Houston council joins #SB4 lawsuit on 10-6 vote

The good news -- beyond what's revealed in the headline -- includes the fact that no conservative had the stones to tag it (postponing the vote a week), and that the mayor cast his ballot in favor even though that's typically done (by rule of Roberts) only when there is a tie.  Jack Christie got up and left before the counting, marking him an abstention.

The noes were Greg Travis, Mike Knox, Michael Kubosh, Brenda Stardig, Dave Martin, and Steve Le.  All but Le were easily predictable.  The vote was purely and politically symbolic; the constitutionality of the law will be decided in the courts, and as Sophie Novack at Texas Monthly has shown, this is why the Legislature overreaches (on voter ID, on women's reproductive freedoms, and all the rest): it takes years for the judges to slap them down.

Let's join this topic to another; the pending decision by the Supreme Court of Texas as to the scheduling of Houston's municipal elections this year, or in two years.

As Charles pointed out yesterday, it's getting to be late in the game for city elections to happen in 2017.  What he didn't mention is that should the SCOTX rule on a writ of mandamus filed by Republican attorney and city council gadfly Eric Dick, on behalf of his client PP Bryant, then we may actually get those elections this year.  Or not.

The November 2015 voting cycle in Houston included one ballot result that surprised many: the decision to extend the term limits of city officials from three two-year terms to two four-year terms. The result was so unexpected, it immediately raised controversy, eyebrows, and the question, “Did the voters of the City of Houston actually mean to extend term limits?”

Phillip Paul Bryant filed a lawsuit to invalidate Proposition 2 because he believes the ballot language misled Houston voters. Annise Parker and the City of Houston have a rich history with misleading voters when it comes to ballot language. Indeed in 2015 alone, Texas Supreme Court has found that Annise Parker and the City of Houston have used inappropriate ballot language twice.

On November 3, 2015, registered voters of the City of Houston were asked to vote on several propositions, including a proposition extending term limits (“Proposition 2”). The ballot language for Proposition 2 reads:

• (Relating to Term Limits for City Elective Office) Shall the City Charter of the City of Houston be amended to reduce the number of terms of elective offices to no more than two terms in the same office and limit the length for all terms of elective office to four years, beginning in January 2016; and provide for transition?

The voters of the City of Houston passed Proposition 2 on November 3, 2015.

Phillip Paul Bryant’s attorney argues that the language of Proposition 2 was misleading for several reasons:

• The ballot language suggested that it would “limit” term length instead of extending it from two year terms to four year terms;
• The ballot language read as if it was shortening the total amount of time an elected official could stay in office when it actually extended it from six years to a total of eight or ten years;
• The ballot language omitted a chief feature of the proposition -  it suggested that it shortened the amount of times an elected official can serve to two terms when in fact there were hidden exceptions that unfairly benefited incumbents.

Indeed, Mayor Annise Parker literally said:

• "There may have been some voter confusion out there. I don't know that they realized that they were giving council members more time in office.”

As further evidence that the City of Houston misled voters, the Houston Chronicle reported that the underlying ballot language was obscured:

• “Political scientists were not convinced Tuesday's result was proof of radically shifting attitudes, however. The ballot language did not spell out the effect on incumbents or that the item would loosen the existing restrictions.
• ‘It was ballot confusion or obfuscation,’ Texas Southern University political scientist Michael Adams said. ‘The way it was written, some people may have thought they were voting to limit the terms rather than extend them to two four- year terms.’
• That take made sense to Rice University political scientist Bob Stein, who added, ‘Nobody reads the ballot when they walk in there. They don't have to read it to vote.’” 

In addition, Houston Public Media reported that the ballot language didn’t tell the whole truth:

• “’When we informed voters that the adoption of the two four-year (terms) would take place immediately in 2016 and advantage incumbent council members, support swung the other way and it was a deficit of 17 points against,’ Stein said.
• But that information was not in the ballot language. In fact, it didn’t even mention that it would actually extend term limits.” 

On June 2, 2016, a writ of mandamus was filed with the Texas Supreme Court asking them to invalidate Proposition 2. If you would like clarity as to whether Houston has municipality elections in 2017, please contact the Texas Supreme Court justices and encourage that they rule on the pending writ of mandamus. We are not asking for a specific ruling, we are only asking for a decision to be made so we know whether or not we have City of Houston elections in 2017. 

Contact Barrister Dick and he'll explain how to ask the Court to rule, and while you're there, order one of his Sixties-era T-shirts.

With respect once more to yesterday's vote on SB4: Turner didn't have to give Council a say.  He could have just exercised his authority, like mayors in all the other Texas metros (save Cowtown) did two weeks ago, as the regular legislative session ended and the bill outlawing sanctuary cities was signed into law by Greg Abbott.  Let's give Sly the benefit of the doubt and presume he was playing three-dimensional chess with those who would be running whenever elections are held, giving some bold Democrat somewhere ammunition to use against dem dat voted against joining the SB4 lawsuit.  In other words, against the conservatives who aim to replace Stardig and Christie, and also the conservatives seeking to replace the Democrats who voted 'aye' yesterday, all of whom are term-limited off Council: Jerry Davis, Ellen Cohen, Mike Laster, and Larry Green.  (Only Cohen's and Laster's seats appear so much as mildly vulnerable in this scenario, from my POV.)

So we wait now for the first hearing on the SB4 lawsuit, a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of the law filed by the city of El Cenizo and to be heard by US Judge Orlando Garcia on Monday morning, June 26.  (More on the legal maneuvering from Gus Bova at the Observer.)  We'll watch how that matriculates through the courts, eventually up to the Fifth Circuit and perhaps the SCOTUS, while we also play a parlor game about who might file and where if the SCOTX rules favorably on holding Houston city council elections this year.

Seems boring as hell, so perhaps it will get a little more exciting as it plays out.

Wednesday Morning Quarterbacking

-- Democrats are now 0-4 in special election bids.

Democrats tried an inoffensive moderate message in Georgia. They ran a banjo-strumming populist in Montana. They called in the cavalry in South Carolina and tried to catch their foe sleeping through a long-shot in Kansas.

None of it worked.

In the special elections for House seats vacated by Republicans who wound up in President Donald Trump's Cabinet, Democrats went 0-for-4.

What follows there is the predictable gloating from Republicans and excuse-making from people like Kos.  Think Progress offers more of that 'better luck next time' for the Donkeys.

Some of us have lived through this before.  And some of us are so old that we can remember when a Blue Dog managed to win a special election in a deep red suburban Congressional district.  Does the name 'Nick Lampson' ring a bell?

-- "Most expensive race in House history cost $60 million — but there’s little evidence minds were changed".

For months, the district has been flooded with every kind of campaign advocacy imaginable: phone calls, mailers, television commercials, lawn signs and ads showing up on every online platform you can think of. Most households have been receiving multiple phone calls every day and multiple home visits from canvassers every week, and everyone has been exposed to more advertising than they can ever remember seeing. I counted 31 pieces of campaign related mail in just one week. Some residents are even getting campaign texts on their cell phones.

This is because of the astonishing amount of money spent on the race. A typical competitive House race sees a total of about US$5 million spent, and the previous record for the most expensive House race ever was $20 million. During the Georgia 6th special election, the two candidates together spent about $33 million, and outside groups added about another $27 million on top of that. That nearly $60 million total represents almost $100 for every man, woman and child who lives in the district. It is the most expensive U.S. House race in the country’s history.

What’s interesting is what all this money and activity did, and didn’t do.

-- Original: "Most expensive race in House history turns out nearly 58 percent of Georgia district’s voters".  (Interesting for those who don't click on links how the different headlines create an instant bias, isn't it?)

Democrats have some reason to be optimistic.

In the special election that took place in South Carolina’s 5th District on the same day as Georgia’s, Republican Ralph Norman received 51.1 percent of the vote in a district where Trump got 57.3 percent just five months earlier.

In April, Kansas Republican Ron Estes received 52.5 percent of the vote in a district where Trump got 60.4 percent.

In May, Montana Republican Greg Gianforte got 49.9 percent where Trump had won 56 percent.

And in a New York state legislative district where Trump won 60 percent of the vote, a republican candidate polled only 42 percent last month.

On the other hand, the Georgia 6th special election bucks that trend. The 10 Republicans collectively beat Trump’s district vote share of 48.3 percent by two points in the first round of voting, and Handel beat it by four points in the runoff.

Did all that caysh the DCCC and MoveOn and the rest of the Democratic establishment pour into southwest Atlanta motivate Republicans (in an R+21 district) as well as Democrats to vote?  Did they -- in what would be a stunning verdict against them and their strategy and tactics -- deliver a narrow victory for Karen Handel?  The SC outcome tells the tale (and so does No More Mister Nice Blog):

Here was Dave Wasserman of FiveThirtyEight not long before the race was called, on the site's live blog of today's two House special elections:

It’s ... legitimately possible that South Carolina’s result could wind up closer than Georgia’s, which would be astounding.

Here was Wasserman about an half hour before that:

If [Democrat Archie] Parnell loses South Carolina by 4 or 5 points, lots of Democratic activists will point fingers at the party’s hierarchy for not getting more involved.... But it’s possible that Parnell is doing well tonight because he wasn’t hyped, not despite it.

Parnell has also been declared a loser of his race -- but he lost by only 3.2 points in a deep-red district. Right now, Ossoff is trailing Republican Karen Handel by 5.2 points in a district that's also solidly red, but where Hillary Clinton made it a squeaker last November.

To be clear, NMMNB blames the media.  Specifically the conservative media, which is certainly at the root of the problem for Democrats, but sadly not something they can overcome in the next 18 months with a certain generation of voters inculcated on Rush Limbaugh.

If Democrats actually did better in the race that didn't get national attention, I worry that it means Democrats struggle to overcome the relentless, 24/7/365 demonization of their party in the right-wing media, which is basically the mainstream media in much of white America. The South Carolina race was ignored by the rest of the country, which means that allegedly nasty nationwide Democrats were never a factor.

-- Josh Marshall has thoughts.  They're more cautiously optimistic for Team Blue's chances of taking back the House in 2018, but echo much of what's been said above.

-- Playing a different blame game, Matthew Sheffield at Salon points toward the GOP's late tactic in GA-6 in suggesting Ossoff's loss might in part be on Nancy Pelosi.

Thankfully, nobody that I can find has publicly accused the Russians for hacking the election.  Update: But others besides Brad Friedman and Greg Palast have picked up the hacked voting machines angle.

-- David Atkins at Washington Monthly thinks Dems should abandon the Romney Caucus and go back after the Obama voters who voted for Trump.  With aggressively populist and progressive politics and candidates.

In July of 2016, Senator Chuck Schumer made a statement that will go down as one of the greatest political miscalculations in modern history: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

This strategy undergirded every decision of the doomed Clinton campaign, from ignoring the white working class in her Rust Belt firewall, to chasing suburban Republican women in Missouri and the South. It is a strategy that establishment Democratic operatives continue to pursue to this day.

That same strategy may well have cost Democrats a House seat in last night’s special elections, where Democrat Jon Ossoff underperformed expectations in a loss in Georgia’s 6th district, while the more ideologically aggressive Democrat Archie Parnell dramatically overperformed expectations in a loss in South Carolina’s 5th.

The two districts in play last night that could not have better mirrored the dilemma facing Democrats over whether to pursue Trump-averse Republican suburban voters, or working class whites and Obama-Trump switchers. Georgia’s 6th District is full of the former: a traditionally heavy Republican district, it veered away from Donald Trump because its residents are less attuned to Trump’s economic populism and—it was believed—his appeals to bigotry. These are the very voters Clinton and Schumer salivated over, and the national Democratic Party pushed very hard for the seat, spending upwards of $5 million.

South Carolina’s 5th district is much more rural and hardscrabble, and was much more favorable to Trump. Establishment Democrats mostly ignored the race, spending no money there.

In GA-06, Jon Ossoff ran a deliberately anti-ideological campaign. Centrist think tank Third Way bragged that Ossoff used a “centrist message aimed at attracting disillusioned Republican voters.” South Carolina’s Parnell, despite his Goldman Sachs background, ran a much more hard-charging campaign of Democratic values.

[...]

The lesson of the special elections around the country is clear: Democratic House candidates can dramatically outperform Clinton in deep red rural areas by running ideological, populist campaigns rooted in progressive areas. Poorer working class voters who pulled the lever for Trump can be swayed back to the left in surprisingly large numbers—perhaps not enough to win in places like Kansas, Montana and South Carolina, but certainly in other more welcoming climes. Nor is there a need to subvert Democratic principles of social justice in order to accomplish this: none of the Democrats who overperformed Clinton’s numbers in these districts curried favor with bigots in order to accomplish it.

Don't look for most Congressional Democratic candidates running in 2018 to get it.  It would be great if some Green candidates would take this ball and run with it, but in Texas they have to get back on the ballot first.