Yep, just another quiet day in ever-so-ethical Virginia (snark). By the way, let me be one of the first Virgnia Democrats to call on Del. Morrissey to resign immediately for his appalling behavior (even though, this being Virginia and all, he’s allowed to work in the House by day, go back to the “big house” at night, to paraphrase Jeff Schapiro).

UPDATE 8:11 am Saturday: Sure hope we get a statement from the Virginia House Democratic Caucus today. So far…continued chirping crickets.

UPDATE 8:34 pm: Other than Atif Qarni, not a single one of the 15 or so Virginia Dems I contacted a few hours ago has responded. I’d say while I’m not surprised, I’m disappointed.

UPDATE 6:34 pm: Just checking Twitter, I see that another Democrat – Jeremy McPike, who’s also running for State Senate in the 29th district – tweeted, “Morrissey enters plea.  Time for change. #MorrisseyTimeToResign”

UPDATE 5:43 pm: I forgot, but actually Del. Mark Keam called for Morrissey to resign on July 1, 2014. At the time, Keam said, “Virginians deserve better from their public servants. For the sake of the Commonwealth and its residents, I call on Delegate Joe Morrissey to resign immediately and to deal with his legal problems as a private citizen.​”

UPDATE 5:32 pm: Democrat Atif Qarni, who almost defeated Del. “Sideshow” Bob Marshall last year for House of Delegates, and who is running this year for State Senate in Virginia’s 29th district (currently held by Chuck Colgan), has called for Joe Morrissey to resign. According to Qarni, it’s “disgusting” and “predatory behavior” for a 57-year-old man to engage in a sexual relationship with a child. Regardless of party affiliation, Qarni adds, Morrissey’s behavior is “unethical” — “what’s wrong is wrong.”

UPDATE 5:08 pm: Dead silence. The sound of crickets quietly chirping…

UPDATE 4:46 pm: I’m checking with Virginia Dems to see if any of them will call on Morrissey to resign. So far, seems pretty quiet… By the way, note that Morrissey’s district is super “blue”/safe, so THAT is no excuse.

From the DPVA:

“Loudoun voters will see right through Craig Parisot's political pandering,” said Morgan Finkelstein, press secretary for the Democratic Party of Virginia. “ “His statement to WAMU was clear as day, Craig Parisot refuses to support all-day Kindergarten in Virginia. Nomidnight press releases or Facebook posts can change the facts.” 

From the Democratic Party of Virginia:

Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Friday, December 12. Also check out the video of Secretary of State John Kerry speaking about climate change in Lima, Peru.

*House approves spending bill just before deadline

*Democrats’ Warren wing sends message with revolt

*Eugene Robinson: Senate report shows that the U.S. answered evil with evil

*Untrained CIA Agents Were Just Making Up Torture Methods As They Went Along (Everyone involved in this should be prosecuted.)

*Backers: Romney more open to 2016 run (“He has sounded unimpressed with the emerging GOP field, associates say.” Yeah, so are the rest of us! LOL)

*House Dem: GOP Gave Dems ‘Virtually Everything’ We Wanted (Interesting take by Rep. Jim Moran. Not sure I agree with it, but interesting…)

*McAuliffe to lead Chesapeake Bay group

*Renewable energy tax credits help level the field with tax-subsidized fossil fuels

*Virginia illogically denies Medicaid expansion as red states embrace it (It’s not “Virginia,” it’s specifically “Virginia Republicans” who are denying it.)

*Sen. Tim Kaine’s war powers push wins Foreign Relations Committee nod

*Ticking clock at NSU (“The problems at Norfolk State University were so bad last year that governing board members ousted the president without specifying a cause two years into his three-year contract. New members were appointed to the board; a veteran university president, considered a fixer for troubled institutions, was recruited and hired to stabilize the state’s largest historically black school.”)

*Uproar at U-Va. spawns debate about school’s treatment of fraternities

*UVA’s Heartening Response to the Rolling Stone Fiasco  

*U-Va. students challenge Rolling Stone account of alleged sexual assault

*Va. panel delays action on easing some probation checks

*Congress budgets $20 million to repair Wallops spaceport

*Norfolk finds no easy answers to shootings involving police

*New ‘Justice for John Geer’ group forms, Grassley staff seeks information

*Temperatures may hit the 40s today, but it will feel more like the 30s

Sowing Fear to Reap Submission

How are we to understand all these shootings, by police, of unarmed black men? And the manner in which the American justice system processes these shootings with the result that very few are indicted, hardly any are convicted, and virtually no one does any jail time? And how are we to understand the way that an impassioned major segment of people on the political right make heroes of the shooters in these cases — like Darren Wilson (and a self-appointed vigilante like George Zimmerman)?

A very dark force in the American body politic — an ancient and destructive component in the consciousness of the American collectivity — is being expressed here. It is all about that component of American civilization, going back centuries, that insists on the power of whites to oppress blacks.

Central to that oppressive power arrangement is making black people — making black men, specifically — afraid. Intimidation is always and everywhere a favorite tool of the oppressor.

In the days of slavery, the white elite created a system of “slave patrols” to capture and punish runaway slaves, and to intimidate the rest of the slave population. In the century of the Jim Crow regime in the American South, a whole range of methods — of which the lynching was only the most dramatic — were employed to intimidate blacks (again, especially black men) into acquiescing in the oppression imposed upon them by the dominant white race.

It is, regrettably, in that context that the pathological pattern of police killings of unarmed black men is to be understood.

What do the recent mottoes “Hands up! Don’t shoot” and “I can’t breathe” express if not a shared sense in the black community that it is dangerous to be an American While Black? And while the police in America truly do — in most ways — “protect and defend” all of us, that is historically not the whole picture. There is also nothing new in American history about the police force also being an instrument for protecting and defending power relationships, some of which are unjust.

And a long tale in that history is the story of police forces being used to keep blacks in a subordinate position. (So also with the judicial system, from the patent falsehood that “separate” would be “equal” to the exclusion of blacks from juries.)

One of the meanings of this rash of incidents, the big historical picture suggests, is that it shows the police serving as instruments of white oppression of black men. Those who are killed in these at best questionable ways — like the slaves who were whipped, and the black men in Jim Crow times who were burned and mutilated and strung up as “strange fruit” — serve as warnings to all those millions still alive.

Fear is used to keep them down.

Who Will Call Out the Party of the Oppressor?

When, in 2008, America elected its first black president, many hoped that this would usher in a brave new period in the history of American race relations. So it might have been, had this black president been up to the task of taking on the ancient forces of white racist oppression that was bound to rear its ugly head. So it seemed reasonable to believe he might do, given the power and the eloquence of candidate Obama’s speech on race delivered at a racially tense time in his 2008 campaign.

But one had only to listen to President Obama’s words to the nation in the wake of the grand jury’s failure to indict in Ferguson, Missouri, to recognize that this black president was more eager to avoid confrontation with that white racism than to lead the nation against it. His words were hesitant, careful. His goal seemed to be to get through this episode without provoking his enemies, without creating a political problem. His posture toward the force of white racism was more appeasing than challenging.

One cannot imagine FDR or Martin Luther King, Jr., shrinking in this way from such an opportunity to summon Americans to the better angels of their nature.

It was already clear long ago, however, that this president had chosen the path of conflict avoidance over winning the battle forced upon him. White racism has been coming at this president from the beginning, and he’s continually refused to take it on.

First, there was the attempt — through the “birther” lie — to make this president into an African, a man not only black but one whose presidency can be declared illegitimate on ostensibly “constitutional” grounds. You owe this president no respect or allegiance, the white racists were thereby assured on such bogus grounds. Obama never took seriously this assault not only on him but on our democracy; he ignored it.

Then, as the Republicans worked over these past six years — albeit more subtly than in the old days of Jim Crow and the Dixiecrats and George Wallace — to summon up the darkest racist impulses among the people on the right, they succeeded in making it politically viable to treat this first black president with a contempt we Americans have never before seen directed at an American president.

They whipped up the latent dark passions in enough white Americans that it became possible for Republican leaders in the Congress talk to and about President Obama with a disrespect and scorn that until now all Americans would have regarded as unAmerican.

But even as these Republicans summoned forth this ugly, long-standing racist impulse — established long ago by the regime of white oppression — this black president has defended neither himself nor his office against this assault. Instead, he shrank from the battle that inevitably was going to be part of the job of being the first black president.

In shrinking from this battle, and leaving the field open for this dark force of racism to rise and grow unchecked, perhaps this first black president was enacting that equally old pattern: a black man being intimidated by the oppressors.

Old patterns die hard. But in this missed opportunity we witness a great American tragedy.

And, unfortunately, not only on those forms of oppression that focus on race. There are other long-standing dimensions of oppression embedded in American civilization, and today’s GOP serves them all.

That party provides a channel for the force of the oppression of women by men, from Virginia’s proposed “transvaginal ultrasound” law to Rush Limbaugh’s rant against a “slut” with the gumption to speak up for the rights of women.

Today’s GOP is a tool of the corporatist system, assaulting the rights of workers, keeping in place a set of arrangements that now deprive American workers of their fair share of their increased productivity and widen our already extreme inequalities in the distribution of wealth and income.

Today’s Republican Party is reliably the instrument of the oppressor, in all its forms. But President Obama has never had the appetite to take on this ugly force of oppression and injustice by calling it out for what it is.

When in a year or so we begin to choose a leader to replace this president, the main priority must be: Who will be most effective in fighting against the oppressor? Who will be able and willing to call out ugly injustice for what it is?

That must be the top priority. For if there is one thing we should have learned in the past six years it is this: if we do not make progress in draining power away from this ugly force, then we will not make progress on all those other “issues” that are the usual stuff of politics.

Instead of Instead of this really stupid bill (click on image to “embiggen”) by right wingnut and “Agenda 21” conspiracy theory/global warming denier nutjob Del. Scott Lingamfelter (R-of course), how about some better ones?

First, though, why is Lingamfelter’s bill — “that when no candidate for an office receives more than 50 percent of the total votes cast at the general election for that office, a run-off election between the candidates receiving the highest and next-highest number of votes for that office shall be held” – a bad idea? Simple: because run-off elections (in this case, “to be held on the fourth Tuesday following the date of the certification of the results of the general election”) almost always have far lower turnout than in the general election. In fact, according to Fairvote.org:

Run-off elections for all offices also tend to have lower turnout that first round elections, especially if the first round election takes place on the same day as several other elections. For example, of 171 regularly scheduled primary runoffs for U.S House and U.S. Senate from 1994 to 2012, all but six of them resulted in a turnout decrease between the initial primary and the runoff, meaning that 96.5% of federal runoff elections had fewer people voting in the second round than in the first. The average decline in turnout was 35.3%. Additionally, the longer the wait between the initial primary and the runoff, the higher the decrease in voter turnout between elections. Primary elections with a gap of more than thirty days had a median decline in voter participation of 48.1%, while those with a gap of twenty days or less had a median decline of 15.4%.

It also, of course, costs money to conduct a run-off election. As Fairfvote.org explains, this is because “jurisdictions must print ballots, recruit and train pollworkers, locate precincts, and prepare voting equipment — not once, but twice.” Another problem: “this process can often disenfranchise overseas and absentee voters, who will not have enough time to return their ballots after they have been printed and mailed to them.” And yet another problem:

… two-round runoff elections require candidates to raise money twice, often requiring an influx of additional special interest contributions for the second round runoff. Coupled with low turnout in the runoff, this can allow these donors to leverage their campaign dollars for even greater influence, sometimes against the public interest. Similarly, well-organized groups who do not represent a majority of voters can take advantage of low turnout in the second round runoff to try and exert disproportionate influence over the result.

Blech. Finally, keep in mind that lower turnout benefits…wait for it…yep, Republicans. So, shocker that a Republican, particularly one as right wingnutty as Scott Lingamfelter, would come with this idea? Nope.

Of course, I agree with Lingamfelter that it would be better if our elected officials actually received a majority of the vote. The good news is that’s totally feasible, with something called “Instant Runoff Voting” (IRV) There are many advantages to IRV, which Fairvote.org lists here, such as that it “Reduces Election Administration Costs,” and “Improves Voter Turnout,” “Reduces Negative Campaigning.” Under IRV, the “process continues until one candidate earns a majority.” But this doesn’t take time, as it can all be calculated instantaneously by computer. For instance, in the 2014 U.S. Senate race here in Virginia, the candidate with the fewest votes in the first round – Robert Sarvis in this case – would be eliminated, with his voters’ second choices now being counted. Voila, no “spoilers” or “wasted votes,” as your vote will definitely be counted if there’s not a majority for any candidate in the first round. We’ve done it here in Arlington in Democratic caucuses, and it’s worked well. Unfortunately, we can NOT do it in a primary, as that’s governed under state law, and Virginia unfortunately is a strong Dillon Rule state. Of course, if Lingamfelter were serious about improving voting in Virginia, he could simply introduce a bill to allow – or even require – IRV throughout the state. But noooooo….

Another idea Lingamfelter could consider if he were serious about improving voting would be “vote by mail,” which is currently used exclusively in three states (Colorado, Washington, Oregon), and as one option in 27 states. An advantage of using this system exclusively is that it “eliminates the requirements to staff and run a polling center during an election, and can result in considerable cost savings to the state.” An even bigger advantage from the perspective of democracy – although NOT from the perspective of Republicans, who do better the fewer people vote – is that voting by mail leads to high turnout. For instance, while turnout here in Virginia was a miserable 41.6%, in the 2014 mid-term elections, in vote-by-mail Oregon, it was a whopping 69.5%. Not coincidentally, Democrats won big in Oregon, which yet again is a perfect illustration of why Republicans like Scott Lingamfelter are actively working to discourage, not encourage, voter turnout here in Virginia. It really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out motives here.

Bottom line: Lingamfelter’s correct that candidates should get a majority of the vote, but he’s absolutely wrong in the way he goes about it, especially considering that he completely ignored IRV and vote-by-mail options.