“You Expect Me To Read The Bill?: NC Governor Admits He “Doesn’t Know Enough” About The Voter Suppression Bill He’s About To Sign
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) said Friday he would sign a bill passed by the North Carolina legislature that would become the most suppressive voting law in the nation. But when asked to speak about a provision in the bill that would prohibit 17-year-olds from registering in advance of their 18th birthday, McCrory admitted he “did not know enough” and had not read that portion of the bill.
The bill, passed just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act and paved the way for new suppressive state laws, imposes a laundry list of new restrictions on access to the ballot, including eliminating same-day registration, cutting early voting, easing campaign contribution limits, and expanding the mechanisms for alleging voter fraud. In remarks saying he would sign the bill, McCrory focused on his support for the bill’s voter ID requirement — a particularly suppressive and discriminatory policy that McCrory has long supported. But when asked by an Associated Press reporter about another provision in the bill to limit new voter registration opportunities, McCrory said, “I don’t know enough. I’m sorry. I haven’t read that portion of the bill.”
McCrory also dodged questions about two other elements of the bill that restrict early voting and end same-day registration, choosing instead to tout new campaign contribution limits, and pointing to an amendment — added by Democrats — that would expand early voting hours to make up for the limited early voting days.
When a reporter repeated the original question, McCrory said same-day registration concerns him because of the “possibility for abuse.” He added: “There’s plenty of opportunity for voter registration — online, off-line, through many methods. I thought that was a fair system before, and I think it’s a fair system now.” The Associated Press pointed out that North Carolina has no online voter registration, although voters can download a form online and print it out
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision that effectively disables federal oversight of states with a history of voting discrimination, states have raced to pass new restrictive voting laws. On Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder said he would challenge a voter ID law in Texas under another provision of the VRA not affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling. Holder hinted he would pursue similar actions against other states with restrictive laws, saying, “This is the department’s first action to protect voting rights [after the Supreme Court’s ruling]. … But it will not be our last.”
By: Nicole Flatow, Think Progress, July 28, 2013
“Your Call Republicans”: Either Job Creation Is The Top Priority Or It Isn’t
I’d very nearly given up trying to convince the political world that sequestration cuts still matter. But then yesterday, something changed my mind.
For those who still care about the policy that was designed to hurt the country on purpose, there’s been quite a bit of news lately, all of it showing the sequester doing what it was intended to do. In addition to the voluminous list of documented problems, just over the last few days we’ve gotten a better sense of the ways in which the policy is hurting the military, public schools, parks, and the justice system. The poor and minorities are disproportionately suffering.
Did the political world care about these stories? Not really. Generally speaking, the slow-motion disaster on auto-pilot just keeps plodding along, with little more than indifference from the Beltway.
So what made yesterday different? This did.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on Thursday estimated that keeping the spending cuts from sequestration in place through fiscal 2014 would cost up to 1.6 million jobs.
Canceling the cuts, on the other hand, would yield between 300,000 to 1.6 million new jobs, with the most likely outcome being the addition of 900,000, the CBO said.
The full CBO report, requested by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), is online here.
And why might this part of the sequestration story matter, even after the other elements of the story were largely ignored? Because it offers the political world an important test.
A month ago, several congressional Republican leaders, including House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), insisted publicly that job creation is their “number one priority.” If those claims were true, I have good news — now they can prove they meant it.
After all, we now have independent confirmation that this one policy, if it remains in place, will cost the nation about 1.6 million jobs through next year. End the policy, on the other hand, and the U.S. economy adds 900,000 jobs.
For those who say the job market is their “number one priority,” this is what’s commonly known as a “no-brainer.”
Let’s make this incredibly simple for Congress: either job creation is your top priority or it isn’t. If it is, then the House and Senate could take five minutes, scrap the sequester, and help the U.S. job market. A lot.
Is it really that simple? Well, yes, actually it is that simple.
But won’t that mean slightly higher spending levels? And won’t that mean slightly less deficit reduction?
Perhaps, but either job creation is your top priority or it isn’t. If someone says, “I’d like to end the sequester, but not if it means increased spending and higher deficits,” then we know, in a very literal sense, that the jobs are not their “number one priority.”
It’s a straightforward, binary choice. Your call, Republicans.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 26, 2013
“Speaking In The Abstract”: How The Right Talks About Race, Even When They’re Not Talking About Race
In 1982, Republican operative Lee Atwater gave an interview to Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University, in which he explained how the so-called “Southern Strategy” of focusing on race had become much more subtle by the 1980s.
Atwater, who apologized to Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis for the “naked cruelty” of his tactics before his early death in 1991, put it like this:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Some conservatives questioned whether the controversial words credited to Atwater were ever truly spoken by the man who helped George H.W. Bush win the presidency using tactics like the so-called “Willie Horton” ad. After the racially charged 2012 campaign — in which the Romney campaign used racial dogwhistles including insinuating that the president was trying to “take the work out of welfare” — James Carter IV, the son of the former president and the researcher who unearthed the “47 Percent” tape, convinced Lamis’ widow to release the audio above.
Atwater was in his own way echoing what President Lyndon B. Johnson once told his press secretary, Bill Moyers.
”I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” the president said. “If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you.”
In this summer of the George Zimmerman trial, Detroit going bankrupt and Republicans demanding huge cuts to food stamps, it’s clear that these old narratives are still embedded in our politics. And in the post-birther era, race is no longer, as Atwater said in 1982, “on the back burner.”
While the right wants to focus on black culture and “black-on-black” crime, they refuse to acknowledge that “white-on-white” crime is statistically nearly as common and happens much more often, as white people, who are the vast majority of the population, commit the vast majority of violent crimes in this country.
Negative aspersions on so-called “food stamps,” like Ronald Reagan’s old “welfare queens,” often carry a racial connotation. But government assistance in this country is actually used by ethnic groups pretty much in proportion to their share of the population:
African-Americans, who make up 22 percent of the poor, receive 14 percent of government benefits, close to their 12 percent population share.
White non-Hispanics, who make up 42 percent of the poor, receive 69 percent of government benefits – again, much closer to their 64 percent population share.
But these statistics fade into the background as Trayvon Martin instantly becomes a thug when he puts up his hood in the rain.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, July 28, 2013
“More Money, Less Voting”: North Carolina Passes The Country’s Worst Voter Suppression Law
I’ve been in Texas this week researching the history of the Voting Rights Act at the LBJ Library. As I’ve been studying how the landmark civil rights law transformed American democracy, I’ve also been closely following how Republicans in North Carolina—parts of which were originally covered by the VRA in 1965—have made a mockery of the law and its prohibition on voting discrimination.
Late last night, the North Carolina legislature passed the country’s worst voter suppression law after only three days of debate. Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog called it “the most sweeping anti-voter law in at least decades” The bill mandates strict voter ID to cast a ballot (no student IDs, no public employee IDs, etc.), even though 318,000 registered voters lack the narrow forms of acceptable ID according to the state’s own numbers and there have been no recorded prosecutions of voter impersonation in the past decade. The bill cuts the number of early voting days by a week, even though 56 percent of North Carolinians voted early in 2012. The bill eliminates same-day voter registration during the early voting period, even though 96,000 people used it during the general election in 2012 and states that have adopted the convenient reform have the highest voter turnout in the country. African-Americans are 23 percent of registered voters in the state, but made up 28 percent of early voters in 2012, 33 percent of those who used same-day registration and 34 percent of those without state-issued ID.
And that’s just the start of it. In short, the bill eliminates practically everything that encourages people to vote in North Carolina, replaced by unnecessary and burdensome new restrictions. At the same time, the bill expands the influence of unregulated corporate influence in state elections. Just what our democracy needs—more money and less voting!
“I want you to understand what this bill means to people,” said Representative Mickey Michaux (D-Durham), the longest-serving member of the North Carolina House and a veteran of the civil rights movement who grew up in the Jim Crow South. “We have fought for, died for and struggled for our right to vote. You can take these 57 pages of abomination and confine them to the streets of Hell for all eternity.”
Here are the details of everything bad about the ball, via North Carolina Policy Watch. It’s a very long list:
The end of pre-registration for 16 & 17 year olds
A ban on paid voter registration drives
Elimination of same day voter registration
A provision allowing voters to be challenged by any registered voter of the county in which they vote rather than just their precinct
A week sliced off Early Voting
Elimination of straight party ticket voting
A provision making the state’s presidential primary date a function of the primary date in South Carolina
A provision calling for a study (rather than a mandate) of electronic candidate filing
An increase in the maximum campaign contribution to $5,000 (the limit will continue to increase every two years with the Consumer Price Index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics)
A provision weakening disclosure requirements for ”independent expenditure” committees
Authorization of vigilante poll observers, lots of them, with expanded range of interference
An expansion of the scope of who may examine registration records and challenge voters
A repeal of out-of-precinct voting
A repeal of the current mandate for high-school registration drives
Elimination of flexibility in opening early voting sites at different hours within a county
A provision making it more difficult to add satellite polling sites for the elderly or voters with disabilities
New limits on who can assist a voter adjudicated to be incompetent by court
The repeal of three public financing programs
The repeal of disclosure requirements under “candidate specific communications.”
“We will see long lines, many citizens turned away and not allowed to vote, more provisional ballots cast but many fewer counting, vigilante observers at the polling place and all disproportionately impacting black voters,” says Anita Earls, executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice and a former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration. “This new law revives everything we have fought against for the past ten years and eliminates everything we fought for.”
The legislation should be a wake-up call for Congress to get serious about resurrecting the Voting Rights Act and passing federal election reform. Six Southern states have passed or implemented new voting restrictions since the Supreme Court’s decision last month invalidating Section 4 of the VRA, which will go down in history as one of the worst rulings in the past century. Voting rights groups (and perhaps the federal government) will soon challenge at least some of the new restrictions through a preliminary injunction, others sections of the VRA, or the state constitution. But if Section 5 of the VRA was still operable, North Carolina would have to clear all of these changes with the federal government and prove they are not discriminatory—practically herculean task given the facts. The new law would’ve been blocked or tempered as a result. Instead, the North Carolina legislature interpreted the Court’s decision as a green light for voter suppression, which it was, and made the bill as draconian as possible.
Move aside Florida, North Carolina is now the new poster child for voter suppression. The Moral Monday movement in the state is now more important than ever. Maybe someday we’ll look back at this period as the turning point when the nation realized just how important the Voting Rights Act was and is.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, July 26, 2013
“A Structural Feature Of Republican Politics”: GOP Obstruction As The New Normal In Washington
The bad news is that approval ratings for both the president and Congress are sinking, with voters increasingly frustrated at the bitter, partisan impasse in Washington. The worse news is that in terms of admiration for our national leaders, these may come to be seen as the good old days.
I’m an optimist by nature, a glass-half-full kind of guy. But try as I might, I can’t convince myself that Republicans in Congress are likely to respond any better to President Obama’s latest proposals on the economy than to the previous umpteen. I’m also pretty gloomy at the moment about the prospects for meaningful immigration reform — unless House Speaker John Boehner decides that passing a bill is more important than keeping his job.
“We should not be judged on how many new laws we create,” Boehner said Sunday. “We ought to be judged on how many laws that we repeal.” So much for faint hope.
My fear is that stasis has become a structural feature of our politics. Nothing lasts forever, but this depressing state of affairs could be with us for quite a while — and could get worse.
The public is not amused. Three out of four Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, while an NBC News-Wall Street Journal survey measured disapproval of Congress at a stunning 83 percent. Obama’s approval rating has slid to 49 percent, the Post-ABC poll found — better than the president’s political opponents are faring but hardly anything to cheer about.
Here’s the basic problem: The Democratic Party seems likely to grow ever stronger nationally while the GOP remains firmly entrenched locally. This means the stubborn, maddening, unproductive standoff between a Democratic president and a Republican majority in the House may be the new normal.
Demographic trends clearly favor the Democrats in presidential elections. Hispanics and Asian Americans, the nation’s biggest and fastest-growing minorities, respectively, both voted for Obama over Mitt Romney by more than 70 percent . This is not just a function of the GOP’s hostility to immigration reform, although that certainly doesn’t help. Republicans are also out of step with these voters on other issues, such as health care. And all too often they transmit a breathtaking level of hostility.
A case in point is the recent allegation by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) that for every young undocumented immigrant who becomes a valedictorian, “there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds — and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”
Criticized by his colleagues — ixnay on the igotrybay — King insisted his comments were “factually correct.” And the GOP’s outreach to Latino voters returned to square one.
None of this eliminates the possibility that Democrats will nominate flawed presidential candidates or that Republicans will nominate attractive ones. But all things being equal, the Democratic Party likely will go into presidential elections with a structural advantage. Eventually the GOP will be at pains to defend even Texas, the party’s only reliable mega-state.
Yet the Republican majority in the House, ensconced by clever redistricting, will be hard to dislodge. Perhaps Democratic registration and get-out-the-vote efforts can reshape the midterm electorate enough next year to recapture the majority. I wouldn’t bet the mortgage on it.
It may be, then, that we’re in for a much longer period of divided government in which the principal way that Republicans can affect federal policy is through obstruction. The whole “party of no” thing is more than a meme; it’s a logical — if somewhat nihilistic — plan of action. Or inaction.
Republicans know they cannot repeal the Affordable Care Act, for example, but they can hamper its implementation. They cannot impose their vision of immigration reform — all fence and no citizenship, basically — but they can ensure that no reforms are approved. They cannot choose their own nominees for federal judgeships, but they can block Obama’s.
Commentators who criticize the president for not hosting enough cocktail parties or golf outings for Republicans are ignoring political reality. He has tried being nice, he has tried being tough, he has tried offering to compromise, he has tried driving a hard bargain. Nothing works if Republicans are committed to blocking every single thing he seeks to do.
No wonder Obama chose to unveil his economic program while making what looks like a campaign swing. It will be the voters who eventually get us out of this hole. Unfortunately, that may take some time.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 25, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 