What Do You Meme?

I can't overstate how tired I am of those Clinton/Sanders memes. You know, the ones that give the candidates fake positions on things like Radiohead or Pokemon, and while making Sanders look cool and Clinton look lame.

I'm tired of them for several reasons. One, neither of these candidates are cool. They're career politicians, old enough to be our grandparents, who have spent their lives considering the intricacies of foreign and domestic policy. There's no way either of them has an opinion on Pokemon.

I decided to make my own Hillary Clinton memes for you all to enjoy.

Two, the meme takes a great idea, which is a side by side comparison of their policies, and turns it into something funny but unimportant. It does not matter which candidate is cooler. Cool won't stop a future war, or fix our economy. Policy will.

So this week, I decided to compare Clinton and Sanders policies on various important issues. It was harder than I thought, because the candidates issue pages contain an incredible amount of issues, each with a heavy amount of text, and specific policy proposals for anything I could think of. I'm one of the biggest political nerds I know, and even I got bogged down in the specifics.

What made it tough to sort through is that there are few substantive differences between the candidates policy proposals. Both want to demilitarize police forces and reign in the excesses of Wall Street. Both want to ensure equal pay for women and ensure that there are federal protections in place for LGBT people. Both support treating drug addiction as a disease, not a crime, and restoring the voting rights act.

Remember Texts From Hillary? Remember when she was the cool one?

If you spend a lot of time looking at the candidates' issues pages (and I did), you'll notice that Clinton and Sanders agree on almost every issues. What they disagree on is how they will get it done. Senator Sanders leans towards using legislation to enshrine his proposals into law, and Secretary Clinton tends to favor executive actions in her policy proposals. 

One clear example of this split is how the candidates responded when asked how they would protect the American people from Wall Street. Sanders talked about breaking up the big banks entirely, and Clinton talked about improving Dodd-Frank and strengthening the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Sanders favored big, sweeping changes, whereas Clinton argued for more incremental, smaller changes.

Look, I hate this meme but I do want to raise awareness of proper Arabic text rendering.

Neither approach is perfect, and neither is inherently bad. The problem with executive orders is that they are not enshrined in law the way Congressional bills are. A determined president could easily and legally reverse all the previous executive orders, if they wanted to.

Bills passed through Congress have staying power, as they're far harder to reverse. But while executive orders can be done quickly and easily, a bill passed through Congress takes far longer, especially given how inactive Congress has been in recent years. We would all love to see bills passed through Congress, but President Obama could barely pass the Affordable Care Act with a Democratic-majority Congress. Can we expect a Republican-controlled Congress to be more effective at passing progressive legislation?

There are policy and procedural differences between the candidates, for sure, and people should absolutely understand those differences in order to make an informed choice. But memes may not be the way to do it, no matter how funny and fictional they might be.

Life motto tbh

Supremely Chaotic

Much has been said about the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, so I won't try to rehash old points. I'll just say that those of us who have last names ending in vowels lost one of our own. Love him or hate him, he was an Italian, so I feel a certain kinship with the man.

We're a special breed of people

But that doesn't mean I think that his seat should go unfilled for the next 11 months, because I know about the history of the court and it's nominations, and by the end of this blog post, you will too!

In the days when everyone becomes an armchair Constitutional scholar, it's useful to take a step back to see what the Constitution actually says about the Supreme Court. Look no further than Article II, section 2, of the United States Constitution which states "he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States."

The "advice and consent of the Senate" (not to be confused with the 1962 movie Advise and Consent) means that the president can't just pick whoever he wants to fill the court. Supreme Court justices have to be approved by the majority of the Senate, which means 51 Senators have to vote to put them on the court. Now, with the prevalence of filibusters, the president would safely need 60 Senators on his side, in order to advance his nominee past a cloture vote, or a vote to end debate and move to a simple majority confirmation vote.

Ah, 1960s noir films, how we miss you.

Senator McConnell (R-KY) made it clear that he didn't think President Obama should not nominate a new justice. The Senator thinks we wait for the next president to do that. Legally, that is possible, as there only need to be six justices present to decide a case, and there are currently 8 still serving on the court.

All we really need is RBG, tbh.

If there's a tie between the 8 judges, the lower court's decision stands. So whatever the lower court decided about the case before it got to the Supreme Court would be the law of the land, should the judges tie. This is true whether a justice dies, is out sick, or recuses themselves from a case they feel they have a conflict of interest in.

So the court can still function without a 9th justice. But it doesn't have to, because it's not unprecedented for the president to nominate a Supreme Court justice in an election year. Many Supreme Court nominees, throughout history, have been confirmed in election years. President Ronald Reagan nominated Justice Anthony Kennedy in an election year, though the seat was vacated prior to an election year.

But no nominee has ever taken more than 125 days to confirm, and there are over 300 days left in President Obama's term. In fact, on average, it takes 25 days to confirm a nominee. President Obama could likely nominate a new Supreme Court Justice and have them confirmed before we even know who the nominees are for president in the Democratic and Republican parties. And as long as he's the president, the constitution gives him the right to nominate a justice, with the advice of the Senate. Because in case Republicans don't remember:

Never forget

It's a Bird, It's a Plane...

It's...Superdelegate! Faster than an electronic voting machine, more powerful than a group of Democrats in a caucus, able to leap over previous delegate counts in a single bound!

One of this year's 700+ superdelegates is the Man of Steel himself

Much like Dear Abby, I answer the political questions that I am sent, and this week, I was sent the same question by three different people. After Hillary Clinton won enough superdelegates in New Hampshire to tie Bernie Sanders in the delegate count, people were abuzz, wondering what these superdelegates were and why they have so much power.

Let's clear up the biggest misconception first. Yes, superdelegates is one word, thank you very much spell check.

But what is a superdelegate? In the Democratic primary, there are around 712 delegates, out of the 4,763 total delegates in play during the Democratic primary. They are what's called "unpledged" delegates, meaning their support isn't bound by the popular vote in whatever state they're from, and they can change it at any time. So, delegates currently backing Clinton can switch before the nominating convention in June to back Sanders.

The people who get to be unpledged superdelegates aren't regular voters like you and I. The 712 superdelegates are made up of all the elected Democratic governors, Senators, Congresspeople, as well as the chairs of the Democratic party in every state, and distinguished party leaders.

Superdelegates were brought into the party in the eighties, to balance the wishes of voters with the Democratic party's need to nominate electable candidates. The Republican Party has a similar system, though they only have three per state, which adds up to 150, less than the Democrats 752.

So did the Democratic Party establishment...

These superdelegates make up about 15% of the overall delegate count, and are free to change their mind at any point. After all, they're human too. In a very close race, where candidates split many of the state delegates, there's a possibility that superdelegates could decide the race. But that's highly unlikely.

Clinton came out even in New Hampshire because, as of this point, she has near-unanimous support among the superdelegates, so even though she lost the primary (gaining 9 delegates to Sanders' 15) she came out even because six of the superdelegates in New Hampshire (elected officials and party chairs) supported her.

But as with everything, New Hampshire is a special case. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: there's no reason that Iowa and New Hampshire should be the first states, because neither have that many delegates. I think the only reason Clinton was able to tie up the nomination is that New Hampshire only has 24 regular delegates, and 8 super delegates (probably because it has a giant state government). In a proportional delegate allocation, it's absolutely possible that superdelegates would push a candidate over the edge. 

I think that is far less likely to happen in a state like California, which has 546 delegates, or New York, with 291 delegates, or even my little home state of New Mexico with 43 delegates. In a state with no people, and the third largest legislature in the English speaking world, it's a big possibility that superdelegates might counteract actual delegates. There's just not that many actual delegates to give out.

There's absolutely an argument for removing the superdelegates, and allowing the people to decide. There's also a related argument that our country places way too much emphasis and attention on states that don't really matter in the primaries like Iowa and New Hampshire, and maybe we should make Nevada the First in the Nation primary, if only so we focus more national attention on how cool Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) looks in sunglasses.

Keep it real Senator.

Coin Flipping Out

For the many of us who don't live in a state that uses the caucus system, the revelation that coin flips were used to determine certain aspects of the Iowa caucus was shocking. Accusations flourished about unfair practices, and more than once on Facebook, I saw people finishing up their posts with "Welcome To Democracy."

Well, yeah. Welcome to the caucus system at least. No one said it was the best system.

In fact, the caucus system, especially the Democratic Party caucus system, is quite complicated. Votes are weighted according to how a precinct has participated in the past, participants sometimes have to pick multiple candidates, and in rare cases, ties are decided by a coin flip, or picking a name out of a hat.

Who knew Two Face ran the Iowa caucus?

And before you think this is something the DNC created to give the edge to Secretary Clinton, this has been the reported rule in the Iowa caucuses for several years, including in 2008, when President Obama won the Iowa caucus

What did these coin flips even decide? The delegates who would represent Iowa at the Democratic National Convention in Iowa? Not even close. In the first caucus, the one all of America just watched, candidates are competing for county delegates who will then go to the state level where delegates will be chosen to represent Iowa at the Democratic National Convention.

Delegates at the precinct level are split up by support, so it's not a "winner-take-all" system at most precincts. In one precinct that Clinton won by a coin flip, the formula determining delegate allocations determined that Clinton won 4 delegates from the precinct and Sanders won 3. That left one delegate unassigned, and because it was so close, the last delegate was decided with a coin flip. But this one delegate that was decided by a coin flip is not the equivalent of a state delegate.

But isn't it weird that there were only six coin flips and Clinton won all of them? 

Accurate representation of Iowa caucus coin flips

No, that's not weird, because that's not necessarily true. In fact, there are reports of at least a dozen coin flips in Iowa, and it's reported that Senator Sanders won "at least a handful," according to one Iowa Democratic Party official. [4] In fact, in terms of games of chance that were registered through the DNC mobile app, Sanders won six of seven, meaning that there were a lot more coin flips than the ones that have been reported.

The vote in Iowa was close, and the awarding of county and precinct delegates did come down to coin flips. But it's not true to say that Clinton won every coin flip, it's not true to say that she was awarded state delegates based on those coin flips, and it's not true to say that those coin flips were the difference between Clinton winning and Sanders winning. The delegate math just doesn't work out. It would take a lot more than six coin flips to give Clinton four state delegate equivalents.

That doesn't mean the Iowa caucuses are perfect. In fact, I've been on record saying that they're not the best system. But the existence of coin flips in a primary that doesn't resemble the rest of our nation's primaries doesn't mean that our democracy is going down the toilet. It just means that maybe we should stop placing so much weight on Iowa.