771 search results for ""voter fraud""

Parting Shot?

by digby

There’s lots of new information in this NY Times article about the allegedly suspicious financial transactions that led the Feds to Spitzer’s call girl habit. It’s still vague about how these scrappy investigators came to be interested in the finances of the governor of New York, but I assume that will be dealt with. Meanwhile, I found this tidbit interesting:

The rendezvous that established Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s involvement with high-priced prostitutes occurred last month in one of Washington’s grandest hotels, but the criminal investigation that discovered the tryst began last year in a nondescript office building opposite a Dunkin’ Donuts on Long Island, according to law enforcement officials.
[…]

Soon, the I.R.S. agents, from the agency’s Criminal Investigation Division, were working with F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors from Manhattan who specialize in political corruption.The inquiry, like many such investigations, was a delicate one. Because the focus was a high-ranking government official, prosecutors were required to seek the approval of the United States attorney general to proceed. Once they secured that permission, the investigation moved forward.

I’m just wondering when exactly last year that permission was sought. Rove and Gonzales both resigned in August of 07 under a cloud for a plot to fire US Attorneys who refused to trump up charges of “voter fraud” and pursue cases against Democratic politicians. Mukasey was sworn in in November. Peter D. Keisler was acting attorney general during the interim. Which one ordered the investigation?

Update: Fired US Attorney David Iglesias is not sitting down and shutting up. He’s written a book, due out in June. Dahlia Lithwick discusses it here.

.

TV Alert

by dday

They buried it on the same night as the Oscars, but 60 Minutes will be airing the Don Siegelman story on Sunday. Siegelman, the Democratic former governor of Alabama, is sitting in a jail cell right now for trumped-up reasons, almost certainly orchestrated by Karl Rove and his charges. Jill Simpson, a former Republican campaign worker, has powerful evidence of this travesty of justice, and she’ll go on the record in the story:

A former Republican campaign worker claims that President Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, asked her to find evidence that the Democratic governor of Alabama at the time was cheating on his wife, according to an upcoming broadcast of “60 Minutes.”

Jill Simpson, who has long alleged that Rove may have influenced the corruption prosecution of former Gov. Don Siegelman, makes the claim against Rove in a broadcast scheduled to be aired Sunday, according to a statement from CBS.

Simpson testified to congressional investigators last year that she overheard conversations among Republicans in 2002 indicating that Rove was involved in the Justice Department’s prosecution of Siegelman. She has never before said that Rove pressed her for evidence of marital infidelity in spite of testifying to congressional lawyers last year, submitting a sworn affidavit and speaking extensively with reporters […]

According to the CBS statement, Simpson says Rove approached her at a 2001 meeting, when Siegelman was still governor.

“Karl Rove asked you to take pictures of Siegelman?” reporter Scott Pelley asks.

“Yes,” Simpson replies.

“In a compromising sexual position with one of his aides,” Pelley says.

“Yes, if I could,” she responds.

Simpson said she is speaking out because Siegelman’s seven-year sentence on corruption charges bothers her, the release said. She said she found no evidence of an affair.

Karl Rove has dodged a lot of bullets in his day, but his entire operation is on the line with this Siegelman story. This involves the US Attorneys scandal, as the real meaning of that purge was about directing federal prosecutors to bring charges against Democrats and to use the Justice Department as an arm of the RNC. It involves Rove’s project to build a permanent Republican majority through implementing all of the federal agencies at his disposal. It involves the entire modus operandi of the Bush White House. This is an extension of what Rove and his merry band of ratfuckers have been doing their entire careers. He just had a bunch of new tools to play with.

Kagro X has a fantastic post detailing the implications here.

This really demonstrates the lengths to which Bush-Cheney’s hyper-politicized Department of Justice can go. If they can railroad the actual governor of a state into prison and have pretty much nobody really sit up and take notice, what does that say about the extent of the damage to the country? Not just the DOJ (which is a goner), but about the supposed watchdogs of the media, who’ve been in large part either cowed into silence, or distracted by an endless stream of shiny objects?

Seriously, this means they can do this to anybody.

But worse than that, it means that anybody who finds themselves under scrutiny by the federal government now has license to charge that they’re being politically targeted. Because if this can happen as Horton describes it happening, all bets are off. It has all the ingredients of the complete and total undoing of all federal law enforcement capability for the foreseeable future […]

That’s the true measure of the damage the Bush-Cheney “administration” has caused. It’s no longer just your basic looting of the Treasury. Dollar-based corruption we at least understand. But corruption of the actual mechanisms of the government itself? Corruption not meant to enrich, but to corrode public trust in the only system we have for actually holding corrupt officials to account?

We’re now looking at federal law enforcement so grossly politicized that even a landslide victory for the opposition party might not be able to root the corruption out.

I’ll be TiVoing on Sunday night. You should too. 52 former state Attorneys General have signed letters in support of re-opening the Siegelman case and investigating the politicization. You should do what you can to help them.

… I should add that this is something that Digby talks about a lot: the right appropriating the critiques of the left. You can bet that if a President Obama or President Clinton tries to get rid of some corrupt Republicans buried deep inside the federal agencies, the bloody shirt of “politicization” will be waved. They poisoned the well of impeachment to innoculate themselves of that potential action, they’re sure to use “voter fraud” claims to try and illegitimize elections, and then this. It’s something I hope we’re thinking about.

.

Meanwhile, On The Court

by dday

Two major Supreme Court cases have been heard this week, and on each of them, it does not appear that the side of justice and the Constitution will be victorious. In the Kentucky case opposing the use of the lethal injection method in capital punishment, the conservative block was skeptical:

“This is an execution, not surgery,” Justice Antonin Scalia told the attorney who was representing two Kentucky inmates who say the use of the three-drug compound poses “an unnecessary risk of pain” to the dying man.

“Where does that come from, that you must find the method of execution that causes the least pain?” Scalia continued. “We have approved electrocution. We have approved death by firing squad. I expect both of those have more possibilities of painful death than the protocol here.”

Yes, where the hell does that come from, this idea that punishment should not be cruel or unusual? What first-year law student pulled that out of their ass?

So, it appears that we’ll continue with a process that has been invalidated for the euthanizing of dogs.

In the other big case, the ruling on Indiana’s voter ID law, the Court again appeared unswayed by arguments about equal protection and the deliberate efforts to suppress voter turnout.

Only two Justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens — even hinted at the real-world fact that the photo ID law in Indiana is at the heart of a bitter, ongoing contest reaching well beyond Indiana. It is a dispute between Republicans worried over election fraud supposedly generated by Democrats to pad their votes, and Democrats worried over voter suppression supposedly promoted by Republicans to cut down their opposition. The abiding question at the end: can a decision be written that does not itself sound like a political, rather than a judicial, tract? Can the Court, in short, avoid at least the appearance of another Bush v. Gore? […]

It was apparent from the outset that the Court’s more conservative members were most interested in (a) finding that no one had a right to bring the constitutional challenge, at least at this stage, (b) putting off a challenge until the law has actually been enforced or at least until just before election day, or (c) salvaging as much as possible of the Indiana photo ID requirement on the theory that voter fraud is a problem that states have a legitimate right to try to solve. There was some hand-wringing, particularly by Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., over how difficult it is for a judge to “draw the line” on when a voting requirement would or would not pass a constitutional test […]

In a notable way, therefore, it appeared that — once more — Justice Anthony M. Kennedy may hold the vote that controls the outcome. He displayed some skepticism about the challenge to Indiana’s law, somewhat impatiently suggesting at one point that the challengers would oppose any kind of voter ID requirement other than a simple signature match at the polling place. Kennedy seemed ultimately to be looking for ways to assure voters who demonstrably would be significantly burdened by the law that they could challenge it, perhaps even before election day came around.

Count me as not sanguine that Alito’s handwringing will hold up. And Kennedy appears lost.

As has been said many times, this is a solution without a problem. The Indiana secretary of state, when pressed, could not come up with one documented instance of voter fraud in his state. Never has so much attention been paid to a crime that has not been proven to be committed. The agenda is as transparent as tissue paper.

These two cases reveal just how partisan, and really cowardly, the Court has become, as the arguments showed an unwillingness to engage on the Constitutional questions, while looking to uphold the rulings on narrower, more technical grounds. This has been the Roberts Court agenda since he rose to Chief Justice.

The revolution that many commentators predicted when President Bush appointed two ultra-right-wing Supreme Court justices is proceeding with breathtaking impatience, and it is a revolution Jacobin in its disdain for tradition and precedent. Bush’s choices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, have joined the two previously most right-wing justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, in an unbreakable phalanx bent on remaking constitutional law by overruling, most often by stealth, the central constitutional doctrines that generations of past justices, conservative as well as liberal, had constructed.

That article by Ronald Dworkin is important. Go read it. (I’ll be here.)

And let’s be very clear about what each and every Republican candidate has said, with total unanimity, on the subject of judges.

Rudy Giuliani

“I will nominate strict constructionist judges with respect for the rule of law and a proven fidelity to the Constitution — judges in the mold of Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito, and Chief Justice Roberts.”

Mitt Romney

“I think the justices that President Bush has appointed are exactly spot-on. I think Justice Roberts and Justice Alito are exactly the kind of justices America needs.”

Fred Thompson

“I like Roberts and Alito and Scalia and Thomas. One of the best things that I got to do as a private citizen was to help get Justice Roberts through the confirmation process… We’re in a heck of a lot better shape because of Roberts and Alito, and one more gain would put us in even better shape.”

Mike Huckabee

“My own personal hero on the court is Scalia, not least because I duck-hunted with him.”

John McCain

“One of our greatest problems in America today is justices that legislate from the bench, activist judges. I’m proud that we have Justice Alito and Roberts on the United States Supreme Court. … [When asked whether he admires any Supreme Court justice in particular] Of course, Antonin Scalia… I admire how articulate he is, but I also from everything I’ve seen admire Roberts as well.”

The two parties have more than a dime’s worth of difference on this, and the Supremes had better be right at the top of the issues that we talk about in the fall.

.

Courting Republicans

by digby

While we’re waiting to find out what happens in New Hampshire today, we might want to think about something equally (if not more) profound that will happen tomorrow in Washington DC:

The most revealing indicator of the state of our democracy is not to be found in the snowdrifts of New Hampshire but in the marbled chamber of the U.S. Supreme Court. Soon enough we will discover whether the court under Chief Justice John Roberts will become a partisan tool in the national Republican drive to place constraints on voting that are targeted at those who tend to support Democrats.

Not since the Supreme Court stopped the Florida presidential election recount in 2000 has a voting case been so significant, or so overflowing with partisan bile.

On Wednesday, the justices will hear a challenge to Indiana’s strict law requiring photo identification in order for a voter to cast a ballot at the polls. The state claims the law is necessary to stop voter fraud. Yet no one—not Indiana officials, not the U.S. Justice Department, which has taken the state’s side in the dispute, nor any commission—has come up with a single case in the state’s history in which an imposter showed up and cast a vote.

Never mind. In 2005, Republicans who controlled the Indiana Legislature and the governor’s mansion imposed the toughest photo identification requirement in the nation. Not coincidentally, studies have repeatedly shown that those least likely to possess photo identification—most commonly a driver’s license—are African-Americans, the poor, the elderly and the disabled. In short, they are more likely to vote Democratic. Challengers to the law have identified at least two Indiana voters who have infirmities that make it impossible for them to drive, according to The New York Times. They were prevented from casting ballots and having them counted after years of voting without difficulty.

Though the state set up a way for those without a license to obtain a photo ID, the process is complex, and eligible voters still can be denied. If, for example, a woman produces a birth certificate bearing her maiden name, rather than the married name under which she is registered to vote, she isn’t entitled to the identification. About 60 percent of those who have tried to get alternative IDs have been turned down, according to briefs filed with the Supreme Court.

To make their case before a court that is supposed to decide matters based on the facts and the law, Indiana and its supporters, including the Justice Department, invoke a compendium of allegations of this type of voter fraud or that. Facts seem to be notable for their absence.

I wrote more about this at the Big Cona couple of weeks ago. This is a big deal.

The Republicans are already doing everything they can to suppress the minority vote in the fall, and that means not just African Americans but Hispanics as well. This case will open the door for people like Mrs Huckabee to run roughshod over voters next fall:

October 19, 2004
MORE ON JANET HUCKABEE: NOT A GOOD PERSON?

NOT TO MIMIC LYNNE CHENEY TOO MUCH, BUT IS JANET HUCKABEE a “good woman”?

This just over the wire from someone who observed Huckabee’s behavior yesterday. I have confirmed that this individual was in a position to observe the Arkansas first lady as she did her ‘civic duty,’ but I need to keep the individual’s identity concealed to protect her/him from the wrath of the Arkansas First Lady’s office.

Steve,

Her rudeness, combined with her position of prominence, infuriated many of the minority voters who voted that day.

Intimidation may or may not have been her intent, but intimidation definitely has been the EFFECT in the neighborhood and throughout Little Rock. Complaints from voters who haven’t even voted yet have been rolling in. I mean, imagine a minority voter who might be concerned about voting and initimidation to begin with, and then to go in the precinct to find the Republican Governor’s wife working as a poll worker and telling you incorrect information about the law, and in a rude manner.

H/T to BB

.

Not Like They’re Stopping With The Vote Suppression Effort

by dday

I know that Digby has done a lot of work on the coming Republican emphasis on bogus claims of “voter fraud,” turning the tables on Democratic concerns about our elections and giving a pretense to increased voter suppression and intimidation. The Supreme Court is about to weigh in on some cases that are very central to this effort.

The Supreme Court will open the new year with its most politically divisive case since Bush v. Gore decided the 2000 presidential election, and its decision could force a major reinterpretation of the rules of the 2008 contest.

The case presents what seems to be a straightforward and even unremarkable question: Does a state requirement that voters show a specific kind of photo identification before casting a ballot violate the Constitution? […]

“It is exceedingly difficult to maneuver in today’s America without a photo ID (try flying, or even entering a tall building such as the courthouse in which we sit, without one),” Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner, a Ronald Reagan appointee, wrote in deciding that Indiana’s strictest-in-the-nation law is not burdensome enough to violate constitutional protections.

His colleague on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, Bill Clinton appointee Terence T. Evans, was equally frank in dissent. “Let’s not beat around the bush: The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic,” Evans wrote.

These cases are a solution in search of a problem. Indeed there have been virtually no credible documented cases of voter fraud almost everywhere in the country. This idea to institute this voter ID law came right out of the Justice Department and directly from the lead villian in these matters, the guy who but for 9 second pro forma Congressional sessions might be sitting on the Federal Election Commission by now.

(Hans) Von Spakovsky was the voting counsel in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division from 2003 to 2005. In that role, he supported Georgia’s voter photo identification law despite the objections of four of the five government attorneys on a panel set up to make sure the Georgia law complied with the Voting Rights Act, who warned that the law would hurt minority voters because they were less likely to have photo IDs, according to former Justice Department officials. “Spakovsky played a major role in the implementation of practices which injected partisan political factors into decision making,” said six former Justice staffers in a letter to senators.

Von Spakovsky, like other Republicans, argues that such strict voter ID laws are needed to combat fraud. Von Spakovsky’s election administration experience includes sitting on the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, which administers elections in the largest county in Georgia.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School asserts that von Spakovsky’s partisan bias extends beyond his signing off on the Georgia bill. Citing recently released E-mails, it says that he tried to quash the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s efforts to support voting ID rules in Arizona and tried to cancel a research contract on the impact of and need for voter ID. (He would not comment for this story.)

It’s a real simple plan. The idea is to put these laws in place, under-report them to the populace, and use them to invalidate the votes of hundreds of thousands of low-income and elderly citizens, many of whom vote Democratic. All this to stop the “scourge” of non-existent incidents of voter fraud. Which is a fake scourge whipped up by the Republican noise machine and absolutely tied to this sudden demonization of illegal immigrants.

Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita (R) said voter fraud was something he was asked about “almost daily” by constituents. “At the Kiwanis Club, the chamber of commerce groups, people would say, ‘Why aren’t you asking who I am when I vote?’ ” Rokita said.

This, by the way, is why we must continue pressing for answers in the US Attorney probe. The firing of the eight federal prosecutors is intimately tied to their unwillingness to pursue B.S. vote fraud cases. If that investigation, and the look into who was giving the orders to fire, is pushed aside for the sake of bipartisan comity or a desire not to confront the President, then we’ll never see the reality of the politicization of justice and the use of federal prosecutor offices as an arm of the RNC. Which will make it that much easier for these needless voter ID laws to be adopted nationwide, expanding the voter suppression.

.

Moving The Ball

by digby

The media have been talking up Tom Tancredo’s new ad, asking whether it crosses the line. It is a doozy:

There are consequences to open borders beyond the 20 million aliens who have come to take our jobs. Islamic terrorists now freely roam U.S. soil, Jihadists who froth with hate here to do as they have in London, Spain, Russia. The price we pay for spineless politicians who refuse to defend our borders against those who come to kill.

It is such an extreme ad that you wouldn’t think anyone who wanted to make a serious case would create such a thing. But then, making a serious case is not Tancredo’s goal at all:

Rep. Tom Tancredo has announced that he will not seek a sixth term in Congress in 2008 but will continue his long-shot campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. His reelection to another term in Congress would have been a slam dunk, whereas he freely admits that he has virtually no chance to actually win his party’s nomination for president.

What’s going on?

The pundits and political analysts who believe Tancredo blundered in choosing an impossible goal — the presidential campaign — while forsaking a slam-dunk reelection to Congress need to follow Ayn Rand’s admonition: “examine your premises.”

Tancredo’s campaigns have never been about winning or holding onto office. Tancredo’s political life is all about “moving the ball forward,” the ball in this instance being the protection of national sovereignty and the struggle to resist and ultimately defeat radical Islamic terrorism. He believes he can do that best by leaving Congress for a larger stage.

From the beginning his presidential campaign has been about influencing the 2008 Republican nominating process and the party platform on immigration control. He knew he did not have a serious shot at winning the party’s nomination, but he could steer the party away from the Bush administration’s disastrous flirtation with amnesty. He has already achieved that goal within the Republican party and even Nancy Pelosi now runs from the amnesty lobby.

[…]

The most savvy voices in the Democratic Party are telling the Latino activist groups to “cool it” until 2009, fearing a voter backlash in 2008 if Democrats are perceived as weak on this issue.

Yes indeed. In fact, the allegedly “savviest” Democrats in the party aren’t just saying “cool it.” This is what they are saying:

A recent memo by one senior Democratic pollster, Stanley Greenberg, warned that voter discontent over immigration is salient among many potential Democratic voters — specifically among less educated voters, African Americans, and blacks and whites in rural areas who view illegal immigration as an economic issue.

[…]

Greenberg’s advice echoed arguments offered last year in a strategy memo from a moderate Democratic group, Third Way. It advised the party’s candidates to be tough and fair — but to avoid sounding overly sympathetic to illegal immigrants at the expense of average voters who believe they are paying for benefits and bearing other burdens of a broken system.

“Compassion and justice for illegal immigrants ends when taxpayer interests begin,” the group said.

This savvy advice to the savvy Democrats has led them to jettison any further attempt to get a comprehensive immigration bill and instead rush to introduce an entirely punitive “enforcement” boondoggle called the SAVE Act that throws even more police power at Homeland Security, tons of money at police agencies, both militarizes AND privatizes the border (a neat trick), empowers the IRS to share information with other agencies and creates a new federal database that contains information about every American worker.

It’s filled with all kinds of neat new requirements for all people who work for a living. If you are a person with two jobs, like a lot of people, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this:

Notification of Multiple Uses of Individual Social Security Numbers

Prior to crediting any individual with concurrent earnings from more than one employer, the Commissioner of Social Security shall notify the individual that earnings from two or more employers are being reported under the individual’s social security account number. Such notice shall include, at a minimum, the name and location of each employer and shall direct the individual to contact the Social Security Administration to submit proof that the individual is the person to whom the social security account number was issued and, if applicable, to submit, either in person or via electronic transmission, a pay stub or other documentation showing that such individual is employed by both or all employers reporting earnings to that social security account number.

Sound like fun?

The savvy Dems have decided to do this because they believe that by helping Tom Tancredo “move the ball.” They can “take the issue off the table.” It is the same tried and true Greenberg and Carville tactic that was argued in 2002 when they said to get the Iraq war resolution off the table so the Dems could discuss the issue their focus groups told them people really cared about — prescription drug coverage. This tactic has really been a big success for Democrats: five long years later, we are arguing that we need to get immigration off the table so we can get down to the issue people really care about —Iraq.

This (pdf) is a more aggressive memorandum from Greenberg and Carville describing Democratic focus groups which they say show that rural and high school educated black and white voters now blame immigrants for most of their problems. Carville and Greenberg see this in the same light as the welfare issue in the 1980’s and since Bill Clinton ended “welfare as we know it” they naturally believe that this should be handled exactly the same way in order to prove to the people who matter that the Democratic party isn’t in thrall to Hispanics.

(One of their contentions — that African Americans are very upset about illegal immigration — is seriously undercut by a brand new Pew study.)

There are a couple of other little flies in Greenberg and Carville’s ointment, however, they fail to explain. First of all, there’s this morning after report from the recent off-year election:

The one point on which moderates and conservatives seem to agree is that their party overplayed the illegal immigration issue. “They went for a magic bullet with immigration, and it didn’t work,” says a conservative strategist who doesn’t want his name used because his clients don’t agree that immigration is a losing issue. Prince William County board Chairman Corey Stewart, the strategist says, “won last year as the anti-tax and anti-growth candidate, and he ended up in the same place this year. He pushed hard on immigration, but it didn’t move his numbers” in his reelection victory Tuesday.

Why, if both the savvy Democrats and the Republicans all agree that this is a major issue, did it have these results?

And how are they planning to deal with this?

I have never seen an issue where the short-term interests of Republican presidential candidates in the primaries were more starkly at odds with the long-term interests of the party itself. At least five swing states that Bush carried in 2004 are rich in Hispanic voters — Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and Florida. Bush won Nevada by just over 20,000 votes. A substantial shift of Hispanic voters toward the Democrats in these states could make the national political map unwinnable for Republicans.

Obviously,in light of that, there’s no rational explanation as to why the Democrats keep pimping this issue. But I think I know why the Republicans are. Check out the prominent “You Can’t Make This Up” button on the RNC web site:

Below are some of the most recently published articles pertaining to vote fraud around the country. Find your state to read about the problems in your area, or scroll down to browse the recent news nationwide. If you have a news item related to voting irregularities in your state, e-mail it here.

Before the last election I (prematurely) opined about this serendipitous convergence of issues:

If we allow the Republicans to define this next election, it will be about immigration and voter fraud.

After the blowback from the base around comprehensive immigration reform (and the loss of any hope of splitting the powerful growing Latino voting bloc) they are going back to the tried and true. Vote suppression and bogus accusation of voter fraud. They’ve been doing it for years and now that they’ve had access to the DOJ and trained a whole new generation of Monica Goodlings, I have no doubt they’ve devised some great new techniques. One excellent approach is to have a whole slew of police wearing a dozen different uniforms harassing the Latino community. Why, the SAVE Act even includes a government sponsored media campaign to tell everyone in the Latino communities all about the harsh new penalties they face.

So why in the world do Democrats believe that they’ll benefit from a new enforcement only bill so harsh that it even calls for legal family members who help an undocumented worker to get a year in jail for doing it? This isn’t like welfare reform at all. There’s no “taking it off the table.” This is an issue that hits directly at the largest and fastest growing new voting bloc in America.

The report documents how Hispanics have gone from a group trending Republican to a group overwhelmingly Democratic; one whose percentage of the American electorate has increased by 33 percent in the last 4 years; and one poised, because of the structure of the Electoral College, to determine who the next President will be in 2008.

And studies show that when you enact punitive enforcement-only measures designed to intimidate and marginalize undocumented workers, you also intimidate and marginalize legal Latino immigrants and citizens:(pdf)

The study that follows is a heavily carted recitation of recent Latino voting patterns, with the most objective analysis I can muster in an environment fraught with variables. But I will state my subjective conclusion here: Immigration policies that induce mass fear among illegal residents will induce mass anger among the legal residents who share their heritage…Ties of family, culture, and a shared media will communicate the fears of the group directly threatened – the illegals — to other Latinos who are not. The profiling inevitable with the enforcement of previously flouted immigration laws will intensify the attendant emotions. To the authorities, every Latino becomes a potential criminal. To Latinos, every interaction with the authorities becomes, or symbolizes, an existential threat.

Telling these people to suck it up, as Carville and Greenberg, in their ever more desperate quest to recover the aging “Reagan Democrat” are doing by urging Democrats to pass legislation virtually designed to suppress their vote, is nothing short of political malpractice. It is the equivalent of the Republicans telling the Christian right to stay the hell out of politics back in the 1980’s.

Big new voting blocs don’t come along every day.

Far be it for the Democratic Congress to look beyond Stan Greenberg’s suspect focus groups of the moment and insist on passing comprehensive immigration reform, which is supported by Latinos and virtually everyone else. Instead they tell Democrats to pass harsh, enforcement only legislation that will only help Republicans. If they gave more than five minutes attention to trying to figure out ways to gain new voters, like unmarried women and Latinos, instead of fighting the Republicans over every cranky white guy who left the party in 1980 and never looked back, they could actually “move the ball” down the field in their direction for a change.

Far be it for the Democratic Congress to try to build a real majority for the long term so that there is a chance of enacting a real progressive agenda. Can’t have that. Plutocrats don’t want that, which is why every single time a populist wave threatens, somebody starts waving a shiny nativist distraction in people’s faces.

Tom Tancredo’s going home, by the way. Quitting electoral politics.

”I feel my job, my task, has been completed.”

He moved the ball down the field and scored. Now he’s going to get a nice wingnut welfare sincure.

Update: Here’s a very moving letter to Rahm Emmanuel from one conservative supporter of the SAVE bill:

Congressman,

Your colleague Heath Shuler is about to present the SAVE Act on the floor of the House within a week. This bill creates a system in which every employer can identify the status of everyone of their employees,. I think we finally have some sensible legislation with a lot of potential to do some real good in ridding this country of the Cancer of illegal immigration. More than once I believe your party has played politics with this issue rather than looking to make good policy. A couple weeks ago your Senate colleagues voted against making cities like ours, sanctuary cities, illegal. All but one Democrat voting against this bill. That is frankly reprehensible.

I don’t know if the Democratic leadership is pandering to the Hispanics, trying to create a new base of current illegals, or simply bowing down to your puppetmaster, George Soros. Either way, your party has shown that it is more interested in compassion for law breakers than it is for the rule of law. I hope that will change with this bill.

This guy’s definitely going to vote for the Democrats if they pass this bill, right?

Blue America and the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rightshave some questions for Rahm Emmanuel too.

Update II: Ian Welsh had an interesting post the other day about the plutocrat angle that is very illuminating.

Update III: In response to those who accuse me of being a shill for whomever they oppose, I hereby acknowledge that Barack Obama stated that he continues to support giving drivers licenses to undocumented workers even as Elliot Spitzer has changed his mind and Hillary Clinton agreed. (I hadn’t heard. Sorry.) Good for him. That’s a bold step in this environment. It would be great if all the candidates would came out against the cruel and punitive SAVE act, which presents a far worse problem for Latinos and Democrats than this symbolic driver’s license issue. (Hint: illegal immigrants don’t purposefully interact with the government, whether it’s to get welfare benefits, medicaid or drivers licenses. They’re not stupid, they’re just poor.)

.

Brown Is The New Black

by digby

I’ve been waiting for some right winger to point this out as if it means something since I read the Democracy Corps poll the other day, and right on time, here comes David Frum:

Maybe you’ve heard about the recent polls showing a huge Democratic advantage among young voters. The latest , conducted by Stanley Greenberg for the Democracy Project, shows (among other dismal tidings) a 19-point party identification lead for Democrats among voters younger than 30.

[…]

Read the report in full, however, and you come across an interesting nugget on page 6: White young people continue to favor Republicans by a thin but real margin of 2 points. The Democrats owe their advantage among youth to a huge lead among young African-Americans (78 points) – and a very large lead (43 points) among Hispanics.

In the past, Republicans could win elections despite their unpopularity among ethnic minorities. But with the huge surge of immigration since 1980 – and especially since 2000 – the voting map of the United States has been redrawn in ways inherently deeply unfavorable to the GOP.

[…]

… the legacy that will damage his party is the legacy of immigration non-enforcement. This has imported a large new community of people who are both economically struggling (and thus open to Democratic arguments) but who lack deep attachment to the American nation (and who are thus immune to the most potent of Republican appeals). It is these voters who will sway elections in future. And thanks to this president’s immigration policies, there are going to be a lot more of them than there might otherwise have been.

Illegal immigrants can’t vote and weren’t polled. So in this poll we are talking about young legal citizens between the ages of 18-29, the vast, vast majority of whom were born in this country. Most of them have never been to Mexico except on vacation, many of them don’t speak Spanish and they have all been educated in American schools and raised on MTV and fast food. In other words, these young people are Americans with all the same attachments to country that all young Americans have. I have no idea how he explains the fact that 78% of young African Americans also loathe Republicans — perhaps they’ve never established any attachment to America either. (I don’t suppose the fact that Republicans are the party of racists has anything to do with it.)

Frum is just carrying on the long tradition of stupid commentators and Republican shills who constantly point out that Republicans would win in a landslide if only white people voted (although in this case, they don’t win decisively among young whites either) as if that’s some sort of meaningful metric. I even heard someone break down the poll numbers for Clinton by saying that she wouldn’t stand a chance if women couldn’t vote. I have never heard anyone note the opposite —- that if white males couldn’t vote, no Republican could ever get elected to any office in the land.

But aside from the racist assumptions about these young Americans, Frum is actually laying the groundwork for the right’s attack against any expansion of the safety net. This is one of those recurring themes in American politics.

Here’s a post I did long ago, and have reprised a time or two, about how our history of slavery and racism have shaped American ideas about public welfare and why we simply can’t seem to get past the legacy of race hatred to create a sense of the common good. It’s a rather ugly argument, but it is persuasive to me. When I see it rear its ugly head once again with people people like Frum pulling the old xenophobe card about young American born citizens of “certain” descent not having any ties to the culture, it’s hard to argue that the old impulse has completely died out.

Here’s a little piece of that post, (which was written in response to those who think we can convince southern white conservatives to vote for Democrats with populist appeals):

In this paper (pdf) Sociologist Nathan Glazer of Harvard, who has long been interested in America’s underdeveloped welfare state, answers a related question — “Why Americans don’t care about income inequality” which may give us some clues. Citing a comprehensive study by economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth called, “Why Doesn’t the United States have a European-Style Welfare State?” (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2/2001) he shows that the reluctance of Americans to embrace an egalitarian economic philosophy goes back to the beginning of the republic. But what is interesting is that both he and the economists offer some pretty conclusive evidence that the main reason for American “exceptionalism” in this case is, quite simply, racism.

AGS [Alesina, Glazear and Sacerdote] report, using the World Values Survey, that “opinions and beliefs about the poor differ sharply between the United States and Europe. In Europe the poor are generally thought to be unfortunate, but not personally responsible for their own condition. For example, according to the World Values Survey, whereas 70 % of West Germans express the belief that people are poor because of imperfections in society, not their own laziness, 70 % of Americans hold the opposite view…. 71 % of Americans but only 40% of Europeans said …poor people could work their way out of poverty.”

[…]

“Racial fragmentation and the disproportionate representation of ethnic minorities among the poor played a major role in limiting redistribution…. Our bottom line is that Americans redistribute less than Europeans for three reasons: because the majority of Americans believe that redistribution favors racial minorities, because Americans believe that they live in an open and fair society, and that if someone is poor it is his or her own fault, and because the political system is geared toward preventing redistribution. In fact the political system is likely to be endogenous to these basic American beliefs.”(p. 61)

“Endogenous” is economics-ese for saying we have the political system we do because we prefer the results it gives, such as limiting redistribution to the blacks. Thus the racial factor as well as a wider net of social beliefs play a key role in why Americans don’t care about income inequality, and why, not caring, they have no great interest in expanding the welfare state.

Glazer goes on to point out how these attitudes may have come to pass historically by discussing the roles that the various immigrant support systems and the variety of religious institutions provided for the poor:

But initial uniformities were succeeded by a diversity which overwhelmed and replaced state functions by nonstate organizations, and it was within these that many of the services that are the mark of a fully developed welfare state were provided. Where do the blacks fit in? The situation of the blacks was indeed different. No religious or ethnic group had to face anything like the conditions of slavery or the fierce subsequent prejudice and segregation to which they were subjected. But the pre-existing conditions of fractionated social services affected them too. Like other groups, they established their own churches, which provided within the limits set by the prevailing poverty and absence of resources some services. Like other groups, too, they were dependant on pre-existing systems of social service that had been set up by religious and ethnic groups, primarily to serve their own, some of which reached out to serve blacks, as is the case with the religiously based (and now publicly funded) social service agencies of New York City. They were much more dependant, owing to their economic condition, on the poorly developed primitive public services, and they became in time the special ward of the expanded American welfare state’s social services. Having become, to a greater extent than other groups, the clients of public services, they also affected, owing to the prevailing racism, the public image of these services.

This latest explosion of nativism has to do with new migration patterns of seasonal illegal immigrants, class anxiety among whites on the lower end, exploitation by media con men, among other things. But I believe that the result will be just as it was in the past: opportunistic politicians and wealthy interests will stoke these impulses in order to stymie the growing movement to expand the government safety net, particularly universal health care. They are already making a simple crude argument (couched in socially acceptable terms, of course) that your tax dollars are going to support a bunch of lazy Mexicans and you’ll get nothing in return. That is the underlying theme of all these appeals and the result is the same as it ever was: because certain people would rather their own family suffer than contribute to the betterment of those whom they despise, the US government cannot be used as a vehicle for social welfare. The question is whether it will work this time.

The sheer numbers of non-whites are changing things, and that has the rightwingers working themselves into a full blown panic. The Bushies were right on this one. They needed to cool the racist ardor of their base, but they couldn’t get it done. And now you see neocons like Frum trying to join the wingnut populist bandwagon with thinly veiled racist appeals to solidarity with the Pat Buchanan wing. (His conflation of “illegal immigrants” who allegedly have no stake in the country with the large numbers of young Hispanic Americans who were born here gives the game away.) But the numbers are just not on their side.

I suspect that this impending panic attack may even be at the root of Karl Rove’s rather desperate US Attorney “voter fraud” gambit. They needed to cool the racist base, pass some kind of worker program as a sop to business AND suppress the vote in the west and southwest in order to keep winning 51% elections. Even a real genius would have had a hard time pulling that off. The whole thing fell apart — and now we are on to them.

So, go ahead, Mr Canadian immigrant. Keep telling young Hispanic Americans that their parents shouldn’t have been allowed to come into the country. Keep talking about blacks like they aren’t real Americans. This isn’t 1860 anymore. It isn’t 1960 anymore. This is the new brown America and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it. You can bash “illegals” and “welfare queens” and run your patented “law and order” campaigns all you want, but you have lost the war. There are way more of them (along with us white liberals from all over the country who also loathe and despise your racist fearmongering)than there are of you now.

So have at it. Every time you make one of these racist appeals to your dittohead base, another young Democratic voter gets her wings.

Update: Rick Perlstein asks Frum an uncomfortable question.

.

Flying Squads

by digby

McClatchy has a new article up called “Was campaigning against voter fraud a Republican ploy?”

Uhm, yeah.

And here was an early clue:

Between 1958 and 1962, when Rehnquist was a private attorney in Arizona, he served as the director of Republican “ballot security” operations in poor neighborhoods in Phoenix. Rehnquist was part of Operation Eagle Eye, a flying squad of GOP lawyers that swept through polling places in minority-dominated districts to challenge the right of African Americans and Latinos to vote. At the time, Democratic poll watchers had to physically push Rehnquist out of the polling place to stop him from interfering with voting rights.

Two decades later, during Rehnquist’s 1986 Senate confirmation hearing for appointment to head the Supreme Court, he denied targeting minority voters. Some election watchers, who had personally observed Rehnquist’s tactics in Phoenix, accused him of lying to Congress.

This is an old story. What’s new is that Karl Rove tried to use the Justice Department itself to steal elections rather than relying on “flying squads” of GOP thugs to suppress the Democratic vote. But then, Rove was the most successful election stealer in American history, so it’s not exactly a surprise.

.

Goo Goo G’joob

by digby

Crooks and Liars has a very informative video up of Paul Weyrich laying out the case for vote suppression back in the 1980’s. He pretty much admits that the Republicans only gain a majority by keeping Democrats from voting:

Weyrich: “Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome — good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

The funny thing about this is that it was traditionally the evangelical Christians who eschewed “wordly” involvement in politics for sincere philosophical and theological reasons. And Paul Weyrich has made a very lucrative career out of threatening that they will once again retreat from the public square if the Republicans don’t stop being so liberal and failing the cause.

This guy is among the biggest con artists on the planet and it’s important to keep this in mind every time he fundraises and markets a new book to the gullible base about how the Republicans failed them but they need to keep the flame. It’s hard to believe they don’t see through his scam by now, but there’s a right wing sucker born every minute.

On the larger issue of vote suppression, it’s been amply documented that the effort that Karl Rove is alleged to have spearheaded to use the DOJ to push phony cases of voter fraud is part of a program that began back in the 1980’s. What we are seeing unravel in the US Attorney scandal is not a case of a rogue group within the department and white house or even a too-clever overreach run by Bush’s brain. This was part of an ongoing, many-decades-long GOP operation to convince the public that “voter fraud” is a threat to the nation’s electoral integrity so that they could keep Democrats from voting. It’s really that simple.

Now, this was accompanied by other measures, including a sophisticated program to challenge close elections and probably rig the voting machines wherever they could. But the most important part was the propaganda and the legal machanisms. They foolishly fired a bunch of Republican prosecutors and then publicly sullied their professional reputations or it would have gone on under the radar and probably tainted the 2008 election. (It still might…)

Weyrich says it clearly and you know it’s true. The more people who vote, the less likely it is that Republicans win. Now, that knowledge would make decent small d democrats take a look at their philosophy and wonder why that would be. They are not decent small d democrats and they don’t care what the people of this country actually want. They represent money and they use Jesus as a beard to stay in power.

If the congress does nothing more, they have to unravel this US Attorney scandal and Democrats need to start taking electoral reform seriously. They continue to ignore this program at their peril. It’s not going to disappear just because Rove is out of the white house.

.

Holding Hans

by digby

My favorite election suppressor Hans von Spakovsky caught the attention of McClatchy this week-end:

Von Spakovsky, who had been a longtime voting rights activist and elections official in Georgia before serving at Justice, accepted a presidential recess appointment to a Republican slot on the Federal Election Commission in December 2005. He is scheduled to appear at a June 13 confirmation hearing before the Senate Rules and Administration Committee.

Calling Orville Reddenbacher.

Here’s the committee:

Dianne Feinstein, CA
Chairman

Robert Bennett, UT
Ranking Member

Robert C. Byrd
Ted Stevens
Daniel K. Inouye
Mitch McConnell
Christopher J. Dodd
Thad Cochran
Charles E. Schumer
Trent Lott
Richard J. Durbin
Kay Bailey Hutchison
E. Benjamin Nelson
C. Saxby Chambliss
Harry Reid
Patty Murray
Lamar Alexander
Chuck Hagel
Mark L. Pryor

I think I’ll send along a little note to my senator Dianne Feinstein. And I think it would also be a great opportunity for presidential candidate Chris Dodd to step up and take on this very important issue of vote suppression. I think I’ll send him a note too. Chuck Shumer and Harry Reid will obviously want to have a good chat with Hans, as will Dick Durbin, so I’ll send along a note to them too. I might even give their offices a jingle before the committee meets just to let them know how much I appreciate that a right wing hit man like Von Spakovsky is thoroughly questioned and hopefully removed from the FEC.

Von Spakovsky has been at the very center of everything the Republicans have been doing to rig the vote for the past decade. He was with VIP when they launched the drive to “purge ” the voter rolls in advance of the stolen 2000 election. He was the main hack the Bushies installed in the civil rights division at the Justice Department to set them up for 2004 and beyond. He is now on the FEC, where Bush put him in a recess appointment. He’s been busy there too:

The House Administration Committee is also inquiring into von Spakovsky’s communications with the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that implemented a 2002 election reform law and serves as a national election information clearinghouse.

The bipartisan, four-member commission stirred a political tempest last year when it delayed the release of voter fraud and voter ID law studies, saying that more research was needed. A House panel revealed last month that the fraud study’s central finding – that there was little evidence of widespread voter fraud – had been toned down to say that “a great deal of debate” surrounded the subject.

Commissioners rejected as flawed the second study’s finding that voter ID laws tend to suppress turnout, especially among Latinos, and ordered more research.

Rich said that von Spakovsky usurped his seat on a commission advisory panel in 2004, although the law creating the panel allocated that spot for the Voting Rights Section chief “or his designee.” Rich said he was not consulted.

After the commission hired both liberal and conservative consultants to work on the studies in 2005, e-mails show that von Spakovsky tried to persuade panel members that the research was flawed.

In an Aug. 18, 2005, e-mail to Chairman DeGregorio, he objected strenuously to a contract award for the ID study to researchers at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, who were teaming with a group at Rutgers University.

Von Spakovsky wrote that Daniel Tokaji, the associate director of Moritz’ election program, was “an outspoken opponent of voter identification requirements” and that those “pre-existing notions” should disqualify him from federal funding for impartial research.

The criticism was ironic coming from von Spakovsky, who a few months earlier had written the anonymous article for the Texas Review of Law and Politics, in which he called voter fraud a problem of importance equal to racial discrimination at the polls. Von Spakovsky acknowledged writing the article after joining the FEC.

Months after its publication, he participated in the department’s review of Georgia’s photo ID law, as required under the 1965 Voting Rights Act for election laws passed in 16 Southern states. After the department approved it, a federal judge struck it down as akin to a Jim Crow-era poll tax on minority voters.

Rich called von Spakovsky’s failure to withdraw from the case “especially disturbing, given the clear ethical concerns” over his prior work as a Georgia elections official and the bias in his article.

Von Spakovsky’s tone toward DeGregorio grew increasingly harsh in 2005 as the chairman refused to take partisan stands, said two people close to the commission who declined to be identified because of the matter’s sensitivity.

Their differences seemed to come to a head last year over two issues raised by Arizona’s Republican secretary of state, Janice Brewer, who was implementing the toughest state voter identification law in the nation. In April 2005, the Justice Department erroneously advised her that Arizona did not need to offer a provisional ballot to those lacking proof of citizenship.

E-mails suggest that von Spakovsky contacted an aide to Missouri Republican Sen. Kit Bond, who inquired of DeGregorio whether the commission was “seriously considering taking a position against” the department on the provisional ballot question.

DeGregorio sent a testy message asking von Spakovsky if the note from Capitol Hill was “an attempt by you to put pressure on me.”

“If so, I do not appreciate it,” he wrote.

The next day, von Spakovsky wrote DeGregorio that he thought they “had a deal” under which the department would reconsider its position on provisional ballots if the commission would allow Arizona to modify the federal voter registration form to require proof of citizenship.

“I do not agree to `deals,’ especially when it comes to interpretation of the law,” DeGregorio replied.

Last September, the White House replaced DeGregorio with Caroline Hunter, a former deputy counsel to the Republican National Committee. DeGregorio confided to associates that he was told that von Spakovsky influenced the White House’s decision not to reappoint him, said the two people close to the panel.

Asked about his ouster, DeGregorio said only that he “was aware that Mr. von Spakovsky was not pleased with the bipartisan approaches that I took.”

If the Democrats want to get to the bottom of the GOP voter suppression program, they might want to prepare for a very intensive hearing. He’s one of the top go-to vote rigging guys in the Republican party.

Update: Maha has some more good stuff on Von Spakovsky.

.