“In Service Of Ideological Gain”: Chris Christie Just Exposed His Entire Party’s Deceitful Voter Suppression Plan
Every now and again a Republican state party operative or elected official will drop the ruse and admit that the purpose of state-level voter restrictions isn’t to curtail voter impersonation fraud or to cut election costs, but to keep the wrong kinds of people from voting.
Usually the admission is purely cynical, as when Pennsylvania’s House Majority Leader Mike Turzai said, “Voter ID … is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” (It didn’t.) Other times it’s suffused with racism—the forefather of vote suppression—as when Don Yelton, then a Republican precinct chairman from North Carolina, appeared on “The Daily Show” last year to announce that “the law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt… If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.”
Governors, senators and national operatives are better at keeping a lid on this kind of candor. But as evidence that voter fraud is a right-wing superstition mounts, alongside evidence that the GOP’s remedies measurably suppress the vote, savvier arguments for voting restrictions are reducing toward either naked appeals like Turzai’s and Yelton’s or toward a kind of post-modernist denial of objective reality in service of ideological gain.
“Would you rather have Rick Scott in Florida overseeing the voting mechanism, or Charlie Crist?” New Jersey Governor Chris Christie asked this week at a Chamber of Commerce event in Washington. “Would you rather have Scott Walker in Wisconsin overseeing the voting mechanism, or would you rather have Mary Burke? Who would you rather have in Ohio, John Kasich or Ed FitzGerald?”
Christie went on, “The fact is it doesn’t matter if you don’t really care what happens in these states, you’re going to care about who is running the state in November of 2016, what kind of political apparatus they’ve set up and what kind of governmental apparatus they’ve set up to ensure a full and fair election in 2016.”
By no coincidence, Republicans in each of those states have already imposed disenfranchising restrictions, which makes it clear that Christie sees these kinds of laws as an existential necessity, the key to Republican self-perpetuation. In Christie’s mind, American election outcomes are a direct function of partisan control of states. Republicans, who “oversee the voting mechanisms,” need to win so that they can continue to “oversee the voting mechanisms.” If they don’t win now, they’ll lose control of the voting mechanisms ahead of an election in which fundamentals will favor the Democrats, and be doomed.
There’s a blinkered and an unblinkered way to interpret such a view. The former—a more generous interpretation—is that Christie believes, against all evidence, that when Republicans lose control of the voting apparatus, fraud becomes rampant and cheaters swing elections to Democrats. The latter, to quote the Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore, is that Christie is “treating the right to vote as discretionary, depending on [his] party’s needs, which makes voter suppression just another day at the office”—that he believes Republicans must cheat to win now, so that they can live to cheat another day.
Neither of these readings flatters Christie. If the extent of voter fraud were an open question, Christie could make a real, but contestable case that GOP-backed voting restrictions yield election outcomes that more closely resemble the will of the voting public. But this is not an open question. What we know about voter fraud, and the right’s insistence on fighting it by limiting the franchise, makes its anti-fraud agenda a mirror image of its rejection of climate science. Republicans oppose the regulatory remedies to climate change, so they question its existence. They support the regulatory remedies to voter fraud, so they insist it exists.
In that way, voter fraud is the dark matter of Republican politics. Except that unlike dark matter, whose existence can be inferred from the way it tugs at the outer stars of our galaxy, the only way to infer that voter fraud swings elections to Democrats is to stipulate that Democratic victories are intrinsically aberrant.
This, again, is the charitable view. The simpler view is that Christie et al understand that voting restrictions suppress the Democratic vote, and see that as a feature rather than a bug. Either way, it suggests that conservatives will cling to the voter fraud myth, in the same way they cling to the myth that upper-bracket income tax cuts pay for themselves; or that they will posit the exact same voter suppression tactics as the solution to other problems, real or imagined.
Earlier this week, Vox’s Matthew Yglesias reprised his argument for building a movement to create a constitutional right to vote. The argument has three prongs. A Voting Rights Amendment would serve as a valuable organizing tool, until adopted; if adopted, it would flip the burden on Republicans, to demonstrate that their efforts to restrict voting don’t violate the Constitution; and it would be hard to defeat along the way, because the substantive and moral arguments for a Voting Rights Amendment are incontestable. Pair it with a national Election Day holiday, and Republicans would have a much harder time sculpting the electorate. The alternative is that Democrats will continue to expend tremendous energy and capital to beat back tactics Republicans are unlikely to abandon on their own.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, October 22, 2014
“Suppressing Votes Just Another Day At The Office”: Republicans Are Treating The Right To Vote As Discretionary
When I said yesterday that the right to vote was increasingly being treated as a partisan political game, I had no way to know that a very prominent Republican politician would supply an instant illustration, per a report from the Bergen Record:
Governor Christie pushed further into the contentious debate over voting rights than ever before, saying Tuesday that Republicans need to win gubernatorial races this year so that they’re the ones controlling “voting mechanisms” going into the next presidential election….
“Would you rather have Rick Scott in Florida overseeing the voting mechanism, or Charlie Crist? Would you rather have Scott Walker in Wisconsin overseeing the voting mechanism, or would you rather have Mary Burke? Who would you rather have in Ohio, John Kasich or Ed FitzGerald?” he asked.
Brother Benen commented archly:
I’m not sure which is worse: the prospect of Christie making these remarks without thinking them through or Christie making these remarks because he’s already thought this through.
In theory, in a functioning democracy, control over “voting mechanisms” shouldn’t dictate election outcomes. Citizens consider the candidates, they cast their ballots, the ballots are counted, and the winner takes office. It’s supposed to be non-partisan – indeed, the oversight of the elections process must be professional and detached from politics in order to maintain the integrity of the system itself.
So what exactly is Chris Christie suggesting here?….
[P]olitical scientist Norm Ornstein paraphrased Christie’s comments this way: “How can we cheat on vote counts if we don’t control the governorships?”
Yep, Republicans are treating the right to vote as discretionary, depending on their party’s needs, which makes voter suppression just another day at the office.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, October 22, 2014
“An Issue People Understand”: What Republicans Don’t Get About The Minimum Wage
Republicans don’t like talking about the minimum wage, which is only natural given that their position is one that is extremely unpopular (raising the minimum to $10.10 an hour, the level advocated by Democrats, regularly polls at 70 percent or more). But while their political problem on the issue stems from their policy stance, the way they do talk about it, when they absolutely have to, makes the problem worse. Witness what New Jersey governor and likely presidential candidate Chris Christie now has to say about it:
“I’m tired of hearing about the minimum wage,” Christie said in a keynote speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “I really am. I don’t think there’s a mother or a father sitting around the kitchen table tonight in America saying, ‘You know, honey, if our son or daughter could just make a higher minimum wage, my God, all of our dreams would be realized.’ “
“Is that what parents aspire to for our children?” Christie continued, “They aspire to a greater, growing America, where their children have the ability to make much more money and have much great success than they have, and that’s not about a higher minimum wage.”
That is some weird logic. We need to keep the minimum wage low, because everybody wants to make a lot more than minimum wage, and an increase won’t make anyone’s dreams come true. It’s kind of like saying to a hungry person: “I could give you a sandwich, but I know what you’d really love is an eight-course meal at the Four Seasons. So no sandwich.” Or saying to the public: “It would be great if we could magically eliminate 100 percent of crime, but since we can’t, we’re not going to bother to have a police force.”
Christie’s exasperation is no doubt widely shared among Republicans. They just can’t seem to grasp why anyone would care about the minimum wage. No matter how many times you explain to them that it isn’t just teenage kids working their after-school jobs who make it, but people trying to raise families (the Economic Policy Institute estimates that increasing the minimum wage would directly or indirectly give a raise to 27.8 million American workers), that fact just doesn’t register.
I could make a conjecture about the psychological underpinnings of that, which would have something to do with the natural contempt many on the right feel for people who are economically struggling. But let’s look at what Florida governor Rick Scott said in a debate last night:
Q: Do you support the concept of a minimum wage?
Scott: Sure.
Q: What should it be?
Scott: How would I know? The private sector decides wages.
Right, and the point of a minimum wage is that the government is setting the minimum, because we have collectively decided what the minimum should be. Either you think there ought to be a minimum wage, or you think the private sector should decide the minimum. You can’t believe in both.
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker got asked the same question last week. “I’m not going to repeal it,” he said. “But I don’t think it serves a purpose because we’re debating then about what the lowest levels are at. I want people to make, like I said the other night, two or three times that.”
I suppose this is now the standard Republican dodge to questions about the minimum wage — we shouldn’t raise it, because it would be even better if people made more! — and it’s so transparently dumb that even voters can see through it. For her part, Walker’s opponent Mary Burke has been pushing the issue hard ever since Walker ran into trouble on it, and the race is currently close to tied.
There’s no question that Republicans aren’t helped by the simple fact that this is an issue people understand and have clear ideas about, and most voters are at odds with the GOP position. But the Republicans’ scorn for the idea that anyone cares about raising the minimum wage seems particularly misguided, given that the GOP is already widely seen as the party of the rich.
This year there are initiatives to raise the minimum wage on five state ballots, including three — Arkansas, Alaska, and South Dakota — where there are close Senate races. Because the federal minimum wage was last increased in 2009 and its value erodes every year, there has been tremendous momentum to increase it at the state and local level. In 2014 alone, bills to increase the minimum wage have been introduced in 34 states, and increases have been enacted in 10 states plus D.C. Minimum wage initiatives that appear on the ballot almost always win. If nobody cared about what the minimum wage is, that wouldn’t be the case. You’d think by now Republicans would have figured that out.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 22, 2014
“The Scramble Is On”: The Social Conservative Royal Rumble Is Brewing In Iowa
The two most crowded places in 2015 may be a subway car at rush hour and the stage at a Republican presidential debate. With the past two winners of the Iowa caucuses, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, both making moves toward a campaign and other social conservatives, ranging from Ben Carson to Ted Cruz, thinking about running, things are already looking crowded.
On Wednesday, Santorum told Real Clear Politics that he is approaching the 2016 election “as if I’m running.” Santorum, who won the Iowa caucuses and finished second in 2012 GOP primary, has never made a secret of the fact that he’s considering another bid for the nomination. The former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania has stumped across the country this year for Republican candidates, including a significant number of visits to Iowa. He has also gone out of his way to endorse candidates in competitive primaries who backed him in 2012, most notably Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz in a congressional primary and Prof. Sam Clovis in the Hawkeye State’s Senate primary.
At the same time, Huckabee is organizing a trip to Europe with a number of pastors from early primary states after Election Day. The trip, first reported in June by David Brody at CBN, will focus on the leadership of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II and feature stops in London, Krakow, and Los Angeles. Longtime Huckabee aide Hogan Gidley described the trip to The Daily Beast as “an outstanding political move” that allows the former Arkansas governor to display his “understanding of the world around us.”
Gidley also said that delegations of business leaders and pastors have been traveling to see the Fox News host to urge him to run for president. While Huckabee pondered running in 2012 before deciding not to mount a bid, Gidley said that this time the former governor was expressing “a much different tenor and tone” in contemplating a run.
Both Huckabee and Santorum had considerable overlap in their support during their respective presidential bids. They were both scrappy and underfunded social conservative standard-bearers who pulled off underdog wins in Iowa against Mitt Romney. But if both run, they may have to compete over the same pool of voters—and there will be plenty of candidates appealing to Iowa conservatives.
In fact, according to the most recent poll of Iowa caucusgoers, the favorite potential candidate from the conservative wing of the Republican Party is neither Huckabee nor Santorum; it’s Ben Carson..
Carson is looking to be a somewhat formidable candidate. His super PAC raised $3.3 million in the most recent fundraising period (although it only netted $100,000 after accounting for expenses, most of which were for fundraising). It’s likely that Carson, who would be a first-time candidate whose own top adviser acknowledges that he suffers from “foot-in-mouth disease,” will flame out before the first ballots are cast. But his presence in the race would serve as yet another draw to the type of voters who both Santorum and Huckabee will have to woo.
And it’s not just Ben Carson who might be their competition.
There’s a baker’s dozen of candidates who could compete for conservative voters, from national figures like Cruz and Scott Walker to somewhat obscure governors like Bobby Jindal and Mike Pence, all of whom would have the potential to catch fire and who will be competing over many of the same voters and activists.
The question though is how this sorts itself out. Many conservatives still feel traumatized from the divisive primaries in 2008 and 2012, where candidates on the right of the party battled for position while two establishment candidates, John McCain and Mitt Romney, slipped by to win the nomination… and then lose the general election to Barack Obama.
This time around, there will be a strong centripetal force among social conservatives to settle on one candidate to challenge whoever eventually emerges as the establishment choice, be it Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, or someone else, not to mention Rand Paul, who has appeal among both social conservatives and some establishment Republicans without belonging to either faction. But that sorting process still has a while to sort itself out as candidates test the waters and see if they can mount and maintain viable candidacies. In the meantime, the scramble is on and, in Republican presidential politics, anything can happen.
By: Ben Jacobs, The Daily Beast, October 17, 2014
“GOP Strategy Won’t Fool Women”: All The Rhetoric In The World Won’t Make Up For Republicans Opposing Pro-Women Policies
If they’re going to pull out a victory in the midterm elections, Republicans need to win over women. But they’re doing everything in their power to alienate them, from pushing extreme anti-abortion measures that even most Republican voters oppose to blocking equal-pay legislation to, well, just opening their mouths. A leading Republican congressional candidate in Georgia recently said, sure, a woman can run for office if she is “within the authority of her husband.”
A report actually commissioned by Republican groups and reported in Politico found that women view the party as “intolerant” and “stuck in the past.” The report found that women are “barely receptive” to GOP policies.
In other words, Republicans are losing female voters faster than their anti-contraception policies can produce them.
What are Republicans to do? The Republican Party seems reluctant to change its actual policies to support women’s economic and reproductive choices and, ya know, generally acknowledge the realities of modern liberated women. So instead, several Republican candidates are coming out against domestic violence in an attempt to seem sensitive to us girls and our issues. That should do the trick, right?
“My ex-husband beat me with a baseball bat, threw me in a garbage can filled with snow and left me in a frozen storage locker to die,” a woman says, looking straight at the camera, in one such ad for Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin. “At that time, I was pregnant, and I lost the child I was carrying. But I fought to stay alive for my other two children, and today I am fighting for Scott Walker.”
Similar ads have been run by Steve Daines, Republican Senate candidate in Montana, and Scott Brown, Republican Senate candidate in New Hampshire.
There’s just one problem: All the rhetoric in the world doesn’t make up for Republicans opposing and obstructing pro-women policies. It’s not just the repeated attempts to crush reproductive freedom and block equal-pay legislation; Republicans also opposed the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. That’s the law that was actually supposed to do something about domestic violence, a law that Republicans blocked for over a year before finally caving and allowing it to pass.
Republicans objected to provisions in the bill that would expand domestic violence protections for Native Americans and gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans; they even tried to pass their own version of the bill with these protections stripped out. Ultimately, after a year of obstructionism, Republicans allowed the more expansive and bipartisan Senate version of the act to come up for a vote in the House — and even then, a majority of Republicans voted against the measure.
Fast-forward to election season. Florida Republican Steve Southerland has one of the toughest re-election fights in the country. In the House, Southerland voted against the expanded version of the Violence Against Women Act, the version that ultimately passed, but voted for the narrow Republican version that didn’t pass. Now, Southerland is running an ad featuring a survivor of domestic violence who says, “Our congressman, Steve, is advocating for things like (the) Violence Against Women Act.” Well, kinda sorta but not really, Steve.
Southerland’s opponent, Gwen Graham, had her response ad up within 24 hours, accusing Southerland of “saying one thing in TV ads, doing the opposite in Congress.” Which basically sums up all the attempts of Republicans to appeal to female voters on rhetoric but abandon them on policy.
And to be clear, equal pay and reproductive freedom are also key to preventing domestic violence. As the National Network to End Domestic Violence writes, “Like all women, survivors of domestic violence need equal pay initiatives like the Paycheck Fairness Act. As long as women are paid less than men, most survivors will have less ability to gain financial stability and independence.” Many of these women are low-wage workers, who would also be helped by raising the minimum wage.
And a new study this week finds (PDF) that as many as one in four women who seek an abortion experience violence from an intimate partner. Women often say one primary reason for seeking an abortion is to avoid exposing their children to domestic violence. Another reason: They don’t want to remain tied to an abusive partner. According to this long-term study, when these women are able to access abortion services, their odds of being abused decrease by 7% each month after — while women who can’t get an abortion see their rates of domestic violence remain the same or even increase.
Reproductive choice, including abortion rights, and wage equity, including raising the minimum wage and passing gender-equity legislation, are key not only for all women and their families but for victims and survivors of domestic violence, for whom economic and reproductive freedom translates directly into freedom from abuse.
The Republican Party has do more than just talk about domestic violence and women’s opportunity and actually support the real policies that support women’s freedom and choices — or otherwise, women will keep choosing to vote for Democrats.
By: Sally Kohn, CNN Opinion, October 9, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 