“Voter ID’s Last Stand”: Let’s Finally Declare Laws What They Are – Racist On Purpose
This week, the US Department of Justice and the state of Texas started arguments in the first of what will be a summer-long dance between the two authorities over voting rights. There are three suits being tried in two districts over gerrymandering and Texas’s voter identification law – both of which are said to be racially motivated. In its filing, the DoJ describes the law as “exceed[ing] the requirements imposed by any other state” at the time that it passed. If the DoJ can prove the arguments in its filing, it won’t just defeat an unjust law: it could put the fiction of “voter fraud” to rest once and for all.
These battles, plus parallel cases proceeding in North Carolina, hinge on proving that the states acted with explicitly exclusionary intent toward minority voters – a higher standard was necessary prior to the Supreme Court’s gutting of Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) back in January. Under Section 3, the DoJ had wide latitude to look at possible consequences of voting regulation before they were even passed – the “preclearance” provision. Ironically, because the states held to preclearance had histories of racial discrimination, some of the messier aspects of the laws’ current intentions escaped comment.
But meeting that higher standard of explicit exclusionary intent comes with the opportunity to show some of the many skeptical Americans the ugly racism behind Republican appeals to “fairness” and warnings about fraud. Progressives have tried, and mostly failed, to show the institutional racism underpinning the sordid history behind voter ID laws; that may have been too subtle. In courts in Texas and North Carolina, the DoJ will make the jump from accusations that laws have a racial impact to straight-up calling voter ID laws racist.
This ought to be interesting.
The DoJ filing in Texas lays it all out pretty clearly, putting the voter ID law in context of a concerted legislative strategy to deny representation to the state’s growing Hispanic population, including Republicans advancing more and more aggressive voter ID bills over the years. The filing points to the anti-immigrant rhetoric that laced the floor debates over the law, and to the measures taken by the Republican-controlled state house to limit the participation of Democratic minority lawmakers in considering or amending the legislation (the bill was heard in front of a special committee selected by the governor, on an expedited schedule). And, the DoJ notes, lawmakers produced “virtually no evidence during or after enactment of SB 14 that in-person voter impersonation – the only form of election fraud addressed by the identification requirements of SB 14 – was a serious problem.”
Perhaps the most significant piece of context in the voter ID suit is how Texas’s voter ID law came on the heels of the redistricting that the DoJ claims was also racially motivated. In the redistricting cases, DoJ’s allegations of malicious intent have been helped along by the admission of the state that it had malicious political intent. The Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, chose as his defense in that case what only can be called the Lesser Evil Strategy – stating up front that the state’s GOP legislators had ulterior motives, but not the ones that the VRA outlaws:
[R]edistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party’s electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats … [They] were motivated by partisan rather than racial considerations and the plaintiffs and DOJ have zero evidence to prove the contrary.
Abbott’s smugness – and his apparent faith in partisanship as a permissible and distinct form of discrimination – will take center stage as the DoJ presses on with both suits. In court, Abbott will be asked to prove his ignorance of demographics for the very state in which he is currently running for governor. Out of court, other GOP defenders of the law will have to do more or less the same. And they will need to defend the outrageous details of the law – such has how a concealed carry permit is a permissible form of voter ID but a federally-issued Medicare card carried by an elderly woman is not.
Some people of Texas may support the kind of bullying Abbott has prepared to defend, and most progressive activists are hardened to it, but I think average Americans hate it. Putting malice under a national spotlight might be the best way to turn people against voter ID laws in general.
Right now, Americans support the idea of voter ID laws by huge margins: polls show favorable attitudes toward a generic “ID requirement” to be between 70 and 80%. Approval exists across all demographic groups – even among black voters (51%), one of the groups that is, of course, disproportionately disenfranchised by these laws.
But the reasons that the public supports such laws aren’t the same as the GOP’s reasons for pursuing them: Republicans want to prevent specific types of people from voting; the American public wants voting to be fair. That’s why conservatives have had to hammer so hard on the false narrative of “voter fraud” – to convince everyone that it’s what the laws are really about.
Add context to the “ID requirement” poll question that Americans get behind, though, and public support changes dramatically. A survey in North Carolina (taken as the state was considering taking up an amendment on the issue) found initial support for voter ID to be 71%. Pollsters then drilled further down and came up with numbers that speak to a truly democratic impulse:
- 72% say it’s wrong to pass laws that make it harder for certain people to vote.
- 62% say they oppose a law that makes it harder for people of one party to vote.
- 74% say there should be demonstrated problems before legislators apply a fix.
If nothing else, these results suggests that Abbott’s argument that supposedly party-based redistricting isn’t the free pass – at least, from the public’s standpoint, if not the court’s – that he thinks it is.
In North Carolina, pollsters found that support for the law decreased as the 2012 election neared and voters started to pay attention and become educated on the issue. Voting rights advocates filled yet another suit based on disenfranchising young voters, which could make a further difference. (Way to keep pissing off millennials, GOP!)
That context effect is true nationwide. A different survey found that informing respondents that “Opponents of voters ID laws argue they can actually prevent people who are eligible to vote from voting” brought support for voter ID down by 12 points.
Pollsters have not publicly investigated whether Texan voters would show a similar shift, though it could be significant that support in the state for voter ID has remained at around 66% for the past two years, less than its support nationwide. Of course, 77% of Texas believe “voter ID laws are mainly used to prevent fraud,” an alternate-reality bubble that attention to these cases may just yet pop.
It’s the Department of Justice that’ll have to bring this to pass. The GOP has always easily waved away “systemic” racism charges, like those made under the non-gutted VRA, as either outright inventions or the result of looking for equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities. Making clear the racist intent of voter ID laws will bring the discussion back to where it belongs: on equal opportunities, in the voting booth.
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Guardian, July 16, 2014
“Really Stepping Into It”: When ‘Traditional’ Apparently Means ‘White’
North Carolina State House Speaker Thom Tillis (R) fairly easily won his party’s U.S. Senate nomination this year, after presenting himself as the most electable center-right candidate to take on Sen. Kay Hagan (D) in November.
He may have oversold his electoral qualities a bit.
We learned a month ago about remarks, first aired by msnbc’s Chris Matthews, in which Tillis argued in 2011, “What we have to do is find a way to divide and conquer the people who are on assistance.” The Republican lawmaker described a vision in which policymakers pit those in need against one another, in order to cut off benefits for those on the losing end of the fight.
This morning, TPM reports on another striking quote from Tillis’ recent past.
State House Speaker Thom Tillis (R-NC), the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in North Carolina, said that the “traditional” voting bloc of his home state wasn’t growing like minority populations in an interview he did in 2012.
In context, the host of the Carolina Business Review television program asked why the Republican Party was struggling with minority voters, most notably Hispanics. Tillis responded that he believes the GOP’s message is “appealing to everybody.” As for his party’s demographic challenges, he added, “The traditional population of North Carolina and the United States is more or less stable. It’s not growing. The African-American population is roughly growing but the Hispanic population and the other immigrant populations are growing in significant numbers.”
It sounded an awful lot like Tillis sees the “traditional population” as the white population.
The Republican’s campaign manager said this morning that Tillis was referring to “North Carolinians who have been here for a few generations” when he used the word “traditional.”
That’s one way of looking at it. But the words themselves are hard to ignore.
Tillis wasn’t talking about migration or new populations that have recently arrived in North Carolina. Rather, he described three demographic groups by name: the African-American population, the Hispanic population, and the “traditional population.”
NBC News’ First Read added, “It appears North Carolina GOP Senate nominee Thom Tillis stepped into it,” which seems more than fair under the circumstances.
Tillis was already likely to struggle with minority-voter outreach, especially given his support for some of the nation’s harshest voting restrictions. It’s safe to say his “traditional population” comment won’t help.
The next question, of course, is whether remarks like these also alienate a broader voting base. In 2006, for example, then-Sen. George Allen’s (R-Va.) “macaca” comments were offensive not just to minority voters, but also to anyone concerned with racism. It’s not hard to imagine Tillis running into a similar problem, alienating anyone uncomfortable with the notion of white people being some kind of “traditional” default.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 17, 2014
“In Dire Demographic Straits”: The GOP’s New Voting Laws Are Nothing Less Than A War On Democracy
Can someone please explain to me why the New York Times’ top story from this past Sunday hasn’t provoked nationwide outrage?
Allow me to provide a handy summary: Having spent the last several years trumping up unsubstantiated charges of voter fraud in order to justify new laws and regulations making it more burdensome to vote in poor and minority (read: Democratic-leaning) districts around the country, the Republican Party has now changed tactics. In the name of enforcing the “uniformity” of voting rules, Republican governors and legislatures in a number of swing states have begun to increase the obstacles to voting still further. Some states are requiring that would-be voters show birth certificates or passports (which many poor people don’t possess), while others are curtailing the days, times, and places available to vote (which is particularly onerous for poor people who have little workplace flexibility and often lack transportation).
Let’s leave aside the spectacle of Republicans, usually our most fulsome champions of local control, suddenly banging on about the need for statewide uniformity in voting rules.
What’s far more noteworthy (and frankly pathetic) about these moves is that they’re a tacit acknowledgement by the Republican Party that it’s in dire demographic straits — and that one of the key pillars of its ideology over the last half-century is crumbling right before our eyes.
Ever since Richard Nixon claimed to speak for the “silent American majority,” the GOP has identified itself with the real America, the true America, the America of morals and faith and common sense, as opposed to the ersatz America of secular liberalism made up of judges, professors, journalists, and other elites who control the commanding heights of culture from decadent enclaves in New York and Hollywood. These elites have a pernicious influence and do a lot of damage, Republicans have maintained, but they’re vastly outnumbered by the real Americans who find their natural home in the GOP.
This ideology of righteous majoritarianism received intellectual validation from the first generation of neoconservatives, who wrote during the 1970s about the emergence of a “new class” of liberal professionals whose moral outlook differed from that of the rest of the country. Then, the ideology contributed to the rhetorical populism of the Reagan Revolution. Later, in a purer, high-octane form, it fueled the rise of right-wing talk radio, Fox News, and the rest of a conservative media infrastructure that exists to continually feed the flames of partisan fury through a potent mixture of flattery, demonization, and identity politics. “YOU are the real and righteous Americans,” these outlets tell their loyal listeners and viewers day after day, year after year, “and THEY are illegitimate, immoral imposters who have usurped political power.”
The story was always an exaggeration, but it once had a certain plausibility. Reagan won re-election in 1984 with 58.8 percent of the vote. Millions of his supporters were lifelong New Deal and Great Society liberals who jumped parties to become the fabled “Reagan Democrats.” It seemed for a time like the silent American majority had finally found its voice.
But then the numbers started heading south. George H.W. Bush succeeded Reagan with a softer 53.4 percent of the vote, and then went on to lose his bid for re-election in 1992. His son notoriously made it to the White House in 2000 despite losing the popular vote; four years later he won a majority — though, with only 50.7 percent of the vote, just barely. And it’s been downhill ever since.
The grassroots of the GOP and its media cheerleaders like to attribute the party’s losses in 2008 (McCain, 45.7 percent) and 2012 (Romney, 47.2 percent) to the party’s foolish decision to go with presidential candidates who were compromised conservatives. If only they’d chosen real Republicans!
But this is a self-serving fantasy. As John Judis and Ruy Teixeira have been arguing for years, with each election cycle providing confirmation of their thesis, the Republican Party faces a possibly intractable demographic problem — with its core voters (older white men) becoming an ever-smaller proportion of the electorate. This means that in the country’s only national election contest (the presidential vote), the popular margin is likely to swing increasingly in the direction of the Democratic Party. Unless, of course, Republicans can keep Democrats from voting.
But what about the GOP’s success at holding on to the House of Representatives in recent years? That, too, is a product of anti-democratic manipulation. The Democrats actually received more overall votes in House races in 2012 but failed to win control of the chamber because the GOP has used state-level redistricting to cram ever-greater numbers of Democrats into smaller numbers of districts, effectively decreasing their political power relative to their raw numbers.
Charming, isn’t it?
But also pitiable. Having built an ideology around the conviction that it speaks axiomatically for the real American majority, the Republican Party has become incapable of coping with evidence to the contrary — and willing to do just about anything, including subverting democracy, to maintain that fiction.
Republicans should be ashamed of themselves — and the rest of us should be disgusted.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, April 1, 2014
“Cultivating The Right Wing”: Rand Paul Woos The Base With Hot Monica Lewinsky Talk
What on earth is Rand Paul thinking, bringing up Monica Lewinsky? On cable TV, they shake their talking heads: ancient history, irrelevant, etc. Quite true, it’s all those things. But in terms of intra-GOP presidential-positioning politics, I think it’s actually quite shrewd, and another sign that he is not to be underestimated in terms of possibly nabbing the GOP nomination. Unfortunately for Paul—although fortunately for America—it’s only shrewd in terms of intra-GOP politics. Among the rest of the electorate, responses will range from indifference to hostility, and the “GOP War on Women” narrative won’t suffer a scratch.
Here’s what Paul is doing. First, he’s getting right with the base. As a devolutionist-libertarian, he takes some unorthodox positions from the conservative point of view—his neo-isolationist, anti-neocon foreign policy views, his comparatively soft-line views on same-sex marriage (he’s not for it, but he’d leave it to the states). There are reasons, in other words, for hard-shell conservatives to give him the gimlet eye.
Given that, what are some ways to make conservatives think you’re “one of us” without having to alter those positions, which he surely knows would be a disaster for him, destroying the very basis of his appeal as principled and so on? Find something conservatives hate and say you hate it too. What bigger something than the Clintons? Well, there’s Obama, but hating on him is old hat. Dredging up Lewinsky, on the other hand, shows that some care was taken to cultivate conservatives. As Paul knows, Clinton-hatred is still mother’s milk for that crowd.
He is also, as Peter Beinart noted, aiming specifically at the Christian Right. He’s been doing this for some time now, talking, for example, of the persecution of Christian minorities around the world. His father never bothered much with evangelicals, an error the son, recognizing their importance in the Iowa GOP caucuses, clearly hopes not to make.
I think there’s a final reason, which emotionally is the most important of all. When Muhammad Ali was Cassius Clay, when he was still months away from a title shot against champ Sonny Liston, he’d knock out the latest second-rater in three rounds and then, when they stepped into the ring to interview him, carry on about how all he wanted was a fight with Liston: “I want that big brown bear!” The more he talked, the more promoters and fans were able to visualize a Clay-Liston fight.
The more Paul talks about the Clintons, the more he sets up the mental picture in the brains of Republican primary voters of him being the logical guy to step into the ring with them. After all, they’ll think, he’s sure not afraid of them!
It’s very smart (all this assumes of course that Hillary Clinton runs and is the Democratic nominee). All the other Republican candidates laying into the Clintons will look like Johnny-come-latelys. Paul spoke up first.
But the good it does him ends there. Here we return to the age-old Republican blind spot on issues relating to groups that don’t vote for them. Republicans think they can make everything better with words and symbolism. Just get our candidates to stop saying these stupid things like Todd Akin did. Speak respectfully. Sensitively. Appoint more women to high-profile thingies. It’ll be fine.
That isn’t how politics works. How politics works is that people actually care about substance to a surprising degree, and they know which party is representing their interests and which party is not. And women, by 12 percentage points at last count, know that Republicans are not. All right, it’s slightly more complicated than that—married women vote Republican, as do white women. But last I checked, African American women and Latina women and single women are women, too, and each of them has the same one vote that a married white woman has.
And overall—don’t take it from me, take it from the numbers—the women of America have decided that the GOP isn’t on their side. And it’s not because of the offal that flows out of the mouths of Todd Akin and company, really. It’s because of policies. And Rand Paul supports every one of those party policies.
Funny, but his libertarianism does not extend to giving a woman the right to decide whether to have an abortion. It did, however, in March 2012, extend to the “freedom” of religious institutions that were fighting the expanded requirement for contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act. You may remember the Blunt Amendment, which sought vast conscience exemptions from the coverage requirement. Paul voted for it.
I could keep going and going. Just last month, Paul floated the idea of a federal cap on welfare benefits for women who have more children. It is true that 16 states have such caps, and it’s not necessarily an ill-intentioned thought that saying “no more money for another child” might produce the desired effect of women not having those children. The problem is that in real life there seems to be no correlation. So the net effect is really just to increase the number of women and children living in poverty.
Then there’s little gem of a quote: “The whole thing with the War on Women, I sort of laughingly say, ‘yeah there might have been,’ but the women are winning it.” He said this two weeks ago. Let’s just say I doubt many professional women would agree.
If Paul really thinks that he can get women to overlook this record (and there’s much more) and decide to vote for him because Bill Clinton made some yakahoola with an intern, he’s as clueless as Reince Priebus is with his Latino and gay outreach. This is a case where the better scenario is that he’s just being cynical for the sake of snagging GOP votes. If he actually believes what he’s saying—well, God help us, but it does make him a natural to become the nominee of that party.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 12, 2014
“Don’t Bank On It”: Can Republicans Govern If They Win In 2014?
What’s the worst-case scenario for Republicans in November? Maybe victory.
A Republican takeover of the Senate is somewhere between plausible and very likely. (If you want more exact predictions, you have to provide a less volatile political climate.) So for argument’s sake, let’s assume Republican candidates roll to victory from Alaska to North Carolina. The Democrats’ 54-46 Senate majority is supplanted by a narrower Republican majority, with Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell or someone of nearly equal skill installed as majority leader.
The Republicans would then control both the House and the Senate. In the Senate, the most enthusiastic partisans in the new majority would be eager to dispense with the filibuster on legislation, allowing bills to pass on party-line Republican votes. Let’s assume that happens, too.
What exactly would they do with these newfound powers?
They wouldn’t pass a jobs bill because they don’t want President Barack Obama to gain credit for an improving economy. Besides, they’ve convinced themselves that jobs bills don’t work — at least until a Republican occupies the White House.
What about health care legislation? Jonathan Bernstein parses the prospects on his blog. According to a CBS News poll in January, only 34 percent of Americans support repealing Obamacare; it would be a nonstarter even if the health care and insurance industries weren’t already too far down the Obamacare road. If Republicans took the plunge to create legislation, the real-world impacts of their proposals would be scored by the Congressional Budget Office and outside policy groups. It’s hard to imagine what Republicans could devise that would satisfy their ideological needs without undermining health security for millions while increasing the deficit. There’s a reason they keep talking about health care but never get around to doing anything.
How about immigration? Senate legislation drafted by Republicans would look nothing like the bipartisan immigration bill passed by the Senate last June. Senate Democrats would have little incentive to support a vastly more conservative bill, which would rely even more on employment enforcement and militarization of the border while offering far-less-generous terms to undocumented immigrants. Under such circumstances, House Democrats would surely abandon House Republicans to their own devices, as well.
Without Democratic votes, the House cannot pass anything more comprehensive than an immigration crackdown. The fate of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. would be unresolved at best. The political failure would be a fiasco, further undermining Republicans among Hispanic and Asian voters while simultaneously opening the door to another round of nativist big-talk among Republican presidential hopefuls. (The U.S. Chamber of Commerce would express its heartfelt disappointment, then funnel millions of dollars to Republican incumbents.)
The party’s internal conflicts would all be exacerbated by a Senate takeover. Imagine, for example, how much leverage a narrow Republican majority would grant to Senator Ted Cruz — and the chaos that could ensue.
In its current incarnation, the party is more or less an anti-tax lobby grafted to a Sons of the Confederacy chapter. Genuine areas of policy consensus among Republicans are few — spending cuts for the poor, tax cuts for the rich and promotion of incumbent dirty energy industries at the expense of Obama’s green agenda. None of these is popular. (Although in coal and oil states the energy reversal would be welcome. Keystone, too, if its construction is not already underway in 2015.) All would face probable Obama vetoes.
What’s left? Entitlement reform? The Republicans’ elderly base is not eager for changes in Medicare or Social Security. That leaves culture warrior stuff, mostly. New abortion restrictions, perhaps? One last lunge against gay rights? Not much electoral magic there.
The party’s capacity to please its right-wing cultural base, its anti-tax, anti-regulatory donor base and a slim majority of American voters is almost nonexistent. Democratic control of the Senate has shielded Republicans both from their own divisions and from the unpopularity of their causes.
Indeed, it’s possible that the Boschian hellscape over which John Boehner presides in the 113th Congress could actually get uglier and more bizarre if Republicans win the Senate in the 114th. I’m not sure even these Republicans deserve that.
By: Francis Wilkinson, The National Memo, February 11, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 