Trump Era: Breakdown Of Law And Order-- Pennsylvania Edition

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court looked at the unconstitutional gerrymander the Republicans in the state legislature perpetrated on the citizens of the state and threw it out. The Justices instructed the Republicans not to show up for prison but to redraw the maps in time for the November midterms. Prison terms would have been more appropriate... but the Court was lenient. One of the leaders of the crooked gang, Senate president Joe Scarnati, announced Wednesday that he doesn't plan to cooperate with what the Supreme Court ordered. This is how desperate Pennsylvania Republicans are to hold onto their illegitimate and illegal power:

"In light of the unconstitutionality of the Court’s Orders and the Court’s plain intent to usurp the General Assembly’s constitutionally delegated role of drafting Pennsylvania’s congressional districting plan, Sen. Scarnati will not be turning over any data identified in the Court’s Orders," his lawyers wrote in a letter to the court.

...In declaring the state’s congressional map an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, the state high court ordered a new map redrawn in time for the primary election in May. It gave the General Assembly less than three weeks to approve a new map, then have it signed by Gov. Wolf. If that does not happen, the justices said in their order, they would adopt their own boundaries.

Days later, the court issued another order, announcing it had retained Stanford University professor Nathaniel Persily as an adviser and requesting the current municipal boundaries from the General Assembly. It also requested the parties submit maps and technical data used in expert testimony. Lawyers for the plaintiffs-- 18 Democratic voters from across the state--— submitted their maps and data Wednesday, as did a lawyer for Lt. Gov. Mike Stack. Other parties, including Wolf, said they did not have any data to provide.

Scarnati and Turzai have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block the state court ruling, arguing that the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures the power to run elections. By saying it would intervene and draw its own map, the lawmakers wrote, the state high court takes that power from the legislature. The court has not officially agreed to consider the case, but U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has requested a response from the plaintiffs by 4 p.m. Friday.

In the meantime, lawmakers have taken the initial steps toward drawing new lines.

Meanwhile, for those perplexed about the sudden retirement of powerful Philly Machine boss, Bob Brady-- he isn't running for reelection-- there is a back story for those outside of Philadelphia-- and it isn't the bullshit Pelosi spit out about Brady's outstanding service as "a forceful champion for working people in Pennsylvania and across the nation." True, he doesn't want to be beaten by Nina Ahmad but there's more to it than that.

The FBI last year filed charges against four people in an investigation into a payment Brady's campaign made to a primary opponent in 2012. Three people have pleaded guilty, including a political consultant to Brady.

Brady's campaign gave a city judge who challenged him in the 2012 primary $90,000 to quit the race, according to the plea memo unsealed after the judge's campaign aide pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws. And Brady himself tried to "influence" a witness in the case, according to prosecutors, who said they filed the case under seal for fear he would "corrupt(ly)" pressure the aide not to cooperate.

At the end of last year, one of Brady's campaign workers agreed to take the fall for Brady. No one was buying it though.

A political consultant for U.S. Rep. Bob Brady pleaded guilty to lying about a $90,000 payoff made by the congressman’s campaign to get an opponent to quit a 2012 primary.

Donald Jones, 62, pleaded guilty on Friday to making false statements to the FBI in a campaign finance probe involving the boss of the Philadelphia Democratic Party.

“I accept full responsibility for my actions and consider my guilty plea a first step in making amends,” Jones said in a statement issued by his attorney Alan J. Tauber. “I apologize to the people of Philadelphia and to my family for bringing this dishonor upon them.”

The district is just 42% white but the establishment white Machine is not giving up without a fight; there's also a black establishment machine, which is likely to run Joanna McClinton. It looks to me that the white machine is going to put up Richie Lazar as the man they want to hold onto Brady's seat and keep Ahmad out of it. Earlier in the month The Inquirer was already speculating that "Many in Philadelphia’s political circles wonder whether Brady is scheming to install Lazer as his successor... One political operative said Lazer replacing Brady would be 'a status quo bait and switch.' Another said that if Lazer does run, it probably would be with Brady’s blessing." The fount of corruption in Philly politics, John “Johnny Doc” Dougherty, building trades leader, is behind Lazar, just as Brady always has.

Meet Nina Ahmad-- You'll Be Happy You Did

Machine bossism is not dead-- far from it. The Queens Democratic Party boss, Joe Crowley, has been picked by Hoyer and Pelosi to take over the Democratic congressional caucus after they're gone. The political capo dei capi of New Jersey Democrats, George Norcross, was able to install his kid brother, Donald, in a South Jersey congressional seat the Machine owns (Camden, Cherry Hill, the eastern Philly suburbs, Gloucester County), and in Philly, on the other side of the Delaware, you have Bob Brady, a congressman and the machine boss of Philadelphia (technically, since 1986, the chairman of the Philadelphia Democratic Party). When Bill Clinton appointed 17-year Congressman Tom Foglietta Ambassador to Italy, there was no primary and barely a general election battle at all. Brady waltzed into the seat and has sat there ever since. He generally gets around 80% of the vote with no serious opposition. Last year he was investigated by the FBI for paying off an opponent, Jimmy Moore, to withdraw from the race. In 2015, during Pope Francis' visit to the United States, Brady stole the glass that the Pope drank from, drank from it himself and had his wife, Sen. Bob Casey and his wife drink from it and allowed Joe Crowley to stick his fingers in the glass. The Philadelphia Inquirer has written that "running against him could equal career suicide." Now he has an opponent who doesn't care about that kind off politics, Nina Ahmad. Will Bunch did an excellent profile of her for The Inquirer about a week ago. When he asked her "Aren’t you afraid of taking on the (Democratic) machine?" she told him "Death has visited my door-- rape, and being killed."

[T]here’s something very different about this race in Pennsylvania’s First Congressional District-- one of the nation’s poorest, snaking down the Delaware from Philly’s river wards to struggling Chester in Delaware County.

...Ahmad makes a strong case that working-class and poverty-plagued women need to win the war against entrenched patriarchy more urgently than affluent females, who have the means to hire a lawyer and sue a male boss for sexual harassment. “These are women who have to suck it up and have been sucking it up for ages, because they don’t have the luxury to smack the man who’s been pawing them as they do their work,” she said, “because that’s one of the three jobs they have to keep so they can put food on the table.”

Nina Ahmad was born in Bangladesh and lived through genocide and war in 1971, only to come to the U.S. and earn a PhD in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania and the go on to work as a molecular geneticist. She became politically active as an organizer for Howard Dean in 2004, served on President Obama's Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, was elected president of the Philadelphia Chapter of the National Organization for Women and served as Deputy Mayor for Public Engagement under Mayor Jim Kenney, where she did outreach to ensure communities of color, women, and millennials were represented in government. Did I mention she's one of the best congressional candidates I've ever spoken to? I asked her to introduce herself to DWT readers and Blue America members. If you like what she has to say, consider contributing to her campaign by clicking on the thermometer on the right.


Confronting Monopoly Power And Its Role In Racial Inequality
-by Nina Ahmad

Monopoly of any industry smacks of a “rigged” system. The rising income inequality can be attributed to the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few. A growing number of candidates are pledging to tackle the trend towards the monopolistic market domination, and I can be counted on to be amongst those who will fight to ensure the corporate power over our economy and our politics is regulated. But less examined in the fight against these forces are the burdens it has placed on people of color locked into an economic class structure that continues to hobble them at the knees. One must be careful to not use race as a stand in for class, but the reality is that structural barriers to racial equity result in low-income communities that disproportionately contain people of color with women being most affected. As a legislator, it will be my job to ensure that all people in my district have a voice, and I wanted to examine the real-world consequences of our failed policies and try to foster solutions for the future.

Starting in the 1980s, the Reagan administration and the courts changed the focus of anti-trust laws to protect businesses with considerable market power under the conservative concept of “economic efficiency." The old gospel of trickle-down economics has, of course, had the opposite effect. Wealth inequality is now at its highest level since the great depression.

Of course, when inequality grows, it adversely affects those at bottom the most, and people of color have the built-in disadvantage I spoke of earlier.  According to an article in Forbes Magazine, (Forbes!) the wealth gap between the median white family and the median African American family will grow from about 25x in 1983 to more than 99x in 2024.  As we concentrate more wealth up the chain, we are further stacking the deck.

The growing influence of monopoly power threatens to further create problems. The social & economic injustice of the “digital divide” facing people in poor communities is further entrenched by the callous and cruel decisions. With the FCC’s decision to end net neutrality, the monopolies that control telecommunications can charge more for certain products, which will further hurt people of color. When people don’t connect to the internet, they fall behind educationally, then economically, and the cycle of poverty is strengthened. The government needed more regulation in that case, not less, and in Congress I will fight to undo this injustice.

As an immigrant woman of color, I am keenly aware of the intersections of race and economic mobility. Monopoly of power in the hands of a few primes and solidifies the structural and institutional barriers to economic freedom. My candidacy for Congress is founded on principle that all marginalized constituencies need more representation in Congress. As the old cliché goes: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” In an era where the courts have allowed corporations unlimited political power, we need more people in Congress who are willing to stand up to the powerful and who will make economic justice with a racial equity lens a central part of their platform going forward.

Time For Robert Brady (D-PA) To Go? Judge Jimmie Moore Sure Thinks So

Politically, Robert Brady's got it made. His Philadelphia House seat is about as generically Democratic as any you'll find in Pennsylvania. PA-1 went 88-12 for Obama in 2008, and even last year, in the midst of the Teabagger Tidal Wave, Brady was reelected without opposition. He wasn't opposed in 2006 either, and in 2008, when he sorta was, his GOP opponent took 9% of the vote. Chairman of the Philadelphia Democratic Party since 1986, Brady is one of the last of the old-line political bosses. He's white in a district where only a third of the population is. He's a reliable vote for the Democratic House leadership and rarely causes any stir. He's the 110th most progressive Member of the House-- in a district that could easily support someone in the Top 10-- and his lifetime ProgressivePunch score is 81.67, kind of a moderate, not really a liberal and not a conservative. His specialty is backroom deals.

This cycle, shockingly, he's drawn an opponent-- in the Democratic primary. He didn't even have a Democratic primary when it was an open seat and he first ran. Democrats are afraid of pissing him off. Judge Jimmie Moore isn't. This week he sent an open letter to Brady in regard to the outrageous gerrymandering of Pennsylvania by the GOP-- with the backing of party boss Brady.

Evidence of an increasingly disenchanted electorate is abundant, as evidenced by Congress’ all-time low approval rating of 9%. One obvious explanation for this phenomenon is Americans’ frustration over politicians putting their own interests above those of their constituents. Your recent intervention to ensure passage of the Republican-dominated Pennsylvania redistricting plan is precisely the sort of self-serving backroom maneuver that is destroying confidence in our political process.

Pennsylvania recently adopted new congressional districts that reflect the loss of one congressional seat as a consequence of the 2010 census. Given Republican control of Pennsylvania’s General Assembly, Senate, and governorship, it is not surprising that the Republicans came out ahead in this process; rather, the surprise lies in the magnitude of the Republican Party’s victory. The Republican Party’s effort here in Pennsylvania has been called by state political observer G. Terry Madonna of Franklin & Marshall College “the worst gerrymander in modern Pennsylvania history."

Despite the new map’s overwhelming favorability to the GOP, it seemed that Republicans in the General Assembly would not have enough votes to pass the redistricting plan-- that was, until you stepped up and started rounding votes in support of the GOP plan. It has been widely reported that Republican leaders in the General Assembly turned to you to secure the necessary votes for passage. Some speculate that you agreed to do this in exchange for a favorable re-drawing of your own congressional district. While the Democratic party as a whole was the big loser in the redistricting process, you were among the biggest winners.

For your part, you have acknowledged that you secured Democratic votes for the plan, despite it being so brazenly skewed in favor of the GOP. As you have personally recognized, “Republicans were in charge of this.” Having no control over the redistricting process Democrats had no role here other than to not help the Republicans pass their first-choice map. But you were only too happy to bail out the Republicans by throwing your own party and constituents under the bus, all to protect yourself, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Watching you sell out your party for your own benefit, I felt as I imagine Eagles fans would feel if Michael Vick, in his Eagles uniform, was caught in the back of a bar sharing game plans with Eli Manning. The people who rely on you expect you to be in the game not for your own self-interest but rather for the interest of the Democratic Party and the constituents that back you. Your actions are those of a free agent who changes teams according to what serves you best.

The Democrats of this city, state and country deserve better and more. Accordingly, I challenge you to four (4) debates throughout the First Congressional District: Temple University, in North Philadelphia, Widener University in Chester, Swarthmore College in Swarthmore and the Constitution Center in Center City, to debate your decision to spearhead the new redistricting plan as well as the challenges which face the First Congressional District.

The First CD has a 17% unemployment rate, and Moore is basing his campaign on the fact that it's the "second hungriest district in America." Chester is the heart of the district and doesn't even have one supermarket. It does, however, have a prison and a casino. Fresh fruits and vegetables aren't readily available there. I've never talked to a candidate for Congress as concerned about something that basic as Moore. More on Moore.


SUNDAY CLASSICS NOTE: OUR TOUR OF SCHUBERT'S
TROUT QUINTET DEPARTS AT 10AM PT/1PM PT

Sorry, I thought this would be an easy one : five movements, one-two-three-four-five and out, and that's still the basic plan. But once again I got caught up in, you know, stuff, and I thought I might as well take the time to get it sort of right. -- Ken

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