772 search results for ""voter fraud""

“The most bizarre thing I’ve ever been a part of”

by digby

Trump knows he didn’t really win the election straight up. And he gives it away in so many different ways …

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, one of the 11 members of the commission formed by President Trump to investigate supposed voter fraud, issued a scathing rebuke of the disbanded panel on Friday, accusing Vice Chair Kris Kobach and the White House of making false statements and saying that he had concluded that the panel had been set up to try to validate the president’s baseless claims about fraudulent votes in the 2016 election.

Dunlap, one of four Democrats on the panel, made the statements in a report he sent to the commission’s two leaders — Vice President Pence and Kobach, who is Kansas’s secretary of state — after reviewing more than 8,000 documents from the group’s work, which he acquired only after a legal fight despite his participation on the panel.

Before it was disbanded by Trump in January, the panel had never presented any findings or evidence of widespread voter fraud. But the White House claimed at the time that it had shut down the commission despite “substantial evidence of voter fraud,” due to the mounting legal challenges it faced from states. Kobach, too, spoke around that time about how “some people on the left were getting uncomfortable about how much we were finding out.”

Dunlap said that the commission’s documents that were turned over to him underscore the hollowness of those claims: “they do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud,” he said in his report, adding that some of the documentation seemed to indicate that the commission was predicting it would find evidence of fraud, evincing “a troubling bias.”

In particular, Dunlap pointed to an outline for a report the commission was working on that circulated in November 2017. The outline included sections for “Improper voter registration practices,” and “Instances of fraudulent or improper voting,” though the sections themselves were blank as they awaited evidence, speaking to what Dunlap said indicated a push for preordained conclusions.

“After reading this,” Dunlap said of the more than 8,000 pages of documents in an interview with The Washington Post, “I see that it wasn’t just a matter of investigating President Trump’s claims that three to five million people voted illegally, but the goal of the commission seems to have been to validate those claims.”

After a career of more than 20 years that has included stints as a state representative and the chairmanship of a committee on fisheries and wildlife, Dunlap said that his time on the panel was “the most bizarre thing I’ve ever been a part of.”

It’s baffling why Trump hasn’t made Kris Kobach a member of the cabinet:

Kris Kobach’s gubernatorial campaign employs three men identified as members of a white nationalist group by two political consultants who have worked with Republicans in Kansas.

Kobach spokeswoman Danedri Herbert rejects the accusation as a baseless distraction from real news in the closing days of a contested GOP primary race.

The consultants in early July independently named the three men, all in their early 20s, as members of American Heritage Initiative, a splinter of Identity Evropa, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as as a campus-based white supremacy group that builds community from shared racial identity.

Also:

Kris Kobach likes to tout his work for Valley Park, Mo. He has boasted on cable TV about crafting and defending the town’s hard-line anti-immigration ordinance. He discussed his “victory” there at length on his old radio show. He still lists it on his resume.

But “victory” isn’t the word most Valley Park residents would use to describe the results of Kobach’s work. With his help, the town of 7,000 passed an ordinance in 2006 that punished employers for hiring illegal immigrants and landlords for renting to them.

After two years of litigation and nearly $300,000 in expenses, the ordinance was largely gutted. Now, it is illegal only to “knowingly” hire illegal immigrants there — something that was already illegal under federal law. The town’s attorney can’t recall a single case brought under the ordinance.

“Ambulance chasing” is how Grant Young, a former mayor of Valley Park, describes Kobach’s role. Young characterized Kobach’s attitude as, “Let’s find a town that’s got some issues or pretends to have some issues, let’s drum up an immigration problem and maybe I can advance my political position, my political thinking and maybe make some money at the same time.”

Kobach used his work in Valley Park to attract other clients, with sometimes disastrous effects on the municipalities. The towns — some with budgets in the single-digit-millions — ran up hefty legal costs after hiring him to defend similar ordinances.

Farmers Branch, Texas, wound up owing $7 million in legal bills. Hazleton, Pa., took on debt to pay $1.4 million and eventually had to file for a state bailout. Fremont, Neb., raised property taxes to pay for Kobach’s services. None of the towns is currently enforcing an ordinance he helped craft.

“This sounds a little bit to me like Harold Hill in ‘The Music Man,’ ” said Larry Dessem, a law professor at the University of Missouri who focuses on legal ethics. “Got a problem here in River City and we can solve it if you buy the band instruments from me. He is selling something that goes well beyond legal services.”

He’s the son Trump never had.

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Late to his own party
by Tom Sullivan

Donald Trump will devour the Republican Party from within, warned David Frum. In an excerpt from “Trumpocracy” published in The Atlantic in January, the former George W. Bush speechwriter cautioned (emphasis mine):

Maybe you do not much care about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy. The stability of American society depends on conservatives’ ability to find a way forward from the Trump dead end, toward a conservatism that cannot only win elections but also govern responsibly, a conservatism that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible, that upholds markets at home and U.S. leadership internationally.

In short, Frum hopes Republicans will outgrow Trumpism and into everything Trump and his followers are working to smash with a mallet. Will reject democracy?

The Frum quote resurfaced a few days ago, in a week one a radio pundit called the longest month in memory. For those who spent it on a beach somewhere, the sitting president of the United States met Monday in Helsinki behind closed doors with Russian president Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer. No record of their conversation exists (except perhaps at the headquarters of Russian intelligence). Their press conference two hours later left jaws hitting chests across the planet. Donald J. Trump all but made public obeisance before Putin, siding with him in the conclusion that Russia had not hacked U.S. computers and run influence operations during the U.S. 2016 presidential campaign. The rest of the week, including Trump’s follow-up non-walk-back of his slap at the U.S. intelligence community, went about as well.

One cannot help but think Frum is late to his own party. Democracy is like the red, white, and blue bunting it hangs at campaign events and conventions — a political decoration but not a declaration of deeply held principle.

McCay Coppins, also from The Atlantic, conducted a thought experiment on Twitter. He asked if there would be blowback if Trump supporters approved Russia helping Trump defeat Hillary Clinton:

The question was rhetorical. The answers that began trickling in were not.

“No,” said Cassandra Fairbanks, a writer at the right-wing news and conspiracy website Gateway Pundit (and a former Sputnik employee). “I mean, I would be cool with it. Im already there. If russia was involved we should thank them.”

“No,” responded another self-identified Trump voter. “Hillary is a greater threat to our Republic.”

There were more, of course. Frum’s party is deeply committed to law and order so long as it is used to keep the lessers in their place. Otherwise, law and order and democracy are as disposable as “cold shoulder” tops will be next summer.

During a 2012 recount hearing here, the votes of students at a local college determined the outcome of a county commission race. T-party members argued at a hearing that votes of students legally registered at the school should not count. Symm v. United States did not matter. North Carolina statute did not matter. (The Board of Elections chair quoted it to them.) The T-party alleged voter fraud (naturally) and argued, essentially, that the law should be what what they wanted it to be. During the hearing, one GOP supporter turned around to flash a hand-written sign at a student spokesperson standing near me, “You are a law breaker.”

As we have seen modeled by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, by GOP-led legislatures across the country, and by Trump himself, Frum’s party has long rejected the norms and practices of democracy except as pageant. They don’t want to govern. They want to rule. Laws exist to be enforced “strongly” … against others.

Jeff Sharlet (The Family) commented on the arrest this week of Marina Butina, the 29-year-old Russian operative, who had become a minor celebrity with the National Rifle Association. We had known the Russians had been using the NRA as a backdoor into U.S. politics, but Butina also involved herself in the National Prayer Breakfast.

Organized by “a private and deeply secretive Christian organization called the Fellowship,” the breakfast is the only public display of a group with a historic affinity to strongmen, writes Sharlet. The group believes in bringing key men to power as a means of shaping society for Jesus:

It’s not just the means that are antidemocratic. God, the Fellowship believes, can be understood through a study of strongmen. “You know Jesus said, ‘You got to put Him before mother-father-brother-sister’?” the late Doug Coe was fond of preaching. “Hitler, Lenin, Mao, that’s what they taught the kids.”

[…]

Putin would be a prize of another order. American fundamentalists admire his anti-LGBTQ crusades, his revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, his “family values” lip service, his bare-chested manliness. The GOP, observed Butina in The National Interest, a conservative foreign-policy publication, “derives much of its support from social conservatives … and those that support an aggressive approach to the war against Islamic terrorism. These are values espoused by [Putin’s] United Russia.”

Thus, American evangelicals’ embrace of Trump, the walking antithesis of their public faith. They embrace Putin as well, seen “as an ally in a global clash of civilizations between Christianity and Islam.”

American as “a government of laws, not of men,” principles of plurality and democracy be damned.

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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.

Guilty until proven innocent
by Tom Sullivan

Freedom Caucus leader, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) got a grilling last night on “All In” with Chris Hayes. In the wake of a report that immigration officers snatched a months-old child from the arms of her breastfeeding mother, Meadows and Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) came on the show to talk about immigrant family separation at the southern border and immigration legislation making its way through the House. Hayes was not accepting the standard talking points without pushback.

Families need to be unified, Meadows said before alleging a 307 percent increase in “fraud” and human trafficking. “Are they families, are they not?” Meadows said. “We’ve got to get to the bottom of it to make sure families stay together.”

Hayes wasn’t having it. If non-family families are the concern, a DNA test can resolve that.

But there’s a legal way and an illegal way to get here, Meadows replied.

“But wait a second,” Hayes interjected. “Asylum is legal.”

Meadows conceded the point.

Whether or not immigrants arrive legally or illegally, they shouldn’t be separated from their kids, Garamendi argued as Meadows nodded.

But Meadows tried to spin the argument to “legitimate asylum,” “real asylum,” and argue that some, not the vast majority, “game the system.” Again, Hayes pounced.

“What’s happening right now, as far as I can understand,” Hayes began, “… the prosecution is happening before an asylum review. So my point is … these people are coming, they are being prosecuted as criminals for entry, their children are being taken away before an asylum review.”

“I don’t know that I would agree,” Meadows said, before glancing at the floor.

Seeking asylum, Garamendi confirmed, is an “international, legal way.” They may be cheating, “but that can be adjudicated later.”

Finally, Hayes asked Meadows whether separating families is a policy used as a deterrent to people seeking asylum (as White House chief of staff John Kelly has plainly stated). Meadows claimed it is not.

Arguing a policy is not what it plainly is is the Republican tactic in passing legislation requiring photo identity cards for voting. Claiming voter ID bills are drafted to address massive in-person voter fraud investigators cannot find mirrors the rhetoric Meadows used last night. The Trump administration is prosecuting asylum seekers as criminals before gathering evidence that they are. Erect barriers to legal voting because someone might be cheating. (We cannot prove how many or how few.) Punish all families seeking asylum, too, because someone might be faking it. In the tradition of “Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out,” this is the authoritarian way.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a footnote to a June 11 US Citizenship and Immigration Services ruling undercut the lawful claims of tens of thousands seeking shelter in the United States. Asylum requests on the basis of domestic or gang violence “generally” will not meet the “credible fear” standard under law for seeking a hearing before a judge. A spokesman told reporters the ruling will be implemented as soon as possible:

“USCIS is carefully reviewing proposed changes to asylum and credible fear processing whereby every legal means is being considered to protect the integrity of our immigration system from fraudulent claims,” he added.

The Trump administration has pointed to the numbers of ultimately unsuccessful claims as evidence of bad faith in the asylum system, and Sessions repeatedly has discussed clearing the way for “legitimate” claims to succeed, though he has not explained how a claim could be known as illegitimate before it is heard.

The credible fear threshold is set to consider that many of the immigrants may speak little English, have little to no legal understanding or education, may fear governmental authorities based on their home countries and may be traumatized from their journey. Roughly 80% of asylum seekers pass that screening, though a smaller share of them eventually achieve asylum.

Changes made to immigration policy post-9/11 have rendered them guilty until proven innocent. This from Quora on September 11, 2015:

While intended to increase coordination and efficiency between agencies, the absorption of all immigration policy execution and enforcement within a single body like the DHS is troubling for a number of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, it fundamentally alters the core American philosophy toward immigration, moving it away from one that is primarily welcoming to one that is largely deflective.

[…]

It’s not hard to see how this re-situating of immigration policymaking has reflected a cultural shift in broader American society. Since 9/11, the visibility of anti-immigrant sentiments has exploded to the extent that it is now a chief campaign platform for Republican presidential hopefuls. This is a major departure from conservative standard-bearers of pre-9/11 America; president Ronald Reagan was identifiably pro-immigration and pro-amnesty, after all.

Guilty until proven innocent is not the American way. Nonetheless, this has been the policy towards immigrants since long before the Trump administration. Yet when we talk about reforming our capricious and cruel immigration policies, no one is talking about reforming that.

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Moving the goalposts, Part I lost count
by Tom Sullivan

Marco Antonio Munoz committed suicide in police custody after becoming agitated and distraught over authorities forcibly separating him from his family.

All eyes may be on the premiere of Donald Trump’s latest reality show in Singapore, but there are other matters to consider at home.

Fearing death from domestic abuse and gang violence is no reason not to deny asylum to women and children reaching our borders because the United States of America declared they are not refugees; because we declared waterboarding is not torture either; and because we wanted to do both.

Who thinks these actions reflect American values?

U.S. and international law require the country to consider the asylum claims of refugees defined by U.S. law:

(42) The term “refugee” means (A) any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of, that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, or (B) in such special circumstances as the President after appropriate consultation (as defined in section 1157(e) of this title) may specify, any person who is within the country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, within the country in which such person is habitually residing, and who is persecuted or who has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. The term “refugee” does not include any person who ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in the persecution of any person on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. For purposes of determinations under this chapter, a person who has been forced to abort a pregnancy or to undergo involuntary sterilization, or who has been persecuted for failure or refusal to undergo such a procedure or for other resistance to a coercive population control program, shall be deemed to have been persecuted on account of political opinion, and a person who has a well founded fear that he or she will be forced to undergo such a procedure or subject to persecution for such failure, refusal, or resistance shall be deemed to have a well founded fear of persecution on account of political opinion.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions told immigration judges Monday to stop granting asylum to most victims of domestic abuse and gang violence:

“Generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-governmental actors will not qualify for asylum,” Mr Sessions wrote in his ruling, which is a binding precedent for US immigration judges and relied largely on the notion that these are “private” crimes and do not qualify a victim for asylum in the US. “The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes—such as domestic violence or gang violence—or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim.”

Sessions didn’t like the working definition of refugee so he moved the goalposts. The change will likely prevent tens of thousands of immigrants — mostly women reports the Independent — from finding safety in the United States.

This follows on the heels of the Trump administration’s announced “zero tolerance” policy on asylum claims and border crossings creating an overflow of immigrants in detention centers, with children being taken from their parents and held separately for weeks or months. The crackdown has resulted in a young Guatemalan woman being shot and killed by the Border Patrol. Marco Antonio Munoz, 39, of Honduras committed suicide in a padded cell after authorities forcibly separated him from his wife and 3-year-old son.

New Yorker‘s Jessica Winter observes that the rationale given for punishing children for the actions of their parents echoes the language of domestic abusers:

In a scene from Sunday’s Globe piece, a defense attorney pleads with a U.S. magistrate judge in Texas, Peter Ormsby, to order a group of immigrants in custody to be reunited with their children; Ormsby turns to the defendants and says, “I hope you understand the reason there was a separation is you violated the laws here.” Look what you made me do.

As the sitting president met with North Korea’s leader in Singapore, Now This compiled a series of video clips of how hotly the America right condemned the previous (Democrat) president for even considering speaking with hostile foreign leaders. Now that Donald Trump occupies the White House, the goalposts have moved:

Fox News: Obama meeting with North Korea = bad. Trump meeting with North Korea = good. #TrumpKimSummit⁠ ⁠ pic.twitter.com/9zp13Bfk91— Jeff Blix (@JeffBlix) June 12, 2018

On Monday conservative justices on the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Ohio could purge its voter rolls. The legal fight arose over the method Ohio uses for purging inactive voters from its rolls.

“You’ll see more red states making it easier to drop people from the voter registration rolls,” said Prof. Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine and editor of Election Law Blog. Lower courts had ruled voters could not be purged for failing to exercise the right. Writing at Slate, Hasen explained, “No doubt other Republican states will follow suit and adopt Ohio’s procedures, leading to the removal of a disproportionate number of minority, low-income, and veteran voters from the list of eligible voters.”

Which is the point, of course. Many of those voters (when they do) tend to vote for Democrats:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a separate dissent, pointed particularly to the effect of Monday’s decision on minority and poor neighborhoods. She observed that, in Hamilton County – which includes Cincinnati – African-American neighborhoods in the city had 10 percent of their voters removed due to inactivity, as compared to only 4 percent in the suburban, white-majority neighborhoods.

Ari Berman wrote in January that Republicans have the National Voter Registration Act on their target list for repeal:

In 2013, the Supreme Court weakened a key part of the Voting Rights Act, ruling that states with long histories of voting discrimination no longer needed to clear their election changes with the federal government. After winning that fight, Republicans are now going after the NVRA in what voting rights advocates say is a thinly veiled effort to make it more difficult for Democratic-leaning constituencies to register to vote—and far easier for state officials to remove them from the voter rolls. “We’re seeing a coming fight over how voter rolls are maintained,” says Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “It’s a new front in the voter suppression battles.”

Facing slumping GOP registration and a rapidly aging base, Republicans are moving the goalposts … for the opposing team.

Critics describe photo ID bills and other Republican-led “voter fraud” election law changes as a solution in search of a problem. Their Senate leader once argued that making voting easier for all Americans (via the NVRA) was a solution in search of a problem. Sen. Mitch McConnell wrote in 1991 that “relatively low voter turnout is a sign of a content democracy.” (These aren’t the voters droids you’re looking for.) He wasn’t advocating low voter participation, McConnell wrote, but what makes American democracy great is “Americans have the right not to vote.”

There is no set of core beliefs here. No faith and trust in American values or in democracy, only in expediency.

The truth when it gets us what we want; lies when it doesn’t.

The rule of law for thee but not for me.

Democracy so long as our side wins.

Mercy for the rich and powerful. Hardened hearts for the poor and weak because they’re poor and weak.

Who thinks these actions reflect American values? People who are Americans like Fox News is “fair and balanced,” that’s who.

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Census question: How many guns in your house?
by Tom Sullivan

Warren Zevon’s “Excitable Boy” album sleeve.

Imagine the tantrums and rent garments on the right if instead of asking about citizenship status, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross inserted a question on the 2020 census that asked how many guns people keep in their homes.

A plot, I tell you! Why, it will lead to tyranny! It will keep white males from answering, resulting in an undercount and their underrepresentation in Congress.

But adding a question that might result in browner-skinned neighbors not responding? No problem. A few NRA members might even utter the phrase in pseudo-Spanish.

The Trump administration has decided to weaponize the census, writes Vann R. Newkirk II at The Atlantic:

On Monday evening, the Commerce Department announced that it would make a controversial change to the next Census that the Trump administration has signaled for months: the addition of a question asking participants about their citizenship status. While citizenship is currently a field in a major interstitial supplemental survey to the Census, the last time it was asked to the entire United States population during the decennial main event was in 1950. But, during the current administration’s crusade against unauthorized immigration and a related campaign against the specter of voter fraud, the Department of Justice in December sent a letter to the Census Bureau asking for the question’s reinstatement, calling it “critical to the Department’s enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and its important protections against racial discrimination in voting.”

Uh-huh.

Paul Waldman pushed back on the move at The Week:

“If you’re a citizen, what do you have to worry about?” some might ask. Or even if you aren’t — after all, it isn’t like the Census is going to be arresting undocumented immigrants on the spot. But the truth is that it’s already difficult to get even legal immigrants in many communities to trust a Census-taker enough to fill out the form, even without that question. “I worked the Census in 2000,” said Salon‘s Amanda Marcotte on Twitter. “Getting immigrants to talk was really hard as it was. I had to assure them up front that I was not interested in citizenship status. This is a deliberate attempt to terrify and erase people.”

That’s even more true in the current environment, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has, it is no exaggeration to say, been terrorizing immigrant communities around the country. The agency has a newly aggressive spirit under President Trump, who came into office promising to build a wall, cancel the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and round up supposed criminal aliens. The result is that even legal immigrants are already reluctant to talk to someone from the government taking down their information; start asking about citizenship status, and they’ll be even more afraid.

Which is why if terrifying and erasing people is a policy goal, make it ecumenical. Ask residents how many guns they have. If for no other reason than seeing if NRA spokesweapon Dana Loesch’s outrage amp goes up to eleven.

You’ve got to give the GOP points for creativity if not for ruthlessness and duplicity. Republicans have deployed every means of retaining power they can think of short of poll taxes and literacy tests to suppress the votes of those they dislike: gerrymandering, photo ID laws, citizenship requirements, curtailing voting hours, siting early voting locations in some neighborhoods and not others, eliminating Sunday voting, shorting voting machines in certain precincts, etc. Now the census.

Cheaters have their avatar in the White House. The Seven Deadly Sins walks on two legs.

E.J. Dionne calls out the cheating in the Washington Post, arguing that “when elected officials use their power to make it ever harder for their opponents to win elections — exactly what’s happening with the census and gerrymandering — the courts have an obligation to serve as democracy’s last line of defense.”

Except the GOP is working feverishly on rigging those as well. In North Carolina. In Pennsylvania. In Wisconsin.

I hate to disagree with Dionne, but the last line of defense for democracy is not the courts. It’s you.

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Epistemology in the Trump era
by Tom Sullivan

Image via Science.

What is truth? And how do we know?

That question is the heart of the matter. Does anyone care? is more to the point. Robinson Meyer examines for The Atlantic a recent study published in Science on fake news and the Twitter users who love it:

The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.

As if we needed a study.

They taught computers to differentiate between accurate stories and spurious ones, then tracked how both spread. Using a “state-of-the-art sentiment-analysis tool,” researchers at MIT also found false stories are more novel, sparking retweets. The report itself found “the truth inspired replies that expressed greater sadness.”

Spread lies, be happy. Cue Bobby McFerrin.

The study did not look at recent bot activity, but rather across the entire existence of Twitter. On that time span, they found little effect of bots in furthering the spread of false stories, concluding “human behavior contributes more to the differential spread of falsity and truth than automated robots do.”

Rebekah Tromble, a professor of political science at Leiden University in the Netherlands responded in an email, “The key takeaway is really that content that arouses strong emotions spreads further, faster, more deeply, and more broadly on Twitter.” Researchers have not applied the same process to Facebook, but believe the results would be similar.

Even for readers already into a fifth of scotch, the analysis is sobering.

An accompanying article in Science considered interventions for staunching the unreality bleed. The prospects are not good:

Fact checking might even be counterproductive under certain circumstances. Research on fluency—the ease of information recall—and familiarity bias in politics shows that people tend to remember information, or how they feel about it, while forgetting the context within which they encountered it. Moreover, they are more likely to accept familiar information as true (10). There is thus a risk that repeating false information, even in a fact-checking context, may increase an individual’s likelihood of accepting it as true. The evidence on the effectiveness of claim repetition in fact checking is mixed (11).

The team called for (emphasis mine) “interdisciplinary research to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies.”

As if we needed a study.

Reading through the reports brought to mind Tom Wolfe’s essay, “O Rotten Gotham: Sliding Down into the Behavioral Sink” (1968?). His tramp through New York with anthropologist Edward T. Hall spawned an essay in how overcrowding would inevitably lead in humans, as it does among rats, to disease and social dysfunction, even mass die-offs. In an over-crowded colony, a few male rats prosper and collect harems while the rest of the colony falls into chaos.

Wolfe wrote:

Most politicians are like the aristocrat rats. They are insulated from The Sink by practically sultanic buffers — limousines chauffeurs, secretaries, aides-de-camp, doormen, shuttered houses, high-floor apartments they almost never ride subways, fight rush-hours, much less live in the slums or work in the Pan-Am Building.

Trump could tell his audience he directed Black Panther and invented the iPhone, and they'd be like, "Yeah! That was awesome when he did that!" https://t.co/86lkD8pxHI— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) March 11, 2018

Overcrowding in rural America, of course, is as rare as voter fraud and does not explain the joie de vivre with which Trumpian crowds celebrate every falsehood uttered by their king. They cheered again Saturday night in Moon Township, Pennsylvania. But it is hard not to look at the false news study and feel America, with its widening gulf between haves and anxious have-nots, with its males engaging in (quoting Wolfe) “unprovoked and senseless assault upon one another,” as happened in Hall’s rat colonies, in Las Vegas, and in Parkland, Florida, is another manifestation of The Sink.

“Social-media platforms do not encourage the kind of behavior that anchors a democratic government,” writes Meyer.

As if we needed a study.

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

With every instrumentality at their disposal
by Tom Sullivan

Han von Spakovsky’s “Ya Got Trouble” routine may not have found its way to the fictional River City, Iowa. But for decades now, plenty of real places across the country have heard his pitch about the caliber of disaster represented by the fictional presence of rampant voter fraud in their communities.

He’s not selling boys bands. He’s selling vote suppression.

A federal judge in Kansas City, Kansas is not buying. Judge Julie Robinson, a George W. Bush appointee, heard arguments last week in the case of Fish v. Kobach, a challenge to the state’s controversial “proof of citizenship” voting law. It pits the ACLU and state plaintiffs denied their right to vote against Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Kobach has promoted amending the National Voter Registration Act to waive provisions for states that adopt a proof of citizenship voter registration requirement.

Tierney Sneed has been covering the trial for Talking Points Memo.

Intent to defraud is irrelevant, von Spakovsky argued as a witness for the state. Whenever a non-citizen registers or votes “they are defrauding citizens,” he argued. But what about the thousands of qualified citizens denied their votes by the restrictive laws? “Would that not also be defrauding the electoral process?” Robinson asked:

“As long as you have an open process to allow the potential voter to obtain the ID to vote,” that’s neither discriminatory nor unconstitutional, then the system is not being defrauded, he said.

Robinson said she was taking from that answer that von Spakovsky wanted to consider the context around burdens in this case. But, conversely, in non-citizen voting — whether that person made a mistake or there was an administrative error — context shouldn’t be considered, she said, describing von Spakovsky’s apparent view.

Why should you only look at it contextually when talking about citizens? Robinson asked.

Von Spakovsky tried to avoid the contradiction again, and said that context should be considered in prosecutions.

“I am not asking about prosecution,” Robinson said. She was asking him how he characterized voter fraud, she said.

Again, von Spakovsky brought up the distinctions he saw between prosecutions and the effect of when a non-citizen casts a ballot.

But Robinson appeared unconvinced. For thousands who are actual citizens, Robinson said, “that’s not diluting the vote? And that’s not impairing the integrity of the electoral process, I take it?”

Neither is the process served when people self-censor by staying home, argues the New York Times in an editorial. They are not, as some believe, protesting poor choices, but “putting their lives and futures in the hands of the people who probably don’t want them to vote.” People like von Spakovsky.

In Virginia, in Alabama, and perhaps this week in Pennsylvania, the Times argues, protesting at the ballot box can make a difference. The Times promises to examine why people abstain in a series of columns between now and November.

Disillusionment with the major parties is part of the problem: “Some people wouldn’t vote if you put a ballot box in their living room.” So are the frustrations of failing election technology. But so is the vote suppression on trial in Kansas.

The Editorial Board writes:

Keeping people from voting has been an American tradition from the nation’s earliest days, when the franchise was restricted to white male landowners. It took a civil war, constitutional amendments, violently suppressed activism against discrimination and a federal act enforcing the guarantees of those amendments to extend this basic right to every adult. With each expansion of voting rights, the nation inched closer to being a truly representative democracy. Today, only one group of Americans may be legally barred from voting — those with felony records, a cruel and pointless restriction that disproportionately silences people of color.

But with each expansion of voting rights come redoubled efforts by the modern analogues of white male landowners to roll them back.

A 96-year-old woman in Tennessee was denied a voter-ID card despite presenting four forms of identification, including her birth certificate. A World War II veteran was turned away in Ohio because his Department of Veterans Affairs photo ID didn’t include his address. Andrea Anthony, a 37-year-old black woman from Wisconsin who had voted in every major election since she was 18, couldn’t vote in 2016 because she had lost her driver’s license a few days before.

Stories like these are distressingly familiar, as more and more states pass laws that make voting harder for certain groups of voters, usually minorities, but also poor people, students and the elderly. They require forms of photo identification that minorities are much less likely to have or be able to get — purportedly to reduce fraud, of which there is virtually no evidence. They eliminate same-day registration, close polling stations in minority areas and cut back early-voting hours and Sunday voting.

These new laws may not be as explicitly discriminatory as the poll taxes or literacy tests of the 20th century, but they are part of the same long-term project to keep minorities from the ballot box. And because African-Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, the laws are nearly always passed by Republican-dominated legislatures.

Those legislatures have declared war on voters not of their persuasion and have prosecuted that war with every instrumentality at their disposal, from redistricting blue cities to undermining public education to gerrymandering to naked voter suppression. We know too well in North Carolina that since 2011 the courts have been the last line of defense against the reactionary Republican hegemon. Those lines won’t hold for long. So long as Republicans hold their majorities, their war will continue and democracy as an American ideal will wither.

“If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,” goes the modern proverb. Those who don’t or won’t vote are the fricassee.

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

The Spartacus tactic

by digby

In light of Trump’s twitter meltdown over the week-end and the fact that he has now had to admit that Russian election interference did take place Walter Shapiro makes a strong case for reporters to band together and ask President Trump the same question over and over again: “Mr President, if your claim that there was no collusion with Russia is correct, then why do you refuse to condemn Vladimir Putin or enforce sanctions against Russia?”
He writes:

Like a small child being introduced to board games, Trump’s instinct is to knock over the table whenever he is challenged. These daily uproars and Twitter tantrums all but erase memories of the prior week’s outrages. The result: the news media has lost its ability to declare that one topic (Russian interference) is of far more lasting importance than Trump’s assaults on random targets like Oprah Winfrey.

Given the leak-proof nature of the Mueller investigation, there is as yet no way to know whether the special counsel has uncovered convincing evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Putin’s puppets. And it remains likely that most Trump insiders and the troll farmers in Moscow never expected the bilious billionaire to actually become president.

But the innocent explanations for Trump’s willful inaction in the face of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election are beginning to seem implausible.

For a long while, I clung to the notion that Trump has a fan-boy crush on Putin, admiring the Russian leader’s bare-chested brazenness, his contempt for democracy and unashamed cronyism.

Another familiar argument is that Trump bristles at any challenge to the legitimacy of his election. That’s why losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton prompted Trump to go off on half-baked conspiracy theories about five million illegal votes and to appoint his ill-fated commission on voter fraud.

When Steve Bannon was riding high, there was talk of his dream of an alliance with Russia against the Muslim world. In such a geopolitical fantasy, the religious links between American evangelicals and Russian Orthodoxy would erase cold war memories as Putin and Trump marched off into the sunset arm-in-arm.

But Bannon has been exiled to Elba. And the president’s unhinged tweets last weekend – excoriating everyone from his national security adviser HR McMaster to the FBI – suggest that there is far more at stake than Trump’s disappointment in his role model in the Kremlin.

Everyone has a private list of what Trump might have to hide. But what matters at the moment is the president’s abdication of any interest in safeguarding the 2018 elections from Moscow’s meddling.

He has no interest in doing so and is, in fact, tacitly inviting it to be done again.

And, lest we forget, so are the Republicans in congress. They refuse to do a real investigation or even make any kind of definitive statement about what happened and produce some plan to prevent it from happening again.

As I have been saying for the past year — they know it happened and they know it will happen again. You have to wonder why they seem so blithely confident that it will never hurt them.

What do they know that we don’t know?

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The Big Question

by digby

David Frum asks the question I think we should all be asking at this point:

To what extent does President Trump—to what extent do congressional Republicans—look to Russian interference to help their party in the 2018 cycle?

Most observers predict a grim year for the GOP in 2018. But the economy is strong, and selective tax cuts are strategically redistributing money from blue-state professionals to red-state parents. The Republican national committee commands a huge financial advantage over its Democratic counterpart. (Thing look more even at the level of the individual candidates.) A little extra help could make a big difference to Republican hopes—and to Trump’s political survival.

Nothing has been done in the past 15 months to prevent that help from flowing. You have to wonder whether the president does not privately welcome that help, as he publicly welcomed help from WikiLeaks in the summer of 2016.

Trump’s own tweets reveal that among the things he most fears is the prospect of Representative Adam Schiff gaining the gavel of the House Intelligence Committee from the clownish present chairman, Devin Nunes. How far would Trump go to stop a dreaded political opponent, inside the law and outside? How far has Donald Trump gone in the past?

Trump continues to insist that he and his campaign team did not collude with Russia in the 2016 election. We know that they were ready and eager to collude—that’s on the public record. (“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”) The public does not yet know whether the collusion actually occurred, and if so, in what form and to what extent.

But in front of our very eyes we can observe that they are leaving the door open to Russian intervention on their behalf in the next election. You might call it collusion in advance—a dereliction of duty as grave as any since President Buchanan looked the other way as Southern state governments pillaged federal arsenals on the eve of the Civil War.

Yes they are. All of them. And I guess that a whole lot of Americans are fine with that.

This strikes me as one of the most astonishing developments in this whole story. I get that Trump is an imbecile who has no idea how politics are supposed to work. He learned everything he knows from watching TV. But other Republicans must know that it would have been so much better if they had at last pretended to be alarmed by this election interference and had put on a show to indicate that they were on top of the matter. But it really doesn’t seem so. They’re all obviously more than willing to fight any attempts to stop another round of interference because they seem to be very sure that they are the ones who will benefit. And they have recognized that they can literally say anything and deny everything and their voters will not challenge them.

They already cheat with their vote suppression efforts and lies about voter fraud. If foreigners want to help them win elections by pushing out propaganda and stealing their opponents’ proprietary documents and private correspondence, what’s the problem? It’s all for a good cause, amirite?

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