Justin's Political Corner

At a social conservative conference this week, Iowa’s Secretary of State argued that Republicans need to pass voter ID in order to advance their top policy goals, including banning abortion and same-sex marriage.

Matt Schultz (R), elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010, spoke at length about his support for implementing voter ID in a speech before the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition on Monday. In the process he accused the other side of cheating in order to win elections, but provided no evidence to back up this claim.

SCHULTZ: There are a whole lot of issues that we care about, abortion, gay marriage, a whole lot of social issues that we care deeply about. But you have to start caring about voter ID and election integrity as well, because if you don’t have that, you’ll never be able to make a difference in any other issue you care about. Never. Because they will cheat! They’ll cheat. And we need to make sure we stop them. So what do I need you to do? I need you start telling your friends and neighbors that you love voter ID. You love voter ID.

There’s a reason why Schultz couldn’t provide any evidence that people are using voter fraud at the polls to rig elections: none exists. In-person voter fraud is extraordinarily rare; a study in nearby Wisconsin found a fraud rate of 0.0002 percent, far less common than even being struck by lightning. Still, a dearth of actual voter fraud hasn’t stopped conservatives from using it as a phantom menace to gin up support for voter ID.

Schultz isn’t the only Republican official pushing voter ID as a means for enacting the Party’s policy goals. Indeed, because approximately 1 in 10 Americans — particularly young voters and minorities, groups who tend to vote Democratic — lack photo ID, a strict voter ID requirement would help Republicans win more elections. 

h/t: Scott Keyes at Think Progress Justice

A bill introduced by Montana state Rep. Steve Lavin would give corporations the right to vote in municipal elections:

Provision for vote by corporate property owner. (1) Subject to subsection (2), if a firm, partnership, company, or corporation owns real property within the municipality, the president, vice president, secretary, or other designee of the entity is eligible to vote in a municipal election as provided in [section 1].

(2) The individual who is designated to vote by the entity is subject to the provisions of [section 1] and shall also provide to the election administrator documentation of the entity’s registration with the secretary of state under 35-1-217 and proof of the individual’s designation to vote on behalf of the entity.

The idea that “corporations are people, my friend” as Mitt Romney put it, is sadly common among conservative lawmakers. Most significantly of all, the five conservative justices voted in Citizens United v. FEC to permit corporations to spend unlimited money to influence elections. Actually giving corporations the right to vote, however, is quite a step beyond what even this Supreme Court has embraced.

The bill does contain some limits on these new corporate voting rights. Most significantly, corporations would not be entitled to vote in “school elections,” and the bill only applies to municipal elections. So state and federal elections would remain beyond the reach of the new corporate voters.

H/T: Ian Millhiser at Think Progress Justice

WASHINGTON — A former congressional candidate is taking the Internal Revenue Service to court for its failure to enforce its laws governing political activity by nonprofits organized under the social welfare section of the tax code.

Dr. David Gill, the 2012 Democratic candidate in Illinois’ 13th district, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) are suing the IRS for allowing the “dark money” nonprofit American Action Network to spend $2.6 million against Gill while enjoying tax exemption and donor anonymity.

Gill and CREW have alleged that the IRS improperly interpreted tax law when it promulgated regulations for social welfare nonprofits, stating that they must be “primarily” focused on social welfare. In contrast, the federal statute states that these nonprofits must be “exclusively” focused on social welfare.

This interpretation has been highly controversial ever since the 2010 Citizen United decision allowed corporations — including nonprofit corporations — and unions to spend freely on elections. Since then, social welfare nonprofits have become a huge force in federal elections, with spending exceeding $300 million in the 2012 campaign.

“It is offensive that the IRS turns a blind eye to reality and allows partisan political groups to seek refuge in a provision of the IRS code that is meant to govern organizations such as volunteer firefighter companies and homeowner organizations,” Dr. Gill said.

The IRS told HuffPost that they do not have a comment and typically don’t comment on pending litigation.

Dr. Gill said he believes that his razor-thin defeat on Nov. 6, 2012, was due to misinformation about his support for Medicare spread by American Action Network’s ads. One ad stated that Gill’s support for single-payer health care meant that he wanted to eliminate Medicare.

“As I went around the district, I was told that people who were going to vote for me changed their minds to save Medicare,” Gill said.

Gill lost by just 1,002 votes to Republican Rodney Davis. The Davis and Gill campaigns combined to spend $2.7 million on the entire election, just $100,000 more than the spending by American Action Network. The only group spending more than American Action Network on the race was the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which spent nearly $2.9 million on the race.

h/t: Paul Blumenthal at Huffington Post

Late last week, democracy scored two important victories over a Republican plan to rig future presidential elections by changing the way electoral votes are counted in several key blue states. Two Virginia Republican state senators spoke out against the plan, effectively killing it. And Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford (R) attacked the election-rigging scheme as trying to “change the rules of the game.”

In Michigan, however, which is the bluest of the six blue states where the election-rigging plan has been discussed, state House Speaker Jase Bolger (R) appears quite open to rigging his state’s electoral college votes to benefit Republicans.

In other words, Republican voters in Michigan are upset that Democrats win elections simply because there are more of them. And Bolger wants to fix that by giving the few Republicans more votes than the majority.

h/t: Ian Millhiser at Think Progress Justice

President Obama is calling out Fox News and Rush Limbaugh by name for creating a toxic environment that makes bipartisanship impossible.

In an interview with The New Republic, Obama brought up the role of right wing media in killing bipartisanship.

One of the biggest factors is going to be how the media shapes debates. If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you’ll see more of them doing it.

I think John Boehner genuinely wanted to get a deal done, but it was hard to do in part because his caucus is more conservative probably than most Republican leaders are, and partly because he is vulnerable to attack for compromising Republican principles and working with Obama.

The same dynamic happens on the Democratic side. I think the difference is just that the more left-leaning media outlets recognize that compromise is not a dirty word. And I think at least leaders like myself—and I include Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in this—are willing to buck the more absolutist-wing elements in our party to try to get stuff done.

The odds of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh not punishing Republicans who work with Obama are exactly zero, because Fox and Rush make their money by keeping a large segment of the Republican base outraged. They have a financial incentive to keep the partisanship high, and the national discourse toxic.

Congressional Republicans are paying the price for the decision to allow the most powerful members of the right wing media establishment to fill their party’s leadership vacuum. It doesn’t seem to matter to these Republicans that Limbaugh and Fox News have little impact on elections. 

They are afraid of the wrath of Rush and Fox, so many of the members of the Republican majority in the House rigidly toe the conservative media line.

A secondary issue is that much like their base many congressional Republicans are grossly misinformed because they rely on Fox News, talk radio, and right wing websites for their information. It is nearly impossible to forge a bipartisan consensus on any issue when a segment of the legislative branch is getting their information from an alternate universe where any and all facts that are not partisan talking points are questioned.

The president was dead on about the difference between liberal and conservative media. The vast majority of the left understands compromise. There is a segment of the left that like the right makes their living off of fanning the flames of perpetual outrage, but the difference is that the professionally outraged left isn’t running the Democratic Party. (In fact, one of the reasons why they have gotten so angry is that many of the white male progressives who used to be viewed as the voices of the left have been replaced by less white and less male Obama Democrats.)

H/T: PoliticusUSA

WASHINGTON — Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) did not rule out allocating the state’s electoral votes proportionally Saturday.

“It’s an interesting idea,” he told a Newsmax interviewer at the National Review Institute Summit in Washington after speaking at a lunch. “I haven’t committed one way or the other to it. For me, and I think any other state considering this, you should really look at not just the short-term but the long-term implications. Is it better or worse for the electorate?

Said Walker, “Some might argue that it would give more opportunity for candidates to jump in; others suggest it might reduce it.”

“I think we have to very careful in changes like that. But I think it’s worth looking at,” he said.

h/t: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/26/scott-walker-electoral-vote_n_2558362.html

Fresh from claiming the GOP’s 2012 run was “a great campaign—a nine-month campaign”; that only went awry at the end, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus now wants to rig the Electoral College so that when Republicans lose they still might “win.”

Specifically, Priebus is urging Republican governors and legislators to take up what was once a fringe scheme to change the rule for distribution of Electoral College votes. Under the Priebus plan, electoral votes from battleground states such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and other states that now regularly back Democrats for president would be allocated not to the statewide winner but to the winners of individual congressional districts.

Because of gerrymandering by Republican governors and legislators, and the concentration of Democratic votes in urban areas and college towns, divvying up Electoral College votes based on congressional district wins would yield significantly better results for the GOP. In Wisconsin, where Democrat Barack Obama won in 2012 by a wider margin than he did nationally, the president would only have gotten half the electoral votes. In Pennsylvania, where Obama won easily, he would not have gotten the twenty electoral votes that he did; instead, under the Priebus plan, it would have been eight for Republican Mitt Romney, twelve for Barack Obama.

Nationwide, Obama won a sweeping popular-vote victory—with an almost 5-million ballot margin that made him the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to take more than 51 percent of the vote in two elections. That translated to a very comfortable 322-206 win in the Electoral College.

How would the 2012 results have changed if a Priebus plan had been in place? According to an analysis byFair Vote-The Center for Voting and Democracy, the results would have been a dramatically closer and might even have yielded a Romney win.

Under the most commonly proposed district plan (the statewide winner gets two votes with the rest divided by congressional district) Obama would have secured the narrowest possible win: 270-268. Under more aggressive plans (including one that awards electoral votes by district and then gives the two statewide votes to the candidate who won the most districts), Romney would have won 280-258.

“If Republicans in 2011 had abused their monopoly control of state government in several key swing states and passed new laws for allocating electoral votes, the exact same votes cast in the exact same way in the 2012 election would have converted Barack Obama’s advantage of nearly five million popular votes and 126 electoral votes into a resounding Electoral College defeat,” explains FairVote’s Rob Richie.

The RNC chair is encouraging Republican governors and legislators—who, thanks to the “Republican wave” election of 2010, still control many battleground states that backed Obama and the Democrats in 2012—to game the system.

“I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue [Democratic in presidential politics] that are fully controlled red [in the statehouse] ought to be considering,” Priebus says with regard to the schemes for distributing electoral votes by district rather than the traditional awarding of the votes of each state (except Nebraska and Maine, which have historically used narrowly defined district plans) to the winner.

Already, there are moves afoot in a number of battleground states to “fix” the rules to favor the Republicans in 2016, just as they have already fixed the district lines for electing members of the House. Thanks to gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic votes, Republicans were able to lose the overall nationwide vote for US House seats by 1.4 million votes and still take control of the chamber—thus giving the United States the divided government that voters have rejected.

h/t: John Nichols at The Nation

Virginia State Senator Charles “Bill” Carrico Sr. (R) has become the latest swing state-Republican to propose a scheme to rig presidential elections for future Republican candidates. Blue Virginia reportshis proposed SB 723 would award the state’s electors based on which candidate gets the majority of votes in each gerrymandered Congressional district — rather than based on who gets the most votes statewide.

The Carrico bill would award one of Virginia’s 13 electoral votes to the presidential candidate who gets the most votes in each of the Commonwealth’s 11 Congressional Districts. The remaining two electors would go to the candidate who won the majority of Congressional Districts. With aRepublican-controlled redistricting passed earlier this year, Virginia Democrats were heavily packed into three districts. Under these maps, Obama won Virginia by almost a 4 point margin, yet he carried just four Virginia Congressional Districts. Were Carrico’s scheme in place, Mitt Romney would have received seven of Virginia’s 11 electoral votes despite receiving just 47.28% of the vote statewide.

Had the Carrico plan been instituted for the 2012 elections in Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin, it is quite likely Mitt Romney would be the president-elect despite President Obama’s 51-47 majority.

H/T: Josh Israel at Think Progress Justice

NOTE: All times are listed in Eastern Time/Central Time. States designated by * have multiple closing times. Click the state for details.

6 p.m./5 p.m.
Indiana*
Kentucky*

7 p.m./6 p.m
Florida*
Georgia
Indiana*
Kentucky*
South Carolina
Vermont
Virginia

7:30 p.m./6:30 p.m.
North Carolina
Ohio
West Virginia

8 p.m./7 p.m.
Alabama
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida*
Illinois
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Mississippi
Missouri
New Hampshire
New Jersey
Oklahoma
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Dakota*
Tennessee
Texas*

8:30 p.m./7:30 p.m.
Arkansas

9 p.m./8 p.m.
Arizona
Colorado
Kansas*
Louisiana
Michigan*
Minnesota
Nebraska
New Mexico
New York
South Dakota*
Texas*
Wisconsin
Wyoming

10 p.m./9 p.m.
Idaho*
Iowa
Kansas*
Montana
Nevada
North Dakota*
Oregon*
Utah

11 p.m./10 p.m.
California
Hawaii
Idaho*
North Dakota*
Oregon*
Washington

12 a.m. & 1 a.m./11 p.m. & 12 midnight
Alaska*

h/t: Huffington Post