“The Fight To Protect Voting Rights, One Year Later”: The Key Barrier Is Finding Republican Support
As of yesterday, it’s been exactly a year since conservatives on the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, gutted the Voting Rights Act. The ruling, however, was open-ended in a way – the Republican-appointed justices didn’t say which part of the Constitution the VRA violated, and it invited Congress to “fix” the law (though the justices didn’t say how).
With this in mind, a bipartisan and bicameral group of lawmakers got to work, and in January they unveiled the Voting Rights Amendment Act, a reform bill intended to address the Supreme Court’s concerns. Zachary Roth reported yesterday that proponents haven’t given up the fight.
Civil rights advocates pressed lawmakers Wednesday at a contentious Senate hearing to advance a bill that would strengthen the Voting Rights Act, saying a failure to do so would represent a historic betrayal of African-American aspirations for political equality. But Republicans appeared unmoved.
“If the Voting Rights Act is not modernized, then you are effectively ending the second Reconstruction of the United States,” Rev. Francys Johnson, the president of the Georgia NAACP, told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
At this point, the key barrier is finding Republican support. When Congress last considered the VRA, support for the law was nearly unanimous – and in the Senate, it was literally unanimous – but in the wake of the high court ruling, GOP support has evaporated. Indeed, as Roth’s report noted, at yesterday’s hearing, the Republican senators and the conservatives witnesses “acknowledged that race bias in voting still exists”; they just don’t intend to support any new measures to prevent voting discrimination.
As of this afternoon, the Voting Rights Amendment Act has zero Republican co-sponsors.
All of which leads us to a gentleman by the name of Thad Cochran.
Cochran, of course, is the senior senator from Mississippi, and just this week, he survived a very competitive Republican primary thanks in large part to support from African-American Democrats who saw the incumbent’s challenger as vastly more offensive.
I suggested yesterday that Cochran, as a gesture of goodwill and gratitude, can repay the favor by – you guessed it – throwing his support to the new Voting Rights Act. He’d already voted for the old one so it’s really a fairly modest request.
I’m hardly the only one who thought of this.
In an interview with HuffPost Live, Derrick Johnson, president of the Mississippi NAACP, said that Cochran could thank black voters by supporting efforts to re-establish protections in the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court struck down last year.
“Our advocacy towards his office is to support amending the Voting Rights Act, free of any conditions such as voter ID,” Johnson said. “I think this is an opportunity for him to show some reciprocity for African-Americans providing a strong level of support for him.”
The editorial board of the New York Times is on board, too.
The prospect of electing an intemperate Tea Party candidate who was openly nostalgic for Confederate days was so repellent to many black voters in Mississippi that they did a remarkable thing on Tuesday, crossing party lines to help give the Republican Senate nomination to Thad Cochran, in office for 36 years. Now it’s time for Mr. Cochran to return the favor by supporting a stronger Voting Rights Act and actively working to reduce his party’s extreme antigovernment policies.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but Cochran is positioned to keep his job because black voters showed up to save his skin. Why not return the favor by showing some leadership on voting rights?
In practical terms, Cochran’s support wouldn’t necessary help get the bill passed into law – House Republicans will almost certainly kill the Voting Rights Amendment Act anyway – so there’s no real harm in the senator doing the right thing.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 26, 2014
“Crashing The White Primary”: Not An Argument Consistent With Broadening The Appeal Of The GOP
Right before the votes started rolling in last night, elements of Team McDaniel started complaining of “illegal Dem votes to steal the election.” As it became obvious that turnout in heavily African-American areas was up sharply from June 3, with Thad Cochran the overwhelming beneficiary, the cry of “theft” grew louder, to the point that McDaniel himself refused to concede after all the experts had declared the incumbent the winner.
Cochran’s win wasn’t all about “crossover” voting; he seems to have beefed up both turnout and his percentage of the vote in Gulf Coast counties where he campaigned personally, reminding voters of the defense contracts he had brought to the area.
It also appears from McDaniel’s enhanced votes in the pineywoods sections of the state that there may have been a backlash to Cochran’s appeals to African-Americans.
In any event, the kvetching from the Right last night sounded an awful lot like southern seggies during the civil rights era complaning about “The Bloc Vote” (though there really never was a Bloc Vote in Mississippi at that time because black people simply weren’t allowed to vote). The unfocused talk of a legal challenge to the outcome either is or isn’t based on documented examples of (a) voting by people who already participated in the Democratic Primary on June 3, which contradicts a lot of anecdotal evidence about people being challenged and excluded on those grounds, or (b) some sort of illegal inducement to vote. If it isn’t, then McDaniel supporters are really going to embarrass themselves and Republicans everywhere if they contest an election on the basis of some ridiculous and patently unconstitutional “intent to support the party in November” law, or some general principle that “crossover” voting is inherently illegitimate.
For all the talk last night of “liberal Democrats” being allowed to determine a Republican primary, there’s actually no way to know the partisan or ideological identity of voters in a state with no party registration (as David Nir pointedly asked this morning, why hasn’t Chris McDaniel sponsored a bill to change that in his years in the state legislature?). So what these birds are really complaining about is black participation in a “white primary.” This is certainly not an argument consistent with broadening the appeal of the GOP or the conservative movement.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 25, 2014
“Sane Is Better Than Insane”: Thad Cochran Wins One For Sanity Over Tea Partier Chris McDaniel
I know, I know. Fellow liberals, you were rooting for Chris McDaniel to beat Thad Cochran on Tuesday night in Mississippi. I understand. Just a few days ago, I was, too. Put more crazy in the national GOP. Make them look that much more embarrassing. Bring one more nut to Washington who talks about hot Latino babes and all the rest of it.
Besides which, if McDaniel had won, the Democrat, Travis Childers, would have had a shot. Childers would scarcely qualify as a Democrat in about 17 or 18 states, but the Senate is the Senate, full of weird senators, for better or worse. Every state gets two. Why not have one be a guy who’ll vote (we presume, shakily) to make Harry Reid the majority leader of the Senate?
Nah. First of all, the idea that Childers ever had any kind of chance of winning a Senate seat in Mississippi was a pipe dream. The voters of Mississippi aren’t going to send a Democratic senator to Washington, D.C., in the era of Barack Obama. I don’t care what the circumstances are. Remember that old joke about incumbents being safe as long as they weren’t caught with a live boy or a dead girl? During the Obama presidency, a Mississippi Republican could be caught with a dead Bichon Frise, and the only question he’d be asked is why he favored a dog with such a gay-sounding Frenchie name. Childers wasn’t going to beat McDaniel.
As to whether Democrats would prefer to have Cochran or McDaniel in the Senate, this takes us back to the old Marxist dialectic, “The worse, the better.” That is, the worse things get for our enemies, the more extreme and crazy they get, the better things are for us, because the worse things get for them, the more quickly the public will see that the other side has lost its freaking mind.
This was the stratagem of leftists everywhere for a long, long time. Not that I’m making any direct comparisons here—OK?—but this is what the socialists and communists thought in Germany in 1933. The right, they were sure, is going to discredit itself. And they were correct. But it took 12 years and around 9 million or 10 million dead human beings. That’s enough collateral damage to prove the theorists wrong.
No, sorry. Boring as it may seem, be glad that Cochran eked out his win. Be happy that sane won. Here’s a little political truism for you: Sane is better than insane. We don’t need more Ted Cruzes in the Senate. We don’t need more candidates endorsed by Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum. We just. Don’t. Need. Them. We don’t need one more extremist GOP candidate who is going to make those cowardly Republicans in the Senate conclude that they have to live in fear of losing to some certifiable, fact-bending jelly-head of the extreme right. We really don’t.
Cochran will never vote for anything Obama wants. No minimum wage hike, no carbon tax, no nothing. I understand that. But he’ll be in there, assuming he wins and stays alive, until January 2021. That is, through what might be Hillary Clinton’s first term. If the GOP intra-bloodbath happens in 2017 after she’s won, Cochran, who won’t be running again and just won’t give a shit, might actually vote for one or two things Clinton asks for. McDaniel, obviously, would not.
And consider this. The Tea Party people are furious about this outcome. A very prominent Tea Party activist tweeted Tuesday night: “If Cochran wins this #mssen race, the GOP is done. They teamed up with Dems to steal a race. Kiss the base goodbye.”
So there we are. Be for sanity. Be against insanity. The dialectic never worked, even back in the glory days. Chris McDaniel belongs where he belongs—chasing ambulances in Pascagoula, or wherever it is he’s from. And his election would not hasten the Republican apocalypse. If anything, Cochran’s would. More Tea Party losses in races like this are what’s needed.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 25, 2014
“A Galloping Conservative Radicalism”: If Republicans Want Respect, They Need To Stop Using The Budget As A Weapon
One of the central provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform package was the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is charged with preventing banks and other financial institutions from preying on vulnerable consumers. Republicans hate the CFPB, and have taken to complaining about its funding stream, which comes from the Federal Reserve rather than the normal budgeting process.
They have a point, but they have only themselves to blame, since the GOP has all but relinquished its claim to responsible oversight by using the budget to cripple laws it doesn’t like.
This steaming Washington Examiner editorial lambasting Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Al Green (D-Texas) is a helpful distillation of the GOP position:
Simply put, Waters and Green view the congressional appropriations process as an obstacle to doing things they judge to be good, rather than as a tool by which the American people make sure the executive branch properly enforces the laws they instructed Congress to approve. This is how a democratic republic functions. Do Waters and Green think other agencies — say, the IRS, NSA, the Department of Homeland Security or perhaps the FBI — should be similarly unaccountable to the people’s representatives?
And what will they do when, having freed the bureaucrats of congressional shackles, they find a Republican president using the CFPB in nefarious ways, with Congress powerless to intervene? [Washington Examiner]
I have some sympathy with this perspective. Putting the CFPB outside the normal budget does reduce its democratic accountability. And the agency hasn’t been covering itself with glory of late; a recent report from American Banker found systematic discrimination in hiring and promotion. It’s plausible that more oversight could have prevented that.
But the problem is that conservatives obviously aren’t concerned about whether taxpayers are getting a good deal. They want to cut the bejesus out of the agency’s funding, even if it means inviting another financial crisis. The GOP budget from earlier this year zeroed out CFPB funding after 2016. Republicans claimed they wouldn’t get rid of it altogether, but given the GOP’s animosity toward pro-consumer regulations, or any programs that benefit the non-rich, it’s easy to suspect that they are trying to quietly axe the agency.
The truth is that the strongest possible oversight authority over the CFPB — the power of life and death — is still firmly in Congress’ hands. The legislature created the agency, and it may destroy it. The trouble is that Republicans don’t have enough votes to destroy the CFPB. They don’t even have a majority in the Senate, never mind enough votes to override a guaranteed veto from President Obama.
By dividing government, the Constitution forces parties into compromise. For a normal partisan with a basic commitment to the norms of American democracy, the idea is to hammer out compromises with the other side until you are in a position to enact a suite of policies. You can’t get everything, but you can get half a loaf here and there. Then, when you get the rare chance at controlling both Congress and the presidency, you pass a big policy suite, and hope people like it enough that it sticks.
That’s a reasonably fair description of how Democrats behaved from 2006 to 2010.
But Republicans have abandoned this set of norms in favor of an enraged constitutional hardball. Under this model, when you don’t have enough votes to pass your agenda, you use every procedural tactic at your disposal to force the other side to embrace it. At the extreme, this includes threatening grievous damage to the nation, by deliberately defaulting on the debt or shutting down the government. Additionally, since what passes for Republican policy is simply repealing laws or privatizing huge swathes of the government, starving agencies for funds is a nice way to accomplish that goal on the sly.
Republicans have eased up on the government-by-hostage-crisis of late, but this behavior is what inspires Democrats to do an end-run around the budget process. Since they can’t trust Republicans to not use the budget process as part of the policy proxy war, there’s a constant search for ways to protect critical agencies from procedural extremism.
It’s not a great situation. But because our poorly designed institutions have collided with a galloping conservative radicalism, it is going to be a more common one.
By: Ryan Cooper, National Correspondent at TheWeek.com, June 24, 2014
“The Big Green Test”: Conservatives And Climate Change
On Sunday Henry Paulson, the former Treasury secretary and a lifelong Republican, had an Op-Ed article about climate policy in The New York Times. In the article, he declared that man-made climate change is “the challenge of our time,” and called for a national tax on carbon emissions to encourage conservation and the adoption of green technologies. Considering the prevalence of climate denial within today’s G.O.P., and the absolute opposition to any kind of tax increase, this was a brave stand to take.
But not nearly brave enough. Emissions taxes are the Economics 101 solution to pollution problems; every economist I know would start cheering wildly if Congress voted in a clean, across-the-board carbon tax. But that isn’t going to happen in the foreseeable future. A carbon tax may be the best thing we could do, but we won’t actually do it.
Yet there are a number of second-best things (in the technical sense, as I’ll explain shortly) that we’re either doing already or might do soon. And the question for Mr. Paulson and other conservatives who consider themselves environmentalists is whether they’re willing to accept second-best answers, and in particular whether they’re willing to accept second-best answers implemented by the other party. If they aren’t, their supposed environmentalism is an empty gesture.
Let me give some examples of what I’m talking about.
First, consider rules like fuel efficiency standards, or “net metering” mandates requiring that utilities buy back the electricity generated by homeowners’ solar panels. Any economics student can tell you that such rules are inefficient compared with the clean incentives provided by an emissions tax. But we don’t have an emissions tax, and fuel efficiency rules and net metering reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So a question for conservative environmentalists: Do you support the continuation of such mandates, or are you with the business groups (spearheaded by the Koch brothers) campaigning to eliminate them and impose fees on home solar installations?
Second, consider government support for clean energy via subsidies and loan guarantees. Again, if we had an appropriately high emissions tax such support might not be necessary (there would be a case for investment promotion even then, but never mind). But we don’t have such a tax. So the question is, Are you O.K. with things like loan guarantees for solar plants, even though we know that some loans will go bad, Solyndra-style?
Finally, what about the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal that it use its regulatory authority to impose large reductions in emissions from power plants? The agency is eager to pursue market-friendly solutions to the extent it can — basically by imposing emissions limits on states, while encouraging states or groups of states to create cap-and-trade systems that effectively put a price on carbon. But this will nonetheless be a partial approach that addresses only one source of greenhouse gas emissions. Are you willing to support this partial approach?
By the way: Readers well versed in economics will recognize that I’m talking about what is technically known as the “theory of the second best.” According to this theory, distortions in one market — in this case, the fact that there are large social costs to carbon emissions, but individuals and firms don’t pay a price for emitting carbon — can justify government intervention in other, related markets. Second-best arguments have a dubious reputation in economics, because the right policy is always to eliminate the primary distortion, if you can. But sometimes you can’t, and this is one of those times.
Which brings me back to Mr. Paulson. In his Op-Ed he likens the climate crisis to the financial crisis he helped confront in 2008. Unfortunately, it’s not a very good analogy: In the financial crisis he could credibly argue that disaster was only days away, while the climate catastrophe will unfold over many decades.
So let me suggest a different analogy, one that he probably won’t like. In policy terms, climate action — if it happens at all — will probably look like health reform. That is, it will be an awkward compromise dictated in part by the need to appease special interests, not the clean, simple solution you would have implemented if you could have started from scratch. It will be the subject of intense partisanship, relying overwhelmingly on support from just one party, and will be the subject of constant, hysterical attacks. And it will, if we’re lucky, nonetheless do the job.
Did I mention that health reform is clearly working, despite its flaws?
The question for Mr. Paulson and those of similar views is whether they’re willing to go along with that kind of imperfection. If they are, welcome aboard.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, June 22, 2014
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