I Bet Election Theft And Voter Suppression Would Stop If They Were Capital Crimes And A Few People Got Executed For It

Georgia's primary elections were a mess yesterday. Look at the race for the Democratic slot in Georgia's first district. Progressive Lisa Ring, the progressive in George's first district will be in a runoff with Joyce Griggs. With 96.89% of precincts reporting (204 out of 225), Lisa had 17,181 votes to Griggs' 17,164. Every vote counts. The Senate race looked like it was coming down to a runoff between a progressive (Teresa Tomlinson) and a nothing (Jon Ossoff) as well, but by last night, the nothing had avoided the runoff and is likely to lose the chance to beat Perdue; leave it to Schumer! The important race in GA-07 also looks like it will be determined in a runoff, as will Democratic primaries in GA-09 and in GA-13, where longtime incumbent and useless Blue Dog David Scott has been forced into a runoff, the only Georgia incumbent who was.

The Associated Press headline tells the real story of the Tuesday primary: 'Chaos in Georgia': Is messy primary a November harbinger?. Bill Barrow wrote that "The long-standing wrangle over voting rights and election security came to a head in Georgia, where a messy primary and partisan finger-pointing offered an unsettling preview of a November contest when battleground states could face potentially record turnout. Many Democrats blamed the Republican secretary of state for hours-long lines, voting machine malfunctions, provisional ballot shortages and absentee ballots failing to arrive in time for Tuesday’s elections. Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential campaign called it “completely unacceptable.” Georgia Republicans deflected responsibility to metro Atlanta’s heavily minority and Democratic-controlled counties, while President Donald Trump’s top campaign attorney decried 'the chaos in Georgia.'"

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the primary quickly turned into an ordeal for voters who waited for hours Tuesday when it became clear officials were unprepared for an election on new voting computers during the coronavirus pandemic. Poll workers couldn’t get voting machines to work. Precincts opened late. Social-distancing requirements created long lines. Some voters gave up and went home. The primary was a major test of Georgia’s ability to run a highly anticipated election in a potential battleground state ahead of November’s presidential election, when more than twice as many voters are expected. Elections officials fell short."

Is it just incompetence? Or is there more to Georgia's Republican-controlled dysfunctional voting system? The last Secretary of State, Brian Kemp blatantly stole the gubernatorial election from Stacey Abrams two years ago. Now he's governor. The new issue of Mother Jones carries an essay by election fraud expert Ari Berman, How the Coronavirus Handed the GOP New Ways to Squash the Vote, which isn't specifically about Georgia. In fact, he starts in Texas, where H. Drew Galloway is executive director of MOVE Texas and "spends his life trying to register young voters. Typi­cally, in the spring of an election year, Galloway would be overseeing a staff of about four dozen who, before classes end for the summer, register newly eligi­ble voters on 55 college campuses and at dozens of high schools. Last year, MOVE Texas signed up more than 25,000 new voters. It reached nearly 8,000 more this year before the state’s March 3 presidential primary. But then the coronavirus outbreak scattered students, and MOVE Texas, like every other political group, suspended in-person registration drives. 'We’ve gone from registering 2,000 people a week to registering maybe 100,' Galloway told me in April. 'Voter registration is decimated in Texas.'"

Texas is one of those states controlled by the GOP-- like Georgia-- where the state works hard to keep as many people from voting as they can, especially people of color, poor people and young people and, wrote Berman, "What’s happened in Texas is happening nationwide: The coronavirus has heightened the already considerable obstacles blocking citizens from exercising their right to vote. In the last decade, Republicans have enacted new voting restrictions in 25 states. The Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act, unleashing new efforts in states with long histories of voting discrimination to make it harder for voters of color to cast ballots."

Even before the pandemic, Texas was a hard place to register. As of May, it was one of 10 states with no way to do so online. Anyone who wants to sign up voters must be deputized by each county they work in, every two years. Texas has an estimated 5.5 million unregistered but eligible voters-- more people than the individual populations of 28 other states. The majority of them, according to the Texas Demo­cratic Party, are young, people of color, or both, who would likely favor Democrats if they voted. Luke Warford, who directs the party’s efforts to expand voting, told me that Texas Democrats had hoped to see 2 million new people register this year as part of its push to tip the state blue. “We had plans to run the largest statewide voter registration program in history,” he said. “Introduce a pandemic and that makes everything you were planning to do in person quite a bit more difficult.”

Even if new voters succeed in registering, without changes to the existing system they’ll face unequal access to mail-in ballots. Texas limits mail-in voting for those under 65 to people who are out of town during the election, in jail, or have a “sickness or physical condition” that prevents them from going to the polls. Meanwhile, any voter 65 or older-- the strongest age demographic for Donald Trump in 2016-- can request an absentee ballot with no questions asked.

In April, a state judge ruled that people afraid of contracting the coronavirus while voting had a legitimate reason to get an absentee ballot. Texas’ Republican attorney general has opposed the ruling, claiming that “a fear of contracting COVID-19” is “an emotional condition and not a physical” one, and has raised the prospect of “criminal sanctions” for groups like MOVE Texas that help voters under 65 obtain mail-in ballots. In late May, the state’s all-Republican Supreme Court agreed a lack of immunity to the virus alone was not a valid reason, but said voters could weigh their health history and make their own decision-- a ruling that could cause confusion and leave some people requesting mail ballots open to prosecution. A separate appeal on the matter is pending in federal court.

...In key states like Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, the number of new voters who registered in March was half or less than it was during the same time period in 2016.

Public health and election expert agree that voting by mail us the safest way to cast a ballot in a pandemic. Yet most states are unprepared to hold mail elections in a way that won’t lead to significant voter disenfranchisement. The six best-positioned states-- California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington-- ­have already put in place systems where a ballot is sent to every registered voter. In three other Western states-- Arizona, Montana, and New Mexico-- a majority of votes are cast by mail, according to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission. With Florida and pockets of other mail-in voters added in, a quarter of Americans voted by mail in 2018, a record number. But in the 40 other states, mail-in ballots made up just 9 percent of votes cast. Fewer than 8 percent of people voted by mail in key states like Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

“Because it’s been a minor method of voting in a lot of the key states, the rules and practices involving mail voting have gotten less scrutiny and haven’t been thought out to make sure they’re fair and accessible,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

While quickly expanding voting by mail could help many people cast ballots in November, it poses its own risks. If election officials, especially in places unused to the method, are overwhelmed by a surge of requests, ballots might not reach voters in time. The United States Postal Service, which faces a major budget shortfall and attacks from the Trump administration (a major fundraiser for the Republican National Convention was just named postmaster general), could lack the resources to handle increases in sent and returned ballots. And a sizable chunk of the electorate will be unfamiliar with the intricate rules governing mail-in voting and could see their ballots thrown out on technicalities.

...While groups like Rock the Vote and Voto Latino have reported a major increase in voter registrations amid the protests over George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer, calls for young people and people of color to reshape the 2020 elections by voting in record numbers must contend with the reality that those communities most affected by racism and police brutality could also have the toughest time voting this year.

“As we push more people to vote by mail, which is a good thing, the number of ballots that aren’t counted is going to increase. And we know those ballots are not equally distributed. This burden is shared disproportionately by young and minority voters,” Elias said.

Wisconsin's disastrous election on April 7, when officials proceeded with a primary and state Supreme Court race despite a statewide shelter-in-place order, provided a vivid illustration of how not to vote during a pandemic. Republican leaders in the state legislature rebuffed calls by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, to postpone the election or mail an absentee ballot to every registered voter. With many people afraid to leave their homes, and cities closing the bulk of their polling places because of poll worker shortages-- Milwaukee opened just 5 of 180-- anxious Wisconsinites were forced to wait hours in line to vote. Just 6 percent of the state’s voters cast ballots by mail in 2018; this spring around 60 percent did.

While photos of masked voters and poll workers in protective gear drew national outrage, they may have obscured the fact that the state was ill-equipped to handle that huge increase. Though officials worked around the clock-- Madison’s city clerk said she logged more than 100 hours a week during the close of the election--121,000 mail-in ballots were not returned, as voters complained they didn’t receive them in time or at all, because of mistakes by election workers or the post office.

A spokesperson for the Wisconsin Elections Commission confirmed that the dramatic increase in absentee voting “certainly caught us by surprise,” conceding that Milwaukee and Green Bay, both home to many Democratic voters, had failed to get every requester a ballot, unlike “the vast majority” of the states’ 1,850 municipalities.

Wisconsin also shined a light on the restrictive rules for mail-in ballots. Voters had to get a witness to watch them fill out their ballots, difficult for anyone living alone at a time of social distancing. Many voters had to include a copy of their photo ID to request an absentee ballot, which at a minimum required uploading a picture of their ID or photocopying it. Such rules, which Republicans refused to waive, helped lead to an estimated 23,000 absentee ballots being rejected-- almost the same number that Trump carried the state by in 2016.

... Despite Trump’s false claim that mail-in voting benefits Democrats, the parties’ voters made roughly equal use of the option in 2016, and it’s helped Republicans in key swing states like Arizona and Florida. Older and whiter voters tend to vote by mail more than the overall electorate. According to a Brennan Center analysis of voting in seven presidential battlegrounds, voters 65 or over were roughly twice as likely to vote by mail than those under 40. Nationwide, in 2018, just 11 percent of Black voters cast ballots by mail while 23 percent of white voters did.

Trump and the RNC have signaled they’ll fight expansions of mail-in voting that would make the process more accessible for younger and more diverse voters, but not for their most reliable voters, such as mailing absentee ballot applications to anyone over 64.

Ben Wikler, who helped thousands of voters cast their first mail-in ballots in April as chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, warns that “the danger is Republicans will apply the ruthless cynicism they’ve used for in-person voter suppression to absentee voter suppression and we’ll be fighting against a whole new set of tactics.”

Another worry is the spread of disinformation about how to vote, which could be particularly disruptive in a year when Americans will have to adopt unfamiliar procedures. The potential methods go well beyond what’s known about Russia’s 2016 playbook. Shady political organizations could send people genuine-seeming but fake absentee ballots, set up bogus websites to trick people into thinking they’ve requested ballots, spread the wrong deadline for returning mail-in ballots, or give incorrect information about the type of documentation or identification needed to vote.

“The pandemic could likely be weaponized in the hands of those that already had the intent to suppress the vote,” said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “There are a lot more challenges now to conducting elections. There’s a lot more potential for mischief.”

“The silver lining” of Wisconsin, Gupta said, “was it raised the alarm for folks who weren’t necessarily focusing on the elections and democracy component of COVID. It certainly awakened local and state officials-- ­they don’t want those same Wisconsin photos on their watch.”

...The electoral response to the coronavirus mirrors the public health one, with little national leadership, and state action varying widely. Some states, like California, which is sending mail-in ballots to all registered voters, are doing a lot to make voting easier while others, like Texas, are fighting common­sense steps to expand voter access. Elements of the federal government and state-level Republicans may be working quietly to respond responsibly and ensure a free and fair election, but Trump is actively undermining that goal by lying about the prevalence of voter fraud and opposing mail-in voting.

The president’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus outbreak may have imperiled his reelection chances. But its disproportionate impacts could play to his advantage. The counties with the highest rates of covid-19 as of mid-April voted for Clinton by 19 points, while the areas with the lowest rates supported Trump by 15 points. If the virus surges or stay-at-home orders return for Election Day, residents of these large and staunchly Democratic cities could be afraid to vote in person-- and in most states, they’ll face untested election systems with their own potentially decisive faults. As Wikler noted in the wake of Wisconsin’s primary, “The harder it is to vote, the more people wind up getting pushed to the side.”

The GOP Is Looking More And More Like An Anti-Democracy Party-- Conservatives, Though Have Always Opposed Voting

McConnell may look like a turtle but he's a lot smarter than one-- albeit, smart in the service of Evil. He realizes that reform is his-- and his party's-- implacable enemy. He is very aware, painfully so, that when more people vote, more Republicans lose. H.R. 1, the For the People Act, is the pro-democracy legislation currently being debated in the House Judiciary Committee. Many Republicans are panic-stricken over it. The very first sentence, introducing the proposed package of laws, strikes fear into their... hearts: "A bill to expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, and strengthen ethics rules for public servants." Expanding access to the ballot box is the polar opposite of GOP policy for the last half century. Voting rights expert Ari Berman was on the case for Mother Jones Tuesday and again on Wednesday.

Tuesday, Berman wrote that "while voting rights lawyers are testifying in favor of the bill, Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who oppose the legislation have recruited two of the biggest vote suppressors in their party to testify against it: Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation and J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation." Both were members of Trump's discredited and now-abandoned election integrity commission, and both have been part of the GOP voter suppression movement for over a decade.

Yesterday, McConnell was on the House floor trying to discredit the bill, particularly the part that would make Election Day a national holiday the way it is in democracies that want to encourage voting, calling it a Democratic Party "power grab." This is turtle-talk: "Just what America needs, another paid holiday and a bunch of government workers being paid to go out and work for I assume our folks-- our colleagues on the other side, on their campaigns. This is the Democrat plan to restore democracy? A brand-new week of paid vacation for every federal employee who would like to hover around while you cast your ballot?" What a clown-- an evil clown.

Ted Lieu is a very active member on the Judiciary Committee-- and extremely serious about protecting the right to vote. "The statement by Sen McConnell," he told us today, "is a surprisingly frank admission that the overwhelming majority of the American people support Democrats. In a democracy, any party that fears democracy will eventually shrink so much that it will drown in a bathtub. The right to vote is a constitutional right. The Republicans can't stop it, and are doomed as a party unless they expand their narrow base."

One of the most extreme right members of the House GOP, Jim Jordan (OH), serves on the House Judiciary Committee, along with other anti-democracy fanatics like Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Debbie Lesko (R-AZ), Ken Buck (R-CO), John Ratcliffe (R-TX). Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Mike Johnson (R-LA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and 4 crazy new members: Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA), Ben Cline (R-VA), Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) and Greg Steube (R-FL). Jordan had a meltdown on the House floor, outraged that Democrats want to make Election Day a federal holiday-- something 65% of Americans support.

In your face, McConnell

What The Wisconsin Republicans Did This Morning Will Backfire-- Bigly!

Call me crazy but I think Wisconsin Republicans made a big strategic boo-boo last night and this morning. The Republican legislators worked all night and into this morning in their lame duck session and, despite protests, internal disagreement and Democratic opposition both Houses of the state legislature passed a package of proposals designed to fuck Democratic voters and empower the GOP-controlled Legislature at the expense of the incoming all-Democratic executive branch. Governor-elect Tony Evers and Attorney General-elect Josh Kaul warned them that the ensuing lawsuits will tie the state up in gridlock. (Keep in mind that in the popular vote in legislative elections last month in Wisconsin, Democrats won 53-45% but, entirely because of Republican gerrymandering, Democrats only won 36% of the seats in the Assembly-- 53% of the vote but 36% of the seats.)

Just after midnight, the Assembly enacted a venal Medicaid work requirement that would prevent Evers from withdrawing a federal waiver request to implement the work requirement and require new legislative oversight of gubernatorial waiver requests related to health care. In the Senate, backroom deal making led to this morning's vote to weaken the governor’s power to put administrative rules enacting state laws in place. The legislature, not the governor, would have the majority of appointments on the state’s economic development agency that Evers has said he wants to dismantle. The Republican bill also restricts early voting to no more than two weeks before an election and gives the legislature-- not the attorney general-- the power to withdraw Wisconsin from the Texas lawsuit challenging the federal health care law that protects people with pre-existing conditions.

The state Senate passed this package of steaming shit 17-16, all Democrats plus one Republican, Rob Cowles of Green Bay, voting against it. Democratic state Senator Chris Larson, who represents a suburban district south of Milwaukee told me just moments ago that "This morning, fresh off an election defeat, the Republican-controlled legislature voted to subvert the will of the people. The effects of this vote will be felt for years to come. Never before in Wisconsin’s 170 year history has an extraordinary session been used in such a cold, calculated way in order to usurp the power of duly elected constitutional officers. It is particularly disturbing that legislative Republicans would chose to poison the well of bipartisanship before duly elected officials are allowed to take office."

Larson-- like DWT-- sees the potential damage these moves will do not just to the state, but to the Republican Party itself, where independent voters are looking at it in disgust. "What the Republicans have done is terribly short-sighted and will leave a permanent stain on their and our state’s legacy," he continued. "It is unfortunate, that by refusing to recognize the voice of the people, they have broken Wisconsin Government. It will be all of our neighbors who suffer for years to come. Wisconsinites went to the polls in record midterm numbers and voted for change on November 6th. They responded to the people by essentially appointing the losing side as Attorney General. Now unelected, unaccountable private lawyers can potentially usurp any federal case from the duly elected Attorney General. We have a rich American history of peaceful transfer of power for the good of the people. This morning, Republicans instead decided to burn the house down on their way out the door."

Ari Berman, writing for Mother Jones, put the Republican Party racist assault on voting rights into a cohesive national context.

The 2018 election saw historic victories for voting rights. Seven states passed ballot initiatives that will make it easier to vote and harder to gerrymander. And some of the biggest cheerleaders for restricting access to the ballot, such as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, lost their gubernatorial races.

But now Republicans in four key swing states-- Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and North Carolina-- are undertaking unprecedented efforts in lame-duck legislative sessions to strip newly elected Democratic officials of their power to oversee state voting laws and rushing to pass new laws that will make it harder to vote.

...Currently, Wisconsin counties can decide when to begin the early voting period. Democratic cities like Madison and Milwaukee began early voting six weeks before the election in 2018 and saw record turnout. The new bill would limit the early voting period to just two weeks across Wisconsin.

The new effort to cut early voting is similar to a previous law that was struck down by a federal court. In 2014, Wisconsin’s Legislature cut early voting from 30 days to 12, reduced early voting hours on nights and weekends, and restricted early voting to one location per municipality, hampering voters in large urban areas. A federal judge ruled in 2016 that the early voting cuts “intentionally discriminate on the basis of race” and had been passed “to suppress the reliably Democratic vote of Milwaukee’s African Americans.”

After the law was overturned, jurisdictions in Wisconsin, particularly in places like Madison and Milwaukee, expanded early voting locations and hours, leading to record turnout in 2016 and 2018. Democrats have pledged to sue if the new law is passed by the Legislature on Tuesday.

The new bill would also prevent Evers from making the state’s voter ID law less restrictive by barring him from expanding the types of IDs Wisconsinites can use to vote. The law, which first went into effect in 2016, led to a sharp decrease in black voter turnout in the last presidential election. A study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that the ID requirement kept as many as 23,000 people from voting in two of the state’s most Democratic counties, Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County, with African Americans more than three times as likely as whites to be deterred from voting. President Donald Trump won the state by that very margin. “It is very probable,” Milwaukee’s top election official, Neil Albrecht, told Mother Jones last year, that “enough people were prevented from voting to have changed the outcome of the presidential election in Wisconsin.”

The GOP bill would also move the state’s 2020 presidential primary from April to March, while keeping the state Supreme Court election in April. A lower turnout in the court race would likely benefit Republicans and help them keep their majority on the court.

...Republican efforts to strip Democrats of power during lame-duck legislative sessions originated in North Carolina in 2016. Following the election of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper in 2016, the Republican-led Legislature passed a series of bills to reduce his power, which included preventing the governor from appointing a majority of members to the state board of elections and 100 county boards of elections.

Now the North Carolina Legislature is at it again. It originally passed a voter ID law in 2013 that the federal courts said targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision.” After that law was struck down in court, the Republican Legislature put a constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2018 requiring government-issued photo ID to vote. It passed with 60 percent support on Election Day, but because Republicans lost their legislative supermajority in 2018, they’re rushing to pass a bill implementing the amendment in the lame-duck session so Cooper will be unable to veto it.

Republicans in all four of these states owe their majorities partly to extreme partisan gerrymandering. Ohio Republicans barely got 50 percent of the vote in last month’s elections, but hold a supermajority in the Legislature, while Republicans in Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina got a minority of votes but control a majority of seats. Now, by stripping power from Democratic officials who won a majority of votes and enacting laws making it harder to vote, they are further enshrining minority rule.

Just back from Berniepalooza, Randy Bryce was busy all day and all night yesterday. This morning, he told me that he "had the opportunity to testify in opposition to the power grab. First words out of my mouth was that this isn’t a bill, it’s a coup. The Republicans need to answer one very simple question. If this was so badly needed, why did they wait until after the election to write it? We are witnessing a very sad time in our state’s history. They are literally doing this in the middle of the night."

We All Know Trump Is For Sale And Putin Is The Richest Man On Earth. Is Trump His Sock Puppet Now?

Sunday morning everyone who loves making fun of Señor Trumpanzee's Adderall-fueled tweet storms, had a field day. The one above was a sensation-- at least among those who enjoy mocking the imbecile Putin helped install in the White House. Did anyone imagine Trump's excursion to Hamburg and his opportunity to pay homage to the Russian dictator in person wouldn't be a farce? Probably my favorite response to the numbskull tweet du jour came from the Trump-Putin allies at Wikileaks.

The election system in Georgia was hacked, likely at Putin's command, in time for the Ossoff-Handel race. The Georgia Republican Party was absolutely complicit, if not in advance, then certainly afterwards when they categorically refused to allow paper ballots. Now there are many people converned that Trump has given Putin the green light to hack the 2018 midterm elections, something the Democrats will never be able to prove and probably-- in fear of discrediting electoral democracy even further-- will never accuse them of. James Clapper, former head of the Director of National Intelligence, was on CNN's Situation Room last week said that he believes Russia is preparing for the 2018 electoral "battleground."



I bet even some Trump supporters would be concerned if Trump made moves to turn Alaska back to the Russians-- after it, it was once part of the Russian Empire, just like Crimea and the Donesk region of Ukraine-- even if they're not concerned about Trump turning our democracy over to Putin to finish it off. Last week Ari Berman wrote about the Trump Regime's domestic initiatives against democracy-- it's unprecedented attack on voting rights, not something Trump supporters care about at all, unless you consider cheering a sign of "caring about." In his report for The Nation, Berman cited 4 specific Regime actions that are causes for concern:

1. The House Appropriations Committee voted to defund the Election Assistance Commission, the only federal agency that helps states make sure their voting machines aren’t hacked. The House Administration Committee previously voted to kill the EAC in February, but yesterday’s vote makes it one step closer to reality-- practically inviting Russia to try to hack our elections again. Russian hackers targeted election systems in 21 states in 2016, according to intelligence officials. The $4 million funding request for the EAC is less than the cost of two trips by Donald Trump to Mar-a-Lago.

2. The Department of Justice sent a letter to all 50 states informing them that “we are reviewing voter registration list maintenance procedures in each state covered by the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act]” and asking how they plan to remove voters from the rolls. While this might sound banal, it’s a clear instruction to states from the federal government to start purging the voting rolls. “Let’s be clear what this letter signals: DOJ Civil Rights is preparing to sue states to force them to trim their voting rolls,” tweeted Sam Bagenstos, the former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Obama administration. There’s a very long and recent history of Republican-controlled states’ purging their voting rolls in inaccurate and discriminatory ways-- for example, Florida’s disastrous purge of alleged ex-felons in 2000 could have cost Al Gore the election-- and it’s especially serious when the Department of Justice forces them to do it.

3. The White House commission on election integrity, led by vice chair Kris Kobach, also sent a letter to 50 states asking them to provide sweeping voter data including “the full first and last names of all registrants, middle names or initials if available, addresses, dates of birth, political party (if recorded in your state), last four digits of social security number if available, voter history (elections voted in) from 2006 onward, active/inactive status, cancelled status, information regarding any felony convictions, information regarding voter registration in another state, information regarding military status, and overseas citizen information.” While Kobach asked for “publicly-available voter roll data,” much of this information, like someone’s Social Security number or military status, is, in fact, private. Never before has a White House asked for such broad data on voters, and it could be easily manipulated by Trump’s commission. Kobach has a very well-documented record of making wildly misleading claims about voter fraud and enacting policies that sharply limit access to the ballot in his home state of Kansas. He’s been sued four times by the ACLU for voter suppression and was sanctioned by a federal court last week for “deceptive conduct and lack of candor.”

4. The Trump administration named Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation as a member of the commission, who’s done more than anyone other than Kobach to spread the myth of voter fraud and enact suppressive policies. Von Spakovsky was special counsel to the Bush administration’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Brad Schlozman, who said he wanted to “gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the [voting] section.” It was a time when longtime civil-rights lawyers were pushed out of the Justice Department and the likes of Schlozman and von Spakovsky reversed the Civil Rights Division’s traditional role of safeguarding voting rights. When von Spakovsky was nominated to the FEC, six former lawyers in the voting section called him “the point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.” My favorite example of von Spakovsky’s ethical lapses is the fact that he published an article praising voter-ID laws under the pseudonym “Publius” at the same time he was in charge of approving Georgia’s voter-ID law at DoJ. With the likes of Kobach and von Spakovsky on it, Trump’s commission has nothing to do with election integrity and everything to do with suppressing votes ahead of the 2018 and 2020 elections.

All four of these actions would be disturbing on their own, but taken together they represent an unprecedented attack on voting rights by the Trump administration and Republican Congress. The actions by Kobach, in particular, appear to mark the beginning of a nationwide voter-suppression campaign, based on spreading lies about voter fraud to justify enacting policies that purge the voter rolls, and make registration and voting more difficult.

FactCheck.org has done a great deal of work laying out the record of Trump's lies about Putin's hacking. This isn't Trump's typical bullshit but the systematic, well-planned out conspiracy that's a far cry from just the bungling of an imbecile.

The Big Question: Will The Democrats Stand Up To Trumpism?

The fascist cadres surrounding Trump-- from politicians like Mike Pence, Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions to predatory billionaires like Betsy DeVos, Steve Mnuchin, Robert Mercer, the Kochs and Wilbur Ross-- are attacking the American core on so many fronts that its unimaginable that congressional Democrats-- led in the Senate by a severely compromised Chuck Schumer and in the House by a gaggle of feeble, tired, sclerotic hacks-- will even begin to know how to resist. Can they filibuster the worst of his appointees? Would that lead to the Republicans doing away with the filibuster, their last line of defense, altogether? Should they keep their power dry for the essential battles-- like saving Medicare from a depraved team of Ryan and Health and Human Services Department head Tom Price? In fact Price and Ryan have been plotting since Trump was elected to start the process of dismantling Medicare in a way that skirts the filibuster-- budget reconciliation. Or is there even worse and more fundamental harm that Trump and the team united around him can do? Ari Berman, in a post at The Nation this week that tags Trump as the greatest threat to American democracy in our lifetime makes the case that massive voter suppression is in the works. Dismantling democracy... even worse than dismantling Medicare-- and more permanent.

"Unlike his Democratic and Republican predecessors," wrote Berman, "Trump has little respect for the institutions that preserve American democracy, whether it’s freedom of the press or the right to vote. We can already glimpse how a Trump administration will undermine voting rights, based on the people he nominated to top positions, those he has advising him, and his own statements. His pick for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, wrongly prosecuted black civil-rights activists for voter fraud in Alabama in the 1980s, called the Voting Rights Act 'a piece of intrusive legislation,' and praised the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, saying that 'if you go to Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, people aren’t being denied the vote because of the color of their skin.'... Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a front-runner to head Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, has called for precisely this. During a meeting with Trump last week, Kobach brought a 'strategic plan' for DHS that advocated purging voter rolls and drafting amendments to the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, presumably to require proof of citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote, which prevented tens of thousands of eligible voters from being able to register in Kansas. It’s chilling that a top Trump adviser like Kobach views voting rights as a threat to homeland security."

And then there's Bannon... Trump's brain, in the same way that Karl Rove was George W. Bush's brain. Bannon has actually said-- aloud-- that only property owners should be allowed to vote and, another time, that excluding African-Americans from voting is "not such a bad thing." Does Trump understand? Can he put it into historical context in terms of where he, unexpectedly, is? Does he even care or even think about this kind of thing? Does it matter?

Trump himself said, after courts struck down voter-ID laws in states like North Carolina, that “the voter-ID situation has turned out to be a very unfair development. We may have people vote 10 times.” Ironically, one of the only documented instances of voter fraud in 2016 was committed by a Trump supporter who voted twice in Iowa-- and was caught in a state without a voter-ID law.

If you want a better idea of the lengths a Trump administration might go to suppress voting rights, take a look at what Republicans are doing in North Carolina right now. A month after the Supreme Court ruled that states with a long history of discrimination no longer had to approve their voting changes with the federal government, North Carolina Republicans passed a “monster” voter-suppression law that required strict photo ID, cut early voting, and eliminated same-day registration and pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds.

Like in so many-GOP controlled states, Republicans in North Carolina justified the voting restrictions by spreading false claims about voter fraud. (Such fraud was in fact exceedingly rare: There were only two cases of voter impersonation in North Carolina from 2002 to 2012 out of 35 million votes cast.)

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit found that North Carolina’s law targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision.” But even after the court restored a week of early voting, GOP-controlled county election boards limited early voting hours and polling locations. The executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party called on Republicans to make “party line changes to early voting” that included opposing polling sites on college campuses and prohibiting early voting on Sundays, when black churches held “Souls to the Polls” voter-mobilization drives. The North Carolina GOP bragged before Election Day that “African American Early Voting is down 8.5% from this time in 2012. Caucasian voters early voting is up 22.5% from this time in 2012.”

Things got even crazier after the election. After Republican Pat McCrory lost the governor’s race to Democrat Roy Cooper by 9,000 votes, his campaign began filing bogus complaints about voter fraud in an attempt to overturn the election result or have the North Carolina legislature reinstall him as governor. Those challenged by the McCrory campaign include a 101-year-old World War II veteran in Greensboro wrongly accused of double voting.

That wasn’t all. After a black Democrat, Mike Morgan, won a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court, giving Democrats a 4-3 majority, Republicans have proposed expanding the size of the court by two justices, who could be appointed by McCrory in his last weeks in office, allowing Republicans to retain control. This would be an outrageous rebuke to the will of the voters and the rule of law, but you can’t put anything past the North Carolina GOP these days.

North Carolina is a case study for how Republicans have institutionalized voter suppression at every level of government and made it the new normal within the GOP. The same thing could soon happen in Washington when Trump takes power.

Yesterday David Dayen, in a post for the Fiscal Times went in the opposite-- as in small bore-- direction when he asked if the Democrats will stand up to Trump, reminding them that their first test is coming right up... even before Trump moves to Washington. House Republicans-- along with some corrupt Wall Street-owned Dems-- are looking to "lift mandatory Dodd-Frank regulatory supervision for all banks with more than $50 billion in assets, meaning those financial giants would no longer be subject to blanket requirements regarding capital and leverage, public disclosures and the production of 'living wills' to map out how to unwind during a crisis" (Wall Street whore Blaine Luetkemeyer's H.R. 6392).

You can see with this bill’s framework how financial regulation in the Trump era will be relaxed, not by outright repeal but through deliberate atrophy. Republicans want to replace any mandatory rules for regulation with discretionary ones. That way they can claim that they’re merely improving the system by putting the decisions in the hands of the experts instead of members of Congress.

The second step in that process, of course, would be to hire regulators dedicated to not paying attention to anything the financial industry does. In this case, the chair of FSOC is the Treasury Secretary. Two of the rumored selections for that position in the Trump administration have current or former allegiances to banks that would be subject to an FSOC determination on enhanced supervision.

...President Obama would almost certainly veto this bill, even if it miraculously passed the Senate. But there’s a reason Republicans plan to roll it out this week instead of waiting for Trump to enter the Oval Office. They want to gauge just how much Democrats have been cowed by the election loss.

In fact, the phrase “regional banks” has a totemic power to turn Democrats’ resolve to jelly. Wall Street-friendly caucus members have already endorsed tailoring Dodd-Frank rules away from the regionals, even though that phrase minimizes the sheer size of banks with $250 billion in assets. Because Democrats can say that JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are unaffected by this change, you might see them support it. Indeed, in the Financial Services Committee, eight Democrats voted for the bill.

Below are the 8 crooked Democrats who voted with the Republicans November 4, 2015. The dollar amounts next to their names are the amounts they've taken from the banksters-- the very banksters they're supposed to be overseeing. Basically, all of these people should be in prison:

• Rob Delaney (New Dem-MD)- $1,947,102
• David Scott (New Dem-GA)- $2,813,894
• Emanuel Cleaver (MO)- $1,442,924
• Gwen Moore (WI)- $1,710,912
• Terri Sewell (New Dem-AL)- $1,580,970
• Brad Sherman (CA)- $3,390,648
• Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ)- $1,683,407
• Joyce Beatty (OH)- $886,100

Back to Dayan; he asked the right question: "This is really a moment of truth for those Democrats. If Republicans put up a big bipartisan vote in the House for this, the Senate will be more inclined to try to pass it down the road. And it will serve as a test case for Democratic resolve more generally. Will they submit to donors and lobbyists and play ball with the Trump deregulatory agenda, or will they recognize the harms that would cause?"

Deregulation historically has never been a partisan game. Democrats and Republicans have typically worked together to roll back rules and open up the Wall Street casino for business. H.R. 6392 could represent a return to those times, or the moment when Democrats join together and say no, forcing Republicans to funnel victories to the banking industry on their own. If I were a Democratic member of Congress, I know what I’d rather have on my conscience.

Dayan was polite enough to describe it in bipartisan terms without mentioning that the Democrats who work with the Republicans on rolling back rules and opening up Wall Street to predators are, first and foremost, corrupt and second, conservatives from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, the Kyrsten Sinemas, David Scotts, Terri Sewells and John Delaneys. And, like I said, these people don't belong in the House... they belong in the Big House. I doubt Trump would pardon them either.

Once There Were No Primaries-- And The Party Bosses Just Picked The Presidential Nominees

There dream of the Republican establishment this year-- stopping Herr Trumpf and the hated Ted Cruz with a deadlocked, brokered convention-- looks pretty moribund at this point. It looks like Trumpf is on the way to be able to march into Cleveland with all the delegates he needs for a first-ballot nomination. And the Establishment seems resigned to convincing themselves that the world is wonderful because at least they won't have to deal with Cruz. But deep in their hearts I bet they're longing for another era, when party bosses picked presidential candidates, not primaries and caucuses. The interview with Geoffrey Cowen, author of Let the People Rule, gives you a good look into how presidential candidates were picked irrespective of the will of ordinary voters up until quote recently.

A few days ago Ari Berman, author of Give Us The Ballot, penned a review of the book for the NY Times and, with the threat of a Mike Bloomberg third party presidential run, a look at the 1912 presidential race Cowen highlights is well worth reexamining. The election itself pitted Republican President William Howard Taft against Democrat Woodrow Wilson, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt running as a Progressive, and Socialist Eugene Debs. Before we get into Berman's review of Cowan's book, let's get the results out of the way:

• Wilson- 6,296,284 (41.8%)-- 40 states, 435 electoral votes
• Roosevelt- 4,122,721 (27.4%)-- 6 states, 88 electoral votes
• Taft- 3,486,242 (23.2%)-- 2 states (Utah and Vermont), 8 electoral votes
• Debs- 901,551 (6.0%). no states, no electoral votes

At the Democratic Party convention, Gov. Wilson was nominated on the 46th ballot-- beating the Wall Street candidate (Champ Clark). At the Republican convention, Taft beat Roosevelt with the help of the conservative GOP establishment that hated Roosevelt for his anti-trust policies. The GOP nomination battle was further complicated by Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette, who was further left than Roosevelt. La Follette won 2 primaries, Roosevelt won 9 and Taft won 1. The rest of the states didn't give voters a role in picking the party nominees. As Berman reminds us in his review, Roosevelt said, in finally coming around to backing primaries, that "The right of the people to rule is the great fundamental issue now before the Republican Party."

But at 9:28 p.m. on June 22, 1912, William Howard Taft was renominated by Republicans at their presidential convention in Chicago. Only minutes later, 150 delegates loyal to Teddy Roosevelt marched out of the Chicago Coliseum, mimicking the rumbling sound of a steamroller, and headed for Orchestra Hall, where thousands had raucously gathered to inaugurate Roosevelt as the leader of the new Progressive Party. “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord,” Roosevelt proclaimed. The machinations that led to Roosevelt’s exit from the Republican Party and the creation of what became known as the Bull Moose Party is the subject of Geoffrey Cowan’s Let the People Rule.

After leaving the presidency in 1908, Roosevelt had named Taft as his handpicked successor. Yet, upon returning from a lengthy trip to Africa and Europe, Roose­velt grew disillusioned with Taft and decided to challenge his former secretary of war.

Cowan explains how Roosevelt’s shrewd support of primaries gave him an opening against Taft while co-opting the message of more radical reformers like the Wisconsin governor Robert ­LaFollette. Roose­velt’s campaign “popularized presidential primaries and increased the number of states that embraced them,” Cowan writes. “His rhetoric helped to enshrine the cause of popular democracy in the nation’s vocabulary.” But Taft still maintained a huge lead in delegates chosen by the party machinery from states that did not hold primaries, which forced Roose­velt to bolt the party after the Chicago convention.

In many ways, Roosevelt’s Progressive candidacy was ahead of its time. It promulgated innovative ideas like social security and a federal minimum wage that were later adopted by Roosevelt’s fifth cousin Franklin in the New Deal.

Yet the primary system wouldn’t be reformed until after 1968, when Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic nominee at his party’s disastrous convention, also in Chicago, despite not having won a single primary. Chaos in Grant Park was the result, forcing both parties to change their rules and become more democratic.

...Cowan paints an admirably nuanced picture of Roosevelt, exposing the hypocrisy of his call to “let the people rule.”

Though the Progressive Party endorsed woman suffrage and welcomed black delegates from the North, Roosevelt, in a bid to woo conservative white Southerners, refused to seat African-Americans from the South at his convention. “I believe that the great majority of the Negroes in the South are wholly unfit for suffrage,” Roose­velt said, echoing the Southern white supremacist sentiments of his day.

His gambit failed in the general election, when the Democrat Woodrow Wilson carried every Southern state, winning 435 electoral votes and 42 percent of the popular vote. Roosevelt won 88 electoral votes and 27 percent of the vote. Taft garnered only eight electoral votes and 23 percent of the vote. But the Progressive Party collapsed soon after. “The dog has returned to its vomit,” Roosevelt said of the Republicans in 1914.

Primaries have not become the democratic remedy Roosevelt was hoping for. Yes, voters have much more say now than they did in 1912, but primary contests have often pushed the parties toward their respective extremes, particularly the Republican Party, while the cost and length of campaigns skyrocketed. “Let the people rule” remains more an aspiration than a reality in American politics today.

For the political history junkies, since I mentioned that Taft only won Vermont and Utah, the 6 states that Roosevelt won were California (by just 200 votes), Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Washington. People interested in where Debs did best-- and 1912 was his best run of his 5 presidential campaigns-- may be surprised to see that all the double digit states were out west:

• Nevada- 16.47%
• Oklahoma- 16.42%
• Montana- 13.64%
• Washington- 12.43%
• Arizona- 13.33%
• California- 11.68%
• Idaho- 11.31%

In an unrelated post in The Atlantic Sunday, David Greenberg pointed out that Teddy Roosevelt "ushered in an age in which presidents would be perpetually engaged in the work of publicity and opinion management-- the work of spin" and he illustrates it with Roosevelt's "historic 1906 quest to clean up the shoddy and predatory practices in the stockyards and meatpacking houses where Americans got their daily diet of beef." This is exactly the kind of thing that earned him the undying enmity of the Big Money Republican Party establishment and why they stuck with the unpopular Taft rather than embrace Teddy Roosevelt in 2012.

After decades of unchecked industrial growth, American businesses and industries were in need of federal regulation—to protect workers, consumers, farmers, or simply other competitors in the marketplace. Addressing the issue of unregulated meatpacking and other foods had been on Roosevelt’s to-do list for some time when he raised it in his December 1905 message to Congress. “Traffic in foodstuffs which have been debased or adulterated so as to injure health or to deceive purchasers,” he declared, “should be forbidden.” The Senate, dominated by business interests, resisted, but Roosevelt hoped to prevail by enlisting public support. To do so, he seized on a popular outcry triggered that spring by the reporting of a crusading, 27-year-old socialist with whom, despite profound ideological disagreements, Roosevelt locked arms.

 ...When his book appeared, Sinclair undertook a promotional campaign. That effort included writing a slew of pieces about the sordid state of Chicago meatpacking for a variety of magazines. It also entailed mailing out copies of The Jungle to important people. One recipient was Theodore Roosevelt, who, fortuitously, was just then considering how to marshal public support for regulation of the so-called Beef Trust.

 Never one to mince words, the president deemed Sinclair a “crackpot.” But he shared the novelist’s dim view of the meat moguls. He wrote Sinclair a three-page letter that mocked the young man’s “pathetic belief” in socialism and offered a critique of The Jungle-- but one that concluded with: “The specific evils you point out shall, if their existence be proved, and if I have the power, be eradicated.” Roosevelt extended an invitation to the White House.

By this point, Roosevelt was at work on his own plan. He had previously asked the Agriculture Department to investigate conditions in Chicago. The president thought that if he could confirm even a portion of Sinclair’s report, he could galvanize public opinion and force the balky Congress-- which was warring with TR over his reform agenda-- to move on meat-inspection legislation. When Roosevelt shared the news of this preliminary step with Sinclair, the novelist demurred, fearing, as he told the president, that having the Agriculture Department examine the issue “was like asking a burglar to determine his own guilt.” Instead, Sinclair urged Roosevelt to open “a secret and confidential investigation” by a disinterested party.

...Public support for reform was building. With Roosevelt’s backing, Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana introduced an amendment to the agriculture appropriations bill that imposed stringent rules on meat inspection, including dating canned meat, with meatpackers forced to pay the costs. Spurred by this flurry of activity, the Pure Food and Drug bill-- which prohibited the adulteration and mislabeling of foods, beverages, medicines, and other drugs-- also now started to advance, separately, toward passage.

On the defensive, the meatpacking and livestock industries joined forces. They warned that any legitimation of Sinclair’s charges would dry up foreign markets for U.S. meat; federal regulation, moreover, would shift control of the industry from the businessmen with the relevant know-how to “theorists, chemists [and] sociologists,” as one spokesman said. When it became clear that some version of the bill was likely to pass, the industrialists switched to trying to strip out the most severe provisions. The beef companies even placed newspaper ads inviting readers to visit the packinghouses and judge for themselves.

The beef industry had been routed in the court of public opinion. As the packinghouses literally whitewashed their facilities as part of a desperate cleanup job, the press grew withering. The New York Evening Post offered doggerel: “Mary had a little lamb/And when she saw it sicken/She shipped it off to Packingtown/And now it’s labeled chicken.” Before a House committee, Neill and Reynolds rehearsed with fanfare their gory findings, including an account of a pig carcass that fell into a urinal before getting hung, unwashed, in a cooling room.

House conservatives made a defiant stand, and Roosevelt and Beveridge ultimately made some concessions. But the Indiana senator proclaimed the final bill “the most pronounced extension of federal power in every direction ever enacted.” Its achievements far outweighed its deficiencies, and it established important standards and precedents. On June 30, 1906, Roosevelt, with a stroke of the pen, made meat inspection the law of the land—and with another stroke signed into law the Pure Food and Drug bill. “In the session that has just closed,” he said to the press, “The Congress has done more substantive work for good than any Congress has done at any session since I became familiar with public affairs.”

The meat-inspection episode showed the president’s skill not only at discerning public opinion aroused by the press but also at using statements, leaks, and the cultivation of journalists to pass his progressive agenda. In an article hailing “The Reign of Public Opinion,” the great muckraker Lincoln Steffens called it “the real power behind Theodore Roosevelt.” Congressmen submitted to the presidential will, Steffens said, because he was “the leader of public opinion” and they feared popular retribution if they defied him. Even Sinclair, who had wanted a stronger bill than the final compromise, praised TR: “He took the matter up with vigor and determination, and he has given it his immediate and personal attention from the very beginning.”

Roosevelt is remembered as the first president of the modern age not simply because he used presidential power on behalf of sweeping reform-- a feat in itself-- but because he redefined the president’s job by governing with an acute consciousness of his power to reach the public.

The Republican Party War Against Democracy Is Unending-- Democrats Need To Oppose Them For Real

Donna Edwards, champion for democracy when we really need one

Thursday was the 50th anniversary of LBJ signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Tuesday Ari Berman's new book, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, was published. The book is the story of the struggle for voting rights in America, from Reconstruction to the election of Barack Obama.

The National Journal outlined 5 of the worst attacks on voting rights from the right since George W. Bush stole the election of 2000:

1. Ohio 2004.

The only reason the 2000 election even ended up in the Supreme Court was because Florida’s purge of the voting rolls left 12,000 citizens, 44 percent of them African-American, unable to vote. “We did think it was outcome determinative,” the Civil Rights Commission reported. Democrats went into 2004 determined to not forget what had happened in Florida. But on Election Day in 2004, history repeated itself, Berman suggests.

Republicans in Ohio didn’t need to purge voting rolls or stop the count, they just needed to make sure that John Kerry’s voters didn’t have easy access to the polls. “Overwhelmingly Democratic precincts in Columbus received seventeen fewer voting machines in 2004 than 2000, while heavily Republican precincts got eight more machines.” The result? Democrats had to wait hours longer to vote than Republicans. In the end, an estimated 174,000 Ohioans left their lines before voting. Bush won the state by 118,000 votes.

2. Bush’s Department of Justice fires U.S. Attorneys for not inventing voter fraud.

Beginning in 2002, the Department of Justice, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, was on a mission to find voter fraud-- while massive mortgage and securities fraud that would lead to the financial crisis went largely unattended. In the end all they proved was that they’d been wasting their time. Of more than 300 million votes cast, they’d nailed 86 convictions. Not a single case involved voter impersonation or had swung an election. Meanwhile administration officials helped suppress an Ohio State/Rutgers University study that found voter ID laws reduced Latino turnout by 10 percent and black and Asian-American turnout by 6 percent in 2004. In other words, they worked just as conservatives had designed them to. Republican donors refused to accept that there was no evidence to justify new voting restrictions and demanded that someone be punished for not finding it. After the 2006 election, respected U.S. Attorneys David Iglesias — the basis for the character Tom Cruise played in A Few Good Men-- and John McKay were forced out of their jobs for failing to indict anyone for fraud Republicans were sure existed.

“It’s very frightening, and it doesn’t exist,” Iglesias said, comparing voting fraud to the bogeyman parents say is in the closet to keep kids in bed. “U.S. Attorneys have better things to do with their time than chasing voting fraud phantoms.”

3. Trying to steal the 2012 election-- and failing.


If Bush losing the popular vote proved access to the polls was a problem, Obama’s landslide election had proven it had become an epidemic. In 2011 and 2012, 27 new laws in 19 states, nearly all Republican, put new limits on voting. Voter ID laws backed by The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) were introduced in 37 states, all nearly identical. In addition, five states-- including the two crucial swing states with the worst records of voting integrity, Ohio and Florida-- cut early voting time. The Department of Justice used Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires certain states and counties to pre-clear all changes to voting laws, to prevent the most egregious attempts to suppress the vote. But if 2012 had been as close as 2004, as many suggested it would be, it wouldn’t have mattered. Voters in Florida reported that they were forced to wait several hours and often make two trips to the polls in order to vote. But a backlash to the new restrictions so baldly targeted at minorities resulted in their turnout rising over the 2008 election. For the first time ever, a higher percentage of black voters showed up at the polls than white.

4. Gutting the Voting Rights Act.

A major subplot in Berman’s book is Chief Justice John Roberts’ passion for limiting voting rights. And ironically, President Obama’s re-election helped him build that majority he needed to do it. In his majority decision for Shelby County v. Holder, Roberts praised the law, which he had claimed was constitutional during his confirmation hearing. “But history did not end in 1965,” he wrote. Deploying the logic of “equal sovereignty” that had not been used by the Court since the Dred Scott decision deprived all black people of citizenship, he gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act by throwing out the formula used in Section 4. His argument was the formula, which allows for state counties that show a strong commitment to voting rights to opt out, was not reflective of current realities.

“These men never stood in unmovable lines,” John Lewis wrote in his reaction to the decision. “They were never denied the right to participate in the democratic process. They were never beaten, jailed, run off their farms or fired from their jobs. No one they knew died simply trying to register to vote. They are not the victims of gerrymandering or contemporary unjust schemes to maneuver them out of their constitutional rights.”

5. Shelby opens the voter suppression floodgates. The speciousness of Roberts’ argument was proven by how several of the states freed from Section 5 immediately reacted to its gutting. Texas immediately put its voter ID law into effect. Pre-Shelby this had been blocked because over half a million Latinos lacked ID and might have to pay, adjusted for inflation, more than the poll taxes that had been outlawed by the VRA, just to secure the papers needed. North Carolina was already in the process of enacting the worst set of voter suppression laws since Reconstruction. After Shelby, it toughened its voter ID law to make it more restrictive than Texas’. Voters in 14 states faced new restrictions during the 2014 elections, the first without the full protection of the VRA since 1965 and, coincidentally, the election with the worst turnout since before World War II ended.

Our voting rights landscape, Berman notes, now resembles the period before 1965. The first Reconstruction fell to violence legitimized by the Supreme Court. Whether our second reconstruction meets the same demise depends on the enduring strength of the remaining sections of the law, and the hopes of fixing it before conservatives construct permanent legislative and judicial majorities that make it possible. And while demographics may be on the side of the ascendant, the cunning effectiveness of a movement so delusional that it can only process failure as fraud presents a fearsome opposition.

“How many of you are going to leave here and remember the blood of the martyrs?” William J. Barber, the architect of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement that rose up in part to oppose the right’s attack on voting rights, asked a crowd in 2014.

Republican gerrymandering has also been a direct assault on democracy. Unfortunately, so has Democratic Party gerrymandering. Yes, both contemptible establishment parties do it, which is why it's been impossible to get rid of. Sure, sure, the Republicans are worse-- or more ruthless-- but when Democrats get the chance, as they did in Illinois and Maryland last go-round, they didn't hesitate. You almost never find a Democrat willing to stand up to their own party's gerrymandering schemes. In fact, many-- think state Senator Debbie Wasserman Schultz for example-- are happy to give the advantage to Republicans so long as they can guarantee their own invincible district boundaries. 

But one rare Democrat who has stood up against her own party's gerrymandering is Donna Edwards (D-MD).

Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) is breaking with other Democrats again over redistricting, saying she’s open to an independent commission proposed by Gov. Larry Hogan (R).

“I have long supported redistricting reforms to end the damage partisan gerrymandering does to our democracy,” she said in a statement. “I look forward to reviewing Governor Hogan’s announcement to see whether it is truly independent of partisan politics.”

All but one of Maryland’s eight congressional districts are held by Democrats, thanks in part to boundaries drawn by Democratic leadership after the 2010 Census. Hogan is creating an 11-member panel to recommend a new process. The Maryland Democratic Party says the lines shouldn’t be redrawn until there’s nationwide agreement on reform.

Edwards, as she has in the past, disagreed with her fellow Democrats.

“It’s not going to change the balance in the state,” Edwards said of redistricting reform in an interview Thursday, given Maryland’s overwhelmingly Democratic population, “but it will be fairer to people.”

At the same time, she said, any new process should take into account contiguity and minority representation.

Her Democratic primary opponent in the race for Maryland’s open Senate seat, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, took a more cautious line. He told Hogan he was “open to reviewing your proposal,” but echoed his fellow Democrats in saying “it makes more sense to have one set of nonpartisan rules for the entire country rather than a state-by-state approach.

”Edwards noted that her opposition to the Maryland political map drawn by Democrats in 2011 is “no secret.” She said at the time that the map disadvantaged minority voters by dividing Montgomery County into three districts represented by white men. Democratic critics, who attacked her for discussing maps with Republicans, said her real concern was keeping her own district safe.

Van Hollen, a former state lawmaker with close ties to Democrats in Annapolis, went along with that plan although it also carved up his district.

If you'd like to help make sure it's progressive icon Edwards, not establishment hack Van Hollen, who moves up to the Senate next year, here's a page where you can help.


UPDATE: Michigan

Today the Detroit Free Press editorial board chimed in on the full frontal assault against democracy that gerrymandering has become.

The existing system is designed for exploitation. Districts are drawn every 10 years, after the U.S. census. The official count of the country’s population determines how many members each state sends to the U.S. House, but the Michigan Legislature decides each district’s boundaries, for both federal and state seats.

That means the party in power-- right now, the Michigan GOP-- has a field day.

For the party in control of the map-making, the main objective is to herd the opposing party’s voters into the fewest legislative districts possible while spreading its own party’s voters as evenly as possible among the remaining districts.

If a drop in population means a congressional seat must be eliminated, it comes from the other team’s territory. Borders are stretched to pit incumbents from the opposing party against each other. Whenever possible, districts are drawn to be “safe”-- in other words, with a sufficient percentage of voters from the dominant party’s voters in order to keep its incumbent legislators in office.

It’s called gerrymandering, and it’s not pretty.

And it’s how, in a state with two Democratic senators, that’s voted for Democratic presidential candidates by substantial margins in national elections since 1992, that the Legislature is dominated by the Republican Party, and how nine Republicans and just five Democrats represent Michigan in the U.S. House.

...Both parties have proved willing to manipulate the redistricting process. Because the GOP dominated the last round, Democrats would likely benefit the most if districts were redrawn along more neutral lines.

But-- and this is something Republicans who oppose redistricting reform should consider carefully-- it won’t be that way forever. And when Dems are back on top, which seems to happen cyclically in Michigan, a neutral process would protect Republicans from Democratic reapportionment mischief.

The American system is built on the notion that no single party or branch of government should reign unchecked. Political parties represent diverse and often opposing viewpoints; citizens are best served when those parties find common ground, not when one party runs roughshod over the other.

Changing the way we draw our districts would end the cycle, and ensure that Michigan’s elected officeholders are more representative of their constituents.

If we can make it happen.