#repugs

Former Republican candidate arrested in shootings targeting Democratic politicians’ homes

BY ELISE KAPLAN AND RYAN BOETEL / JOURNAL STAFF WRITERS MONDAY, JANUARY 16TH, 2023 AT 5:06PM

 Albuquerque SWAT officers take a man into custody Monday afternoon in Southwest Albuquerque. (Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal)

The Albuquerque Police Department has arrested Solomon Pena, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for the House District 14 seat in the South Valley, in connection with the shootings at local Democratic politicians’ homes, the police chief announced Monday afternoon.

“Pena, an unsuccessful legislative candidate in the 2022 election, is accused of conspiring with, and paying four other men to shoot at the homes of two county commissioners and two state legislators,” Chief Harold Medina said.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/millennial-voters-2018-midterms-climate-change-gerontocracy-survey-polls-turnout.html

please consider the following evidence that your vote would make a difference — perhaps, even the difference — in averting our democracy’s collapse into senescence.

1) Boomers get a big bang for their ballots.

Last year, Donald Trump’s GOP tried to slash Medicaid in the middle of a “public health emergency” that was concentrated in red America; made it easier for payday lenders to exploit cash-strapped veterans; restored the right of serial labor-law violators to compete for federal contracts; and responded to the student-debt crisis by relaxing federal oversight on predatory, for-profit colleges.

Which is to say: There are very few things that America’s governing political party isn’t willing to do to please its reactionary donor class.

But taking socialism away from baby-boomers is one of them.

Despite its ruthless disregard for the most basic interests of most Americans — and the Koch Network’s aching desire to cut “entitlements” — the Republican Party doesn’t have the stomach to mess with boomers’ beloved socialized medicine and basic income programs. Of course, many GOP lawmakers do support cuts to Medicare and Social Security — but only for when you need it, dear millennial reader. As Marco Rubio explained during a primary debate early in the 2016 cycle, “Everyone up here tonight that’s talking about reforms [is] talking about reforms for future generations. Nothing has to change for current beneficiaries.”

There is no technocratic rationale for this position. Millennials and Gen-Xers will, on average, have much lower lifetime earnings than the exceptionally lucky boomers did — and thus, will be more reliant on Social Security in their golden years. The GOP’s deference to current beneficiaries is purely a testament to older voters’ political power. And AARP members do not owe their immense clout to the militancy of their street protests — or the wit of their Twitter “owns” — but merely, to their singular propensity to show up at the polls.

Millennials have the numbers to make student debt-relief, public day care, a federal ban on mayonnaise, or any other policy priority of younger Americans into an object of bipartisan consensus (which is to say, into something that Republicans must try to kill quietly through judicial fiat, instead of loudly through legislation). If 71 percent of eligible voters under 30 cast ballots this November (as 71 percent of those over 65 did in 2016), the American government would become drastically more responsive to their interests.

2) If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal — and they are.

In 2008, an uptick in turnout among young voters helped deliver North Carolina to Barack Obama. Shortly thereafter, Republicans in the Tarheel State’s government revised North Carolina’s Voter ID law to exclude student identification cards. Eight other states have adopted similar restrictions.

Just this year, New Hampshire passed a law that effectively imposes a poll tax on college students who wish to vote in the Granite State; Florida’s Republican governor (and Senate candidate) Rick Scott tried to block early voting on university campuses; state legislators in North Dakota have straight-up disenfranchised just about every millennial (and Gen-Xer and boomer) who lives on a Native American reservation; and down in Georgia, the Republican gubernatorial candidate is also the acting secretary of State — and is using the authorities of his office to purge voter rolls and deny registration applications, in an ostensible bid to customize the electorate he will face in November.

Millennials might doubt their ability to make change at the ballot box — but the powers that be sure don’t.

3) The median millennial voter understands “the issues” better than the average American.

If Donald Trump “knows the issues” well enough to be president, then you, hypothetical non-voting millennial reader, are well informed enough to vote.

In fact, there’s a good chance you understand the problems facing our country better than the average American. According to Pew Research, millennials are more likely to accept the reality of climate change than any other generation of Americans, with 81 percent saying there is solid evidence that the Earth is warming — a factual statement that only 69 percent of baby-boomers are willing to endorse. What’s more, millennials are the only generation in which a supermajority (correctly) attributes climate change primarily to human activity.

Millennials are also, by far, the most racially progressive generation in the electorate. A majority of younger Americans say that Islam “does not encourage violence more than other religions,” and that discrimination is the primary reason why African Americans “can’t get ahead these days” — sentiments that majorities of boomers and Gen-Xers reject. Thus, an America in which millennials voted in high numbers would be one where Republicans would have a much harder time burying their unpopular policy positions beneath attacks on Colin Kaepernick and sanctuary cities. Which is to say: The mass entrance of millennials into the electorate would likely lead to a more substantive political debate, as demagogic appeals to racial paranoia would lose much of their efficacy.

More concretely, as mentioned above, millennials are by far the most pro-Democratic — and anti-Trump — generation in the U.S. Which is to say, they are the generation most likely to recognize the reality that Donald Trump and his party are a threat to our republic.

Beyond their (singularly correct) ideological instincts, millennials also boast important insights into many public-policy issues, simply as a function of their generation’s lived experience and material realities. For example, American housing policy is profoundly biased in favor of homeowners, and this reality has has generated housing shortages in many major American cities, thereby undermining economic growth. The overrepresentation of boomers in the electorate perpetuates these problems, due to that generation’s high-levels of home ownership.

By contrast, a sharp increase in voter participation among millennials — only about 34 percent of whom own homes — would likely increase the salience of renters’ interests in U.S. politics. Similarly, the existing electorate is much less likely to appreciate the severity of the student-debt crisis than millennials are, or to comprehend the broader material challenges that younger Americans face: Despite the fact that the United States does far less for its young people (in terms of subsidizing education, job training, housing and child care) than just about any other advanced democracy, a majority of boomers say that the government “does enough for young people” (but still needs to do more for older folks).