Rigging The Game Is Easier Than Earning Votes
It’s not unusual to find a fair amount of 2012 optimism in Democratic circles. The economy is improving; Republican overreach is causing voters to recoil; and President Obama will be on the top of the ballot again, giving Dems a boost they lacked in 2010.
But for all that cautious confidence, it’s worth noting that Dems can’t win if their supporters can’t vote. And with that in mind, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee reported this week on Republican efforts in state legislatures to rewrite voting laws “to make exercising one’s right to cast a ballot more difficult.”
After examining the plethora of bills introduced in statehouses this year that, among other things, would reduce poll hours and require voters to show photo ID, it seems clear that Republicans are trying to make it harder for certain groups to vote. The Advancement Project, an advocacy group of civil rights attorneys, called the push “the largest legislative effort to scale back voting rights in a century.”
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), Republican legislators have introduced bills that would diminish access to the voting booth in over 40 states. All of these Republican proposals focus on one apparent goal: restrict ballot access and shrink the electorate — often in ways that would decrease Democratic votes.
Many of the proposals are in the form of voter ID legislation, which would require potential voters to present specified forms of identification in order to cast a ballot. Republicans supporting these measures claim they’re necessary to prevent “voter fraud.”
Too bad that “voter fraud” isn’t a problem that actually exists.
By all appearances, GOP efforts fall under the “When in doubt, disenfranchise” category. The Republican-led efforts aren’t addressing actual problems with the integrity of the voting process, unless you consider likely Democrats participating in elections to be a “problem.”
Of particular interest are voter-ID efforts, which are likely to disproportionately affect African Americans, the poor, and voters under the age of 30.
In other words, state Republican officials are targeting — without cause — the constituencies least likely to vote Republican. What a coincidence.
But there are related GOP efforts to stand in the precinct door. Patrick Caldwell has reported on Texas Republicans’ proposals designed to limit access to the polls, including absurd new restrictions on registering new voters. There are also measures in states like New Hampshire to block college students from registering in their adopted home states because, as one prominent GOP leader put it, “Voting as a liberal. That’s what kids do.”
We’re talking about a systematic effort, which is unfolding nationwide for a reason. The easiest way to win an election has nothing to do with candidates, fundraising, or grassroots operations. It’s to stack the deck long before the election — rigging the system so that those most likely to vote the “wrong” way simply don’t get to participate. We saw some of this during the Bush era, relying on odious tactics like “voter caging,” but the strategy is clearly expanding and intensifying.
Ideally, if Republicans are so panicky about losing elections, they should field better candidates and adopt a more sensible policy agenda, not push schemes to block Americans from voting. Indeed, Republicans routinely pull a lot of stunts, but few are as offensive as these anti-voting tactics. It’s one thing to lie one’s way through a campaign; it’s more damaging to the integrity of the country to stop people who disagree with you from even having a say in the process.
In a close election, where a percentage point or two can help dictate the future of the country, just how damaging can these tactics be? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly
Ron Paul And The Civil Rights Act Of 1964
Last May, then-candidate Rand Paul’s (R) Senate campaign in Kentucky ran into a little trouble. The self-accredited ophthalmologist explained in newspaper, radio, and television interviews that he disapproved of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because the private sector should be allowed to do as it pleases. “[T]his,” Paul said at the time, “is the hard part about believing in freedom.”
Asked specifically by Rachel Maddow, “Do you think that a private business has the right to say, ‘We don’t serve black people’?” Paul replied, “Yes.” Seven months later, he won easily.
Almost exactly a year later, Paul’s father, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, explained his nearly identical beliefs about the milestone civil rights legislation.
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked the Texas congressman, “The ‘64 civil rights bill, do you think an employer, a guy who runs his shop down in Texas or anywhere has a right to say, ‘If you’re black, you don’t come in my store’?” And with that, Paul explained he would have opposed the Civil Rights Act, adding, “I wouldn’t vote against getting rid of the Jim Crow laws.”
Matthews noted, “I once knew a laundromat when I was in the Peace Corps training in Louisiana, in Baker, Louisiana. A laundromat had this sign on it in glaze, ‘whites only on the laundromat, just to use the laundromat machines. This was a local shop saying ‘no blacks allowed.’ You say that should be legal.”
Paul didn’t deny the premise, but instead said, “That’s ancient history. That’s over and done with.”
I’d note in response that this isn’t “ancient” history — millions of Americans are old enough to remember segregation, and millions more are still feeling the effects. For that matter, that era is “over and done with” precisely because of laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The country didn’t just progress by accident; it took brave men and women willing to bend the arc of history.
Let’s also not lose sight of the larger context. In 2011, the United States has a member of Congress and a Republican presidential candidate who publicly expresses his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And because we’ve grown inured to GOP extremism, this somehow seems routine.
Indeed, it’s unlikely Paul’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination will feel the need to condemn his remarks, and probably won’t even be asked about them.
By: Steve Benen, Political Animal, Washington Monthly, May 14, 2011
Of Course Newt Gingrich Supported A Health Care Mandate
Mitt Romney continues to face all kinds of heat over his support for a health care mandate, in large part because he continues to defend it. But Sam Stein notes this week that disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Romney rival for the Republican presidential nomination, was just as ardent an advocate of the idea.
In his post-congressional life, Gingrich has been a vocal champion for mandated insurance coverage — the very provision of President Obama’s health care legislation that the Republican Party now decries as fundamentally unconstitutional.
This mandate was hardly some little-discussed aspect of Gingrich’s plan for health care reform. In the mid-2000s, he partnered with then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) to promote a centrist solution to fixing the nation’s health care system. A July 22, 2005, Hotline article on one of the duo’s events described the former speaker as endorsing not just state-based mandates (the linchpin of Romney’s Massachusetts law) but “some federal mandates” as well. A New York Sun writeup of what appears to be the same event noted that “both politicians appeared to endorse proposals to require all individuals to have some form of health coverage.”
Neera Tanden, an aide to Clinton at the time who went on to help craft President Obama’s law, said she couldn’t recall exact speeches, but “strongly” believed that the both Clinton and Gingrich backed the individual mandate. Either way, she added, “Gingrich has been known as a supporter” of the idea for some time.
A simple newspaper archive search bears this out.
Gingrich endorsed the individual health care mandate over and over again, in public remarks, in media interviews, and in policy proposals. Ironically, he even explained the importance of the mandate in a book entitled, “Winning the Future.” Gingrich didn’t just grudgingly go along with the measure as part of some kind of compromise; he actively touted it as a good idea.
And he was right.
But that was before President Obama decided he also agreed with the idea, at which point the mandate became poisonous in Republican circles.
The point to keep in mind, though, is that Gingrich’s support for the idea isn’t at all surprising. Indeed, it would have been odd if Gingrich didn’t endorse the mandate.
For those who’ve forgotten, this was a Republican idea in the first place. Nixon embraced it in the 1970s, and George H.W. Bush supported the idea in the 1980s. When Dole endorsed the mandate in 1994, it was in keeping with the party’s prevailing attitudes at the time. Romney embraced the mandate as governor and it was largely ignored during the ‘08 campaign, since it was in keeping with the GOP mainstream.
In recent years, the mandate has also been embraced by the likes of John McCain, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Bob Bennett, Tommy Thompson, Lamar Alexander, Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Scott Brown, and Judd Gregg, among many others. Indeed, several of them not only endorsed the policy, they literally co-sponsored legislation that included a mandate.
During the fight over Obama’s reform proposal, Grassley told Fox News, of all outlets, “I believe that there is a bipartisan consensus to have an individual mandate” — and there was no pushback from party leaders. This isn’t ancient history; it was a year and a half ago.
Newt Gingrich touted the same idea? Well, sure, of course he did.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, The Washington Monthly, May 13, 2011
Deficits Still Don’t Matter To Republicans
Think there will eventually be a bipartisan deal to increase the public debt limit after an extended period of Kabuki Theater posturing? Maybe it’s time to think again.
Ezra Klein really hits the nail on the head in describing the “negotiations” as they stand today:
The negotiation that we’re having, in theory, is how to cut the deficit in order to give politicians in both parties space to increase the debt limit. But if you look closely at the positions, that’s not really the negotiation we’re having. Republicans are negotiating not over the deficit, but over tax rates and the size of government. That’s why they’ve ruled revenue “off the table” as a way to reduce the deficit, and why they are calling for laws and even constitutional amendments that cap federal spending rather than attack deficits. Democrats, meanwhile, lack a similarly clear posture: most of them are negotiating to raise the debt ceiling, but a few are trying to survive in 2012, and a few more are actually trying to reduce the deficit, and meanwhile, the Obama administration just met with the Senate Democrats to ask them to please, please, stop laying down new negotiating markers every day.If we were really just negotiating over the deficit, this would be easy. The White House, the House Republicans, the House Progressives, the House Democrats and the Senate Republicans have all released deficit-reduction plans. There’s not only apparent unanimity on the goal, but a broad menu of approaches. We’d just take elements from each and call it a day. But if the Republicans are negotiating over their antipathy to taxes and their belief that government should be much smaller, that’s a much more ideological, and much tougher to resolve, dispute. The two parties don’t agree on that goal. And if the Democrats haven’t quite decided what their negotiating position is, save to survive this fight both economically and politically, that’s not necessarily going to make things easier, either. Negotiations are hard enough when both sides agree about the basic issue under contention. They’re almost impossible when they don’t.
It’s worth underlining that “deficits” and “debt” don’t in themselves mean any more to conservatives than they did when then-Vice President Dick Cheney said “deficits don’t matter” in 2002. Every Republican “deficit reduction” proposal is keyed to specific spending cuts–without new revenues–and increasingly, to an arbitrary limit on spending as a percentage of GDP. Even the version of a constitutional balanced budget amendment that Sen. Jim DeMint is insisting on as part of any debt limit deal would have a spending-as-percentage-of-GDP “cap” (at 18%, as compared to about 24% currently) that would force huge spending reductions (you can guess from where since GOPers typically consider defense spending as off-limits as taxes).
Today’s Republicans are simply using deficits as an excuse to revoke as much of the New Deal/Great Society tepid-welfare-state system as they can get away with. And it’s really just a latter stage of the old conservative Starve-the-Beast strategy for deliberately manufacturing deficits in order to cut spending. Democrats should point this out constantly, and not let Republicans get away with claiming they are only worried about debt and fiscal responsibility.
By: Ed Kilgore, The Democratic Strategist, May 12, 2011
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