Americans really don’t understand constitutional government.  They have a simplistic view of constitutionalism based on a legalism that boggles the mind.  I say this because of my enormous respect for British constitutionalism that understands that a constitution is not just law but also custom and usage.

Hence lame ducks and dead ducks.  There is nothing as undemocratic as lame ducks.  I don’t mean the time when an office holder is not willing or able to run again, I refer to the time after an election takes place and before the newly elected take office.

In Britain, that period can be as short as a matter of hours. 
There is no reason whatsoever for there to be any delay other than delay caused by an undetermined result. 

And this leads to my point about constitutionalism.  Yes, the documents say that a new Congress doesn’t begin until January 3rd or a new President doesn’t get inaugurated until January 20th with similar situations in the states. 

In the British based systems, a electorally defeated  Prime Minister has the legal right to wait in office until the new Parliament meets and defeats him/her on the Throne Speech.  However, the custom and usage calls for resignation as soon as the results are clear.  Equally important, if there is a lame duck period, which begins when the election is called, the government can only act as a caretaker.  Good and democratic. 

For instance, nothing prevents a President ending his period in office from having his/her Vice President resign the day after the election and then under the 25th Amendment appointing the elected successor.

This would also have the enormous impact of reducing the bloated and redundant staff that enclose our elected leaders in bubbles.

Anyone running for office should be prepared to take over at a moment’s notice. 

We’re all pretty happy about the election results across the river in New Hampshire, but it’s not that long ago that the Republicans in New Hampshire, with help from the RNC, were deep into election fraud by jamming the Democrats’ GOTV effort with thousands of robo-calls. You’ll recall that it was so bad that James Tobin of the national Republican Party was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison for the scheme.

Now the Democrats are suing the Republican Party for damages, arguing that the Republican phone-jamming effort trespassed on their personal property and deprived them of its value. There’s only one thing: the two parties have different views of the value of the damages the Dems suffered. The Republicans claim that their efforts only cost the D’s a few thousand dollars, about what it cost them to rent the phone service for the day. The D’s, on the other hand, say, “He, the whole point of all the money we spend on setting up our GOTV campaign is so that we can make GOTV calls on Election Day. If we can’t do that, we’ve wasted all of our investment in setting up the GOTV system. That’ll be four mill, please.”

It’s too soon to tell what will happen, but we’ll be following the story. Meanwhil, here’s hte link to the story in the Times Argus.

Meanwhil, down in the sunny South, remember Katherine Harris?

Yes, that’s her, the Bush hatchet woman with the scary makeup who made a fool of herself in her Senate run.

Well, when she ran for Senate her House seat was open, and in a hotly contested race the Republican who was running to replace, Vern Buchanan, her won by 369 votes.

But wait, it is Florida, and Katherine Harris’s home district, so it couldn’t be as easy as that, could it? No, indeed. In Sarasota County, which the Democratic candidate Christine Jennings carried, there was an undervote of over 18,000 votes. Missing voting machines, people being told their votes didn’t register, the whole litany of things that can go wrong with touch screen voting.

The recount’s over, Buchanan is demanding that Jenings back off, but it ain’t over yet, folks.

If this is what they call democracy here at home, what do the R’s think qualifies as democracy in Iraq?

About, oh, fifty pounds or so ago, I was hiking for a week in Washington’s Glacier Peak Wilderness when my camping-buddy and I encountered a passing ranger who regaled us with tales of the silly questions tourists had asked him over the years. My favorite question was “at what altitude do the deer turn into elk?” It was worth a good guffaw, and these days I often think of that question when I hear discussions of Vermont’s political spectrum (there are shades of it in this PoliticsVT post). But the Vermont version is “How far to the left do Democrats go before turning into Progressives?”

If you’ll stop and think for a second, you’ll realize that this iteration of the question is no more valid than the first, and yet it has become the conventional-shorthand-wisdom in the Green Mountain state due to its casual simplicity (and the traditional media do tend to gravitate towards simplicity). I used to hang with the Washington County Progressive Coalition until I realized that they were committed as a group to the proliferating of the fledgling Progressive Party, and I’m far from alone in drawing that line. Much to the distaste of many in both camps, you don’t have to look too far before you’ll find plenty of Democrats who are every bit as left wing as any Progressive (some more so), but who simply make the considered judgment that third parties are not a viable option for meaningful social change. And yet, that convenient, shorthand characterization remains…

That convenience is the only reason (I believe) for the repeated characterization of this blog as “centrist.” I’ve heard it at least a half dozen times in the last month or so. Consider the “centrist” stances front pagers on this blog have taken since it’s inception on issues such as:

• Single-payer healthcare
• Instant Runoff Voting
• The Impeachment of George W. Bush
• Same-sex marriage
• Vermont’s immediate divestment from Sudan
• Hemp legalization

…and so on. Centrist!? Given that it’s practically the Progressive Party platform, I can only assume it’s simply that the “D” label on most of the front pagers here is shorthanding us as “centrist.” The truth is, the characterization used to bug me because it wasn’t true for one, and because it clearly served the Progs interest by creating a perception that lefties weren’t present or welcome among the Dems – which is also untrue.

But you know what? I’ve changed my tune. Everyone has their own reason for diving into the blog thing, but a big part of mine was to try to do my part to shift the political debate in a progressive direction after seeing it go so far to the right for so long. To the extent that may or may not be beginning to happen is for others to judge, but to that end I now welcome the centrist label. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still bogus, but who cares? If enough people think it, say it, and start to read it, maybe the perception will creep towards reality and will start coming true.

Because those li’l policy bullets above should be centrist, and if all the sentiments on this blog truly come to be viewed as centrist ones (and public policy starts to reflect that), we’ll all be a lot better off.

(I smell a cross-river barbeque in the offing… – promoted by odum)

Hello Green Mountaineers,

Now that the Granite State just underwent a kind of Republican Massacre, and folks are comparing our new shade of blue to yours, I thought I would let y’all in on a brand new venture of ours:

Blue Hampshire

(hey, we could have gone with “White Mountain Daily,” but that would have been a bit too cute, don’t you think?)

It’s run by me (Dean, AKA Yankee Doodler on my former blog, and Republic not Empire on DailyKos) Laura of Blue Granite, and Keener (AKA Mike) of NH-02 Progressive.

You may remember us as the ones who became obsessed with the Bass-Hodes race, and we even became part of the story when we were visited by a sockpuppet from Bass’ House office.  We also had a bit of fun highlighting Charlie Bass’ outrageous comments about Bernie and the “Sandernistas.”

Anyhow, Blue Hampshire is a soapblox site, so we now have a contiguous chain from you to us to Blue Mass Group.  We’ll be pretty busy over the next two years digesting our newly blue statehouse and Congressmen, our phonejamming scandal, the presidential primary, and one very vulnerable senator named Sununu.

Hope to see you all over the river at some point, and congrats on Welch and Sanders.