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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2020 5:56:19 GMT
THESE ARE THE GAMES REPUBLICANS PLAY IN ORDER TO CUT TAXES OF THE WEALTHY SO THEY CAN SLASH PROGRAMS THAT HELP THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. THIS LIBERTARIAN CONCEPT IS BANKRUPT AND DISINGENUOUS AND IS ONE RIGHT WINGERS FALL FOR TIME AND AGAIN.
But the higher debt projections in this year’s outlook are not surprising – they are the predictable consequence of tax cuts that Congress passed last year. Republican leaders in Congress insisted on passing those tax cuts without paying for them, despite a veto threat from the White House due to the lack of offsetting deficit reduction. President Barack Obama only signed the tax cuts into law after Congress also included important tax relief for working families alongside the tax cuts for businesses.
GOP Uses Debt They Created As An Excuse For Program Cutsby Harry Stein - Guest Contributor Jul 12, 2016 3:34 pm
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released an updated outlook on the country’s long-term fiscal future on Tuesday. The budget outlook projects that the national debt will grow at a faster rate than the CBO projected in last year’s outlook, and some Republicans have already seized the news to attack programs that support low- and middle-income Americans.
Shortly after the CBO published the new data, House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-GA) said in a statement, “These debt projections portend a horrible fiscal legacy,” and specifically expressed alarm about “insolvent Medicare and Social Security programs.” Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) also singled out Social Security and Medicare in a statement that claimed, “We’re past the tipping point in this debt crisis.”
But the higher debt projections in this year’s outlook are not surprising – they are the predictable consequence of tax cuts that Congress passed last year. Republican leaders in Congress insisted on passing those tax cuts without paying for them, despite a veto threat from the White House due to the lack of offsetting deficit reduction. President Barack Obama only signed the tax cuts into law after Congress also included important tax relief for working families alongside the tax cuts for businesses.
Republican leaders brushed aside deficit concerns when the tax deal passed at the end of last year. And just a few weeks ago, House Republicans unveiled a tax plan that would increase deficits even more with tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans.
But now some are saying that higher debt projections mean we cannot afford programs that work for low- and middle-income families. Fortunately for the American people, their warning of a looming fiscal crisis is greatly exaggerated. Annual budget deficits have fallen dramatically in recent years, and are currently in line with their historical average. The United States is not facing an immediate fiscal crisis.
Markets are fully confident in the full faith and credit of the United States. The interest rate on 5-year Treasury bonds is currently negative after adjusting for inflation, meaning that investors are literally paying to make a loan to the United States – showing their confidence that the country will be able to afford to pay them back in the future. Even 30-year inflation-adjusted Treasury rates are less than 1 percent, which reflects the fundamental long-term fiscal strength of the United States.
Only moderate changes are needed to sustain programs like Social Security and Medicare. The United States is an extremely low-tax country by international standards. In 2013, U.S. federal, state, and local taxes equaled just 25.4 percent of GDP, much lower than the average tax burden for industrialized nations in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) of 34.2 percent of GDP. The new CBO report estimates that the federal government would need to reduce annual deficits by 1.7 percent of GDP in order to prevent the long-term debt from increasing over the next 30 years as a share of the economy. Even if this was done entirely by raising taxes, the U.S. would still be an extremely low tax country.
Cutting taxes and then stoking fiscal panic after the deficit increases is an attempt to use the “starve the beast” strategy to dismantle the safety net and slash middle-class investments. The most recent House Republican budget, which was written by Chairman Price, raises the specter of a “devastating fiscal crisis,” which it claims to solve by cutting non-defense programs – such as health care, nutrition assistance, and Pell Grants – by $6 trillion over 10 years. More than 60 percent of these cuts would hit programs serving low- and moderate-income Americans. Yet the budget doesn’t contemplate solving the fiscal picture by increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans at all.
The new budget data from CBO largely confirms what we already know. The national debt is stable right now, and long-term fiscal shortfalls can be addressed with relatively modest changes. Dire warnings of a debt crisis are a common tactic to justify slashing effective and popular federal programs, and those warnings should be taken even less seriously when they come from politicians who have no problem with higher deficits when they want to cut taxes
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2020 5:57:54 GMT
OK, THIS QUOTE TAKES THE CAKE FOR THE MOST NERVE AND PASSING THE BLAME. THE PARTY WHO HAS HELD THE MAJORITY MOST OF OBAMA'S TURN AND HAS BEEN THE MOST OBSTRUCTIONIST SINCE TRUMAN'S "DO NOTHING" CONGRESS PAUL RYAN HAS THE NERVE TO SAY THIS: “Look, it’s divided government,” Ryan said. “It’s not easy to get things done when you don’t have a lot of cooperation from the other party.”BY THE WAY THEY ALSO HELD THE MAJORITY PLUS THE PRESIDENCY FOR MOST OF BUSH'S 8 YEARS AND LOOK AT THE MESS THEY MADE THEN. IT IS AMAZING OBAMA HAS GOTTEN ANYTHING DONE AND NOT SURPRISING HE HAD TO RESORT TO EXECUTIVE ORDERS TO ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING AT ALL.
IMAGINE THE UTTER CHAOS AND DISASTER IF TRUMP WINS AND THEY HAVE ALL 3 BRANCHES? www.washingtonpost.com/politics/on-capitol-hill-dysfunction-reins-gop-leaders-fall-short/2016/07/15/3eb6d178-4aca-11e6-8dac-0c6e4accc5b1_story.html
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2020 5:58:49 GMT
REPUBLICANS ARE HORRIBLE SORE LOSERS WHO ARE UNABLE TO GOVERN. THEY ARE INCOMPETENT EXCEPT WHEN IT COMES TO OBSTRUCTIONISM. I HOPE WHEN THE ROLES ARE REVERSED THE DEMOCRATS DO LIKEWISE. OBSTRUCT ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING THE NEXT REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT TRIES TO ACCOMPLISH NO MATTER WHAT. Everything You Need To Know About The Republican Party’s Recalcitrance, In One Chartby Ian Millhiser Jul 18, 2016 8:00 am So, this happened: What didn’t happen is much of the sort of things that the Senate is supposed to do while it is in session. The Senate did not provide for emergency Zika funding, although Senate Republicans did try to score points against Democrats by pushing a bill laden with poison pills targeting Planned Parenthood and the Affordable Care Act. It also didn’t pass any legislation addressing gun violence, despite the recent shootings in Orlando and Dallas. Nor did the Senate perform much of its other core function — confirming presidential nominees. The Senate’s Republican majority has thus-far kept to it’s promise not to even hold a hearing for Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. And its hardly used the time freed up by not confirming Garland to move forward on other judicial nominations. To the contrary, the Senate confirmed fewer judges since Republicans gained the majority in 2015 than in any comparable period in a two-term presidency since Harry Truman — and the drop-off from recent presidents is quite stark. Lest anyone conclude that the current Senate merely returned to a confirmation rate that was normal in our grandparents’ heyday, it is important to note that the size of the federal judiciary has grown tremendously since the Truman presidency. On the day that Truman left office, only 291 life-tenured judges were authorized by federal law. Today, that number is 860. Thus, the Senate confirmed nearly as many judges in the comparable period in the Truman administration as it has confirmed under President Obama, despite the fact that there are now more than three times as many judgeships to fill. Under Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, moreover, the Senate confirmed significantly less than half of the number of judges confirmed during the comparable period in President George W. Bush’s presidency, and about a third of the judges confirmed during similar periods in the Clinton and Reagan presidencies. Notably, Reagan, Clinton and Bush all faced senates that were controlled by the opposite party during their final years in office. (Although President Richard Nixon was elected to serve a second term, this chart does not include him because he resigned before the election year in his second term.) Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) indicated last May that he would invoke the so-called “Thurmond Rule,” after the Senate’s recess begins. Less a rule than an excuse that senators invoke when they do not want to confirm judges late in a presidential term, Grassley’s invocation of this supposed rule indicates that he plans to slow down confirmations even more — or possibly even halt them altogether. And there are few signs that the pace will pick up if Hillary Clinton wins the presidential election and Republicans retain control over the Senate. To the contrary, McConnell has strongly suggested that he will not confirm anyone Clinton nominates to the Supreme Court either — at one point hinting that he will give a veto power to the National Rifle Association over any Supreme Court nominees. Meanwhile, McConnell’s been quite open about his desire to see Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump fill vacancies on the Supreme Court. Indeed, the Senate leader claimed last month that the overtly racist presidential candidate is “going to appoint the right kind of person to the Supreme Court.” thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/07/18/3798731/everything-need-know-republican-partys-recalcitrance-one-chart/
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2020 5:59:44 GMT
Here is a thumbnail sketch of the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln however it ended being the party of Lincoln when Lincoln was assassinated. It has therefore become the party of elites, big corporate business and racists.
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2020 6:00:13 GMT
AT LAST. LET'S HOPE THEY AREN'T ABLE TO TAKE THE REST OF US DOWN TO THE GATES OF HELL WITH THEM.
2016 ELECTIONS
Republican Party Burns Down One Last Institution: Itself
Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S. domestic policy for Bloomberg View. He was executive editor of the Week. He was previously a national affairs writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.
Aug 3, 2016 1:34 PM EST By Francis Wilkinson
There used to be some exceptions to the Republican Party's war on American institutions.
The party began aggressively attacking the news media and the academy in the era of Nixon-Agnew, undermining confidence in the validity of news reports and the integrity of journalists, while condemning the pernicious ideological influence of university professors.
Republicans added public schools to the enemies list as desegregation orders trickled through the nation in the 1960s and 1970s. The courts, the ultimate source of such orders, were cast as a radical den, home to judges who were delegitimized as "unelected," "liberal" and "activist." Racial conservatives resisted integrated schools while religious conservatives condemned public education as a godless swamp. More often than not, the religious and racial objections drew from the same well of resentment.
Hollywood, which adds more than a half trillion dollars to U.S. gross domestic product each year, became a target as the religious right cemented its place in conservative politics. Like the academy, Hollywood was accused of poisoning the minds of American youth, turning them against decent conservative values.
In the 1980s, Newt Gingrich began a sustained assault on the U.S. Congress, seeking to undermine decades of Democratic control by bringing the entire institution into disrepute. Gingrich inherited the rubble he created in 1994, becoming speaker of the House.
Republicans never stopped blasting at the institution, even when they controlled it. They called Congress wasteful, corrupt, arrogant and illegitimate. (It sometimes was.) Under Republican Speaker John Boehner, they grew increasingly comfortable with legislative anarchy and symbolic posturing in lieu of governing. Last year, they drove Boehner out of office. His replacement, Paul Ryan, has been dangling ever since, powerless to legislate except in rare instances.
The Republican assault on the presidency began as soon as Bill Clinton entered the White House in 1993. After an eight-year Republican respite, the attack intensified when Barack Obama became president in 2009, and expanded to include the entire executive branch.
Congressional committees were organized with the goal of destroying the Internal Revenue Service, which was attacked with phony allegations of political meddling by IRS agents into the activities of Tea Party groups.
As its own demographic and ideological weaknesses grew more apparent, the GOP resorted to more attacks to bolster itself, even attacking the franchise itself, the root of American democracy, with false claims of voter fraud. The attacks were aided by partisan media -- Fox News above all -- that echoed and advanced Republican messages and hyped stories, such as Benghazi, into "scandals" that further undermined conservative faith in governing institutions.
Having been told the Obama administration was a source of major corruption, conservative voters were even more irate that there were somehow no legal consequences for the high crimes alleged. The obvious conclusion: The whole system must be corrupt.
Enter Donald Trump. Before Trump, two institutions were off limits to Republican attacks. The military was one. Ever since Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, Trump's forebear in scattershot, seat-of-the-pants demagogy, had tried and failed to damage the U.S. Army in the 1950s, Republicans could be counted on to rally around the troops and their leaders.
No more. Trump has called the U.S. military "depleted" and "a disaster." He has alienated its leaders. His attacks on the parents of a heroic soldier killed in combat have been so relentless and callous that they have prompted what the Washington Post called a "bipartisan constellation" of military figures to condemn Trump.
The military seems likely to survive Trump's assault. But the final institution on the Republican hit list, the one that had been immune to attack for decades, may not.
The Republican Party is an institution, too -- an old and once respected one. Having devoted much of the past half century to undermining other American institutions in pursuit of its own power, the party has at last turned on itself. The ethos of destruction preceded Trump. But he is a natural conclusion of it.
Many years of bad faith, and bad practice, in American politics have culminated in Trump.
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2020 6:00:51 GMT
WHO THE HELL ARE REPUBLICANS TRYING TO KID WITH THEIR VOTER SUPPRESSION TECHNIQUES?? THEIR LAST RESORT WILL BE THE FLIPFRAUD ELECTION MACHINERY TALLIES. IT HAS WORKED BEFORE AND WILL WORK AGAIN. IT WILL ONLY BE DIFFICULT TO PULL OFF IT THE RACE HAS A WIDE MARGIN BETWEEN CANDIDATES.
Thursday, Aug 4, 2016 02:00 AM -0700
Republicans are doomed: How the GOP’s cynical election strategy is imploding
In the past two weeks, judges have ruled against voter-ID laws and other limits on voting in five states David Daley, BillMoyers.com This piece originally appeared on BillMoyers.com.
As Donald Trump enmeshed himself in a bitter fight with the parents of an American Muslim military hero — and Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and John McCain looked to put distance between themselves and their party’s presidential nominee — there’s actually worse news for Republicans.
Several important court victories for voting rights since Friday could dramatically remake the campaign for Congress and the White House, and this time, GOP leadership may have a harder time distancing themselves from un-American tactics.
When an outraged 4th Circuit Court struck down several North Carolina voting restrictions on Friday — including a stringent voter-ID provision, tough limits on early voting and an end to same-day registration — the panel of federal judges wrote that these “new provisions target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” The judges stopped just short of calling the Republican legislators who crafted the laws racist, but condemned the racist result in unusually direct language. “We cannot ignore the record evidence that, because of race, the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history.”
Meanwhile in Wisconsin, a federal judge issued a similar ruling Friday and struck a similarly appalled tone as he invalidated several recent efforts by the state legislature to tighten voter-ID requirements, limit absentee voting and shorten the windows for early voting. Judge James Peterson called the provisions a “wretched failure” and ruled, “A preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement.”
These judges — as well as those who knocked down similarly restrictive provisions in Kansas and Texas in recent days — might well have been ruling on the GOP’s very electoral strategy this decade. It is a concerted effort to grab control of state legislatures and the House of Representatives by the minority party, and it has been staggeringly effective.
First, Republicans used their big win in 2010 to radically gerrymander the House of Representatives and state legislatures nationwide during the decennial redistricting, using dark money and cutting-edge mapmaking technology to create a majority of districts that were whiter and more conservative, even as America as a whole becomes less white and less conservative.
Then these gerrymandered legislatures — unearned supermajorities in states like North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin, for example, where Republicans drew such effective and unbeatable lines that they took veto-proof control of chambers despite winning fewer overall votes — pushed for new laws designed to make it even harder for minorities to vote and, ultimately, for Democrats to win.
In states like Wisconsin, maps were drawn by strategists like Tad Ottman, who sent top-secret emails to fellow partisans outlining how “we have an opportunity and an obligation to draw these maps that Republicans haven’t had in decades.” When districts are drawn with partisan intent and the desire to suppress competition, they naturally elect legislators who might then favor voter-ID laws. There is a direct line between districts drawn to minimize the effectiveness of the minority vote around Milwaukee. Judge Peterson’s finding last week that the partisan intent in drawing districts, which led to a Republican-majority legislature that enacted the voter-ID rules and other restrictive measures, had the “immediate goal” of achieving a “partisan objective, but the means of achieving that objective was to suppress the reliably Democratic vote of Milwaukee’s African-Americans.”
These judges — as well as those who knocked down similarly restrictive provisions in Kansas and Texas in recent days — might well have been ruling on the GOP’s very electoral strategy this decade.
It is no coincidence that 17 states have enacted new voting restrictions just in time for the 2016 presidential election — or that 22 states have toughened access to the ballot box since 2010. Here are those 17 states: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin.
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2020 6:01:16 GMT
Republicans and Conservatives can't get over the fact that they are wrong. They think there is a conspiracy against them, keeping them down. Well there is. It is called nature, natural selection, evolution, thinning the herd, etc.
This article shows how a dolt like Trump is representative of Conservatives who populate the Republican Party. They refuse to accept the truth and demand everyone else accept their truth and if not they will force their way into trusted institutions like state universities. It is bad enough states have forced right wing charter schools on us. Now states like Wisconsin, Arizona, and North Carolina have cut or will cut funding unless useful conservative idiots are purposely hired to brainwash our youth.
Professor: Here’s why most of us are Democrats
Citing that Democrats outnumber Republicans 12:1 in faculty positions at the University of North Carolina, Senate Majority leader Phil Berger suggests that Republican job candidates are discriminated against when they apply for university positions unless they “toe the line from the left.” However, it seems likely that there may be other, more objective explanations for the imbalance of party affiliation.
In 17 years of experience with hiring faculty at the School of Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill, I have never heard political affiliation mentioned in any job search. There is certainly no place for information about it on the application form. I have never heard any member of a search committee ask a candidate about political preference, and I have never heard of it coming up in any of the many interviews that job candidates go through. I have never heard party affiliation or political leaning raised in the final committee deliberations that determine which candidate is selected.
So if we are not actively searching for Democrats among job applicants, why is the ratio of party affiliation so lopsided?
One reason is the anti-science attitude adopted by many rank and file Republicans and supported by some Republican leaders. For example, a Pew Research Survey in 2013 found that only 43 percent of Republicans believe that humans have evolved over time. During the recent Republican primary season, only Jeb Bush could be found to have ever made a statement expressing belief in the theory of evolution. Several of the candidates were on record stating that they did not accept evolutionary theory.
How should scientists react to this? The theory of evolution is the central organizing principle of modern biology. If Republican leaders don’t believe it is true, how can scientists support them? Further, public funds in North Carolina are directed at “voucher” schools that teach that the theory of evolution is false. How can we join the party that apportions funds in this way?
More relevant is Republican positions on climate science. Most of the faculty have no information yet about the new “N.C. Policy Collaboratory” at UNC-CH or candidates to lead it, but presumably the university would choose an individual who supports climate science. Admittedly climate science is complicated. Most of us in the biomedical sciences don’t go into the primary data. However, we respect the conclusions of the overwhelming majority of scientists who are developing and testing climate models.
A recent joint report issued by the National Academy of Science in the U.S. and Royal Society in the U.K. clearly expressed the scientific consensus about the causes and dangers of global warning and emphasized the role of carbon emissions. Most scientists cannot imagine that National Academy of Science or Royal Society members would participate in a conspiracy to manipulate data and conclusions. It is also apparent to anyone who follows the issue that many of the statements claiming that climate science is a hoax are compromised by economic self-interest related to companies and individuals who profit from fossil fuels.
The life of the university depends on rational discourse. If people want to debate women’s reproductive issues or the integrity of elections, interested university faculty in the relevant areas would welcome these discussions. But how should we react when partisan legislation on these issues is justified by catch phrases like “protecting women’s health” and “massive voter fraud” and passed without any serious discussion? In several recent cases, the courts have found that the stated rationales for the partisan legislation in these areas were fictitious. Of course, the faculty are of the opinion that issues should be debated on merits rather than on rationale manufactured to appeal to a political base.
Will there be consequences due to the fact that so many of us in the university community are Democrats? Of course, we hope not, but the University of North Carolina system has already seen a competent and respected president who was a Democrat forced out so a Republican could be installed. Looking at what’s happening at other Republican-controlled states like Wisconsin, there is reason for concern that state funding to the university could be cut even more deeply. The sad part is that this will happen only at public schools. The private colleges and universities will continue to prosper via endowments and high tuitions, their faculty will remain heavily Democratic and the wealthy will continue to send their children there.
William Snider, M.D., is a professor in the Department of Neurology at UNC
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2020 6:01:47 GMT
Now That Courts Have Destroyed ‘Voter ID’ Laws, the GOP Is in a Panic to Suppress the Vote Federal judges from Michigan to North Carolina to New Orleans have said what’s obviously true—‘voter ID’ laws are voter-suppression laws. And now the GOP is in overdrive.
Susan E. Seager 09.06.16 10:00 PM ET
Donald Trump’s phony prayer for the black vote at an African-American church in Detroit should not distract us from the truth. Ever since Barack Obama was elected as our first black president in 2008, the GOP-controlled state legislatures have been passing laws to block black and brown voters from voting.
It’s clear from their platform and voter suppression legislation that Republican National Committee and Republican Party don’t want black and brown people to vote. Not for Trump. Not for anyone. You’ve heard of Rock the Vote? The GOP campaign is Block the Vote.
The GOP’s voter suppression honchos must be tearing their hair out because the federal courts are finally on to them. In recent months, federal courts across the country have issued a series of decisions striking down or requiring changes to GOP’s racist voting laws.
The GOP-controlled North Carolina legislature got caught red-handed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit when it ruled on July 29 that North Carolina’s 2013 restrictive voting law was enacted with “discriminatory intent” that used “almost surgical precision” to stop blacks from voting.
The evidence was clear to the Fourth Circuit: “the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the [black voter] franchise in modern North Carolina history” and even admitted in a “smoking gun” argument that the voting restrictions were necessary due to “concern that African Americans, who had overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, had too much access to the franchise.”
Message from the GOP to black voters in North Carolina: you are voting too much, so we need to curb those black votes with a voter suppression law!
play icon Supreme Court Shuts Door On North Carolina's Voter ID Laws Supreme Court Shuts Door On North Carolina's Voter ID Laws play icon Appeals Court Sides With Wisconsin's Voter ID Laws Appeals Court Sides With Wisconsin's Voter ID Laws play icon Virginia Just Restored Thousands Of Ex-Prisoners’ Voting Rights Virginia Just Restored Thousands Of Ex-Prisoners’ Voting Rights
The GOP pushed through the voter suppression law after realizing that black voter registration in North Carolina jumped by 51 percent between 2000 and 2012, and black voter turnout surged up to 42 percent in 2000, 72 percent in 2008 and a whopping 69 percent in 2012.
The Fourth Circuit is not the only court to call out these discriminatory voting laws in the last several weeks.
In Michigan, where Trump spoke at the black church, a new GOP law banning Michigan’s straight-party ballot option was blocked on July 21 optional link: by a federal judge who ruled that the ban disproportionately hurts black voters and therefore violates the Voting Rights Act.
Until the GOP ban, Michigan offered voters a bubble on their ballots allowing a straight-party vote without checking off all the individual candidates, which is favored by many black voters. Without that one-and-done option, black voters would take longer to vote and create long lines in precincts already plagued by long lines. Michigan’s GOP attorney general has challenged the ruling in a September 2 emergency filing with the Supreme Court by Michigan’s Republican attorney general.
Then down in New Orleans, the full United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the most conservative federal appeals court in the country, shocked everyone on July 20 when it ruled that the new Texas voter ID law violates the Voting Rights Act. The court held that 600,000 Texan voters who are disproportionately black, Latino and poor lack the ID required by the new law—including a driver’s license, military ID, passport or weapons permit—and most would be unable to obtain such an ID. The court did not strike down the law but ordered a lower court to fix it before the November 8 election.
The GOP must be panicking now that the federal court judges who once backed voter-ID laws are getting wise to the GOP shenanigans. Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh District says his vote upholding the Indiana law was wrong; he realizes that photo-ID laws are “now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention.” Boom!
These voter suppression laws were made possible by the conservative block of five justices of the Supreme Court who voted to gut the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder.
When Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that “Voter turnout and registration rates” for black and white voters were nearly equal in the South, the GOP saw this as an endorsement of their fears that black and brown voters were gaining too much voting power.
Since 2008, Republican legislatures in 17 states have adopted new restrictive voting laws. Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin imposed strict voter ID requirements. North Carolina and other states eliminated the early voting days favored by guess who—blacks and Latinos—along with a variety of other provisions that can disproportionately keep voters of color from the polls.
The GOP is waging a panicky fight to save its voter suppression laws in the weeks before the election. North Carolina’s GOP governor filed an emergency application asking the Supreme Court to reinstate that state’s restrictive voting law found to be discriminatory by the Fourth Circuit. But the Court got tangled up with a 4-4 tie vote and could not reinstate the discriminatory voting rules.
The GOP has a sinister Plan B in North Carolina. A leaked email from North Carolina Republican Party leader Dallas Woodhouse reveals that the GOP is urging local voting officials in North Carolina to eliminate Sunday voting favored by blacks, which could circumvent the Fourth Circuit decision. “Republicans can and should make party line changes to early voting,” Woodhouse wrote to local voting officials, according to The News & Observer.
It’s crazy that the modern Republican Party calls itself the “Party of Lincoln” and Trump has called the Democratic Party is the “Party of Slavery.”
Don’t be fooled by this historical amnesia. The two parties switched sides for good when Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson rammed the Civil Right Act and Voting Rights Act through Congress. The Republican Party is now the Party of the New Jim Crow Voter Suppression.
Trump argues that black voters have nothing to lose by voting for him. Wrong. Black and brown voters will continue to lose their right to vote—which is a constitutional right and not a privilege like a driver’s license—if they chose Trump and other Republican candidates.
Susan E. Seager is a First Amendment lawyer who teaches media law at the University of Southern California and was a volunteer poll observer for the Barack Obama presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012. She tweets at @seagreen55
www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/07/now-that-courts-have-destroyed-voter-id-laws-the-gop-is-in-a-panic-to-suppress-the-vote.html
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2020 6:02:34 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2020 6:03:05 GMT
Voter-ID Laws
Republicans Admit Voter-ID Laws Are Aimed at Democratic Voters
It’s been clear for a while that the voter-identification laws the GOP has been pushing are aimed at suppressing Democratic constituencies. And Republicans are fessing up, says Jamelle Bouie. Jamelle Bouie 08.28.13 1:45 AM ET
When liberals decry voter-identification laws as tools for voter suppression, they aren’t arguing ex nihilo. The evidence is clear: identification requirements for voting reduce turnout among low-income and minority voters. And the particular restrictions imposed by Republican lawmakers—limiting the acceptable forms of identification, ending opportunities for student voting, reducing hours for early voting—certainly do appear aimed at Democratic voters.
Indeed, in a column for right-wing clearinghouse WorldNetDaily, longtime conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly acknowledged as much with a defense of North Carolina’s new voting law, which has been criticized for its restrictions on access, among other things. Here’s Schlafly:
“The reduction in the number of days allowed for early voting is particularly important because early voting plays a major role in Obama’s ground game. The Democrats carried most states that allow many days of early voting, and Obama’s national field director admitted, shortly before last year’s election, that ‘early voting is giving us a solid lead in the battleground states that will decide this election.’
“The Obama technocrats have developed an efficient system of identifying prospective Obama voters and then nagging them (some might say harassing them) until they actually vote. It may take several days to accomplish this, so early voting is an essential component of the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote campaign.”
She later adds that early voting “violates the spirit of the Constitution” and facilitates “illegal votes” that “cancel out the votes of honest Americans.” I’m not sure what she means by “illegal votes,” but it sounds an awful lot like voting by Democratic constituencies: students, low-income people, and minorities.
Schlafly, it should be noted, isn’t the first Republican to confess the true reason for voter-identification laws. Among friendly audiences, they can’t seem to help it.
Last spring, for example, Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai told a gathering of Republicans that their voter identification law would “allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” That summer, at an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation, former Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund conceded that Democrats had a point about the GOP’s focus on voter ID, as opposed to those measures—such as absentee balloting—that are vulnerable to tampering. “I think it is a fair argument of some liberals that there are some people who emphasize the voter ID part more than the absentee ballot part because supposedly Republicans like absentee ballots more and they don’t want to restrict that,” he said.
After the election, former Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer told The Palm Beach Post that the explicit goal of the state’s voter-ID law was Democratic suppression. “The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” Greer told the Post. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only ... ‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us,’” he said. Indeed, the Florida Republican Party imposed a host of policies, from longer ballots to fewer precincts in minority areas, meant to discourage voting. And it worked. According to one study, as many as 49,000 people were discouraged from voting in November 2012 as a result of long lines and other obstacles.
One could spend hours going through the abundant evidence that these laws are meant to discourage Democratic voting with burdens that harm blacks, Latinos, and other disproportionately low-income groups. In 2011 an Associated Press analysis found that South Carolina’s proposed voter-identification law would hit black precincts the hardest, keeping thousands from casting nonprovisional ballots. Likewise, if Alabama’s voter-ID law goes into effect, it will place its largest burden on black voters who lack acceptable forms of identification and don’t have immediate access to alternatives. And while most of these laws—which, it’s worth noting, have been passed in most of the states of the former Confederacy—provide for free identification, it’s not an easy reach. To get one in Mississippi, for instance, residents need a birth certificate, which costs $15 and requires the photo identification they don’t have. They’ll also need time to travel to the state office to pay or a computer to do the transaction online.
For the one in five Mississippians who live below the poverty line, there’s no guarantee of the time to go to an office, a computer to access the website, or a credit card to make the transaction. After all, more than 10 million American households don’t have bank accounts, and the large majority of them are low income. Most voters will know the steps they need to get an ID. They just aren’t easy to complete, and that’s the point.
So we should be thankful for Schlafly’s candor. The more Republicans acknowledge that these laws are designed to suppress the votes of blacks, Latinos, and others, the easier building a movement to stop them will be.
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2020 10:00:02 GMT
THESE PEOPLE ARE SUCH F'N BASTARDS
North Carolina GOP’s new argument against early voting: People could die before Election Day
The North Carolina Republican Party has spent years trying to cut the early voting days available in their state — after ordering studies that found voters of color disproportionately cast their ballots early. Even though they lost in federal court and are mostly losing at the county level, the leaders of the state GOP have a new argument: early voting will allow dead people to influence the election in the crucial swing state. “We have a situation here where you have to be alive on Election Day. If you vote early, you still have to be alive,” the state GOP’s executive director Dallas Woodhouse told local Fox reporters. “In a very close race you could literally have dead people voting.”
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2020 10:00:24 GMT
With all this noise about Hillary Clinton's emails one can't help but relate this to the Presidential Records Act. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Records_Act All Republican presidents...Reagan, Bush I, Bush II basically ignored these when it came to emails. Only Clinton and Obama followed the law. What does that tell you?
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2020 10:00:46 GMT
Quote by ronstadtfanaz: One law for the Republicans and their fat-cat cronies, and another (different) one for us schmucks.
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2020 10:01:15 GMT
THEY ARE STILL AT IT AND WILL NEVER STOP WITH THEIR LIES AND MISINFORMATION TO GET VOTES AND WIN ELECTIONS. ANYTHING GOES WITH THESE PEOPLE.
Election office in Texas’ 2nd-largest county misinforming voters about photo ID
The state’s voter ID law was actually struck down in July.
Thanks to a recent federal court ruling, Texans who cannot reasonably obtain photo ID no longer have to show such ID when voting. But you wouldn’t know that from looking at false information prominently displayed on Bexar County property.
According to Ari Berman, an author and reporter who focuses on voting rights, the following incorrect information is displayed in a Bexar County elections office:
As ThinkProgress has previously reported, thanks to the federal ruling, registered Texas voters no longer need to bring an ID to cast a ballot. Instead, they can “present a valid voter registration certificate, a certified birth certificate, a current utility bill, a bank statement, a government check, a paycheck, or any other government document that displays the voter’s name and address” so long as they “sign a reasonable impediment declaration” — a document stating they were not reasonably able to obtain the forms of ID mandated by the state’s now-invalidated ID law.
Berman told ThinkProgress that the incorrect information is displayed on a large poster at the entrance to the Bexar County office. But he said materials behind a desk in the office contain accurate info, and workers told him they plan to swap out the inaccurate poster sometime soon.
Bexar County Elections Administrator Jacquelyn F. Callanen didn’t respond to a ThinkProgress voicemail seeking comment. With more than 1.8 million residents, her county is the second most populous county in Texas and the seventh largest in the United States. It’s also much bluer than most of Texas. Though Mitt Romney won the state by a 16 points in 2012, Bexar, which encompasses San Antonio, went for Obama by a 5-point margin.
ThinkProgress has previously documented how voter suppression laws like the one Texas previously had on the books can skew elections:
Laws requiring voters to show photo ID in order to vote do create an obstacle to the franchise that is particularly likely to impact racial minorities, low-income voters, students and other groups that tend to prefer Democrats to Republicans. Data journalist Nate Silver estimated that voter ID could “reduce President Obama’s margin against Mitt Romney by a net of 1.2 percentage points.” A more recent study found even starker results, determining that “Democratic turnout drops by an estimated 8.8 percentage points in general elections when strict photo identification laws are in place,” as opposed to just 3.6 percentage points for Republicans.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a motion accusing Texas officials of instructing voters and poll workers that someone without photo ID cannot vote unless it is literally impossible for them to obtain that ID — a misstatement that would violate a federal court order. In a response filed Monday, Texas officials — including Attorney General Ken Paxton — argue that DOJ officials rely “on selected statements” to support this allegation, although a quote Texas provides in an attempt to rebut DOJ’s claims still incorrectly states that a voter may only vote without ID if they “cannot obtain” such ID.
The last time Texas went for a Democrat in a presidential election was when Jimmy Carter carried the state in 1976, but a recent Washington Post poll that found Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in a dead heat indicates the Lone State’s politics may be shifting. Other polls have Trump leading in Texas by about a half-dozen points.
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2020 10:01:46 GMT
REPUBLICANS HAVE BEEN SALIVATING TO PRIVATIZE THE MOST SUCCESSFUL GOVERNMENT PROGRAM IN HISTORY AND TURN IT OVER TO WALL STREET TO THE DETRIMENT OF ALL AMERICANSSlowly Killing Social Security: Death By A Thousand Cuts 10/02/2016 10:18 am ET | Updated 6 hours ago
Nancy Altman Founding Co-director, Social Security Works
A surreptitious but deadly attack against your Social Security is underway. Congress just left town, but not without plunging the knife in one more time. From the beginning, a small but powerful group of ideologues — a “small splinter group” in the words of President Dwight Eisenhower — has sought to get rid of Social Security. At the start, the plan was to repeal it and replace it with means-tested welfare. In recent decades, the plan has been to “save” Social Security by destroying it — again, replacing it with means-tested welfare, but now also with inadequate 401k-type layered on top, as sugar-coating.
The American people have never let it happen, and the Democratic Party is now solidly with them, pushing to expand, not cut, Social Security. Stymied in their efforts to destroy Social Security legislatively, the system’s opponents are relying on another tactic, involving small cuts, largely imperceptible to the American people and ultimately lethal.
www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-altman/slowly-killing-social-sec_b_12295912.html
For decades, opponents of Social Security have worked to dismantle it. When President George W. Bush tried to pass his privatization scheme, a leaked White House memo asserted, “For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win.”
Of course, the assessment was wrong. While opponents of Social Security certainly have not given up on their quest to dismantle Social Security, they must see that it has become even more difficult now that the Democratic Party is united in support of expanding and not cutting benefits. But, death by a thousand administrative cuts remains hidden, under the radar.
False claims by Social Security’s opponents that Social Security is unaffordable have succeeded in weakening the confidence of the American people in the program’s future, but the false claims have not, at least so far, resulted in actual cuts. But perhaps closed offices, long wait times, and overworked employees might weaken the public’s support enough, to allow the program to be dismantled. At least, that appears to be the thinking.
The 2016 Democratic Party Platform calls specifically for increased funding for SSA’s administration:
The Democratic Party is also committed to providing all necessary financial support for the Social Security Administration (“SSA”) so that it can provide timely benefits and high-quality service for those it serves.
If Democrats are smart, they will run strongly on this plank. All Democrats should make it clear to voters that the Republicans are the ones responsible for the decline in SSA’s historically exemplary service. Let the American people know what’s really going on so that they can make an informed decision on Election Day.
Those who have a stake in Social Security — that’s all of us — should send a clear message to every candidate running for federal office: Expand, don’t cut, our earned Social Security benefits. And expand, don’t cut, the Social Security services we have also earned and purchased.
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