198 search results for ""election integrity""

Has Putin compromised the GOP too?
by Tom Sullivan

California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher was among a group of Republicans that appeared to endorse a fictional program to arm toddlers on Showtime’s ‘Who Is America?’ — Hollywood Reporter.

Former CIA Moscow station chief Daniel Hoffman summarizes Vladimir Putin’s KGB tradecraft with a Russian expression, “What makes a person breathe?” Seeing how Donald Trump breathes, Putin knows Trump lacks the self-restraint to be a “controlled agent” of the Kremlin. Putin instead uses the U.S. president a “confidential contact,” a more technical term, writes David Ignatius, than “useful idiot.” Thus, has he turned Trump into “a human wrecking ball against America’s traditional allies and trading partners.”

European allies are “gobsmacked” by Trump’s failure to stand up to Putin in Helsinki. That compounded his undermining of the NATO alliance last week in Brussels.

But as appalled as Trump’s GOP colleagues are at his fawning over the Russian dictator, they have made no serious efforts at reeling him back in. But damage control? Congressional Republicans are getting a crash course in damage control. Perhaps because they have become useful idiots as well.

Sacha Baron Cohen found it too easy to co-opt prominent conservatives into supporting (and advocating on film) a phony Israeli program for arming schoolchildren, Matt Lewis writes at Daily Beast:

In one interview, Cohen, posing as an Israeli colonel and terrorism expert, gets former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh to advocate arming little kids.

“The intensive three-week Kinderguardian course introduces specially selected children from 12 to 4 years old to pistols, rifles, semiautomatics, and a rudimentary knowledge of mortars. In less than a month—less than a month—a first-grader can become a first grenader,” Walsh says on camera. On purpose. Amazing.

Russophile California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher’s duping in Cohen’s Kinderguardian prank has already become a campaign issue.

And @SachaBaronCohen has officially become a campaign issue pic.twitter.com/e3ivf2I30y— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) July 17, 2018

Do you think Vladimir Putin hasn’t noticed credulity trips over itself on the right?

This week federal agents arrested Maria Butina, a 29-year-old Russian national and graduate student who had become a minor celebrity for the National Rifle Association. Butina is allegedly a Russian agent the FBI has been monitoring since she arrived as a student in the U.S. in 2016. She worked at gaining access to NRA and Conservative Political Action Conference circles by “touting her interest in U.S. affairs and efforts to promote gun rights in Vladi­mir Putin’s restrictive Russia.” Only unlike Cohen, she wasn’t fishing for laughs. A grand jury indicted her for conspiracy and failing to register as a foreign agent.

Wayne LaPierre.
Rick Santorum.
David Clarke.
Scott Walker.

All with Maria Butina. Lookie here. 👀 pic.twitter.com/KYB6Ut32jN— Ricky Davila (@TheRickyDavila) July 18, 2018

Buzzfeed adds:

What is clear is that in Butina, the Russian government either found or created an irresistible persona for US conservatives. The story she repeated over years of speeches and interviews — of a scrappy girl from Siberia fighting for gun rights in Russia — was carefully calibrated to show a passion for self-defense, a yearning for America’s easy access to guns, and a hint of criticism of Russia’s own laws.

“Anyone can be duped,” Lewis writes. “However, some people were more vulnerable at certain times in our history than others.” In the past, Russians co-opted members of the left. Now Russian President Vladimir Putin is running the same play on the right. That they fell so easily for both Borat and Butina, he believes, is no coincidence.

Russian intelligence knows what makes the right breathe. It knows their instincts. Republicans don’t want to govern. They want to rule. To that end they have enacted a large set of anti-democratic measures in legislatures across the country for empowering themselves at the expense of representative democracy. To that end they have spent years promoting the spurious rumor that millions of unseen, illegal voters (black and brown ones) are corrupting election integrity. Russia has reinforced their efforts to erode confidence in U.S. elections through criminal interference in the 2016 elections. Donald Trump proclaimed the election rigged in campaign stops across the country.

The American Idea is built around majority rule, that “whichever cluster of interests and preferences are held by the greatest number of individuals should receive the lion’s share of the political power at any given time,” warns Damon Linker at The Week:

What we have seen in recent years is something else entirely. George W. Bush lost the 2000 presidential election by roughly half a million votes and yet won the presidency with the help of two counter-majoritarian institutions — the Electoral College and the Supreme Court. President Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million votes and yet won the presidency, this time because of the Electoral College alone. In 2012, Democrats in House races received nearly 1.5 million more votes than Republicans, yet due in large part to gerrymandered congressional districts, the Republicans won a majority of the seats by a margin of 234-201. Some models predict that in the upcoming midterm elections this November, Democrats could outpoll Republicans by 4, 5, 6, or even 7 percent while still failing to win a majority in the House.

Add it all up and we’re left with something perilously close to minority rule. This is pure civic poison.

The prospect of permanent minority rule compounds the growing threat that those now primed to believe elections are rigged will reject the American norm of peaceful transitions between elected U.S. governments. Thanks to the NRA and it’s Russian handlers, they’ll have plenty of armament for the task.

Michael Scheuer, the former senior CIA official and NYT bestselling author of Imperial Hubris, is calling for Trump supporters to kill Trump opponents https://t.co/lH81xBoKqX pic.twitter.com/Hh0IM2HHtN— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) July 16, 2018

Putin will have just what he’s always wanted. He’s already enlisted useful idiots in the cause.

* * * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

This immigration horror isn’t just Trump. It’s a conservative movement strategy.

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

On Monday, in a courtroom in Wichita, a federal judge told Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach that he had so blatantly violated federal discovery rules in a case he argued, defending a law requiring voters to prove their citizenship, that she ordered Kobach — a former Department of Justice official under George W. Bush — to take remedial legal courses. She also ruled against the law itself, saying there was no evidence it was necessary.

Kobach is best known for writing the “show me your papers” law in Arizona that was also struck down in federal court. He also headed up the ill-fated Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which was disbanded after many states balked at Kobach’s demand that they turn over their confidential voter rolls to the federal government. He had very big plans:

Kris Kobach should learn to use folders and cover sheets. pic.twitter.com/q3sqB59wtA

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) November 21, 2016

Kobach is currently running for governor of Kansas, and the crusade to curtail immigration and voting rights will continue no matter how his checkered political career turns out. This is now a central organizing principle of the Republican party.

Donald Trump’s administration has the most extreme immigration policy in a century. Among his first acts as president was his theatrical Muslim ban. He’s beefed up the border patrol and ICE and told them all to “take off the gloves.” He put one of the most anti-immigration politicians in the country in charge of the Justice Department, and they are systematically deporting people, even those who have been here for 50 years. Trump backed out of a deal to legalize the DACA recipients at the last minute. Now they are separating children from their parents at the border and putting them into detention camps in order to “deter” Latino immigrants, even those who are seeking asylum from the rampant violence in their home countries.

It’s tempting to chalk all this up to simple Republican racism and nativism. That is certainly what fuels the emotion on this issue on the right. Conservative media pounds the message that “the illegals” are all on welfare (which isn’t true) and are ruining the culture with taco trucks on every corner. (If only.) But that isn’t the whole story.

Back in 2014, when the wave of unaccompanied minors from Central American came to the border, Laura Ingraham led the charge against those kids:

Oh no, you won’t. This is our country. . . . Our borders matter to us. Our way of life and our culture matter to us. Our jobs and our wages matter to us. No, you won’t.

She ranted day after day about these children, claiming that the government was “trafficking illegal immigrants from one part of the country to another part of the country to further erode American wages and further forward their goal of ultimate amnesty and changing the electoral and cultural landscape of the United States forever.”

Note that Ingraham said “electoral” landscape. We can see that Trump and his lieutenants see this latest border crisis as an opportunity to get their base fired up and get out to the polls in November. But movement conservatives have a long-term strategy in mind that goes way beyond the midterms and even Trump. That’s why cynical politicians and media stars have been pushing this issue so hard for the last few years.

They realized somewhere along the line that the fundamental xenophobia of the GOP base would make it very difficult to form any sort of governing majority that included Latinos, the fastest growing ethnic group in the country. So they decided their future prospects would be better served by suppressing the Latino vote with spurious accusations of voter fraud and demagoguery about foreigners more generally, in an effort to force the government to curb immigration overall. Anti-immigrant groups like VDARE have made the argument explicit, saying Democrats favor immigration because it will give them an electoral advantage.

Back in August of 2015, Rush Limbaugh endorsed Trump’s hardcore immigration position, saying that “everybody knows that [bipartisan immigration reform] is an immigration plan that is going to result in millions more registered Democrats.” He even got a shout-out from the big guy himself that same day:

Listening to @rushlimbaugh on way back to Jury Duty. Fantastic show, terrific guy!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2015

Limbaugh is a bit cagier these days, saying that he’d support DACA recipients getting a path to citizenship as long as they aren’t given the vote for 12 to 15 years.

Right-wing radio host Dennis Prager made a similar case this year in a piece laying out three reasons the left supports immigration. The first of these:

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, chain migration, sanctuary cities, and citizenship for immigrants living in the country illegally will give the Left political power. An estimated 70 to 80 percent of Latin American immigrants will vote Democratic. So with enough new voters from Latin America alone, the Democrats would essentially be assured the presidency and Congress for decades.

(If you’re wondering: Reason two is because they are Marxists and reason three is that they want to feel good about themselves.)

The ruling right-wing diva of anti-immigrant fervor is of course Ann Coulter. She has been ranting even more than usual these days, telling Breitbart that nobody should believe the “actor children” at the border, citing some articles from 2011 about refugees embellishing their stories to get asylum. Coulter’s influence on the GOP on this issue can’t be overstated — her book “Adios America” was clearly a major influence on Trump’s agenda.

You may recall that Coulter called Trump’s most notorious immigration speech during the campaign “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.” It was later revealed that she and Stephen Miller had written it. There are no limits to how low she will go in demeaning and degrading immigrants, but she too has stated clearly what the real issue is. At CPAC in 2014, she put it this way:

Amnesty goes through, and the Democrats have 30 million new voters. I just don’t think Republicans have an obligation to forgive law-breaking just because the Democrats need another 30 million voters.

The nativism we are seeing play out right now is cruel and inhumane. It’s born of an ugly strain of white nationalism that forms the core of the Republican Party under Trump. But the conservative movement is still working feverishly on their own projects, using Trump and his demagoguery to serve their long-term goals. They know that keeping Latinos from voting and shutting down immigration, both legal and illegal, is necessary to their political survival as a movement and a party.

This time they may have underestimated how the rest of America feels about seeing small children ripped away from their families for cheap political purposes. Let’s hope so, anyway.

Heart of Dixie
by Tom Sullivan

The special election for U.S. Senate today in Alabama should not be a toss-up. And yet.

With the fall of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and members of Congress over sexual harassment claims, and with the allegations of child predation against Republican candidate Roy Moore, the cultural shift surrounding the #MeToo movement has changed the dynamics of the race between Moore and Democrat Doug Jones. In deep-red Alabama, tonight’s outcome is anybody’s guess.

Annie Linskey of the Boston Globe told Chris Matthews last night on “Hardball” she had visited an Alabama county where three-quarters of the voters had supported the sitting president last fall. “When I was looking for women who would say on the record that they were voting for Roy Moore, I mean, they laughed at me,” she told Matthews. “They just laughed at me. Almost all of them said no.”

Even though she is a yankee, Linskey said, Alabamians had all been polite. The puzzle pollsters seem unable to unravel is, were they being honest? What will women do away from reporters and husbands in the privacy of the voting booth?

“Somebody’s going to be wrong in Alabama,” Nate Silver writes at FiveThirtyEight. Silver examines the vagaries of calling cell phones or landlines, and live calls versus robocalls. There still remains the question of whether people who are going to vote for (or against) Roy Moore will admit to voting for (or against) Roy Moore. The polls are all over the place.

Scott Douglas, executive director of Greater Birmingham Ministries, worries aloud in the New York Times that Alabama’s photo ID law may already have determined the outcome, something Silver’s analysis did not consider. People may be coy about who they are supporting in today’s election, but in Alabama supporters of photo ID laws are less shy about whom they do not want voting:

A state senator who had tried for over a decade to get the bill into law, told The Huntsville Times that a photo ID law would undermine Alabama’s “black power structure.” In The Montgomery Advertiser, he said that the absence of an ID law “benefits black elected leaders.”

The bill’s sponsors were even caught on tape devising a plan to depress the turnout of black voters — whom they called “aborigines” and “illiterates” who would ride “H.U.D.-financed buses” to the polls — in the 2010 midterm election by keeping a gambling referendum off the ballot. Gambling is popular among black voters in Alabama, so they thought if it had remained on the ballot, black voters would show up to vote in droves.

Douglas considers Alabama’s law “a naked attempt to suppress the voting rights of people of color.”

Estimates Douglas cites for how many registered voters do not have the required ID may be inflated, however. Telephone surveys we conducted in North Carolina ahead of the 2016 election found that many voters flagged for not also having a driver’s license (an indication they might not be able to vote) did in fact have other valid ID. But the size of the pool of exclusion is not the point. Republicans’ public reasoning is that even one illegal vote “steals” the vote of a legitimate voter and justifies expensive and onerous measures in the name of election integrity. They are simply less concerned about integrity preventing even one legitimate voter from casting a ballot at all if that person is black or Latino and likely to vote for a Democrat.

People can be racists and not want to be seen as racists. People may vote for a sexual predator and not want to be seen as voting for a sexual predator. Or not. We’ll know more about Alabama’s heart tonight after 7 p.m. Central Time.

* * * * * * * *

Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Wait, voting is like shooting people? What? 

by digby

I wrote about the latest voter “fraud” nonsense for Salon this morning:

It’s pretty much beyond dispute at this point that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election in a number of different ways. The extent of the damage, and whether or not the Trump campaign and other Republicans who were clearly the beneficiaries helped them do it, is still unknown. In the past it would have been automatic for the government to establish a blue-ribbon commission to investigate and make recommendations about how to prevent such events in the future. The 9/11 Commission comes to mind. That obviously is not happening now. In fact, the president is doing everything he can to prevent any investigations at all.

Never let it be said that Donald Trump isn’t concerned about the integrity of our elections, however. He is convinced that he was the victim of an unprecedented tidal wave of election fraud amounting to millions of illegal votes, all cast for his opponent in 2016. Determined to prove that he was cheated out of the popular vote, he immediately convened his Election Integrity Commission to look into the matter. It’s led by vote suppression zealot, Kansas Secretary of State and paid Breitbart columnist Kris Kobach, the man who wrote the template for Arizona’s odious “show me your papers” law that was struck down by the courts.

I’ve written about Kobach here on Salon for years. He is one of the foremost GOP experts on vote suppression and anti-immigration law. Those issues have long been central to conservative political strategy but have achieved new salience with demographic challenges to the Republican coalition, since that relies more and more upon a large racist and xenophobic faction at its base. Kobach is determined to ensure that both legal and illegal immigration is stopped and that voting is made as difficult as possible for minority groups and young people who tend to vote Democratic.

As analyst Ron Brownstein said on CNN on Tuesday when asked about the commission and the issue of “voter fraud”:

This is not a neutral “good government” argument. As the court said about the North Carolina [voter fraud] law, they talked about surgical precision aimed at minority voters. You have a diversifying country, and you have in Trump a candidate who relied on whites for 90 percent of his votes in that rapidly diversifying country. He’s looking at approval ratings among nonwhite voters of under 20 percent. So there is a clear kind of direction in the way this might be going in terms of the recommendations . . . that is about resisting the implications of a changing America.

On the same program, Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander explained the specific strategy behind Kobach’s commission:

As the chief election official in the state of Missouri that has a Republican supermajority, I have seen the GOP voter suppression playbook up close . . . The commission is step one. Convince the American people that American democracy doesn’t work so they can then take laws that make it harder to vote and spread them all over the country. And that is the core of the Trump reelection strategy.

Kobach got off to a bad start when he demanded that all states turn over all the personal information on their voters to the commission. He had to back off when many states, even those run by Republicans, refused. This looks even worse today than it did at the time, with Tuesday’s report that the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation demanded that the commission be stacked with right-wing extremists. That didn’t happen, but the president did appoint the man the foundation confirmed was the one who made that demand to the commission, Hans von Spakovsky. As the Campaign Legal Center has said, von Spakovsky is “widely considered to be the architect of the voter fraud myth.” One can only imagine what he and Kobach had planned to do with that information.

On Tuesday, Kobach held the second meeting of the commission and was once again embarrassed by his sloppy extremism. In a Breitbart column last week, he declared that voter fraud had tipped the election in New Hampshire last fall, costing the Republicans a Senate seat. The reason? There were people who registered to vote on Election Day with out-of-state drivers’ licenses and didn’t get a New Hampshire license within 60 days. As usual, the governing assumption was that these were mostly Democrats because Republicans are all honest as the day is long.

Dave Weigel of The Washington Post debunked this story at the time. These people were mostly college students, and there is no law that says your vote doesn’t count if you don’t change your driver’s license within 60 days. Nonetheless, Kobach and the commission hightailed it up to New Hampshire to “investigate,” where Kobach was confronted with his misleading assertions. He now says his evidence was “anecdotal” and admits he shouldn’t have said it “appears” there was fraud. He looked foolish, but didn’t admit he was wrong.

But that was nothing compared to the master trolling presentation by the thoroughly discredited economist John Lott, whose usual field is the study of gun violence on behalf of the NRA. Evidently, Lott wrote an article on voter fraud a decade ago from which to hang his alleged expert testimony, but his proposal was clearly designed simply to provoke Democrats. He suggested that if the left is so adamant about background checks for gun owners, the government should use that system to determine whether someone is eligible to vote. Quoting Senator Chuck Schumer, Lott said:

Democrats have long been concerned about voter suppression but they’ve also long lauded the background check system on guns, saying it’s simple, accurate, in “complete harmony with the right of people to go and defend themselves.” If they don’t believe that it suppresses people’s ability to defend themselves, would we believe that using this system would suppress being able to go and vote?

The sophomoric Republican commission members could barely keep from snickering and high-fiving each other over how they’d totally pwned those libs. It’ll be a cold day in hell before they try to pass gun control legislation again!

Oh, wait: This was about voter fraud. And they want to stop people from voting, don’t they? What are they talking about?

To recap: our election campaign was clearly tampered with by a foreign country. The president of the United States may or may not have been in on it, but he’s certainly been active in trying to cover it up. Meanwhile, he’s convened a commission that’s completely lacking in credibility to investigate election fraud that doesn’t exist, and they’re spending their time trolling Democrats about gun control.

It’s Breitbart’s world. We just live in it.

Trouble with a capital T
by Tom Sullivan

Still from The Music Man.

That rhymes with V. Guess what that stands for?

You’d think the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky would be in Iowa selling boys bands. But no. The godfather of the voter fraud myth was in New Hampshire yesterday as part of Kris Kobach’s crack Presidential Advisory Commission On Election Integrity selling voter ID. The commission’s true goal is, as Mother Jones reports, “focused on building up a narrative about widespread voter fraud—and potentially laying the groundwork to impose new restrictions on voting in order to combat it.”

This has been the holy grail for Republicans at least since since Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich publicly declared in 1980, “I don’t want everybody to vote,” adding “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Reducing that populace has probably been a goal since the Voting Rights Act became law in 1965.

Kobach brought the commission to New Hampshire to investigate alleged voter fraud. Alleged by him in a Breitbart News column last week. Kobach claimed that Democrat Maggie Hassan’s U.S. Senate seat was “stolen through voter fraud” last fall. See (Aha!), of the 6,540 same-day registrants who voted using out-of-state driver’s licenses for ID, only 1,014 had filed for a New Hampshire license 10 months later. The fact that the bulk were college students voting where they attend school, as provided by law, went unmentioned. The only college Kobach is interested in is the electoral college.

Lobbing fraud smoke bombs has a long tradition. By the time the smoke clears and we discover once again there was never a fire, all the public remembers is they saw smoke and heard someone yelling, “Fire!” It’s all about the publicity.

Von Spakovsky was there to present evidence in the form of a Heritage Foundation database of voter fraud assembled from cases of election irregularities of any variety going back decades. The bulk involve absentee ballot fraud, but they pad out the case for erecting barriers to people voting in person, which of course is the point. Heritage earlier in the year urged the administration to keep Democrats and mainstream Republicans off the panel.

Former Secretary of State Jason Kander told CNN:

“I have seen the GOP voter suppression playbook up close,” Kander explained. “It has three steps. Step one, undermine faith in democracy. Step two, create obstacles to voting. Step three, create obstacles to the obstacles.”

“The commission is step one, it is convincing the American people that American democracy doesn’t work, so that they can then take laws that make it harder to vote and spread them all around the country,” Kander predicted. “It’s the core of Trump’s re-election strategy.”

Promoters of the erecting higher barriers to voting argue that people don’t vote because the system is rigged. Polls say otherwise, says University of New Hampshire political scientist Andrew Smith:

“The major reason that they see that people don’t vote … is that they just didn’t bother, they weren’t interested, they forgot,” Smith said. “Basically, issues of convenience and noninterest were the major reasons.”

Still, several members of the commission — including Kobach — have argued that voter fraud is a serious problem that undermines public confidence.

Except undermining public confidence to build support for erecting voting barriers is Kobach’s goal (von Spakovsky’s as well). Providing rubes with a solution to a problem they didn’t know they had before the traveling salesman conjured it was Harold Hill’s business model, as it has been Spakovsky’s for decades.

This is where Kander is mistaken. The commission isn’t step one. It’s the eleventy-leventh edition of step one.

The Brennan Center for Justice maintains an archive of documents relating to GOP attempts to suppress minority voting that dates back to 1982:

DNC v. RNC Consent Decree

November 5, 2016

In 1982, after caging in predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhoods, the Republican National Committee and New Jersey Republican State Committee entered into a consent decree with their Democratic party counterparts. Under that decree and its 1987 successor, the Republican party organizations agreed to allow a federal court to review proposed “ballot security” programs, including any proposed voter caging.

The consent decree has been invoked several times, by the parties to the decree and by others. In late 2008, the Democratic National Committee and Obama for America sought to enforce the consent decree, claiming that the RNC had not submitted alleged ballot security operations for review. After the election, the RNC asked the federal court to vacate or substantially modify the decree. The court denied the RNC’s motion to vacate the consent decree and ordered the decree remain in effect until December 2017. The RNC then appealed to the Third Circuit, which unanimously rejected the appeal and affirmed the District Court’s decision. A subsequent petition for rehearing en banc by the full Third Circuit, and a certiorari petition to U.S. Supreme Court, were denied.

On October 26, 2016, the DNC filed a motion asking that the court find the RNC had violated the decree. On November 5, after abbreviated discovery, the district court denied the DNC’s request, ruling that the DNC had not provided sufficient evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and the RNC on ballot-security operations, but will allow the DNC to offer further evidence after the election.

The reason the GOP’s “voter fraud” promotion didn’t enjoy more press earlier is because in the 1980s conservatives did not have Fox News, talk radio, and social media to promote it. But the fraud fraud is nothing new. Suppressing the vote has been a GOP project for decades.

* * * * * * * *

Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Trump’s one true belief

by digby

This piece by Carol Anderson in the New York Times about the policies of racism is really important, particularly in light of what the Trump administration is trying to accomplish:

White resentment put Donald Trump in the White House. And there is every indication that it will keep him there, especially as he continues to transform that seething, irrational fear about an increasingly diverse America into policies that feed his supporters’ worst racial anxieties.

If there is one consistent thread through Mr. Trump’s political career, it is his overt connection to white resentment and white nationalism. Mr. Trump’s fixation on Barack Obama’s birth certificate gave him the white nationalist street cred that no other Republican candidate could match, and that credibility has sustained him in office — no amount of scandal or evidence of incompetence will undermine his followers’ belief that he, and he alone, could Make America White Again.

The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration. No wonder that, even while his White House sinks deeper into chaos, scandal and legislative mismanagement, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among whites (and only whites) has remained unnaturally high. Washington may obsess over Obamacare repeal, Russian sanctions and the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump’s base sees something different — and, to them, inspiring.

Like on Christmas morning, every day brings his supporters presents: travel bans against Muslims, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Hispanic communities and brutal, family-gutting deportations, a crackdown on sanctuary cities, an Election Integrity Commission stacked with notorious vote suppressors, announcements of a ban on transgender personnel in the military, approval of police brutality against “thugs,” a denial of citizenship to immigrants who serve in the armed forces and a renewed war on drugs that, if it is anything like the last one, will single out African-Americans and Latinos although they are not the primary drug users in this country. Last week, Mr. Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions put the latest package under the tree: a staffing call for a case on reverse discrimination in college admissions, likely the first step in a federal assault on affirmative action and a determination to hunt for colleges and universities that discriminate against white applicants.

That so many of these policies are based on perception and lies rather than reality is nothing new. White resentment has long thrived on the fantasy of being under siege and having to fight back, as the mass lynchings and destruction of thriving, politically active black communities in Colfax, La. (1873), Wilmington, N.C. (1898), Ocoee, Fla. (1920), and Tulsa, Okla. (1921), attest. White resentment needs the boogeyman of job-taking, maiden-ravaging, tax-evading, criminally inclined others to justify the policies that thwart the upward mobility and success of people of color.

The last half-century hasn’t changed that. The war on drugs, for example, branded African-Americans and Latinos as felons, which stripped them of voting rights and access to housing and education just when the civil rights movement had pushed open the doors to those opportunities in the United States.

Similarly, the intensified war on immigrants comes, not coincidentally, at the moment when Latinos have gained visible political power, asserted their place in American society and achieved greater access to schools and colleges. The ICE raids have terrorized these communities, led to attendance drop-offs in schools and silenced many from even seeking their legal rights when abused.

The so-called Election Integrity Commission falls in the same category. It is a direct response to the election of Mr. Obama as president. Despite the howls from Mr. Trump and the Republicans, there was no widespread voter fraud then or now. Instead, what happened was that millions of new voters, overwhelmingly African-American, Hispanic and Asian, cast the ballots that put a black man in the White House. The punishment for participating in democracy has been a rash of voter ID laws, the purging of names from the voter rolls, redrawn district boundaries and closed and moved polling places.

There’s more. It’s not pretty.

The good news is that racism is dead. It’s such a relief.

The schoolhouse door again
by Tom Sullivan

Vivian Malone entering Foster Auditorium to register for classes at the University of Alabama. (Library of Congress)

Why?

Yes, yes, discrimination against white people is just the sort of rumor Fox News enjoys throwing gasoline on for days at a time. But now the Trump Justice Department is getting in on the act.

A document obtained by the New York Times indicates the Justice Department’s civil rights division plans to sue universities that discriminate against white applicants in favor of minority ones:

The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.

“Intentional race-based discrimination” would seem to cover affirmative action efforts in place for decades. Never mind that the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled in a Texas case just last year that universities had “considerable deference” in how to administer affirmative action programs. That Justice Samuel Alito called the ruling “affirmative action gone berzerk” was probably enough for Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The Washington Post’s account adds that officials within the civil rights division refused to work on the project, seeing it as contrary to the department’s longstanding approach to expanding educational opportunities. So the political division took over. Vanita Gupta, former head of the civil rights division under the Obama administration called the project “an affront to our values as a country and the very mission of the civil rights ­division.” She told the Post:

“Long-standing Supreme Court precedent has upheld the constitutionality and compelling state interest of these policies, and generations of Americans have benefited from richer, more inclusive institutions of higher education,” Gupta said.

Now, it is not as if discrimination against white people is an impossibility. Certainly current demographic trends make people accustomed to seeing this as a white, Christians-only country are nervous about being on the receiving rather than the giving end of racial discrimination. But other than Fox News’ interest in boosting its ratings, who is pushing for targeting universities on this? Neither report says.

In the past, conservative politicians went after universities as centers of liberal strength they meant to weaken. What is novel here, other than the attempt to intimidate universities and fuel the culture war, is the attempt to limit the access to them by non-whites by claiming it is whites facing discrimination. Not that Sessions fans are clamoring to get into engineering or law schools and failing to. But keeping others out of “white” institutions has a long tradition in places Sessions finds support, even among those who themselves will never attend. Discrimination is about maintaining the establish pecking order.

This Justice Department effort grows from another conservative tradition: “wedging.” Urban vs. rural, us vs. Them. Keeping resentment properly stoked is good politics out in red America. Slate‘s Isaac Chotiner spoke with political scientist Katherine J. Cramer who has studied voters in rural Wisconsin. Cramer tell him in spite of being city dwellers, Gov. Scott Walker and Donald Trump are masters of tapping rural resentment:

You can’t separate culture and economics. When people are telling me that they’re not getting their fair share, and they’re feeling like all the taxpayer dollars go to the cities, and that they pay in a lot of taxes but they don’t see that money in return, they’re also telling me, “That money is going to people who don’t deserve it as much as I do, and don’t seem to be working as hard as I do.” And some of that is racist sentiment. Whether we’re talking about cultural issues in terms of race or ethnicity or immigration, we’re also talking about it in terms of just the lifestyles of city people versus the lifestyles of people in rural areas, and the sense of who works hard: People who sit behind a desk all day or people who are doing manual labor? Economic insecurity is intertwined with their sense of deservingness, which is a very cultural notion. So in my mind you can’t really separate the two.

Or who deserves to get into college and who doesn’t. The Justice Department investigating universities isn’t any more about discrimination against white people than the president’s voter fraud commission is about election integrity. It is about keeping Republican base voters engaged for the next election. “Real Americans” consider any election they lose discrimination against them too.

* * * * * * * *

Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Gold braid and mirrored sunglasses
by Tom Sullivan

Still from The In-Laws (1979).

The local board of elections made me the Democratic judge in my precinct in the very first election I voted in. My father thought it would be a lesson in democracy, I guess, one I could get paid for if I applied to be an election worker. But since we have the same first name, the board mistakenly thought the application came from him and put me in charge. At age 18.

County parties here this summer, in the slow, odd-numbered years, are assembling lists of election workers for the next 2-year cycle. It is essentially a volunteer job, community service with a stipend. People don’t do this for the money. Mostly, older people volunteer in that window between retirement and no longer being able to stand the 15-hour day. Finding replacements when the stalwarts age out is tough.

In the last week, two women called worried that personal information such as social security and drivers license numbers would be given to Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state leading up President Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity. One, a Latina, was especially worried her voter registration information would be used to target her. Her name, like mine, is not uncommon. And being a Latino, she worried about being caught up in Kobach’s fraud-fishing net. I can relate. For years, I told her, I was not the only one with my name in my own neighborhood. I sometimes break the ice in meetings by explaining I am not the Fox Business guy who fills in for Rush Limbaugh. How easy it would be for us both to get netted by Kobach’s bad data matching program.

Working inside the process, it is stunning how at odds with the fantastical, Republican rhetoric reality is. Safeguarding people’s right to vote is a big deal for these volunteers. Ensuring people can vote and that the process is fair is a passion. Most (though not all) of our GOP counterparts here in this work respect the process. We who work elections know what a fraud “voter fraud” is, which makes us, I guess, both smarter than the president and/or smart enough to be president.

This morning, the New York Times again inveighs against this massive snipe hunt and national effort at voter intimidation:

It was born out of a marriage of convenience between conservative anti-voter-fraud crusaders, who refuse to accept actual data, and a president who refuses to accept that he lost the popular vote fair and square.

It is run by some of the nation’s most determined vote suppressors, the kind who try to throw out voter registrations for being printed on insufficiently thick paper or who release reports on noncitizen voting that are titled “Alien Invasion” and illustrated with images of U.F.O.s.

Its purpose is not to restore integrity to elections but to undermine the public’s confidence enough to push through policies and practices that make registration and voting harder, if not impossible, for certain groups of people who tend to vote Democratic.

The Times calls it “a far greater threat to electoral integrity than whatever wrongdoing it may claim to dig up.” It is another example of the bad faith politics endemic at the highest level of the Republican Party.

The Week‘s Damon Linker believes the Kobach nonsense is symptomatic of a deeper anti-democratic bent in his party. Republican lawmakers’ acquiescence in the face of Trump’s insistence on personal loyalty and vapid expressions of “concern’ demonstrate they are “perfectly fine with Trump acting more like a kleptocratic despot than the head of the executive branch of a democratic republic.”

But that was just a warm-up:

There is, to begin with, the bill that would make it a federal crime (a felony punishable by up to a $1 million fine and 20 years in prison) to support the international boycott against Israel for its occupation of the West Bank. That 14 Democratic senators have joined with 29 Republicans in backing this flagrant assault on the First Amendment is certainly shameful, but it does nothing to diminish the outrageousness of those who like to portray themselves as courageous defenders of free speech endorsing a bill that would drastically curtail it. (And no, I don’t support the movement to boycott Israel, just the right of others to do so, which is exactly the way liberal democracy is supposed to work.)

Even worse is the Justice Department’s announcement on Wednesday that it is reviving the practice of allowing “state and local law enforcement officials to use federal law to seize the cash, cars, or other personal property of people suspected of crimes but not charged.” This practice, known as civil asset forfeiture, has been widely abused by police departments across the country in what amounts to government-backed theft from citizens who are supposed to be constitutionally protected from having their property seized without due process of law. That’s why state and local governments, along with the Obama Justice Department, have acted to curtail the practice. But now, in a full-frontal assault on civil liberties, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has given local police departments a way to circumvent these restrictions.

Of course, Linker saves his harshest criticism for Kobach and his phony commission, calling it “a full-frontal assault on the core liberal democratic institution of free and fair elections.” The Times wonders whether it is just a callous attempt to boost Republican’s electoral clout or if “they actually believe their own paranoid fantasies.”

The least banana Republicans could do is wear more gold braid and mirrored sunglasses.

A commission with a mission

by digby

I wrote about the voter fraud commission for Salon this morning:

President Trump had a very, very big day yesterday. In fact, he was almost manic running from one meeting to the other, speaking before cameras with what seemed to be barely contained rage and ending it with a devastating, incoherent, rambling interview with the New York Times. He must be all worn out.

But he also had photo-ops and made some remarks earlier in the day which were a bit more substantive, if no more coherent or prudent. After the failure of the latest iteration of Trumpcare, the Senate’s Better Care Reconciliation Act, the president dragged all the GOP Senators to the White House for lunch and then humiliated some of them before the cameras by threatening their jobs. This gives you the flavor of how it went:

But, Trump’s first meeting of the day had been his surprise welcome to his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. You’ll recall that he promised to put that together after he made the ridiculous claim that Hillary Clinton hadn’t really won the popular vote because 3 million “illegals” had voted in California. It took a while but one of his biggest supporters, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has made vote suppression his life’s work, came in board and it’s finally up and running. (I wrote about Kobach here, here and here.)

Trump named Kobach and Vice President Mike Pence as co-chairs and almost immediately the commission was embroiled in controversy. Kobach had instituted a plan that would kick eligible voters off the rolls in his home state of Kansas and he wanted to take it national so his first step was to cause a national firestorm by requesting all personal voter information from each state, which most secretaries of state of both parties refused.

Now lawsuits are rolling in from all over the country regarding the commission’s lack of transparency and violations of federal regulations and privacy laws. Kobach was served with a suit claiming that he’s illegally exploiting his position to promote his candidacy for governor of Kansas and is being investigated by the Kansas Supreme Court for ironically refusing to turn over documents to the court. Democratic lawmakers have sent an official notice requesting that Kobach be removed from the commission for violations of the Hatch Act and and the Federal Advisory Committee Act. All in all, it’s off to a terrific start.

Wednesday morning, Pence opened the proceedings by saying the commission “has no preconceived notions or preordained results. We’re fact-finders. And in the days ahead, we will gather the relevant facts and data, and at the conclusion of our work, we will present the president with a report of our findings.” But whatever hopes Pence had of keeping the pretense of nonpartisan fact-finding were blown to kingdom come when the president took the mic and started talking about the need for the states get with the program:

If any state does not want to share this information, one has to wonder what they’re worried about. And I ask the vice president and I ask the commission: What are they worried about? There’s something. There always is. 

This issue is very important to me because throughout the campaign and even after, people would come up to me and express their concerns about voter inconsistencies and irregularities which they saw, in some cases, having to do with very large numbers of people in certain states.

Trump said for months that the electoral system was rigged and even said at a presidential debate that he might not accept the results. Of course people come up to him and say they know about some instance of voter fraud.

His real gripe is that he didn’t win the popular vote and is driven by some egomaniacal need to be able to at least create the possibility that he actually did. Kris Kobach went on MSNBC yesterday and gave an astonishing interview that surely pleased him:

KATY TUR (HOST): Do you believe Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 to 5 million votes because of voter fraud?
KRIS KOBACH: We may never know the answer to that — we will probably never know the answer to that question, because even if you could prove that a certain number of votes were cast by ineligible voters, for example —

TUR: So, again, you think that maybe Hillary Clinton did not win the popular vote?

KOBACH: We may never know the answer to that question.

That’s an outrageous assertion. It is completely impossible that 3 million votes were cast illegally in 2016. In a world that makes sense he would have been fired immediately for casting such a shadow over the electoral results. There have been more than nine major investigations into alleged “voter fraud” and it just does not exist on even a small systematic scale much less something like what he’s suggesting.

One can only imagine what the boss had to say when he heard this follow up, though:

TUR: So were the votes for Donald Trump that led him to win the election in doubt as well?
KOBACH: Absolutely. If there are ineligible voters in an election, people who are noncitizens, people who are felons who shouldn’t be voting according to the laws of that state —

So Trump’s rather pathetic 77,000 vote Electoral College win is also in doubt? Oh my.

But Trump needn’t worry. Kobach is a conservative extremist whose life’s work is preventing people from voting. That’s what this is about. Trump’s victory will never be questioned by him.

There is one slight mystery about all this, however. With all this talk of our electoral system being vulnerable to fraud the commission isn’t the least bit interested in the subject of Russian interference in the election. That seems odd.

Of course if the goal of the hacking was to create chaos sow the seeds of doubt about the integrity of our democracy the Russian government is probably are wondering why they went to the trouble. Kris Kobach and his friends are doing a fine job of that all on their own. If he could manage to get all that voter information for them in one place that would be very helpful for future hacking. They’re pulling for his success if no one else is.

.

Unpopular revolt
by Tom Sullivan

George Washington and his troops near Fort Cumberland, Maryland, before their march to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion. (Public domain)

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pressing forward to pass the “most unpopular legislation in three decades.” The latest version is expected to debut this morning looking much like the old version. Not a single state supports it. Writing for Reuters, political scientist Scott Lemieux recounts how wildly unpopular the Republican project is in general:

It’s not just healthcare. Every major item on the GOP’s agenda polls badly. After healthcare, Republicans want to pass more tax cuts for the rich, which are very unpopular among all voters except Republican elites. The rollback of environmental regulations – which under Trump’s EPA director Scott Pruitt has been one of the most consequential results of Trump’s victory – is widely despised. The public also opposes loosening workplace safety standards and defunding Planned Parenthood. The Republican agenda couldn’t be less popular if it was designed to repel majorities.

But majorities are not required, as Republicans see it. It is sufficient that they remain in charge, in a sham democracy if need be. Through sophisticated gerrymandering, voter integrity propaganda, voter purges, voter suppression measures, and by continuing to support a president compromised morally, ethically and politically, they hope to maintain their rule even as they pursue an agenda supported by an underwhelming minority of voters in an electorate that votes in ever shrinking numbers. Time for a popular rebellion about something more than whiskey.

John Nichols writes for The Nation:

The Republican Party, which has benefited from this dysfunction, is in no rush to change things. Indeed, it has at its highest levels embraced the voter-suppression lies and scheming of charlatans such as Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and President Trump’s Orwellian “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.” So it falls to progressive Democrats, nonaligned independents and third-party activists to take the lead in the struggle for democratic renewal.

Rep. Don Beyers, a Virginia Democrat, introduced in late June the Fair Representation Act to address the gerrymandering problem. FairVote explains how it would work:

Smaller states with five or fewer members will elect all representatives from one statewide, at-large district. States with more than six will draw multi-winner districts of three to five representatives each. Congress will remain the same size, but districts will be larger.

They will be elected through ranked-choice voting, an increasingly common electoral method used in many American cities, whereby voters rank candidates in order of choice, ensuring that as many voters as possible help elect a candidate they support. Under ranked-choice voting, if no candidate reaches the threshold needed to win, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. When a voter’s top choice loses, their vote instantly goes to their second choice. The process repeats until all seats are elected.

Using this approach, four in five voters would elect someone they support. The number of voters in position to swing a seat would immediately triple — from less than 15 percent in 2016, to just under half.

The districts themselves will be drawn by state-created, independent commissions made up of ordinary citizens. These larger districts would be nearly impossible to gerrymander for political advantage – and would force politicians to seek out voters with different perspectives and remain accountable to them.

The bill (H.R.3057) is in committee. It has two Democratic co-sponsors, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Rep. Ro Khanna, of California, and little chance of going anywhere in this Congress. Ranked voting has its supporters, but I haven’t dug enough into it to speak to its merit and weaknesses. Nevertheless, Democrats need to be moving in this direction, writes Nichols:

The people are angry about gerrymandering. They want competitive elections and true representative democracy. (A 2013 Harris poll found that 74 percent of Republicans, 73 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independents object to the pro-politician, anti-voter methods of redistricting that now prevail in most states for congressional and legislative elections.)

Combining support for the assault on gerrymandering that Beyer has proposed with support for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling (as proposed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and others in the Senate and House) and with support for a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to vote and to have that vote counted (as Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan and Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison have proposed) would go a long way toward branding the Democrats as the party of reform that America needs.

By becoming the party of democratic renewal — promoting bold and meaningful changes that empower voters to end the malaise in Washington and state capitals nationwide — Democrats can make themselves the party of the future.

Can, maybe. But will they? According to local legend, back in prehistory when Democrats still firmly controlled both houses of North Carolina’s legislature, progressive activists approached the senate’s majority leader about moving to nonpartisan redistricting. He grinned and dismissed the idea saying, “Democrats draw great districts,” and lived to regret it.