Eric Black
Minneapolis
I write for MinnPost.com about politics & government of MN and the US, the historical background of topics & other issues. (I tweet via RSS, for now)
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Articles by Eric Black
Michigan labor defeats right to work (for less)
In a historic win for labor unions and workers all across the state of Michigan, the Michigan Senate voted 20-17, along party lines, on Senate Bill 34, which officially ends the state’s “right-to-work” laws. The State House previously passed their version of the bill, HB 4005, on March 8th. On Friday, March 24th, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer it.
Michigan Senate repeals right-to-work, sends bill to Whitmer for signature
LANSING, Mich.—To huge cheers from workers who packed the galleries, the Michigan Senate voted 20-17 along party lines on Senate Bill 34 to officially end “right-to-work” laws in Michigan on March 21. The State House passed its version of the bill, HB4005, previously on March 8. According to sources within the United Food and Commercial Workers, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) is expected to sign the repeal of right-to-work, an historic win for union workers and all Michigan workers, in the coming weeks.
A note to MinnPost readers from Eric Black
Dear Readers of MinnPost (and especially of Eric Black Ink), Just a note to let you know why my Eric Black Ink column has gone silent. The short and obvious answer is that I’ve retired.
Robert Reich's 20 bullet points on the Jan. 6 committee's accomplishments | MinnPost
I’m not sure, but after reading Robert Reich’s take on the final day of the House special committee on Jan. 6, I’m afraid my Tuesday post might have underplayed the power of the final presentation, calling it “a solid, if-no-longer-very-surprising list of Trump’s possible crimes.” Reich was much more impressed, and I’m passing along a few of his 20 bullet points with a link at the bottom to his full take.
The Jan. 6 committee's expected and welcome referral of charges against Trump | MinnPost
The special congressional committee investigating the Trump-inspired Jan. 6, 2021, riots (and attempt to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s election) wrapped up Monday with few big surprises but having compiled a lot of damning evidence against the former president. The committee’s final and expected act was to refer criminal charges against Donald Trump to be prosecuted by others. They left behind a solid, if-no-longer-very-surprising list of Trump’s possible crimes.
Is DeSantis the rising star and Trump the falling star in early GOP polls?
You have to have a solid base in confidence, or at least a powerful belief in yourself, to run for office. I wouldn’t want to do it. But the self-confidence of Donald Trump (at least if we are to take him at his word) is so epic that he never bothered with the usual protestations of caution or, God forbid, humility.
Unpacking the vote for GOP U.S. House candidates nationwide (they did better than Trump)
Here’s a fact that might surprise you. If you’re like me, you might have guessed (or assumed) that Republicans in the midterm won their new U.S. House majority primarily through successful gerrymandering from prior cycles. Apparently not. They may have won it the old-fashioned way.
Alexei Navalny’s daughter’s heartbreaking letter helps us contemplate our freedoms
I’ve lived my entire life with the blessings of U.S. citizenship, but my ancestors grew up under Russian czars before emigrating. Whatever your ancestry, every American should tremble with gratitude for the liberty we enjoy here, although we don’t necessarily take time every day to contemplate those freedoms.
Biden's latest approval rating gives reason for hope against Trump comeback | MinnPost
I’d like to say I’m a recovering politics junkie, but there’s not that much evidence I’m recovering even as I edge toward retirement. For example, I still look, pretty much every day, at the constantly updated FiveThirtyEight.com graphic that tracks the movement of President Joe Biden’s approval rating.
Why survey showing a third of Republicans get news from Trump is so troubling | MinnPost
It’s obviously pretty crucial to a healthy, functioning democracy for voters to believe in the legitimacy of election results, even when – perhaps especially when – their favorite candidate lost. Before Donald Trump, this was seldom an issue. Skeptics, I suppose, might point to the aftermath of the Bush vs. Gore election of 2000, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. But that was all about the outcome in Florida, which was decided by less than one-half of one percent of the vote.
Ezra Klein's take on 'strange moment' American politics is in | MinnPost
Ezra Klein, from whose insights I often benefit, places the current state of U.S. politics into historical perspective in his latest New York Times column. I’ll just offer two paragraphs, each of which makes a very smart point, and offer a link to the full piece Paragraph 1: “American politics has typically had ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ parties. After the Civil War, Republicans controlled American politics for decades. After the New Deal, Democrats dominated.
Remembering the Republicans not on Election Day ballots
Soon-to-be-be-former Congressman Adam Kinzinger, R-Illinois, was one of two Republican House members who sacrificed his political future in order to fulfill his oath to “support and defend the Constitution” by serving on the special U.S. House committee to investigate the attempted Trumpian coup of Jan. 6, 2021. The other one, U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, jeopardized her otherwise safe seat by the role she played and was defeated in a primary by a Trumpier Republican.
What voters say when weighing importance of the economy vs. U.S. democracy
Just a week out from midterm Election Day, I’m tired of horserace polls and ready to see some actual results. Maybe you are, too. As you know, pretty much all the major polls suggest that Republicans will take over the House, with the race for control of the Senate too close to call. But I stumbled on a quick analysis, based on a recent CBS poll, that illustrates a powerful point. A lot of voters say their top issue is the economy, which is quite normal.
'Frontline' documentary tells stories of Russians who oppose Putin's war
The latest installment of the great long-running PBS documentary series “Frontline” is titled “Inside Russia: Putin’s War at Home,” which pretty much tells you what it’s about. The one-hour documentary will air Tuesday 9 p.m. Central Time on KTCA Channel 2 in the Twin Cities and other PBS stations.
Predictions hard to come by in pre-election analyses in Minnesota
University of Minnesota political scientist Kathryn Pearson sat down Monday with Star Tribune political reporter Briana Bierschbach (live and on Zoom) for a very smart and, of course, frustrating look ahead to the upcoming Minnesota election. I say “frustrating,” but only for those who are silly enough to think that, even this close to Election Day, either of these smart political observers is going to tell you what will happen two weeks from today.
Efforts to limit early voting unsuccessful so far, and that's good news
It’s a little hard (for me, at least) to believe this is true, but the folks at the Center for Election Innovation and Research have surveyed every state and concluded that those who are trying to make it harder to vote early, by mail, or absentee have pretty much failed so far. David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research summarized the findings of their survey, thus: According to me, this good news.
What will come of unanimous vote by Jan. 6 committee to forward evidence again
Thursday’s meeting of the special U.S. House committee to investigate the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, included few, if any, big reveals. But I nonetheless found it well worth my time to see this bipartisan panel wrap up its (public) season with a unanimous vote to refer the committee’s hearing transcripts to the Department of Justice. That seems especially necessary, because the DOJ can enforce subpoenas for several key players who refused to talk to the committee to be questioned under oath.
Columbus Day is increasingly attached to more realistic story of exploitation
Today, Monday, is the second Monday in October, which used to be celebrated as “Columbus Day,” in recognition of the Italian adventurer who was sailing for Spain when he made one of the earliest nautical crossings of the Atlantic from Europe to what we now call the Americas. My current Google calendar lists it as both “Columbus Day” and “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” which is just one of the many ways “Columbus’s” stock has dropped over the past half-century or so.
Post analysis lists 6 Minnesota Republicans among 299 'election deniers'
According to me and, I would say, any fair-minded fact-oriented observer, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, even though Trump has never (and probably will never) acknowledge this fact.
Why retired federal Judge J. Michael Luttig is right about electoral system
Bluntly summarized, the hilariously lame “independent state legislature” theory of presidential elections, goes like this: In other words, the “independent state legislature” theory is a theory in which the state legislature is “independent” of the power of the people of the state to vote for the presidential ticket of their choice.
Rolling Stone's profile of Jan. 6 officer Michael Fanone is colorful
If you click this link you will see a photo of a man you might remember from the horrors of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. You might recognize him, if you paid much attention to those horrors. Michael Fanone was one of the hero cops who risked his life to protect the building and the members of Congress who were trying to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election that liberated our poor dear nation, at least temporarily, from the horror of the Donald Trump presidency.
How Biden's lagging approval rating compares to other recent presidents
I’m supposed to be a history nerd (and I am, especially the nerdy part). But I had made an erroneous assumption that President Joe Biden’s 42% approval rating heading into the midterms was unusually bad. In fact, it is extremely normal.
The latest takedown of the Electoral College is here
The Electoral College is a deeply flawed, antiquated mechanism that distorts our presidential election campaigns by focusing the candidates on just a few states that are deemed to be “in play” and thus distorts campaign strategy by incentivizing candidates to all-but-ignore about 40 of the states.
Test your presidential election knowledge of the popular vs. electoral vote
For today, a bit of presidential election historical trivia, followed by a little bit of Trump trivia. Who was the only presidential candidate to win the national popular vote in three and exactly three consecutive presidential elections? (The exactly three takes Franklin D.
Refusal of some Republicans to commit to accepting election results is troubling
You can blame Donald Trump, and you should, for the example he has set of not only refusing to accept the result of an election he lost, but of announcing in advance that he would refuse to accept the result if he lost. This was and is a recipe for the death or at least mortal wounding of democracy in our country.
New York Times piece on democracy is spot on
In a massive piece that ran over the weekend, The New York Times continued its brilliant effort to not only explain how U.S. democracy came so close to going off its rails in 2020, but also to highlight many features of our system of politics and government that threaten our future as a functioning democracy. Here’s a link. I’ll provide it again after a few more brief words, but feel to go straight there.
Another Republican eloquently rejects Trump
Donald Trump is gone from high office, thank goodness — at least for now, and I hope forever. I’m not so sure how to summarize the damage he has done, and is still trying to do, to our little American experiment in democratic self-governance. It feels like quite a lot, and the damage is ongoing. As a past-his-prime scribbler with a smallish (but very smart) audience, I can’t do much to help my beloved country move beyond the horror of the Trump experience.
President Biden's approval rating is improving, but will he seek second term?
As they did with presidents Trump and Obama, the folks at the politics-obsessed website fivethirtyeight.com track the approval ratings of Joe Biden on a daily basis. Using an algorithm, they mush together a great many polls done by others and update the average. I’m sure I couldn’t understand their algorithm, but I click on it almost daily and, as you likely know, for the first year and a half of Biden’s term it has been a disaster for ol’ Joe from Scranton.
PBS 'Frontline' documentary examines former President Donald Trump's lies
The newest documentary by the great PBS “Frontline” outfit premieres Tuesday night at 9 p.m. It’s titled “Lies, Politics and Democracy.” As you may have guessed from the title, it’s about Donald Trump, the biggest liar in recent (and perhaps in all of ) U.S. political history.
A liberal’s experiment in calling DeSantis a ‘fascist’ and what it says about labels
To the degree possible, without engaging in excessive political correctness, I have believed that it’s best to allow politically active people to describe their own views. You could go too far with it, of course, if someone is clearly lying about positions he or she has taken or refusing to acknowledge words and labels that apply to their views.
New poll shows public disapproval of U.S. Supreme Court at 30-year high
By a fairly humongous margin, public disapproval of the U.S. Supreme Court has risen to the highest point in the 30 years Hart Research has been polling on that question. The change seems to have been driven by substantially by the Dobbs ruling that overturned the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion which had been in place since 1973. As recently as January of 2021, the percentage of respondents who said they had a negative view of the court was just 19%.
Why a Harvard political scientist thinks 'Stop the Steal' is not about ballots
In an interview with Atlantic writer Elaine Godfrey, Harvard-based political scientist and sociologist Theda Skocpol weighed in on the meaning of Trump, Trumpism and the “Stop the Steal” movement. Having interviewed and corresponded with Skocpol in the past, I have long admired her insights, and she wowed me again in this transcribed interview describing what “Stop the Steal” really means to those who embrace that slogan to express their outrage over Joe Biden’s victory.
Cheney's act of honorable sacrifice to expose Trump's lies
U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, could probably have held onto her seat in Congress as long as she wanted, if that was all she wanted. But she made a different, more honorable choice, and Tuesday night she paid the honorable price. Cheney (daughter of Dick Cheney, who held the same seat when Liz Cheney was a kid and later served as U.S. Secretary of Defense and as vice president under George W. Bush), lost her seat in a primary Tuesday, and everyone knows why.
An anniversary for Social Security and a nod to its first beneficiary
Sunday was the anniversary of the day in 1935 that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. Critics decried the program as “socialism,” which it is, of a mild and democratic sort, but hardly anyone complains about it nowadays. In fact, Social Security might be the single most popular program the federal government operates.
Through time, polls ask Americans whether to tax rich to redistribute wealth
In 1939, the year economic historians suggest that the Great Depression ended, the Roper polling organization asked, for the first time: Personally, I’m a little surprised by the result: 35% said yes; 54% said no. It was the late stages of the Depression, after all.
On the 48th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, the presidency and the law
Monday was the 48th anniversary of the day in 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned as president. I might have missed it, except that I read religiously “Letters from an American,” an almost daily reflection on history and current events by Boston University historian (and podcaster) Heather Cox Richardson.
Why we (still) need to get rid of the Electoral College
I’ve ranted long, often and hard against the Electoral College system. But, given the 2020 Trumpian coup attempt (which relied on technical weak spots in the Electoral College system) and the ongoing threat that the jury-rigged system poses to our democracy, I thought perhaps I should dig up my 2012 list of the Constitution’s biggest flaws, which I’ll link to just below.
‘Trumpism’ actually grew out of Newt Gingrich’s ’94 ascendance, argues Dana Milbank’s new book
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank is out with a new book, “The Destructionists: The 25-year crackup of the Republican Party,” in which he argues (as you can tell by the subtitle) that the Trumpist insanity that overtook the GOP had deep roots in the preceding decades. I haven’t read the book; only a long essay adapted from it that ran in Thursday’s Washington Post Opinion section.
What Trump and enablers did to his Arizona electors was despicable
Some of the Arizona electors who were pledged to cast electoral votes for Donald Trump if he had carried their state (which he didn’t) were so concerned about the pressure they were getting from the Trump campaign to go along with a plan to cast electoral votes for Trump anyway, they worried that going along with the scheme would have been an act of “treason.” Personally, I doubt they would have faced treason charges. More likely some form of election fraud, which is nonetheless a felony.
And now, a choice serving from Bret Stephens
Bret Stephens occupies the moderate (non-Trump) Republican seat on the New York Times editorial page, which led to this hilarious comment in the latest transcripted exchange with liberal Gail Collins for the ongoing op-ed series called “The Conversation.” Collins coaxed Stephens to admit that, if the Trumpy Republican Blake Masters is the nominee against moderate incumbent Democrat (and astronaut) Mark Kelly, in the 2022 Arizona Senate contest, Stephens would break party ranks and support Kelly.
Klobuchar and Walz for president? New Washington Post list has them as possible candidates
The Washington Post op-ed page compiled (and published on Friday morning) a list of possible candidates for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination and two Minnesotans made the list: U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Gov. Tim Walz. Klobuchar, of course, ran in 2020, although didn’t come particularly close to the nomination. The Post listed her as fifth most likely to run if Biden doesn’t.
Poll shows some shift in views of former President Trump since hearings on Jan. 6
Morning Consult, a business-oriented polling and research firm, is out with a few poll numbers measuring public views of former President Donald Trump before and after the recent congressional hearings into the Jan. 6 Trump-inspired lethal riots at the U.S. Capitol.
Yale historian Snyder: Ukraine most likely will win the war
I’ve long been an admirer of Yale historian Timothy Snyder (since I read his short book titled “On Tyranny,” which I still highly recommend). His latest short essay, an overview of the current status and possible future of the Russian war on Ukraine, made me admire him all the more and help me continue to hope/believe that Ukraine might survive Vladimir Putin’s despicable unprovoked attack.
Why Biden shouldn’t run again — and should tell us that now | MinnPost
Whatever ups and downs I feel about Joe Biden, I will never stop being grateful that he defeated Donald Trump in 2020. I have been feeling for quite a while that Biden should not seek a second term as president. His age would be reason enough. His low approval ratings would be a strong additional argument. But conventional wisdom always held that, even if Biden realizes this and doesn’t plan on a 2024, he should postpone saying so, in order to avoid lame-duck status any sooner than he must.
Gerrymandering and partisan division in the U.S., as seen by a British-based paper
I’m often impressed with the insightful coverage of U.S. politics by The Guardian, the British-based paper, and I pass along a recent Guardian analysis of gerrymandering: the practice of drawing boundaries of U.S. House districts in ways that benefit whichever party is doing the drawing. The full piece is here on the Guardian’s site, and if you don’t want to bother with my summary, go ahead and click through and read the whole thing.
The results are in, and they’re (still) pitiful
How much confidence do you have in the news media to help you stay accurately informed? The Gallup organization has been polling on this question since the 1970s for newspapers and since the 1990s for TV news. The answer has been less and less and less over time and, if you are a Republican, even less than that. I’ll give you a link to the results displayed graphically below. Gallup started asking the newspaper question in 1972.
The first NYT poll of voter sentiment before midterm elections, with a cautionary note
Over the weekend, the New York Times published its first (many to follow of course) poll of voter sentiment heading into the midterms. An obvious thought, followed by the highlights of the poll’s findings. The obvious thought: It would be dumb to think this tells us how the midterms will turn out. It’s July. The elections are in November. The poll shows an impressively close division on the question of which preference for which party should control Congress in 2023-24 (Dems 41; Repubs 40).
Let’s make a deal: I’ll give you your U.S. attorney if you give me my judge
In a New Republic piece from last week, headlined “The Rise of the Hereditary Judiciary,” Matt Ford lays out the case that the federal judiciary up to and including the Supreme Court, which was always the least democratic branch, has over recent years become even less democratic.
Legitimate protest, riot or insurrection: Republican views of Jan. 6 are shifting
A couple of new poll results below underscore what one might call the weakness of information to influence people’s beliefs, at least for very long. First, a confession. I’m not a big fan of former President Donald Trump. He’s such a prolific liar that if he asserts something as a fact, I make no presumption in advance that it is probably true and am quick to believe, upon the production of any evidence of its falsity, that it is false.
Esteemed Gallup Poll has grim report about public confidence in institutions
The Gallup Organization has been surveying almost every year on the public’s level of confidence in a wide array of institutions in both the public and private sectors, going back several years, and it’s out with a report of its latest confidence numbers. In 2022, for the first time, every single institution of the 16 they asked about got a lower score than the previous year. I’ll link you below to the full list, with a comparison of the 2021 to the 2022 numbers for each institution.
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