“Another Long And Ignoble Tradition”: Why The Supreme Court Is Allowing Texas To Hold An Unconstitutional Election
This weekend, the Supreme Court allowed Texas to apply new, stringent voting restrictions to the upcoming midterm elections, which could potentially disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters lacking proper identification. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained in a short but brilliant dissent, this is a disaster for the citizens of Texas: the upcoming elections will be conducted under a statute that is unconstitutional on multiple levels.
How could this happen?
There is, admittedly, a quasi-defensible reason for the court’s latest move. The Supreme Court is usually reluctant to issue opinions that would change election rules when a vote is imminent. For example, the court recently acted to prevent Wisconsin from using its new voter ID law in the upcoming midterms, coming to the opposite result from the Texas case. That is the principle at work here, and on a superficial level it makes sense.
But as Ginsburg — joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — points out, the general reluctance to change election rules at the last minute is not absolute. In Wisconsin, using the new law would have created chaos. For example, absentee ballots would not have indicated that identification was necessary for a vote to count, so many Wisconsin voters would have unknowingly sent in illegal ballots.
In the Texas case, conversely, there is little reason to believe that restoring the rules that prevailed before the legislature’s Senate Bill 14 would have been disruptive. “In all likelihood,” the dissent observes, “Texas’ poll workers are at least as familiar with Texas’ pre-Senate Bill 14 procedures as they are with the new law’s requirements.”
And more importantly, some risk of disruption is a price worth paying to prevent an election from being conducted under unconstitutional rules. The Texas statute, which is extreme even by the standards of contemporary Republican vote-suppression efforts, is not remotely constitutional.
The Texas law has all the defects of every law that requires photo ID to vote. You don’t have to take my word for it — you can read the recent tour de force opinion of the idiosyncratic, immensely influential Judge Richard Posner of the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago. Posner initially wrote an important opinion upholding an Indiana voter ID law, which was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court. But last week, he concluded based on new evidence that the laws are “a mere fig leaf for efforts to disenfranchise voters likely to vote for the political party that does not control the state government.”
The fundamental problem with the ID requirements is that they are a bad solution to a non-existent problem. Not only is voter impersonation exceedingly rare, even in theory it would be impossible to steal an election by having large numbers of people pretend they are other voters. Election thefts are accomplished by manipulating vote counts or manufacturing fake votes after the fact, not by having an army of impostors cast votes!
The costs in vote suppression, however, are real, and since voter ID laws don’t accomplish anything, even miniscule costs cannot be worth it.
But the Texas law is much worse than typical voter ID laws. As the Ginsburg dissent explains, “[I]t was enacted with a racially discriminatory purpose and would yield a prohibited discriminatory result,” and hence violates the Voting Rights Act (and, presumably, the Fourteenth Amendment). All voter ID laws are discriminatory in effect, but Texas public officials made little effort to hide the extent to which the laws were intended to suppress the minority vote to protect Republican incumbents from demographic change. Indeed, the only reason the law was able to go into effect in the first place was the Supreme Court’s notoriously shoddy 2013 opinion gutting the Voting Rights Act.
In and of itself, this should be enough to prevent the law from going into effect. But the legal deficiencies of Texas’ election law do not end there. None of the forms of ID required by the statute are available for free. As the dissenters note, the costs are not necessarily trivial: “A voter whose birth certificate lists her maiden name or misstates her date of birth,” Ginsburg explains, “may be charged $37 for the amended certificate she needs to obtain a qualifying ID.”
Texas is simply not constitutionally permitted to do this. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment forbids poll taxes, and the Supreme Court held in 1966 that “a State violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment whenever it makes the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee an electoral standard.”
The fact that Texas’ law is unconstitutional twice over — both by being racially discriminatory and imposing a direct cost on voting — is not a coincidence. Even after racial discrimination in voting was made illegal by the Fifteenth Amendment, for nearly a century states were able to use formally race-neutral measures like poll taxes and literacy tests to disenfranchise minority voters. The Texas law is very much part of this long and ignoble tradition.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s decisions in 2013 and 2014 allowing the Texas law to go into effect are part of another long and ignoble tradition: the Supreme Court collaborating with state governments to suppress the vote rather than protecting minorities against discrimination. As long as Republican nominees control the Supreme Court, this problem is likely to get worse before it gets better.
By: Scott Lemieux, Professor of Political Science at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y; The Week, October 20, 2014
“Rand Paul’s Appeal To White Moderates”: The Return Of The “Different Kind Of Republican”
There’s always a market, particularly in the media, for the politician who can surprise by running counter to the stereotypes of his or her party. As the two parties become more ideologically unified, that figure becomes even more compelling. The trick is to do it without making your party’s loyal supporters angry at you. Which brings us to Rand Paul, who has a plan to become 2016’s “Different kind of Republican,” the label that was placed on George W. Bush back in 2000:
Sen. Rand Paul tells POLITICO that the Republican presidential candidate in 2016 could capture one-third or more of the African-American vote by pushing criminal-justice reform, school choice and economic empowerment.
“If Republicans have a clue and do this and go out and ask every African-American for their vote, I think we can transform an election in one cycle,” the Kentucky Republican said in a phone interview Thursday as he was driven through New Hampshire in a rental car.
Paul — on the cover of the new issue of Time as “The Most Interesting Man in Politics” — met with black leaders in Ferguson, Missouri, last week; opened a “GOP engagement office” in an African-American area of Louisville in June; and spoke the next month to a National Urban League convention in Cincinnati.
“That doesn’t mean that we get to a majority of African-American votes in one cycle,” Paul continued, speaking between campaign stops in Plymouth and Salem. “But I think there is fully a third of the African-American vote that is open to much of the message, because much of what the Democrats has offered hasn’t worked.”
Paul is probably taking inspiration from Bush’s experience with Latino voters. Bush made a very visible effort to reach out to them, not because he thought he could actually win the Latino vote, but because he thought he could make some inroads, and even more importantly, because it would be a signal to moderate voters that he wasn’t like all those other mean Republicans who had contempt for poor people, people of color, and anyone who wasn’t firmly in the GOP’s camp. That’s what “compassionate conservatism” was about—not a set of policies but an attempt to be more welcoming, aimed ostensibly at minorities but actually at moderate whites.
And it did make a difference among Hispanics—according to exit polls Bush got 35 percent of the Latino vote in 2000 and 44 percent in 2004. Compare that to the 31 percent John McCain got in 2008 and the 27 percent Mitt Romney got in 2012.
Paul seems to understand that “reaching out” to a group your party has in the past either ignored or been openly antagonistic toward has two components. You have to pay attention to them, going to events where they’re gathering and making sure you listen to what they have to say. And you also have to offer them something in the policy realm, to show that it isn’t just about symbolism. That’s what Republicans aren’t doing now when it comes to Latinos—they say they want their votes, but if anything they’ve moved to the right on immigration reform.
Paul’s positions on the drug war and mass incarceration allow him to say to African-Americans that he has something substantive to offer them. But there’s no way he (or any other Republican) could get a third of their votes in a presidential campaign.
That’s partly because Paul is only one person, and no matter how much he reaches out, other people in his party are going to keep doing things like air this latter-day Willie Horton ad. Then there’s the comprehensive Republican project to restrict voting rights, which African-Americans rightly interpret as an effort to keep them from voting. Then there’s the fact that for the last six years, Barack Obama has been subject to an endless torrent of racist invective, not only from your uncle at Thanksgiving but from people with nationally syndicated radio shows. On his listening tour, Paul might ask a few black people how they feel about the fact that America’s first black president had to show his birth certificate to prove he’s a real American. Their answers would probably be instructive.
The final reason that Republicans will struggle to win the votes of all but a tiny number of blacks is that on an individual, organizational, and institutional level, the African-American community is woven deeply into the Democratic party. That interdependence has been built over the last 50 years, and undoing it even partially would take a long time even if the Republican party was completely committed to trying, which it won’t be.
I have trouble believing that Rand Paul actually thinks he can get a third of the African-American vote. And maybe this is all about appealing to white moderates. Even so, he deserves some credit for making the effort. Given the fact that we’re talking about a guy who first got national attention for his opposition to the public accommodation provisions of the Civil Rights Act, it’s pretty remarkable.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 17, 2014
“Depressing And Infuriating”: Voter ID Laws Make The Poll Tax Look Good
The poll tax is looking pretty tempting in the rear-view mirror. It was $1.50 in 1964, when the 24th Amendment outlawed it as a requirement for voting in federal elections. Adjusted for inflation, the tax would be less than $12 today. That makes it a lot cheaper — and infinitely easier — than getting hold of exactly the right documentation to cast a ballot under some state laws.
The recent wave of rulings and opinions on voter ID laws makes for depressing, at times infuriating, reading. There is the parade of “practical obstacles” summarized by U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman, writing on the Wisconsin law. Trying to learn what you need, collecting the documents, getting to and standing on line at one or more state offices that are open only during business hours, and perhaps having to deal with multiple other state and federal agencies to address discrepancies — just skimming the list will make your stomach clench and your head ache. It’s a major undertaking for a high-income, highly educated person with flexible work hours and access to public officials. It’s prohibitive in multiple ways for others.
There are the calculated choices majority Republicans made in Texas about what kinds of ID to accept and reject. They said yes to gun permits and military IDs and didn’t mess with absentee ballots — all ways to “broaden Anglo voting,” U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos wrote. They rejected student IDs, state government employee IDs and federal IDs, all “disproportionately held by African-Americans and Hispanics.”
There is the barrier of cost, addressed in an opinion on the Wisconsin law by Judge Richard Posner, a conservative named by Ronald Reagan to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. He cited a Harvard Law School report that found the cost of documentation, travel and waiting time to get an ID to be $75 to $175. That’s 50 to 100 times more than that $1.50 poll tax, and all you’d have to do is pay at the polling station before voting.
The poll tax, in many cases applied selectively and used to discriminate, had no place in a democracy. Yet how different was it from the hurdles placed in the path of so many voters today?
These burdens, and possibly even the outcome of a close race or two, hang in the balance as the courts whipsaw back and forth in the weeks before the Nov. 4 election. Ramos blocked the Texas law last week, she was reversed by a three-judge appeals panel this week, and the next day the Supreme Court was asked to again block the law from taking effect. The Wisconsin law went through a similar judicial rollercoaster before the Supreme Court last week said it could not go forward this year.
Posner’s dissent in the Wisconsin case is memorable for personal asides that inject bracing reminders of the real world, and an overall scathing tone. His 11-page appendix, for instance, is called “Scrounging for your birth certificate in Wisconsin.” All 11 pages are required forms and instructions on how to fill them out.
“Scrounge” was the Seventh Circuit panel’s verb of choice in its short-lived ruling to let the law take effect. The panel referred disapprovingly to people “unwilling to invest the necessary time” to “scrounge up a birth certificate and stand in line at the office that issues driver’s licenses.” To which Posner responded that “the author of this dissenting opinion” — that would be him — “has never seen his birth certificate and does not know how he would go about ‘scrounging’ it up. Nor does he enjoy waiting in line at motor vehicle bureaus.”
Posner wrote that since voter-impersonation fraud is virtually non-existent, the only motivation for such requirements is “to discourage voting by persons likely to vote against the party responsible for imposing the burdens.” He uses charts to show that of the nine states with the strictest ID requirements, eight laws were passed by all-GOP legislatures and seven of the eight also had GOP governors.
The morality of all this is bad enough — we’re talking about voting, for Pete’s sake, the bedrock of the republic, a right people died to win. But the voter ID fad also reveals flawed political strategy. It courts backlash, in the form of higher minority turnout. And it will make it harder to repair relations with the affected groups when demographic reality takes hold and the GOP needs their votes.
If the Supreme Court decides to rule on the merits of voter ID laws, let’s hope it acts with more dispatch than it did on poll taxes. The taxes were declared constitutional in 1937. It was not until 1966, two years after the 24th Amendment banning them in federal elections, that the high court ruled them unconstitutional in all elections. We don’t need 29 years to know that voter suppression is wrong.
By: Jill Lawrence, The National Memo, October 16, 2014
“One More Barrier To Voting”: Scott Walker Could Win Thanks To Wisconsin’s Voter ID Law
On September 12, Wisconsin voting-rights groups began to scramble when the Seventh Circuit Court upheld the state’s voter ID law, one of the strictest in the country. By the end of September, the same court had narrowly declined to re-hear the case en banc—giving voters and election officials mere weeks before the state’s upcoming gubernatorial election to grapple with the law. Unless the Supreme Court overturns the decision in response to an emergency appeal filed Thursday by the ACLU, Wisconsin voters will have to show identification from a list of approved types at the November election. It’s hard to say how many people might be disenfranchised by the law, but in such a tight election, where Republican incumbent Scott Walker is neck-and-neck with Democrat Mary Burke, it doesn’t take many votes to swing the results.
In April, when District court judge Lynn Adelman issued an injunction against the law, he estimated that 300,000 registered voters across the state lack the IDs they need to vote. The judge arrived at that estimate by comparing the testimony of two witnesses, a statistical marketing consultant, Leland Beatty, and a professor at the University of Georgia, M.V. Hood III. Beatty and Hood both crunched through the DMV records with registered voter files to determine how many registered voters in the state lack either a driver’s license or state ID card, the two most common forms of identification. Using different methodologies, the two men produced different estimates. Hood said between 4.9 percent (167,351) and 10.9 percent (368,824) of registered voters lacked ID, while Beatty estimated 9.4 percent (317,735).
Even Hood’s low-end estimate of 167,351 disenfranchised voters is enough voters to swing a tight election. Walker won in 2010 by only 124,638 votes. According to the Huffington Post Pollster, Walker is currently leading Burke 48.3 to 46.3.
Walker’s supporters are more likely than Burke’s to show up at the polls in the first place. According to Marquette University’s latest polls, Walker leads by a five-point margin among those who say they are certain to vote. But, among those who aren’t as certain they’ll make it to the polls, Burke leads by an eleven-point margin. This gap is common in midterm elections, since Republican voters—usually white, wealthy, and older—have more time and resources to make it to polling stations for the elections that get less hype. The voter ID law might deepen this disparity, since it creates one more barrier to vote for those already on the fence.
The clock is ticking for voting rights groups to organize in response to the law. Mike Wilder from Wisconsin Voices said that his group began educating voters and helping them procure identification a few days after the law was upheld in mid-September. But it’s not just the voters without identification in need of education. The majority of voters who have the necessary ID need to be reminded to bring it to the polls. A recent Marquette University poll found that 20 percent of voters didn’t know they needed their IDs to vote.
By: Claire Groden, The New Republic, October 6, 2014
“Holder A Fighter Who Would Not Cower”: He Dared Others To Summon The Nerve To Fight Alongside Him
Eric Holder, who resigned Thursday, kicked off his stormy tenure as attorney general with a challenge to the American public that set the tone for his six turbulent years as the nation’s top law-enforcement officer.
“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards,” said Holder in his first public speech after being sworn in.
When the remark drew an uproar from conservatives, Holder shrugged and doubled down. “I wouldn’t walk away from that speech,” Holder told ABC News. “I think we are still a nation that is too afraid to confront racial issues,” rarely engaging “one another across the color line [to] talk about racial issues.”
And true to form, Holder — a tall man who carries himself with the relaxed, quiet confidence of a corporate attorney — seldom backed down from a confrontation, on racial justice or other issues.
He pressed Credit Suisse, and the Swiss bank eventually paid over $2.6 billion to settle claims it was illegally helping wealthy Americans avoid paying taxes. Holder took the lead in pushing banks and other financial companies involved in the mortgage crisis to pay $25 billion to federal and state governments, a record civil settlement.
And Holder famously sparred with members of Congress such as Darrell Issa and Louie Gohmert as the television cameras rolled. In one heated exchange at a Judiciary Committee hearing in 2013, Issa and Holder talked over each other, with the attorney general concluding, “That is inappropriate and is too consistent with the way in which you conduct yourself as a member of Congress. It’s unacceptable, and it’s shameful.”
In another back-and-forth, Holder trash-talked Gohmert with lines that could have been taken from a comedy routine. “You don’t want to go there, buddy. You don’t want to go there, OK?”
While the history books will note Holder was the first African-American attorney general, a more relevant biographical fact might be his status as possibly the first attorney general who, as a college student protester, occupied a campus building: In 1969, as a freshman at Columbia University, Holder was part of a group of black students that took over a former naval ROTC office for five days, demanding that it be renamed the Malcolm X Lounge. (In a sign of the times, the university complied.)
Echoes of Holder’s activist history could be heard years later, in the middle of a high-stakes battle with leaders of several Southern states over voter-ID laws and other rules changes that Holder deemed an attack on black voting rights.
“People should understand that there’s steel here, and I am resolved to oppose any attempts to try to roll back the clock,” Holder told CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin in an article for The New Yorker.
Not all of Holder’s crusades have worked out well.
The Supreme Court, despite Holder’s efforts, voted to strike down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, and conservative senators blocked Debo Adegbile, Holder’s preferred choice to run the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department.
The attorney general has launched or joined legal battles against restrictions on voting rights in Ohio, Wisconsin, Texas and North Carolina, but it’s unclear whether those efforts will end up back at the same Supreme Court that weakened the original law.
In 2012, House Republicans voted to hold the attorney general in contempt of Congress for stonewalling on information requests in the bungled Fast and Furious gun-smuggling operation in which 2,000 weapons went missing. It was the first time in U.S. history that a sitting Cabinet member was given such a severe sanction. (The case will continue after Holder’s resignation, although his successor will inherit the fallout, not Holder personally.)
But history will surely judge Holder a success at broadly expanding access to justice for groups seeking acceptance and fairness. He announced the federal government would no longer defend laws banning same-sex marriage and told state attorneys general they could do the same.
And Holder made good on his initial commitment to change the conversation on race. He traveled to Ferguson, Missouri, and assigned dozens of Justice Department personnel to investigate law enforcement practices after the police killing of Michael Brown triggered street riots.
He has also called for voting rights to be restored to formerly incarcerated Americans, and pressed for a reduction in the prosecution of low-level marijuana users.
For one clue about how history will regard Holder, go back to 2009. In the effort to battle terrorism, Holder called for five accused terrorist’s suspected of participating in the 9/11 attacks to be tried in federal courts in New York — only to see the proposal scuttled after a political uproar.
“We need not cower in the face of this enemy,” Holder told skeptical members of the Senate. They didn’t buy the argument, but it was classic Holder: Once again, the battler leaping into the arena and daring others to summon the nerve to fight alongside him.
By: Errol Louis, CNN Opinion, September 26, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 