Voting Rights

2024 Election, Supreme Court, Voting Rights

Gutting the Voting Rights Act …

Posted on by mjohnson

On Sunday night, March 7, 1965, the ABC Sunday Night Movie was interrupted for a breaking news bulletin from Selma, Alabama, a city of about 28,000 souls fifty miles west of the state capitol of Montgomery.

It’s a safe bet that most Americans watching the film Judgment at Nuremberg – a movie about Nazi war crime trials after World War II – had never heard of Selma in Dallas County, Alabama. After that Sunday, the events of Selma would come to define the long and still continuing struggle for voting rights in America.

As Alabama Heritage magazine has noted of Selma in the 1960s: “Despite the gains made by civil rights activists across the state of Alabama, the Black Belt city of Selma remained a bastion of racial discrimination. In particular, the city’s segregationist leadership excelled at disenfranchising the African American community. By 1964 whites made up less than half of the population of Dallas County but constituted 99 percent of the registered voters.”

Seven of every eight Black Americans who attempted to join voter rolls in that Alabama county were rejected. Little wonder that the major civil rights groups in the South, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), chose Selma as the place to launch a march for voting rights.

Alabama Governor George C. Wallace gave the order to stop the marchers. Mayhem and blood followed, all broadcast on national television giving viewers a living room view of what was at stake for Black Americans.

John Lewis (foreground) is beaten by a state trooper in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965. The future congressman suffered a fractured skull. | AP Photo

“The troopers rushed forward,” the New York Times reported, “their blue uniforms and white helmets blurring into a flying wedge as they moved. The wedge moved with such force that it seemed almost to pass over the waiting column instead of through it. The first 10 or 20 Negros were swept to the ground screaming, arms and legs flying, and packs and bags went skittering across the grassy divider strop and on to the pavement on both sides. Those still on their feet retreated.”

One marcher, beaten to the point of hospitalization, was John Lewis, the chairman of SNCC and years later a member of Congress from Georgia.

Others died trying to secure the Constitutional right to simply vote in a democracy. One of the martyrs was a white Unitarian minister from California, James Reeb, who responded to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s call for white preachers to join the march from Selma to Montgomery.

Reeb died on March 12, 1965 of injuries sustained when he was beaten by white segregationists who were so opposed to fellow Americans attempting to secure the vote that they were willing to kill.

The Voting Rights Act was passed on August 6, 1965 with some naively believing a conclusive battle had been won. But while the events of that long ago bloody Sunday have faded the conservative assault on the Voting Rights Act never has.

Remember this history as you consider that Republican attorneys general from Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia recently asked the U.S. Supreme Court to gut – as in eviscerate – another key section of the Voting Rights Act.

The state of Louisiana brought the case to end the long established practice of individuals and voting rights organizations taking private legal action to enforce the right to vote. Louisiana and rightwing AGs like Idaho’s Raul Labrador and Montana’s Austin Knudsen claim that all that history is rubbish and that efforts to use the law to protect the right to vote cannot be invoked by private parties, but only by the Justice Department.

Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA and voting rights expert, has said that unless the Supreme Court reverses a recent ruling by the Eighth Circuit that ruled private actions unconstitutional the rights of minority voters will be decimated. The Justice Department, Hasen and many others say, has inadequate resources to go after a gerrymander in Wisconsin or a voter suppression effort in Mississippi or a hundred or a thousand other devious efforts to limit the Constitutional voting rights of Americans.

Hasen noted that two Supreme Court justices – Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas – have already endorsed this specious reading of the law, the Constitution and long standing precedent. Three more justices could literally erase one of the most effective tools to ensuring voting rights, and in doing so expand the conservative re-writing of not only the law, but American history.

Knudsen, the Montana attorney general and a hard right firebrand who professional ethics are under review by the state bar, is a too young to remember his state’s greatest political leader and the role Senator Mike Mansfield, the Democratic majority leader in 1965, played in passage of the Voting Rights Act. Mansfield worked tirelessly with Republican leader Everett Dirksen to assemble a bipartisan Senate coalition to ensure that the promise of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution – the right to vote for African Americans – was guaranteed. Mansfield considered the Voting Rights Act the most important legislation of his generation.

Labrador, who as a Tea Party congressman helped set the U.S. House on the path of its current dysfunction, now employs a team of zealous, even radical lawyers from everywhere but Idaho to push the latest alt right legal hobby horse. Labrador should be reminded that no less a conservative than former Idaho governor and senator Len Jordan was one of the Senate Republicans who followed his party leadership in support of the Voting Rights Act 58 years ago.

You might do well to ask what Knudsen and Labrador are doing as they waste their state’s resources by signing on to legal action designed solely to deny Americans access to the courts? Why do they believe it’s worth the effort of their high office or the spirit of their sworn oath to embrace a patently transparent effort to disenfranchise fellow Americans and trash a historic law, as well as the protections of the Constitution? 

The answer to these questions is that it is all about power – raw, unbridled political power wielded by states against their own citizens. Conservatism has become about eliminating rights, not enhancing them.

In this Aug. 6, 1965, photo, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a ceremony in the President’s Room near the Senate Chambers on Capitol Hill in Washington. Surrounding the president from left directly above his right hand, Vice President Hubert Humphrey; House Speaker John McCormack; Rep. Emanuel Celler, D-N.Y.; first daughter Luci Johnson; and Sen. Everett Dirksen, R-Ill. Behind Humphrey is House Majority Leader Carl Albert of Oklahoma; and behind Celler is Sen. Carl Hayden, D-Ariz. (AP Photo)

Conservatives started going after the Voting Rights Act about ten seconds after Lyndon Johnson signed it into law. Now they have created a national network of extremists at every level of government determined to roll back the clock. And they have realized a fever dream decades in the making – a Supreme Court more beholden to political outcomes than legal protections. It is a truism of our age that the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse 50 years of history on abortion rights was but the beginning.

You’ll hear more about this pending Supreme Court case in the days ahead and when you do remember Jim Reeb and so many others who gave their lives in the fight for these fundamental rights of citizenship.

No one, by the way, has ever been convicted of that young minister’s murder in Selma in 1965. Just one more reason why we should expect more today from those who would use the law he died for to effectively dance on his grave.

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Additional Reading:

A few other things that caught my eye …

Special counsel Jack Smith made a gutsy, momentous decision in his prosecution of Donald Trump

The always excellent Margaret Sullivan writes about the special counsel’s decision to take Trump’s claim of immunity directly to the Supreme Court.

The former guy calls him “deranged.” But Jack Smith may have just pulled off a master legal stroke.

“The former US president intends to use timing – delay, delay, delay – to avoid punishment for trying to overturn the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, and for fomenting a violent coup.

“Nope, said Smith this week. A tough guy who has prosecuted war crimes in the Hague, Smith clearly recognizes that putting off the case until after next fall’s presidential election could let Trump off the hook.”

Link to the full piece in The Guardian.

The Convert: The radicalization of Mike Lee

Nick Catoggio writes in The Dispatch about the Utah Republican senator and whether he’s really a cynic or a convert. His verdict – Lee hasn’t just drunk the Trumpian Kool-Aid, he’s happily chugging it.

“So if he sounds like a crank, it’s not because he has to. It’s because he wants to.

“Which brings us to the other problem. Only a true convert to crank populism would embarrass himself to the degree Lee routinely does nowadays. There’s a gratuitousness to some of his lapses of judgment that suggests he’s not faking them to impress the grassroots right’s worst elements, as is often the case with his buddy Ted Cruz. One simply can’t step on as many rakes as Mike Lee has lately without being genuinely blind.”

Good example of why the Republican Party really no longer exists.

And finally …

“Welcome, fellow haters, to another bilious edition of the Most Scathing Book Reviews of the Year.”

Come for the put downs, stay for the laughs. Here’s the link.

See you soon. Tip your server. Smile at strangers. Call an old friend you haven’t spoken with for too long. Get in the spirit.

All the best.

Civil Rights, Voting Rights

The More Things Change…

Posted on by mjohnson

When in the late spring of 1964 the United States Senate defeated the longest filibuster in Senate history and passed the landmark Civil Rights Act, the Senate’s majority leader Mike Mansfield called the matter of insuring fundamental rights to all Americans – the right to fair treatment in accommodations and employment, for example – “the most divisive issue in our history.”

Montana’s Mansfield, a westerner of few words who always chose them well, called passage of the legislation over the committed opposition of southern segregationists and a few very conservative Republicans an “exceptional accomplishment.” It had been the work of both political parties. The bill, years in the making, passed with a large bipartisan majority.

Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who rallied Republicans to the cause of civil rights, hailed the historic accomplishment as “an idea whose time has come.” One holdout who refused to follow Dirksen’s lead was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who became the GOP presidential candidate later in 1964. Goldwater’s refusal to embrace civil rights legislation – he argued it was an unconstitutional federal power grab – is an attitude that still echoes through the Republican Party nearly 60 years later.

What Mike Mansfield, who played a pivotal role in passage of the Civil Rights Act, rarely acknowledged during the often-bitter fight around the legislation was the depth of opposition to the measure from his own voters, not to mention the misguided vehemence of arguments opponents fielded in defense of discrimination.

An anti-civil right bill ad in the Montana Standard, February 1964

A Eureka, Montana constituent wrote Mansfield early in 1964, “It is my firm conviction that the Civil Rights Bill is a radical, unconstitutional and thoroughly unacceptable proposal, in that it will destroy the basic rights of all individuals through federal intervention.”

A Billings couple wrote Mansfield, “Individual freedoms cannot be removed, either collectively or one at a time, without leading us along the road to socialism which will enslave us all, black and white alike.”

In what was clearly a coordinated lobbying effort, several anti-civil rights letters to Mansfield used the same language: “The Civil Rights Bill before the Senate now, is 10% civil rights and 90% take-over of all activities of life.”

Western states in the 1960’s seemed far removed from the civil rights protests and demonstrations in distant Selma or the massive march on Washington in 1963 that helped set the political stage for the legislation that followed.

But the West was, in many ways, a key to passage of both the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Idaho’s then-bipartisan Senate delegation – Len Jordan, a very conservative Republican, and Frank Church, a liberal Democrat – voted for both pieces of legislation, even amid a drumbeat of local opposition.

When Jordan, who ran sheep in Hells Canyon during the Great Depression and later became Idaho’s 22nd governor, announced he would vote to end the filibuster that was preventing a Senate vote on a civil rights bill, his comments ran side-by-side in the Idaho Statesman with a story from Baldwin, New York, a community on Long Island. That story reported that the home of a Black family had been defaced with a red swastika and “insulting lettering” that demanded the family “get out now.” Neighbors – all of them white – showed up to repaint the house and signal the community’s “shame” for what had been done.

The article that ran side-by-side with a story about Idaho Republican Len Jordan voting to end a 1964 civil rights filibuster

Senator Jordan indicated his mail was running heavily in favor of support for civil rights, but the sentiment was hardly universal. A doctor in Burley said in a public meeting that he opposed efforts to outlaw racial discrimination because it “would rob doctors and professional men of their rights to refuse service to anyone for any reason.” A John Birch Society sponsored meeting in Boise drew a hundred people who were told a civil rights bill was part of a Communist plot to promote strife. A letter writer to the Twin Falls Times-News said he opposed integration because it was a “stepping stone to mongrelization.”

The John Birch Society claimed the Civil Rights Bill was pushed by Communists

The country is now locked, as it arguably hasn’t been since 1965 when the Voting Rights Act passed, in a battle over who votes and how in America. One party – Democrats – are trying to make it easier for many Americans to vote. The other party – Republicans – are operating at every level of government to make voting more difficult. The bipartisan consensus represented in the 1960’s by Mansfield and Dirksen and Church and Jordan is as unimaginable today as it was enlightened then.

“The ‘bipartisan tradition’ backing voting rights is, in many ways, a mirage,” Princeton history Kevin Kruse wrote recently. “The liberal and moderate Republicans who helped create the [Civil Rights and] Voting Rights Act are long gone, as are the prominent conservatives who saw no conflict between their ideology and democracy and who were confident their party could win elections even if everyone voted. What remains in the Republican ranks is a core that sees voting rights as a clear and present danger to the party.”

Need proof? Republican legislatures in Texas, Arizona, Florida and Georgia have all enacted new restrictions on voting since the last presidential election. One rural county in Georgia is close to deciding to have only one polling place in the entire county. Democrats have been booted off election boards and one newly reconstituted board eliminated Sunday voting during a recent municipal election, a decision aimed squarely at Black churchgoers, a key Democratic constituency.

The Republican rationale for opposing new federal voting rights legislation is remarkably similar to what passed for arguments against civil rights and voting rights in the 1960’s. “Every single proposed change,” former vice president Mike Pence said recently, “serves one goal, and one goal only: to give leftists a permanent, unfair, and unconstitutional advantage in our political system.”

Other Republicans worry about a federal takeover of elections, a specious argument since the Constitution speaks to a clear federal role in how elections are conducted, and a federal role in elections was precisely why Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in the first place.

Idaho Republican Senator Mike Crapo, like so many in the past who tried to limit voting, invoked the old “state’s rights” argument, channeling the segregationist talking points of the 1950’s and 1960’s. You wonder if these guys know anything about the kind of voter suppression that took place in so many places for so long. Or, more likely they just don’t care.

Some conservatives have been more honest with their objections to the idea of more Americans voting. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, an architect of the modern conservative movement said in 1980. “Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

The structure of the American system is under assault and restricting voting is at the heart of the attack. The assault is just as real now as it was in the 1960’s. Bipartisan good faith triumphed then. What now?

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Additional Reading:

Why There’s a Civil War in Idaho — Inside the GOP

A deep and I think pretty accurate dive into Idaho’s increasingly crazy GOP politics.

“So why are Idaho Republicans at each others’ throats? The intraparty divisions center on, and have been fanned by, two polarizing figures: [Janice] McGeachin and Priscilla Giddings, a state legislator who’s been called McGeachin’s ‘de facto running mate.’ Giddings has joined her at campaign events, and co-chaired McGeachin’s ‘Task Force to Examine Indoctrination in Idaho Education.’ The task force failed to find the ‘teachings on social justice, critical race theory, socialism, communism, Marxism’ it sought but did produce a spicy public-records scandal.”

The Idaho Republican Party has always had its nut cases, but now they are increasingly in charge. Here is a link to the Politico story.

Stranded dog saved from rising tide after rescuers attach sausage to drone

OK, we all need a story like this…

“Millie disappeared after slipping her lead in Havant, Hampshire, and after frantic public appeals was spotted on the mudflats, in danger of being engulfed by the tide. She resisted efforts to encourage her to a safer spot until a drone pilot suggested attaching food to one of the unmanned aerial vehicles that had been used to track the dog.”

A sausage on a drone did the trick.

Be well. Stay safe. Thanks for reading.

Politics, Voting Rights

Nothing Eternal But Change…

Posted on by mjohnson

In June of 1964 – 57 years ago – the United States Senate came face-to-face with the nation’s future. And a strange thing happened, it least in the context of today’s politics, bipartisanship broke out. 

A catalyst for one of the most important legislative accomplishments of the 20th Century was an unconventional politician from the heartland who was also a conventional conservative. 

When Everett Dirksen of Illinois took the Senate floor on June 10, 1964, he was at the apex of his influence, considered by many the most powerful man in the Senate. He was the minority leader. 

Republican Senator Everett Dirksen with Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. and John Lewis

“Years ago,” Dirksen told a Senate paralyzed as a result of a filibuster over civil right legislation, “a professor who thought he had developed an incontrovertible scientific premise submitted it to his faculty associates. Quickly they picked it apart. In agony he cried out, ‘Is nothing eternal?’ To this one of his associates replied, ‘Nothing is eternal except change.’”

Dirksen was a flamboyant figure. As a young man he aspired to a career before the footlights, and he wrote many plays. The Senate eventually became his stage. With a glorious voice – “like honey dripping on metal tiles” one contemporary explained – an expressive face and a mane of unmanageable grey hair, Dirksen was a true political celebrity. Think Mitch McConnell without the meanness, obstruction and undemocratic instincts. 

Dirksen could be a committed partisan, but he knew when to compromise in the national interest. Dirksen’s speech in June 1964 helped break the back of a southern led filibuster against the Civil Rights Act. “America grows. America changes,” Dirksen said. “And on the civil rights issue we must rise with the occasion. That calls for cloture and for the enactment of a civil rights bill.”

Quoting Victor Hugo – imagine McConnell doing so today – Dirksen said, “Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come.” The filibuster ended, the Senate passed the historic Civil Rights Act – a simple idea, Dirksen said, to take a big step toward equality for every American –  with a bipartisan majority of 71-29. 

Among other provisions, as the Senate historian has written, the Civil Rights Act “contained sections relating to discrimination in education, in voting, and in public accommodations such as restaurants, theaters, hotels and motels; it also strengthened the Civil Rights Commission and established an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.” Change had come to America, slowly but unmistakably.

I recount this history, in part, to celebrate Dirksen’s role in creating this landmark legislation, a conservative Republican working with Democratic liberals like Hubert Humphrey to pass a bill opposed by people in both parties, but also because this history is missing from our troubled moment. 

The recent jumbled, often silly Senate fulminations – there was no real debate – over efforts to protect and expand voting rights was mostly a fact-free zone where the history of making voting easier and more widely available had no place. Democrats lacked an effective strategy to protect voting, which played directly into the hands of Republicans who fell back, as is increasingly common, on absurd bad faith arguments. 

Wyoming Republican John Barasso, a leader of the Senate’s bad faith caucus, claimed that voter protection efforts were “designed to make it easier for Democrats to cheat so that they would never lose an election again.” 

The senator actually said that as the Brennan Center Justice documented that 22 of the 24 laws that restrict voter’s rights, introduced and passed in state legislatures so far this year, were entirely the work of Republicans. On the very day Senate Republicans to a person opposed even debating protections for voting by mail and same day registration, the GOP governor of Texas summoned a special session of the legislature to pass new voting restrictions. 

The March of Washington in 1963. And, yes, it was – at least in part – about voting rights

If you are confused by what’s been transpiring remember this: The Republican filibuster in the Senate utilized a tactic to protect minority rights, in order to infringe on minority rights. It’s what southern Democrats were doing in 1964. 

Or as Georgia Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, an African American whose election last November gave his party control of the Senate, put it: “What could be more hypocritical and cynical than invoking minority rights in the Senate as a pretext for preventing debate about how to preserve minority rights in society.” 

Georgia, of course, elected two Democrats to the Senate last year, both because of high levels of electoral participation by minority voters. Republicans who control the legislature there have responded with new voting restrictions. 

This is part of a larger, obvious pattern. Republicans lose elections because they fail to appeal to minority voters, so they find ways to make it harder for minority voters to vote. It is a hypocritical and cynical approach, but very effective. 

The current national debate about teaching about racism and exploring the nation’s often troubled history is a neat compliment to the GOP voter restriction strategy. The fable that the last presidential election was not fairly won is also part of this narrative. 

It was the great novelist and essayist Gore Vidal who said, “We learn nothing because we remember nothing.” History ignored, distorted or forgotten is history not applied. 

When Republican Ev Dirksen helped pass the Civil Rights Act in 1964 it was hailed as “a second Reconstruction,” making good on a 100-year-old promise to, among others, descendants of slaves. That legislation was followed a year later by a powerful Voting Rights Act, finally making good the words of the 15th Amendment that became effective in 1870. Dirksen and many fellow Republicans were again a driving force to get that legislation passed. 

The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960’s were fiercely debated. Amendments – dozens of them – were considered. And compromise in tribute to a fundamental principle – the right to be treated equally and to vote – was arrived at. American democracy was strengthened. Now it’s being weakened.

The Supreme Court sharply reduced the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, gutting the section of the law that would have made restrictions like Georgia’s more difficult. Congress, with Republicans refusing to budge, has been unwilling to respond. Now conservatives won’t even debate many of the issues fundamental to voting. 

The partisan political shenanigans around voting in America, with one party trying to protect and expand this fundamental democratic right and another doing everything possible to limit it, confirms that we learn nothing because we remember nothing. 

Nothing is eternal except change. The change underway in America is sadly about taking us back.     

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Additional Reading:

A couple of items you may find of interest…

Critical Race Theory

The New Yorker dissects the origins of conservative outrage over “critical race theory.” Read this if you want to understand how the cultural wars get fought. A lot of it begins with, big surprise, Fox News.

“The next morning, Rufo was home with his wife and two sons when he got a phone call from a 202 area code. The man on the other end, Rufo recalled, said, ‘Chris, this is Mark Meadows, chief of staff, reaching out on behalf of the President. He saw your segment on ‘Tucker’ last night, and he’s instructed me to take action.’ Soon after, Rufo flew to Washington, D.C., to assist in drafting an executive order, issued by the White House in late September, that limited how contractors providing federal diversity seminars could talk about race.”

Full story here:

New Yorkers fled to the Hamptons in 2020 – and sparked a major sewage crisis

You hear about “the Hamptons” as the very upscale retreat of the rich and famous of New York City, but it turns out the area has a, well, septic tank problem.

A lovely home in the Hampton sits on the most polluted lake in New York state

“The fact that the village of Southampton never built a centralized sanitation system affects year-round residents and second-homers alike. Local officials estimate that Suffolk county – where Southampton is located – has more unsewered residences than any other similarly suburban county in the US.”

From The Guardian:

The Lab Leak Theory Doesn’t Hold Up

Foreign Policy (the magazine) looks at the theory about COVID-19.

“Prior to the outbreak in December 2019, nothing closely resembling the COVID-19 virus was reported in any lab. Since it has emerged, it has taken hundreds of millions of infections to net just a handful of serious mutations and variants.

“We’re not good enough, in virology, to make the perfect virus,” Goldstein said.

“Nature, however, is.”

Good story:

Thanks for reading. Be well.             

                                                                                                                                                                         

Johnson, Voting Rights

GOP Channels Southern Democrats in the 1960’s…

Posted on by mjohnson

On a Monday night 56 years ago next month, Lyndon Johnson ambled his way on to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to play the role, as one of his biographers has written, of “one shrewd heartland politician finishing what another had started.” 

“The galleries were jammed with whites and blacks, some in street clothes fresh from demonstrations and others in business attire,” historian Randall Woods wrote of the scene. The president’s wife and a daughter were in the crowd, so was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. But the entire Mississippi delegation was boycotting the speech. Those unreconstructed segregationists Democrats, still embracing the grievance of a lost cause, knew what was coming. 

Lyndon Johnson speaks to Congress, March 15, 1965

“At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom,” Johnson said in his low, familiar Texas drawl. “So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”

The week before – forever etched in American memory as “Bloody Sunday”- voting rights advocates had been routed and brutalized in Selma, Alabama. The next day’s coverage on the front page of the New York Times ran under the headline: “Alabama police use gas and clubs to rout Negros.” A four-column photo showed Alabama state troopers beating a young marcher – future Georgia congressman John Lewis – leaving his skull fractured and blood on his white shirt and tan raincoat. 

The ugly, un-American state terrorism at the Edmund Pettus Bridge – the bridge still carries the name of a Confederate general and Alabama leader of the Klan – was a hinge moment in political history, and LBJ seized the moment. He would push a Voting Rights Act (VRA) to finally make real the promise of that earlier heartland politician, Abraham Lincoln, martyred in his pledge to guarantee equal rights for all Americans.

Alabama state troopers assault John Lewis during a voting rights march in 1965

“The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro,” Johnson told the country and the Congress in 1965. “His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this Nation. His demonstrations have been designed to call attention to injustice, designed to provoke change, designed to stir reform.

“He has called upon us to make good the promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not for his persistent bravery, and his faith in American democracy.” 

Writing recently in The Atlantic, journalist Vann R. Newkirk II correctly asserted that passage of the VRA “finally delivered on the stated ideals of the country,” but now in state after state across the country that ideal “hangs by a thread.” 

From Georgia to Arizona, Montana to Idaho, Republican dominated state legislatures are attempting to do what southern segregationist Democrats did in earlier days: make it more difficult, if not impossible for some Americans to vote. It is no accident that this wave of new era vote suppression and denial comes on the heels of a record vote in a presidential election where a Democrat won the White House over a man who over and over perpetuated a big lie about elections being stolen, dead people voting and ballots being manufactured. 

By repeating time and again that some Americans are “skeptical about the integrity of our elections” Republicans, including the former president, have manufactured a malicious assault on American democracy. It quite simply amounts to the biggest lie ever told about American politics. 

Minnesota’s secretary of state Steve Simon described recently what is happening: “Some folks bring these proposals forward and say, ‘Well, we just need to address confidence in our election systems,’ when it’s some of those very same people, or at least their allies and enablers, [who] have denigrated our election system by either telling lies or at least leveraging or relying on other people’s lies to justify some of these policies.” 

This tactic is the voting rights equivalent of the fellow who murdered his parents and then insisting on leniency because he’s an orphan. 

The Republican floor leader of the Idaho House of Representatives, a guy so cynical that he blasted federal efforts to provide financial assistance to businesses whacked by the impacts of the pandemic and then ended up taking the aid himself, is a champion of the “many people are saying” logic of voter suppression. 

“There are a lot of people in this country looking at what happened in other states — some of those states had ballot harvesting — that feel like they were victimized by the outcome of this last national election,” Mike Moyle said recently as he pushed a bill to restrict your ability to pick up and drop off your elderly grandparent’s absentee ballot.

In the face of precisely no evidence of abuse, Moyle said the quiet part out loud while pushing an earlier even more restrictive bill. “You know what? Voting shouldn’t be easy,” Moyle said. Other legislators are seeking to ruin the ability of voters to take action using the time-test initiative method. 

The gentleman from Idaho won’t appreciate the reference, or likely understand it, but he’s a latter-day version of Mississippi segregationist James Eastland who resisted the Voting Rights Act by claiming his state had a right to disqualify certain voters and, after all, some communists must certainly be mixed up in this push to get more people to vote. 

Mississippi segregationist James O. Eastland

In the 56 years since Johnson framed the basic right to vote as a “battle for equality” rooted in “a deep-seated belief in the democratic process,” the two political parties have traded places on voting rights. Democrats, believing that making it easier to vote and easier for more people to vote, have embraced policies like motor voter registration, mail voting and same day registration. Republicans, looking fearfully at what high turnout portends for their long-term electoral success, now broadly reject inclusive policies and endorse conspiracy theories about stolen elections. In 2013, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court gutted a key enforcement provision of the landmark 1965 law, and the GOP resists efforts to address stronger enforcement. 

In politics the truth is often hiding in plain sight. Georgia voters, including record turnout among African Americans, elected two Democratic senators in January, one, the state’s first black U.S. senator, the other, the first Jewish senator in the state’s history. More people voting is good for democracy. Attempting to keep more people from voting is good for Republicans. 

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Additional Reading:

Some items you may find of interest…

Rush Limbaugh Was Trapped in the ’80s: It’s his fault that our politics were, too.

Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh takes a break and smokes a cigar during his radio show. (Photo by mark peterson/Corbis via Getty Images)

Michael J. Socolow has an insightful piece on the recently departed talk radio personality and his impact on American politics.  

“Limbaugh’s influence on U.S. politics from the Reagan era to the Trump presidency was enormous. To discuss him primarily as a media figure (many credit him with saving the AM radio band when FM radio listening became dominant) is to overlook his more general impact on American political culture. He did not innovate radio programming, nor did he leave an easily replicable formula for a successful show. Like Arthur Godfrey and Walter Winchell before him, there was only one Rush Limbaugh. And like those two earlier giants in U.S. radio, Limbaugh’s style and massive audiences will no doubt disappear along with him. For better or for worse, there won’t be another one like him.” 

Read the entire article:

The Filibuster That Saved the Electoral College

A central character in my new book on four 1980 U.S. Senate races is Indiana Senator Birch Bayh. He was an enormously important political figure and it’s almost lost to history that he came remarkably close in 1968 to doing away with the Electoral College.

“Mr. Bayh had been pushing for a popular vote since 1966, shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts had ended the Jim Crow era and pulled America closer than it had ever been to a truly representative democracy. Electing the president directly was the next logical step in that progression.”

Read how a Senate filibuster killed the effort. Bayh called it the biggest disappointment of his political life.

One night in Cancun: Ted Cruz’s disastrous decision to go on vacation during Texas storm crisis

Cruz fled disastrous winter weather and ran into another kind of storm

In this delightfully snarky take down of the oleaginous Texas senator the Washington Post’s Ashely Parker strikes a blow for freedom.

“Usually, it takes at least one full day in Cancún to do something embarrassing you’ll never live down.

“But for Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), it took just 10 hours — from when his United plane touched down at Cancún International Airport at 7:52 p.m. Wednesday to when he booked a return flight back to Houston around 6 a.m. Thursday — for the state’s junior senator to apparently realize he had made a horrible mistake.”

The most hated man in the Senate expands his reach.

Read about it here:

Thanks for following along.

And please check out my author website for regular updates about events and talks related to my new book Tuesday Night Massacre: Four Senate Elections and the Radicalization of the Republican Party.

2020 Election, Voting Rights

Let ‘Em Vote…

Posted on by mjohnson

Wisconsin, a state with a long progressive political tradition were state-level innovations were once the rule, recently held a vote-in-person primary election in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. The election went ahead after the Republican dominated state legislature sued the Democratic governor who had wanted to delay the election and create time to allow more folks to vote by mail. 

The conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled for the Republicans, as subsequently did the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court’s rationale was tortured to say the least. Court’s ought not to interfere with state election laws, the majority said, notwithstanding the inconvenience of an unprecedented pandemic. Oh, yes, and notwithstanding the precedent the Court established in 2000 when five justices handed the presidency to George W. Bush by ordering that Florida state law be set aside and a recount stopped.

Voters line up in Wisconsin to cast ballots in the recent primary. (USA Today photo)

Failing to see the Republican action in Wisconsin and the Court’s ultimate decision to ignore reality as anything less than an effort at partisan vote manipulation is failing to see the forest for the trees.  

In Wisconsin there were numerous predictions that hundreds of thousands of people showing up in polling places would surely lead to more coronavirus cases and sure enough the Milwaukee health commissioner reported earlier this week that at least seven new cases of the virus are traceable to people exercising their franchise. 

All this is a sickly preview of what is likely to happen in November. Failure to adopt vote by mail policies nationally could profoundly impact the presidential and other elections this year. It’s really not too much to call it a crisis for democracy. It doesn’t have to be. 

In a couple of weeks my vote by mail ballot will arrive in my post office box in Oregon. I’ll mark the ballot in the privacy of my dining room table and mail it back or drop the ballot in a special collection box in town. The ballot will need to arrive or be dropped off by election day – May 19. Oregon has been exclusively a vote by mail state for 20 years and it works like a charm – clear, easy and clean. Oregon’s system enjoys bipartisan support, as well. 

Oregon has had an exclusive vote by mail system for 20 years

“Vote-by-mail is cheap and convenient,” Oregon’s Republican Secretary of State Bev Clarno said recently, “it’s given Oregon one of the highest voter turnout rates in the country, and we’ve proven that it’s very secure. In the wake of COVID-19, it also prevents voters from having to choose between staying safe at home and casting their ballot.”

According to records assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation voter fraud in Oregon is hardly a problem since there is strict enforcement with fines for offenders. As the Eugene Register-Guard reported recently Oregon has had only 15 vote fraud cases since 2000, compared with Mississippi’s 29 cases since 2000 and Minnesota’s 130 cases since 2009. Those states are about the same size as Oregon and only allow in-person voting. In another analysis, The Brennan Center at New York University Law School has calculated the rate of Oregon voter fraud on 100 million ballots cast at .0012 percent. 

Voting by mail has other benefits, as well. I suspect we’ve all been in the position of standing in the voting booth looking at the candidates in an obscure special district election or down ballot race and thinking: “Who should I support for the board of the local mosquito abatement district or I don’t know anything about the candidates for state treasurer.” While sitting at the dining room table filling out your vote by mail ballot you can actually take a moment and educate yourself about such things. 

Vote by mail is also good for working families, seniors, people with disabilities who may have trouble getting to the polls and citizens who are non-native speakers of English. 

Additionally, and some campaigns really dislike this part, vote by mail helps minimize the impact of the last-minute campaign smear. When ballots start arriving two weeks before election day the spurious, two days before the election slimy charge that leaves no time for response isn’t nearly as effective. Campaigns are, at least slightly, less dirty as a result. 

Oregon is remarkably fast at counting ballots, too and results are often known within an hour or so of the polls closing. 

Oregon’s senior senator, Democrat Ron Wyden, is a national champion for voting by mail and has been joined by a host of Democrats in pushing for the idea. But time is running out to get a system in place by November, and of course Mitch McConnell is obstructing. 

Republicans generally don’t like vote by mail and President Trump has spun his usual fantasy arguments and conspiracy theories about the process. “Mail ballots are very dangerous for this country because of cheaters,” Trump said recently and incoherently. “They go collect them. They are fraudulent in many cases. They have to vote. They should have voter ID, by the way.” Trump, of course, has voted absentee since becoming a Florida resident, but never mind that. The man knows what he doesn’t know. 

Traditional, in person voting in November is clearly going to be difficult and the situation presents a threat to democracy

Trump went on to say the quiet part out loud, admitting his real concern with mail voting, as he said, is that “for whatever reason, [it] doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” 

Total fantasy. Utah, one of the most Republican states in the country, has gone almost entirely to vote by mail. Colorado, a swing state, has voted by mail since 2014. 

The canard that making it easier for people to vote would harm Republicans was clearly behind the recent Wisconsin debacle. Republican leaders there desperately wanted to help a conservative state supreme court judge win re-election and they cynically calculated that pandemic impacted in-person voting would hurt turnout and help the judge. Ironically, even while many Wisconsinites requested absentee ballots and hundreds of thousands voted in person, often wearing masks while standing in line at a drastically reduced number of polling places, the conservative judge lost in a landslide. Turns out that people like to vote. Little wonder some Republicans want to make it difficult. 

When historian Alexander Keyssar, who has written extensively on voting rights, testified before Congress in 2006 he said, “Our history makes plain that the right to vote can be as fragile as it is fundamental.” Protecting our right to vote – and making it easier by voting by mail – should represent a bipartisan commitment to democracy. That it doesn’t speaks directly to the fragility of the American experience. 

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Additional reading:

  • The president and his allies are working overtime to rewrite the history of the last couple of months. That reality makes this remarkable piece from The Bulwark all the more important. The title sums it up nicely – Ten Weeks That Lost the War. You’ll want to keep this and share it with your kids and grandkids.
  • You have likely seen news coverage this week of “protests” in several states from Washington to Idaho to Michigan against state-level state at home orders. These events may seem to be stimulated from the grassroots, but they are not as the Washington Post has confirmed. And as this piece from a scholar who studies the radical right makes clear there is a vast amount of disinformation and conspiracy floating out there.
  • And there is this. One remarkable aspect of the current world situation is that a number of really wonder publications – the New York Review and the London Review of Books for example – have gone into the archives to find great stories to give us perspective. I’ll try to keep posting at least one a week here. This week a piece from September 1940 from The New Yorker. Read the whole thing.