Tag Archives: voter suppression

Political Rants

Voting the bums in for the last time.

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Okay, so the “For the People” act did not overcome the filibuster this past week. That was no surprise, of course. Neither was the fact that Republican senators made no effort to specify exactly why they thought the provisions of the act would negatively affect Republicans. They speak in billboards, these people – short, snappy phrases like “power grab” and “stop the steal,” with no key as to what the hell they’re talking about.

But let’s be clear: in statehouses across the country, GOP legislatures and governors are putting the mechanisms in place to commandeer the next election, regardless of who gets the most votes. The “For the People” act would have rolled much of those back. Without some restraint from the Federal level, it’s going to be very difficult for poorer and disenfranchised people to access the ballot in coming elections.

Nothing new under the gun

Republicans have been working on this stuff for a long time. They’ve been pushing voter i.d. laws, rolling back early voting, and resisting policies like automatic voter registration for decades. During the Bush II administration, they even fired a bunch of U.S. Attorneys for not aggressively prosecuting voter fraud cases (which, frankly, were practically non-existent even then). The reason is simple: the more people vote, the more they tend to lose because their stated policies are so deeply unpopular.

Also, they have long tended to appeal to their constituents’ baser instincts – namely, fear of immigrants, fear and hatred of dark people more generally, fear of crime, etc. Democrats have resorted to this as well, but less so over time as white people have become a proportionately smaller part of the electorate. (Many of them do accommodate the views of their Republican colleagues, of course.)

GOP election strategy: one and done

There is, however, a difference in kind, not degree, about the current “conservative” movement. Now they truly seem determined not only to steal elections via legal and extralegal means, but to set themselves up so that they permanently remain in power. Trump is not what I would call a “thought leader” on the right, but he does have utter contempt for rules, restrictions, and institutions, and I think he deployed this to supercharge the autocratic tendencies in the Republican party, which now seems enamored with his erratic, dictatorial behavior.

Readers of this blog will know that I had my doubts last year over whether Trump would leave office if he lost the election. Based on what we know he and his cohorts attempted to do, I think that sentiment was justified. In all honesty, if Trump or some Trump clone runs for president in 2024, I think there’s a better than good chance that, with the support of these GOP legislators and governors, that candidate will be named the winner. And once they pull that off, staying permanently becomes that much easier.

Keith was kinda right

At the beginning of Trump’s term, Keith Olbermann put out a series of videos attacking him as a usurper, a criminal, and an autocrat. While I think the Russia, Russia, Russia stuff was way overblown, he was kind of right about Trump’s congeniality towards the idea of ruling like a freaking King Rat. I, for one, will not underestimate the danger of autocracy again, and I strongly suggest that you take the same precaution.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Richer and poorer.

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This was a week when the Senate saw fit to go home for a long weekend while enhanced jobless benefits expired along with a ban on evictions for federally supported renters. It was also a week when the richest dude on the planet, along with the heads of other monopolistic tech firms, testified in front of a House subcommittee. I realize the focus of this hearing was antitrust, and that is a more-than-worthy enterprise, but I had hoped for at least one exchange that would go something like this:

Congressmember: Mr. Bezos, how much money do you have?
Bezos: What time is it? 11:25 a.m.? Uhhhh … $153 billion.
Congressmember: Don’t you think that’s too much?
Bezos: Excuse me?
Congressmember: Nobody needs anywhere near that much money, Mr. Bezos. Why don’t you leave more of it on the table? Why does so much of it end up with you? That seems like a really strong sign that something’s drastically wrong with the way you run your business. What you need is stronger workplace regulation and confiscatory taxation. I yield back my time.

Yeah, that didn’t happen. Not surprised.

For the Senate’s part, they appear to have rediscovered their concern about deficits, perhaps because they’re anticipating a loss in the upcoming election. Best restart the national debt scare talk now so it doesn’t seem as contrived in January. Still, it kind of amazes me that at a time when we have more people out of a job than we did at the height of the Great Depression – and we got there in a matter of weeks – Mitch and the boys are getting cold feet about spending federal dollars to pump the tires up a bit. Expect this to return to an obsession level policy if there’s a Biden administration next January, and expect plenty of the never Trumpers to be right on board.

It’s not surprising that the Senate Republicans (and most of the Democrats) act in the best interests of their constituents – rich people. There was a time, though, when they tried a little harder to conceal it. Maybe they think it doesn’t have an electoral impact. Maybe with the extremist gerrymandering they accomplished in 2010 and all the voter suppression laws they’ve put in place since article five of the Voting Rights Act was struck down – maybe with all that, they feel they can still pull it out. Well, maybe they’re right, but we’ll see. I kind of think their tactics are optimized for an economic circumstance that’s significantly less toxic than the current state of affairs. Many of the top-tier Democrats still act like it’s the 1990s; I think this is true of the Republicans as well. It’s just possible that their callous disregard for the voting public may well bite them on the ass … hard.

There haven’t been this many people down and out since the 1930s. And the people who aren’t feeling it now will feel it soon enough. That simple fact makes the politics of this moment very unpredictable.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

That thing that matters.

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While you were looking over there, this week the Trump administration set the wheels in motion to lock-in a structural electoral advantage for white people and conservatives for the next generation. They argued before the Supreme Court in favor of including a citizenship question on the 2020 Census, challenges to which have been upheld by lower courts, and it looks pretty promising for them, based on comments from the bench. A decision in favor of the administration would be very bad news for any hope of not only electoral and policy victories in the short term, but also equitable distribution of services and resources in the years and decades to come, so this is probably literally the most important story in the country this week, and the coverage has been relatively cursory.

The fact is, there is already a slanted playing field, tilted toward the Republican party’s core constituencies, regardless of what Trump claims. Just look at what happened in 2016. For the second time in four presidential election cycles, a GOP candidate won the presidency with an electoral majority and a popular vote minority, only this time, the discrepancy between the two results was far greater than it was in 2000. The 2016 election was 304 Trump to 227 Clinton in the electoral college, but 48.2% Clinton to 46.1% Trump in the popular vote – a nearly 3 million vote plurality. Gore’s popular vote margin of victory in 2000 was one-tenth the size, but he only lost the electoral college by 4 votes (271 Bush to 266 Gore). Not a positive trend, and the story in the Senate is very similar – outsized influence on the part of white voters in more rural regions has us gradually drifting towards a persistent GOP majority. (Don’t even get me started on gerrymandering.)

Elections have consequences. This is one.

The Census case before the Supreme Court is potentially the final nail in the coffin of progressive hopes for some recovery from the losses we’ve suffered over the past decade. As I’ve said previously, elections have consequences – namely, a solid reactionary majority on the Supreme Court, an increasingly reactionary bench in the lower courts, the undermining of voting rights, reproductive rights, immigrant rights, environmental policy, you name it. Activism is vital, crucial, particularly as it relates to ground-level organizing, but we cannot neglect a progressive electoral strategy – one that both strives to move the country in a more leftward direction, while at minimum reducing harm to the most vulnerable populations.

We failed in the latter respect in 2016, particularly, losing our last chance to steer the Supreme Court in a new direction. We must fight on, but the road ahead is steeper than it was before.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Week one.

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Well, we got through the first week alive. That’s the good news. I had the creeping fear that Herr Mr. Hair might mistake the biscuit for his smartphone one early morning and, in an attempt to throw Twitter shade on Alec Baldwin, mistakenly launch World War III. That didn’t happen, but it has been a busy start to what promises to be a very problematic presidency. There has been the usual flurry of shiny media objects, which in Trump world amounts mostly to diversion tactics, drawing the press’s attention away from the crucial legislative and executive actions that form the core of the Republicans’ reactionary agenda.

Get the big picture.The most effective way of distracting the media is by attacking them head-on, which we saw last weekend when Sean Spicer marched into the White House press room and delivered a stern lecture to the fourth estate, mostly based on outright lies and falsehoods. It was a remarkable performance, worthy of a pre-teenager, and pure Trumpist arrogance/ignorance. All presidential administrations lie; the Trump cadre, however, is distinctive in that they tell painfully obvious lies – lies that require no research to disprove. Many of their transparent lies are rooted in Trump’s overheated ego: the whining about the relative size of his inaugural crowd, the fable about millions of fraudulent votes in California, and so on. The press should just slap the “lie” label on this trash and soldier on.

It’s what lies behind the lies that should be our focus. The voter fraud accusation is the opening salvo in Trump’s effort to nationalize the ongoing GOP war on minority voters. This will start with an investigation along the lines of his inquiry into Obama’s birth certificate. (“You won’t believe what my people are finding.”) And while the mainstream press has reported that Trump’s fellow Republicans have backed away from this, Paul Ryan’s response was instructive. He essentially said that voter fraud was a “concern” in Wisconsin that the state addressed through voter I.D. legislation and other measures. Those responses helped deliver that Wisconsin to Trump, of course. So, with respect to legislative “solutions” to so-called voter fraud (i.e. voting on the part of people who don’t typically vote for them), Trump and Ryan are on the same page.

Bottom line: Keep your eye on Congress and on the executive orders and memorandums flying out of the White House, and respond accordingly. That’s where the real fight is now.

luv u,

jp