“Time For A Second Crusade”: A Fresh Revolt Against That Other Godless RINO Devil-Figure, Mitch McConnell
In the world of objective reality where most of us live, John Boehner’s resignation seems to have bought off just enough of the Crazy to keep the federal government functioning until after Thanksgiving. But over in the fever swamps where the Washington Times is published, veteran reporter Ralph Hallow (who’s been around so long I almost wonder if Halloween was named after him) discerns a fresh revolt against that other godless RINO devil-figure, Mitch McConnell. Seems the Louisiana State GOP Chairman wants him gone.
With John Boehner now departing as House speaker, an influential Republican Party official is now seeking the ouster of another GOP leader who has frustrated conservatives: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
“McConnell needs to resign!!” Louisiana GOP Chairman Roger Villere wrote in a Facebook posting….
Mr. Villere was stumped when asked whom he preferred to take over as leader of the Senate Republican majority.
“Honestly, I haven really thought of a replacement,” he said. “We are being so beat up by the base. I just was frustrated.”
Mr. Villere did say what specifically about Mr. McConnell makes his state’s rank-and-file GOP voters so dyspeptic that they want him out as leader — his failure to challenge executive overreach by President Obama or fight to repeal Obamacare and other unpopular measures.
“Mr. McConnell could have suspended consideration of confirmations for all presidential appointees, except for those who are essential to national security, until the president rescinded his unconstitutional executive action on amnesty,” Mr. Villere said.
“This would have been a constitutionally appropriate response to the overreach of the executive branch,” he said. “It would have transformed the political environment, greatly encouraged Republican donors and grass-roots activists, and positioned us to refuse to confirm replacements for any Supreme Court openings that might occur during the remainder of the Obama administration.”
Yeah, right. And it would have been like a slow-moving but long-lasting government shutdown, too.
Villere is the rare Lousiana Republican who is publicly backing Bobby Jindal’s presidential candidacy. As you may have noticed, Bobby the career pol has gone all Outsidery of late, as part of his gambit to offer Republican voters Trumpism Without Trump. His latest tag phrase is that Republicans need to “burn Washington down.” Such a project probably encompasses McConnell losing his gavel, I’d think.
So I’m guessing we’ll soon hear Jindal competing with Ted Cruz in demonizing McConnell on the theory that thunderbolts from Baton Rouge are the equivalent of the Texan’s agitation on the Senate floor. I’m sure ol’ Mitch is just terrified.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, September 28, 2015
“Congress Does Nothing But Sue Obama”: Boehner’s Obama Lawsuit Is The Fault Of The Do-Nothing Congress
House Republicans are so angry that President Obama has been going around them to make policy that Speaker John Boehner says he will file a lawsuit against Obama to stop what the GOP sees as abuse of executive power. Said Boehner:
The Constitution makes it clear that a president’s job is to faithfully execute the laws. In my view, the president has not faithfully executed the laws. When there are conflicts like this between the legislative branch and the administrative branch, it’s … our responsibility to stand up for this institution.
Hello, pot? It’s the kettle calling. You’re black.
Boehner’s right in that the executive branch has been driving policy changes – even ones around the edges – and often using executive orders to do it. Obama is not the only president to do this, and it’s understandable that Congress would be irked at not being made a part of the process.
What rings hollow here is that Congress has aggressively chosen not to be part of the process. The 113th Congress is the least effective Congress in recent history, unable to get even basic budget and appropriations items, let alone a comprehensive immigration bill or entitlement reform. This Congress, and the House in particular, has made it a mission to oppose pretty much anything Obama wants to do (even, in some cases, where what Obama wants to do is not that dissimilar to what a lot of Republicans say they want). That’s their right, but it’s not rational for them to expect Obama to just sit by, throw up his hands and say, “oh, well – I guess I just won’t have any impact on the nation, even though I’m president.” (Though that would serve a Republican goal, too, giving them fodder to call Obama “weak” and “ineffective.”)
And it’s not as though the legislative branch hasn’t tried to flex its muscles and push around other branches of government . The House, in the past, has considered legislation that says, in the text, that the law cannot be subject to judicial review. Another bill would force another branch of government, the Supreme Court, to allow cameras in the room during oral arguments – something the high court doesn’t want and sees as a legislative branch encroachment on its day-to-day workings.
And is Obama really the only “kinglike” figure here? Mitt Romney, in the 2012 campaign, repeatedly pledged to undo Obamacare – a law written by Congress and passed by Congress – by executive order on his first day in office. Obama has been fiddling with enforcement and application of laws and regulations administered by the executive branch. Romney wanted to undo an entire law, just because it was approved by people who were duly elected by their constituents but with whom Romney does not agree. Rick Santorum, running in 2012, listed nine executive orders he planned to issue to undo laws of the land relating to abortion, stem cell research and gay marriage. He also pledged to call on Congress to abolish the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a court whose rulings Santorum did not like.
Power abhors a vacuum. And if Congress categorically refuses to participate in the law-making process, it can’t expect other branches to follow suit. The Supreme Court has had a major role recently in public policy, especially issues such as gay marriage. It’s not because nine justices are sitting in a room, wringing their collective hands in a menacing way while laughing evilly. It’s because the legislative and executive branches have been unable to work together and recognize each other’s authority.
So some in Congress think Obama is taking too much power in the way he does his job. Maybe if Congress would do its job, there would be no problem.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, June 26, 2014
“Plan B For Voting Rights”: It’s Time For Congress To Use It’s Authority Under The Election Clause
Voting-rights advocates generally don’t look to Justice Antonin Scalia for comfort. During oral arguments earlier this year in Shelby County v. Holder, the case in which the Supreme Court struck down a central part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Justice Scalia called the act a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”
But a growing circle of legal scholars is focusing on a lower-profile ruling — issued one week before the Shelby County decision and written by Justice Scalia — that may point the way to a new approach to protecting voting rights.
The 7-to-2 decision, in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, struck down an Arizona law requiring anyone who wanted to vote to provide proof of citizenship. It said the state could not impose a rule that was more restrictive than the federal “motor voter” law, which requires only a sworn statement of citizenship by the voter.
Congress passed the motor-voter law under its power to set the “times, places and manner” of federal elections as authorized by Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution, known as the elections clause. The clause is much less well known than, say, the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and yet Congress’s power under it, Justice Scalia wrote, “is paramount, and may be exercised at any time, and to any extent which [Congress] deems expedient.”
“That sort of woke everybody up again,” said Samuel Issacharoff, a professor at New York University School of Law who has studied the elections clause’s possibilities.
The problem, Mr. Issacharoff said, is that voting laws based on intentional racial discrimination, which the Voting Rights Act has been so successful at blocking, are both rarer and harder to identify today. “A lot of the contemporary problems are not well handled through the 50-year-old mechanism of the Voting Rights Act,” he said.
The elections clause, by contrast, does not speak to racial discrimination at all, but addresses the administration of voting rules. Still, in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby County, it could have an important role to play. Strong federal laws enacted under the clause could help ensure voting fairness to all voters, especially when a state law appears neutral but has serious partisan or racially discriminatory effects. For instance, a state’s voter ID law might put up hurdles for poor or young voters, who may be disproportionately minority and Democratic, or for elderly voters, who lean Republican.
The elections clause allows Congress to set rules only for federal elections, but those laws almost always guide state election practices, too. For instance, Congressional legislation could pre-empt voter ID laws like Arizona’s or changes to early-voting laws like those attempted in Florida last year.
The bottom line, said Daniel Tokaji, an election law professor at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State, is that Congress has much more power to legislate under the clause than it has exercised. It could, for example, liberalize voter registration nationwide, which has been shown to lead to higher turnout.
“I think Congress would be foolish not to look at the elections clause,” Mr. Tokaji said. “If they could do it over again, they might have paid more attention to it back in 2006,” when the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized using data that the Supreme Court in the Shelby County case found to be outdated. (Mr. Tokaji argued in an amicus brief that the justices should rely on the elections clause to uphold the Voting Rights Act, but the court did not address the issue in its ruling.)
Given the apparent direction of the court, even the remaining parts of the Voting Rights Act could be vulnerable to constitutional challenges. That makes it all the more timely for Congress to turn to its expansive authority under the elections clause to protect the right to vote.
By: Jesse Wegman, The New York Times, August 31, 2013
“Just Secede Already!”: Texas Asks Court To Nuke The Voting Rights Act, Forever
When the Supreme Court dismantled a key provision of the Voting Rights Act last June, there were two small silver linings in this decision. The first was the possibility that Congress could revive the regime killed by the Court, where states with particularly poor records of racialized voter suppression must “preclear” their voting practices with the Justice Department or a federal court before those practices can take effect. The second potential silver lining is Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act, which allows a state to be brought back under the preclearance requirement if a court finds that it engaged in “violations of the fourteenth or fifteenth amendment justifying equitable relief.”
Now, however, Texas wants to destroy these two silver linings as well. And there is a fair chance that the conservative Supreme Court will allow them to do so.
Late last month, the Justice Department joined a Section 3 lawsuit claiming that federal supervision of Texas’ election practices should be reinstated in light of very recent examples of intentional race discrimination by Texas. Among other things, a federal court found that Texas “consciously replaced many of [a] district’s active Hispanic voters with low-turnout Hispanic voters in an effort to strengthen the voting power of [the district’s] Anglo citizens.” These, the Justice Department explained, were “violations of the fourteenth or fifteenth amendment” justifying federal supervision.
Texas’ response to the Justice Department does not simply reject the idea that it should be subject to preclearance, it calls upon the courts to declare virtually any preclearance regime unconstitutional. According to Texas, the Supreme Court’s decision hobbling the Voting Rights Act “threw out Congress’s reauthorization of a preclearance regime because the legislative record failed to show ‘anything approaching the ‘pervasive,’ ‘flagrant,’ ‘widespread,’ and ‘rampant’ discrimination that faced Congress in 1965, and that clearly distinguished the covered jurisdictions from the rest of the Nation at that time.’” In other words, Texas wants a federal court order saying that any effort to reinstate the Voting Rights Act in Texas is unconstitutional unless Texas transforms into Mississippi at the height of the Jim Crow era.
And they may very well succeed in getting this order. While Texas’ theory cannot be squared with the text of the Fifteenth Amendment — which provides that “[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” and gives Congress “power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation” — it is not that hard to square with the Supreme Court’s recent decision. Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion does indeed contain language suggesting that only something “approaching the ‘pervasive,’ ‘flagrant,’ ‘widespread,’ and ‘rampant’ discrimination that faced Congress in 1965″ can permit a preclearance regime now. The fact that this language flies in the face of the Constitution is not likely to bother the five conservative justices who already signed onto it once.
As a final act of chutzpah, Texas also claims that it cannot be subject to preclearance because “Hispanic citizens in Texas registered to vote at higher rates” than Hispanics in other states not subject to federal supervision under the Voting Rights Act. That very well be true, but it’s also besides the point. The thrust of the Justice Department’s lawsuit is that Texas intentionally drew its district lines so that white votes would count more and Hispanic votes would count less. In other words, the whole purpose of these lines was to make sure that it didn’t matter if Hispanic voters registered at high rates because their voting power would still be diluted by gerrymandering. It’s like a basketball referee claiming that it doesn’t matter that he’s not counting all the points scored by one team because that team is taking more shots.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, August 9, 2013
“Yes, Mess With Texas”: To Ensure Fairness At The Polls, Southern States Still Require Scrutiny
Pro-tip: When you win a big court case giving you the go-ahead to suppress voter turnout for your political opponents, don’t gloat about it.
That is surely one of the lessons in the remarkable news that the U.S. Department of Justice is challenging new voting-rights laws in Texas and elsewhere even after the Supreme Court ruling that eviscerated the part of the Voting Rights Act that the feds had relied on for decades to challenge voting restrictions. What made the ruling especially galling was the celebration that followed from Republicans in states, including Texas, who immediately vowed to proceed with voting restrictions that had been challenged under the now-undermined part of the VRA.
The alacrity with which Texas, North Carolina and other states have rushed to take advantage of the ruling seriously weakened the sober conservative argument, from Chief Justice John Roberts and others, that Southern states no longer needed to be singled out for special scrutiny because they had long since left their discriminatory ways behind. And it all but invited Attorney General Eric Holder to take this new step, to announce that his department would still do everything in its power to ensure fairness at the polls.
This will of course be decried as executive overreach and an assault on checks and balances, but the case for declaring it such would be much easier to make if Texas and other states hadn’t been so gleeful in their rush to capitalize on the ruling. Texas takes the cake for the speed of its response, but North Carolina surely takes the prize for sheer brazenness: The legislation making its way through Raleigh is so extreme that it earned even a tut-tut from arch-conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Stephen Moore. The legislation will not only add a strict Voter ID requirement by the polls, but reduce early voting days from 17 to 10 (early voting has been used disproportionately by African-Americans in the state), prohibit counties from extending polling hours in extraordinary circumstances, like unusually long lines, and eliminate provisional ballots for voters who show up at the wrong precinct, among other changes. A separate bill seeks to give a tax penalty to parents whose dependent children register to vote somewhere in the state other than where the parents reside, a nifty way to discourage voting by college students.
What impact would the changes have? My colleague Nate Cohn, who has generally warned against over-reaction on voter suppression measures, ran the numbers and found that the Voter ID provision alone could swing enough votes to win the state for Republicans in a close statewide election—and that’s not accounting for the early voting cutbacks and other changes. The New York Times has declared North Carolina “first in voter suppression,” a judgment quoted approvingly by election-law expert Rick Hasen, also not one prone to overstatement.
Holder is now, essentially, using the giddy brazenness of the voting-restriction push in these states to justify federal challenges even in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. Under the “pre-clearance” provision in Sections 4 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act that was eviscerated by the ruling, a whole swath of states and municipalities, mostly in the South, had to submit voting law changes to the feds for approval as a matter of course. Holder is now threatening to use a different part of the Voting Rights Act, Section 3, which allows the federal government to demand pre-clearance rights by “bail-in.” As the Times puts it, if “the department can show that given jurisdictions have committed constitutional violations, federal courts may impose federal oversight on those places in a piecemeal fashion.” In other words, if the states’ recent track record on voting rights is sufficiently egregious, they may still need federal approval.
That is not to say, though, that the Supreme Court ruling was not enormously consequential. It will be much harder for the federal government to press its case by the Section 3 route. And whether the DOJ decides to make the effort to move against states will depend even more on which party holds the White House. As South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley boasted when I saw her on the stump in Greenville with Mitt Romney in early 2012, whereas the Obama administration had challenged her state’s stringent new Voter ID law, “President Romney [will say] that’s our right.”
By: Alec MacGillis, Senior Editor, The New Republic, July 26, 2013
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