Suchergebnisse

With Super Tuesday in the rearview mirror,
Louisiana's presidential primary and other elections straight ahead, and the
2024 Regular Session of the Louisiana Legislature to start soon, now is a good
time for Louisiana to review its ballot integrity as other
states surpass it on this account.

Historically, the state has done well compared to
others in terms of votes cast under the name of an individual being cast by
that individual, who is a citizen residing at the address registered. It was
one of the early adopters of photo identification and positive identification
upon registering and at the polls.

However, while one can register
to vote online or mail that mandates eventual photographic identification preferably
in the form of a driver's license or special identification card (which require
other documents assuring an accurate identity) also acceptable is any photo ID
and some other documentation containing name and address.  Presentation of verified photo ID also isn't
needed when registering at a site that dispenses government benefits and the
registerer also receives those benefits.

Magnifying the threat to ensuring that caster
of a vote is an actual individual accurately registered to vote as that
individual is that one can vote without a government picture ID backed by
definitive identification. The state can issue one with positive picture
identification from another source, but, even more troubling, a person can vote
in Louisiana without any picture ID at all by swearing an affidavit and
answering correctly identifying information enrolled a registration.

It's not
hard to beat such a system. For example, a political operative could gather
information from people at a congregate setting, perhaps with the cooperation
of their relatives, then send in imposters on election day who provided with
the correct information when quizzed successfully impersonate the registrant. The
same could occur with college students out of state.

For that reason, Louisiana is classified
among the states by the National Conference of State Legislatures as "photo ID
requested," as opposed to its more stringent categorization of "strict photo
ID," such as in Georgia where a voter must present a Georgia driver's license
(even if expired), or an ID card issued by the state of Georgia or the federal
government; or a free voter ID card issued by the state or county (like
Louisiana's); or a U.S. passport; or a valid employee ID card containing a
photograph from any branch, department, agency, or entity of the U.S.
Government, Georgia, or any county, municipality, board, authority or other
entity of the state; or a valid U.S. military identification card; or a valid
tribal photo ID. If not, the voter casts a provision ballot that is counted
only if the person returns to the registrar's office within three working days
with the acceptable ID. This is the kind of law Louisiana should have.

Also leaky is Louisiana's absentee voting rules. It's
good in that it requires for most
individuals wanting to vote absentee a request to do so, with three exceptions:
people with disabilities who are homebound, anybody age 65 or older, and
nursing home residents. Absentee ballots are sent automatically to the homebound
and can be for the elderly, while registrars visit nursing homes to solicit and
witness ballots cast. All such ballots must be witnessed.

Still, ballot harvesting can occur under these conditions,
even if state law says witnesses unrelated to voters may witness only one
ballot, because if parish election boards ignore this (as
happened last year in Caddo that caused overturning of the results of its
sheriff's election) integrity measures can be defeated. Worse, unscrupulous
individuals can intercept or entice ballots and mark them without the knowledge
of voters. This can be countered by adopting a signature requirement like Mississippi's,
where the registrar checks the voter's signature and invalidates those that
blatantly don't match.

Fortunately, some legislation has been proposed to
ameliorate these problems, particularly Republican state Sen. Heather Cloud's SB 226 that
forces election boards to follow the law in regards to required information on absentee
ballots. Still, nothing has been introduced to add a signature verification requirement.

Nor has anything been introduced that would
tighten photo ID requirements. That also would vault the state into the category
of best practices when it comes to voting integrity. There's nothing more important
than elections that are as fraud-free as possible, because any fraudulent vote
stains the democratic process and people's trust in government, and states should
do as much as possible to implement measures such as these that present next-to-no
burden on voters that accomplish this objective.

It's still advantage Democrat Henry Whitehorn, but,
if allegations made by his opponent for Caddo Parish Sheriff Republican John Nickelson prove correct, that may
end up switching things for good – eventually.

Initial tallies on Nov. 18 gave Whitehorn a single
vote lead out of over 43,000 cast. Certification by the parish could occur as
late as 4 PM Nov. 27, which involved the board of election supervisors
verifying machine totals and early voting and absentee totals, with the
additional task of conducting a recount as requested by Nickelson. Keep in mind
that a recount only comes from absentee ballots, 7,780 in this instance, because
these are the only ones not entered electronically but are scanned.

This put Nickelson at a partisan disadvantage. The
board is comprised of the clerk of Court, Democrat Mike Spence; Registrar no
party Dale Sibley,
Democrat Gov. John
Bel Edwards' appointee Democrat Brenda
Traylor, and representatives one each from the major political parties. The
board as part of its duties reviews absentee ballots that initially didn't optically
read correctly to discern, if possible and by majority vote, the intent of the
voter – a process engineered by a "recopying" technique.

That equated to adding
three votes to each candidate, leaving the Whitehorn one-vote margin intact.
Nickelson immediately sued, citing a number of irregularities. Clearly,
Nickelson's legal team had done its homework. Its petition
noted problems including at least two voters voting both early and on Nov. 18,
some voters claiming their votes didn't register, at least one voter saying he
supposedly was registered legally at a precinct but denied being able to vote
even provisionally, at least four voting unable to do so legally as interdicted
under law, and as many as six votes cast on election day from people deceased.

Further, the filing questioned the administration
of the recount. It alleged imprecision in the machine recount that demanded a
hand recount of all absentee ballots that the board denied in the interests of
time, improper retention for counting of ballots with disqualifying marks, and improper
witnessing and voter signing on the envelopes in which ballots were sealed.

The filing asked the district court, which by law
will hear the case at 10 AM Dec. 1, to order a hand recount, and declare a
winner if possible, or schedule a new election which would be held on the
statutorily-designated day of Dec. 16. This almost certainly guarantees a new election,
because unless the hand count is allowed and shows a remarkably large swing in
favor of one candidate, the other who then otherwise would be declared the
loser can claim that so many irregularities exist that even a small lead leaves
open the possibility with so many tainted votes out there that this makes the
original election's outcome unknowable.

And if it does come to that, Nickelson may come
out the winner. Nickelson in the general election racked up 45 percent of the
vote because in precincts where white Democrats and Republicans made up at
least 70 percent of registrants, Republican candidates averaged 91 percent of
the vote, while Whitehorn got 35 percent because in precincts where black
Democrats made up at least 70 percent of registrants, black Democrats averaged
88.8 percent of the vote. In that election, turnout in precincts where at least
75 percent of the registrants were white averaged 27.9 percent of the vote,
while in precincts where at least 75 percent of the registrants were black
averaged 14.8 percent.

But in the runoff, turnout in those mostly-white
precincts fell 5.3 points while in those mostly-black precincts actually rose 1.2
points. If these numbers reverted even slightly to the general election form,
Nickelson wins a special election.

On the one hand, as overall turnout slipped between
elections 2.4 points, Whitehorn did better with his base, so another election
that could be expected to feature even more reduced turnout the trend would
indicate he would do better still. But on the other hand, and perhaps more compellingly
with just a single contest on the ballot, fewer than ten days before Christmas,
and where Nickelson by the latest campaign finance reports would appear to hold
a significant funding advantage necessary to drive turnout of his base, he
might be in better shape to hold onto voters.

That resolution may or may not happen anytime
soon. Depending on what happens in district court, appeals could go all the way
to the state Supreme Court, and may push any election into 2024. Its certification
may have been completed, but this contest is far from over.

Colorado's Supreme Court kicks Trump off the ballot (WSJ). I wrote earlier forecasting constitutional crisis with  next election. Legal chaos is starting right on schedule. Summary: Both sides are casting their opponents as illegitimate. That justifies profound norm-breaking behavior.  Political battles are being fought in the courts, so control of the courts and the judicial system now becomes vital to political success. When you can't afford to lose an election you do anything to win. Scorched earth rules the day. This affair offers a catch-22 to the Supreme Court. As a partisan chess move, you can't help but admire it. The case is weak, as even the judges voting for it admit. The election is coming up fast. There are many pending state cases to keep Trump off the ballot. The Supreme Court surely does not want to see elections more and more decided by courts. This will likely force the Court to act.Letting the ruling stand, and having Trump off the ballot in several states, will inflame Trump supporters, and bolster their view that the justice system is hijacked by Democrats.  If it is overturned, Democrats will quickly cast it as a  "pro-Trump" partisan move, and use it to inflame their campaign to de-legitimize the court. Among other consequences, that will embolden the increasing habit of simply ignoring Supreme Court decisions.  The brouhaha may also scare the court over the many election cases that are headed its way like an avalanche in the next year.  It is  devilishly clever. If it were not so utterly destructive. The WSJ on these points. The ruling ... placed the Supreme Court in a position it likely would have preferred to avoid: having to resolve unprecedented legal issues that also ignite strong political passions among the nation's electorate. ...  A central legal question:  One point of deep disagreement was whether removing Trump from the ballot violated his due process rights, given that he hasn't been convicted of a crime and the pending criminal charges against him aren't for insurrection.... One dissenting justice was particularly vehement in opposition, saying it violated bedrock American principles to remove Trump from the ballot in this fashion. "Even if we are convinced that a candidate committed horrible acts in the past—dare I say, engaged in insurrection—there must be procedural due process before we can declare that individual disqualified from holding public office," Justice Carlos Samour Jr. wrote."I could see the Supreme Court worrying about that and saying if you're going to disqualify someone you need to give them more of an opportunity to make their case because that's such a momentous deprivation of liberty and rights," said [David] Orentlicher, an elected Democrat...Hypocrisy is hardly new in politics. But it is noteworthy that the party bleating most loudly about "threats to democracy" is so distrustful of democracy that it is waging legal battles to keep Mr. Trump from being democratically elected.  If it's so self-evident that Trump violated the Constitution and his oath of office, the correct remedy is to simply let voters not vote for him on that basis. The party supposedly of the little person does not trust that little person to make the most basic decisions.  Pushing political battles into the judicial system really is a threat to democracy. In a lot of semi-autocratic countries, when someone loses an election, the winners  go after them on vague charges, impoverish them, family, and supporters, and often put them in jail if not worse. In response, people do everything in their power not to lose elections, no matter how many law and norms get broken along the way. The more political battles end up in court, the closer we come to that state. I repeat the warning from my last post. This is the tip of the iceberg. We have not just the 92 (is that the latest number?) charges against Trump. Redistricting will be a battleground. Campaign finance charges will be levied. Republicans are gearing up Hunter Biden charges. Every smudged postmark, every extended deadline will end up in court. The Supreme Court may end up making crucial decisions again. The losers will claim illegitimacy of both the winner and the process, and will spend the following 4 years in resistance. Stop now while you can. (I am moving to Substack. I will cross-post everything in both places until the bugs are worked out.) Update:Thanks all for the thoughtful and mostly polite comments, on such a sensitive topic. I now think the Supreme Court should leave it alone. Let the election come, let Coloradans ponder their Supreme Court banning the candidate of one of our two parties from the ballot, and let Coloradan voters do something about it if they don't like that outcome. I come to this view from reading Nellie Bowles always fantastic and humorous commentary over at the Free Press: The only way to protect democracy is to end democracy: The Colorado Supreme Court decided this week that Trump is disqualified from holding the presidency and so cannot appear on the Republican primary ballot in the state. Meanwhile, California's lieutenant governor ordered the state Supreme Court to "explore every legal option" to remove Trump from the ballot. In doing so, she said that the rules for the presidency are simple: "The constitution is clear: You must be 40 years old and not an insurrectionist." Yet even there she is wrong: you only have to be 35. Anyway, for a long time the standard liberal take has been that Democracy Is Under Threat from Republicans. And Trump certainly tried schemes in Georgia and whatnot, like, the man gave it a shot. But I would say that banning the opposition party's leading candidate. . . is pretty much the biggest threat to democracy you can do. It's a classic one, really. Timeless. Oldie but Goodie. The American left was so committed to protecting democracy that they had to ban voting. All I'll say is that once you ban the opposition party's top candidate, you can no longer, in fact, say you're for democracy at all. You can say you like other things: power, control, the end of voting, choosing the president you want, rule by technocratic elites chosen by SAT score, all of which I personally agree with. But you can't say you like democracy per se.So Colorado, listen, I dream every day of being a dictator. I would seize the local golf course and turn it into a park on day one; day two, expand Austin breakfast taco territory to the whole country; day three, invade Canada. Day four, we ban zoos. My fellow fascists, we're on the same page. Let's just drop the democracy stuff and call it what it is. But until courts pick candidates for Colorado Supreme Court, the voters of Colorado can choose if they want democracy. 

As the fig leaves fall away and the threats
escalate, the battle about term limits on Bossier City elected officials has
mutated from a veneer of concern over legal obligations to a process driven by
reelection concerns on both sides, although opponents have captured a monopoly on
hypocritical self-interest that continues to erode their political fortunes while
giving Mayor Tommy Chandler a tremendous opportunity to boost his own.

This
week a Council majority of graybeards – councilors Republicans David Montgomery
and Jeff Free,
Democrat Bubba
Williams, and no party Jeff Darby
who all will have served at least 12 years by 2025 – plus their pet rookie
Republican Vince
Maggio, in concert with their consigliere City Attorney Charles
Jacobs hope to go all Cosa Nostra in their endeavor to defeat the effort
to give voters a say on a three-term lifetime and retroactive limit in office. They
combat a petition certified by Bossier Parish Registrar of Voters Stephanie
Agee that the city charter forces the Council to approve placing such an item
on the ballot by Nov. 7.

But this majority bloc resists, because such a
vote of taken within the next 14 months almost certainly will pass the measure
and end the political careers of the graybeards. And the excuse they try to use
is the petition didn't directly have the birth years of signers listed as
stated specifically in the relevant state statute, although it did
list the voter identification numbers unique to signing individuals that
includes the birth year of them, providing an indirect listing that complies
with the spirit of the law if not its exact wording.

Until
recently, the bloc went to great pains to frame their opposition in terms
of legal niceties, principally that every letter needed correct crossing and
dotting or else sometime in the indeterminate future some otherwise ineligible candidate
(read: any of the graybeards) would sue to get on the ballot, citing
defectiveness of the petition process. However, this fig leaf cannot overcome
the fact that the charter says they must put the contents of a certified
petition on the ballot by a certain date or they are in violation of the
charter, and they have just such a petition at hand.

Further, Chandler won't leave them alone, pricking
at them to do their duty to their public embarrassment. At the Council's last
meeting, he introduced a resolution to fulfill the charter's imperative,
which the bloc voted down but was supported by Republicans Chris Smith and
Brian
Hammons. So, he reintroduced it for the very next one, and he may keep
doing it every single meeting as long as the Council doesn't comply. Every time
he does this, he reminds voters he will fight for term limits and gives a
chance for Hammons and Smith to do the same. And every time he does this, he
reminds voters that not only do Darby, Free, Maggio, Montgomery, and Williams
oppose term limits, but also that they repudiate their own oaths of office requiring
them to uphold the charter.

Thus, to contain the damage Chandler keeps inflicting
the bloc must dispense with the chimera of neutrality it has tried to sell and instead
attack the petition itself. Adding a layer of hypocrisy to its quest, at the
upcoming meeting it wants to pass a resolution – which failed to make the
agenda as a late addition last meeting – to ask Agee to "decertify" the
petition. The resolution's language doesn't hide that, despite no legal judgment
to verify this, it declares its request valid "due to the petition failing to
meet all the requirements of Louisiana Revised Statute 18:3."

Note that until now Jacobs and the bloc have claimed
they oppose a move to put the petition language onto the ballot out of strict
adherence to the law, but now they expose themselves as taking a side by asking
Agee to do something for which registrars don't have the legal authority which
appears nowhere in statute. It is an extralegal process invented out of thin
air that does anything but adhere to the law, but which fulfills a purely
political purpose.

However, this is only the veiled threat, akin to a
mobster visiting Agee and telling her something like she has a nice registrar's
office and it would be a shame if something happened to it, which she could
avoid by following the bloc's wishes (assuming it passes that resolution, which
given the numbers assuredly will happen). Because another resolution on the
agenda carries the threat through by empowering Jacobs to litigate against the
petition, which involves suing the registrar.

Of course, the resolution in many respects is both
empty and meaningless. Under the charter,
the city attorney doesn't have to have such a resolution in hand to pursue
litigation, but rather it is a political gesture that carries both risk and reward.
It attempts to avoid further damage to Jacobs, who has come under ethical fire
for his manipulation of Council affairs at odds with the Charter and his publicly
spreading false information in the course of his duties, by giving him the
appearance of an imprimatur to procced, but it also puts the bloc again on
record against term limits utilizing an unambiguous attempt to sabotage the
democratic process.

And it would appear objectively as a futile
gesture. How does the city have any standing to do this; who is harmed by having
a certified petition? And because the law is silent about reversing petition
certification, there's no valid mandamus claim that government fails to do its
duty. The legal gymnastics involved even to present a plausible challenge will
prove challenging.

Finally, and again involving a display of
hypocrisy, last meeting the bloc muscled through a call for a charter review
commission that would assess, among other things, term limits. Thus, why doesn't
the majority let the vote take place, and during the campaign as a reason to
vote down the measures (councilor and mayor terms) cite its allegation of invalidity
and that the commission will come up with its own version of limits to correct
that? And regardless of whether these pass, it can present its own version if
different through the commission for voter approval (which it can guarantee
through its selection of commissioners)? Why does it insist on bending and twisting
the law instead?

Of course, the end goal in any legal machinations is
not to defeat the petition's validity, which ultimately seems unlikely under
the spirit of the law, but to delay having to put its language on the ballot
until either it becomes subject to a low-stimulus special election that
provides its lowest chances of success – which means a delay of at least six
months but no more than nine because national elections will drive the election
calendar next year and provoke high turnout – or it gets pushed past city
elections in 2025. With Jacobs' past as a 26th Judicial District
judge, he can hope his comradeship with that bench will pay off with a former
colleague producing the ruling he wants that accomplishes the amount of delay
desired.

Perhaps the bloc will succeed through all of this
in buying its members the chance to win another term. Yet if this victory
comes, it may be pyrrhic, for the resulting bad publicity and easy explanation
to voters – X number of times voting against term limits, Y number of times voting
to violate the city charter, all the while looking out for their own
self-interests at the expense of the people's using taxpayer dollars – could
cause the bloc members to lose the war of reelection. Aided by Chandler, who
every time he twists the knife in by contrast further solidifies his chances of
reelection.

The story remains the same, and helps explain why
the group
dedicated to putting leftist women in office has crashed and burned in
Louisiana.

It seems the national group Emerge America is in
retreat. In its decade of existence, it has established chapters in over half
the states, recruiting and training female Democrats to run for office. It has roughly
1,300 of serving in elected office, eight members of Congress and 24 statewide
officials among its alumnae. But discord has set in among a few of its state
chapters, and some essentially have been cut loose.

That's happened in Louisiana, in which the
organization began operating in 2017, where almost two years ago the
then-leader of the state's branch left and hasn't been replaced, with the
organization asserting its strategic profile was served better by having the
state's leftist women interested in its services attend regional and national
training, as well as having alumnae available for mentoring. This has
disconcerted some, who see the move as surrendering and selling out leftist
activist women to whom it had proffered promises of assistance.

Not that Emerge
Louisiana ever had much success. It started to great fanfare in 2018 and 2019,
but then the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic hit it that caused many organizations
to pause, if not wilt. It had a small 2022 class, but nothing since. And it can
claim only 10 electoral successes, almost all confined to the state's most Democrat-friendly
parish Orleans, and just one state officeholder, ultra-left Democrat state Rep.
Mandie Landry,
who also hails from there.

Contrast this with the success that conservative
women running as Republicans enjoyed this fall. Incoming Secretary of State
Nancy Landry and Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill will assume statewide elected posts in
less than a month. The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will see the
return of Sandy Holloway and the introduction of Stacy Melerine. In the
Legislature, three GOP women outnumber a pair of female Democrats in the
Senate, and in the House, the GOP has 18 women incoming and/or repeating while
the Democrats have just 10 including Landry.

Reviewing all legislative candidacies, in districts
with at least one Republican woman running, a GOP female won three-quarters of
the time. As for Democrats, their distaff partisans won only half of such
races, with four fewer total such contests than for Republicans, meaning 75
percent more Republican women were elected than Democrat females.

That Republican women run and win at higher rates
than do Democrats continues the pattern that has emerged in the 21st
century and echoes
2019 election results, regardless of Emerge Louisiana efforts. This is as because
dynamics haven't changed: the center-right electorate of Louisiana responds
strongly to conservative appeals, magnified by the built-in advantage that conservatism
philosophically and empirically enjoys over liberalism.

A fatal conceit broadly shared by the political
left is that if only it can get the messaging correct, it will win elections,
even in conservative strongholds like Louisiana. That's exactly backwards of
the actual dynamics that leftism enjoys success only when its messaging skews the
realities of data and history through lenses of "isms" enough to detract from
objective conditions. When the inherent contradictions of conditions on the
ground versus the left's message become too detached, it can't win elections.

The wages of Louisiana's long history of liberal populism
have created a near-permanent rupture between leftist successful messaging
capability and the contrary reality realized by a critical mass of the voting public.
The rest of the country may be catching up: the same dynamic in the short-term
increasingly is operating against national Democrats, causing
increased defections from their coalition that point ominously to a GOP
sweep of the majoritarian branches in 2024.

As always in 21st century Louisiana, the lesson is this: if Democrats
want to win elections, objective conditions necessitate that they pull back
from the severe ideological left turn the party has taken in the century. If Emerge
Louisiana hasn't learned this, it might as well fold up shop here. 

Parallel efforts in the House and Senate hoping to find a short-term funding solution have advanced at a snail's pace this week, and it continues to look likely that no agreement will be struck and the federal government will shutdown on October 1. Central to the major battles being fought right now between and within both chambers is the future of Ukraine aid. While majorities in both the House and Senate still support both humanitarian and weapons assistance to Kyiv, an increasing number of Republicans have expressed skepticism or flat-out oppose additional funding beyond the $113 billion allocated by Washington last year. A few have vowed to reject any government funding measures that include more aid or have pushed to attach more conditions to future support. In the latest in a series of flip-flops in recent weeks, House Republican leadership decided late on Wednesday night to remove $300 million in security assistance for Ukraine from the Defense Appropriations bill, and will vote on the aid separately, according to reporting from Juliegrace Brufke. The Senate, which has been more generally more supportive of President Joe Biden's $24 billion emergency supplemental request for Ukraine, has put forward a proposal for a continuing resolution containing $6 billion in funding for Ukraine (coming up short of Biden's ask). The trimming down of aid is likely an effort to placate skeptical Republicans. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), for example, has pledged "to do everything in [his] power to block a bill that includes funding for Ukraine," and he will likely use procedural tools that can delay the resolution from arriving on the House floor until the weekend, all but ensuring a shutdown. Even if the stopgap measure does eventually make its way through the Senate, it is likely dead on arrival in the House. "I don't see the support in the House," Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said on Wednesday. The Speaker reportedly told Sen. Mitch McConnell, the GOP leader in the Senate, that he would not bring a bill to the House floor that funded Ukraine while ignoring problems at the United States' southern border. McCarthy's apparent refusal to entertain the Senate proposal continues his back-and-forth stance on how to handle further aid for Kyiv. The Speaker is in a tricky political situation, balancing a desire to avoid a shutdown with the fear that he will face a "motion to vacate" — in which one member could force a vote on removing him from his job — if he ignores his right flank's demands. As a result, he has continued to be ambiguous on his own stance on aid to Ukraine. After turning down both the Biden administration's offer to hold a briefing with various high-level officials on the status of the war, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's request to address a joint session of Congress during his visit to Washington last week, McCarthy met with Zelensky in a smaller, private group. His brief comments following the meeting suggested that it was a productive one.But a few hours later, Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News posted on X that House Republicans were "considering removing any Ukraine-related funding from the Pentagon spending bill in order to attract GOP holdouts." On Saturday, the Speaker had again reversed course, saying that removing the funding was "too difficult" to do, and that it would therefore stay in, before changing his mind once more on Wednesday. The Ukraine-related funding in the DoD spending bill amounts to approximately $300 million, part of the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI). An amendment to the bill that would have removed this money, introduced by Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), was defeated 104-330, with all votes in favor coming from Republicans.It is now unclear if McCarthy, who controls a very narrow majority, can get spending bills that contain any money for Kyiv through the House. After two failed attempts, House Republicans finally managed to vote to approve the rule that will allow them to begin debate on their defense appropriations bill (along with three other single-subject spending bills). The only dissenting GOP vote on the defense appropriations rule was from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who argued that "voting yes means more money for Ukraine." Once the rule was approved, Greene posted on X that she was "the ONLY Republican to vote NO on the rule yesterday that contained appropriation bills with unlimited funds for Ukraine." Other Republicans who voted in favor of the rule may try to strip any Ukraine funding from the legislation (as Rep. Matt Gaetz has already attempted, through the amendment process) or eventually vote against the spending bill. Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) posted a video on X over the weekend, saying "people all over the country are tired of funding never-ending wars." Appearing on Washington Journal on Friday, Biggs said that he would continue to oppose more aid, since "there is no exit plan," out of this conflict.Greene told Cami Mondeaux of the Washington Examiner that the defense spending bill was "dead on arrival" when it gets a vote on the House floor, because there are enough Republican members opposed specifically to Ukraine funding. It appears she was correct, as GOP leadership's decision on Wednesday indicates that they knew that there were not enough votes for the spending bill to pass. Greene, Crane, and Biggs are three of the 29 Republican members of Congress (six Senators and 23 House representatives) who signed a letter last week arguing that "The American people deserve to know what their money has gone to. How is the counteroffensive going? Are the Ukrainians any closer to victory than they were 6 months ago? What is our strategy, and what is the president's exit plan? What does the administration define as victory in Ukraine?"Until those questions were answered, the signers pledged to oppose any future expenditures for the war. "It would be an absurd abdication of congressional responsibility to grant this request without knowing the answers to these questions," they wrote. Twenty-nine members represents a small total of the GOP caucus (though earlier measures making similar demands have garnered more support). As a recent story in Semafor points out, this dynamic puts a majority of Republicans in Congress at odds with their constituents. "Among the GOP base, skepticism of U.S. involvement in the conflict runs deep," reports Semafor. "Fifty-nine percent of Republicans say the U.S. is doing too much to help Kyiv, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released over the weekend, similar to earlier results from Gallup and CNN." Republicans in Congress are slowly shifting in that direction. Gaetz's first attempt to prohibit security assistance for Ukraine had 70 Republicans voting in favor. A similar amendment introduced by Gaetz on Wednesday received 93 votes. If congressional leadership can find a way to break the logjam on other parts of the government funding debate, it's possible that bipartisan and bicameral support for new Ukraine monies will stream forward in future legislation. But the tumultuous events of the last few weeks show that the political pressure in the Republican caucus is moving against future funding, that debates over Ukraine are becoming increasingly thorny, and that the issue will remain central to political disputes for the foreseeable future.

What is a woman? Louisiana
Democrats might start having to explain themselves on this as their answer
might endorse breaking state election law.

Across the state this Saturday, registered
Republicans and Democrats will cast ballots for their respective party's governing
institutions, both for parish executive committees and state central committee.
State law sets some parameters for this process for recognized political
parties of a certain size, i.e. the two major parties.

Statute for composition of the state central
committees gives parties two choices. One, they can follow the somewhat-structured
R.S. 18:443.1, which
mandates that the SCC have 210 seats with its members elected from each of the
105 state House districts, where males run separately and females run
separately. Two, R.S.
18:443.2 mandates broadly that a governor of the party must serve on its
SCC but the rest of members selection is left up to the party so long as it's
not inconsistent with state law.

Republicans have chosen the second option, which in
its present form they managed
to put in statute in 2020. Basically, their SCC has 230 seats with multiple
members elected by state Senate districts in varying numbers depending upon
past voting support for the GOP in those districts, plus has all statewide
single executives and members of Congress as part of it, all as dictated by
party rules adjusted from time to time.

But Democrats have stuck with the first option, which
they implemented when they had essentially undisputed statewide power in 1987 as
a symbolic way of supporting parity between the sexes. My, times have changed.

Because the outcome of the District 91B could end
up breaking the law. Statute defines "A" slots as reserved for females and "B"
for males. Among three candidates running for 91B is Britain Forsyth, described
as a "transgender man" – in plain English, a biological female who self-conceives
and wishes others to see her as "male."

Of all the Democrats on the ballot in Orleans
Parish when registering as a candidate, only Forsyth failed to designate
biological sex, perhaps not feeling it applied (candidates are not required to fill
out any of party, race, or sex), even though the law makes the male/female
distinction only for qualifying under the option state Democrats have chosen
that apparently should make essential acknowledging that information if the correct
office for qualification can be determined. Indeed, the party's bylaws
explicitly state that it will follow R.S. 18:443.1.

This leads to a couple of questions if Forsyth
wins and is seated as the male committee member. First, does Forsyth run afoul
of the law – a biological female running for a slot reserved for a biological
male – because that section of the law doesn't explicitly define "female" as a
person with female sex chromosomes, etc., as is done in other sections of the
Louisiana Revised Statutes appertaining to other laws, such as with abortion or
fairness in women's sports? That definitions spring up elsewhere in statute may
mean there is an implied meaning to it, but it might require some explicit
defining legally specific to the particular law.

Second, can such a candidate's election and even
seating be ruled invalid because biological sex didn't match the legal requirement?
Typically, if an ineligible candidate
qualifies, that candidate is allowed to run and even can win unless challenged in a court of
law within seven working days of the close of qualification. That would
seem to indicate Forsyth would be in the clear, and the law broken regardless.
At that point, only the DSCC could remove Forsyth, and that's hardly likely
given the symbolic nature of it all that the party seems destined to endorse.

So, if Republicans wanted to have fun with this,
they would change the law to define that only biological females, whether by birth
or by sexual reassignment surgery with ongoing medications, qualify as a "woman"
for the purposes of R.S. 18:443.1, and biological males for men-designated
slots. This they could argue would allow for true equality between the sexes

This would bring publicity wins for the GOP, because
you would have Democrats arguing against equality of the sexes in political representation.
And deliciously so, because when Republicans changed the law in 2020 to enable
them to follow their preferred governance structure, some Democrats decried
that as aversion to women's equality; thus, this move would expose Democrats'
hypocrisy and past unprincipled grandstanding.

If that turns your crank, hope that Forsyth pulls
it off and we'll see what drama unfolds.

Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett


The Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) latest 30‐​year budget projections forecast rising debt, deficits, and interest costs. Rising spending on old‐​age entitlement programs, primarily Medicare and Social Security, is mostly to blame. Legislators should act now to make gradual changes to achieve a sustainable budget policy and avert a future fiscal catastrophe.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA), which suspended the debt limit until 2025, has been championed by President Biden and House Speaker McCarthy as a major success. Its primary achievement is a far cry from adopting a sustainable fiscal policy. The deal averted a self‐​imposed debt limit crisis but did so with a budget sleight of hand, as side deals and loose spending caps will undermine the FRA's modest deficit reduction. Even assuming CBO's charitable score of $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction from full implementation of the FRA, federal debt is still projected to exceed historic highs within this decade.
CBO warns that "high and rising debt would slow economic growth, push up interest payments to foreign holders of U.S. debt, and pose significant risks to the fiscal and economic outlook." Lawmakers should heed CBO's warnings and adopt a credible fiscal plan that will keep U.S. publicly held debt below the size of the economy. Annual spending is projected to grow from more than $6 trillion to $23 trillion (before adjusting for inflation) over the next 30 years. Without fiscal reforms, the government will accumulate $119 trillion in additional deficits and end 2053 with debt at 181 percent of GDP. To avoid more painful and likely more chaotic austerity in the future, policymakers should correct course by restraining entitlement spending growth today.
Here are key highlights from CBO's 30‐​year forecast report:
Debt grows to 181 percent of GDP by 2053











As a percentage of the country's yearly economic output, federal public debt (the debt borrowed from credit markets) is currently 98 percent of GDP—about $96,000 for every person in America. In just six years, public debt is projected to surpass its all‐​time World War II high of 106 percent. By 2033 (ten years from now), public debt will reach 115 percent of GDP. By 2053 (30 years from now), public debt is projected to surpass 180 percent of GDP. Such high debt levels have never before been recorded in U.S. history.
Interest costs triple to 6.7 percent of GDP by 2053
Between 2023 and 2053, interest costs are projected to grow from 2.5 percent to 6.7 percent of GDP. Interest costs are projected to grow more rapidly than most other budget categories. By 2047, net interest payments will be larger than all discretionary spending combined. In other words, interest costs will exceed combined government spending on defense, education, transportation, agriculture, energy, and more. For these projections, CBO assumes an average 4 percent interest rate on 10‐​year Treasury notes—the projected rate for 2023 is 3.9 percent. Were interest rates just one point higher than projected in 2053, interest costs that year would rise to 8.4 percent of GDP—an increase of $1.4 trillion for that year.
Entitlement spending drives unsustainable growth in federal debt
Between 2023 and 2053, total federal spending will increase from 24.2 percent to 29.1 percent of GDP. That's nearly one‐​third higher than the 30‐​year historical spending average (21 percent of GDP), spanning 1992–2022. Major entitlements, like Social Security and Medicare, are almost entirely responsible for non‐​interest spending growth. In 2023, Social Security's and Medicare's combined contribution to the deficit was 2.1 percent of GDP. By 2053, their annual deficit contribution will be 5.4 percent of GDP. That's more than half or 54 percent of the total deficit in 2053 due to spending on Social Security and Medicare (assuming additional borrowing past trust fund exhaustion and no other policy changes).
Obvious solutions to restrain excess entitlement spending growth include reducing retirement and health care subsidies for wealthier individuals, adjusting eligibility ages for old‐​age entitlements with improvements in health and life span, and preserving current benefits by adjusting for inflation while stopping excess benefit growth.
Social Security's Old‐​Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) and Medicare's Part A Hospital Insurance (HI) trust funds—which are more akin to financial ledgers than funds with real assets—are both projected to exhaust their borrowing authority in less than 10 years. Medicare's HI trust fund will be depleted by 2035 (other estimates place the exhaustion date at 2031). For Social Security's OASI, scheduled benefits can continue uninterrupted up to 2033. After borrowing authority is exhausted, Medicare and Social Security benefits would be indiscriminately cut by 11 and 23 percent, respectively, if Congress fails to act. Waiting until the 11th hour will leave legislators with few options to avoid steep benefit cuts and harmful tax increases.
Congress and the President must work together to stabilize spending and debt
Given that debt is projected to grow by 85% (nearly doubling) over the next 30 years as a percentage of GDP, the savings from the 2023 debt limit deal are a drop in the bucket. The FRA adopted spending limits governing less than 30 percent of the federal budget. As Rep. Womack (R‑AR) points out, "70% of this whole federal budget is on autopilot right now."
More than $8 trillion in savings will be necessary to stabilize the debt over the next 10 years. Political considerations over entitlement changes and how these will play out electorally have delayed inevitable reforms for far too long. Americans in and near retirement age are the most active at the voting booth, and they also stand to be hurt the most should Congress allow indiscriminate benefit cuts to take place over the next 10 years.
One promising proposal is to establish a BRAC‐​like fiscal commission to empower an independent body of experts to put forth policies to stabilize the federal debt. A well‐​designed commission will be composed of independent experts with diverse viewpoints, who are tasked with a clear goal, such as stabilizing the public debt at no more than 100% of GDP over the next 10 years, and whose recommendations will be self‐​executing in Congress through a similar fast‐​track mechanism that allowed the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) commission to be successful. A BRAC process can overcome political gridlock by providing legislators with cover from delegating entitlement reform to outside experts.
If policymakers continue to put serious fiscal reform on the back burner, the severity and scope of necessary reforms will grow. High and rising debt causes a significant drag on the economy and threatens America's fiscal and economic future. Delay is costly and risky. Congress and the President should act soon.

Readers will be aware of the philosophy journal poll I have been hosting here. The poll was comprehensive in that it covered over 140 philosophy journals, most of them suggestions by readers. These journals cover the full spectrum of the discipline. There have been more than 36,000 votes cast already and I believe we can draw some initial findings. Journals are each assigned a score: this is the percent (%) chance that voters will select this journal as their favourite if asked to choose between this journal and a second journal chosen at random.

The first finding is that there appears to be a top tier of philosophy journals -- this is not controversial -- that is relatively small -- this latter part may be more controversial.

From the poll, the top tier of philosophy journals appears to consist of the following publications:

1. Journal of Philosophy 87

2. Philosophical Review 84
3. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research 83
3. Nous 83 
5. Mind 82 
6. Ethics 80

I say that these appear to be the top tier as each were no. 1 or 2 at some point during the voting (unlike other journals). Each would be selected at least 80% of the time if paired with a second journal chosen at random.

A further finding is that the second tier of journals -- which we might classify as chosen at least 60-79% of the time when paired with a second journal chosen at random -- is perhaps surprsingly large. This second tier might consist of the following journals:

7. Philosophical Studies 79
8. Synthese 77
8. Philosophy & Public Affairs 77
10. Analysis 76
10. Philosophical Quarterly 76
10. American Philosophical Quarterly 76
10. Philosophers' Imprint 76
10. Monist 76
10. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 76
16. Journal of the History of Philosophy 75
16. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 75
16. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 75
16. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 75
20. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74
21. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73
21. European Journal of Philosophy 73
23. Erkenntnis 72
24. Philosophy of Science 71
25. Philosophy 70
25. History of Philosophy Quarterly 70
25. Ratio 70
28. Journal of Moral Philosophy 69
29. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 68
30. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 67
31. Philosophical Papers 67
32. Journal of Philosophical Logic 67
33. Journal of Philosophical Research 66
33. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 66
33. Utilitas 66
33. Mind and Language 66
33. Journal of Ethics 66
38. Southern Journal of Philosophy 65
39. Review of Metaphysics 64
39. Philosophical Investigations 64
39. Kant-Studien 64
42. Metaphilosophy 62
42. Philosophy Compass 62
42. Journal of Political Philosophy 62
42. Philosophical Topics 62
42. Philosophia 62
47. Hume Studies 61
47. Linguistics and Philosophy 61
49. Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy 60

The next third tier of journals are those chosen about 50% of the time (from 40-60%)  where paired with a second journal chosen at random:

50. Phronesis 59 
51. Journal of the History of Ideas 58

51. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58
53. Ethical Theory & Moral Practice 57
53. Philosophical Forum 57
53. Inquiry 57
56. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 56
57. Political Theory 55
57. Social Theory & Practice 55
57. Philosophical Explorations 55
57. Journal of Social Philosophy 55
57. Economics & Philosophy 55
62. Law & Philosophy 54
62. dialectica 54
62. Public Affairs Quarterly 54
62. Acta Analytica 54
66. Social Philosophy & Policy 53
66. Theoria 53
66. Journal of Applied Philosophy 53
69. Faith and Philosophy 52
70. Political Studies 51
71. Journal of Value Inquiry 51
72. Harvard Law Review 50
73. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 49
73. Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly 49
73. Philosophical Psychology 49
76. Bioethics 48
76. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 48
78. Politics, Philosophy, Economics 47
78. Kantian Studies 47
79. History of Political Thought 44
80. Legal Theory 43
81. Hypatia 42
82. Philosophical Writings 41
82. southwest philosophy review 41
84. Apeiron 40
84. European Journal of Political Theory 40
84. American Journal of Bioethics 40

The remaining results for other journals are as follows:

87. Environmental Ethics 39
87. Logique et Analyse 39
87. Philosophy Today 39
90. Ratio Juris 38
90. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 38
90. Business Ethics Quarterly 38
93. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 37
93. Ethical Perspectives 37
93. Public Reason 37
96. Hegel-Studien 36
97. Philosophy & Social Criticism 35
97. Res Publica 35
97. Philosophy in Review 35
97. Philo 35

101. Neuroethics 34
101. Ethics and Justice 34
103. Philosophy and Theology 33
104. International Journal of Applied Philosophy 32
105. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 32
106. Review of Politics 31
106. Jurisprudence 31
106. Research in Phenomenology 31
109. Journal of Philosophy of Education 30
109. Review Journal of Political Philosophy 30
109. Philosophy East and West 30
112. South African Journal of Philosophy 29
112. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 29
114. Teaching Philosophy 28
114. Review Journal of Philosophy & Social Science 28
114. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 28
117. Journal of Global Ethics 27
117. APA Newsletters 27
119. Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society 26
120. Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 25
121. Adam Smith Review 23
121. Archiv fur Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 23
121. Imprints: Egalitarian Theory and Practice 23
124, Theory and Research in Education 22
125. Polish Journal of Philosophy 21
125. Epoche 21
125. Fichte Studien 21
125. Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 21
125. Asian Philosophy 21
130. Think 20
131. Archives de Philosophie du Droit 18
131. Collingwood & British Idealism Studies 18
131. Owl of Minerva 18
131. New Criminal Law Review 18
135. Journal of Indian Philosophy 17
136. Continental Philosophy Review 17
136. The European Legacy 17
138. Education, Citizenship, and Social Justice 15
139. Reason Papers 14
139. Associations 14
139. Journal of Indian Philosophy and Religion 14
142. Studia Philosophica Estonica 13
143. Derrida Today 5

Some further reflections. While there are several exceptions, it would be interesting to analyze any correlation between the age of a journal and its position in the rankings. There are several surprises on the list, this list does not correspond to my own opinions (I would have ranked many journals differently), and I do not believe that there is much difference between journals ranked closely together.

I also purposively put some selections in to see how they might play out. For example, I added Harvard Law Review out of curiosity and I was surprised to see of all journals exclusively publishing law and legal philosophy journals it appears to come second to the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and above other choices. (I was surprised legal philosophy journals did not score much better.) I added several journals edited by political scientists, such as Political Studies, and was surprised to see they did not score as highly as I had thought. Roughly speaking, journals with a wider remit performed much better than journals with a more specific audience. I also added at least one journal, Ethics and Justice, that I believe is no longer in print. (Can readers correct me on this? I hope I am in error.) It scored 34% and came in at 101st.

What I will do shortly is create a new poll that will only have the top 50 philosophy journals from this poll roughly speaking. Expect to see this new link widely advertised shortly.

In the meantime, what do readers think we can take away from the results thus far? Have I missed anything?

With most through to another four years of office, in
their latest meeting Bossier Parish police jurors reverted to their typical
arrogance and obtuseness. Perhaps they should pay attention to the shape of their
future: what happened at the last Bossier City Council meeting.

Recent election results guaranteed nine jurors
would return to office. The one runoff that remains will send a new member to
the Jury since District 10 four-decade veteran Jerome
Darby retired, but vying as his replacement leading into the runoff is his
brother Democrat Julius Darby. Republican challenger Keith Sutton defeated
incumbent Republican Mac Plummer in
District 12, while the GOP's Pam Glorioso beat incumbent Democrat Charles
Gray in District 9.

But over the past two years, all jurors had
engaged in questionable, if not illegal, acts. They hired, knowing
full well it was against the law, Butch Ford as parish administrator, because
he was not a registered voter in Bossier Parish. He would not become one until
ten months into his tenure, but even
now some dispute remains over whether that residence qualifies for that purpose.
They also filled completely the parish's Library
Board of Control with themselves, a move which
is of uncertain legal status and unprecedented across the state.

When at that latest meeting
a couple of citizens questioned the reappointment
of Republican Juror Doug
Rimmer to the Board, drawing upon attorney general documents that declared
sitting jurors on library boards was dual officeholding, as well as questioning
why all five board members had to be jurors when in a parish approaching
130,000 residents surely there were more than enough non-jurors willing to
serve, the likes of Rimmer and another juror on the Board, Republican Julianna
Parks, at jury meetings and other forums have asserted the necessity of
having jurors on the Board because of alleged and nebulously specified problems
with the Board. As well, at this meeting Rimmer stated, on the advice of Parish
Attorney Patrick Jackson, that the ability for jurors to serve on the Board was
unquestioned.

The problem is, in addition to the Attorney
General's office publicly taking the opposite position, case law not addressing
this exact situation – at the meeting Jackson erroneously implied that it had
and in favor of his interpretation – and conflicting statutes that seemingly give
a parish the ability to dodge dual officeholding restrictions in this instance,
Jackson himself doesn't have a good track record when it comes to understanding
what the law means concerning appointments in parish government. In the past, he
told jurors that, absent a court
ruling otherwise which eventually happened, that Jury appointee Robert Berry
to the Cypress Black Bayou Recreation
and Water Conservation District could serve in that capacity and as the agency's
executive director without violating dual officeholding law. And Rimmer stated at
a recent Republican Parish Executive Committee meeting that Jackson also advised
jurors they could appoint Ford as parish administrator despite his voter
registration not being in Bossier while he looked to rectify that, which appears
nowhere in the law and an action Ford showed no signs of pursuing until this
space publicized his continued registration in Caddo parish ten months after
his appointment.

Worst of all, Jackson either apparently was
unaware of, tacitly approved of, or actually counseled in favor of the fact
that the Board, then comprised of Rimmer, Republican Bob
Brotherton who won reelection, and Gray illegally had made Ford interim
library director in October, 2022, in contravention of R.S. 25:215 that states
any head of a library system must have qualifications under R.S. 25:222, or a certification
by the State Board of Library Examiners. Ford would serve six months in that
job.

This unequivocally illegal action by three jurors
(probably four, as minutes of that meeting never haven been made widely available,
if they exist; the next meeting's minutes imply at that previous meeting
Republican Juror Glenn
Benton had been appointed but it's unknown whether he participated in the
vote to appoint Ford) belies the argument that jurors were necessary to "clean
up" the Board. In fact, they disgraced it and themselves by behaving illegally.

And the whole argument of juror necessity to respond
to some problem is untenable, if not a mendacious excuse to justify the juror
takeover. In fact, jurors were serving on the Board as long ago as 2016,
when the Jury expanded the Board to include Rimmer and Brotherton with five
other citizens (boards can have five to seven members). If there were alleged
difficulties, not only have these been going on a long time, but also jurors by
definition contributed to these so how can adding more jurors – and retaining the
two already there – solve for problems jurors already are creating? So what's
so great about juror service on the Board if they act illegally and supposedly
badly enough to need outside intervention?

Of course, to clarify about whether jurors can
serve on the Board, a simple request to the Attorney General's office for an opinion could be pursued. That
would take a resolution passed by the Jury, but no juror has suggested this
happen – perhaps because they know their policy might be in trouble. And the
dismissive attitude that Rimmer and other jurors showed in the meeting towards
citizen concerns on this issue illustrates their haughtiness and a belief they
are above the citizenry, if not the law, emboldened now by recent electoral
success.

If it stays that way. And it may not, if the
latest Bossier City Council meeting indicates anything. Because three years ago,
the Council was much like the Jury today. Back then five members of almost two
decades or more service on the Council, actively supported by another more
junior member, ran the show with little transparency, using their voting power
and a compliant mayor to foist an avalanche of unneeded capital spending fueled
by debt onto the backs of the citizenry.

However, the stench of that awakened enough voters
so that two of the graybeards lost their jobs and eventually were replaced by
newcomers Republicans Chris Smith and
Brian
Hammons. Since then, the pair have become increasingly vocal about use of
tax dollars going to genuine needs rather than to monuments, figurative and literal,
to long-serving councilors' egos.

While Hammons missed the last meeting, Smith more
than made up for the both of them with a display of this critical attitude over
spending. On an item
for more capital expenditures for parks and recreation, Smith pointed out that
in recent years over $20 million in tax dollars had gone for capital expenditures
at the Tinsley Park complex, yet tax-paying citizens often couldn't use these
in being crowded out instead by out-of-towners paying fees to use these.

Sparring with head of the Bossier City Department
of Parks and Recreation Clay Bohanan, who with past mayoral and current Council
graybeard support has pursued a model
that puts revenue generation ahead of citizen ability to use certain facilities,
Smith not only fought back against Bohanan's arrogance, who was joined by graybeard
Democrat Councilor Bubba Williams
implying that their exclusionary pay-to-play model was unimpeachably correct,
but he also made the heretical suggestion that in following that model it would
make more sense just to sell off the facilities to private operators.

In the larger scheme of things, Smith's argument
was that instead of taxpayer dollars going to paying of the principal and
interest on debt on things of little value to the citizenry, it could be
reserved to fund employee raises, particularly for public safety personnel.
When Williams subsequently challenged (actually calling untrue) a Smith
statement that Bossier City's salaries ranked at the bottom of the region by
pointing to a study
done a couple of years back comparing Alexandria's public safety salaries to
others in the state that put Bossier City police in the middle of the pack,
Smith trumped him with his own very recent data looking at regional agencies,
almost all in Texas, which had Bossier City salaries at or near the bottom.

Such argumentation would have been unheard of
coming from the Council three years ago. But Smith and Hammons' elections in 2021 brought a breath of fresh air into Council debates that until then had been
almost always get-along-go-along with no dissension on big spending plans with
total disregard of airing out negative implications of that spending.

Hopefully, those kinds of debates will commence
and flourish now that at least one reform-minded outsider, Sutton, will join
the Jury. Glorioso was part of the cabal united with the Council graybeards
when she served as Bossier City chief administrative officer until her boss
lost reelection, so it seems unlikely that she would act differently in opening
up the Jury. Perhaps Darby's opponent Democrat Mary Giles would ally with
Sutton, while Julius Darby seems unlikely to.

But as the events surrounding Bossier City
government over the past couple of years have shown, you don't have to have a
majority to change the atmosphere. Perhaps a couple of years from now the
sunshine even one dissenter can bring will have started to show results in curbing
the Jury's penchant for lawless, sanctimonious behavior while deflating its members'
attitude of insufferably unaccountable behavior.

Fifty years is a long enough time to dissipate the impact of war. In the United States, the Vietnam War is no longer much discussed. Scholars still plow the field, but the war that tore America apart, spurred a counterculture movement, killed 57,000 Americans (and vastly more Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians), led to a restructuring of the U.S. military and the all-volunteer force, and was an impetus to Desert Storm no longer shapes the discourse.My students were born in 2002 or 2003; they're voting age. Even those with living grandparents who served in Vietnam don't know much if anything about the conflict. Of course, there have been intervening failures that proved costly, although not on the same scale. But proximity bias — the hard-wired human tendency to accord greater importance to things that are closer than others in time or distance — ensured that the mayhem generated by the Iraq and Afghan Wars would eclipse the awfulness of Vietnam.The Yom Kippur War of 1973 has likewise receded in the Israeli imagination. But its specter is more complex. The 2,500 Israeli soldiers killed (a fraction of the 15,000 Arabs who perished) was three times the per capita human cost of the Vietnam War to the United States. I was in Israel during that time, and everyone knew someone who'd been killed. The war was also far shorter, about 10 days, so the casualty list had an outsized emotional impact. It was not the long slog of Vietnam, but rather an avalanche.Early in the war, Syrian armor destroyed the Israeli tank brigade deployed to the Golan Heights and reached Gesher B'not Yaakov (Jisr Banat Yaqub). Just beyond it was the Jezreel Valley. The prospect of a large Syrian armored formation penetrating the Israeli heartland was as ghastly for Israelis as it must have been thrilling for the Syrians. The United States has never experienced anything like this, including 9/11.In the space of this instant, violence burgeoned. The largest tank battle since World War II, when German and Soviet armored juggernauts collided at Kursk, unfolded on the Golan. Fierce battles developed in the Sinai and then on the left bank of Suez, where Israeli forces encircled an entire Egyptian army. A week into the war, the U.S. launched its largest-ever intra-war arms transfer. For days, U.S. C-5 cargo aircraft touched down at Israeli airfields every six minutes. The airlift, however, occurred after Israel had regained its balance and counterattacked, halting an hour outside of Damascus and holding Egyptian territory — in addition to the Sinai, where Israel stopped the main thrust of Egyptian armor toward the mountains passes and destroyed the advancing units.The war also included other dramatic moments. Apparently believing that the Soviets were preparing to intervene militarily on Syria's behalf, the Nixon administration raised the United States' nuclear readiness level, an extraordinary step. Saudi Arabia led an OPEC oil embargo against the United States that carried profound implications for its economic and political stability for the ensuing decade, bringing the so-called long summer of postwar economic growth to an end and guaranteeing an era of sluggish economic growth and high inflation.The long-term effects of the war on Israel were profound as well. The outcome, despite the phenomenal recovery of Israeli forces under the much maligned but in fact highly competent IDF chief of staff, was traumatically dislocating for an Israeli public accustomed to thinking that its victory in the 1967 war rendered the state immune to Arab military challenge.Within four years, the Labor Party that had dominated Israeli politics in one form or another since 1948 was dislodged. Trust in the old elites was shattered. The intelligence community failed to credit the Egyptian and Syrian commitment to waging war. Across the board there was a conviction that the conditions under which the Arabs would launch an offensive simply did not exist. And Military Intelligence disregarded Mossad's success in recruiting a senior member of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's entourage who underscored that a war was in the cards. Moreover, the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, who had presided over the disaster, had heeded stern guidance from Nixon and Kissinger not to preempt Arab war preparations when these were finally acknowledged 24 hours before the start of hostilities.Whether or not this was a wise call on Washington's part, it certainly increased the butcher's bill Israel was to pay and undermined the Labor government. Meir would come under attack later for having ignored Sadat's peace feelers following the 1969 War of Attrition along the Suez Canal. Sadat, however, tended to frame his overtures as demands for an upfront Israeli withdrawal from all of the Sinai Peninsula, which the Israeli government could not meet. There was plenty of blame to go around. In any case, combined with serious ethnic tensions generated by the political mobilization of Mizrahim — Jews who had immigrated from the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa — the cratering of Labor credibility enabled the ascendance of the Likud Party.Half a century later, what lingering significance does the war have? Israel and Saudi Arabia are negotiating normalization, which will entail a civilian Saudi nuclear capability that is inherently dual-purpose. The Abraham Accords have already normalized Israel's relations with Bahrain, the UAE, Sudan, and Morocco. Egypt and Jordan have longstanding peace treaties with Israel. Syria has been neutered by a long, destructive civil war. Lebanon has ceased to exist as a functioning state and has not engaged Israel in hostilities since 2006. Two eviscerating wars with the United States removed Iraq as a potential combatant of the old rejectionist front.A cataclysmic ground war between Israel and its neighbors has been inconceivable during this veritable Age of Aquarius. But if the Yom Kippur War is no longer relevant, the present irenic reality — excluding the West Bank and Gaza — is largely due to the instrumentalization of that conflict by the Nixon administration for the purpose of peacemaking. One really can't contemplate these developments without implicitly thinking about the 1973 war.Another potent outcome of the war was the diplomatic process that surrounded the ceasefire and the years that followed. Kissinger gets credit for this, not unfairly. He was not one to waste a crisis. He seized the opportunity the war presented to use Sadat's evident interest in joining the Western camp and Israel's reliance on American support to bind each closer to Washington while crowding out the Soviet Union. Although his diplomatic strategy yielded disengagement agreements on both fronts, the fact remains that Egypt and Israel had embarked on a quiet bilateral process even as the guns were still cooling.Sadat had waged the war to shatter the status quo by drawing Israeli blood and bringing the U.S. into the conflict. His goal was the negotiated return of Sinai to Egyptian control. The war, for him, had a clear and well-defined political purpose. Although the seven years that preceded the Camp David Accords were at times touch and go — down to the climactic talks themselves — the so-called peace process would be difficult to imagine without the bloody impetus of 1973. Kissinger's key insight, regrettably abandoned by his successors but seemingly grasped now by Beijing, is that it pays to maintain ties with both sides in a conflict.As the Arab-Israeli conflict has devolved to Israel and the Palestinians, this lesson of the 1973 war has faded for Israel as well. Israel's use of force now has no political objective. Its purpose is solely conflict management and deterrence. To borrow from Lord Carrington's verdict on NATO, it is to keep the Palestinians down, the U.S. out, and wealthy Persian Gulf states in.Yet, perversely, the possibility of change is in the air. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right coalition partners are less interested in managing the level of violence on the West Bank than in informally annexing it. Their commitment to Israeli settlement of the West Bank is greater than their interest in grand geopolitical deals that might boost the Tel Aviv stock exchange but defer redemption of biblical lands. One could construe the hard right's agenda as restoring a true political objective to Israel's fight with the Palestinians.The 1973 war also altered Israeli military doctrine. Planners have recognized that — beginning with that war — Israel has not won any major ones. (Neither has the United States.) The reasons for this are legion, but one stands out: the losers do not concede defeat. They take a licking but keep on ticking. Hence the most recent development in Israel's military doctrine, accorded the acronym Mabam, meaning "the battles between the wars."The idea is that major wars are no longer decisive and will therefore recur periodically. The best course is to delay these wars and weaken adversaries' ability to wage them by fighting draining low-level battles in the interim. This makes some sense, naturally, but militates against any attempt to leverage the fighting to achieve durable peace. This applies to the Palestinians as well. Their violence is expressive, perhaps reflecting their view that there is no conceivable political objective.There's a larger theme here, though. The international system was vastly different in 1973. The Cold War framework in which the United States and Soviet Union conducted their foreign policies and made it possible for Sadat to conduct a war with such a bold but cogent purpose is long gone. We will see whether the U.S.-China in the Middle East recreates it.The leftist post-colonial Arab states that fought Israel are scarcely even remembered. The Israeli state and society that fought the Yom Kippur War, like the America that waged war in Vietnam, no longer exists. The values that animated it no longer shape the nation's thoughts and actions.Fifty years after the war, this should come as no surprise. In the ongoing demonstrations against judicial reform in Israel, one can see veterans of 1973 claiming that their wartime sacrifice would be betrayed by the triumph of the hard right. They are correct, but they're old duffers and out of touch with young Israeli mainstream voters, who, if they dwell on the 1973 war at all, likely see the left as the guilty party. Thus, policy makers, mostly in the West, can noodle about the war's lessons for diplomacy and statecraft, but for Israel — and the Arabs — it's ancient history.