What’s the Matter with West Virginia?

Cartoon corporate villains don’t come more cartoonish than Don Blankenship, a former coal baron of West Virginia. Last week, Blankenship, the former chief executive officer of Massey Energy, was charged in a federal indictment for a variety of crimes in connection with a disaster at the Upper Big Branch mine in April, 2010, in which twenty-nine coal workers were killed. According to the forty-three-page indictment, Blankenship engaged in a lengthy pattern of deception in dealings with federal mine regulators, in an effort to cut costs, and, consequently, exposed his employees to appalling risks. (His lawyer, William Taylor III, told reporters that Blankenship was innocent and would fight the charges.)

The indictment came just a few days after the 2014 midterm elections, which the Democratic Party in West Virginia lost in a rout: Republicans won all three of the state’s seats in the House of Representatives, including a twelve-point Republican win over Nick Rahall, who had served in Congress for thirty-eight years. In the race to succeed Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat who had served for five terms, Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican congresswoman, won sixty-three per cent of the vote. Capito’s big issue in the race was coal. As her campaign Web site boasts, Capito “has been fighting in the U.S. House of Representatives against the EPA’s war on coal and is a co-founder of the Congressional Coal Caucus.”

To endorse coal is not necessarily to endorse the alleged perfidies of Don Blankenship. But it is true that the charges against Blankenship only came to light because he was so aggressive in fighting the regulations that Capito and other Republicans so despise. The indictment tells a chilling story of a man who ran his company both to defy mine-safety laws and to deceive the regulators. According to the indictment, the company had a system of code words to warn those in the mine when inspectors were on the way, and Blankenship repeatedly demanded that his company put profits before safety. Faced with subordinates who failed to follow his orders, Blankenship allegedly issued a distinctive threat: “I could Krushchev [sic] you.” Mother Jones has a breakdown of the most egregious allegations in the indictment.

Blankenship had made national news a few years earlier, too. In 2002, a competing coal company won a fifty-million-dollar judgment against Massey Coal in a West Virginia trial court. While the case was pending before the state Supreme Court, Blankenship created a nonprofit corporation called (one cannot make this up) And For the Sake of the Kids. Through the nonprofit, Blankenship gave three million dollars to support the candidacy of Brent Benjamin, a lawyer who was running against one of the incumbents on the state court. This amount was three thousand times larger than the maximum legally permissible direct contribution. Benjamin won the election, and he joined the majority in the West Virginia Supreme Court’s 3-2 decision to overturn the judgment against Massey.

In 2009, the United States Supreme Court overturned the West Virginia decision, ruling, 5-4, that Benjamin should have recused himself because of Blankenship’s funding of his campaign. In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that “Blankenship’s significant and disproportionate influence—coupled with the temporal relationship between the election and the pending case—” made Benjamin’s recusal obligatory. (Later, the state Supreme Court reheard the case, and Massey and Blankenship won again, so the fifty-million-dollar judgment was ultimately overturned.)

Blankenship’s foray into the state Supreme Court election suggests one reason why Republicans have done so well in West Virginia in recent years. The G.O.P. has a great deal more money than the Democrats to spend in elections. Capito spent about seven million dollars in her Senate race, roughly double what Natalie Tennant, the Democrat, was able to raise. Republicans are also greater beneficiaries of money from super PACs and other donations from outsiders, like the Koch brothers.

But money alone doesn’t explain the fall of the Democrats in West Virginia. As in other border states, like Kentucky and Arkansas, Republicans have won a cultural war against Democrats, at least among white voters (especially men). It’s a good bet that a majority of the Massey miners, whose lives Blankenship may have placed in jeopardy and whom the federal bureaucrats were trying to protect, voted Republican. (In Raleigh County, where the Upper Big Branch mine is located, Capito got sixty-two per cent of the vote.) Fairly or not, white voters in West Virginia appear to regard the Democratic Party as an alien force—élitist, condescending, bureaucratic, out of touch, and perhaps, unduly diverse. At the moment, national Democrats have little in the way of a real answer. They need one in the next two years, probably sooner.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com/
Author: BY JEFFREY TOOBIN