This Week in Statehouse Action: Polarized Vortex edition

OMG WHERE'D WE GO

I don’t care what nitwit Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin says, losing extremities to frostbite or full-on freezing to death doesn’t make you hardcore. It’s freaking cold out there and you need to be careful.

But the action in state legislatures across the country right now BURNS WITH THE FIRE OF A THOUSAND SUNS, so lets bask in the glow and get toasty, hm?

(Yes, I know I said last week that this missive wasn’t happening this week but there’s just too much action to discuss and bullshit to call out. So here I am.)

She Shook Me Cold: That odor from the mid-Atlantic that’s filling your nostrils rn is the rank stench of Virginia GOP desperation.

• With one-seat majorities in both the state House and Senate and a state electorate that’s rather obviously trending away from them, can you really blame Old Dominion Republicans for acting like cornered animals?

… well, yes, especially when they’re exploiting the issue of women’s reproductive rights in their desperate attempt to vilify Virginia Democrats.

• Republican have turned the fake outrage up to 11 over Democratic reproductive healthcare legislation that:
  • Doesn’t actually impact which stage in a pregnancy a woman can obtain an abortion (current state law allows it through the end of the third trimester when the life mother is at risk or if the danger to her health is “substantial and irredeemable”)
    • The bill loosens the danger-to-her-health standard and reduces the number of doctors who must sign off on a third-trimester abortion from (insultingly, absurdly) three to (far more reasonably, also please get three doctors to sign off on your vasectomy, thanks) one.
  • Has already been killed (it died in a subcommittee on Monday)
    • The same bill had been introduced and killed with little fanfare in each of the past three legislative sessions.
• Speaking of that subcommittee … make no mistake, the national uproar over this dead bill is the result of Virginia Republicans’ desperate to make hay out of crabgrass.
  • First, the Republican head of the subcommittee hearing the bill grilled the sponsor, first-term Democratic Del. Kathy Tran, about whether the bill would allow abortions right up until the moment of birth—failing to mention, of course, that current law already allows abortions right up until the moment of birth.
  • This meeting, like all General Assembly committee meetings, was recorded on video.
  • Republicans began circulating the clip of Tran defending her (FAILED) bill under GOP interrogation on Tuesday night.
  • On Wednesday morning, the clip was the subject of a Virginia Republican fundraising email.
  • Republican House Speaker Kirk Cox took the exceedingly rare (for a speaker) occasion to oh-so-theatrically leave his dais and gavel to speak about the—again, FAILED—bill from the House floor.
  • National Republicans, including Donald Trump, have jumped on the bullshit bandwagon, further amplifying the lies about the (FAILED) bill.

All of this manufactured outrage has given rise to something that really should piss decent people off, though.

• Tran is getting death threats.

But let’s take a step back and consider why Republicans chose this year to freak out about this bill, as opposed to one of the other three years in which it was introduced.

• This year, all 140 seats in the Virginia legislature are on the ballot.
• This year, Republicans are clinging to single-seat majorities in both the state House and Senate.
• This year, the federal government, which employs 130,000 Virginians, has already shut down once because of Republicans, and it may yet do so again.
• This year, Republicans have been in control of the Virginia General Assembly for so long that they have little to offer Virginians in the way of what voters are clearly hungry for—policies that make people’s lives better and elected officials without Rs by their names.
• This year, Republicans will be running on new House maps where Clinton won 56 of the chamber’s 100 seats (she won 51 on the old map).
• This year, Republicans will be trying to keep three Senate seats Clinton won in 2016 (Democrats need to win just one to control the chamber).

If Republicans think lying about a (FAILED) bill and flooding mailboxes with fliers decrying the evils of reproductive rights and covered with pictures of dismembered fetuses is going to keep them in control of the legislature … well, it’d be sad if it weren’t so shitty.

Stone Cold Crazy: Florida, man.

• State Sen. Kevin Rader has some bright ideas.
  • He wants to move the state to a top-two primary system, like the one they use in California, where the two candidates who receive the most votes—regardless of party—move on to the general election.
  • He also wants to stop allocating Florida’s 29 electoral votes based on which party’s candidate wins a majority of votes statewide and instead allocate them based on which party’s candidate wins each congressional district.

… wait these are actually TERRIBLE IDEAS.

• The California top-two primary system has no discernible impact on its purported goal—to reduce polarization—and instead has a way of screwing both parties over and depriving voters of real choices in the general election. Say, for instance, six Republicans run in a primary, and just two Democrats run. The district may prefer Republicans overall, but the six candidates could split the GOP vote to the point that the two Democrats are the ones who make it to the general election ballot.
• The Electoral College is certainly a problematic way of selecting a president, but allocating electoral votes by congressional district is basically the worst way to “fix” it. In fact, it’s the one EC reform proposal out there that would actually make the problem worse.

Why?

Gerrymandering, duh.

• Moving states from winner-take-all electoral vote allocation to EV-by-CD was all the rage in Republican-controlled legislatures back in 2011 and 2013—but curiously, only in states Obama won.

okay not curiously at all

• GOP lawmakers in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin pushed legislation in the first half of the decade that would have denied some of their states’ electoral votes to Obama by giving some of them to Republican presidential candidates who won individual congressional districts.

Something else all of these states have in common?

• GOP-gerrymandered congressional maps. 
  • Virginia and Pennsylvania have since redrawn theirs as a result of court rulings that found them to be unconstitutional gerrymanders.
• And while Florida’s congressional map isn’t one of the most gerrymandered ones out there, it’s still unquestionably drawn to favor the GOP.

… which makes Rader’s push for this idea even worse than it is on its face.

Because, you see, state Sen. Kevin Rader is a Democrat.

srsly wtf dude

• Okay yeah so that’s bad but Republican state Sen. Dennis Baxley is way worse.
  • He’s introduced a bill—helpfully drafted for him by the fringe-right group Florida Citizens Alliance—that will allow public schools to stop teaching evolution and climate change as the well-established facts they are and instead also teach “alternative theories” (which is a super nice way of saying “unscientific lies and garbage”).
  • By the by, Florida Citizens Alliance has been working diligently for years to inject climate science denialism into classrooms.

Winter Winds: Ditching the GOP and joining the Democratic fold seems to be all the rage lately.

• The most recent instance happened this week in New Jersey, when longtime Republican state Sen. Dawn Marie Addiego jumped ship and switched parties, expanding Democrats’ comfortable majority in the chamber.
  • This flip comes on the heels of a Republican member of the California Assembly bailing on his party just last week.
  • And about a month ago, three Kansas lawmakers switched their party affiliations from R to D.

So if this is gonna be, like, a thing, it deserves tracking.

And we here at Daily Kos Elections do like tracking things.

Behold, the Daily Kos Elections Party Switcher Tracker!

• Beyond just the whos and whats and wheres of the party switches themselves, this tracker also lists presidential results in those districts, as well as the outcomes of these lawmakers’ most recent elections. For, like, context and junk.
  • And context is key: Four of the five districts where Republicans have decided to become Democrats moved sharply against Trump in 2016.

Welp, thanks for tuning in for this surprise edition of This Week in Statehouse Action. Frankly, the shock probably renders you unfit to work for the rest of the week, so you should just go ahead and knock off early for the weekend. Just print this out and show it to your boss, I’m sure she won’t mind.