“Denying And Ignoring The Realities”: For Some, The Name “Obama” Has Become A Code Word
Racial tensions in the United States have changed since Obama’s election as president, and for the worse. As judicial opinions since 2008 have revealed, both the word “Obama” and the president’s image have become tools for harassing and otherwise discriminating, in the workplace and in places of public accommodation, against blacks and against whites in romantic relationships with blacks.
For instance, while at a company picnic, one white employee sat down next to his co-workers, held a watermelon slice in his hand, and asserted, “I’m going to sit down to eat my ‘Obama fruit.’” In a different court case, a plaintiff complained that the company’s C.E.O. once said he had a “gift for you for all the Obama people outside” — while handing a rifle to another employee. In yet another case, a white employee derided an African co-worker, calling the co-worker “boy,” threatening his life and telling him he should take Obama back to Africa to vote for him.
For other individuals, President Obama’s election has become a basis for denying and ignoring the realities of racism, both conscious and unconscious, in our country. Soon after Obama’s election, conservatives such as Gregory Coleman, a Texas lawyer, argued that the election demonstrated the obsolescence of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — a point reiterated by the U.S. Supreme Court in its June decision invalidating a section of the act.
In fact, the results from three experiments by Stanford University researchers suggest that endorsing Obama enables some whites to feel more comfortable in favoring other whites at the expense of blacks. The Stanford researchers contended that, for these whites, supporting Obama seemed to reduce their fears about appearing racially prejudiced, giving them the “moral credentials” to exhibit favoritism toward other whites.
At least one case showed this phenomenon affecting the legal process. After admitting that he based his decision in a criminal matter upon the race of the defendant, a white juror later denied his admission. His decision could not have been racially motivated, he argued. Why he was incapable of racial bias? Because, he said, he voted for Obama.
By: Angela Onwuachi-Willig, The Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law, Opinion Pages, The New York Times, November 20, 2013
“Gaining Even More Traction”: GOP-Backed Voting Laws Target And Hurt Young Minority Voters
A new report released by the Advancement Project highlights the numerous ways “young voters of color” are affected by restrictive voting laws that have been adopted by Republicans in several states across the nation.
The millennial generation, which is now between 18 and 29 years of age, is significantly more racially diverse than prior generations. Thus, the report explains, laws that suppress the youth vote also suppress voters of color. Restrictive laws affect particular demographics – in this case, young African-American and Latino voters – in different ways; some produce abnormally long lines on which voters must wait just to vote, while others implement barriers to actually getting to the polls.
On Election Day 2012, polling places in Florida counties with especially high numbers of minority youth voters closed on average 86 minutes after the 7 p.m. closing time, as a result of long lines. The obvious danger is that this will discourage young voters from voting. Others may “not be able to wait many hours to vote in future elections.”
A similar situation also occurred in Pennsylvania during the 2008 presidential election. Though local election officials petitioned for a larger polling space to cover the Lincoln University – a historically black university – district, the state’s Chester County Board of Elections denied the request, forcing voters to endure 6- to 8-hour wait times in the original “inadequately sized polling location.”
Also in Pennsylvania, and other states such as Texas, strict photo ID requirements directly affect specific groups’ ability to vote. A survey included in the report compares the disproportionately implemented voter ID requirements in both states to states without such laws. In states without voter ID laws, 65.5 percent of young black voters and 55.3 percent of young Latino voters were asked to present photo identification – a significantly greater share than the 42.8 percent of young white voters asked to present the same form of ID. In states with voter ID laws, however, 84.3 percent of young white voters were asked to produce specific photo ID, as opposed to 81.8 percent of young Latino voters asked to do the same.
An even greater 94.3 percent of young black voters were asked to present ID.
Strict photo ID laws – which typically require a voter to present a state-issued driver’s license or non-driver ID – account for why 17.3 percent of young black voters and 8.1 percent of young Latino voters could not vote in the 2012 presidential election. Fewer than 5 percent of young white voters were not able to vote for the same reason.
The measure is especially effective because many young voters in general don’t have a driver’s license. Even those who do, but attend an out-of-state college, do not have a state-issued driver’s license, and obtaining a standard state-issued photo ID usually requires a birth certificate – an obstacle that makes it more difficult for young voters. Furthermore, a larger percentage of young white voters have different forms of ID than young black and Latino voters. The report also mentions that several states – including Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Kansas and Pennsylvania, among others – have even attempted to ban student photo IDs as voter identification.
In North Carolina, however, specific photo ID requirements are not the sole legislation hurting young minority voters; in August 2013, Governor Pat McCrory signed into law a ban on same-day voter registration during early voting – the law also decreases the early voting period by a week. Among other provisions, the law also eliminates pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds and a state mandate for voter registration in high schools. In October, a Republican precinct chair from Buncombe County, North Carolina, Don Yelton, admitted that the legislation hindered African-Americans’ and college students’ ability to vote.
According to Yelton, both demographics were targeted because they tend to vote Democratic.
These types of restrictive laws are only gaining more traction since June, when the Supreme Court struck down a crucial provision of the Voting Rights Act that required specific states known for passing discriminatory voting laws to first get “pre-clearance” from the federal government in order to change their voting laws.
The Advancement Project warns that “attacks on young voters” are “ongoing” and “threatening the voting rights of many across the country for future elections.”
The report also recommends “policy-makers and election officials…concentrate on positive measures that would help alleviate the woefully low percentage of voter participation rates seen…especially among young people, who are our future.” Besides eliminating laws that implement strict ID requirements, ban same-day voter registration and shorten early voting periods, the Advancement Project also suggests nationwide implementation of online voter registration, “uniform standards” for voting machines and poll workers, and institutionalizing voter registration.
Lastly, the report adds: “Congress must act immediately to update the Voting Rights Act.”
The problem, however, is not that politicians are unaware of how to increase voter turnout, but that there are many lawmakers who support these restrictive laws because they benefit their party.
By: Elissa Gomez, Featured Post, The National Memo, November 19, 2013
“This Is Sabotage, Plain And Simple”: The Unprecedented GOP Efforts To Undermine A Federal Law
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who’s never been the Affordable Care Act’s biggest fan, appeared on MSNBC yesterday to join the critical chorus. In reference to the Obama administration, the conservative Democrat said, “The bottom line is that they messed up, they messed up royally. There’s no excuse for this.”
The administration’s missteps have been well documented, and officials have earned much of the criticism they’ve received. But to say there’s “no excuse” is to overlook Republican sabotage efforts that have made a real difference.
Todd Purdum recently made the case, for example, that “calculated sabotage by Republicans at every step” is a “less acknowledged cause” of the rollout’s troubles. Jamelle Bouie added this week, “If Republicans have shown anything over the last four years, it’s that they’ll do anything to stop the Affordable Care Act, even if it amounts to legislative sabotage.”
We’ve talked before about the scope of these unprecedented efforts to undermine a federal law, which include blocking necessary resources needed for implementation, public misinformation campaigns, discouraging public-private partnerships, blocking Medicaid expansion, blocking CMS nominees, refusing to create marketplaces, and prohibiting “Navigators” from doing their jobs. But the campaign is arguably intensifying now.
Dana Milbank reports on House Republican leaders who emerged from their weekly meeting yesterday and tried to scare the bejesus out of Americans.
The Republicans’ scary-movie strategy has some logic to it: If they can frighten young and healthy people from joining the health-care exchanges, the exchanges will become expensive and unmanageable. This is sabotage, plain and simple – much like the refusal by red-state governors to participate in setting up the exchanges in the first place.
The quotes from House GOP leaders are rather remarkable. Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said health care reform may lead to identity theft; Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) falsely claimed “premiums are going right through the roof”; Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) warned that consumers who visit healthcare.gov may become victims of fraud; and Caucus Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said vulnerable constituents may be put “on the casualty list.”
Milbank added, “Let’s hope the new health-care plans have generous coverage for anti-anxiety medication.”
Let’s not forget that the difference between a lie and a falsehood is intent – if you know the truth and say the opposite because your goal is deceit, you’re lying. And for the most part, congressional Republicans, whose interest in helping provide greater health security for Americans is easily trumped by their interested in destroying a Democratic law, have been reducing to lying.
But for saboteurs, honesty and serious policy debate are easily sacrificed for the larger goal. Indeed, they’re a small price to pay.
Also note, we’re looking at quite a one-two punch from the far-right – on the one hand we see the Koch brothers and their allies urge the uninsured to stay that way on purpose, in order to advance conservatives’ ideological goals, and on the other we see congressional Republicans try to terrify the public in the hopes that people who stand to benefit from “Obamacare” steer clear of the system.
President Obama added yesterday, during an interview with the Wall Street Journal, that if both parties were “invested in success,” the rollout wouldn’t have been quite so rocky. “One of the problems that we’ve had is that one side of Capitol Hill is invested in failure and that makes the kind of iterative process of fixing glitches as they come up and fine tuning the law more challenging,” he added.
There’s no denying that the dysfunctional health care website matters, and the administration’s missteps deserve criticism. But Republican sabotage matters, too.
Kevin Drum recently explained, “No federal program that I can remember faced quite the implacable hostility during its implementation that Obamacare has faced. This excuses neither the Obama administration’s poor decisions nor its timidity in the face of Republican attacks, but it certainly puts them in the proper perspective.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 20, 2013
“The Real Roots Of The Filibuster Crisis”: This Is About Whether Barack Obama Is Legitimately The President Of The United States
We’re about to have ourselves a little filibuster crisis, and the only surprising thing is that it took so long. We’ve now reached a point where Republicans no longer accept that Barack Obama has the right, as president of the United States, to fill judicial vacancies. Unlike in previous battles over judicial nominations, we’re not talking about the nominees’ qualifications or their ideological proclivities. It’s merely a question of the president’s constitutional privileges. Republicans don’t think he has them. This is only the latest feature of a long descent for the GOP away from considering any Democratic president—but particularly this one—as a legitimate holder of the office to which he was elected.
There has never been a president, at least in our lifetimes, whose legitimacy was so frequently questioned in both word and deed by the opposition party and its adherents. Even today, many Republicans, including some members of Congress, refuse to believe that Obama was born in the United States. Right after he was re-elected, 49 percent of Republicans told pollsters they thought ACORN had stolen the election for Obama, a decline of only 3 points from the number that said so after the 2008 election, despite the fact that in the interim, ACORN had gone out of business. Think about that for a moment. How many times have you heard conservatives say that the Affordable Care Act was “rammed through” Congress, as though a year of debate and endless hearings and negotiations, followed by votes in both houses, followed by the president’s signature, was somehow not a legitimate way to pass a law? In short, we’ve seen this again and again: it isn’t just that Republicans consider Obama wrong about policy questions or object to the substance of one or another of his actions, it’s as though they don’t quite accept that he’s the president, and everything he does carries for them the taint of illegitimacy.
If that’s where you’re coming from, it seems perfectly justifiable to upend the norms that have traditionally determined how things work in Washington. One of those norms is that while it’s common to fight against the judicial nominees of a president from the other party, you have to at least have a gripe about each of those nominees. But Republicans are no longer bothering with that. The current argument is about three vacancies on the D.C. Court of Appeals, widely understood as the second most important court in the system, because it deals with many cases concerning government’s powers (four of the nine current Supreme Court justices came there from the D.C. Circuit). Republicans argue that by attempting to fill those vacancies, Obama is engaged in an unconscionable act of “court-packing,” and besides, the D.C. Circuit doesn’t have enough work to do anyway, so the seats should just remain empty.
Until there’s a Republican president, of course! Though they haven’t said so explicitly, here’s a suggestion for Capitol Hill reporters: Next time you’re interviewing a Republican senator who says he’s filibustering these nominations because the D.C. Circuit doesn’t have enough work to do, ask him if he’s willing to make a pledge, right there and on the record, to filibuster any appointment the next Republican president makes to that court. See what he says.
Anyhow, Harry Reid is now threatening to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominees altogether, something he can do with a simple majority vote. But he’ll need to get 50 of the 55 Senate Democrats to vote for it, and there’s a good deal of reluctance to do so, particularly since Democrats won’t be in the majority forever, and whenever they’re back in the minority they’ll want to have the filibuster for themselves. But according to recent reporting by Greg Sargent and others, Reid thinks he has the votes and is just about ready to pull the trigger if Republicans don’t relent on these three nominees.
But the threat of the “nuclear option” of eliminating the filibuster for nominees could be just a negotiating tactic. The outcome Democrats would probably most prefer is what happened the last time we went through this, in 2005. In that case the controversy was over a group of Bush appointees who were true radicals, none more so than Janice Rogers Brown, who calls the New Deal a “socialist revolution” and says things like, “In the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery.” That controversy ended with an agreement in which Bush got his nominees—Brown now sits on the D.C. Circuit—and Democrats promised to use the filibuster only in “extraordinary circumstances.” In other words, it was a complete win for the Republicans. The biggest difference between then and now is that Democrats never questioned whether Bush had the right to fill judicial vacancies; they had specific objections to particular nominees.
In the various flare-ups of the birther controversy, reporters would occasionally ask Republican members of Congress very basic questions, like “Do you think the President was born in the United States?” The answers were incredibly revealing. Some simply said yes, but others hemmed and hawed, saying things like “It’s not my responsibility to tell people what to think” or “I take him at his word,” as though there were still some doubt. It’s time they got asked the same kind of questions about this crisis. If you asked Republicans, “Does Barack Obama have the right to fill judicial vacancies?”, I honestly have no idea what they’d say. But it would be interesting to find out.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 20, 2013
“What Nonsense”: Blaming President Obama For Passing A “Partisan” Health-Care Bill?
Here’s one thing I absolutely cannot stand hearing: that President Obama is getting what he deserves now because he passed such a “partisan” health-care bill. The suggestion is truly beyond belief and, quite literally, totalitarian in spirit, in the way it flips the truth so perversely on its head, turning the perpetrated-upon into the perpetrator and the aggressor into the victim. As Obamacare flails, one hears the “partisan” line frequently these days on television and radio. More maddeningly still, the alleged liberals and fact-based reporters on various panels often permit it to go unchallenged. Let’s set the record straight.
Obama came into office trying to reach out to Republicans and their voters. Remember Pastor Rick Warren at the inaugural? Remember how the president met with pro-abortion rights and anti-abortion rights groups early on? (You may not, but he did.) He also tried to horse-trade with them on the stimulus. True, he would not compromise on a tax credit for low-wage workers that Republicans opposed. (Interesting to read this article in retrospect; Obama was trying to help here the later-famous 47 percent.) But he did offer movement on tax cuts, and the Senate did pass a Charles Grassley amendment about the alternative minimum tax. And, at the White House’s request, certain expenditures the White House thought would repel Republicans were stripped out in the hopes of winning GOP support. But that, of course, did not happen in any meaningful way.
In the late spring of 2009, Obama started talking health care. He sat down with Republicans over the summer. He invited a group of Republicans into his office and told them he’d put tort reform in the bill if it would get him Republican votes. They stared at him. Other administration officials met with Republicans a number of times to see if anything could be put in the bill to appease them. The answer was always no. Remember here that the Affordable Care Act is basically a Republican plan to begin with, as the individual mandate idea came from the Heritage Foundation. So you might have thought that some Republicans would be OK with that.
Outside the administration, Democrats in the Senate negotiated with Republicans for months. Those Democrats finally did decide, on August 17, that it was time to throw up their hands, and they reluctantly proceeded without Republicans. “Given hardening Republican opposition to Congressional health care proposals, Democrats now say they see little chance of the minority’s cooperation in approving any overhaul…” is how the Times opened its article on the matter. But it wasn’t for want of trying. Democrats tried, for ages.
Why did they stop trying? Maybe because of things like then-Sen. Jim DeMint’s vow July 9 to make health care Obama’s “Waterloo.” Or maybe Democrats took the hint July 16, when they heard Minority Leader Mitch McConnell say, “We’re doing everything we can to defeat it.” Or maybe it was July 22, when Orrin Hatch, once a reasonable conservative, walked out of the Senate negotiations and announced he would not back any bill. That was, of course, the summer of the Tea Party town hall madness.
It was obvious by then—really before, but certainly by the time of Hatch’s departure—that Republicans would never agree to anything about health-care reform. They would say Obama wouldn’t accept their ideas, and there would be about a half an iota of a smidgeon of truth in that protestation, but of course the reason Obama didn’t accept their ideas is that their ideas were far worse than what ended up in the bill. They put out a four-page set of broad principles in June 2009. Then they filled in some details, and the Congressional Budget Office went over it. Unsurprisingly, it was a joke. The CBO found that it would have increased the number of uninsured and raised premiums for millions. Oh, and get this: Under their plan, insurance companies could still have denied coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. Ending that is the main point of reform, and ending that is why reform is so hard.
So Republicans gave no support at all, by design, essentially from the beginning. And then they blame Obama for passing a “partisan” bill? It’s beyond Kafkaesque. It really is like an old communist secret-police trick: We will seize most of your farmland and then jail you for failing to live up to the production quotas.
And then they vote 40 times to repeal it. And then Kevin McCarthy, the No. 3 Republican in the House, goes on MSNBC on Thursday, and Chuck Todd asks him if the Republicans want the Affordable Care Act to fail, and he says: “Never.” Never! Can you imagine? Voting to repeal something 40 times is kind of an odd way for a group of people to express their desire to see it succeed.
At a moment when Obamacare is on the ropes, and in a country of people with memories shorter than Michele Bachmann’s future in public life, Republicans know that they can repeat such a dishonest talking point and get a fair percentage of Americans to believe Obama behaved like some raging partisan. The associated corollary point is that this was about his ego or some such nonsense.
Uh, no. Progressive-minded people have been wanting to pass universal health care in the United States for a century. Usually they were Democrats, although back in the day some were Republicans, including Teddy Roosevelt. It has been the major unmet policy goal of American liberalism for decades—not because Democrats want to overpower Republicans politically, but because Democrats want people to have access to health care. Republicans don’t. Since the policy goal makes utterly no sense to them, they assume everything is about politics. Obama wasn’t being “partisan.” He was fulfilling a long-held policy goal—and a central campaign promise, by the way. I thought we were supposed to like it when politicians keep their promises. But now that’s partisan, too, at least to people who see everything through partisan glasses.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 19, 2013
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