Problems with the (DC) one party state

Means that you don't engage enough and work for better practices. I was thinking about this while scanning the article, "Early American Echoes in South Africa?" from the New York Times, about South Africa, and how democracy there is maturing, as a new party has calved off the African National Congress, and the new party has a greater concern for good and ethical government.

In DC, theoretically, you could have multiple parties, because of the ward-based election system. I went to college in Ann Arbor, where in the early 1970s, a more left "Human Rights Party" was created to get more progressive representation on the Ann Arbor City Council, by focusing on wards possessing large numbers of students as potential voters. At the time the Ann Arbor City Council was strongly Republican and conservative. Because of that experience (I went to school beginning in the late 1970s) I have always been attracted to ways of building broader participatory and representative governing structures in municipalities.

Parties like the Republicans and the now Statehood-Green party haven't been that successful at mounting Ward-focused efforts in DC elections. And Mayor Fenty has tied donations and access by ensuring that preferred candidates for Ward councilmember positions are well-financed, with hundreds of thousands of dollars of donations, which are enough to bludgeon and vanquish even the best non-machine candidates. This focus on the dough makes it unlikely that non-Democrats can win elections in DC, at least for awhile.

Note that while I favor the rule that provides for alternative representation other than the majority party for two of the at-large seats, I recognize that faux independents such as Michael Brown these days or William Lightfoot in the 1990s, can game the system. At the same time, the DC Republican party challenge to Michael Brown's independent status was doomed to fail, as anyone in our system of politics can change their party affiliation at any time.

Still we need to do (much) better.

How can an alleged "Constitutional Law expert", GWU professor and Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh introduce legislation a couple days ago to make public demonstrations in the vicinity of private homes illegal? (I can't see how this will hold up as an exception to the First Amendment's provision for "freedom of assembly.")

And the new law banning consecutive year funding of earmarks to nonprofits misses the point. Allow consecutive year funding of nonprofits, but ban earmarks, and replace earmarks with an open and transparent contracting system that seeks proposals based on criteria, and having the proposals evaluated and ranked according to this criteria. See "D.C. Council hardens line on handouts to nonprofits" from the Examiner.