Tag: Steve Ross

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Opinion Viewpoint

Time to Get Rid of the Electoral College

As the new session of Congress gets underway, members are submitting legislation to be considered over the next two years. Memphis’ own Representative Steve Cohen has introduced 16 measures to be considered, including a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College. The Electoral College amendment brought a swift condemnation from the Shelby County GOP, who used a Brietbart.com link to plead their case.

Steve Ross

Cohen has sponsored this constitutional amendment several times. He proposed it in the 114th and 115th Congresses. It should come as no surprise that he’s putting it forward now, as a member of the majority.

A little history: The Electoral College came about thanks to the “Grand Compromise.” Southern states had a problem: They were really rural. They didn’t have the population density of northern states. They also had another concern: slavery. In 1787, slaves didn’t count for the purposes of apportioning Congressional Districts. As a result, the South’s ability to have an impact on national politics would be greatly diminished.

Enter the three-fifths compromise, two Senators per state, and the Electoral College. Thanks to this compromise, Virginia had an outsized impact on national relections for decades. Seven of the first 12 presidents hailed from Virginia. Nine of 16 pre-Civil War presidents hailed from Southern states. The three-fifths compromise and the Electoral College together gave Southern states incentive to increase their slave population to increase their political power in the nation. The three-fifths part of the Constitution was repealed after the Civil War, but the Electoral College, despite its role in empowering slave states, lives on. Since its inception, the Electoral College has favored smaller states over larger states. This holds true today.

• Twenty U.S. states, including Texas, California, and Tennessee have less electoral power per vote to decide the presidency than the other 30.

• Fifteen states have more power in the Electoral College than their population. Seven-and-a-half percent of the population has 12.6 percent of the Electoral College votes.
• The 20 largest states have less power than their population. Seventy-five-point-six percent of the U.S. population has only 68.4 percent of the power to decide the presidency. This disparity is the rationale behind Cohen’s constitutional amendment. By relying on the popular vote, the majority of the nation’s voters are better served.

This is the third time Cohen has filed a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College. Certainly, he knows it’s a long shot, but as the saying goes, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get.”

The amendment would need 290 votes in the House. Currently, Democrats occupy 235 seats. So 55 Republicans would have to join the effort. Then, two-thirds of the Senate would have to agree. With only 47 Democrats in the Senate, it’s unlikely the amendment would even come up for a vote. And even after meeting those two very high bars, the amendment would have to be ratified by 38 states.

Fifteen states currently get a great deal more power from the Electoral College than their population warrants. That alone is enough resistance to keep the amendment from being ratified. But there are another 15 states who also benefit some from the system. That brings the total to 30. Some of those 30 states might choose to ratify. But there are plenty of states, like Texas and Florida, who currently lose electoral power but are unlikely to push it forward for purely partisan reasons.

Since 1980, smaller Southern and Western states with less than six Electoral College votes have generally favored Republicans. No Republican-led state legislature is going to give away that advantage, no matter how badly it disadvantages voters in their state. The GOP controls both houses in 30 states. Democrats control just 18 (two are split). To get to 38 states, you would need the majority of GOP-led legislatures to approve the amendment, which seems unlikely.

But let’s say the amendment did make it past Congress. The amendment would have seven years to be approved by 38 states. That still leaves time for Democrats to gain power and get it passed … even if that’s not very likely.

In the end, Cohen is right to bring this amendment forward, even if it doesn’t have much of a chance of moving. By doing so, he’s placing a marker on the right side of history. And if conditions on the ground change to make this more viable, he’ll be ready.

Steve Ross is a longtime contributor to the Flyer and proprietor of the watchdog blog, Vibinc.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Changing the Guard at MPD

CREDIT: Memphis Police Department

It was recently announced that Memphis Police Director Toney Armstrong and nearly half of his command staff are leaving the department. While there’s no question the departure of so many seasoned officers will be a huge loss, it also gives newly inaugurated Mayor Jim Strickland an opportunity to remake the department to better serve the community.

Memphis Police Department

Departing MPD Director Toney Armstrong

The department faces many external challenges and suffers from internal problems that have been long ignored. These challenges are unlikely to be adequately addressed by an insider.

One of the flaws that was exposed in the investigation into the officer involved in the shooting death of Darrius Stewart is the lack of consistent policy positions for officers in what would often be standard situations. 

Currently, rules are written vaguely, giving officers the latitude to make judgment calls. Unfortunately, that latitude can also be used to treat different people in similar situations very differently. This ultimately undermines the relationship between law enforcement and populations that have been wrongly targeted due to circumstances that are beyond their control (race, the condition of their vehicles/residences, and the areas in which they live).

Rules that detail when passengers involved in traffic stops are to identify themselves need to be put in writing. This will ensure people’s privacy rights are respected, and officers don’t accidentally create a situation where an arrest is thrown out due to mishandling.

Clear rules about when to call for backup need to be in place.

Finally, rules about when force, either restraining force or deadly force, is to be used need to be in line with a 1985 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which involved an unarmed, fleeing suspect and the Memphis Police Department. 

That ruling states deadly force cannot be used unless the officer has “probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”

The new police administration should actively engage the Citizen Law Enforcement Review Board (CLERB) on any new policy adopted and treat their relationship as a partnership to both inform the public of new policy and provide oversight when policy violations are reported.

For too long, relations between law enforcement and the public have been strained due to real and/or perceived wrongs committed by officers. Partnering with the CLERB will give the public the assurance that conduct issues will be dealt with in a timely manner.

Changing the way the department polices the city is another issue to address.  Instituting a community policing program would help heal fractures and most likely lead to a real decrease in crime.

Officers in Memphis have little direct contact with the populations they’re serving unless they’re on a call. That means officers only see the people they’re serving when they’re at their worst or in a bad situation. This negatively impacts their outlook on the community and leads to more alienation.

While walking patrols may not be feasible in every neighborhood, focusing on developing relationships in the community will minimize the alienation that is common in traditional patrols. It also builds relationships between the public and police that are durable, even when things go wrong.

Those relationships also provide a “boots on the ground” intelligence to identify other societal ills that may be occurring in communities (domestic violence, child abuse or neglect, unfit housing, wage theft, and other problems people who feel forgotten may not report, because they don’t believe anything will be done about it).

These things are important for a city like Memphis that has a high rate of working poor. While the loss of decades of institutional memory may seem like a severe problem for the city, problems are really just opportunities ripe for the taking.

Positive changes are unlikely to come from within. Institutions have their own inertia and generally follow Newtonian laws of motion, meaning they will most certainly maintain their current velocity and direction unless acted upon by an external force, and even then, they’ll still resist any push to change.

The opportunity for Memphis and law enforcement in the new administration is to identify the right kind of “external force” that will move the department in the right direction and make Memphis not only safer for its citizens but also a city that places a high degree of value in a cooperative relationship between the police and the community.

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Politics Politics Feature

As Early Voting Starts, a Burst of Kumbaya

CREDIT: JB

Toward the end of Monday’s regular meeting of the Shelby County Commission, which had featured the final resolution of a month-long stand-off on approval of Chairman Justin Ford’s appointment of committee chairs, Commissioner Mark Billingsley, a Germantown Republican, conferred praise on the relative bipartisan unanimity of the day.

Billingsley went on to offer kudos for the inaugural “coffee and conversation” event sponsored by Ford last Friday, involving commissioners and guests at large, which he termed the kind of “positive” news often overlooked by the media. 

Indeed, there was a fair amount of kumbaya on the political scene last week, a modest cessation of conflict, even as the calendar slipped into the final month of the fall political campaign and early voting began on Wednesday of this week. 

One example of concord took place last Thursday at the Madison Hotel in a forum on Constitutional Amendment 2, one of four amendments on the November 4th ballot. The participants in the event, sponsored by the Federalist Society were Republican John Ryder and Democrat Steve Mulroy, both lawyers and both well-known for their partisan political involvement.

Ryder is a GOP national committeeman from Tennessee and general counsel of the Republican National Committee, and he was the chief architect of his party’s national redistricting efforts after the census of 2010. Mulroy, a Democrat and law professor, recently completed two terms on the Shelby County Commission and was a candidate earlier this year for his party’s nomination for Shelby County mayor.

Yet, both had no problem agreeing on the need for Amendment 2, which would constitutionally authenticate a variant of the oft-contested “Tennessee Plan” for appointment of state appellate judges. Like Governor Bill Haslam and former state Supreme Court Justice George Brown of Memphis, who had appeared at a public forum at the Kroc Center earlier in the week, both Ryder and Mulroy saw Amendment 2 as balancing the need for judicial independence with that of citizen input.

Essentially, the amendment provides for gubernatorial appointment of appellate judges, coupled with a need for ratification by both houses of the General Assembly. Judges would be subject to retention elections every eight years, as they are at present.

Along with the requirement for legislative approval (within a 60-day window for response), the amendment would do away with the current judicial nominating commission, which has previously been charged with making suggestions to the governor on the front end of the appointment process.

Ryder and Mulroy agreed, as had Haslam and Brown at the earlier forum, that direct election of appellate judges would introduce too much political involvement and financial influence into the naming process — a result of what Ryder called “an excess of Jacksonian democracy.”

While Amendment 2 has its opponents (notably lawyer John Jay Hooker of Nashville, who for years has litigated in favor of direct election of appellate judges), the most hotly contested of the four constitutional amendments on the ballot is unquestionably Amendment 1, which has generated considerable political activity and big-time war chests on both sides of the issue.

Basically, Amendment 1 would nullify a 2000 state Supreme Court decision, which provided protections of abortion rights that in some ways were stronger than those afforded by the federal courts. Opponents of abortion welcome the amendment, while supporters fear the “slippery slope” effect of its language allowing potential legislative action on abortion, even in cases involving rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother.

JB

Director Ashley Coffield, Congressman Steve Cohen, and honoree Beverly Marrero at Planned Parenthood event

Planned Parenthood of Memphis, which is aggressively resisting Amendment 1, honored former state Senator Beverly Marrero at a fund-raising event for the its campaign last Thursday night. •  Realistically, the battle for leadership on the Shelby County Commission is over for the time being — or at least in remission. By a vote, on Monday, of 11 for, one opposed, and one abstaining, the commission formally sustained Chairman Ford’s choices for committee chairs and thereby ended any immediate prospect of a challenge to his leadership. Monday’s vote was a reprise of a preliminary vote in Ford’s favor at last Wednesday’s committee meetings.

Given that last week’s vote had been similarly lopsided, there was very little fighting left to do at the regular commission meeting, and Democrat Walter Bailey, who had been the chief Ford resister, was content to cast his no vote, the only one against the appointments, as quietly and uneventfully as possible. The only other break from unanimity was an abstaining vote from Democrat Van Turner, chairman of the general government committee, which handled the appointments matter. 

The lack of drama reflected the currently anti-climactic state of a controversy that had seen Ford’s appointments blocked and referred back to committee by a 7-6 vote — six Democrats and Republican Steve Basar — on a motion made by the disgruntled Bailey at the regular Commission meeting of September 22nd.

And the relatively matter-of-fact denouement occurred, despite some serious prodding from others, on both sides of the issue, who evidently thought the contest was still on. 

Over the weekend, Norma Lester, a vocal Democratic representative on the Shelby County Election Commission, released the text of an “open letter” to fellow Democrats. The letter expressed Lester’s view that Ford, who was elected chairman of the reconstituted commission last month on the strength of his own vote, plus those of six Republicans, had subsequently fulfilled GOP wishes in the manner of the committee chairmanships.

Lester echoed Bailey’s charge that a “deal” had been cut on the chairmanship appointments between Ford and the GOP members who supported his chairmanship bid. Particularly controversial was the naming, for the second year in a row, of Republican member Heidi Shafer as chair of the commission’s budget committee.

Bailey had slammed what he called “political machinations” involved in both Ford’s election and his subsequent naming of committee chairs. Lester’s weekend letter seconded Bailey’s accusations of deal-making and “getting in bed with Republicans,” and made a charge of “blatant betrayal, which is what happened with young Ford and [is] the basis for the contempt amongst fellow Democrats.”

A visibly subdued Bailey restricted his objections on Monday to asking that the two appointments issue items be pulled off the commission’s consent agenda, leaving them potentially subject to debate.

But all Bailey had to say was “I again voice my objection.”

JB

Political activists turned up en masse for Saturday’s nuptials of well-known blogger Steve Ross and Ellyn Daniel, daughter of former state Rep. Jeanne Richardson.