1. You could spend all day on the slanted & misleading history in this @jbouie column why Mitch McConnell is...the new John C. Calhoun? To start with, search the column for mention of Harry Reid, Robert Byrd, or Lyndon Johnson. You won't find them. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
@jbouie 2. Bouie also begins & ends his history of gerrymandering with Republicans in the past decade, ignoring the vast history of Democrat gerrymanders. In 2009, Democrats had 15 more House seats than their share of the popular vote - without which Obamacare doesn't pass.
@jbouie 3. Bouie's history of Walker-era Wisconsin power struggles ignores the unprecedented Democrat efforts to recall Walker, have the legislative minority flee the state, surround the capitol with angry mobs, & sic investigators on conservative donors.
@jbouie 4. This is aside from the oddity of including, in a series on black Americans, a jeremiad against any political structure that defends the rights of the minority. I wonder if America has ever had minorities oppressed by the majority.
@jbouie 6. Then there is Bouie's history of Reaganism, which consists entirely of a quote about the 1991 David Duke campaign that is so hilariously ahistorical regarding the environment of 1980 & 1984, it's hard to believe anyone who lived through that era wouldn't laugh at it.
@jbouie 7. Bouie's view that Bill Buckley only rethought his view on civil rights "when key civil rights questions had been settled by law" also has the timeline of Buckley's evolution wrong, unless Bouie thinks these things had been settled by the mid-60s politico.com/magazine/story…
@jbouie 8. I'm not sure how you write this paragraph without pulling a hamstring.
@jbouie 9. Also, in ascribing Calhounism as the source of anti-majoritarianism in American politics, Bouie ignores the role of "living constitution" judges & the administrative state, both of which derive from the anti-majoritarian theories of white supremacist Woodrow Wilson.
@jbouie 10. Now, Calhoun began with a germ of truth: the American system runs on multiple tracks - the president, Senate, House, & states each answer to separate electorates. Those distinct majorities can each, within limits, obstruct the others. But that's not why Calhoun's wrong.
@jbouie 11. The federal system, including the provision of a written & amendable constitution, ultimately allows large or lasting majorities to override all opposition. Calhoun clung to a pre-1787, anti-originalist view that the concurrent systems had an absolute veto.
@jbouie 12. To belabor the obvious, Calhoun was also bad on the merits - he also turned away from the Founders' view of slavery & embraced it as a positive good.
@jbouie 13. Antebellum South Carolina was also uniquely bad. Bouie describes it as "the paradigmatic slave state" but it was more the extreme example. From 1828-60 it was the only state that held no popular vote for POTUS. Its state government was likewise out of step w/even the South.
@jbouie 14. Anyway, there are deeper issues w/transporting Calhounism to the modern GOP while totally whitewashing the entire history of the Democratic Party outside the South & the modern progressive posture towards popular sovereignty & constitutional government, but you get the idea.
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This is a category error. There were rationalizations for slavery drawn from Christianity, just as there were rationalizations drawn from science, history, & law.
But abolitionism was *driven* by the movement to impose Christian moral limits on human self-interest.
These people really have been brainwashed to deny the central, indispensable role of Christianity in the American & global anti-slavery movements, without which we do not get the end of slavery (ditto the end of segregation).
Of course, as I've argued for years, the Christian moralists did not end slavery alone. They needed to join a broader Free Soil movement & Republican Party that fused their concerns w/free marketers & the political principles of the American founding.
Good-not-great poll for McAuliffe. It is past time for Youngkin to actually start running on something besides being a fresh face. He can't capitalize on issues if he won't talk about them.
It takes a near-perfect alignment of the stars for a Republican to win in Virginia. Youngkin has an opportunity, & it's fine to start off with gauzy positive bio ads when your opponent is too well-known to be worth defining him negatively. But at some point, you gotta fight.
As I've said from the start, the GOP's odds of taking over the Virginia House of Delegates in November, while not favored, are better than Youngkin's odds.
Democrats got 50.8% of the popular vote in House races in 2020. 50.8% of the seats would be 221. They got 222. Every Democratic House majority since 1938 had had more seats than its share of the popular vote. For decades, that advantage was massive.
If Democrats had won only the same share of House seats in 2008 as their share of the popular vote, we would not have Obamacare.
The only reason the Field of Dreams game was the first MLB game in Iowa is because MLB has - in my view, wrongly - neglected to recognize the National Association as the first major league baseball-reference.com/teams/ROK/1871…
The NA was certainly not "major league" compared to 20th century levels of competition, but in 1871 it was the first professional baseball league; the first American pro sports league. Many of its stars went straight to the NL in 1876, some of them Hall of Famers.
Rockford's star was Cap Anson. He hit .325. He hit .331 in 22 seasons in the National League.
Before 1871, British soccer & British & US horse racing were the only arguably professional organized sports on earth. And US thoroughbred racing was two years old.