VOTERS DISMISSED AS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO THE 1%

U.S.voters popular desires cannot be achieved because there’s no vehicle to express their unhappiness, and there’s no way in which American voters can express what they want either in the Democrat or the Republican parties because they are really the same party and are in full agreement with what they are doing. Not only have both major U.S.political parties abandoned ideas and innovation, but also abandoned most voters. Republicans and Democrats alike are merely reactive to events/problems as demanded by their sponsors/donors in big business, oligarchs and large unaccountable corporations. 2023 politics in the US has devolved into one party, the “business party”, with two branches, democrats and republicans., who engage in and promote distracting contests giving us the illusion that they are basically different from one another on basic economic issues. Buffoon politicians from both parties have become shameless, beholden tools and lackeys of corporate America. They offer us a devil’s bargain mix of self-serving toxic programs and policies, frequently changing their positions as fast as others change socks.

The voters don’t matter because the American definition of democracy is oligarchy. Polls have shown, for example, large popular support by citizens for Medicare for All, but neither political party has supported it. Economist Michael Hudson writes that by “conquering the brains of a country by shaping how people think, you can twist their view into ‘unreality economics’ and make them think you are there to help them and not to take money out of them, then you’ve got them hooked. This is how Big Insurance and Big Pharma maintain control of U.S. health insurance. Our system is privatized, financialized and unregulated so that private, big insurance companies can make money”.

PRIVATIZING GOVERNMENT/PUBLIC SERVICES

Like other states, Florida governors from Jeb Bush, Rick Scott to Ron DeSantos, the GOP legislature’s plan is to privatize all state-run social services, from schools to prisons to Medicaid. They sought to gain political advantage by upending the system, and would do anything they could do to undercut unions, public social welfare entities, mental health/public health, school teachers, public schools and state employees for a political return from corporate benefactors. GOP and some democrat governors defunded state social services, health/mental health services , contracted with profiteering private corporations and slashed taxes on the rich.

On the national level, President Biden and many Democrats have spent their careers defending the financial sector, including Big Insurance and Big Pharma, whose policy is also to maintain and further privatize basic health care financing and infrastructure. Economist Hudson further notes that, “Biden’s long political career has been right-wing. He’s the senator from Delaware, the country’s most pro-corporate state—which is why most U.S. corporations are incorporated there. As such, he represents the banking and credit-card industry. He sponsored the regressive bankruptcy “reform” written and put into his hands by the credit-card companies. As a budget hawk, he’s rejected Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), and also “Medicare for All” as if it is too expensive for the government to afford—thereby making the private sector afford to pay 18% of US GDP for health-insurance monopolies, far more than any other country. That means blocking governments from providing basic services at cost or on a subsidized basis—education, health care/health insurance, roads and communications. Privatized and financialized economies are high-cost.”

RESISTANCE TO CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM

Resistance to true campaign finance reform, and strong support for the U.S.Supreme Court’s, ‘Citizens United’ decision by unaccountable/unregulated large corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals/families is based on their Machiavellian understanding of the purpose of dark money in politics: to use dark money to change political outcomes to favor themselves, the 001% oligarchs and becomes a threat to democracy because its source is not made public. Dark money is corruption that erodes confidence and trust in local, state and national government and in both major political parties. It’s used to throw referendums and elections from which can come many of today’s social, economic, public health, mental health and environmental problems. Dark money is used to hide conflicts of interests and self promotion with bogus scientific controversies, fake news and fake grassroots campaigns.

Corporate big business ideology asserts that human society is a market, and social relations are commercial transactions with a “natural hierarchy” of winners and losers. Attempts to limit competition, change social outcomes eg, estate tax issue, mandated health insurance, etc. is treated as hostile to liberty and big business interests. Count on the neocons/GOP/ many democrats to crush unions and collective bargaining, minimize or eliminate tax and public protection regulations, privatize public services and promote privatization of all social/mental health/health insurance programs. Inequality is okay since it’s a result of a reward for merit and generates wealth for the tiny .001%, which the false neoliberal myth says trickles down to enrich everyone in the 99%. Tax and other social policies to create a more equal society are dismissed as counterproductive to the interests of the ultra wealthy.001%.

WALL STREET NOW IN CHARGE OF GOVERNMENT

Neoliberalism support for privatization of health insurance/other social welfare programs is grounded in the philosophy espoused by University of Chicago economist, Milton Friedman. Friedman said,“the corporations should not take into account the public interest” and added that “the government itself should not take into account the public interest. The job of the government is to simply let everybody make as much money as they can, however they can”.

Classical economist Michael Hudson notes that Big Pharma , like Big Insurance, doesn’t want any kind of anti-monopoly legislation . “Essentially you have what is called a free market, as advocated by Milton Friedman. A free market means the wealthiest people dominate the market and the supply of credit, the management of the economy that allocates credit, and who gets what shifts from Washington to Wall Street. It shift’s from the government to the private financial sector, and allows the financial sector to do the planning. One problem with this is the financial sector lives in the short run. So, it means that they only look for the next three months, the next year’s balance sheet, because the free market is so complex you don’t know what’s going to happen. Well, of course, since you’re managing it from Wall Street you in reality do know what’s going to happen but you don’t want to tell people exactly what’s going to happen”.

The assumption that whatever the market produces is rational and functional is the bedrock of Western economies. And it’s wrong, as notes Michael Hudson, because it “negates the fact that you really need some government power strong enough to override the self-serving special interests of oligarchs and other 1% corporate interests. And that takes a very strong government, which is why the free market people have always opposed strong government and why their economic models don’t give any acknowledgement for government investment in infrastructure that Biden wants or any government activity that is able to override that of the 1% rentier/profiteering class, the financial class, the property-owning class and the corporate monopolists. That’s the problem we have”.

In the Democrat Party, for instance, every Democratic representative has to raise a given amount of money from campaign contributors to give to the Democrat National Committee. Whoever can raise the most money gets to be the committee heads. Big Pharma will give a lot of money to some representative they want to be head of the health committee. Bankers give money to whoever they want to be the head of the banking committee and so on. Once privatized, the basic function of government is to make money for the donor class, which basically is the financial and monopoly class. Banks have always been the mother of monopolies and the financial sector’s largest business market is in creating monopolies. So, you have basically the privatization of monopolies.

POLICYMAKERS AVOID REGULATION OF THEIR DONORS

Policymakers, regulators, employers, and the media have shown little interest in closely examining, regulating or changing the taxpayer-reliant business practices of large insurance companies, which wield substantial lobbying power that they deploy against any effort to transform the United States’ fragmented healthcare system. “They’ve essentially been bailed out by taxpayers,” health policy expert Wendall Potter said of for-profit insurance giants. “And members of Congress, and various administrations, have remained on the sidelines, avoiding paying attention to what their wealthy campaign donors have been doing.” Meanwhile, The Commonwealth Fund found that the United States spent close to twice as much as the average OECD nation on healthcare while achieving worse outcomes in critical areas such as life expectancy at birth and death rates for treatable conditions.

We now have several decades of experience with neoliberal conversion of mental health services/insurance
into a business. Our health care is being rationed, with health care insurance guidelines determined by profitability and secrecy decided in private Wall Street corporate boardrooms. To realize large profits demanded by Wall Street investors, our health system must attract the healthy and turn away the sick, disabled, the poor, many of the old, and the mentally ill. So far, this country has been unable to eliminate private control of health insurance even in spite of the small value it offers when 15 to 25 percent of the health care dollar is skimmed off for private corporate profit and overhead.

SUPPORT DEMOCRACY FOR ALL AMENDMENT

With elected officials spending more and more of their time raising millions of dollars to defend themselves from multi-million dollar smear campaigns from outside groups, it has become harder for everyday Americans living on a budget to be heard in the post-CitizensUnited era. In addition to concluding that donors receive greater access to legislators than non-donors, several academic studies have now confirmed that elected officials’ growing reliance on large dollar donations have skewed the agenda in Washington towards special interests and away from the priorities of ordinary voters. To repair this problem, U.S. citizens should support the joint resolution proposing a constitutional amendment authorizing Congress and the states to set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections. The amendment grants Congress and the states the power to implement and enforce this amendment by legislation.

THE DEMOCRACY FOR ALL AMENDMENT: (H.J. Res. 2)
L I N K : H.J.Res.1 – Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United …

SECTION I. To advance democratic self-government and political equality, and to protect the
integrity of government and the electoral process, Congress and the States may regulate
and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to
influence elections.

SECTION II. Congress and the States shall have power to implement and enforce this article
by appropriate legislation, and may distinguish between natural persons and corporations
or other artificial entities created by law, including by prohibiting such entities from
spending money to influence elections.

SECTION III. Nothing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress or the States the
power to abridge the freedom of the press.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – The fundamental right to vote has been a core value of Black politics since the colonial era — and so has the effort to suppress that vote right up to the present moment. In fact, the history of the suppression of Black voters is a first-rate horror story that as yet shows no sign of ending.

While Democrats and progressives justifiably celebrated the humbling defeat of some of the most notorious election-denying Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms, the GOP campaign to quell and marginalize Black voters has only continued with an all-too-striking vigor. In 2023, attacks on voting rights are melding with the increasingly authoritarian thrust of a Republican Party ever more aligned with far-right extremists and outright white supremacists.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that the insurrection of January 6, 2021, at the Capitol in Washington was also an assault on minority voters. In the post-election weeks of 2020, insurrection-loving and disgraced President Donald Trump and his allies sought to discard votes in swing-state cities like Atlanta, Detroit, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Phoenix. Those were all places with large Black, Latino, or Native American populations. It was no accident then that the overwhelmingly white mob at the Capitol didn’t hesitate to hurl racist language, including the “N” word, at Black police officers as that mob invaded the building.  

For years, Republican lawmakers at the state level had proposed — and where possible implemented — voter suppression laws and policies whose impacts were sharply felt in communities of color nationwide. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, “At least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting,” laws invariably generated by Republican legislators. These included bills to limit early voting, restrict voting by mail, and even deny the provision of water to voters waiting for hours in long lines, something almost universally experienced in Black and poor communities.

While normally pretending that such laws were not raced-based but focused on — the phrases sound so positive and sensible — “voter integrity” or “election security,” on occasion GOP leaders and officials have revealed their real purpose. A recent example was Republican Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Robert Spindell, one of three GOP appointees on the six-person commission that oversees that state’s elections. He openly bragged that the “well thought out multi-faceted plan” of the Republicans had resulted in a dramatic drop in Black voters in the 2022 midterm elections, including in Milwaukee, the state’s largest city, which is about 40% African American. He wrote: “We can be especially proud of the City of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem Vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.”

How Far Might Voter Suppression Go?

You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that, rather than develop policies attractive to voters of color, the GOP and conservatives generally have chosen the path of voter suppression, intimidation, and gaming the system. And if anything, those attempts are still on the rise. In 2023, less than a month into the new year, according to the Guardian, Republicans across the country have proposed dozens of voter-suppression and election-administration-interference bills in multiple states.

Republican state legislators in Texas alone filed 14 bills on January 10th, including ones that would raise penalties for “illegal” voting, whether committed knowingly or not. More ominously, one Texas proposal would fund the creation of an election police force exclusively dedicated to catching those who violate voting or election laws. That unit would be similar to the draconian election-police unit created in Governor Ron DeSantis’s Florida as part of what is functionally becoming a regime dedicated to a version of right-wing terror. Symbolically enough, for instance, Black ex-felons were disproportionately targeted by DeSantis. Although the campaign was launched with great fanfare, only a few generally confused ex-felons were arrested and most of them had been given misinformation by state officials about their eligibility to vote and were convinced that they had the right to do so.

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But DeSantis never really wanted to stop the virtually nonexistent crime of voter impersonation or fraud. His goal, and that of the GOP nationally, has been to strike fear into the hearts of potential non-Republican voters to ensure election victories for his party. 

In states like Alabama, Mississippi, and 20 others where the GOP controls both chambers of the state legislature and the governor’s mansion, intimidating voter-tracking police squads could be the next play in an ongoing effort to undemocratically control elections. Such policing efforts would without question disproportionately target communities of color.

While the expected midterm “red wave” of Republican victories didn’t occur nationally in 2022, the same can’t be said for the South. As documented by the Institute for Southern Studies’ Facing South, the GOP actually outperformed expectations, expanding its hold on multiple state legislatures in the region. Prior to the election, analysts had predicted that the Republicans might gain 40 seats across the South; in fact, they gained at least 55. Not only did they take control of at least 25 state legislative chambers — the lone exception, Virginia’s state senate where Democrats retained a two-seat majority — but they also built or maintained supermajorities in legislative chambers in Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia. This means that even if a Democratic governor is in office, Republican legislators can pass extremist bills into law despite a gubernatorial veto.

None of this is spontaneous, nor is it random. Tens of millions of dollars or more from super-rich conservative donors and right-wing foundations have poured into voter-suppression and election-manipulation efforts. Heritage Action for America, a conservative legislative-writing group linked to the Heritage Foundation, spent upwards of $24 million in 2021 and 2022 in key swing states to help Republicans write bills that would restrict voting, targeting Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, and Texas. Consider it anything but a coincidence that the language in voter-suppression bills in those states and elsewhere sounded eerily familiar. As the Guardian reported, at least 11 voter suppression bills in at least eight states were due, in part or whole, to advocacy and organizing by Heritage Action. A New York Times investigation found that in Georgia, “Of the 68 bills pertaining to voting, at least 23 had similar language or were firmly rooted in the principles laid out in the Heritage group’s letter” that offered outlines and details for how to limit voting access.

Contemporary voter suppression efforts, however, go significantly beyond just trying to prevent people from voting or making it harder for them to do so. Credit that, at least in part, to the determination of so many Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans to vote despite restrictions imposed by the states. Consequently, Republican legislators now seek to control — that is, manipulate — election administration, too. Their tactics include the harassment of election workers, far-right activists seeking positions as election officials, and various other potentially far-reaching legal maneuvers.

In fact, in recent voting, attacks on election workers, officials, and volunteers have become so prevalent that a new national organization, the Election Officials Legal Defense Network (EOLDN), was formed to protect them. EOLDN provides attorneys and other kinds of assistance to such officials when they find themselves under attack.

Meanwhile, a flood of far-right activists has applied for positions or volunteered to work on elections. Neo-fascist Steven Bannon and other extremist influencers have typically called for such activists to take over local election boards with the express purpose of helping Republicans and conservatives win power.

Finally, GOP leaders in multiple states have been pushing an “independent state legislature” doctrine that argues such bodies have the ultimate power to determine election outcomes. They contend that governors, state supreme courts, and even the U.S. Supreme Court have no jurisdiction over non-federal elections. Their fanciful and erroneous reading of Article 1, Section 4 and Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution suggests that state legislatures can not only overturn the will of voters in a given election but select electors of their choice in a presidential contest, no matter the will of the voters.

In past decisions, Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia indicated that they were at least open to such a reading. A firm decision on this matter may occur in that court’s current session in the case of Moore v. Harper. Court watchers are split on whether the court’s conservative majority might indeed embrace that “doctrine” in full, in part, or at all in ruling on that case later this year.

Missed Chances

Much of this dynamic of voter suppression is the result of the failure of congressional Democrats to carry two voting rights bills across the finish line. Black activists are all too aware that the Democrats blew the opportunity to pass such legislation during the last two years when they controlled both chambers of Congress, even if by the slimmest of margins in the Senate. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (JLVRAA) and the For the People Act (FtPA) were each game-changing bills that would, in many ways, have blunted the massive efforts of Republicans at the state level to institute voter restrictions and other policies that result in the disproportionate disenfranchisement of African Americans, Latinos, young people, and working-class voters generally, all of whom tend to vote Democratic.

The JLVRAA would have restored the power of the Voting Rights Act to prevent the very passage of voter suppression laws taken away by the Supreme Court in 2013 in the case of Shelby County v. Holder. The FtPA would have banned partisan gerrymandering, expanded voting rights, and even supported statehood for Washington, D.C. Those bills were aimed specifically at countering the hundreds of voter-suppression proposals in Republican-controlled state legislatures.

In its final report, the January 6th committee actually blew a chance to highlight the attacks on Black voting rights. That report’s full-scale focus on the role of Donald Trump, who certainly was the key instigator of the insurrectionary events at the Capitol and its chief potential beneficiary, ended up obscuring the role of racism and white nationalism in the stop-the-steal movement that accompanied it and was so crucial to Republican election deniers. It should be remembered, though, that Trump’s central argument and the biggest lie of all was that Black, Latino, and Native American votes should be thrown out in Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other urban areas in states like Arizona and Nevada where he was rejected by overwhelming numbers. 

Unfortunately, the January 6th report didn’t sufficiently identify white supremacy as a driver of the “stop the steal” movement. Despite the prominence of certain Black faces among the Trump camp, including conservative organizer Ali Alexander, Trump campaign aid Katrina Pierson, and former Georgia legislator Vernon Jones, January 6th, in fact, represented the culmination of months of attacks on Black campaign workers, especially in Atlanta and Detroit. President Trump explicitly fired up white nationalists by name-checking and endangering individual African American election workers as spoilers of his alleged victory.

The movement in some democratic states to follow Trump’s autocratic playbook is now also metastasizing globally. In Brazil, on January 8th, thousands of followers of the defeated far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro attacked government buildings in Brasilia. Newly elected President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva has had to confront a surging wave of election deniers in the early days of his administration. And it’s important to note that Lula’s voters were disproportionately from the north and northeastern regions of Brazil, areas with deep concentrations of Black and indigenous communities.

In the United Kingdom, in 2022, the Conservative Party pushed through legislation that requires photo identification to vote in future elections beginning in May 2023. As with Republican legislation in Texas, student IDs will not suffice, creating a new obstacle for a constituency that tends to vote for the Labour Party. In a country where many working-class people don’t have drivers’ licenses and the state does not easily provide acceptable IDs, voter suppression is operative.

A democracy agenda that recognizes the racial elements of voter suppression and election denial is sorely needed. At the federal level, President Biden and Congressional Democrats should prioritize keeping the issue alive, while forcing Republicans to divulge their undemocratic hand, until the Democrats (hopefully) fully take back Congress in 2024.

At the state level, Democrats who have momentum from their victories in 2022 need to consolidate and strengthen voting-access laws and policies. In Michigan, for example, where the GOP had for years used its control of the state legislature to pass outlandish, racist laws that generated significant harm for Black communities, the recent Democratic sweep should mean a new voting day.

Former President Trump and the rest of his crew, as well as state versions of the same, are sadly enough in a significant, if grim, American tradition. Isn’t it time to focus more energy on how to stop their urge to suppress the Black vote?

Copyright 2023 Clarence Lusane

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Otherwords.org ) – Breaking news: After years of failed Republican efforts to uncover any proof of widespread voter fraud by Democrats, Republican Governor Ron “Tough Guy” DeSantis of Florida found not one, but 20 ineligible people casting ballots.

Like Donald Trump and a gaggle of other GOP governors, DeSantis has used the phony bugaboo of an illegal voting epidemic as a political ploy to keep true believers believing. They spend millions of taxpayer dollars on partisan wild goose chases — DeSantis even created a new police bureaucracy, the “Office of Election Crimes,” to snoop on voters. 

It was all just silly political nastiness, but then Ron’s dragnet scooped up 20 of the diabolical culprits — about one 10,000th of a percent of the state’s over 14 million registered voters. Vindication!

Who were they? All are former convicts who had previously been stripped of their right to vote and erroneously believed their right had been restored after serving their time — and after Florida voters overwhelmingly voted to restore voting rights for people who’d served time for felonies in 2018. 

Who cares what they thought, bellowed the bullish governor? He trashed them as “election criminals,” conveniently ignoring their Constitutional right to be presumed innocent unless convicted by a jury.

Why did all 20 think they could vote? Because each one had properly submitted voter registration applications that went to DeSantis’ state agency responsible for determining eligibility — and all 20 had been authorized to get official voter ID cards! 

In short, the governor himself effectively told them they could vote — then had them arrested and publicly condemned for doing so.

This self-serving political thug now wants to be our next president, even claiming in a recent PR video that God has chosen him to rule because he’s “a fighter.” But Saint Ron fights the people, rather than fighting for them. He’s a bully — and there’s nothing godly about that.  

Jim Hightower

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.

Via Otherwords.org

( ProPublica ) – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was incensed. Late last year, the state’s Republican legislature had drawn congressional maps that largely kept districts intact, leaving the GOP with only a modest electoral advantage.

DeSantis threw out the legislature’s work and redrew Florida’s congressional districts, making them far more favorable to Republicans. The plan was so aggressive that the Republican-controlled legislature balked and fought DeSantis for months. The governor overruled lawmakers and pushed his map through.

DeSantis’ office has publicly stressed that partisan considerations played no role and that partisan operatives were not involved in the new map.

A ProPublica examination of how that map was drawn — and who helped decide its new boundaries — reveals a much different origin story. The new details show that the governor’s office appears to have misled the public and the state legislature and may also have violated Florida law.

DeSantis aides worked behind the scenes with an attorney who serves as the national GOP’s top redistricting lawyer and other consultants tied to the national party apparatus, according to records and interviews.

Florida’s constitution was amended in 2010 to prohibit partisan-driven redistricting, a landmark effort in the growing movement to end gerrymandering as an inescapable feature of American politics.

Barbara Pariente, a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court who retired in 2019, told ProPublica that DeSantis’ collaboration with people connected to the national GOP would constitute “significant evidence of a violation of the constitutional amendment.”

“If that evidence was offered in a trial, the fact that DeSantis was getting input from someone working with the Republican Party and who’s also working in other states — that would be very powerful,” said Pariente, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Democrat Lawton Chiles.

A meeting invite obtained by ProPublica shows that on Jan. 5, top DeSantis aides had a “Florida Redistricting Kick-off Call” with out-of-state operatives. Those outsiders had also been working with states across the country to help the Republican Party create a favorable election map. In the days after the call, the key GOP law firm working for DeSantis logged dozens of hours on the effort, invoices show. The firm has since billed the state more than $450,000 for its work on redistricting.

A week and a half after the call, DeSantis unveiled his new map. No Florida governor had ever pushed their own district lines before. His plan wiped away half of the state’s Black-dominated congressional districts, dramatically curtailing Black voting power in America’s largest swing state.

One of the districts, held by Democrat Al Lawson, had been created by the Florida Supreme Court just seven years before. Stretching along a swath of north Florida once dominated by tobacco and cotton plantations, it had drawn together Black communities largely populated by the descendants of sharecroppers and slaves. DeSantis shattered it, breaking the district into four pieces. He then tucked each fragment away in a majority-white, heavily Republican district.

DeSantis’ strong-arming of his Republican allies was covered extensively by the Florida press. But until now, little has emerged about how the governor crafted his bold move and who his office worked with. To reconstruct DeSantis’ groundbreaking undertaking, ProPublica interviewed dozens of consultants, legislators and political operatives and reviewed thousands of pages of documents obtained through public records requests and from the nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight.

DeSantis’ office did not respond to detailed questions for this story.

“Florida’s Governor fought for a legal map — unlike the gerrymandered plan the Governor rightly vetoed,” Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, whose top lawyer was hired by DeSantis’ office, said in an email to ProPublica. “If Governor DeSantis retained some of the best redistricting lawyers and experts in the country to advise him then that speaks to the good judgment of the Governor, not some alleged partisan motive.”

In four years as governor, DeSantis has championed an array of controversial policies and repeatedly used his power to punish his political opponents. A presumptive candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, he has often made moves that seemed tailored to attract headlines, such as his recent stunt sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. But it’s the governor’s less flashy commandeering of the redistricting process that may ultimately have the most long-lasting consequences.

Analysts predict that DeSantis’ map will give the GOP four more members of Congress from Florida, the largest gain by either party in any state. If the forecasts hold, Republicans will win 20 of Florida’s 28 seats in the upcoming midterms — meaning that Republicans would control more than 70% of the House delegation in a state where Trump won just over half of the vote.

The reverberations of DeSantis’ effort could go beyond Florida in another way. His erasure of Lawson’s seat broke long-held norms and invited racial discrimination lawsuits, experts said. Six political scientists and law professors who study voting rights told ProPublica it’s the first instance they’re aware of where a state so thoroughly dismantled a Black-dominated district. If the governor prevails against suits challenging his map, he will have forged a path for Republicans all over the country to take aim at Black-held districts.

“To the extent that this is successful, it’s going to be replicated in other states. There’s no question,” said Michael Latner, a political science professor at California Polytechnic State University who studies redistricting. “The repercussions are so broad that it’s kind of terrifying.”

Al Lawson’s district, now wiped away by DeSantis, had been created in response to an earlier episode of surreptitious gerrymandering in Florida.

Twelve years ago, Florida became one of the first states to outlaw partisan gerrymandering. Through a ballot initiative that passed with 63% of the vote, Florida citizens enshrined the so-called Fair Districts amendment in the state constitution. The amendment prohibited drawing maps with “the intent to favor or disfavor a political party.” It also created new protections for minority communities, in a state that’s 17% Black, forming a backstop as the U.S. Supreme Court chipped away at the federal Voting Rights Act.

Florida elected its first Black member of Congress, a former slave named Josiah Walls, in 1870, shortly after the end of the Civil War. But Florida rapidly enacted new voter suppression laws, and Walls soon lost his office as Reconstruction gave way to the era of Jim Crow.

Thanks to distorted maps, Florida did not elect a second Black representative to Congress until 1992. That year, a federal court created three plurality-Black districts in Florida — and then three Black politicians won seats in the U.S. House.

After the Fair Districts amendment became law in 2010, state legislators promised to conduct what one called “the most transparent, open, and interactive redistricting process in America.” Policymakers went on tour across the state, hosting public hearings where their constituents could learn about the legislature’s decision-making and voice their concerns.

The hearings also served a more nefarious purpose, a judge would later rule. They were instrumental in what state circuit judge Terry Lewis described as “a conspiracy to influence and manipulate the Legislature into a violation of its constitutional duty.”

For months, a team of state-level Republican operatives worked in secret to craft maps that favored the GOP, coordinating with both statehouse leadership and the Republican National Committee. Then they recruited civilians to attend the hearings and submit the maps as their own.

An email detailed the advice the operatives gave their recruits. “Do NOT identify oneself orally or in writing,” it read, “as a part of the Republican party. It is more than OK to represent oneself as just a citizen.”

It took years of litigation for the details of the scheme to come to light. But in 2015, the Florida Supreme Court responded with force. In a series of rulings that ultimately rejected the Republicans’ efforts, the court laid out the stringent new requirements under Fair Districts, making clear that partisan “practices that have been acceptable in the past” were now illegal in the state of Florida.

After ruling that the legislature’s process was unconstitutional, the court threw out the Republicans’ congressional district lines and imposed a map of their own. That is how Lawson’s district came to be.

“It was important,” Pariente, who authored the key opinions, told ProPublica, “to make sure the amendment had teeth and was enforceable.”

The amendment took on even greater significance in 2019, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling on redistricting.

The court’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause barred federal court challenges to partisan gerrymanders. Writing for the 5-4 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said it was not an issue for the federal judiciary to decide, but emphasized the ruling did not “condemn complaints about districting to echo into a void.”

In fact, the issue was being actively addressed at the state level, Roberts wrote. He cited Florida’s amendment and one of Pariente’s opinions. Responding to liberal justices who wanted to reject Rucho’s map as an unconstitutional gerrymander, Roberts wrote they could not because “there is no ‘Fair Districts Amendment’ to the Federal Constitution.”

In 2021, state legislative leaders were more careful.

The senate instructed its members to “insulate themselves from partisan-funded organizations” and others who might harbor partisan motivations, reminding legislators that a court could see conversations with outsiders as evidence of unconstitutional intent. The legislature imposed stringent transparency requirements, like publishing emails that it received from constituents. And they ordered their staff to base their decisions exclusively on the criteria “adopted by the citizens of Florida.”

The Senate leadership “explained to us at the beginning of the session that because of what happened last cycle, everything had to go through the process,” Sen. Joe Gruters, who is also chairman of the Florida Republican Party, told ProPublica.

In November, the state senate proposed maps that largely stuck to the status quo. Analysts predicted they would give Republicans 16 seats in Congress and Democrats 12.

“Were they the fairest maps you could draw? No,” said Ellen Freidin, leader of the anti-gerrymandering advocacy group FairDistricts Now. “But they weren’t bad Republican gerrymanders.”

DeSantis wasn’t satisfied. “The governor’s office was very pissed off about the map. They thought it was weak,” said a well-connected Florida Republican, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could be candid. “They thought it was ridiculous to not even try to make it as advantageous as possible.”

In early January, DeSantis’ deputy chief of staff, Alex Kelly, was quietly assigned to oversee a small team that would devise an alternative proposal, according to Kelly’s later testimony.

State employees often spend years preparing for the redistricting process — time that DeSantis did not have. As Kelly and his colleagues set to work, they brought in critical help from the D.C. suburbs: Jason Torchinsky, a Republican election attorney and one of the leading GOP strategists for redistricting nationwide.

On Jan. 5, Kelly and two other top DeSantis aides had the redistricting “kick-off call,” according to the meeting invite, which was provided to ProPublica by American Oversight. The invitation included Torchinsky and another guest from out of state: Thomas Bryan, a redistricting specialist.

In an interview with ProPublica, Bryan explained the connection between the national Republican Party and his work with DeSantis. “There’s a core group of attorneys that works with the party and then they work with specific states,” he said. “It’s not a coincidence that I worked on Texas, Florida, Virginia, Kansas, Michigan, Alabama.”

He added that the main lawyer he works with is Torchinsky: “Jason will say, ‘I want you to work on this state.’”

A top partner at a conservative law firm, Torchinsky has represented the RNC, the Republican Party of Florida and many of America’s most influential right-wing groups, such as the Koch network’s Americans for Prosperity.

He also occupies a central role in the Republican Party’s efforts to swing Congress in its favor in 2022. Torchinsky is the general counsel and senior advisor to the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the entity the Republican National Committee helped set up to manage the party’s redistricting operations.

The NRRT boasts millions of dollars in funding and a roster of prominent advisors that includes Mike Pompeo and Karl Rove. Earlier this year, Kincaid, the trust’s executive director, summarized its objective bluntly: “Take vulnerable incumbents off the board, go on offense and create an opportunity to take and hold the House for the decade.”

In a statement to ProPublica, Kincaid said that the trust is one of Torchinsky’s many clients and that the lawyer’s work in Florida was separate: “When I would ask Jason what was happening in Florida, he would tell me his conversations were privileged.” Kincaid added that he personally did not speak with anyone in the DeSantis administration “during this redistricting cycle.”

Torchinsky’s involvement in the creation of DeSantis’ map has not been previously reported. His role in the process appears to have been intimate and extensive, though the specifics of his contributions are largely unclear. He spent more than 100 hours working for the DeSantis administration on redistricting, according to invoices sent to the Florida Department of State.

Torchinsky held repeated meetings with DeSantis’ team as the group crafted maps and navigated the ensuing political battles, according to documents obtained by ProPublica. And he brought in other operatives who’d worked around the country in priority states for the national GOP.

A week after the kickoff meeting, Torchinsky scheduled a Zoom call between Kelly, Bryan and a second consultant, Adam Foltz.

Foltz and Bryan arrived in Florida just as they were becoming go-to mapmakers for the GOP. They appeared together in multiple states where the NRRT was directly involved last year, generating controversy in their wake.

In Texas, Foltz, Bryan and the NRRT’s leader, Kincaid, all worked behind the scenes helping draw maps, court records show. After they finished, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas, contending that the map violated the Voting Rights Act and illegally diluted Black and Latino votes. The case is still pending.

Last fall in Virginia, each party submitted three candidates to the state supreme court to guide the state’s redistricting process. The Democrats put forward three professors. Republicans submitted Bryan, Foltz and Kincaid. The court’s conservative majority rejected all three Republican nominees, citing conflicts of interest and “concerns about the ability” of the men to carry out the job neutrally.

In a statement, Kincaid said Foltz and Bryan are not partisan operatives and “the Virginia Supreme Court erred” in rejecting them. He also downplayed his own relationship to the consultants, saying they are not “employees or retained consultants” for his group.

“Adam and Tom are two of the best political demographers in the country,” Kincaid wrote. “It would only make sense that states looking for redistricting experts would retain them.”

Until last year, Foltz had spent his entire career working in Wisconsin politics, on state GOP campaigns and for Republican state legislators, according to court records. He was introduced to redistricting a decade ago when he spent months helping craft maps that became notoriously effective Republican gerrymanders. When he testified under oath that partisanship played no role in the Wisconsin process, a three-judge panel dismissed his claim as “almost laughable.”

Bryan was also a new figure on the national stage. Before 2020, he was a “bit player” in the redistricting industry, he said, running a small consulting company based in Virginia. He’d drawn maps for school districts and for local elections, but never for Congress, and he held a second job in consumer analytics at a large tobacco conglomerate.

“In 2020, my phone started going off the hook, with states either asking to retain me as an expert or to actually draw the lines,” Bryan told ProPublica. “I get phone calls from random places, and I’m on the phone with a governor.” While he mostly worked with Republicans, he was also retained by Illinois Democrats this cycle, according to court records.

Foltz and Bryan’s rapid ascension culminated in Florida. On Jan. 14, Torchinsky set up a third call with Foltz and Kelly. Then two days later, DeSantis released his map.

According to Kelly’s subsequent testimony, Foltz drew the map himself.

“I was completely blindsided,” said Rep. Geraldine Thompson, a Democrat on the House redistricting committee. “That is the purview of the legislature.”

Foltz declined an interview when reached by phone and did not respond to subsequent requests for comment. Kelly and Torchinsky, who went on to defend DeSantis in a lawsuit against the redistricting, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The House redistricting subcommittee later brought Kelly in to answer questions about DeSantis’ proposals. Before the deputy chief of staff testified, the Democrats’ ranking member moved to place him under oath. Republican legislators blocked the committee from swearing Kelly in.

In his opening statement, Kelly took pains to emphasize that the governor’s office colored within the lines of the Florida constitution.

“I can confirm that I’ve had no discussions with any political consultant,” he testified. “No partisan operative. No political party official.”

This appears to have been misleading. By the time he testified, Kelly had been personally invited to at least five calls to discuss redistricting with Torchinsky, Bryan or Foltz, records show.

Kelly mentioned Foltz only briefly in his testimony. Torchinsky and Bryan’s names didn’t come up.

DeSantis holds as much sway in Tallahassee as any governor in recent memory. But even after he publicly weighed in with a map of his own, Republicans in the legislature didn’t bow down. The state Senate refused to even consider the governor’s version. In late January, they passed their original plan.

DeSantis’ aides argued that Lawson’s district was an “unconstitutional gerrymander,” extending recent precedent that limits states’ ability to deliberately protect Black voting power.

Florida Republicans were skeptical. House Speaker Chris Sprowls told reporters that DeSantis was relying on a “novel legal argument” that lawmakers were unlikely to adopt.

“In the absence of legal precedent,” Sprowls said, “we are going to follow the law.”

On Feb. 11, DeSantis ratcheted up the pressure. He held a press conference reiterating his opposition to Lawson’s district. He vowed to veto any map that left it intact. But he still needed to win over Republican policymakers. Again, DeSantis’ top aides turned to Torchinsky.

In February, Torchinsky helped DeSantis’ staff pick out an expert witness to sell the governor’s vision to the legislature, according to emails provided to ProPublica by American Oversight. Once the group chose an expert, Torchinsky had a call with him in advance of his appearance.

With a deadline to prepare for the November midterms looming, the legislature moved toward compromise. In early March, it passed a new bill that was much closer to DeSantis’ version — but still kept a Democrat-leaning district with a large Black population in North Florida.

The governor’s attempts at persuasion were over.

On Mar. 28, Foltz and Kelly had another call, along with a partner at Torchinsky’s law firm. The next day, DeSantis vetoed the compromise plan.

Democrats were outraged; many Republicans were shocked. “A veto of a bill as significant as that was definitely surprising,” Gruters, the state senator and chair of the Florida GOP, told ProPublica.

Kelly soon submitted a slightly modified version of Foltz’s map to the legislature. This time, the legislature took DeSantis’ proposal and ran with it.

On Apr. 20, Rep. Thomas Leek, the Republican chair of the House redistricting committee, formally presented DeSantis’ plan before the general assembly. When his colleagues asked him who the governor’s staff consulted while drawing the map, Leek told them that he didn’t know.

“I can’t speak to the governor’s entire process,” Leek said. “I can only tell you what Mr. Kelly said.”

The legislature had required everyone submitting a map to file a disclosure form listing the “name of every person(s), group(s), or organization(s) you collaborated with.” Kelly left the form blank.

The legislature voted on party lines and passed DeSantis’ proposal the next day. Anticipating litigation, they also allocated $1 million to defend the map in court.

Before DeSantis even signed the bill into law, a coalition of advocacy groups filed a lawsuit challenging the map in state court.

They soon scored a major victory. Circuit Court Judge J. Layne Smith, a DeSantis appointee, imposed a temporary injunction that would keep Lawson’s district intact through the midterm elections.

“This case is one of fundamental public importance, involving fundamental constitutional rights,” Smith wrote. His ruling cited the lengthy history of Black voter suppression in North Florida and across the state.

That victory was short-lived. Torchinsky’s firm quickly filed an appeal on DeSantis’ behalf. Then, in a unanimous decision in late May, the appellate court allowed DeSantis’ map to move ahead.

The higher court’s opinion was authored by Adam Tanenbaum, a familiar face in Tallahassee. Until DeSantis appointed him to the court in 2019, Tanenbaum was the Florida House’s general counsel, and before that he was general counsel to the Florida Department of State — both of which were parties to the case.

The very day Tanenbaum issued the opinion, he completed an application to fill a vacancy on the Florida Supreme Court, records show. In Florida, Supreme Court justices are appointed by the governor, in this case DeSantis.

Tanenbaum was not chosen for the position. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The broader case is still pending and is expected to eventually be decided by the state supreme court. Every justice on Florida’s supreme court was appointed by Republicans. The majority of them were chosen by DeSantis.

The deeply conservative body has already demonstrated its willingness to overturn precedent that’s only a few years old. DeSantis’ senior aides have indicated they hope it will do so here.

During his public testimony, Kelly was asked how Lawson’s district could be unconstitutional when it was recently created by Florida’s highest court.

Kelly responded tersely: “The court got it wrong.”

Joshua Kaplan is a reporter at ProPublica. Previously, he wrote a column about criminal justice for the Washington City Paper, reporting on topics such as police misconduct during undercover prostitution stings and prosecutors’ tactics for depriving defendants of the right to a jury trial. He also reported on behavioral health care quality inside schools, psychiatric hospitals and addiction treatment facilities, including a series of investigations into mismanagement at D.C.’s Department of Behavioral Health.

Via ProPublica

Defending democracy has suddenly become one of the central challenges of our age. The land war in Ukraine is widely considered a front line between autocratic rule and democratic freedom. The United States continues to absorb the meaning of the riot that took place on January 6 2021 in an attempt to overthrow the result of the previous year’s election. Elsewhere, concerns have been raised that the pandemic could have provided cover for governments to postpone elections.

Elections are an essential part of democracy. They enable citizens to hold their governments to account for their actions and bring peaceful transitions in power. Unfortunately, elections often fall short of these ideals. They can be marred by problems such as voter intimidation, low turnout, fake news and the under-representation of women and minority candidates.

Our new research report provides a global assessment of the quality of national elections around the world from 2012-21, based on nearly 500 elections across 170 countries. The US is the lowest ranked liberal democracy in the list. It comes just 15th in the 29 states in the Americas, behind Costa Rica, Brazil, Trinidad & Tobago and others, and 75th overall.

Why is the United States so low?

There were claims made by former president Donald Trump of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Theses claims were baseless, but they still caused the US elections ranking to fall.

Elections with disputed results score lower on our rankings because a key part of democracy is the peaceful transition of power through accepted results, rather than force and violence. Trump’s comments led to post-election violence as his supporters stormed the Capitol building and sowed doubt about the legitimacy of the outcome amongst much of America.

This illustrates that electoral integrity is not just about designing laws – it is also dependent on candidates and supporters acting responsibly throughout the electoral process.

Problems with US elections run much deeper than this one event, however. Our report shows that the way electoral boundaries are drawn up in the US are a main area of concern. There has been a long history of gerrymandering, where political districts are craftily drawn by legislators so that populations that are more likely to vote for them are included in a given constituency – as was recently seen in North Carolina.

Voter registration and the polls is another problem. Some US states have recently implemented laws that make it harder to vote, such as requiring ID, which is raising concern about what effect that will have on turnout. We already know that the costs, time and complexity of completing the ID process, alongside the added difficulties for those with high residential mobility or insecure housing situations, makes it even less likely that under-represented groups will take part in elections.

Nordics on top, concern about Russia

The Nordic countries of Finland, Sweden and Denmark came out on top in our rankings. Finland is commonly described as having a pluralistic media landscape, which helps. It also provides public funding to help political parties and candidates contest elections. A recent report from the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights found a “high level of confidence in all of the aspects of the electoral process”.

Cape Verde has the greatest quality of electoral integrity in Africa. Taiwan, Canada and New Zealand are ranked first for their respective continents.

Electoral integrity in Russia has seen a further decline following the 2021 parliamentary elections. A pre-election report warned of intimidation and violence against journalists, and the media “largely promote policies of the current government”. Only Belarus ranks lower in Europe.

Globally, electoral integrity is lowest in Comoros, the Central African Republic and Syria.

Money matters

How politicians and political parties receive and spend money was found to be the weakest part of the electoral process in general. There are all kinds of threats to the integrity of elections that revolve around campaign money. Where campaign money comes from, for example, could affect a candidate’s ideology or policies on important issues. It is also often the case that the candidate who spends the most money wins – which means unequal opportunities are often part and parcel of an election.

It helps when parties and candidates are required to publish transparent financial accounts. But in an era where “dark money” can be more easily transferred across borders, it can be very hard to trace where donations really come from.

There are also solutions for many of the other problems, such as automatic voter registration, independence for electoral authorities, funding for electoral officials and electoral observation.

Democracy may need to be defended in battle, as we are currently seeing in Ukraine. But it also needs to be defended before it comes to all-out conflict, through discussion, protest, clicktivism and calls for electoral reforms.

Toby James, Professor of Politics and Public Policy, University of East Anglia and Holly Ann Garnett, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Royal Military College of Canada

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Otherwords.org ) – “Voter suppression” is a divisive and highly politicized term. But for the slate of bills Republicans are pushing across the country, it’s the only correct one.

They’re introducing these bills in virtually every state, but three — Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin — are especially worrisome. These swing states, along with Pennsylvania and Michigan, helped decide the last presidential election. Each flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020.

But now, in these states and elsewhere, Republicans want to make it harder to vote by mail, get rid of same-day voter registration and ballot drop-off boxes, limit early voting, reduce the number of voting booths at polling locations, and much more.

If you’re not paying attention to these election bills, you should be. They might determine the next president of the United States.

Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by a combined 45,000 votes. He didn’t win because of widespread voter fraud or some liberal conspiracy. He won because more people voted for him.

The GOP response hasn’t been to win more votes. It’s been to make sure fewer people get to vote.

Voting rights should be a bipartisan issue. Instead, we’re seeing Republicans throw every voter suppression idea they have at the wall of their Capitol buildings hoping something sticks. A big part of this is Trump’s iron grip over the Republican Party.

To appease Trump, Republicans have spent the last two years trying to overturn the last presidential election. They failed. But if the election bills they’re pushing are signed into law, they may not have to overturn the next one.

Texas Senate Bill 1 is a good example of the kind of restrictive bills Republicans are pursuing in at least 40 states — including those three swing states.

The new Texas law makes it illegal for election officials to send mail-in ballots to voters unless they ask for them. It requires a voter identification number to be included with mail-in ballots. And it bans 24-hour polling places, among other things.

In the first election since the law was implemented, over 27,000 mail ballots were flagged for rejection in Texas. Most rejections were due to a technicality — forgetting to include that newly required voter identification number.

In the end, 23,000 ballots were thrown out, which was about 13 percent of all mail ballots. In Democratic-dominated Harris County around Houston, that figure rose to 19 percent — nearly one in five ballots.

For comparison, less than 1 percent of mail-in ballots in Texas were rejected in the 2020 general election. When ballot rejections increase by 10- to 20-fold, that’s not a free and fair election.

If we see rejection numbers like Texas’s in a general election — especially in swing states like Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin — we’re talking about control of the House, Senate, and presidency being stolen. Not stolen from Democrats, but from voters.

According to the Voting Rights Lab, which tracks state-level election legislation, 565 election bills that restrict voter access or election administration have been introduced so far this session. Of those 565 bills, 129 are courtesy of Republicans in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin.

Elections should be about the person with the most votes winning. For Republicans, it’s about putting up as many barriers to voting as possible and shrinking the electorate until it churns out the result they want.

The good news for voters and for supporters of free and fair elections is the vast majority of those bills haven’t made their way out of their state legislatures. There’s still time to stop them.

Robert P. Alvarez is a media relations associate at the Institute for Policy Studies.

One of the most brazen recent examples is in Tennessee, where the Republican-dominated legislature recently proposed re-districting Nashville and Memphis, to break up their solidly Democratic congressional districts, and conjoin them with white suburban and rural areas to create new Republican majorities. https://dailymemphian.com/section/metrostate-government/article/26677/redistricting-tennessee-legislature-district-lines-us-house-of-representatives?utm_source=email_edition&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=morning_2022-01-25

This change means that Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) and Jim Cooper (D-TN), who represent Memphis and Nashville respectively, will have to face Republican challengers with the support of tens of thousands of newly anointed Republicans in their re-districted constituencies. They are the only two Democrats in the Tennessee congressional delegation, after Democrats in Chattanooga and Knoxville were gerrymandered out in prior campaigns.

The same thing already happened in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which enabled Donald Trump to win in 2016, despite Republicans being a minority in those states. Similar efforts are underway in North Carolina, Texas, Ohio and of course Georgia. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2021/nov/12/gerrymander-redistricting-map-republicans-democrats-visual According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 20 states have enacted 34 laws intended to make it harder for minorities to vote.

The sabotage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and Freedom to Vote Act by Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WVA) may be the death knell of free and fair elections in the United States. Sinema put on one of the most foul and disingenuous displays of phony indignation, when she tacitly endorsed the importance of free and fair elections, but then launched into an ugly rant about how important the filibuster is to preserving the integrity of the Senate, and therefore Democracy in America.

Oh please girl; you’ve got it all backwards. The filibuster has been used as an opaque cover to suppress minority voting rights since before Martin Luther King, Jr. called it out in 1963 saying, “I think the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting.” Nearly 50 years later, we’re back to Square One in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency. His legacy was the “all-clear” signal for bigoted people in America to come out, and act out all their repressed fantasies and frustrations since the original VRA passed in 1965.

Republicans, with the support of Manchin and Sinema, have characterized (slandered) the national effort to secure elections as “federal interference in state run elections.” That “states’ rights” thing is a slippery slope. States that used to argue for preservation of slavery, then Jim Crow and other oppressive legislation, now argue it is a state’s right to decide which sectors of a city or county may vote freely. The Justice Department got involved in local elections under Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960’s. The original Voting Rights Act of 1965 mandated Justice Department “pre-clearance” (approval) of any changes to everything from the number of polling places, hours of operation and other metrics.

The intent of the Lewis and Freedom to Vote Act is to overturn newly enacted voter-suppression laws in Republican states, by implementing new national standards that prevail over these state laws, designed to suppress minority voting. It would also restore the ability of the Justice Department to monitor and police states with histories of discrimination, which was wiped out by the Supreme Court in 2013 with their in Shelby County vs. Holder decision, and last year with Brnovich vs. the Democratic National Committee. The Freedom to Vote Act would expand voter registration efforts and better ensure voting access, while making it harder to remove voters from the eligibility list. It would also make Election Day a federal holiday.

Sinema earned praise from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for her phony indignation in support of McConnell’s Black vote suppression agenda. He said, “It was extraordinarily important and [Sinema] has, as a conspicuous act of political courage, saved the Senate as an institution.” Oh please! As if preserving a legislative tool designed by and FOR the comfort of slave-driving plantations has equal importance to the sacred right of all Americans to vote in free and fair elections.

Dispensing with the filibuster will not compromise the “Senate as an institution.” It will only increase the possibility of bringing in more thoughtful women and POC’s into that aging White Man’s Club, and that is what McConnell and Trump are fearful of. McConnell wants to preserve the Senate’s right to manipulate which SCOTUS nominees even get a hearing, and which nominees can be bulldozed through against other Senate customs and rules. It’s another vertigo-inducing rabbit hole, where anything not backwards is upside down.

Previously, I discussed the Republican “business plan” to stock local offices, state election boards and secretary of state offices with candidates loyal to Trump’s Stop the Steal madness. https://www.juancole.com/2021/12/insurrection-republican-government.html Trump still OWNS the Republican Party, where devotion to the Stop the Steal myth is a requirement for any Republican running for public office at any level. Honest Republicans, a vanishing breed, have been tormented and punished by Trump for upholding election results and refusing to cave to his intimidating demands such as, “find 11,700 votes.” Trump has prompted death threats against honest public officials who refuse him, and mustered an army of millions determined to rig state and local elections in perpetuity.

The current Supreme Court has been a willing accomplice to voter suppression efforts in recent years, most notably with the 2013 decision on Shelby County vs. Holder in North Carolina. The crux of Shelby County vs. Holder was that Section 4(b) of the 1965 VRA was unconstitutional because the formula was based on 40 year-old data. Sadly, the prompt for challenging the 1965 VRA never abated, and has escalated with the Stop the Steal fictions. The VRA of 1965 came about during a violent and dramatic time in American History. President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed it into law that August, to expand, protect and enforce the protections established by the14th and 15^th Amendments. That legislation was a direct response to the violence of that summer, which saw four black girls murdered in the bombing of a Black Birmingham church.

In July 2021, the Supreme Court made it even more difficult to challenge laws that suppress voting rights under Section 2 of the VRA, with their Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decision. In that ruling, the Court literally moved the goalposts back, creating new guidelines for determining Section 2 claims. The new SCOTUS standard used data from 1982, when Section 2 was last amended, to argue that Arizona offered more voting opportunities in recent years than 1982. This ruling ignored more current and cogent data, such as the number of polling places recently closed in minority areas and other brazen discrimination.

The John Lewis Voting Rights Act would renew and strengthen the VRA with stronger legal protections against discriminatory voting policies and partisan redistricting. It would restore what the Supreme Court struck down in the 2013 Shelby County decision, by creating a new formula to determine which jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination are subject to preclearance by the Justice Department. It would also add a practical coverage element, giving the Justice Department expanded jurisdiction in areas with a history of voting discrimination. Finally, it would also restore the original Section 2 provision of the 1965 VRA, in response to Brnovich, namely the right to issue legal challenges to visibly discriminatory voting practices in states with a history of same. This is what Senators Manchin and Sinema are resisting with greater force than the vortex of Republican hysteria.

State lawmakers are keeping their wealthy backers wealthy

( Inequality.org) – America’s national media typically pay little attention to the moves the nation’s state lawmakers make. Not this year. State legislative battles have emerged over recent months as a top-tier national story. And deservedly so. The battling at the state level — on a tidal wave of proposed new voter-suppression laws — could well determine the course of American democracy.

But state lawmakers are threatening democracy with more than schemes for voter suppression. In one state after another, legislators have been advancing and enacting tax cuts that pump more dollars into rich people’s pockets — and fix in place more plutocratic power over the political process.

In Arizona, for instance, the tax cuts enacted last year figure to deliver 55.5 percent of their benefits to the state’s top 1 percent. Arizonans making over half a million dollars will save an average $30,000 off their tax bills. Taxpayers making between $21,000 and $40,000 will average $13 in savings.

In Arkansas, among other tax changes, lawmakers chopped the highest state income rate — on income over $37,200 — from 5.9 to 4.9 percent. The state’s overall tax changes will save the poorest 20 percent of Arkansas taxpayers an average $17 each. Households in the state’s top 1 percent will average $10,400 in tax savings.

In Kansas, a state that should know better, a similar story. A decade ago, the state’s right-wing governor gave taxpayers of means a massive tax break that cratered state revenues and, relates Wesley Sharpe of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “forced schools to shift more costs on to parents and teachers” and “left millions of people without health insurance.” The Kansas economy, meanwhile, would see no sign of the “shot of adrenaline” the governor had promised the tax cut would deliver.

Now the Kansas legislature, news reports indicate, is revving up for more tax cutting. Lawmakers appear “likely to consider a bill that would take Kansas from three income tax brackets to a single rate,” a move that would destroy what remains of progressivity — the notion that higher incomes should face higher tax rates — in the state’s tax code.

Last year 14 states cut their taxes, either by enacting new rates that heap big benefits on the rich or having the cuts triggered by legislation passed in previous years. Some 20 states, the Institute for Tax and Economic Policy calculates, “are already discussing tax cuts for 2022.”

This rash of tax cutting has received precious little national attention, and — given our turbulent times — that shouldn’t surprise us. The ongoing tax cuts, after all, seem to involve mere dollars, not our national future as a democracy. But tax cuts for the rich and attacks on the integrity of our democracy go hand in hand. The same state legislatures that are pushing voter suppression are pushing “tax relief” for their state’s most affluent.

“Many of the same states — Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, and Kansas, to name a few — considering tax cuts are also making it harder for people to vote,” explains analyst Wesley Sharpe, “such as by criminalizing efforts to assist voters with disabilities.”

Statehouse cheerleaders for grand private fortune have also shown little respect for the niceties of democracy as they rush to lavish tax breaks on the already well-endowed. Arizona may be the most outrageous example. State GOP lawmakers there have been bending over backwards to undo the tax-the-rich will of the voters.

Those voters in 2020 approved a referendum that significantly raised taxes on Arizona’s rich to pay for increased funding for the state’s public schools. The voter-backed tax hike, details the Tax Foundation, “created a 3.5 percent high earners tax atop of the state’s existing 4.5 percent top marginal income tax rate, functionally yielding a new top rate of 8 percent.”

State lawmakers in Arizona would not accept the referendum result. In their 2021 session, they proceeded to rewrite the state’s basic tax-rate structure. They slashed the already existing 4.5 percent rate “to ensure” that the combined top rate Arizona’s richest face never exceeds 4.5 percent, essentially erasing the tax hike on the rich the referendum had put in place.

A “small group of politicians is helping their rich friends avoid paying their fair share to public schools,” responded Rebecca Gau, the executive director of Stand for Children Arizona. “Worst of all, they are trying to silence voters.”

Gau and other angry Arizona education advocates subsequently collected enough signatures to put onto the November 2022 ballot a referendum that would repeal the 2021 legislative session’s exceedingly rich people-friendly rate-rigging.

But Arizona’s conservative lawmakers have still another wildcard to play. They sense that state education advocates will prevail at the polls in this November’s referendum and kill the tax cut for the rich the legislature passed last year. The lawmakers’ new strategy? They’re planning to repeal the 2021 tax cut themselves in the 2022 legislative session and, as local news reports explain, “replace it with a new version, a move that would end a voter referendum that has stopped the tax cut law from taking effect.”

In the meantime, the Tax Foundation observes, no wealthy Arizonans will be facing the top 8 percent rate that voters adopted in 2020.

Rich people-friendly state lawmakers are moving on other fronts as well. Kentucky friends of grand private fortune want to replace more of the state’s income tax revenue with regressive hikes in the state sales tax. Iowa has begun a phased-in repeal of its inheritance tax. In Mississippi, the governor is calling for the total elimination of the personal income tax.

How are these pals of plutocrats justifying their magnanimity toward mega-millionaire households? They’re pointing to the sizeable budget surpluses many states are currently experiencing.

But those surpluses, points out Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analyst Neva Butkus, reflect a set of special circumstances that range from billions in federal Covid aid to changes in tax-filing deadlines during the pandemic that have left many 2020 and 2021 tax payments getting collected in the same fiscal year. Using the surpluses these special conditions have created as an excuse for permanently cutting the taxes rich people pay makes no fiscal sense.

The same legislators who were touting tax cuts for the rich as the perfect solution to our problems before the pandemic, adds ITEP’s Butkus, are now calling tax cuts for the rich the solution to our problems during the pandemic.

“Tax cuts,” she notes, “cannot be a solution to everything.”

Tac cuts carefully targeted to families struggling to get by, to be sure, can make solid policy sense. But tax cuts for wealthy households that have become wealthier during the pandemic have no redeeming social value. We shouldn’t be cutting the taxes these rich people pay. We should be raising them. And if we did that raising, the resulting revenue — and opportunities for real social progress — would be stunning.

Just how stunning? Oxfam, the Institute for Policy Studies, Patriotic Millionaires, and the Fight Inequality Alliance have just issued a new report that does the math, nation by nation and for the world as a whole.

In the United States, a nation whose billionaires now hold more wealth than the population’s poorest 60 percent, even a modest annual wealth tax — say one that started with a 2 percent levy on wealth over $5 million and topped off with a 5 percent bite on wealth over $1 billion — would raise close to $1 trillion a year, $928.4 billion to be more exact.

Oxfam is also proposing a one-time 99 percent tax on all the wealth the world’s ten richest men — a group that includes nine Americans — have gained since Covid hit. If these 10 richest men lost 99.999 percent of their combined fortunes, Oxfam goes on to note, each of them would still be richer than 99 percent of humanity.

Via Inequality.org

Content licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License

As the Republican Party has become more and more inflected by white nationalism, its officials have begun attempting to undo the gains of the Civil Rights Movement led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., which ended the Deep South’s practices of segregation and denying the vote to African-Americans. The Republican-captured Supreme Court, now also an instrument of white nationalism and corporate supremacy, struck down in the 2013 ruling Shelby County v. Holder the oversight provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The Southern states initiated a gold rush to restrict the right to vote with new tactics, rather than the old literacy tests, using voter ID requirements and reducing the number of polling stations in heavily minority counties.

The Brennan Center for Justice writes of 2021,

“Between January 1 and December 7, at least 19 states passed 34 restrictive laws. The restrictive laws make it more difficult for voters to cast mail ballots that count, make in-person voting more difficult by reducing polling place hours and locations, increase voter purges or the risk of faulty voter purges, and criminalize the ordinary, lawful behavior of election officials and other individuals involved in elections.”

There are two bills in Congress that would roll back the sinister and reactionary laws passed by Republican statehouses. The John Lewis Voting Rights Act would restore Department of Justice preclearance oversight of election laws in states with a tradition of suppressing the Black vote. The Freedom to Vote Act requires early voting days, no-excuse mail voting, and other provisions that protect this essential right from the provincial blowhards now tinkering with it.

Because all fifty Republican senators oppose both of these bills, they can’t get past the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to close off filibustering and allow a floor vote. Because two Democrats, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) oppose a carve-out of the filibuster for voting rights, the President cannot get the legislation he backs passed.

CNN explains that in the late 1700s, the Senate could vote to end debate on a bill and bring it to a floor vote by a simple majority. Even in the twentieth century, a filibuster to prevent a vote required the senator to stay on the floor speaking with no food or bathroom breaks. The current 60-vote rule for cloture or ending debate only dates from 1975, and from that time it was permitted to filibuster by simply registering an objection to cloture, rather than physically speaking at the podium.

One possible way forward for the Democrats is to go back to requiring senators to filibuster in person.

As we honor Dr. King today, it is worth remembering what he said about the filibuster:

“I think the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting. They won’t let the majority senators vote. And certainly they wouldn’t want the majority of people to vote, because they know they do not represent the majority of the American people. In fact, they represent, in their own states, a very small minority.”

As for voting rights, they were at the heart of King’s campaigns of civil disobedience. He said in Montgomery, Alabama in 1956,

“We must continue to gain the ballot. This is one of the basic keys to the solution of our problem. Until we gain political power through possession of the ballot we will be convenient tools of unscrupulous politicians. We must face the appalling fact that we have been betrayed by both the Democratic and Republican parties . . . Until we gain the ballot and place proper public officials in office this condition will continue to exist. In communities where we confront difficulties in gaining the ballot, we must use all legal and moral means to remove these difficulties. We must continue to struggle through legalism and legislation. There are those who contend that integration can come only through education, for no other reason than that morals cannot be legislated. I choose, however, to be dialectical at this point. It isn’t either education or legislation; it is both legislation and education.”

If voting rights keep being endangered, nonviolent noncooperation on a mass scale may well reemerge.

King said of the boycotts, marches and other campaigns of the Indian freedom struggle in British colonial India,

“I had heard of Gandhi, but I had never studied him seriously. As I read I became deeply fascinated by his campaigns of nonviolent resistance. I was particularly moved by the Salt March to the Sea and his numerous fasts. The whole concept of “Satyagraha” (Satya is truth which equals love, and agraha is force: “Satyagraha,” therefore, means truth-force or love force) was profoundly significant to me. As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform.”

The ballot and education are necessary for achieving social and racial justice. But where these are blocked, the truthforce may be brought into play. And in this moment, all of us are in danger of being robbed of the franchise, of the validity of our votes, by corrupt and tyrannical Trumpists. It isn’t just the African-Americans who face a new Jim Crow.