“Running Against History”: It Looks Like Scott Brown May Have Picked Exactly The Wrong State
Republican Scott Brown is not just a pretty face or the first senator to be seen around the Dirksen Senate Office Building in full biking gear for his afternoon rides. How else is he to keep his tall, lean physique in fighting form in the deliberative body? After all, the once senator from Massachusetts may be the future senator from New Hampshire.
But there’s more to that story than switching states. Brown has already earned a unique place in U.S. political history, despite a slender record of service after winning a special election to fill the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s Senate seat in 2010, as he is the first man to fully face the ramifications of the rise in formidable women players running for high office in the past 20 years. The Senate now has an all-time high of 20 women. If Brown wins, he will cut into that peak, reached in 2012. Does he want to cycle against history?
Brown will likely become the only man ever to run in three consecutive Senate races against three women candidates. You read it here first. I say this despite Mark Leibovich’s wry piece in the New York Times Magazine giving Brown the sobriquet, “Superhypothetical.”
Lest we forget, he beat Martha Coakley, the state’s Democratic attorney general, when she forgot to campaign and even took a vacation shortly before the election. Then he lost to feisty Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren in 2012. And now he comes into the fray again — well, almost. Bowing to party pressure, he has formed an exploratory committee in New Hampshire, where his family has a vacation home. That means that he is taking all the right steps to challenge a popular Democrat, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, in the red-flecked Granite state.
Let’s say that Brown is, for all intents and purposes, jumping into the race this spring. That is roughly the consensus among the politerati. Republican party operatives are delirious at the thought that Brown could clinch their goal of painting the Senate red overnight. And he could, because Shaheen is not the only vulnerable Democrat in this cycle. Two Southern Democrats, Sens. Mary Landrieu and David Pryor, are in deep danger and don’t want any “help” from President Obama.
If the wily Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky becomes the Majority Leader, even by a margin of 51-49, that will effectively doom President Obama’s chances of getting any major legislation passed in his second term. Big money stands by, ready to help Brown become a powerful contender.
In fairness to him, Brown is no Ted Cruz tea partier, but a telegenic New England moderate with some appealing qualities. If Brown declares and engages, New Hampshire will be the most closely watched state on the 2014 political map. Accustomed to the drill, voters there will love the national media trudging through the leaves to take their political pulse. They are an unusually seasoned, sophisticated set of voters in a small state and the outcome is bound to be a close call. For Shaheen, a former governor, the home court advantage could prove decisive.
More interestingly, gender may help Shaheen where she lives; the state’s other senator is a Republican woman, Kelly Ayotte. In fact, the state’s congressional delegation is all female, and the governor is a woman, all of which is the stuff of history. That is hard evidence that Brown will have to pedal uphill in a state that favors electing women, lately.
For Brown, the race will break his personal tie, one way or the other, when it comes to running against women. And it sure looks like he picked exactly the wrong state.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, March 24, 2014
“An ‘Impermissible Attempt’ To Coerce Women”: Federal Court Permanently Blocks North Carolina’s Narrated Ultrasound Law
A federal court on Friday permanently blocked a North Carolina law requiring women to undergo coercive counseling and a narrated ultrasound prior to obtaining an abortion. The judge permanently enjoined the unconstitutional law, ruling that “the Act requires providers to deliver the state’s message to women who take steps not to hear it and to women who will be harmed by receiving it with no legitimate purpose.”
United States District Court Judge Catherine Eagles called the law “an impermissible attempt to compel these providers to deliver the state’s message in favor of childbirth and against abortion.”
The decision is a clear victory for doctors and women in the state, and a strong indictment of similar laws intended to pressure or shame women out of accessing basic medical care.
Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, celebrated the ruling in a statement. “Today’s ruling marks a major victory for North Carolina women and sends a message to lawmakers across the country: it is unconstitutional for politicians to interfere in a woman’s personal medical decisions,” she said. “This dangerous law would have required abortion providers to perform an ultrasound and place the image in the woman’s line of sight — even if she asks not to view it. The provider would then be required to describe the image in detail — even over the woman’s objection. It made no exceptions for women under any circumstances, including cases of rape, incest, or those who receive a tragic diagnosis during pregnancy.”
The North Carolina law was a clear overstep, but as Salon has previously noted, forced ultrasound laws do virtually nothing to influence women’s choices, making them little more than intentionally punitive policies intended to shame women for making sound medical choices.
By: Katie McDonough, Salon, January 17, 2014
“Evangelical Church’s Ugly Truth”: Duck Dynasty And Christian Racists
The Evangelical Church has a racism problem. And it is incumbent on us in this Christmas season to tell the truth about that. Recently A&E suspended Phil Robertson, the patriarch of its hit show, “Duck Dynasty,” for making incredibly homophobic statements in a GQ magazine interview. In typical fashion, he affirmed his evangelical belief that homosexuality is a sin, but went even further, comparing gay people’s sexual behavior to bestiality, and declaring emphatically that they would not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.
Liberal-minded folk, some Christians included, have been outraged at his homophobia, while conservative Christians of all races jumped to defend his right to free speech. Many of these Christians feel particularly threatened by what they call “censorship” of Robertson, because the belief that homosexuality is a sin, and the right to declare that belief freely without recourse, has become for many of these people a defining marker of their identity as Christians.
A reluctant evangelical, I reject conservative theological teachings on homosexuality; the violence that the Church does to gay people in the name of God is indeed one of the primary reasons for my reluctance. But I am also ambivalent about the Church because of its continued subjugation of women and its failure to be forthright about its continuing racism problem.
I grew up in a black baptist church, in a small town in North Central Louisiana, about 30 miles west of where “Duck Dynasty” is filmed. I made my first “profession of faith” in Jesus Christ while at a white baptist church I had visited with my childhood best friend, Amanda, when I was about 7 years old. I was baptized at the age of 13.
At 33 years of age, my disillusionment with the church — which has come to full bloom in the last five years or so — is the thing that perhaps most solidly marks me as a member of the Millennial generation. Though I am often ambivalent about that label, too, I still get why Millennials, fed up with the vile homophobia of the church — as particularly evidenced by the “Duck Dynasty” episode — are leaving the institution in droves. But in the fervor and closing of ranks over Robertson’s homophobia, many Christians, white and Black, old and young alike, have missed the racist remarks he made in that same interview. Millennials, it turns out, haven’t proven themselves to be fundamentally better on race, despite post-racial proclamations to the contrary.
Apparently, according to Robertson, 1950s and 60s Louisiana — the Louisiana of his childhood — was a happy heavenly place where Black people hoed cotton and eschewed the blues:
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field. … They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’ — not a word! … Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
I have several aunts and uncles and a grandparent who would beg to differ with Robertson’s account of events. In 1956, several hundred African Americans were purged from the voter registration rolls in Monroe, and spent years struggling to be re-enfranchised.
I’m reminded of these words from James Baldwin’s essay “A Fly in Buttermilk”:
“Segregation has worked brilliantly in the South, and in fact, in the nation to this extent: It has allowed white people with scarcely any pangs of conscience whatever, to create, in every generation only the Negro they wished to see.”
But racism and colonization have also allowed white people, like Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, to create the Jesus they wish to see, too: a blonde, blue-eyed white man with long hair. Now my Bible says that Jesus was a Jew with Egyptian (Read: African) ancestry (Matthew 1). But many white people are decidedly uncomfortable worshipping a God that doesn’t look like them.
As Evangelicalism goes, racism, homophobia, and sexism go hand in hand. Black evangelicals like to tell themselves that they can reject Christianity’s racist past, while embracing homophobic and sexist ideas about the position of gay people and women, in the world and the church. I have come to say: It just isn’t so.
God is not a racist. I know that despite a Bible that sanctions enslavement and implores slaves to obey and be kind to their masters.
God is not a sexist. I know that despite a Bible that tells me that women are to be quiet in church, that women are not to teach men, that women are to submit.
God is not a homophobe. I know that despite a Bible that declares sex between men to be an abomination.
God is love. That is a truth I learned first and foremost from the Bible. And it holds moral and political weight for me because of the life that Jesus Christ lived, from birth to death and back again.
I love the Church, despite myself. But I won’t love it uncritically. This is what hermeneutic consistency requires. And worshipping alongside white folks who are more moved to stand with a homophobe than to stand against racism gives me great pause.
The Church can no longer afford to be disingenuous about its racism problem. Easy unity is not what we need. Time has run out for an African American Church that continues to tack hard to the right — uncritically imbibing the agenda of the (white) Evangelical Right, without acknowledging that this position, predicated as it is on the belief that Christian = Republican, is fundamentally averse to, and in some ways responsible for, the declining social and political condition of African Americans, gay and straight alike.
Ironically enough, the progressive Christians who inspire me the most these days are white. Rachel Held Evans, Jay Bakker, Brian McLaren and theologian Peter Enns are fighting the good fight of faith. But I won’t let any of them off the hook for their failure to be more forthright in addressing racism. Evans, Bakker and McLaren are great on questions of homophobia, poverty and sexism; but racism, when it is addressed at all, is largely addressed as a problem of individual attitudes rather than systemic disfranchisement. What Robertson’s statements point to, however, is that individual prejudices, and the amelioration of them, are bound up with the structures that support them. After all, it wasn’t his racist statements that got him suspended.
This is the season of hope. And I am hopeful. Because even though Phil Robertson said gay people would not inherit the kingdom of God, Jesus did say that the Kingdom of God is within us. Phil Robertson and his ilk don’t possess the keys to the kingdom. We do.
By: Brittany Cooper, Contributing Writer, Salon, December 24, 2013
“We Have To Do Better”: We Can’t Just Play Defense On Voting Access, It’s Time To Make Voting Easier
When I think of the 2012 Obama campaign, I am proud of so many things we accomplished. But one thing I wasn’t totally satisfied with was voter turnout.
It’s not that we didn’t meet our goals—we actually surpassed them, especially in key states. The numbers were stark: We won nine of the ten battleground states, registered 1.8 million new voters, and built a grassroots army of more than 2 million volunteers who made 146 million calls and door knocks over the course of the electoral cycle. Yet the really telling stats are the ones no one is discussing—specifically who failed to cast his or her vote in either this past election or any election in the last decade.
In 2012, 60 percent of eligible voters (129 million American citizens) headed to the polling booth, including the largest number of voters ever among African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans, and large numbers of women and young people—many of whom voted for the first time ever. But when 40 percent (86 million American citizen adults) are not voting, the simple fact is our society—and democracy writ large—suffers.
The fundamental problem is that the way we exercise our right to vote remains trapped in the 19th century. Some election officials still use unwieldy reams of paper to check off voters, voting machines vary from precinct to precinct and frequently break, and voters are driving to city hall or the public library to get their voter registration forms in many states.
What’s more, it’s costing Americans to participate in the process both in terms of the time and effort they must invest in order to register and vote—and in taxpayer dollars. In Oregon, where voter turnout is remarkably high in comparison with the rest of the nation, the state spends $4.11 to process each voter registration form. Meanwhile in Canada, the average cost is less than thirty-five cents.
At the same time, lines to cast a ballot have been getting longer and longer, especially in urban and minority communities. Analytical studies of the 2012 election show the problem extends far beyond the anecdotal evidence of Florida early voters waiting for hours to enter the polling booth. In fact, MIT scholar Charles Stewart III found that while two-thirds of American voters waited less than ten minutes to vote, voters in low-income neighborhoods with high percentages of minorities often waited more than an hour. On average, African American voters across the country waited two times as long to vote as whites. Similarly, Hispanic voters waited a third longer than white voters.
The good news is the same innovative spirit and technological savvy that is making so many aspects of our lives easier—from travelling paper-free, to banking from home, to tracking on our smartphones how miles we’ve run or how many calories we’ve consumed—can also fix the problems with the way we vote. Digital technology and big data systems are continuing to change the world in which we live by helping us track massive amounts of data, protect against fraud, and democratize things that used to be the sole property of the elite and well-connected. It makes sense that those tools can help lead us to a more just and effective voting system as well.
The solutions already exist, and the policies are simply waiting to be adopted and enacted. In particular, by expanding online and automated voter registration, permitting no-excuse vote-by-mail, extending early voting, and implementing portable and Election Day registration, we can finally bring our voting system into the 21st century
If we do all these things we will not only improve democracy in America—we will save significant taxpayer dollars in the process.
One state leading the way on making voting both easier and more accessible is Colorado. In May, Governor John Hickenlooper signed a sweeping measure passed by both houses of the legislature that not only requires ballots be mailed to every single registered voter in Colorado but also permits registration through Election Day. Among the provisions included are a longer early voting period, a shorter time required for state residency to qualify to vote, and the ability to vote at any precinct within the voter’s county. What’s more, the law leaves it up to voters how they choose to cast their ballots during early vote or on Election Day—by mail, by dropping off the ballot, or in-person if that’s their preference.
We’re also seeing results in places like Washington State, which is a great case study on the benefits of expanding online and automated voter registration. Thanks to automated opt-in voter registration in the state’s Department of Licensing (DOL) offices, Washington saw cost savings amounting to $126,000 in 2008 alone, according to studies conducted by the Brennan Center. In addition, voters saved more than $90,000 in postage that would have been required to mail in their registration forms. It’s no wonder that Washington’s system has been popular with both the state and voters. In 2004, 15 percent of total registrations were completed at DOLs. By 2009, just a year after the state fully adopted and implemented online and automated registration, that number had jumped to 70 percent of total registrations.
While online and automated registration are key to easing the process for new voters, we know that increasing overall electoral participation can only happen if we improve the accessibility and convenience of voting, particularly for low-income and minority communities. That’s where policies that permit vote-by-mail and expand early voting come into play.
Oregon, Colorado, and Washington have already shown us what vote-by-mail can do for turnout. Oregon and Washington have instituted universal vote-by-mail, and both states have experienced voter participation rates that are significantly higher than the national average. Similarly, Colorado instituted the vote-by-mail option in 1992, and as awareness and education for this option increased, so has turnout. In 2012, Colorado had 70 percent turnout—and fully 82 percent of those voters cast their ballots before Election Day.
Instituting in-person early voting is another important piece that will help make it easier to vote, but this approach must go hand-in-hand with increasing early voting administrative resources and hours. In most states, early voting hours coincide with business hours and are shorter than Election Day hours. There are typically far fewer voting locations than on Election Day, and they are staffed with fewer poll workers and fewer machines. As a result, early voters have no choice but to travel greater distances to vote, and the expanded opportunity can be offset by the inconvenience.
One state that showcases how early voting can work well is Nevada. In 2008, 67 percent of Nevada voters voted early and 90 percent of Nevada early voters lived within 2.5 miles of an early vote site, further demonstrating the correlation between voting convenience and turnout. In 2012, Nevada offered two full weeks of early voting prior to Election Day with both permanent and mobile locations. Instead of the typical handful of staffers, mobile locations were run by teams of 10-12 election workers—and these locations changed sites every few days to ease the geographic burden on would-be voters. It’s not surprising then that in 2012, 69 percent of Nevadan voters cast their ballots prior to Election Day.
Finally, a crucial element of fixing our voting system is expanding portable and Election Day registration. Twenty-nine million voting age Americans move each year—that’s approximately one in eight people who would be eligible to vote—and 45 percent of voting age Americans move every five years. Yet most states require voters to re-register when they move to a new address. Portable voter registration would allow voters to keep their registration when they move.
Ten states currently allow voters to register and vote on Election Day: Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—and when California’s new law goes into effect it will bring the total to 11. There is no reason why that number should be less than 50.
Fortunately, organizations like Turbovote are working to make this process easier for voters: Their goal is to ensure voters only have to register once in their lifetime. But if we want to modernize our voting system to reflect both our values as a nation and our technological capabilities, we will need to build the political will to do it.
Last November, former Florida Republican Party chair Jim Greer came clean about efforts to suppress the Democratic vote in his home state by reducing early voting hours, saying, “the Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates…It’s done for one reason and one reason only…We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us.”
We heard similar things in Pennsylvania when State House Republican leader Mike Turzai touted passing a law with serious voting restrictions, including “voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”
And it’s no coincidence that Texas Attorney General and presumed Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott put that state’s voter ID law into effect just hours after the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act this past June. What’s clear is the Texas voter ID law is designed to make it easier for certain people to vote and harder for others—under this law, a concealed handgun license is considered acceptable identification for voting while a student ID issued by a Texas university is not. It’s no wonder U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has already announced plans by the Department of Justice to fight the Texas law and other efforts by states seeking to capitalize on the court’s decision.
In North Carolina, the state’s new Republican governor and Republican state legislature approved a sweeping law last month to reduce early voting, eliminate voter registration during early voting, require voters to obtain photo ID, and impose a tax on parents of students who choose to vote on campus. Like Texas, the North Carolina law further discriminates against students by prohibiting them from using their North Carolina student ID to vote.
What these extreme comments and actions indicate is that we need a “common sense caucus” on voting rights. There are moderate Republicans who believe that elections should be about who has the best ideas—not who can change the laws to make it more difficult for their opponents to vote. We need to lift up those voices.
The ideas outlined above are just common sense solutions—and lawmakers in Washington should be taking action to implement them. Ultimately, driving up voter participation and making it easier to vote will help not only urban voters but provide greater access to the political process for voters in rural communities as well. That’s a goal leaders from both sides of the aisle should be able to support.
But we can’t wait for Washington.
States need to begin passing laws that reform and modernize our voting system—and begin seeing results the likes of those in Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada. In fact this kind of a decentralized approach—using the states as “laboratories of democracy”—may be the only way to solve the problem
In Silicon Valley, former Obama staffer Jim Green recently started a venture called Technology for America (T4A). This group brings together the best and brightest of Silicon Valley together with mayors and other elected officials of either party who want to solve the big problems of our day. Every Secretary of State in this country should be banging down Jim’s door asking how they can partner with Silicon Valley to come up with smart technology solutions to create a better voting system. If they don’t care or have the audacity to lead on this, we should fire them and vote in better Secretaries of State who do.
In the last election, 60 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, and many of those who did waited in unacceptably long lines to do so. As President Obama said in his acceptance speech on election night, “we have to fix that.”
The facts are clear on this front—we have the technology and the brilliant technologists to help us do just that. The question is whether or not national and state lawmakers have the political will. If not, we need to start electing political leaders who care about our democracy and understand that participation in it is critical to our success.
We made history in 2012—and in 2008—and I was deeply honored to be part of both amazing, transcendent campaigns. But history isn’t enough. We have to do better.
By: Jeremy Bird, the New Republic, November 30, 2013
“Group Polarization Intensifies”: Only Hearing Praise Back Home, It’s Too Soon To Write Off The Tea Party
Don’t write the tea party’s obituary just yet. Despite historic victories over tea party extremism in Tuesday’s elections, we haven’t seen the last of tea partiers.
First, the good news. Effectiveness triumphed over extremism on Tuesday. Voters in New Jersey and Virginia elected governors who appeal to the great bipartisan middle by moving beyond partisanship to “get things done” for the people. In Virginia, even Republican leaders endorsed Democrat Terry McAuliffe because he demonstrated cooperation across the aisle, including helping to secure Democratic votes for a bipartisan state transportation bill. McAuliffe’s success in presenting himself as non-partisan is notable given that he once served as national chair of the Democratic party and recently flaunted his poor rating from the NRA.
Extremism lost out. In contrast to McAuliffe, Ken Cuccinelli focused on a divisive social agenda that was too extreme for purple state Virginia, where a full third of the voters are independents. He inflamed Latino opposition with comments that compared immigration policy to rodent extermination, and offended women by introducing legislation to make divorce more difficult and to confer “personhood” on fetuses, which experts say would have outlawed common forms of birth control, including the pill.
Cuccinelli also alienated purple state voters by pursuing an extremist social agenda as attorney general (leading the legal fight against the Affordable Care Act, investigating climate scientists, aggressively implementing anti-abortion regulations and pursuing sodomy laws). More than half of Virginia voters called Cuccinelli “too conservative” on most issues, while finding McAuliffe “just about right,” in a Washington Post poll. (Cuccinelli’s social agenda blinders prevent him from recognizing that his opposition to Obamacare didn’t help him narrow the vote gap in the days leading up to the election. His tea party allies are similarly blinded, as evidenced by our election night debate on The Kudlow Report; they remain enamored of their social agenda and don’t recognize it is divisive.)
The final straw may have been when tea party leader Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas came to Virginia to campaign for Cuccinelli. Cruz, the architect of the federal government shutdown, only served to remind Virginians of Cuccinelli’s adoration for the shutdown politics the tea party pursues – particularly damaging given how many Virginians’ livelihoods are tied to the federal government (32 percent of Virginian voters reported that their households were affected by the shutdown). Nevertheless, one cannot chalk up the Virginia results to the shutdown, since McAuliffe’s lead in the polls over Cuccinelli dates back to July, before the shutdown.
Like McAuliffe, New Jersey incumbent Republican Governor Chris Christie credibly made the case to voters that he is an effective, bipartisan leader. Christie won praise from blue state voters for his willingness to collaborate with President Obama on the cleanup after Hurricane Sandy and on an expansion of state Medicaid through Obamacare. Sure, he’s conservative (anti-choice, anti-gay marriage, anti-labor), but Christie appealed to voters as someone willing to set aside partisanship to get results – proving that a Republican can win a blue state if he prioritizes effectiveness across party lines and plays down his social agenda.
A third victory for the middle came in a special primary for an Alabama House seat, where the Republican establishment called in heavy guns and large corporate dollars to ensure mainstream Republican Bradley Byrne beat tea party radical Dean Young – proving that even conservative House districts can reject tea partiers, so long as the Republican establishment fights hard enough.
And in New York City, a populist liberal – Bill de Blasio – was heartily elected over his business-minded Republican opponent, although the real race, in this blue city, occurred during the Democratic primary.
Combine Tuesday’s losses with news of a Republican PAC to combat tea party primary candidates and national polls showing diminishing support for the tea party, and you might well think the tea party is facing a death knell. Especially when you add in the prediction by demographic pollsters that the tea party will eventually die out with the aging of its largely older supporters.
But, before you write that obituary, remember that many House Republicans who championed the government shutdown are hearing only praise back home. Given gerrymandering in 2010, most House Republicans now represent ideologically conservative districts. Only 17 Republicans represent districts that voted for President Obama in 2012. As social scientists have pointed out, group polarization only intensifies as group members reinforce each other’s views and hear fewer alternative views. And if they “live” in a conservative news bubble, then, as conservative journalist Robert Costa put it, “the conservative strategy of the moment, no matter how unrealistic it might be, catches fire.”
These House conservatives aren’t going anywhere, and they may well launch another shutdown and threaten debt default this winter. Nevertheless, Tuesday reminds us that extremism can be a liability on election day.
By: Carrie Wofford, U. S. News and World Report, November 7, 2013
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