John Nichols

Three Strategies to Stop the Gerrymandering of the Electoral College

John Nichols on January 25, 2013 - 6:24 PM ET

As Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus promotes one of the most blatant assaults on democracy in modern times – a scheme to gerrymander the Electoral College so that the loser of the popular vote could win key states and the presidency – the number one question from frustrated citizens is: What can we do about it.
After so many assaults on voting rights and the electoral process itself have been advanced, it is easy to imagine that Priebus, Karl Rove and their team could get away even with so audacious an initiative as the rigging of presidential elections.

Priebus is counting on precisely that cynicism, as well as the neglect of the story by major media, to enable the plan to have Republican legislatures and governors in key swing states – Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin – arrange for the distribution of electoral votes not to winners of the popular vote statewide but to the winners of individual congressional districts. Because of the gerrymandering of congressional district lines, the scheme would in 2012 have shifted the circumstance so that, in Pennsylvania for instance, the losing candidate, Republican Mitt Romney would have won the overwhelming majority of the state’s electoral votes.

Why Do 'Pro-Life' Pols Like Paul Ryan Protect Weapons of Mass Murder?

John Nichols on January 24, 2013 - 10:56 AM ET

Paul Ryan. (AP Photo)

Congressman Paul Ryan consistently—make that aggressively—identifies himself as “pro-life.”

GOP Version2013: Battling Not Just Democrats but Democracy

John Nichols on January 23, 2013 - 11:53 AM ET

RNC chairman Reince Priebus speaking at the 2011 Western Republican Leadership Conference. (Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

On a day when most Americans were focused on the stirring second inaugural address of President Barack Obama—and on the broader majesty of the transference of an election result into a governing mandate—Republican state senators in Virginia hatched an elaborate scheme to rig the electoral system against democracy.

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Barack Obama Charts an Arc of History That Bends Toward Justice

John Nichols on January 21, 2013 - 4:40 PM ET

President Obama delivers his inaugural address, January 21, 2013. (AP Photo)

Barack Obama, the president who publicly swore his second oath of office on the Bibles of Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., used his inaugural address to chart an arc of history from the liberation movements of the sixteenth president’s time through the civil rights movements of a century later to the day on which hundreds of thousands of Americans packed the National Mall to cheer for the promise of an emboldened presidency.

This President Can—and Must—Claim a Mandate to Govern

John Nichols on January 20, 2013 - 2:15 PM ET

With his second inauguration, Barack Obama will become the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to renew his tenure after having won more than 51 percent of the vote in two consecutive elections.

More importantly, in a political sense, he will be the first Democrat since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to have won mandates from the majority of the American people in two consecutive elections.

This is the perspective that Americans should bring to the inaugural festivities. We should expect a great deal from Barack Obama. Despite four years of battering by Fox News and Limbaugh and the Tea Party and Mitch McConnell, he has been re-elected with a higher percentage of the popular vote than John Kennedy in 1960, Richard Nixon in 1968, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan in 1980, Bill Clinton in 1992 or 1996 or George Bush in 2000 or 2004.

Filibuster Reform Is Essential to Enacting Gun-Safety Legislation

John Nichols on January 18, 2013 - 1:13 PM ET

President Obama says that, when it comes to congressional action on gun-safety legislation, “This time must be different.”

No longer should partisan obstruction be allowed to block congressional action on sensible reforms that are favored by great majority of Americans, the president says.

He’s right.

The Movement Dr. Parker Made: Father of Media Reform Turns 100

John Nichols on January 17, 2013 - 9:26 AM ET

America has always had media critics—from Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin in 1775 to the folks at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and Media Matters for America today. And they have played a vital role in exposing the mistakes and misdeeds first of subservient newspapers and more recently of broadcast and digital news outlets.

But the media reform movement that steps from complaining about irresponsible and malicious broadcasters to actually holding them to account is a more recent phenomenon. And it is entirely reasonable to suggest that the man who initiated what we today understand as a national media reform movement is Dr. Everett C. Parker, the amazing activist who successfully challenged media complicity with the Southern segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s.

Dr. Parker wrote a new chapter in American history with the fight he led, as founding director of the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ, to deny the license renewal of a powerful Southern television station that refused to cover the civil rights movement.

How Obsequious Media Coverage Perpetuates NRA Mythology

John Nichols on January 15, 2013 - 3:22 PM ET

Protesters assemble at a gun control rally, December 17, 2012. (Flickr/Edward Kimmel)

Hysterical at the prospect that at least a few elected officials might stop treating its pronouncements as political gospel, the National Rifle Association announced Tuesday that it had attracted 250,000 new members in the month since the slaying of twenty children by a gun-toting killer in Newtown, Connecticut.

RNC's Priebus Proposes to Rig Electoral College so Losing Republicans Can 'Win'

John Nichols on January 14, 2013 - 11:15 AM ET

Reince Priebus speaks at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans. (Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

Fresh from claiming the GOP’s 2012 run was “a great campaign—a great nine-month campaign" that only went awry at the end, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus now wants to rig the Electoral College so that when Republicans lose they still might “win.”

Why Bernie Sanders Objects to Obama's Treasury Nominee

John Nichols on January 11, 2013 - 7:17 PM ET

Bernie Sanders campaigned, hard, for Barack Obama’s re-election.

But the independent senator from Vermont is not going to rubberstamp the president’s selection of Jack Lew, a supporter of banking deregulation who has passed back and forth through the revolving door from Wall Street to Washington, as the nation’s seventy-sixth secretary of the Treasury.

While Sanders caucuses with the Democrats, he represents the people who elected him. And he swears an oath to a Constitution that requires—not “allows,” requires—the legislative branch of the federal government to check and balance the executive branch.