“A Foiled Power Grab”: Voter ID Laws Face Major Roadblocks
Texas Republicans have been trying for years to pass a law that would require state voters to show identification before hitting the polls—and state Democrats have been equally determined to stop such a measure. The Rs came close in 2009, but the House Democrats, only two seats away from a majority, blew up the legislative session rather than see the measure pass. By 2011, however, fresh from Tea Party victories, the GOP had overwhelming majorities in both Houses. The bill was almost undoubtedly going to pass, and rather than go for a more moderate version of voter ID with non-photo options, the conservatives went for the gold, introducing one of the most stringent versions of a voter ID requirement. The only option left for the Democrats was to set up the grounds for the legal battles sure to come.
Monday, it looks like those efforts paid off. The Department of Justice has blocked the law, meaning that while the measure goes to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, the Lone Star State won’t be allowed to enforce the measure. Not every state must seek permission before changing election law, a process known as preclearance. The entire reason Texas must preclear changes to its election law stems from the state’s history of civil rights abuses. 50 years after the Voting Rights Act was passed, it seems the feds are right to keep their guard up.
Of the many problems the DOJ outlines in its letter to the state, one major point came up repeatedly during the legislative debate on the subject: the plight of rural voters. Democratic senators hit hard on the problem of access to state drivers’ license offices; in the letter, the DOJ notes 81 of the state’s 254 counties lack operational drivers’ license offices. The DOJ also notes that in rural areas the gap between Hispanics and non-Hispanics who have the necessary ID is “particularly stark in counties without driver’s license offices.” The senators were also vehement in discussing the hardships low-income voters would face both in terms of logistics and in terms of monetary costs. The DOJ finds that someone lacking the necessary documents to get an ID would have to start by obtaining a birth certificate—at minimum $22.
The question, not surprisingly, stems from whether Hispanic voters will be disproportionately affected by the new hurdles. The DOJ is fairly damning here, looking separately at two data sets provided by the state, one from September 2011 and one from January 2012. The state failed to explain discrepancies between the two sets of data, but more importantly, the two sets both show similar trends. Latino residents are significantly less likely to have the identification necessary for voting. Furthermore, the letter notes that the state has done almost nothing to educate voters about the coming change: “The state has indicated that it will implement a new educational program;” the letter reads, “but as of this date, our information indicates that the currently proposed plan will incorporate the new identification requirement into a general voter-education program.”
The state attorney general has already filed a preemptive lawsuit, so the next step is the D.C. Courts. But in the meantime, the law can’t go into effect—a legal win for the minority rights groups and Democrats fighting against the state. It’s not the only victory. As the DOJ issued its letter, a second judge in Wisconsin has blocked the state’s measure to require idenfication. Back in December, the Obama administration nixed a similar proposal from South Carolina.
To me, the partisan quality of the debate stains almost everything. Last week, I wrote about Connecticut’s efforts to increase voter turnout—a rare example in the midst of efforts to make voter more difficult. I’ll say now what I said then. These measures have obvious partisan consequences—and voter ID would help Republicans and hurt Democrats in political races. It’s obvious that concern for power is motivating many of the actors in the debate.
But voting is a holy act in democratic governments. It’s a powerful right, one people have struggled and died to exercise, and only relatively recently have minority communities had the necessary legal protections to get to the ballot box. The fact that the DOJ’s decision may benefit one political party is hardly worth mentioning when one considers that it also benefits basic rights of citizens.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, March 12, 2012
Defying “A Throwback To 40 Years Ago”: Americans Still Support The Birth-Control Mandate
To go back to The Washington Post poll for a moment, there is a little good news if the Obama administration is still fretting over its handling of the contraception mandate.
By a margin of 61 percent to 35 percent, Americans believe that health insurers should be required to cover the full cost of birth control for women. This even extends to religious-affiliated employers—like hospitals—which were the focal point of the controversy. According to the poll, 79 percent of those who support the birth-control mandate also support it for religious-affiliated employers.
Now that the controversy is over, for the most part, it’s obvious that this is good territory for the administration, and they should continue to press their advantage. Already, as The New York Times reports, Republican missteps have created an opening for Obama to improve his standing with moderate and Republican-leaning women. Indeed, as the year goes on, I expect that this view will become a little more prevalent:
“We all agreed that this seemed like a throwback to 40 years ago,” said Ms. Russell, 57, a retired teacher from Iowa City who describes herself as an evangelical Christian and “old school” Republican of the moderate mold. Until the baby shower, just two weeks ago, she had favored Mitt Romney for president.
Not anymore. She said she might vote for President Obama now. “I didn’t realize I had a strong viewpoint on this until these conversations,” Ms. Russell said. As for the Republican presidential candidates, she added: “If they’re going to decide on women’s reproductive issues, I’m not going to vote for any of them. Women’s reproduction is our own business.”
In the same way that Democrats should avoid preemptive celebration, Republicans should proceed with caution. It’s one thing to alienate single women, who lean Democratic anyway. It’s something else entirely to scare suburban white women from the GOP coalition. In a world where that happens, it’s hard to imagine Republican control of anything, much less the White House.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, March 12, 2012
“It’s Always In The Future”: When Do We Get To See Obama’s Radicalism?
Last week I wrote a post mocking conservatives for their relentless search for the next secret videotape that will expose Barack Obama as a dangerous radical, the latest of which was the shocking revelation that as a law student, he supported his professor Derrick Bell’s efforts to diversify the Harvard Law School faculty. Unsurprisingly, conservatives reacted by saying that I just didn’t get it (here‘s a sample). It’s worth saying a bit more about this phenomenon, because we surely haven’t seen the last of it, both in the campaign and in Obama’s second term, should he win one.
The search for the radical associations in Obama’s pre-political history began almost as soon as Obama’s presidential candidacy began in 2007. Some conservatives (and that’s an important qualifier; many conservatives understand that this stuff is nuts) have been positively obsessed with uncovering Obama’s radical associations. They have also insisted that those associations are closer than anyone thinks. So it isn’t enough that Obama once served on a charitable board with former ’60s radical Bill Ayers; some want us to believe that Ayers actually ghostwrote Obama’s books! Obama didn’t just speak at a rally supporting Derrick Bell; he hugged Bell, which just shows how close they were!
And all of this is supposed to lead to something, something about Obama’s presidency. Not even the craziest among the conspirators thinks that Obama is, today, taking orders from Ayers. But they would no doubt assert that he doesn’t have to, because in his youth Obama drank so deeply from their cup of extremist America-hating that he will be doing what the likes of Ayers want anyway.
So here’s my question: When do we get to see Obama’s radicalism?
I’m not talking about Affordable Care Act-type radicalism. I mean the real radicalism. The Weather Underground radicalism. The Black Panther radicalism. The dismantling of capitalism, the closing of the Defense Department, the demotion of white people to second-class citizenship. When is that going to come? Can they give us the litany of Obama policies that represent the realization of the visions of the ’60s radicals who supposedly control his mind across the decades?
Because after all, the point of the supposedly shocking revelation about Obama’s past isn’t to help us understand what has already happened but to give us a preview of what is to come. For instance, some conservatives believe the auto bailout is a key component of Obama’s nefarious socialist plan. But you don’t need to know when Obama spoke with Bill Ayers 15 years ago or what he said about Derrick Bell 20 years ago to understand the auto bailout. You can look at the actual auto bailout. No, the shocking revelation is supposed to warn us about new radicalism, the radicalism to come that can only be appreciated if you grasp the full implications of the people Obama was hanging around with a couple of decades ago.
So what exactly is it that they’re warning America about? When do we get to see this crazy radical Obama? If they’re pressed, there is an answer to this question: In his second term! That’s when the mask will be torn off, and the true Obama revealed. Sure, he might be governing like your average center-left Democrat now, but that’s only because he’s been lulling us into a false sense of security, so he can get re-elected and then begin his true project of remaking America, when Angela Davis gets nominated to the Supreme Court, private property is outlawed, and half the public gets herded onto collective farms. Or something.
To people who have a grip on reality, the things Barack Obama will do in a second term aren’t particularly mysterious. We don’t know exactly what will happen, of course, but we’ve got a pretty good idea. He’ll try to solidify the ACA, his signature legislative accomplishment. He may try to achieve tax reform, which could involve slightly higher rates for the wealthy, although he’ll need Republican cooperation to do it. He’ll try to extricate us from Afghanistan, and he doesn’t seem too keen on starting a war with Iran. And so on. Conservatives will dislike most of what he does, and liberals will like most (but not all) of it. In short, though the details aren’t easy to predict, in its broad strokes a second Obama term will probably be a lot like the first Obama term. You’d have to be pretty crazy to believe otherwise.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 12, 2012
“No Communist Plot”: Catholicism Is Not The Tea Party At Prayer
The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops will make an important decision this week: Do they want to defend the church’s legitimate interest in religious autonomy, or do they want to wage an election-year war against President Obama?
And do the most conservative bishops want to junk the Roman Catholic Church as we have known it, with its deep commitment to both life and social justice, and turn it into the Tea Party at prayer?
These are the issues confronting the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ administrative committee when it begins a two-day meeting on Tuesday. The bishops should ponder how they transformed a moment of exceptional Catholic unity into an occasion for recrimination and anger.
When the Department of Health and Human Services initially issued rules requiring contraceptive services to be covered under the new health-care law, it effectively exempted churches and other houses of worship but declined to do so for religiously affiliated entities such as hospitals, universities and social welfare organizations.
Catholics across the political spectrum — including liberals like me — demanded a broader exemption, on the theory that government should honor the religious character of the educational and social service institutions closely connected to faith traditions.
Under pressure, Obama announced a compromise on Feb. 10. It still mandated contraception coverage, but religiously affiliated groups would neither have to pay for it nor refer its employees to alternatives. These burdens would be on insurance companies.
The compromise was quickly endorsed by the Catholic Health Association. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the president of the bishops’ conference, reserved judgment but called Obama’s move “a first step in the right direction.”
Then, right-wing bishops and allied staff at the bishops’ conference took control. For weeks, Catholics at Sunday Mass were confronted with attacks that, at the most extreme, cast administration officials as communist-style apparatchiks intent on destroying Roman Catholicism.
You think I exaggerate? In his diocesan newspaper, Cardinal Francis George, archbishop of Chicago, wrote: “The provision of health care should not demand ‘giving up’ religious liberty. Liberty of religion is more than freedom of worship. Freedom of worship was guaranteed in the Constitution of the former Soviet Union. You could go to church, if you could find one. The church, however, could do nothing except conduct religious rites in places of worship — no schools, religious publications, health care institutions, organized charity, ministry for justice and the works of mercy that flow naturally from a living faith. All of these were co-opted by the government. We fought a long Cold War to defeat that vision of society.”
My goodness, does Obama want to bring the Commies back?
Cardinal Dolan is more moderate than Cardinal George, but he offered an unfortunate metaphor in a March 3 speech on Long Island. “I suppose we could say there might be some doctor who would say to a man who is suffering some sort of sexual dysfunction, ‘You ought to start visiting a prostitute to help you, and I will write you a prescription, and I hope the government will pay for it.’ ”
Did Cardinal Dolan really want to suggest to faithfully married Catholic women and men who decide to limit the size of their families that there is any moral equivalence between wanting contraception coverage and visiting a prostitute? Presumably not. But then why even reach for such an outlandish comparison?
Opposition in the church to extreme rhetoric is growing. Moderate and progressive bishops are alarmed that Catholicism’s deep commitment to social justice is being shunted aside in this single-minded and exceptionally narrow focus on the health-care exemption. A wise priest of my acquaintance offered the bishops some excellent questions about the church.
“Is it abandoning its historical style of being a leaven in society to become a strident critic of government?” he asked. “Have the bishops given up on their conviction that there can be disagreement among Catholics on the application of principle to policy? Do they now believe that there must be unanimity even on political strategy?”
The bishops have legitimate concerns about the Obama compromise, including how to deal with self-insured entities and whether the wording of the HHS rule still fails to recognize the religious character of the church’s charitable work. But before the bishops accuse Obama of being an enemy of the faith, they might look for a settlement that’s within reach — one that would give the church the accommodations it needs while offering women the health coverage they need. I don’t see any communist plots in this.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 11, 2012
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