“Utterly Shocking!”: Just Like Dear Old Dad, Rand Paul Has Ties To Neo-Confederates
During his 2008 presidential campaign, then Texas Representative Ron Paul faced wide criticism for his newsletters—published as far back as the 1970s—which, at various points, were racist, homophobic, and anti-semitic. One newsletter from 1992 claimed that nearly all black men in Washington D.C. are “Semi-Criminal or Entirely Criminal”—while another from 1994 claimed that gays were “maliciously” infecting people with AIDS. Paul defended himself by saying that the newsletters were produced by a ghostwriter—with his name attached, and presumably, his consent—and the controversy didn’t do much to diminish his following among a certain set of young libertarians. But for those of us less enamored with Ron Paul, it did underscore one thing: His long-time association with the reactionary far-right of American politics.
Ron Paul has retired from politics, but his son—Kentucky Senator Rand Paul—is in the mix, and is clearly planning a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Ideologically, the younger Paul is indistinguishable from his father. And while he isn’t as close to the far-right as Ron Paul, it’s hard to say that he doesn’t have his own problems with race. In 2009, his campaign spokesperson resigned after racist images were discovered on his MySpace wall, and in 2010, Paul landed in a little hot water during an interview with Rachel Maddow, when he told her that he would have opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act for its impositions on businesses, i.e., they were no longer allowed to discriminate against blacks and other minorities.
Now, as the Washington Free Beacon reports, it also turns out that Rand Paul has his own relationship with the racist backwaters of American politics. I’m not a fan of the publication, but this looks terrible for the Kentucky senator:
A close aide to Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) who co-wrote the senator’s 2011 book spent years working as a pro-secessionist radio pundit and neo-Confederate activist, raising questions about whether Paul will be able to transcend the same fringe-figure associations that dogged his father’s political career.
Paul hired Jack Hunter, 39, to help write his book The Tea Party Goes to Washington during his 2010 Senate run. Hunter joined Paul’s office as his social media director in August 2012.
From 1999 to 2012, Hunter was a South Carolina radio shock jock known as the “Southern Avenger.” He has weighed in on issues such as racial pride and Hispanic immigration, and stated his support for the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
During public appearances, Hunter often wore a mask on which was printed a Confederate flag.
When considered in light of everything I mentioned earlier, none of this comes as a surprise. We know that Ron Paul has ties to neo-Confederates, and we know that Rand Paul has faced criticism for beliefs that echo their opposition to civil rights laws. Hiring a John Wilkes Booth sympathizer fits the picture of the Pauls as a political family that—regardless of what’s in their hearts—is comfortable working with right-wing racists.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, July 9, 2013
“An Extension Of The GOP”: The Republicans Of The Supreme Court
In order to fully understand what the five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have been up to when they make decisions that affect our democracy, as they did last week on voting rights, you need to understand what the Republican Party has been up to.
The modern GOP is based on an unlikely coalition of wealthy business executives, small business owners, and struggling whites. Its durability depends on the latter two categories believing that the economic stresses they’ve experienced for decades have a lot to do with the government taking their money and giving it to the poor, who are disproportionately black and Latino.
The real reason small business owners and struggling whites haven’t done better is the same as most of the rest of America hasn’t done better: Although the output of Americans has continued to rise, almost all the gains have gone to the very top.
Government is implicated, but not in the way wealthy Republicans want the other members of their coalition to believe. Laws that the GOP itself championed (too often with the complicity of some Democrats) have trammeled unions, invited outsourcing abroad, slashed taxes on the rich, encouraged takeovers, allowed monopolization, reduced the real median wage, and deregulated Wall Street.
Four decades ago, the typical household’s income rose in tandem with output. But since the late 1970s, as these laws took hold, most Americans’ incomes have flattened. Had the real median household income continued to keep pace with economic growth it would now be almost $92,000 instead of $50,000.
Obviously, wealthy Republicans would rather other members of their coalition not know any of this — including, especially, their role in making it happen. Their nightmare is small-business owners and struggling whites joining with the poor and the rest of the middle class to wrest economic power away. So they’ve created a convenient scapegoat in America’s minority underclass, along with a government that supposedly taxes hardworking whites to support them.
This is where the five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have played, and continue to play, such an important role.
First, wealthy Republicans have to be able to spend as much money as possible to bribe lawmakers to do their bidding, tell their version of history, and promulgate several big lies (the poor are “takers not makers,” government keeps them “dependent,” the wealthy are “job-creators” so cutting their taxes creates more jobs, unions are bad, regulations reduce economic growth, and so on).
The five Republicans on the Supreme Court have obliged by eviscerating campaign finance laws. Their 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, along with the broad interpretations given it by several appellate judges (also Republican appointees), has opened the money floodgates.
Second, wealthy Republicans want to quietly reduce the impact of any laws that might limit their profits, even though they may help struggling whites as consumers or employees. The easiest way to execute this delicate maneuver is to make it harder to sue under such laws.
Here, too, the five Republicans on the Court have been eager to oblige by tightening requirements for class actions and limiting standing to sue. In their recent Comcast Corp. v. Behrend decision, for example, they threw out $875 million in damages that a group of Philadelphia-area subscribers had sought from the cable giant, reasoning that the subscriber plaintiffs hadn’t proven they constituted a “class” for the purpose of a class action.
Third and finally, wealthy Republicans want to minimize the votes of poor and minority citizens – and further propagate the myth that these people are responsible for the economic problems of struggling whites – through state redistricting and gerrymandering, voter-identification requirements at polling stations, and the use of almost any pretext to purge minority voters from voting lists.
The five Republicans on the Court obliged last week by striking down a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that sets the formula under which states with a long history of discrimination must ask the federal government or a judge for approval before changing their voting procedures.
The significance of Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder was made plain Thursday when the Court effectively nullified two cases involving Texas voter laws by sending them back to lower courts to reconsider in light of Shelby. One was a voter identification requirement, enacted in 2011, that a federal judge had rejected on grounds that it imposed a disproportionate burden on lower-income people, many of whom are minorities. The other was a redistricting plan, also rejected by a federal court, in part because it would block minorities from gaining a majority vote in almost all districts.
But now both are effectively reinstated, as are the efforts of several other states to suppress votes.
Supreme Court justices are appointed for life in order to ensure their independence from politics. But when it comes to the core political strategy of the Republican Party, the five Republican appointees are, in effect, an extension of the GOP.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, July 1, 2013
“Echos Of The Past”: Civil Rights Assaulted By Supreme Court
Last week was bittersweet for the cause of human dignity.
On one hand, the Supreme Court gave us reason for applause, striking down barriers against the full citizenship of gay men and lesbians. On the other, it gave us reason for dread, gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The 5-4 decision was stunning and despicable, but not unexpected. The country has been moving in this direction for years.
The act is sometimes called the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement, but it was even more than that: the most important piece of legislation in the cause of African-American freedom since Reconstruction. And in shredding it, the court commits its gravest crime against that freedom since Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.
That decision ratified segregation, capping a 30-year campaign by conservative Southern Democrats to overturn the results of the Civil War. Given that the Voting Rights Act now lies in tatters even as Republicans embrace Voter ID schemes to suppress the black vote, given that GOP star Rand Paul has questioned the constitutionality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, one has to wonder if the results of the Civil Rights Movement do not face a similar fate.
Or, as Georgia Rep. John Lewis put it when I spoke with him Monday, “Can history repeat itself?”
Lewis was the great hero of the battle for voting rights, a then-25-year-old activist who had his skull broken by Alabama state troopers on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL while leading a march against the use of poll taxes, literacy tests, morals tests, economic intimidation, clubs, guns and bombs to deny black people the ballot. The law he helped enact required states and counties with histories of voting discrimination to seek federal approval before changing their voting procedures. (Those that behaved themselves for a decade could be released from that requirement.)
The court struck down the formula the law uses to determine where discrimination lives (and therefore, which jurisdictions should be covered), saying the dates are too old to be reliable. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted in writing for the majority, the country has changed dramatically since that era. African-American electoral participation is at levels undreamt of in 1965.
And so it is. Because. The Act. Worked.
Using that success as an excuse to cripple it, noted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissent, is like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Indeed, had the nation not changed dramatically since 1965, would that not have been cited as evidence of the Act’s failure? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, then: The Voting Rights Act never had a chance.
This court, said Lewis, “plunged a dagger in the heart” of the freedom movement. Nor is it lost on him that the majority which struck down this bedrock of black freedom included a black jurist: Clarence Thomas. “The brother on the court,” said Lewis, “I think he’s lost his way.”
So what now? Lewis says we must push Congress for legislation to “put teeth back in the Voting Rights Act.” Given that this Congress is notorious for its adamantine uselessness, that seems farfetched, but Lewis insists bipartisan discussion is already under way.
Fine. Let us demand that bickering, dysfunctional body do what is needed. But let us — African-Americans and all believers in freedom — also serve notice that, whatever lawmakers do, we will not stand placidly by as history repeats and citizenship is repealed, but that we will energetically resist by every moral means.
Saying that, I hear the ghostly echo of those who, once upon a generation, marched into Southern jails, singing “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.” It is an ancient song of defiance that feels freshly — sadly — relevant to our times.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo, July 3, 2013
“A Congress Divided”: Overcoming The Rigid And Obstructionist Partisanship Of House Republicans
The Senate provided the country a rare and modest glimpse of bipartisanship in its 68-32 passage of the comprehensive immigration reform bill laboriously accomplished by the Gang of Eight — four Democrats and four Republicans. But overcoming the rigid and obstructionist partisanship of the House Republicans will be another matter.
House Speaker John Boehner, like a chief lemming leading his followers over a cliff, warned in advance of that Senate vote, in which 14 Republicans broke party ranks, that his flock would continue its obdurate ways on the politically explosive immigration issue.
“For any legislation, including a conference report, to pass the House,” Boehner proclaimed, “it’s going to have to be a bill that has the support of the majority of our members.” He obviously was referring to the GOP side alone, as if the House Democrats weren’t members of what senators call “the other body.”
It’s a party position that former House Speaker Dennis Hastert often insisted upon in his abbreviated tenure. It was designed to assure that the House Republicans would work their will on the full House in an our-way-or-the-highway invitation to stalemate.
Boehner in adhering to this posture endangers not only the prospect for meaningful immigration reform. He also jeopardizes his party’s political outlook in 2014 and 2016 and his own speakership. He continues to genuflect before the most conservative House Republicans, driven by Tea-Party recalcitrance, who nevertheless increasingly favor his disposal.
The 14 Senate Republicans apparently hope their support of the bipartisan compromise will ameliorate their party’s problem with Hispanic voters, so graphically demonstrated by their 70 percent vote against GOP standard-bearer Mitt Romney in 2012. But the Senate version, heavy on fattened border security but allowing a path to American citizenship for undocumented aliens, will mean little politically if their House brethren refuse to buy into key elements of it.
President Obama did not hesitate to goad the House Republicans to follow the lead of the small band of Senate Republicans who followed GOP Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Marco Rubio of Florida in getting off the naysay trail for once.
In all the Republican post-mortems after the Romney defeat, a deafening chorus was heard arguing that the party should address the wide loss of Hispanic, Asian and African-American voters in the 2012 election. Boehner, an astute and practical politician, surely got the message, but appears throttled by the Tea-Party constituency that now dominates his flock.
Until the 14 Senate Republicans cast their votes for the Gang of Eight’s immigration reform package, conservatives in both houses had at least the comfort of knowing they were all in the same boat. The challenge for Boehner, after one-third of the Senate Republican membership voted with the Democrats, is to prevent further leakage in his foundering House craft.
Obama and fellow Democrats, frustrated throughout the president’s first term by Republican congressional roadblocks, are looking to next year’s midterm elections to break the jam, expecting enhanced support from minority voters. The same elections could likewise determine Boehner’s political future if he continues to allow the most extreme elements of his constituency of the right to set a stubborn and resistant course to genuine immigration reform.
At a minimum, Boehner needs to get off his insistence that the House must and will go its own way on the issue, writing a package that can capture “a majority of the majority” membership. Such an outcome will only end in negating a rare example of Senate bipartisanship achieved in a Congress that once marked its most productive and laudatory days under both Democratic and Republican presidents.,
Last November, the Republican brand suffered a body blow with a presidential campaign that only reinforced its image as the party of the white and the well-off. The continuing fight over immigration reform can be a GOP opportunity to combat that view, but not unless Boehner and Co. seize it as their 14 Senate brethren have done.
By: Jules Witcover, The National Memo, July 2, 2013
“Preventing Access To The Ballot Box”: Polling Disenfranchisement Will Be More Difficult To Flag
Time for everyone to step away from their respective ledges.
A few days have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on one of the most effective pieces of civil rights legislation ever passed, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Some of the kneejerk liberal oratory, the gnashing of teeth, is completely out of step with reality. The court’s decision does not signal a slippage to Jim Crow antics like poll taxes and hatred so violent that merely registering a black person to vote could lead to murder.
Likewise, conservatives would do well to cease gloating about the landmark ruling that nullified an important part of the Act. After all, it’s not like the court found that the nine states and portions of six others receiving extra scrutiny have become bastions of free and equal treatment for all voters.
In fact, records compiled for Congress the last time it renewed the Voting Rights Act in 2006 reflect many examples of disparate impacts for voters in recent years.
Clearly, a black man in the White House does not mean the nation has eradicated discriminatory problems in voting, intentional or not.
The problem now is Congress.
Congress needs to rewrite the guidelines nullified by the ruling to consider new situations across the United States. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts tried to nudge toward that goal in the ruling.
Dramatic demographic shifts necessitate it. New populations of voters not fully considered in 1965 such as Hispanics, Asians and increasing numbers of less mobile elderly are bringing new challenges to ensuring access to the polls.
The Court’s 5-4 ruling in Shelby v. Holder made irrelevant a portion of the law initially intended to halt the horrific abuses of the civil rights era.
Alabama’s Shelby County challenged a section of the Voting Rights Act that mandated so-called pre-clearance standards. Most of the states and some of jurisdictions covered are in the South. Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, they must first receive the federal government’s permission before redrawing legislative maps, shifting polling places or enacting new rules on voter identification.
These jurisdictions must prove to the Justice Department or a panel of federal judges that planned changes will not have a discriminatory effect.
Problem was, the areas were chosen by past abuses. Too far in the past, the court decided, nullifying the formula used to determine who is covered.
The court wants Congress to readdress the formula, using more current voting patterns. Congress failed to do that the last time the Voting Rights Act was renewed.
The Justice Department can and will still pursue abuses. They’ll be busy.
Accessibility to the ballot box is under assault in America. Legislatures nationwide are passing changes to voting laws, often under the guise of stopping voter fraud.
Repeatedly, politicians pushing for the measures cannot prove fraud exists. Often, they are mislabeling database errors as fraud. Problems like two people with the same name, inaccurate data entry of addresses or birthdays. The glitches need to be eliminated; new technology can be employed.
But the goal should always be increasing access for eligible voters, not making reaching the ballot box unnecessarily more difficult — and often placing that burden on older, poorer and minority voters.
Here is the thing.
Areas affected by pre-clearance standards could have been exempted from scrutiny years ago. All they needed to do was keep a clean slate, not have any violations for 10 consecutive years. This process, called “bailout,” is included in the act.
But problems continued. Most of the jurisdictions never met that mark.
No, they had to wait until a conservative-leaning court cut them some slack.
And now an ineffective Congress will make it that much more difficult to flag modern-era abuses.
By: Mary Sanchez, The National Memo, July 1, 2013
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