“Fighting Back On Voting Rights”: First The Struggle Will Begin In Texas, Then The NC Omnibus Voter Suppression Act of 2013
Attorney General Eric Holder has opened what will be an epic battle over whether our country will remain committed to equal rights at the ballot box. In a display of egregious judicial activism in late June, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. Holder made clear last week he intends to fight back.
The struggle will begin in Texas, but it won’t end there. “We cannot allow the slow unraveling of the progress that so many, throughout history, have sacrificed so much to achieve,” Holder told the National Urban League’s annual conference.
He wasn’t exaggerating the stakes. From the moment the Supreme Court threw out Section 4 of the act, which subjected the voting laws in states and jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to Justice Department scrutiny, conservative legislators in those places gleefully signaled their intention to pass laws to make it harder to vote. In addition, Texas re-imposed a redistricting map that a federal court had already ruled was discriminatory.
These hasty moves were unseemly but entirely predictable, proving that Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion in the case will become a Magna Carta for voter suppression. Without having to worry about “preclearance” from the Justice Department, legislators can go about their business of making it more difficult for voters who would throw them out of office to reach the polls — and of drawing racially gerrymandered districts that prolong their tenure. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg understood a logic here that escaped Roberts. “A governing political coalition,” she wrote in her dissent, “has an incentive to prevent changes in the existing balance of voting power.”
This in turn means that when a political party fares badly with minority voters, it will try to turn them away from the polling booths. That’s what segregationist Southern Democrats did in the past. Many Republican-controlled legislatures are doing it now.
Holder announced he was using Section 3, a different part of the Voting Rights Act that was left standing, to ask a federal court to re-subject Texas to preclearance. It is a less efficient way to achieve what the pre-gutted act allowed automatically, but it is the best that can be done for now. It would be better still if Congress reinstated a revised version of Section 4. In the meantime, the hope is to limit the damage of the high court’s folly — and perhaps also give other states pause before they rush into new discriminatory schemes.
“This is the department’s first action to protect voting rights following the [Supreme Court] decision, but it will not be our last,” Holder declared. His department is likely to move this week against the Texas voter-identification law, and to go to court eventually against other states that pass comparable statutes.
To get a sense of how bad these laws are, consider the bill Republicans rushed through both houses of North Carolina’s Legislature that should be called the Omnibus Voter Suppression Act of 2013. It reads like a parody written for Stephen Colbert’s show with its cornucopia of provisions that would make it as hard as possible for African-Americans, Latinos and young people to vote.
As the Charlotte Observer reported, it shortens the early-voting period, eliminates the opportunity to register and vote on the same day during that time, and ends pre-registration for teenagers 16 to 17. The bill also prevents counties from extending voting hours when lines are long — which they will be with the cutback on early voting days. It not only requires photo identification, but also narrows the list of what’s acceptable, eliminating college IDs, for example.
Oh, yes, and remember the old civic tradition of using all avenues to encourage people to register to vote, a favorite cause of that famously revolutionary group, the League of Women Voters? This bill would ban paid voter registration drives.
Throughout the world, our country proclaims its commitment to equal rights and broad democratic participation. We seem to be abandoning those ideals at home. You have to wonder what this will do to our witness on behalf of democracy.
It won’t shock you to learn that after Holder made his announcement, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas condemned the Obama administration for showing an “utter contempt for our country’s system of checks and balances.”
Actually, what Holder’s move shows is an utter contempt for efforts to deprive our fellow Americans of their right to cast a meaningful ballot. It is a contempt that all of us should feel.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 29, 2013
“Hoping For The Best”: In The Race For The Future, Virginia Foxx And House Republicans Are Willing To Tolerate Defeat
There’s been a fair amount of talk on Capitol Hill recently about student loans and interest rates, which led to an unsatisfying compromise in the Senate. But as part of the larger discussion, a notable lawmaker said something interesting that stood out for me.
Getting American kids into college without saddling them with massive debt shouldn’t be the government’s job, according to a prominent House Republican and possible 2014 Senate candidate. “It is not the role of the Congress to make college affordable and accessible,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said Wednesday morning during a committee markup of legislation that would halt federal officials from regulating for-profit educational institutions.
Foxx likened federal standards for things like the definition of a credit-hour to totalitarianism.
Well, sure, of course she did. She’s Virginia Foxx.
But it’s worth noting that there’s nothing inherently incorrect about her views on the federal role in higher education. It’s an inherently subjective question — some people believe federal policymakers have a role in making college affordable and accessible, some don’t. Foxx has her opinions on the matter, I have mine.
I’ve long hoped, however, that this generates a larger conversation about the future of the United States as a global superpower. There’s a spirited competition underway, and we have real rivals who’d be delighted to see us settle for second place. To remain on top, we’re going to need an educated workforce and electorate, and with this in mind, it makes sense if Americans were represented by a Congress that prioritized access to affordable higher-ed.
Or perhaps the nation prefers Foxx’s vision: some states will help young people get degrees; some won’t; Congress doesn’t care. Under this approach, education is of relative importance, but it’s just not a national priority.
Long-time readers have no doubt seen me mention this before, but I often think about some specific remarks President Obama made in 2009. He’d just returned from a trip to East Asia, and Obama shared an anecdote about a luncheon he attended with the then-president of South Korea.
“I was interested in education policy — they’ve grown enormously over the last 40 years. And I asked him, what are the biggest challenges in your education policy? He said, ‘The biggest challenge that I have is that my parents are too demanding.’ He said, ‘Even if somebody is dirt poor, they are insisting that their kids are getting the best education.’ He said, ‘I’ve had to import thousands of foreign teachers because they’re all insisting that Korean children have to learn English in elementary school.’ That was the biggest education challenge that he had, was an insistence, a demand from parents for excellence in the schools.
“And the same thing was true when I went to China. I was talking to the mayor of Shanghai, and I asked him about how he was doing recruiting teachers, given that they’ve got 25 million people in this one city. He said, ‘We don’t have problems recruiting teachers because teaching is so revered and the pay scales for teachers are actually comparable to doctors and other professions.’
“That gives you a sense of what’s happening around the world. There is a hunger for knowledge, an insistence on excellence, a reverence for science and math and technology and learning. That used to be what we were about.”
Right. The United States used to be about a lot of things.
But as we discussed in April, many American policymakers have shifted their focus away from insisting on excellence and towards, well, a Virginia Foxx-like attitude. Countries like South Korea and China can have their hunger for knowledge; we’ll just keep cutting education spending and hope for the best.
We’re the wealthiest country on the planet by an order of magnitude, so maybe we can just coast for a while, neglecting key priorities. Maybe we can stop looking at areas like education, energy, health care, and transportation as national problems — the way our competitors do — and can instead hope states figure something out. Someday. With some elusive resources.
Put it this way: while some countries are insisting on excellence in education, our country shrugs its shoulders while kids get thrown out of pre-schools because of budget cuts and young adults get priced out of college. Which side of the ocean is preparing for the future?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 26, 2013
“A Structural Feature Of Republican Politics”: GOP Obstruction As The New Normal In Washington
The bad news is that approval ratings for both the president and Congress are sinking, with voters increasingly frustrated at the bitter, partisan impasse in Washington. The worse news is that in terms of admiration for our national leaders, these may come to be seen as the good old days.
I’m an optimist by nature, a glass-half-full kind of guy. But try as I might, I can’t convince myself that Republicans in Congress are likely to respond any better to President Obama’s latest proposals on the economy than to the previous umpteen. I’m also pretty gloomy at the moment about the prospects for meaningful immigration reform — unless House Speaker John Boehner decides that passing a bill is more important than keeping his job.
“We should not be judged on how many new laws we create,” Boehner said Sunday. “We ought to be judged on how many laws that we repeal.” So much for faint hope.
My fear is that stasis has become a structural feature of our politics. Nothing lasts forever, but this depressing state of affairs could be with us for quite a while — and could get worse.
The public is not amused. Three out of four Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, while an NBC News-Wall Street Journal survey measured disapproval of Congress at a stunning 83 percent. Obama’s approval rating has slid to 49 percent, the Post-ABC poll found — better than the president’s political opponents are faring but hardly anything to cheer about.
Here’s the basic problem: The Democratic Party seems likely to grow ever stronger nationally while the GOP remains firmly entrenched locally. This means the stubborn, maddening, unproductive standoff between a Democratic president and a Republican majority in the House may be the new normal.
Demographic trends clearly favor the Democrats in presidential elections. Hispanics and Asian Americans, the nation’s biggest and fastest-growing minorities, respectively, both voted for Obama over Mitt Romney by more than 70 percent . This is not just a function of the GOP’s hostility to immigration reform, although that certainly doesn’t help. Republicans are also out of step with these voters on other issues, such as health care. And all too often they transmit a breathtaking level of hostility.
A case in point is the recent allegation by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) that for every young undocumented immigrant who becomes a valedictorian, “there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds — and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”
Criticized by his colleagues — ixnay on the igotrybay — King insisted his comments were “factually correct.” And the GOP’s outreach to Latino voters returned to square one.
None of this eliminates the possibility that Democrats will nominate flawed presidential candidates or that Republicans will nominate attractive ones. But all things being equal, the Democratic Party likely will go into presidential elections with a structural advantage. Eventually the GOP will be at pains to defend even Texas, the party’s only reliable mega-state.
Yet the Republican majority in the House, ensconced by clever redistricting, will be hard to dislodge. Perhaps Democratic registration and get-out-the-vote efforts can reshape the midterm electorate enough next year to recapture the majority. I wouldn’t bet the mortgage on it.
It may be, then, that we’re in for a much longer period of divided government in which the principal way that Republicans can affect federal policy is through obstruction. The whole “party of no” thing is more than a meme; it’s a logical — if somewhat nihilistic — plan of action. Or inaction.
Republicans know they cannot repeal the Affordable Care Act, for example, but they can hamper its implementation. They cannot impose their vision of immigration reform — all fence and no citizenship, basically — but they can ensure that no reforms are approved. They cannot choose their own nominees for federal judgeships, but they can block Obama’s.
Commentators who criticize the president for not hosting enough cocktail parties or golf outings for Republicans are ignoring political reality. He has tried being nice, he has tried being tough, he has tried offering to compromise, he has tried driving a hard bargain. Nothing works if Republicans are committed to blocking every single thing he seeks to do.
No wonder Obama chose to unveil his economic program while making what looks like a campaign swing. It will be the voters who eventually get us out of this hole. Unfortunately, that may take some time.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 25, 2013
“Fostering Public Ignorance”: Health Care Reform Drives Republicans Stark Raving Mad
If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, it’s tempting to observe that congressional Republicans have gone stark, raving mad. My own GOP congressman, Rep. Tim Griffin, recently delivered himself of an opinion column boasting about having “voted more than 30 times to repeal all or parts of Obamacare.”
Only in politics does somebody expect praise for sheer futility.
Characteristically, Griffin’s column began by misrepresenting Senator Max Baucus. No, the retiring Montana Democrat didn’t call Obamacare a “train wreck.” In context, Baucus was complaining about Congress’s refusal to adequately fund programs helping people understand the law. With so much disinformation out there, he feared that public ignorance would lead to citizens initially missing out on its benefits.
But then fostering public ignorance is the whole GOP game plan at this point. Having been defeated in the House and Senate, failing to have Obamacare declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and being rejected by voters in the 2012 presidential election, disinformation and sabotage are all they’ve got left.
In that spirit, Griffin quoted The Washington Examiner, one of those tycoon-funded right-wing propaganda publications reporting that “cost estimates from 17 of the nation’s largest insurance companies indicate that health insurance premiums will grow an average of 100 percent under Obamacare, and that some will soar more than 400 percent.”
Yeah, well the results are starting to come in. In California and New York, the nation’s two most populous states that have set up health care exchanges, premiums have dropped sharply below Congressional Budget Office projections.
According to the New York Times, “State insurance regulators say they have approved rates for 2014 that are at least 50 percent lower on average than those currently available in New York. Beginning in October, individuals in New York City who now pay $1,000 a month or more for coverage will be able to shop for health insurance for as little as $308 monthly. With federal subsidies, the cost will be even lower.”
Similar savings have been achieved in California. They can be expected anywhere that large numbers of Americans can be persuaded to buy into the program and quit playing health care roulette.
But then that’s how insurance works—auto insurance, life insurance homeowners’ insurance, all insurance. By spreading the risk, you lower the cost to individual customers.
That’s the basic insight that led Benjamin Franklin to found the Philadelphia Contribution for Insurance Against Loss by Fire back in 1752. The more people purchase private health insurance through Obamacare, the lower their premiums and the lower the eventual cost to taxpayers.
Not to mention the enormous gain in personal freedom to individuals who can no longer be denied coverage due to “pre-existing conditions,” bankrupted by unexpected medical conditions, or forced to keep a job they dislike for fear of losing health insurance. Under Obamacare they can take it with them.
A certain kind of Republican, however, still doesn’t get it. Here’s GOP patriarch Ronald Reagan in 1961 inveighing against the dangers of “socialized medicine.” Unless Americans rejected it, he predicted, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”
And what was Reagan talking about? Medicare. Should it be enacted, he warned, the plan to provide for Grandma’s medical bills would lead to government seizure of all doctors’ offices and hospitals. An all-powerful state would dictate where Americans would live and what their jobs would be.
Of course the Gipper was only an actor, reading a tycoon-approved script. After he became president he vowed to protect Medicare, already one of the most popular and successful government programs in U.S. history—along with Social Security, another threat to freedom as the scripted Reagan saw it.
Some still do. A local Republican politician of my acquaintance once suggested that if I liked Obamacare so much I should leave the country. I responded that as the losing party, maybe he should emigrate.
And good luck finding a country without universal health insurance and with indoor plumbing.
It’s true that with Red State politicians dragging their feet and Republican congressmen whose offices routinely assist constituents to work out Medicare and Social Security problems telling reporters they’ll refuse to help with Obamacare, the short-term rollout could be bumpy.
Over time, however, the Republican right is setting itself up for epic failure. Partisan passions aside, people want and need reliable health insurance. Doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies need it as well.
This too: never mind the politicians. Health insurance companies are going to market Obamacare bigtime. Since the law mandates that 80 percent of premiums must be spent on benefits, the only way the insurance industry can enhance profits is by finding more customers.
It’s the American way.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, July 24, 2013
“The Mitch McConnell Strategy”: The Republican “Just Say No” Approach To Governing
As David Firestone wrote yesterday, the standards for cooperation in Congress have fallen so low that Senators pat themselves on the back whenever they manage to pass legislation. If it seems like an achievement when the Senate does its job — wow! A farm bill! — that’s probably because some of its members are committed to making it as dysfunctional as the House.
Take Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who is warming a seat held with distinction by Kay Bailey Hutchison. In about six months in office, Mr. Cruz has devoted himself to opposing everything President Obama wants. (The Mitch McConnell strategy of 2009.)
Mr. Cruz tried to block the nomination of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense, for example, by demanding that he prove that he wasn’t taking money from America’s enemies. He’s one of several Republicans who’ve tried to nullify agencies they don’t like — such as the National Labor Relations Board or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — by simply refusing to allow votes on Mr. Obama’s nominees.
This week, according to Robert Costa of the National Review, he’s been in Iowa, where he attended a meeting with conservative pastors. “Per pastors/attendees, Cruz told Iowa group this morn that conservatives must not fund the govt — ‘any CR’ — unless O’care ‘fully’ defunded,” Mr. Costa said on Twitter.
In other words, Congress shuts down the government, and presumably defaults on its debts, unless the Democrats agree to kill health care reform.
I presume Mr. Cruz thinks this is a winning strategy — at least among the Tea Party folks and other people on the far right. (Here’s a scary thought: Was he in Iowa because he’s thinking of a presidential run?)
But I’m not sure it’s going to play well with the rest of America, where contempt for Congress, and Congressional Republicans in particular, is evident in every poll. Some staunch conservatives are arguing that “just say no” is not working.
Jennifer Rubin, the right-wing commentator for the Washington Post, wrote on her blog yesterday that the House GOP has to come up with ideas of its own, starting with doing more than trying to delay or repeal “the noxious provisions” of the Affordable Care act:
“Without a GOP alternative to Obamacare, their complaints are empty and their votes unlikely to be taken seriously by voters. It is long, long past the point at which Republicans should have begun crafting and selling their alternative. To be frank, other than the budgets, when it comes to complex legislation (the details of tax reform, health care, education) this House has been weak. Where is the tax plan? Where is the market-based health-care plan? And of course we know they’ve been sitting on the sidelines in the immigration debate.”
Well put.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, Opinion Pages, The New York Times, July 19, 2013
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