Republicans Are Running Riot in Lame-Duck State Legislature Sessions
(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)
Being our 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 hot iron blows as you raise the shade.
In this week's Special Edition of our semi-regular weekly survey, we look at lame-duck sessions in which Republicans, whether they are an outgoing majority or not, work to sabotage the results of the midterm elections just passed by setting land mines while they still have the power to do it. We begin in Wisconsin, where the victorious Republican legislative majorities announced on the day after the election that they would make a life of living hell for Tony Evers, the Democratic governor-elect who helped rid the world of Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage this particular midwest subsidiary.
They're as good as their word, at least in this case. From the AP:
State law requires legislators to redraw the boundaries every 10 years to reflect population changes. It’s a high-stakes task since the party in control can craft maps that consolidate their power and lock in their majority for years.
The last time lawmakers drew new boundaries was in 2011, when Republicans controlled the Senate, Assembly and governor’s office. A federal judicial panel invalidated the Assembly districts as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander in 2016. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned that in June and sent the case back to the lower court to establish whether there was harm to particular voters. A new trial is set for April...
Meanwhile, the next round of redistricting is set for early 2021. After suffocating for a decade from the 2011 maps, Democrats had high hopes in the first days after the election that Evers would block another set of Republican-drawn boundaries. But nervous Democrats fear Republicans may take steps to remove or weaken the governor’s power in the redistricting process. “There’s just about anything you can do if you really want to,” U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, said earlier this month. “I’m just concerned. I’m watching everything. It’s just the wrong thing to do. You already have gerrymandered the state enough that you have all of the seats that you could possibly want.”
Republican leaders have said they don’t plan on tinkering with redistricting when they return in December for a lame-duck session to advance their priorities and take some power away from Evers before he takes office. But they haven’t released their proposal, fueling concerns among Democrats.
I can't understand why the state's Democrats would be so suspicious. From the Wisconsin State Journal:
Text of the bills to be considered could be released Friday, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said lawmakers could hold public hearings on the bills Monday. It was not immediately clear which committees could convene.
GOP lawmakers are expected to take up bills in the lame-duck session that could include scaling back certain powers of the governor's office or moving the date of Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential primary. Fitzgerald said Assembly Republicans are working on a large omnibus bill -- meaning one that could address a range of subjects. But he said Senate Republicans may proceed differently. "I don't think we're going in that direction -- maybe breaking it up," Fitzgerald said.
Over in Michigan, the Republicans in Lansing were even sharper. The voters in the state were preparing to put on the November ballot two referenda-one, to raise the state's minimum wage to $12, and the other to require employers to grant paid sick leave time to every employee. Since the state's voters passed referenda on voting reform and on legalizing marijuana, as well as electing a Democratic governor and flipping two House seats, it seems safe to assume that these two measures would have passed as well. But we'll never find out, because the Republican legislature passed these laws late in the last legislative sessions.
"Wait, what do you mean we'll never find out? They're the law now, ain't they?"
Patience, pilgrim. Here's where you find out how workers in the state of Michigan got swindled and how their advocates got played. From Michigan Public Radio:
The state Legislature is moving forward with changes to a citizen initiative on paid sick leave. The measure to require employers to offer earned, paid sick time got enough signatures to make the November ballot. But the Senate pre-empted that in an effort to scale it back before it becomes law.
You see, had the two measures made it onto the ballot, it would have taken a three-fourths majority in both houses of the state legislature to tinker with them. Now, though, because they were passed through the conventional legislative process, the Republicans can do anything they want to them in the lame-duck session, and then ship whatever dreck that process produces along to lame-duck Governor Rick (Lead Pipe) Snyder to sign. Governing is easy if you remove conscience from the equation.
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To the surprise of practically nobody, the same shenanigans are afoot down in North Carolina, where the lame-duck session already is underway, and the Republicans in Art Pope's pet legislature are not allowing any coal-ash poisoned grass to grow under their feet.
First up, in the state where they targeted African-American voters "with almost surgical precision" the last time they redrew the maps, at least according to one court-and whence comes Thomas Farr, the surgeon in question who's one step away from a seat on a federal court-they're looking to implement stringently a voter-ID law that the voters passed in November. As the Durham Herald-Sun reports, this bill likely would look a lot different if it were passed in the next session of the legislature-which, as Farr's nomination should remind us, is still preposterously gerrymandered.
In January, after the new Democratic legislators are sworn in, Republicans will lose their veto-proof supermajority in the legislature. While they still will control a majority, they won’t be able to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes as easily as they have for the last two years. The protest Tuesday was organized by the North Carolina NAACP and voter rights groups from across the state. Rev. William J. Barber II told the crowd the voter ID effort “is veiled in deliberate lies.” Barber was also joined by the president of the North Carolina NAACP, Rev. T. Anthony Spearman.
And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Holiday Jingle-Jangler Friedman of the Plains brings us a whole bunch of history. He points us to this fascinating piece by Friend O'The Blog Garrett Epps in The Atlantic about a grisly murder, and how its winding tale could lead theoretically to a court decision declaring half of Oklahoma to be reservation land.
Fifteen years ago, an assistant federal public defender and a defense investigator found a cross commemorating a murder beside a deserted road in eastern Oklahoma. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Law-enforcement records said it should have been about a mile and a quarter away.
The facts of the case:
The homemade monument the lawyer and the investigator found had been erected by family members to memorialize George Jacobs, a Muscogee Creek tribal member. His killer, [Dwayne] Murphy, also a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation (MCN), had been living with Jacobs’s ex, Patsy Jacobs. At about 9:30 p.m. on August 28, 1999, Murphy and his friends forced George Jacobs’s car off the road; Murphy then cut his throat and sliced off his genitals, leaving him to die on the roadside.
So this Murphy guy gets convicted and sentenced to die, then he vainly appeals the conviction a couple of times. Then he happens upon Lisa McCalmont, a public defender who also is a geologist-What are the odds?-and she is an expert in the laws governing the mineral rights possessed by Oklahoma's Native tribes to whatever happens to be under the land onto which they were forced to move almost 200 years ago. Naturally, those arrangements worked mainly to further cheat the Native peoples out of everything valuable below their feet, but some of them remain intact.
We pick up Epps's story.
McCalmont, the federal defender, thought that the new crime scene might still be part of an Indian allotment. Research revealed that it had originally been allotted to an individual member of the MCN. In 2004, one of that member’s descendants still maintained a small ownership interest-one-twelfth of the subsurface-mineral rights.
That ownership might make it Indian country, and that possibility has implications for Murphy’s case. An 1885 federal statute called the Major Crimes Act governs most serious crimes committed in Indian country. Indian people charged with these crimes fall under exclusive federal jurisdiction. If the crime scene was Indian country, the state would have had no authority to try Murphy, and his conviction would have to be set aside.
Murphy went back to court with that claim and another: Even if the road was not allotment land, the petition argued, it was still Indian country. Why? Because, the lawyers argued, all the surrounding land was still part of the huge MCN reservation guaranteed under an 1832 treaty with the United States.
Like, oops.
In November 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit agreed. After 175 years, it held, the Creek Reservation remained intact. But case law says there is a “clear statement” rule: If Congress wants to end a reservation, it has to say so.
It apparently did not. The Tenth Circuit said it couldn’t find any statute ending the reservation created by the Creek Nation’s treaty of 1832. Nor could it find evidence that Congress at any time showed a desire to abolish the reservation. Applying a 1983 precedent called Solem v. Bartlett, the court reasoned that all 3 million acres, whether owned by Indians, non-Indians, the federal government, or state or city governments, remained “Indian country.” Under the Major Crimes Act, Murphy’s conviction was void and he was entitled to a retrial in federal court.
Like the kidz say, read the whole thing. The Supreme Court heard arguments on Tuesday.
This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.
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