Justin's Political Corner

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

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

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

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

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

h/t: Scott Keyes at Think Progress Justice

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 

WASHINGTON, DC — There were audible gasps in the Supreme Court’s lawyer’s lounge, where audio of the oral argument is pumped in for members of the Supreme Court bar, when Justice Antonin Scalia offered his assessment of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. He called it a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

The comment came as part of a larger riff on a comment Scalia made the last time the landmark voting law was before the justices. Noting the fact that the Voting Rights Act reauthorization passed 98-0 when it was before the Senate in 2006, Scalia claimed four years ago that this unopposed vote actually undermines the law: “The Israeli supreme court, the Sanhedrin, used to have a rule that if the death penalty was pronounced unanimously, it was invalid, because there must be something wrong there.”

h/t: Think Progress Justice

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

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

Thanks to Donkeylicious for bringing this to my attention. Michael Walsh of National Review Online called for the termination of women’s right to vote last week:

 Nevertheless, you’re on to something I’ve been advocating for years now. And that is the repeal of all four of the so-called “Progressive Era” amendments, including the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th, which were passed between 1911 and 1920. 

One of those has already been repealed—the 18th amendment, which ushered in Prohibition—which Walsh admits. That’s not really what he’s on about anyway:

The income-tax amendment was a self-evident attack on capitalism and led to the explosive growth of the federal government we currently enjoy today. (Without it, there’d be no need for a Balanced Budget Amendment.) Direct elections of senators has given us, among other wonders, the elevation of John F. Kerry to, now, secretary of state. Prohibition was directly responsible for the rise of organized crime and its unholy alliance with the big-city Democratic machines. And women’s suffrage … well, let’s just observe that without it Barack Obama could never have become president. Time for the ladies to take one for the team.

I suppose we’re supposed to imagine it’s a “joke”, because he takes a jovial tone for the last one. But if so, it doesn’t make sense. He’s dead fucking serious about the other two—three, really, because he only seems to be against Prohibition because he believes it gave Democrats a leg up, which is one of those deaf-to-historical-change moments that lead Republicans to imagine that Lincoln would have anything to do with the modern version of their party—so, as a joke, it falls completely apart. If he hadn’t rolled it up with the other amendments initially, the “joke” defense he clearly has in his pocket would be an easier sell. Something like, “I’ve long advocated for the repeal of 3 of the Progressive Amendments (though one has already been repealed), and hey, ladies, sometimes you make me wish to repeal all four.” It would still be a misogynist joke, but easier to sell as a joke, even if not a very funny one.

I’m trying to imagine the shitstorm that would erupt if a feminist dare say men should forsake their right to vote until they shape up and start voting correctly. It certainly wouldn’t slide under the waters, like this did.

Typical sexism from the far-right.

h/t: Amanda Marcotte at The Raw Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

h/t: John Nichols at The Nation