Quentin's Weeknotes 10/6/18-10/12/18

weeknotes family politics

This Week:

I went to the Massachusetts coast with my family. We watched whales off the coast of Gloucester, wandered around Rockport, and then spent Sunday in Boston playing on the Common, eating at Durgin Park, and grabbing pastry at the other great North End bakery.
I read this interview with a political scientist named David Faris, who argues that after a long string of disappointing electoral and policy defeats, the democrats need to shift from a war of policy ideas to a war of procedure, which he argues is what the Republicans have been doing since the 1990s. Two of the major policies he mentions are breaking California up into several smaller states, and granting statehood to Puerto Rico and D.C. This would essentially pack the Senate and Congress with reliably Democratic votes for long enough to pass progressive legislation and install a more reliably progressive court system. It breaks precident, but not any actual rules. Corey Robin made much the same argument on Monday, arguing that we have to argue that “The principle to mount against that scandal of democracy is simple: one person, one vote. In a democracy, no one’s vote should count for more than any other person’s vote.” Doing so would require a radical re-shifting of the three anti-democratic pillars of the constitution: the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the Electoral College.