“Mercy Me!”: This Is How Fox Reacts When Democrats Talk About Racism In The South
News Flash: The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans.
And now that some Democrats are daring to point that out, in ads and interviews, the media is grabbing its smelling salts.
Mercy me! they’re crying—it’s unseemly for Southern candidates to mention that black people face discrimination, voter suppression and even violence in the Old Confederacy.
In an interview yesterday, Chuck Todd asked Senator Mary Landrieu, now locked in a tight race in Louisiana, “Why does President Obama have a hard time in Louisiana?” Fossil-fuel hawk Landrieu first cited Obama’s moratorium on off-shore drilling after the BP disaster, which she said put a lot of people out of business. Then, she ventured:
I’ll be very, very honest with you. The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans. It’s been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader.
“Why is she talking like this?” Fox News host Bill Hemmer asked incredulously this morning. A guest came on to explain, “She is excusing her poor performance by blaming voters.”
It can’t be because it’s true.
Even the host of an Al Jazeera news show today, while not doubting the veracity of Landrieu’s comment, treated it like a gaffe, a bad one, and had an expert on to decide if Landrieu’s campaign was now doomed. (The verdict: maybe.)
More predictably, Republicans are shocked, shocked at Landrieu’s audacity. Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal called the remarks “remarkably divisive” and “a major insult” to Louisianans. “She appears to be living in a different century,” he said in a statement.
“Louisiana deserves better than a senator who denigrates her own people by questioning and projecting insidious motives on the very people she claims to represent,” State Republican Party Chairman Roger Villere said in a statement. “Senator Landrieu and President Obama are unpopular for no other reason than the fact the policies they advance are wrong for Louisiana and wrong for America.” And of course there’ve been demands that Landrieu apologize. (Do not do this, Mary.)
It’s not that people, left or right, shouldn’t object to Obama’s policies. But the claim that whites in the South, or elsewhere, hate Obama’s policies (many of which are Republican-bred) and are color-blind to his race is ludicrous. But they can get away with it in part because of the persistent myth that this is a post-racial America, the one the Supreme Court decided was so enlightened that it gutted the civil rights voting law and has allowed the voter ID laws in Texas to stand.
Right after making her “inflammatory” remarks about African-Americans, Landrieu went out on another limb and said of the South, “It’s not always been a good place for women to present ourselves. It’s more of a conservative place.” But even if Landrieu were pandering to blacks and women to get them to the polls, so what? Her statements are true and obvious. And this is an election.
The media have been similarly timid in accepting what’s true and obvious when it comes to covering the get-out-the-black-vote ad campaigns that cite Trayvon Martin, Ferguson and GOP hopes to impeach Obama. A front-page story in Wednesday’s New York Times described the various flyers and radio ads targeting African-Americans, especially in the South:
The images and words they are using are striking for how overtly they play on fears of intimidation and repression….
In North Carolina, the “super PAC” started by Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, ran an ad on black radio that accused the Republican candidate, Thom Tillis, of leading an effort to pass the kind of gun law that “caused the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.”
In Georgia, Democrats are circulating a flier warning that voting is the only way “to prevent another Ferguson.” It shows two black children holding cardboard signs that say “Don’t shoot.”….
In Arkansas, voters are opening mailboxes to find leaflets with images of the Ferguson protests and the words: “Enough! Republicans are targeting our kids, silencing our voices and even trying to impeach our president.” The group distributing them is Color of Change, a grass-roots civil rights organization.
In Georgia, the state Democratic Party is mixing themes of racial discrimination with appeals to rally behind the only black man elected president. “It’s up to us to vote to protect the legacy of the first African-American president,” one flier reads.
It’s not that the Times story necessarily agrees with conservatives that these ads are “race-baiting”—it’s the tone of strained, he-said/she-said “balance”:
That has led Republicans to accuse Democrats of turning to race-baiting in a desperate bid to win at the polls next Tuesday.
“They have been playing on this nerve in the black community that if you even so much as look at a Republican, churches will start to burn, your civil rights will be taken away and young black men like Trayvon Martin will die,” said Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican Party….
Democrats say Republicans need to own their record of passing laws hostile to African-American interests on issues like voting rights.
But the story doesn’t cut through the journalistic niceties until the very end.
For many African-Americans, feelings of persecution—from voter ID laws, aggressive police forces and a host of other social problems— are hard to overstate. And they see no hyperbole in the attacks.
“It’s not race-baiting; it’s actually happening,” said Jaymes Powell Jr., an official in the North Carolina Democratic Party’s African-American Caucus. “I can’t catch a fish unless there’s a worm on the hook.”
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, October 31, 2014
“Shame On Texas And The U.S. Supreme Court”: A Capitulation To Voter Suppressors Everywhere
In allowing Texas’ voter identification law to go into effect, at least for the November election, the U.S. Supreme Court last week showed the nation precisely what it meant in 2013 when its conservatives struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County vs. Holder.
It is hard to chronicle in a short space the ways in which the Texas law, one of the most discriminatory voting laws in modern history, runs afoul of constitutional norms and reasonable standards of justice. State lawmakers rammed through the measure, jettisoning procedural protections that had been used for generations in the state Legislature. By requiring registered voters to present a certain kind of photo identification card, and by making it difficult for those without such cards to obtain one, the law’s Republican architects would ensure that poor voters, or ill ones, or the elderly or blacks or Latinos — all likely Democratic voters — would be disenfranchised, all in the name of preventing a type of voter fraud that does not materially exist.
These lawmakers — and for that matter the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court judges who now have sanctioned the law’s implementation for next month’s election — were shown mountains of evidence on what the law’s discriminatory impact would be on minority communities. Witness after witness testified that the new law amounted to a poll tax on people who had, even in the deepest recesses of Texas, been able for decades to adequately identify themselves before lawfully casting their ballot.
What was Texas’ strongest argument against all this evidence? That a state may establish financial and practical hurdles that preclude the poor from voting so long as it — purportedly — does not discriminate against voters by race. For now, this nonsense is the law of the land in Texas.
And as Congress dithers over an amendment to the Voting Rights Act and state lawmakers continue to churn out legislation on voting that widens the nation’s divides, the high court’s ruling essentially endorses the following judicial construction — a capitulation, really, to vote suppressors everywhere — to be the law of the land in America: That even when a state with a long history of discrimination in voting practices is found to have intentionally discriminated against minority citizens by restricting their voting rights, even when a trial judge says so and even in the absence of a contradictory appellate finding on the scope and effect of that discrimination, the state still is entitled to implement those discriminatory practices in a national election.
The six Supreme Court justices who allowed the Texas law to go into effect did not write a single word about the trial judge’s extensive findings of intentional discrimination in the law’s creation or implementation. The 5th Circuit judges, who overturned that trial judge’s ruling, evaded the vital issue by noting, in passing, that those complicated issues could be resolved later, when the federal judiciary evaluated the case on the merits.
The rationale behind these hollow displays of justice is perverse, saying it would be more unfair now to force Texas to go back to the old voter identification laws, the ones that had worked well for decades, than it would be to require voters to get the new identification the law demands.
The swift passage of this Texas law — it was blocked by the Voting Rights Act until the 2013 Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County, then began to be hustled through the state Legislature on the very day that case was decided — is unassailable proof that intentional racial discrimination still exists in these jurisdictions. The trial judge so found, in page after page of documentation, that Texas state officials, emboldened by the Shelby County decision, devised a way to make it harder for blacks and Latinos to have their votes counted. Read her opinion for yourself.
Only three justices on the Supreme Court — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — had the courage to call the high court’s ruling the sham that it is. Ginsburg wrote in the dissent that there was ample proof the Texas law discriminates, and no proof that it doesn’t. There was ample proof, she wrote, that state officials relentlessly fought against amendments to the measures that would have ameliorated the discrimination, and no proof that the new restrictions will solve whatever perceived voter fraud problems lawmakers fear. About 600,000 registered voters could be disenfranchised, Ginsburg warned.
Some stoic commentators have noted that the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of the Texas law — that the justices may well strike it down next year, or the year after that, when it inevitably comes back to them following a ruling on the merits at the 5th Circuit. I don’t buy it. And even if this court ultimately does strike down this odious law, where precisely do the disenfranchised citizens of Texas in the November election go to get their votes back? Nowhere, which is the point of the Texas law and the ultimate effect of the judiciary’s shameful tolerance of it.
By: Andrew Cohen, The Los Angeles Times; The National Memo, October 24, 2014
“Confused Voter Or Disenfranchised Voter?”: In Texas, You Can Vote With A Concealed Handgun License—But Not A Student ID
Texans casting a ballot on Monday, when early voting begins, will need to show one of seven forms of photo ID. A concealed handgun license is okay, but a student ID isn’t. The Supreme Court on Saturday allowed Texas to go forward with this controversial voter ID law. A federal judge had previously struck down the law, arguing that it could disenfranchise 600,000 voters or a full 4.5 percent of registered voters, many of them black and Latino.
Critics say voter ID laws, especially the one in Texas, amount to voter suppression, because it can be both difficult and costly to get the required identification. In a powerfully worded dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagen, wrote, “The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.”
Saturday’s decision marks the third time this season that the Supreme Court has allowed a controversial voter law to take effect. The other two were about measures in Ohio and North Carolina. This may not seem surprising, given that the Roberts Court has struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, but the rationale for this (and the other decisions) may have been more about timing than substance—in particular, observing the precedent of Purcell v. Gonzalez, in which the Court has blocked last-minute changes in voting laws in order to avoid confusion. Still, what’s worse? A confused voter or a disenfranchised one? The latter, Ian Millhiser argued at ThinkProgress: “If a confused voter brings an ID to the polls that they do not need to have, they will still get to cast a ballot. But if the same voter mistakenly forgets their ID (or fails to obtain one) because they were confused and believed that their state’s voter ID law was not in effect, then they will be disenfranchised.”
Actual voter fraud, which is the problem that Republican legislation supposedly addresses, is difficult to find. Ginsburg noted that there were “only two in-person voter fraud cases prosecuted to conviction” in Texas in almost a decade. The consequences of voter ID laws, on the other hand, are much easier to track. According to the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, existing ID requirements reduced turnout in some states during the last presidential election, particularly among young and black voters. Now, imagine the impact is even larger, because it is spread over the 33 states that now require some form of photo ID to vote. The same report found that the costs of acquiring the needed ID ranged between $14.50 to $58.50 for 17 of the states.
By: Rebecca Leber, The New Republic, October 20, 2014
“An Affirmative Right”: Adding The Right To Vote To The Constitution
The Bill of Rights, as the name implies, lists a wide variety of privileges of citizenship that cannot be taken from Americans without due process. You have the right to free speech, you have the right to bear arms, you have the right to a fair trial, etc. The right to vote, however, isn’t mentioned.
In fact, though the Constitution offers some relatively detailed instructions on voting for president through the Electoral College, the document has far less to say about the right of Americans to cast a ballot in their own democracy. There are amendments extending voting rights to freed slaves, women, and 18-year-olds, and poll taxes are prohibited, but there’s no additional clarity in the text about Americans’ franchise.
Up until fairly recently, that wasn’t considered much of a problem – at least since the Jim Crow era, there was no systemic national campaign underway to undermine voting rights. But in the Obama era, the Republican campaign to suppress the vote has included restrictions without modern precedent, which in turn has started a new conversation about changing the Constitution to guarantee what is arguably the most fundamental of all democratic rights.
Matt Yglesias had a good piece on this yesterday.
When the constitution was enacted it did not include a right to vote for the simple reason that the Founders didn’t think most people should vote. Voting laws, at the time, mostly favored white, male property-holders, and the rules varied sharply from state to state. But over the first half of the nineteenth century, the idea of popular democracy took root across the land. Property qualifications were universally abolished, and the franchise became the key marker of white male political equality. Subsequent activists sought to further expand the franchise, by barring discrimination on the basis of race (the 15th Amendment) and gender (the 19th) — establishing the norm that all citizens should have the right to vote.
But this norm is just a norm. There is no actual constitutional provision stating that all citizens have the right to vote, only that voting rights cannot be dispensed on the basis of race or gender discrimination. A law requiring you to cut your hair short before voting, or dye it blue, or say “pretty please let me vote,” all might pass muster. And so might a voter ID requirement.
The legality of these kinds of laws hinge on whether they violate the Constitution’s protections against race and gender discrimination, not on whether they prevent citizens from voting. As Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier has written, this “leaves one of the fundamental elements of democratic citizenship tethered to the whims of local officials.”
All of which leads to the question about a constitutional amendment, making the affirmative right of an adult American citizen to cast a ballot explicit within our constitutional system.
For some in Congress, this isn’t just an academic exercise. TPM had this report back in May.
A pair of Democratic congressmen is pushing an amendment that would place an affirmative right to vote in the U.S. Constitution. According to Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), who is sponsoring the legislation along with Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), the amendment would protect voters from what he described as a “systematic” push to “restrict voting access” through voter ID laws, shorter early voting deadlines, and other measures that are being proposed in many states.
“Most people believe that there already is something in the Constitution that gives people the right to vote, but unfortunately … there is no affirmative right to vote in the Constitution. We have a number of amendments that protect against discrimination in voting, but we don’t have an affirmative right,” Pocan told TPM last week. “Especially in an era … you know, in the last decade especially we’ve just seen a number of these measures to restrict access to voting rights in so many states. … There’s just so many of these that are out there, that it shows the real need that we have.”
The Pocan/Ellison proposal would stipulate that “every citizen of the United States, who is of legal voting age, shall have the fundamental right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides.”
The proposed amendment did not exactly catch fire on Capitol Hill: after its introduction, the proposal picked up 25 Democratic co-sponsors; en route to being entirely ignored by the political establishment and the House Republican leadership. There’s still no companion bill in the Senate.
I would assume that Pocan and Ellison aren’t surprised by the reception, but as the “war on voting” intensifies, and the Supreme Court’s support for voting rights wanes further, it’s not hard to imagine the demand for their measure growing.
Indeed, a year ago, Norm Ornstein, one of the Beltway’s most respected political scientists, made the case for precisely this kind of constitutional amendment.
We need a modernized voter-registration system, weekend elections, and a host of other practices to make voting easier. But we also need to focus on an even more audacious and broader effort – a constitutional amendment protecting the right to vote…. [T]he lack of an explicit right opens the door to the courts’ ratifying the sweeping kinds of voter-restrictions and voter-suppression tactics that are becoming depressingly common.
An explicit constitutional right to vote would give traction to individual Americans who are facing these tactics, and to legal cases challenging restrictive laws. The courts have up to now said that the concern about voter fraud – largely manufactured and exaggerated – provides an opening for severe restrictions on voting by many groups of Americans. That balance would have to shift in the face of an explicit right to vote. Finally, a major national debate on this issue would alert and educate voters to the twin realities: There is no right to vote in the Constitution, and many political actors are trying to take away what should be that right from many millions of Americans.
That shift in balance is of particular interest. As Matt noted in his piece, “A constitutional right to vote would instantly flip the script on anti-fraud efforts. States would retain a strong interest in developing rules and procedures that make it hard for ineligible voters to vote, but those efforts would be bounded by an ironclad constitutional guarantee that legitimate citizens’ votes must be counted. A state that wanted to require possession of a certain ID card to vote, for example, would have to take affirmative steps to ensure that everyone has that ID card, or that there’s a process for an ID-less citizen to cast a ballot and have it counted later upon verification of citizenship.”
I’m generally skeptical of proposed changes to the Constitution, but that skepticism wanes in the face of a sweeping voter-suppression campaign, unlike anything in my lifetime, that shows no signs of abating.
Don’t be surprised if, in the near future, candidates for Congress and the White House are confronted with a simple question: is it time to add the right to vote to the Constitution?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 21, 2014
“Fair Housing Act”: The Next Assault On Civil Rights
Last Thursday the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in the case of Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project. The case concerns the “disparate impact” rule, a legal guideline embedded in the 1968 Fair Housing Act that says discrimination doesn’t have to be intentional to be discrimination. This rule has been at the bedrock of fair-housing enforcement for more than four decades.
Another way to understand disparate impact is this: It’s a way to confront the realities of racial inequality without trying to prove the motivations of an institution, organization, or landlord. In housing especially, it’s rare to get someone as explicit about his discrimination as Donald Sterling. More often, you must look for patterns of unequal results or unfair treatment that stem from “objective” or “neutral” criteria.
In United States v. Wells Fargo, for example, the Department of Justice sued the mortgage lender over its role in the subprime market. According to the suit, Wells Fargo brokers raised interest rates and fees for more than 30,000 minority customers, and encouraged black and Hispanic homeowners to take subprime loans even if they qualified for traditional financing. We don’t know if malice drove this policy, but under disparate impact guidelines, it doesn’t matter: The government can show concrete harm and act accordingly.
This is an expansive power, but given our history, also a necessary one. We built our housing markets on a structure of discrimination, from bias in lending and state-sanctioned segregation to exclusionary zoning and active attacks on minority homeownership. To fix this, you can’t just ban discrimination, you need a countervailing force; otherwise, inequality would reproduce itself.
Beyond this, there’s the simple fact that racial bias is still alive in vast areas of American life, and it’s a fool’s errand to root out racists—most people who discriminate are too smart to broadcast their prejudice. Disparate impact—backed by both courts and the present administration—is a vital tool in fighting these battles.
But it’s also controversial, with opponents who see it as subversive to equal protection. “Instead of promoting equal protection under the law,” wrote Ammon Simon for National Review in 2012, disparate impact “grasps at ‘ensuring equal results,’ treating people like depersonalized ‘components of a racial, religious, sexual or national class.’ ” Likewise, in his concurrence in Ricci v. DeStefano—an affirmative action case—Justice Antonin Scalia swings at the doctrine, calling disparate impact provisions in employment practices a “racial thumb on the scales” that forces discriminatory “racial decisionmaking.”
Scalia and the conservative bloc of the Supreme Court are hostile to almost all race-conscious policies—from affirmative action (which Justice Clarence Thomas once compared to segregation) to important parts of the Voting Rights Act—and want to end disparate impact as a federal tool. Last year they almost had a chance; a group of New Jersey residents challenged disparate impact in Mount Holly v. Mount Holly Gardens Citizens in Action, Inc., a fight over a neighborhood revitalization plan that plaintiffs claimed would dislocate and disproportionately harm minority residents. But the case was settled before it could reach the high court.
With the latest case, a settlement is unlikely. The court will hear disparate impact, and most likely—following Chief Justice John Roberts’ infamous declaration that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race”—end it.
It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of such a decision. In the last decade, with Roberts at the forefront, the Supreme Court has chipped away at the major provisions and policies of the civil rights era. With Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 in 2007, the Roberts court struck down voluntary integration efforts in Seattle; with Shelby County v. Holder, it struck down the preclearance formula for the Voting Rights Act, gutting the law and opening the door to voter suppression; and with Schuette v. BAMN, it gave Michigan voters free rein to block affirmative action through constitutional amendment. At the moment, it’s poised to uphold strict voter identification laws and—if the opportunity presents itself—strike at the core provisions of the VRA.
There’s a reason Justice Sonia Sotomayor swiped at Roberts in her now-famous Schuette dissent—the chief justice has launched an astounding assault on civil rights law that promises huge consequences for efforts against racial inequality. And indeed, Roberts is joined by a whole host of right-wing legislators and conservative intellectuals—perched at think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the misnamed Center for Equal Opportunity—all united in a “colorblind” vision of American life that doesn’t see a public role for fighting racial inequality, and often holds it as overstated or attributable to “culture,” not the accumulated effects of past discrimination.
What’s interesting is the degree to which this isn’t new. In fact, it sits parallel to our past, where large gains for minorities—and blacks in particular—sit flush with setbacks and challenges.
We don’t think of it this way in the popular imagination, but the United States had two periods of “Reconstruction.” The first came after emancipation, when freed slaves worked in alliance with sympathetic whites to rebuild the South and forge a new path after the Civil War. But weakened by President Andrew Johnson, it never came to fruition. Instead, it was destroyed by ex-Confederates who terrorized the South with violence and drove blacks out of political life. With the Democratic Party as their vehicle, these “Redeemers” would set the stage for Jim Crow, convict leasing, and the march of horrors that marked black life for the next century.
The Second Reconstruction was the civil rights movement, and—as historian Eric Foner writes in his magisterial book on the first Reconstruction, it marks a time when “the nation again attempted to come to terms with the implications of emancipation and the political and social agenda of Reconstruction.”
Where the first Reconstruction had politicians, the second had preachers (and later, again, politicians). And where the first gave us a new Constitution—through the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments—the second gave force to their provisions, through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. It’s these laws—and the court cases that followed—that dismantled Jim Crow and integrated blacks into American political life.
Outside the far, far fringes of American life, there’s no challenge to that inclusion. But as we see with large parts of the Republican Party—including today’s conservatives on the Supreme Court—there is a challenge to the race-conscious policies and measures we use to protect and secure the political participation of blacks and other minorities.
This attack has far more to do with partisan advantage than any racial animus—as Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott explained in his defense of the state’s voter ID law, the goal is to limit Democrats, not minorities. Still, the effect is the same: applying new state limits on participation that have their largest impact on minorities, with shrinking protection from the federal government.
In his 1883 ruling against the 1875 Civil Rights Act—which prohibited black exclusion from jury service and guaranteed equal treatment in public accommodations, public transportation—Justice Joseph P. Bradley took a stand that should sound familiar to contemporary opponents of so-called racial entitlements:
When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen, or a man, are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.
Replace “slavery” with “Jim Crow” and you have the popular conservative view of race and Constitution. And small setbacks aside, that view is on the march, with its crosshairs aimed at disparate impact and the Fair Housing Act.
Put another way, if the civil rights movement was Second Reconstruction, then—if we need a name for today’s push against its key measures—you could do worse than the Second Redemption.
By: Jamelle Bouie, Slate, October 10, 2014
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