772 search results for ""voter fraud""

Voting Rights Jeopardy
by Tom Sullivan

“Alex, I’ll take Voting Irregularities for $100.”
It’s the solution to dead people voting.

“What is Voter ID?”

That is the conservatively correct response to every voting irregularity in the category. Dated voter rolls. Felons voting. Clerical errors. Registration errors. Non-citizens voting. Double voting. Machine tampering. Ballot box stuffing. Absentee ballot fraud (a big one). The entire gamut of election irregularities. For voter fraud vigilantes, one non-solution fits all and puts the voting rights of millions of legal voters in jeopardy in pursuit of the ever-elusive, voter imposter. Why is that?

Right-wing media has been flogging the results of an audit of the 2016 election released last week by the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE). Misrepresenting those results helps sell one single product that won’t prevent the overwhelming majority of suspected ineligible votes. On Fox & Friends Sunday April 23, guest J. Christian Adams declared, “The system is broken and needs work.”

Yet the Charlotte Observer Editorial Board concludes:

On Friday, the State Board of Elections released the results of an extensive, objective audit of the 2016 election. It found that 4,769,640 votes were cast in November and that one (1) would probably have been avoided with a voter ID law. One out of nearly 4.8 million.

Let that sink in. In fact, the audit identified 508 suspected cases of inelligible votes. Offsetting those (highlight in the original), “A provisional ballot audit resulted in 428 ballots of eligible voters being counted that would not otherwise have counted.” (They won’t be celebrating that on Fox News.) But before we get to the details, the Republican-led NCSBE is careful not to mischaracterize what the votes flagged as worthy of investigation represent (highlight in the original):

This agency strongly cautions readers not to refer to each of these cases as “voter fraud.” As stated earlier, “ineligible voters casting ballots” may be the result of unintentional or intentional conduct. Fraud, in most cases, is an intent crime that requires prosecutors to show that the voter knowingly committed a crime.

The evidence suggests that participation by ineligible voters is neither rampant nor non-existent in North Carolina. Our audits suggest that in the 2016 general election, approximately 0.01% of ballots were cast by ineligible voters. Most incidents are isolated and uncoordinated, and detecting technical violations does not always prove purposefully unlawful conduct. Our work indicates that ineligible voters are not isolated to one political party or any geographical region of the state.

Contrary to the alarmism on the right about election integrity, a 0.01% error rate would indicate a system that works pretty well, well below the defect rate for consumer electronics, actually. The Observer continues:

About 87 percent of those (441) were felons who voted. State law prohibits felons from voting until their sentence is fully served, including probation and parole. It is believed that many of the felons who voted did not realize they could not vote while on probation.

The probe found 41 non-citizens, from 28 countries, voted. All were here legally, but were not eligible to vote. The audit also found 24 cases of double-voting and two cases of voter impersonation (one by mail and one in person).

The two impersonation cases have been referred to prosecutors. They involve ballots by persons voting the preferences of recently deceased members of the family. (Both were Republicans.) The in-person case is the one identified out of 4.8 million that might have been stopped by a photo ID law.

It’s the solution to non-citizens voting

The Board is also careful to remind readers that these are for the most part only suspected cases of “ineligible voters casting ballots.” They’ve been flagged for further investigation. In many cases, the initial screening proves incorrect.

Investigations on non-citizen cases also have revealed the complexities
of immigration law and citizenship status.

For instance, some individuals achieve citizenship as a matter of law through “derived citizenship” as the child of a naturalized citizen, though paperwork showing that changed status is only available if requested and official databases may not reflect the correct status. An Application for Certificate of Citizenship costs $1,170. Individual contact with affected registrants has also illustrated the limitations of the data. Even where data from the Division of Motor Vehicles, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the voter rolls matched exactly, a high proportion of flagged individuals were citizens.

And since the cases identified to date are all legal immigrants, they would already have government IDs.

It’s the solution to felons voting

As in the cases of felons returning to voting before completing their parole or probation, the Board believes “education and understanding of state law appear to be the primary problem.”

It’s the solution to double voting

The Board rarely encounters cases of double voting, but has flagged 24 records for further investigation. If past experience is any indication, suspected double voting will turn out in a majority of cases (I wrote about one case I know personally here) to be bad data matching or clerical errors:

Detecting double voting and voter impersonation is a time-intensive process. Database matching is not enough, as administrative errors can lead to voter history being assigned to the wrong person — such as when a poll worker checks off the wrong name on the poll book. Instead, data is only the starting point for cases that ultimately involve live interviews
and signature analyses. NCSBE has begun that process on possible instate double voting cases in 2016. This initial review of NC voter registration records indicates that there are a few dozen possible additional cases of double voting; however, this process is still in its preliminary stages and staff have not yet completed review of voter documents to determine whether the match was due to administrative error rather than illegal voting.

The NCSBE offers additional steps it is taking for reducing voting errors to augment deterrents already in place. They involve improved voter education, updated elections software (to check felon status at the time of registration), automated detection of transcription errors in real time, and continued use of the Interstate Crosscheck Program, among others.

But not voter ID, the all-purpose response when “election integrity” advocates play Voting Rights Jeopardy.

They want to rule, Part eleventy-leven
by Tom Sullivan

Six years ago, I asked, Colonist or Royalist? Because the rich have put a lot of time and money behind programming people to support maintaining a society that keeps them safely on top. Business schools that teach Ayn Rand. Money-losing conservative newspapers. Fox News. Talk radio. How many people around your workplace marinate in it all day? On headphones? (Happens where I work.)

It’s working:

“Corporations shouldn’t pay taxes at all. That’s a terrible idea.”
— pro-Walker demonstrator Jay from LaCrosse in Madison, WI.

All that is prelude to how obvious (or careless) over time our friends across the aisle have become about what the real game is. North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Michigan have been test beds for Republicans to rig the election system, by restricting voting and through redistricting. If traditional rules no longer protect their dominance, change the rule. If the courts stop them, try, try again.

It’s clear from the expectations the Trump administration brings to the White House that they too expect not to govern, but to rule.

Ahead of this week’s congressional special election in Georgia which sends Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel to a June 20 runoff, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported:

At a GOP breakfast on the district’s eastern DeKalb outskirts, state Sen. Fran Millar criticized Democrats who think it’s a “done deal that this kid’s going to become the Congressman.”

“I’ll be very blunt: These lines were not drawn to get Hank Johnson’s protégé to be my representative. And you didn’t hear that,” said Millar. “They were not drawn for that purpose, OK? They were not drawn for that purpose.”

Rep. Hank Johnson, Democrat representing Georgia’s 4th District.

In an era in which shifting demographics are reducing the voting majorities white America treat as a birthright:

Losing power is very personal for people on the right. Both left and right talk about taking “their country” back, but it seems much more personal for conservatives. In their America, it seems, there is no we, just i and me.

One place you hear it is in their rhetoric about voter fraud. It is a very personal affront to them that the power of their votes might be diminished by the Other. Every time someone ineligible casts a fraudulent ballot, they insist, it “steals your vote.” Your vote. They have convinced themselves that there are thousands and thousands of invisible felons stealing their votes every election. Passing more restrictive voting laws is a matter of justice and voting integrity, of course. What other motivation could there be for railroading eligible poor, minority, and college-age voters?

So it is no surprise at all that after Tuesday’s jungle primary in Georgia, Karen Handel, a real pioneer in Republican voter suppression, invoked the notion that losing an election to Democrats amounts to theft.

Handel at party: We cannot let [them]…steal a seat that has been held by the great leaders of Tom Price, Jonny Isakson and Newt Gingrich.— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) April 19, 2017

The president himself joined the chorus:

Trump sends fundraising email for Karen Handel pic.twitter.com/qk2ff266Xa— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) April 20, 2017

Does someone “as morally bankrupt as this president” even know the meaning of the word “steal”? Nancy LeTourneau asks. In court this week, his lawyers argued that protesters’ First Amendment rights do not extend to “the campaign rally of the political candidates they oppose.” LeTourneau writes:

What it comes down to is that Trump’s reaction to anything he doesn’t like is to define it as criminal. Back in January, Martin wrote about the 12 early warning signs of fascism posted at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. This tendency is embedded in several of them, but most notably this one: “obsession with crime and punishment.”

You might suggest that this time it was simply a fundraising email for one House seat in Georgia. But using rhetoric about “stealing” an election is serious business in my book.

It is serious. It’s a strategy.

Dusk of the Dead revisited
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by La Tête Krançien via Creative Commons.

Zombie lies. They just won’t die. A head shot works for normal zombies, but lies have no heads. [Film idea: headless zombies. How then do the eat brains?] Voter fraud, that really unstoppable zombie lie, gets its genealogy mapped at Politico. The lie’s history goes back decades, but for those just catching up, Lisa Rab begins in 2002. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft sent federal prosecutors on a snipe hunt:

“Votes have been bought, voters intimidated and ballot boxes stuffed,” he told the attendees of the Justice Department’s inaugural Voting Integrity Symposium. “Voters have been duped into signing absentee ballots believing they were applications for public relief. And the residents of cemeteries have infamously shown up at the polls on Election Day.”

Guess what color he imagined those seeking “public relief” were. The same color we all do. We’ve been conditioned to it since at least the Reagan years. Race has been the subtext to voter suppression measures since the days of Jim Crow and literacy tests. Who knows what color Ashcroft thought the zombies were.

The U.S. attorneys found no evidence of any massive conspiracy. By July 2006, they had only 86 convictions to show for over 300 investigations. The Bush Justice Department abruptly fired seven U.S. attorneys that December (and two others later), critics said, for failing to prosecute thin evidence of election fraud. The scandal resulted in a congressional investigation and the resignations of then United States Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and several others.

But this stuff never goes away no matter how often it’s debunked. In January 2012, S.C. Department of Motor Vehicles director Kevin Shwedo tesified — and got big headlines for saying so (Dusk of the Dead, 2-25-12) — that 950 dead people had voted in the state’s 2010 elections. The Institute for Southern Studies reported the investigation’s findings:

As was suspected from the beginning, the fevered stories of “zombie voters” turned out to be fantasy. This week, state elections officials reviewed 207 of the supposed 950 cases of dead people voting, and couldn’t confirm fraud in any of them. 106 stemmed from clerical errors at the polls, and another 56 involved bad data — the usual culprits when claims of dead voters have surfaced in the past.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence where the Voting Dead are concerned. The last I heard, the SCGOP was still looking. Eventually, however, the party’s national branch turned from pursuing the dead to accusing the living. Now it’s non-citizen immigrants behind the alleged widespread and undetectable conspiracy. Plus the threat from people who move from one state but another remain on the voter rolls in their former states for a few years.

In 2014, the Institute for Southern Studies again weighed in on the alleged fraud carried out (somehow) by people registered in two states:

Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies just as quickly debunked the study by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach whose office, after checking 5 million voter records in 2013, “couldn’t provide any evidence of a single instance in which the Interstate Crosscheck’s data had led to an actual legal charge of voter fraud.” Because the data, Kromm writes, “offers no proof such fraud is occurring.” Requiring citizens to present identity cards to vote would have no effect on voting in multiple states.

But millions of dead still on the voter rolls (over two and a half million Americans die each year) and the existence of two-state registrants translates, in Republican minds anyway, to millions of actual votes cast against Republican candidates. Cast by whom, they cannot say, but rest assured they have a mental image of their skin color. President Donald Trump is convinced that 3 million or more voted illegally in 2016 and he’s put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of finding them. Just don’t expect Trump to ask Congress for funding to help states upgrade their voter registration systems and do better list maintenance.

Lisa Rab concludes:

The Republican narrative of massive voter fraud persists despite evidence from the party’s own crackdown—what election law expert Rick Hasen, a University of California-Irvine professor, calls “a whole lot of nothing.” For many conservatives, fears about voting by felons, who they say lean Democratic, and ACORN registration drives have simply been replaced with concerns about undocumented immigrants. (ACORN shut down in 2010 after conservative activist James O’Keefe posed as a pimp and filmed a misleading video of ACORN employees supposedly advising him and a prostitute on how to get a mortgage. O’Keefe later paid a $100,000 settlement to one employee whose name he had smeared.)

[…]

“Just because someone can fill out a registration form doesn’t meant they get on a [voter] list, doesn’t mean they cast a ballot, doesn’t meant the ballot is counted,” Becker says. “There’s a variety of checks in place … that would easily prevent widespread fraud.”

Studies conducted by academics and secretaries of state have found noncitizen voting to be extremely rare. There are small-scale examples, such as the Texas city councilwoman who was sentenced to five years in prison for registering noncitizens to vote during a 2006 primary. But Lorraine Minnite, a public policy professor at Rutgers, studied the Justice Department’s voter fraud crackdown during the Bush years and found that only 14 noncitizens were convicted of voting between 2002 and 2005.

But promoting the threat of voter fraud is a cottage industry, as I’ve said repreatedly:

Every couple of months, their agents (figuratively) fling smoke bombs into newsrooms and yell “voter fraud.” By the time the smoke clears and reporters realize there’s no fire — and no fraud — all viewers remember are hearing the words “voter fraud” over and over again, and the eye-popping crawlers on the news at six about dead people voting. Thus is spread an urban legend.

The voter fraud promotion industry conflates any and all kinds of election irregularities with in-person voter fraud to manufacture a significant problem where there is none, undermine confidence in elections (Vladimir Putin would approve), and build a constituency for photo ID and other election suppression laws that target minority voters with almost surgical precision. The Heritage Foundation maintains a database frequently referenced to support the need for state election “reforms.” But try finding in it actual cases of in-person fraud among 462 criminal cases of vote-buying, registration fraud, double voting, and election rigging by local officials dating back to 1990. In-person fraud is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of votes cast in each election.

Point this out and you might be accused of not valuing election integrity. That the potential exists that someone might vote improperly, the argument goes, demands greater vigilance and higher hurdles to participation. That so few people go to their polling places on Election Day to commit felonies is no counterargument to fraud believers. States allowing concealed and open carry of firearms means millions might breeze into banks and rob them, yet there is no concomitant push for heightened bank security. Nor calls for more barriers to widespread carrying of firearms. Because more regulations simply infringe honest Americans’ rights, and we can’t have that.

Mike Pence will have as much chance of finding those millions of elusive illegal voters as finding space aliens. As those paying attention recall, a clever study published in 2013 looked at how many people in America report having committed voter fraud. Researchers found that roughly the same percentages of the population admit to perpetrating voter fraud as admit to being abducted by aliens:

The implication here is that if one accepts that 2.5% is a valid lower bound for the prevalence of voter impersonation in the 2012 election then one must also accept that about 2.5% of the adult U.S. population — about 6 million people — believe that they were abducted by extra-terrestrials in the last year. If this were true then voter impersonation would be the least of our worries.

Since we know Trump gets some of his “intel” from Infowars conspiracist Alex Jones, perhaps reporters should ask whether Trump believes he has ever been abducted by aliens and if Alex Jones might be the better leader of the search for extra-legal voters.

The latest GOP US Attorney scandal. They just can’t help themselves

by digby

I wrote about the latest Republican US Attorney scandal for Salon this morning:

You would think that 40 years after Watergate, Republicans would be careful not to appear overtly political when it comes to the Justice Department. But apparently they can’t help themselves. The last GOP Justice Department under George W. Bush created a huge scandal when its leaders abruptly fired a number of federal prosecutors for political purposes. These prosecutors were let go for such reasons as not succumbing to political pressure to indict Democrats in the final days before an election, and refusing to bring bogus voter fraud cases. One was fired simply because Karl Rove wanted to place a crony in the job. Most of them were loyal Republicans so it caused more of a stir than usual.

But perhaps the worst of all the reasons for some of those firings was because prosecutors had brought charges against corrupt Republicans. That was a warning sign to all the federal prosecutors in the country who were still on the job: stay away from Republicans if you know what’s good for you. That scandal eventually led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, even if lying to Congress about NSA surveillance was the final straw.

President Donald Trump has taken all this to a new level. He has already fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates for refusing to enforce his Muslim travel ban, an executive order that was greeted with shock by legal experts and courts around the nation, leading his lawyers to try to draft a new one that could pass legal muster. Yates was right, and Trump’s insulting dismissal letter will long be remembered for its petulance.

On Friday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions abruptly demanded the resignations all 46 U.S. attorneys who had been appointed by President Obama. It’s not unprecedented for a new A.G. to ask for resignations, although the obvious partisanship in only removing the Obama appointees can leave no doubt about the the motives. But the way in which this was done has been crude, in typical Trump fashion, and it’s left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths.

When Janet Reno, attorney general during the Clinton administration, asked for the resignations of all the U.S. attorneys, they were allowed to leave gradually, finish up some important cases and wait for their replacements to be confirmed. Trump wanted these people out immediately, which raises some questions about why.

Sessions gave no indication that he planned a large-scale purge when he spoke to all the prosecutors in the middle of last week about his criminal justice agenda. But on Friday they suddenly brought the hammer down. There is some speculation that this was the result of a paranoid rant by Sean Hannity on his Fox News show Thursday night, when he exhorted Trump to begin purging the “deep state” of all those who are disloyal:

Deep-state Obama holdovers embedded like barnacles in the federal bureaucracy are hell-bent on destroying President Trump. It’s time for the Trump administration to purge these saboteurs …

He even quoted the notorious Rep. Steve King saying, “Donald Trump needs to purge leftists from the executive branch before disloyal, illegal and treasonous acts sink us,” to which Hannity added, “It’s important that the president begins to hear this and act now.”

The next day he did just that. The U.S. attorney most surprised by this was Preet Bharara of the Southern District of New York, who had been personally assured by Trump and Sessions last November that he would be staying on. Trump tried to get Bharara on the phone last week and he refused to take the call, telling Sessions it was inappropriate for the president to be contacting U.S. attorneys, “particularly ones that have jurisdictions over important matters,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

There was quite a bit of drama on social media when Bharara tweeted that he was refusing to resign and then shortly followed with a note that he’d officially been fired. But it was this tweet that really raised eyebrows:

By the way, now I know what the Moreland Commission must have felt like.

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) March 12, 2017

The Moreland Commission was set up in 2013 by Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York to investigate political corruption. After passing a few minor ethics reforms, he shut it down in 2014. Bharara decided to investigate why Cuomo did that and ended up indicting the leaders of the state Senate and Assembly along with Cuomo’s own aides. In other words, there was plenty of corruption in New York and the governor had papered it over.

Clearly, Bharara was implying with his tweet that he’d been shut down by Trump for similar reasons. As the man whose jurisdiction includes Trump Tower and many banks and other financial operations, it makes you wonder what he might have been looking at.

We do know that one of the cases Bharara was overseeing was the case against Fox News and Roger Ailes over illegal payments to settle sexual harassment complaints. The New York Times reported on Monday evening that a grand jury had just been convened in the case. The Times article references a favor done by Trump in the recent past:

In 2014, Mr. Trump intervened in a dispute between Mr. Ailes and a former aide who said he had damaging information about Mr. Ailes and the network. 

Mr. Trump negotiated a settlement on behalf of Mr. Ailes, and later boasted of his work, telling the journalist Gabriel Sherman, “When Roger was having problems, he didn’t call 97 people, he called me.”

There’s no word on whether Ailes gave the president a call this week or whether Trump’s call to Bharara might have been another attempt to “negotiate a settlement” for his friend. Trump doesn’t believe he is capable of having a conflict of interest or an inappropriate contact, so it’s not impossible to imagine that he might intervene once again on behalf of his good friend Roger.

As it happens, a lawyer at the top of the short list to replace Bharara happens to be Marc Mukasey, one of Roger Ailes’ personal attorneys. Mukasey’s firm handles real estate matters for Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and one of Mukasey’s partners is Rudy Giuliani, who made his name as the U.S. attorney for New York himself. Not only that, Marc Mukasey’s father, Michael Mukasey, is the man who succeeded Alberto Gonzales as attorney general after he resigned in disgrace over the firing of U.S. attorneys for political reasons. What a coincidence.

For such an outsider, Trump certainly has a small circle of familiar Republican friends.

.

Sinclair Lewis is being recognized more and more, I notice*
by Tom Sullivan

Wasn’t this guy was supposed to be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross?

WH Sr. Policy Adviser Stephen Miller: "The powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned" pic.twitter.com/sn3GyFATPD— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) February 12, 2017

Think Progress on White House policy advisor, Stephen Miller:

Senior White House Policy Advisor Stephen Miller raised plenty of eyebrows on Sunday as the perused the talk-show circuit talking about cases of voter fraud (that don’t exist) and Steve Bannon’s lack of involvement in drafting executive orders (which, according to most reports, is the exact opposite of the truth).

But perhaps his most alarming statement was in reference to the federal judges in Washington rejecting President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban.

“I think that it’s been an important reminder to all Americans that we have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become in many cases a supreme branch of government,” Miller told John Dickerson of CBS News, as first noted by Will Saletan of Slate. “The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

Mein Führer! I can walk!

sorry.

We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

sorry.

Or maybe not:

White House senior advisor doubles down on unsubstantiated NH voter fraud claims: “Voter fraud is a serious problem in this country” pic.twitter.com/xVDqHMAgYV— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) February 12, 2017

Trump & crew fraudulent claim of voter fraud is the new birtherism — a baseless lie whose purpose is to delegitimize US electoral democracy.— Philip Gourevitch (@PGourevitch) February 12, 2017

It’s no wonder Trump likes Miller. Secondhand hearsay is his idea of proof. (In a proper, Trumpish court, that will be enough to convict.) Deliberately implying registration discrepancies are the same as fraudulent votes without having to produce any illegal votes or fraudulent voters is a Machiavellian artifice. It doesn’t matter to members of this White House what the truth is, only what they can get enough people to believe.

To build support for even harsher voting restrictions on American citizens of the wrong persuasion, they need the right kind of people to believe “massive numbers” of the wrong kind of people are “cancelling out the franchise of lawful citizens.” They don’t need no evidence. They don’t have to show you any stinkin’ perpetrators, either. Perhaps this is another reason evangelicals bought into Trump: because he and his people can spew bullshit forcefully and with such supreme confidence.

As Bill McKibben once wrote:

The power of the Christian right rests largely in the fact that they boldly claim religious authority, and by their boldness convince the rest of us that they must know what they’re talking about. They’re like the guy who gives you directions with such loud confidence that you drive on even though the road appears to be turning into a faint, rutted track.

Look straight into the camera and lie through your teeth. Boldly. Do it with enough panache and you will fool some of the people all of the time. At this pace, the Trump White House will be moving up soon to selling prayer cloths and prosperity plans. After all, Trump did that once already with his phony university.

*(Yes, I know.)

The little ladies will sit down and shut up
by Tom Sullivan

Break out the pink pussyhats. It seems the voices of both Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the late Coretta Scott King are unwelcome in the Senate old boys’ club. The Senate last night voted to silence Warren for reading a 1986 letter from King criticizing Jeff Sessions’ civil rights record. CNN:

The rebuke of Warren came after the Massachusetts Democrat read a letter written 30 years ago by Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., opposing the nomination of Jeff Sessions for a federal judgeship.

Warren cited the letter during a debate on the nomination of Sessions — now an Alabama senator — as Donald Trump’s attorney general. Reading from King’s letter to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986, Warren said: “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge.”

Majority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell raised an objection, saying, “The senator has impugned the motives and conduct of our colleague from Alabama, as warned by the chair.” A violation, he asserted, of Rule XIX:

2. No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.

The New York Times account continues:

When Mr. McConnell concluded, Ms. Warren said she was “surprised that the words of Coretta Scott King are not suitable for debate in the United States Senate.” She asked to continue her remarks.

Mr. McConnell objected.

“Objection is heard,” said Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, who was presiding in the chamber at the time. “The senator will take her seat.”

Warren was forbidden on a party line vote from further participation in the floor debate ahead of the Sessions confirmation vote expected today. Warren did not, but an appropriate rejoinder might have been, “Go ahead. Make my day.”

CNN notes how the move may backfire on the GOP:

“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said on the Senate floor.

The line was an instant classic — the kind liberals imagine being replayed ad nauseum in TV ads in a future presidential campaign.

Warren stepped outside to record the letter for a Facebook video:

McConnell’s objection meant millions more will hear the reading of the King letter. As of this moment, it has over 3.6 million views, 275k shares, and 54k comments.

I note, in particular, King’s several references to Sessions’ participation in 1984 voter fraud prosecutions of the use of absentee voting by blacks:

The actions taken by Mr. Sessions in regard to the 1984 voting fraud prosecutions represent just one more technique used to intimidate black voters and thus deny them this most precious franchise. The investigations into the absentee voting process were conducted only in the black belt counties where blacks had finally achieved political power in local government. Whites had been using the absentee process to their advantage for years, without incident. Then, when blacks, realizing its strength, began to use it with success, criminal investigations were begun.

In these investigations, Mr. Sessions, a US Attorney, exhibited an eagerness to bring to trial and convict three leaders of the Perry County Civic League including Albert Turner, despite evidence clearly demonstrating their innocence of any wrongdoing. Furthermore, in initiating the case, Mr. Sessions ignored allegations of similar behavior by whites, choosing instead to chill the exercise of the franchise by blacks in his misguided investigation. In fact, Mr. Sessions sought to punish older black civil rights activists, advisers and colleagues of my husband, who had been key figures in the civil rights movement in the 1960’s. These were persons who, realizing the potential of the absentee vote among blacks, had learned to use the process within the bounds of legality and had taught others to do the same. The only sin they committed was being too successful in gaining votes.

Republicans were crying voter fraud before Fox News, Drudge, and Breitbart made crying voter fraud “cool.” If you need some amusing reading to take the edge off this morning, check out these excerpts from the 2012 decision against the RNC by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The RNC’s voter fraud arguments were bogus in 2012. They are bogus now. And they were bogus when Jeff Sessions was pursuing black people for voting in 1984.

UPDATE: Then Oregon’s Sen. Jeff Merkley reads the King letter “uninterrupted” by the “old boys.” #ShePersisted

Emmigrating from Bizarroworld

by digby

I wrote about the realization among some right wingers that they have created an alternate reality for Salon today:

The latest polling shows that Donald Trump is the most unpopular new president in history. Most new presidents, even when elected only by a plurality like Bill Clinton, or under dubious circumstances like George W. Bush, receive at least a short-lived honeymoon in which a majority of the population decides to put aside the rancor of the election and give the new leader a chance.

Of course, most new presidents go out of their way to try to heal the inevitable hard feelings of a tough campaign and reach out to the people who didn’t vote for them. In principle, the person who wins the election becomes president of the whole country not just those who gave him their votes.

On the night of the election, Trump gave a standard magnanimous speech. Since then he has never returned to that theme. He has obsessed over his voters, even going on a victory tour only to states that he won and fetishizing his supporters in speeches as “the forgotten Americans who will never be forgotten again.” To everyone else he has simply issued edicts effectively saying, “We will come together.” (Left unsaid is the obvious: “or else.”)

On New Year’s Eve he made himself very clear with this juvenile tweet:

Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 31, 2016

On Sunday night during Trump’s Super Bowl interview with Bill O’Reilly, Trump said that California is “out of control” and suggested he might withhold federal funds to the state if it doesn’t do what he wants it to do. He is purposefully antagonizing the most populous state in the nation. (Which, not coincidentally, overwhelmingly supported his opponent.)

This is not the only reason he’s unpopular, of course. Trump’s flurry of executive orders and bizarre behavior toward foreign leaders have horrified tens of millions of Americans. Opposition to his policies is fierce, substantive and widespread.

But Trump is not universally unpopular. Indeed, he has maintained the support of roughly the same number of people who voted for him. News stories about his followers depict people impressed with his unwillingness to reach out to his political opponents because they believe they were treated with massive disrespect for eight years by former president Barack Obama. They appreciate that Trump is doing to Democrats what they believe was done to them.

One can certainly argue whether Obama ever treated them with anything approaching the level of disdain that Trump displays toward people who oppose him. But that’s missing the point. That sense of persecution has been part of the conservative movement for decades. What’s different now is the extent to which Trump’s followers see a completely different presidency than the rest of the world sees. That’s because they are watching, reading or listening to right-wing media — and right-wing media is showing them a presidency that does not exist.

Former conservative talk-radio show host Charlie Sykes wrote a courageous op-ed for The New York Times over the past weekend that took a hard look at how so many people came to believe Trump’s lies and why they are so willing to accept what presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway has called “alternative facts.” Sykes put the blame squarely on the right-wing propaganda machine, which he was a part of for many years.

Trump’s followers have been conditioned to believe that the mainstream media is hostile and biased. Hearing the president attack CNN or The New York Times with the same ferocity they hear from Michael Savage or Mark Levin validates their beliefs beyond anything they could have imagined. Sykes wrote:

For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.

Many in the conservative base are no longer capable of knowing truth from fiction. They have been fed BS for so long and with such relentless purpose that they no longer have BS detectors at all.

Sykes pointed out that White House press secretary Sean Spicer took this phenomenon to a new level when he said that Trump’s belief that the unfounded charges of voter fraud was evidence that the voter fraud happened, which is mind-boggling. He also noted that Spicer refused to answer a question about the unemployment rate, which suggests the administration will have no problem making up numbers to back up claims that Trump is massively improving the economy.

Furthermore, administration officials can do this in full confidence that right-wing media outlets will provide cover for their claims. As Sykes said, conservatives “believe they have shifted the paradigm of media coverage, replacing the traditional media with their own.” In other words, Breitbart is now their paper of record. Fox News is their Tiffany network. Rush Limbaugh is their Walter Cronkite.

This has been happening for quite some time. I remember an incident way back in 2004 when Republican operative Mary Matalin called up Rush Limbaugh’s show to complain about The New York Times and gush over Rush’s alternative facts:

[W]hen I listen to you, I get all the information I need, and I — and I — it is — I have a confidence in the president [George W. Bush], in the policies, in the goals. I have — I know his conviction. I know he’s right and I know he has the leadership to do it. What I don’t have, and what I can only get from you, is the cheerfulness of your confidence —

Matalin is a pro who knew what she was doing. But the people who were listening that day, and who listen every day, don’t necessarily have her detachment. They may once have understood that Rush was a hyperbolic entertainer, not a newsman. But as Sykes said, after years of relentless propaganda they have lost their ability to discern truth from fiction, news from fake news, facts from alternative facts. He pointed out that this leads to a situation whereby “the leader becomes the only reliable source of truth; a familiar phenomenon in an authoritarian state, but a radical departure from the norms of a democratic society. The battle over truth is now central to our politics.” It’s going to be a tough fight.

“that they should believe a lie”
by Tom Sullivan

Supporters told pollsters they liked Donald Trump for telling it like it is. Except that was never true. What Trump supporters like is he tells them what they want to hear. They don’t want the truth. He tells them lies. They don’t want facts. He feeds them disinformation. His administration dishes out propaganda, the kind Cold Warrior parents warned about.

Trump is a legend in his own mind. Even he doesn’t really believe it. He requires constant auto-reinforcement and adulation from those who surround him or he throws a Twitter tantrum. But that’s personal pathology. The societal one is more concerning. So is his party’s.

Two years ago, Heather Cox Richardson writing for Salon spoke about the Republican abandonment of truth for utility. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker attempted to write the search for truth out of the University of Wisconsin’s mission statement, replacing it with “meet the state’s workforce needs.” She traced the impulse back to William F. Buckley’s 1951 “God and Man at Yale” in which he proposed that The Enlightenment had led western civilization astray, in the mid-twentieth century, specifically, towards the New Deal.

Richardson wrote:

Rational argument supported by facts did not lead to sound societal decisions, Buckley claimed; it led people astray. Christianity and an economy based on untrammeled individualism were truths that should not be questioned. Impartial debate based in empirical facts was dangerous because it led people toward secularism and collectivism—both bad by definition, according to Buckley. Instead of engaging in rational argument, Buckley insisted, thinkers must stand firm on what he called a new “value orthodoxy” that indoctrinated people to understand that Christianity and economic individualism were absolute truths. Maintaining that faith in reasoned debate was a worse “superstition” than the Enlightenment had set out to replace, Buckley launched an intellectual war to replace the principle of academic inquiry with a Christian and individualist ideology.

By the ascent of George W. Bush to the presidency, Buckley’s view had won:

As Movement Conservatives took over the Republican Party, that ideology worked its way deep into our political system. It has given us, for example, a senator claiming words he spoke on the Senate floor were “not intended to be a factual statement.” It has given us “dynamic scoring,” a rule changing the way the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the economic impact of tax cuts, to reinforce the idea that cuts fuel economic growth despite the visibly disastrous effects of recent tax cuts on states such as Kansas. And it has given us attempts in Oklahoma, Texas, North Carolina and Colorado to discard the A.P. U.S. History framework and dictate that students learn instead the Movement Conservatives’ skewed version of the nation’s history. Politicians have always spun information to advance their own policies. The practice infuriates partisans but it reflects the Enlightenment idea of progress through reasoned argument. Movement Conservatives’ insistence on their own version of reality, in defiance of facts, is something different altogether.

Now Donald Trump is a president. A Republican president. With this walking bundle of pathologies, the descent into alternate reality returns and the slope is even steeper. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway insist we should accept the White House’s “alternative facts” over the evidence of our own eyes. And who, for instance, will ever forget the Bowling Green Massacre she fabricated?

What’s more confounding is how many Americans — Americans — buy into the kind of Soviet fantasy they once railed against.

Mikhail Iossel writes for The New Yorker that even Soviet citizens knew better than to believe the kind of propaganda Trump and his coterie spew daily. But in the name of making America great again, Trump’s supporters (the older ones, anyway) embrace what they once feared:

… Everyone knew that they, the Soviet people, lived in a veritable funhouse of a giant isolated world unto itself, in the parallel reality of that endless hall of crazily distorted mirrors. People were not fooled, to put it mildly. Still, there was nothing they, including myself and everyone I knew, could do with or about that understanding. There was no place for them to take it, to pour it out on. Being exposed to constant, relentless irradiation by that funhouse reality, forever aswim in a sea of lies, had made people lethargic and apathetic, cynical and fatalistic, dumbfounded into mute infantilism, drunkenness, and helpless rage in the meagreness of their tiny private, personal worlds.

Lethargic, cynical, fatalistic, etc. Hardly how Trump fanciers fancy themselves, but beware. Believe the lie, become the lie. What’s different is how amateur-hour similar propaganda efforts are here at home. No one is fooled.

“This American Life” took a skeptical look at the Trump travel ban over the weekend. They interviwed Benjamin Wittes, a national security expert from the Brookings Institution. Wittes wrote a scathing review of the Trump executive order, calling its purpose malevolent in addition to “the astonishing incompetence of its drafting and construction.” Specifically, Wittes calls out the thinly veiled lie at the heart of it. Wittes writes:

What’s more, the document also takes steps that strike me as utterly orthogonal to any relevant security interest. If the purpose of the order is the one it describes, for example, I can think of no good reason to burden the lives of students individually suspected of nothing who are here lawfully and just happen to be temporarily overseas, or to detain tourists and refugees who were mid-flight when the order came down. I have trouble imagining any reason to raise questions about whether green card holders who have lived here for years can leave the country and then return. Yes, it’s temporary, and that may lessen the costs (or it may not, depending on the outcome of the policy review the order mandates), but temporarily irrational is still irrational.

Put simply, I don’t believe that the stated purpose is the real purpose. This is the first policy the United States has adopted in the post-9/11 era about which I have ever said this. It’s a grave charge, I know, and I’m not making it lightly. But in the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don’t marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process. You don’t target the wrong people in nutty ways when you’re rationally pursuing real security objectives.

When do you do these things? You do these things when you’re elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest. You do them when you’ve made a deliberate decision to burden human lives to make a public point. In other words, this is not a document that will cause hardship and misery because of regrettable incidental impacts on people injured in the pursuit of a public good. It will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to do.

Then you lie about why you’re really doing it, not because anyone will believe the lie, but because it’s company policy, as I once read about a meeting between a dissatisfied customer and a regional manager for GM:

“He was lying to me. I knew he was lying to me. He knew I knew he was lying to me. But he lied anyway, not because he had anything to gain from the lies, but because it was company policy.”

And so it is with the Trump administration. I once believed the Bush II administration represented the apotheosis of Movement Conservative ideology, but I was wrong. Trump has discovered an even lower circle of hell.

The interview with Wittes brought me back to the voter fraud propaganda I referenced yesterday morning. Voter fraud is code speak the way Lee Atwater used “forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.” Promoters of voter ID laws and other voting restrictions don’t give a damn about election integrity. They’re not really concerned that masses of invisible people are voting illegally undetected. That’s the thinnest of window dressings. They’re angry that the “wrong kind” of people are voting at all. But believers in “telling it like it is” won’t admit to the lie.

Trump and those supporting his travel ban aren’t as afraid of terrorist violence as they are of foreign Others encroaching on their turf. Trump’s travel ban, like voter fraud, is another institutionalized lie. No one is fooled. Like the Soviets before them, they don’t even care if nobody is fooled. Lying is company policy.

Battle-hardened and gaining strength
by Tom Sullivan

Greensboro sit-in lunch counter is now a museum.

Voters who sat out the Iraq War, extraordinary rendition, black sites, Abu Ghraib, and Bush II’s Privatize Social Security 2005 Tour are finally in the streets and trying to wrap their brains around the whole activism thing. President Donald Trump’s election, sexism and xenophobia brought home the need for engagement in a way military interventions in faraway lands and far-off retirement concerns did not. Plus, a lot of those in the streets today weren’t old enough to vote a decade or more ago. For those with a lot more future in their futures, the stakes are higher.

In response to Trumpism, several Indivisible groups have already formed and merged here and are active. How many across the country will survive the inevitable shaking out no one knows. Setbacks are certain. But so is victory for those who refuse to lose.

At The Guardian, Erica Chenoweth argues that history shows that when campaigns of nonviolent resistance “prepare, train, and remain resilient, they often succeed regardless of whether the government uses violence against them.” Studies show a mere “3.5% of a population engaged in sustained nonviolent resistance” are enough to topple even brutal dictatorships. Plus, those in resistance have never been better equipped to fight back:

Today, those seeking knowledge about the theory and practice of civil resistance can find a wealth of information at their fingertips. In virtually any language, one can find training manuals, strategy-building tools, facilitation guides and documentation about successes and mistakes of past nonviolent campaigns.

Material is available in many formats, including graphic novels, e-classes, films and documentaries, scholarly books, novels, websites, research monographs, research inventories, and children’s books. And of course, the world is full of experienced activists with wisdom to share.

Here is a bit of wisdom at Think Progress from an activist with over a decade in the streets, someone who knows how to fight and win (emphasis mine):

Yes, we’re witnessing extremism in Washington, D.C. But some of us have been facing it for a while now. The extremists took over state government in my home state of North Carolina four years ago. But we challenged them with the moral language of our deepest religious and constitutional traditions. We dug deep into our state’s history of fusion politics and committed to stand together. And we learned something about extremism.

The same folks who were attacking public schools in our state were attacking health care. And the same folks against health care were against the LGBTQ community. And they were against labor. And they were attacking immigrants and Muslims and poor people. And to top it all off, the extremists were crying “voter fraud” as justification for the worst voter suppression measures we’d seen since Jim Crow.

They didn’t have any more evidence than Trump has now. We fought them in court and won. But we had to realize something deeper about our movement: if they were cynical enough to get together on all of these issues, we had to be courageous enough to come out of our single-issue silos and fight together in the streets, in the legislature, in the courts and at the ballot box.

When we linked up and started fighting back with Moral Mondays, they fought us harder. We lost some battles, and we’ve spent some long nights in jail. But even as Trumpism rolled across the South this past November, we beat extremism in our governor’s race, in four Council of State races, and in the race for a state Supreme Court seat. The extremists controlled all three branches of government before the election, but they only have the legislature now. And a federal court has ordered a special election this year because they found the legislature districts were gerrymandered with racial intent.

America needs more than a strategy to win back some seats for Democrats in 2018. We need a long term plan for a moral movement that links up and fights together for a moral agenda. Trump’s extremism is bad, but I’m convinced that it’s the last gasp of an order that knows it’s passing away. The question isn’t whether these lies and attacks can last. They cannot. The question is, “Who will stand together to offer a real alternative to the disaster of these policies?”

At the #MoralMarch #WeMarch to say #ImmigrantsWelcome! @RI4A we're looking forward to seeing you at #HKonJ. RSVP: https://t.co/yurRLXb5TO— NC NAACP (@ncnaacp) February 3, 2017

One week from today, thousands will take to the streets of Raleigh, North Carolina with Rev. William Barber for the 11th time. It is not only a show of force by a community calling for justice from a system that institutionalized inequality. It is an act of defiance against governance by leaders who wish people different themselves would just go away.

After a 2014 visit to the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro (where you will find the famous lunch counter preserved), I wrote:

One place you hear it is in their rhetoric about voter fraud. It is a very personal affront to them that the power of their votes might be diminished by the Other. Every time someone ineligible casts a fraudulent ballot, they insist, it “steals your vote.” Your vote. They have convinced themselves that there are thousands and thousands of invisible felons stealing their votes every election. Passing more restrictive voting laws is a matter of justice and voting integrity, of course. What other motivation could there be for railroading eligible poor, minority, and college-age voters?

The Others they suspect of this heinous activity are people who do not believe as they do nor vote as they do. Voter fraud itself is a code word, the way Lee Atwater used “forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.” It’s “much more abstract,” as Atwater said. The issue is not really whether the invisible “those people” are voting illegally or not. It is that they are voting at all. Sharing in governance, sharing power, is a privilege for deserving, Real Americans, not for the unwashed Irresponsibles. That Others do so legally is just as much an affront. Right now they’re targeting the invisible Others. Restricting voting to Real Americans comes later, I guess.

With Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of all three branches of government, later is now. The country as a whole faces what North Carolina faced in 2013 when Republicans gained full control of the governor’s mansion and the legislature for the first time in 100 years. They rolled into Raleigh just as they have today in Washington. D.C. But in North Carolina, the resistance is already fully formed, battle-hardened, gaining strength, and winning.

Come see how it’s done at the 11th Annual Moral March on Raleigh & HKonJ People’s Assembly next Saturday.

I wrote about Trump’s Razputin for Salon this morning: