(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of government' gets done, and where, if you cannot bring good news, you must not then bring any.

We begin in Maine, where another congressional seat flipped from Republican to Democratic, but where an actual experiment in this particular laboratory of democracy, newly sprung from the grasp of human bowling-jacket Governor Paul LePage, produced the winner. From the Portland Press-Herald:

[Jared] Golden, a Marine Corps veteran and state lawmaker from Lewiston, began the day roughly 2,000 votes behind two-term incumbent Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin. But Golden surged past Poliquin by slightly less than 3,000 votes after the ranked-choice votes of two independents in the race were redistributed Thursday afternoon...

This is the first time in U.S. history that a congressional race was decided using ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to cast ballots for their favorite candidate but also rank other candidates in order of preference. Those ranked-choice votes only come into play when no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote on the initial tally.

Ranked-choice is one of the possible actual solutions to the sclerosis afflicting the two-party system. It opens things up a little more for third-party and no-party candidates to have some sort of real impact on election results. At the very least, it's an idea worth going along with.

Jared Golden Joel Page/AP/REX/Shutterstock

Naturally, however, Poliquin, the unseated Republican, is dissatisfied with the results of this experiment.

Thursday’s vote tally may not be the end, however. Poliquin is challenging the constitutionality of ranked-choice voting in federal court, and the campaign could ask for a recount of the results.

“It is now officially clear I won the constitutional ‘one-person, one-vote’ first choice election on Election Day that has been used in Maine for more than 100 years,” Poliquin said in a statement Thursday afternoon after the results were announced. “We will proceed with our constitutional concerns about the ranked-vote algorithm.” Poliquin and three other plaintiffs had asked U.S. District Court Judge Lance Walker to declare the ranked-choice process unconstitutional and effectively declare Poliquin the winner. They also asked for Walker to halt the tabulation process until he can consider the constitutionality question.

This litigious society. What're you going to do anyway?

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There's even more finagling and sore-loserdom down in Kentucky, where local Republicans are finding a particular judge's rulings inconvenient—so the obvious solution is to keep him from making any more of them. From the Louisville Courier-Journal (h/t Blue In The Bluegrass):

Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd’s order striking down the new Republican-backed pension law led to a lot of criticism from majority-party leaders, including from the governor himself. Now, some of those leaders are looking at ways to keep all the important state government cases from going to Franklin Circuit Court. “You basically have a super circuit judge, or judges, because the venue for so many cases are exclusively here. And that shouldn’t be,” Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, said in an interview...

Shepherd has been the target of repeated attacks by Republican Gov. Matt Bevin in radio interviews as being biased and political after Shepherd has ruled against him in some high-profile cases. However, an examination published in the Courier Journal of Shepherd’s rulings in major cases with political implications between 2007 and 2016 showed he more often ruled in favor of the Republican side than the Democratic side.

Most appeals of administrative actions of state agencies must be filed in Franklin Circuit Court. And historically most legal challenges of actions of the General Assembly or executive orders of the governor are filed there. Franklin Circuit Court has two judges, Shepherd and Thomas Wingate. Cases filed there alternately go to one judge, then the other. But more of the high profile cases involving the Bevin administration have ended up before Shepherd.

The precipitating event seems to be the judge's striking down of a law that would have allowed Bevin and the Republicans in the legislature to raid the pensions of retired public workers, a favorite tactic of conservative governors whose bone-stupid economics put their respective states into the hole. So, naturally, the solution is not to make your lawyers work a little harder, it's to 86 the judge. Splendid.

Matt Bevin Bill Pugliano Getty Images

We skip on up to Michigan, where Friend of the Blog Dan Wetzel hipped us to an example of how El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago has become poison to Republicans all the way down the downballot. From the Detroit Free Press:

Long before Donald Trump starting alienating suburban voters, Brooks Patterson saw a blue tide creeping northward across Michigan's richest county and demanded that the Republican-controlled state Legislature to do something about it. In 2011, at County Executive Patterson's behest, legislators voted along party lines to adopt a law they hoped would reinforce the GOP's loosening grip on Oakland County and assure that a Republican county commission majority would pick Patterson's interim successor in the event he resigned from office before completing his term.

But Democrats stunned Patterson and his allies by winning 11 of the Oakland County Commission's 21 seats in last week's election — and now it's their party that stands to exercise the increased authority state legislators gave the commission seven years ago. Unless he resigns before Jan. 1, Patterson, 79 and ailing, will either have to tough out the second half of his four-year term or watch Democratic commissioners pick his successor.

All together now.

To be entirely fair, this is a bipartisan phenomenon—making long-term adjustments in institutions for short-term political gain, only to have those adjustments turn up later, attached by their molars to the seat of your pants. Seeing only as far ahead as the next election, and only as far back as the last one, is a really bad way to run a democratic republic.

Brooks Patterson Clarence Tabb, Jr. AP

From there, we pass along the northern border to Idaho, where we don't stop that often. Alas, for wildlife and human beings, the area around Lake Coeur d'Alene was a mining company's, well, gold mine. Also zinc, lead, and silver mines as well. Unfortunately, as Bloomberg reports, this turned the area poisoned and deadly.

Over the course of a century, the tailings and mine drainage flowed down the 40-mile-long watershed, depositing some 75 million tons of highly toxic sludge into Lake Coeur d’Alene. House cats convulsed from drinking the water. Migratory tundra swans suffered slow deaths as their digestive tracts seized up from lead poisoning, causing both suffocation and starvation as undigested food backed up into their long necks. Children in the Silver Valley in the 1970s registered some of the highest levels of lead in their bloodstreams recorded anywhere.

In the early 1980s, they shuttered the Bunker Hill Mine in Kellogg, the biggest one in the region. In 1983, the EPA made the area around the Bunker Hill Mine to be the second-largest Superfund site in the country. You can probably see the punchline coming a mile off.

The Trump EPA doesn’t do healing. In March, the agency disclosed a shocker: After months of secret talks, it had signed an agreement with a Canadian company to reopen the Bunker Hill Mine. Scott Pruitt, the agency’s administrator until his ouster in July, said in a statement that the pact would restore mining jobs, contribute $20 million toward cleanup costs for the Bunker Hill Mine, and provide almost $1 million a year for water treatment. In exchange, the new Bunker Hill Mining Corp. and the property’s previous operator were absolved of any responsibility for past toxic releases. The slate, if not the Coeur d’Alene watershed, would be wiped clean.

Great idea. It stalled because the prices for metals dropped, and because the guy who proposed to reopen the mine turned out to be something of a crook.

Coeur d’Alene Lake JoanBudai Getty Images

But, hell, it's not like that ever stopped this administration before. They had their own grifters ready to go.

But the consent decree to let bygones be bygones still stands, available for use by Bunker Hill Mining or whatever operator succeeds it. One way or another, the Bunker Hill Mine, one of the most prodigious polluters in American history, appears destined for a “fresh start,” as the EPA put it in its March announcement celebrating the deal. The reprieve for Bunker Hill was vintage Scott Pruitt. During his tumultuous 16 months in office, he pushed cleanup and reuse of Superfund sites with the same ardor he brought to gutting regulations protecting the nation’s air and water. The rehabilitation of toxic facilities was part of “refocusing” the EPA on its “core mission,” Pruitt said—ignoring that President Richard Nixon created the EPA a decade before the Superfund law explicitly to prevent pollution from harming the environment.

Scott Pruitt—the blight that keeps on giving.

Justin Merriman Getty Images

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Rumble Fisherman Friedman Of The Plains is manning the sports desk this week, and he brings us this tale—via the WaPo—from the golden streets of Stillwater.

Gundy, whose Cowboys are 5-5 this season, was asked during a Monday news conference in Stillwater, Okla., about safety Thabo Mwaniki’s tweet on Sunday that he would be transferring out of the school. The question posed to the coach, who once said that his mullet has been worth “millions” to his football program, concerned the increased frequency of college athletes transferring, thanks to a new rule implemented by the NCAA.

“I think we live in a world where people are noncommittal,” Gundy said. “We allow liberalism to say, ‘Hey, I can really just do what I want and I don’t have to be really tough and fight through it.’ You see that with young people because it’s an option they’re given. We weren’t given that option when we were growing up. We were told what to do, we did it the right way, or you go figure it out on your own. In the world today, there’s a lot of entitlement.”

"I’m a firm believer in the snowflake,” he said. Gundy, clarifying that he wasn’t referring to Mwaniki, who hasn’t played since starting the first four games of the season, said he was "talking about every millennial, young person. Generation Z, I think is what they call ’em. It’s the world we live in because if they say, ‘Well, it’s a little bit hard,’ then we say, ‘Okay, well, let’s go try something else’ versus ‘Hey, let’s bear down and let’s fight and do this.’ So you see a lot of that nowadays.”

How many of them are in Afghanistan right now, or fighting wildfires in California, or doing other thankless, important jobs while Mike Gundy makes $5 million a year to bully teenagers into traumatic brain injuries? Shut up, Mullet.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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