07 June 21
Who can Get Today Started With a Contribution?
The last 2 days have been very slow in terms of donations. Ir would be great to get today off to a quick start.
Who can help get it started?
Thanks to all in advance.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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There's Less Than Two Years to Save American Democracy
Luke Savage, Jacobin
Excerpt: "The ongoing drive by Republicans to pass voter suppression laws presents the biggest challenge to democratic government since the establishment of Jim Crow."
The ongoing drive by Republicans to pass voter suppression laws presents the biggest challenge to democratic government since the establishment of Jim Crow. If Democrats in Congress fail to act by the 2022 midterms, it could be too late to stop it.
hough it has yet to fully register as the national story it deserves to be, America is currently in the throes of what may well be the most concerted effort at voter suppression in living memory. Since the beginning of the year, Republican state legislators have introduced a deluge of new laws intended to restrict voting, suppress traditionally non-Republican constituencies, and overturn the results of elections.
Mother Jones senior reporter Ari Berman has been covering issues related to voting rights, gerrymandering, and democratic disenfranchisement for years and is author of the 2015 book Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. Berman spoke to Jacobin’s Luke Savage about the concerted right-wing offensive currently underway at the state level, its deep parallels with similar efforts in the nineteenth century, and why failure to pass federal voting rights legislation will have dire consequences for American democracy.
LS: America is currently in the midst of the most pronounced effort at voter suppression it’s seen for quite some time. According to the Brennan Center, fourteen states enacted twenty-two new laws between January 1 and the middle of last month that restrict access to the vote. From what I can tell, this is just the tip of the iceberg — there being hundreds of voting laws tabled at the state level that have a restrictive character. How would you characterize what’s going on right now?
AB: I would characterize it as the greatest assault on voting rights since the end of Reconstruction. If you look at the number of bills introduced, the number of bills passed, and the intensity of the effort behind it, I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Many of these kinds of efforts were blocked under the Voting Rights Act — and since the Supreme Court gutted it in 2013, voter suppression has gotten worse. But this is by far the worst it’s been in the past decade. It’s not like this is the first time there have been efforts to suppress the vote, but we are seeing a greater number of efforts at suppression, more restrictive bills than before, and more of an intensity within the Republican party to pass them.
LS: What are some illustrative examples of the bills at play here? I know there’s one in Arizona (which hasn’t passed) that would essentially make it possible for the legislature to nullify the secretary of state’s certification of election results by a simple majority vote. Are there other particularly egregious examples of restrictive or draconian laws that come to mind?
AB: Well, there are laws that have actually passed, or that are close to passing, that I find very disturbing. In Georgia, they stripped the secretary of state as a voting member on the board of elections and basically gave the gerrymandered legislature much more control over the state election board — giving that board the power to take over up to four county boards of elections. That kind of stuff is very disturbing when you think about the fact that Donald Trump tried to overturn the election and that the exact mechanisms he tried to use involved going through county canvassing boards, going through state election boards, and pressuring the secretary of state. So they’re pursuing all the methods that Trump tried to use. There’s a Texas bill making it easier for courts to try to throw out votes, to try to overturn an election which, again, is exactly the kind of thing that Trump wanted to do.
So I’m concerned about all of the bills that will make it harder to vote: whether it’s making it harder to get a mail ballot, making it harder to return a mail ballot, making it harder for your ballot to be counted, the kind of intimidation work that poll watchers could do, adding new ID requirements that weren’t there before, or cutting back on early voting and the amount of time that people have to vote. I’m concerned about all of those policies, which are in some ways a continuation of what we’ve been seeing for the past decade. What I’m really, really concerned about, though, is that we’re actually making it easier to overturn an election. Because that’s the fail-safe if voter suppression doesn’t work: you say, “Okay, well, we didn’t achieve all of our ends to suppress the vote. So we’ll just throw out votes altogether or decertify the election,” then just start breaking one democratic norm after another. That’s what didn’t happen in 2020 that I’m very concerned could happen in 2024.
LS: How concerted would you say the effort is? To what extent are these state-level Republican parties acting in concert? And to what extent is this a national strategy that we’re seeing play out?
AB: It’s an incredibly concerted effort to try and make it harder to vote. First off, it starts with the leader of the Republican Party. He’s setting the tone in terms of the policies and outcome that he wants to see. But we also recently broke a story about this big dark money group, Heritage Action for America (the sister organization of the Heritage Foundation) bragging to donors that they’re writing what they call “model legislation” restricting voting rights. They said very clearly that they either draft the bills for them [state-level Republicans] or they have what they called their “sentinel” give them to legislators. So it has what they called a “grassroots from the bottom up” vibe, or they’re advising them on the kinds of policies they want to see.
They’re doing this in all of these key battleground states, and they’re putting real money behind it. They’re spending $24 million over two years on this campaign, while dark money groups overall are spending $42 million on their voter suppression campaigns. The Republican National Committee and state-level Republicans all have so-called “election integrity” committees, so this is way more coordinated than it was in the past. In short, the voter suppression efforts that we’re seeing right now are much more coordinated than they were a decade ago, with a lot more money and the top leadership of the Republican Party behind it.
“I would characterize it as the greatest assault on voting rights since the end of Reconstruction.”
Just this week, the Pennsylvania Republicans went to Arizona to observe their audit. This is why there was such a big battle over voting rights in Georgia, because the Georgia bill was basically going to be the template for what other states would do. And there have been a lot of similar provisions passed in different places. Any time you have so many bills passed in such a short period of time that are all quite similar, someone’s gotta be coordinating it. And, to me, the Heritage video that we uncovered shows that they are, if not the main group, one of the key groups coordinating it.
LS: This week, you published a long essay on the deep history of voter suppression in places like Georgia — which goes all the way back to the years immediately after the Union victory in the Civil War. I think many people are at least somewhat aware of the parallels between what Southern Democrats did in the late nineteenth century and what Republicans are doing today, but they may not realize how concrete and literal those parallels actually are. Can you talk about the very direct linkages between earlier efforts at disenfranchising black voters and what’s happening right now?
AB: There’s both a pattern that’s familiar and specific parallels. First the pattern: the familiar pattern is that you had the enfranchisement of new voters during Reconstruction. It was black voters who turned out in record numbers and were elected. Then you had efforts at violence, fraud, and intimidation to try to suppress black votes. That worked for a time, but when black voters were disenfranchised it was really through legal means like literacy tests, poll taxes, and things like that, which happened when states changed their constitutions a while after the end of Reconstruction. Reconstruction is often thought to have ended in 1877, when Rutherford B. Hayes pulled federal troops out of the South, but blacks still voted in a bunch of states in the South through that period. It wasn’t until Mississippi adopted its constitution to disenfranchise black voters in 1890 that Southern states tried to figure out a way to completely disenfranchise them through what were thought of as “legal” means.
That same kind of process is playing out today: you had the enfranchisement of new groups, manifested in higher turnout in 2020, and you had an attempt to try to overturn the election through extralegal means, including an insurrection. Then, in 2021, you have the so-called legal means to try to disenfranchise people through changes to election law. Those are the big-picture similarities.
The more specific similarities are, number one, the language: Jim Crow never actually said “we want to disenfranchise black voters.” It was technically race neutral, it’s just that everyone knew who the target was. The same thing is happening today. Georgia Republicans aren’t saying “we want to disenfranchise black voters,” but everyone knows that’s their target, because that’s the strongest constituency of the Democratic Party. Number two, even back then you had Southern white Democrats in Mississippi — because remember that Democrats were the segregationist party back then and Republicans were the party of civil rights, and that’s flipped — who were arguing that they were expanding voting rights. They either argued they were expanding voting rights or they argued they were protecting the sanctity or purity of the ballot. That same language is being used by Republicans today.
The last thing is that in the nineteenth century they also made it easier to overturn elections by taking away power from bipartisan election officials, and either gave it to partisan election officials or took power from voters to appoint their election officials. That kind of pattern is playing out in states like Georgia and Texas today. So there are big picture parallels, but also a lot of specific similarities in terms of the nature of the laws themselves.
LS: Legislation intended to curtail the current Republican offensive against voting rights is currently sitting before Congress in the form of H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Both face obstruction from the filibuster and from Democratic senators like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
I don’t want to ask you to speculate on what the exact outcome will be here, but let’s assume for a second that the filibuster remains in place: What’s the worst-case scenario if these two bills, and particularly H.R. 1, aren’t passed? What do subsequent elections from the 2022 midterms on look like if the current state-level offensive against voting rights succeeds in its main ambitions?
AB: If the federal legislation fails, it’s going to embolden Republicans to pass more sweeping voter suppression laws without fear of any kind of consequence. That could lead to reduced Democratic turnout and higher levels of voter suppression, which could enable Republicans to take back power in Congress and retain power at the state level in 2022 and 2024. That could allow them to not certify elections in 2022 and 2024 so that even if Democrats are able to overcome the suppression measures, Republicans will still control the outcome of the elections and essentially nullify the will of the voters. That’s the worst-case scenario here. Basically, we’ll be in a situation where an election is only viewed as legitimate if Republicans win, and there’s no way that you could describe that as a democracy — where only one side is acknowledged as being able to fairly win an election.
That just goes against all the tenets of what it means to be a democracy. That’s the worst-case outcome, and I see it as a very likely outcome — especially if Democrats fail to do anything. That’s another parallel that I see with Reconstruction: back then, Southern Democrats were passing all of these voter suppression laws and the only thing they were concerned about was what Congress might do, and when Congress didn’t pass federal legislation to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment and protect voting rights, Southern states just felt completely emboldened to do whatever they wanted.
To some extent, that’s the same way Republicans feel right now. I don’t think they fear the voters because they feel like they’re manipulating them — they are not worried about a voter backlash. They also don’t fear the courts, because those are now so dominated by Trump appointees. The only thing they fear is what Democrats can do in Congress, and if the Democrats don’t do anything, it’s very unlikely they’re going to retain both houses of Congress in 2022.
Sen. Joe Manchin. (photo: Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)
Joe Manchin Opposes For the People Act in Blow to Democrats' Voting Rights Push
Amanda Holpuch, Guardian UK
Holpuch writes: "In a huge blow to Democrats' hopes of passing sweeping voting rights protections, the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin said on Sunday he would not support his party's flagship bill - because of Republican opposition to it."
The West Virginia senator is considered a key vote to pass the For the People Act, which would ensure automatic and same-day registration, place limits on gerrymandering and restore voting rights for felons.
Many Democrats see the bill as essential to counter efforts by Republicans in state government to restrict access to the ballot and to make it more easy to overturn election results.
It would also present voters with a forceful answer to Donald Trump’s continued lies about electoral fraud, which the former president rehearsed in a speech in North Carolina on Saturday.
In a column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin said: “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act.”
Manchin’s opposition to the bill also known as HR1 could prove crucial in the evenly split Senate. His argument against the legislation focused on Republican opposition to the bill and did not specify any issues with its contents.
Manchin instead endorsed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a measure named for the late Georgia Democratic congressman and campaigner which would reauthorize voting protections established in the civil rights era but eliminated by the supreme court in 2013.
Manchin also reiterated his support for the filibuster, which gives 41 of 100 senators the ability to block action by the majority.
Democrats are seeking to abolish the filibuster, arguing that Republicans have repeatedly abused it to support minority positions on issues like gun control and, just last month, to block the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol.
Republicans have used the filibuster roughly twice as often as Democrats to prevent the other party from passing legislation, according to a study by the Center for American Progress.
“I have always said, ‘If I can’t go home and explain it, I can’t vote for it,’” Manchin wrote. “And I cannot explain strictly partisan election reform or blowing up the Senate rules to expedite one party’s agenda.”
In a sign of growing frustration within Manchin’s own party, Mondaire Jones, a progressive congressman from New York, tweeted that his op-ed “might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow.’”
Jim Crow was the name given to the system of legalised segregation which dominated southern states between the end of the civil war in 1865 and the civil rights era of the 1960s.
On the Sunday talk shows, hosts pressed Manchin on whether his expectations of a bipartisan solution on voting rights were realistic in such a divided Congress, and with a Republican party firmly in thrall to Donald Trump.
Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace told him that if he were to threaten to vote against the filibuster, it could incentivize Republicans to negotiate on legislation.
“Haven’t you empowered Republicans to be obstructionists?” Wallace asked.
“I don’t think so,” Manchin said. “Because we have seven brave Republicans that continue to vote for what they know is right and the facts as they see them, not worrying about the political consequences.”
Seven Republican defections from the pro-Trump party line is not enough to beat the filibuster, even if all 50 Democrats remain united. Manchin said he was hopeful other Republicans would “rise to the occasion”.
Wallace asked if he was being “naive”, noting that the Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said in May: “One hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration.”
“I’m not being naive,” Manchin said. “I think he’s 100% wrong in trying to block all the good things that we’re trying to do for America. It would be a lot better if we had participation and we’re getting participation.”
With the Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, Manchin has emerged as one of the most powerful figures in Washington, by virtue of his centrist views in a Senate split on starkly partisan lines. In Tulsa this week, in a remark that risked angering Manchin, Biden said the two senators “vote more with my Republican friends”, though their voting record does not actually reflect this.
On CBS’s Face the Nation, host John Dickerson asked Manchin if his bipartisan ideals were outdated.
Dickerson noted that since the 2020 election put Democrats in control of Washington, Republicans in the states have introduced more than 300 bills featuring voting restrictions. Furthermore, Republicans who embraced baseless claims about the election being stolen are now running to be chief elections officials in several states.
Dickerson asked: “Why would Republicans, when they’re making all these gains in the statehouses and achieving their goals in the states, why would they vote for a bill someday in the Senate that’s going to take away all the things they’re achieving right now in those statehouses?”
Manchin said those state-level successes could ultimately damage Republicans.
“The bottom line is the fundamental purpose of our democracy is the freedom of our elections,” Manchin said. “If we can’t come to an agreement on that, God help us.”
Police stand guard after protesters set fire to dumpsters after a vigil for Winston Boogie Smith Jr. early on Saturday. (photo: Christian Monterrosa/AP)
Investigators Say There's No Video Evidence of What Led to Shooting of Black Man in Minneapolis
Zack Linly, The Root
Linly writes: "Until every law enforcement agency in America learns that transparency is key in regards to police-involved deaths of Black people, they can expect to see civil unrest. Law enforcement in America has earned that distrust."
f George Floyd’s murder wasn’t recorded by a bystander and shown to the world, there is little doubt that Derek Chauvin would be free today and that he and the other three officers charged in Floyd’s death would still be policing the streets of Minneapolis. It’s also a fact that sometimes cops lie in their reports with the expectation that they will be taken at face value by virtue of them being cops.
So it’s no surprise that members of the Minneapolis community and the family of 32-year-old Winston Boogie Smith Jr.—a Black man who was fatally shot in the city Thursday by members of a U.S. Marshals Service task force—aren’t buying the authorities’ narrative that it was a clean shoot citing the fact that the marshals weren’t wearing body cameras and investigators said there is no video evidence available to determine what led up to the shooting. Not only were the task force members not wearing body-cams, but they aren’t allowed to wear them.
The Washington Post reports that U.S. Marshals and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), which is investigating the shooting, said that Smith had a warrant for a felony firearms violation. The task force aptly known as the North Star Fugitive Task Force (*face-palm* Jesus, Mary and slave patrols) said that Smith didn’t comply with their orders and that he “produced a handgun resulting in task force members firing upon the subject.”
The BCA said in a statement that there was evidence that indicated that Smith fired a gun from inside his car, so it’s entirely plausible that this was a justified shoot. The problem is, we may never know definitively how things unfolded because of another tidbit in the BCA’s report.
“The U.S. Marshal Service currently does not allow the use of body cameras for officers serving on its North Star Fugitive Task Force,” the bureau said. “There is no squad camera footage of the incident.”
Listen: I’ve never had a job in law enforcement, so I’m clearly not an authority on the matter, but I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering why the hell any law enforcement department would disallow officers to wear a body-cam unless they know damn well how much easier it is to cover one’s ass when a lack of video evidence makes taking artistic liberty in an official report more convenient.
I’m not even saying the U.S. Marshalls are lying—I’m saying there are multiple sides to every story, that one person is no longer alive to give his side and that video footage would have been able to provide more reliable truth than anyone involved could provide without said footage.
Suffice it to say, the community and family members of Smith aren’t going along with it.
From the Post:
His family criticized law enforcers’ depiction of Smith and said that while he was trying to “turn over a new leaf,” police were “using his past to tarnish his character.”
“They’re using his past to diminish that what he was trying to do in the present,” Smith’s sister Tiesha Floyd said during a Friday news conference.
Family members and friends said Smith was a father of three who enjoyed music and writing comedy sketches. Shelly Hopkins, who was in a longtime relationship with Smith, described him to the Associated Press as a spiritual man who cared most of all about making people happy and being there for his children. Hopkins told the news outlet that Smith had legal troubles but that police “tried to make a case against him that didn’t exist.”
Toshira Garraway, a Minneapolis community activist and founder of Families Supporting Families Against Police Violence, said during the Friday news conference that she does not believe the BCA’s explanation.
“We no longer have faith in just believing the narratives that the police give us. They have forfeited their right to just tell us a story,” Garraway said. “We need facts, and the fact is any video footage. And we refuse to believe that no one has any video footage after all those departments showed up yesterday.”
According to the Star Tribune, protests and vigils on behalf of Smith continued through Friday and leading into Saturday morning. In some instances, things grew contentious between protesters and police.
From the Tribune:
Activists blocked traffic at busy Lake Street and Hennepin Avenue during the Friday evening rush hour. Minneapolis police officers on bikes moved in to try to take control of the busy intersection, but protesters later blocked Lake Street again with a makeshift barricade of motorcycles, bike racks and dumpsters. There were some standoffs between protesters and officers throughout the night.
Until every law enforcement agency in America learns that transparency is key in regards to police-involved deaths of Black people, they can expect to see civil unrest. Law enforcement in America has earned that distrust.
If the people aren’t satisfied that justice is being done then “no justice, no peace” often becomes the default, just as law enforcement tends to consider the reports of officers to be the defacto “truth.”
A customer looks at a custom made AR-15 style rifle. (photo: Getty Images)
Judge Who Nixed California Assault Weapons Ban Is a Second Amendment Champion
Blake Montgomery, The Daily Beast
Montgomery writes: "Roger Benitez likened an AR-15 to a Swiss Army Knife, and he has ruled in favor of an expansive Second Amendment time and time again."
READ MORE
A mother holds her child as they surrender to U.S. Border Patrol agents. (photo: David J. Phillip/AP)
Put Migrant Protections at Heart of US Policy, Rights Groups Urge
Sandra Cuffe, Al Jazeera
Cuffe writes: "The Biden administration's focus so far has been on addressing the 'root causes' of migration from Central America, but migration advocates say prioritizing the use of security forces and expulsions to block asylum seekers means that years of failed US policies are continuing."
The coronavirus's second wave in India has been accompanied by packed hospital wards and oxygen shortages. (photo: Parveen Kumar/Hindustan Times/Getty Images)
Narendra Modi Turned COVID-19 Into a Catastrophe for India
Somdeep Sen, Jacobin
Sen writes: "India's experience of COVID-19 has gone from crisis to catastrophe in recent months. Responsibility for the disaster lies squarely with Narendra Modi's right-wing government, which has consistently prioritized its own political interests over public health."
READ MORE
A gray wolf. (photo: National Geographic)
Trump Canceled Endangered Species Protections. Biden Wants to Bring Them Back
Peter Wade, Rolling Stone
The last administration revoked or downgraded protections for gray wolves, the American burying beetle, the northern spotted owl and other protected species
he Biden administration announced Friday it is reviewing or ending policies put in place by the Trump administration that weakened protections for endangered or threatened species.
The move comes from an executive order Biden issued instructing all federal agencies to examine Trump administration actions that may conflict with Biden-Harris administration objectives, including climate change policies.
Fish and Wildlife Service Principal Deputy Director Martha Williams said in a statement that the administration intends to work with “diverse federal, Tribal, state and industry partners to not only protect and recover America’s imperiled wildlife but to ensure cornerstone laws like the Endangered Species Act are helping us meet 21st-century challenges.”
As part of these actions, the administration will reinstate a “blanket rule” that automatically extends endangered species protections to species designated as threatened. The agencies will also reinstate an Obama rule that said decisions to protect species and designate areas as a critical habitat should not factor in “possible economic or other impacts.” Trump had reversed that rule, allowing wildlife officials to consider potential economic costs of conservation when selecting which species should be designated as endangered.
Trump also revoked or downgraded protections for gray wolves, the American burying beetle, the northern spotted owl and other protected species, often in service of industries that threaten their habitats. At the end of his term, the Trump administration shrunk the northern spotted owl’s habitat by 3.5 million acres, but Biden’s Interior Department prevented that from going into effect and is reconsidering the plan. Biden has also already made moves to rescind a Trump-era rule that weakened the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which penalizes businesses and people who kill migratory birds, including accidentally.
Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization that sued the Trump administration when it weakened the Endangered Species Act, praised the administration’s decision but urged the president to move quickly. But many of these actions may take a while to implement, just as it took Trump years to undo some Obama-era protections.
“We are currently in the midst of an unprecedented global extinction crisis, and endangered species have no time to waste,” Earthjustice said in a statement. “We are grateful the Biden administration is moving to protect the most imperiled species by reversing the Trump-era rules, but time is of the essence. Each day that goes by is another day that puts our imperiled species and their habitats in danger.”
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