A Good Night for All of Us

(Note: Voting on Friday, May 5, Ohio Education Association Representative Assembly delegates elected Jim Timlin as OEA’s Secretary-Treasurer and re-elected Marsh Buckley as a National Education Association Director from Ohio. Both men are members of northeastern Ohio locals and the North Eastern Ohio Education Association.)

Voting results for the recent elections hadn’t even been officially announced last week when a friend from outside NEOEA congratulated me on the election results. “It’s a good night for you and your colleagues,” he told me.

I knew what he meant, of course. Candidates don’t win offices in the state’s largest public employee union without effective planning and leadership. Both candidates had good campaign plans, and NEOEA leaders did an effective job of making sure that NEOEA delegates voted. My friend was congratulating me on an outcome that my elected leaders had worked toward, and which I had supported (off hours, of couse) as a retired volunteer. My friend meant the compliment well, and I accepted it as graciously as I could; but he had it wrong.

The election of Jim and re-election of Marsh were a triumph for NEOEA only if they were the right choices for OEA. If somehow they prove to be the wrong choices for OEA over the next three years, northeastern Ohio members will suffer just as much as our colleagues throughout the rest of the state. Not that I expect that to happen: I’m sure they’ll serve well and make all of us proud. But my point is simple: NEOEA doesn’t win unless OEA wins.

There are those throughout OEA who fear NEOEA because our wealth and size create power. (More on that in another column some other time.) NEOEA’s delegation is the largest among OEA’s district associations, but it’s a highly diverse, independent-minded group. Since the ballot is secret, just holding onto the base is a challenge for most NEOEA candidates. And since we don’t have anywhere near a majority of the delegate votes, a candidate from NEOEA has to both energize his or her base and earn votes from other parts of the state. Both Jim and Marsh did that.

The point? Our candidates didn’t win because of NEOEA’s size and wealth. They won because they were strong candidates who ran good campaigns. The May 5 election wasn’t a victory of NEOEA over the rest of the state; it was a victory for all of us and for public education in Ohio.

Reform Ohio

Originally posted November 6, 2005:

In a little less than 36 hours, polls will open in Ohio, and voters will begin to give their decision about a set of proposals called collectively “Reform Ohio Now” (RON). There are other important issues, of course: Cleveland voters will choose a mayor, and in the community where I live, voters will fill most of the seats on the board of education. And yet Issues 2 through 5 represent the most far-reaching decision to be made in this state this year.
What set the stage for RON is six years of unchecked one-party rule. Ohio is a fairly evenly-balanced state, but Republicans achieved total control of state government several years ago. They used that control to solidify their political advantages. They reapportioned legislative districts to guarantee Republican majorities in both houses of the General Assembly. They “reformed” campaign finance by quadrupling the individual contribution limit and limiting the political involvement of union members. And Ohio elections are supervised by a Republican Secretary of State who is an announced candidate for governor in the 2006 election.

The four issues address these problems.

  • Issue 2 makes absentee voting easier.
  • Issue 3 rolls back individual contribution limits.
  • Issue 4 puts reapportionment in the hands of a bipartisan panel.
  • Issue 5 puts elections in the hands of a bipartisan elections authority.

I am not convinced that these proposals are perfect, and I am not convinced that they are the only solution to these problems. I am convinced that they are the best solution available to us at this time.

Republican one-party rule has been so abused—a convicted governor, a state investment scandal, allegations of influence peddling, the continuing embarrassment of an unconstitutional system of school funding—that Democrats, despite their habitual campaign incompetence, may capture several top state offices in 2006. Without passage of Issues 2 through 5, Democrats in 2010 may be in a position to gerrymander the state their way. One or two legislative elections could give this evenly-balanced state a one-party rule in which the same kinds of abuses are practiced by a different party. RON would impact Republican rule now, but it would limit Democratic governments in the future.

So it’s easy to see why RON has been opposed by most Republicans and ignored by many Democrats. Support for RON comes not from parties but from unions, including the Ohio Education Association, and a wide variety of nonpartisan organizations.

That in turn explains why we’re not seeing many ads in favor of the issues: the Reform Ohio Now campaign is poorly funded. In contrast, the opposition is well-funded, and includes the most strident Republican allies: right-wing religious groups, business groups, and gun-rights supporters. They’ve been able to put together a slick, misleading media campaign that may sink all four issues.

As it’s sometimes pointed out, “what goes around comes around.” Even without RON, Ohio’s political life is likely to change. Whether that change will be managed for the common good or whether it will take the form of cyclical partisan power shifts will largely be determined by whether RON passes or fails.

I believe that these four issues represent a once-in-a-lifetime chance to change a system that promotes abuse and corruption. I’m voting for Issues 2-5, and I hope you will too. It’s an uphill battle, but it’s worth the climb.

An Immoral Majority?

Originally posted on Monday, May 23, 2005:

As I write this, news reports are indicating that the Senate will probably vote this week on a scheme to prevent the “filibustering” of judicial appointments. I think this so-called “nuclear option” is immoral, un-American, and unwise. I’ve written both of my Senators to let them know that opinion, and I’d encourage others to do the same. Here’s why. 1) It’s immoral. The type of procedure that we call “parliamentary” has many forms, including that used in the Senate. Parliamentary procedure has evolved as a system for balancing the rights of the majority against those of minorities. Parliamentary procedure protects the rights of the minority by providing that certain actions require a “supermajority” vote: that is, a vote larger than a simple majority. Examples of actions that require supermajorities are suspending rules and closing debate, In an ordinary organization, cutting off debate requires a two-thirds supermajority; in the Senate, the rule is more lenient: it requires only sixty votes. Thus, in an ordinary society, a minority of one-third is protected; in the Senate, a minority has to have at least 40 votes to get that protection. While the specifics differ, in both cases the rule protects the rights of a minority of the members. What is really tyrannical is how the Senate majority proposes to end filibusters. Since the minority is sizable, the majority can’t pass a suspension of the rules. So what they propose to do (a point which gets little attention) is to use a parliamentary provision by which a simple majority can uphold a chairperson’s ruling. If they decide to pursue this course, a member of the majority will raise a parliamentary point and argue that the filibuster of judicial candidates is unconstitutional; the President of the Senate will rule that the point is correct; the minority will appeal the decision of the chair; and the majority will sustain that decision. In other words, the majority will cut the rights of the minority by using a vote which requires only a simple majority. 2) It’s un-American. In its simplest terms, “democracy” simply means a rule by the people, and that’s generally interpreted as a rule by the majority. In fact, American democracy is far more complicated than that: the Constitution provided for the sharing of power among distinct, often competitive institutions, and the Bill of Rights was provided largely to guarantee that minorities would be protected against oppression. In countries around the world, we see the real difficulty of exporting our form of democracy. It turns out that disarming dictators, conducting elections, and empowering winners is the easy part. The real challenges have been to convince newly empowered majorities to value–not just tolerate–diversity and to find ways to protect it. Our success in this has been the great good fortune of the American experiment, but it has proved harder to export than simple majority rule. In this respect, the behavior of the Senate majority isn’t unlike that of ideological majorities in emerging democracies. I suspect that one reason the Bush administration has been so surprised at the difficulty of establishing an American-style democracy in Iraq is that neoconservatives and their theocratic brethren don’t grasp, don’t value, and didn’t provide for this second component of “American-style” democracy. 3) It’s unwise. The Senate has always been the place that moderates the more extreme tendencies of the House of Representatives–a characteristic which it shares with the “upper houses” of other bicameral legislatures in individual states and in other countries. The American Senate has long been a place where teamwork and compromise are valued more than they are in the House. If the majority-passed reinterpretation of rules is employed by this Senate in this case, then the tactic will be used again, and in connection with other issues. The Senate will forever become more like the House in its style, regardless of its partisan composition. At my core, I believe that people get the government they deserve. Americans elected a one-party government in November. Since January, the Democratic minorities in both houses have used stalling tactics in an effort to mitigate the more extreme ideas of the Republican majorities. In doing so, they protect voters from the consequences of their decisions, and they look obstructionist while doing it. The nuclear option might force impotent Congressional minorities to focus on articulating their message while the majorities give Americans what they voted for. That wouldn’t be all bad: voters would learn the consequences of their decisions. Right-wing extremists would have their way for a while. Generally, extremist agendas of both the right and the left aren’t sustainable. I believe that the present right-wing plan would eventually be exposed as a fraud. The pendulum would swing and a new majority would emerge. Neoconservatives and theocrats would hide out like postwar French collaborators. This would undoubtedly be a great victory for someone, somewhere; but the price would be too high. The nuclear option and the political climate it engendered would have institutionalized bitter ideological differences and hardened the cultural chasm between red and blue states. We would risk losing public education, social security, large chunks of the environment, and precious individual liberties. Ideologically-driven junk science would make us a worldwide laughingstock. Workers’ rights would disappear, the divide between rich and poor would increase, and inner cities would become even more dangerous. If this scenario seems as bleak to you as it does to me, consider contacting your Senators. For readers in Ohio, the links to Senators DeWine and Voinovich appear below.