Please bear with me while I do a little dance of joy. The Nebraska legislature just gave Trump a middle finger. Okay, maybe it wasn't quite that good. But they did just reject a proposal to help Trump win the Electoral College. The vote wasn't even close, only eight voted in favor, with 36 opposed. Keep in mind that the legislature is dominated by Republicans, even though technically it is a nonpartisan unicameral; the only one in the nation. However, everyone knows the party affiliations of all the members.
Vox News had a good write-up on it: Nebraska Electoral College: GOP wants rules changed to help Trump win - Vox
I tried to find a local news source which discussed it, but it was media silence. Don't know why, usually they are all over something like this that makes national news. Anyway, from the Vox article:
"Donald Trump wanted Nebraska Republicans to change the state’s electoral vote rules — in a way that would likely flip one electoral vote from Biden to him."
"But on Wednesday night, the GOP-dominated Nebraska state legislature said no. An effort to attach the proposal to another bill failed, with just 8 votes in favor and 36 opposed. "
"...Nebraska currently has an unusual way of distributing its five electoral votes. Rather than giving them all to the statewide winner — as 48 other states do — it awards two votes to the statewide winner, and the rest go to the winner in each of Nebraska’s three congressional districts."
"Nebraska is a deep red state that Trump won by a 19-point margin in 2020. However, Biden walked away with one of its electoral votes, because he won in Nebraska’s Second District, which includes the city of Omaha. Trump wants to switch this to a winner-take-all system, to lock down that vote. The stakes are enormous: the single electoral vote from Nebraska’s Second District really could determine whether Trump or Biden wins in 2024."
"If Biden wins Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, while Trump wins Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, and no other outcomes change from 2020, then Biden would need Nebraska’s Second District vote to win. If he doesn’t get it, the electoral vote would be a 269-269 tie. The new House of Representatives would break the tie with each state delegation getting one vote, and since Republicans will almost surely control more state delegations, that means a tie likely goes to Trump. But after the failed vote Wednesday, Trump’s supporters were no longer optimistic that they could make this change before Nebraska’s legislative session ends this month."
"...But beyond the angling for partisan advantage, it is true that Nebraska’s and Maine’s rules are kind of odd — quirky historical accidents that arguably should be brought in line with the way the other 48 states do it. The fair way to do it would be for both to change their rules in the same cycle, standardizing the winner-take-all rule without handing either candidate an advantage."
(Here I will butt into the Vox article and express my opinion that it is the other 48 who need to change, not the two states who are doing it somewhat rationally.)
"...The history of the Electoral College system is a bizarre one, but the modern norm of how it works is: each state holds a statewide vote, and the top candidate in that vote would get all of that state’s electors. That’s the winner-take-all system...as partisan competition intensified, states flocked to winner-take-all — the district system was gone by the 1830s, and stayed gone for more than a century."
"Then, in the latter half of the 20th century, it came back. Two states decided to switch to a system where two electoral votes would go to the statewide winner, and one electoral vote to the winner in each congressional district."
"The first was Maine, in 1969, which adopted a proposal from an idiosyncratic legislator, whose apparent motivation was to help voters with different views be reflected in the Electoral College results. (Maine had used the district system back in the 1820s.) The second was Nebraska, in 1991, where legislators hoped to get presidential candidates to pay more attention to the state rather than writing off all its electoral votes as safely Republican."
"As urban-rural partisan polarization intensified, that started to change. In 2008, Barack Obama won Nebraska’s Second District. Republicans responded by making the district more conservative in redistricting, but the underlying polarization trends continued and by 2020 Biden won it again. In Maine, the rural Second District swung to Trump in both 2016 and 2020. (Neither district was all that close in 2020 — Biden won NE-2 by 6.5 percentage points, and Trump won ME-2 by 7.5.)"
"So we’ve ended up with a system where 48 states use winner-take-all, and then two states throw a stray electoral vote to someone every so often, which is pretty odd — just one of many ways the US’s method of picking a president is ridiculous. As partisanship and polarization have risen, Nebraska Republicans have attempted to respond. Back in 2016, they tried to switch to a winner-take-all electoral vote system. But there was a problem — the filibuster."
"Yes, the Cornhusker State is the rare state to have a legislative filibuster with a strong supermajority requirement. In fact, it’s stronger than the US Senate’s — a two-thirds vote, or 33 of 49 legislators, is necessary to overcome a filibuster in Nebraska. And though Republicans have regularly had big majorities, it’s proven maddeningly difficult for them to get over that hump. They fell just one vote short in 2016."
"The latest push kicked off on Tuesday, when conservative activist Charlie Kirk wrote on X about a nightmare scenario for Trump supporters where Nebraska’s Second District could throw this year’s election to Biden. He urged Nebraskans to “call their legislators and their governor to demand their state stop pointlessly giving strength to their political enemies.”
"...Just hours later, Gov. Pillen made his announcement that, “in response to a call out for his support,” he supported such a change, and Trump praised him in a Truth Social post. (You might get the impression that this was not entirely an organic grassroots phenomenon.)But many doubted that they had the votes. Republicans had 32 seats — one vote short of the 33 seats necessary to beat a filibuster."
"...But when the proposal came for a vote Wednesday night, it wasn’t even close — only eight Republican legislators voted yes. Nebraska’s legislative session is scheduled to end on April 18, so in theory there is still time for another attempt, but legislators said that for procedural reasons that is quite unlikely to happen."
I am going to take some encouragement wherever I can get it. Nebraska is kind of quirky. We're predominantly Republican, but we're not all MAGA. I hope it's a sign that we're not all going to fall behind Trump "like trained pigs", to use my dad's expression.
aganst.
Read about this in the Washington Post this morning. Hope you will write the legislators opposed to the bill a letter of encouragement!
ReplyDeleteI think many Republicans are hinky about changing long-standing election rules. We had Mike Shirkey and Lee Chatfield heading the the Mich Legislature in 2020. Both MAGAs, both wingnut evangelicals. Shirkey would sing hymns when he didn't want to answer reporter questions, and Chatfield ran a Bible cult up north and was charged with boinking his sis in law when she was a minor and illegally putting her and her spouse on his payroll.
Both were summoned to the White House and pressured by Trump to pull a variety of dirty tricks to throw the election. And they both declined.
It enrages Raber when I say it, but we owe the integrity of the 2020 election to these numbskulls, just as the nation owes a debt to Mike Pence for doing his job when it counted.
That's a good idea to write letters of encouragement. I think most of the people who voted against the bill were Republicans long before Trump came on the scene, and may have considered that it was improper for Trump to be pressuring them to change the rules. Which of course it was. If I message them I will say that I am still a registered Republican; it may carry more weight than a Democrat giving them positive feedback.
DeleteI also tell them I'm a registered Repub, which I am, but only because I like to get party info to see what their spiel is. I often begin with a pearl-clutching "whatever is happening to our Michigan Republican party??" because the state has historically flourished under moderate Republican administrations (though One Tough Nerd Rick Snyder killed that truism), and I voted for many of them. MAGA is not in line with the state GOP of yore.
DeleteI try not to begin "Dear Numbskull."
Just a little side thing here. This morning, I experienced the Great New Jersey Earthquake of 2024 with the epicenter 30 miles from my home. I thought it was a loaded gravel truck going down my road and brushed it off. Only later did I find out what it was. My friends in New Jersey had pictures come off the wall. Only ten miles away from the epicenter, they received a lot more energy. Some people looked toward NYC looking for a mushroom cloud. Others thought my old workplace blew up. Picatinny Arsenal did blow up in 1917 during war production and broke windows in NYC 30 miles distant. Anyway, I don't think anyone got hurt.
ReplyDeleteStanley, glad no one was hurt. I have a niece who lives in Boston. She told her parents that she didn't even know anything had happened. I wonder what the Richter scale number was.
DeleteWe had one of those quakelets in Mich about 5-10 yrs ago. Rattled the pipes in the basement but no truck went past. I figured it was a quake, and later the weatherman confirmed it local news. Raber checked out the crawl space, but pipes OK.
Delete"Survive an earthquake" is now crossed off my bucket list.
I was sitting at my computer reading various newspapers this morning when I felt (and heard) something at about 10:23. It was not dramatic, just a slight jar of the building and creak or crack of the walls. Nevertheless, my first thought was that it was a very minor earthquake. I found no mention on the Internet of an earthquake for about 15 minutes, and then the news stories began to appear. That is only the second time I have felt an earthquake. The first one was some years ago and happened while I was at work (in offices on about the 25th floor) . I noticed a very slight shift in the building and thought nothing of it. Only later did I find out it was an earthquake.
DeleteMy mother grew up in or near Terre Haute, Indiana, and she had many stories about tornadoes she had experienced. As a kid, I was fascinated by the idea, and every time we had a storm, I would hope for a tornado. My siblings and I were always thrilled when a storm knocked down power lines and the lights went out. We had an ancient coal oil lantern that we would always drag out whenever there was a chance of a power outage.
Katherine, it was a 4.8. I took a business trip to Los Angeles a month after their 1973 Richter 7 earthquake. The TRW engineers all had stories. One guy said he walked out of his house after the quake. His poor dog was standing there wet and trembling next to his in-ground pool which had sloshed a good deal of its water on the unfortunate poochie.
DeleteI wonder of it's true that animals can sense if an earthquake is about to happen.
Deletehttps://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-animals-predict-earthquakes
DeleteWell, speaking as a native Californian, 4.8 is relatively mild as earthquakes go. Enough to feel but fortunately not usually very destructive.
ReplyDeleteI had cataract surgery yesterday on my left eye. My vision has always been terrible. (20/400) Today my vision in that eye is blurry which the doc said is normal the day after. Please pray it clears up. I am scheduled for the other eye in 2 weeks and I won’t get it done if this eye doesn’t improve a lot.
Anne, my husband had cataract surgery in August. He also had blurry vision for a day or two after, but it did clear up. He had the other eye done a week after the first. I was worried that was too soon, but it worked out. He was very nearsighted previously but now only needs reading glasses. I'll pray that your blurriness goes away and that you have a complete recovery.
DeleteIn 2011 there was a 5.8 earthquake in Virginia about 50 miles from DC. I was leaving a gas station then that had a car wash. I looked behind me but the car wash wasn’t running. Being 5 mikes from downtown DC my second thought was a terrorists attackso I turned on the radio. Finally i heard the real reason for the shaking on the radio. The Washington National Cathedral suffered a lot of damage. Some of it is still being repaired. They had to begin charging admission ( donation) afterwards because the damage was so great. They eliminated several programs like The College for Preachers. And several others. The undercroft chapels were closed for years. The Catholic archdiocese contributed $25,000 to the funds to repair.
ReplyDeleteThe admissions was only for tourists. Services, including Evensong, didn’t ask for donations.
Delete