Month: October 2014

What a difference a day makes
by Tom Sullivan

The U.S. Supreme Court last night blocked implementation of Wisconsin’s photo ID law for next month’s election:

By a 6-3 vote, the justices granted an emergency appeal from civil rights lawyers, who argued it was too late to put the rule into effect this year.

Lawyers for the ACLU noted that the state had already sent out thousands of absentee ballots without mentioning the need for voters to return a copy of their photo identification.

It would be “chaos,” they said, for Wisconsin to have to decide whether to count such ballots now because voters had failed to comply with the new law.

Meanwhile in Texas, a federal district judge ruled the state’s photo ID card law unconstitutional:

U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos equated the law, which passed the Texas Legislature in 2011 and has been in effect since last year, to the poll taxes of the Jim Crow-era South that were used to hinder minorities’ ability to cast ballots.

“The Court holds that S.B. 14 creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, has an impermissible discriminatory effect against Hispanics and African-Americans, and was imposed with an unconstitutional discriminatory purpose,” Ramos’ opinion said. “The Court further holds that SB 14 constitutes an unconstitutional poll tax.”

While the Wisconsin and Texas rulings specifically addressed the ID sections of these laws, SCOTUS opinions on other voting restrictions have been a mixed bag:

Recent Supreme Court orders have restored voting restrictions in Ohio and North Carolina that appeals courts had blocked. The Ohio case concerned early voting, and the North Carolina case involved same-day registration and votes cast in error at the wrong precinct.

These court battles are far from over. The case challenging North Carolina’s sweeping, new voting law does not go to trial until next summer. While SCOTUS blocked implementation of Wisconsin’s ID provisions for November, federal court rulings on the law are still under appeal. Texas will appeal again, after “a long string of federal rulings” against its version. Texas immediately reinstated its photo ID requirement after SCOTUS eviscerated the Voting Rights Act’s Section 5 pre-clearance provision in 2013.

As I observed yesterday, SCOTUS conservatives this week came down harshly on Arkansas for restricting a Muslim prisoner’s religious freedom over an “exaggerated fear” about his beard. The same sort of exaggerated fear justices mocked in that case is the stated basis for photo ID laws across the country. Will SCOTUS’ conservatives bring the same skepticism to bear in protecting voting rights as religious rights?

From the “Ready for Warren” files

by Gaius Publius

Hello to regular readers of Hullabaloo. digby has graciously allowed me to contribute to these pages and to offer my thoughts on subjects she covers frequently. My thanks for that! I’ll try to write here with some regularity.

Part of what we cover is the Elizabeth Warren–Wall Street divide in the Democratic party. This divide has been short-handed as “Ready for Warren” and “Ready for Hillary,” but it covers whole philosophies, from Piketty-like attacks on wealth concentration to Democrats’ constant forgiveness of the crimes of the Insider class of either party.

Can you be in both wings? Can you be “ready” for both candidates? Not according to some. It looks like a group of “Ready for Warren” people are definitely not Ready for Hillary. The Hill:

Liberal grass roots gather to find a challenger for Hillary Clinton

Liberal groups are building a grassroots army in Iowa and New Hampshire in hopes of stopping a Hillary Clinton coronation in 2016.

While the progressive groups don’t have a candidate, they are hiring organizers and opening offices as if one will emerge.

At a minimum, the groups hope their efforts will push Clinton to the left. And if the political winds blow just right, the activists hope Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) will take the plunge — and turn their organizing work into the foundation for her candidacy.

Officials form Democracy For America, a liberal group, are getting involved in local-level politics by endorsing state House and Senate candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire in an effort to flip the states’ legislatures — and build momentum for 2016.

“[It’ll] send all politicians with 2016 ambitions a powerful message,” said DFA chairman Jim Dean.

“This is a preview, in a way, for coming attractions in 2016,” added DFA spokesman Neil Sroka.

This is the first year DFA has included Iowa and New Hampshire as part of its Purple to Blue Project, which began in 2013 and aims to flip legislature seats in “purple” states to Democratic control.

Ready For Warren, a group that is trying to draft Warren to run for president, is planning to open field offices in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, three early-contest states crucial to the primary process, said Erica Sagrans, the group’s campaign manager.

It comes as the group announced it is staffing up in those same states by hiring state coordinators, charged with building volunteer teams and handling local media requests.

“They’ll be our point people on the ground,” Sagrans said. “There’s a huge desire out there for an alternative progressive candidate. Democrats want there to be a choice in the primaries.”

Longer term, Sagrans said the group is looking to make inroads at universities. …

Something to keep an eye on, but with this caution. Be careful about that “pushing Clinton to the left” plan. You may not like what happens next. If she does make statements you want to hear, you’ll then have a new problem — deciding to believe her.

Notice two things from this article — the names of the groups involved, and the fact that there’s no candidate. The two groups are Democracy for America (DFA), Howard Dean’s progressive operation, and a newly active and organized “Ready for Warren” team, apparently headed up by Erica Sagrans.

Organizing without a candidate takes determination. I’ve been wondering when (or if) Democrats who are “ready for Warren” would decide they’re “not ready for Hillary” at all — that being in the actual Warren Wing, the one that means what it says, prevents you from ever joining the Wall Street Wing. Looks like that day has arrived.

Now if there were only a candidate …

(The Ready for Warren Facebook page is here; feel free to Like, Share and read it. The page is updated daily. My most recent thoughts on progressives, Democrats and Netroots Nation are here. As for candidates, I think we have many; we just need to broaden the net. Stay tuned.)

GP

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Who is Larry Pressler?

by digby

Blue America endorsed Rick Weiland for the Senate many moons ago, the minute we met him and realized that there was a good chance South Dakota was offering up another smart prairie populist in the mold of George McGovern. He wants to raise the minimum wage, expand Social Security and limit money in politics. And guess what?  He could win.

When I met Weiland back in 2013, he was accompanied by a very sharp young South Dakotan named Ryan Casey, a graduate of the Naval Academy and Georgetown’s school of public policy.  He was very enthusiastic about this campaign.  He still is. He wrote this piece about the Republican recently turned “independent” Larry Pressler for Down with Tyranny.  Before progressives get too excited about the prospect of an “Indy” winning the seat, they’d probably better take a look at who this guy is:

Sure, he endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, but that was only because he was sniffing around for a presidential appointment, after flirting with a run for DC Mayor and losing a Republican primary for U.S. House in 2002. Even now, Pressler won’t say whether he’d caucus with the Republicans or the Democrats; apparently he’s been reduced to auctioning his core values to the highest bidder.

His other claim to liberal fame these days is his (tepid) support for marriage equality, which puts him just to the right of that all-time patron saint of South Dakota progressives, Dick Cheney.

Pressler’s decades-long record as a Republican Congressman and Senator, however, tells a different story. There’s a reason South Dakota voters sent him out to pasture in 1996 and hired Tim Johnson instead. We decided it made a lot more sense to choose a trustworthy, genuine public servant like Tim as our senator than a phony, Beltway opportunist.

In fact, it was only last year that Larry Pressler supposedly searched his heart and quit the Republican Party. That’s right, as the national GOP careened off the rails after 2008 and ventured completely into crazytown—highlighted by the rise of the Tea Party, Birtherism, the War on Women, debt ceiling brinksmanship and the demonization of families on food stamps… after all that, Larry Pressler was still a Republican. Only in 2013, once it was clear that Mike Rounds would be the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate— despite his glaring liabilities as a back-bencher governor and a glass-jawed Senate candidate— did Pressler experience his epiphany on the ugly side of partisanship. How convenient.

But just for old time’s sake, let’s review Pressler’s actual record on Capitol Hill:

Buddies with MLK, Er…What?!

Pressler has laughably said he marched with Dr. King in the 1960s.

But if Larry was such a stalwart champion of Civil Rights, why was he one of just 22 senators to vote against the establishment of Martin Luther King Day in 1983? Did he truly oppose honoring the slain Civil Rights leader, or was he just trying to curry favor with the right wing ahead of his 1984 reelection campaign? With Larry, we just never know!

Then again, as he positioned himself for a run for DC mayor, Pressler actually told the Weekly Standard, “I have a lot of African American friends.”

The Original PAC-man

Larry Pressler shook down Big Money lobbyists and special interests before it was even cool. Back when he first got to Washington, lobbyists weren’t completely running the show. But Pressler held the dubious honor of having taken more PAC contributions than anyone else in the Senate or the House. That’s right— out of 535 Members of Congress, no one had a bigger hand out to Big Money than Larry Lee Pressler. To absolve himself, Pressler figured he could wipe away the stink by forbidding his staff from talking to lobbyists. But he was busted by the Associated Press: “At the same time Sen. Larry Pressler was barring his staff from talking to lobbyists for the telecommunications industry, he was soliciting the same lobbyists for thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.”

Not only was Pressler raking in telecom lobbyist money at the very same time he was writing their laws for them, he had a penchant for spending these campaign funds… on himself. The Argus Leader pointed out in 1994: “The [finance] reports dating to 1991 offer few clues to explain how or why Pressler and his wife incurred so many expenses that required reimbursement, or how any of the $500,000 spent related to campaign activities.”

And even with a Washington culture awash in Big Money, the Argus notes how Pressler’s big spending on himself stood out. “Pressler’s total was significantly more than any other senator….” Along with the gaudy campaign expense tabs for things like luxury hotels, maid services and the opera, Pressler drew a salary of more than $125,000 from his campaign for reelection, in addition to his Senate salary and generous benefit package.

At the End of the Day, a Phony

Larry Pressler has made not getting busted in the Abscam sting the crown jewel highlighting his civic virtue. But putting aside the fact that the hidden camera footage portrays Pressler more as a confused and paranoid huckster than an honorable public servant, how much credit should we give him for doing what he’s supposed to do? Even back in 1980, the Washington Post called out Pressler for embellishing his supposed heroism. “Pressler did a pretty classy job of conning the American public about his supposed Sir Galahad role. The videotapes show he chatted amicably with the FBI undercover agent both before and after the vague offer of money. The meeting lasted about half an hour… Nothing very heroic, perhaps, but nothing Pressler had to lie about. Apparently he couldn’t resist the temptation to work his personal political Abscam on the public.”

There’s more at the link.

Mayday PAC’ going in with big money for Weiland. But he needs all the help he can get.You can contribute here.

Howie updates here:

DSCC Won’t But GOP Is Going After Pressler

The Beltway has finally discovered there’s a big race in South Dakota. Lawrence Lessig’s PAC and the DSCC both put in a million dollars, Lessig for Weiland and the DSCC against Rounds. As Greg Sargent put it in his Washington Post column this morning, this race tests whether or not “Democrats can win even on difficult political terrain by unabashedly campaigning on an economically populist platform excoriating big money’s influence in politics and its role in rigging the economy against working and middle class Americans.” The Washington Examiner emphasized that the GOP is ready to go on the attack against Pressler…

A loud, ugly Republican civil war pitting Rounds against Pressler— with teabagger Gordon Howie howling in the background— would certainly help lock up the race for Weiland.

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Once a back-stabber always a back-stabber

by digby

Why are people surprised that Leon Panetta is stabbing the president in the back before he’s left office? Don’t they remember this?

Former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta is already speculating about a possible Clinton resignation.

“If these are baseless charges, it’ll be OK. On the other hand, if there’s something there, and it leads to him having to step out of office, it may be time to do some repair work and that may not have the consequences you would expect,” Panetta said.

If the charges are true, Panetta said, it would be better for the Democratic Party “if Gore became president and you had a new message and new individual up there.”

That was days after the Lewinsky scandal blew up. He was among the first to raise the possibility of resignation which got the Republicans so excited they almost passed out.

I’d like to feel sorry for the Obama White House but they hired him knowing that he was disloyal and self-serving. What did they expect?

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That red, white and blue leg of the GOP stool

by digby

Over at Salon today I talk a bit about the Republicans’ new National Security strategy:

If there is one thing liberals have envied about the conservative movement over the years, it’s the simple and clear metaphor they employ to describe their coalition: a three legged stool consisting of “family values, small government and a strong national defense.” (If you’ve ever had the experience of listening to Democratic strategists struggle with an “elevator pitch” you’d understand why.) The original brilliance of that metaphor was the idea that it requires all three legs to stand up so every faction must be equally supported by the others. (I would argue that the seat of the stool is law and order — aka race — but the poor metaphor is so tortured at this point that it’s about to collapse of its own weight, so I won’t.) In any case, over time those factions all merged into a party consensus that was simply called “conservatism” and the three legs of the stool today merely symbolize the three issue areas that animate the Party. Each set of concerns is always relevant to some extent or another but when one gets a little bit shaky they can usually trot out one of the other ones to rally their troops.

So it’s not just an ideological coalition, it’s also an electoral strategy. For instance, when the Obamacare fearmongering fails to produce the predicted chaos they could shift gears and start frothing about debt and taxes. Or when the culture warriors go too far and start babbling about “legitimate rape” and call women who use birth control a bunch of sluts they can call in the nativists to scream about an “invasion of illegals” or stoke fears that we are in imminent danger of terrorists killing us all in our beds. When events break just right, they can even combine them to create a full-blown panic.

Here’s how it’s being done for the upcoming election:

read on …

You won’t believe some of these ads …

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They never gave it a chance

by digby

From the “conservatism can never fail it can only be failed” files, we have Sam Brownback saying that despite the fact he got everything he wanted and it put his state into economic hell, it’s all the liberals’ fault.

In an exclusive one-on-one interview with The Brody File, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback came out swinging against his critics who say his conservative plan to revive the state’s economy by eliminating state income and corporate taxes has backfired. “I think the left is just so desperate,” Brownback tells The Brody File.” They want this model to fail so bad that they can’t wait for it to and they just want to get me electorally before we get on through this and prove that this is working.”

During the interview, Governor Brownback was adamant that his policies to turn the state around economically will work, citing a number of recent reports that brought positive economic news. But he readily admits that ultimate success won’t happen overnight. “Tax policy takes some time for it to work but it is the exact right thing to do.”

As usual, the American public just hasn’t given conservative policies a chance. They just need a little more time. Because in the long run it’s bound to get better, right? Right???

H/t to Perlstein

QOTD: Laura Ingraham

by digby

Explaining why her daily offensive and bigoted statements about Latinos aren’t xenophobic:

“I have a Latina living in my house who basically runs the show,” Ingraham said without explanation. “She runs the Ingraham household.”

I would imagine most people assume she’s talking about her housekeeper which would be bad enough. But she could also be talking about her Central American daughter. One can only imagine how confused that poor kid is going to feel when she hears her mother’s despicable commentary about Latinos polluting the American culture and destroying our “way of life.” And worse.

Perhaps Ingraham will just explain this was how mommy put food on the table and perhaps her daughter will forgive her. Kids love their parents. But Ingraham could have found a different kind of red meat specialty to serve up to her audience than Hispanic xenophobia if she was going to raise a Latina child. Unless, of course, she really believes all the stuff she says in which case it’s even more disturbing …

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SCOTUS: Weird with a beard
by Tom Sullivan

We’re going to discuss photo IDs and vote suppression in just a minute.

But first, God and beards were before the Supreme Court on Tuesday in the case of Holt v. Hobbs. At issue: Whether a Muslim prisoner in Arkansas should be allowed to wear a beard in accordance with his religious faith. Per federal statute, prisons should allow such accomodation. As a compromise, the plaintiff, Holt, had agreed that a half-inch beard would satisfy his obligation to God.

University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock testified for the plaintiff.

Inside the court chamber, Laycock told the justices that 40 prison systems allow beards of any length, yet Arkansas still will not allow a short, half-inch beard. That policy, he argued, is “seeking absolute deference to anything they say, just because they say it.”

Admitting that they have no similar policy restricting hair on the head, Arkansas Deputy Attorney General David Curran argued that facial hair is a different matter. Why, a prisoner might be able to shave his beard to change his appearance before an escape or before sneaking into another barracks to assault another prisoner.

Chief Justice Roberts interrupted, “You have no examples of that ever happening.”

Well, he might hide contraband in his beard, Curran offered. (This was not going well.) Justice Breyer jumped in:

“Would you say it’s an exaggerated fear that people would hide something in their beards when, in a country of a very high prison population, not one example has ever been found of anybody hiding anything in his beard?” Breyer asked.

Would such exaggerated fears justify allowing the state to interfere with the prisoner’s free exercise of religion?

Curren replied, “Just because we haven’t found the example doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”

Justice Alito fired back:

“Why can’t the prison just give the inmate a comb . . . and if there’s anything in there, if there’s a SIM card in there or a revolver — or anything else you think can be hidden in a 1/2-inch beard, a tiny revolver — it’ll fall out,” Alito said.

Just such exaggerated fears such are at the heart of the voter fraud frauds’ relentless campaign to require photo IDs for voting. We need to restore confidence in the election process, they argue, after having spent decades undermining it.

They Might Be Giants

See, not requiring photo IDs might pose a threat of voter impersonation. Dead or relocated people still on registration rolls might be used by criminals to vote multiple times. People registered in two states might vote in both. GIS, USPS, and local address systems don’t always agree — people with odd-looking addresses might be registered fraudulently. Somebody might be running off fake utility bills as ID for the homeless dead from housing projects.

What voter fraud sleuths never seem to produce are living, breathing perpetrators of in-person voter fraud as lively as their imaginations.

“Just because we haven’t found the example doesn’t mean they aren’t there.” Hans von Spakovsky, True the Vote, and the Voter Integrity Project believe the same thing, and just as firmly.

Come to think of it, underneath their rubber skin, True the Vote members might be Red Lectroids from Planet 10. You know, there could be thousands of them Lectroids on our planet, in our country, and voting illegally in our elections, and we would ever know, would we? Because WE’RE NOT LOOKING. So, DNA tests for every voter, right? I mean, you wouldn’t want Red Lectroids corrupting the integrity of our elections.

Just because they say it, are exaggerated fears about might-be fraud sufficient to justify states erecting obstacles to voting that disenfranchise Americans young and old, poor and minority? Because a new report by the Government Accountability Office suggests that that is just what photo ID laws do. And lo and behold, “declines were greater among younger and African-American voters, when compared to turnout in other states.”

In deciding the 2008 Crawford v. Marion County Election Board photo ID case in Indiana, it’s a shame that the nine Supreme Court justices had not heard this hairy one from Arkansas first. As SCOTUS now mulls over the “horrendous” ruling this week upholding Scott Walker’s photo ID law in Wisconsin, perhaps now the court will bring the same degree of skepticism to protecting Americans’ voting rights as it showed in protecting religious ones.

Then again, don’t hold your breath.

To the rescue

by digby

I’m sure you’ve seen this already but you need to see it again just to feel good about the sheer privilege of being able to witness it:

Ah, that’s better …

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QOTD: Duncan Hunter Jr

by digby

”[a]t least ten ISIS fighters have been caught coming across the border in Texas.”

Sure they have. When asked where he got the information he said from the Border Patrol.

Homeland Security said he is completely full of hot air:

“The suggestion that individuals who have ties to ISIL have been apprehended at the Southwest border is categorically false, and not supported by any credible intelligence or the facts on the ground,” the spokeswoman told The New Republic. “DHS continues to have no credible intelligence to suggest terrorist organizations are actively plotting to cross the southwest border.”

This is insane. Hunter isn’t some Tea Party gadfly or cynical talk radio gasbag. He’s a US congressman. And it doesn’t matter if a couple of border patrol yahoos told him this or he saw it in a peyote induced vision it’s cracked either way for him to be spewing this nonsense.

Good lord. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from all this is that it doesn’t take a spectacular terrorist attack like 9/11 to make these people foul their trousers in fear. A cheap video of an execution in a war zone by a guy in a scary costume will do the trick for a lot less planning, time and money.

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