F-L-A Governor Rick Scott's Walk On The Wild Side: Voter Suppression Is UnAmerican

Florida isn't someplace progressives normally turn for good political news. Just the other day People For the American Way was wondering aloud if Gov. Rick Scott's ALEC disenfranchisement schemes would recreate an opportunity for Romney to steal the presidential election the same way Bush did in 2000.

Do you remember the Florida debacle in the 2000 presidential race? At the time, news focused on the recount and the spectacle of the infamous “hanging chad.” But when the dust settled, America learned that the real affront to democracy was the flawed purge of eligible voters from the voting rolls in advance of the election.

The state that ultimately decided the election for George W. Bush by a mere 537 votes, hired a firm to purge ex-felons-- who had lost their right to vote according to state law-- from the voter file. But the data match was so sloppy that countless eligible voters, mostly African American, were scrubbed from the file and turned away from the polls on Election Day.

Now, under Florida’s Tea Party governor, Rick Scott, it’s happening all over again!

Florida has begun a purge of “non-citizens” from the voting rolls and reports are saying that hundreds of eligible voters have already been struck from the rolls.

Florida has already put out an initial list of more than 2,600 people identified as non-U.S. citizens and has indicated it could aim to purge up to 180,000 supposed non-citizens from the rolls ... but from all the inaccuracies we’ve seen so far, that could mean a staggering number of eligible voters being wrongfully purged and denied their right to vote.

This process is going forward with no oversight, and is all too reminiscent of the scrub orchestrated in 2000 by Secretary of State Katherine Harris under then-Gov. Jeb Bush. Under Gov. Scott, Florida has already erected barriers to voter registration that hurt minority and low-income voters... now, the state’s right-wing leaders seem to be dredging up ugly tactics from the past in what looks like naked, politically motivated voter suppression.

Hundreds of eligible voters have already been scrubbed from the rolls and many more have not replied to a letter that informs them they will lose their right to vote if they don’t reply with proof of citizenship. Despite the clear inaccuracy of the purge, the burden is on registered voters to prove that they are eligible, not on the state to prove that they are not.

The editorial board of the NY Times was shocked... shocked. I mean fascists in other countries do this... but American fascists? Who could have guessed?

In Florida, where a few hundred votes can determine a presidential election, Republicans have never stopped searching for new ways to keep ballots out of the hands of minorities and poor people, groups that tend to vote Democratic. They have cut back on early voting, tried to stamp out registration drives, and imposed onerous identification requirements. (A federal judge reinstated the registration drives on Thursday.) Now, hoping to gain a new edge, Gov. Rick Scott is trying to clear voter rolls of noncitizens, a menace that only he and a few other Republican governors have been able to detect.

Last year, Mr. Scott ordered the state’s elections division to compare the rolls to the federal Homeland Security Department’s immigration database, a request the federal government sensibly refused. Then, a few weeks ago, the state pressed the Department of Motor Vehicles into comparing the voter rolls to its list of driver’s licenses, which often has out-of-date citizenship information. It came up with nearly 2,700 voters considered suspicious and sent them letters demanding that they produce proof of citizenship within 30 days if they wanted to vote.

Because both the driver’s license list and the system to match it to the voter rolls are deeply flawed, not showing naturalizations or other updates, many on the list turned out to be citizens, entitled to vote. More than 350 people in the Miami area alone came forward to dispute their presence on the list, forced to take steps to demonstrate their citizenship. One of them was Bill Internicola, who was born in Brooklyn in 1921 and earned the Bronze Star during the Battle of the Bulge. After talking to local elections officials, he was required to send a copy of his Army discharge papers.

Those who did not respond to the elections division’s letter in time may well include legitimate voters who do not speak English, or have moved, or didn’t check their mail-- all of whom will be barred from voting.

The Miami Herald found that 58 percent of the people on the list of nearly 2,700 voters were Hispanic, and 14 percent were black. Whites and Republicans were least likely to show up on the list, according to the paper.

The other two states conducting similar voter purges are Colorado and New Mexico, which, like Florida, are swing states with large Hispanic populations. New Mexico’s wasteful investigation of 64,000 “suspicious” voter registrations found only 19 cases of voters who may have been noncitizens.

Florida has a sordid history with manipulating voter rolls. In 2000 and 2004, it tried to purge felons from the rolls using wildly inaccurate lists, which had the effect of removing black voters who were not felons. As long as there is a chance of tilting the outcome of a close election, Republicans like Mr. Scott won’t stop trying.

So the good news? As the Times editors mentioned, a Federal Court threw out Scott's latest attempt to rig the elections in his state. Michael Froomkin explains what happened:

[T]hanks to a lawsuit by the League of Women Voters of Florida, Florida Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, and Rock the Vote, a federal judge in Tallahassee, no hotbed of liberalism, has issued a preliminary injunction halting enforcement of key parts of the voter-registration-suppression scheme:

The statute and rule impose a harsh and impractical 48-hour deadline for an organization to deliver applications to a voter registration office and effectively prohibit an organization from mailing applications in. And the statute and rule impose burdensome record-keeping and reporting requirements that serve little if any purpose, thus rendering them unconstitutional even to the extent they do not violate the [National Voting Rights Act].

This is good news, and on a quick read I found the opinion very persuasive, so I have high hopes that it would survive an appeal (although voting law is not my area, so I welcome other views).

Of course, as the Times warned, "Republicans like Mr. Scott won’t stop trying." Not with the likes of the Koch brothers and the rest of the plutocrats making it worth their while. In fact, Scott has insisted he will ignore the Justice Department's demand he stop suppressing the vote in Florida-- and that he would accelerate the voter purge. This morning, though, the Palm Beach Post reported thast all 67 state elections supervisors "will discontinue a state-directed effort to remove names from county voter rolls because they believe the state data is flawed and because the U.S. Department of Justice has said the process violates federal voting laws."

Will NJ voters really replace Jon Corzine with a poster boy for the Bush regime's corruption of U.S. justice?

It's the economy, stupid: Governor Corzine may have contributed to his own problems, but surely only the state of the economy makes it seriously possible that he could lose to a grandstanding sleazebag like Chris Christie.

"Once upon a time we had a concept of 'disgrace'. People with money, power, office, social position, actually cared about whether they acted dishonorably, because if they did they wouldn’t get invited to corporate boards and dinner parties. People would cross the street to show their disdain. Now we give them book contracts, TV deals, visiting professorships, and they get interviewed as experts by the media."

-- Michael Froomkin, in a Discourse.net post,

"The Threat Level Remains Unchanged"

by Ken

Luckily for most of our governors, 2009 -- being a political "off" year -- isn't a time when many of them have to face an electorate rendered increasingly angry and panicky by a year's experience of the Bush Depression. In fact, only one sitting governor is facing the voters this year: New Jersey's Jon Corzine. (The only other state electing a governor is Virginia, where Tim Kaine is finishing his allotted second term, so there's no incumbent on the ballot.)

I feel bad for not writing about the New Jersey race sooner. I guess it's just been hard to grasp that Corzine could be in trouble, especially against a political and moral nothing like former U.S. attorney Chris Christie, whose entire career reads as a majestic buildup to the great day of his own indictment perp walk.

Goodness knows, Governor Corzine has contributed to his own electoral troubles. He came into office with an arrogance that clearly put New Jerseyans off even when he had a point, as with the budget showdown not long after he took office in 2006, which led to a six-day government shutdown that has never been forgotten. Add to the brusqueness of his CEO style a trail of "rich guy"-type scandals, and it's not surprising that the governor doesn't have a vast reservoir of voter good will to fall back on.

Still, Corzine is a guy of substance, and in times of economic stress, his background and skills -- especially as tempered by the wisdom in matters of public service he has gained in his first term -- are good credentials for helping New Jersey survive and recover from the economic meltdown. He is a solid progressive, and would surely deserve reelection if he were facing serious competition. But when he's up against a guy whose political values seem limited to right-wing Republican platitudes ("tax cuts"!) and old-style cronyism, it goes beyond "no contest" to a matter of considerable urgency.

Of course this is a terrible year for a sitting governor to be running. In the early months of the meltdown, Americans seemed to grasp that the economy not only wasn't going to be turned around in a month, but having gotten where we were, it was going to be a long road back. I never had a lot of faith in those assurances, though. When people are feeling this kind of economic hurt, which we knew was likely to get worse before it got better, the perception of a "long road" becomes highly subjective. I think a lot of people have moved into "Are we there yet?" mode.

And governors are between a rock and a hard place. However badly the Obama administration has mismanaged the "stimulus" -- with its preposterous attempt to appease shithead Republicans who hope to dance on the administration's grave and its reliance on economic advisers who swear by the old adage, "What's good for the Wall Street gang and the banksters is good for, well, the Wall Street gang and the banksters" -- it has succeeded in pumping streams of spendable money into the economy. Paul Krugman has suggested that the large number of government-funded programs already in existence have assured a flow of cash that is likely what saved us from a full-fledged depression.

Some of that money has gone to the states, but not nearly enough, which has forced them into the position of having to drastically cut spending and raise taxes, thereby seriously reducing the amount of money consumers have in pocket and are willing to spend. But what else is a governor to do?

(There are, of course, shithead governors who came up with the brilliant idea of trying to reject federal stim funds. You know, geniuses like Louisiana's Booby Jindal and South Carolina's Mark Sanford, gentlemen from whom we will be happy to sign up for economics instruction as soon as (a) Governor Booby dislodges his head from his heinie and (b) Governor Mark apologizes for his sorry-ass existence.)

In this respect New Jersey is luckier than most states in having a governor prepared to seriously address the state's economic woes -- that is, assuming its voters have the sense to retain his services. At the moment, even though Governor Corzine's personal wealth is reportedly much depleted by recent events (leaving him badly positioned to self-finance a campaign as expensive as this one is likely to be; he has pointed out that he's not Mike Bloomberg), it's surely the case that New Jersey needs Corzine more than Corzine needs New Jersey.

I suppose we could, and should, be examining a host of policy issues, looking at what the governor has done and proposed, and comparing all of that with what candidate Chris Christie is saying. I trust that there are people doing that, and maybe at some point we'll get around to it. But for now only two points concern me:

(1) Jon Corzine has accomplished a fair amount in his first term under a panoply of trying conditions. He's exceptionally well qualified for the job and has undoubtedly learned a great deal that will make him a better governor in his second term, if he gets one, and in any case he is the only serious candidate in the race.

(2) Chris Christie is a sorry specimen of your small-time wannabe big shot, who doesn't seem to believe in much of anything but is content to spew doctrinaire right-wing ideology, and whose principal operating principle is knowing a guy who knows a guy who . . . .

I have no qualms in taking the position that Christie should never be elected to any position, should never again occupy any public office, if only for one reason: He was Karl Rove's idea of a satisfactory U.S. attorney.

I apologize for resurrecting a hoary old scandal like that of the Bush regime's purge of U.S. attorneys who refused to go along with the regime's mandate to subordinate the administration of federal justice to acting as the enforcement arm of the Bush political machine. Even now, with all the testimony that John Conyers' House Judiciary Committee was finally able to extract from the apparent pointpersons of the purge, regime political mastermind Karl Rove and then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers, testimony that I gather from people who have ventured into it is severely incriminating with regard both to the Bush regime's political perversion of the U.S. attorneys' job and to the role played by Master Karl, the son of a bitch has the temerity to go on TV (after all, he's a "commentator" now!) and insist that he's vindicated and owed an apology by the media who have been hounding him with baseless allegations.

What will save Rove from doing time is the apparent absence of a smoking gun -- you know, something like him dancing in a T-shirt that says, "I Broke Every Law in the Book Prohibiting Politicization of the Justice Dept." (There is also, of course, the more immediately pressing charge that Rove masterminded the framing of Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, which needs to be pursued relentlessly, first to restore the freedom and reputation, if not the career, of a man who was railroaded out of office and into prison, and second to establish the principle that political hatchetmen operating under cover of the White House really aren't allowed to conspire to overthrow the legally elected government of one of the 50 states.)

As the U.S. attorney scandal was breaking, and frequently thereafter, I wrote here that, next to the disastrous war that the Bush regime lied the country into, the worst of its vast array of malfeasances was its carefully orchestrated destruction of the "justice" function of the Department of Justice, and one of the principal tools was the purge of U.S. attorneys, the DoJ's regional administrators of the federal justice system, who refused to play along.

Just think, to pick a famous example (and one that the Rove and Miers testimony seems to confirm happened exactly the way we thought it did), of David Iglesias being fired for refusing to bring bogus indictments against New Mexico Democratic pols threatening the reelection of New Mexico Republicans like then-Sen. Pete Domenici and then-Rep. Heather Wilson. Is it really so hard to see how direct and immediate a threat this is to American democracy?

From what we already know based on the reporting and piecing together that has already been done regarding the U.S.A. firings, behind almost every one lies a story -- some similar, some different -- so ugly, so unlawful and anti-constitutional, and so dangerous to our most basic American values that it should by itself have constituted an impeachable offense. I'm sorry, but this is another of those things we can't "just put behind us." That isn't going to neutralize the threat to our electoral system. I think for that it's necessary for some people to spend a chunk of time in a federal penitentiary, or the next time we have a U.S. administration that's inclined to repeat the abuses of the Bush regime, those people are going to feel free to do so.

Nevertheless, as important as this, it isn't anywhere close to the most important issue at stake in the U.S.A. firings.

This is another point I first encountered thanks to Paul Krugman, though I'm sure many other people made the same connection. Okay, this line of thinking goes, we've learned about some of the kinds of things that could get you fired from the Bush DoJ. But what about the 84 U.S. attorneys who weren't fired? What did they have to do to retain the favor of Karl Rove's White House political operation?

For starters, I hope no one has forgotten the study undertaken by Donald Shields and John Cragan of Bush DoJ prosecutions undertaken in the years 2001-06, which found:

Data indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven (7) times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops.

Beyond that, well, we know of some individual cases, as in Alabama's Middle District, where U.S.A. Leura Canary apparently served as pointperson in the Rove conspiracy against Governor Siegelman. But since we're apparently never going to get a proper investigation into the reasons for the firing of the Bush U.S.A.s who were fired, we have even less chance of learning what exactly the un-fired 84 did to keep their jobs.

Possibly many of them did nothing more than avoid doing anything to offend the White House political operation. And surely it would be a shame to tar them all with the same brush. Or would it? This is what happens when you pervert the Executive Branch the way the Bush regime did. All of its actions become suspect. And rightly so, I think.

Certainly there's plenty of indication that in the District of New Jersey Chris Christie was very much Karl Rove's kind of U.S.A., never shying from political prosecutions and doing all the influence-peddling and cronyism you expect from a Rove-certified U.S.A. That's without the so-far-acknowledged two conversations that Christie and Rove had while Christie was still in office about his running for New Jersey governor. You don't have to have the blazing insight of a political mastermind to see that Rove recognized his kind of political hack and was only too happy to send him out into the world to do Satan's work.

But one thing I don't think should happen is the seamless reintegration of Rove's Rogues into civilian life. I am taking a serious liberty in quoting the following splendid paragraphs from a post today by University of Miami Law School Prof. Michael Froomkin on his Discourse.net blog, "The Threat Level Remains Unchanged." Michael was writing about former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who apparently writes in his forthcoming book something he actually acknowledged as far back as 2005: that he at the very least suspected that the Bush regime was using the famous multicolored terror alerts for political purposes. And yet he went on uncomplainingly with his business.

We don't have any admission of culpability from Chris Christie, of course, and in the good professor's evidence-based world, I doubt that he would accept my guilt-by-association condemnation. However, I do know that Michael was and is profoundly concerned about the abuses of the Bush DoJ, including the U.S.A. firings, and so with that proviso -- that I'm not presenting legally sufficient evidence to link Christie to the following paragraphs -- I am nevertheless taking the liberty of quoting them in this connection:

Once upon a time we had a concept of “disgrace”. People with money, power, office, social position, actually cared about whether they acted dishonorably, because if they did they wouldn’t get invited to corporate boards and dinner parties. People would cross the street to show their disdain. Now we give them book contracts, TV deals, visiting professorships, and they get interviewed as experts by the media.

Maybe it’s time to bring the notion of respectability back. If we won’t have public justice to sort out truth from fiction, no special prosecutors until after the statute of limitations has run, maybe instead we need a quiet form of the private personal justice we can manage based on the facts on the public record. Shun Ridge. Shun Yoo. Shun Rove. Shun Gonzales. Shun all the torturers and torture enablers, and shun the perverters of law and justice. Don’t ever put anything their way. Don’t give them a visiting gig. Don’t invite them on TV. Don’t buy their books. And make it contagious. Make them professional lepers. Make the people who give them treats sorry they did it.

But it won’t happen. Not because there’s always the risk that social shunning gets out hand, brings out the worst in some people who then punish the innocent, for all that these are real and demonstrated dangers not to be taken lightly. No, it won’t happen because the people who put those unprincipled traitors to law and decency in power and who then coined it thanks to their connivance at kleptocracy hope to do it again and again and again. And that means that even used and dishonored tools need to be kept on financial life support so as not to discourage their successors.

Angry? I’m beyond angry. I’m tired of angry.

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You'd think by now the Bush regime has all the experience it needs rationalizing bad employment numbers. Do the regimists just not care anymore?

America's sweethearts: Miss Mitch and Miss Elaine have jobs -- for now.

You've probably heard the news by now: 49,000 jobs lost in May, unemployment up a whopping .5% (from 5.0% to 5.5%), the largest jump since 1986. Into the fray jumps our esteemed secretary of labor, Elaine Chao -- who, it is pointed out on the ShameonElaine website, is not only the wife of our beloved Senate minority leader (and DWT-fave heartthrob) Miss Mitch McConnell but the longest-serving member of the Bush regime cabinet.

Here is ShameonElaine's take on Secretary Chao's contribution to the discussion:

Elaine Chao Lays Blame for May Unemployment Jump

There’s an excuse for everything.

U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao issued the following statement on the May employment situation report released today:

“Today’s increase in the unemployment rate reflects the fact that unusually large numbers of students and graduates are entering the labor market.”

For those following at home, the aforementioned “May employment situation” is the largest jump in unemployment since 1986. That’s 49,000 lost jobs for a total unemployment rate of 5.5%.

But as EPI notes (via Mother Jones), Elaine’s “blame the kids” excuse doesn’t explain everything.

An increase in the youth labor force played a role in May’s unemployment spike. However, even if we take teenagers out of the data, unemployment still rises from 4.5% to 4.8%, a considerable 0.3% increase, and well above the 4.0% adult rate of one-year ago.

Elaine Chao is still in denial about America’s economic crisis. What will wake her up?

However, even this doesn't exhaust the mysteries surrounding the new unemployment figures. I have theorized before that where the Bush regime has fallen off most grievously in the gone-to-hell second term is in the quality of its lies. Americans expect a certain standard in the lies they're fed, and frankly, this effort strikes me as downright pathetic.

Strange currents have swirled around these numbers since their release -- in particular the role played by those greedy students, damn them, grasping for jobs:

* A reference to this explanation was once in, and then mysteriously out of, the online version of the NYT's story.

* There was intriguing speculation that the reference to students was not to summer jobs but to 2008's largest-in-memory surge of high school graduates, owing to a 1990 birth spike. And if you look at the wording, it could actually be that something along these lines was what was in the mind of whoever prepared Secretary Chao's remarks, and they just didn't explain it to her -- or maybe she just wasn't paying attention. (There's not much evidence to suggest that the secretary has much interest in, not to mention knowledge of, labor matters. After all, the job of the secretary of labor in Republican adminstrations is to screw labor.)

* The excellent question was asked, How on earth could students entering the job market for the summer already show up as unemployed in May?

* I myself was wondering, through this whole confusing stretch, how it happens that this student-caused surge in unemployment has caught everyone unprepared and unawares, apparently a brand-new phenomenon in A.D. 2008?

* And then our learned friend Michael Froomkin (of Discourse.net), one of our Web go-to guys for legal matters, chimed in -- in a fairly high state of dudgeon, we have to note -- with a reminder that the unemployment figures are always seasonally adjusted.

I guess what matters to America's sweethearts Elaine and Mitch is that they both have jobs, though we like to think that the clock is ticking on both of them.

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