John Nichols | The Nation

The Pennsylvania state capitol building. (Flickr/Paul Vasiliades)

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus has been blunt about his determination to rig the Electoral College. So it should come as no surprise that, even after his partisan minions were "named and shamed" into distancing themselves from an initial strategy for gaming presidential politics, key Republicans have returned with another plan to make it possible for a GOP loser to "win" the 2016 presidential race. 

Thwarted in an effort to assign electoral votes based on the results from gerrymandered congressional districts, Republicans are now proposing a "proportional representation" plan that offers another avenue to assign substantial numbers of electoral votes to Republican nominees who lose key swing states such as Pennsylvania.

The proportional proposal—which Pennsylvania state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, a top Republican closely allied with Governor Tom Corbett, says he will introduce in short order—sounds on the surface like a somewhat fairer approach. But, if implemented, it would put the “fix” in just as surely as the previous plan.

Indeed, a Pileggi spokesman admits, "The major goal remains the same..." 

It is the goal of rigging the rules to benefit future Republican presidential nominess that has always mattered most to Priebus and his allies.

The RNC chair and those aligned with him have never evidenced any great concern regarding specifics. They're concerned with gaining an illicit advantage for Republican presidential candidates who Priebus has essentially admitted are unlikely to win a fair fight under the existing rules.

In the arcane language of the permanent political insider, Priebus says: "states that have been consistently blue that are controlled red ought to be looking at" ways to alter rules for distributing electoral votes. Translation: In states where Democrats regularly win presidential races, Republicans should use their transitory control of governorships and state legislative chambers to grab as many electoral votes as they can.

Priebus initially talked up the idea of to having Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania abandon the current model of assigning electoral votes to the winner of the state and instead implement a model where the allotment would be based on the winners of congressional districts. That plan, which would have allowed the loser of the popular vote in many states to "win" most of the electoral votes, was such a blatant rip-off that shamed Republicans in Virginia, Florida, Wisconsin and other states abandoned it.

But they did not abandon the basic premise laid out by Priebus—that states that are "controlled red" by the Republicans should game the rules so that they are less "consistently blue" in presidential politics. They've just shifted strategy.

Under the plan now being entertained by Pennsylvania Republicans, electoral votes would be distributed based on the percentage of the vote received by the contenders. Had the plan been in place in 2012, President Obama, who won 52 percent of the Pennsylvania popular vote, would have gotten 11 or 12 electoral votes, while Republican Mitt Romney would have gotten 8 or 9.

That looks like a more reasonable result than under the plan for allocating by congressional district results, which would have given Romney most of Pennsylvania's electoral votes despite Obama's popular vote win.

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But here's where things get tricky. If Pennsylvania and other swing states that tend to back Democrats move to the proportional model, while big states such as Texas and Georgia that have been voting Republican stick with a winner-take-all plan, they will lock in a national advantage for the Republicans. 

The Pennsylvania initiative may not be quite as "sweet" for Republicans as the initial Priebus plan. But if states that vote Democratic assign substantial numbers of their electoral votes to the Republican loser, while states that vote Republican make no such concession, it will be a lot easier to chart a course where a Republican nominee who is trounced in the national popular vote might still "win" the electoral vote and the presidency.

The necessary response from democracy advocates to the latest plan to rig the Electoral College is essentially the same as the response to the last scheme. 

The very fact that the rules for distributing electoral votes can be so easily rewritten to thwart the will of the people regarding the election of the president of the United States “should give us all pause,” explains FairVote's Rob Richie.

“The Election of the president should be a fair process where all American voters should have an equal ability to hold their president accountable,” says Richie. “It’s time for the nation to embrace one-person, one-vote elections and the ‘fair fight’ represented by a national popular vote. Let’s forever dismiss the potential of such electoral hooliganism and finally do what the overwhelming majorities of Americans have consistently preferred: make every vote equal with a national popular vote for president.”

That—not the Priebus plan, or the Pennsylvania variation—is what the people want.

Indeed, a Gallup poll taken January 8-9, 2013, found that 63 percent of Americans would support “doing away with the Electoral College and basing the election of the president on the total vote cast throughout the nation.”

The people are right.

Priebus and his pal in Pennsylvania are wrong.

Read John Nichols's takedown of Reince Priebus.

Tom Harkin. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Tom Harkin’s decision to retire from the Senate at the end of his current term will create an immeasurable void in the chamber where he has served for more than a quarter-century. A progressive populist with a history of defending organized labor, working farmers, public education and public services, the Iowan arrived in the Senate as a fighting FDR Democrat and he will leave as one.

As The Des Moines Register well recognized in its editorial on the Iowa Democrat’s decision to retire:

A variety of terms have been used to describe Harkin’s politics. He has been called a progressive or a populist from the prairie school. He is that but more: He was a close friend of the late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone who used to say he belonged to the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, meaning he was not ashamed to be called a liberal. That’s the same wing of the party Harkin has represented without apology.

Actually, Harkin’s politics and his philosophy of government are rooted in the age of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which swept in a historic change in the role of government in the affairs of the nation.

On a national political landscape that could use a good deal more of FDR’s ideological and political determination—especially in the updated and extended form that Harkin employed it—this is a retirement that will be felt by every American who recognizes that formation of a more perfect union requires the forging of a truly national, urban and rural progressive politics.

Harkin has for almost forty years, first as a member of the House and then as a senator, represented a swing state with a Republican governor, a Republican senator and a competitive streak in presidential politics. Yet, he has won, again and again, and by ever-expanding margins. Elected to the Senate in the same year that Ronald Reagan won his second term by a landslide both nationally and in Iowa, Harkin has repeatedly bucked Republican tides and prevailed when more moderate Democrats have been defeated. His electoral success confirms the progressive premise that voters are more likely to back a determined Democrat than a compromising centrist.

But there has always been more to Harkin than populist rhetoric and ideological clarity. He came to Congress to get things done: to end secret wars in Latin America, to keep family farmers on the land, to make workplaces safer and to enact the groundbreaking civil rights protections contained in the Americans With Disabilities Act. Many of his greatest legislative victories came when Republicans sat in the White House, most were enacted with Republican co-sponsorship.

Harkin has always understood something that only a few other progressives—Wellstone, Russ Feingold, Bernie Sanders—have ever really “got”: that it is not necessary to sacrifice principles when organizing coalitions of conscience across lines of party and ideology.

For Harkin, the key word has been “conscience.”

Harkin has consistently clung to an old faith in what politics could and should be. He speaks of morality, of right and wrong. And his colleagues know he is serious; so serious that they often put aside cynicism and cooperate to accomplish that which—and the ADA is a classic example of this—few thought possible.

Harkin could compromise. He was proud if those compromises advanced the common good. If they went awry, he was usually the first talk about it. When Harkin cast a wrong vote—and he did sometimes—it tore at him. But he has rarely suffered in silence. He voted for the 2002 resolution that became President Bush’s excuse for a war of whim in Iraq, but by 2003 he was declaring: “I made a mistake, and I wouldn’t do it again.” He bluntly said that Bush “misled Congress and got his war…a pre-emptive war that has ended in disaster.”

By 2004, Harkin was an enthusiastic, and because of his Iowa prominence, essential backer of Howard Dean’s anti-war campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Harkin would eventually become one of the loudest congressional critics of the war, and of the Bush administration’s abuses of power, joining with Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold in a lonely effort to censure the president. When Bush nominated the noxious John Negroponte to serve as US ambassador to Iraq, the Iowan broke not just with the administration but with fellow Democrats to vote against a man who had been linked to human rights abuses in Honduras two decades earlier. Harkin battled, essentially alone, to hold Negroponte to account.

The senator came full circle in the 2004 debate over Negroponte’s nomination.

Harkin’s first big fight on Capitol Hill, as a young congressman from a competitive district representing rural Iowa, was to demand that the entire thrust of US foreign policy be altered.

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As a young congressional aide in 1970, Harkin had played a critical role in exposing South Vietnam’s abusive treatment of prisoners, who were held in so-called “tiger cages.” Horrified by mounting evidence of US support for right-wing coups, murderous dictators and torture states in southern Asia and Latin America, Harkin in 1975 proposed an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act that prohibited the United States from providing economic aid to any country determined to be engaged gross human rights violations unless. The only exception was a provision that permitted allocation of US funds if could be proved that the money who directly benefit the most impoverished citizens.

The amendment, which passed with relative ease, became Section 116 of the Foreign Assistance Act, which declared: “No assistance may be provided under this part to the government of any country which engages in consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, prolonged detention without charges, or other flagrant denial of the right to life, liberty, and the security of person, unless such assistance will directly benefit the needy people in such country.”

Presidents and their congressional allies invariably circumvented human rights responsibilities, to Harkin’s great frustration. As a new US senator in the mid-1980s, he joined another new senator, John Kerry of Massachusetts, in seeking to expose and end the Reagan administration’s support for right-wing dictators and death squads in Latin America. Others softened in their stances, but not Harkin. When Bush nominated Negroponte for the Iraqi ambassadorship, the senator from Iowa took to the floor of the chamber and recounted the dark history of the nominee’s “service” as Ronald Reagan’s administration gave lawless support to death squads and paramilitary murderers. Harkin accused the nominee of lying to Congress and the American people about circumstances on the ground in Honduras in the early 1980s—where 184 people, including an American priest, “disappeared” while Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras.

“Ambassador Negroponte turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the human rights abuses in Honduras,” Harkin thundered. “To send Mr. Negroponte to Iraq would send entirely the wrong message at this time.”

For Tom Harkin, it was not enough to amend the laws of the land to defend human rights. It was necessary to hold to account those who circumvented those laws.

It was a conscience call. A moral duty. And for Tom Harkin, this has always been the point of being a senator.

For those of us who know Harkin, and his record, this is our source of regret at the news of his decision to retire. He has surely given a full measure of service. But his kind is rare, too rare, in a Congress that will be deeply diminished by his departure.

Chuck Hagel is also no favorite of foreign policy hawks, John Nichols writes.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. (Flickr/Rappaport Center)

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has rejected former Congressman Barney Frank’s request that he be appointed to fill the vacancy created by Senator John Kerry’s resignation to serve as secretary of state. Despite the fact that progressive groups urged the Frank pick for the temporary slot—arguing that the former congressman could play a critical, perhaps definitional, role in budget fights over cutting Pentagon waste and taxing speculators—the governor instead picked his former chief of staff.

The new senator, William “Mo” Cowan, has long been close to the governor, having formerly served as Patrick’s legal counsel. He’s experienced, capable and politically connected, a well-regarded lawyer who has worked not just with Patrick but also with former Governor Mitt Romney (whom Cowan helped identify judicial picks). He’ll be the state’s second African-American senator, after liberal Republican Ed Brooke, who served in the 1960s and 1970s. As a lawyer, Cowan has been active with the American Constitution Society—joining in the society’s “work  to advance the progressive values and principles of the U.S. Constitution”—which counts for a lot with Americans who seek to challenge right-wing judicial activism.

But, as with his selection of former Democratic National Committee Paul Kirk to fill the interim vacancy created by the death of Senator Edward Kennedy, Patrick has gone with a connected insider rather than someone who is likely to shake things up in the Senate.

Patrick says he’s now got “a valued ally” in the Senate.

And there is no reason to doubt that this is the case.

But, of course, this is the problem with letting governors, be they Republicans or Democrats, appoint US senators. The Massachusetts circumstance is less troublesome than in states such as Hawaii and South Carolina, which will be represented for more than two years by recently appointed senators. A special election in June will replace Cowan with a senator chosen by the voters.

But gubernatorial appointments of senators, be they for a few months, or for a few years, make the United States Senate, never a perfectly representative body, a good deal less representative.

Cowan will join three appointed senators in the chamber during what Barney Frank correctly identified as a particularly critical period in the chamber.

Another new senator, Tim Scott, has been appointed by South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, rather than elected by the people of that state. The same goes for Brian Schatz, Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie’s pick to fill the vacancy created by the death of Senator Dan Inouye.

Cowan, Schatz and Scott come from different parties and different ideological backgrounds. There is every reason to believe they will serve honorably, and ably. Progressives are already excited by some of what Schatz has done, while conservatives are enthusiastic about Scott.

But none of these details change the fact that a trio of unelected senators will be powerful, perhaps even definitional, figures in what is supposed to be a representative body. They will play critical roles in deciding whether to approve or reject cabinet nominees and Supreme Court selections, they will vote on tax policies and budget measures and they will decide whether to crack the “debt ceiling”—or send young men and women off to war. But they will do so without democratic legitimacy.

No member of Congress should serve without having been elected by the people of the district or state they represent.

Unfortunately, the new Senate will have at least three members who serve not as representatives but as mandarins—appointees assigned to positions by governors who have assumed dubious authority.

The point here ought not be to do disparage Cowan, Shatz or Scott.

The point is to raise a concern about the fact that more laws will be proposed, more filibusters will be sustained, more critical votes will be tipped in one direction or another by “senators” who never earned a single vote for the positions they are holding.

Why?

Because of a deliberate misreading of the vague 1913 amendment to the US Constitution that replaced the old system of appointing senators with one that said they were all supposed to be directly elected.

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The Seventeenth Amendment sought to end the corrupt, and corrupting, process of appointing senators. But a loophole was included to give governors the authority to make temporary appointments. That meant that, while no one has ever been allowed to serve in the US House of Representatives without having first been elected, dozens of men and women have served in the Senate without having been elected. And those appointed senators often serve for two full years, as will South Carolina’s Scott and Hawaii’s Senator Schatz, both of whom will serve until at least 2015. To the end of the 113th Congress, senators chosen by individual governor in South Carolina and Hawaii will have the same authority as a senator elected by 7,748,994 voters (California Democrat Dianne Feinstein).

Former House Judiciacy Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-MI), rightly points out that this is a fundamental voting-rights issue. It is, as well, a question of “basic consistency in how our Representatives in Congress are elected.” Says Conyers: “The Constitution has always required that House vacancies be filled by election. The Senate should not be subject to a different standard. Americans should always have a direct say in who represents them in Congress—in both Houses, all of the time.”

Conyers was a key House backer of former US Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), when the then-chairman of the Senate Judiciacy Committee’s subcommittee on the Constitution tried to amend the Constitution to address the problem.

Feingold’s proposal, which would have required special elections to fill all Senate vacancies, got a little bit of traction when Feingold was still serving in the Senate. In 2009, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution approved Feingold’s proposed amendment to end gubernatorial appointments to vacant Senate seats.

Recalling a series of appointments following the 2008 election, Feingold said: “I applaud my colleagues on the subcommittee for passing the Senate Vacancies Amendment, which will end an anti-democratic process that denies voters the opportunity to determine who represents them in the US Senate. The nation witnessed four gubernatorial appointments to Senate seats earlier this year, some mired in controversy, and we will soon see another one in Texas. This will leave more than 20 percent of Americans represented by a senator whom they did not elect.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), was not enthusiastic about the amendment. He defended the appointment of senators, saying, “In the state of Nevada the governor appoints. Even though we have a Republican governor now I think that’s the way it should be so I don’t support his legislation.”

No one with a taste for democracy can possibly respect the majority leader’s position on appointed senators.

More thoughtful senators, including the number-two Democrat in the chamber, Illinoisan Dick Durbin, co-sponsored Feingold’s amendment.

Reid got that one wrong. Feingold got it right.

“It is time to finish the job started by the great progressive Bob La Follette of Wisconsin to require the direct election of senators,” the former senator from Wisconsin said in 2009. “No one can represent the American people in the House of Representatives without the approval of the voters. The same should be true for the Senate. I hope the full Senate Judiciary Committee will soon get the chance to consider this important constitutional amendment to entrust the people, not state governors, with the power to select U.S. senators.”

The worst deficit facing America is the democracy deficit.

It can be addressed, at least in part, by making the Senate a representative chamber.

Feingold can’t complete the process he began. But his former colleagues, led by Dick Durbin, should do so. As Durbin said several years ago when he chaired a hearing on the issue: “Over a half century ago, Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously said: ‘No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ The same might be said of special elections to fill vacant U.S. Senate seats—they are the worst way to fill such seats, except for all the others.”

Read John Nichols’s primer on Barney Frank’s Senate candidacy that was.

Reince Priebus. (Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

The Republican National Committee has retained Reince Priebus as party chairman, keeping the failed leader in a position previously occupied by Mark Hanna, Lee Atwater and Haley Barbour.

Even as he accepted his new term, Priebus acknowledged that he and his minions have led their party far from the American mainstream. “We have to build better relationships in minority communities, urban centers and college towns,” he admitted in his acceptence speech.

Addressing the tens of millions of Americans—women, African-Americans, Hispanics, gays and lesbians, young people, union members—who by wide margins reject the Republican “brand,” Priebus said, “We want to earn your trust again.”

But those are just carefully chosen words for public consumption.

Priebus was not reelected to build a multiracial, multiethnic party that embraces diversity and seeks to deliver a message of opportunity for all. The whole point of his chairmanship has been to combat the politics of inclusion that Republicans decry Barack Obama for practicing.

That has placed the once honorable Republican Party on the wrong side of history, and of American progress.

Priebus has seen the numbers. He understands the demographics. He knows the GOP, as it is currently organized and focused, is unlikely to win the “trust” he spoke of. Indeed, he is so sure that the party will fail to do so that he has devoted himself and his party to advancing restrictive “Voter ID” laws, placing limits on early voting and Election Day registration and, most recently, restructuring the Electoral College so that the party can remain competitive even if it lacks popular appeal.

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It is that scheming—not a promise of Republican renewal—that explains why Priebus retained the chairmanship in spite of the electoral failures that occurred on his watch.

RNC members certainly did not retain Priebus because of his track record.

The RNC’s top priority in 2012 was beating Barack Obama. Yet, they lost the popular vote by 5 million ballots, lost the Electoral College 332 to 206, lost two seats in the US Senate and fell 1.4 behind in the nationwide vote for the US House. They also lost seven of eleven gubernatorial races.

Only gerrymandering of congressional and legislative district lines prevented a complete wipeout for the Grand Old Party.

So why keep Priebus?

Because the former chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, and veteran party fixer, has a plan for a party on a losing streak.

Priebus wants to make it possible for losers to “win.” To that end, he’s urging Republican governors and legislators to change the rules for distribution of Electoral College votes so that a Republican presidential candidate might lose a state and still gain most of its electoral votes. Responsible Republicans in key states have objected to the chairman’s scheming to have those states end the practice of awarding electoral votes to the winner and instead allot them based on the results from gerrymandered congressional districts.

Unfortunately for the Republicans who would like their party to stand for something more noble than gaming the system, Priebus is what happens when the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower loses its way—and its self respect.

Read John Nichols’s proposals for fighting back against the GOP’s voter exclusion schemes.