Why the Republicans don't want to know about Russian intervention in the 2016 elections

Will Bunch reminds us that not only do the Republicans want to spare themselves the partisan embarrassment of what a thorough investigation of alleged Russian intervention in the 2016 election because it would remind everyone of how the Russians preferred Donald "Make American Great Again" Trump. Looking at election system vulnerabilities would inevitably bring suggestions for election system security that would make the Republicans' efforts to suppress black and Latino voting much more difficult than they are finding it to be right now. From Can America handle the truth of the tarnished 2016 election? Philadelphia Inquirer 09/03/2017:

American elections are easy to mess with because America’s election system is terrible — Russian hacking or no Russian hacking. Voters went to the polls in 2016 after years of efforts by mostly GOP-led state governments to make it hard for citizens — but especially non-white citizens, college students or the elderly — to cast ballots. Consider Wisconsin, the state where Trump pulled arguably his biggest upset, winning by only 22,748 votes. Critics have said Wisconsin’s turnout fell sharply because of its voter ID law (although maybe not by 200,000, as one study claimed.) Voters in the Badger State were also badgered with “fake news” — some of it undoubtedly from Russia. It’s hard to tell an array of innocent computer glitches and malfunctions from criminal hacking.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist or political scientist to figure out what needs to be done. In the long run, we need massive election reform — including a new and improved Voting Rights Act that would pinpoint the most pernicious voter ID laws, an Election Day federal holiday, and same-day voter registration. We need a voting system that leaves a real paper trail that can be routinely audited and easily investigated when there are allegations of vote tampering. And, as the Times article makes clear, we need a more thorough investigation of computer hacking and other problems that occurred in 2016 — regardless of the possibility that we might learn the unthinkable.

The liberal "concern trolls" are starting to swarm

There never seems to be a shortage of people who are happy to share their advice as to how the Democrats would do better at the polls if they would just act more like Republicans. And especially to stop worrying about all those black people, and wimmin, and Latinos, and gays, and immigrants. Because in showing concern for the rights of those people (who add up to a substantial majority of the population, BTW) those Mean Libruls are acting like the Ku Klux Klan! Here is Mark Lilla getting nostalgic for the days of "Sister Souljah moments, The End of Identity Liberalism New York Times 11/18/2016:

Finally, the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. Such people are not actually reacting against the reality of our diverse America (they tend, after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the country). But they are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they mean by “political correctness.” Liberals should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.

We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)

That's an innovative idea, that the Democrats should "speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another"!

Maybe they could come up with a slogan like "Stronger Together." Hey, in fact, Hillary Clinton just used that. And won a larger plurality of the vote than Donald Trump.

I definitely want to see the Democrats focus more on stimulative economic policies, better regulation of finance and business, the rights of labor and consumers and generally develop and articulate a New Deal kind of framing for their project instead of the neoliberal one that has worked out poorly for them. And for the majority of the people.

But that's not what Lilla is arguing here. This is little more than a rehash of conservative talking points. And as David Leonhardt reports, also in the New York Times (The Democrats’ Real Turnout Problem 11/17/2016), "In the simplest terms, Republican turnout seems to have surged this year, while Democratic turnout stagnated."

It would be foolish for the Democrats to further disappoint the major constituencies that actually favor them in the forlorn hope of winning over habitual Republican voters in significant numbers. They need to get their own constituence sufficiently motivated to vote and develop the organizational structure to facilitate theat. Leonhardt has a very different recommendation for the Democrats than tired concern-troll scripts:

For starters, it should continue to fight hard for voting rights. Doing so puts it on the right side of history and also helps the party tactically. There is a reason that Republican officials have been trying to restrict voting hours and eligibility: Many of them are afraid of high turnout. The Republicans’ new political dominance will make the fight harder, but it must continue.

Second, the Democrats should recommit themselves to old-fashioned organizing without giving up on the emerging science of voter turnout. Academic researchers have learned a lot in the last decade about voter behavior and turnout tactics. There is much more to learn, as this year’s disappointment makes clear. The ubiquity of social media and smartphones creates opportunities to get more people to vote.

Finally, the Democrats should remember that inspiring turnout and persuading swing voters aren’t separate problems. It’s a lot easier to do both with a galvanizing message that makes voters feel part of a larger project — be it an uplifting project or a combative one. [my emphasis]

Leonhardt reminds us that many factors are involved in voting behavior. But the suggestions he mentions are ones worth following.

Trump's election and major threats to American democracy

I don't have anything particularly insightful to say about the outcome of the Presidential election. Because I assume it's obvious to everyone that in two months, the inmates will officially take charge of the asylum.

But I do know the incoming President made it a central campaign promise to deport all undocumented immigrants. Like on most everything, he was vague and sometimes self-contradictory on that. But he did promise that he would make a two-year push to deport them all. He explicitly referred to the deportation program under President Eisenhower, which was literally called Operation Wetback. It was a brutal operation that directly resulted in numerous deaths. And that was under Dwight Eisenhower, who in Republican terms then was considered a moderate or even a liberal.

That also involved about two million people forced out of the country. Today it is commonly estimated that there are 11-12 million, playing a far more significant role in the economy. American agriculture is almost completely dependent on *undocumented* labor. I've seen one historian claim that expelling 12 million people would be the largest forced migration in all of history. I don't know how it may rank in the Guiness Book of Humanitarian Horrors. But it would involve a lot of very real horror. Trump very recently promised that immediately after inauguration he would deport 2 million "criminal" immigrants.

For a bit of history on Project Wetback, see: Joshua Keating, Trump Praises Eisenhower’s Deportation Program, Fails to Mention It Was Called “Operation Wetback” Slate 11/10/2015; John Dillin, How Eisenhower solved illegal border crossings from Mexico Christian Science Monitor 07/06/2006.

Pilar Marrero in Incrédulos, grupos pro inmigrantes prometen “resistir” ante una presidencia Trump La Opinión 09.11.2016:

Donald Trump fue electo presidente de los Estados Unidos de América, sobre una plataforma que incluyó la promesa de deportaciones masivas, la construcción de un gran muro entre Estados Unidos y México y el reforzamiento del sistema policial fronterizo, triplicando la cantidad de agentes de inmigración y anulando medidas ejecutivas de ayuda a los inmigrantes.

[Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America on a platform that included the promise of massive deportations, the construction of a big wall between the United States and Mexico and the reinforcing of the frontier police system, tripling the number of immigration agents and annuling executives measures to support immigrants.]

And she writes, "los grupos que por años han luchado contra las deportaciones y la militarización de la frontera, y por una reforma migratoria, buscan reagruparse y comenzar una lucha que se presenta titánica" ("the groups who have been fighting for years against deportations and the militarization of the frontier, and for immigration reform, are seeking to regroup and to begin a fight that appears to be titanic").

There is also the very real effect of systematic, segregationist voter-suppression efforts targeting especially black and Latino voters. Rick Perlstein summed up the state of play on those recently in GOP Voting Fraud Squads Are Nothing New Washington Spectator 11/04/2016.

Unfortunately, it's not easy to immediately evaluate those, as this article by Justin Elliott notes, What We Don’t Know: The Full Effect Of Voter Suppression and Voter ID Laws ProPublica Electionland 11/08/2016:

As journalist Ari Berman, who covers the voting rights beat, pointed out today, this is the first presidential election in half a century without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. The 2013 Supreme Court ruling Shelby County v. Holder invalidated federal oversight of states with a history of voting discrimination.

But quantifying exactly how much the changes have depressed turnout is nearly impossible.

“It’s exceedingly difficult to measure the effects of voter ID laws,” says David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. That’s because, Becker notes, “it’s incredibly hard to know who’s choosing not to vote because of barriers.”

But "not easy" is far from meaning "impossible." There are ways to determine the effects of voter suppression, as the Justice Department did in the early 1960s in court challenging segregationist voter suppression laws then.

Ari Berman, who is quoted there, has been doing great work reporting on this nefarious practice in its various forms. He explained in a piece in May the stakes involved, Voter Suppression Is the Only Way Donald Trump Can Win The Nation/Moyers & Company 05/10/2016:

Unless there’s an unexpected turnaround in his terrible numbers among nonwhite and young voters, there’s only one way Trump can win the general election: by massively suppressing Democratic voters or hoping they don’t show up on Election Day. Trump could do this by supporting new voting restrictions adopted by GOP-controlled states (17 have new restrictions in place for the first time in 2016), urging his supporters to create chaos at the polls and running a breathtakingly negative campaign that demobilizes his opposition.

Trump’s support in the primary directly correlated with racial resentment toward African-Americans, Hispanics and Muslims. “The higher you scored on racial resentment, the more likely you were to support Trump; the more you resented immigrants or professed your white ethnocentrism, the likelier you were to plan to vote for Trump,” wrote Tom Edsall in The New York Times. It’s not a stretch to imagine Trump supporters trying to block these same voters from the polls.

We probably won't have a decent picture of how that worked in yesterday's election for a while. As Ari noted there, "Studies have shown that restrictions like voter-ID laws can reduce voter turnout by 2 to 3 percent, with the largest drop-off among young, first-time and African-American voters."

Then there is campaign-financing system, which the Republican-dominated Supreme Court made orders of magnitude worse with their Citizens United decision. I wrote just after that decision in 2010:

President Obama addressed the issue in his weekly address on 01/23/09 01/23/2010, the White House transcript of which is grandly titled, President Obama Vows to Continue Standing Up to the Special Interests on Behalf of the American People. As they often do, many of the words sound right (my emphasis):

But this week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists – and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence. This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. [my emphasis]

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections. [my emphasis]

But will he fight for real solutions? Sadly, he pleaded for a "bipartisan" solution, which has become for the Obama administration and the current Senate leadership at least an offer of preemptive surrender.

We currently have one Party, the Republicans, who are both strongly partisan and willing to fight for their goals. We have another Party, the Democrats, who are lukewarm partisan and not notably willing to fight for the goals that are most important to their Party's own base and to the majority of the people.

Sadly, the Party that is made up of fighting partisans has also become an authoritarian Party hostile to democracy and the rule. (See Bush v. Gore, the Cheney-Bush torture policy, to take two examples among many.)

It really is remarkable for the President of the United States to say of a Supreme Court decision:

This ruling strikes at our democracy itself.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest.

But those words at this particular moment in time remind me of what's been so gut-wrenching disappointing to even Democrats like me, who never viewed Obama as some kind of democratic messiah. His actions haven't matched up to the urgency of his words.

There will be a lot to say about the 2016 election. For a long time. But this are some of the most urgent issues that stand out for me on the morning after.

Republican hysteria about an upcoming "stolen" election

The Republicans, and the Trump campaign in particular, are making a big hoopla right now about the possibility that the November Presidential election will be stolen by the Democrats.

For Democrats, this is pretty befuddling in its content. One, because most Democrats wouldn't want to do such a thing. And two, because most Democrats can't imagine the national party leadership having the gumption to consider such a thing. Such a thing is, after all, illegal, un-Constitutional and anti-democratic.

Laurel Raymond has a roundup for Think Progress of some of the latest outbreaks of this fearmongering from Republicans in Sheriff openly calls for riots as Trump says election is ‘rigged’ 10/15/2016.

The Republican Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence used the accusation in a somewhat mealy-mouthed way on Meet the Press yesterday with Chuck Todd (Meet the Press - October 16, 2016):

CHUCK TODD:

Will you accept the results of the election?

GOV. MIKE PENCE:

We will absolutely accept the results of the election. Look, the American people will speak in an election that will culminate on November the 8th. But the American people are tired of the obvious bias in the national media. That's where the sense of a rigged election goes here, Chuck.

CHUCK TODD:

The more you say--

GOV. MIKE PENCE:

--the media comes in with an avalanche of continuous negative attacks against my running mate instead of focusing on the real, hard evidence coming--

CHUCK TODD:

Do you--

GOV. MIKE PENCE:

--out about corruption and pay to play--

CHUCK TODD:

--are you at all--

GOV. MIKE PENCE:

--in the Clinton Foundation years. It's why people are frustrated. But look, we'll--

CHUCK TODD:

--the more you say rigged election--

GOV. MIKE PENCE:

--find a way to get through to November the 8th. And we'll accept the will of the American people. You bet.

CHUCK TODD:

Governor, you keep saying rigged election. Are you concerned that the more you say it, the more you actually undermine our democracy unintentionally?

GOV. MIKE PENCE:

Look, one of the great traditions of America is the peaceful transfer of power. And elections, Chuck, you know, you're a student of history, elections always get pretty rough. I expect they're going to stay just as rough as they are right now going into November the 8th. The stakes are so high in this election.

But as Donald Trump said in that first debate, I'll say to you again today, we're going to accept the will of the American people. But between now and election day we're going to work our hearts out against all odds, against most of you in the national media. We're going to go lay out a story for a stronger more prosperous America.

The Pod Pundit Panel proceeded to address the issue in an unsurprisingly feckless way. Kristen Walker:

Well, my takeaway was the end of your interview with Mike Pence, when you asked him if he would accept the election results, he said yes, of course we'll accept the results. Donald Trump is sending out the complete opposite message. And he's trying to lay the groundwork for this idea that the election is rigged. And yesterday you had the Clinton campaign and Paul Ryan coming out in very strong terms, saying we will respect the results of this election. And the republicans are increasingly concerned that they need to be louder about that so that whatever happens on election day is respected. [my emphasis]

This kind of knee-jerk conservative reaction is partially self-defense of the media, whose worst problem is not so much Establishment bias - which they certainly have - but bad reporting. And, no, Pence was not saying the "complete opposite" of Trump. He brought up the theme of media bias rigging the election but took the stock position that they will accept the results of the November election because Trump will win the November election. Joy-Ann Reid at least seems to have noticed that Pence was sticking to the campaign's position:

But I think you also see the sort of struggle within Mike Pence. Because he's trying to yield to what are clearly the candidate's talking points the candidate wants, which is that the election is rigged. Because he's said that you. And then he said of course we'll accept it. But he still has to sell this idea. Look, Jeff Sessions is also selling this idea. I think for the Republican Party, just as an institution, there has to be a righting of the ship because the integrity of the United States election I think is bigger than any candidate. [my emphasis]

Chris Cillizza offered this syntax-challenged comment:

And I think it's so hard for me to imagine that what he [presumably Trump] says and tweets over this last week, somehow three weeks from now, he says and I just want to say I've announced that I've placed a call to Hillary Clinton to congratulate her. Like, I can't. I literally struggle to wrap my mind around him doing that. I think it's in all of his business interests, conservative media network, a Rump faction of the Republican party. So all of those suggest that he not concede. And this idea that like Reince Priebus and Paul Ryan say that we concede.

I'll pause here to make a few observations that aren't restricted to the talking points of the week.

• The 2000 Presidential election was contested with Republicans and Democrats fighting over the Florida vote count. The world didn't collapse. Neither did the Constitutional system.
• Voter suppression implemented by our old friend Kathleen Harris in Florida in the form of disproportionately purging African-American voters from the registration lists played an essential role in the Florida vote being close enough for the Supreme Court to hand the Presidency to Shrub Bush and Dick Cheney.
• The media consortium that did their own recount of the Florida vote in 2001 found strong evidence (to put it mildly!) that Gore actually won the statewide vote in Florida. One could make a good case that the Democrats did contest the results long and hard enough.
• The outcome of the Florida fiasco of 2000 may not have ended the Constitution. But the upshot did some real damage to it. I took the image below from a Democratic fundraising letter several years ago signed by Al Gore:

• Whether we call it "rigging" or "stealing" or whatever, one of the most serious dangers to democratic governance in the US today is the long-standing, Segregation 2.0 drive of the Republicans to suppress the votes of black and Latino citizens by the same sorts of tricks, subterfuges and bad laws the Southern segregationists used to keep the federal gubment and democratic voting out of the Deep South from the mid-1870s to the mid-1960s.
• Republican accusations of "voter fraud" are not new. On the contrary, they are a central claim in the Republicans voter-suppression efforts.
• Honest and fair elections are extremely, extremely important. Poll watchers are a necessary and entirely legitimate tool to keep them honest.
• Intimidating voters at the polling places with threats or weapons is not legitimate poll watching. It's not legitimate at all. In fact, it's the kind of Ku Klux Klan actions that were a key element in disenfranching African-American citizens in the South in the 1870s going forward.
• The Clinton campaign with active help from the Obama Administration is promoting the dubious idea that Russian hackers favoring Trump could commit election fraud on Trump's behalf via hacking voting machines.
• Democrats have been complaining for years, and with very good reason, that voting machines need to be adequately maintained and audited. And that harcopy backups are needed in case their are substantial questions about the accuracy of the machines' recording of voters.

As in every other aspects of politics, the Democrats need to be able to walk and talk at the same time. Rejecting phony Republican complaints about voter fraud and election-stealing is necessary. So is fighting back against false claims used by Republicans to justify segregationist voter-suppression laws and practices. Insisting on honest elections is something the Democrats should be doing whether the Republicans join them in the effort or not.

Digby Parton focuses on how the Republicans long-standing voter-suppression rhetoric feeds directly into the Republicans' current peremptory warning about a stolen Presidential election in Where did the GOP think this would lead? Hullabaloo 11/15/2016:

... Trump didn't invent this theme and the GOP leaders who are now expressing alarm that their voters believe the election is being stolen have only themselves to blame. All over he country they've been pimping the thinly veiled racist voter fraud meme for years, passing laws to suppress the vote and otherwise try to rig elections! They've admitted it dozens of times. ...

They [the Republicans] are trying to "rig" the vote and they admit it. And the way they do it by accusing the Democrats of rigging the vote.

Now the GOP leaders are upset that this sociopathic demagogue is fomenting violence by running with this theme they've been subtly pushing for decades. Look in the mirrors boys. You built the road he's careening down at a a hundred miles an hour.

Allegra Chapman describes the state of the legal fight against Republican voter suppression in Voting Rights: Will Court Protections Deliver? The American Prospect 09/26/2016.

Picking on those persecuted segregationist white folks in the South

As I mentioned in my previous post, Mississippi has one of the new segregationist voter-suppression laws in place. (Voting Rights Act ruling clears path for Mississippi voter ID use in 2014 AP 06/25/2013.

The Republican voter-suppression efforts are nationwide and have been notably present in swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. But most of the states that were covered in whole or part by the now-nullified preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) were states of the former Confederacy, the two big exceptions being Alaska and Arizona.

Ed Kilgore isn't sympathetic to the argument we're hearing from today's segregationists in the preclearance states that it was terribly unfair to be singling them out for special federal review of their voting laws ("Getting Over" Jim Crow Political Animal 07/02/2013) since 1965:

Is 49 years ago ancient history? Well, I haven't headed off to the nursing home just yet, and I can certainly remember Jim Crow quite vividly. And I have a feeling that the millions of southern African-Americans still alive today who can remember experiencing Jim Crow from the less advantageous side of the racial barrier don’t consider it ancient history either.

What makes this “oh, get over it” attitude especially maddening is that the extraordinary effort that culminated in the enactment of the Civil Rights Act (and then the Voting Rights Act the next year) was necessitated by the refusal of the South to accept defeat in a war a century earlier and its successful resistance to the Civil Rights Amendments enacted to ensure the region didn't just revert to its antebellum racial practices. The entire history of race relations in the South has been a story of racists taking the long view and outlasting the wandering attention span of those demanding change—who out of fatigue or competing priorities or their own prejudices "got over it" and left the South to its own devices. [my emphasis]

When it comes to trends in white supremacy, Pat Buchanan is a reliable bellwether (A Reconstructed South Under Fire The American Conservative 06/28/2013). And he sees last week's ruling by the Roberts Court Segregation Five in Shelby County that guts the VRA:

What Congress can no longer do is impose conditions on Southern states from which Northern states are exempt. Washington can no longer treat the states unequally — for that, too, is a violation of the Constitution.

The Roberts court just took a giant stride to restoring the Union.

This was the main segregationist talking point against the VRA when it the first version was enacted in 1965. They argued it was unfair and unconstitutional to apply it only to Southern states that had demonstrated blatant and egregious racial discrimination against African-American voters. The Segregation Five of the Roberts Court validated that position last week. Pat Buchanan recognizes this and is thrilled to see it.

Bill Denny, Republican State House of Representatives Elections Committee Chairman in Mississippi, is singing from the same hymnal (Miss. leaders react to Voting Rights Act decision Jackson Clarion-Ledger 06/25/2013):

If Mississippi and a few other states have to get federal clearance for election changes, all states should have to do so, said state House Elections Committee Chairman Bill Denny, R-Jackson.

"I've always felt that it was unconstitutional," Denny said in a phone interview Tuesday. "I would've agreed in 1965 that something had to be done, but it should've been done to all 50 states. I just always felt that was wrong, that was a violation of the 10th Amendment to begin with, of states' rights." [my emphasis]

At his official website, Rep. Denny brags that he is "affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council" (ALEC), the Koch Brothers-supported group that promotes reactionary legislation at the state level. Denny turns 84 next month, so he's would have been 35 when the VRA was first passed, old enough to be well acquainted with the pre-VRA segregation system. And, just like as every other sentient adult in Mississippi, he knows what "states rights" meant then and now as a political slogan.

This is another version of this viewpoint from a Mike Walker, in a letter to the editor from Brandon MS (Voting Rights Jackson Clarion-Ledger 06/25/2013):

As long as blacks can vote as many times as they want to for their chosen candidate, everything is right with the world. As long as dead voters rise every four years to cast their vote for the Democrat Party, voting in our state is equal & fair. At least that is what the Mississippi Black Legislative Caucus believes.

The Voting Rights Act was, at best, unconstitutional, because it was written to specifically target 9 states, not the entire country. It needed to be wiped from the slate 50 years ago.

That same time-(dis)honored segregationist position is taken by Marty Duren in Religious Liberty as Idolatry? Christian Post 06/28/2013:

Just how restrictive was section 4 of the Voting Rights Act? Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston said, "If you move a polling place from the Baptist church to the Methodist church, you've got to go through the Justice Department." Since other states have no such requirements the court saw this an unfair to the states, counties and townships that did.

Most, if not all, of the states involved have elected minority officials and representatives, including the national level. Responses to the court's decision ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Since Duren is part of the segregation chorus here - pretty much the rest of his piece is about the horrors of same-sec marriage - I'm assuming he takes responses like those of Pat Buchanan and Ole Bill Denny to be the "sublime ones."

Tags: segregation, shelby county decision, voter suppression

Segregation watch

Some of the liberal commentary on the Roberts Court Segregation Five decision last week in the Shelby County case gutting the Voting Rights Act (VRA) Bob Kuttner in Why Voter Suppression Will Backfire Huffington Post 06/30/2013 gives reasons for optimism. And there are reasons for optimism. Latino voting rates in California went up significantly after Republican Gov. Pete Wilson's anti-immigrant initiative that year, and have remained high. That was a real backlash against a law and a campaign that had clear racial and xenophobia elements. High African-American turnout in 2012 in the face of widespread segregationist voter suppression efforts is also a reason for optimism.

Fortunately, Kuttner is not being superficially optimistic: "we will need to fight the civil rights revolution of the 1960s all over again, on the ground. In the long run, we have demographics on our side. A ton of damage, however, can be done in the short run, and this will take mobilization of a movement to fight for the right to vote and to have every vote count."

Voter suppression does its largest damage over time. Will black and Latino voters be willing to stand in line for hours to vote, sometimes in the cold and rain, in an non-Presidential election year like 2014? And again in 2016, and 2018, and in the various primary and mid-year and off-year elections that take place in between?

Mississippi has one of the new segregationist voter-suppression laws in place, as the AP reports in Voting Rights Act ruling clears path for Mississippi voter ID use in 2014 06/25/2013. Mississippi's Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann - the state secretaries of state manage elections - just after the Segregation Five made their decision happily declared that racial discrimination in voting is now unthinkable in Mississippi: "Mississippi citizens have earned the right to determine our voting processes. Our relationships and trust in each other have matured. This chapter is closed." (Statement on Supreme Court Voting Rights Act Opinion 06/25/2013)

Growing up in what a completely segregated Mississippi in the year I was born, I always try to keep in mind what statements like this mean in SegSpeak. In this case the translation to plain English would be: " White folks in Mississippi have earned the right to go back to gittin' the coloreds off the votin' rolls. Our relationships and trust in each other have matured so that these here blacks are ready to learn what thar real place is ag'in. This chapter of having to practice the American form of government is closed and we can start gettin' us a proper White Man's gubment ag'in."

In-person voter fraud is a minimal, virtually non-existent problem, though that's what's used to justify the Voter ID laws. Urban voters with no driver's license are particularly likely to be affected by Mississippi's Voter ID segregation law. If you don't have a photo ID, ole Delbert says he's settin' up photo machines at the county registrars' offices. But it still means you have to take the time to get the ID.

Even with no hanky-panky by the county registrars or local election officials, this is likely to suppress African-American voting. If you leave your ID at home one election day because you haven't needed it for the last 30 years, you don't get to vote and you may not have time to go get it and come back to the poll.

Add in the tactical voter suppression tricks and it gives the segregationists some extra tools. "This picher don't look like you, boy. We cain't accept this." (Aside to his fellow poll workers when the black voter is turned away: "They all look alike anyhow, hyuck, hyuck!")

Change the polling place at the last minute. Restrict the hours to create long lines. "Darn, our Voter ID camera hyere at the registrar's office broke down just after we took the picher of that white feller who was here just before you. You'll have to come back later." "What, election's tomorrow and you ain't got yore voter ID yet? Well, hope it comes in the mail tomorrow so you can vote."

In other words, even honestly administered - and honestly administering segregation voter-suppression laws is just not part of the program - the voter ID creates an extra impediment to blacks voting in Mississippi. And that's its main purpose, though excluding Latinos and some poor whites is part of the package. Though even then, it's a safe bet that fewer whites will have their voter IDs questioned at the polls. And after one or two or three hastles around the ID in voting, lots of the voters affected with be discouraged from voting. Toss in a few "public service" commercials from ole Delbert's office the week before the election warning of the dire consequences of showing up at the voting places with an improper ID, ... Well, you get the picture. And so does ole Delbert and everyone else in Mississippi, though legal niceties and segregationist neuroses require segregationist whites to pretend otherwise.

As a general thing to keep in mind with these segregationist voter-suppression laws, a large part of the actual discrimination with take place at the local level: at the polling places, in the county registrar's offices. And when local shenanigans suppress the black vote and fewer black candidates get elected, that starts to restrict the pool of experienced African-American talent seeking state and federal offices. Ole Delbert isn't going to be putting out any press releases saying that as of such-and-such a date, only white people in Mississippi can vote. That wasn't how it worked in 1953, it's not how it will work in 2013 and afterward.

From the Southern Coalition for Social Justice: Community Organizing Is Even More Critical After the Supreme Court’s Decision in Shelby (n/d, accessing 07/01/2013)

Tags: segregation, shelby county decision, voter suppression

How serious is the voter suppression problem?

Elizabeth Drew in Voting Wrongs NYR Blog 09/21/2012 says it's this serious:

Having covered Watergate and the impeachment of Richard Nixon, and more recently written a biography of Nixon, I believe that the wrongdoing we are seeing in this election is more menacing even than what went on then. Watergate was a struggle over the Constitutional powers and accountability of a president, and, alarmingly, the president and his aides attempted to interfere with the nominating process of the opposition party. But the current voting rights issue is even more serious: it’s a coordinated attempt by a political party to fix the result of a presidential election by restricting the opportunities of members of the opposition party’s constituency—most notably blacks—to exercise a Constitutional right.

This is the worst thing that has happened to our democratic election system since the late nineteenth century, when legislatures in southern states systematically negated the voting rights blacks had won in the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. [my emphasis]

And there's a direct line of the political tradition that leads from the anti-Reconstruction and anti-democracy Southern "Redeemers" of the 1870s to today's Republican voter suppression efforts.

These are straight-up segregationist measures.

Tags: segregation, voter suppression

At the cutting edge of segregationist voting suppression today

Roll Call has an article describing some of the key operators behind the Republican Party's segregationist voter-suppression operations: Eliza Newlin Carney, Conservative Veterans of Voting Wars Cite Ballot Integrity to Justify Fight 09/26/2012:

Less well-known than Indiana election lawyer James Bopp Jr., who's made a national name for himself challenging the political money laws, conservative veterans of voting wars such as Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams nonetheless play a role similar to Bopp's in their behind-the-scenes fight to protect ballot integrity.

And by protecting ballot integrity they mean blocking as many black and Latino voters as possible. ...

Other leaders in the Beltway anti-fraud [i.e., segregationist anti-voting] brigade include GOP election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, president of the Republican National Lawyers Association, and Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, who helped launch the anti-fraud movement with his 2004 book "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy."

Also active is the nonprofit American Civil Rights Union, which bills itself as a conservative counterpoint to the American Civil Liberties Union ...

Unfortunately, Carney's article relies on the lazy this-side-says/the-other-side-says formula of which reporters have become so fond and so doesn't state clearly the flat-out segregationist nature of this voter-suppression effort. This is a classic case: "About the only thing both sides agree on is that their opponents have the facts wrong."

It would be nice if we had someone like professional reporters to, you know, really research this stuff and tell us who is lying and who is not instead of just getting "balance" by taking stenography from Both Sides.

Tags: segregation, voter suppression

Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian on voter-suppression segregation laws

Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks don't use the label "segregation" for the voter-suppression laws the national Republican Party is pushing hard. But their analysis is a good one.

What's More Common: UFO Sightings or Voter Fraud? YouTube date 07/16/2012:

These laws are straight out of the segregation playbook. Such laws were the primary device used to deny African-American citizens their right to vote in the segregated South for 90 years or so, with the threat and sometimes actual practice of violence backing it up, more often reinforced by economic coercion.

Tags: segregation, white racism, voter suppression

Now THIS is voter suppression (Arizona edition)

Old-fashioned Jim Crow voter suppression has become a standard procedure for today's Republican Party. This is one sign of how respectable it's become among Republicans: Kim Geiger, Arizona official: It's 'possible' Obama won't make ballot Los Angeles Times 05/18/2012.

Kind of like Abraham Lincoln not even being a choice in the slave states in the election of 1860.

Arizona co-chair of Romney's Presidential campaign Ken Bennett: another Republican white guy who thinks Obama may be one of them thar foreigners

Geiger reports:

In a revival of the controversy surrounding President Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate, a state official in Arizona says it’s “possible” that he’ll hold Obama’s name off the Arizona ballot if Hawaii officials don’t send him confirmation that the president was born there.

Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, a Republican who is exploring a 2014 race for governor, says he waded into the issue after receiving more than 1,200 emails from people requesting that he verify Obama’s birth in Hawaii before placing the president’s name on the 2012 ballot.

Mr. Swiftboat himself, Jerome Corsi, is part of the story. Matthew Hendley reports for the Phoenix New Times, Ken Bennett, Arizona Secretary of State, Plays to the "Birthers" 05/17/2012:

Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, who just recently filed the paperwork for an exploratory committee in the 2014 Arizona gubernatorial race, appears to be the latest Arizona politician to play to the "birther" crowd.

In the mess that is Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's "investigation" into President Obama's birth certificate, conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi has already courted the likes of state Representatives David Burnell Smith, Jack Harper, and Carl Seel as well as state Senator Lori Klein and others into making appearances at "birther"-related press conferences.

Now, Corsi claims to have some support from Bennett to deal with the Obama birth-certificate issue.

But in Arizona today, this kind of thing can look like a promising career enhancer to Republican politicians. Yvonne Wingett Sanchez writes in Arizona Secretary of State Bennett seeks verification of Obama's citizenship Arizona Republic 05/18/2012:

Yet the state's No.2 elected official has waded into the highly charged controversy, asking the island state to verify the president's birthplace to ensure Obama can appear on Arizona's Nov.6 ballot.

In doing so, Bennett, who is co-chairman for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Arizona campaign, has reignited the birther debate coast to coast. ...

Bennett, who is exploring a 2014 gubernatorial run, told The Arizona Republic on Friday that he could not recall the name of the constituent who made the request. Documents obtained through a public-records inquiry show Bennett's office in early March began communicating with individuals asking the office to look into Obama's birth following an investigation by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. [my emphasis]

The Democrats there are making some kind of response:

The White House did not respond to requests for comment. The Obama campaign in Arizona, however, released a statement saying the president's name will appear on the ballot.

"Secretary of State Bennett's flirtation with a conspiracy theory that has been debunked time and time again will have no bearing on the election, but it does present an opportunity for Mitt Romney to finally rise to the occasion and denounce the extreme voices in his party," said Mahen Gunaratna, Arizona communications director for Obama for America.

House Minority Leader Chad Campbell, D-Phoenix, said Bennett had bowed to pressure from "tea party" birthers.

"This is just blatant political pandering," he said in a statement. "He is jeopardizing the integrity of our election system to appease a fringe movement."

But why shouldn't the White House make a big stink over this? Supposedly they are trying to paint Romney as an extremist. It seems to me that dogging him with this action by his Arizona state co-chairman makes good political sense.

On the general topic of voter suppression, see also: Tampa Bay Times editorial, Voter fraud effort smacks of voter suppression campaign 05/17/2012; Sandhya Bathija, Voter Suppression Laws: Will We Let Them Impact the 2012 Election? ACLU 05/10/2012.

Tags: segregation, voter suppression

Charlie Pierce on the "worst crimes against democracy"

"The worst crimes against democracy are always the ones committed under the law," Charlie Pierce writes in We Are All Legal: 2012's Voter Suppression Carries On Esquire Politics Blog 03/06/2012.

He's writing with particular reference to the Citizen's United decision and voter-suppression laws. The latter was and is central to segregationist politics. Pierce points out how Obama's policy of not prosecuting criminal behavior of officials in the previous Administration missed an important chance to stymie the segregationist voter-suppression practice before it got as far as it has today:

The latest thing that happened was that a judge in Wisconsin on Super Tuesday issued a temporary injunction against that state's new voter-ID law that will keep the law from being used in Wisconsin's presidential primary election on April 3. However, the ongoing campaign of voter suppression around the country continues apace. It's important always to remember that none of this is happening by accident, that the fault in the system these laws are alleged to address does not really exist, and that this is actually a legacy of looking-forward-not-back. These various laws are a direct result of the U. S. Attorneys scandal during the administration of C-Plus Augustus. Local conservative pols in New Mexico, for example, wanted U.S. Attorney David Iglesias canned because he wouldn't pursue spurious voter-fraud claims with sufficient political enthusiasm. It was for this precise purpose that Karl Rove and the rest of the White House political team at the time sought to turn the Department Of Justice into a second-rate political chop-shop staffed by ambitious hacks and/or the product of Christianist diploma mills. Remember Monica Goodling? She was a prize. Because these people were allowed to skate without substantial penalties, the virus they loosed into the American political system was allowed to run wild in the states. There was no national consensus developed around the notion that voter-suppression is not a legitimate function of the government, not even when you try to gussy it up as some sort of consumer protection racket. [my emphasis]

Pierce reminds us that voter-suppression as well as unprecedented floods of money will be major features of this year's elections:

Nevertheless, it's clear that the fall elections will take place within two radically new contexts. One is the money context created by the Citizens United decision. The other, closer to the ground, is the context of the voter-suppression laws — and that's what they are, and suppressing votes is what they were meant to do — in the several states. This, I would almost guarantee, is going to set off ugly scenes at polling places around the country, as well as further disillusioning the very voters who lack any other avenue to exercise what little political power they have, which is also the point of these laws.

Tags: citizens united decision, voter suppression

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 30: The past isn't even past

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."- Gavin Stevens, a character in Requiem for a Nun, Act 1, Scene 3, by William Faulkner

Sadly, we have an all-too-current issue of the triumph of segregationist values that grew from the Lost Cause outlook and the practices of the segregated South after the "Redeemers" overthrew the democratic Reconstruction governments in the South by force and violence.

A Supreme Court decision this week green-lighted a core segregationist practice: voter suppression. The decision came in the case of Crawford vs. Marion County Election Board, which upheld an Indiana law requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls. The Indiana law is one of the successes of the Republican voter suppression efforts, a widespread practice that comes straight out of the playbook of the Old South segregationists. To be regionally fair, the future Chief Justice William Rehnquist was also a practitioner of the method in the 1960s in Arizona.

The most exotic features of the Jim Crow segregation system were things like the whites-only water fountains and bathrooms in public places. But the core of the system, going back to the the overthrow by the so-called "Redeemers" of the democratic Reconstruction governments by force and violence and intimidation in the 1870s, was voter suppression. Through a combination of terrorism and legal subterfuges, African-American voters were prevented from registering and voting.

During the 1960s, one of the most popular methods of doing so was the poll tax, which effectively disenfranchised most black citizens and a significant number of poor whites. It took a Constitutional Amendment to get rid of that practice, although the Republicans are seeking today to institute some backdoor version of the poll tax.

A popular method in Mississippi was to require a voter to give a written interpretation of a section of the state constitution which had to be judged adequate by the county registrar of voters before the voter could register. It turned out that most black applicants just couldn't give an adequate interpretation in the opinions of the registrars, who weren't exactly legal scholars themselves in most cases. The registrars would sometimes be helpful, though, and give the person registering a text to copy which would be acceptable. Although rarely if ever were black applicants given such assistance.

I'm once again struck by this week's coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright by the deeply warped priorities of the Establishment press. Not only are the views of the African-American minister Wright treated in tabloid style and dissected gleefully by pundits who know bupkis about theology or the African-American religious traditions, while the outrageous religious views of Christian Right leaders are treated as a normal thing. But in a week where the Republican Supreme Court issued a ruling validating one of the most serious anti-democratic practices in the country today, media hysteria over the Rev. Wright gets far and away more priority than this very serious setback for American democracy.

Most white Americans of all regions of the country probably tell ourselves in one way or another that we would never tolerate something like that awful Jim Crow system that those backward white Southerners of yesteryear practice. But the truth is that our powdered princes and princesses of the Establishment media mostly don't give a rat's petootie about this new ruling. Sneering at that scary black minister from Chicago is just so-ooo much more entertaining for those supposed guardians of our democracy.

Art Levine provides a good description of the rotten Republican scheme in The Republican War on Voting The American Prospect 04/01/08, in which he writes:

The roots of John Ashcroft's passion on this issue go back to the chaos of Election Day 2000 in St. Louis, when hundreds, if not thousands, of mostly inner-city voters were turned away from polling places because their names were not on voting rolls. The resulting last-minute court battle kept some polling places open for 45 minutes after their scheduled closing time of 7 P.M. Ashcroft, then the Republican U.S. Senate nominee, lost his race to the dead Democratic governor, Mel Carnahan, whose name stayed on the ballot weeks after he died in a plane crash. At an election-night party, an infuriated Republican Sen. Kit Bond pounded the podium and screamed, "This is an outrage!" - and subsequently charged that Republican losses were due in part to dogs and dead people voting. As one local government official observed, "In St. Louis, 'dogs and dead people' is code for black people [voting fraudulently]."

That election night gave birth to the new right-wing voter-fraud movement, while Missouri became a proving ground for the vote-suppression campaigns that later spread to other key states. Missouri's then-Secretary of State Matt Blunt, now governor, launched a trumped-up investigation that concluded that more than 1,000 fraudulent ballots had been cast in an organized scheme. A Justice Department Civil Rights Division investigation, started before Ashcroft shifted the department's priorities, found no fraudulent ballots, however. Instead, it discovered that the St. Louis election board had improperly purged 50,000 voters from the rolls.

Nonetheless, the template for smear campaigns, groundless lawsuits, and politicized prosecutions used across the country had been set in Missouri. Key roles were played by many of the same GOP zealots who later made their mark on the national drive to fight voter fraud, among them St. Louis attorney Thor Hearne, the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign election counsel who later launched the GOP front group, the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR). And as early as 2002, the executive director of the Missouri Republican Party pioneered a new dirty trick: publicly "filing" with the Federal Election Commission a 26-page complaint against the state's leading registration group, known as Pro Vote, that charged it with secretly conspiring with Democrats in the Senate race - but then failing to sign the document so the agency never considered it.

The Supreme Court decision is reported in Voter ID law upheld by David Savage, Los Angeles Times 04/29/08 and Ruling's impact on the poor raises concern by Deborah Hastings AP/San Franciso Chronicle 04/29/08.

Digby comments on this awful decision in Validating Voter Suppression Hullabaloo blog 04/28/08. Her comments are, as usual, on point when she explains the significance of this:

First of all, let's not forget that this may be the biggest political land mine the Bush administration has set for Democrats. "Voter fraud" was, you'll remember, at the bottom of the US Attorney scandals and one of their main tools for suppressing the Democratic vote. This is the realization of a very long term plan to chip away at the Voting Rights Act. Republicans, like all aristocrats, know that if enough average people vote, they will lose. Period.

I have been writing about this since before I started this blog. It's at the heart of the Florida debacle in 2000, where they illegitimately purged voter rolls and relied on arcane interpretations of the rules to deny people the fundamental right to have their votes counted. It goes all the way back to the reconstruction period and has continued right up to Ohio in 2004.

The Supreme Court has just legitimized the notion that "voter fraud" is a problem when, in fact, every study shows that it simply does not exist in any systematic way and that the voter disenfranchisement that results from such laws is a far more serious problem.

That's what this is about. It's the victory of a basic, basic practice of the segregation system. This segregationist measure is aimed at suppressing African-American and Latino voters. Digby:

It's important to remember that the thrust of many of these latest laws are to suppress the Latino vote, many of whom are reluctant to show up at polling places only to be treated like second class citizens and viewed with suspicion. Life is short. The same, of course, holds true for African Americans, even today. Simply slowing the lines with demands for proof of ID is enough to suppress the votes in urban precincts with too few voting machines. And then there are the handicapped and elderly who often just don't have the same type of ID as the rest of us. But then that's the point. These people must be made to jump through hoops in order to exercise their right to vote.

Oh wait. That's not quite right, is it? After all it was none other than the majority in Bush vs Gore who made it a point to reaffirm that "the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States."

Perhaps we ought to change that.

As the news articles and various bloggers have noted, the Crawford vs. Marion County Election Board decision isn't a complete capitulation to the Indiana-type voter suppression law. It was a 5-4 decision that refused to strike down the voter-suppression law. Three of the majority Justice - Thomas, Scalia and Alito - took the straight-up segregationist position that it was valid on the face of it for the a state to pass such a law despite the complete absence of evidence that the "voter fraud" it was nominally aimed at preventing was actually occurring in the state. The actual decision was on the more narrow grounds that the opponents of the law hadn't demonstrated an actual instance of the law violating someone's voting rights. That was bad enough. But the majority decision does leave open the possibility of challenging the law on other grounds, including demonstration of actual violation of rights.

There have been some worthwhile blog comments on the case, including The Supreme Court and the Vote Fraud Fraud by Scott Lemieux TAPPED 04/28/08.

Jack Balkin weighs in on the decision at his Balkiniization blog in Facial ID's, Facial Challenges and In Your Face Politics 04/28/08. He notes the partisan continuity between the pro-Republican decision in Crawford and the pro-Republican decision by the Scalia Five in the infamous Bush v. Gore decision in 2000.

Andrew Malcolm in GOP, Dems split over Supreme Court OK of Indiana voter ID law. More to come? Top of the Ticket blog 04/28/08 essentially makes a "nothing to see here, move along" defense of the ruling. Malcolm is an editor for the Los Angeles Times who served as Laura Bush's press secretary for 1999-2000. His post is a snarky take that apparently finds it amusing that Democrats should object to such a ruling.

The spirit of the Lost Cause is alive and well. And actively at working damaging American democracy.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2008, voter suppression