I'm Not Sure We Can Survive This Abandonment of Our Civic Faith
(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)
Being our (belated) semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done, and where the steam-pipes just cough.
We begin by checking in on the shenanigans in Tennessee, where they seem to have solved the problem of defenestrating Glen Casada, the speaker of the house who got caught texting bro-like with an aide in argot that seemed to have been drawn from the brothers of Delta Tau Chi at Faber College. However, weep not for Casada. He still gets to cash out. From The Tennessean:
Casada has said he is not resigning from his seat in the legislature - the only way he would be able to begin drawing a pension. In his case, turning 60 wouldn’t affect his eligibility since he is already over 55, King said. As speaker, Casada makes an annual salary of nearly $73,000, which will drop to $22,000 when he is back to being a regular House member. His retirement benefits will not be based on his annual salary, but rather a flat rate for lawmakers based on years of service. Were he to resign from his legislative seat altogether, Casada’s monthly pension would be at least $1,600. Based solely on his 18 years in the General Assembly and the pension formula for legislators, Casada would receive a $19,379 annual pension in retirement.
However, Casada has announced that he won't be stepping down until his 60th birthday (Hey, everybody gets to give themselves a birthday present, right?), and that's two months from now. This has frosted the his fellow Republicans, as NewsChannel 5 in Nashville informs us.
Many in his own party are worried Casada is prolonging his departure in an attempt to handpick a successor and continue to exert control over the General Assembly. "It's petty. There's no basis for him to extend this and it's making himself look worse," Greeneville Republican David Hawk said in an interview on Wednesday. Hawk continued to call on Casada to resign immediately. "Speaker Casada waiting two months to resign is ridiculous and unacceptable. People who lose their jobs don't get to set the time frame for when they leave those jobs," Hawk added.
Ah, Rep. Hawk. 'Tis new to politics you must be.
We move along up to West Virginia, where some folks got a win against an energy company, which is not something that happens as often as birdsong in those mountains. From the Charleston Gazette-Mail:
Natural gas producers in West Virginia no longer can drill on one person’s property to reach gas reserves under adjoining or neighboring tracts, the state Supreme Court said Wednesday in a much-anticipated ruling that gives additional leverage to residents struggling with the effects from the booming industry. In a 5-0 ruling, the justices upheld a lower court ruling and jury verdict against EQT Corp., siding with two Doddridge County residents who had sued the state’s second-largest gas company. Justice John Hutchison wrote that gas and other mineral companies must obtain permission from surface owners to use their land to reach reserves under other properties.
“The court will not imply a right to use a surface estate to conduct drilling or mining operations under neighboring lands,” Hutchison wrote. “The right must be expressly obtained, addressed, or reserved in the parties’ deeds, leases, or other writings.”
There will be no more drinking of other people's milkshakes for a while, anyway. This, again, is another victory against the presumption of the extraction industries as regards their right to go wherever they want to go. This is the same fight that ranchers and farmers in Nebraska have fought against TransCanada in the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline.
In the case, two people who live on a 300-acre farm in Doddridge County said EQT came onto their land to extract gas from underneath adjacent properties. The two people, Beth Crowder and David Wentz, warned EQT that the company would be trespassing. EQT entered the property anyway. Crowder and Wentz sued, and a local circuit judge ruled in their favor, and a jury two years ago awarded them nearly $200,000 in damages. EQT appealed that decision to the West Virginia Supreme Court, and the justices heard oral arguments in the case in March. “To us, the point was kind of obvious, and what’s disappointing is that it took all these years to get the Supreme Court ruling saying so,” said Dave McMahon, one of the lawyers for Crowder and Wentz, who came to the farm in 1975 but divorced in 2005 and now live in separate homes on the property.
We move up to Wisconsin, where a man named Mandela Barnes, an African-American, is now the lieutenant governor. The Republican legislature concocted a deal on highway funding that would limit the amount of security Barnes would enjoy. This seems more than passing strange. From Channel 3000:
Barnes is the first African American to hold the post in state history. He had nine more hours of security protection during his first two months in office than his Republican predecessor had all of 2018. It's not clear why Barnes is receiving so much more protection. The Wisconsin State Patrol protects state dignitaries. A patrol spokesman says the decision to provide more security for Barnes was made by the patrol and Gov. Tony Evers' office. Republicans on the Legislature's finance committee introduced changes to the transportation portion of Evers' state budget on Thursday night. The revisions including prohibiting the Department of Transportation, which runs the state patrol, from spending more on security for the lieutenant governor in the 2019-21 biennium than in the 2017-2019 biennium.
I admit this is a bit mystifying, and it is to be fervently hoped that this is just Republicans being cheap, and not Republicans being reckless. This is never a safe bet either way.
You may recall the story about how the estranged daughter of Thomas Hofeller, the Republican master of the gerrymander, found files on her father's hard drive that detailed Hofeller's role in crafting a citizenship question for the 2020 census, thereby complicating things for the Supreme Court, which is presently deliberating on that question's constitutionality. However, that's not all that was in those files, which is what the people of the newly insane state of North Carolina are discovering. From The New York Times:
The advocacy group Common Cause said in court documents submitted in Raleigh on Thursday that the Hofeller files include new evidence showing how North Carolina Republicans misled a federal court to prolong the life of their map of state legislative districts, which had been ruled unconstitutional.
The Republicans told the federal court hearing the map case that they would not be able to draw new legislative districts and hold public hearings on them in time for a proposed special election in late 2017 or early 2018. In fact, Common Cause said, Mr. Hofeller’s files show that almost all the work had already been done. While the advocacy group’s court filing did not include any of the underlying documents from Mr. Hofeller’s storage drives, it stated that a detailed analysis of the maps found among his files showed that new boundaries had been drawn for more than 97 percent of the state’s proposed Senate districts and 90 percent of House districts.
Republicans used that extra time to, among other things, try to tilt the state judiciary rightward, remap elected judges’ districts in the state’s largest county, and tweak election rules for the state Supreme Court. They restructured the State Board of Elections to dilute the influence of Roy Cooper, the state’s Democratic governor. And they tacked six proposed constitutional amendments onto last November’s ballot - many of them, like a proposal to make fishing and hunting a constitutional right, aimed at pumping up Republican turnout.
I'm not entirely sure that we ever will have a consensus in this country again that there is a right to vote, and that an election is not somehow tainted. I'm also not sure we can survive that kind of abandonment of our civic faith.
And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Son Of A Pioneer Friedman of the Plains brings us the saga of how his state has found itself paralyzed in its response to a measles outbreak. From Oklahoma Watch:
Public health policies that drew little attention for decades are now so politically toxic that few lawmakers want to take a recorded vote on the issue. And fewer still feel comfortable talking about updates to the state’s vaccination schedule or getting rid of certain vaccine exemptions. Even bills mandating vaccine information for adults are shot down as they wend their way through the legislative process. As Oklahoma joins 25 other states in the worst measles outbreak in a generation, changing the state’s vaccination policies has become the latest third rail of politics. Public health officials appear paralyzed almost to the point of inaction, and many lawmakers beg their colleagues not to sponsor vaccine-related bills that could embolden potential opponents.
Someone once wrote a book about the consequences of believing nonsense. Now, the anti-science embraced on the subject of, say, the climate crisis has come home to roost in the family kitchen, and the essential cowardice of the modern legislator is laid bare. Sometimes, your job is to piss off the crazy people, and no political office is worth being complicit in an assault on the public health. Do your damn jobs.
This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.
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