Good Riddance! LGBT-Hating NC-Gov Concedes Defeat

Nearly four weeks after the election, North Carolina Governor Pat McRory has (finally!) conceded defeat in the last unresolved gubernatorial election of 2016. The Republican trailed Democrat North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper by just over 10,000 votes (out of nearly 4.5 million cast), which is just enough to forestall an automatic recount. McRory had claimed massive voter fraud and had initiated a recount in heavily Democratic Durham County but when few votes turned up he gave up on Monday. Republicans found the result in the Governor's race hard to swallow because Donald Trump won the state's 15 electoral votes by nearly 4 percentage points and U.S. Senator Richard Burr also won re-election. But McRory earned widespread notoriety and opprobrium for championing a controversial bill called HB-2 which overturned an LGBT civil rights ordinance in Charlotte, NC and explicitly permitted discrimination against LGBT individuals in the state.

Gee, maybe the difference between the electoral fortunes of Trump, Burr and McRory in North Carolina was a repudiation of explicit hostility to civil rights?

VIDEO: EQCA Encourages LGBT Community To Vote In June 7 California Primary

It's exactly two weeks until California's 2016 Statewide Primary Election on June 7th. Equality California, the state's largest LGBT political advocacy organization, is urging the LGBT community to vote, and will be running PSA on television in important markets like Los Angeles, San Diego and Palm Springs.

Today is Women's Equality Day! 95th Anniversary of Women's Right To Vote!

Celebrate! Today is August 26th, also known as Women's Equality Day, celebrating the 95th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which expanded the franchise to include women.

The measure was actually ratified on August 20, 1920, and reads:

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.Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Oh, happy day!

Saturday Politics: Voting Rights Becomes Salient Issue As Election Day Approaches

The fight to exercise the right to vote has become more salient as Election Day gets closer and closer. Republicans are generally trying to make voting more difficult while Democrats are trying to make sure that everyone can vote. Legislatures in red states where Republicans have full control have passed multiple measures reducing early voting days, enacting voter identification laws in the name of "reducing voter fraud."

In the past week there have been important court actions from federal judges (including the U.S. Supreme Court) involving voting rights in states like Wisconsin, Texas, North Carolina and Ohio.

Prominent Election Law expert Rick Hasen describes these actions in an article for Slate magazine:

As I explained in a recent Slate column, ultimately at issue in the Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Texas cases is how broadly courts are going to intervene to protect voting rights in states where Republican legislatures have made it harder to register and to vote. All the cases raise claims under the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Ultimately, the Supreme Court could well side with the conservative judges in the courts below who have read these protections narrowly and not worried too much about the risk of voter disenfranchisement, rather than siding with the more liberal judges who have blocked restrictive laws for hurting minority voters, poor voters, and others. 

But none of these cases so far reached (or will reach) the Supreme Court as fully formed final cases. Instead, they have come up on emergency requests to block lower court orders that were put into effect just weeks before the election. The rulings have had election officials scrambling in Ohio, North Carolina, and Wisconsin to comply with new, and sometimes conflicting, court orders.

Meanwhile, in Illinois progressives have an opportunity to go on the offensive in the "War on Voting" this November when voters will decide whether to include a voting rights amendment to their state constitution.

The Illinois Right To Vote amendment reads:

No person shall be denied the right to register to vote or to cast a ballot in an election based on race, color, ethnicity, status as a member of a language minority, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or income.

It may come as a surprise but there is no official right to vote in the United States Constitution. It seems to me that getting such language in as many states as possible is a necessary (but not sufficient!) step to insure that our democracy remains functional.

SCOTUS Fatally Wounds The 1965 Voting Right Act

Today the GOP's War on Voting was extended to the Supreme Court, when the 5 Republican justices (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia and Kennedy) voted to effectively kill one of the most significant federal civil rights statutes in the United States, the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Just as the words "fatally wounded" are are used to deliberately obfuscate people from understanding that the subject has been killed, so did the majority opinion fatally wound the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in Shelby County v Holder. All attention was on Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, so the opinion upheld that section of the law but struck down Section 4 of the law. However, Section 5 can not be implemented without Section 4.

NBC News reports:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the map that determines which states must get federal permission before they change their voting laws. The ruling, a 5-4 decision by Chief Justice John Roberts, leaves the future of the law deeply uncertain because it will be up to a sharply divided Congress to redraw the map. 

“Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions,” Roberts wrote for the court. Under the law, nine mostly Southern states must get permission from the Justice Department or a special panel of three federal judges before they make changes. The rule also applies to 12 cities and 57 counties elsewhere.

Basically, despite the fact the VRA was reauthorized nearly unanimously by Congress in 2006 (it passed 98-0 in the Senate) the Supreme Court GOP majority struck down the current formula found in VRA Section 4 that the Justice Department uses to determine which jurisdictions need to have their election laws "pre-cleared" before they can go into effect. Without that formula, the Justice Department will not be able to challenge provisions it suspects are being issued (primarily by Republican politicians) to dilute the voting rights of people of color throughout the United States. In the 2012 election the bizarre laws and procedures GOP governors and Secretaries of State attempted to enact to prevent racial and ethnic minorities from voting became increasingly obvious and resulted in a huge voter turnout by those groups, aiding President Obama's re-election  in the end.

This is a huge loss for people who believe in civil rights and an America where all citizens have equal rights. Chief Justice John Roberts knows that by giving this Congress the option to pass a new federal law with a formula to give the the federal government the right to intervene in elections where a majority of Republican House members represent is simply not going to happen any time soon. Most definitely not before the 2014 midterm elections, and probably not before the 2016 presidential election. (Note that the next Congress will most likely be even more hostile to the civil rights of racial and ethnic minorities and actions by the federal government to protect those rights than the current Congress is, and that's saying a lot!) So, basically the Court has killed the VRA while "keeping their fingerprints off the murder weapon" as MSNBC's Chris Hayes said on TV today.

Happily, the LGBT rights community is stepping up to the plate and denouncing the Supreme Court's actions in Shelby County with a joint statement:

We, America’s leading LGBT advocacy organizations, join civil rights organizations – and indeed, all Americans whom this law has served to protect – in expressing acute dismay at today’s ruling. Not only had Congress repeatedly reaffirmed the need for this bedrock civil rights protection, but authoritative voices from across America had filed amicus briefs urging the court not to undermine the law: the NAACP; the American Bar Association; the Navajo Nation; the states of New York, California, Mississippi and North Carolina; numerous former Justice Department officials charged with protecting voting rights; dozens of U.S. senators and representatives; and many others. 

These varied and powerful voices attest to the self-evident reality that racial protections are still needed in voting in this country. As recently as last year’s elections, political partisans resorted to voter suppression laws and tactics aimed at reducing the votes of people of color.  Voting rights protections, which have long served our nation’s commitment to equality and justice, should not be cast aside now. The court has done America a grave disservice, and we will work with our coalition partners to undo the damage inflicted by this retrogressive ruling.

The statement was signed by the usual suspects: The Task Force, HRC, Pride at Work, Immigration Equality, Lambda Legal, Freedom To Marry, National Center for Lesbian Rights,  GMHC, GLAD, National Black Justice Coalition, Family Equality Council, PFLAG, and others.

The graphic at the top of this post is from the Williams Institute analysis of where African-American same-sex couples live throughout the United States. So, a diminution of the electoral rights and concomitant political power of racial and ethnic minorities does impact the LGBT community, because the LGBT community encompasses all racial and ethnic minorities.

Hat/tip to Joe.My.God

DIRTY TRICK: Anti-Gay, Anti-Obama SMS Spam

Things that make you go hmmmm! 6 days before the presidential election the dirty tricks are already beginning, with apparently thousands of people are starting to receive spam SMS text messages with anti-Obama, anti-gay messages. The texts say things like "Obama supports same-sex relationships. Voting for him will destroy the sanctity of marriage" and "Obama supports transgender marriage in America. Obamas values are just wrong." (This second text message is really just amusing and bizarre--bad punctuation and completely clueless. "transgender marriage"? What the heck is that?)

The largest LGBT political organization in the country, Human Rights Campaign, has filed an official complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The anonymous texts, which may be a violation of federal law, have prompted HRC to file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. 

"It's unsurprising that our opponents are employing such underhanded tactics and trying to attack equality from behind shrouds of secrecy," said HRC Vice President of Communications Fred Sainz in a statement announcing that the nation's largest LGBT-rights organization would ask the FCC to investigate the incident. 

"HRC is filing a complaint with the FCC so that these types of organizations know there are consequences for their actions," Sainz added. "It's unacceptable to launch these types of despicable attacks from dark corners, and it’s incredibly irresponsible to send out unsolicited messages to people who have no desire to receive this type of vitriol."

Although it is illegal to send spam text messages, apparently the texts originated as emails, and using email-to-text technology, the perpetrators may be exploiting a loophole in federal law.

Saturday Politics: Update on the GOP War on Voting

There are now 17 days to go before the election and early voting has started in many states around the country. This seems like a good time to get an update on what has become to be known as the Republican War on Voting.

Most analysts think that many more Democrats than Republican have taken advantage of early voting procedures so far, and this is most likely one of the reasons Republicans have been trying so hard to suppressing voting rights all over the country, by making it harder for people to register to vote, by literally dropping likely Democrats from voting rolls, reducing early voter hours and by making voting more difficult by enacting voter identification laws. I have previously discussed how racial animus fuels this movement to restrict voting.

Of course, the most notorious of these battles in the War on Voting have occurred in some of the most important states, namely Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. I have previously discussed the nakedly partisan actions of the Republican Secretary of State in Ohio to restrict early voting in order to make it more difficult for people to vote in his state.

Ari Berman of The Nation has the deets on Ohio:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously rejected an appeal by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted to overturn a lower court decision upholding early voting in Ohio three days before the election. The ruling was a major victory for voting rights—and yet another defeat for voter suppression efforts—allowing Ohio voters to cast a ballot when it’s most convenient and hopefully forestalling the long lines that marred the outcome of the 2004 election in the state. 

That’s the good news. The bad news? Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted swiftly limited early voting hours on those crucial three days to 8 am–2 pm on Saturday, November 3; 1–5 pm on Sunday, November 4; and 8am–2 pm on Monday, November 5. That means Ohio voters will have a total of only sixteen hours to cast a ballot during those three days. And before the weekend before the election, Ohio voters will still not be able to cast a ballot in-person on nights or weekends. 

In 2008, the most populous counties in Ohio allowed more time for early voting—both in terms of days (thirty-five) and hours (on nights and weekends in many places). For the three days before the election, early voting locations were open for a total of twenty-four hours in Columbus’s Franklin County (8-5 on Saturday, 1-5 on Sunday and 8-7 on Monday) and 18 and a half hours in Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County (9-1 on Saturday, 1-5 on Sunday, 8:30-7 pm on Monday). During those final three pre-election days in 2008, 148,000 votes were cast and “wait times stretched 2 1/2 hours,” reported the Columbus Dispatch.

While the Huffington Post reported on the suspension of the most odious aspects of the Pennsylvania voter id law by a judge on October 2:

In a much-anticipated ruling, Commonwealth Court Judge Robert E. Simpson Jr. ordered that voters without government-issued photo ID should be allowed to cast regular ballots. 

[...] 

Simpson's injunction "will have the effect of extending the express transition provisions of [the new law] through the general election," the judge wrote. That means that, just like during the primary election, voters will be asked for ID but still be allowed to vote if they don't have it. 

The law as passed by the Republican legislature and signed by the Republican governor had only allowed people without ID to cast "provisional" ballots, which would be thrown out unless they returned with ID within six days.
The Pennsyvlania legislature is one of several that, after Republicans took control in 2010, passed legislation to make it harder, rather than easier, to vote.

The ruling doesn't stop the state and other groups from publicizing false information that voter id is still required in Pennsylvania, so the good guys are going back to court to get that activity prevented under a new injunction.

Meanwhile in Florida, Think Progress reports on Republican Governor's failed attempt to strike as many 180,000 people from the voter rolls has fizzled to a list with just 198 names on it:

Initially, Florida identified 180,000 potential non-citizens to be purged from the voter rolls. That list was subsequently narrowed down to 2600 “sure fire” non-citizens. When it became clear in early June that even the smaller list was riddled with errors, elections officials stopped the effort. 

According to the Miami Herald, Florida has sent just 198 names to local election supervisors. (Of those, no more than 36 have ever cast a ballot.) But there is already evidence that the latest list still is not accurate.

And just for completeness the Los Angeles Times reported this week that a Republican operative in Virginia was arrested for illegally throwing completed voter registration forms in the garbage:

A man who was being paid to register voters by the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested Thursday after he was seen dumping eight registration forms into a dumpster. 

Colin Small, 31, was working as a supervisor as part of a registration operation in eight swing states financed by the Republican National Committee. Small, of Phoenixville, Pa., was first hired by Strategic Allied Consulting, a firm that was fired by the party after suspect voter forms surfaced in Florida and other states. 

[...] 

Strategic Allied is owned by Nathan Sproul, an Arizona political consultant for Republicans whose companies have faced charges in past elections of submitting forged forms and of dumping Democratic registrations. None of the charges were proved, and Sproul continues to do get-out-the-vote work for conservative causes this election.

Hopefully the election will not be close enough in any state for the War on Voting to actually determine the result but honestly that is unlikely.

Obama's Judges Confirmed At Much Slower Rate

Today is the first Monday in October, which is traditionally known as the beginning of the Supreme Court's term. While there are a number of blockbuster cases before the High Court (the 1965 Voting Rights Act, affirmative action in higher education, the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, California's Proposition 8) I want to use this opportunity to talk about federal judges, not the decisions they make.

Doug Kendall at Slate has shown that even uncontroversial federal judicial nominees are now typically getting delayed by the United States Senate for 200 days or more, which is a dramatic increase from the practice as recently as four presidential administrations ago.

The gist is this: The average confirmation time for uncontroversial circuit court nominees rose from 64.5 days under Reagan to 227.3 days under Obama. There simply are no Obama appeals court nominees who make it through the confirmation process in 100 days or less—whereas nearly 30 percent of President George W. Bush’s nominees sped through in that amount of time. Similarly, the average waiting time for uncontroversial district court nominees increased from 69.9 days under Reagan to 204.8 days under President Obama. And the number of district court nominees who wait more than 200 days has doubled from George W.’s time to Obama’s.

This change can be graphically illustrated in the images at the top of the post. The facts which leap up at me from the graphics are that zero percentage (i.e. none!) of Obama's federal appellate court judges were approved in less than 100 days, while more than 25% of President George W. Bush's nominees were approved that quickly. Also, less than 2% of the President Obama's federal district court judges were approved in 100 days or less. This basically means that the days of rapid approval of federal judges has basically become a thing of the past.

Hat/tip to Think Progress

Do Republicans Believe In Democracy? It Seems Not

It's starting to get sorta obvious that the Republican Party doesn't really believe in the principle that democracy is strengthened when voter participation is increased. In fact, they really are trying really, really hard to make it as hard as possible for minority voters in urban settings to vote, using the presumable non-partisan machinery of the state to enact this vision of a lily-white electorate.

The Nation magazine has a great article describing some of the shenanigans that are going on now to make sure that Ohio delivers it's all-important electoral college votes for the Republican nominee:

The real story from Ohio is how cutbacks to early voting will disproportionately disenfranchise African-American voters in Ohio’s most populous counties. African-Americans, who supported Obama over McCain by 95 points in Ohio, comprise 28 percent of the population of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County but accounted for 56 percent of early voters in 2008, according to research done by Norman Robbins of the Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates and Mark Salling of Cleveland State University. In Columbus’s Franklin County, African-Americans comprise 20 percent of the population but made up 34 percent of early voters.

Now, in heavily Democratic cities like Cleveland, Columbus, Akron and Toledo, early voting hours will be limited to 8 am until 5 pm on weekdays beginning on October 1, with no voting at night or during the weekend, when it’s most convenient for working people to vote. Republican election commissioners have blocked Democratic efforts to expand early voting hours in these counties, where the board of elections are split equally between Democratic and Republican members. Ohio Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted has broken the tie by intervening on behalf of his fellow Republicans. (According to the Board of Elections, 82% of early voters in Franklin County voted early on nights or weekends, which Republicans have curtailed. The number who voted on nights or weekends was nearly 50% in Cuyahoga County.)

"I cannot create unequal access from one county board to another, and I must also keep in mind resources available to each county,” Husted said in explaining his decision to deny expanded early voting hours in heavily Democratic counties. Yet in solidly Republican counties like Warren and Butler, GOP election commissioners have approved expanded early voting hours on nights and weekends. Noted the Cincinnati Enquirer: “The counties where Husted has joined other Republicans to deny expanded early voting strongly backed then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008, while most of those where the extra hours will stand heavily supported GOP nominee John McCain.” Moreover, budget constraints have not stopped Republican legislators from passing costly voter ID laws across the map since 2010.

Read that excerpt again. They are expanding early voting hours in Republican-leaning counties while simultaneously denying similar efforts in Democrat-leaning counties! This is why the identity (and political affiliation) of the Secretary of State is so important. I hope that this story becomes more widely known and that people take measures now to combat this craziness and make sure to exercise their right to vote regardless of how difficult the GOP makes it, in every state of the Union.

I also hope that the Department of Justice takes a serious look at these practices and uses every tool it has to  try to enforce basic levels of equal access to the polls throughout Ohio and other states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida and Colorado where concerted efforts are being engaged in to reduce the votes of Black and Latino voters, primarily Black voters. Republicans know that for every Black vote they can prevent from being cast, there's a close to 95% probability they have reduced Barack Obama's presidential vote total.

What's so astonishing here is that I'm sure that GOP operatives just consider this as "politics as usual" while one would think that there are some principles that would supersede partisanship and the desire to win at all cost, and that is the notion that Democracy (and democratic principles) are at stake here.

hat/tip to Maddow Blog.

STUDY: Racial Animus Fuels Voter ID Laws

One of the big stories of 2012 as the United States approaches the presidential election on November 6 has been what progressives like to call "the war on voting." It's pretty much an article of faith among most people who are not Republicans that our Democracy is strengthened if more people vote. However, in many states with a Republican majority in the legislature and a Republican governor (like Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida) due to the low-turnout 2010 elections, Republicans have passed "voter identification" (sometimes called "vote protection" laws by Republicans or "voter suppression" laws by Democrats) which appear to have the effect of reducing the number of people who will be allowed to cast a legal vote.

Voter ID Laws Have Disparate Impact On Racial Minorities
The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has analyzed the impact of these voter identification laws on various racial groups, poor people and young people and the results are striking:

The 11 percent of eligible voters who lack the required photo ID must travel to a designated government office to obtain one. Yet many citizens will have trouble making this trip. In the 10 states with restrictive voter ID laws:

• Nearly 500,000 eligible voters do not have access to a vehicle and live more than 10 miles from the nearest state ID-issuing office open more than two days a week. Many of them live in rural areas with dwindling public transportation options.

• More than 10 million eligible voters live more than 10 miles from their nearest state ID-issuing office open more than two days a week.

• 1.2 million eligible black voters and 500,000 eligible Hispanic voters live more than 10 miles from their nearest ID-issuing office open more than two days a week. People of color are more likely to be disenfranchised by these laws since they are less likely to have photo ID than the general population.

• Many ID-issuing offices maintain limited business hours. For example, the office in Sauk City, Wisconsin is open only on the fifth Wednesday of any month. But only four months in 2012 — February, May, August, and October — have five Wednesdays. In other states — Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas — many part-time ID-issuing offices are in the rural regions with the highest concentrations of people of color and people in poverty.

More than 1 million eligible voters in these states fall below the federal poverty line and live more than 10 miles from their nearest ID-issuing office open more than two days a week. These voters may be particularly affected by the significant costs of the documentation required to obtain a photo ID. Birth certificates can cost between $8 and $25. Marriage licenses, required for married women whose birth certificates include a maiden name, can cost between $8 and $20. By comparison, the notorious poll tax — outlawed during the civil rights era — cost $10.64 in current dollars.

A poll tax by any other name is still a poll tax (and is therefore just as unconstitutional)!

Joan McCarter at DailyKos points out that the suppressive effect on the voting rights of these constituencies, all of whom tend to vote more prevalently for Democrats than Republicans, is precisely what the people who passed the laws intended.

Voter ID Laws Are Fueled By Racial Animus
One interesting question is what is fueling the drive for voter identification laws now and another academic study has analyzed that question and come to a conclusion (that is unsurprising to some) that it involves racism.

The University of Delaware's Center for Political Communication recently conducted a national survey of American voters to discover what kind of voters support voter identification laws and demonstrated that support for the measures is highly correlated with racial resentment, regardless of party affiliation.

In fact, while most Republicans and conservatives strongly support voter identification laws regardless of their level of racial resentment, it is Democrats and liberals who have more racial resentment that are more likely to support voter identification laws.

The survey reveals strong partisan and ideological divisions on racial resentment [see Figure]. Republicans and conservatives have the highest “racial resentment” scores, and Democrats and liberals have the lowest; Independents and moderates are in the middle. In addition, Democrats and liberals are least supportive of voter ID laws, whereas Republicans and conservatives are most supportive. The link between “racial resentment” and support for such laws persists even after controlling for the effects of partisanship, ideology, and a range of demographic variables.

Read the last sentence again. Regardless of partisanship (Republican or Democrat) or ideology (conservative or liberal) or other demographics, people who support voter identification laws are correlated with people who harbor racial resentment. There's also the matter-of-fact reporting that Republicans and conservatives have the highest levels of racial resentment; it is not just partisanship which animates the Right's energetic efforts to replace the first black Democratic president.

Hopefully, federal courts who are considering challenges to these voter identification laws in places like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania (which "just happen" to be the swing states where the outcome of the 2012 presidential election may be decided) will also consider the unconstitutional disparate racial impact of these laws as well as the evidence that that they are fueled by unconstitutional racial animus.

Our nation's democratic tradition is one of the wonders of the modern world, but it is vulnerable to partisan manipulation, especially in a close election, because all one has to do is produce a disturbance or perturbation which either (more likely) suppresses voter turnout of your opposition or enhances voter turnout of your supporters on Election Day to swing an election in your favor. Once Election Day is over, it's over and the results will stand, even if those results were tainted by partisan trickery. And once a group is able to achieve a result that does not reflect what the majority of voters actually intended (some would argue that this already has happened!) it is basically the end of our nation's democratic tradition.