The funniest part of the Brett Kavanaugh hearing so far is a left-wing protester shouting over U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) while he was making a procedural objection over the supposed inadequacy of documents the Senate Judiciary Committee has received concerning the U.S. Supreme Court nominee.
The young woman yelling about "LGBT rights" apparently saw an elderly bald bespectacled white man and assumed he was her enemy instead of her ally.
The slowness of the growth of racial diversity in the Massachusetts Legislature stems from demands by liberals in the late 1960s and and early 1970s to reduce the number of seats in the state House of Representatives by one-third, argues Peter Lucas in a column in the Lowell Sun.
But reducing the House from 240 seats, which it once had, to 160 seats in the November 1978 election also reduced the body's representativeness and made it harder for non-incumbents to break through. Among other things, that slowed the progress that black candidates and other racial minority candidates were making in the 1970s, Lucas says.
