The fundamental principle of free government would be reversed

My Sunday movie for today wasn’t streamed, but in a theater. It was my first time in a movie theater in 17 months. I took off my mask because there were all of ten people in the audience. The movie was In the Heights. This was Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway show before Hamilton. More than ten years later it was adapted as a movie. There is a plot to this movie, though not much of one. But it doesn’t matter. It’s an enjoyable film. Usnavi is named for the first words his parents saw when arriving in New York harbor, which was a ship with the designation of “U.S. Navy.” He runs a corner bodega in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. He longs to return to the Dominican Republic, where he spent the first nine years of his life and considered them his best years (though that doesn’t quite explain what his parents were doing in the New York harbor before he was born). He wants to restore and run the beachside bar that his father owned before it was damaged in a hurricane. He is attracted to Vanessa, but can’t quite seem to actually ask her out. She works at the nail salon next to the bodega and wants out of the neighborhood to be able to spread her wings. Benny is a taxi dispatcher and is dating Nina. She’s glad to be home after a year at Stanford University, but argues with her father because she doesn’t want to go back due to the racism she felt. Mostly this is a celebration of community. This is a musical with lots of dancing (I estimate about 230 dancers are named in the credits, though they were not all in one scene). In addition to the many songs (at times it almost seemed like an opera) Usnavi does several raps, with some quite interesting rhymes. I highly recommend this one and suggest seeing it on the big screen, though given today’s attendance (well, all right, it is Independence Day), it may not be in theaters all that much longer. Many people have wondered why the rich are preventing actions that could lessen the damages of a climate change disaster. Don’t they live here too? I’ve heard talk (and I think I wrote about) OligArks, some sort of closed communities in which the richest can ride out the worst of the disasters. Yesterday, I wrote that Leah McElrath tweeted “There is no where safe to flee.” Perhaps the rich would escape to space? Sim Kern, a spouse of a NASA flight controller, tweeted a thread that, no, that won’t happen. Living in space is hard, as anyone who has spent months or up to a year in the International Space Station will agree. The half dozen people who live on the ISS require a ground team of thousands. Just staying alive with all systems running takes a significant amount of time each day. The work is tedious and cannot be delegated to underlings. Living conditions are far from comfortable. The ISS certainly cannot support all of the world’s billionaires and their families.

The world is burning, and our billionaires are the people MOST responsible, but at least there's no escape for them. They will live and die (alone, like all of us) on this beautiful, precious, one-in-a-gazillion planet. We should take our wealth back from them and use it better.

Lauren Floyd of Daily Kos reported that Kansas has passed a law that says impersonating an election official is a felony. The consequence – surely intended – is that groups that do voter registration and in other ways help people vote have canceled all activities until this law gets before a judge. Adam Jentleson, in a thread from a couple weeks ago, wrote:

The question of whether to reform the filibuster boils down to whether we want a functional government or a dysfunctional one. This is how the Framers saw it. This is why they opposed the filibuster or anything like it, and why they created the Senate as a majority-rule body. Madison called majority rule the “republican principle.” He was consistent, from when he was a young man crafting the Constitution until the 1830s, when he was asked to respond to Calhoun’s argument that the minority should get to wield a veto over the majority (Madison said no). Madison zeroed in on the principle that if the minority were allowed to wield a veto over the majority, “the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed.” The reason? “The power would be transferred to the minority,” he said. That’s exactly what Sinema is doing. Hamilton took on critics (like Sinema) who argued a supermajority threshold would be a force for compromise. He & the Framers knew that “what at first sight may seem a remedy, is, in reality, a position” because “its real operation is to embarrass the administration.” Prophetic! The reason the Framers were so focused on this question of majority vs supermajority rule is that they saw what happens when a legislature has a supermajority threshold. The Articles of Confederation required a supermajority for most major legislation and was a complete disaster. ... During Jim Crow, civil rights bills did not fail for lack of public support. Gallup found anti-lynching bills with 72% support in 1937 & anti-poll tax bills with 60% support in the 1940s. They passed the House by big margins and presidents of both parties were ready to sign them. During Jim Crow, civil rights bills failed because unlike other bills, they were forced to clear a supermajority threshold in the Senate while other bills were allowed to pass or fail on a majority basis - just as all bills had for the entire history of the Senate until then. Self-avowed white supremacy motivated Jim Crow-era southern senators to force civil rights bills to clear a supermajority threshold, but the results of their experiment were clear: when bills were forced to clear a supermajority, the result was not compromise, but gridlock.

Amzieaa replied:

Its not whether Americans want a functioning government-its whether corporations will let America have one. My money (if I had any) would be on corporate America telling Americans to ef off.

I’ve mentioned before that Christopher Rufo started the campaign against Critical Race Theory that is flooding school board meetings with angry parents. Laura Clawson of Kos reported that Joy Reid, on her own show on MSNBC, grilled into Rufo, saying CRT really stands for Christopher Rufo Theory. Clawson wrote of Rufo’s goal:

The campaign against critical race theory in schools is based on identifying virtually any discussion of race or racism as critical race theory.

Clawson then turned to Matt Gertz of Media Matters (who is not Matt Gaetz of Congress). Gertz documented how campaigns against CRT and other conspiracies get started. * A right-wing think tank comes up with a framework for discussing and idea. In this case it is equating CRT with all discussions of race and racism. * Advocacy groups use the think tank framework to oppose the idea and disrupt discussion of the idea. In the case of CRT there are 165 local and national groups involved. That includes blatant astroturfing – small groups pretending to represent grassroots opposition, named after a kind of artificial grass. * That work generates press coverage, mainly in right-wing media. The mentions of CRT in places like Fox News has jumped. * Republican politicians get involved. They jump on the issue, center their campaigns on it, and pass legislation. The action by politicians convinces the rest of the base this is a Big Problem. It’s all a 100% manufactured controversy. Alas, it is also quite effective.