Author: Tom Sullivan

Privatized politics
by Tom Sullivan

“President Hillary thanks you,” I used to say when Republicans saluted any expansion of presidential power under George W. Bush. As someone who watched lots of 1950s science fiction and monster films growing up, I have a healthy appreciation for how what at first seem like good ideas have a way of quickly spinning out of control. And the Citizens United ruling never seemed like a good idea. Yet it spun out of control faster than Frankenstein’s monster.

Jim Rutenberg looks at how the decision has allowed America’s oligarchs of whatever political persuasion to become “their own political parties.” Rutenberg sat in on a strategy session with hedge fund billionaire, Tom Steyer, founder of NextGen Climate Action, itself “a capitulation to the post-Citizens United world.” Gubernatorial candidate and former Florida governor, Charlie Christ, could wait:

With the advent of Citizens United, any players with the wherewithal, and there are surprisingly many of them, can start what are in essence their own political parties, built around pet causes or industries and backing politicians uniquely answerable to them. No longer do they have to buy into the system. Instead, they buy their own pieces of it outright, to use as they see fit. “Suddenly, we privatized politics,” says Trevor Potter, an election lawyer who helped draft the McCain-Feingold law.

Now we have Michael Bloomberg, who has committed to spending $50 million to support gun-control legislation; his Independence USA PAC, meanwhile, is spending $25 million this fall to elect “centrists.” We have the TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts and his group Ending Spending, which has spent roughly $10 million so far this year to elect fiscal conservatives to Congress, an effort that has drawn support from the billionaire hedge-fund executive Paul E. Singer, who has also devoted tens of millions to Republican candidates who share his views on Israel. We have Mark Zuckerberg and his FWD.us, with a budget of about $50 million to push an immigration overhaul. In 2014, as of early October, when the campaigns had yet to do their big final pushes, overall spending was already more than $444 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Roughly $231 million was from the parties and their congressional committees, the rest from outside spending. The biggest chunk of that by far came from super PACs — more than $196 million. Looking at those numbers, it’s not hard to understand why Crist was willing to wait outside a conference room in Coral Gables for Steyer.

Citizens United has created new playgrounds for ideological billionaires where America’s quasi-democratic process used to be. Are there not enough islands for sale, or enough gulches?

Gaming democracy

by Tom Sullivan

Last night, judges once again struck down another state’s photo ID law. This time in Arkansas:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas’ highest court on Wednesday struck down a state law that requires voters to show photo identification before casting a ballot, ruling the requirement unconstitutional just days before early voting begins.

In a decision that could have major implications in the Nov. 4 election, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that determined the law unconstitutionally added a requirement for voting.

The high court noted the Arkansas Constitution lists specific requirements to vote: that a person be a citizen of both the U.S. and Arkansas, be at least 18 years old and be lawfully registered. Anything beyond that amounts to a new requirement and is therefore unconstitutional, the court ruled.

Similar rulings have occurred with Republican voting laws in Pennsylvania (January), Wisconsin, and Texas, although the Texas ruling by the U.S. District Court was overturned yesterday by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The day before the Wisconsin ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed North Carolina to implement its ban on same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting. The state’s sweeping voting bill goes to trial next summer. The mixed rulings may have more to do more with timing than principle:

Despite the flurry of high court rulings, many legal analysts and some judges say the Supreme Court’s actions are less about broad voting rights principles than telling federal judges to butt out, particularly so close to Election Day. In each of the cases where the justices acted, lower federal courts had issued orders that would have changed the rules for elections just weeks away, potentially causing confusion among voters and election officials.

You have to wonder when (and if) the light bulb will come on in the public consciousness. Our moneyed lords and their Republican vassals oppose the very idea of democracy for fear of the peasants peeing on the furniture. The succession of court challenges overturning photo ID laws and marriage equality bans follows a pattern seen in Republican-led states across the country, certainly here in North Carolina. GOP legislatures feel empowered (and directed) to push the constitution and established rules to the limits and beyond, and they dare anyone to stop them. As president-elect George W. Bush quipped, “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.” Was that a Kinsley gaffe?

Charlie Pierce in Esquire on the GOP mining democracy [emphasis mine]:

Simply put, the Republican party deliberately has transformed itself from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of I’ve Got Mine, Jack. And it rarely, if ever, gets called to account for that. As a result, and without substantial notice or paying a substantial price, and on many issues, individual Republicans have been able to justify the benefits they’ve received from government activity that they now oppose in theory and in practice. This is not “hypocrisy.” That is too mild a word. This is the regulatory capture of the government for personal benefit. That it makes a lie, again and again, of the basic principles of modern conservatism — indeed, that it shows those principles to be a sham — is certainly worthy of notice and debate. It is certainly worthy of notice and debate that the conservative idea of the benefits of a political commonwealth means those benefits run only one way. Modern conservatism is not about making the government smaller. It’s about making the government exclusive.

They are bent on gaming democracy the way they game capitalism.

For thee, but not for she

by Tom Sullivan

How are those Stand Your Ground laws working for ya? Well, if you’re a man like George Zimmerman and not a black man, just fine. And if you’re a woman?

“(The Legislature’s) intent … was to provide law-abiding citizens greater protections from external threats in the form of intruders and attackers,” prosecutor Culver Kidd told the [Charleston, SC] Post and Courier. “We believe that applying the statute so that its reach into our homes and personal relationships is inconsistent with (its) wording and intent.”

In South Carolina, prosecutors are appealing a circuit judge’s ruling that under the state’s Protection of Persons and Property Act Whitlee Jones should not face trial in the stabbing death of her boyfriend two years ago. During a fight in which he dragged a screaming Jones down the street by her hair, reports Think Progress, neighbors called police.

When the officer arrived that night, the argument had already ended and Jones had fled the scene. While she was out, Jones decided to leave her boyfriend, Eric Lee, and went back to the house to pack up her things. She didn’t even know the police officer had been there earlier that night, her lawyer Mary Ford explained. She packed a knife to protect herself, and as she exited the house, she says Lee attacked her and she stabbed Lee once in defense. He died, although Jones says she did not intend to kill him.

The Stand Your Ground defense tends to succeed in “many more cases involving white shooters and black victims,” says Think Progress, however,

In cases in which women have invoked Stand Your Ground laws, an MSNBC analysis found that women invoking the Stand Your Ground defense against white men succeeded in only about 2.6 percent of cases (2.9 percent of the woman was also white). The disparity of Stand Your Ground cases came to national attention with the case of Marissa Alexander, who was sentenced to 20 years in jail for firing a warning shot against her alleged abuser. She was denied Stand Your Ground immunity.

A Florida appellate court overturned Alexander’s 20-year sentence just weeks ago. Judging by the Google, the ruling barely made a blip on the national radar.

Alexander unsuccessfully tried to invoke Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law as the same prosecutors who unsuccessfully worked to put Zimmerman behind bars told the court that she did not act in self-defense.

In granting the new trial, Judge James H. Daniel also seemed unmoved by the Stand Your Ground defense.

“We reject her contention that the trial court erred in declining to grant her immunity from prosecution under Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, but we remand for a new trial because the jury instructions on self-defense were erroneous,” wrote Daniel.

Both Alexander and Jones are black women. “Inconsistent with [the statute’s] wording and intent”? Maybe. Or perhaps it was just a Freudian slip about whom Stand Your Ground laws consider “law-abiding citizens.”

The Sudetenland will rise again

by Tom Sullivan

Last October, Asheville, NC introduced America to Don Yelton on The Daily Show. You remember? The clip where Aasif Mandvi asked Yelton, “You know that we can hear you, right?” after the Republican precinct chair’s remark about “lazy blacks.”

This October, it’s a swastika photoshopped in front of city hall. Asheville is nothing if not colorful.

Known for its hipster arts scene, craft beer culture, and LGBT-friendly atmosphere, Asheville was dubbed “a cesspool of sin” in 2011 by James Forrester, the late Republican state senator. (You could buy tee shirts within hours.) As local gay couples on Thursday anticipated a federal order allowing same-sex marriages for the first time in North Carolina, city council members approved displaying a large rainbow flag from city hall. The local register’s office began issuing licenses late Friday.

So once more unto the breach, two Republican culture warriors — both known for publicity stunts — stepped up to strike back by photoshopping a Nazi flag in place of an image of the rainbow flag. The Sudetenland will rise again or something.

The two Republicans, former city councilman Carl Mumpower and former Buncombe County GOP chairman Chad Nesbitt, criticized the move saying the Asheville City Council’s decision to fly the flag (the council voted unanimously to display it) violated North Carolina open meeting laws.

“I am equating their methods with the Nazi movement,” Mumpower said according to the North Carolina newspaper. “They are indifferent to the rule of law and indifferent to the vote of the people. And that’s Adolph [sic] Hitler all over again in a different disguise.”

These proud, local characters stand as living proof that hippies and fall leaves are not the only local color in town.

The new corruption

by Tom Sullivan

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the system is rigged. Sen. Elizabeth Warren makes that point at every opportunity. But her most recent interview about that with Thomas Frank in Salon shifted too quickly from philosophy to process. Warren would rather talk about how the rigging hurts working people. She wants to explain how the system is rigged and by whom:

The system is rigged. And now that I’ve been in Washington and seen it up close and personal, I just see new ways in which that happens. But we have to stop and back up, and you have to kind of get the right diagnosis of the problem, to see how it is that—it goes well beyond campaign contributions.

Indeed it does. But “the question that lies at the heart of whether our democracy will survive” isn’t a matter of process or policy.

Janine Wedel comes closer to the mark in an excerpt (also in Salon) from her book, “Unaccountable: How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt our Finances, Freedom, and Security.” Everyday people know the system is rigged better than the elite. Wedel sees it in the comments section of Transparency International’s annual rankings of corrupt countries. “Ordinary people have an instinctual grasp of the real nature of corruption and the inequality that often results.” The United States, they believe, is “grievously under-scrutinized.”

Research out in 2014 shows just how gamed it really is. Two political scientists looked at 1,779 policy issues hashed out from 1981 to 2002 and found that policies widely supported by economically elite Americans were adopted about forty-five percent of the time. If these same Americans indicated little support? Eighteen percent. They write: “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” Lest you blame the typically business-oriented Republicans, consider what one of the researchers said in an interview: “Both parties have to a large degree embraced a set of policies that reflect the needs, preferences and interests of the well to do.”

That the system is rigged resounds worldwide. There’s a documented and striking loss of confidence in formal institutions, from governments, parliaments, and courts to banks and corporations, to the media. Apparently, people feel that their public institutions and leaders now merit even less confidence than in the past.

The source (or at least the symptom) is the unaccountability at the top, Wedel argues.

Whether it’s the behavior of public figures or the behavior of public institutions, the new corruption is anchored in unaccountability. Unaccountability, as we shall see in the next chapter, is structured into the DNA of many of today’s corporate and governmental organizations. It is an essential but incomplete condition for the new corruption—the violation of the public trust.

Not having read that chapter for Wedel’s view of organizational DNA, here’s mine. Limited liability—the veil of personal immunity—is a core feature of the modern corporation most of us spend our lives working for. The all-holy Market may impose some external economic discipline on business. But personal unaccountability holds together the strands of corporate DNA. It is no small irony that the most well-heeled servants of the dominant business model so vigorously promote personal responsibility—for others. The corporate form has become the water we swim in but can no longer see when seeking a diagnosis for the widespread corruption both Wedel and Warren identify. If capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, as Marx believed, are those seeds produced by the very way we structure our businesses?

Can we immerse ourselves for years on end in a modern business culture suckled on the “morality” of Ayn Rand now taught in business schools, where the self answers to no one, where greed is good, where the bottom line rules, where human beings are “resources” to be consumed, and not be corrupted by it? Think a few motivational posters, a lofty mission statement, or an hour at church each Sunday seeking a higher power will neutralize 50-60 per week spent in service to a different god?

Professor Donald McCabe’s 2006 Rutgers study of cheating behavior found that at the business school level:

Fifty-six percent of graduate business students admitted to cheating … while only 47 percent of their non-business counterparts confessed to it.

Both figures should be shocking.

Duke’s Fuqua School of Business disciplined 34 students for cheating in 2007. McCabe explained to reporters:

“They’ll argue that they’re just emulating the behavior they’re seeing in the corporate world; they’re acquiring a skill that will serve them well when they’re out there,” McCabe, 63, said in an interview. “Getting the job done is the important thing. How you get it done is less important.”

Yves Smith went further, sniffing at the idea that ethics courses would make any difference:

“… American elites are openly corrupt. You can see it with the revolving doors between regulators and top industry jobs, the way CEOs and top politicians tell astonishing lies whenever they are in trouble, the weird combination of precision on inconsequential details versus the carefully coached combinations of misleading but not untruthful answers and “I don’t recall” when you sure as hell know they do remember, the way the press is so thick with propaganda that it takes an Enigma machine to pull out any real messages. So with those role models, why should we expect business school graduates to be paragons of virtue? The are aspiring Masters of the Universe. They are smart enough to see what the real game is, and the message conveyed by the business press and who rises to the top in large organizations today is far more powerful than any lecture, no matter how well or frequently delivered.”

Especially when Democrats and Republicans and authorities across the globe let them get away with anything so long as the donations keep flowing, the doors keep revolving, and accountability is for suckers.

Every breath you take, Every move you make

by Tom Sullivan

I woke up in the middle of the night with that line in my head, sat down at the piano and had written it in half an hour. The tune itself is generic, an aggregate of hundreds of others, but the words are interesting. It sounds like a comforting love song. I didn’t realize at the time how sinister it is. I think I was thinking of Big Brother, surveillance and control.

—Sting

As other states across the country, North Carolina is looking at ways to implement legislation that would allow drone use in the state. The FAA is still attempting to define how they might safely share the skies with other aircraft. Equipped with a GoPro camera, small drones seem like nifty tools for photographers and hobbyists. But given the growing surveillance state revealed by Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, it is natural that civil liberties groups –
and even the T-party – are wary of their use by the government against civilians. It didn’t help that one of the sites chosen for early testing in the state belongs to the private security company formerly known as Blackwater.

This morning, the Winston-Salem Journal begins a 3-part series on how drones have been promoted in North Carolina, and by whom.

Imagine: You’re having an open-invitation BBQ in your own backyard. Friends can bring friends. Anyone can come. Thanks to newly enacted legislation, local and state law enforcement agencies are allowed to show up, too, without a warrant, to spy on you with drones.

It seems an unlikely scenario. Yet, a staff attorney at the state General Assembly’s Research Division, confirmed that it could happen. At a BBQ, “a Moral Monday planning session at a friend’s house” or “a conservative Tea Party gathering.”

Barry Summers, an Asheville-based activist, had attended earlier committee meetings on the legislation. As he described it, he was the only civilian in the room. The rest – the players – tended to be industry, military, ex-military, and Booz Allen (Snowden’s former employer). And, of course, ALEC wants to Open the Sky for Innovation and
Entrepreneurship. Over the summer, the North Carolina legislation was slipped quietly and anonymously into a must-pass budget bill:

The drone legislation was never the subject of a debate in the House or Senate.

The standalone drone bill – House bill 1099 – passed unanimously in the second hour of a marathon four-hour session in the House in June. Next, it died in the Senate before appearing in August, not as a standalone bill but as a section of the lengthy $21 billion budget bill, which contained more pressing items, such spending on education, Medicaid and roads, for example.

When asked, several sponsors of the language did not respond to questions. (One sponsor earlier denied it had passed after voting for it.)

Other local reports that the police video Moral Monday rallies where no arrests were made have angered civil liberties activists. Even the local T-party president:

“I think there’s a transparency issue,” she said. “If they are taking these pictures in a public place we have a right to know where are they being stored, who’s storing them, why aren’t they being destroyed. I think these are legitimate questions we need to ask.”

The Winston-Salem Journal asked principal sponsor Rep. John Torbett, R-Gaston, about privacy issues:

Asked by email whether he and other supporters of the drone legislation “espouse the notion that people should not have an expectation of privacy when having an open-invitation gathering at their home — when having, for example, a backyard BBQ to which anyone is invited?” he said: “They could do no more with a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) then they can do with the help or Cessna. … If folks feel we need additional language next session, then we can always adjust for absolute clarity.”

I know I feel more secure now.

A new prairie populism?


by Tom Sullivan

Somebody described the DNC’s presidential campaign strategy as counting on large, reliable blocks of Electoral College votes from the East and West coasts, then betting on hitting a triple bank shot and pick up enough votes in a couple of big, Midwest states to total 270. The less-populous “flyover states” in the heartland and the South they abandoned to Rush Limbaugh and the GOP long ago.

Howard Dean thought that was nuts. The DNC thought Howard was nuts. And even after Dean as DNC Chair implemented his Fifty State Strategy and Democrats started winning in places that had not seen the DNC in decades, Beltway Democrats pitched Dean’s strategy as soon as Dean left.

Mike Lux sees a new populism lifting Democratic fortunes in the Plains States in a way Dean would approve. In Oklahoma and North Dakota Democrats are surprisingly competitive this year. And more:

In my home state of Nebraska, the open seat Governor’s race is very competitive, with prairie populist Chuck Hassebrook within 7 points in the latest public poll of close friend of the Koch brothers (He spoke at their secret meeting in June), Pete Ricketts. Hassebrook has spent his career advocating for small farmers and small town businesses at the Center for Rural Affairs, while Ricketts’ Koch-style extremism has gotten him into hot water. (First bias alert: Hassebrook is a long time friend.) Meanwhile, the Democrat running for the House in the Omaha district, Brad Ashford, is in a dead heat race with Republican incumbent Lee Terry. 

In Kansas, as anyone following politics has become aware of in recent weeks, both incumbent Republican Governor Sam Brownback and incumbent Republican Senator Pat Roberts are in very deep trouble, with high unfavorability numbers and trailing consistently in the polls. The Roberts campaign has been awful, but a big part of the reason for the problems these Republicans are having is that Brownback’s extreme tax and spending cut agenda have badly alienated voters. 

Finally in South Dakota, in a race long written off by many pundits and national Democrats, support for Republican Mike Rounds has been collapsing in a 4 way race, and Democrat Rick Weiland (2nd bias alert, Rick is also a good friend whose campaign I am helping) is now close enough in the polling that both the DSCC and several progressive groups are putting real money into the state to help him. Rick is running a classic folksy prairie populist campaign against big money, including writing his own lyrics and singing songs like this one on the campaign trail:

Someone complained to me yesterday about Sen. Kay Hagan ignoring rural counties in western North Carolina. She parachutes into the cities for high-dollar fundraisers and high-profile events, but is invisible in redder counties with few Democrats with fat checkbooks. If your priorities run in election cycles, that makes a kind of sense. Lux offers observations taking a longer view [Emphasis mine]:

The first is that these Democrats are campaigning with gusto in small towns and rural counties. There is a very large part of America that Democrats can’t win without appealing to rural voters, and as Democrats have become more oriented over the years toward focusing on big cities and the suburbs, they have sometimes forgotten to reach out to folks in small towns and on farms and ranches. That has made red states redder, and it has made it harder for Democrats to win a majority in the House. But Democrats in the Plains States are making campaigning in small towns and rural counties a cornerstone of their campaigns. Hassebrook, as I mentioned, has been an advocate for rural folks his whole career, and had robust, active steering committees set up in every county in Nebraska from early in his campaign. He fully expects to win or come close in a lot of rural counties where the last Democratic candidate for Governor, Bob Kerrey, did not get to 30%. In South Dakota, Rick Weiland made as the centerpiece of his campaign strategy the idea that he would become the first candidate to ever go to all 311 South Dakota towns, making quite a contrast with Rounds who has spent most of his campaign raising money on the east and west coasts. The bottom line is that rural voters are like anyone else: if you ignore them, they won’t like you. National Democrats have been ignoring rural America for too long, but these Plains States Democrats are proving that they can win a lot of rural votes if they just work at it.

Are we willing to?

.

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?

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.

Picking sides

By Tom Sullivan

The Boston Globe’s Noah Bierman examines the struggle between the populist, Elizabeth Warren Wing of the Democratic Party and corporate-backed, Third Way centrists. When critics charge there is no difference between the major parties, Democrats have their Wall Street Wing to thank:

Third Way’s founders dispute that they are doing Wall Street’s bidding or are trying to leave the poor behind. They also insist their financial supporters on the board of trustees do not influence the organization’s political and policy positions.

And yet, Bierman points out,

Third Way’s insistence on linking tax hikes to a grand bargain — which has been impossible to obtain in the Obama era — has a direct bearing on the wallets of the group’s wealthy funders.

Among those are Goldman Sachs Gives. The charitable fund donated a total of $850,000 in 2010 and 2011. So even as the middle class erodes and the party itself moves further left, “financial dependence on Wall Street effectively ties the hands of the Democratic Party,” contends former Clinton labor secretary, Robert Reich.

In a surprising attack on the Warren Wing in the The Wall Street Journal last December, Third Way warned that Warren-style economic populism is a dead end for Democrats. Populist candidates may appeal to the party’s liberal base, writes Bierman, but sound anti-business to the party’s corporate funders.

“That really has never generated a hell of a lot of support on Election Day,” said former JP Morgan Chase senior executive, former Obama chief of staff, and Third Way board member, William M. Daley — no doubt also an authority on neighborhood organizing.

Or not. Especially since the country hasn’t heard a Warren-style populist message since FDR. And you know how that worked out.

As a matter of fact, while Third Way defends the Democrats’ right flank, the rest of the party is moving left, according to Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect. Since 2000, Gallup reports, as party moderates shrank from 44 to 36 percent, the ranks of self-described liberals swelled from 29 to 43 percent. Shifting demography fueled by immigration is one reason.

Nonetheless, business-cozy groups such as Third Way (supposedly concerned with electing Democrats) favor trade agreements unpopular with the Democratic base, but that cater to the “job creators” who bankroll them. But those agreements tend to create more new jobs offshore for people who cannot vote in U.S. elections! Meanwhile, the profit creators — American workers themselves — see fewer of those rising corporate profits in their paychecks. Therefore, as the American middle class continues to shrink, Meyerson believes it’s time for the party to — as both Roosevelts did — pick a side.

Meyerson offers several prescriptions you can read about here.

Village Democrats are consistently about a decade behind their base. Their dependency on corporate money is a big reason why. Money has such a nice, insulating effect that way. But it’s time party leaders caught on and caught up. Perhaps defending the status quo is the real dead end.