“We Only Discriminate For Partisan Reasons”: Texas Struggles To Defend Discriminatory Voting Policies
It’s been about three weeks since the Justice Department, relying on what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, went after voter-discrimination policies in Texas. The U.S. Supreme Court may have severely damaged the VRA, but the Justice Department nevertheless argued that when “intentional voting discrimination” is found, changes to voting rights cannot be permitted to continue.
This week, as Adam Serwer reported, Texas submitted a brief presenting their defense.
Texas didn’t discriminate against minority voters. It was only because they were Democrats. And even if it did, the racial discrimination Texas engaged in is nowhere near as bad as the stuff that happened in the 1960s.
These are some of the arguments the state of Texas is making in an attempt to stave off federal supervision of its election laws. In late July, citing the state’s recent history of discrimination, the Justice Department asked a federal court to place the entire state back under “preclearance.” That means the state would have to submit its election law changes in advance to the Justice Department, which would ensure Texas wasn’t disenfranchising voters on the basis of race.
The arguments from Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) administration are pretty amazing, especially considering federal courts already found Texas’ election policies discriminatory as recently as two years ago, before the Supreme Court intervened.
As Kevin Drum explained, Texas’ first argument, as pushed by state Attorney General Greg Abbott, “is that, sure, Texas has tried to discriminate as recently as 2011, but their efforts were overturned by a court. So that means there are no current violations, and thus no reason to grant any kind of ‘equitable relief.'”
The second argument is the half-glass-full tack. As Serwer put it, “[T]he state claims, even if Texas did discriminate, and the state stresses that it did not, it was nothing as bad as ‘the ‘pervasive,’ ‘flagrant,’ ‘widespread,’ and ‘rampant’ discrimination that originally justified preclearance in 1965.’ So as long as Texas skies aren’t alight with flames from burning crosses, what’s the big whoop?”
But it’s the third argument that’s truly amazing.
From the brief filed by the state:
DOJ’s accusations of racial discrimination are baseless. In 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were controlled by large Republican majorities, and their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party’s electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats….The redistricting decisions of which DOJ complains were motivated by partisan rather than racial considerations, and the plaintiffs and DOJ have zero evidence to prove the contrary.
Got that? Texas wasn’t trying to discriminate against racial and ethnic minorities; Texas was simply trying to discriminate against racial and ethnic minorities who vote for Democrats.
In other words, Texas’ defense is that state policymakers were trying to crush the Democratic vote, and this led to inadvertent discrimination against African Americans and Latinos. As such, the argument goes, Texas was motivated by crass partisanship, and not racism, so the discrimination doesn’t really count.
Any chance this might be persuasive in court? Brenda Wright, a voting law expert with the liberal think tank Demos, told Serwer, “I don’t think it’s going to work, frankly. The mere desire to achieve partisan advantage does not give Texas a free hand to engage in racial discrimination. If the only way you can protect white incumbents is by diluting the voting strength of Hispanic citizens, you are engaging in intentional racial discrimination, and the courts will see that.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 13, 2013
“Shifting Winds, Changing Landscape”: Eric Holder Steps Up, GOP Stands Down On Sentencing Reforms
If you missed Rachel’s segment last night on Attorney General Eric Holder’s dramatic announcement on sentencing in drug crimes, it’s well worth your time. Indeed, by any fair measure, yesterday may be one of the most important days of the Obama administration’s second term, at least insofar as criminal justice is concerned.
Holder declared what many have long argued: too many Americans convicted of non-violent drug crimes are stuck in too many prisons for far too long. It’s a policy that costs too much, ravages families and communities, and has no practical law-enforcement rationale. That the Attorney General is using his prosecutorial discretion to circumvent mandatory minimums is an incredibly important step in the right direction — it’s the kind of move that will put fewer Americans behind bars for low-level, non-violent drug crimes.
What I was also eager to see were the next-day reactions, most notably from the right. Would Holder face a backlash from Republicans? So far, no. The conservative Washington Times ran this report today:
Grover Norquist, a conservative libertarian Republican and founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform … [claimed] that the Holder directive simply cribs from legislation by Democratic Sens. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, along with Republicans Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, that would give federal judges greater discretion in sentencing certain drug offenders.
In the House, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, and Robert C. “Bobby” Scott, Virginia Democrat and ranking member on the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime, terrorism, homeland security, and investigations, also have introduced legislation to reduce recidivism and federal prison costs through post-sentencing risk assessments and other evidence-based programs developed by states.
Mike Huckabee responded to the AG’s announcement by saying he “finally found something I can agree with Eric Holder on.”
As best as I can tell, not one member of the congressional Republican leadership in either chamber criticized Holder’s decision in any way.
And that matters enormously.
As we discussed earlier in the summer, in the not-too-distant past, the conservative line on these issues lacked all reason and nuance. The right wanted more prisons, more prisoners, harsher sentences, an aggressive “war on drugs,” and no questions. To disagree was to invite the “soft on crime” condemnation. As the nation’s prison population soared to unprecedented levels, the right simply responded, “Good.”
The landscape has, however, changed rather quickly. Twenty years ago, if an Attorney General from a Democratic administration had made this announcement, conservatives would have condemned “letting drug addicts onto our streets.” Yesterday, such reactionary, knee-jerk reactions were muted, and among prominent Republicans, non-existent.
On the surface, this gives the Obama administration some breathing room — Holder and other officials will realize they can adopt common-sense measures without facing political fury and instigating a national uproar. But below the surface, the response suggests more systemic reforms may yet be possible — the A.G.’s move represents progress, but Congress will have to act to make more sweeping changes.
And for the first time in recent memory, that now seems realistic. As Greg Sargent explained yesterday, as the political winds shift on this issue, the “soft on crime” attacks “no longer have anywhere near the cultural potency or political relevance they once did. As a result, “this may now be an area where compromise is possible.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 13, 2013
“Pleading Ignorance”: Congress Can’t Pretend It Didn’t Know About NSA Surveillance
Having been, at one place or another in my career, on each side of the perennial debate in Washington about “who knew what and when,” I knew it was a matter of time before we started hearing it about the leaked NSA operations.
Since leaving government, I have written before about the weird dynamics of “briefing” Congress on sensitive operations, e.g., Nancy Pelosi’s claim that she didn’t know about CIA’s program of “enhanced interrogations” during the Bush Administration. Now, and perhaps ironically, we have a spate of Republicans saying they knew little or nothing of the NSA operations
So, what’s the real story behind this typical Washington play to the media?
The media, of course, has a field day because on any day, they can get someone in Congress who wants to get their face on TV to say most anything – this whips up the hysteria that gives the story legs.To them, it’s media Nirvana – it’s the Trayvon Martin case of national security, and the best thing since the “torture” scandal.
Here is what’s behind all this political smoke:
There are some traditional Republican vs. Democrat tensions at work, in that it’s an opportunity for Republicans to criticize a Democratic President.
The NSA operations are very awkward for many Democrats to support (and many don’t) because of their liberal views on personal liberties and conciliatory approaches to national security.
Likewise, Republicans – who traditionally are more aggressive in national security matters – are also reluctant to support a Democratic administration, even though they may agree with the NSA operations.
The “tea party” faction of the Republican Party opposes the NSA operations – and as such is aligned with the most liberal Democrats on the issue. Strange bedfellows indeed.
Members of the two intelligence committees, Republican and Democrat, seem generally to support the NSA operations – and they also seem to know the most about them. They should.
However, complaints that “we didn’t know about this” are now being heard from both congressional Republicans and Democrats who are not on the intelligence committees.
Coming, perhaps, are internal divisions within the intelligence committees, some Republican-Democrat spats and some between the committee leaderships and rank and file committee members. This is awkward for the intelligence committee leaderships.
The lawyers at the Department of Justice, are – uncomfortably perhaps – in bed with each other on the NSA ops, because the programs were started in the Bush administration and continued into the Obama administration. And the president himself has supported the programs in every opportunity he has had to talk about them. He clearly believes that privacy and security are in proper balance with the NSA operations – or at least not out of balance.
So, who (probably) knew what and when about the compromised NSA program?
Some relevant background: Ever since Watergate, the Church and Pike Committees, the creation of the intelligence committees and the enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (by the Democrats, FYI) in the 70’s, there have been various legal requirements for the intelligence community to keep the Congress informed about what they are doing. And the Congressional Seniors, often called the “Gang of Eight” (majority and minority leaders of each house and majority and minority members of the intelligence committees), get briefed in more detail on the most sensitive intelligence activities and operations.
Now, put yourself in the place of the directors of the various intelligence agencies. If you have any political sense at all (and you wouldn’t be a director if you didn’t), you are going to tell all about your agency’s various activities and operations, including all the risks – at least to the gang of eight. This way no one can later accuse you of withholding information when one of these sensitive programs goes south or is compromised. And, because the most sensitive activities and operations are often the most risky, the odds of failure or compromise are correspondingly high.
So, we can assume that – at the very least – the gang of eight was fully briefed on the NSA operations. And we can also assume that any other member of the intelligence committees who expressed interest in the programs would have likewise had a complete briefing, including on-site briefings by agency technicians, if such were requested.
How about an ordinary member of Congress who was interested in these programs? They can also get briefings if they request them, and should approach their own party leaderships if they want additional information, or go to the leaderships of their house’s intelligence committee. Are these briefings often complex, technical and time consuming? Yes, for sure.
However, the suggestion that information is somehow being withheld from them is, frankly, silly, just as it was for Pelosi, a 10-plus year member of the gang of eight and a former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, to say that she didn’t know about the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program.
They know. They may wish they didn’t when the story hits the news, but they know. In fact, it’s to the administration’s advantage – whether Republican or Democrat – that they know all the details. In short, they are all in this boat together, whether they like it or not.
By: Daniel Gallington, U. S. News and World Report, August 12, 2013
“Gingrich’s Revisionist History Of Himself”: Bizarre Anyone Would Take Newt’s Advice About How To Engineer A Government Shutdown
Newt Gingrich has often relied on short memories of his political career (as I can attest from the shocked reaction I got in 2011 when writing about his well-known history as a Rockefeller Republican), but he’s clearly going too far in pretending the government shutdown he engineered in 1995 was some sort of triumph. Conservative Ramesh Ponnuru slaps him down pretty emphatically today:
Newt Gingrich is telling Republicans not to fear a government shutdown because the last one went so well for them. This is pure revisionist history, and they would be fools to believe him….
Gingrich’s current spin on the events of 1995-96 is just wrong. The election of a Republican Congress in 1994 put government spending on a lower trajectory, as the election of a Republican House did again in 2010. Whether the shutdowns contributed to that result is a different matter.
Almost nobody back then believed it. Democrats thought that they had won the battle over the shutdowns, and that the agreement to end them was a Republican surrender. Clinton made a point, in his next State of the Union address, to criticize Republicans for their strategy. It was an applause line. Clinton’s job-approval numbers started to rise as soon as the shutdown fight was over, and they never really sank again.
Republicans thought they had lost, too. A minority of them thought that they should have kept the government shuttered longer, and that Gingrich and Senate Republican leader Bob Dole had caved. (Gingrich was widely reported at the time to have told unhappy colleagues, “I melt when I’m around him,” referring to Clinton.) Most of them decided that bringing on a shutdown at all was a mistake.
It’s true, as Gingrich now says, that Republicans lost only a few House seats in the next election. But it’s also true that the shutdowns ended what had been called the “Republican revolution” of the mid-1990s. Before the shutdowns, the Republicans had talked about eliminating four cabinet departments. Afterward, they quit….
Gingrich himself accepted the conventional wisdom that his party had lost. That’s what associates of his told me (among others) at the time, and that’s how they recollect it now.
I’d say Ramesh is really pulling his punches here. The rationalization that the GOP “lost only a few seats” reflects some serious amnesia. This was the only time in U.S. history that the party holding the White House for two consecutive terms gained House seats in the second midterm election. It was perceived as a disaster at the time–after all, Gingrich stepped down as Speaker almost immediately–and was largely blamed on Gingrich’s handling of the budget negotiations that led to the shutdown. Ponnuru mentions Clinton’s rising approval ratings after the confrontation with Newt, but here’s what Gallup’s Frank Newport had to say about the saga’s effect on Gingrich’s popularity:
The public appeared to turn particularly strongly against the Speaker after his budget confrontation with Bill Clinton and the resulting U.S. Government shutdown in late 1995. (Publicity at the time, including a famous front page caricature in the New York Daily News, included the allegation that Gingrich had closed down the government because he was given a bad seat at the back of Air Force One when returning from the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin in Israel.) By January of 1996, 57% of Americans said that their image of Gingrich was unfavorable, compared with 37% who had a favorable image of him. This nearly two-to-one negative-to-positive image ratio persisted throughout most of 1996 and 1997.
It’s just bizarre that anyone would take Newt Gingrich’s advice about how to engineer a fiscal confrontation involving a government shutdown threat, and an example of the man’s invincible chutzpah that he’s offering it.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 12, 2013
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