Probably both. Rational enough to know that he has to walk the line between seeming reasonable to the North and killing the bill for the South. Sneaky enough to get away with it.
The Ruins of an American Party System, Part Three: Revolution
- Thread starter Emperor Julian
- Start date
Interesting for LBJ to be seen as a weak leader at this point. I wonder if that's his youth, or Long's shadow, or some more devious ploy.
Alternatively, he wants to jump ship and realizes that being labeled with that label is stupid.
He's really inexperienced and only became leader because everyone else was clearly part of the Long faction or the anti-Long faction in the party. He managed to keep his allegiance to Long hidden enough.
I get a feeling that LBJ is a wolf in sheep's clothes, waiting his moment, even at Huey Long disadvantage. That's because Long's fall seems certain : the brutal campaign against the American party was successful but it couldn't hide the decline of the Commonwealth on account of its many failures to stop civil rights legislation and Long failures in elections. I would think that the American party will eventually return, with eventually either Progressives, or Republicans, taking on the left wing electorate.
I look forward to seeing his development. I have to imagine having leadership thrust upon him like this and handling it poorly will frustrate his ambition, but he's still LBJ, so that ambition isn't going away.
The Voting Rights Act
The 1945 Voting Rights Act, the first strong voting rights legislation since the Reconstruction Era, had two focuses. The first was to eliminate racial discrimination in voting registration, which had persisted despite the 1925 Act. The second was to combat fraud, abuse, and underhanded electoral tactics in general against political opposition.
Provisions of the 1945 Voting Rights Act:
- Standardization of voter registration procedures across all 50 states and DC - with federal supervision to ensure compliance and no racial bias
- Outlawing malapportionment
- Forbidding states from drawing electoral districts to divide and neutralize minority voters
- Restrictions on gerrymandering through adding additional compactness tests
- Outlawing tests being required for voting registration or voting other than proof of citizenship and residence
- Requiring states and other jurisdictions found under Dewey's report to have engaged in abuses of the electoral procedure to have future laws affecting their elections approved by the Justice Department
- Requiring election materials to be available in common minority languages
- Set limits to state ballot access requirements
- Enforcing ballot secrecy, registration and primary voting secrecy
- Forbidding employers from firing people based on their political party registration or donations
- Campaign finance transparency
- Putting limits on state campaign finance laws
- Provisions limiting government officials ability to campaign
- Anti-voter intimidation provisions
While the American Party had almost no support among black voters, most American Party leaders, even Southern ones who had officially opposed the bill, were privately happy that the Act had passed, as many of the provisions protected their supporters and campaigns. Furthermore, they hoped to exploit dissatisfaction among White Southerners who felt that the Commonwealth Party had failed them. Republicans were overall in favor of the bill; concerns about the size of the federal government and power of the Justice Department, which had led many to oppose LaGuardia's efforts in civil rights, suddenly disappeared when a Republican was in charge of the executive branch. Throughout the heavily black areas of the South, the Republican, Progressive, and Socialist Parties tended to run fusion candidates on anti-Commonwealth tickets.
The Supreme Court also helped with the democratization of the Southern United States by ruling against the Commonwealth state governments in a series of court cases brought against them by newspapers that felt they were facing biased enforcement of regulations and other forms of discrimination due to not supporting the Commonwealth line. The Commonwealth's power over the media in their states was crippled. The Supreme Court wasn't entirely on the path of reform in the lead-up to the 1946 midterms, however. When the Rhode Island state legislature tried to abolish districts for their lower house and move onto a proportional representation system, the court ruled that the 24th Amendment prevented proportional representation, as it stated that parties were given the ability to cross-endorse candidates of their choice which would not work in a proportional system.
It is possible though. Just have to structure the ballot to be candidate centric rather than party centric, and use single transferable vote or or reweighted approval voting.
Nice! I can see southern blacks being Republican leaning because of this, and the Americans making huge gains among southern whites as opposed to Commonwealth. The Kingfish's party will be taking massive losses
I'm a bit concerned about some of the parts of the Voting Rights Act:
1. If TTL is anything like OTL, by this point, population shifts have meant that most state legislatures are severely malapportioned in favor of rural areas that can effectively veto any measure the increasingly populous cities and suburbs want. This is in addition to some state legislatures that had constitutional requirements where each county (or town in New England) was entitled to at least one representative/senator, which of course meant rural voters were overrepresented compared to their urban counterparts. Federal congressional districts at this time were also really malapportioned, since states didn't usually redistrict them unless they lost or gained a seat after a Census- this lead to things like one of Detroit's seats in 1930 representing 1.3 million people while 10 out of Missouri's 16 districts represented an average of 180,000 people.
So there's not really much of an incentive for the congressmen representing those rural districts that would be hurt under proper apportionment to vote for such an act, and OTL this fight was pretty much a constant failure for those pushing for districts to have equal populations (even as the population shift from rural to urban continued) until Baker v. Carr.
2. Before malapportionment (except for the US Senate) was ruled unconstitutional, most districts were fairly compact, so I can't imagine a district compactness section would be included. Plus, it's much harder to draw the kinds of misshapen monstrosities that have been common since the 1980s without the help of modern computers making sure that those swiggly districts capture the "right" group of people.
3. Would campaign finance really be an issue that a large part of the act is dedicated to? IOTL both major parties had some pretty shady campaign financing practices before the post-Watergate reforms and I can't imagine any of the parties ITTL (especially the Commonwealth Party) deviating from that, since it would be tantamount to unilateral disarmament. Without some sort of public outrage/major scandal like the stuff uncovered after Watergate, I can't see a major impetus for Congress to pass any sort of law changing that.
1. If TTL is anything like OTL, by this point, population shifts have meant that most state legislatures are severely malapportioned in favor of rural areas that can effectively veto any measure the increasingly populous cities and suburbs want. This is in addition to some state legislatures that had constitutional requirements where each county (or town in New England) was entitled to at least one representative/senator, which of course meant rural voters were overrepresented compared to their urban counterparts. Federal congressional districts at this time were also really malapportioned, since states didn't usually redistrict them unless they lost or gained a seat after a Census- this lead to things like one of Detroit's seats in 1930 representing 1.3 million people while 10 out of Missouri's 16 districts represented an average of 180,000 people.
So there's not really much of an incentive for the congressmen representing those rural districts that would be hurt under proper apportionment to vote for such an act, and OTL this fight was pretty much a constant failure for those pushing for districts to have equal populations (even as the population shift from rural to urban continued) until Baker v. Carr.
2. Before malapportionment (except for the US Senate) was ruled unconstitutional, most districts were fairly compact, so I can't imagine a district compactness section would be included. Plus, it's much harder to draw the kinds of misshapen monstrosities that have been common since the 1980s without the help of modern computers making sure that those swiggly districts capture the "right" group of people.
3. Would campaign finance really be an issue that a large part of the act is dedicated to? IOTL both major parties had some pretty shady campaign financing practices before the post-Watergate reforms and I can't imagine any of the parties ITTL (especially the Commonwealth Party) deviating from that, since it would be tantamount to unilateral disarmament. Without some sort of public outrage/major scandal like the stuff uncovered after Watergate, I can't see a major impetus for Congress to pass any sort of law changing that.
These factors were true in OTL. And in some TL where Hoover won in 1928 like OTL and kept the economy from getting that bad and the old school Progressives maintained control of the party, it probably would still be true. But when the economy went to a Hell that it didn't in OTL, and the Olson-style radicals seized control of the state legislatures. This led to there being a brief period in the early 1930s where a lot of state legislatures were dominated by ideologues who passed a bunch of reforms to ensure equal representation. For example, this is why the national reapportionment law was changed to lead to an increase in the size of the House after 1940, while in OTL they fixed the size in order to help rural areas.
Both of these are generally attributed to "Huey Long's regime enacted some really outrageous stuff down South". One important thing to note is that this campaign finance law is actually mostly a liberalization of the system - states aren't allowed to ban private contributions, like some Commonwealth states had (in order to force people to rely on public funds which would then be tied to the size of the party membership in the state which would always result in the Commonwealth candidate receiving like 80% of the funds). Also in places like Louisiana it was widely known that they were straight up giving huge amounts of tax money directly to the Commonwealth Party and not to other political parties.
Has Senate reform been seriously discussed ITTL? If Progressives don't like disproportional representation, I can't imagine they're fans of a system that weights all states equally, regardless of population. But Article V makes equal Senatorial representation very difficult to amend in. Has anyone thought of a way through or around that? Maybe going unicameral?
Would probably require going around the Senate because they aren't going to back an amendment to weaken or remove themselves.
Maybe add an additional senator or two for the bigger states?
That would require unanimous consensus among all the states, which will happen the day Floyd Olson returns from the dead.
Maybe add a way through it, say if the house passes a bill with a 2/3 majority it gets sent directly to the president.
It's not perfect, but it does avoid the worse issues and keeps enough blocking power in the senate to sway moderates while still allowing bills that are incredibly popular through.
Bulldoggus
Banned
I'm sure there's plenty of Liberal Republicans who call Olson a commie bastard behind closed doors.