Republican Voter Suppression Well Underway in Alabama, North Carolina

Republican voter disenfranchisement efforts in Alabama and North Carolina are proceeding apace, thanks to the Republican Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder).

Alabama:  

On Sept. 30, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency announced that a budget cut of $11 million would force it to close 31 part-time driver's licensing offices across the state. [snip]

While the number of office closures was less dramatic than what the ALEA had threatened in August, when the state legislature was still working out its budget, the state's voter identification requirement for elections means that some eligible voters could be disenfranchised if they are unable to travel far beyond their county to obtain a license. Moreover, many of the areas that will now lack a part-time driver's license office are very low-income, majority African-American counties.

North Carolina:

A data-mining analysis of information publicly available from the North Carolina State Board of Elections has uncovered apparently systematic irregularities in voter registration efforts which are required of the state by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA; the so-called 'Motor Voter Act'). These irregularities, potentially disenfranchising tens of thousands of poverty-level North Carolina citizens, have all occurred during the Republican administration of North Carolina's current governor, Pat McCrory (R).

Under McCrory (who took office in January of 2013), North Carolina has become the tip of the GOP's spear in efforts to suppress voting by demographic groups which typically do not lean Republican (blacks, Latinos, youth, and the economically disadvantaged). McCrory's efforts culminated in 2013 with his signing into law of the nation's single most draconian voter suppression bill, The Voter Information Verification Act... [snip]

Today, North Carolina's voter registration rolls are missing some 40,000 or more poverty-level citizens (and still counting), due to what may prove to be systematic actions by the McCrory administration, in possible violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. To put that number of voters in perspective: in the 2014 election, Thom Tillis (R) beat incumbent Kay Hagan (D) for his current U.S. Senate seat by roughly the same number - just 45,608 votes.

Jim Crow is alive and well in the Republican South.  Maybe "Democracy" sounds too much like "Democrats" to them.

Then Is Now Cartoon Of The Day, Cont.

(click on image to enlarge)

(Clay Jones, claytoonz.com)

Fixing the hole blown in the Voting Rights Act by the Republican "justices" on the Supreme Court isn't likely to happen soon.  Greg Sargent explains why:

...There’s no incentive for House Republicans to act. 

“A strong plurality of House Republicans are from the south, and their strategy has been to pack African Americans into one district across some southern states, and preserve every other district for themselves,” [David] Wasserman of the Cook Political report tells me. He adds that Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee each have one such black-heavy district, while North Carolina has two. [snip] 

“House Republicans are pretty happy with the status quo in the south — particularly the fact that packing African Americans has led to safe Republican surrounding districts,” Wasserman continues. “Any efforts to newly implement a pre-clearance regime could interfere with that status quo.”

That's why photo ops are about the only thing we'll get (and then, reluctantly) from the Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid Party.

Quote Of The Day - Texas Voter Suppression Edition

"The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters."  -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who along with Justices Sotomayor and Kagan dissented with the right-wing majority decision to let the Texas voter I.D.  suppression law stand.  Earlier, U.S. District Court Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos had issued an order throwing out the Texas law on the grounds that it constituted an unconstitutional poll tax and was clearly designed to suppress voting by Democratic constituencies. After the Republican-majority 5th Circuit Court of Appeals stayed Judge Ramos' ruling, the Justice Department and civil rights groups had appealed to the Supreme Court for relief.

This is why we needed the Voting Rights Act, and why its gutting by the Republican Supreme Court was so important to the desperate anti-democratic forces of the far right.

Voter Suppression Challenged in North Carolina

Less than a day after Rethuglican Gov. Pat McCrory signed North Carolina's new voter suppression bill into law, several lawsuits have been filed seeking to overturn the law.  Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan and Congressman G.K. Butterfield have asked the Justice Department to take legal action to stop the law from being implemented.  Here's why:

Besides requiring a narrow range of acceptable IDs, the law dumps same-day registration during early voting, cuts a week off the number of early voting days, ends early voting on Sunday (a day traditionally strong for African American voting), eliminates pre-registration of 16 and 17-year olds, eliminates straight party voting, reduces disclosure requirements of corporate campaign donations and gives poll watchers more clout to challenge the eligibility of people who come to the polls.

The law is, of course, popular with the knuckle-draggers but not so much with the rest of the state, according to a Public Policy poll:

White voters only narrowly support the new voting bill (46/44), while African Americans (16/72) are heavily opposed. Republicans (71%) support the bill but Democrats (72%) are just as unified in their opposition and independents are against it by a 49/43 margin as well. And perhaps most foreboding for Republicans, moderate voters stand against the legislation 70/20.

In a speech to the American Bar Association, Hillary Clinton denounced the voter suppression law in North Carolina, as well as similar efforts by Rethugs in Texas and Florida (watch out for Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania, too!).   She also zinged Chief Justice Roberts' premature "free at last" declaration in Shelby County v. Holder thusly:

Not every obstacle is related to race, but anyone who says that racial discrimination is no longer a problem in American elections must not be paying attention.

Of course, as Ms. Clinton knows, not only are Justice Roberts, his Rethug cohorts on the bench, and the Rethug nimrods passing these voter suppression bills out in the hinterlands, perfectly aware that there's racial discrimination in American elections -- they're actively engaged in seeing it enshrined and protected!

Sunday Funnies

(click to enlarge)

(News Item: "Lincoln Memorial Vandalism")

As we noted below, efforts by Rethuglicans to shape voter turnout to their liking are moving ahead, and the Justice Department will be busy in the next few months and perhaps years in keeping that from happening.

(cartoon: Signe Wilkinson, via Gocomics.com)

Sunday Read -- Messing With Texas Edition

Stephen Stromberg in the once great Washington Post Kaplan Daily on the Attorney General's decision to enforce what's left of the Voting Rights Act in Texas:

If you believe a handful of Texas Republicans, Attorney General Eric Holder’s new effort to enforce the Voting Rights Act in their state and elsewhere brazenly defies the Supreme Court, which struck down part of the law in June. “This end run around the Supreme Court undermines the will of the people of Texas,” Gov. Rick Perry said.

“The Supreme Court message to the Justice Department was clear — don’t mess with Texas,” Rep. Lamar Smith insisted. “But Eric Holder and the Justice Department aren’t listening.”

It would be amazing if that’s actually what Chief Justice John Roberts and the court majority said. But, in reality, the attorney general’s move to use the Voting Rights Act provisions the Supreme Court left in place is perfectly consonant with the ruling, and not just in a technical sense. It also comports with the court’s logic. Anyone who says otherwise didn’t read it, didn’t understand it, or didn’t let that stop him. Lamar Smith apparently confused the 24-page decision with an asinine bumper sticker.

The recent (Democratic) voter suppression law passed in North Carolina by the Rethuglican state legislature is certain to receive the same treatment, as should every state and jurisdiction that has taken the decision in Shelby County v Holder to mean it can proceed full speed backward in denying the vote to people they don't want to see at the polls.

The Voting Rights Struggle, Cont.

One hundred fifty years after Gettysburg and nearly 50 years after the March on Washington, the forces of reaction are feeling empowered by the 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder.  Fred Grimm writes in the Miami Herald that Florida might be the next Rethuglican-dominated state to try some minority voter suppression shenanigans again:

Just two hours after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act last week, Texas celebrated by reinstating a discredited voter ID law, designed to tamp down those damn nuisance minority voters. Mississippi was not far behind.

Florida, I expect, will be more subtle. The politics hereabouts, in an evenly divided state, are a bit more delicate.

Texas was among a slew of states, including Florida, that leading up to the 2012 election passed clever new laws designed to diminish voter turnout.  [snip]

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/06/29/3477001/fred-grimm-crippled-voting-rights.html#storylink=cpy

But you’ve got to worry, with the Voting Rights Acts crippled, with the good ol’ boys in Texas and elsewhere in the Confederacy raring to push another round of election “reforms,” that the gang in Tallahassee might get inspired to come up with new and novel ways to limit the turnout of certain demographics.

Odd, isn’t it, how our governor and legislative leadership defend gun rights with such fervor, based on a single, ambiguous passage in the Constitution. Meanwhile, the phrase “right to vote” shows up in the 14th, 15th, 19th, 24th and 26th Amendments. You’d think our legislators might defend that right to vote with as much enthusiasm as they champion our sacred right to shoot.

It's now clear that voting rights and marriage equality are the civil rights struggles of our time.  Those struggles will be waged on the national, state and local levels, and over time we should expect defeats as well as victories.  Progressives have to be determined to fight a long battle with these reactionaries whose philosophical forbears lined up against justice and equality at Little Round Top, Seminary Ridge, Selma and Montgomery.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/06/29/3477001_p2/fred-grimm-crippled-voting-rights.html#storylink=cpy

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

If one had any doubts about the continuing need for a strong Voting Rights Act after Tuesday's gutting of the Act by the right-wing majority of the Supreme Court, look no further than the actions taken immediately by several southern States to curb minority voting.  Rethuglicans in Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia launched new voter ID and other measures intended to suppress minority, young and poor voters in their states.  Now that they are free from the "pre clearance" requirement of the Act's Section 4, the frightened bigots in those States are trying to change the outcome of elections by changing the rules to favor them.  What remains of the Voting Rights Act can still be used by private organizations to sue States violating voting rights of their citizens (Section 2), but it's an "after the fact" process and so much harder without the resources of the Federal Government to block it in the first place.

When Rethugs claim that times have changed, the only things that have changed are the tactics and methods to undermine voting rights of minorities.  Poll taxes, literacy requirements, and police dogs have been replaced by more subtle methods of disenfranchisement, but it's a rear-guard action by those who know their ideology and policies would be defeated in open elections.

BONUS:  Ed Kilgore has a good analysis of the contortions Chief Justice Roberts was willing to engage in in order to get his "trophy" -- the gutting of the VRA.

BONUS II:  A possible "fix" for Section 4?

BONUS III:  Wait until you read what Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals 7th Circuit had to say about Roberts' gymnastics on the VRA!  (Posner's a respected judicial conservative, appointed by St. Ronnie of Hollywood!)