“Two Tiered Discrimination”: Separate And Unequal Voting In Arizona And Kansas Are About Nullification And Voter Suppression
In its 2013 decision in Arizona v. The Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Arizona’s proof of citizenship law for voter registration violated the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).
In 2004, Arizona voters approved Proposition 200, a stringent anti-immigration law that included provisions requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot. Last year, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit blocked the proof of citizenship requirement, which it said violated the NVRA. Under the 1993 act, which drastically expanded voter access by allowing registration at public facilities like the DMV, those using a federal form to register to vote must affirm, under penalty of perjury, that they are US citizens. Twenty-eight million people used that federal form to register to vote in 2008. Arizona’s law, the court concluded, violated the NVRA by requiring additional documentation, such as a driver’s license, birth certificate, passport or tribal forms. According to a 2006 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, at least 7 percent of eligible voters “do not have ready access to the documents needed to prove citizenship.” The Supreme Court affirmed the lower court ruling, finding that states like Arizona could not reject applicants who registered using the NVRA form.
Now Arizona and Kansas—which passed a similar proof-of-citizenship law in 2011—are arguing that the Supreme Court’s decision applies only to federal elections and that those who register using the federal form cannot vote in state and local elections. The two states have sued the Election Assistance Commission and are setting up a two-tiered system of voter registration, which could disenfranchise thousands of voters and infringe on state and federal law.
The tactics of Arizona and Kansas recall the days of segregation and the Supreme Court’s 1896 “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. “These dual registration systems have a really ugly racial history,” says Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “They were set up after Reconstruction alongside poll taxes, literacy tests and all the other devices that were used to disenfranchise African-American voters.”
In the Jim Crow South, citizens often had to register multiple times, with different clerks, to be able to vote in state and federal elections. It was hard enough to register once in states like Mississippi, where only 6.7 percent of African-Americans were registered to vote before the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And when the federal courts struck down a literacy test or a poll tax before 1965, states like Mississippi still retained them for state and local elections, thereby preventing African-American voters from replacing those officials most responsible for upholding voter disenfranchisement laws.
The Voting Rights Act ended this dichotomy between federal and state elections by prohibiting racial discrimination in voting in all elections. Section 5 of the Act, which the Supreme Court eviscerated earlier this year in Shelby County v. Holder, prevented states with the worst history of voting discrimination—like Mississippi—from instituting new disenfranchisement schemes. It was Section 5 that blocked Mississippi from implementing a two-tiered system of voter registration following the passage of the NVRA in 1993, which the state claimed applied only to federal elections. (A similar plan was stopped in Illinois under state court.) Arizona—another state previously subject to Section 5 based on a long history of discrimination against Hispanic voters and other language minority groups—is making virtually the same rejected argument as Mississippi in the 1990s, but, thanks to the Roberts Court, no longer has to seek federal approval to make the voting change. The revival of the dual registration scheme is yet another reason why Congress should revive Section 5.
The proposed two-tiered system of voting and the harmfulness of proof-of-citizenship laws warrant legal scrutiny. Over 30,000 voters were prevented from registering in Arizona after its proof-of-citizenship law passed in 2004. In Kansas, 17,000 voters have been blocked from registering this year, a third of all registration applicants, because the DMV doesn’t transfer citizenship documents to election officials. The ACLU has vowed to sue Kansas if the state continues its noncompliance with state and federal law.
Proof-of-citizenship laws and the new two-tiered voting scheme are the brainchild of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has done more than just about anyone to stir up fears about the manufactured threat of voter fraud. As the author of Arizona’s “papers please” immigration law and Mitt Romney’s nonsensical “self deportation” immigration plan, he’s fused anti-immigrant hysteria with voter-fraud paranoia. Kobach helped the American Legislative Exchange Council draft model legislation for proof of citizenship laws based on Arizona’s bill, which were adopted in three states—Alabama, Kansas and Tennessee—following the 2010 election.
To justify his state’s new voting restrictions (Kansas also has a strict voter ID law), Kobach told The Huffington Post, “We identified 15 aliens registered to vote,” but he seems unconcerned that 17,000 eligible Kansans have been prevented from registering. Moreover, there’s no evidence these fifteen alleged non-citizens actually voted—just as there’s no evidence that dead people are voting in Kansas, another erroneous claim from Kobach. As Brad Friedman noted, Kansas City Star columnist Yael Abouhalkah wrote last year that Kobach “has a way of lying” about the threat of voter fraud.
Kobach claimed in 2011 that sixty-seven non-citizens had illegally registered, out of 1.7 million on the state’s voter rolls, but he “was unable to identify a single instance of a non-citizen illegally casting a vote, or any successful prosecution for voter fraud in the state,” according to the Brennan Center. As I’ve asked before, why would a non-citizen, who presumably is in the United States to work, risk deportation and imprisonment in order to cast a ballot? Kobach once suggested in a radio interview that perhaps their coyote was paying them to vote, which defies all logic.
There’s also no evidence that using the NVRA’s federal form to register leads to higher incidents of voter fraud. “Nobody has ever been prosecuted for using the federal form to register to vote as a non-citizen,” Nina Perales, vice president of litigation at the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, told me earlier this year.
In reality, the two-tiered system of registration being set up in Arizona and Kansas has less to do with stopping voter registration fraud, which as shown is a very rare problem in both states, and more to do with “nullifying” federal laws that Republicans don’t like, such as Obamacare. There’s symmetry between shutting down the government and creating separate and unequal systems of voter registration. It’s a strategy that dates back to Jim Crow, when fierce segregationists like John Calhoun of South Carolina tried to prevent the federal government from taxing the Confederacy and Southern Democrats instituted a policy of “massive resistance” to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling desegregating public schools.
Wrote Sam Tanenhaus in “Why Republicans Are The Party of White People”:
When the intellectual authors of the modern right created its doctrines in the 1950s, they drew on nineteenth-century political thought, borrowing explicitly from the great apologists for slavery, above all, the intellectually fierce South Carolinian John C. Calhoun. This is not to say conservatives today share Calhoun’s ideas about race. It is to say instead that the Calhoun revival, based on his complex theories of constitutional democracy, became the justification for conservative politicians to resist, ignore, or even overturn the will of the electoral majority.
The Confederates and Dixiecrats of yesteryear are the Republicans of today.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, October 15, 2013
“Your Job Isn’t Safe Until Extremist’s Lose Theirs”: Tea Party Extremism Cost Millions Of Jobs And Risks Millions More
If Americans learn anything from this month’s shutdown-and-debt-ceiling debacle, they ought to realize that political extremism brings real costs—denominated in dollars and jobs as well as national cohesion and prestige—and that those costs are not small. So long as the Tea Party faction continues to wield its malign influence over the Republican leadership in Congress, the threat of further, even worse damage will not subside.
Everyone should heed the clear warning issued by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), his cohort on Capitol Hill, and the leaders of outfits such as the Tea Party Express and FreedomWorks, all enraged and determined to lash out again as soon as possible. “This was going to be a multi-stage, extended battle,” said Cruz, “but we’ve also seen a model that I think is the model going forward to defeat Obamacare, to bring back jobs, economic growth…”
Only a dwindling fraction of voters is still mesmerized by such demagogic nonsense, but their anger intimidates enough Republicans to ensure that Cruz and company can seek to sabotage the economy again—and they will. So it is vital for everyone to understand what these vandals have inflicted on us already.
We will probably not know the full cost of the shutdown and the near-default for several months, if ever, but fresh estimates are now arriving daily. According to Standard & Poor’s, the financial ratings agency, the shutdown alone reduced economic activity in the United States by at least $24 billion and cut growth in the current quarter by as much as 0.6 percent. That means a loss of thousands of jobs and billions in household income, just when the economy would traditionally surge upward for the holiday season.
But that is just the beginning of a much grimmer inventory of suffering, which can be traced back more than two years to the first episode of Tea Party debt-ceiling bluster. For that assessment, we can look to none other than the Peter G. Peterson Foundation—named for its creator, a former Republican Commerce Secretary and fanatical fiscal hawk—whose latest contribution to public discourse is a thorough study, with charts, of “the cost of crisis-driven fiscal policy.” Peterson’s full study is worth reading, but its essential points are simple enough.
The repeated manufacturing of partisan fiscal crises has created sufficient uncertainty to reduce growth since 2009 by as much as 0.3 percentage points annually—eliminating as many as 900,000 potential jobs.
Now add on the wrong-headed cuts in federal discretionary spending caused by budget sequestration—the awful “solution” to the 2011 debt crisis. That reduced annual growth by 0.7 points since 2010 and raised unemployment by almost a full percentage point, or 1.2 million lost jobs.
Finally, the report examines two possible economic scenarios that could follow a Treasury default: a “brief” recessionary interlude that would see unemployment jump to 8.5 percent, costing 2.5 million jobs, and a longer, deeper, more volatile recession in which joblessness would rise to 8.9 percent and more than three million jobs would be lost.
Just as disturbing as all this sad waste of human potential is the incredible pettiness of the goals pursued by the Republican leadership. Their ultimate, most pathetic demand was to deny health insurance to their own aides.
So when Ted Cruz and the Tea Party tell you their holy crusade against health care will “bring back jobs,” assume the opposite (and act accordingly). There is no bipartisan compromise on offer here— only more of the same ruinous obstruction, and worse.
Your job won’t be secure until they lose theirs.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, October 18, 2013
“What Lesson Was Learned?”: For Republicans, It’s About “The How” Rather Than “The What” And “The Why”
So if the end of the fiscal crisis represents, as Ross Douthat calls it, a “Teachable Moment” for the GOP, what would that lesson, exactly, be? It mostly appears to be about strategy and tactics, not goals or ideology (or “principles” as ideologues like to say in their endless efforts to ascribe dishonesty and gutlessness to dissidents).
Even for Douthat, who clearly wants the memory of the Tea Folk (or to use his term, “populist”) failure in this incident to be seared into the collective memory of Republicans, it’s mostly about the how rather than the what and the why:
The mentality that drove the shutdown — a toxic combination of tactical irrationality and the elevation of that irrationality into a True Conservative (TM) litmus test — may have less influence in next year’s Beltway negotiations than it did this time around, thanks to the way this has ended for the defunders after John Boehner gave them pretty much all the rope that they’d been asking for. But just turn on talk radio or browse RedState or look at Ted Cruz’s approval ratings with Tea Partiers and you’ll see how potent this mentality remains, how quickly it could resurface, and how easily Republican politics and American governance alike could be warped by it in the future.
So for undeluded conservatives of all persuasions, lessons must be learned. If the party’s populists want to shape and redefine and ultimately remake the party, they can’t pull this kind of stunt again.
The problem was “the stunt,” not the violent antipathy towards a pale version of universal health coverage or the conviction that the New Deal/Great Society legacy is fatal to America or the belief that nearly half the country is composed of satanic blood-suckers and baby-killers.
Eric Cantor stressed this distinction between strategy and tactics, on the one hand, and ideology on the other in his speech to yesterday’s doomed House Republican Conference:
“We all agree Obamacare is an abomination. We all agree taxes are too high. We all agree spending is too high. We all agree Washington is getting in the way of job growth. We all agree we have a real debt crisis that will cripple future generations. We all agree on these fundamental conservative principles. . . . We must not confuse tactics with principles. The differences between us are dwarfed by the differences we have with the Democratic party, and we can do more for the American people united,” he told them.
In fact, I’m beginning to get the sense that the more loudly a conservative denounces the tactics of the fiscal fight as idiotic, the more he or she can be counted on to insist on agreeing with the ideology that motivated the idiocy in the first place.
One of my favorite characterizations of the whole “defund Obamacare” crusade was by the conservative blogger Allahpundit:
If “defund” was more likely than repeal, it was more likely in the sense that an 85-yard field goal is more likely than a 90-yard one.
But don’t confuse that strategic argument with any broader sense that conservatives or Republicans should rethink their entire militant opposition to the Affordable Care Act. No, it just means recognizing that getting rid of this law–as opposed to obstructing it and making sure the number of people benefitting from it is as small as possible–must await the kind of victory in 2016 that eluded the party last year.
Don’t get me wrong here: there’s great value to the nation in convincing one of our two major political parties to respect the results of elections and eschew wildly disruptive legislative strategies and tactics. But even if that “lesson was learned,” and the jury’s still out on that proposition, it’s not the same as a serious reconsideration of today’s radical conservatism, which may well emerge from this incident as strong as ever.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 17, 2013
“An Alternate Bizzaro Universe”: Ted Cruz’s “American People” Remain Imaginary And Elusive
Give Ted Cruz this much: He remains unbowed in the face of both substantive defeat and public opinion, which he ceaselessly claims to have on his side.
For example, yesterday Cruz addressed the press (the man seems to only communicate in formal speeches – can you imagine dining with him?) on the shutdown and its conclusion, declaring the whole thing a massive expression of the will of “the American people.” He said:
Unfortunately, once again, it appears the Washington establishment is refusing to listen to the American people.
It is unfortunate that Washington is not listening to the people.
And I want to commend the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives has taken a bold stance listening to the American people.
Months ago, when the – when the effort to defund “Obamacare” began, official Washington scoffed – they scoffed that the American people would rise up. They scoffed that the House of Representatives would do anything, and they scoffed that the Senate would do anything.
We saw, first of all, millions upon millions of Americans rise up all over this country. Over two million people signing a national petition to defund “Obamacare.” We saw the House of Representatives take a courageous stand listening to the American people …
As I have argued before, it raises the question of precisely which “American people” Cruz is speaking for, because it’s not the ones who are answering pollsters. For example, an ABC News/Washington Post poll released Monday found that 74 percent – 74 percernt! – of Americans disapproved of the way Congressional Republicans were handling the budget negotiations, an 11 percent increase from a few weeks earlier. That came after an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll last week found only 24 percent of those surveyed approving of congressional Republicans – a result which Republican pollster Bill McInturff (who along with Democrat Peter Hart conducted the survey) said made it, “among the handful of surveys that stand out in my career as being significant and consequential,” along with polls taken in the wake of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Lehman collapse and the last debt ceiling crisis. (Cruz tried to “unskew” the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, but was unsuccessful.)
Further, polls have shown that Obamacare has become more popular and that the intensity among its opponents has ebbed. And while polls show that more Americans disapprove of Obamacare than like it (though those numbers are deceptive if you don’t take out the people who disapprove because the law doesn’t go far enough), surveys also show that most Americans prefer to have Congress work to improve the law rather than repeal or defund it, a la Cruz.
And all of this after polls showed overwhelming numbers of Americans disapproved of shutting down the government in order to win policy concessions from the other side … which brings me to Cruz on Fox News last night. “But we’ve also seen a model that I think is the model going forward to defeat Obamacare, to bring back jobs, economic growth, to abolish the IRS, to rein in out-of-control spending,” he said. A model going forward – that’s right folks, Ted Cruz enjoyed this shutdown so much that he wants to do it again.
Presumably he’ll claim then to be acting in the name of the American people as well. Ted Cruz was elected from Texas, but it’s clear he really hails from some bizarro alternate universe. Where else could Obama winning a comfortable re-election and poll after poll after poll showing that Americans like neither shutdowns nor the party behind the specific shutdown that just ended all add up to a by-any-means-necessary mandate to pursue Cruz’s narrow right-wing agenda?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 17, 2013
“A Love Story For The Ages”: Republicans And The Sequester
The deal allowing the government to reopen today included a mandate that the House and Senate engage in a new round of budget negotiations, with the lawmakers involved facing the unenviable task of reconciling the different tax and spending plans passed by each respective chamber. One contentious issue right off the bat is whether or not to preserve the spending levels under the so-called “sequester,” which were a byproduct of the 2011 debt ceiling debacle.
To review, when Republicans took the debt ceiling hostage two years ago, the deal crafted to avoid default – known as the Budget Control Act – mandated the creation of a “supercommittee” that was supposed to come up with a budget compromise. The sequester was meant to be the stick that would force a deal, as it included cuts that were supposedly so painful to each party that they would have no choice but to agree on something else.
Except that’s not what happened. The negotiations fell apart where they always fall apart: with Republicans refusing to accede to one dime in new revenue. The sequester went into effect and is now cutting an indiscriminate path through the budget.
Democrats, then, have made some noise about undoing the sequester, for at least a short period of time, during this new round of budget negotiations. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., made clear on the Senate floor yesterday that he is not interested in such an idea.
“I’m also confident that we’ll be able to announce that we’re protecting the government spending reductions that both parties agreed to under the Budget Control Act, and that the president signed into law. That’s been a top priority for me and my Republican colleagues throughout this debate. And it’s been worth the effort,” McConnell said. “Some have suggested that we break that promise as part of the agreement. … But what the BCA showed is that Washington can cut spending. … And we’re not going back on this agreement.” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, called sequestration, “one of the good things that has happened” and “an important thing that we have achieved.” Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, even threatened another debt ceiling standoff in the new year should Democrats try to undo the sequester.
But when the sequester first went into effect, Republicans did everything they could to blame it on Obama. They even tried to call it the “Obamaquester.” In fact, here’s what McConnell had to say about the sequester back in February: “Take the Obama sequester as just one example. The president had a chance last night to offer a thoughtful alternative to his sequester, one that could reduce spending in a smarter way. That is what Republicans have been calling for all along.”
So in just eight short months, those spending cuts went from “the Obama sequester” to a “top priority” for the GOP. How the times change.
During his floor speech, McConnell also excoriated Obamacare for “killing jobs.” Not only is that false, but if McConnell wants to see a real job killer, he needs to look no further than his precious sequester spending levels. As I noted last week, the sequester has not only been gutting important programs, but is slowly strangling economic growth. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the spending levels under the sequester will cost up to 1.6 million jobs through fiscal year 2014.
Of course, the GOP to this point has been impervious to the mountain of evidence showing that cutting spending in a weak economy just makes for a weaker economy. So perhaps it’s best that McConnell and co. are just owning up to the fact that the sequester is something they desire and admire. It’s a love story for the ages: the sequester, once spurned, is now the one thing Republicans want to ensure will be staying around forever.
By: Pat Garofalo, U. S. News and World Report, October 17, 2013
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