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Puerto Rico votes for statehood but Congress looks unlikely to agree
Nov 05 2020
A narrow majority of Puerto Ricans have voted once again to seek statehood, but their wish is hardly guaranteed to come true in the foreseeable future.
It will be up to Congress and the president to follow through and negotiate the terms of a switch for the island, which has essentially become the world's oldest colony during a dozen decades as a second-class territory of the United States. Proponents say changing that would erase a big blemish on the global reputation of American democracy.
Because the Senate looks increasingly likely to remain under Republcian control, though, prospects for a statehood bill next year look very dim no matter who is president. President Trump is no fan of the idea, believing it would mean more Democrats in Congress. And former Vice President Joe Biden would lack sufficient Democratic support on Capitol Hill to push through statehood for either Puerto Rico or much bluer Washington, D.C.
<p>Tuesday's referendum secured the "yes" votes of 52 percent in nearly complete returns, a victory margin of about 50,000 votes. The island has voted for statehood twice before in the past decade, but neither plebiscite prompted congressional action.</p>
<p>Statehood supporters came to believe something would be different this time, on the assumption of a lopsided Biden win and a decisive Democratic sweep of Congress — neither of which materialized.</p>
<p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>Legislation would be required to end the commonwealth arrangement of the past 70 years: Puerto Ricans are American citizens who are mainly exempt from federal income taxes, although they must pay Social Security and Medicare taxes. The island has significant autonomy, but in return it gets much less federal aid than the states and has no electoral votes or voting members of Congress.</p>
<p>With a population of 3.2 million, Puerto Rico would rank 31st in population among states, and like half a dozen others would elect four House members and a pair of senators. At least at the outset, its complex political alignments would mean it looks relatively purple. But at a minimum it could be counted on to send more non-white lawmakers to Washington.</p>
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Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Joe Biden unveiled a full slate of political reforms early in the campaign but has spent minimal time talking about these issues in recent months.
While you wait: What a Democratic sweep would mean for democracy reform
Nov 02 2020
American democracy has taken a beating over the last four years, but Election Day may set the table for historic reforms.
The severe stress test for democratic norms can be counted on to further intensify if President Trump gets re-elected. Continuation of a divided Congress would likely perpetuate gridlock on most policy fronts. But should Joe Biden win the White House, and the Senate turn Democratic as well, the new president would take office with an ambitious stack of ready-to-go democracy reform bills on his desk — all of them strongly backed by Democrats newly in control of the entire Capitol.
And those sweeping overhauls of the laws governing campaign financing, voting rights, gerrymandering, executive branch ethics, the courts and even the inner workings of Congress would all be both on the table and viable. The question would be how high they would be on a Biden priority list and how much political capital he and his congressional allies would be willing to spend to get them done.
<p>"As dispiriting as it can be how frustrated Americans have become with politics, their anger actually is a source of hope," says Rep. John Sarbanes, the Maryland Democrat who was the main sponsor of HR 1, the catchall election process, government ethics and money-in politics package that died in the GOP Senate right after the House passed in early 2019. "Because the fact that they're angry means they still care enough about their democracy to want to see it change and improve."</p>
<p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>To Sarbanes, the voter protections and big money curbs long central to the democracy reform movement remain the most urgent, and the most likely to top Democrats' agenda in the new Congress. </p>
<p>But Trump's four-year assault on democratic norms and institutions has fueled bipartisan support for a new class of reforms aimed at ending self-dealing, cronyism, foreign collusion and other ethics abuses in the executive branch. Talk of expanding the Supreme Court and bestowing statehood on D.C. and perhaps Puerto Rico is mobilizing progressives. </p>
<p>And the Senate's legislative filibuster may also get toppled if Democrats take over and Republicans refuse to cooperate early on. That change would please those who view those supermajority rules as a relic of a Senate culture that's long gone, and as a recipe for the partisan deadlock that has fueled congressional dysfunction. It also would likely be needed to get most fix-the-system bills past GOP opposition and under a President Biden's pen.</p>
<p><div class="x12"><div class="htlad-Desktop_Content_Banner"></div></div></p><p>The obstacles to changing ethics and election laws remain as formidable as ever. Even reform-minded Democrats this year embraced deep-pocketed outside groups that helped push election spending past <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/10/cost-of-2020-election-14billion-update" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a record-shattering $14 billion</a>, double what was spent on presidential and congressional contests just four years ago. Bitter lawsuits over voting this year attest to the difficulty of expanding access to the ballot. And partisan divisions tend to flare most heatedly around the rules of the political game. </p>
<p>But the depth of the nation's democracy crisis may be precisely what ushers in change. Trump's norm shredding, the coronavirus pandemic, the resulting recession, heightened reckoning with systemic racism, income inequality fueled by tax cuts and bailouts for the super rich, efforts in many states to suppress the vote this fall — all have riled up the electorate this year, and not just on the left.</p>
<p>Voters are voicing growing unease that rigged rules are keeping an out-of-touch minority in power. Republicans' rush to install Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court was the latest evidence of this cited by Democrats, and it has boosted their fundraising and Senate hopes — along with their ambitions for reform.</p>
<p>"Our political system has so clearly failed the people that the environment will be ripe for a big transformative package to make our government work for all of us," Deirdre Schifeling, campaign director for the progressive coalition Democracy For All 2021, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/28/democracy-america-trump-biden-election" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">told</a><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/28/democracy-america-trump-biden-election" target="_blank"> The Guardian</a>.</p>
<p>Biden unveiled a full slate of political money, lobbying and ethics reforms early in the campaign and much of the consensus democracy reform agenda earned a place in the <a href="https://www.demconvention.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2020-07-31-Democratic-Party-Platform-For-Distribution.pdf" target="_blank">party platform</a>. But since <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/big-picture/joe-biden-agenda" target="_self">ticking those boxes</a> he and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, have spent minimal time talking about these issues during the fall campaign — beyond professing their support for an election that gives Americans many options for voting and doesn't block them from the polls.Biden would face <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/democracy-reform-groups-to-biden-dont-you-forget-about-us" target="_self">considerable pressure</a> from good governance advocates to try to deliver in his first 100 days — and he could, if he decides he can do that while also potentially moving to combat the pandemic, stimulate the economy, address the health care system's shortcomings and curb climate change.<br></p>
<p>Those are big "ifs." But democracy advocates see an analogy to the Watergate era, which also ushered in historic reforms. If the stars align for Democrats, here's what their reform agenda would look like:</p>
<p><strong>Curb special interests. </strong>Democrats would immediately revive the "For the People Act," the other name for HR 1, the sweeping package of voting, ethics and campaign finance reforms the House passed entirely along party lines in March 2019. The bill would modernize voter registration, take aim at voter suppression and gerrymandering, strengthen ethics laws, expand lobbyist disclosure and inject new transparency, tougher limits and public money into campaign financing, among other measures.</p>
<p><strong>Restore voting rights. </strong>The afterglow of the election would spur a new push to update the <a data-linked-post="2636710625" href="https://thefulcrum.us/voting-rights-act" target="_blank">Voting Rights Act</a>. The bill the House <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/voting-rights-act-2641537798" target="_self">passed last year</a> has since been renamed after the late civil right icon and Georgia congressman John Lewis. The legislation would revive the racial discrimination protections enshrined in the original 1965 landmark law — by once again requiring states with histories of voter suppression to get federal permission to change any election rules. The old rules for this "<a data-linked-post="2636699867" href="https://thefulcrum.us/preclearance-voting-rights" target="_blank">preclearance</a>" were struck down seven years ago by the Supreme Court.</p>
<p><strong>End presidential abuses. </strong>In September the Democrats in charge of seven House committees unveiled the Protecting Our Democracy Act, <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/democracy-reform-237909823" target="_self">their plan for curbing</a> executive branch balance-of-power abuses after Trump is gone. The measure would regulate presidential pardons, enforce bans on foreign contributions and expedite enforcement of congressional subpoenas. It echoes some of the bipartisan reforms outlined by Bob Bauer, a White House counsel in the Obama administration, and Jack Goldsmith, who served in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/us/politics/trump-washington-reforms.html?referringSource=articleShare" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">in their new book</a> "After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency." </p>
<p><strong>Strengthen Congress.</strong> While the rest of Congress bickered, a bipartisan Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress quietly but with <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/congress/select-committee-on-the-modernization-of-congress" target="_self">rare bipartisan unanimity</a> approved 97 ideas to make the House more efficient, transparent and responsive to voters. Key recommendations include technology and staffing upgrades, strengthening congressional committees and executive branch oversight and overhauling the budget process. Many of <a href="https://modernizecongress.house.gov/final-report" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">these ideas</a> would need to be turned into House rules or legislation next year.</p>
<p><strong>Limiting minority power. </strong>Curbing or downright ending the legislative filibuster, which allows 40 senators (almost always from the minority) to block a bill, would get intense scrutiny the first time the Senate GOP refuses to negotiate on a high-profile measure. Democrats may also decide that — in part to counterbalance the 22 Republican senators reliably elected from states with 5 percent of the population — it's time to make states out of much more Democratic and ethnically diverse D.C. and Puerto Rico. And they would frame talk of adding more seats to the Supreme Court, or limiting justices' terms, as a way to curb conservative dominance at a time the country is not so conservative.</p>
<p>And if Trump wins? Or if Republicans retain the Senate? Democracy reforms would be put off, but the impetus for them would continue to grow. History tells us that scandals tend to usher in cycles of change. As Sarbanes puts it: "It's when you reach these points of high frustration in the electorate, and a sense that things are fundamentally broken, that you have the opportunity to come in with significant reform."</p>
<p><em>Carney is a contributing writer.</em></p>
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AFP/Getty Images
The last such referendum, in 2017, went overwhelmingly for statehood -- but opponents boycotted the contest.
Puerto Ricans will vote this fall to seek statehood or independence
May 20 2020
Puerto Rico will vote on whether to seek statehood or independence in November, the latest ballot measure posing a fundamental question about the future of American democracy.
The outcome of the referendum will compel the island's government to negotiate with Washington the details of one of those options for ending a system in place for 70 years: Puerto Ricans are American citizens who are exempt from federal income taxes and have significant local autonomy, but in return they get much less federal aid than the states and have no electoral votes or voting members of Congress.
The referendum is ultimately non-binding because Congress and the president would have to agree to end Puerto Rico's current commonwealth arrangement. But the result will still send a signal about the desires of Americans now lacking full democratic rights – and could intensify or deflate momentum for statehood in Washington, D.C.
<p>Residents of the nation's capital, who have been pressing consistently and for decades to become the 51st state, hold out hope they might get their wish if Democrats control both Congress and the White House next year.</p><p>But the people of Puerto Rico have sent inconsistent and ambivalent signals in five previous referendums in the past half century. Maintaining the status quo received the most votes in 1967, 1993 and 1998, after which statehood has come on strong — although the most recent plebiscite, three years ago, was boycotted by one of the three major political parties and so turnout was just 23 percent. Outright independence has never been supported by more than 6 percent.</p><p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>The new measure will be the first offering residents only the options of statehood or independence, also dubbed "free association."</p><p>The island's political parties align mostly on the issue of political status, and Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced as well as a majority of the Legislature belong to the pro-statehood New Progressive Party.<br></p><p>"Our people will have the opportunity once and for all to define our future," the governor said in signing the referendum bill Saturday. "It's never too late to be treated as equals."</p><p>The vote will come at a time of intensifying disillusion among Puerto Ricans about their treatment by Washington. The island has struggled to obtain all the federal aid it says is needed to recover from hurricanes Irma and Maria, a string of strong earthquakes and the coronavirus pandemic. And its economy has been weakened in part by the end of federal tax incentives that had steered businesses to the commonwealth.</p><p><div class="x12"><div class="htlad-Desktop_Content_Banner"></div></div></p><p>Congress has not moved legislation in response to any of the earlier referendums and there's no guarantee it would next year, either. President Trump's clearest statement on the matter, two years ago, was that "Puerto Rico shouldn't be talking about statehood until they get some people that really know what they're doing." His Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, has not taken a firm stand on the island's future.</p><p>Puerto Rico's population of 3.2 million is closest to that of Iowa, suggesting statehood would mean four House members for the island as well as a pair of senators. Unlike D.C., which could be counted on to elect nothing but Democrats to Congress if it were a state, the partisan nature of a potential Puerto Rican delegation is unclear. </p><p>Other prominent democracy reform measures that have won spits on statewide ballots Nov. 3 include proposals to open Florida's primaries to all voters, have Colorado quit a promise to pledge its electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, roll back Missouri's two-year-old partisan <a data-linked-post="2636688309" href="https://thefulcrum.us/gerrymandering" target="_blank">gerrymandering</a> reforms and institute an independent redistricting commission in Virginia.</p>
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Spanish ballots mandated for much of Florida
May 13 2019
Voters in almost half of Florida must have access to Spanish-language ballots in time for the 2020 presidential primary next March, a federal judge has ruled.
District Judge Mark Walker on Friday ordered state election officials to offer election materials and assistance to the growing Spanish-speaking population in the nation's most populous politically competitive state. In a close contest at a critical juncture in the primary Democratic season, a bigger turnout by Latinos (who find their access to the ballot box has been made easier) could prove decisive in propelling one candidate toward the nomination.
<p>Civil rights groups sued the state last year for what they claim was inadequate voting assistance made available to Spanish-speaking citizens, including the estimated 56,000 Puerto Ricans who migrated to Florida after the island was devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017. The suit, brought by LatinoJustice PRLDEF and Demos, argued that federal law guarantees the right to register and vote for those with limited English, and Walker agreed.</p><p>The Voting Rights Act "prohibits English-only elections for those citizens — yes, <em>citizens </em>— educated in Puerto Rico in Spanish," Walker <a href="https://www.latinojustice.org/sites/default/files/PI%20Ordering%20Compliance%20with%20Voting%20Rights%20in%20Next%20Florida%20Election.pdf" target="_blank">wrote</a> in his ruling, italicizing the key word for emphasis. His order covers 32 of the state's 67 counties.</p><p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>Puerto Ricans are born U.S. citizens and can register to vote in any state once they establish residency, but many reared on the island primarily speak Spanish.</p><p>Florida's Puerto Rican population had eclipsed 1 million by the middle of this decade, according to the Pew Research Center.</p><p>"For democratic participation to have any meaning, voters must be able to exercise their right to vote in a language they understand," Stuart Naifeh, senior counsel at Demos, said after the ruling. "In today's decision, the court recognized that Spanish-speaking voters are not second-class citizens."</p>
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