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      As California Votes, It Rethinks Its Tradition of Direct Democracy

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      Any proposed changes to a century-old recall law are likely to be met with stiff opposition from Republicans, who see it as one of the last avenues of influence in a Democratic-led state.SACRAMENTO — As Californians went to the polls on Tuesday to determine whether Gov. Gavin Newsom would be removed from office, the recall election had already spawned another campaign: to recall the recall.In a state famous for its acts of direct democracy, whether banning affirmative action or legalizing cannabis, detractors of this year’s special election say the recall process is democracy gone off the rails, a distraction from crises that require the government’s attention, and a waste of hundreds of millions of dollars.California’s forests are on fire, with wildfire smoke sending thousands of residents fleeing. Towns are running out of water from severe drought. And some rural hospitals are packed with coronavirus patients.Many voters who went to the polls on Tuesday said the election was an unwelcome distraction that preoccupied Mr. Newsom and, some critics said, might have prevented him from taking on tough decisions.“This recall is so dumb,” said Frankie Santos, a 43-year-old artist who voted in Hollywood on Tuesday. “It’s so not a good use of resources.” She said that if she could have scrawled “absolutely no” to recalling Mr. Newsom without invalidating her ballot, she would have.Anthony Rendon, the speaker of the State Assembly, and other legislative leaders have already said discussions were underway to place a constitutional amendment regarding recalls before voters in 2022.Voters waited to enter a polling site at a library in Huntington Beach.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesAn election worker collected mail-in ballots at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Pasadena.Ryan Young for The New York Times“This is a system that was put in place 100 years ago,” said Mr. Rendon, referring to the current recall rules. “We’ll be asking if this is what’s best for the state.”The election, which is costing the state $276 million to administer, has at times had a circus atmosphere to it, not least when one of the 46 candidates on the ballot brought a large bear to a campaign rally.No one in the state’s Democratic leadership is suggesting the elimination of recalls, which are baked into the State Constitution. But many are vowing to make it more difficult for them to qualify for the ballot, or to change the rules on how a successor is chosen.Currently, opponents of a governor — or any other elected official in California — can trigger a recall election by submitting signatures equal to 12 percent of the turnout in the most recent election for that office.In a sharp piece of political irony, it will take a referendum to decide whether to change this particular referendum.Democrats will be working over howls of opposition from Republicans, who see the recall process as one of the few resorts left to them in a state where Democrats control every statewide office and have supermajorities in the Legislature.“The last thing we need is legal changes that make it even harder for Californians to access their government,” said Kevin Kiley, a Republican assemblyman who ran in the recall election.Mr. Kiley said Democrats had already tried to delegitimize the process by calling it a democratic coup.“If they are trying to make it harder or impossible to hold your public officials accountable, that is absolutely something that I would oppose,” Mr. Kiley said.Critics of the recall process say it is fundamentally antidemocratic. With a simple majority, voters could recall Mr. Newsom, who was well ahead in the polls in the final days of campaigning. But his replacement would be chosen by plurality.Gov. Gavin Newsom thanked members of the IBEW Local 6 union for their support in San Francisco.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesLarry Elder, the leading Republican candidate, in Whittier last week.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesPolling showed that the front-runner to replace Mr. Newsom, the conservative talk show host Larry Elder, had nowhere near a majority of support, and many Democrats left that section of the ballot blank.Among Newsom supporters, there were strong feelings about the recall.Jose Orbeta, an employee of San Francisco’s Department of Public Health, was blunt in describing the recall election as he voted on Tuesday.“Waste of time,” he said. “It’s a power grab by the G.O.P.”Mr. Newsom had done a “decent job” leading California through the pandemic, he said.Recalls in California date back more than a century, to a suite of reforms passed from 1910 to 1913 under Gov. Hiram Johnson, a Republican and progressive crusader. They were the capstone of a yearslong effort to curb the political power of the Southern Pacific railroad, which all but owned the state’s government and economy, controlling politicians, judges and regulators.Mr. Johnson’s reforms broke the hold, overhauling the state’s election system and, through a constitutional amendment passed by voters in 1911, instituting the system of referendums, ballot initiatives and the recall. Kevin Starr, a California historian who died in 2017, called this “the very re-creation of the political and social order of California.”It is often pointed out that Mr. Johnson’s reforms — tools that were explicitly created to curb the influence of big business on California’s politics — have now become a major corporate weapon. This is particularly true of initiatives, which can be put on the ballot with a few million dollars’ worth of clipboard-holding workers gathering signatures from registered voters.One recent example was Proposition 22, a $200 million initiative by the ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft to prevent their drivers from being classified as employees.“That is the bigger problem here,” said Jim Newton, a historian and lecturer on public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has written biographies of the governors Earl Warren and Jerry Brown.“It’s not whether Gavin Newsom gets 51 percent or we have Gov. Larry Elder. That’s important, but the general premise that the initiative, referendum and recall are intended to curb the influence of powerful special interests has been tipped entirely on its head and it has now become the tool of special interests.”Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law expert and the dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that the state’s recall process is unconstitutional because the two-step nature of the process — with voters deciding whether to recall the sitting governor and then, separately, choosing a replacement — makes it possible for a new governor to take office with less popular support than the old one.If 49 percent of voters supported Mr. Newsom, 25 percent supported Mr. Elder, and fewer than that supported any other candidate, Mr. Elder would become governor with about half as many votes as Mr. Newsom. In that scenario, the vote of one Elder supporter would effectively have twice as much power as the vote of a Newsom supporter, said Professor Chemerinsky — and that would violate the “one person, one vote” principle affirmed in two Supreme Court decisions in 1964, Reynolds v. Sims and Wesberry v. Sanders.Californians were not forced to confront that problem in the 2003 recall, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger replaced Gov. Gray Davis, because Mr. Schwarzenegger received more votes on the second question than Mr. Davis did on the first.Voters cast their ballots at Redwood Playhouse in Garberville.Alexandra Hootnick for The New York TimesLeaving a voting site at Jesse Owens Park in Los Angeles on Monday.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesMr. Davis, the first California governor to lose a recall election, said in an interview that the ability to recall officials was part of California’s “unique direct democracy approach to voting,” but that he supported changes to the specifics of the process.“For 110 years, anyone running for governor knew there was a possibility of being subject to a recall,” he said. “It comes with the territory — and life isn’t always fair.”But he argued that the threshold for getting a recall on the ballot — signatures from 12 percent of the voters in the previous election for governor — was insufficient in an era that allows interest groups to gain supporters with the click of a button on Facebook.“We should go from a 12 percent to a 25 percent threshold,” Mr. Davis said, and ask voters only one question: “Who should serve out the balance of the governor’s term?”State Senator Josh Newman, who experienced the state’s recall rules firsthand when he was recalled in 2018 and replaced by a candidate who received fewer votes than him in the recall election, said he planned to propose a constitutional amendment early next year that would remove the replacement race on the ballot. Voters would decide whether a governor should be recalled, and if so, the lieutenant governor would automatically take the job. Mr. Newman ran against his replacement and won back his seat in 2020.Yet amid the plans and proposals to tweak the recall rules, there were voters who wanted them to stay just as they are.Jim Mastrosimone, a voter in Irvine, groused that the list of replacement candidates was too long after casting his vote for Mr. Elder.But ultimately, Mr. Mastrosimone said, he is happy Californians have recall elections.“It gives the power to the little guy,” he said.Thomas Fuller More

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      The Gavin Newsom Recall Is a Farce

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      After a slow start, California ranks 10th in the nation for coronavirus vaccinations. It’s down to about three cases per 100,000 residents. Its economy is booming. According to Bloomberg, the state “has no peers among developed economies for expanding G.D.P., creating jobs, raising household income, manufacturing growth, investment in innovation, producing clean energy and unprecedented wealth through its stocks and bonds.” State coffers are flush: The governor’s office estimates a $76 billion budget surplus. The Legislative Analyst’s Office puts it at $38 billion. (The difference turns on the definition of the word “surplus.”) More

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      El presidente de Haití no tiene apoyo popular pero quiere reformar la Constitución

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      El país se enfrenta a una crisis prolongada y se prepara para la mayor reorganización del gobierno que se haya visto en décadas con un referéndum constitucional y elecciones nacionales previstas para este año.El presidente de Haití sabe que tiene un problema: gobernar un país que a veces parece rozar lo ingobernable es bastante difícil cuando se tiene mucho apoyo.Está claro que Jovenel Moïse no lo tiene.En una entrevista reciente, el líder haitiano se lamentó de que solo tiene la confianza de una pequeña parte de su pueblo.Ganó las elecciones de 2016 con algo menos de 600.000 votos en un país de 11 millones de personas. Y ahora muchos están enojados por su negativa a dejar el cargo en enero, en medio de una disputa sobre si su mandato terminaba entonces o debía prolongarse un año más.Sin embargo, Moïse, de 52 años, ha escogido este momento para embarcarse en la mayor sacudida de la política haitiana en décadas, y supervisa la redacción de una nueva Constitución que reestructurará el gobierno y dará mayores poderes a la presidencia.La necesidad de una nueva Constitución es un raro punto de acuerdo entre Moïse y sus numerosos detractores. Lo que preocupa a algunos observadores es el enfoque unilateral del presidente para redactarla. Otros simplemente no confían en él.Moïse, según los críticos, se ha vuelto cada vez más autocrático y se apoya en un pequeño círculo de confidentes para redactar un documento que, entre otros cambios, dará al presidente mayor poder sobre las fuerzas armadas, así como la posibilidad de presentarse a dos mandatos consecutivos. También otorgaría al líder de Haití inmunidad por cualquier acción realizada en el cargo.Una protesta contra MoïseValerie Baeriswyl/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMoïse dice que la ampliación de poderes es necesaria.“Necesitamos un sistema que funcione”, dijo en la entrevista telefónica. “El sistema actual no funciona. El presidente no puede trabajar para cumplir”.Haití obtuvo su independencia en 1804, después de que los haitianos se alzaran contra la Francia colonial, pero no fue hasta 1990 cuando tuvo sus primeras elecciones ampliamente consideradas como libres y justas. Incluso entonces, en un país con una larga historia de dictaduras y golpes de Estado, la democracia nunca se ha arraigado del todo.Muchos haitianos dicen que es necesaria una nueva Constitución. La actual ha creado dos centros de poder que compiten entre sí en el país —el presidente y el primer ministro —, lo que a menudo provoca fricciones y un gobierno fracturado.El proyecto de Constitución suprimiría el Senado, y dejaría en su lugar un único órgano legislativo elegido cada cinco años, y sustituiría el cargo de primer ministro por un vicepresidente que responda ante el presidente, en un intento de simplificar el gobierno.Los haitianos votarán la nueva Constitución en junio, antes de las elecciones nacionales previstas para septiembre.Sin embargo, algunos no se sienten muy tranquilos con la votación que se avecina.“La gente tiene que darse cuenta de que las elecciones no son inherentemente equivalentes a la democracia”, dijo Jake Johnston, investigador asociado del Centro de Investigación Económica y Política en Washington.Cada vez que hay una crisis política en Haití, dijo, la comunidad internacional tiende a pedir elecciones. Eso deja al país pasando de un gobierno paralizado a otro, en lugar de intentar reformar el proceso electoral y trabajar para conseguir la participación de los votantes.“Cuando unas elecciones dejan de representar realmente la voluntad del pueblo, ¿qué tipo de gobierno esperan que produzca?”, preguntó Johnston.Desde 1986, tras casi 30 años de dictadura, la participación electoral ha disminuido constantemente en Haití. Solo el 18 por ciento de los haitianos con derecho a voto participaron en las elecciones de 2016 que llevaron a Moïse al poder.Ahora, el profundo marasmo económico y social del país solo puede animar a más haitianos a quedarse en casa cuando llegue el momento de votar por la nueva Constitución y luego por un nuevo presidente.El desempleo es galopante y la desesperación está en su punto más alto. Muchos haitianos son incapaces de salir a la calle para hacer el mercado sin preocuparse de que los secuestren para pedir un rescate.Un mercado en Puerto Príncipe. Muchos haitianos no pueden salir a la calle sin preocuparse por la delincuencia, incluido el secuestro.Chery Dieu-Nalio para The New York TimesMoïse dice que a él también le preocupa la participación electoral.“Hay una mayoría silenciosa”, dijo. “Muchos haitianos no quieren participar en algo que creen que será violento. Necesitamos paz y estabilidad para animar a la gente a votar”.A medida que se acerca el referéndum de junio sobre la Constitución, el gobierno trata de registrar a cinco millones de votantes, dijo Moïse. Su objetivo, explicó, es inyectar al proceso más legitimidad de la que tuvo su presidencia.Según las Naciones Unidas, hay al menos 6,7 millones de votantes potenciales en Haití. Otros dicen que esa cifra es un recuento insuficiente, ya que muchos haitianos son indocumentados y sus nacimientos nunca se registran ante el gobierno.En un esfuerzo por aplacar a los críticos, y aliviar las preocupaciones de que se posiciona para beneficiarse de la nueva Constitución, Moïse ha prometido no presentarse a las próximas elecciones.Pero para arreglar el país antes de retirarse, dice, necesita acumular suficiente poder para enfrentarse a una oligarquía que, según él, ha paralizado Haití para aprovecharse de un gobierno demasiado débil para regular o cobrar impuestos sus negocios.“Hoy en día sufrimos la captura del Estado, es el mayor problema al que nos enfrentamos”, dijo Moïse.Algunos ven con profundo escepticismo las afirmaciones de Moïse de que se ha convertido en un enemigo de las grandes empresas al intentar regularlas. Dicen que el presidente simplemente trata de avivar el sentimiento populista para desviar la atención de los fracasos de su propio gobierno y dejar de lado a sus oponentes políticos.Policías se enfrentan a manifestantes que exigían la renuncia de Moïse en febrero de este año.Valerie Baeriswyl/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOtros están dispuestos a ser más colaborativos, pero dicen que él no ha hecho lo suficiente para conseguir apoyo.“El problema es la forma en que Moïse ha actuado”, dijo Alexandra Filippova, abogada del Instituto para la Justicia y la Democracia en Haití, una organización que proporciona representación legal a las víctimas de abusos de los derechos humanos. “Lo está impulsando unilateralmente”.El proyecto de Constitución, por ejemplo, publicado el mes pasado, solo está disponible en francés —que la gran mayoría de los haitianos no lee— en lugar de en criollo.Y no se invitó a ningún miembro de la sociedad civil a participar en la redacción del documento. En su lugar, Moïse nombró una comisión especial para hacerlo. Esto, según los críticos, disminuye las posibilidades de un progreso real.“Se supone que el cambio constitucional debe reflejar algún tipo de consenso social”, dijo Filippova.Maria Abi-Habib es la jefa de la corresponsalía para México, Centroamérica y el Caribe. Ha reportado para el Times desde el sur de Asia y el Medio Oriente. Síguela en Twitter: @abihabib More

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      A Go-It-Alone President Wants to Reshape Haiti. Some Are Skeptical.

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      Haiti, facing a prolonged crisis, is preparing for the biggest shake-up of government seen in decades with a constitutional referendum and national elections slated for this year.Haiti’s president knows he has a problem: Governing a country that at times seems to verge on the ungovernable is hard enough when you have a lot of support.Jovenel Moïse clearly does not.In a recent interview, the Haitian leader lamented that he has the confidence of only a small sliver of his people.He won the 2016 elections with just under 600,000 votes in a country of 11 million. And now many are angry over his refusal to leave office in February, amid a dispute over whether his term ended then or should extend for one more year.Yet Mr. Moïse, 52, has chosen this moment to embark on the biggest shake-up Haiti’s politics has seen in decades, overseeing the drafting of a new Constitution that will restructure government and give the presidency greater powers.The need for a new Constitution is a rare point of agreement between Mr. Moïse and his many detractors. What concerns some observers is the president’s unilateral approach to writing one. Others just don’t trust him.Mr. Moïse, critics charge, has become increasingly autocratic and is relying on a small circle of confidants to write a document that, among other changes, will give the president greater power over the armed forces as well as the ability to run for two consecutive terms. It would also grant Haiti’s leader immunity for any actions taken in office.A protest againt Mr. Moïse.Valerie Baeriswyl/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Moïse says the broader powers are necessary.“We need a system that works,” he said in the telephone interview. “The system now doesn’t work. The president cannot work to deliver.”Haiti won its independence in 1804, after Haitians rose up against colonial France, but it was not until 1990 that it had its first election widely regarded as free and fair. Even then, in a country with a long history of dictatorships and coups, democracy has never fully taken root.Many Haitians say a new Constitution is needed. The current one has created two competing power centers in the country — the president and prime minister — which often leads to friction and a fractured government.The draft Constitution would abolish the Senate, leaving in place a single legislative body elected every five years, and replace the post of prime minister with a vice president that answers to the president, in a bid to streamline government.Haitians will vote on the new Constitution in June, ahead of national elections slated for September.But some take little reassurance from the ballot casting ahead.“People need to realize that elections are not inherently equivalent to democracy,” said Jake Johnston, a research associate for the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.Every time there is a political crisis in Haiti, he said, the international community tends to call for elections. That leaves the country limping from one paralyzed government to another, instead of trying to reform the electoral process and work to engage voter participation.“When an election actually ceases to represent the will of the people, what kind of government do they expect that to produce?” Mr. Johnston asked.Since 1986, after nearly 30 years of dictatorship, voter turnout has steadily declined in Haiti. Only 18 percent of all eligible Haitians participated in the 2016 election that brought Mr. Moïse to power.Now, the country’s deep economic and social morass may only encourage more Haitians to stay at home when it is time to vote on the new Constitution and then for a new president.Unemployment is rampant and desperation is at an all-time high. Many Haitians are unable to step onto the street to run basic errands without worrying about being kidnapped for ransom.A market in Port-au-Prince. Many Haitians are unable to run basic errands without worrying about crime, including being kidnapped.Chery Dieu-Nalio for The New York TimesMr. Moïse says he, too, is concerned about voter participation.“There is a silent majority,” he said. “Many Haitians don’t want to participate in something they think will be violent. We need peace and stability to encourage people to vote.”As the June referendum on the Constitution approaches, the government is trying to register five million voters, Mr. Moïse said. His goal, he said, is to inject the process with more legitimacy than his presidency had.According to the United Nations, there are at least 6.7 million potential voters in Haiti. Others say that number is an undercount, since many Haitians are undocumented, their births never registered with the government.In an effort to placate critics, and ease concerns that he is positioning himself to benefit from the new Constitution, Mr. Moïse has promised not to run in the next election.But to fix the country before he steps down, he says, he needs to accumulate enough power to take on an oligarchy he says has paralyzed Haiti to profit off a government too weak to regulate or tax their businesses.“We are suffering today from state capture — it is the biggest problem we face today,” Mr. Moïse said.Some view with deep skepticism Mr. Moïse’s claims that he has made an enemy out of big businesses by trying to regulate them. They say the president is simply trying to stoke populist sentiment to deflect from the failures of his own government and sideline political opponents.Police officers clashing with protesters demanding the resignation of Mr. Moïse.Valerie Baeriswyl/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOthers are willing to be more charitable, but say he has not done enough to build support.“The problem is that the way that Moïse has gone about it,” said Alexandra Filippova, a senior staff attorney with the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, an organization that provides legal representation for victims of human rights abuses. “He is unilaterally pushing it forward.”The draft Constitution, for example, released last month, is available only in French — which the vast majority of Haitians do not read — instead of Creole.And no members of civil society were invited to take part as the document was drafted. Mr. Moïse instead appointed a special commission to do that. That, critics say, dims the chances for real progress.“Constitutional change is supposed to reflect a social consensus of some sort,” Ms. Filippova said. More

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      How the Pennsylvania GOP is Trying to Increase Their Control of State Courts

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPennsylvania G.O.P.’s Push for More Power Over Judiciary Raises AlarmsAfter fighting the election results, state Republicans are trying to increase their control of the courts. Outraged Democrats and good government groups see it as a new kind of gerrymandering.The Pennsylvania Capitol building, which houses chambers for the State Supreme Court. Under a Republican proposal, the legislative branch would have more control over the courts. Credit…Hilary Swift for The New York TimesFeb. 15, 2021Updated 10:29 a.m. ETWhen the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unanimously rejected a Republican attempt to overturn the state’s election results in November, Justice David N. Wecht issued his own pointed rebuke, condemning the G.O.P. effort as “futile” and “a dangerous game.”“It is not our role to lend legitimacy to such transparent and untimely efforts to subvert the will of Pennsylvania voters,” wrote Justice Wecht, a Democrat who was elected to a 10-year term on the bench in 2016. “Courts should not decide elections when the will of the voters is clear.”Now Pennsylvania Republicans have a plan to make it less likely that judges like Justice Wecht get in their way.G.O.P. legislators, dozens of whom supported overturning the state’s election results to aid former President Donald J. Trump, are moving to change the entire way that judges are selected in Pennsylvania, in a gambit that could tip the scales of the judiciary to favor their party, or at least elect judges more inclined to embrace Republican election challenges.The proposal would replace the current system of statewide elections for judges with judicial districts drawn by the Republican-controlled legislature. Those districts could empower rural, predominantly conservative areas and particularly rewire the State Supreme Court, which has a 5-to-2 Democratic lean.Democrats are now mobilizing to fight the effort, calling it a thinly veiled attempt at creating a new level of gerrymandering — an escalation of the decades-old practice of drawing congressional and state legislative districts to ensure that political power remains in one party’s hands. Democrats are marshaling grass-roots opposition, holding regular town hall events conducted over Zoom, and planning social media campaigns and call-in days to legislators, as well as an enormous voter education campaign. One group, Why Courts Matter Pennsylvania, has cut a two-minute infomercial.Republicans in Pennsylvania have historically used gerrymandering to maintain their majority in the legislature, despite Democratic victories in statewide elections. Republicans have controlled the State House of Representatives since 2011 and the State Senate since 1993.Current schedules for the legislature make it unlikely the Republicans could marshal their majorities in the House and Senate to pass the bill by Wednesday and put the proposal before voters on the ballot in May. Passing the bill after that date would set up a new and lengthy political war for November in this fiercely contested state.Republicans have some history on their side: Pennsylvania voters tend to approve ballot measures.“You should be very suspicious when you see a legislature who has been thwarted by a Supreme Court in its unconstitutional attempts to rig the democratic process then trying to rig the composition of that Supreme Court,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.She added, “It is way too much control for one branch to have over another branch, particularly where one of its charges is to reign in the excesses of the legislative branch.”If the Republican bill becomes law, Pennsylvania would become just the fifth state in the country, after Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi and Illinois, to wholly map its judicial system into electoral districts, according to the Brennan Center. And other states may soon join Pennsylvania in trying to remake the courts through redistricting.Republicans in the Texas Legislature, which is also controlled by the G.O.P., recently introduced a bill that would shift districts for the state appellate courts by moving some counties into different districts, causing an uproar among state Democrats who saw the new districts as weakening the voting power of Black and Latino communities in judicial elections and potentially adding to the Republican tilt of the Texas courts.Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the Texas Democratic Party, called the bill a “pure power grab meant to keep Blacks and Latinos from having influence on courts as their numbers in the state grow.”These judicial redistricting battles are taking shape as Republican-controlled legislatures across the country explore new restrictions on voting after the 2020 elections. In Georgia, Republicans in the state legislature are seeking a host of new laws that would make voting more difficult, including banning drop boxes and placing sweeping limitations on mail-in voting. Similar bills in Arizona would restrict mail-in voting, including barring the state from sending out mail ballot applications. And in Texas, Republican lawmakers want to limit early voting periods.The nationwide effort by Republicans follows a successful four-year drive by the party’s lawmakers in Washington to reshape the federal judiciary with conservative judges. Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, until recently the majority leader, and Mr. Trump, the Senate confirmed 231 federal judges, as well as three new Supreme Court justices, over the former president’s four-year term, according to data maintained by Russell Wheeler, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution.In a state like Pennsylvania, which has two densely populated Democratic cities and large rural areas, this could give outsize representation to sparsely populated places that lean more conservative, particularly if the legislature resorts to a gerrymandering tactic similar to one used in Pennsylvania in 2011.“Republicans have been good at gerrymandering districts in Pennsylvania, or good in the sense that they’ve been successful,” said State Senator Sharif Street, a Democrat. “I think they would like to remain successful, and they are confident that they can gerrymander judicial districts.”Republicans in the state legislature argue that their proposed move would give different regions of Pennsylvania more representation.Russ Diamond, the Republican state representative who is sponsoring the bill, said in an email that regional representation was necessary for the judiciary “because the same statewide consensus which goes in making law should come to bear when those statutes are heard on appeal, are applied in practical real-life situations, and when precedent is set for the future of the Commonwealth.”State Representative Russ Diamond during a town hall meeting in Llewellyn, Pa. He sponsored the bill to reshape the judiciary, after first introducing a similar one in 2015. Credit…Lindsey Shuey/Republican-Herald, via Associated Press“The overall goal is to include the full diversity of Pennsylvania’s appellate courts,” Mr. Diamond added. “There is no way to completely depoliticize the courts, other than choosing judges via random selection or a lottery system. Every individual holds some political opinion or another.”Geographic diversity, however, rarely equates to racial diversity in the courts. The four states that use judicial districts in state Supreme Court elections — Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi and Kentucky — have never had more than one justice of color on the court at any given time, according to data from the Brennan Center.While eight states use some form of judicial districts to elect judges, Pennsylvania’s proposal remains an outlier on a few key elements. First, a partisan legislature would have the power to redraw the districts every 10 years, whereas those elsewhere remain for longer or are based on statute. Additionally, the judicial districts in Pennsylvania would not be bound by or based on any existing legislative or congressional districts, created from scratch by the Republican-controlled legislature.The move has caught the attention of national Democratic groups that are at the forefront of redistricting battles across the country.“A decade ago, Pennsylvania Republicans gerrymandered themselves into majorities in the legislature and congressional delegation,” said Eric H. Holder Jr., the former United States attorney general and current chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “Now that their grip on power has been forcibly loosened by the courts, they want to create and then manipulate judicial districts in a blatant attempt to undermine the independence of the judiciary and stack the courts with their conservative allies.”Because the bill has already passed the House once, in 2020, it needs only to pass both chambers of the state legislature again to make it on the ballot.Further stoking Democrats’ fears: The bill does not need the signature of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat. Since it would be an amendment to the Constitution, it would head to the ballot as a referendum question to be voted on in the next election (if the bill passes before Wednesday, it would go to voters during the May primary). Historically, Pennsylvania voters have voted more in favor of ballot measures than against them, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.Good government groups have teamed up with Democrats to mount a huge voter education campaign, anticipating that the judicial question may soon be on the ballot. Progressive groups including the Judicial Independence Project of PA, a new coalition that includes the voting rights group Common Cause, have been holding digital town halls about the judicial redistricting proposal, with attendance regularly topping 100 people.On a Thursday evening late last month, more than 160 people logged into Zoom to hear from coalition leaders about the bill and to hatch plans to further mobilize against it. Rebecca Litt, a senior organizer from a local Indivisible group, proposed a call-your-legislator day. Ricardo Almodovar, an organizing director with We the People PA, another progressive group, noted the graphics and other social media campaigns already underway to help educate voters.“We’re also trying to humanize the courts,” Mr. Almodovar explained during a smaller session with southeastern Pennsylvania residents, sharing stories of how specific court decisions “impact our lives.”Throughout the full, hourlong meeting, organizers repeatedly sought to make the stakes very clear.“We are in the last legislative session of this,” said Alexa Grant, a program advocate with Common Cause. “So we are the last line of defense.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Pennsylvania G.O.P.’s Push for More Power Over Judiciary Raises Alarms

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPennsylvania G.O.P.’s Push for More Power Over Judiciary Raises AlarmsAfter fighting the election results, state Republicans are trying to increase their control of the courts. Outraged Democrats and good government groups see it as a new kind of gerrymandering.The Pennsylvania Capitol building, which houses chambers for the State Supreme Court. Under a Republican proposal, the legislative branch would have more control over the courts. Credit…Hilary Swift for The New York TimesFeb. 15, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETWhen the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unanimously rejected a Republican attempt to overturn the state’s election results in November, Justice David N. Wecht issued his own pointed rebuke, condemning the G.O.P. effort as “futile” and “a dangerous game.”“It is not our role to lend legitimacy to such transparent and untimely efforts to subvert the will of Pennsylvania voters,” wrote Justice Wecht, a Democrat who was elected to a 10-year term on the bench in 2016. “Courts should not decide elections when the will of the voters is clear.”Now Pennsylvania Republicans have a plan to make it less likely that judges like Justice Wecht get in their way.G.O.P. legislators, dozens of whom supported overturning the state’s election results to aid former President Donald J. Trump, are moving to change the entire way that judges are selected in Pennsylvania, in a gambit that could tip the scales of the judiciary to favor their party, or at least elect judges more inclined to embrace Republican election challenges.The proposal would replace the current system of statewide elections for judges with judicial districts drawn by the Republican-controlled legislature. Those districts could empower rural, predominantly conservative areas and particularly rewire the State Supreme Court, which has a 5-to-2 Democratic lean.Democrats are now mobilizing to fight the effort, calling it a thinly veiled attempt at creating a new level of gerrymandering — an escalation of the decades-old practice of drawing congressional and state legislative districts to ensure that political power remains in one party’s hands. Democrats are marshaling grass-roots opposition, holding regular town hall events conducted over Zoom, and planning social media campaigns and call-in days to legislators, as well as an enormous voter education campaign. One group, Why Courts Matter Pennsylvania, has cut a two-minute infomercial.Republicans in Pennsylvania have historically used gerrymandering to maintain their majority in the legislature, despite Democratic victories in statewide elections. Republicans have controlled the State House of Representatives since 2011 and the State Senate since 1993.Current schedules for the legislature make it unlikely the Republicans could marshal their majorities in the House and Senate to pass the bill by Wednesday and put the proposal before voters on the ballot in May. Passing the bill after that date would set up a new and lengthy political war for November in this fiercely contested state.Republicans have some history on their side: Pennsylvania voters tend to approve ballot measures.“You should be very suspicious when you see a legislature who has been thwarted by a Supreme Court in its unconstitutional attempts to rig the democratic process then trying to rig the composition of that Supreme Court,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.She added, “It is way too much control for one branch to have over another branch, particularly where one of its charges is to reign in the excesses of the legislative branch.”If the Republican bill becomes law, Pennsylvania would become just the fifth state in the country, after Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi and Illinois, to wholly map its judicial system into electoral districts, according to the Brennan Center. And other states may soon join Pennsylvania in trying to remake the courts through redistricting.Republicans in the Texas Legislature, which is also controlled by the G.O.P., recently introduced a bill that would shift districts for the state appellate courts by moving some counties into different districts, causing an uproar among state Democrats who saw the new districts as weakening the voting power of Black and Latino communities in judicial elections and potentially adding to the Republican tilt of the Texas courts.Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the Texas Democratic Party, called the bill a “pure power grab meant to keep Blacks and Latinos from having influence on courts as their numbers in the state grow.”These judicial redistricting battles are taking shape as Republican-controlled legislatures across the country explore new restrictions on voting after the 2020 elections. In Georgia, Republicans in the state legislature are seeking a host of new laws that would make voting more difficult, including banning drop boxes and placing sweeping limitations on mail-in voting. Similar bills in Arizona would restrict mail-in voting, including barring the state from sending out mail ballot applications. And in Texas, Republican lawmakers want to limit early voting periods.The nationwide effort by Republicans follows a successful four-year drive by the party’s lawmakers in Washington to reshape the federal judiciary with conservative judges. Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, until recently the majority leader, and Mr. Trump, the Senate confirmed 231 federal judges, as well as three new Supreme Court justices, over the former president’s four-year term, according to data maintained by Russell Wheeler, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution.In a state like Pennsylvania, which has two densely populated Democratic cities and large rural areas, this could give outsize representation to sparsely populated places that lean more conservative, particularly if the legislature resorts to a gerrymandering tactic similar to one used in Pennsylvania in 2011.“Republicans have been good at gerrymandering districts in Pennsylvania, or good in the sense that they’ve been successful,” said State Senator Sharif Street, a Democrat. “I think they would like to remain successful, and they are confident that they can gerrymander judicial districts.”Republicans in the state legislature argue that their proposed move would give different regions of Pennsylvania more representation.Russ Diamond, the Republican state representative who is sponsoring the bill, said in an email that regional representation was necessary for the judiciary “because the same statewide consensus which goes in making law should come to bear when those statutes are heard on appeal, are applied in practical real-life situations, and when precedent is set for the future of the Commonwealth.”State Representative Russ Diamond during a town hall meeting in Llewellyn, Pa. He sponsored the bill to reshape the judiciary, after first introducing a similar one in 2015. Credit…Lindsey Shuey/Republican-Herald, via Associated Press“The overall goal is to include the full diversity of Pennsylvania’s appellate courts,” Mr. Diamond added. “There is no way to completely depoliticize the courts, other than choosing judges via random selection or a lottery system. Every individual holds some political opinion or another.”Geographic diversity, however, rarely equates to racial diversity in the courts. The four states that use judicial districts in state Supreme Court elections — Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi and Kentucky — have never had more than one justice of color on the court at any given time, according to data from the Brennan Center.While eight states use some form of judicial districts to elect judges, Pennsylvania’s proposal remains an outlier on a few key elements. First, a partisan legislature would have the power to redraw the districts every 10 years, whereas those elsewhere remain for longer or are based on statute. Additionally, the judicial districts in Pennsylvania would not be bound by or based on any existing legislative or congressional districts, created from scratch by the Republican-controlled legislature.The move has caught the attention of national Democratic groups that are at the forefront of redistricting battles across the country.“A decade ago, Pennsylvania Republicans gerrymandered themselves into majorities in the legislature and congressional delegation,” said Eric H. Holder Jr., the former United States attorney general and current chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “Now that their grip on power has been forcibly loosened by the courts, they want to create and then manipulate judicial districts in a blatant attempt to undermine the independence of the judiciary and stack the courts with their conservative allies.”Because the bill has already passed the House once, in 2020, it needs only to pass both chambers of the state legislature again to make it on the ballot.Further stoking Democrats’ fears: The bill does not need the signature of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat. Since it would be an amendment to the Constitution, it would head to the ballot as a referendum question to be voted on in the next election (if the bill passes before Wednesday, it would go to voters during the May primary). Historically, Pennsylvania voters have voted more in favor of ballot measures than against them, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.Good government groups have teamed up with Democrats to mount a huge voter education campaign, anticipating that the judicial question may soon be on the ballot. Progressive groups including the Judicial Independent Project of PA, a new coalition that includes the voting rights group Common Cause, have been holding digital town halls about the judicial redistricting proposal, with attendance regularly topping 100 people.On a Thursday evening late last month, more than 160 people logged into Zoom to hear from coalition leaders about the bill and to hatch plans to further mobilize against it. Rebecca Litt, a senior organizer from a local Indivisible group, proposed a call-your-legislator day. Ricardo Almodovar, an organizing director with We the People PA, another progressive group, noted the graphics and other social media campaigns already underway to help educate voters.“We’re also trying to humanize the courts,” Mr. Almodovar explained during a smaller session with southeastern Pennsylvania residents, sharing stories of how specific court decisions “impact our lives.”Throughout the full, hourlong meeting, organizers repeatedly sought to make the stakes very clear.“We are in the last legislative session of this,” said Alexa Grant, a program advocate with Common Cause. “So we are the last line of defense.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More