“White Districts And White Sensibilities”: The Real Problem Republicans Have, They Don’t Want To Change Their Policies
You may have heard that in the incoming Congress, white men will constitute a minority of the Democratic caucus for the first time. That’s an interesting fact, but it’s only part of the story. At National Journal, Ron Brownstein and Scott Bland have a long, Brownsteinian look at how “the parties glare across a deep racial chasm” not only in the members of Congress themselves, but in the people they represent. “Republicans now hold 187 of the 259 districts (72 percent) in which whites exceed their national share of the voting-age population. Democrats hold 129 of the 176 seats (73 percent) in which minorities exceed their national share of the voting-age population. From another angle, 80 percent of Republicans represent districts more heavily white than the national average; 64 percent of House Democrats represent seats more heavily nonwhite than the national average.”
The implications for the GOP of the fact that most of their members represent mostly white districts are profound, touching on the continuous interaction between individuals and policy. Politicians are shaped by their political environments and the things they have to do to win, and the fact that most GOP members represent overwhelmingly white districts means that as they rise through the ranks, the time they’re going to have to spend talking to and listening to non-white people is going to be limited. Brownstein and Bland talked to some of the few Republicans who represent more diverse districts:
But even some House Republicans from racially diverse districts worry that many of their colleagues representing more monolithically white areas aren’t doing enough to court minorities. “Honestly, I don’t believe they are,” says Rep. Joe Heck, who won reelection in a diverse district outside Las Vegas.
Heck says he’s established beachheads among minority voters by working first with ethnic chambers of commerce. “For me, meeting with the members of the chamber was a door to building relationships with members of those communities,” he says. Then he hired aides to coordinate outreach to Hispanic and Asian constituents; during his campaign, he organized coalitions in those communities. “When I’m home in the district, we would do entire outreach days, visiting multiple Hispanic businesses, even ones outside of my district.”
As it happens, Joe Heck is an extremely conservative Republican. But he does all that outreach because he has no choice. And over time, that will make him more understanding of, and sensitive to, the concerns of people who aren’t white. It means that he’ll have a better awareness of the things that piss Hispanics off, and learning how not to piss different kinds of people off—with both substance and symbolism—is a big part of politics. This is important for both sides, and with a variety of constituencies. For instance, one of the first things you learn working on a Democratic campaign is that every piece of printed material you produce, from brochures to door hangers, has to have on it the tiny union “bug” that shows it was printed at a union shop. If it doesn’t, you can be damn sure you’ll get some angry phone calls from union members and representatives, because they notice. Republicans have I’s to be dotted and T’s to be crossed for their own constituencies as well. But somebody coming up through Republican politics in an overwhelmingly white district won’t have to learn, for instance, what pisses off Hispanics. So when they talk about immigration their speech is peppered with terms like “illegal aliens” that Hispanics find, well, alienating.
The advantage Democrats have is that nobody has to teach them how to talk to white people, because you learn that no matter where you live. It’s the same reason colleges don’t offer courses in White History or White Literature—you’re already learning it. Yes, there are subgroups of whites whom you can fail to understand, but it’s a lot less likely that you’re going to alienate them and end up losing the White House because of it.
So the real problem Republicans have isn’t that they don’t want to recruit minorities, because they do. They don’t want to change their policies to do it, of course, but they’re pleased as punch when they find someone like Tim Scott or Ted Cruz, a real-live minority who also happens to be rabidly right-wing, whom they can hold up as an example. Their problem is that they don’t know how to attract minority voters, because where most of them come from, they don’t have to.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January, 15, 2013
“The Militarization Of School Safety”: Race, Gun Control And Unintended Consequences
Vice President Joe Biden’s task force on gun control handed its recommendations to President Obama yesterday, who will announce them tomorrow. This is the first time in recent memory that one of our increasingly common acts of mass violence has sparked such immediate action. It may not bring solace to all of the victims’ families, but it has the potential to start preventing these horrors from happening in the first place.
But as encouraging as it is to see action to curb gun violence, an epidemic in this country compared to our peers, it is still worth pausing to ask what kind of action is being taken and what its consequences will be. Some reforms, like the “guns in every school” approach from the NRA, rightly strike many liberals as absurd. This direction is not just dangerous—it also will likely disproportionately impact the lives of young black and brown children. But other gun control measures that we might feel more comfortable with could have similar unintended consequences if we don’t pay attention to how they are implemented.
Few can forget the absurd news conference held by the NRA in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in which NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre called for putting “armed police officers in every school in this nation.” But it’s not as out-of-box as many of us might assume. Some lawmakers have echoed this call; Senator Barbara Boxer introduced legislation that would let governors use federal funds to have the National Guard secure schools and increase the money spent annually on things like metal detectors and security cameras at schools. But many schools already have armed policemen patrolling the halls and using these law enforcement gadgets. As Julianne Hing of Colorlines reports:
As of 2011, 68 percent of U.S. schoolchildren said police officers patrolled their school campuses… In 1999, that number was 54 percent. Last year, 70 percent of schoolkids went to schools where surveillance cameras were used, and more than half of students reported that locker checks were used as a security tactic. More than one in 10 U.S. students goes to a school with metal detectors on campus.
The militarization of school safety and orderliness most heavily impacts children of color. It effectively feeds the school-to-prison pipeline. Hing notes, “The rise of police officers and militarized security tactics in schools runs parallel with the rise of zero-tolerance school discipline policies in the 1980s and 1990s.” Those zero tolerance laws entail cracking down on behavior infractions with a heavy fist. As Jim Eichner of the Advancement Project told Hing, “What we know is that when you put police in school they arrest kids,” which means students going to jail for things like fist fights, talking back to teachers or even showing up late or wearing the wrong color socks.
The heavy fist doesn’t fall evenly. One study showed that black boys are three times more likely to be suspended than white boys and black girls were four times more likely than white girls. Studies have shown that if young children come into contact with the criminal justice system, that’s likely only the first time.
But the misguided idea that good teachers with guns will stop bad guys with guns is not the only possible gun control measure that could negatively impact people of color. The more restrictive gun control laws about to be passed in New York, for example, expand the number of assault weapons that will be banned in the state. Biden’s task force is likely to also push for an assault weapon ban. The evidence does seem pretty clear that fewer guns lead to less violence. But we can’t forget about the impact expanded criminalization could have as it’s implemented. The founder of Prison Culture, a blog focused on eradicating youth incarceration, took to Twitter shortly after the Sandy Hook shooting to warn against this problem. “I live in a city where black and brown kids some of whom I work with are currently locked up on ‘gun charges.’ These laws disproportionately impact and target the ‘usual suspects’ which happen to be the archetype ‘criminalblackman.’ As long our criminal legal system is racist and classist and heterosexist, it will be the marginalized who will be locked up,” the user said over a number of tweets. After all, as my Nation colleague Rick Perlstein explained last week, it was fear of gun-toting Black Panthers that led to some of the first strict gun control laws.
To understand the racist underbelly of our justice system, look no further than the extreme example of the War on Drugs. As Michelle Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow, despite similar drug use rates, “African Americans constitute 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison. In at least fifteen states, blacks are admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate from twenty to fifty-seven times greater than that of white men.” Meanwhile, the majority of dealers and sellers are white. (Everyone should read the whole book to get the full picture.) What may look like a colorblind law on the books can be interpreted and implemented in incredibly racist ways. So while it’s absolutely necessary that we pass laws that restrict the number and types of guns that are lawfully available, we also have to pay attention to whether those rules are fairly and evenly enforced.
We’ve seen the ways that gun control gets tied up in a ramped up police state before. The last time there was a significant push on gun control (also helmed by Joe Biden), back in 1994, an assault weapon ban was included in a comprehensive crime package. That package also included an expansion of the death penalty, the building of more prisons and the authorization of 100,000 more police officers. These are all policies that target people of color. African-Americans make up 12 percent of the population but 40 percent of death row inmates and one in three of those executed since 1977. African-Americans and Hispanics make up about a quarter of the population but nearly 60 percent of all prisoners.
As we continue to debate guns in this country, it’s also worth remembering who is the victim of this violence and who is the face of rising mass murders. As David Cole writes in The New York Times, “young black men die of gun homicide at a rate eight times that of young white men.” He gives the examples of Chicago, where African-Americans are 33 percent of the population yet 70 percent of the murder victims, and Philadelphia, where three quarters of the victims of gun violence were black. Meanwhile, the faces of those who go on shooting rampages are almost all white and male. Forty-four of the killers in the sixty-two mass shootings since 1982 were white males, according to Mother Jones. This entire issue, from causes to consequences, is steeped in race. To pretend otherwise is farce. To ignore how our actions play out in this context risks disproportionately harming those who are already affected by violence.
By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, January 15, 2013
“A Disturbing Sign”: Why Are Some Leading Dems Getting Soft On An Assault Weapons Ban?
In the wake of the horrific mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, support for re-banning assault weapons grew exponentially inside and outside of the Beltway. It’s only natural when an AR-15 is used to slaughter twenty schoolchildren and six educators, only months after another was used to shoot seventy-one people inside a movie theater.
Yesterday, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel—seen as recently as 2006 recruiting pro-gun Democrats to run in House races—said that Newtown was a “tipping point, a galvanization for action.” He’s now calling for an assault weapons ban, expanded background checks, and is ordering Chicago municipal pension funds to divest from all gun manufacturers.
Indeed, it was a tipping point. Five days after the shootings, President Obama stood in the White House briefing room and explicitly called for another assault weapons ban, and Vice President Joe Biden is expected to recommend one this week. Senator Dianne Feinstein announced she’d introduce a strong bill in the Senate, and all the pieces looked to be in place.
But in the past twenty-four hours, there have been disturbing signs of pre-emptive surrender by key Democrats on the assault weapons ban.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told a PBS affiliate in Las Vegas that he didn’t think the assault weapons ban could pass the House, and thus he wanted would “focus” on what could. His comments echoed many pro-gun talking points about Hollywood and violent video games, and Reid openly tried to throw cold water on the gun-control movement:
“We have too much violence in our society, and it’s not just from guns. It’s from a lot of stuff. And I think we should take a look at TV, movies, video games and weapons. And I hope that everyone will just be careful and cautious. […]
“Let’s just look at everything. I don’t think we need to point to anything now,” he said. “We need to be very cool and cautious. […]
“I think that the American people want us to be very cautious what we do. I think they want us to do things that are logical, smart, and make the country safer, not just be doing things that get a headline in a newspaper.”
On Monday, Representative Mike Thompson—appointed by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to head the House’s gun violence prevention task force—also signaled surrender on the assault weapons ban, according to Politico:
Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Democrats’ gun violence task force, said the magazine ban and universal registration requirement would be far more effective than an assault weapons ban without the political cost.
“Probably the most recognizable thing you can say in this debate is ban assault weapons,” Thompson said. “But the other two issues” – forbidding high-capacity ammunition magazines and requiring universal registration for gun purchases – “those two things have more impact on making our neighborhoods safe than everything else combined. Anytime you try and prohibit what kind of gun people has it generates some concern.”
It’s not that Reid and Thompson are necessarily wrong in their political calculus—maybe an assault weapons ban can’t pass the House.
But publicly dooming the effort before it starts is self-enforcing, and repeats a Democratic proclivity that has frustrated progressives to no end: heading into negotiations and votes with a pre-compromised position.
Americans favor an assault weapons ban 58-39, according to an ABC/Washington Post poll released Monday. The president is about to stick his neck out and propose it, and then push for it in the weeks to come. Moreover, as Thompson and Reid both correctly noted, it’s the headline-grabbing issue here: rampages with assault weapons are what is driving the momentum on gun control.
Democrats would naturally be wise to push forward aggressively on the ban, as they have mostly done up to this point. If they fail, they fail. At least they’d likely be able to wrest more concessions from the GOP on background checks and high-capacity magazine bans during the legislative battle, and potentially force Republicans into a difficult vote where they would effectively be supporting military style weapons on the street.
Yet, it appears Reid and Thompson—absolutely key figures in the legislative battles in the Senate and House respectively—want to drop the assault weapons ban from the legislative agenda. It’s not yet clear that they will, but even signaling a lack of confidence is damaging to both the legislative prospects for meaningful gun control, and for public attitudes and activist motivation. And it’s not the debate demanded by what happened in Newtown.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, January 15, 2013
“We Are Not A Deadbeat Nation”: Do Your Duty Congress, Or We’ll All Suffer The Consequences
By the time the president was making his case for the fourth time, the responses started getting a little repetitious, but Obama’s line didn’t change: we’ve already made enormous progress on debt reduction, he’s willing to do more, but a hostage strategy based on the debt ceiling isn’t acceptable.
In fact, the president spent a fair amount of time trying to explain to the public what some reporters occasionally overlook:
“The debt ceiling is not a question of authorizing more spending. Raising the debt ceiling does not authorize more spending. It simply allows the country to pay for spending that Congress has already committed to.
“These are bills that have already been racked up, and we need to pay them. So while I’m willing to compromise and find common ground over how to reduce our deficits, America cannot afford another debate with this Congress about whether or not they should pay the bills they’ve already racked up. […]
“So to even entertain the idea of this happening, of the United States of America not paying its bills, is irresponsible. It’s absurd…. And Republicans in Congress have two choices here: They can act responsibly and pay America’s bills or they can act irresponsibly and put America through another economic crisis. But they will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy. The financial well-being of the American people is not leverage to be used. The full faith and credit of the United States of America is not a bargaining chip.”
It doesn’t sound like he’s ready to cave. On the contrary, it sounds like the president is issuing a not-so-subtle challenge to congressional Republicans: do your duty or we’ll all suffer the consequences.
The president went on to say:
“[T]he issue here is whether or not America pays its bills. We are not a deadbeat nation. And so there’s a very simple solution to this. Congress authorizes us to pay our bills.
“Now if the House and the Senate want to give me the authority so that they don’t have to take these tough votes, if they want to put the responsibility on me to raise the debt ceiling, I’m happy to take it. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, had a proposal like that last year, and I’m happy to accept it.
“But if they want to keep this responsibility, then they need to go ahead and get it done. And you know, there are no magic tricks here. There are no loopholes. There are no, you know, easy outs. This is a matter of Congress authorizes spending. They order me to spend. They tell me: You need to fund our Defense Department at such-and-such a level. You need to send Social Security checks. You need to make sure that you are paying to care for our veterans.
“They lay all this out for me, and — because they have the spending power. And so I am required by law to go ahead and pay these bills.
“Separately, they also have to authorize a raising of the debt ceiling in order to make sure that those bills are paid. And so what Congress can’t do is tell me to spend X and then say, but we’re not going to give you the authority to go ahead and pay the bills.”
Obama added that he’s ready to negotiate on debt reduction, and he’s even open to entitlement changes, but he doesn’t intend to reward Congress for doing what it must do anyway.
What’s more, of particular interest was the president highlighting Republicans’ philosophical goals, which have less to do with debt reduction, and more to do with undermining public institutions.
“[I]t seems as if what’s motivating and propelling at this point some of the House Republicans is more than simply deficit reduction. They have a particular vision about what government should and should not do. So they are suspicious about government’s commitments, for example, to make sure that seniors have decent health care as they get older. They have suspicions about Social Security. They have suspicions about whether government should make sure that kids in poverty are getting enough to eat or whether we should be spending money on medical research. So they’ve got a particular view of what government should do and should be.
“And that view was rejected by the American people when it was debated during the presidential campaign. I think every poll that’s out there indicates that the American people actually think our commitment to Medicare or to education is really important, and that’s something that we should look at as a last resort in terms of reducing the deficit, and it makes a lot more sense for us to close, for example, corporate loopholes before we go to putting a bigger burden on students or seniors.”
I’m glad Obama reminded the political world of this basic truth; I get the sense folks sometimes forget what the driving motivations are behind many of our ongoing partisan fights.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 14, 2013
“The Crazies Just Get Crazier”: Bring Me Your Angry, Your Paranoid, Your Masses Huddled In Their Bunkers…
Independence is the new media thing. Andrew Sullivan is doing it. Trey Parker and Matt Stone are doing it. And Glenn Beck, who did it already when he got booted from Fox News and created his own internet TV … um … thing in response, is taking it even farther. Inspired by “Galt’s Gulch,” the place in Atlas Shrugged where the Randian übermenschen retreated, Beck is unveiling plans for an entire city he will build, a city to embody all that is right and good and libertarian about America, a true refuge where those who have proven their mettle by watching hundreds of hours of his programs can come and live just as the Founders intended. It’ll be called, naturally, Independence, U.S.A. Behold: http://www.video.theblaze.com/media/video.jsp?content_id=25550259
You’ll notice how right at the beginning Beck says, “You will have to literally wipe us off the face of the earth and wipe us off the map before you can erase the truth that is America.” Presumably in the regular America, the sinister forces can just come for us one by one, and before you know it America is gone, but it’ll be a lot harder if the True America is all concentrated in one city. Seems a little backward to me, but OK.
Of course this will never happen, but you can’t fault him for a lack of ambition. It isn’t enough to pay to be a member of Glenn’s web site and listen to his radio show and buy his books. He wants you to come live in a city he designed! And what’s the end point of this? Perhaps an “Eternal Glenn” program, where after your loved one dies, you mail to Beck a small vial containing some of old grandad’s blood (harvested while he was alive, of course), and in a brief but solemn ceremony, Glenn will join the blood with that of other Beck fans in a beautiful cauldron (mini-replicas available for only $39.95), merging their essences into a powerful liquid spirit, each drop a concentrated reduction of Paranoid Cranky Old White Man, bursting with America-ness and used for anointing in secret ceremonies deep within the underground temple at Independence, U.S.A. Don’t be surprised.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 14, 2013
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