Justin's Political Corner
Displaying a remarkable lack of self-awareness, Rush Limbaugh tried to convince a caller that ”it’s a pretty safe bet” that liberals always lie and conservatives never do — an assertion he backed up with a series of his own lies on everything from abortion to minority vote suppression and the IRS.
On the June 18 edition of his radio show, Limbaugh addressed a caller who expressed interest in hearing both sides — liberal and conservative — of any given debate before coming to his own conclusion on the issue. Limbaugh chastised the caller for informing himself in this manner, telling him, “The liberals lie. I do not form my opinions on what both sides say. I form my opinions on what I know to be right.” Limbaugh concluded that it’s a “pretty safe bet” that liberals are always lying, while conservatives don’t lie. In his attempts to prove his theory, Limbaugh turned to some misinformation of his own on the subject of abortion and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
On the issue of reproductive choice, Limbaugh claimed that “nobody is taking away a women’s right to choose …. it’s never happened,” which is deceptive, if not an outright lie. Limbaugh pointed to the U.S. Constitution as evidence, and he is correct that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to obtain an abortion, and thus no Republican is able to restrict this right without meeting a high bar. But Limbaugh conveniently ignored the vast and varied efforts of the Republican pro-life movement to restrict the ability of women and girls to obtain an abortion — laws which have almost certainly resulted in women being denied access to abortion entirely.
Limbaugh continued his defense of conservative integrity by seguing into another common right-wing myth: that no one at the IRS has been fired for applying improper scrutiny of conservative groups. Limbaugh said, “Obama hasn’t fired anybody for what they did in any of these scandals.”
In fact, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew fired Steven Miller. Lois Lerner was asked to resign and was placed on administrative leave when she refused. Her deputy has also been placed on administrative leave.
And Limbaugh’s claim that conservatives never lie didn’t end with a distortion of administrative scandals and abortion myths. He continued with the same caller, next opining on the subject of GOP efforts to suppress minority voters, saying, “there’s no evidence” that Republicans are attemped to suppress the black vote:
Limbaugh’s claim that the GOP has not and is not able to suppress the votes of African-Americans is a lie. The Republican Party has tried — and succeeded — at suppressing the vote of minorities as recently as 2012. In Florida, black and Hispanic voters were disproportionately represented amongst the tens of thousands of individuals whose votes were suppressed due to long lines stemming from Republican legislation that reduced the number of early voting days from 14 to eight during the 2012 elections. Commentators from across the political spectrum have written widely on Republican efforts in numerous GOP-controlled state governments to suppress minority voters — with voter ID laws, administrative changes to election procedure and other similar tactics.
Of course, none of this should come as a surprise to Rush’s listeners. His propensity for pushing conservative misinformation is well-documented.
H/T: MMFA
On March 7, 1965, John Lewis threw an apple, an orange, a toothbrush, some toothpaste and two books into his backpack, and prepared to lead a fifty-four-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The impromptu march was organized to call national attention to the disenfranchisement of African-Americans in the South and to protest the death of a young civil rights activist shot by police during a demonstration in a neighboring town.
Lewis’s group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), had been trying to register voters in Selma since 1963. They hadn’t gotten very far. At the time of the march, only 383 of the 15,000 black residents in Selma’s Dallas County were registered to vote. At 25, Lewis had already been arrested twenty times by white segregationists and badly beaten during Freedom Rides in South Carolina and Montgomery.
On an overcast Sunday afternoon, Lewis and Hosea Williams, a top aide to Martin Luther King Jr., led some 600 local residents marching in two single-file lines. The streets of downtown Selma were eerily quiet. “There was no singing, no shouting—just the sound of scuffling feet,” Lewis wrote in his memoir. “There was something holy about it, as if we were walking down a sacred path. It reminded me of Gandhi’s march to the sea.” Lewis thought he would be arrested, but he had no idea that the ensuing events would dramatically alter the arc of American history.
As they crossed the Alabama River on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, Alabama state troopers descended on the marchers with batons and bullwhips; some demonstrators were trampled by policemen on horseback, and the air was choked with tear gas. Lewis, who suffered a fractured skull from a clubbing, thought he was going to die. That evening, the prime-time network news played extensive footage of what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” Those scenes “struck with the force of instant historical icon,” wrote historian Taylor Branch.
Eight days later, President Lyndon Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act before a joint session of Congress. “It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country,” Johnson said. On August 6, 1965, a hundred years after the end of the Civil War, the VRA became law. It quickly became known as the most important piece of civil rights legislation and one of the most consequential laws ever passed by Congress. The VRA led to the abolition of literacy tests and poll taxes; made possible the registration of millions of minority voters by replacing segregationist registrars with federal examiners; forced states with a history of voting discrimination to clear electoral changes with the federal government; and laid the foundation for generations of minority elected officials, including Barack Obama. Lewis has the pen LBJ gave him after signing the VRA framed in his Atlanta home and a bust of the thirty-sixth president in his Washington office. “When Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act,” Lewis said on a recent trip to Alabama, “he helped free and liberate all of us.”
Lewis, now a thirteen-term congressman from Atlanta, was a leading participant in nearly all of the pivotal events of the civil rights movement—the Nashville sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer. But his signature achievement is the VRA. Of all the surviving leaders of the movement, Lewis is most responsible for its passage and its overwhelming reauthorization four times by Congress. He is the soul of the voting rights movement and its most eloquent advocate. So many of his comrades from the civil rights years have died or drifted away, but Lewis remains as committed as ever to the fight to protect the right to vote. 
”I feel like it’s part of my calling,” he says.
On March 3, Lewis returned to Selma for the forty-eighth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Thirty members of Congress accompanied him—part of a pilgrimage to Alabama that Lewis has led since 2000—along with Vice President Joseph Biden and Attorney General Eric Holder. On a sunny Sunday afternoon, Lewis locked arms with Biden and Luci Baines Johnson, LBJ’s youngest daughter, and once again marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Fifteen thousand people followed, some of whom would continue all the way to Montgomery. “Woke up this morning with my mind/ stayed on freedom,” activists sang as they climbed the bridge. At the top, high above the Alabama River, Lewis grabbed a bullhorn and retold the story of Bloody Sunday. “You have to tell the story over and over again to educate people,” Lewis told me. “It is my obligation to do what I can to complete what we started many, many years ago,” he said in Selma.
Every return to Selma is meaningful for Lewis, but this trip had special significance. Just four days before, Lewis had sat inside the Supreme Court as the justices heard a challenge to Section 5 of the VRA, which compels parts or all of sixteen states with a history of racial discrimination in voting, primarily in the South, to clear election-related changes with the federal government. (A decision in that case, Shelby County v. Holder, is expected at the end of June.) Lewis calls Section 5 the “heart and soul” of the law, and was deeply disturbed by the arguments from the Court’s conservative justices. “It appeared to me that several members of the Court didn’t have a sense of the history, what brought us to this point, and not just the legislative history and how it came about,” Lewis said afterward in his congressional office, which is decorated with iconic photographs of the civil rights movement. “They seemed to be somewhat indifferent to why people fought so hard and so long to get the act passed in the first place. And they didn’t see the need.”
Justice Antonin Scalia said the law represented a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested that the federal government is discriminating against states like Alabama more than Alabama is discriminating against its own citizens. Chief Justice John Roberts implied that Massachusetts has a bigger problem with voting discrimination than Mississippi. Clarence Thomas, who as is customary didn’t speak, had already declared Section 5 unconstitutional in a previous decision.
Lewis called Scalia’s statement “shocking and unbelievable” and said he almost cried when he heard it. “So what happened to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments?” he asked, shaking his head. “What happened to the whole struggle to make it possible in the twentieth century, and now the twenty-first, for every person to be able to cast a free and open vote?”
Forty-eight years after Bloody Sunday, Lewis is once again in the fight of his life, with conservative officeholders resurrecting voter suppression methods not seen since the 1960s and Supreme Court justices asserting that the federal efforts to combat historic discrimination in voting—reforms that Lewis nearly died to win—are no longer needed. In January, he filed an amicus brief with the Court opposing the Shelby County challenge. It noted “the high price many paid for the enactment of the Voting Rights Act and the still higher cost we might yet bear if we prematurely discard one of the most vital tools of our democracy.”
Lewis grew up a hundred miles southeast of Selma, in the rural Alabama Black Belt near Troy. He was the third of ten kids; his parents farmed cotton, corn and peanuts. Their farmhouse had no electricity, running water or insulation. He was a bookish, devout child who wore ties and preached to his chickens, sneaking away from the fields to attend school. His life changed when, at 15, he heard about the bus boycott in Montgomery in 1955 and listened to Martin Luther King Jr. (who quickly became his idol) preaching on the radio.
While at college in Nashville, Lewis played an instrumental role in the sit-ins and Freedom Rides that hastened the demise of Jim Crow. “I was like a soldier in a nonviolent army,” he says. He soon became the movement’s field commander, assuming chairmanship of SNCC in 1963. “John was probably the most committed person I’ve ever met,” says South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn, who met Lewis at a SNCC conference in 1960. A lifelong adherent of peaceful resistance, Lewis saw his mission as “bringing the Gandhian way into the belly of the Black Belt.”
Lewis became head of the Voter Education Project in 1970, which took the lead in registering black voters in the South after the VRA’s passage. The VEP registered 2 million voters from 1970 to 1977, including Lewis’s mother and father. The group distributed posters that read: “Hands that pick cotton…can now pick our elected officials.” In 1986, Lewis won election to the US House from Atlanta, defeating his close friend Julian Bond. “Vote for the tugboat, not the showboat” was one of his slogans. Lewis became known as “the conscience of Congress,” with an unmatched stature on civil rights. “I don’t think I’ve seen anybody in the movement that carries the moral cachet that John Lewis has,” says Clyburn.
Lewis initially endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2008, based on their close friendship, but viewed Obama’s election as a culmination of what he and so many others had put their lives on the line for. “Because of what you did, Barack Obama is the president of the United States,” Lewis said in Selma following Obama’s 2008 victory, on the forty-fourth anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
Lewis knew the president would be attacked because of his race, but the full-scale assault on voting rights that followed the 2010 midterm elections caught him and other movement veterans off-guard. More than a dozen states, including critical battlegrounds like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, adopted new laws to restrict access to the ballot—all of which disproportionately affected communities of color. “I was naïve to think voting rights were untouchable,” says Bond, former chair of the NAACP. “I didn’t dream that Republicans would be as bold and as racist as they are.”
Lewis saw the restrictions as an obvious ploy to suppress the power of the young and minority voters who formed the core of Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” in 2008. “It was a deliberate, well-greased and organized attempt to stop this progress,” he says. “They saw all these people getting registered as a threat to power.”
In July 2011, when few were paying attention to the issue, Lewis delivered an impassioned speech on the House floor about the right to vote. “Voting rights are under attack in America,” Lewis told the nearly empty chamber in his deep baritone. “There’s a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.” He called voter-ID laws a poll tax—a year before Attorney General Holder would make the same comparison—and recalled how, before passage of the VRA, blacks who attempted to register in the South were required to guess the number of bubbles in a bar of soap or the number of jellybeans in a jar. “We must not step backward to another dark period in our history,” Lewis warned. “The vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democratic society.” To combat voter suppression, Lewis sponsored the Voter Empowerment Act, which would add millions of voters to the rolls and increase turnout by modernizing registration, mandating early voting and adopting Election Day registration.
On the last night of the 2012 Democratic National Convention, which took place just twenty-five miles from where Lewis was beaten 
as a Freedom Rider in Rock Hill, South Carolina, he implored the faithful to “march to the polls like never, ever before.” By that time, civil rights activists, the Obama administration and the judiciary had heeded his warning on voting rights, as ten major restrictive laws were blocked in court under the VRA and federal and state protections. “The election of 2012,” Lewis said on MSNBC, “dramatized…the need for Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.”
Lewis spent the pivotal Sunday before the election campaigning in Ohio for Obama. The Ohio GOP had tried to prevent early voting three days before the election, but the Obama campaign had successfully sued to reinstate those days. As he approached the Hamilton County Board of Elections in Cincinnati, Lewis saw the line of voters stretching for nearly a mile around city blocks, with hundreds waiting for hours in the damp cold. “This is very, very moving,” Lewis said as he walked the line. “This is living testimony that people who tried to make it hard and difficult and who put up stumbling blocks and roadblocks—it’s just not working.”
The successful resistance to voter suppression may be the most important story of the 2012 election. Compared with 2008, 1.7 million more blacks, 1.4 million more Hispanics and 550,000 more Asians went to the polls, versus 2 million fewer whites. The turnout rate among black voters exceeded that of whites for the first time on record, according to the Census Bureau. While the turnout rate fell among nearly every demographic group, the largest increase came from blacks 65 and over. Those, like Lewis, who had lived through the days when merely trying to register could get you killed were the people most determined to defend their rights last year.
Yet Lewis viewed Obama’s re-election as only a temporary victory, given the challenge to Section 5 before the Supreme Court. The mood in Selma during this year’s anniversary of Bloody Sunday was more somber than celebratory. “Here we are, forty-eight years after all you did, and we’re still fighting?” Biden said in Selma. “In 2011, ‘12 and ‘13? We were able to beat back most of those attempts in the election of 2012, but that doesn’t mean it’s over.” After Holder cited the continued importance of Section 5 in combating discrimination, the crowd at the foot of the bridge chanted, in what had to be a first, “Section 5! Section 5!”
“When it comes to voting rights,” says Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP, “you realize the past isn’t the past.”
* * *
On May 20, 1961, Lewis and two dozen Freedom Riders traveling through the South to desegregate interstate bus travel were assaulted by a frenzied mob at the Greyhound station in Montgomery. Lewis was struck over the head with a Coca-Cola crate and left lying unconscious in a pool of blood. The Freedom Riders sought refuge at the First Baptist Church, disguising themselves as members of the choir to avoid police scrutiny. Three thousand white supremacists surrounded the church the next night and hurled Molotov cocktails through the stained-glass windows. “That night was unbelievable,” Lewis recalls. “I thought some of us would die.” After tortured deliberation, President John Kennedy sent in federal marshals to escort the Freedom Riders to safety.
This past March 2, when Lewis returned to First Baptist Church with 200 guests, Chief Kevin Murphy, head of the Montgomery Police Department, unexpectedly apologized to him. “We enforced unjust laws,” Murphy said. It was the first apology Lewis had ever received from a law enforcement official, after forty arrests and countless near-death experiences. They embraced, as the congregation cheered and wept, and Murphy gave Lewis his badge. “Chief Murphy, my brother, 
I accept your apology,” Lewis responded. “I don’t think I’m worthy of this.” Then he joked, “Actually, do you think I could get another?” Lewis kept the badge in his pocket for days. “I want to say to all of you here, it shows the power of love, the power of peace, the power of nonviolence,” he said.
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The Montgomery Advertiser featured Murphy’s apology on its front page. Next to it, however, was a story about how, if the Supreme Court overturns Section 5, Republicans would likely dismantle the majority-black legislative districts protected under the act, which illustrates the South’s continuing racial divide. Obama, the article noted, won 95 percent of the black vote in Alabama last year, but only 15 percent of the white vote. “Whites won’t vote for blacks in Alabama,” said State Senator Hank Sanders of Selma. “That’s the state of race relations.”
Indeed, despite powerful moments of reconciliation, the South is far from a post-racial utopia. Six of the nine states fully covered by Section 5, all in the South, passed new voting restrictions after the 2010 election. “Section 5,” write law professors Christopher Elmendorf and Douglas Spencer, “is remarkably well tailored to the geography of anti-black prejudice.” Of the ten states where anti-black stereotypes are most common, based on data from the National Annenberg Election Survey, six in the South are subject to Section 5. Racially polarized voting and “explicit anti-black attitudes,” according to an AP survey, have increased since 2008. Arkansas and Virginia have passed strict new voter-ID laws this year, while North Carolina is considering a slew of draconian restrictions.
“Places like Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, they forget recent history,” Lewis said. “We’re not talking about something that took place a hundred years ago, but a few short years ago. And some of it is still going on today. And if you get rid of Section 5 of the VRA, many of these places, whether it be state, county or town, will slip back into the habits of the past.”
Against this backdrop, it’s shocking that the Supreme Court appears to be leaning toward overturning the centerpiece of the country’s most important civil rights law. Last year, Lewis found out that his great-great-grandfather had registered and voted after becoming an emancipated slave following the Civil War, during Reconstruction—something that Lewis could not do until 100 years later, after the passage of the VRA. He wept when he heard the news. It underscored how delicate the right to vote has been throughout American history. If the Court upholds Section 5, as it has in four prior opinions, Lewis’s legacy will be cemented. And if the Court eviscerates it, Lewis’s voice will be needed as never before.
Back in April, two Alaska House committees approved a bill that would require voters to show a photo ID at the polls – a particularly damaging measure in a state where many rural communities don’t even require photos on drivers’ licenses. Now, the Anchorage Daily News is reporting that there is a familiar face behind the measure. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the driving force behind voter suppression and anti-immigrant measures around the country, reportedly coordinated with Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell to push the bill in what looks like an effort to damage Democratic Sen. Mark Begich in his 2014 reelection bid. (Treadwell denies that he worked with Kobach on the bill, which he says he opposes.)
Alaska Natives say a photo ID rule would be a roadblock to voting in the Bush. A decline in turnout there, with its traditionally heavy Democratic vote, could affect the 2014 reelection hopes of U.S. Sen. Mark Begich, a Democrat running in a Republican-leaning state. One of his potential rivals is Alaska’s top election official, Republican Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell.
Treadwell says he doesn’t support the voter ID bill, but Kobach says Treadwell was instrumental in getting him involved in promoting the Alaska legislation.
In an April statement to reporters that didn’t mention Kobach or Kansas, Treadwell touted the cross-checking as having found 14 people suspected of “actually voting in both Alaska and another state” in 2012. Treadwell threatened to prosecute the voters if the allegations were confirmed.
Alaska elections director Gail Fenumiai recently said 12 of the 14 voters cited in Treadwell’s April statement were wrongly identified as duplicate voters and actually voted only in Alaska.
…
Kobach told the Daily News it was he who suggested to Treadwell that Alaska get involved in the Kansas project. “I personally talked to Mead Treadwell, your lieutenant governor, and encouraged him to join, and he did so,” Kobach said.And his testimony on the photo ID bill, Kobach said, was the result of a conversation with Treadwell.
“I spoke to Mead about it at one of our national conferences — he mentioned that you guys were considering a photo ID law,” Kobach said. “I said I’d be happy to share some of the experiences we’ve had in Kansas.”
Treadwell, who said he doesn’t support the Alaska bill because of the difficulty for Bush residents to get photo identification, said he didn’t recall talking to Kobach about it.
As the Daily News explains, a photo ID bill would be especially damaging to Alaska Natives living in rural communities where DMVs are hard to access and where many towns don’t even require photographs on drivers’ licenses:
Photo ID measures are controversial across the country. Advocates say they help prevent fraud. Opponents say they make it more difficult for particular groups of people to vote: the elderly, students and the poor who don’t own cars. In Alaska, the situation is compounded by the difficulty of getting to a Division of Motor Vehicles office in a regional hub like Nome or Bethel from a small village. Alaska doesn’t even require a photograph on a driver’s license in dozens of Bush communities.
Democratic activists say photo ID bills have the effect of disenfranchising more Democratic voters than Republicans. In his annual address to the Alaska Legislature this year, Begich criticized the bill as making it more difficult for Alaska Natives and Hispanics — two traditional Democratic groups — to vote.
The sponsor of Alaska’s bill, who has acknowledged that he drafted the measure using materials from the corporate-funded conservative group ALEC, had odd words of consolation for those concerned about the suppressive impact of the bill: at least it wouldn’t be as bad as Iraq!
Rep. Bob Lynn, an Anchorage Republican who is prime sponsor of the voter ID bill, said he wasn’t trying to disenfranchise anyone. He dismissed opponents as complainers who should be happy they don’t face the kind of obstacles voters do in places like Iraq.
“Terrorists have threatened to kill anyone who voted, but they voted anyway, and then these voters put ink in their finger to prove they had voted — evidence that could have gotten them killed. Now that’s a hassle, to say the least. Needing a photo ID to vote in Alaska wouldn’t even come close to that,” Lynn said when his State Affairs Committee first heard the bill in February.
h/t: Miranda Blue at RWW
A pair of Democratic congressmen is pushing an amendment that would place an affirmative right to vote in the U.S. Constitution. According to Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), who is sponsoring the legislation along with Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), the amendment would protect voters from what he described as a “systematic” push to “restrict voting access” through voter ID laws, shorter early voting deadlines, and other measures that are being proposed in many states.
“Most people believe that there already is something in the Constitution that gives people the right to vote, but unfortunately … there is no affirmative right to vote in the Constitution. We have a number of amendments that protect against discrimination in voting, but we don’t have an affirmative right,” Pocan told TPM last week. “Especially in an era … you know, in the last decade especially we’ve just seen a number of these measures to restrict access to voting rights in so many states. … There’s just so many of these that are out there, that it shows the real need that we have.”
The brief amendment would stipulate that “every citizen of the United States, who is of legal voting age, shall have the fundamental right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides.” It would also give Congress “the power to enforce and implement this article by appropriate legislation.”
After investigating the issue, Pocan said he and Ellison decided this type of amendment was the best way to combat measures to restrict voting access.
“Essentially, what it would do is it would put the burden on any of these states that try to make laws that are more restrictive that they would have to prove that they’re not disenfranchising a voter. Rather than, currently, where a voter has to prove they’ve somehow been wronged by a state measure,” said Pocan.
Pocan laid the blame for this push to restrict voting rights on conservatives he described as interested in influencing elections.
“I think there are a number of folks, most likely on the right, who are looking at when we have larger turnout elections, generally, I think they realize that they don’t have much control over the election,” said Pocan. “Trying to control who goes to vote is just another strategy in trying to have an electoral outcome.”
Pocan said he was inspired to investigate this type of legislation after the NAACP’s legal challenge to a photo ID measure supported by Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, succeeded because of a guarantee of the right to vote in the state’s constitution. He linked up with Ellison who had taken over a push to establish an affirmative right to vote on the federal level from former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL).
Ellison and Pocan announced their legislation May 13. Pocan said there’s currently no counterpart in the Senate.
There will be a long, hard road to getting the amendment approved. In the more than two centuries of American government, only 27 amendments to the Constitution have been approved though thousands have been discussed.
If an amendment gets the support of two-thirds of both the House and Senate, it is then sent to the states for ratification. Three-quarters of the state legislatures must approve the amendment for it be ratified. An amendment to the Constitution can also be approved at a Constitutional Convention called by two-thirds of state governments where it must be approved by three quarters of the states. None of the successful amendments were approved through Constitutional Conventions.
Pocan didn’t say whether he believes it will pass in the House of Representatives describing it as “fairly new.”
H/T: TPMDC
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.
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:
Oops: Conservative group (badly) photoshops out minorities in mailer opposing pro-voting legislation.
Uhh.
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.
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.
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
