The Supreme Court confirmation process is broken. Here’s how to fix it.

Robert Bork. 2005 photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Previously published at WGBH News.

Recently I proposed to fix our state elections by adopting ranked voter choice, moving the primaries to June, and making them nonpartisan. (You’re welcome.) Today I’m back with the exponentially more difficult task of repairing our broken Supreme Court confirmation process. My plan, I think, is simple and logical. But I’d be the first to concede that it has virtually no chance of happening.

Let’s begin with this: Judge Brett Kavanaugh will almost certainly be confirmed once the FBI has finished its quickie investigation. Senate Republicans have been pining for an ultraconservative like Kavanaugh for years, and they’re not going to let credible allegations of sexual assault, false testimony about his role in the George W. Bush administration’s torture policy, and a career spent immersed in the culture of misogyny to stand in the way.

What’s next? Democrats may take over the Senate in the November election, and they’ll be spoiling for a fight. It’s more than possible that they will reinvestigate Kavanaugh and maybe even impeach him. He has given them plenty of reasons to do so. But that’s the road to chaos, and it would lead to an endless cycle of retribution. That cycle has to be stopped, and on terms that recognize what a terrible choice Kavanaugh was while leaving both parties a chance to regain their dignity.

The way to do that is to let Kavanaugh take his seat on the court (assuming the FBI doesn’t find something new and explosive or at least two Republicans decide they can’t abide him) and then look to the future. I’d do this in three steps.

1. McConnell must apologize. The root of all this madness is Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal even to consider Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. McConnell’s alleged reason was that the next president should make that choice, even though Obama had nearly a year left in his term. It was an outrageous and shocking breach of protocol, and Democrats remain rightly incensed.

Republicans like to cite the Senate’s defeat of Robert Bork, chosen by President Reagan in 1987, as the original sin that led to today’s dysfunction. That’s ludicrous. Bork was granted a hearing and was rejected for what opponents considered his extreme views. Six Republicans were among those who voted no. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Since that time, nearly every justice nominated by Republican and Democratic presidents alike has been approved by a wide bipartisan margin.

McConnell needs to acknowledge publicly the damage he did to the Senate and negotiate an agreement that neither party will try such a maneuver again. Leaders of both major parties should restore the 60-vote margin needed to avoid a filibuster, which would encourage presidents to choose consensus candidates for the court rather than extreme ideologues. In other words, they need to return to “regular order,” the breakdown of which the late senator John McCain cited when he voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act.

2. The court should be temporarily expanded. In writing about the lunacy that the Senate may fall into if the Democrats seek revenge for Garland, some have predicted that they may try to expand the size of the court in order to offset the conservative majority. As with the possible impeachment of Kavanaugh, that seems likely to set off an endless series of tit-for-tat actions.

But by temporarily expanding the court by one seat, from nine to 10, Congress could acknowledge the outrageousness of what happened to Garland and send a clear message that it won’t happen again. Appoint a 10th justice now, and the next time a justice leaves the court, let it shrink back to nine.

3. Trump should nominate Garland. Temporarily expanding the court from nine to 10 justices accomplishes nothing if President Trump simply chooses another candidate from the list that the Federalist Society has provided him. Trump should be part of the negotiations over how to fix the process. And he, McConnell, and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer should all agree that the 10th justice will be none other than Judge Garland. Garland, a moderate, would be an ideal consensus choice; before McConnell nixed him, some Republican senators had said he was someone they could support.

Trump, needless to say, would have to demonstrate that he is capable of acting for the good of the country rather than simply indulging his animal instincts. It’s not likely. Then again, nothing I am suggesting here is likely.

The tragedy is that extreme polarization and partisan warfare are tearing down every institution of government, including the Supreme Court. I think the record is clear that Republicans are to blame far more than the Democrats. But they both need to be part of the solution — if there is to be any solution.

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Alex Jones and the privatization of free speech

Alex Jones with fans. Photo (cc) 2006 by Nick Mollberg.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Alex Jones is the sort of dangerous crank that freedom of speech was designed to protect. When the late Anthony Lewis wrote his “biography” of the First Amendment, he titled it “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate.” We don’t need constitutional protections to report on the church picnic. We need them to make sure that the most loathsome among us are allowed to spread conspiracy theories, spout vile insults, and stage outrageous demonstrations of hatred and prejudice.

And no, Jones is not in danger of losing his First Amendment rights. The government has not attempted to silence him. His website, InfoWars, continues to be a popular stop for those on the extreme right. He is facing a lawsuit from several of the Sandy Hook families, whom he had cruelly accused of staging an elaborate hoax. But that, too, is part of the First Amendment.

The problem is that Jones illustrates perfectly a dilemma that some of us have been warning about for years: the privatization of free speech. As you may know, Jones in recent months has been banned from Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms. Last Friday he was cut off by PayPal as well. He’s going to need to find another way for his customers to pay him for those InfoWars Life Super Male Vitality supplements.

No one seriously questions the right of the tech platforms to banish Jones to the far corners of the internet. These services are owned by giant corporations that became fabulously wealthy (Facebook) or at least marginally profitable (Twitter) by offering their customers a controlled experience. Algorithms determine what you are most likely to see, especially on Facebook. Their policies prohibit nudity (usually), profanity (sometimes), copyright violations, and — especially as the manipulation of the 2016 election becomes clear — fake news aimed at swaying public opinion.

This would all be fine except that the platforms — and Facebook in particular — have become our new civic commons. As Josh Marshall, the founder and editor of the liberal website Talking Points Memo wrote recently, “To a real extent, the places you can exercise your speech these days are on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. That is really the heart of the problem. A big part of the public square has been gobbled up by closed systems: Facebook especially, but also Google’s YouTube, Twitter, et al.”

Now, as I said, no one is threatening Jones’ ability to reach millions of people through his website, although the weight of his legal problems might put him out of business. (Which would be fine with me.) If need be, he could host his site in another country, or from a server in his basement. But, these days, the platforms are how we extend our reach beyond the relatively small number of people who make the effort to seek us out. Early indications are that traffic to InfoWars dropped by half following Jones’ disappearance from Facebook. Again, that’s fine; Facebook, far from doing anything wrong, is acting responsibly. But with some 2.2 billion active monthly users, Facebook simply has too much power and influence to be trusted as a conservator of the First Amendment.

As Micah Sifry, who writes about the intersection of technology and civic life, put it in The New Republic, Facebook has usurped our initial hopes that the internet would spark a “civic renaissance” by democratizing information and giving everyone a voice:

With 68 percent of Americans currently using Facebook, it has become the nation’s de facto digital public square, at least in part because the country’s political leaders lacked the civic imagination to insist on a public alternative. With their tacit approval, Facebook built a giant garden for its users, walled off from the open internet. And then, taking advantage of its popularity, Facebook started copying and replacing older public forms of civic engagement with new ones that only live inside its platform.

There is nothing new about this, and in some respects it predates technology. In 2003 I bestowed a New England Muzzle Award (then hosted by The Boston Phoenix, now by WGBH News) upon a mall in the almost-New England suburbs of Albany, New York, for calling police and having a man arrested because he was wearing an antiwar T-shirt. Shopping centers have essentially become the new village square, except that they’re geared toward commerce rather than civic life. In 2017, I awarded Muzzles to YouTube (owned by Google) for suppressing a pro-Israel video by Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz and to Instagram (owned by Facebook) for deleting a photo of a nude painting posted by the Museum of Fine Arts. Technology companies have become so powerful that they need to take their First Amendment responsibilities seriously.

But the platforms are not common carriers like telephone companies, which are obligated to carry any calls and data that come their way. Nor are they the internet itself, although there’s plenty of reason to be concerned about the possibility of censorship now that President Trump’s FCC has done away with net neutrality. The solution, if there is one, is to draw people away from Facebook and toward an idea animated by something other than the profit motive. “If Americans truly want a digital public forum centered on the needs of the citizenry,” writes Sifry, “it has to be built and maintained the same way they’ve built and maintained America’s national parks — as public goods open to all.

Which brings me back to Alex Jones. In theory, his freedom to speak and to publish are intact. In reality, he can’t gain access to the platforms he needs to get his message out. Jones, of course, must be held accountable for the Sandy Hook families who’ve had to go into hiding because of his vicious lies, and for promoting crazy conspiracy theories like the Pizzagate child-sex ring tied to Hillary Clinton, which prompted a deranged individual to show up and start shooting.

The semi-censorship to which Jones has been subjected — quieted, but not silenced — may seem like a small price to pay in order to stop him from harassing innocent people and putting their lives in danger. Given the media environment as it currently exists, the platforms did the right thing by taking away his megaphone. But their actions only underscore what we have lost by granting custody of our free-speech rights to private entities beyond our control. Next time it might be someone who’s far less malevolent than Jones.

We really need to ask ourselves whether we want that accountability to come in the form of giant corporations silencing him simply because it’s good for business. I would not tell Mark Zuckerberg how to run his company, although even he has suggested that he would not be averse to some common-sense regulations. Like Sifry, though, I believe the time has come to try to revive the idea of the internet as a truly public space rather than the private playground of tech billionaires.

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Brett Kavanaugh has thrived in a culture that embraces sexual harassment

Judge Brett Kavanaugh (right) meets Sen. Chuck Grassley. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser now has a name and a harrowing story to tell. Over the next few days, we can expect an avalanche of news stories and cable talk about Christine Blasey Ford and whether her allegations are enough to topple the Kavanaugh nomination.

But there’s a broader context to all of this, and journalists would be negligent if they fail to explore it. Simply put, Kavanaugh has been in close proximity to, and in some cases has benefited from, a culture of sexual harassment and assault his entire life.

The best known example is Kavanaugh’s work for the grand inquisitor himself, Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who exposed Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Both then and now, the focus has been on Clinton’s sleazy, exploitative behavior. But his affair with Lewinsky was nobody’s business until Starr concocted a bizarre legal theory that it would shed light on Paula Jones’ sexual-harassment lawsuit against Clinton — thus dragging a secret sexual relationship into the public sphere and transforming it into a perjury trap for Clinton.

Kavanaugh was a full participant in what amounted to an unforgivable assault on Lewinsky’s character. You may have heard that Kavanaugh drafted a series of questions that the president would be required to answer under oath. The questions say much about what was rattling around in Kavanaugh’s mind. Here is one of them: “If Monica Lewinsky says that you ejaculated into her mouth on two occasions in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?”

Clinton may have been the subject of the investigation, but Lewinsky suffered the most. To this day she is an object of pity and derision, despite her admirable attempts to speak out and reclaim her life. Many years later Starr, in what was surely one of the most satisfying ironies of our time, resigned in disgrace from the presidency of Baylor University for covering upinstances of sexual assault involving the school’s football team.

If Kavanaugh’s assault on Monica Lewinsky was his most notorious brush with sexual harassment, it was by no means the only one. Earlier this year Kavanaugh said he had no knowledge of dirty jokes and naked pictures of women that appeals court judge Alex Kozinski shared with his law clerks. Kavanaugh was among those clerks, and was apparently one of Kozinski’s favorites, as the mentor introduced the mentee to the Senate in 2006 when Kavanaugh was nominated for an appeals court judgeship.

“Kozinski’s sexual comments — to both men and women — were legendary,” wrote another ex-Kozinski clerk, Heidi Bond, at Slate. “When I first arrived in chambers, the outgoing clerks suggested that we should watch ‘The Aristocrats,’ a documentary about a notorious dirty joke, to prepare ourselves for the upcoming year. Kozinski’s email list had hundreds of participants, and some of the jokes he shared were incredibly off-color.” Yet Kavanaugh, when asked about the matter, replied: “I do not remember any such comments.”

His reputation in ruins, Kozinski retired. Kavanaugh, as he had following the Starr investigation, skated away.

There is more. Kavanaugh’s opposition to abortion rights is not necessarily related to his toleration of sexual harassment, of course. But some of his actions stand out. Despite Kavanaugh’s denial, White House records show that he was involved in the nomination of Judge William Pryor of Arkansas to an appeals court position. Pryor is a notorious culture warrior, calling Roe v. Wade an “abomination” and harshly criticizing homosexuality. As an appeals court judge himself, Kavanaugh ruled against a 17-year-old undocumented immigrant’s request for an abortion, a decision that one of his colleagues called “unconstitutional” and “wrong.”

We are already hearing that Kavanaugh’s actions as a minor should not be held against him all these years later, regardless of how reprehensible they were and regardless of the lasting harm that Christine Ford said was done to her psyche. Surely there is something to the idea that the actions of an adult should be taken more seriously than those of a minor. There’s a line to be drawn, even if you might draw it in a different place than I would.

But consider that, just a few years after his alleged assault on Ford, he joined a secret club at Yale called Truth and Courage that was devoted to heavy drinking and was “organized around having sex with coeds,” according to Kristin Sherry, an alum who was interviewed by BuzzFeed News.

Or consider that Kavanaugh is on the verge of joining the Supreme Court thanks to the patronage of President Trump, who has bragged about sexually assaulting women — boasts that have been corroborated.

In the days and weeks immediately following Kavanaugh’s nomination, the mainstream consensus was that he was a fine fellow, but gosh, he’s awfully conservative. The sheen has worn off. There is a coherent story to be told about Brett Kavanaugh, and it is ugly — the story of a child of privilege whose rise has been constructed, in part, on the degradation of women. Are the media capable of telling that story? We’ll see.

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Beyond ‘Fear’: An ex-New York Times critic explains the cultural rot Trump exploits

Previously published at WGBH News.

We are in the midst of a book-inspired frenzy over Donald Trump’s the cruelty and mendacity. The legendary journalist Bob Woodward’s latest, “Fear: Trump in the White House,” has renewed our anguished questions over how this petulant, foul-mouthed racist could be elected president.

But though Woodward has described the what and the how of the Trump presidency, we must look elsewhere for the why. Trump did not spring out of nowhere; we had been slouching in his direction for a long time. As former president Barack Obama put it the other day: “It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause.” But a symptom of what, exactly?

Attempting to give us some answers is Michiko Kakutani. Her new book, “The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump,” provides some much-needed context to help us understand what happened to our democracy. The tools wielded by Kakutani, the former weekday book critic for The New York Times, are deep reading and cultural criticism. The result is not entirely satisfying. But she does offer some provocative observations the about social changes that made Trump not just possible, but inevitable. She writes:

It is unlikely that a candidate who had already been exposed during the campaign for his history of lying and deceptive business practices would have gained such popular support were portions of the public not somehow blasé about truth telling and were there not more systemic problems with how people get their information and how they’ve come to think in increasingly partisan terms.

Some of Kakutani’s targets are familiar. The internet, she argues, is partly responsible for a rise in anti-intellectualism that manifests itself in contempt for expertise and an embrace of “the wisdom of the crowd.” In an online universe in which scientific knowledge is too often regarded as elitist, anti-vaxxers and climate-change deniers flourish in their ignorance.

Kakutani is also sharp in her observations about how the media have shifted from a few outlets speaking with authority to a myriad of competing voices catering to every conceivable ideology, with audiences increasingly trapped inside filter bubbles determined by algorithms that we don’t understand.

Oddly enough, Kakutani blames some of these cultural changes on postmodernism, an academic theory generally associated with the left. The essence of postmodernism, Kakutani explains, is that “there are no universal truths, only smaller personal truths — perceptions shaped by the cultural and social forces of one’s day.” This type of thinking, she argues, has since been adopted by the right. It certainly can be seen in President Trump’s use of the term “fake news” to describe journalism he doesn’t like, or in the toxic fiction that Fox News and Breitbart are simply conservative counterparts to the Times and The Washington Post. But it’s hard to draw a connection between an esoteric academic theory and the outrageous conspiracies promoted by the likes of Alex Jones.

The firehose of disturbing news that comes out of the Trump White House on a daily basis is overwhelming. Bob Woodward’s book was preceded by a similar if less credible book by Michael Wolff, “Fire and Fury.” Many of the details offered by Woodward, in turn, were almost immediately confirmed by an anonymous op-ed piece in the Times, written by a “high official” in the administration. The talk these days is of the 25th Amendment and “Crazytown,” of documents filched off Trump’s desk to prevent him from signing them and of obscenity-laced rants demanding that his generals assassinate adversaries like Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

At such a chaotic moment, Kakutani’s broader perspective is invaluable. She opens with Hannah Arendt’s warning that totalitarianism arises not from committed ideologues but from “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exist.” And she closes with the late media scholar Neil Postman, who is rapidly becoming the Tocqueville of our era. Postman’s 1980s classic, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” predicted much of what is unfolding today by examining the effect of television on the public discourse. Kakutani quotes Postman: “Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship.”

Trump is nothing if not a showman — literally, as he has transitioned from reality-show star to reality-show president. There is little that is real or truthful about reality shows, and there is little that is real or truthful about the Trump presidency. In Kakutani’s telling, the lies that are at the heart of this malign enterprise are not a problem that could be corrected but, rather, their defining feature. It is a dispiriting conclusion, but these are the times in which we live.

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A few preliminary thoughts on The Boston Globe’s new Arc-powered app

Following a soft launch, The Boston Globe today is going public with its new app for tablets and phones, powered by Arc, The Washington Post’s content-management system. I’ve been playing with it since Tuesday, and I have a few very preliminary observations.

— It’s fast and attractive in a Post kind of way. The icon for the app is a white “B” on a black background, and the look and feel are similar to the Post’s black app. Stories load quickly, pictures are big and the type size can be easily adjusted.

— The organizational scheme is intuitive and makes sense. Across the top is a navigation bar that lets you choose from among Top Stories, Sports, Metro and the like. One of the choices is Marijuana, a hint of the paper’s expanded coverage of all things pot that is said to be in the works. Click on “Sections” at the bottom and you can drill down to more specific coverage. Again, this will be familiar to Post readers.

— Unlike virtually any news app I’ve ever used, you can’t swipe from one story to the next. Instead, you have to click the back arrow to return to whatever section you’re browsing. Stories load quickly enough that this amounts to a minor annoyance, not a major one. But it needs to be fixed.

— Stories appear in seemingly random order, even in the Top Stories section. As I scroll through the section right now, I see a few news stories followed by some sports, then back to news, then some more sports. The Top Stories sections of the best newspaper apps — those offered by the Post and The New York Times — are divided into sections and have a curated feel to them. The Globe needs to do better.

— As with the Post, there is no Today’s Paper listing of stories. That’s actually one of my favorite features of the Times’ app, since I might read a few stories on my way to work and then pick it up later during the day. A newspaper as a fixed record of the day’s most important events may seem old-school, but stories you might want to read tend to disappear from continuously updated apps. There’s a Today’s Paper listing at the Globe’s website, which works fine on a phone, even if it’s slow. I’d like to see that migrate to the app as well.

Based on first impressions, I’d give the Globe’s app a “B.” Given that the Globe’s owners, John and Linda Henry, have bet the farm on selling pricey digital subscriptions (currently just shy of 100,000), the tech side ought to keep working and get it into the “A” range. There’s a lot to like, a few things that need to be improved and one shortcoming — the inability to swipe from story to story — that is just plain unacceptable.

Update: A Facebook commenter says that you can swipe with the Android version. I’m an iOS user. But that suggests the problem won’t be too difficult to fix.

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How June primaries, the instant runoff and nonpartisan elections could revive democracy in Mass.

WGBH News photo by Meredith Nierman.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

The Massachusetts primaries were a success — if by “success” you mean there was no obvious Russian interference, there were enough ballots for everyone, and none of candidates came to blows in the parking lot outside the local Elks hall.

But notwithstanding the excitement of Ayanna Pressley’s surprising win over longtime congressman Michael Capuano, you would have been hard-pressed to find an outbreak of civic engagement.

Secretary of State Bill Galvin had predicted that turnout would be around 15 percent — a pathetic figure that’s pretty much standard for primaries, and one more obstacle for challengers hoping to unseat better-known incumbents. Moreover, in the hotly contested Democratic primary for the 3rd Congressional District, Daniel Koh was leading a 10-candidate field early this morning with less than 22 percent of the vote. In other words, more than 78 percent of voters wanted someone else to succeed U.S. Rep. Niki Tsongas, who’s retiring.

Minuscule turnout and razor-thin victories by candidates who are supported by barely one-fifth of those who bothered to show up are deadly to the body politic. But it doesn’t have to be that way. With a reform-minded spirit and a willingness to try something new, we could reinvent elections in Massachusetts. Here are three ideas that could restore competition as well turn nonvoters into voters. What are we waiting for?

Move the primaries to June

Galvin didn’t have to designate Sept. 4 as primary day. But he didn’t have any good choices. Given when the Jewish holidays fall this year, he couldn’t have scheduled the primaries for either of the following two Tuesdays. But who says the primaries have to be held in September?

If you’ve been paying attention to primary contests in other states, you know that voters have been casting ballots all summer. The stretch between the July 4 and Labor Day is traditionally a time when many people set politics aside and concentrate on more compelling matters, such as the beach. That’s why I’d move the primaries to sometime in mid- or late June. New York does it with federal offices; you may recall that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s unexpected victory in the primary for a congressional seat came on June 26. I would do the same in Massachusetts for both federal and state contests.

On the face of it, you might think a longer campaign is something to be avoided. Here’s why I think that’s wrong. A late-June primary would mean that candidates could run hard for two or three months in the spring, at a time when voters might be paying more attention. Televised debates would get bigger audiences. Challengers would be able to make their case in the high-attention months of April, May, and June rather than in the dog days of summer.

The switch would help general-election challengers as well. State Rep. Geoff Diehl, an obscure Republican, and former Patrick administration official Jay Gonzalez, a little-known Democrat, now have an eight-week sprint in which to make the case that they should defeat two popular incumbents — U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Gov. Charlie Baker, respectively. The challengers should have had the summer to put their campaigns together rather than fending off challengers from their own parties.

The good news is that both Galvin and his Republican opponent, Anthony Amore, support moving the primaries to the spring, as did Galvin’s Democratic challenger, Josh Zakim. So does The Boston Globe’s editorial page. To many this is one reform idea whose time has come.

Adopt the instant runoff

I’ve been arguing for this since 2000, and there are reasons to believe it might finally happen. Maine has adopted it. Cambridge has been doing it in municipal elections for years. The Boston Globe has endorsed it. The goal is to get past our winner-take-all elections, in which whoever comes in first is handed the victory, even if he or she attracts far less than a majority.

The instant runoff, also known as ranked choice, gives voters an opportunity to indicate their order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first-place votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated, and her supporters’ second-place votes are awarded to the remaining contenders. Candidates continue to be eliminated in this manner until someone has a majority. And if no candidate has a majority after the second-place votes are counted, the process is repeated with voters’ third choices, fourth choices, and so on. It’s like having a series of runoff elections, except that voters only have to go to the polls once.

The advantage of this is that the eventual winner might be someone who has more broad support among the electorate than the candidate who finishes first with less than a majority. As I’m writing this, Daniel Koh is just a little more than 600 votes ahead of Lori Trahan in the Democratic primary for the 3rd Congressional District, with a margin of 21.7 percent to 20.9 percent. A recount looms. In a 10-candidate field, though, it’s impossible to know which of them would prove to be more popular with voters who backed another candidate. For that matter, the consensus choice might be someone else altogether. The instant runoff would provide the answer.

For more information about ranked-choice voting, visit the website of the the nonprofit organization Voter Choice Massachusetts.

Switch to nonpartisan primaries

I’ll admit that I’m not as enthusiastic about this idea as I am about June primaries and the instant runoff. But despite Republican Charlie Baker’s popularity, Democrats have long had a stranglehold on politics in Massachusetts. Democrats control every statewide office except the governorship — both U.S. Senate seats, all nine congressional seats, and overwhelming majorities in both branches of the state Legislature. Consider that Pressley, following her exciting win over Capuano, will not even face a Republican opponent in November. That’s not healthy for democracy.

Nonpartisan primaries would simply mean that the top two finishers would face each other in the general election. They might be two Democrats, a Democrat and a Republican, two independents, a Democrat and a Libertarian, or whatever. Among other things, such a system might lead to the emergence of more moderate Baker-style Republicans, as right-wing candidates would no longer be assured of a spot on the November ballot simply by virtue of winning the Republican primary.

Nonpartisan primaries have been adopted in California. They have also long been in effect in cities like Boston, where both the mayor and the city council are elected without regard for party affiliation.

I would not eliminate party labels. But nonpartisan primaries could lead to more competition — especially for entrenched Democratic incumbents who coast to their party’s nomination and then face token Republican opposition (if that) in November.

The fact that not just Pressley but also challengers to several longtime legislators were successful shows that democracy in Massachusetts still has a beating pulse. But we can do better. And these are not the only ideas to improve our elections. Weekend-long voting would make it easier for many people to get to the polls than the one-day Tuesday ritual. Dividing the state into, say, three congressional districts instead of nine, with each district electing three people, could give a boost to Republicans and minority parties.

After Tuesday’s low-turnout exercise in what is supposed to be participatory democracy, though, changing the way we hold primaries and moving past winner-take-all ought to be the first order of business.

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It’s 1974 all over again: For the Globe, Trump’s angry words have consequences

Entrance to the lobby of the Globe’s former plant in Dorchester. Photo (cc) 2012 by Dan Kennedy.

Early Monday morning, a gunman fired one shot through the plate glass window of the plant’s lobby facing Morrissey boulevard, narrowly missing a security guard, and three more shots through the plate glass windows of the press room. No one was injured.

— The Boston Globe, Oct. 8, 1974

Angry words have consequences. Nearly 44 years ago, The Boston Globe came under attack because of white racism, fueled by anti-integration activists who were furious at the Globe’s sympathetic coverage of and editorial support for court-ordered desegregation.

In addition to the shots that were fired at the Globe on two separate occasions (possibly by the notorious killer James “Whitey” Bulger), the Globe was beset by a violent demonstration in front of the plant as well as vandalism. At one point, gun-wielding youths forced a driver out of a Globe delivery truck, whereupon they pushed it into Fort Point Channel. All of this is described in J. Anthony Lukas’ “Common Ground” (1985), possibly the greatest book ever written about Boston.

What brings this history to mind, obviously, is a death threat made against the Globe following the Globe’s campaign to persuade newspapers across the country to editorialize against President Trump’s anti-press rhetoric. (Ultimately more than 400 papers joined in.) The suspect, a Trump supporter named Robert Chain, reportedly referred to the Globe as “the enemy of the people,” thus quoting his hero’s oft-tweeted characterization word for word.

Fortunately no one was hurt, just as the anonymous shooter or shooters in 1974 somehow didn’t injure or kill anyone. But Trump’s dangerous words add up to incitement to violence — not in the legal sense, perhaps, but certainly in the moral sense. Our president is a careless and evil man.

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A couple of laments about our undemocratic primaries

Photo (cc) 2008 by Dan Kennedy.

A couple of laments about the Massachusetts primaries, which will be held next Tuesday, the day after Labor Day.

First, voters traditionally don’t tune in to politics until after Labor Day. Secretary of State Bill Galvin had no good options given the timing of the Jewish holidays this year. But the Sept. 4 date gives a huge advantage to incumbents who might otherwise be in trouble, including Galvin himself. I don’t like the idea of an August primary, which a number of states have adopted. But why not several months earlier? New York holds its primaries in June. Sounds good to me.

Second, winner-take-all elections are fundamentally anti-democratic, especially in multi-candidate fields. No one would be surprised if the winner of the Democratic primary in the Third Congressional District, where Niki Tsongas is retiring, got 20 percent of the vote — or less. For that matter, U.S. Rep. Mike Capuano, who faces a tough challenge from Boston City Councilor Ayanna Pressley in the Seventh, won the Democratic primary with just 23 percent when he was nominated for the first time in 1998 with a 10-candidate field. At the very least, the top two finishers should meet in a runoff. Even better, adopt the instant runoff so that voters can rank candidates by their order of preference.

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Judge extends censorship in plastic-handgun case

In 1931, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Near v. Minnesota that prior restraint — censorship — was permissible only to prevent serious breaches of national security, incitement to violence, and the publication of obscenity. It was Near to which the court looked in 1971 when it ruled that The New York Times and The Washington Post could resume publishing the Pentagon Papers, the government’s secret history of the Vietnam War.

Yet the rise of new doomsday technologies has put a crimp in Near. The latest example: efforts by a radical activist named Cody Wilson to publish blueprints on the internet describing how to use a 3D printer to produce an untraceable plastic gun. As I wrote for WGBH News several weeks ago, the case, based in Washington State, was reminiscent of one involving a left-wing magazine called The Progressive, which in 1979 sought to publish an article describing how to build a hydrogen bomb. In both instances, judges temporarily banned publication. The Progressive eventually published its article, and yet somehow we’re all still here.

Unfortunately U.S. District Court Judge Robert Lasnik is allowing the muzzling of Wilson to drag on, ruling on Monday that the temporary restraining order he had put in place on July 31 would not be lifted until the case has been resolved. According to The New York Times, Lasnik ruled that Wilson’s First Amendment rights “are dwarfed by the irreparable harms the states are likely to suffer if the existing restrictions are withdrawn and that, over all, the public interest strongly supports maintaining the status quo through the pendency of this litigation.”

And yet, the Times continues, the plans Wilson wants to publish are already leaking out here and there, thus showing the futility of censorship.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who joined the suit, is celebrating Judge Lasnik’s ruling. Healey, I should note, is a two-time winner of a New England Muzzle Award from WGBH News for her less-than-vigorous support of the First Amendment.

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