open seats, and more.

HIGHLIGHTS

More U.S. House races were contested by members of both major parties than in any general election since at least 1920, with 95.4% of races featuring major party competition.

Of the U.S. Representatives and U.S. Senators who were eligible to run for re-election in 2018, 55 of them did not appear on the general election ballot in 2020.

In the 53 open seats where an incumbent either did not seek re-election or was defeated in a primary, there were 13 races where the incumbent’s district overlapped at least one pivot county in 2008 and 2012, before switching to support President Donald Trump in 2016).

In 20 races, only one major party candidate appeared on the general election ballot, the lowest number compared to the preceding decade.

Four U.S. senators and 36 U.S. representatives did not run for re-election.

Don’t Miss: How Many States Are Controlled By Republicans

Th Congress 2009 And 2010

White House: Democrat

House: Democrats held 257 seats, Republicans held 178 seats

Senate: Democrats held 57 seats, Republicans held 41 seats; there was one independent and one independent Democrat

*Notes: U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter was reelected in 2004 as a Republican but switched parties to become a Democrat on April 30, 2009. U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut was reelected in 2006 as an independent candidate and became an Independent Democrat. U.S. Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont was elected in 2006 as an independent.

Th Congress 2011 And 2012

Members of the 112th Congress were elected in a 2010 midterm election “shellacking” of the Democratic Party. Republicans won back the House two years after voters handed control of the White House and both chambers of Congress to the Democrats.

After the 2010 midterms, Obama said:

“People are frustrated. They’re deeply frustrated with the pace of our economic recovery and the opportunities that they hope for their children and their grandchildren. They want jobs to come back faster.”

White House: Democrat

House: Republicans held 242 seats, Democrats held 193 seats

Senate: Democrats held 51 seats, Republicans held 47 seats; there was one independent and one independent Democrat

Don’t Miss: Who Is Right Republicans Or Democrats

Us Election : Democrats’ Hopes Of Gaining Control Of Senate Fade

Democrats are rapidly losing hope of gaining control of the US Senate after underperforming in key states.

Controlling the Senate would have allowed them to either obstruct or push through the next president’s agenda.

The party had high hopes of gaining the four necessary seats in Congress’s upper chamber, but many Republican incumbents held their seats.

The Democrats are projected to retain their majority in the lower chamber, the House, but with some key losses.

With many votes still to be counted, the final outcome for both houses may not be known for some time.

Why don’t we have a winner yet?

Among the disappointments for the Democrats was the fight for the seat in Maine, where Republican incumbent Susan Collins staved off a fierce challenge from Democrat Sara Gideon.

However, the night did see a number of firsts – including the first black openly LGBTQ people ever elected to Congress and the first openly transgender state senator.

The balance of power in the Senate may also change next January. At least one run-off election is due to be held that month in Georgia, since neither candidate has been able to secure more than 50% of votes.

This year’s congressional election is running alongside the battle for the White House between Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden.

Of the 35 Senate seats up for grabs, 23 were Republican-held and 12 were Democrat.

Senators serve six-year terms, and every two years a third of the seats are up for re-election.

What Does The Republican Party Stand For

The Republican Party was initially created to advocate for a free-market economy that countered the Democratic Partys agrarian leanings and support of slave labour. In recent history, the Republicans have been affiliated with reducing taxes to stimulate the economy, deregulation, and conservative social values.

Read Also: How Many Democratic Presidents Have Republicans Tried To Impeach

Diversity Of The Freshman Class

The demographics of the 116th U.S. Congress freshmen were more diverse than any previous incoming class.

At least 25 new congressional representatives were Hispanic, Native American, or people of color, and the incoming class included the first Native American women, the first Muslim women, and the two youngest women ever elected. The 116th Congress included more women elected to the House than any previous Congress.

Compromise Of : The 1876 Election

Texas Democrats Ramp Up Fight Against New GOP Suppression Attempt

By the 1870s, support was waning for the racially egalitarian policies of Reconstruction, a series of laws put in place after the Civil War to protect the rights of African Americans, especially in the South. Many southern whites had resorted to intimidation and violence to keep blacks from voting and restore white supremacy in the region. Beginning in 1873, a series of Supreme Court decisions limited the scope of Reconstruction-era laws and federal support for the so-called Reconstruction Amendments, particularly the 14th Amendment and 15 Amendment, which gave African Americans the status of citizenship and the protection of the Constitution, including the all-important right to vote.

Did you know? After the most disputed election in American history, the Compromise of 1877 put Rutherford Hayes into office as the nations 19th president; outraged northern Democrats derided Hayes as His Fraudulency.

You May Like: When Did Republicans And Democrats Switch Platforms

Read Also: When Is The Last Time Republicans Controlled Congress

Senate And House Elections : Full Results For Congress

As well as electing the US president, the country has been voting for senators and members of the House of Representatives. Here are full results from all 50 states

Mon 9 Nov 2020 09.44;GMT Last modified on Tue 15 Dec 2020 14.28;GMT

The US legislature, Congress, has two chambers. The lower chamber, the House of Representatives, has 435 voting seats, each representing a district of roughly similar size. There are elections in each of these seats every two years.

The upper chamber, the Senate, has 100 members, who sit for six-year terms. One-third of the seats come up for election in each two-year cycle. Each state has two senators, regardless of its population; this means that Wyoming, with a population of less than 600,000, carries the same weight as California, with almost 40 million.

Most legislation needs to pass both chambers to become law, but the Senate has some important other functions, notably approving senior presidential appointments, for instance to the supreme court.

In most states, the candidate with the most votes on election day wins the seat. However, Georgia and Louisiana require the winning candidate to garner 50% of votes cast; if no one does, they hold a run-off election between the top two candidates.

The First Hurdle Is The Organizing Resolution

Incoming Democratic Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer and outgoing Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will have to agree on a set of rules, known as an organizing resolution, which governs how the Senate works. The organizing resolution determines everything from committee membership and staff budgets, to who gets the best office space.

Even with Harriss tie-breaking vote, Schumer will need McConnells support: passing the organizing resolution requires 60 votes. As a result, Republicans will likely end up with much more power than a minority would usually hold.

The last time the Senate was split 50-50, in 2001, lawmakers agreed on an organizing resolution that allowed both parties to share power. Under that deal, the parties agreed to split committee memberships and staff equally and changed the rules, making it so that if a tie vote prevented a measure from moving out of committee, either the majority or the minority leader could bring the bill to the Senate floor.

Schumer and McConnell may take a cue from that 2001 agreement, but Senate observers note that, in these hyper-partisan times, agreeing on even the rules of the road may be tricky. As partisan as it was in 2000, things have become even more partisan, says Sarah Binder, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

Read Also: When Did Republicans And Democrats Switch Platforms

A Coalition To Protect Its Self

The modern-day 1st District can trace its origins to the 1960s.

As former Congressman Bill Clay explained in his book,13 Black legislators, 57 Republicans and nine white Democrats from rural areas voted to establish a St. Louis-based district that would be highly possible for an African American to win. In the book, Bill Clay: A Political Voice at the Grassroots,he said the unusual coalition held strong to protect its self-interests.

The newly drawn congressional districts provided representation in the cotton-driven, agricultural economy of the Bootheel section of the southeastern part of the state, maintained a substantial number of Republican voters in the suburban area of St. Louis County, and created a Black-majority district located mostly in the city of St. Louis, Clay wrote. Democrats and Governor , a Democrat, opposed the redistricting proposal. They filed a lawsuit supporting a plan to place the Black population in three separate districts. However, the U.S. Supreme Court thwarted the will of the Democrats and ruled that the district drawn by legislators was legal.

Bill Clay was elected to the 1st Congressional District in 1968. No white candidate has even come close to prevailing in that district since that election. And because of the Voting Rights Act, lawmakers cannot draw the 1st District in a way that diminishes the ability of a racial or language minority to elect its candidates of choice.

Important Dates And Deadlines

The table below lists filing deadlines and primary dates in each state for Democratic Party and Republican Party candidates for congressional and state-level office.

Primary dates and filing deadlines, 2020 State Filing deadline for primary candidates Primary date 04/21/2020 & 05/08/2020 08/04/2020 04/24/2020 & 6/12/2020 05/05/2020 & 06/02/2020 09/01/2020 06/24/2020 07/10/2020

The congressional approval rating indicates public satisfaction in the job performance of the members of the United States Congress. It is the percentage of people polled who responded favorably toward the work of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

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Districts That Flipped In 2018

The map below highlights congressional districts that changed party control in the general elections on November 6, 2018.

The following table lists congressional districts that changed party control in the general elections on November 6, 2018. It also includes 2020 general election race ratings from three outlets.

Flipped congressional districts, 2018

Democrats’ House Targets Vanish As Gop Redraws New Maps

Many of the districts Democrats have contested in recent elections will become safer Republican holds under new GOP-drawn congressional maps.

State Sen. Sollie Norwood points out his district on a poster-sized map in the Capitol rotunda in Jackson, Miss., Thursday, Aug. 26, 2021. |

09/15/2021 04:30 AM EDT

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House Democrats spent the past two elections crowing about ousting Republicans from longtime red districts that had suddenly grown competitive. Now, Republicans are about to make many of those targets disappear from the battlefield entirely.

GOP mapmakers are readying to shore up more than a dozen of the most hotly contested House battlegrounds from the past four years, narrowing Democrats path to maintain control of the House, as they prepare for midterm elections that are historically tough for the party in power.

Democrats got their first taste of a shrinking playing field on Tuesday, when Republican state lawmakers in Indiana unveiled a draft congressional plan that would transform the state’s most competitive district into a relatively safe red seat by siphoning off voters in deep-blue Marion County, whichincludes Indianapolis.

Just like that, Indiana’s 5th District, where both parties spent well over $10 million last year, became an easy hold for freshman GOP Rep. Victoria Spartz.

By HEATHER CAYGLE, SARAH FERRIS and ALLY MUTNICK

By ALLY MUTNICK

But new district lines will ease their path to their reelections, at least for the next few elections.

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Senate Republicans Arent Interested In Compromise It May Be Time For Democrats To Use Plan B

No one would think of blaming Sen. Joe ManchinJoe ManchinOvernight Energy & Environment Presented by the League of Conservation Voters Biden, Xi talk climate at UN forumElection reform in the states is not all doom and gloomManchin presses Interior nominee on leasing program reviewMORE for shrinking West Virginias population by 3.5 percent since 2010, one of only three states that lost people over the last decade. There are lots of economic and demographic dynamics that accounted for the drop.

But given that the Mountaineer State will lose a House seat and an electoral vote, one should question whether Manchin should be determining the fate of multiple bills in the U.S. Senate. For the record, I really dont mind that Sen. Manchin says he only wants to make sure that West Virginia has a seat at the table. What I do mind, and what every American concerned about our democracy should mind, is that he now apparently thinks he gets to decide what everyone at the table will eat.

In The Federalist Papers, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton wrote that while the Senate was designed in a way to ensure that the majority didnt ride roughshod over the minority , those two Founding Fathers insisted that the majority must eventually always win; that minority rule was antithetical to a democracy. Common sense tells us that this is still the case in 2021, Trump Nation notwithstanding.

Yarmuth represents the 3rd District of Kentucky and is chairman of the Budget Committee.

Since 1: Contemporary Era

GOP lawmaker: Democrats turned impeachment into a big political fiasco

From 1970 to 2009, the House expanded delegates, along with their powers and privileges representing U.S. citizens in non-state areas, beginning with representation on committees for Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner in 1970. In 1971, a delegate for the District of Columbia was authorized, and in 1972 new delegate positions were established for U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam. 1978 saw an additional delegate for American Samoa, and another for the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands began in 2009. These six members of Congress enjoy floor privileges to introduce bills and resolutions, and in recent Congresses they vote in permanent and select committees, in party caucuses and in joint conferences with the Senate. They have Capitol Hill offices, staff and two annual appointments to each of the four military academies. While their votes are constitutional when Congress authorizes their House Committee of the Whole votes, recent Congresses have not allowed for that, and they cannot vote when the House is meeting as the House of Representatives.

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Can Democrats Reclaim The House

Despite the large Republican majority in the House, a major collapse due to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign could have put the House back in play in 2016. This section highlights what was said by pundits on the possibility of Democrats gaining control of Congress.

John Sides – October 18, 2016: “This model currently predicts that the Democrats will control 204 seats after the 2016 election. That is 16 more than they had after the 2014 election. The margin of error associated with that is plus or minus 8 seats. That forecast implies a very small chance less than 1 percent that the Democrats could win the 218 or more seats needed for a majority.”

Sean Trende – October 8, 2016: “Whats more interesting is the House. When Trump first secured the nomination in March, analysts speculated that he could flip the chamber to Democrats. That speculation subsided over the spring and summer, as Trumps vote share held and Democratic recruiting efforts sputtered. As of today, RealClearPolitics has Republicans favored to lose about 15 House seats a significant loss, but not enough to flip control.”

Jeff Stein – October 8, 2016: “But one political analyst I interviewed earlier this campaign thinks an epic Trump collapse might be enough to overcome that built-in advantage. Geoffrey Skelley, of the University of Virginias Center for Politics, argues that a Clinton victory of 6 points or more might be enough to put the House back in play.”

Incumbents Who Sought Other Offices

U.S. House members who ran for President

1 Democratic member of the U.S. House

Running for president, 2020

U.S. House members who sought a seat in the U.S. Senate

2 Democratic members of the U.S. House

3 Republican members of the U.S. House

Running for Senate, 2020

U.S. House members who ran for governor

1 Republican member of the U.S. House

Running for governor, 2020

U.S. House members who ran for another office

2 Republican members of the U.S. House

1 Democratic member of the U.S. House

Running for another office, 2020 Name No

Also Check: When Did Republicans And Democrats Switch Platforms

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glittergummicandypeach · 4 years

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The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness | Religion Dispatches

“[T]he North has as much to apprehend from abolition as the South…and it is time for conservatives every where to unite in efforts to suppress and extinguish it.” — George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters, 1857

“Conservative” is a misnomer. The term obscures the fact that those identified as conservatives have varied more widely in views on national debt, religion, military excursions, the personal conduct of elected officials, political party affiliation and other putative conservative concerns than they have on the treatment of Black people. The through line of American conservatism has been the work towards the increased injury of Black people at each stage of U.S. history.

Whether it’s come to slavery, Jim Crow, convict leasing, incarceration, policing, voting rights or healthcare, the dominant conservative position has always been whichever was the most anti-Black of the legitimate options. And yet it remains difficult to have it admitted to public consciousness that American conservatism is organized anti-Black politics. American conservatism is, however, well-dressed white nationalism.

Racists have put conservatism on like a hat, then disappeared in front of the eyes of those for whom object permanence would preferably remain a mystery. Liberal citizens require a veil, no matter how thin, to believe or claim to believe that, in what they’ve known as their flawed but progressed society, in their imperfect but fundamentally post-racist country, the racists “are just a few idiots,” not a number tallied in the millions.

In “conservatism,” the intellectual legacy of the Confederacy has been normalized and an entire population of Negrophobes is absorbed into society and allowed space to push their anti-Black agenda everywhere from the Senate floor to bank cubicles. It’s been said that politics is the continuation of war by other means. After the surrender at Appomattox, acolytes of anti-Black torture culture—Southerners as well as Northerners—continued the war to keep their boots on Black necks on the beaches and landing grounds of law and policy.

White nationalists put on a hat reading conservative—or, in contemporary parlance, Make America Great Again—and disappear into the crowd. Liberals wipe their brow, thankful that the pro-enslavement troop has been consigned to a book titled “Unenlightened History.” They then proceed to teach the misinformed millions—materialized apparently out of thin air, weeping at the feet of felled Confederate monuments—about the “the legacy of racism in this country.”

Confederates fought and died for the right to keep Black people captive in a centuries-long sexual assault. They bled for the right to keep them tortured and exploited in an enslavement that halved their life expectancies. Conservatives memorialize that war. Not, they say, because it was theirs, nor because they hold in their lockets portraits of a perfected Black degradation, but because they’re history buffs.

The displayed battle flags, the defense of their racism porn and monuments and the panic over their removal aren’t evidence of nostalgia for enslavement but merely expressions of ‘conservative culture.’ The historical desire for the repression of Black people has been washed and re-presented as a political outlook. Like antebellum “Southern hospitality,” conservatism is gentrified anti-Blackness.

The Confederacy wasn’t dissolved, it was sublimated

The Compromise of 1877 brought white, anti-Black militia culture into the fold of the postbellum state. Confederate generals and other violent Southern Democrats agreed to accept Republican Rutherford B. Hayes’ victory in the 1876 election so long as the federal troops were removed from the South. After the federal withdrawal, conservatives quickly marshaled their racist street and electoral violence to end the possibility of Black political representation, heightening terrorism and formalizing apartheid in the southern regions of the colony despite promising to uphold newly-won civil rights for African Americans as part of the “Compromise.”

Thus the lie that “we aren’t racist” proved useful in the furtherance of the white nationalist cause and anti-Black violence as far back as 1877. Men, who only a decade earlier wore the uniform of the Confederacy to fight to preserve the traditional power relationship between white men’s boots and Black necks, removed their steel-grey chasseur caps, put on one that did not admit color and disappeared. The Confederacy was not dissolved, it was sublimated.

Those who believe conservatives are tragically “ignorant” and have merely failed to connect the dots between the history of American conservatism and anti-Black racism would buy any bridge. They would hear conservatives out when they claim that South Africa’s or Kenya’s richest farmland ended up in white hands because of the “white work ethic” or that Reconstruction’s Black farms found today in white pockets got there fair and square.

They will believe that the reason Harriett Tubman’s image will not appear on U.S. currency as planned is that the current administration has concerns about counterfeiting. Or that a president who bought an ad calling for the murder of exonerated Black youth and who, according to a family member, used the N-Word unsparingly, is saddened at the death of a “Civil Rights hero.”

They would believe that his disciples “hold their nose and vote” for such a man, or, alternatively, have been taken in unawares by his charm, rather than believe that they would follow him in their millions even unto the ends of the earth, looking past each flaw no matter how glaring, excusing each performance no matter how absurd, because their heartstrings have waited centuries to be undone by even the junkiest of exhumed Robert E. Lees.

White supremacist privilege, as opposed to white privilege, is the privilege—which is to say the power—to deny racist intent and always be taken at one’s word. To always be able to clutch one’s pearls and appeal in Scarlett O’Hara’s mint julep-inflected tone, Dearest me, we never intended to… and be believed. And remain a symbol of beauty in the world no matter how many scars are on Prissy’s back.

Preventing that ‘eureka moment’

Republican officials’ voter registration purges and restricting the possibility of voting for Black people is the pursuit of Klan business by other means. They will say, however, that they aim to protect voting rights. It’s never enough to beat Black people down. We must be mocked. Even if every one of a conservative’s errors is one that furthers the cause of fascism they will be given the benefit of the doubt. No matter their priors, they will be presumed innocent, they will not be subject to a ‘three strikes’ rule, they will be shown a grace that passeth all understanding and let loose again onto Black society.

Conservatism is not an innocent bystander that just happens to be found at the scene of nearly every anti-Black political act. Conservatism is a hat that Negrophobes with good jobs put on to move undetected in a society that refuses to overturn the racist order but considers the N-word to be taboo. Those who’ve shown historical hostility to Black life are invited to the table to determine our fates as long as they name their Negrophobia “the conservative perspective”—as long as they keep on their hats. Of course, such a threadbare disguise fools no one who hasn’t a vested interest in being fooled.

Anti-Blackness is laundered until it appears as conservatism. There’s no immediately apparent relationship between “fiscal conservatism” and a mourning over the felled monuments of Confederate generals erected to threaten aspiring Black people. It’s not natural to assume that advocates for liberty and small government would be championing the expansion of police power and be the chief defenders of Terry stops (aka ‘stop and frisk’) and lengthy sentences. The precepts of evangelicalism (if seen as a religious and not a racist movement) don’t immediately suggest Donald Trump as a natural figurehead. Indeed, most of the stated values of conservatism would not seem to correspond to conservative practice.

Confronted with these contradictions, liberal pundits waddle mindlessly between performing astonishment and accusations of hypocrisy. They say they cannot figure out why Donald Trump has not yet “pivoted” away from the racism of the campaign or why he keeps “missing opportunities” to heal the country and lead on race. The work of pundits and anchors is the work to stave off the eureka moment. To refuse the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle; the piece that would explain so many of the contradictions.

A world of Muslim bans, dissidents taken away in unmarked vehicles, castigation and public denouncement of the Lügenpresse, a senior policy advisor dedicated to stamping out a secret plan for white demographic replacement, and a threatened American Nuremberg rally held on Juneteenth is, according to them, unprecedented. It’s too terrible to admit that millions of their compatriots can not only stomach the stench of concentration camps and strange fruit but can also inhale it deeply and be exhilarated by it.

A more reasonable interpretation exists

Tom Cotton, a Republican Senator from Arkansas, defended slave masters saying they thought it to be a “necessary evil.” Jeff Sessions, the former US Attorney General “joked” about thinking the Ku Klux Klan was OK. Former Iowa Representative Steve King wondered aloud about how white nationalism and white supremacy became offensive. These and the other racist remarks made hourly by conservative administrators and lawmakers are never allowed to contaminate the consensus that conservatism is race-neutral. They are an eccentricity of conservatives, perhaps, but never seen as exactly the discourse one would expect from careful white supremacists.

Racist speech from conservative Congresspeople, when criticized, is taken to be an oddity of ignorant, bumbling, pathetic old white folks and nothing more. They, it’s believed, have long renounced the apartheid, pro-slavery and ethno-state dreams of earlier generations, but see no need to throw the baby out with the bath water. The fact that anti-Black white nationalist organizing during Reconstruction “was necessarily secret since open opposition of any kind would be considered rebellion,” however, should mean that no declaration of a ‘coming to Jesus’ moment on race by today’s conservatives should be taken at face value. The political survival of the pro-enslavement camp back then required duplicity, i.e, paying lip service to non-racialism and the enfranchisement of Black people while plotting their harm and repression just as the political survival of today’s conservatives requires plausible deniability regarding their racist remarks and policies.

The Knights of the White Camelia, a Louisiana-based white supremacist secretive society made up of judges, teachers and white professionals, for example, required the oath that included the declaration:

“I swear to maintain and defend the social and political superiority of the White Race on this Continent; always and in all places to observe a marked distinction between the White and African races; to vote for none but white men for any office of honor, profit or trust; to devote my intelligence, energy and influence to instil these principles in the minds and hearts of others; and to protect and defend persons of the White Race, in their lives, rights and property, against the encroachments and aggressions of an inferior race.”

It should not be assumed that the governors representing counties that once held lynching bees to have never made similar pacts. If duplicity has been the conservative tradition under liberal hegemony, it is negligent to not take a second, investigative glance at people who praise Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but seem to blow on the embers of George Wallace and Bull Connor’s program at every opportunity.

American conservatism has always been white nationalist. It has always been organized anti-Blackness. If racism were a deformation of conservatism the arrival of an openly racist administration would have meant an exodus from the Republican Party similar to the white exodus from the mid-twentieth century Democratic Party after it moved towards rights for Black people.

There has been no exodus.

Instead, liberals attempt to put a hat back onto the head of a reality they increasingly have difficulty denying. As a last resort they assist with another vanishing act: the invention of “Trump’s base.” His base is understood to be the underbelly of American conservatives and not, as the “base” itself cheers: the silent majority. Trump is forever “appealing to the worst instincts of his base” as if they have any other. As if he is some mastermind manipulating a crowd terrified of social change. A more reasonable interpretation exists: Trump is no evil genius. He’s simply one of the millions of conservatives who’ve decided they like the feel of their hair blowing in the wind.

This content was originally published here.

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