“All Rifles Welcome, Especially The Evil Black Ones”: Just A Small Reminder Of The Revolution To Come
While Adam Kokesh’s much-discussed July 4 march on Washington by gun-toting sons of liberty got called off (perhaps because of Kokesh’s frequent incarcerations), the spirit lives on in Colorado, as reported by TPM’s Tony Kludt:
A tea party group’s vow to march with guns in a Fourth of July parade has caused panic in a small Colorado town.
The Southern Colorado Patriots Club announced that its members would march with guns in the annual Independence Day parade in Westcliffe, Colo. to “make a statement that we still believe in our Constitution” to protest new gun control laws in the state, the Denver Post reported. A flier distributed by the group urged members to come to the parade with unarmed rifles.
“All rifles welcome especially the evil black ones,” the flier read.
The announcement prompted the Custer County Chamber of Commerce, the event’s sponsor, to cancel the parade as nervous citizens circulated a petition to stop the club. Donna Hood, president of the chamber, abstained from the vote to cancel the parade but told the Post that the matter has “polarized this community in a week.” The parade was ultimately saved when the Town of Westcliffe agreed to pick up the sponsorship tab.
And get this:
Although the group has marched with guns in the past, the passage of new statewide gun measures has heightened public sensitivity to the action. The state’s new 15-round limit on gun magazines is slated to take effect next week.
I’m guessing the “sensitivity” was mostly raised among second amendment absolutists, who want to remind their fellow citizens that if their “liberties” are further trifled with, they’ll feel free to respond with revolutionary violence, though they tend to call it “resistance to tyranny” or even “self-defense.”
At some point, it would be nice if regular old conservatives would denounce this sort of nonsense, not because it’s embarrassing, but because it reflects the “constitutional conservative” belief that the public policy preferences of self-styled right-wing “patriots” cannot be overridden by democratic majorities operating according to the rule of law. The thinly-disguised motive for these armed demonstrations is to remind the rest of us that we can have our Obamacare or our legalized abortion or our gun safety regulations only so long as the real Americans choose to let us by leaving the ammo at home.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Editor, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 28, 2013
“The Party Isn’t White Enough”: Get Ready For More Republican Party Race Baiting
You, unsuspecting citizen, probably take the view that the Republican Party is too white. It’s the conventional wisdom, after all, and last year’s election results would seem to have proven the point resoundingly. But you’re obviously not up with the newest thinking in some conservative quarters, which is that the party isn’t white enough, and that the true and only path to victory in the future is to get whiter still. Some disagree, which gives us the makings of a highly entertaining intra-GOP race war playing out as we head into 2016. But given this mad party’s recent history, which side would you bet on winning?
The situation is this. The immigration reform bill passed the Senate yesterday. It will now go to the House. A few weeks ago, as I read things, there were occasional and tepid signals that the House would not take up the Senate bill. Now, by contrast, those signals are frequent and full-throated. For example, yesterday Peter Roskam, a deputy GOP whip in the House, said this: “It is a pipe dream to think that [the Senate] bill is going to go to the floor and be voted on. The House is going to move through in a more deliberative process.”
“Deliberative process” probably means, in this case, killing the legislation. House conservatives, National Journal reports, are increasingly bullish on the idea that they may be able to persuade John Boehner to drop the whole thing.
Last December, such an outcome was supposed to mean disaster for the Republicans. But now, some say the opposite. Phyllis Schlafly and talk-radio opponents of the bill like Laura Ingraham have been saying for a while now that the party doesn’t need Latino votes, it just needs to build up the white vote. And now, they have the social science to prove it, or the “social science” to “prove” it.
Sean Trende, the conservative movement’s heavily asterisked answer to Nate Silver (that is to say, Silver got everything right, and Trende got everything wrong), came out with an analysis this week, headlined “Does GOP Have to Pass Immigration Reform?,” showing that by golly no, it doesn’t. You can jump over there yourself and study all his charts and graphs, but the long and short of it is something like this. Black turnout and Democratic support have both been unusually high in the last two elections, which is true; Democrats have been steadily losing white voters, which is also true; if you move black turnout back down to 2004-ish levels and bump up GOP margins among whites (by what strikes me as a wildly optimistic amount), you reach White Valhalla. Somehow or another, under Trende’s “racial polarization scenario,” it’ll be 2044 before the Democrats again capture 270 electoral votes. Thus is the heat of Schlafly’s rhetoric cooled and given fresh substance via the dispassionate tools of statistics.
Karl Rove says this is bunk. He wrote in The Wall Street Journal yesterday that to win the White House without more Latino support, a Republican candidate would have to equal Ronald Reagan’s 1984 total among whites, which was 63 percent. Rove thinks this unlikely—Trende thinks it’s pessimistic—and counsels some Latino reach-out (naturally, none of them ever says anything about black reach-out). The party used to listen to Rove, but most of them have zoomed well past him to the twilight zone of the far, far right.
These Republicans and the people they represent—that is, the sliver of people they care about representing—don’t want any outreach. They almost certainly won’t let a path to citizenship get through the House. And they’ll attack minorities in other ways, too. It’s been mostly civil rights advocates who’ve denounced the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision, and one can obviously see why. But trust me, that decision, as Bloomberg’s Josh Green shrewdly noted the day it came down, is a “poisoned chalice” for the GOP.
Why? Just look at what’s already happened since the decision was announced—the party is launching voter-suppression drives in six of the nine freshly liberated states. All the states, of course, are down South. These drives might “work.” But they will attract an enormous amount of negative publicity, and they’ll probably induce massive backlashes and counter-movements. This effort will lead to even greater distrust of the GOP by people of color, and it will reinforce the captive Southern-ness of the party, making it even more Southern than it already is. And Republicans won’t stop, because they can’t stop. Race baiting is their crack pipe.
And here’s the worst part of this story. If the House Republicans kill immigration reform, and Republican parties across the South double down to keep blacks from voting, then they really will need to jack up the white vote—and especially the old white vote—in a huge way to be competitive in 2016 and beyond. Well, they’re not going to do that by mailing out Lawrence Welk CDs. They’re going to run heavily divisive and racialized campaigns, worse than we’ve ever seen out of Nixon or anyone. Their only hope of victory will be to make a prophet of Trende—that is, reduce the Democrats’ share of the white vote to something in the mid- to low-30 percent range. That probably can’t happen, but there’s only one way it might. Run the most racially inflamed campaign imaginable.
That’s the near-term future we’re staring at. We can take satisfaction in the fact that it’s bad for them, but unfortunately, it’s not so good for the country.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 28, 2013
“Investigate Darrell Issa”: Or How To Apply The Chairman’s Own Methods And Style To Him
Among the many reasons that Americans hold the House of Representatives in low repute – at historically abysmal levels, in fact – is the blatantly partisan and ideological misconduct of so many committee chairs. Without any evident embarrassment these mighty politicians deny science, defy mathematics, and dismiss every fact that contradicts their prejudices. But bad as these chairs tend to be, none is quite as flamboyantly awful as Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the Government Oversight Committee, a special investigative panel whose latest effort to conjure scandal from nothingness at the Internal Revenue Service would provoke his removal by a responsible leadership.
As we have pointed out repeatedly in these pages, and as testimony by the IRS inspector general has since confirmed, it is now clear that right-wing groups were not targeted for exceptional scrutiny. Moreover, there was no political motive in the agency’s treatment of the Tea Party and associated groups seeking tax exemption (in many cases illegitimately).
It is now equally obvious that the behavior of Issa himself, with his attempts to skew his committee’s investigation and conceal testimony that exonerated the agency, represents the most serious wrongdoing in the supposed “IRS scandal.” But this isn’t the first time that the California Republican, who happens to be the wealthiest man in Congress, has misused the broad powers of his chairmanship. Actually, that is all he does – as he demonstrated in equally opportunistic and amateurish examinations of both the Benghazi tragedy and the “Fast and Furious” affair.
Issa’s stewardship of the House Government Reform Committee has failed even by the standards of the Republican congressional leadership, which must have hoped that he would have collected some Obama administration scalps by now. He delayed the Fast and Furious probe solely to extend it into the election year, blustered against Attorney General Eric Holder, and accomplished…nothing.
There is little hope that Speaker John Boehner, who has enough problems maintaining a semblance of authority and dignity, will question Issa’s fitness to chair this important committee. But still we are left wondering: What would become of Issa if he were subjected to the Republican style of investigation? What if the presumption of guilt, the preference for insinuation over evidence, the omission of exculpatory facts, and the promulgation of conspiratorial speculations that feature in all of Issa’s theatrical probes were applied to him?
As the richest member of Congress, Issa seems to enjoy the same veneer of respectability that great wealth has provided to many dubious figures. But his past includes several troubling encounters with law enforcement, from alleged car thefts to weapons offenses. So what would the public learn from an Issa-style investigation of Darrell Issa?
First, the committee chair would reveal the troubling findings about Issa, namely that he was arrested not once but twice for illegal weapons offenses. Worse yet, he would explain, Issa had been convicted the second time. Then he would release slightly redacted copies of court records on file in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where Issa grew up, showing an arrest, charges of auto theft and carrying a concealed weapon only one month after his discharge from the Army in the winter of 1972. Those same records would also reveal that Issa and an older brother were both suspects in the theft of a “new red Maserati sports car” from an auto dealership, and that Issa was eventually indicted for larceny.
And then the committee might leak a second, even more damaging set of records showing that Issa had been picked up several months later on another weapons charge in Michigan, where he attended college. Police arrested him for possession of an unregistered handgun, leading ultimately to his conviction.
What we might not learn – at least not until the facts were excavated by less partisan probers – is that Issa was only 19 years old at the time; that the first set of charges in Ohio was eventually dropped by prosecutors; and that the Michigan charge was a misdemeanor, punishable by a $100 fine. Which young Issa paid.
Yet whatever Issa did as a foolish kid could be made to look quite sinister by a congressional committee chair like him, dedicated to trumping up minor irritations into major scandals. How fortunate he is that nobody in authority has ever misused the investigative power to smear him – and that those currently in authority over him have no appetite for reining in his abuses of that power.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, June 29, 2013
“John Roberts Gets His Trophy”: Inventing A Previously Unheard Of “New Constitutional Doctrine”
In my focus on the joyful and immediate exploitation of the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder by southern Republicans who behaved like they were in the midst of a jail break, I probably gave too little attention to the audacity of the decision itself. Ari Berman of The Nation offered some immediate observations, beginning with the stunning contrast between the Chief Justice’s solicitude for Congress is his dissent against the invalidation of the Defense of Marriage Act with his breezy contempt in Shelby County v. Holder:
In his dissent in the Defense of Marriage Act case today, Justice Scalia wrote: “We have no power to decide this case. And even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation.”
Justice Roberts wrote in his concurrence: “I agree with Justice Scalia that this Court lacks jurisdiction to review the decisions of the courts below… I also agree with Justice Scalia that Congress acted constitutionally in passing the Defense of Marriage Act.”
Yet that reasoning didn’t stop Justices Roberts and Scalia from striking down the centerpiece of the Voting Rights Act yesterday, a hugely important civil rights law that has been passed by Congress five times with overwhelming bipartisan approval. Why didn’t the court defer to Congress on the VRA, which has a far more robust Congressional history/mandate than DOMA? And how did Roberts and Scalia reach such contradictory conclusions in the different cases?
But more fundamentally, as 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner notes in a scathing review of Shelby County v. Holder for Slate, Roberts kind of made up the constitutional foundation for the decision: a previously unheard-of doctrine of the “equal sovereignty of the states.”
Roberts, of course, is rather famous for his specific hostility to the Voting Rights Act, as Adam Serwer pointed out at MoJo when this case was first argued:
Shelby County offers Roberts an opportunity to complete a mission he began three decades ago. When the chief justice was a young lawyer, in 1981, Southern legislators hoped an ascendant conservative movement could pressure Reagan into opposing an extension of the VRA. In June of that year, Reagan wrote a letter to Attorney General William French Smith requesting an “assessment” of the law. “I am sensitive to the controversy which has attached itself to some of the Act’s provisions, in particular those provisions which impose burdens unequally upon different parts of the nation,” Reagan wrote. “But I am sensitive also to the fact that the spirit of the Act marks this nation’s commitment to full equality for all Americans, regardless of race, color, or national origin.” Reagan didn’t go as far as former segregationist and then-Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) by opposing the Voting Rights Act in its entirety, but his administration fought efforts to strengthen the law.
Additionally, Roberts has been around the block enough times to know that a legislative “fix” to Section 4 either won’t happen (that’s my bet), or would take long enough that long-stalled voter suppression efforts in the Deep South will find their way into statute books and election procedures. Yes, the Justice Department and civil rights advocates will try to use Section 2 remedies in the absence of preclearance powers, but winning such cases typically requires after-the-fact demonstrations of harm to minority voting influence.
It took a while, and required looking far away from the congressional history of the Voting Rights Act, and inventing a new constitutional doctrine, but John Roberts got his trophy this week. He should have had the sense of decorum to assign the opinion to someone else.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 26, 2013
“So Much For Sacred Obligations”: It’s Open Season On Voting Rights Right Now In America
Immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, it was hard not to wonder how long it would take for Republican state lawmakers to begin imposing new voting restrictions on Americans they don’t like. As it turns out, GOP policymakers were apparently already revving their engines, just waiting for the green light that came 24 hours ago.
MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin noted that the Supreme Court’s majority said the Voting Rights Act “probably wasn’t a deterrent against new restrictions.” Sarlin added, “Oops.”
Quite right. Just yesterday, Republican state lawmakers in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas all moved forward, with great enthusiasm, on new election measures intended to make it harder for traditional Democratic voters to participate in their own democracy. It is, as Rachel noted on the show last night, “open season on voting rights right now in America,” thanks to the Republican-appointed justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Of course, the responsibility for “fixing” the Voting Rights Act is now in the hands of Congress, where one GOP leader was willing to say … something.
Earlier this year, [House Majority Leader Eric Cantor] participated in the congressional delegation that Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., leads back to Selma, Ala., annually. That pilgrimage visits the sites of the civil rights movement, particularly one where, during a nonviolent demonstration, an explosion of police brutality erupted that left Lewis, then a young activist, with severe injuries.
“My experience with John Lewis in Selma earlier this year was a profound experience that demonstrated the fortitude it took to advance civil rights and ensure equal protection for all,” Cantor said. “I’m hopeful Congress will put politics aside, as we did on that trip, and find a reasonable path forward that ensures that the sacred obligation of voting in this country remains protected.”
That wouldn’t be especially noteworthy were it not for the fact that Cantor, to his credit, was literally the only member of the House congressional leadership — in either party — to issue a statement in response to the high court ruling. John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and John Cornyn all said nothing.
Looking ahead, to put it mildly, this matters.
Indeed, why is it they were so reluctant to say anything at all? One of their colleagues was willing to explain the situation fairly accurately.
Most House Republicans were relatively subdued in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Tuesday decision to strike parts of the Voting Rights Act.
Conservative Arizona Rep. Trent Franks said that was no accident, but the result of a fear that their remarks would be interpreted as racism.
I suspect that’s a fair summary of the party’s fears, but I hope Republican lawmakers will consider the larger context. If they’re afraid of commenting for fear of looking racist, how do they suppose they’ll look when they reject efforts to “fix” the Voting Rights Act itself?
Boehner, McConnell, and company may not have a plan just yet, and they very likely would have preferred that the Supreme Court not drop this in their laps, but they’re going to have to come up with a strategy very soon.
And while they’re at it, I’d also encourage the Republican National Committee to think long and hard about voting rights in the coming months. Reince Priebus has been on a “listening tour” in recent months, making what appears to be a sincere effort to reach out to minority communities.
But whether the RNC realizes it or not, the party is in an untenable situation — Republicans can’t reach out to minority communities with one hand and wage a war on voting with the other, at least not if they expect their outreach efforts to be taken seriously.
Put it this way: if Republicans think they have a demographic problem now, imagine what it’ll look like after the party refuses to back a revamped Voting Rights Act.
No wonder Boehner and McConnell were feeling shy yesterday.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 26, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 