The Arc of Justice, Pretzeled by the Far Right Undoing the VRA

Goddammit. Just as I was writing a long spiel about gerrymandering, this extremist Roberts Court decides to come out with a ruling against redistricting for minority representation that basically made things worse for democracy (via Lawrence Hurley at NBC News):

The Supreme Court on Wednesday further weakened the Voting Rights Act, ruling that a congressional map in Louisiana was a racial gerrymander even though it was drawn to comply with the landmark law aimed at protecting minority voters.

The justices, split 6-3 with the court's (note: Republican) conservatives in the majority, told states they can almost never consider race when drawing maps to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted to protect minority voters who long faced discrimination in elections.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said that while there may be extreme situations where the use of race can be justified to draw a map, no such conditions existed in the Louisiana case. As a result, the new map was an "unconstitutional racial gerrymander," he added.

This ruling ignores the long, horrifying history of segregation when post-Civil War southern states slid back to control under ex-Confederate racists who rigged elections, took away voting rights for Blacks, and drew maps in such a way that pretty much guaranteed racist one-party rule well up into the Second World War. But that's the point: Alito and his fellow Far Right conservatives wanted to return to that segregationist era ever since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s ended their racist regimes. Labeling the Louisiana district as a "racial gerrymander" is irony of the sickest kind.

The implications could be immediate: as much as we're weeks away from midterm primaries kicking off, a number of Republican-controlled states were already in the process of last-minute gerrymandering efforts that can get a boost from this ruling to erase every Black majority district off their maps. Not only the congressional districts, but the state legislative districts are at risk of seeing every Black/Latino representative getting mapped out of office.

If there's any ray of hope, it's the one David A. Graham shared in that dummymander article I quoted in my previous blog entry:

The math is simple: In order to draw more districts favoring Republicans, GOP legislators had to spread their own voters a little thinner. But if they spread them too thin and Democrats have a good year, Republican candidates will become vulnerable.

The state-level Republicans may be eager to redraw Black majority districts out of existence, but they run into the risk that those voting blocs with blend in with the surrounding districts that the conservatives made sure were racist White enough to lean conservative/Republican. A lot of those "racial gerrymandered" Black districts were intentionally over-packed with Democratic voters to where that district could be +20 Dem while the surrounding four or five districts leaned +2 or +5 GOP. Without that overpack, that +20 Blue can flow into those GOP Red districts and shift them enough to where the Republicans lose their advantages in spite of their map rigging.

This is why the Republicans are also working overtime to take away voting rights from everyone they fear/hate. Don't be surprised if there's a lot of last-minute legislation under the guise of fighting "voter fraud" to take away the constitutionally guaranteed rights of Blacks, women, and college students to solidify whatever "win" the Far Right inflicted on this nation today.

Keep fighting. This was how things were in the 1960s and here we are again, but these rights are worth fighting for, there is an America still out there worth fighting for. Don't let these bastards win: Vote every fucking conservative Republican out of office while we still can.

Update: Adam Serwer at the Atlantic explains it better than I can.

As the historian Nancy MacLean wrote in Freedom Is Not Enough, by the 1970s, (segregationist James Jackson Kilpatrick) had refashioned himself as an opponent of racial discrimination, a champion of color-blindness. Liberal egalitarians supporting race-conscious remedies, he argued, were “worse racists—much worse racists—than the old Southern bigots.” His transformation was so complete, he joked, that he was like the convert who “became more Catholic than the Pope.”

In fact, Kilpatrick’s conversion was no conversion at all. To understand it is to understand the Roberts Court’s decision today in Louisiana v. Callais. The decision purports to uphold Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting, but effectively nullifies it, ruling that a Louisiana redistricting map that created two majority-Black districts out of six, in a state whose population is one-third Black, was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” The majority opinion uses procedural language to obscure what its rewriting of the VRA will allow lawmakers to do: engage in racial discrimination in drawing political districts as long as they say they are doing so for a partisan purpose rather than a racist one—as if the results would not be identical.

In states with large Black populations that remain under Republican control—half of the Black American population resides in the South—lawmakers will now be able to draw districts that dilute Black residents’ voting power. In his opinion for the right-wing majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “in considering the constitutionality of a districting scheme, courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim: a constitutionally permissible criterion that States may rely on as desired.” The Court’s decision is consonant with the philosophy, articulated by Kilpatrick in his earlier days, that the state is oppressive when it interferes with the right to discriminate, and respects liberty when it allows discrimination. And the decision fits just as well with Kilpatrick’s later spin on that philosophy: Attempts to ban racial discrimination are themselves discriminatory—against white people.

What Kilpatrick wanted, and what the Roberts Court is making possible, is a country where white people can maintain their political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white. The anticaste provisions of the Reconstruction amendments, intended by their authors to reverse the “horrid blasphemy” that America was a white man’s country, are being inverted to defend that dominance. This is not the color-blindness of Martin Luther King Jr., but what the scholar Ian Haney López has called “reactionary colorblindness,” the purpose of which is to maintain racial hierarchy through superficially neutral means. It takes the view that the Constitution’s “color-blindness” renders any attempt to remedy anti-Black racism unconstitutional, because by definition that would involve making racial distinctions. Similarly, the ruling in this case does not explicitly overturn the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination in voting so much as rewrite it to allow such discrimination.

The best way to stop racists is to stop fucking voting for them. Get every Republican out of office now.

trump's Objective: The Denial

It's been noted that as the presidential campaigning shifts away from the primaries - it's all over but the tears - that Joe Biden's ground game is extensive and well-funded while donald trump's is... well... (via Peter Nicholas, Allan Smith, Vaughn Hillyard, Adam Edelman and Ben Kamisar at NBC News):

President Joe Biden has been scooping up record-making donations and plowing the money into an expanding campaign operation in battleground states that appears to surpass what Donald Trump has built thus far.

Flush with $71 million cash at the end of February — more than twice that of Trump's campaign — Biden parlayed his fundraising advantage into a hiring spree that now boasts 300 paid staffers across nine states and 100 offices in parts of the country that will decide the 2024 election, according to details provided by the campaign.

Trump’s advisers would not disclose staffing levels, but his ground game still seems to be at a nascent stage. His campaign hired state directors in Pennsylvania and Michigan last week, people familiar with the recruitment process said.

Combined, the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee have fewer than five staff members in each of the battleground states, said two Republicans familiar with the committee and the Trump campaign’s organizational structures in 2020 and 2024.

It's looking like trump isn't even trying to get the vote out - even for his Republican base.

That's the danger: trump sort of doesn't want voter turnout at all.

If the past two presidential elections taught trump anything, it's that he's not going to win the Popular Vote. Oh, he gaslights that he "won the most votes ever," but he lost the majority of voters to Hillary and he lost also to Joe. The only thing he won was the Electoral count in 2016.

trump can lie all he wants about the Popular vote, but he knows nothing's really changed to his favor this 2024. With his pending criminal trials - especially the one starting this Monday - he risks losing even more voters across the nation before November.

So he's going to take the other route: The cheaters' route. trump's going to sow chaos to prevent the electoral system from working at all.

trump's going to scream - falsely - about "stolen votes" and illegal voters. (via Nicholas Riccardi at AP News): 

Former President Donald Trump turned to one of his favorite themes on Friday — the specter of immigrants improperly voting in federal elections. House Speaker Mike Johnson came to the former president’s Florida compound to announce that he would introduce a bill to stop those who are not citizens from voting in elections.

Trump has made baseless claims about this subject before, like in 2016, when he blamed his loss of the popular vote on voting by immigrants, and then appointed a commission to investigate the issue. It disbanded without identifying a single case of a noncitizen casting a vote...

This has actually been a gambit of the Far Right for decades now. Don't forget Kris Kobach has been working as an election denialist out of Kansas for years, always getting into court battles trying to prove there's mass voter fraud... and always failing because there's no proof of it.

What's happening here is the Conservative mindset - the fear - that there are "undesirables" or "non-citizens" threatening to undermine the power and privileges of the "elite" (themselves), getting projected into a Narrative of mass voter fraud that isn't taking place.

And yet, trump is running with this because it justifies his delusions that he's "really popular" and always winning. And the Republicans are happy to play to those delusions because it fits into their belief that "non-Americans" - the ethnic minorities, the women, the young - shouldn't have the right to vote in the first place.

Instead of working a ground game of voter registrations and "get out the vote" drives, trump and his ilk are going to figure out way to sabotage the vote, disrupt precincts and harass poll workers, throw off early voting and mail-in ballot efforts. With trump's takeover of the national-level RNC, the GOP is already spreading the lie that there was massive fraud in 2020 to lay the foundation to trump's claims of unproven voter fraud for 2024.

trump doesn't want to win the Popular Vote. he doesn't even want to win the Electoral College. trump is planning on breaking the entire voting process so that the results all come down to who controls the US House in January 2025, so he can get his MAGA allies in the House to reject any Biden win and just hand the Presidency to trump even if trump got his ass stomped in November 2024.

It depends on two things: How the Electoral College works out and how many state the Republicans control in the House when January 2025 rolls around. If the Electoral College clearly goes to Biden -  and trump can't bully or trick enough Blue states to disrupt their Electoral numbers - then it comes down to if the Republicans control either the House or Senate to forcibly reject those results (like trump wanted on January 6th when he sent in the rioters) and send the whole thing to the House where it'll be rigged for the cheater to cheat.

This will all come down to voter turnout for Congress and the state legislatures as much as turnout for the Presidential election.

Elections matter, everybody. And it matters that the Republicans be in NO position to disrupt the results if they don't go their way.

Get the damn vote out, Democrats and Indy voters and whatever Moderate Republicans are left out there. Deny trump any chance to deny OUR votes.

The Shame of Tigert Hall (w/ Update)

I am with fellow University of Florida alum Betty Cracker here, I am ashamed of being a Florida Gator this weekend. (Balloon Juice linked to Washington Post article (paywall)): 

The University of Florida barred three faculty members from testifying for plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging a voting-restrictions law enthusiastically embraced by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), which activists say makes it harder for racial minorities to vote. The university’s action raises sharp concerns about academic freedom and free speech in the state.

The public university said the three faculty members — political scientists Daniel A. Smith, Michael McDonald and Sharon Wright Austin — could pose “a conflict of interest to the executive branch” and harm the school’s interests if they testified against the law signed by DeSantis in May.

“As UF is a state actor, litigation against the state is adverse to UF’s interests,” school officials said, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post...

The only conflict of interest here is with the university's administration, which is cowering at the thought of DeSantis retaliating against UF if they allowed these professors to testify. There is no conflict with regards to the freedom of information, there is no conflict with regards to research and academia, there is no conflict as those professors were going to be under oath and testifying to the facts as they knew them.

How many other cases have UF professors, or any other academic in the state of Florida, testified? How many times were they denied because of "conflict of interest"? Did this ever come up before? I've yet to hear of one during my lifetime ever since I was a student there in the late 1980s.

The leadership at the University of Florida did this out of fear. No press release or explanation will excuse this.

These professors were set to testify to the damage caused by the repressive voting law the state Republicans passed in the wake of the 2020 elections to make it harder to vote by mail, to vote early, to vote at all in certain cases. It's a law that doubles down on more IDs required to vote (as though that kind of voter fraud is rampant: IT'S NOT).

As much as these professors' rights to speech were blocked, the rights of the Florida citizenry - including the young UF students just turned 18 and able to vote - were denied from hearing any expert evaluation of this law, of any other laws that could deny them their constitutional right (under the 13th, 19th, and 26th Amendments) to vote in local, state, and federal elections.

As I said on Betty Cracker's article:

As a fellow Florida alum, I am horrified and sickened by my university’s cowardice. In the face of watching DeSantis and the state Republicans suppress our constitutional voting rights, they would rather roll over and play dead than fight for the civil rights of their own students and faculty.

What do they think they’re doing, saving their payroll, their budget, their jobs? The Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated their anti-education anti-intellectual bias, and would likely close down most of the colleges (or worse, turn them into for-profit boondoggles) for shits and giggles.

The independence and reputation of our state’s higher educational institutions are at risk from political censorship and suppression. The students at Gainesville and every other college campus in Florida should rise up and protest this enforced silence.

You better use your voice now, Florida students, before DeSantis and his craven lackeys silence them for you. You know where Tigert Hall is. You know where the corner of University Avenue and 13th Street is. You know where the spots are outside of Turlington and the Century Tower. Hey, nice big open spot in that Plaza of the Americas outside the main libraries. Why let the suspendered Bible-thumpers always out there railing against you claim that open field? It's your spot to protest.

Protest now. Speak out now. Keep speaking until the UF President and his handlers realize they answer to YOU and not the corrupt powers in Tallahassee.

Update 11/5: As Doug mentioned in the comments below, NPR is reporting that the university has changed its tune (via Deepa Shivaram): 

...The university's earlier decision, which was revealed last week through documents filed in federal court, was widely criticized as an infringement of the professors' First Amendment rights.

The case was particularly under scrutiny because the lawsuit targeted legislation, supported by Gov. Ron DeSantis, that inhibited access to the ballot — and the school has strong ties to the governor.

University of Florida President Kent Fuchs said in a letter released Friday that he had asked the university's conflict of interest office to reverse the decision and "approve the requests regardless of personal compensation, assuming the activity is on their own time without using university resources..."

You can kind of see where Fuchs is trying to redirect the focus as though this whole thing was "using university resources," when at issue was the university's argument that their professors and faculty could not contest "the state" as an absolute authority.

The fact that UF had never withheld their faculty from testifying against Florida's government until Fuchs showed up should not be ignored. Back to Shivaram:

...After the school's original decision was reported, the university's accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, said it was investigating the school. The story was originally reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education and confirmed to NPR.

UF professors Daniel Smith, Sharon Austin and Michael McDonald were originally denied the opportunity to testify; they are all experts on voting rights and elections. Their lawyers say that since the university's original decision to bar them from testifying is still a violation of their First Amendment rights, the professors are still considering their legal options...

This whole embarrassment should lead to people in Florida's college administration to resign on whatever honor they have left, with new people hired with no ties to DeSantis and no obligation to suppress either their professors' or their students' First Amendment rights to academic freedom.

And shame on DeSantis for creating this environment of intellectual suppression in the first place.

The Republican Dilemma: Adapt or Die

(Update 4/6/21: Thanks again to Batocchio for including this article in Crooks&Liars Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please check out the site, and support your local library during #NationalLibraryWeek ) 

I may have blogged once or twice before about the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Especially in regards to a Republican Party that no longer respected the American Republic.

The Iron Law basically states that any organization - usually political - that starts with broad support across populations will eventually end up with only an elite or specific faction of that organization in charge of it. One of the side elements of this Law is that a moment comes when that group has a choice between upholding their ideals and imploding from the consequent schism, or adapting/corrupting their ideals in order to maintain their broad support.

The modern Republican Party kind of inverts that side rule: They are corrupting themselves to uphold the oligarchs' ideals - tax cuts for the rich, racism and misogyny for everyone else - rather than adapting themselves to maintain any semblance of broad support with Americans.

We've been seeing it as they slide into Minority Party Rule, where they no longer reflect the majority views of the American voting population, yet maintain political control because they've corrupted themselves and the processes by which our political controls get voted on. A corruption of process we see through Gerrymandering at the state level to grant themselves safe Republican districts at the expense of the voters, and their actions in the past decade of pushing for stricter voting regulations to restrict voting rights rather than uphold them.

Leading up to this past month where the Republican-controlled states - lead by Georgia and Texas - are passing or planning to pass voting restrictions so severe they've pretty much brought back the Jim Crow laws from the 1880s-1960s. Consider the damage being done by Georgia (via Zack Beauchamp at Vox):

The bill, known as SB 202, gives state-level officials the authority to usurp the powers of county election boards — allowing the Republican-dominated state government to potentially disqualify voters in Democratic-leaning areas. It criminalizes the provision of food and water to voters waiting in line, in a state where lines are notoriously long in heavily nonwhite precincts. It requires ID for absentee ballots and limits the placement of ballot drop boxes...

Everybody - myself included - jumped on the most sadistic part of that bill, the part where people can get arrested and jailed for providing food and water to people waiting in long lines (lines that tend to form in Black-heavy cities/counties that have had precincts taken away to force those long lines in the first place). But that's not the scariest part, this is: The bit where the state can disqualify county-level election results in case those counties fail to vote the way the Republicans want them to (hint: never FOR the Democratic candidates). This is where the GOP can say "FUCK YOU, Democratic voters, we don't want you winning anywhere" and nullify the choices their own citizens prefer. They're telling these voters to not even bother trying.

There is nothing in the bill specifically attempting to deny the vote to Blacks or Latinos or even Asians - because even the conservative-held courts will balk at that in this day and age - but given the recent attempts by the Georgia Republicans to disenfranchise those particular communities - with reduced precincts in poor (minority) neighborhoods, for example - you can do the math. You don't expect the Republicans to denounce the rich and mostly White counties they'll be winning, do you?

These laws, these rebirths of Jim Crow 50 years after the Voting Rights Act enfranchised Americans to vote, are not protecting democracy or the republic. These laws are getting passed on a Big Lie (from the liar trump, who still can't accept the facts he lost), that there's massive voter fraud. The Republicans keep screaming that there's fraud but can never prove it, and yet they're using their own screaming lies to justify restrictions we voters do not need.

Why are Republicans lying like this? Because they can't admit to the truth that they no longer reflect the majority views of the United States. They've slid down a path of ideological purification, seeking more conservative leadership that would stick to Far Right dogma, making it harder for any leadership to shift back towards positions on issues more favorable to more Americans. The Republicans' ideology has become so calcified and broken that in 2020 they refused to establish a platform at all, running instead on their candidates' personalities (in trump's case, a Cult of Personality).

The Republicans know they are no longer in majority control of the country - and even in some of the large Red States they're holding onto with these suppression laws - and they also know that the future will not be kind to them: It's long been an open (non)secret that by 2028 the population demographics are against them. To quote from the Center for American Progress' report on voting trends:

Many analysts suggest that if current voting patterns remain the same as in recent elections, the projected rise of communities of color—Hispanics, blacks, Asians, and others—will favor Democrats as the Republican-leaning white share of the electorate shrinks...

The scenarios in this report suggest that there are paths for both parties to win the Electoral College in 2020 and beyond. For Republicans, future success is tied to mobilizing their strength among whites without college educations—a still-substantial but shrinking portion of the electorate—while attaining gains among at least some growing demographic groups. A narrow Republican reliance on noncollege-educated whites would lead, at best, to continued popular vote losses and ever smaller Electoral College wins, which would eventually peter out...

Republicans could (and in 2016, did) win the Electoral College through relying on their base of non-colleged Whites, but they needed (and still need) a mix of disgruntled voters among the non-White blocs. They pulled that off with surprising numbers from Latinos in some states (Florida, where anti-socialistic views turned enough voters away from Dems) both in 2016 and 2020.

But 2020 demonstrated enough losses from White suburbanites negating that bloc's advantage for Republicans, with little sign they're regaining those voters back for 2024 and beyond. It did not help Republicans that 2020 voter turnout among Blacks - especially in Georgia - went up thanks to the mail-in balloting during the pandemic.

Hence the push now to shut down mail-in options and ballot dropoffs and early voting and a hundred other things that help poor (minority) voters, all because Republicans don't want to make the outreach efforts to those voters to balance with their GOP base.

Republicans don't want to make that outreach because they can't. The party itself has become so beholden to their extremist factions - who are mostly rage-driven, racist, and misogynist - that any attempt to moderate the party's stances on issues would cause that base to implode. 

That side rule about the Iron Law of Oligarchy, where a political party reaches a point where it has to Adapt Or Die: The Republican Party has finally reached that moment, these anti-voting laws the big red flag showing us all they are willing to fight to the bitter end on their racist, greedy ways rather than adapt to survive the coming demographic changes.

There is some irony to this: The Republicans cannot adapt, because the party dies if they do. Thanks to the electoral reality that our elections favor a two-party majority, the Republicans can still exist despite their growing minority status.

Except they can't persist this way, either. At some point - and it's coming no matter how much the Republicans try to cheat now - the GOP will fall into minority status in enough battleground states to where no amount of gerrymandering or voter suppression can save them. More states are set to turn Democratic Blue, maybe not this 2022 or even 2024, but it's coming, and when it does they will lose their political power nationwide.

This is when it will get scary. Having talked themselves into the false belief that only Republicans should rule, they are likely to convince themselves they have nothing else left to lose and will seek ruin for us all instead...

One Quick Observation About the Republican War on Voters

This came up on Twitter, and my response sparked a realization about an irony regarding the Republican Party's obsession to suppress voters across all the states they can.

And this voter suppression effort is something that's been going on for a long time, this huge war against the Voting Rights Act that led to the Supreme Court's Shelby County v Holder ruling that essentially gave the Far Right states free license to throw up voting roadblocks however they see fit.

And this is with every legal assault pushed by Republicans claiming massive voter fraud they can never prove in the courts.

It's that, ironically enough, every recent attempt by Republicans to suppress voter turnout in the last two-three election cycles (since the Holder ruling) has probably done more to encourage massive voter registration and turnout with better and stronger evidence that such elections were fairly run.

From Wikipedia Commons created by Orser67

It's rather hilarious that the Republicans want to keep pushing for even more voter suppression attempts, especially in Georgia, when it's getting pretty obvious that a growing majority of Americans will push back against their efforts and vote accordingly. Every attempt the GOP legislators will come up with, the pro-voting groups will figure out how to hurdle those blocks and keep people voting. Other than outright denial of voting to ethnic minorities, women, and/or young people in open violation of the 15th, 19th, and 26th Amendments, the Republicans are going to make it worse for themselves.

I shouldn't complain. At this rate, the Republicans are going to be responsible for getting the 2024 Presidential election turnout well over 70 percent of the total population, which IMHO will be a great moment for American democracy (and the Democratic Party because the population numbers favor them).

trump's Public Coup

trump is not winning at the polls.

trump is not going to win the Popular Vote.

trump is looking at the reality that he won't win enough states to trick the Electoral College.

trump is going to cheat.

And he's not even hiding it anymore.

From Barton Gellman at the Atlantic, with a serious look at how far trump is willing to go to destroy our voting rights:

If we are lucky, this fraught and dysfunctional election cycle will reach a conventional stopping point in time to meet crucial deadlines in December and January. The contest will be decided with sufficient authority that the losing candidate will be forced to yield. Collectively we will have made our choice—a messy one, no doubt, but clear enough to arm the president-elect with a mandate to govern.

As a nation, we have never failed to clear that bar. But in this election year of plague and recession and catastrophized politics, the mechanisms of decision are at meaningful risk of breaking down. Close students of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative result. We have no fail-safe against that calamity. Thus the blinking red lights...

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice...

Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. Not under any circumstance. Not during the Interregnum and not afterward. If compelled in the end to vacate his office, Trump will insist from exile, as long as he draws breath, that the contest was rigged.

Trump’s invincible commitment to this stance will be the most important fact about the coming Interregnum. It will deform the proceedings from beginning to end. We have not experienced anything like it before...

Trump’s behavior and declared intent leave no room to suppose that he will accept the public’s verdict if the vote is going against him. He lies prodigiously—to manipulate events, to secure advantage, to dodge accountability, and to ward off injury to his pride. An election produces the perfect distillate of all those motives...

All of which is to say that there is no version of the Interregnum in which Trump congratulates Biden on his victory. He has told us so. “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention on August 24. Unless he wins a bona fide victory in the Electoral College, Trump’s refusal to concede—his mere denial of defeat—will have cascading effects...

trump has already set the groundwork, laid the accusations of mass voter fraud that won't even stand up in court... and we have to contend with the possibility that a Republican-tilted Judiciary - packed the last four years by an eager McConnell - will twist the known law to fit trump's desires.

Just this afternoon, trump refused to answer any question about conceding the election if he loses to Biden this November (via Alana Wise at NPR):

President Trump on Wednesday suggested that he might not accept the election results if he is not declared the winner in November.

"We're going to have to see what happens. You know that. I've been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster," Trump said, alluding to his unsubstantiated arguments about widespread mail-in ballot fraud.

"Get rid of the ballots and you'll have a very peaceful — there won't be a transfer, frankly, there'll be a continuation. The ballots are out of control. You know it. And you know who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else."

trump is accusing the Democratic Party of cheating while he himself is preparing to send 50,000 paid "observers" nationwide to precincts in a likely attempt to intimidate minority voters into turning away from casting their ballots.

trump is openly refusing to play by the rules of our elective system. he's going to try to intimidate the voters into not voting in person, and then he's going to demand that the mail-in ballots for Democrats get tossed as "fakes". And even if trump loses to Biden by five points in the Popular, and even with Biden securing 332 Electoral College votes (basing this on the 2012 Obama results, which the current polling suggests is going for Biden as well, plus Arizona and maybe North Carolina), trump will lie about the results and convince the GOP-held state legislatures and district courts into denying Biden the win.

he's not hiding this anymore. This is no October Surprise getting unleashed. This is trump, exposed and revealed as the bullying con artist he's always been.

Except this time he's sitting in control of the Executive branches of the federal government - especially in control of Barr's corrupted Justice Dept. - willing and eager to bully and con his way through the 2020 results.

America, we dare not let him.

For the LOVE OF GOD, vote. If there's early voting in your state, do it now. If you're balloting by mail, use your county Elections' office drop-off box if you think the mail system is broken. If you have to vote in your precinct, go. Risk the coronavirus, and face the Republican-bought enforcers already threatening to hassle voters on Election Day.

Your vote is YOUR voice and YOUR power. Use it, spite trump's attempt to steal it away. Make the results so lopsided in Biden's and the Democrats favor that no amount of trumpian lies will hide his doom.

This is trump's War on our power. This is the Republicans' War on America, finally with battle lines drawn.

We must win, America, against trump's threat to steal our nation away.

Nullifying 2020

(Update 9/16/20: Thanks again to Tengrain at Crooks&Liars to share this article at Mike's Blog Round-Up! Wish me luck with the FWA Royal Palm Literary Award for Non-Fiction: Blogging)

It's getting more obvious by the day: trump wants to nullify the 2020 Elections. Via Cameron Peters at Vox:

It’s not a new talking point for Trump, who has already mounted a sustained campaign against mail-in voting and the US Postal Service — and who continues to claim there was widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election, when there was not.

But in an election where as many as six in 10 Americans say they plan to vote early and a historic number of ballots are likely to be cast by mail, such rhetoric takes on a dangerous new dimension. There’s a fair chance we won’t know who won on election night as ballots are counted — many states accept ballots postmarked on Election Day for days afterward — and Trump is already sending up a signal that he plans to dispute the results or even prematurely claim victory on Election Day if early returns show him ahead...

...Trump also suggested Saturday that his supporters should turn out as poll watchers, “because with you people watching the polls it’s going to be pretty hard to cheat. I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t want to be a cheater.”

The suggestion is a concerning one, however. There is a history of GOP poll watchers engaging in voter intimidation — one that led to a since-expired federal consent decree curbing such activity. With instances of armed Trump supporters engaging in pseudo-law enforcement vigilantism, there’s reason for concern that poll watching could lead to further voter intimidation in November...

there are several things at play here. trump above all is projecting, accusing the other party of being the cheaters when it's been him and the Republicans caught cheating both in 2016 and now. trump is also trying to create a Narrative to sell to the Beltway media, as a means of beating it into their heads early and often to the point they will parrot it as fact.

Above all, trump is sowing chaos, creating an environment where he can abuse the powers of the office and refuse to accept a possible outcome of not only losing the popular vote to Biden, but also enough states to lose the Electoral College as well.

This is an attempt by trump to intimidate voters into not even trying to vote, of depressing turnout so that only his true believers show up and skew the results again like in 2016.

There is a solution to this, Democrats.

TURN THE VOTE OUT. Everyone registered to vote, get the fck to the polling booths. Mail in your ballots. Show up for Early Voting, show up in such numbers that trump can't claim early leads.

VOTING MATTERS. You have the numbers, Democrats. You have allies among Independent voters sick of trump's incompetence. You need to counter trump's lies with a clarion call to every voter who supports you to get the ballots in and make every person count.

Anniversary: The Vote Mattered Then, It Matters Now

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed this:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Before this, elections and thus political representation could only be done by men. Even though women counted in the Census towards the congressional apportionment, even as women came to own property and run businesses, even with women showing centuries worth of spilling the same blood, sweat, and tears as men.

The right to vote had long been a struggle even before the Constitution was made, with the feminists of the Revolutionary era calling for equal rights of women to vote and hold office. Even as the abolitionists were arguing for Blacks to be free, a good number of them also didn't see a reason to let women vote. The entitlement of patriarchy was pretty strong.

But the struggle grew, not just here but across much of the planet where any elective body existed. The suffrage movement was a universal one, and by the 1900s the Progressive reformers that had gained control of the United States policy making got around to getting the right to vote for women set in stone.

The struggle to get women elected into office took a while longer, with few winning their way into Congress well into the 1970s. Every so often there would be a wave of women candidates expanding the representation in office, but that wave would ebb and the number would never get to near-equal the number of men (in a planetary demographic where the male-female gender split is roughly half-and-half, it's a bit shocking to see we're STILL below a quarter of the Senate AND House of Representatives by 2020). 

What matters about voting is the power the voters have in choosing people who will enact laws and reforms that benefit their needs. In issues that matter most to women - equal pay at work, better social aid for family care, legal protections against harassment and rape and exploitation, equal access to higher education and career opportunities, better health care and the freedom of health care choices - they are not seeing enough women in leadership roles working to resolve those issues (and few male elected officials caring enough to resolve them as well).

Getting women to vote mattered in 1920 and earlier, getting women to vote matters today because there remains so much work left to be done to ensure equality and justice for all regardless of gender or race or orientation or faith.

It matters today because our overall right to vote is under attack more so than it has been since the 1960s, not just for minorities but for every demographic that is not Rich White Male.

A hundred years ago women won their power to vote in elections. This year, everyone needs to express that power to vote to stop the corruption of a vote-suppressing Republican Party before we - not just women but men - lose that power.

Get the damn vote out, America. Women as well as men.

Hell No, trump

So trump dropped a tweet or three this morning, in the middle of a thousand other things happening, where he expressed his interest in suspending the 2020 General (and Presidential) Elections. The excuse was concern over the possibility of "ballot-by-mail fraud" (which still hasn't been proven in court) and the pandemic (which was trump's own damn fault letting it get out of control).

It prompted a day-long Twitter Trend of HELL NO, and brought a lot of angry people to bear worried that trump was now at full dictator mode.

To quote Ian Millhiser at Vox: trump can't do it if he tried.

A trio of federal laws set Election Day for presidential electors, senators, and US representatives as “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November.” If Republicans want to change this law, they would need to go through the Democratic House.

The 20th Amendment, moreover, provides that “the terms of the President and the Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January.” Thus, even if the election were somehow canceled, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence’s terms would still expire as scheduled — although, as explained below, the question of who would succeed them is devilishly complicated...

trump could try to argue that his emergency powers would override the existing laws, but there's no way he can argue past something written in stone the way the 20th Amendment is. Supreme Court justices, even trumpian Far Right ones, do not take kindly to that kind of scam. And Chief Roberts has already expressed his disdain with trump's legal shenanigans. Back to Millhiser:

Under the 20th Amendment, “the terms of the President and the Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d [sic] day of January.” So, if no one is elected to replace these officials, Trump and Pence cease to be elected officials the minute their terms expire on January 20. Members of the House serve two-year terms, so all members of the House will cease to be representatives on January 3; one-third of senators’ terms also expire on that date.

Ordinarily, if the Presidency and Vice Presidency are both vacant at the same time, the office falls to the Speaker of the House. But if there is no election, there will be no Speaker when Trump and Pence’s terms expire because all House seats will become vacant on January 3...

I've seen other arguments online that there's a possibility that Nancy Pelosi, the current serving Speaker, might still qualify under the 25th Amendment because the Speakership still belongs to her. The rules of the House are that she remains so unless voted out from office (which technically did not happen, there just wasn't a vote period), if majority control flipped to another party (which hadn't happened, due to no vote), if she was voted out by a No-Confidence motion (which is rare, and does not apply to this), or if she resigned. Technically, anybody could be voted as Speaker even if they were not elected to the House at all (which did come up during the struggle to find a replacement for Boehner when he retired), so Pelosi as sitting Speaker could remain so if the election was suspended.

But to continue Millhiser's reasoning:

If there is no President, Vice president, or Speaker, the next official in line is the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, a largely ceremonial position that is traditionally held by the most senior member of the majority party. Right now that is Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).

But wait! Recall that the terms of many senators also expire on January 3. As it turns out, 23 seats held by Republicans and only 12 seats held by Democrats are up for election this year, so if no election is held, Democrats will have a majority in the Senate once these seats become vacant. Which would mean that Senate Democrats would be able to choose a new President pro tempore. If they follow the tradition of choosing the most senior member of their caucus, that would place Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) next in line for the presidency.

Things actually get even more complicated from here. The 17th Amendment permits state governors to name temporary senators to vacant seats, but not all states allow their governors to do so. It’s also not immediately clear who would be the governor of many states if no election takes place in 2020, because much of the line of succession in those states could be rendered vacant as well...

Personally, if it works out that Pat Leahy ends up as President through all this, I'd be happy because it'd mean we'd get a President who personally stared down the Joker.

It's a pretty thought experiment to try, but the reality is trump can't stop this election cycle: It is hardwired into our system. Not just in the law but by tradition: We held a Presidential election in the middle of a Civil War, for God's sake. he'd have to order a straight-up military coup into the states to shut down the local election setups, especially in the Blue states that won't obey any suspension order he gives.

But that's not trump's true intention here. trump know how to play a long con, and he's setting the groundwork to invalidate the election after it happens. Per David A. Graham at The Atlantic:

Trump has repeatedly and falsely alleged that the election will be tainted by widespread fraud due to increased use of mail-in voting stemming from the coronavirus pandemic. (He has also repeatedly and falsely claimed major fraud in the 2016 election, which he won.) While voting by mail, like all methods, is susceptible to fraud, no evidence suggests widespread fraud that could affect the result of the election...

However, there are legitimate worries about the ability of many Americans to properly and safely vote, and many reasons to fear that the November election will be a train wreck. COVID-19-related complications, including a huge increase in demand for voting by mail and a shortage of polling places and poll workers, threaten to swamp already struggling local election systems. Election experts worry that final election results will not be available for weeks after Election Day, as votes are slowly counted. Any delay in the day of the election would only exacerbate this problem by making it even harder to meet other deadlines. Also under statute, the Electoral College must meet on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. According to the Constitution, the new presidential term starts at noon on January 20 of the following year...

trump is setting up now his ability to throw a wrench into that process, delaying things through court challenges at every mail-in ballot against him that nothing can get counted in time and force the Electoral College to not even vote. That would send the whole mess into the US House where by a quirk of the election rules each state (50) gets ONE vote (not proportioned out to each Representative), with the majority of each state dominating their single vote (there are 26 controlled by Republicans, one split, 23 controlled by Democrats). It wouldn't matter if Democrats have 230-plus Representatives: It would only matter that Republicans control 26 state delegations. The only way this doesn't work to the Republicans' advantage is if Democrats flip delegation control of three states, but there's no guarantee of that despite the signs of a Blue Wave in congressional elections.

This could happen even if Joe Biden secures both the popular vote (which is likely) and the Electoral vote (which would involve flipping back three to five - even six if Texas goes Blue (!) - states that went barely for trump). Just imagine it: Biden wins 374 EV by securing all the 2012 Blue states plus Arizona and North Carolina and maybe one more, and does so with 70 million voters to trump's 61 million with a nice 53 percent popular count. Yet trump and his Republican cronies still in control of Florida, Ohio, Arizona and Wisconsin contest the votes forcing a delay similar to what happened in 1876, compelling the system to toss it all to a US House where Republicans hold 26 delegations.

It'd be a huge risk to piss off 70 million Americans, but like any political party relying on Minority Rule, the Republicans right now do not give a fuck about the Majority.

Back to Graham:

Trump’s unpopularity is one of the peculiarities of his proposal to delay the election. There aren’t many historical precedents for such a move, but when they exist, they have been undertaken by politicians who are extremely well liked... 

Such leaders could argue that their constituents needed and wanted continuity. Trump, by contrast, is a widely reviled politician. Most of the country feels that things are on the wrong track, and he knows it. This is, in fact, the likely motivation behind this proposal. It’s more a means of preemptively contesting the outcome of an election he fears he will lose than trying to actually move it...

If Trump loses the election in November and wants to argue that he was cheated and the voting was not legitimate, he can’t start on November 4. He needs to lay the groundwork ahead of time—for example, by repeatedly warning that the vote will be fraudulent and rigged, and by telling his supporters that he tried to postpone it but was denied by “Them.”

Some observers have focused on the question of whether a defeated Trump would actually leave office, as required by law, or stage some sort of coup. That still seems tough to envision, though the president’s complete disregard for the rule of law makes it hard to rule anything out. But a concerted effort to undermine the election, and to convince 35 to 45 percent of the electorate that the balloting was never fair, would do its own damage...

Either trump wins by cheating, or he wins by burning everything in his wake as he scurries out the White House door. It's both bluff - to cower us to behave - and threat - making sure his violent obsessive MAGA fans riot over his loss even if Biden tops him with 55 percent of the popular vote and a solid Electoral win.

We are too far into a disastrous trump regime to cower in fear. We've had 232 years of this nation to build our resolve and our faith in the United States to let this tiny, whining Shitgibbon get the better of us.

Vote however you can. Vote by mail even as trump destroys our Postal Service. Vote in person using every safety and health precaution you've got. Overwhelm trump's diminishing support. Overwhelm every Republican attempt to suppress our votes.

Make it so the turnout is so lopsided in favor to the Democratic Party that the state-level Republicans won't risk playing trump's con game to delay the counts.

Make it so the Majority - the TRUE Majority of Americans who want normalcy again, who want a working federal government again - finally gets their say after decades of abuse by a Republican Party that no longer represents us.

Don't play trump's game. Beat him at ours.

Hell No, trump.

What Florida Republicans Want: No More Voters

If we return our attention to the state level, we'll note that the Republicans have decided to give up on the people and take more power unto themselves.

For example: Passing legislation to make it harder for Florida voters to pass their own amendments. Via Lawrence Mower at the Tampa Bay Times:

 Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday approved legislation that would crack down on citizen petitions, a move that is likely to quash future ballot initiatives disliked by Republican lawmakers and corporate donors.

The bill, which takes effect before the 2020 election, makes it drastically harder to collect enough signatures to make it onto voters’ ballots.

And it will solidify Republican control in Tallahassee by eliminating one of the last threats to their power: the ballot box...

The Republicans have garnered political control of the Sunshine State ever since the demographic/party shifts that changed everything in the 1990s. After the last elected Democratic governor in Lawton Chiles passed away, everything went to the GOP. Even though a solid majority of voters remain Democratic... even as the voter shifts of the last ten years away from Far Right dogma are causing cracks in GOP domination.

The clearest sign of those cracks was the Amendment referendum process. Unable to break the GOP's control of the legislature via gerrymandering, the center-left population have resorted to petition-driven referendums to create State Constitutional Amendments - like anti-gerrymander rules, medical marijuana, funding for clean water and wetlands protection, classroom size limits to stop overcrowding poorer schools - that the conservative legislators can't ignore (well, actually they do, but it stops them from passing laws that would hew further Right Wing). Back to Mower:

What the legislation is sure to do, however, is stifle the last area outside of statewide Republican control in Florida.

Republicans have dominated the Legislature, Cabinet and governor’s mansion for the last 20 years, and every member of the state Supreme Court has now been appointed by Republicans.

But liberal groups and others have seen some success getting their priorities into law by proposing amendments to the state Constitution.

Over the last several years, at least 60 percent of voters have changed the Constitution to require the Legislature adopt fair voter districts, allow medical marijuana, protect environmental lands and restore the right to vote for felons.

And more amendments are on the way — or were on the way before DeSantis signed the bill Friday...

Republicans have fought every measure that a supermajority of Florida voters supported - which has to include a sizable number of fellow Republicans - because they don't fit their agenda of tax cuts, social aid cuts, school funding cuts, and aggressive land development for their rich construction buddies.

Referendums proposed for the coming 2020 ballot included a Minimum Wage ballot to fight the 20-year-plus stagnation of wages for every non-CEO worker, an "Energy Choice" option to break the monopolistic practices of the regional utilities, a statewide ban on military-grade assault rifles commonly used in mass shootings, a separate Universal Background Check amendment, an Open Primary system similar to California's that had all parties as a primary choice (meaning a district could have TWO Republicans in the final election or TWO Democrats in the final, meaning the extremists don't have safe seats either way), a Medicaid Expansion (which the state GOP definitely doesn't want to do), and Taco Trucks On Every Corner okay I made that last one up, but the rest of them are real. Follow that link to Ballotpedia to see more.

Those are issues that matter to the voting public, and things that a supermajority - 60 percent of voters - might want the state government to do.

But none of them are things the Florida Republicans want. They openly refuse to pass laws supporting ANY of that already, because each one offends a lobby group they rely on for campaign funding and future cushy no-show jobs.

They're also terrified of some of the election reform amendments that could pass that would break the Minority Rule they now inflict on the state. Florida Republicans rule without accountability, refusing to answer to the cries of local residents screaming for financial aid to cover feeding their kids and paying for schools and keeping roofs over their heads. The state GOP doesn't want to do anything about regional ecological disasters like toxic algae that are clearly man-made from Big Sugar and overdevelopment consuming our wetlands. 

You see, Florida Republicans are making too much money off of all that. So rather than do what the majority (most Florida residents) wants - clean water, safe schools, healthy families - the state GOP will indulge the minority's (the Obscenely Rich) whims.

What Florida Republicans want is for Florida Voters to sit down and shut up, FOREVER.

This should be as obvious a sign to my fellow Floridians why we needed to stop voting Republican the last eleven years I've been screaming that, and why we all need to stop NOW on voting Republican ever again. Our rights are getting bled dry, one cut at a time, while Republicans feast on our bones and keep us caged. As of today, the only power we have left is the power to VOTE EVERY REPUBLICAN OUT OF OFFICE. For the LOVE of GOD and HUMANITY, that's the one thing WE NEED TO DO.

Full-out Florida Failure: 2019 Republican Asshat Edition

Jesus, my crazy-ass state of Florida is going for the goddamn hat trick this week.

Part One: The Florida Legislature is looking to deny the popular voter referendum to allow non-violent felons who've served their time to automatically regain their right as citizens to vote, by adding a rule requiring them to pay off any fines and fees they still owe before they can vote. Jesus.

Let's quote from that Miami Herald article by Lawrence Mower:

Voting along party lines, Republicans advanced the bill, which would require felons to pay back all court fees and costs before being eligible to vote, even if those costs are not handed down by a judge as part of the person’s sentence.

That standard goes beyond the restoration system before Amendment 4 passed in November, which only required someone pay back restitution to a victim before applying to have their civil rights restored...

Yet the House bill serves the same purpose as the voter suppression tactics of the past, said Neil Volz, political director for the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which advocated and helped draft Amendment 4.

“We’re opposed to restricting voting rights,” Volz said. “And this bill does that...”
Kara Gross, legislative director and senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, which also helped draft Amendment 4, said Monday that the House bill is too restrictive.

“It will inevitably prevent individuals from voting based on the size of the person’s bank account,” Gross said. “Those who have the financial means will vote, and those who can’t, won’t...”

That is exactly it. Considering some fines and fees go into the thousands of dollars, how many ex-felons do you think have that amount of money to take care of these bills right away? How many of them are going to have to work off those debts for five, ten, maybe twenty years?

What the Lege wants to pass is a goddamn poll tax that punishes the poor. Fuck the GOP legislators.

Part Two: The Florida Legislature is looking to pass a bill that not only would allow the religiously offended to ban books they don't like from schools - by giving them the ability to go past the county school boards' advisory staffs and appeal to the more tone-deaf state agencies - but also make it a Third Degree felony for ANYONE buying a "pornographic" or "inappropriate" book. That sound you heard was a hundred thousand families spitting their coffee out while letting their kids read "The Sneetches" (yes, Dr. Seuss has been banned) for the nineteenth time. You will be amazed how quickly the wingnuts' list of banned books will go from 100 to 100-Thousand. JESUS.

I can quote from other sources but let's go with myself: I work as a librarian and I know how to handle Challenged/Banned Books. The rules should be A) a person can challenge a book's place in the collection, B) there is a defense and debate about the book's value towards education or learning reading skills, C) the book can either return to the collection with complaint noted, the book can be placed elsewhere in the collection - usually in the adult reading away from the children's section - or the book can be removed if it fails to meet "community standards" (i.e. if it's a book with clear offensive or obscene elements, also known as the "I know it when I see it" Rule).

Most libraries are aware and sensitive to the needs of their readers and usually do a good job of handling challenged works. However, you still get those (cough Bible-humping Evangelicals cough) who are offended by things that by modern standards are mild or inoffensive or by rational measures not offensive at all. (we're talking about a group of people who are offended by everything on a library shelf and insist on ONE BOOK ONLY for everyone to read)

What this bill is going to do is take away the local control of the county school boards - and libraries - and drag them up to the state level where the politicians are less attuned to community standards and more attuned to the Christian groups screaming loudest into their ears. As a result, the school libraries - and then the public libraries - are going to see half their shelves cleared out all because the Christianists disagree with Ray Bradbury, Judy Blume, and the entire 500 Dewey Decimals (yes, say goodbye to all pure sciences books covering evolution, climatology, astronomy and even MATH). For starters.

Part Three: The Florida Legislature is about to pass an anti-Sanctuary City bill that would compel cities, counties and their law enforcement agencies to assist federal authorities with the feds' pursuit of an aggressive - and inhumane - anti-immigration policy that can well violate a ton of residents (even legal ones) of their civil liberties. JESUS CHRIST.

Anyone remember how that Fugitive Slave Act worked back in the 1850s?! Say hello to Slave Act 2.0. where every local agency along with our Sheriff offices - like say Child and Family Services - will be compelled to hand every Latino family over to ICE. Don't think I'm exaggerating.

Never mind DeSantis' signing of allowing medical marijuana. He's about to sign at least three bills - if they pass the Lege - that will severely curtain our citizen's rights to vote, read, and live.

This is why I've been screaming for ten-plus years on this blog for my fellow Floridians to stop voting Republican. And now they've been in office long enough that they're emboldened to dig even deeper into our lives and ruin us all.

There are days I hate living in this state.

These are the days I need to stand up and fight.

Call your legislators. Be polite but tell them - especially the Republicans - to not fuck with us.

Grand Theft Elections

Update: (Not again! Every time it gets busy at work, I miss getting added to the daily Mike's Blog Round-Up at Crooksandliars.com! Sigh. Thank you this time to Frances Langum of the Professional Left podcasts!)

It used to be, not even that long ago, that the political parties showed at least some deference some respect to how the voters made up their minds each election cycle.

But something changed with the Republican Party. Whatever it's been that has driven that party further to the Right on issues, it's also driven them to a point where they won't even give Democrats a modicum of respect when the voters side with Dems.

We've seen it at the national level, when the Republicans dismissed and belittled Bill Clinton's Presidency, even pursuing any hint of scandal to find a way to impeach him out of office. We've seen it from Day One of Obama's entire tenure - with a plan of obstruction and denial on a scale never before seen - where they even denied Obama was an honest-to-God American.

And now we're seeing it at the state level. In situations where the voters have put a Democrat into the governor's office (or other elective executive offices like the Attorney General in Michigan), the Republican-controlled legislatures are holding "lame duck" sessions passing extremist laws taking away much of those offices' power or authority to do ANYTHING.

We saw it last elections in 2016 when North Carolina's GOP legislature decided to kneecap the incoming Democratic governor there (via Tara Golshan at Vox.com):

Within 48 hours, on a late December night in 2016, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a series of bills that pulled Cooper’s ability to make key cabinet appointments without their approval, drastically cut the size of Cooper’s administration, and changed the Board of Elections so that Republicans would control it in election years. They ensured lawsuits had to first go through the Republican-controlled appeals court, before the Democratic-majority state Supreme Court.

Democrats — who thought of Cooper’s victory as one of the few bright spots in an otherwise devastating year for the party — were blindsided...

It doesn't matter if the North Carolina Dems have fought every twisted GOP law in the courts. It's caused just enough delay and confusion to where Governor Cooper has achieved little in office. A perfect example the state Leges in Michigan and Wisconsin are following with great relish.

Worse, the Republican legislatures are insulting the voters directly. Voter referendums that went against GOP dogma - like raising the minimum wage, or opening up voter registration to make it easier to vote - are being blatantly ignored, sabotaged, and overwritten.

To note what is happening in Michigan (via Nancy LeTourneau in Washington Monthly but linking to Paul Waldman in the WaPo ):

Republicans are responding to a Democratic sweep of statewide offices by giving the legislature the ability to overrule the attorney general on state lawsuits and take authority over campaign finance regulation away from the secretary of state. They are also considering a bill to cut off voter registration 14 days before every election, in effect overruling a same-day registration initiative voters just passed...

...Michigan activists had organized to get enough signatures to put a couple of items on the ballot: an increase in the minimum wage and paid sick leave for all workers. If those initiatives had been approved by voters, a two-thirds majority in the legislature would be needed to amend them.

In September, both of those measures were passed, exactly as written, by the state legislature, ensuring they would be removed from the ballot. Over the last week, however, Republican legislators have amended them via a simple majority vote...

The Republicans knew those referendum items were too popular, so they staged a fake-out to get them removed from the ballot and then when all was safe rewrote everything so that the voters would get screwed.

This is not governance. This is bullying.

If we can go back to Golshan at Vox:

“North Carolina set a precedent in playing a kind of political hardball that we haven’t seen in other places,” Rick Hasen, an election law scholar with the University of California Irvine, said. “Does it spiral out of control? This has been more asymmetric with Republicans, but I don’t think it would always stay that way...”

In Wisconsin, some of these proposals passed on Wednesday, and Republican Gov. Scott Walker said he would sign them into law. In all, they would limit Evers’s power to change policies around welfare, health care, and economic development, cut down early voting, and allow the Republican-led legislature to undermine the attorney general, giving them the power to block his decision to remove Wisconsin from federal lawsuits.

“Power-hungry politicians rushed through sweeping changes to our laws to expand their own power and override the will of the people of Wisconsin who asked for change on November 6th,” Evers said in a statement.

In Michigan, a Republican proposal would guarantee the GOP-controlled legislature the right to intervene in any legal battles involving state laws that the attorney general may be reluctant to defend, like restrictions for same-sex couples looking to adopt...

This isn’t normal. There’s a basic understanding in a democracy that when one party wins, they have won.

But Republicans across the country are explicitly rejecting election outcomes. In Wisconsin, the Republican state House Speaker Rep. Robin Vos said the reforms were necessary because otherwise, he said, “we are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”

These legislatures are turning to extremes, and before long those extremes can become the new norm.

“It’s a further devolution of norms of democracy, where the losers accept the results of an election and move on,” Hasen said. “This is about polarization generally, and a break down of political norms...”

Back to LeTourneau:

Over the last few years, we’ve witnessed many examples of how Republicans have been willing to spit in the face of our democratic principles to maintain their power. But this one should probably take its place at the top of the list. Could it be any more obvious that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the voting public? If this little charade is allowed to stand, what it will take to wake people up to that reality?

This has been one of the reasons why I'd been screaming STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN for the longest time. Republicans are not concerned with leading or responding to the people's will: Republicans want power and more of it, and Republicans want their tax-cut and patriarchal Utopia at all costs. They are willing to bend and break every rule to keep in power even when the majority of Americans are telling them NO We Do Not Trust You With That Anymore.

This is how we've gotten to Minority Rule of an increasingly shrinking and dying party unwilling to accept their losses when they happen and rebuild into a more responsive party.

It would be pretty to think that the growing Majority of Voters will push back, stop voting Republican, drive them out of office. But the bastards are exploiting their ungodly advantage of Gerrymandering to rig the votes, to give them enough seats in the Legislatures to keep rigging more votes and more tricks and more obstruction to favor them.

We're not going to see a truly representative state where the Republicans hold sway. They can't afford to let that happen. We are not going to see any salvation until Gerrymandering itself is wiped out of our electoral process once and for all.

Until then, every election is under threat of thievery by the GOP.

Gods help us.

The Ballot Ballad of Bladen County

You wanna know what voter fraud REALLY looks like?

Try what's getting found out in North Carolina's 9th Congressional District (via Vox.com):

There are two major pieces to this puzzle: First, specific allegations of unusual activities related to absentee ballots, made in a series of affidavits submitted to the state board by lawyers for the Democratic Party, and second, analyses by political experts suggesting the number of absentee ballots requested but not returned in the Ninth District was unusually high...

* One voter says a young woman came to her house and asked for her absentee ballot because she was collecting them. The voter had made her choice for only two offices on the ballot, but still gave her ballot to the young woman, who said she would fill out the rest (Note: OMFG THIS IS ILLEGAL AS HELL).
* Another voter also says a young woman came to her house and claimed she was responsible for collecting absentee ballots. The voter filled out her ballot while the young woman waited; the woman then took the ballot, but never asked the voter to sign it and did not put it in a sealed envelope (Note: I've done door-to-door canvassing offering to hand-deliver absentee ballots-by-mail. We *had* to ensure the signatures, put it in envelopes, and leave a receipt. It doesn't seem like this woman did any of that).
* A third voter says she did not request an absentee ballot but received one in the mail anyway.
* A fourth person says she saw unusual activity at a polling site: election results being run after polls closed on the last day of early voting and observed by people who were not elections judges, which she understood to be “improper.” The person said she also helped tabulate absentee ballots after the election that were quite worn and had “coding” written on them.
* A fifth person, Dwight Sheppard, says he overheard people talking outside a polling station on Election Day who said a well-known local operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless, Jr., would be paid a $40,000 bonus if Harris won the election.
* In another affidavit — signed and witnessed, but not notarized — a sixth person said he actually talked to Dowless in April during the Republican primary, in which Harris upset sitting Republican Rep. Robert Pittenger (Note: Hmmmmm), According to this person, Dowless said he was working on the absentee vote for Harris, that he had 80 people working for him, and that he accepted cash payments only from campaigns.

This isn’t the first time Dowless’s name has come up in relation to voting shenanigans: In 2016, several people filed complaints about campaign workers hired by Dowless who were collecting absentee ballots, as WECT reported at the time...

You might notice that at no point did any group of "questionable" or "illegal" voters showed up by the bus-load to stuff ballots. Every tidbit of "questionable" actions were by campaign/party workers. This has nothing to do with illegal voters: it has everything to do with illegal campaigners.

Back to Point Two: A high count of absentee balloting within two counties - Bladen and Robeson - with even higher counts of non-returns.

Most of the attention has focused on two counties in the Ninth: Bladen and Robeson, in the southeast corner of the state near the South Carolina border. Notably, each of the affidavits provided by Democratic attorneys involved voters in Bladen County, and one man said that Dowless himself had stated he was working on absentee ballots for Harris in the county.

Michael Bitzer, a politics professor at Catawba College who obsessively follows North Carolina, documented the unusual trend in those counties: They had a much higher rate of mail-in absentee ballots that were requested but not returned, compared to other counties in the Ninth District...

And at the district level, according to Bitzer’s calculations, the Ninth had a much higher rate of unreturned absentee ballots than any other district in North Carolina...

If you follow the link back to Vox, you'll see the charts showing the discrepancies. The volume of non-returns jumps way out of the scope of statistical norms compared to the other counties.

What makes this matter really striking is how the response has been. The state's Elections Board - the oversight authority - is freaking out:

The state board took these allegations seriously enough to vote unanimously — with four Democratic members, four Republicans, and one unaffiliated member — not to certify the results from the Ninth District earlier this week.

Democrats want further investigation into these various allegations of odd behavior and possible tampering, and the state board seems ready to pursue the matter. At the end of the day, North Carolina law allows the elections board to call for a new election if there is evidence that casts doubt on the basic fairness of the vote. The number of ballots in doubt or in question doesn’t appear to make a difference...

The Harris campaign may yet win the argument that overturning the results shouldn't happen. The statistical oddities may not point to an overall attempt to rig the ballots by messing with the absentee/mail-in voting.

But something is rotten in the State of Denmark Counties of Bladen and Robeson. An honest investigation into what happened in those places and how the entire 9th District may have been subverted needs to take place.

 

Florida Ballot Amendments 2018: These Things Matter, SO VOTE

It's the midterms again, and that means one thing:

Getting the vote out and throwing every Republican out of office!

Well, okay, here in Florida it means TWO things:

That first thing, AND we've got another round of Amendment ballot measures to vote on.

Lemme just link here to Ballotpedia for their easy-to-access listing of items on the upcoming November referendum... If you want a different take on the amendments, here's a link to the Tampa Bay Times' recommendations.

As a reminder, there's normally two ways for an amendment to reach the ballot: Legislative Referred, and Initiated (public) Referred. There's also a third way: a Committee Referred from a Constitution Revision Commission that forms every 20 years. This means there can be a sh-t-ton of ballot measures this cycle. Thank God the courts (try to) weed out the bad amendments before they reach the voters...

Here now for your entertainment are the ballots that may be up for 60 percent approval to pass (some of them are still pending judicial review and may be taken off):

Amendment One: Homestead Exemption Increase

The thing I keep worrying about: cutting back on any kind of property tax that would cut into our cities and counties' ability to raise their own revenue to pay for sh-t.

Whenever there's a tax-related referendum, consider this rule: Who Profits From The Tax Cuts? In this case, the amendment offers to raise the Homestead Exemption for properties valued above $125,000 (that is, for families living in the hint expensive suburbs). This takes a lot of property taxes out of county and city coffers, and shifts the tax burden onto property renters and those properties that DON'T make the value range.

On a personal note, the place I live does not value above $125,000. I will miss qualifying for the exemption. So, yeah, f-ck it I have no reason to vote for this bull. Even the ones who DO qualify, just remember this will f-ck up your county's ability to repair your water and electric utilities and your roads and your parks and libraries and your cultural events and...

For the love of God VOTE NO.

Amendment Two: Permanent Cap on NonHomestead Parcel Assessment

Did I stutter? Back to Rule One of any tax-related referendum: who profits from it?

There had been a ten-year cap on tax assessment to avoid making properties more costly at a time (2008) when property values took a serious hit due to the Housing bubble nightmare (you NEED to see the movie The Big Short, okay?). Now that the recession is over and property values are rising naturally in a growing economy, it would be helpful to city and county governments to regain a solid tax base on the property taxes they raise. Making that cap permanent kills our local governments' revenue-raising abilities.

This is a big NO vote, Florida.

Amendment Three: Casino Gambling

On its face, this amendment is requiring that any further Casino/Gambling legislation in the state of Florida depends on the voters passing amendment referendums like this one to allow it.

Just a reminder, gambling is not a harmless vice. It impoverishes people, puts some into debt. While states could raise revenues from managing it - just look at the Lotto system - it can well be a regressive revenue methid. Making it a requirement for the voters to approve of the matter overall doesn't seem like a bad idea.

It's just - like the Tampa Bay Times editorial notes - this is more a matter of the legislature. Requiring a referendum on gambling all the time means extra footwork and debating at a level that most voters might actually tune out.

Personally, I'm ambivalent about this amendment. I'm not a huge fan of gambling - although I may buy a Powerball ticket if the jackpot is over $150 Million (it is?) - but I don't think making extra roadblocks to the debate is a way to resolve it as a political issue.

Amendment Four: Felon Voter Enfranchisement

This is the big one.

One of the Republicans' biggest tricks holding onto power as a Minority Party has been voter suppression. One of the best weapons they have on that is the current laws that prevent convicted felons from keeping their right to vote even AFTER they've served their time and passed parole. SEE Jeb Bush's voter purge before 2000.

Currently there's a system in place where ex-felons have to petition the Governor's office for reinstatement for voting rights, and that is a system where clear bias will filter out all of one party in favor of the Governor's (which has been Republican since 1998). It's a clearly unfair process.

This amendment makes it automatically restore Right-to-Vote for people with prior convictions, except murder and violent sex crimes (those still have to go through the Governor's office, apparently).

This is, essentially, the key to allowing non-violent offenders - mostly those imprisoned for things like drug possession or burglary - regain their rights as citizens with a voice with their vote.

I will argue this is necessity: Isn't the whole point of parole and reform to allow criminals a chance - their RIGHT - to rejoin society? They served their time: Denying the vote is just further punishment. This would be positive reinforcement to encourage engagement in community. This amendment also weakens the abuse of a legal system that has a troubling habit of imprisoning the poor as a means of silencing their power to speak out.

This amendment needs to pass, Florida. Our legislature and Governor's office will fight it because it improves the rights of the poor and the minorities who suffer a disproportionate amount under the current system. Who profits from this amendment? Every resident will.

Vote YES.

Amendment Five: Two-Thirds Legislative Vote to Raise Taxes or Fees

If this looks familiar, it's tied into the ongoing wingnut obsession to prevent governments from EVER raising taxes to pay for sh-t.

Thing is, we've SEEN what happens when a state government is unable to break past the 2/3rd tax rule. California had a rule like that - Prop 13 - and for decades they faced ongoing budget woes because enough Republicans squashed any attempt to pass that hurdle.

So California voters turned against the Republicans and voted them out of power. That and their anti-immigrant stance pretty much killed the California GOP.

If this amendment passes, regardless of which party is in control of Florida's government, we will not be able to balance our state's budget through sharing the costs via taxes. Our state would have to cut services, cut school funding, cut environmental support, cut transportation/road repairs, cut family services (which is already an underfunded godless nightmare), cut food stamps, cut everything.

You wanna cap on spending for government services? Force your GOP legislator to man up and get his hands dirty instead of rigging the rules to make it harder no matter what.

This should be the easiest f-cking NO vote on your ballot. This is the Far Right's attempt to kill public services in our state.

Amendment Six: Victims Rights, Judicial Retirement Cap, Agency Deferral in Court Cases

This is one of the Commission ballots, and you're gonna start noticing a weird pattern of... well, dumping different ideas into one container and trying to sell it as a box of gold.

This Amendment actually has three parts: There is a Victims Right part known as Marsy's Law that tries to protect crime victims and their families from harassment and intimidation; There is a part that increases the retirement age of state judges to 75 (to match most others' states); And there is a part that blocks the state courts from deferring to a state agency's expertise on interpreting a law. This is the sticking point: Courts like to get input from the agencies implementing certain laws because the legislatures tend to leave the wording of their laws vague to clear interpretation. By blocking that input, this Amendment would force the courts to rely only on the legislature's intent (which is, again, vague because politicians hate getting nailed to anything).

Just on the third part, you shouldn't consider this Amendment. But the annoying thing here: This is bad law. There's three different provisions to this amendment that ought to be voted on separately.

They're trying to get people to vote for the one thing that matters - the victims' rights - to one thing that the legislature ought to do itself - raise retirement age - and then to one thing that would make our legal system worse - denying courts from getting administrative input.

Just vote NO on this. It's a trap, people.

Amendment Seven: First Responders and Military Survivor Benefits, College Fees, and College System

This is the same problem as Amendment Six. WHAT THE F-CK DOES SURVIVOR BENEFITS HAVE TO DO WITH COLLEGE REFORMS?

Okay. Okay, let's look at the provision that makes this a bad amendment: Forcing the state universities to get a supermajority (9 out of 13) vote from their governing board to raise fees. College has been getting costly, yes, but there are reasons for that and like it or not the universities have to raise fees to keep their doors open. Making it harder to do so would force schools to shut down programs or worse close altogether (SEE the near-destruction of LSU a few years back).

Another thing about the Survivor Benefits portion is that it's useless: Military survivors already get benefits from the federal government and what does this amendment even have to do with that?

Just Vote NO. Please. This is a bad idea. Force the legislature to do its damn job.

Amendment Eight: Already blocked.

Ugh. Let's not even look at why...

Amendment Nine: Offshore Oil Drilling, and Office Vaping

This is an amendment making it harder to drill for oil offshore - which can cause environmental catastrophes - and also make it harder to smoke electronically - called vaping - indoors.

...WHAT THE EVERF-CKING HELL IS THIS?

WHAT DOES OFFSHORE DRILLING HAVE TO DO WITH VAPING???

Okay, look, I know this is an environmental concern, and workplace air quality concern, BUT YOU SHOULD NOT SANDWICH THESE TWO THINGS TOGETHER AND CALL IT A MEAL. I mean, Christ, just focus on the offshore drilling, THAT'S a serious concern and should pass. The vaping thing should be done separately in an actual legislative law. WTF. WTF!!!!!

Ahem. I know people wanna block the offshore drilling and I'm tempted to vote YES myself, so most voters will look past the vaping thing. But seriously people, don't encourage this sh-t.

Amendment Ten: County Agencies and Executive Offices Reforms, Change of Legislative Dates

This is another odd one of mashed-up ideas.

• Requires the state to form a Department of Veterans Affairs (?) and a Department of Counter-Terrorism (???),
• Require the State legislature to convene on the Second Tuesday of January every even year (I think the legislature is a part-time job but do they even show up for odd-numbered years???),
• Prevents county governments from removing certain agencies like the Sheriff's Department and require those departments are elective offices.

My mind boggles at the problems that would arise from a Department of Counter-Terror, something that ought to be and IS handled at a FEDERAL Level. It may help for a retirement state like Florida to have a Veterans Affairs office but how much of it would be overlap with the Federal VA? This just seems like bureaucratic overreach... and I am terrified of the implications of what a Republican-led government would think of as a terrorist group (those a-holes still haven't explained why they spy on Quakers all the time!).

The second part about requiring a different starting date to open the State Lege ought to stand on its own.

What I see happening here is the third part of this bad amendment: What this is doing doesn't make the local governments more responsive to voters, this is making those governments more dependent on state intervention. The state will force certain counties to keep open agencies that they may need to close (if even temporarily) should those agencies go bad or corrupt (hello, problematic Sheriff's departments).

The first two parts of this amendment cannot cover up how much the third part looks and smells like a bad deal. Vote NO on this.

Amendment Eleven: A Catch-All Amendment for Repealing a Lot of Junk?

There's three weird things here as well:

• Getting rid of a constitutional prohibition for "foreign-born persons ineligible for citizenship" from owning or inheriting property;
• Clearing out an obsolete provision for high-speed trains in Florida; 
• Ending a confusing provision that "an amendment to a criminal statute does not affect the prosecution of a crime committed before the statute's amendment."

The first part gets rid of aged legal terminology for an Alien Land law that's racist and already proved unconstitutional in other states, so it's something the courts could well take care of on its own. The rest of this looks like it's weeding out bad amendments from earlier eras... but again this is stuff that needs to be done in separate amendments, not one goddamn package of junk.

On this one, I'd vote YES to get rid of the racist stuff in the first part, but I'll be holding my nose when I do so.

Amendment Twelve: Compensation for Public Officials

On the face of it, this amendment "prohibits public officials from lobbying for compensation during the official's term in office and for six years after the official leaves office, and prohibits public officials from using the office to obtain a disproportionate benefit."

It doesn't look wrong, but when you consider it's by the Commission that's offered up a bunch of junk amendments, you need to take a closer look.

This makes it a constitutional limit on lobbying that in most respects should be an Ethics law the legislature should pass and enforce. Putting it into the constitution makes it harder to reform or fix it should unexpected consequences turn up.

I'd hesitate on voting YES on this, if only because - again - this may not need to be so set in stone.

Amendment Thirteen: Dog Races Betting Prohibition

This one again is something that the State legislature could pass as a law, but they're handing it over to the voters because the Lege couldn't be bothered.

The effects of this amendment would likely end dog racing as a sport in Florida, and all things considered I don't think it's an industry that's been doing well lately (the mistreatment of greyhounds is a major problem). On that as a moral issue, I'd vote YES, but again the Lege should be doing this, not the voters.


So that's the amendment ballot for Florida this November.

One troubling thing I'm seeing this year is a mashup of both reform ideas and reactionary sabotage being shoved together in Amendments that would otherwise be treated as separate issues. It's as though the Florida Legislature and the Commission are trying to plug bad laws into the system by using reform ideas that would appeal to an increasingly progressive voter base in Florida (note that a lot of Floridians are pro-marijuana, pro-schools, and pro-environment against the desires of the GOP leadership).

So all in all, PLEASE stay focused on Amendment Four, and probably consider and vote YES on Nine and Thirteen: Make sure those pass. Of the ones to reject, PLEASE reject Amendments One, Two, Five, Six, Seven, and Ten. Seriously, make damn sure One, Two and Five DIE DIE DIE because those will kill our state's ability to raise revenues when we NEED to.

And again a reminder: STOP F-CKING VOTING REPUBLICAN. We've had 25-30 years of their sh-t dominating the Florida State legislature and we've got poisoned waters, collapsing understaffed schools, and an ongoing healthcare crisis that THEY are making worse. It is TIME for different leadership, one that DOES support better education, cleaner environment, and affordable health (hint: DEMOCRATS, YOU PEEPS).

Sigh. Just let me be 100 percent in the right this year, O Lord...