“Red, White And Untrue”: Romney’s Big Lie About Military Voting
No, Obama is not trying to restrict military voting in Ohio.
If Ferris Bueller taught us anything, it was this: If you’re going to lie or mislead, do it in a big, over-the-top kind of way. At least it’ll be memorable.
It’s a lesson Mitt Romney’s campaign took to heart this past weekend. But instead of stealing a Ferrari or taking over a parade, they opted for something much darker. Halfway through the general-election campaign, attacks from both campaigns have been so relentless as to make each one fade into a low background buzz. Getting something to cut through the noise is hard. So when President Obama’s campaign filed a lawsuit to restore the rights to all Ohio citizens to cast early ballots up until the Sunday before Election Day—a right that the Ohio legislature had restricted to active-duty military personnel casting their ballots in person—the Romney side decided to go all in with a charge so outlandish it was bound to capture attention.
“President Obama’s lawsuit claiming it is unconstitutional for Ohio to allow servicemen and women extended early voting privileges during the state’s early voting period is an outrage,” the Republican candidate’s Facebook message proclaimed. Next came a statement from the campaign: “We Must Defend the Rights of Military Voters.” Right-wing bloggers took it from there, and the outraged headlines came pouring forth. When 15 military groups filed paperwork to be interveners in the case, requesting that the Obama campaign’s suit be dismissed in court, the whole thing really caught fire.
After months of backing voting restrictions—like voter ID laws that could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands across the country—you almost have to admire the chutzpah of the Romney campaign for lashing out against Obama on the issue of voting rights, and accusing him of restricting military voters. Particularly because the charge is entirely untrue.
If there’s one thing that’s certain in Ohio, it’s that voters in the military will have the right to vote on the Saturday, Sunday, and Monday before the November 6 election—no matter what happens with Obama’s lawsuit. Active-duty soldiers who are stationed outside of Ohio still get to send in their ballots, too. It’s the rest of the state—including a much larger number of veterans and military families—whose early-voting rights the Obama campaign is suing to protect. The president wants to ensure that all Ohio voters can vote early, as they could in 2008. Ohio’s Republican leadership wants to keep it limited to active military—making voting harder for everyone else, and likely decreasing turnout among poorer and likely Democratic voters. But they still want points for patriotism!
While the motivations for the skirmish are almost entirely political, the fight will have a real impact on voters in one of the nation’s most fiercely contested battleground states. So let’s break it all down:
What exactly is the Obama campaign suing over?
Thanks to its status as a key swing state, many will remember the infamous Election Day lines at Ohio polling stations. After it got particularly horrendous in 2004, the state extended its early voting period to ease the pressure at the polls. Famously in 2008, black church congregations showed up en masse to vote for Obama on the Sunday before the election; around 93,000 Ohioans voted in the three days before the election. There’s nothing unusual about this: Across the country, early voting has been successfully adopted by most states as a way to increase turnout and make Election days go more smoothly. The extra days particularly help those without access to transportation or with inflexible job schedules—poorer voters who tend to vote Democratic.
But after Obama’s win, Republicans began promoting a voter-restriction strategy across the country, including Ohio. The state’s majority-Republican legislature passed a bunch of new voting laws in 2011. Among other things, they halted early voting on the Friday before the election; it had previously continued until Monday, the day before the election. But as the Washington Post explains, “there was a problem: The measures contained conflicting deadlines for military personnel and their families, who benefit from the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voter Act.” To resolve the conflict, Ohio’s secretary of state determined that while military voters would get to vote through Monday, the rest of the state would have an early voting deadline three days earlier. In other words, while an active-duty solider could cast a ballot on the Sunday before an election, a military veteran, like the rest of the state’s voters, could not.
And that’s where the lawsuit comes in?
Right. The Obama campaign argues that all state voters should have the same deadline: the Monday before Election Day. By creating two different classes of voters, the Obamacampaign argues, Ohio now violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. “Whether caused by legislative error or partisan motivation,” the lawsuit reads, “the result of this legislative process is arbitrary and inequitable treatment of similarly situated Ohio voters with respect to in-person early voting.”
The Romney campaign is charging that, by calling for equal treatment for all Ohio voters, the Obama campaign is saying that it’s unconstitutional for military voters to have extended early voting priviledges. That’s patently false. “They’re not asking for the court to somehow withdraw the rights of military and overseas voters,” says Sonia GIll, an associate council for the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “They’re asking for the rest of Ohioans to have the same rights afforded in-person military voters.”
Meanwhile, military voters overseas or in combat will not be impacted one way or another—they can still send in absentee ballots as always.
But if military voters aren’t being affected, why are military groups working to have the lawsuit dismissed?
Good question. Fifteen groups representing active soldiers have “intervened” in the Obama campaign’s suit, asking that the judge dismiss the case. The groups are afraid that the campaign’s argument will undercut privileges for members of the military: “Although the relief Plaintiffs seek is an overall extension of Ohio’s early voting period,” their motion to intervene states, “the means through which Plaintiffs are attempting to attain it—a ruling that it is arbitrary and unconstitutional to grant extra time for early voting solely to military voters and overseas citizens—is both legally inappropriate and squarely contrary to the legal interests and constitutional rights of [the military groups intervening].”
In other words, the government must be allowed to make accommodations to military voters that are not made for the rest of the population, even when the military voters in question are voting in-person in their state. (Calls to two of the groups in the suit were not returned.)
But the government already makes special accomodations for military voters—thanks in part to President Obama. He signed the Military Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act, which made a number of extra voting guarantees to servicemen and women overseas. For example, military bases now must have voter-registration services, and those serving overseas are allowed to send and receive their applications for voter registration and absentee ballots by email or fax as well as through the mail.
But when it comes to the lawsuit, it’s Team Obama versus a united military and Team Romney?
Hardly. When it comes to special privileges on U.S. soil, many have argued against the groups intervening in the Ohio lawsuit. Diane Mazur, a law professor at the University of Florida and a former Air Force officer, told Buzzfeed that the groups’ argument is “extremely misleading.” While military voters get special privileges when away on duty and voting absentee, Mazur says there’s no history of providing particular accomodations to military voters casting a ballot in person. “The idea that service member are fuller citizens than the rest of America is a disaster for military professionalism,” she says.
Jon Stoltz, who heads the group VoteVets, has been outspoken in support of the Obama campaign’s lawsuit. “What appalled me so much about the narrative in Ohio,” he said on a telephone call with reporters, “is that the Romney campaign is supporting legislation that actually denies 900,000 veterans in the state of Ohio the right to vote early.”
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, August 8, 2012
“A Blatant Attempt To Mislead”: Romney Falsely Accuses Obama Campaign Of Trying To Restrict Military Voting Rights
Mitt Romney attacked a lawsuit brought by President Obama’s campaign seeking the restoration of early voting rights for Ohio voters by falsely implying that Obama is trying to take away the early voting privileges for members of the military.
“President Obama’s lawsuit claiming it is unconstitutional for Ohio to allow servicemen and women extended early voting privileges during the state’s early voting period is an outrage,” Romney said in a statement Saturday.
Actually, the Obama campaign’s lawsuit, filed by the campaign in mid-July, explicitly asks a federal court to restore in-person early voting rights to all eligible Ohio voters on the three days preceding Election Day.
The suit does not seek to prevent members of the military from voting in person during that period, rather it seeks to force Ohio to give other voters (including, for instance, cops and firefighters) the same opportunity to vote.
Romney said in the statement that as president he would “work to protect the voting rights of our military, not undermine them.” He said that members of the military “make tremendous sacrifices to protect and defend our freedoms, and we should do everything we can to protect their fundamental right to vote.”
The Romney campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TPM on whether he believes cops and firefighters should also be allowed to vote in the three days before the election.
Obama’s campaign is fighting back, calling Romney’s statement a “blatant attempt to mislead” voters.
“This lawsuit seeks to treat all Ohio citizens equally under the law,” Obama for America attorney Bob Bauer said in a statement. “We want to restore the right of all to vote before Election Day.”
Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department has filed 10 lawsuits and reached nine settlements with various states to protect military voters under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA).
Late update: Obama for America Veterans and Military Family Vote Director Rob Diamond issued this statement:
“Mitt Romney and his campaign have completely fabricated a claim that the Obama campaign is trying to restrict military voting in Ohio. In fact, the opposite is true: the Obama campaign filed a lawsuit to make sure every Ohioan, including military members and their families, has early voting rights over the last weekend prior to the election. The case filed with the court could not be clearer on this point. The real story of what is happening in the Buckeye State is that Mitt Romney supports the Republican effort to stop people from voting by restricting their access to the polls. In 2008, more than 93,000 Ohioans utilized early voting in the three days before the election. In complete disregard of the will of Ohio voters expressed last year through the referendum process, the Republican legislature is attempting to remove from the vast majority of voters — including veterans of our armed services — the early voting rights they enjoyed in 2008. This latest Republican attack on rights of voters is shameful — and so is Mitt Romney’s endorsement of it.”
By: Ryan J. Reilly, Talking Points Memo, August 4, 2012
“Whistling Pass The Graveyard”: The Path To Amnesia, How To Forget On Memorial Day
It’s the saddest reading around: the little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two — those terse, relatively uninformative death notices: rank; name; age; small town, suburb, or second-level city of origin; means of death (“small arms fire,” “improvised explosive device,” “the result of gunshot wounds inflicted by an individual wearing an Afghan National Army uniform,” or sometimes something vaguer like “while conducting combat operations,” “supporting Operation Enduring Freedom,” or simply no explanation at all); and the unit the dead soldier belonged to. They are seldom 100 words, even with the usual opening line: “The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.” Sometimes they include more than one death.
They are essentially bureaucratic notices designed to draw little attention to themselves. Yet cumulatively, in their hundreds over the last decade, they represent a grim archive of America’s still ongoing, already largely forgotten second Afghan War, and I’ve read them obsessively for years.
Into the Memory Hole
May is the official month of remembrance when it comes to our war dead, ending as it does on the long Memorial Day weekend when Americans typically take to the road and kill themselves and each other in far greater numbers than will die in Afghanistan. It’s a weekend for which the police tend to predict rising fatalities and news reports tend to celebrate any declines in deaths on our roads and highways.
Quiz Americans and a surprising number undoubtedly won’t have thought about the “memorial” in Memorial Day at all — especially now that it’s largely a marker of the start of summer and an excuse for cookouts.
How many today are aware that, as Decoration Day, it began in 1865 in a nation still torn by grief over the loss of — we now know — up to 750,000 dead in the first modern war, a wrenching civil catastrophe in a then-smaller and still under-populated country? How many know that the first Decoration Day was held in 1865 with 10,000 freed slaves and some Union soldiers parading on a Charleston, South Carolina, race track previously frequented by planters and transformed in wartime into a grim outdoor prison? The former slaves were honoring Union prisoners who had died there and been hastily buried in unmarked graves, but as historian Kenneth Jackson has written, they were also offering “a declaration of the meaning of the war and of their own freedom.”
Those ceremonies migrated north in 1866, became official at national cemeteries in 1868, and grew into ever more elaborate civic remembrances over the years. Even the South, which had previously marked its grief separately, began to take part after World War I as the ceremonies were extended to the remembrance of all American war dead. Only in 1968, in the midst of another deeply unpopular war, did Congress make it official as Memorial Day, creating the now traditional long holiday weekend.
And yet, when it comes to the major war the United States is still fighting, now in its 11th year, the word remembrance is surely inappropriate, as is the “Memorial” in Memorial Day. It’s not just that the dead of the Afghan War have largely been tossed down the memory hole of history (even if they do get official attention on Memorial Day itself). Even the fact that Americans are still dying in Afghanistan seems largely to have been forgotten, along with the war itself.
As the endlessly plummeting opinion polls indicate, the Afghan War is one Americans would clearly prefer to forget — yesterday, not tomorrow. It was, in fact, regularly classified as “the forgotten war” almost from the moment that the Bush administration turned its attention to the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and so declared its urge to create a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East. Despite the massive “surge” of troops, special operations forces, CIA agents, and civilian personnel sent to Afghanistan by President Obama in 2009-2010, and the ending of the military part of the Iraq debacle in 2011, the Afghan War has never made it out of the grave of forgetfulness to which it was so early consigned.
Count on one thing: there will be no Afghan version of Maya Lin, no Afghan Wall on the National Mall. Unlike the Vietnam conflict, tens of thousands of books won’t be pouring out for decades to come arguing passionately about the conflict. There may not even be a “who lost Afghanistan” debate in its aftermath.
Few Afghan veterans are likely to return from the war to infuse with new energy an antiwar movement that remains small indeed, nor will they worry about being “spit upon.” There will be little controversy. They — their traumas and their wounds — will, like so many bureaucratic notices, disappear into the American ether, leaving behind only an emptiness and misery, here and in Afghanistan, as perhaps befits a bankrupting, never-ending imperial war on the global frontiers.
Whistling Past the Graveyard of Empires
If nothing else, the path to American amnesia is worth recalling on this Memorial Day.
Though few here remember it that way, the invasion of Afghanistan was launched on a cult of the dead. These were the dead civilians from the Twin Towers in New York City. It was to their memory that the only “Wall” of this era — the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan — has been built. Theirs are the biographies that are still remembered in annual rites nationwide. They are, and remain, the dead of the Afghan War, even though they died before it began.
On the other hand, from the moment the invasion of Afghanistan was launched, how to deal with the actual American war dead was always considered a problematic matter. The Bush administration and the military high command, with the Vietnam War still etched in their collective memories, feared those uniformed bodies coming home (as they feared and banished the “body count” of enemy dead in the field). They remembered the return of the “body bags” of the Vietnam era as a kind of nightmare, stoking a fierce antiwar movement, which they were determined not to see repeated.
As a result, in the early years of the Afghan and then Iraq wars, the Bush administration took relatively draconian steps to cut the media off from any images of the returning war dead. They strictly enforced a Pentagon ban, in existence since the first Gulf War, on media coverage and images of the coffins arriving from the war fronts at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. At the same time, much publicity was given to the way President Bush met privately and emotionally — theoretically beyond the view of the media — with the families of the dead.
And yet, banned or not, for a period the war dead proliferated. In those early years of Washington’s two increasingly catastrophic wars on the Eurasian mainland, newspapers regularly produced full-page or double-page “walls of heroes” with tiny images of the faces of the American dead, while their names were repeatedly read in somber tones on television. In a similar fashion, the antiwar movement toured the country with little “cemeteries” or displays of combat boots representing the war dead.
The Pentagon ban ended with the arrival of the Obama administration. In October 2009, six months after the Pentagon rescinded it, in an obvious rebuke to his predecessor, President Obama traveled to Dover Air Base. There, inside a plane bringing the bodies of the dead home, he reportedly prayed over the coffins and was later photographed offering a salute as one of them was carried off the plane. But by the time the arrival of the dead could be covered, few seemed to care.
The Bush administration, it turns out, needn’t have worried. In an America largely detached from war, the Iraq War would end without fanfare or anyone here visibly giving much of a damn. Similarly, the Afghan War would continue to limp from one disaster to the next, from an American “kill team” murdering Afghan civilians “for sport” to troops urinating on Afghan corpses (and videotaping the event), or mugging for the camera with enemy body parts, or an American sergeant running amok, or the burning of Korans, or the raising of an SS banner. And, of course, ever more regularly, ever more unnervingly, Afghan “allies” would turn their guns on American and NATO troops and blow them away. It’s a phenomenon almost unheard of in such wars, but so common in Afghanistan these days that it’s gotten its own label: “green-on-blue violence.”
This has been the road to oblivion and it’s paved with forgotten bodies. Forgetfulness, of course, comes at a price, which includes the escalating long-term costs of paying for the American war-wounded and war-traumatized. On this Memorial Day, there will undoubtedly be much cant in the form of tributes to “our heroes” and then, Tuesday morning, when the mangled cars have been towed away, the barbeque grills cleaned, and the “heroes” set aside, the forgetting will continue. If the Obama administration has its way and American special operations forces, trainers, and advisors in reduced but still significant numbers remain in Afghanistan until perhaps 2024, we have more than another decade of forgetting ahead of us in a tragedy that will, by then, be beyond all comprehension.
Afghanistan has often enough been called “the graveyard of empires.” Americans have made it a habit to whistle past that graveyard, looking the other way — a form of obliviousness much aided by the fact that the American war dead conveniently come from the less well known or forgotten places in our country. They are so much easier to ignore thanks to that.
Except in their hometowns, how easy the war dead are to forget in an era when corporations go to war but Americans largely don’t. So far, 1,980 American military personnel (and significant but largely unacknowledged numbers of private contractors) have died in Afghanistan, as have 1,028 NATO and allied troops, and (despite U.N. efforts to count them) unknown but staggering numbers of Afghans.
So far in the month of May, 22 American dead have been listed in those Pentagon announcements. If you want a little memorial to a war that shouldn’t be, check out their hometowns and you’ll experience a kind of modern graveyard poetry. Consider it an elegy to the dead of second- or third-tier cities, suburbs, and small towns whose names are resonant exactly because they are part of your country, but seldom or never heard by you.
Here, then, on this Memorial Day, are not the names of the May dead, but of their hometowns, announcement by announcement, placed at the graveside of a war that we can’t bear to remember and that simply won’t go away. If it’s the undead of wars, the deaths from it remain a quiet crime against American humanity:
Spencerport, New York
Wichita, Kansas
Warren, Arkansas
West Chester, Ohio
Alameda, California
Charlotte, North Carolina
Stow, Ohio
Clarksville, Tennessee
Chico, California
Jeffersonville, Kentucky
Yuma, Arizona
Normangee, Texas
Round Rock, Texas
Rolla, Missouri
Lucerne Valley, California
Las Cruses, New Mexico
Fort Wayne, Indiana
Overland Park, Kansas
Wheaton, Illinois
Lawton, Oklahoma
Prince George, Virginia
Terre Haute, Indiana.
As long as the hometowns pile up, no one should rest in peace.
By: Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com, May 24, 2012
“In Memoriam”: Joe Biden Recalling Dark Days After Losing Family, “It Can And Will Get Better”
Vice President Joe Biden, in a moving speech to families of fallen troops on Friday, recounted the dark days following the tragic deaths of his wife and daughter and talked about understanding thoughts of suicide.
“It was the first time in my career, in my life, I realized someone could go out – and I probably shouldn’t say this with the press here, but no, but it’s more important, you’re more important. For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide,” he said. ”Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts, because they had been to the top of the mountain, and they just knew in their heart they would never get there again.”
Biden said he would sometimes call family just to hear someone say that he could get through it, that he could make it through the grief. He recalled the day he got the news in 1972, a few weeks after he had been elected to the U.S. Senate for the first time at the age of 29.
“I was down in Washington hiring my staff and I got a phone call, saying that my family had been in an accident,” he said. “And just like you guys know by the tone of the phone call, you just knew. You knew when they walked up the path. You knew when the call came. You knew. You just felt it in your bones: Something bad happened. And I knew — I don’t know how I knew, but the caller said my wife is dead. My daughter is dead. And I wasn’t sure how my sons were going to make it. They were Christmas shopping and a tractor trailer broadsided them.
“In one instant, killed two of them and, well…” Biden said, his voice trailing off before finishing the thought.
He was angry, he said, angry they were gone, angry at God, and he recalled walking through the rotunda at the Capitol, on his way home to identify the bodies.
“And I remember looking up and saying, ‘God,’ I was, as if I was talking to God myself, ‘You can’t be good, how can you be good?’”
Biden said he was lucky to have the support of his family, but as the days and weeks unfolded, it sometimes wasn’t enough.
“There was still something gigantic missing,” he said. “And just when you think, ‘Maybe I’m going to make it,’ you’re riding down the road and you pass a field, and you see a flower and it reminds you. Or you hear a tune on the radio. Or you just look up in the night. You know, you think, ‘Maybe I’m not going to make it, man.’ Because you feel at that moment the way you felt the day you got the news.”
And he said well-wishers would express their condolences and often tell him that they knew how he felt, something he resented.
“You knew they were genuine. But you knew they didn’t have any damn idea, right?” Biden told attendees at the TAPS National Military Survivor Seminar and Good Grief Camp in Arlington, Va.. “That black hole you feel in your chest like you’re being sucked back into it.”
He said a phone call finally jolted him out of despair. It didn’t take away his grief but showed him a path through it. Biden didn’t identify the caller by name but said he was a former New Jersey governor whose wife had also died suddenly. The caller told Biden to start marking in a calendar each day how he felt, and that, after a few months, he would find that he still had dark days but that they would grow fewer and further apart.
“He said, ‘That’s when you know you’re going to make it,’’” Biden said.
Biden concluded his remarks with some advice: to keep in mind what late loved ones would have wanted and that loved ones who are alive still need you.
“Folks, it can and will get better,” Biden said. “There will come a day – I promise you, and your parents as well – when the thought of your son or daughter, or your husband or wife, brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye. It will happen.”
By: Donovan Slack, Politico, May 25, 2012
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