“Ugly And Un-American”: Republicans’ Long Term Strategy Is To Limit Voting Rights
According to political prognosticators, the presidential race is once again a toss-up, settling into a familiar pattern after weeks in which President Obama seemed to be gaining a modest lead. The pundits are wrong to suggest a new dynamic: The race has always been too close to call.
That’s always been the contour of this campaign — periodic gaffes and brilliant debate performances aside. Republican strategists have long expected a close election; they prepared for it years ago. How did they do it? With Machiavellian strokes, GOP leaders around the country passed laws designed to block the ballot for a small number of voting blocs that tend to support Democrats.
It’s no secret — and no surprise — that the strict voter ID laws in vogue in Republican circles target poorer voters, especially those who are black and brown. Black and Latino Americans tend to vote for Democratic candidates.
No matter how much the right yells “voter fraud,” its spokesmen cannot conceal an ugly and old-fashioned strategy: Suppress the vote. Keep poor people of color from casting a ballot. Deny to certain citizens a fundamental democratic right. There is virtually no in-person voter fraud at the polls, and that’s the sort of chicanery that voter identification laws ostensibly prevent.
Instead, voter ID laws are intended to help Republicans win elections. Because the GOP brain trust is excellent at executing a long-term strategy, its demographers saw the party’s weakness years ago and began to plan for it. As the nation’s ethnic minorities, especially Latinos, grow in number, the Republican Party would have to become more inclusive or face extinction.
President George W. Bush tried to make the GOP more inclusive, but he couldn’t persuade the nativists in his party to back comprehensive immigration reform. Instead, the Republican base became more exclusionary, more jingoistic, more suspicious of diversity.
That’s why voter ID laws became so important to the party’s future. In a deeply polarized country, important races are increasingly decided by very narrow margins. In 2000, the popular vote was essentially tied. In 2004, Bush won the popular vote by about 2.5 percentage points over John Kerry. In such tight contests, Republicans need not disenfranchise large numbers of voters — just a few.
The GOP insists it just wants to protect “ballot integrity,” but sometimes its lesser lights fail to stay on message. In June, Pennsylvania state House Majority Leader Mike Turzai, a Republican, proudly recited a list of accomplishments at a state party meeting. “Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it’s done. First pro-life legislation — abortion facility regulations — in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
Since young adults voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008, college students have also been the targets of stringent voter ID laws. In New Hampshire, for example, state House Speaker Bill O’Brien, also a Republican, pushed hard for a ban on college-issued photo IDs at the polls and an end to same-day voter registration in 2011.
Allowing students to register and vote on the same day, he later told a group of tea partiers, would simply lead to “the kids coming out of the schools and basically doing what I did when I was a kid, which is voting as a liberal. That’s what kids do — they don’t have life experience, and they just vote their feelings.”
Neither Turzai nor O’Brien mentioned voter fraud.
If protecting the ballot from con artists were the real issue here, Republicans would zero in on absentee ballots, which have been at the heart of most of the biggest voting scams over the last several decades. The Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by James Baker and Jimmy Carter, cited absentee ballots as the “largest source of potential voter fraud” in its 2005 report.
Curiously, rules for absentee ballots have been loosened in many states. That’s because of the widespread perception that those ballots of convenience are more likely to be used by Republican voters.
The Republican Party ought to be ashamed of this ugly and un-American strategy. For all its talk about the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution, it seems to have little respect for one of its basic principles: the right to vote.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, October 13, 2012
“Most Extreme Example Of Racial Gerrymandering”: Federal Court Blocks Discriminatory Texas Redistricting Plan
In December of last year, the Justice Department asserted that Texas’s redistricting plans for Congress and the state legislature violated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act by “diminishing the ability of citizens of the United States, on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group, to elect their preferred candidates of choice.” Today a three-judge federal court in Washington concurred with DOJ, writing that Texas’s redistricting plans were “enacted with discriminatory purpose” and did not deserve preclearance under Section 5.
Here are the relevant facts of the case: Texas gained 4.3 million new residents from 2000-2010. Nearly 90 percent of that growth came from minority citizens (65 percent Hispanic, 13 percent African-American, 10 percent Asian). As a result, Texas gained four new Congressional seats, from thirty-two to thirty-six. Yet, under the Congressional redistricting map passed by Texas Republicans following the 2010 election, white Republicans were awarded three of the four new seats that resulted from Democratic-leaning minority population growth. The League of Women Voters called the plan “the most extreme example of racial gerrymandering among all the redistricting proposals passed by lawmakers so far this year.”
Noted the federal court:
The Black and Hispanic communities currently make up 39.3% of Texas’s CVAP [current voting age population]. Thus, if districts were allocated proportionally, there would be 13 minority districts out of the 32 in the benchmark (39.3% of 32 is 12.6). Yet minorities have only 10 seats in the benchmark, so the representation gap is three districts. In the enacted plan, proportional representation would yield 14 ability districts (39.3% of 36 is 14.1), but there are still only 10 ability districts.
Texas Republicans went to extreme lengths in order to dilute and suppress the state’s booming minority vote, as I reported in The Nation in January (see “How the GOP is Resegregating the South”).
According to a lawsuit filed by a host of civil rights groups, “even though Whites’ share of the population declined from 52 percent to 45 percent, they remain the majority in 70 percent of Congressional Districts.” To cite just one of many examples: in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the Hispanic population increased by 440,898, the African-American population grew by 152,825 and the white population fell by 156,742. Yet white Republicans, a minority in the metropolis, control four of five Congressional seats. Despite declining in population, white Republicans managed to pick up two Congressional seats in the Dallas and Houston areas. In fact, whites are the minority in the state’s five largest counties but control twelve of nineteen Congressional districts.
Texas Republicans not only failed to grant new power to minority voters in the state, they also took away vital economic resources from minority Democratic members of Congress.
Reported the court:
Congressman Al Green, who represents CD 9, testified that “substantial surgery” was done to his district that could not have happened by accident. The Medical Center, Astrodome, rail line, and Houston Baptist University — the “economic engines” of the district — were all removed in the enacted plan. The enacted plan also removed from CD 9 the area where Representative Green had established his district office. Likewise, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who represents CD 18, testified that the plan removed from her district key economic generators as well as her district office. Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson of CD 30 also testified that the plan removed the American Center (home of the Dallas Mavericks), the arts district, her district office, and her home from CD 30. The mapdrawers also removed the district office, the Alamo, and the Convention Center (named after the incumbent’s father), from CD 20, a Hispanic ability district.
No such surgery was performed on the districts of Anglo incumbents. In fact, every Anglo member of Congress retained his or her district office. Anglo district boundaries were redrawn to include particular country clubs and, in one case, the school belonging to the incumbent’s grandchildren. And Texas never challenged evidence that only minority districts lost their economic centers by showing, for example, that the same types of changes had been made in Anglo districts.
The only explanation Texas offers for this pattern is “coincidence.” But if this was coincidence, it was a striking one indeed. It is difficult to believe that pure chance would lead to such results. The State also argues that it “attempted to accommodate unsolicited requests from a bipartisan group of lawmakers,” and that “[w]ithout hearing from the members, the mapdrawers did not know where district offices were located.” But we find this hard to believe as well. We are confident that the mapdrawers can not only draw maps but read them, and the locations of these district offices were not secret. The improbability of these events alone could well qualify as a “clear pattern, unexplainable on grounds other than race,” and lead us to infer a discriminatory purpose behind the Congressional Plan.
The same analysis applied to the state senate and state house maps as well. “Texas has failed to carry its burden that [its redistricting plans] do not have the purpose or effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group under section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,” the court wrote in its conclusion. An interim map drawn by a federal court in San Antonio in February will be used for the 2012 election.
Texas’s redistricting maps and voter ID law (which DOJ has also objected to and will soon be decided by a federal court in Washington) in many ways embody the conservative response to the country’s changing demographics. Instead of courting an increasingly diverse electorate, Republicans in Texas and elsewhere are trying to take away political power from minority voters and make it harder for them to vote.
Texas is one of seven GOP states that recently filed an amicus brief supporting a challenge to the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act before the Supreme Court. The state has already vowed to appeal the redistricting case to the Supreme Court, which could also hear Texas’s voter ID case if overturned. Texas, it should be noted, has lost more Section 5 enforcement suits than any other state. Today’s ruling is another black eye for Republicans in the Lone Star State.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, August 28, 2012
“The Temporary Glitter Of Expediency”: A “Party Of Principle” Will Not Occur On A Mitt Romney Watch
This will not be Mitt Romney’s first Republican National Convention. Forty-eight years ago this summer, 17-year-old Mitt went with his father, Michigan Governor George Romney, to the party’s 1964 convention in San Francisco. As the party prepared to nominate Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater for the presidency, and to embrace a platform that was even more extreme in its positions than those taken by its standard-bearer, Mitt watched as his father fought a valiant battle to prevent the party’s lurch to the right.
It was a battle of ideology, idealism and honor. George Romney, a committed supporter of the struggle for racial justice that he traced to Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, believed that Goldwater’s opposition to federal civil rights legislation meant that the presumptive nominee’s “views deviate as indicated from the heritage of our party.” He argued that the party needed to fully embrace the civil rights struggle and to explicitly reject the extremism of far-right groups such as the John Birch Society.
“There is no place in either of our parties for the purveyors of hate,” George Romney argued to no avail. The Republican Party rejected platform planks proposed by the elder Romney and the moderate wing of the Republican Party and went all-in for extremism. With that, he walked out of the convention, displaying the resolve that would lead the future president of the United States, Gerald Ford, to say “(George Romney) has never let the temporary glitter of expediency obscure the path which his integrity dictated he must follow.”
Even allowing for the overheated rhetoric of nominating speakers, there will be no such pronouncements this year regarding Mitt Romney. Nor will there be any meaningful efforts to dial back the extremism of a platform that one of its drafters, Oregon delegate and Tea Party activist Russ Walker, says “appears to be the most conservative platform in modern history.” The Washington Times echoed that assessment, as Republican U.S. Senate candidates such Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Laura Lingle of Hawaii scrambled to distance themselves from a platform defined by its:
* no-exceptions approach to abortion and a “personhood” section that seeks “legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children”
* militant opposition to marriage equality and a refusal even to acknowledge civil unions
* call for limiting the role of women in the military
* celebrations of election suppression schemes such as Voter ID laws and proof-of-citizenship requirements
* endorsement of Arizona-style anti-immigration laws
* support for overriding popular democracy and local lawmaking in the District of Columbia
* proposal to constitutionally restrict the ability of Congress to write budgets, with “exceptions for only war and national emergencies”
* pining for a return to the Gold Standard
* full embrace of soon-to-be vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s proposals to begin the process of undermining Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — along lines advocated in 1964 by Goldwater but opposed by George Romney.
Unlike his father, Mitt Romney will make no effort to guide his party back toward the mainstream. The man who just a decade ago was identified as the brave new champion of the centrism, even liberalism, that his father once espoused will make no demand for moderation. There will be no stance on principle. No show of integrity.
Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus admits that the platform is frequently at odds with Mitt Romney’s stated positions — if not with those of Paul Ryan. “This is the platform of the Republican Party; it’s not the platform of Mitt Romney,” says Priebus.
But isn’t Mitt Romney effectively the leader of the Republican Party at this point, in the same sense that Barack Obama is (as Republicans so frequently suggest) the leader of the Democratic Party? Why isn’t Romney exercising leadership? Why isn’t he saying that he will not run on a platform that is at odds with his stated positions on critical social policy, economic policy and international policy issues? Why isn’t he objecting to stances that “deviate… from the heritage of our party”?
The answer is not that Romney, who once declared “I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush,” who began his own political career as an enthusiastic supporter of abortion rights and gay rights, whose Massachusetts health-care reforms laid the groundwork for “Obamacare,” is some kind of right-wing purist.
Romeny’s lack of a coherent conservatism going into the 2012 race is what scared conservatives so much that they supported, literally, Anyone-But-Romney — from Michele Bachmann to Herman Cain to Newt Gingrich to Rick Santorum. Ultimately, Romney bent enough to the demands of the right to secure the nomination. And he threw conservatives a bigger bone with the selection of House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan, who is a true believer, as the party’s vice presidential nominee.
It is that determination to make himself acceptable to the right that distinguishes Mitt Romney from his father. And it is what would distinguish a Romney-Ryan presidency, were the ticket to prevail in November.
Mitt Romney defers to the extremism that George Romney battled as a matter of principle. Where George Romney defended the heritage of a great American political party, Mitt Romney will this week “let the temporary glitter of expediency obscure the path which his integrity dictated he must follow.”
By: John Nichols, The Nation, August 27, 2012
“Re-defining Presidential Politics”: Voting Women Is Key For Complete Gender Equality
The fight for women’s equality will stand still unless women vote. This election year is especially important as Congress will vote on issues key to women’s economic security and health. Today, on Women’s Equality Day, we all can take a step toward complete gender equality by encouraging our young women to vote on Nov. 6.
Since the height of the women’s rights movement, the percentage of eligible women who vote in presidential elections has declined. According to the Center for American Women and Politics, while 72% of eligible women voted in the 1964 presidential election, only 60% voted in 2008. This apparent complacency among young women with a right that our forebears fought so desperately to earn must be addressed.
Universities and colleges across the country are launching voter initiatives that speak to the young community. TurboVote is an online registration tool that sends email and text message reminders to students with the goal of registering record numbers of students in this presidential election year, a time seeing significantly lower youth enthusiasm than four years ago.
College campuses are a bright spot in the work toward women’s equality. Today, women have surpassed men in pursuit of higher education, graduating in greater numbers and with more degrees than their male counterparts. Another great higher education initiative is Vision 2020, a national campaign launched at Drexel University with the goal of achieving gender equality by 2020, the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.
When I was a young college instructor, such a goal would have been unimaginable. My department chair told me I would never be granted tenure. Apparently, I had embarrassed my male colleagues by publishing more papers than they had written collectively.
As a president of a Big Ten university and a former U.S. secretary of health and human services, I cannot help but feel proud looking back at overcoming such blatant discrimination. But I also cannot help feeling concerned about the many places in the country still dominated by males – whether it be corporate boardrooms, chambers of commerce or even our nation’s capital. I am proud of the strides we have made as a country, but we have a ways to go.
Women’s equality is a problem not just for women but for all Americans. The best policies are made when there is genuine diversity of thought involved in the process, which includes the distinct voice of women.
Today, as our country celebrates the legacy of those who fought hard for justice, opportunity and prosperity, let us recommit ourselves to the goal of gender equality in our country. And by voting this November, the nation will have no choice but to hear us. Ninety-two years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, we may finally see women redefine presidential politics.
By: Donna Shalala, President, University of Miami, JSOnline, August 24, 2012
“Subsidized By Taxpayers”: Pennsylvania Makes It Even Harder To Vote
Pennsylvania has gotten a lot of attention recently for its new restrictive voter ID law which was just affirmed by a state judge this week. However, that’s not the only barrier to voting that the Keystone State has imposed recently.
On Wednesday, Pennsylvania suddenly reversed course on implementing a system that allows voters to register and sign up for absentee ballots on the Internet. In an email, a state official said implementing the new system before the November election would be too difficult. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, this news came as a shock to the top elections official in Philadelphia, that state’s largest municipality.
In contrast, New York unveiled its new online system for voter registration this week, just before the voter registration deadline for the state’s September primaries. This was not thought to present any additional complications.
Online voter registration, which is now available in 13 states, does make it mildly easier for people to register to vote. But that’s not the only benefit. It also saves a lot of money.
The data from handwritten voter registration and absentee ballot forms has to be manually entered into computers. This takes time and costs money (not to mention creates a lot of potential for error). A form filled out on a computer can be directly input into a state’s voter database. There are estimates that New York’s law would lead to taxpayers saving at least $250,000 a year as a result.
The decision by Pennsylvania to hold off implementing its online system until after November is bad enough because it may make it more difficult for some to register and to vote. But the fact that this additional obstacle to voting will be subsidized by taxpayers makes it even worse.
By: Ben Jacobs, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 18, 2012
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