“Voting Rights Should Not Precede Gun Rights”: Conservatives Would Let Felons Vote And Pack Heat
It’s an idea so incredibly crazy it just might work: Restoring voting rights to non-violent felons—if they get back their right to own guns, too.
For some tough-on-crime conservatives, the right to bear firearms is a right that is as fundamental as the right to vote. Capitalizing on this sentiment, the strategy goes, could lead to a larger compromise on felons’ rights.
“If someone asked me if I would rather vote for mayor or have a gun, I’d rather have a gun,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a signatory to the conservative Right on Crime criminal justice reform coalition.
Criminal-justice reform is a hot topic in Washington, D.C. this Congress, driven by the prospect of bipartisan collaboration in an era of divided government. Leading lawmakers in both Republican and Democratic camps have proposed legislation that would address police militarization, civil asset forfeiture, and mandatory minimum sentences.
Groups such as the Brennan Center and the ACLU have also been working on reenfranchising felons in some way.
Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, proposed a bill last year that would restore voting rights for nonviolent felons, joining the ranks of Democrats such as Sen. Ben Cardin who believe that at least some felons should have their voting rights restored.
However, advocates of criminal justice reform are nervous about Sen. Chuck Grassley, who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, and has not been gung ho about some of these ideas. He’s skeptical about reforms to mandatory minimums, for example, viewing them as a source of “stability in the criminal justice system.”
The thinking goes that Grassley—a senator with an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association—might be brought to the negotiating table on voting rights if the right to bear firearms were in the mix (Grassley’s office did not comment for this article).
It’s a long-shot idea, and in its embryonic stage. But tough-on-crime conservatives aren’t likely to budge on the restoration of voting rights to felons—who, they suspect, will not vote for their candidates if re-enfranchised—if they don’t get something in return.
“It is the obvious compromise,” Norquist said. “Many conservatives willing to restore voting rights would not be willing to suggest Second Amendment rights are second-class rights… In talking to conservatives, some are more or less excited about speeding up voting rights restoration. But all, when asked, agree voting rights should not precede gun rights.”
Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik should know something about the way the criminal justice treats felons—he’s also an ex-convict.
“[Lawmakers] should give at least equal attention to voting rights, Second Amendment rights… that you are deprived of as a result of the conviction,” Kerik told The Daily Beast.
A former cop, Kerik was appointed by the Bush administration to be an interim Iraqi minister of interior following the U.S. invasion, and was also once nominated to be U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security. He withdrew his nomination after he acknowledged failing to pay taxes for a nanny he hired. After pleading guilty to charges relating to this tax issue, he was sentenced to several years in federal prison.
The theft of oysters or harvesting too many fish commercially can make you a felon, Kerik said. And, as he too well knows, so can a federal tax charge.
“I possessed a firearm for this country for 35 years. I’ve used a firearm personally when my partner was shot in a gun battle… I was convicted of false statements on tax charges primarily relating to my children’s nanny, but I can never possess firearms again for the rest of my life. Is it fair? No.” Kerik told The Daily Beast.
Kerik is also planning to launch a nonprofit organization to press for criminal justice reform in the next several weeks.
Among libertarians working on the criminal justice issue, there is some initial support for the idea, even in its early stages.
“Obviously, we’d need to see details of any proposal, but we’d be very likely to support a bill that restored voting and Second Amendment rights to nonviolent offenders who made youthful mistakes,” said David Pasch, spokesman for Generation Opportunity, a Koch-backed youth advocacy group.
Clark Neily, a senior attorney at the libertarian Institute for Justice, said he has heard about the prospect of combining voting and Second Amendment in a broader effort to restore rights to some felons. He approves of rights restoration broadly, but disapproves of the idea of a political trade on the issues.
“If what is going on is trying to limit the extent to which people are dispossessed of political rights, great. But if it’s a political ploy, I find it distasteful,” he said. “If it is in fact a trade-off, I don’t like the idea of horse-trading when it comes to liberties, or constitutional rights.”
Much of the momentum for criminal justice reform on the right has been created due to renewed efforts by libertarians like the Koch brothers. However, many of the major groups operating in this policy area—such as the Charles Koch Institute, the Institute for Justice nor the Right on Crime coalition—have yet to take a formal stance on the restoration of Second Amendment rights to nonviolent felons.
Under federal law, felons lose their right to bear firearms, unless their rights are individually restored by a federal agency or through litigation. Felons are subject to the laws of their state when it comes to their right to vote after their time is served. In 11 states, felons lose their right to vote forever, while in two states felons continue to have the right to vote even while in prison. The remainder of the states have some sort of limitation on voting rights for felons.
For now, as the idea is being mulled, the legislative prospects for the trade-off are not good. If any compromise is made on the issue, it will likely be first formed off of Capitol Hill by outside criminal justice reform groups, away from the political poison pill of restoring rights to felons, even nonviolent ones.
“Tons of momentum in the public for criminal justice reform, but not nearly as much in the Republican caucus,” said a top Senate aide who works on the issue. “Many of the Republican caucus were elected when tough-on-crime was a driving force.”
Prison reform, civil asset forfeiture reform, and a juvenile justice bill are far more likely to pass in the current political environment, the aide said.
But Norquist argued that if progressive lawmakers are serious about helping felons rejoin society, the restoration of firearms rights should be on the table.
“If someone thinks [ex-felons] should not be trusted with a gun, why would you trust him with voting for the government, which is the legal monopoly on force?” he said.
By: Tim Mak, The Daily Beast, February 8, 2015
“Deluded And Dysfunctional, The Republicans Have Lost The Plot”: They’ve Run Out Of People To Blame For Not Compromising
Recently, in an effort to embarrass Republicans pandering to their scientifically challenged base, Senate Democrats proposed a series of votes on climate change. While most Americans and the overwhelming majority of scientists believe climate change is real and people are the primary cause of it, Republican voters are evenly divided on whether it exists at all, and reject the idea that we are responsible.
One amendment, by the Democratic senator Brian Schatz, stated simply that climate change is real and human activity significantly contributes to it. Republican senator John Hoeven offered a compromise: take the word “significantly” out. When asked why, he said: “It was about finding that balance that would bring bipartisan support to the bill.”
Reaching across the aisle in search of compromise and consensus is the professed goal of almost every candidate for public office in the US, particularly in recent times, when presidents have come to personify not unity but division. Over the past six decades, the 10 most polarising years in terms of presidential approval have been under either George W Bush or Barack Obama.
As a means, bipartisanship is, of course, an admirable goal: the more politicians are able to work together, put the interests of their constituents first and get things done, the better. The grandstanding, bickering and procedural one-upmanship that characterises so much of what passes for politics is one of the things that makes electorates cynical and drives down voter turnout.
But as an end in itself, bipartisanship is at best shallow and at worst corrosive. For it entirely depends what parties are joining together to do. This is particularly true in America, where constituencies are openly gerrymandered, both parties are funded by big money, and legislation is often written by corporate lobbyists.
Bipartisan efforts over the past couple of decades have produced the Iraq war, the deregulation of the financial industry, the bank bailout made necessary by that deregulation, the slashing of welfare to the poor, and an exponential increase in incarceration. As the hapless Steve Martin says to his hopeless travel companion, John Candy, in Planes, Trains and Automobiles: “You know, I was thinking, when we put our heads together … we’ve really gotten nowhere.”
Comity in the polity is overrated and should certainly not be mistaken for what is right or even popular. And even if it wasn’t overrated, bipartisanship is not always possible. Half of Republicans still believe the US did find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, over half believe climate change is a hoax, and almost half do not believe in evolution. There is a limit to how much agreement you can reach with people with whom you disagree on fundamental matters of fact, let alone principle.
But if the parties cannot work together, they are at least supposed to work separately. What has become evident since Republican victories in November’s midterm elections, which delivered them both houses of Congress, is that they don’t just have a problem compromising with Democrats – they cannot even compromise with each other. For the past four years they have revelled in their dysfunctionality, using Obama as a foil. Apparently unaware that brinkmanship is supposed to take you to the edge, not over it, they have shut down the government and almost forced the nation to default on its debts through a series a spectacular temper tantrums.
As the Republican congressman Marlin Stutzman pointed out in a particularly candid moment 18 months ago, when Republican obduracy caused a government shutdown, “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
These hissy fits have invariably been aimed at forcing Obama to undo the very things he pledged to do if elected, and to which Republicans have no plausible, coherent response: during his first term that was Obamacare; now it is immigration reform. Opposition, in short, had become not a temporary electoral state but a permanent ideological mindset in which their role was not to produce workable ideas but to resist them.
When they won the Senate as well as the House, they were supposed to work together to produce Republican legislation that Obama would be forced to veto, definitively exposing the real source of the gridlock. In fact, they are simply imploding under the weight of their own obstinacy. They’ve run out of people to blame for not compromising with them. So now they’re blaming each other.
“The Republicans are like Fido when he finally catches the car,” the Democratic senator Charles Schumer told the New York Times. “Now they don’t have any clue about what to do. They are realising that being in the majority is both less fun and more difficult than they thought.”
Their current internal feud was prompted by Obama’s executive order for modest immigration reform, which was enacted last November. It aims to prevent the deportation of up to 5 million undocumented immigrants living in the US, provide many with work permits, and shift the focus of immigration control to deportations of convicted criminals and recent arrivals.
The Republican-controlled House, where funding bills must originate and legislation can be passed by a simple majority, has voted for a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) bill that would eviscerate Obama’s reforms. But to get the bill through the 100-seat Senate they need 60 votes. Senate Republicans have only 54 seats and Democrats, who are unanimously opposed to the bill, keep filibustering it.
In a functional party the Republican Speaker, John Boehner, would work out what changes he could make to the bill to give the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, a fighting chance of getting the requisite majority to pass legislation they could both take credit for. Instead, Boehner has offered McConnell not compromise but commiserations. “He’s got a tough job over there; I’ve got a tough job over here. God bless him, and good luck.”
The House has sent the same bill to the Senate twice. The Senate has failed to pass it several times. In effect, they’ve treated the Republican-controlled Senate no differently to how they treated its Democratic predecessor, with similar results. Reflexively, House Republicans have their bottom lip extended and at the ready. “We sent them a bill,” representative Michael Burgess told Politico, “and they need to pass it. They need to pass our bill.” A tantrum is not far off. “Politically, [McConnell] needs to make a lot of noise,” says representative John Carter.
Senate Republicans, meanwhile, roll their eyes, count to 10 and wait patiently for the noise to give way to reason. “We can go through the motions, sure, but I don’t think we’re fooling anybody,” said Republican senator Jeff Flake about the prospect of another doomed vote. “Because we need [Democratic] support to get on the bill.”
If they don’t find a solution by 27 February, then the DHS will be shut down and Obama won’t have had a thing to do with it. The true source of the gridlock over the past six years will be clearer than ever. The emperor will be out there, twerking, in the buff.
“It’s not an issue of commitment, it’s a matter of math,” said the Republican senator John McCain – perhaps failing to realise that math, like science, is no competition for blind faith and bad politics.
By: Gary Younge, The Guardian, February 9, 2015
“A Rickety Scaffold Of Fictional History”: The Sham Lawsuit That Could Eviscerate Obamacare
Republicans in the House voted on Wednesday to repeal the Affordable Care Act—for the fifty-six time. After four years these show votes have become a tedious joke. But Wednesday’s action had bleaker implications, as it was cast in the shadow of a lawsuit that could undermine the healthcare law in fatal ways.
In a few weeks the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell, which contends that the text of the ACA allows the IRS to give subsidies only to people who purchase insurance through exchanges set up by their state, and not to those who rely on the federally run marketplace. If the plaintiffs prevail, some 7 million people in the thirty-four states that have declined to set up their own exchanges would lose the tax credits that subsidize their insurance. Coverage would likely become unaffordable for many of them; without enough people in the marketplace, the law could collapse into a “death spiral.” In human terms, a group of hospitals wrote in a brief supporting the government, a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs “would be a disaster for millions of lower- and middle-income Americans…. The ranks of the uninsured will swell again, with all that portends in the way of untreated illness and overwhelming debt.”
To build their case, the plaintiffs have erected a rickety scaffold of fictional history around a single phrase in the 906-page law. The section of the law in question concerns the calculation of subsidies available to people “enrolled in through an exchange established by the State.” The plaintiffs argue that lacking an explicit reference to subsidies available to people enrolled in the federal exchanges, the text indicates that subsidies are only available in states operating their own. Furthermore, the plaintiffs argue, this was not sloppy writing but instead “reflects a specific choice by Congress” to design the subsidies as a carrot to entice states to establish their exchanges and punish them if they failed to do so.
The lack of structural integrity in the plaintiff’s case has become increasingly obvious in the past week, thanks to a sheaf of briefs filed states, lawmakers, and the healthcare industry. In sum, there’s about zero evidence for the challengers’ version of history, and what proof they do muster is shoddy. For example, one brief cites former Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson, who played a defining role in designing the exchanges. According to the plaintiffs, Nelson thought it was “insufficient to merely allow states the option to establish Exchanges,” hence the need for a stick. But Nelson himself stated recently that he “always believed that tax credits should be available in all fifty states regardless of who built the exchange, and the final law also reflects that belief as well.”
It’s not hard to find conservative lawmakers, like Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who will argue now that “the language of the law says…subsidies are only available for states that set up state exchanges.” But the idea that subsidies might be withheld was never articulated by anyone during the congressional debate, nor in the months after the law’s passage—even when states began to signal they would not operate their own exchanges. Instead, the same Republicans who endorse the lawsuit now were passing laws and making statements that affirmed the idea that subsidies would be available in all states. Statements from legislators and state officials that back up the plaintiff’s version of legislative history were made only after the implications of that ambiguous phrase in the ACA began to circulate around right-wing thought shops like the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute.
If Congress did intend to use the subsidies as an incentive for states to set up their own exchanges, the fact that many state officials were clueless about the possible loss of tax credits is perplexing. None of the states “had reason to believe that choosing a federally facilitated exchange would alter so fundamental a feature of the ACA as the availability of tax credits,” reads a brief filed last week by nearly two dozen attorneys general representing red and blue states alike. “Nothing in the ACA provided clear notice of that risk, and retroactively imposing such a new condition now would upend the bargain the states thought they had struck,” it continues. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent spoke with a number of Republican state officials involved in the implementation of the ACA who confirmed that the possibility of losing subsidies was never part of discussions about whether or not to set up state exchanges.
The court could strike a blow against the ACA without fully accepting the strained version of history offered by the challengers. But as legal scholar Linda Greenhouse describes in The New York Times, doing so would require the justices to set aside their own principles and precedents. “The court has permitted itself to be recruited into the front lines of a partisan war. Not only the Affordable Care Act but the court itself is in peril as a result,” Greenhouse writes. “To reject the government’s defense of the law, the justices would have to suspend their own settled approach to statutory interpretation as well as their often-stated view of how Congress should act toward the states.”
It’s tempting to dismiss the lawsuit as a deeply silly partisan attack, akin to the House GOP’s repeated votes for repeal. Its basis may indeed be fluff. And yet it’s entirely possible that it will be this absurd case—not sabotage by Republicans at the state level; not lawsuits challenging the law on its constitutional merits—that dooms the signature achievement of the Obama years, at an immense human cost.
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, February 5, 2015
“In Boehner We Trusted”: Netanyahu Throws Boehner Under The Bus; Biden To Skip Speech
There’s been scuttlebutt all week about congressional Democrats skipping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming speech as a way to send a message about the party’s disappointment. The way in which Netanyahu and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) went behind President Obama’s back, and partnered to undermine U.S. foreign policy, does not sit well with many Dems, and even an informal boycott of his congressional address would be a big deal.
Those Democrats inclined to skip the Prime Minister’s remarks will apparently have some cover.
Vice President Joe Biden is expected not to attend a March 3 speech at the Capitol by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because he will be traveling abroad, Biden’s office confirmed to NBC News Friday.
It is not clear yet where Biden will be traveling at the time of Netanyahu’s speech, which has become controversial both because of its proximity to the Israeli elections and because it was planned by Republicans without prior consultation with the White House.
The second part is of particular interest. As the AP’s report notes, the Vice President’s office didn’t point to a specific commitment abroad on March 3, only that Biden is “expected to be traveling.” The office didn’t say where or why.
It’s hardly unreasonable to wonder if this is the diplomatic equivalent of, “I’m washing my hair – somewhere.”
Just as striking, meanwhile, is the degree to which Netanyahu’s administration appears to be throwing the Republican leadership under the bus.
A senior Israeli official suggested on Friday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been misled into thinking an invitation to address the U.S. Congress on Iran next month was fully supported by the Democrats. […]
“It appears that the speaker of Congress made a move, in which we trusted, but which it ultimately became clear was a one sided move and not a move by both sides,” Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Tzachi Hanegbi told 102 FM Tel Aviv Radio on Friday.
Or to put it another way, “We totally trusted Boehner to do this the right way; he didn’t; so blame him for this fiasco.”
We talked the other day about this increasingly messy problem, and the growing debate as to who screwed up more; Boehner or Netanyahu. These latest comments from a senior Israeli official suggest the Prime Minister is eager to tilt the scales in the GOP leader’s direction.
That said, in the same interview Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Tzachi Hanegbi suggested Netanyahu’s speech will go forward as planned. The question now is how many Democrats intend to show up.
I’ve generally been skeptical about whether a large-scale boycott would come together – a few House Dems have announced their intention to stay away, though it’s a pretty small group – but the news about Vice President Biden may very well change the entire dynamic for Democrats.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 8, 2015
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