“The Rest Of The Story”: What’s The Deal With The Pennsylvania Voter-ID Law?
The Keystone State goes to court this week over its voter-ID law. So what is that again? And where does the Department of Justice fit in?
We get it. Real-life court dramas are not as exciting as Judge Judy (and definitely not as exciting as Judge Joe Brown). So we totally don’t judge you for not knowing why the hell Pennsylvania’s voter-ID law is suddenly in court.
Of course, you thought you’d covered your bases when you read our early explanation of voter-ID laws. (If you didn’t, well, you only need to be a little embarrassed.) You know there’s basically no evidence of in-person voter fraud where one person impersonates another—the only type of fraud voter ID guards against. You know that the big fights were in Texas and South Carolina. So why is everyone so worked up about some court case in Harrisburg?
Well let us be quick and leave you plenty of time for Court TV.
So a bunch of states have voter-ID laws—what’s the big deal about Pennsylvania?
Well, not shockingly in a presidential election year, a lot of it boils down to politics. Pennsylvania is a swing state in a close election, so every vote each side can pull counts big. Most people believe voter-ID laws help Republicans win elections, because poor and nonwhite voters tend to vote Democratic and also tend to be the populations less likely to have the necessary ID. In case there was any doubt about those intentions, the state House majority leader told an audience that passing voter ID was “going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” (He evidently didn’t get the whole memo about pretending we need this to combat nonexistent voter fraud.)
But as it turns out, the number of voters in Pennsylvania who might get disenfranchised is huge. The state law requires a government-issued photo id with an expiration date. The law was geared toward voters using an ID issued by the state Department of Transportation. During the debates earlier this year, the governor’s office said that 99 percent of state voters already had such an ID. But when the secretary of the commonwealth did a study in early July, it showed that as many as 758,000 people—or 9 percent of voters—didn’t have an ID from the Department of Transportation. Other studies estimate that there could be a million Pennsylvania voters without ID. That’s more than the margin of victory Barack Obama had in 2008.
While some people are worked up about what this means for the presidential election, there’s also this little-bitty other detail: that the right to vote is a cornerstone of our democracy. In Philadelphia (you know, that place where the Declaration of Independence was signed) as many as 18 percent of voters lack the necessary identification. Democrat or Republican, the whole denying-tons-of-people-their-right-to-vote thing has got some pretty upset as well.
Is someone trying to fight the law?
Damn straight someone is. Wednesday is the first day of court for a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Advancement Project, and other voting-rights groups. This lawsuit argues that the voter-ID law violates the “free and equal” elections clause in the state constitution and adds a new and unnecessary burden to voters. The case has some pretty sympathetic plaintiffs, including a 93-year-old civil-rights activist who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. Several of the plaintiffs are elderly women of color who cannot get a photo ID because they cannot get copies of their birth certificates.
“What they’re saying in Pennsylvania is that the fundamental right to vote in Pennsylvania is broader than the right to vote under the Constitution,” says Jon Greenbaum, the chief counsel at the Lawyers Committee. That means that even though the Supreme Court said voter-ID laws didn’t violate the 14th Amendment, which guarantees the right to vote, the ACLU and others claim that it does violate Pennsylvania’s guaranteed right to vote.
Greenbaum says that if the court agrees that the right to vote in Pennsylvania is broader than it is under the 14th Amendment, then the state will likely have to prove that the voter-ID law is necessary to prevent voter fraud. That’s going to be tough, because the state has already admitted that there are no known cases of in-person voter fraud.
However, if the state decides that the right to vote in Pennsylvania is no different than it is under the U.S. Constitution, then the burden will be on the plaintiffs. They will have to show that this is an extreme burden for voters and one that will result in many people losing their right to vote. That would be a harder case for them to prove. Either way, the case is supposed to last about a week.
Why isn’t the Department of Justice bringing them to court? Didn’t they stop Texas’s and South Carolina’s laws?
Chill out, Nancy Grace—the Justice Department isn’t just hanging around watching American Idol. As it turns out, not all states get the same treatment when it comes to the old D of J. Texas and South Carolina are both listed under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. That section specifically targets states with a history of voter discrimination, and for the nine states listed, the law requires the feds to approve all changes to election laws. (It’s pithily known as “preclearance.”) So before Texas and South Carolina could implement their voter-ID laws, they had to show the Department of Justice that the laws would not have a discriminatory impact. Neither state succeeded, and the Justice Department prevented the laws from being implemented. (Now both states are suing the department. Fun times in court dramas!) However, Pennsylvania is not listed under Section 5, so it did not need to get preclearance to implement the law.
But the Justice Department just announced that it’s investigating whether Pennsylvania violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits laws that have a discriminatory intent or effect.
So what are the grounds of the investigation, and how is it different from the state lawsuit?
While the state constitution case is about the fundamental right to vote, the investigation dealing with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act will likely be all about racial discrimination. The section forbids any election law that is intended to cause discrimination or that will, in practice, result in discrimination. Greenbaum says that will be the main focus of the Justice Department effort: whether this law will make it disproportionately harder for nonwhite voters to cast their ballot. While in Section 5 cases, it falls to the state to show that it’s not discriminating, in Section 2, the burden is on the department to prove that the state is discriminating.
Right now, the Justice Department is just collecting evidence—it’s asked for tons of documents in 16 different categories. (The paper cuts alone will probably lead to some bitter Pennsylvania state employees.)
If the department winds up taking Pennsylvania to court, in some ways it will be in uncharted territory. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is usually used for “voter dilution” cases like redistricting. For instance, a state violates Section 2 when it spreads out minority voters into different districts where their votes are a small percentage, rather than keeping them in a district together where they can elect their candidate of choice. But until the voter-ID fad hit, there weren’t many cases of states trying to deny voters their right. According to Greenbaum, while there’s a lot of precedent to show what you have to prove in a “voter dilution” case, there’s not much to go on when it comes to showing that voters are getting denied the right to vote.
Both the state lawsuit and any potential Justice Department case face a similar hurdle: Trying to prove the impact of a law before an election is a whole lot harder than waiting until the election is over. But the groups cannot wait until afterward to litigate, since that would mean waiting until people were denied the right to vote and the election outcome would already be decided. But litigating the cases now is much harder.
The reasons are obvious. Before an election, you must show the effect of the law before it’s put in place. After the election, you can show exactly what happened and who was denied the right to vote. Before the election, evidence is harder to collect. For instance, many people who currently lack ID may still get one before the election. That’s why it’s good that the ACLU case has focused on several plaintiffs who cannot get an ID no matter how hard they try, for lack of documentation.
A pre-election Section 2 case would likely be an even greater challenge. But Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, says it’s certainly worth pursuing, particularly if the Justice Department can gather a lot of evidence from the state. “If Section 2 could never be used preemptively,” she says, “it would not be a sufficient protection of voting rights.”
So scratch it. This drama may give Judge Judy a run for her money.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, July 25, 2012
“Strap The Horse To The Car Top”: Mitt Needs A Photo-Op During His Pandering Tour
A 3-pointer at a gym full of U.S. troops in a war zone, or a crowd of 250,000 at a speech in Europe — neither is likely, and certainly not necessary. But Mitt Romney needs a helicopter moment for sure.
Four years ago, Barack Obama — a former state senator with mere months in the U.S. Senate who had no foreign-policy experience whatsoever — went overseas to bolster his credentials as potential commander in chief. He traveled to Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Jordan, Germany, France and England. In the midst of two active wars, Obama met with the prime minister of Iraq and the president of Afghanistan and was famously photographed with Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, in a helicopter over Baghdad.
Dan Schnur, a former aide for GOP nominee Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — then strongly preferred by voters over Obama on foreign-policy and defense matters — wrote in The New York Times that because the Iraqi prime minister announced support for the same timeline for U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq that Obama outlined, a Bush administration official was heading to multi-nation talks with Iran and a consensus was emerging in favor of a stronger military presence in Afghanistan, “the three most important pillars of Mr. Obama’s international platform had been endorsed from a variety of unexpected sources.” Schnur added, “That’s a pretty good way to start a trip.”
The optics overpowered the picture of McCain back home — puttering around on a golf cart with former President George H.W. Bush — but the substance of Obama’s foreign-policy agenda made headlines as well.
Romney has arrived in England for the Olympic Games before he heads to Israel and Poland on his foreign trip, where he, too, hopes to build confidence and comfort among voters back home in his leadership ability abroad. Like Obama, he lacks experience, but unlike Obama he has yet to lay out a clear vision or even broad plans for how he would handle our most pressing foreign-policy challenges. In his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nevada on Tuesday, Romney blasted the president’s foreign-policy record, suggested Obama has betrayed the nation by allowing leaks of classified information for political gain and lambasted cuts to military spending Obama has supported and that all GOP leaders and most of their rank and file in Congress voted for as well. Romney extolled the greatness of America, and said he was “not ashamed of American power,” but wasn’t specific.
After criticizing Obama two years ago for “announcing the day he’s pulling out” of Afghanistan, Romney suddenly announced in his speech Tuesday that he too would advocate withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014. His exact words: “As president, my goal in Afghanistan will be to complete a successful transition to Afghan security forces by the end of 2014.” Had he been on his way to the site of our nation’s longest-ever war, Romney would have spent the entire trip explaining his flip-flop.
While in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom Romney enjoys a decades-old friendship, Romney might offer a new policy prescription for stopping Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons that differs from the Obama administration. He might have ideas about how to depose Syria’s Bashar Assad.
Perhaps in Poland, as he criticizes the Russians, whom he has called “our No. 1 geopolitical foe,” Romney will announce just how he would counter Russian aggression in Eastern Europe and how he might convince the Russians — as well as the Chinese — to help the United States, Israel and our allies confront Iran and Syria.
Perhaps not. But the Israeli border of war-torn Syria would be the perfect spot for a helicopter ride with Netanyahu.
By: A. B. Stoddard, Editor, The Hill, July 25, 2012
“Speaking In Code”: Race And Ethnicity Never Far From Presidential Campaign
The racially offensive remark by an unnamed adviser to Republican Mitt Romney– if the painfully thin Daily Telegraph story is to be believed — is likely to be described as the injection of race, ethnicity and nationality in what has been a colorblind campaign.
While the comment may be the most blatant reference to President Obama’s background in the 2012 race, it is hardly the first. Or the last.
“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser reportedly said of Romney, who arrived in London Wednesday. “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”
Romney was born and raised in Michigan. Obama’s story is far more complicated. His mother was white and born in Kansas. His father came from Kenya. Obama was born in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia. He is Christian, but crazy rumors persist that he is Muslim with ties to terrorists. All of this allows the president to be easily characterized as different, exotic, less American and more foreign. As “other.” And Romney and his supporters have not shied from those types of descriptions.
In one recent example, former New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu told reporters in a call arranged by the Romney campaign that “I wish this president would learn how to be an American.” Sununu later walked back his remarks, saying “The president has to learn the American formula for creating business.”
Romney himself said of Obama’s approach to the economy in a speech last week in Pittsburgh: “His course is extraordinarily foreign.” He has repeatedly said Obama “doesn’t understand America.”
Romney and his team are certainly entitled to make robust criticisms of the president and his policies. There is a legitimate debate in this campaign over the role of the federal government and what kind of country we want to live in. Constant references to “America,” a word laced with images of patriotism and amber waves of grain, are nothing new to the campaign trail, where candidates are trying desperately to connect with voters.
But in this campaign, these criticisms are not made in a vacuum free of the politics of race and identity. Hillary Clinton ran into this tripwire during the 2008 Democratic primary when she said Obama’s support was waning among “hard-working Americans, white Americans.”
It would be far more enlightening for Obama’s critics to say exactly what they mean instead of speaking in code.
By: Beth Reinhard, National Journal, July 25, 2012
“Making Things Up”: Romney’s First Foreign Stumble?
It’s treacherous for a US presidential candidate to travel overseas — lots of opportunities for mis-chosen words and getting drawn into other countries’ domestic politics. With Mitt Romney about to leave on his big trip abroad he may already have had his first big foreign stumble. At a GOP fundraiser in San Francisco last night, Romney said that Australia’s foreign minister had warned him that foreign leaders see the US in decline and — at least in Romney’s telling — was hoping for Romney-like policies to make things right.
That at least was the version of the comments that appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald. A similar version, but without the full quotes, appeared in the AP.
Quoting Romney: ”And this idea of America in decline, it was interesting [Carr] said that, he led the talk of America being in decline. See that’s not talk we hear about here as much as they’re hearing there. And if they’re thinking about investing in America, entrepreneurs putting their future in America, if they think America’s in decline they’re not gonna do it.”
Whether or not the SMH got it right is one question. The Hill notes that the pool reports did not have Romney clearly characterizing the comments as a warning.
And now, Australia’s Foreign Minister’s office has come forward to shoot down Romney’s characterization of the discussion, calling Romney’s interpretation “not correct.”
You cannot take a shoot down like this at face value in any case. Whatever Carr said, he almost certainly didn’t expect Romney to turn around and use it as ammo in a political speech. Allies don’t want to get publicly embroiled in a US election — especially on the wrong side of an incumbent who they believe is more likely than not to get reelected. So he’d be under a lot of pressure to walk away from Romney’s comments, even if Romney was accurately characterizing them. On the other hand, maybe Mitt just made it up or gave it — probably the most likely option — a negative spin the retelling. One way or another, it will be interesting to see how Romney navigates this sort of stuff when he’s overseas.
By: Josh Marshall, Editor and Publisher, Talking Points Memo, July 23, 2012
“The Exotic Manipulation Of Numbers”: The Secret In Mitt Romney’s Tax Returns
To paraphrase Rhett Butler, I don’t give a damn if Mitt Romney releases more of his tax returns. I expect to learn nothing from them, aside from the fact that he is very rich and has paid less in taxes than he has acknowledged. He has probably taken advantage of all the loops and dodges in the tax code, piling trusts on top of trusts, securing wealth for Romneys yet unborn — gelt unto the third generation, little taxed, slightly taxed or taxed not at all.
“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. ’Scuse me, Scotty, let me tell you about them: They don’t pay much in taxes.
This is what the average person would learn if all of Romney’s tax filings hit the light of day. He has so far divulged just his 2010 return and the estimate for 2011, and the Obama camp, smelling blood, has demanded more. The din has reached such a level that even some conservatives are entreating Romney to reveal additional filings. They are not, however, imploring their candidate to identify his bundlers — for this might actually reveal who has their hooks into him. The filings, I promise you, will show loopholes and financial black holes that make taxable income disappear. What we will not see is anything revelatory or, as some insist, genuine insights into the character of the candidate.
Certainly, this has been the case in the past. Richard Nixon disclosed his taxes preceding the 1968 presidential campaign. He reported hefty earnings averaging $200,000 in his years as a New York lawyer, but there was nothing in the forms relating to occasional bouts of drunkenness, paranoia, excessive self-pity or a proclivity to listen to the telephone conversations of others.
Similarly, Bill Clinton, in his pre-White House filings, showed a gross 1990 income of $268,646, but the box (32a) relating to possible extramarital relations in the Oval Office was left blank. No doubt it was an oversight.
George W. Bush’s tax forms were as vacant as he was of any suggestion that he moved his lips when he read and would, if given the chance, tank the economy and lead the nation into two wars, mismanaging both.
By and large, the tax filings tell you nothing you don’t already know. But the refusal to release them is a different matter. In Romney’s case, this is his one and only stand on principle, an odd example of political bravery. He has flipped on abortion, gun control and, of course, health-insurance reform, his signature achievement as governor of Massachusetts. But not on releasing his taxes. Others have been recalcitrant. Ronald Reagan didn’t want to do it (he charged his daughter Maureen interest on a loan) but ultimately did.
In general, presidential and vice presidential candidates have released their returns. Maybe this was because most of them were public servants whose salaries were already known and whose wealth was modest. Others, though, were persons of considerable wealth — Lloyd Bentsen, John Kerry, John Edwards — who laid it all out on the table. (I wonder if Edwards, if he still had presidential prospects, would have deducted his latest child.)
It’s impossible to know what Romney is not revealing. But it is instructive to contrast him to his father, George, who was an auto executive and governor of Michigan. When George Romney ran for president in 1968, he released 12 years of income tax returns. But he was essentially salaried — his remuneration set either by statute or by a board of directors — and so really he was divulging little. Maybe more important, he actually made something (cars) or did something (governed). His son not only manufactured nothing but earned his wealth the new way — by financial manipulation, leveraging and such. On paper, it could look ugly.
For Mitt Romney, there are no assembly lines, no factories or mines — just back offices and computer terminals and such esoterica as the infinitesimal difference between what the Libor rate should be and what it is. He was loyal to no company, no industry — just to his investors. The making of such money is concealed, based on the exotic manipulation of numbers and the disregard of people. Only a relatively few know how to do this sort of thing, and they don’t much like to talk about it. Romney, as we already know, is one of those people. He hides his taxes not because it would reveal anything new about him, but because it would reveal what he has always known about us: We’re suckers.
By: Richard Cohen, Opinion Writer, The washington Post, July 23, 2012
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