If there were ever a time in the past 200 years that an Independent candidate could win the presidency, it’s now.
Now is the time to show the political establishment that, this time around, Americans are not going to be manipulated by fear. Now is the time to vote for hope and a… pic.twitter.com/uqXDMBE8r0
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) April 30, 2024
From 1981 to 1985, Assistant to U.S. Solicitor General Rex E. Lee -- father of Sen. Mike Lee.
From 1985-1987, Deputy Assistant Attorney General under Charles J. Cooper in the Office of Legal Counsel during the tenure of Attorney General Edwin Meese. SEE HIS JOB APPLICATION
From 1987 to 1990, United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey.
Abortion and partisan outside groups
All five have been members of the Federalist Society.
Hershey (p. 370): "Why should partisanship help citizens who have so many other sources of information about candidates and issues? Perhaps it is because they are exposed to so much information."
In all bodies, those who will lead, must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must conform their propositions to the taste, talent, and disposition, of those whom they wish to conduct: therefore, if an assembly is viciously or feebly composed in a very great part of it, nothing but such a supreme degree of virtue as very rarely appears in the world, and for that reason cannot enter into calculation, will prevent the men of talent disseminated through it from becoming only the expert instruments of absurd projects!
In the 2012 Missouri Senate race, incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill ran ads during the GOP primary campaign saying that Todd Akin was "too conservative." The idea of the "attack ad" was to drive GOP voters to Akin, her weakest potential foe. It worked.
A mysterious new super PAC with links to Democrats released a TV ad on Wednesday meddling in next month's Kansas Republican Senate primary.
The super PAC, Sunflower State, formed on Monday and two days later launched its first TV ad, focused on Kris Kobach and Rep. Roger Marshall, two of the Republicans running in the Aug. 4 primary. National Republicans have expressed concern that Kobach — the former secretary of state who lost the 2018 governor's race to Democrat Laura Kelly — would put the seat in jeopardy if he becomes the nominee, while Marshall has attempted to consolidate support from the establishment in the primary.
The ad is engineered to drive conservative voters toward Kobach. A narrator in the ad calls Kobach "too conservative" because he "won't compromise" on building President Donald Trump's border wall or on taking a harsher stance on relations with China. By contrast, the ad labels Marshall as a "phony politician" who is "soft on Trump."
... Sunflower State has apparent ties to Democrats. The media buyer used to place the ad, Old Town Media, was also used to place more than $11 million in ads from Unite the Country, the pro-Joe Biden super PAC that spent heavily in the Democratic presidential primary. Sunflower State also holds its account at Amalgamated Bank, which is used by Senate Majority PAC, a top Democratic outside group, among other prominent Democratic groups, including Biden's campaign, according to the filing with the Federal Election Commission.
KANSAS: New ad from Democratic super-PAC intervening in Republican Senate primary refers to Kris Kobach as "the pro-Trump conservative leader" and Roger Marshall as "the swamp creature." Mostly attacks Marshall. 7 days to primary. #kssenpic.twitter.com/VwDy8LQQB3
Major party deterioration and issue responsiveness
Economic decline
Unacceptable major party candidates
Reasons for the brevity of the bursts
Major parties coopt the third party agenda: Wilson coopts TR on Progressive reform, FDR coopts Socialists on social programs, Nixon coopts G. Wallace on law & order, Clinton coopts Perot on deficit control.
Perception of spoiler effect: Nader in 2000, Stein in 2016
The advocacy coalition framework (ACF): The difference between the “long coalition” of a political party (see Bawn et al. 2006, 4) and the coalition of the ACF is that the larger coalition must, by necessity, have a wider variety of deep core beliefs; it must somehow address the true multidimensionality of politics. When we conceptualise individuals as participants in nested (and overlapping) policy coalitions, it becomes easier to imagine how severely competition for office within the same party might disrupt or rearrange coalitional opportunities as well within the type of policy-making coalition imagined in the ACF. The new requirements for getting elected to office can reshape the ACF-type coalition’s (in one domain, so conceptualised as one dimension) deep core beliefs because some camel got its nose under the party tent to win the election (in a multidimensional space).
The dimensions do not have to be partisan:
. Our model gives California’s AD47 in 2012 a 50% chance of having a copartisan election – and it did. Two Democrats entered and fought it out with two nearly irrelevant Republican spectators (Alvarez and Sinclair 2015). This district also featured a Black woman against a Latino man as Democratic copartisans in a Latino majority district. This race’s outcome suggests how that process might work, with each building on separate pathways to power, but the driver of the high probability here is just the extremity of the vote share difference between the Republican and Democratic parties. AD47 would have a copartisan election again in 2014 and again in 2016, with Cheryl Brown eventually falling to Eloise Reyes. One potential explanatory factor here is the district’s low 2016 Trump support relative to its 2012 Romney vote – an opposition lacking in rancorous spirit appears to reduce the chance of credible entry.
Gary G. Miller*, REP 16,708.... 26.7% Bob Dutton, REP 15,557 ...........24.8% Pete Aguilar, DEM 14,181 ........22.6% Justin Kim, DEM 8,487 .............13.5% Renea Wickman, DEM 4,188 .....6.7% Rita Ramirez-Dean, DEM 3,546 .5.7%
Major party deterioration and issue responsiveness
Economic decline
Unacceptable major party candidates
Reasons for the brevity of the bursts
Major parties coopt the third party agenda: Wilson coopts TR on Progressive reform, FDR coopts Socialists on social programs, Nixon coopts G. Wallace on law & order, Clinton coopts Perot on deficit control.
Perception of spoiler effect: Nader in 2000, Stein in 2016
If we had the six-party system that Drutman describes here, which party would have the most seats in the House today? What coalition of parties would control the House?
Pick one of these propositions from Drutman. Explain the arguments for and against it. Which side has the better case?
Multiparty democracy will make it easier to reform campaign finance and lobbying (p. 203).
A multiparty Congress would be stronger and would rein in the presidency (p. 232).
For responsible party government to happen, writes Hershey (p. 338), "all the elected branches of government would have to be controlled by the same party at a particular time." [Emphasis in the original.] This situation existed in 2017 and 2018, and it has existed since 2021. So did we have responsible party government in 2017-2018? Do we have it today? Explain with reference to class readings, discussions, and outside research.
Pick a relevant topic of your choice, subject to my approval. If you have a passion that bears a plausible connection to American political parties, write about it.
The specifications:
Essays should be typed (12-point), double-spaced, and no more than four pages long. I will not read past the fourth page. Please submit papers as Word documents, not pdfs.
Cite your sources. Please use endnotes in Turabian format. Endnotes do not count against the page limit. Please do not use footnotes, which take up too much page space.
Watch your spelling, grammar, diction, and punctuation. Errors will count against you. Graduating seniors should return essays to the Sakai dropbox for this class by 11:59 PM, Wednesday May 4.All others should return essays by 11:59 PM, Friday, May 6.
A recent survey asked Republicans and Democrats whether they agreed with the statement that members of the opposition party “are not just worse for politics — they are downright evil.”
The answers, published in January in a paper, “Lethal Mass Partisanship,” were startling, but maybe they shouldn’t have been.
Just over 42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as “downright evil.” In real numbers, this suggests that 48.8 million voters out of the 136.7 million who cast ballots in 2016 believe that members of opposition party are in league with the devil.
The mass partisanship paper was written by Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, political scientists at Louisiana State University and the University of Maryland Kalmoe and Mason, taking the exploration of partisan animosity a step farther, found that nearly one out of five Republicans and Democrats agree with the statement that their political adversaries “lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals.”
Their line of questioning did not stop there.
How about: “Do you ever think: ‘we’d be better off as a country if large numbers of the opposing party in the public today just died’?”
Some 20 percent of Democrats (that translates to 12.6 million voters) and 16 percent of Republicans (or 7.9 million voters) do think on occasion that the country would be better off if large numbers of the opposition died.
We’re not finished: “What if the opposing party wins the 2020 presidential election. How much do you feel violence would be justified then?” 18.3 percent of Democrats and 13.8 percent of Republicans said violence would be justified on a scale ranging from “a little” to “a lot.”
Both Democrats and Republicans have become more certain that the opposing party’s vision for the country represents a clear and present danger. Three-quarters (75 percent) of Republicans say the Democratic policies pose a threat, while nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of Democrats say the same about the GOP’s agenda. Only 30 percent of Democrats say Republican policies are misguided or wrong but not dangerous, while 19 percent of Republicans say the same of Democratic policies.
A pro-Trump nonprofit organization called Women for America First hosted the “Save America Rally” on Jan. 6 at the Ellipse, a federally owned patch of land near the White House. But an attachment to the permit, granted by the National Park Service, lists more than half a dozen people in staff positions who just weeks earlier had been paid thousands of dollars by Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. Other staff scheduled to be “on site” during the protest have close ties to the White House.
Conservative Groups: The Republican Attorneys General Association, Turning Point Action, Tea Party Patriots, Council for National Policy.
STEP 1: John Eastman concocts a “legal blueprint” whereby VP Pence elides the requirements of the Electoral Vote Act based on 7 states submitting dual slates of electors, allowing Pence to either count the alternate slate or not count those states at all https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf…
STEP 3: DOJ, meanwhile, submits letters to each state, indicating (falsely) that they have reason to believe that there has been election fraud. This creates perception that results are actually in question, bolstering VP’s ability to discount their votes.
[She later tweeted: “Jeffrey Clark’s letter references the alternate slate of electors “which have already been submitted”… his DOJ scheme was part and parcel of the same Eastman/forged slate scheme (also creating appearance the the “alternate slate” is OK as a matter of law)”]
STEP 5: Plan for all of these angry and agitated individuals to come to D.C. on January 6, the day that Eastman’s plan will be put into effect. The protesters are sent to march on the Capitol, to further put pressure on VP Pence and lawmakers, as stated in Oath Keeper indictment.
STEP 6: Since mob attack is intended to keep up pressure on Pence/lawmakers, they must be able to remain in Capitol as long as possible.
STEP 7: ??? I’m not sure what was supposed to happen at this point. Presumably, Pence would somehow declare Trump the winner, or if not, the Capitol would remain occupied until they found a way to make him do it. Seems like they planned to continue the siege.
The point is that there are a lot of moving parts and evidence surfacing in a lot of different areas but they are all connected to one overarching goal: Keep Trump in power by subverting the counting of the electoral votes and preventing the transfer of power to Biden /END
Census reports decline in raw numbers; "The White population remained the largest race or ethnicity group in the United States, with 204.3 million people identifying as White alone. Overall, 235.4 million people reported White alone or in combination with another group. However, the White alone population decreased by 8.6% since 2010."
We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different potions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen,- Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance-and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortieses exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few-not omitting even scaffolding-or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to yet bring such piece in-in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.
