“Money In, People Out”: The Twin Pillars Of The GOP’s Voter Disenfranchisement 2012 Plan
Mitt Romney escaped the record heat this weekend by attending several parties in his honor in the Hamptons. Early predictions were that one afternoon in this elite enclave would net the candidate more than $3 million for his campaign.
Less than 200 miles away in Philadelphia, where the median income hovers at $36,000 and a quarter of the city lives below the poverty line, there were no beach parties, but some disturbing news. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that state election officials upped the number of statewide voters potentially affected by the new voter ID laws from the 90,000 that Governor Corbett claimed to 758,000. A full 9.2 percent of the state’s eligible voters could be turned away from the polls in November, despite being eligible. In Philadelphia, where over half of the city’s residents are people of color, 18 percent of registered voters lack proper ID under the state’s new laws—laws that Pennsylvania House leader Mike Turzai claimed will deliver the state to Romney in November.
These twin anecdotes seem to perfectly capture the GOP 2012 plan for victory: “voters out, money in.” Despite the massive capital advantage the Republicans have accrued, they’re still driving a strategy of disenfranchisement and destruction that imperils our democracy and seeds distrust among a populace already experiencing record lows of confidence in their elected leadership.
Next week, pundits will be hyperventilating over the political fundraising totals from the last quarter. The cover of the Sunday NY Times Magazine breathlessly asks the rhetorical question, “Can Democrats Catch Up in the Super-PAC game?” Let’s get it clear: no, they can’t and no one ever claimed they could. But they also don’t need to—what they need is to raise some money, spend it smarter than their counterparts, and provide millions of people the legal means and the emotional desire to exercise their constitutional right to vote. The right understands this key to Democratic victory, which is why outraising is not enough. Victory requires dominating the system at both ends.
More than two dozen states have passed voter ID laws, with eleven passing in the last two years. Republicans, sensing the opportunity, have continually hyped the negligible threat of voter fraud in order to make voting tougher and tougher for the elderly, the poor, Latinos and African-Americans—all of whom tend to lean Democratic. Meanwhile, back in April, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson gave $10 million on one day to Romney Super PAC, Restore Our Future. Combined with $20 million to Newt Gingrich’s failed bid plus millions more to Rove and Koch brothers front groups, Adelson has given close to $60 million all told, and has stated publicly that he’ll spend up to $100 million to defeat Barack Obama.
What’s driving these actions at both ends of the spectrum is a mix of personal entitlement, business efficiency and good old-fashioned elitism, with a healthy dose of racism. Take Adelson: he’s in for high stakes because his personal stakes are high. He’s under investigation by both the Department of Justice and the Security and Exchange Commission for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) by paying off local officials and working with organized crime to further his gambling empire in Macau, China. The Obama administration has been diligent about prosecuting FCPA cases, while Adelson presumes the heat would be off under a Romney presidency. When you have $25 billion, what’s $100 million to secure your freedom?
Adelson also makes 90 percent of his earnings from his casinos in Macau and Singapore, a high number, but not unheard of for US companies operating abroad. Obama has promised to close the loopholes that allow these corporations to shelter earnings overseas, robbing US treasuries of billions in tax dollars. Preserving offshore tax havens is not the only place where donating big bucks to GOP Super PACs is a highly efficient business model. Mega-donors David and Charles Koch’s company, Koch Industries, spent a whopping $40 million on disclosed lobbying expenditures between 2008 and 2010. The price of a fundraiser in the Hamptons is peanuts compared to that tab. Between the tax plan and the estate tax, high-net-worth folks stand to save millions annually under Romney. The candidate himself would save almost $5 million per year under his own plan.
Apparently, when the stakes are this high, you don’t take chances. Hence, the full court press on disenfranchisement. In Florida, the GOP governor has been so intent on purging voter rolls of Latino-sounding names that the Justice Department filed an injunction and sixty-seven election supervisors courageously refused to implement the program until he proves his claims in each case.
Self-serving economics is a repugnant driver, but the psychology that allows lawmakers to deny fundamental rights to their constituents while their rank and file stand by is even more insidious. In a rare moment of honesty, a GOP donor that shelled out $25,000 to attend one of the Romney events yesterday had this to say to a LA Times reporter:
“I don’t think the common person is getting it,” she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. “Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them… But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies—everybody who’s got the right to vote—they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income—one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”
While it’s the money they flaunt, it’s the people they fear, a fact that would serve us well to remember as limited resources are spent in 2012 and beyond. As progressives work to protect the vote for every American citizen in the short term and to blunt the impact of big money on our democratic process, let’s not lose focus on long-term investments in our own not-so-secret weapon: the people—of all colors and ages, all incomes levels, in the cities and on the farms—that make this country great. When they all have a voice, we all win.
By: Ilyse Hogue, The Nation, July 9, 2012
GOP “Ultracraziness”: Experts On “Lady Stuff”, Ultrasounds And Contraception
If the state of Arizona excels at one thing, it’s passing laws that make people angry. Today, an Arizona senate panel voted to give all employers the right to refuse coverage of birth control on their health-insurance plans. The bill is awaiting approval by the State Senate. Arizona Representative Debbie Lesko, a supporter of the bill, explained her rationale to the Arizona Star: “I believe that we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union. So government shouldn’t be telling employers, Catholic organizations or mom-and-pop employers to do something that’s against their moral beliefs.”
In other contraception news, the controversial “Women’s Right to Know” Act, which would make it mandatory for women to have ultrasounds before getting abortions, made some more enemies today.
Republican Virginia State Senator Ryan McDougle, who backs the bill, received a barrage of posts on his Facebook page today from women who oppose the bill, asking McDougle for gynecological wisdom. One woman, complaining about her period, wrote, “frankly, I’ve had enough of this inconvenience — the costs of pads and pain reliever and all the mess — well YOU know how it is. You’re an expert on this lady stuff.” McDougle’s staff promptly removed the comments, but not before a screenshot was taken.
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett also chimed in about the ultrasound bill. When asked if he thought it was going too far to make a woman look at her ultrasound before having an abortion, he replied: “You can’t make anybody watch, okay? Because you just have to close your eyes.” All in all, a rough day for Republicans and ladies.
By: Eliza Shapiro, Daily Intel, March 16, 2012
Who’s Paying For The GOP’s Plan To Hijack The 2012 Election?
Over the past six months, someone—or a group of someones—has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund an effort to change the rules of the 2012 presidential election to make it very difficult for President Barack Obama to win reelection. But the shadowy lobbying group mounting this campaign hasn’t disclosed its donors—and under current law, it doesn’t have to.
In two states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, GOP legislators have introduced bills that would change how electoral votes—a candidate needs 270 of the 538 to win the presidency—are awarded in a presidential election. Under the current system, the winner of the statewide popular vote receives all of the electoral votes from that state.
If the Republican plan becomes law in either Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, those states would change how electoral votes are awarded. The new plan would allot electoral votes on the basis of vote totals within congressional districts. If a candidate wins a congressional district, he or she would receive one electoral college vote. Whoever does best in the statewide race would receive two electoral votes.
Because Republicans will draw the boundaries of the congressional districts in both states, the new rules would mean that Obama could win the states but still receive fewer electoral votes than his Republican opponent. Should a Republican split the states’ electoral votes with Obama (even if Obama draws more votes), that could provide the GOPer with the margin of victory in a close race. (Under the US Constitution, it is up to the states to allot electoral votes as they see fit.)
In Pennsylvania, a secretive nonprofit group called All Votes Matter has been pushing the electoral vote scheme since May. All Votes Matter has close ties to the Pennsylvania GOP—it hired a number of former top state Senate staffers-turned-lobbyists. “It was pretty much the Senate GOP All Star Lobbying Team and [former state House Democratic Counsel Bill] Sloane,” Peter DeCoursey, the bureau chief for Capitolwire, a newswire that’s read religiously by Harrisburg insiders, explained in September.
Between April and June, the group spent $77,700 to lobby state officials to support legislation to implement this scheme. By early September, GOP Gov. Tom Corbett and the state House and Senate leaders, Mike Turzai and Dominic Pileggi, both Republicans, had all expressed their support for the idea. It was “the best $77,700 anyone ever spent on potential legislation,” DeCoursey wrote. “The entire state governing wing [was] for a bill that [hadn’t] been introduced yet.”
A week later, though, the landscape had changed significantly. Mother Jones and other national media outlets drew widespread attention to the story, and the state GOP chairman and the vast majority of its congressional delegation came out against the plan.
All Votes Matter wasn’t fazed. It kept lobbying. Charles Gerow, a spokesman for All Votes Matter, told DeCoursey that the group had raised $300,000—and already spent $180,000. But Gerow wouldn’t tell reporters where the money was coming from, saying only that “civic-minded citizens” had provided the dough. This week, the group filed new lobbying disclosure forms revealing that it spent $186,882 on lobbying between July and September.
All Votes Matter doesn’t disclose its donors “as a matter of policy, per the request of many of them,” Gerow told Mother Jones. “It’s their legal right not to have it disclosed, and they don’t want it disclosed so they’re not subject to media calls and other potential harassment,” he added. All Votes Matter has “fully and completely complied with the law and will continue to do so,” Gerow said, and “if those who don’t agree with the law want to change it, it certainly is their right to do that.”
There’s no law that says All Votes Matter has to disclose where its money comes from. But opponents of the electoral college changes are outraged that voters are being kept in the dark about who’s behind such a potentially consequential reform. “This is an effort to fundamentally change the way Pennsylvania conducts its presidential elections, in my view to rig the election,” says Democratic state Sen. Daylin Leach. “They raised an awful lot of money very quickly—$300,000 in just a few days. We’re all curious where that level of funding comes from.”
Carolyn Fiddler, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which assists Democrats in state-level races around the country, says: “Given the potential impact of this measure this group is lobbying for, not just for Pennsylvanians but for presidential politics and Americans in general, the public has a right to know who’s behind it.”
Transparency advocates say it’s not enough to just know who is doing the lobbying—voters should also know who is paying the bills. “The old adage is that actions speak louder than words, and deeper pockets allow for more action,” says Michael Beckel, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics. “Without disclosure, the public is unable to fully hold accountable the companies and organizations that have hired these lobbyists in the first place.”
In Wisconsin, it’s even less clear who’s behind the electoral college shenanigans. The Wisconsin Democratic party has alleged that the bill there, sponsored by GOP state Rep. Dan LeMahieu, was written by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, among others. But so far, the Dems haven’t been able to produce any evidence to back up their charge, and emails from LeMahieu’s office Mother Jones obtained via an open records request showed no evidence of any outside involvement in the drafting of the law.
Democratic state legislators are worried that the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin bills are part of a broader effort. If GOP legislatures in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and other states where Democrats typically win presidential elections pass the electoral college changes All Votes Matter is proposing, it would mean “the end of competitive presidential elections and certainly people’s confidence that the process is fair,” Leach maintains. “To think that some secret group somewhere is rubbing their hands together and putting millions of dollars into this effort—and we can’t even know who they are—I think that’s obscene.”
By: Nick Baumann, Mother Jones, November 2, 2011
Politics Without Purpose: September 11 Should Not Be Another Media Event
It was another one of those weeks in the capital when our leaders debated matters crucial to the survival of American civilization.
Did President Obama try to upstage the Republican presidential debate by asking to address a joint session of Congress that same night? And did House Speaker John Boehner dis the president, and the presidency, by denying him that slot?
Tempted though I was to weigh in on this important matter, I decided instead to head over to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, to preview a small but immensely powerful exhibit marking the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
There, displayed for the first time, are sacred relics of 9/11: the crumpled piece of the fuselage where the American flag had been painted on the Boeing 757 that crashed in a Pennsylvania field, a flight-attendant call button from the plane, a window shade, a landing gear strut, and a log book with the pages intact. The exhibit is simple and raw, without glass or showcases. Some dried mud caked on an airplane seatbelt was flaking off onto a tablecloth.
Nearby is the door from a fire truck crushed at Ground Zero and the beeper of a man who died in the South Tower. There’s a Pentagon clock frozen at about the time American Airlines Flight 77 struck the complex and the phone on which Ted Olson received the last call from his wife on the doomed plane. Most poignant, perhaps, is the postcard from another passenger, written to her sister the day before the crash to give the address of a new home in which she would never live.
The spare exhibit brought back the horror of that time. But it also reminded me of the pride in what followed, the national unity and sense of purpose.
The warm feelings didn’t last long, of course, destroyed by the war in Iraq and the politicization of homeland security. By now, we have lost all sense of purpose in politics, alternately distracted by Sarah Palin’s bus tours, Anthony Weiner’s private parts, David Wu’s tiger suit, Donald Trump’s birth-certificate campaign, and Dick Cheney’s broadsides.
Obama, whose uncertain trumpet has ceased to rally even his own troops, contemplated his long-delayed jobs agenda while lounging on Martha’s Vineyard last month. His leading Republican rival for the presidency talks of treason and secession. Another challenger arranges to quadruple the size of his California home (his defense: He’s only doubling the living space). Lawmakers play games with the debt ceiling and wound the nation’s credit rating but can’t agree on anything to put Americans back to work.
The political extraneousness of the moment, in other words, is like that of early September 2001. We spent those days amusing ourselves with Gary Condit and shark attacks. President George W. Bush spent August on a record-long ranch vacation. The biggest issue under debate: stem-cell research. Warnings about Osama bin Laden were ignored while the administration obsessed over rewriting a missile treaty with Russia.
What will it require to end the drift this time? A depression? Another attack? Or is there a less painful way to regain national purpose?
“For most people,” curator David Allison told me as I toured the Smithsonian exhibit, “Sept. 11 is only a media event.” The exhibit is a modest attempt at changing that, taking that day’s ruins out of storage and rekindling memory. The lucky few who see the exhibit during its short run will be reminded that there are things more important than whether the president addresses Congress on a Wednesday or a Thursday.
Consider the simple postcard, written by Georgetown economist Leslie Whittington to her sister and brother-in-law, as Whittington, her husband and their 8- and 3-year-old daughters headed off to Australia for a sabbatical. The card, postmarked Sept. 12 at Dulles Airport, must have been mailed just before the family boarded American Flight 77. The note says, in its entirety:
9/10/01
Dear Sara & Jay,
Well, we’re off to Australia. When we return we will have a new address (as of 11/30): 8034 Glendale Rd. Chevy Chase, MD 20815
We don’t know our phone # yet. While we are in “Oz”, email will work best for contacting us: whittinl@georgetown.edu.
Love, Leslie, Chas, Zoe & Dana
I thought about Sara receiving that postcard from her dead sister, and about those little girls who never made it to Glendale Road – because of 19 evil men and a government distracted by less important things.
Then I went out onto Constitution Avenue, where, across from the museum, a bus labeled “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” had just parked.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 2, 2011
This Was Personal: Obama Announces Osama bin Laden Dead
Nearly 10 years later, we have a moment of national catharsis. President Obama last night put in words the sentiment which the spontaneous, jubilant crowds outside the White House and at Ground Zero expressed with triumphant roars and cheers: “Justice has been done.”
Justice is not always swift. But it is patient, and its reach can be long–in this case long enough to cut through years and over continents to deliver its final judgment.
The details will filter out in the coming hours, days, and weeks. But this much we know: “A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability,” the president told the country, adding that, “after a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.” It is viscerally gratifying that this was a firefight, not a missile fired from a ship miles away at sea or from a robot plane circling far overhead, or something similarly impersonal. This was personal.
The details of that awful day will, as the president said, forever be “seared into our national memory.” It left, he said, “a gaping hole in our hearts.” But as a friend of mine wrote on Facebook last night, reflecting what so many of us feel, “I saw a horrifyingly large cloud of black smoke rising over the Pentagon on 9/11 when I biked to work that day. I’ve been waiting for today’s news ever since.”
The wound of 9/11 is no longer an open one. Justice has been done.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U.S. News and World Report, May 2, 2011
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