“As Lawless As The Pharaohs”: The Conservative Grip On Power
Writing in Salon, Natasha Lennard proposes that with the warm weather we can again expect the Occupy movement to shoot up. Arab Spring, American Spring. She’s right about one thing: Like in the decades before the Arab Spring, it has been a long, cold, American winter. In the 30 years since coming to power here, Republicans have used their initial ascent to power to seal themselves into office as tightly as the pharaohs. Smart commentators have noted how lawless the conservatives are in making substantive decisions, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is how they use their tenure to make it increasingly impossible to oust them.
With this week’s Supreme Court hearings — which will end, liberals worry, with the justices overturning healthcare reform — we are nearing the apotheosis of conservative power. Let us recount how we got here: In 2000, a mob of conservative thugs stopped the vote recount in Florida. And that was before the court got involved, the five conservative justices seizing the election and handing the White House to George W. Bush. Secure in the tenure of their undemocratically selected president, the two older conservative justices, William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor, retired from the bench. Bush replaced them with two young conservatives, destined, by constitutional design and the miracles of modern medicine, to dominate the court into the foreseeable future. At the Supreme Court, it’s always winter (and never Christmas).
The stunningly inept performance by the Bush administration unforeseeably produced the first Democratic federal government since 1994. Immediately thereafter, the conservative Supreme Court majority ruled that the GOP’s wealthy sponsors could spend an unlimited amount of the money putting conservatives in office. Now, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, appointed, in part, by the conservative president they put in the White House, is preparing to wipe from the statute books the only piece of meaningful progressive legislation in the last half century, passed during the brief Indian summer of a two-year Democratic majority.
And it’s not just the federal government. In 2010, fueled, in part, by the money the conservative justices unleashed, the conservatives took over state legislatures across the country. In power, they enacted a series of measures that should make Hosni Mubarak blush. They redrew the legislative maps to guarantee that they would hold a majority of the legislatures, state and federal, regardless of whether they failed to gain a majority of actual votes. (The design of the Senate, favoring sparsely populated rural states, already way overrepresents the Republicans.) Using a panoply of legislative strategies, they made it infinitely harder for the Democrats to register their supporters and for the Democratic voters, even if registered, to vote. Voters must be reported within 24 hours of being registered or penalties will be levied on the laggard registrars. Would-be voters must produce a fistful of identity documents, notoriously more common among old white (Republican) voters than the youthful and nonwhite Americans likely to support the Democrats. If they run the registration gauntlet, they must again verify their identity on Election Day, with the same culturally skewed set of papers. In the swing state of Florida, the New York Times reports, the activists have given up registering new voters: Too perilous.
True, the Democrats have not been models of political virtue. Cowardly when confronted by their powerful adversaries, confused about the moral grounding of their political vision, faithless to their allies, racketing from one trendy policy initiative to another, without anything resembling long-term planning — with enemies like the Democrats, who needs friends? But blaming the victim is way too easy. Democrats made the mistake of behaving as if the American rules of representative government still applied. Confronted with the lawless conservative Republicans, their fate was sealed.
By: Linda Hirshman, Salon, March 31, 2012
“Block The Vote”: The Republican War On Voter Registration
Republican state legislatures aren’t only trying to prevent voting at the polling place, they are also stopping people from becoming registered voters in the first place. These same laws that require voters to present state issued photo identification at the polling both—nominally aimed at preventing voter fraud—also sometimes contain provisions that are placing onerous requirements and stringent limitations on third party voter registration efforts.
The targets are national and statewide organizations that use volunteers or paid staffers to canvass underrepresented communities to register new voters. Often these voters are young, poor or non-white and thus lean Democratic. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice found, “54 million eligible Americans are not registered to vote. More than 25% of the voting-age citizen population is not registered to vote. Among minority groups, this percentage is even higher— more than 30% for African Americans and more than 40% for Hispanics.” Registration drives typically focuse their efforts on these historically disenfranchised populations, as well as elderly and disabled voters who may have trouble reaching a government office to register. Perversely, as the Brennan Center notes, “Instead of praising civic groups who register voters for their contribution to democracy, many states have cracked down on those groups.”
The excuse is that they wish to prevent fraudulent voter registrations from being submitted. But the result, if these rules are enforced, is that far fewer voters are registered.
In Florida, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, the law has been quite successful:
Florida, which is expected to be a vital swing state once again in this year’s presidential election, is enrolling fewer new voters than it did four years ago as prominent civic organizations have suspended registration drives because of what they describe as onerous restrictions imposed last year by Republican state officials.
The state’s new elections law—which requires groups that register voters to turn in completed forms within 48 hours or risk fines, among other things—has led the state’s League of Women Voters to halt its efforts this year. Rock the Vote, a national organization that encourages young people to vote, began an effort last week to register high school students around the nation—but not in Florida, over fears that teachers could face fines. And on college campuses, the once-ubiquitous folding tables piled high with voter registration forms are now a rarer sight.
The election of 2000 demonstrated how just a few hundred votes in Florida could determine who wins the presidency. Florida’s voter registration law is, of course, facing legal challenges. If the law remains in place, though, it could depress turnout by far more than a few hundred votes.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, March 29, 2012
The Truth About Voter Suppression
The national trauma of the 2000 presidential election and its messy denouement in Florida and the U.S. Supreme Court made, for a brief moment, election reform a cause célèbre. The scrutiny of election administration went far beyond the vote counting and recounting that dominated headlines. The Florida saga cast a harsh light on the whole country’s archaic and fragmented system of election administration, exemplified by a state where hundreds of thousands of citizens were disenfranchised by incompetent and malicious voter purges, Reconstruction-era felon voting bans, improper record-keeping, and deliberate deception and harassment.
The outrage generated by the revelations of 2000 soon spent itself or was channeled into other avenues, producing, as a sort of consolation prize, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, an underambitious and underfunded law mainly aimed at preventing partisan mischief in vote counting. The fundamental problem of accepting 50 different systems for election administration, complicated even more in states like Florida where local election officials control most decisions with minimal federal, state or judicial oversight, was barely touched by HAVA. As Judith Browne-Dianis, of the civil rights group the Advancement Project, told me: “The same cracks in the system have persisted.”
But most politicians in both parties paid lip service to the idea that every American citizen had a right to vote, and that higher voting levels of the sort taken for granted in most democracies would be a good thing. “Convenience voting” via mail and early on-site balloting, or simply liberalized “absentee” voting, spread rapidly throughout the last decade, often as a way to minimize Election Day confusion or chicanery. In Florida itself, Republican Govs. Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist relaxed and then abolished the state’s practice of disenfranchising nonviolent felons for a period of time after their release.
No more. In the wake of the 2010 elections, Republican governors and legislatures are engaging in a wave of restrictive voting legislation unlike anything this country has seen since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which signaled the defeat of the South’s long effort to prevent universal suffrage. This wave of activism is too universal to be a coincidence, and too broad to reflect anything other than a general determination to restrict the franchise.
Millions of voters are affected. In Florida new Republican Gov. Rick Scott signed legislation reversing Crist’s order automatically restoring the voting rights of nonviolent ex-felons. In one fell swoop, Scott extinguished the right to vote for 97,000 Florida citizens and placed more than a million others in danger of disenfranchisement. In a close contest for the Sunshine State’s 29 electoral votes, such measures could be as crucial to the outcome as the various vote suppression efforts of 2000.
As Ari Berman explained in an excellent recent summary of these developments for Rolling Stone, restrictive legislation, which has been introduced in 38 states and enacted (so far) in at least 12, can be divided into four main categories: restrictions on voter registration drives by nonpartisan, nonprofit civic and advocacy groups; cutbacks in early voting opportunities; new, burdensome identification requirements for voting; and reinstitution of bans on voting by ex-felons.
While new voter ID laws have clearly been coordinated by the powerful conservative state legislative lobbying network ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), other initiatives have spread almost virally. Virtually all of these restrictions demonstrably target segments of the electorate — the very poor, African-Americans and Hispanics, college students, and organizations trying to register all of the above — that tend to vote for Democrats.
Virtually all have been justified by their sponsors as measures to prevent “voter fraud,” a phenomenon for which there is remarkably little evidence anywhere in the country. As Tovah Andrea Wang, an election law expert at Demos, has concluded: “[L]aw enforcement statistics, reports from elections officials and widespread research have proved that voter fraud at the polling place is virtually nonexistent.” The Bush administration’s Justice Department tried to a scandalous degree to find cases of voter fraud to prosecute, and failed.
But as Marge Baker, executive vice president of People for the American Way, observes:
So-called anti-fraud laws are almost always thinly veiled attempts to prevent large segments of the population from making it to the ballot box … low-income voters, college students, people of color, the elderly. The people behind these laws know that there is no “voter fraud” epidemic. They just want to make it as difficult as possible for certain types of people to vote.
If so, is the motivation simply and purely partisanship? That’s the conclusion reached by former President Bill Clinton, who told a Campus Progress audience in July: “They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate.”
The prevalence of restrictive measures in key 2012 swing states certainly reinforces this impression. With Scott’s order Florida rolled back the early voting that played a key role in Obama’s 2008 victory. New voter ID laws were pioneered in Indiana, the red state most famously carried by Obama in 2008. A voter ID bill passed in the Legislature in North Carolina, but was vetoed by the governor, a Democrat.
Cynical as such actions may seem, they do reflect an ideology. For some conservatives, however, there is a deeper motive than partisanship that helps explain the rapid proliferation of restrictive legislation. It hearkens back to much older debates over the franchise that raged from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries: the belief that voting is a “privilege” rather than a right, and one best exercised by “responsible” or “productive” members of the community. And it’s not really surprising that old-school doubts about the very concept of “voting rights” have accompanied the dramatic rise to power of “constitutional conservatives” who strongly believe that no popular majority should have the power to modify fixed concepts of property rights and limited government as handed down by the Founders, who themselves acted (according to many Tea Partyers) according to a divine mandate.
You hear echoes of this ancient anti-democratic conviction scattered all across the Tea Party Movement and among many state legislators active in voting for restriction legislation. Tea Party Nation president Judson Phillips created a furor in November of 2010 by suggesting that voting should be restricted to property owners, as it often was prior to enactment of the 15th Amendment.
Minnesota House Speaker Kurt Zellers flatly claimed voting was “not a right” during debate over a photo ID bill (a statement he later partially walked back). So, too, did Florida state Sen. Mike Bennett in a similar debate. Republican legislators and party leaders in Wisconsin, Maine and New Hampshire said all sorts of disparaging things about the civic qualifications of college students in the process of seeking to keep them from voting on campus.
Suffusing much of this sentiment is the pervasive Tea Party fear that voters without “skin in the game,” that is, “property ownership or significant tax liability,” will be prone to voting for big government and “welfare” at the expense of “productive” citizens. Few would publicly go so far as right-wing author Matthew Vadim, who briefly became a Fox celebrity for his argument that registering poor people to vote is “like handing out burglary tools to criminals,” since they “can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians.”
But throughout the conservative and Tea Party subculture you find countless people who subscribe to the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” (popularized by Glenn Beck) that liberals have been engaged in a deliberate effort for decades to buy votes with expanded welfare benefits. And from practically the moment the financial crisis exploded, a preferred conservative-activist interpretation (advanced most aggressively by presidential candidate Michele Bachmann) has involved an elaborate variation on the Cloward-Piven Strategy.
The story is that the obscure community organizing group ACORN utilized the provisions of the Community Reinvestment Act to destroy the housing and banking industries with mortgages for shiftless poor and minority borrowers who were then encouraged to elect “socialist” politicians like Barack Obama to bail them out. This particular conspiracy theory has been especially potent since ACORN’s often-clumsy voter registration efforts also happen to be at the very center of Republican claims of widespread voter fraud.
Conservative suspicions that letting poor people vote leads to “socialism” have been most evident in the strange furor among tax-hating Republicans about the number of Americans who do not have net federal income tax liability. These “lucky duckies” (as the Wall Street Journal famously called them in a 2002 Op-Ed deploring the low taxes paid by the poor) have no “skin in the game.” Thus, as the Journal put it, “can hardly be expected to care about tax relief for everybody else … [and] are also that much more detached from recognizing the costs of government.”
While it’s unlikely Republican politicians will come right out and advocate higher taxes on the poor (although some “fair tax” schemes calling for a shift to consumption taxes would have the same effect), the resentment of them as freeloaders who get to “vote themselves welfare” probably does operate as a fine rationalization for placing landmines on their path to the voting booth.
All in all, the conservative commitment to full voting rights, which used to be a bipartisan totem that Republican operatives undermined in the dark and out of sight, is probably dead for the foreseeable future. And the war on voting will continue.
By: Ed Kilgore, Salon, September 30, 2011
School of Glock-Get Your Graduate Degree Here
It’s been nearly nine weeks since that tragic shooting in Tucson, and you may be wondering whether there’s been any gun legislation proposed in the aftermath.
Well, in Florida, a state representative has introduced a bill that would impose fines of up to $5 million on any doctor who asks a patient whether he or she owns a gun. This is certainly a new and interesting concept, but I don’t think we can classify it as a response to Tucson. Jason Brodeur, the Republican who thought it up, says it’s a response to the health care reform act.
A sizable chunk of this country seems to feel as though there is nothing so secure that it can’t be endangered by Obamacare. It’s only a matter of time before somebody discovers that giving everyone access to health insurance poses a terrible threat to the armed forces, or the soybean crop, or poodles.
Brodeur’s is one of many, many gun bills floating around state legislatures these days. Virtually all of them seem to be based on the proposition that one of the really big problems we have in this country is a lack of weaponry. His nightmare scenario is that thanks to the “overreaching federal government,” insurance companies would learn who has guns from the doctors and use the information to raise the owners’ rates.
However, it turns out that the health care law has a provision that specifically prohibits insurers from reducing any coverage or benefits because of gun ownership. A St. Petersburg Times reporter, Aaron Sharockman, looked this up. I had no idea, did you? Apparently Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid himself stuck this in to make the gun-lobby folks happy.
Which they really aren’t. The gun lobby will never be happy, unless the health care law specifically requires every American to have a pistol on his or her person at all times.
Great idea! thought State Representative Hal Wick of South Dakota, who tossed in a bill this year requiring every adult citizen to purchase a gun. Actually, even Wick admitted this one wasn’t going anywhere. It was mainly a symbolic protest against the you-know-what law.
Actual responses to the Tucson shooting — that is, something that might actually stop similar tragedies in the future or reduce the carnage — seem to be limited to a proposal in Congress to ban the sale of the kind of ammunition clip that allowed the gunman to fire 31 shots in 15 seconds. That bill is stalled at the gate. Perhaps Congress has been too busy repeatedly voting on bills to repeal the health care law to think about anything else. But, so far, the gun-clip ban has zero Republican supporters, which is a problem given the matter of the Republicans being in the House majority.
Meanwhile in the states, legislation to get more guns in more places (public libraries, college campuses) is getting a more enthusiastic reception.
The nation’s state legislators seem to be troubled by a shortage of things they can do to make the National Rifle Association happy. Once you’ve voted to allow people to carry guns into bars (Georgia), eliminated the need for getting a permit to carry a concealed weapon (Arizona) and designated your own official state gun (Utah — awaiting the governor’s signature), it gets hard to come up with new ideas.
This may be why so many states are now considering laws that would prohibit colleges and universities from barring guns on campus.
“It’s about people having the right to personal protection,” said Daniel Crocker, the southwest regional director for Students for Concealed Carry on Campus.
Concealed Carry on Campus is a national organization of students dedicated to opening up schools to more weaponry. Every spring it holds a national Empty Holster Protest “symbolizing that disarming all law-abiding citizens creates defense-free zones, which are attractive targets for criminals.”
And you thought the youth of America had lost its idealism. Hang your head.
The core of the great national gun divide comes down to this: On one side, people’s sense of public safety goes up as the number of guns goes down; the other side responds to every gun tragedy by reflecting that this might have been averted if only more legally armed citizens had been on the scene.
I am on the first side simply because I believe that in a time of crisis, there is no such thing as a good shot.
“Police, on average, for every 10 rounds fired, I think, actually strike something once or twice, and they are highly trained,” said Bill Bratton, the former New York City police commissioner.
Concealed Carry on Campus envisions a female student being saved from an armed assailant by a freshman with a concealed weapon permit. I see a well-intentioned kid with a pistol trying to intervene in a scary situation and accidentally shooting the victim.
And, somehow, it’ll all turn out to be the health care reform law’s fault.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 9, 2011
Repeal, Restrict and Repress: GOP Running Amok
Republican state lawmakers, emboldened by their swollen ranks, have a message for minorities, women, immigrants and the poor: It’s on!
In the first month of the new legislative season, they have introduced a dizzying number of measures on hot-button issues in statehouses around the country as part of what amounts to a full-throttle mission to repeal, restrict and repress.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
As Reuters pointed out this week, in the midterms, “Republicans gained nearly 700 state legislative seats and now have their largest numbers since the Great Depression, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.”
Judging by the lead-up to those elections, one could have easily concluded that the first order of business on Republicans’ agendas would be a laserlike focus on job creation and deficit reductions to the exclusion of all else. Not the case.
As MSNBC and Telemundo reported recently, at least 15 state legislatures are considering Arizona-style immigration legislation. If passed, four of the five states with the largest Hispanic populations — California, Texas, Florida and Arizona — would also be the most inhospitable to them.
As Fox News Latino recently reported, state legislatures are poised to break the record on the number of immigration measures and resolutions introduced this year, having already introduced 600 by the end of last month. For comparison, 1,400 were introduced in total last year, according to a report issued last month by the state legislatures’ group. A record number of those laws were enacted.
And, according to the State Legislators for Legal Immigration, which was founded by State Representative Daryl Metcalfe, a Republican of Pennsylvania, lawmakers from 40 state legislatures have joined the group that last month unveiled “model legislation to correct the monumental misapplication of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”
On another note, Republicans in Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska and Oregon are pushing legislation that would require drug testing of welfare recipients.
This despite the fact that, as the American Civil Liberties Union rightly pointed out, the policy is “scientifically, fiscally, and constitutionally unsound.” Other states have considered it but deemed it not feasible or impractical. In Michigan, the only state to implement it, only a tenth of those tested had positive results for drugs and only 3 percent had positive results for hard drugs, which the A.C.L.U. points out is “in line with the drug use rates of the general population.”
Most importantly, the Michigan law was struck down as unconstitutional, with the judge ruling that the rationale for testing people on welfare “could be used for testing the parents of all children who received Medicaid, State Emergency Relief, educational grants or loans, public education or any other benefit from that state.”
Despite all this, these states are pushing ahead because the made-for-the-movies image of a crack-addicted welfare queen squandering government money on her habit is the beef carpaccio of red meat for spending-weary, hungry conservatives.
On the gay rights front, Republicans in Iowa, Indiana, West Virginia and Wyoming (where Matthew Shepard was tortured to death) are pushing constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriage.
Republican Rick Snuffer, a freshman delegate from Raleigh, W.Va., turned logic on its head when arguing for that state’s amendment. He chided Democrats’ pro-choice position, and reasoned that, “They don’t want you to choose your definition of marriage, so they’re not really pro-choice. If they’re pro-choice, let the people choose their definition of marriage.” So let me get this straight. To be pro-choice, one has to submit to the tyranny of the majority, which may seek to restrict the rights and choices of others?
This is exactly the kind of thinking that the shapers of the Constitution worried about. A quick read of the Federalist Papers would help Mr. Snuffer understand just how concerned they were about the danger posed by majority rule to personal freedom.
Republicans in New Hampshire have filed bills to overturn that state’s same-sex marriage law, even though, according to a recent WMUR Granite State Poll, the state’s residents want to leave the law in place by a majority of more than 2 to 1, and when asked which were the most important issues the State Legislature should address, “almost no one mentioned dealing with hot-button social issues such as gay marriage or abortion.” I guess that “let the people choose” argument only works when the people agree with the Republican position.
A Republican state representative in Utah has even gone so far as to introduce a bill that would bar same-sex couples from drafting wills.
According to The News and Observer in North Carolina, Republicans are considering severely narrowing or repealing the state’s recently enacted Racial Justice Act, which allows death-row inmates to use statistics to appeal their cases on the basis of racial discrimination.
Two studies of the death penalty in the state have found that someone who kills a white person is about three times as likely to be sentenced to death as someone who kills a minority.
And in Wisconsin, Republicans are pushing a bill that would repeal a 2009 law that requires police to record the race of people they pull over at traffic stops so the data could be used to study racial-profiling.
Furthermore, abortion rights advocates are now bracing for the worst. NARAL Pro Choice America is now tracking 133 proposed bills thus far this legislative season, and that’s just the beginning. Donna Crane, the policy director of the group, said earlier this month that thanks to the gains by conservatives in the Nov. 2 election, “2011 will be a banner year for anti-choice legislation in the states.”
Richard Gephardt once said, “Elections have consequences.” He was right, and the consequences of the last election could well be a loss of liberty, choice, access and avenues of recourse for many. Brace yourselves. It’s on!
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times-February 11, 2011
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