EU-Hungarian Relations: Hungary’s classrooms have become the new battleground for the war on ‘LGBT ideology’ - by Mark Gevisser

Last week, the Hungarian parliament banned any portrayal of homosexuality or transgenderism to minors, in educational material or on television. Appending this to a law protecting children from child abuse, the country’s president, Viktor Orbán, drew an explicit connection between homosexuality and paedophilia. In so doing, he resorted to a canard that much of the world has long dispensed with, but that is enjoying a troubling new emergence in the global battles against “gender ideology”: the danger posed by homosexuals and trans people to children.

Read more at: Hungary’s classrooms have become the new battleground for the war on ‘LGBT ideology’ | Mark Gevisser | The Guardian

Poland′s planned judiciary reforms would ′undermine′ rule of law

Constitutional experts warn Poland's latest proposed bill introducing new disciplinary rules for judges could further erode the country's judiciary. The EU is also speaking out, and has tried to intervene.

Read more at:
https://www.dw.com/en/polands-planned-judiciary-reforms-would-undermine-rule-of-law/a-52034657

Britain - the Brexit drama: UK PM Johnson sends conflicting messages to EU on Brexit delay request

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson sent an unsigned letter to the European Union on Saturday requesting a delay to Brexit but he also sent another message in which he stated he did not want the extension, a government source said.

Johnson was compelled by a law, passed by opponents last month, to ask the bloc for an extension to the current Brexit deadline of Oct. 31 until Jan. 31 after lawmakers thwarted his attempt to pass his EU divorce deal earlier on Saturday.

The government source said Johnson sent a total of three letters to Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council: a photocopy of the text that the law, known as the Benn Act, forced him to write; a cover note from Britain's EU envoy; and a third letter in which he said he did not want an extension.

As Parliament met in London Saturday morning and voted to force a Brexit delay, hundreds of thousands of anti-Brexit protesters marched in the city’s streets demanding citizens be given a second chance at deciding whether to leave the European Union. 

The massive crowds moved through the city towards Parliament in a festive and defiant demonstration of frustration with the country’s impending break with the EU, the New York Times reported. 

 Organizers of the effort told the Times they expected more than a million demonstrators, which would make it one of the largest protests Britain has ever had.

The demonstrators were joined by a host of current and former politicians, as well as celebrities, who addressed the crowd. In his speech, former Conservative deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine said Brexit represents “a creeping paralysis, where yesterday’s nostalgia distorts tomorrow’s opportunities”.

Note EU-Digest: Boris Johnson by politically manuevering in a very devious and undemocratic way, without letting the people have a final say on the agreement he reached with the EU, is taking Britain on a disastrous destructive path, from which they probably will never recover .

Read more at: UK PM Johnson sends conflicting messages to EU on Brexit delay request

Britain-Brexit: Boris Johnsons Brexiteers' bid to force no-deal suffers legal blow, as constitutional expert warns UK 'heading for deep trouble': by Adam Forrest, Ashley Cowburn, Zamira Rahim, Jane Dalton

A new Trans-Atlantic Axis

Britain is in “deep trouble” unless Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn can act like “good chaps” and find a way to resolve the Brexit crisis, a leading constitutional expert has warned.

In a boost for pro-EU campaigners, a Court of Session judge has ruled that a legal challenge seeking to prevent Mr Johnson from suspending parliament to force through a no-deal exit will be heard before 31 October.

It comes as No 10 is said to be ready to pull British diplomats out of Brussels. Donald Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton, meanwhile, said the UK was “first in line” for a trade deal with the US after meeting the PM.

Meanwhile John Bercow, the House of Commons speaker, has warned that he will try to stop the prime minister from suspending parliament.

Mr Bercow told an audience at the Edinburgh Fringe festival that he "strongly" believes the House of Commons "must have its way", in remarks reported by the Herald newspaper.

"And if there is an attempt to circumvent, to bypass or - God forbid - to close down Parliament, that is anathema to me," he said.

"I will fight with every breath in my body to stop that happening."

Amber Rudd also told the BBC on Tuesday that she would urge the prime minister not to suspend the Commons.

Read more at:: Boris Johnson news: Brexiteers' bid to force no-deal suffers legal blow, as constitutional expert warns UK 'heading for deep trouble' | The Independent

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US Politics: Interview - "The Majority Does Not Rule In US Democracy" - by Benjamin I. Page

Your study “Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” is set to appear in the fall issue of Perspectives on Politics and has already been acclaimed as “historically important”. The study shows that the preferences of average Americans have little to no impact on the formulation of public policy. How do you arrive at this conclusion?

Marty Gilens and several assistants spent ten years assembling a unique data set on 1,779 cases of U.S. policy making. They gathered comprehensive information on each case including preferences of the average American and affluent Americans, along with the line-up of how many business or mass based interest groups took positions (pro or con). We then used regression analysis to analyze policy outcomes. 

This seems like a good way to estimate influence, but of course there was nothing easy about measuring the presence or absence of policy change for each of the 1,779 different cases. Gilens and his team spent hours poring over news accounts, government data, Congressional Quarterly publications, academic papers and the like.

By studying these policy cases, we found that even overwhelmingly large pro-change majorities of up to 80 percent in the population managed to effect policy changes in only about 43 percent of the cases. Narrow pro-change majorities of the public got the policy changes they wanted even only in about 30 percent of the cases. 

The data shows that average citizens and mass-based interest groups actually have little or no independent influence on policies. This is troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate that the majority does not rule – at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.

Those who rule the US are \mostly affluent Americans, corporations, and business oriented interest groups. 

Our research shows that economic elites and groups that represent business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy. These results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism. In contrast, it seems that theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism fail to adequately describe the process of U.S. policy formulation today.

Read more: Benjamin I. Page: The Majority Does Not Rule In US Democracy

EU-US Relations: Obama’s Anemic Speech in Europe - by Roger Cohen

Having pivoted to Asia and done the de rigueur minimum over several years to keep the trans-Atlantic alliance off life-support, Barack Obama awakened with a jolt to Europe this week and, on his first visit to Brussels as president, spoke of “inseparable allies” with a shared mission to demonstrate that Russia cannot “run roughshod over its neighbors.”

Shaken from a view of Europe as a kind of 20th-century yawn, Obama spoke of freedom and the ideas that bind the United States and Europe still in an ongoing “contest of ideas” against autocracy and “brute force.” He rightly rejected the notion that this is “another Cold War that we’re entering into,” noting that President Vladimir Putin of Russia represents “no global ideology.”

 

He spoke in timely fashion of “our Article 5 duty” under the North Atlantic Treaty to respond with force to any attack on a NATO country, important reassurance to the Baltic states, among others. This military commitment was backed by reference to the need for “very real contingency plans” to protect NATO nations in Central and Eastern Europe. Those plans, to date, have been inadequate. Overall, the combination of sanctions against Russia, economic support for Ukraine, and the dispatch of additional military forces eastward sent a clear message to Putin — one that will not reverse Russia’s Crimea annexation but may stop him going any further.

 

Better late than never: The Russian president has benefited from the perception of a United States in full-tilt, war-weary retrenchment; of American red lines turning amber and then green; of a divided European Union; and a hollow NATO living more on the past than any vision of a 21st-century future. Obama has been making up for lost ground.

Still, his Brussels speech, presented as a capstone of his visit and one of those Obama specials designed to offset with eloquence a deficit of deeds, was a poor performance overall, a jejune collection of nostrums about binding values of free-market Western societies and their appeal to the hearts (and pocketbooks) of people throughout the world, not least Ukrainians.

The problem is not that these propositions are untrue. The United States and the European Union are still magnets to the poor and disenfranchised of the earth. The problem is not even that an argument that the Iraq war (with its myriad dead) is somehow more defensible than Crimea is impossible to win. The problem is Obama needed to be more honest. 

The fact is the Western democracies he was exalting have been failing to deliver, and autocrats of the world, bare-chested Putin included, benefit indirectly from the resulting disenchantment.

“Now is not the time for bluster,” Obama intoned. “The situation in Ukraine, like crises in many parts of the world, does not have easy answers nor a military solution.”

This is true. But nor is it a time for clichés about the wonders of democracy, freedom, open-market economies, the rule of law and other underpinnings of the West. Not when democracy seems blocked, freedom sometimes selective, open markets cruel and the law harshest on those who have least.

Read more: Obama’s Anemic Speech in Europe - NYTimes.com