Justin's Political Corner

Following other far-right attacks on comprehensive immigration reform, True the Vote, a Tea Party group purporting to combat voter fraud, is now rallying against the Senate’s immigration bill. In a fundraising email to supporters, True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht warned that the bill presents a “golden opportunity” to allow “millions of newly legalized immigrants” to “undermine our electoral system.”

In reality, immigrants who become legal under the bill would have to wait 14 years to gain citizenship and the accompanying right to vote. However, True the Vote’s unfounded suspicion that minorities voting is inherently illegal is nothing new. Despite the group’s stated intention of fighting in-person voter fraud, an exceedingly rare phenomenon, the legislation they advocate for, such as voter ID, limited voter registration, and voter purges, has been found time and again to target minorities’ voting rights. In the last election cycle alone, the Justice Department blocked 4 supposedly anti-voter fraud laws in 3 states because they would clearly make it harder for minorities to vote. Florida and Colorado also threatened to purge suspected non-citizens — most of whom were Latino — from their voter rolls if the individuals could not prove their citizenship in time. Florida found a single non-citizen voter from Canada, and Colorado ultimately gave up after confirming citizenship for the vast majority of suspected non-citizens.

Even though citizens have the right to vote regardless of origin or language, anti-immigrant lawmakers have also pushed for legislation targeting non-English speaking voters.

h/t: Aviva Shen at Think Progress Immigration

But is it true? Let’s take a look at several issues and how both mainstream liberals and mainstream conservatives respond. I will be adding links to the conservative side to forestall the usual “Straw man” complaint.

1. Abortion: Can a woman abort a fetus and if so, up to what stage of development?

Liberals – Currently, there is no way to know when a fetus/zygote becomes a  person with the same moral weight as a “post-uterine” individual. In the absence of anything more solid than, “That’s how I feel about it,” liberals are willing to let the choice belong to the woman up to the point of viability. No one is comfortable with a 30 week abortion except under dire circumstances.

Conservatives – Not only have they declared that a single celled zygote is the same as a 10 year old child but have tried to pass laws to allow civilians to kill abortion providers and arrest women suspected of trying to induce a miscarriage.

Who is more extreme?

2. Religion in school – Should religion be promoted in school through teacher-led prayer and religious iconography or should schools be “religion neutral?”

Liberals – They would prefer to keep religion out of schools so no one religion is promoted over others in a country with literally hundreds of different faiths and sects (or none at all). This way, no one is ostracized or pressured.

Conservatives – They want Christianity, only Christianity and a particular brand of Christianity (No Catholics or Mormons!) taught in schools. At the same time, they do not want objective and verifiable science taught because it runs counter their very specific brand of fundamentalist Christianity. No evolution and no six billion year old Earth.

Who is more extreme?

3. Banning religion – Should the United States pass laws against unpopular religions in direct contradiction of the First Amendment?

Liberals - Militant atheists, not all of whom are liberals, talk about banning religion but they are a minority and no lawmaker has tried to seriously do this.

Conservatives – Conservatives talk about banning Islam all the time and have passed several “anti-Sharia” laws.

Who is more extreme?

4. Guns – Does society have the right to limit certain kinds of firearms and accessories like semi-automatic assault rifles, extended clips and fully-automatic machine guns while requiring all purchases of guns to be subjected to a background check to weed out criminals, the mentally ill, potential terrorists, etc.?

Liberals - Militant gun control proponents would like to ban all guns like many other industrialized countries have done with no ill effect. They are a minority and no lawmaker has tried to seriously do this. Liberals, in general, believe that background checks will reduce gun crime and banning certain kinds of guns and accessories will reduce, but not eliminate, the ability of killers to commit mass murder.

Conservatives – They have suppressed gun control laws so much that anyone can buy almost any gun at anytime with no oversight whatsoever and want to continue to do so. Conservative lawmakers have pushed laws to allow guns in churches, pre-schools and bars that serve alcohol. Some towns have mandated that every household MUST have a gun. They even want people just released from mental health facilities to immediately be able to buy a gun as well as convicted violent felons. They believe more guns make them safer in direct contradiction to evidence that show states flooded with guns have a high level of gun violence.

Who is more extreme?

5. Marriage – Can the definition of marriage be expanded to include homosexuals? 

Liberals – Considering marriage used to be prohibited between blacks and whites and nothing bad happened when we changed it, liberals would like for people to be able to marry the person they love regardless of their sex.

Conservatives – They insist that marriage has remained unchanged for centuries despite all evidence to the contrary. They also insist that same sex marriage is no different than bestiality and pedophilia despite it being between two consenting adults.

Who is more extreme?

6. Voting – Should we require citizens to obtain special ID in order to vote?

“Big government” Liberals – Everybody should be able to vote with a minimal amount of interference.

“Small government” Conservatives – Everyone should be forced to have “Voter ID” that costs time and money to get in order to fight wide-spread (but strangely impossible to find) “voter fraud.” Curiously, if you ask these same people if guns should be subject to the same kinds of rules to combat the well established tens of thousands of gun deaths and hundreds of thousands of gun crimes a year, they get very upset at this “infringement” on their “freedom.”

Who is more extreme?

7. The President – Does the office of the President of the United States deserve unquestioning respect and obedience in a time of war?

“Totalitarian” Liberals – No. No president should have carte blanche to wage war in our names or be immune to criticism. The right to to petition the Government for a redress of grievances is in the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights. Yet, anyone that criticized President Bush in any way, including about about non-war related policies, was labeled “traitors” by conservatives for “not supporting the president in a time of war” as if he were the God-Emperor of Arrakis.

Conservatives – During the very same war in which Bush was not allowed to be criticized, President Obama has been accused of being a secret Muslim from Kenya, a Nazi, a Communist, a Socialist, a homosexual, a gangsta, a traitor, a terrorist and racial slurs have been tossed around like confetti at a KKK gathering. The calls for impeachment haven’t stopped since almost his first day in office.

Who is more extreme?

8. Taxes – How should the broken tax code be fixed?

Liberals – We want tax loopholes closed for the rich and corporations and for them to pay what they actually owe. Hiding money in tax havens should be aggressively discouraged with confiscation and jail time (just like the rest if us face when we dodge our taxes). A modest tax hike on billionaires wouldn’t be so bad, either but not terribly necessary if the previous steps are taken.

Conservatives – They want to pay no taxes at all (but not a penny to be taken from their Social Security and Medicare) because they’ve been taxed enough already despite having lower taxes than at any point in the last 30 years..

Who is more extreme?

9. Rhetoric – Whose rhetoric displays a disconnect from reality and/or violence?

Liberals – We yell about the banks stealing our money with bailouts and being “Too big to fail,” getting money out of politics, the rich not paying their taxes, no more warmongering, no more rape, no more discrimination, respecting women’s rights, feeding the poor and hungry, stopping Climate Change and freedom of, and from, religion.

Conservatives – While they happen to agree with liberals about the banks, getting money out of politics and no more warmongering, they also say that liberals are violent thugs that are planning on putting conservatives into concentration camps, regularly talk about secession, revolution, Second Amendment remedies, shooting liberals and pray for Obama’s death.

Who is more extreme?

10. Rape – Is rape…rape?*

Liberals – Yes. It doesn’t matter if violence, drugs or coercion were used. If the sex was not consensual, it’s rape.

Conservatives – Well, it depends. Was it legitimate? A Gift from God? Did she get pregnant? Was it forcible? Was her vagina shredded by the rape? If not then it wasn’t “real rape.”

*I’m leaving out all of the slut shaming and “she was asking for it” because that is a product of rape culture and is almost entirely independent of political affiliation. While it is more prevalent among conservatives it’s not remotely confined to them. I’m not even sure they represent a majority in this regard.

Who is more extreme?

Now, conservatives will complain that I’m “misrepresenting them” or “using straw man arguments.” This is why I included all of the links to actual quotes from actual mainstream Republicans or conservatives. These are not fringe beliefs for the right. This is what their elected officials and media representatives say. When a conservative uses the most extreme of left wing positions (They want to ban all guns!), they have to find a blog no one has heard of or random Facebook comments to support their accusation. It certainly isn’t a part of mainstream liberal ideology.

h/t: Justin Rosario at AddictingInfo.org

After watching the Republican presidential candidates lose the last two elections, right-wing activist Ken Blackwell cooked up a scheme whereby states would move away from winner-take-all allocations of electors to a system in which Electoral College votes would be assigned according to congressional districts.

The result would be that a Republican presidential candidate who does not win the overall popular vote in the state could still end up receiving a majority of that state’s electoral votes simply by virtue of winning the popular vote in more individual districts.

Today, Blackwell appeared on “WallBuilders Live” to promote this scheme, where it was met with enthusiastic support from Rick Green and David Barton. As Blackwell explained, if every state had implemented this plan for the 2012 election, Mitt Romney would have won despite the fact that he lost the overall popular vote by nearly 5 million votes.

Blackwell: There’s an old farmer’s tale that if you throw a brick at a pack of pigs, the one that squeals is the one you hit.  Well, when we put this out there, the Left started squealing, the New York Times started squealing, so we must be on to something.

Green: You must be on to something. No doubt about that.  I haven’t had a chance to look, I don’t if anyone has done a map, I’d be real curious to know if every state did this, how would the last few elections [have gone]? Have you had a chance to look?

Blackwell: I already know. If every state did it, Romney would have won the election.  And so that’s another reason that the Left just instinctively dislikes it.

…

Barton: This actually is a way to give the people a greater voice rather than just having the majority slap it to the minority every time you turn around. And I really like what he’s proposed here with reverting back out of the winner-take-all philosophy of the states, going back to congressional district take all, which is a good way to do it.

From the 05.02.2013 edition of Wallbuilders Live:

h/t: Kyle Mantyla at Right Wing Watch

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

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) both appeared on a politics panel at the annual convention of Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network Wednesday where they discussed an on-going assault on voting rights that could affect the African- American community in the upcoming midterm elections. Controversies over voting rights and voter suppression weren’t absent from the 2012 campaign narrative. But the dialogue coming from the mainstream media, which is dominated by white voices on both sides of the question, was inevitably different from what was on display at the NAN panel. Jeffries and Rangel both had extremely harsh words for Republicans who they described as hell bent on disenfranchising black voters — rhetoric that mixed anger with hope that Republican opponents are on the losing side of history in a rapidly changing America.

“We’re confronting the most significant and violent assault on voting rights since the advent of the 1965 Voting Rights Act,” Jeffries began. “It’s taken different forms. That legislation was designed to deal with poll taxes, and the grandfather clauses, and the literacy tests, and now we have voter ID laws and a contraction or an end to early voting. But it’s designed to accomplish the same objective—suppress the right to vote, particularly in communities of color.”

Jeffries attributed this “assault on the electoral college” to a realization among some conservatives that their prospects are dimming due to the country’s increasingly diverse demographics.

“I believe that there are folks in this country on the extreme right wing that wake up each and every morning with diabolical intensity trying to figure out how they are going to advance their agenda in the most cold-blooded way possible,” said Jeffries. “They probably go to sleep dreaming about schemes and then wake up to try to execute it, because they’re facing a serious demographic challenge that threatens the viability of their capacity to get elected at the presidential level. In many states it’s moving forward because the amount of black and brown people in this country is increasing, the communities of color as a percentage of the electorate are increasing, the progressive ideals of young people regardless of color has increased and that’s a recipe for disaster for the other side.”

Jeffries said addressing this “assault” on African American voting rights would take a “twofold approach” from black activists and politicians. Firstly, he said activists can work to pursue a constitutional amendment to change the fact “electoral law still remains the province of the states” and, as a result, can be manipulated for partisan purposes by local officials. However, Jeffries recognized this would be a “long and difficult process.” In the meantime, the second element of the plan Jeffries recommended for African American activists was a “clear state-by-state strategy to counteract the intensity of the voter suppression efforts,” which he said was largely fueled by the rise of the Tea Party in 2010 and the influence state-level Republicans were then able to exert on the House through the decennial redistricting process that took place last year.

Along with various “voter suppression” laws, Jeffries said the Tea Party influence on state governments and redistricting was fueling the Republican House majority. As evidence of this, he cited election results in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

“Democrats in Congress won a majority of the vote of the American people in this last election. … But because of the redistricting that took place after the midterm elections, the GOP maintained control of the House of Representatives. And two states illustrate this problem,” said Jeffries. “The great State of Ohio … Barack Obama won Ohio. Sherrod Brown, a progressive senator, won Ohio. And yet, in the same cycle, sixteen members of the congressional delegation in Ohio, twelve are Republicans. Same cycle, twelve Republicans four Democrats because of redistricting. In Pennsylvania, Barack Obama won the state. Bob Casey Jr., the senator, won the state comfortably. Same cycle, eighteen members of the congressional delegation, thirteen Republican, five Democratic. There was a lot of damage that was done in 2010 and the only way to rectify it in the short term is a clear state by state strategy to deal with the voter suppression that is taking place.”

Like Jeffries, Rangel accused Republicans of trying to prevent minorities from voting. But he doesn’t believe the this strategy would ultimately yield victories for conservatives. In fact, Rangel suggested failing to embrace diversity could lead to the demise of the GOP.

“The Republican Party is on a self-destructive mission. When we got rid of the Dixiecrats, they joined the Republican Party. When we had moderate Republicans in the State of New York, they chased them out,” Rangel said. “They are prepared to destroy their country to keep their base. They know that they are going out of business. They have had their last presidential campaign as we know it, so they’re doing two things; stop people who don’t look like them from coming into the country, don’t let those who got in vote. And those people who think like we do, do all you can do in the state level to prevent them from coming to the polls.”

Rangel and Jeffries come from opposite ends of the spectrum of African American political leadership—Jeffries is a rising freshman congressional star and Rangel is a veteran of the Civil Rights movement and the second senior most member of the Congressional Black Caucus. Seeing black leaders from two different generations share such a negative view of the GOP should dismay the Republican operatives who just drafted a $10 million outreach plan for the party to connect with minority communities. Indeed, Rangel was completely dismissive when TPM asked if he thought the plan might be able to succeed.

H/T: TPM

The office of Comptroller of Illinois is largely a technocratic one, since the Comptroller is legally responsible for maintaining the State of Illinois’s financial accounts, as well as ordering payments into and out of state accounts.

However, since the Comptroller of Illinois has to win a partisan election in order to serve in that role, often times, the Comptroller will recommend that state legislators take up a legislative proposal that the Comptroller has endorsed.

Judy Baar Topinka, a Republican, is the incumbent Comptroller, and she recently proposed legislation that would prohibit Illinois schools from being used as polling places in election, and she managed to get a Democratic state representative, Jack Franks, to support the proposal.

When asked to justify why she would want to make it harder for Illinoisans to vote, she used the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut to justify her support for the bill! One has to keep in mind that, in many Illinois precincts, mostly in rural areas in Central and Southern Illinois, the only logical place within a precinct that election administrators could set up a polling place is a school, so this bill would make it harder for many Illinoisans to vote!

Here in Illinois, we have a Republican comptroller, Judy Baar Topinka, who doubles as a supporter of voter suppression and is willing to do so over the dead bodies of those who were killed in a mass shooting. That’s why she’s the third member of the Illinois Republican Party’s “Dirty Dozen”.

h/t: BlueDownstate 

We do not have to guess what the states currently subject to a key provision of the Voting Rights Act will do if the Supreme Court grants their wish to have that provision declared unconstitutional — top Republicans in those states have already told us. In a brief filed last August, Republican attorneys general from six of the states covered, at least in part, by Section 5 of the Voting Right Act complained that this landmark legislation is all that stands between them and implementing a common method of disenfranchising minority voters. Two of those states, South Carolina and Texas, admit that the Voting Rights Act stopped them from implementing a voter suppression law their governors already signed.

Of course, the voter suppression law at issue here are so-called “voter ID” provisions that require voters to present photo ID at the polls. Their supporters clam publicly that these laws are needed to prevent voter fraud at the polls, but this claim is absurd. Voters are more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit in-person voter fraud. A study of Wisconsin voters found that just 0.00023 percent of votes are the product of such fraud.

What these laws do accomplish is disenfranchisement; even conservative estimates suggest that they prevent 2 to 3 percent of registered voters from casting a ballot. This voter disenfranchisement is particularly pronounced among low-income voters, students and — a fact that is particularly salient for any discussion of the Voting Rights Act — racial minorities.

The Voting Rights Act, of course, protects against laws that expose minority voters to greater burdens than other voters. Section 5, the provision that the Supreme Court will consider tomorrow, requires parts of the country that have historically engaged in voter suppression to “pre-clear” any new voting laws with the Justice Department or a federal court in DC to make sure they do not impose racial burdens. Thus, voter suppression laws such as voter ID can be blocked before an election is held, preventing officials from being elected to office by an electorate that has been unlawfully culled of minority voters.

Lest there be any doubt, voter ID laws are just one of many tactics Republican lawmakers have turned to in order to reshape the electorate into something more likely to elect their favored candidates.

As President Lyndon Johnson warned when he originally proposed the Voting Rights Act to Congress, vote suppressors will bring “every device of which human ingenuity is capable” to deny the right to vote. This is why it is so important that Section 5 exist. Advocates of disenfranchisement are smart, nimble and capable of subtlety. The law must have a mechanism to block their efforts from taking effect before an election is held using illegal, vote suppressing procedures.

Indeed, it is deeply distressing that the Supreme Court would consider weakening the Voting Rights Act at the exact moment that Republican lawmakers are engaged in what President Bill Clinton called the most “determined effort to limit the franchise” since Jim Crow. What America needs today is not weaker voting rights. At the very least, we need to keep the protections we already have and expand Section 5′s coverage to include many Republican-controlled states that are not currently subject to its rule — an expansion the Voting Rights Act explicitly contemplates under what is known as the “bail-in” provision of the law. The lawmakers who reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 2006 could not have anticipated that Republican lawmakers in many states would begin a voter suppression campaign a few years later, but the drafters of the act were wise to include a provision that enables it to adapt to these circumstances.

h/t: Ian Millhiser at Think Progress

On March 15, 1965, a week after Alabama state troopers brutally attacked civil rights protesters in Selma, President Lyndon Johnson delivered a stirring speech to a joint session of Congress introducing a bill to end voter discrimination against blacks.

The law that it gave birth to, the Voting Rights Act, now hangs in the balance, with oral arguments next week before the Supreme Court. Five conservative justices are skeptical that a centerpiece of the nearly-half-century-old law is constitutional.

“I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” Johnson said that night, nearly half a century ago. “A century has passed, more than a hundred years, since equality was promised. And yet the Negro is not equal. A century has passed since the day of promise. And the promise is unkept. The time of justice has now come.”

Days later, he submitted legislation to Congress aimed at taking stringent, unprecedented steps to end voter discrimination and disenfranchisement. As Congress took it up, opponents rebelled.

“I said it was worse than the Thaddeus Stevens legislation during Reconstruction, sir, and it is,” said Leander Perez, a pro-segregation Louisianan, at a subsequent Senate hearing. “It is the most nefarious — it is inconceivable that Americans would do that to Americans.”

Despite its intensity, the opposition failed. The Voting Rights Act overwhelmingly passed Congress that summer and was signed into law by Johnson on Aug. 6, 1965. A key part of the law, Section 5, required a slew of state and local governments with a history of voter discrimination to receive preclearance from the Justice Department before changing their voting laws. Today it is widely credited for helping minority voters participate equally in elections. The law played a key role in ending voter suppression tactics such as literacy tests and poll taxes.

“After a century of flouting the 15th Amendment, Congress acted to use its powers to protect the right to vote from racial discrimination,” said David Gans of the liberal-leaning Constitutional Accountability Center. “It is now seen as probably the most important federal civil rights law — one that sought to realize the promise of multiracial democracy.”

South Carolina soon led a legal challenge to key portions of the law, including Section 5. Recourse was sought directly from the Supreme Court, bypassing the lower federal courts. The Supreme Court accepted the case.

The solicitor general who defended the law on behalf of the federal government was Thurgood Marshall. Some dozen years earlier Marshall, as chief counsel of the NAACP, had argued and won the landmark Brown v. Board of Education school segregation case. A year after defending the Voting Rights Act, Johnson would name Marshall to the Supreme Court, making him the nation’s first black justice.

“In these states, there has been a policy of overt or covert obstruction with respect to the enforcement of the 15th Amendment [which prohibits voter discrimination],” Marshall said during the 1966 oral argument before the Supreme Court, referring to the states covered by the Section 5 preclearance provision. “Moreover, as a matter of common sense and reasoned judgment, it would be extreme optimism or naivete to assume that in states where there has been long enduring policies of racial discrimination, that even well disposed officials could assure the fair administration of such tests on a local level.”

The legal challenge to the Voting Rights Act in South Carolina v. Katzenbach failed, 8-1. The court proceeded to reaffirm the validity of the law three more times — in 1973, 1980 and 1999. Meanwhile, Congress repeatedly reauthorized it, with Section 5 intact, most recently in in 2006, for a period of 25 additional years.

That monument of history faces its toughest test yet next Wednesday in the Supreme Court.

Lawyers for Alabama’s Shelby County will argue for invalidating Section 5 before the most conservative bench since the law passed. Five justices have signaled their misgivings with that provision, notably Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2009 when the high court ruled in favor of a Texas jurisdiction seeking an exemption from preclearance.

h/t: Sahil Kapur at TPM

Supporters of the Voting Rights Act are painting a bleak picture of what it would mean for the rights of minority voters if the Supreme Court were to strike down the landmark 1965 law’s Section 5, which requires state and local governments with a history of disenfranchising minority voters (i.e. mostly in the south) to receive preclearance from the Justice Department or federal court before changing laws that affect voting.

“Broadly speaking, if we didn’t have Section 5 we would find that minority voters are in many places around the covered jurisdictions will have their ability to equally participate in the political process severely compromised,” Julie Fernandes, a civil rights activist and former deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said this week. “We’ll see a lot more of the diluting tactics that we used to have.”

The Supreme Court hears oral arguments Wednesday in Shelby County v. Holder, the most serious challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Right Acts in the nearly 50 years since its enactment. The liberal-leaning Center For America Progress held a briefing with reporters in advance of the Supreme Court hearing where experts, including Fernandes, made the case for the validity and necessity of Section 5. Nervous that their side will face five very skeptical justices at oral arguments, they described the part of the law as critical to protecting minority voters’ rights.

Fernandes warned that certain states and municipalities would be free to enact laws that dilute the African-American and Latino vote — such as a return to “at-large” elections where all of the voters vote for all of the seats and racially-oriented redistricting in Congress, county commissions, sheriff elections and police juries.

“I think that we will see that African Americans and Latinos in particular, but in some places Native Americans, will just not have equal political power,” she said. Fernandes pointed in particular to Alabama, where the Shelby County case originated, and other southern states.

Texas State Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer (D), also at the CAP briefing, argued that the outcome would be systematic efforts in certain state and local governments to marginalize, disenfranchise and even intimidate minority voters.

“Even for those who do persevere, who register and engage in the process, you’re starting to see an increase in voter purges and secretaries of state taking a more active role in maintaining their voting lists,” he said. “You see the voter intimidation tactics of folks … going into minority communities and intimidating poll workers. … So these are things that I think you’ll see more of.”

Keep the VRA and Section 5!

H/T: Sahil Kapur at TPM

The Missouri House of Representatives on Wednesday will debate a bill to require photo identification at polling places.

According to NBC affiliate KOMU, this will mark the seventh consecutive year the House has debated such a bill. 

H/T: TPM Livewire

In 2006, Congress voted overwhelmingly to reauthorize key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for another twenty-five years. The legislation passed 390–33 in the House and 98–0 in the Senate. Every top Republican supported the bill. “The Voting Rights Act must continue to exist,” said House Judiciary chair James Sensenbrenner, a conservative Republican, “and exist in its current form.” Civil rights leaders flanked George W. Bush at the signing ceremony.

Seven years later, the bipartisan consensus that supported the VRA for nearly fifty years has collapsed, and conservatives are challenging the law as never before. Last November, three days after a presidential election in which voter suppression played a starring role, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to Section 5 of the VRA, which compels parts or all of sixteen states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to clear election-related changes with the federal government. The case will be heard on February 27. The lawsuit, originating in Shelby County, Alabama, is backed by leading operatives and funders in the conservative movement, along with Republican attorneys general in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas. Shelby County’s brief claims that “Section 5’s federalism cost is too great” and that the statute has “accomplished [its] mission.” 

The current campaign against the VRA is the result of three key factors: a whiter, more Southern, more conservative GOP that has responded to demographic change by trying to suppress an increasingly diverse electorate; a twenty-five-year effort to gut the VRA by conservative intellectuals, who in recent years have received millions of dollars from top right-wing funders, including Charles Koch; and a reactionary Supreme Court that does not support remedies to racial discrimination. 

The push by conservatives to repeal Section 5 comes on the heels of what NAACP president Benjamin Jealous has called “the greatest attacks on voting rights since segregation.” After the 2010 election, GOP officials approved laws in more than a dozen states to restrict the right to vote by requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, shutting down voter registration drives, curtailing early voting, disenfranchising ex-felons and mandating government-issued photo IDs to cast a ballot—all of which disproportionately target communities of color. The states covered by Section 5 were significantly more likely to pass such laws than those that are not. 

Attorney General Eric Holder has called Section 5 the “keystone of our voting rights,” and the Justice Department and voting rights groups have argued that it is an essential tool for dismantling barriers to the ballot box. “The record compiled by Congress demonstrates that, without the continuation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 protections, racial and language minority citizens will be deprived of the opportunity to exercise their right to vote, or will have their votes diluted, undermining the significant gains made by minorities in the last forty years,” Congress stated in reauthorizing the act in 2006. The disappearance of Section 5 would be a devastating setback for voting rights—akin to the way the Citizens United decision eviscerated campaign finance regulation—and would greenlight the kind of voter suppression attempts that proved so unpopular in 2012. 

Overturning Section 5 is in many respects the most important battle in the GOP’s war on voting. As Holder noted in a recent speech, there have been more lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of Section 5 over the past two years than during the previous four decades. Section 5 is in the gravest danger at a moment in contemporary history when it’s needed the most. 

The Fifteenth Amendment, which Congress ratified in 1870, states that the right 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.” Yet it took nearly a century, until the passage of the VRA, for those words to become the enforced law of all the land. “Section 5 was not the first response to the problem, but it was the first effective one, enacted only after case-by-case litigation and less stringent legislative remedies failed,” says a recent brief filed by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The law led to the abolition of poll taxes and literacy tests; spurred massive voter registration drives; and laid the foundation for generations of minority elected officials. Even conservatives like George Will regard the VRA as “the 20th century’s noblest and most transformative law.” 

A group of prominent black conservatives is trying to help scrap a key part of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark civil rights-era legislation that enshrined the right of black Americans to have equal treatment at the ballot box.

The law was signed in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson in the presence of civil rights leaders like Dr Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, and it represented one of the milestone victories in ending the Jim Crow segregation of the deep south.

Now, however, a black conservative group called Project 21 has filed a legal brief before the US supreme court in support of a case aimed at overturning key provisions of the act. The bid, on which the supreme court is set to rule this summer, has been brought by the authorities in Shelby County in the southern state of Alabama. 

Project 21′s argument focuses on the part of the Voting Rights Act called Section 5, which holds that certain areas of the country with a history of racial discrimination when it comes to voting rights need to get federal approval before changing any of their voting procedures.

Cherylyn Harley LeBon, a former senior counsel for the US Senate judiciary committee and a co-founder of Project 21, told the Guardian that her group – which represents numerous high-profile black conservatives – supports the scrapping of Section 5 because she believes America had changed so much since the law was signed.

“Now we are in 2013, and the Voting Rights Act was something that came from a historical context. We need to update the law and this part of it is no longer needed,” Harley LeBon said. She said her own father had hailed from the deep south and had left the region at times to get away from racial discrimination, but she insisted changing the act now was still the right thing to do. “Just because issues may be difficult to deal with does not mean they should not be dealt with,” she said.

However, the effort to scrap part of the Voting Rights Act has met stiff opposition with many civil rights groups, especially those seeking to represent black Americans. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has come out strongly against the legal bid by Shelby County and its supporters.

Harley LeBon disagreed, saying that Section 5 was an unfair intrusion by the federal government into the rights of local government to organise their own affairs and that she was happy for black conservatives at Project 21 to spark a debate on such a thorny racial issue. “This is what America is all about: having a discussion. There is a whole network of black conservatives. The Democrats do not have a lock on black support,” she said.

Project 21 is sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research, a Washington-based foundation that says it is dedicated to finding “free market solutions” to social problems. According to its website, the NCPPP opposes environmental regulation, the influence of the United Nations and wants to drastically cut government spending.

H/T: The Raw Story

Rather than continuing to solely play defense, the Center for American Progress has released a report detailing 11 pieces of state legislation that voting rights advocates can use to go on offense in 2013:

1. Online voter registration. Less than 63 percent of Americans aged 18-34 were registered to vote in 2009, yet a Nielsen survey found that these young citizens were by far the most electronically connected, with 88 percent having an Internet connection at home. Modernizing the voter-registration process and allowing people to register online would be a boon for the overall number of voters in our country.

2. Election Day registration. Most states bar their residents from registering in the weeks just before an election—at a time when media coverage is at a fever pitch and less-engaged citizens are just starting to tune in. Some states, such as Pennsylvania, stop allowing people to register 30 days before an election. Election Day registration eliminates that barrier, helping a significant number of Americans vote. In 2008 alone, more than 1 million individuals registered on Election Day in these states. Studies have found that Election Day registration boosts turnout on average by 7-percentage points to 14-percentage points.

3. Require public schools to help register voters. Young Americans continue to vote at far lower rates than the rest of the citizenry. This year, for instance, only half of the voting-eligible population between the ages of 18 and 24 cast a ballot, compared to more than two-thirds of senior citizens. One simple way to encourage students to vote is for states to require that public schools provide voter-registration services.

4. Expand early voting. Early voting is one of the most important realms of voting rights over the past decade. It offers citizens more flexibility to vote at their convenience—not everyone can take off an hour or two from work on the first Tuesday of November—and allows election officials to spread the process of counting ballots over a number of days or weeks, rather than getting inundated all at once. It’s also a major boon for minority turnout. Many African American churches, for instance, participate in a “souls to the polls” voting drive on the Sunday before Election Day helping boost black early voting rates. Currently, 16 states don’t offer early voting.

5. Allow voters to cast a ballot in any county polling location. One of the most exciting new developments in the past couple years is the advent of polling centers. Rather than restricting voters to one assigned precinct where they must cast their ballot, a handful of counties now allow residents to vote at any polling location in their home county. Travis County, Texas, home to Austin, for example, conducted a study of its new policy after it was introduced in 2011 and found that allowing voters to cast a ballot at any of the county’s 207 polling locations led directly to a 1.4 percent increase in turnout. Approximately one in three voters ended up going to a different polling location than their usual one.

6. No-excuse absentee voting. For many Americans taking time off during the work day to vote is not an option. Fortunately for them an increasing number of states are enacting “no-excuse absentee” laws that allow anyone who requests an absentee ballot to receive one, not just individuals who will be out of town or have another reason barring them from voting on Election Day.

7. Strengthen penalties for knowingly deceiving voters. Though voter fraud is largely a myth, one form of actual election hijinks occurs when individuals or groups purposefully deceive certain voters about when or how to vote. These deceptive practices are unfortunately commonplace, such as fliers plastered in urban areas telling Republicans to vote on Tuesday and Democrats to vote on Wednesday. States should not only specifically ban deceptive practices, but classify them as a felony.

8. Outlaw voter caging. Voter caging is when an operative or group sends letters to a “target’s” home and uses any returned mail to challenge that voter’s eligibility on the presumption that they don’t live at the listed residence. For years, political operatives have used voter caging as a tactic to suppress turnout among largely minority populations. Because it’s a process that is riddled with problems, states should affirmatively ban the practice of voter caging. There are dozens of reasons why a piece of mail would be returned that are more plausible than a voter intending to commit voter fraud, including as clerical errors or military deployment, and serves primarily to suppress legitimate voters.

9. Reform the voter-challenge process. Poll watchers became a household term in the 2012 election as campaigns and outside groups like True The Vote trained thousands of volunteers to challenge voters’ eligibility anytime they suspected irregularities. When a poll watcher makes a challenge most states place the burden of proof on the voter to prove he or she is eligible to cast a ballot, a process that does little to disincentivize frivolous challenges. States therefore should pass legislation shifting the burden of proof from the voter to the challenger. In addition, states should impose penalties on individuals and groups who make frivolous challenges.

10. Restore voting rights to ex-felons. Felons in most states aren’t just barred from voting while in prison; a handful of states strip them of their voting rights for the rest of their life, even after completing their sentence. As a result, 3.1 million Americans were disenfranchised in 2008. If we as a society want to reintegrate people with felony convictions back into society after they finish their prison terms, it makes little sense to permanently brand them with a scarlet letter.

11. Enact constitutional language affirming an equal right to vote. When Wisconsin passed voter ID legislation in 2011 the only thing stopping its implementation in the 2012 election was the state constitution’s language affirming Wisconsin residents’ right to vote. Every state constitution has different language regarding the right to vote. Still, the most important thing voting-rights advocates can proactively do to prevent further attacks on voting rights such as voter ID is to strengthen their state’s constitutional language regarding the right to vote.

H/T: Scott Keyes at Think Progress Justice