“Another Dog Whistle To GOP Base”: The Latest Lie In The Push For Voter ID Restrictions
To the Republican supporters of laws that would treat the poll booth like an exclusive nightclub that asks for photo ID and other qualifications before allowing entry, the answer to why anyone would oppose this is simple: They must not want to vote badly enough.
This was the logic for Wisconsin State Senator Glenn Grothman who last week on MSNBC said, “I really don’t think they care that much about voting in the first place, right?” in response to a question about how African-American voters might be impacted by voter ID and early voting cuts.
This is not anomalous thinking among Republicans. Similar comments have been made by Republican state legislators in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Florida. In fact, they say these things so often publicly that you have to wonder if it’s some kind of dog-whistle to the more racially polarized portion of their voting base.
The idea that people of color don’t “care” about voting ignores how expensive it can be to meet the qualifications of voter ID laws to begin with. Those expenses are irrelevant only to those who can easily meet them. On Friday November 15th, a federal court trial over Wisconsin’s voter ID law concluded after two weeks of testimony from at least a dozen state residents illustrating how difficult it’s been to obtain the photo ID needed to vote. It also featured the testimony of state government officials who dismissed those residents’ burdens as easily surmountable.
The question of who’s right in that tug of war comes down to careful consideration of the racial and class contexts of the law. If you are a white male with a government job, you obviously are in tune enough with the law, and have the resources to meet it. But if you are not that … well consider the statistics:
- 78 percent of African-American men in Wisconsin between the ages of 18 and 24 do not have a driver’s license
- 66 percent of young African-American women in the same age range lack a driver’s license
- 57 percent of young Latino men aged 18 to 24, and 63 percent of young Latinas lack driver’s licenses
During the Wisconsin trial, statistician Leland Beatty testified that more than 300,000 registered Wisconsin voters did not have a driver’s license or state ID card in 2012—16.2 percent of them African-American registered voters compared to just 9.5 percent of registered white voters. For Latinos, over 24 percent lacked a driver’s license or state ID card. Beatty analyzed the same data for 2013 and found the same racial disparate impact.
The burden suffered by people of color in Wisconsin under a voter ID law is not an academic exercise in statistics, though. Real Wisconsin residents testified about how hard it is to comply with the law—a law unnecessary given the state went hundreds of years without it and yet still managed to earn the top score in election performance by the Pew Research Center last year. Despite that, the expenses that come along with the voter ID law were laid bare during the November trial, which is the first litigation that has happened under the Voting Rights Act’s Section Two since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the civil rights law this summer.
Lorene Hutchins, a 93-year-old, African-American woman born in Mississippi was able to retrieve her birth certificate from her home state only after her daughter Katherine Clark helped her through the arduous process. It cost them over $2,000 in expenses and legal fees to do so.
Ray Ciszewski, a volunteer for his church’s program that helps the homeless and those recently released from prison obtain birth certificates for jobs, and lately to vote, testified that it costs on average $20 for a Wisconsin birth certificate. Roughly 23 percent of the people he’s tried to help were unable to get their birth certificates for a number of reasons, he said during the trial.
Carmen Cabrera of the Latino non-profit Centro Hispano Milwaukee testified that many of their members encountered language barriers—in particular, a limited availability of Spanish-speaking DMV clerks—when they help them get state IDs. Not to mention, there’s limited access to the DMV offices around the state since most of them are open only on weekdays and close at 4:30 p.m. Anytime voters have to take time off from work or school to haggle with DMV operators, especially those who don’t speak their language, that is a cost voters have to bare.
Attorney General Kawski called these plaintiffs’ experiences “uncommon, bizarre and one-of-a-kind exceptions”—again, only bizarre to those who are privileged enough to not have to deal with the every day struggles of people of color and low income.
I encountered this same dynamic last year while covering the Pennsylvania court trial over its voter ID law, where poor people of color had to prove that they even existed, ID or not. Over two dozen witnesses, mostly black and Latino, provided account after account about how difficult it is for them to transact with the government over ID while state officials responded on the stand by placing those life stories in doubt. That case is still unresolved, pending a judge’s ruling
More stories about the costs and burdens of Wisconsin residents who lack ID are bound to surface. The Wisconsin state supreme court this week decided to hear two other challenges to the voter ID law filed by local NAACP and League of Women Voter chapters. Other Voter ID law challenges are waiting for their day in court in North Carolina and Texas—the latter of which is a protracted court battle that rivals only Wisconsin in terms of time elapsed without resolving the voter ID controversy. Texas’s law was stopped last year in federal court under a Voting Rights Act Section 5 challenge. When the Supreme Court invalidated Section Five’s coverage formula, Texas immediately reinstated the law, which ranks at the top of the nation with Wisconsin in terms of its voter restrictions. It is headed back to federal court, this time under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
The stakes for all of these voter ID trials are not only who may or may not show up to vote in 2014 and 2016, but also whether government officials will finally recognize the true costs and burdens of being poor, black and brown in America as illustrated in these court testimonies. It’s not that they don’t care about voting; it’s that too many obstructions have been placed in their way.
By: Brentin Mock, The American Prospect, November 25, 2013
“Many Rivers To Cross”: What To Get Rush Limbaugh And Other Racism Deniers For Christmas
Oh, hey, Jonah Goldberg and Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Rush Limbaugh, and all you right-wingers trying to whitesplain racism to Oprah Winfrey: The finale of “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” is on PBS tonight and I’m sure you won’t want to miss it.
You guys know the guy behind it, Henry Louis Gates Jr. Well, OK, you probably only know one thing about him: that he was the Harvard professor arrested by a Cambridge cop in 2009 after having trouble getting into his own house — arrested even after he’d proven he lived there. It took a beer summit with President Obama and Vice President Biden to make things sort of OK.
I wrote at the time about how Obama’s wading into the Gates controversy – he simply told the truth, that the police had acted “stupidly” in detaining and booking the Harvard professor in his own home – had “blackened” him for many white people. It coincided with a sudden plunge in the president’s approval rating among white voters, from the 60s down to the 40s, and he never really recovered.
Yet Gates was a terrible choice to play Angry Black Man, because he’s always been someone who’s treated white people as though they deserve the benefit of the doubt. Melissa Harris-Perry argued in the Nation at the time, “Gates is invested in black life, black history, black art, and black literature, but he has managed to achieve a largely post-political and even substantially post-racial existence.” Which is what made his arrest so shocking.
“Many Rivers to Cross” seems the ideal way for whites, even conservatives, to cross over to understand the enduring legacy of slavery (even you, Sarah Palin) and Jim Crow and the persistence of racism in the age of Obama. Gates doesn’t interview Oprah, but in the finale he does talk to the most illustrious black Republican of our time, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who gets teary talking about Obama’s victory. “I cried,” Powell confesses to Gates, and Gates gets choked up too.
Oh, I forgot: Colin Powell used to prove the Republican Party wasn’t racist; then he endorsed Barack Obama, and now you guys hate Colin Powell, and think he’s a racist.
Still, Gates does a lot of sly things to make everyone comfortable crossing these rivers with him. He’s kind of literally company, as we see him walk on a cane down roads and riverbeds where unspeakable racial tragedies took place. You’d be safe with him, Jonah Goldberg, strolling down a path that led to the savage quelling of a slave rebellion or a bridge where a Detroit race riot erupted. He admits his own fears. Gates walks Ruby Bridges back to the elementary school she integrated. “Ruby, were you scared?” he asks. “I would have been terrified.”
Yet he also shows how African-American achievement has always coexisted with African-American oppression, which would be a bracing corrective to the ignorance of insisting the ascendance of Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey mean racism is behind us. Oprah even has an American capitalist antecedent in Sarah Breedlove/Madame C.J. Walker, who was the first African-American millionaire, male or female (though Walker got rich marketing to black women where Oprah ministers to all of us).
Gates introduces us to black strivers and titans and culture heroes, from Walker to Don Cornelius to Vernon Jordan to Questlove; black meccas from St. Augustine, Fla., to Tulsa, Okla., to Detroit, all while telling the story of how far we still have to travel to equality. He shows how white Americans have always been able to love (and appropriate) black culture without giving up their racism. I’m not saying nothing has changed, nor is Gates, but the notion that Oprah’s own popularity disproves her charge of racism is itself disproven by American history.
I probably know more than the average white person about African-American history, which only ensures that I know less than I think I do. And I learned so much from “Many Rivers,” I am sorry to see it end. One thing I haven’t seen anyone say about it: There’s a gender balance that’s rare in history documentaries that aren’t about women’s history. I watched Episode 4 online back to back with “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” which I loved, but which only featured one female scholar, the great Melissa Harris-Perry.
Gates features dozens, from Annette Gordon-Reed and Thavolia Glymph to Michelle Alexander and Isabel Wilkerson. And he focused on the transformative stories and ideas of black women, from Walker to Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, Diane Nash, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Grace Lee Boggs (including my friend and mentor Angela Glover Blackwell of PolicyLink, where I’m on the board — but I was writing this piece already before I learned that).
I know Goldberg and Limbaugh and Hasselbeck and the other racism deniers aren’t likely to watch “Many Rivers.” And I know it’s simplistic to think a documentary, however artful, can change the minds of partisans who make a good living denying our history, but I can dream. I’d still try to sneak the whole series into the Christmas stocking of your racism-denying but “cultured” relatives this holiday season.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, November 26, 2013
“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
“The Coming Electoral Consequences”: Speaker Boehner Keeps Motivating The Wrong Base
The widely held assumption is that a variety of popular measures can pass the Senate and earn President Obama’s signature, but won’t become law because of the Republican-led House. And in plenty of instances, that’s true.
But on a variety of important proposals, the problem isn’t the House majority party, but rather, the willingness of the House GOP leadership to let the chamber vote up or down on the bills in question. The obstacle, in other words, isn’t 218 “no” votes; it’s House Speaker John Boehner’s disinclination to let the House exercise its will.
I can appreciate why the Speaker would rather kill popular bills than pass them – he promised his right-wing members he’d honor the manufactured “Hastert Rule,” and Boehner’s afraid of being deposed – but as Brian Beutler noted yesterday, the posture may well carry electoral consequences.
Big Senate bills in and of themselves won’t shake House Republicans out of their paralysis. It’s unrealistic to expect the House will address all of these issues and it’s possible they won’t address any of them. But the constituent groups to whom these issues matter – Latinos, the LGBT community, women and African Americans – won’t be confused about who killed them.
The flip side of the GOP becoming a whites-only party and crossing its fingers that Healthcare.gov fails is that Boehner is doing his damnedest to help Democrats receive their 2008 and 2012 coalitions in the coming midterm.
Remember, one of the key Democratic hopes going into the 2014 midterms – now 364 days away – is that congressional Republicans will motivate the Democratic base to show up for a change in a midterm cycle. How’s that going so far?
Swimmingly. Democratic candidates and campaign committees now intend to go to Latino communities and say, “Like immigration reform? Then help vote out the Republicans who killed the bipartisan reform package.” Dems intend to go to LGBT communities and say, “Like ENDA? Then help vote out the Republicans who killed the bipartisan bill.” Dems intend to go to African-American communities and say, “Like voting rights? Then help vote out the Republicans who made it impossible to reform the Voting Rights Act.”
And Dems intend to go to everyone and say, “Like the government shutdown and series of self-imposed crises? If not, then help vote out the Republicans who cooked up these schemes.”
The Democratic coalition is stable, but not unbreakable. By refusing to govern, Boehner and House Republicans are strengthening that coalition, boosting Democratic fundraising, helping Democratic recruiting efforts, and motivating the Democratic base.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 5, 2013
“The Summer Of Voting Discontent”: Texas’ Voter ID Laws Are Plain And Simple Discrimination
Last month, the Department of Justice sued Texas over the state’s discriminatory and punishing voter ID law, SB 14. The same law was blocked by a federal court last summer, which determined that a “law that forces poorer citizens to choose between their wages and their franchise unquestionably denies or abridges their right to vote.”
In a state and country where voters of color are significantly more likely to live in poverty than white voters, the impermissible choice that Texas has imposed on voters discriminates on the basis of class and race both. In the wake of Supreme Court’s decision earlier this summer in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, which immobilized a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Justice’s lawsuit represents the next phase in pushing back against measures that are intended to make it harder for people of color to vote, and less likely that our votes will count when we do.
Texas, like many states, passed SB 14 for the ostensible reason of combating in-person voter fraud, which Hillary Rodham Clinton recently called a “phantom epidemic.” But Texas has not been able to identify a single instance of in-person voter fraud. Texas has said that the law is not intended to discriminate against Black and Latino voters, whose communities represent 90 percent of the state’s population grown in the past decade, and yet the state’s legislature refused to accept any of the amendments offered that would have mitigated any of SB 14’s burdens that disproportionately affect voters of color — amendments that, for example, would have created a way for poor voters to get free identification, or would have accepted student IDs.
A single comparison of the accepted and not accepted forms of photo ID makes the priorities of the law clear: SB 14 will allow voters to present a concealed handgun license at the polls, but not a student ID from any of Texas’s public universities.
In addition to challenging the discriminatory ID law itself, the DoJ lawsuit also seeks to bail Texas in to a preclearance structure similar to the one that was lost in the Shelby County decision. Texas’s longstanding history of crafting discriminatory voting laws and schemes extends far past the voter ID law at issue now; in fact, Texas boasts the inglorious accolade of being the only state for which federal authorities have challenged at least one of its statewide redistricting plans after every decennial census since 1970.
As recently as last year, a federal court concluded that the state had drawn up its various redistricting plans with the intent to suppress the growing political power of African-American and Latino districts. A provision of the Voting Rights Act asserted in the DOJ’s case can bring back to Texas the preclearance defense lost in June’s Shelby County decision.
As the summer of our voting discontent draws to a close, it should serve as a powerful message that the first major voting lawsuit filed by the DOJ since the Shelby County decision goes directly to a state with one of the most well-documented histories of racial discrimination in voting, and seeks to use the full power of the remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act both to invalidate SB 14 and to bring Texas back under federal review.
By: Natasha Korgaonkar, Assistant Counsel of the Political Participation Group at the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, U. S. News and World Report, September 3, 2013
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