|
|
Thursday, July 1, 2021
POLITICO NIGHTLY: What comes next for the Trump Org.?
RSN: BREAKING | The Supreme Court Has Opened the Floodgates to Voter Suppression
01 July 21
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote the opinion in the 6 to 3 ruling, which divided the court along ideological lines. Voting rights experts said the decision could make it harder to challenge some of the new voting restrictions being passed by state legislatures around the country.
The court was considering the shield provided by the Voting Rights Act (VRA), first passed in 1965 to forbid laws that result in discrimination based on race.
The cases involved two voting regulations from Arizona that are in common use across the country. One throws out the ballots of those who vote in the wrong precinct. The other restricts who may collect ballots cast early for delivery to polling places, a practice then-President Donald Trump denounced as “ballot harvesting.”
Even the Biden administration had concluded that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit had erred in condemning the Arizona laws. So the outcome was not a surprise.
But the greater impact will be how VRA relates to an outpouring of new laws enacted by state legislatures that have changed voting procedures, and on the drawing of congressional and legislative districts after the 2020 Census.
Alito wrote that the majority declines to “announce a test to govern all … claims involving rules, like those at issue here, that specify the time, place, or manner for casting ballots.”
But he said certain “guidelines” should be considered, such as the size of the burden imposed by a challenged rule; the disparities imposed on different racial and ethnic groups and the opportunities for voting provided by a state’s entire system for voting.
Also: “One strong and entirely legitimate state interest is the prevention of fraud,” Alito wrote. “Fraud can affect the outcome of a close election, and fraudulent votes dilute the right of citizens to cast ballots that carry appropriate weight. Fraud can also undermine public confidence in the fairness of elections and the perceived legitimacy of the announced outcome.”
Reacting to Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud, Republican-led legislatures are racing to enact laws that cut back on easements to voting implemented in part because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Even if investigations by Trump’s Justice Department and other Republican officials failed to substantiate the charges, they say changes are needed to ensure public confidence in election outcomes
Democratic lawyers are challenging changes in the South and Midwest. Attorney General Merrick Garland has filed a complaint about changes made to Georgia’s voting laws.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote a stinging dissent, saying the court was undermining the intent of the VRA by weakening the protections in Section 2.
“The majority writes its own set of rules, limiting Section 2 from multiple directions,” wrote Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.
“Wherever it can, the majority gives a cramped reading to broad language. And then it uses that reading to uphold two election laws from Arizona that discriminate against minority voters.”
She added: “What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses.”
The liberal Brennan Center for Justice said that at least 880 bills proposing election law changes have been introduced in 49 states. Of these, at least 28 bills with expansive provisions have been signed into law in 14 states.
In 2013, the Supreme Court made it harder for civil rights groups to challenge such changes. It effectively eliminated the requirement that states proven to have discriminated against minorities in the past receive advance approval from a panel of federal judges or the Justice Department before changing their laws.
The court was examining a part of the voter protection law called Section 2, which was amended in 1982 to prohibit any voting practice that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”
It most often has been employed against jurisdictions that rig election lines to dilute minority voters’ impact. But after the decision in Shelby County v. Holder, civil rights groups are using it to challenge restrictions they say place a heavier burden on minority groups.
Lower courts are working through how to apply the law in these new challenges.
In Arizona, Democrats challenged the two provisions on out-of-precinct voting and ballot collection. A district judge held a trial and upheld them. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit agreed with that decision on a 2-to-1 vote.
But a larger panel of the 9th Circuit stepped in, and said that the way the provisions were applied in Arizona disproportionately affected Black and Hispanic voters.
Those judges said that the state changed locations of voting places more often in minority communities, leading to voter confusion, and that the rates of discarded out-of-precinct (OOP) votes were far higher in Arizona than in other states. Arizona throws out the entire ballot, even if some races — for governor, for instance — are not affected by the voter’s precinct location.
Democrats said that between 2008 and 2016, Arizona discarded 38,335 OOP ballots in general elections, all of which were cast by registered, eligible voters.
The judges said the ban on collecting ballots was intentionally passed to harm minority voters, who they said were more likely to be homebound or disabled and also lacking reliable means to vote in person. Native Americans had in the past been served by community or political leaders who collected early vote ballots, the court said.
“There is no evidence of any fraud in the long history of third-party ballot collection in Arizona,” Judge William A. Fletcher wrote. The court’s 6-to-5 ruling that the discrimination was intentional is a rarity in federal court reviews of state actions.
Arizona countered that it makes exceptions for ballot-handling by family and household members and caregivers, and that nothing prevents Arizona from taking action to prevent fraud.
In an unusual letter to the Supreme Court, the Biden administration somewhat reluctantly agreed that Arizona’s laws do not violate Section 2.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
RSN: Norman Solomon | The Empire Strikes Back at the Left in Buffalo and Cleveland
01 July 21
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
For Buffalo’s entrenched leaders, a shocking crisis arrived out of the blue on June 22 when socialist India Walton won the Democratic primary for mayor, handily defeating a 15-year incumbent with a deplorable track record. “I am a coalition builder,” Walton said in her victory speech that night. But for the city’s power brokers, she was a sudden disaster.
“This is organizing,” Walton said as rejoicing supporters cheered. “When we organize, we win. Today is only the beginning. From the very start, I said this is not about making India Walton mayor of Buffalo – this is about building the infrastructure to challenge every damn seat. I’m talking about committee seats, school board, county council. All that we are doing in this moment is claiming what is rightfully ours. We are the workers. We do the work. And we deserve a government that works with and for us.”
To the people running City Hall, the 38-year-old victor seemed to come out of nowhere. Actually, she had come out of grassroots activism and a campaign that focused on key issues like “food access,” “pandemic recovery,” education, climate, housing and public safety. And for corporate elites accustomed to having their hands on Buffalo’s levers of power, there would not be a GOP fallback. Mayor Byron Brown had appeared to be such a shoo-in for a fifth term that no Republican bothered to run, so India Walton will be the only name on the November ballot.
Alarm sirens went off immediately after election night. The loudest and most prominent came from wealthy (net worth $150 million) real-estate developer Carl Paladino, a strident Trump supporter and former Republican nominee for governor, who became notorious in 2016 for racist public comments about Michelle and Barack Obama. Walton’s victory incensed Paladino, who made it clear that he vastly preferred the black incumbent to the black challenger. “I will do everything I can to destroy her candidacy,” Paladino said, and he urged fellow business leaders in Buffalo to unite behind Brown as a write-in candidate.
In with Paladino while keeping him at arm’s-length, Brown announced on Monday evening that he will mount a write-in campaign to stay in the mayor’s office. Brown cited among his mayoral achievements “the fact that the tax rate in Buffalo is the lowest it’s been in over 25 years.” Then he began scaremongering.
“I have also heard from voters that there is tremendous fear that has spread across this community,” Brown said. “People are fearful about the future of our city. They are fearful about the future of their families. They are fearful about the future of their children. And they have said to me that they do not want a radical socialist occupying the mayor’s office in Buffalo City Hall. You know, we know the difference between socialism and democracy. We are going to fight for democracy in the city of Buffalo. The voters have said that they don’t want an unqualified inexperienced radical socialist trying to learn on the job on the backs of the residents of this community. We will not let it happen. It will not stand.”
Such attacks, with McCarthyite echoes of Trumpism, are likely to be at the core of Brown’s strategy for winning the general election. But he’ll be in conflict with the formal apparatus of his party in Buffalo. After the write-in campaign announcement, the chair of the Erie County Democratic Party issued an unequivocal statement about India Walton, “to strongly affirm once again that we are with her, now and through the general election in the fall.” It added: “Last Tuesday, India proved she has the message and the means to move and inspire the people of Buffalo. It was a historic moment in Western New York politics. The voters heard her message and embraced her vision for the city’s future, and we look forward to working with her and her team to cross that final finish line on November 2.”
Two hundred miles away, in northeast Ohio, the clash between progressives and corporatists has been escalating for several months, ever since Rep. Marcia Fudge left a Congressional seat vacant when she became President Biden’s HUD secretary. Early voting begins next week, and the district is so heavily Democratic that the winner of the August 3 primary is virtually certain to fill the vacancy this fall.
On Tuesday, the No. 3 Democrat in the House, Rep. Jim Clyburn, went out of his way to be emphatic that he doesn’t want the frontrunner in the race, progressive stalwart Nina Turner, to become a colleague in Congress. Though nominally endorsing Turner’s main opponent, Shontel Brown, the clear underlying message was: Stop Turner.
Clyburn went beyond just making an endorsement. He provided some barbed innuendos via an interview with the New York Times, which reported comments that say something about Clyburn’s self-concept but nothing really about Turner. “What I try to do is demonstrate by precept and example how we are to proceed as a party,” he said. “When I spoke out against sloganeering, like ‘Burn, baby, burn’ in the 1960s and ‘defund the police,’ which I think is cutting the throats of the party, I know exactly where my constituents are. They are against that, and I’m against that.”
In fact, Democrats are overwhelmingly in favor of programs being championed by Turner, none more notably than Medicare for All, a proposal that Clyburn and many of his big funders have worked so hard to block. “Clyburn has vacuumed in more than $1 million from donors in the pharmaceutical industry – and he previously made headlines vilifying Medicare for All during the 2020 presidential primary,” the Daily Poster pointed out on Wednesday.
The corporate money behind Clyburn is of a piece with the forces arrayed against Turner. What she calls “the commodification of health care” is a major reason.
In mid-June, Turner “launched her television spot entitled ‘Worry,’ in which she talks about how her family’s struggle to pay health care bills led her to support Medicare for All,” the Daily Poster reported. “The very next day, corporate lobbyists held a Washington fundraiser for Turner’s primary opponent, Shontel Brown. Among those headlining the fundraiser was Jerome Murray – a registered lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers Association, which has been backing a nationwide campaign to reduce support for Medicare for All.”
Whether Clyburn’s endorsement will have significant impact on the voting is hard to say, but it signaled that high-ranking Democrats are more determined than ever to keep Turner out of Congress if they possibly can. His move came two weeks after Hillary Clinton endorsed Brown, who has also received endorsements from the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Joyce Beatty, and the chief deputy whip of House Democrats, Rep. Pete Aguilar. On the other hand, a dozen progressive members of the House have endorsed Turner, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman, as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Carmen Yulín Cruz, the former mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico – who, like Nina Turner, was a national co-chair of the Sanders 2020 presidential campaign – is a strong supporter of Turner for Congress. This week, summing up the fierce opposition from power brokers who want to prevent a Turner victory, Cruz used words that equally apply to the powerful interests trying to prevent India Walton from becoming the next mayor of Buffalo: “They’re afraid of a politician that can’t be bought.”
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
RSN: FOCUS: Exxon Oil Lobbyist in Sting Video Identifies 11 Senators 'Crucial' to Its Lobbying
01 July 21
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
The footage was obtained by Unearthed, an investigative unit of environmental group Greenpeace UK, which posed as headhunters to obtain the information from Exxon lobbyist Keith McCoy.
Among the senators listed as allies, McCoy calls Joe Manchin the “kingmaker” on energy issues because of his status as a Democrat representing West Virginia, a key natural gas-producing state. McCoy says he speaks with Manchin’s staff every week. Manchin is also chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
McCoy also named Sens. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the top GOP member of the Energy Committee, and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, the Republican ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee.
Other lobbying targets of Exxon include centrist Democrats Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Jon Tester of Montana.
McCoy also singles out Sen. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, as an important contact because of his close relationship with President Joe Biden.
Other Exxon contacts are up for reelection in 2022, McCoy notes: Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Mark Kelly of Arizona.
McCoy also name-checks traditional Republican allies John Cornyn of Texas, Steve Daines of Montana, and Marco Rubio of Florida.
In the leaked video, McCoy also suggested that Exxon is only publicly supporting a carbon tax to appear to be environmentally friendly with little consequence because it sees the policy as politically impossible to pass and thus unlikely to affect the company. Exxon is one of many large oil and gas companies and their lobby groups that have endorsed the concept of a carbon tax as preferable to mandates and regulations.
“I will tell you, there is not an appetite for a carbon tax. It is a non-starter. Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans,” McCoy said. “And the cynical side of me says, 'Yeah, we kind of know that. But it gives us a talking point. We can say, 'Well, what is ExxonMobil for? Well, we’re for a carbon tax.'”
Among other revelations, McCoy acknowledges Exxon “aggressively” fought against climate science in the past to protect its oil and gas business and joined “shadow groups” to push back against the science underpinning global warming.
“We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders,” McCoy said.
And he claims that Exxon lobbied Congress to limit climate provisions in infrastructure negotiations over Biden’s American Jobs Plan and to focus on roads and bridges.
“If you lower that threshold, you stick to highways and bridges, then a lot of the negative stuff starts to come out,” McCoy said. “Why would you put in something on emissions reductions on climate change to oil refineries in a highway bill?”
Exxon CEO Darren Woods issued a statement Wednesday afternoon condemning the lobbyist's comments and apologizing for them, specifically those "regarding interactions with elected officials."
Woods stressed Exxon's "firm commitment" to supporting carbon pricing to address climate change.
McCoy posted his own apologetic statement declaring himself "deeply embarrassed" and saying his comments "clearly do not represent ExxonMobil’s positions on important public policy issues."
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
BREAKING: Elon Musk’s gamble BLOWS UP in his face PAY ATTENTION! ELECT CLOWNS EXPECT A CIRCUS!
ELON MUSK TOLD MAGA DIM WITS TO CUT CHILD CANCER REEARCH FUNDING! WHAT HAS ELON MUSK EVER DONE FOR ANYONE? THIS IS ABOUT CUTTING SOCIAL S...
-
25 November 22 Live on the homepage now! Reader Supported News WE CANNOT FAIL ON FUNDING — There is too much to lose by failing, and too m...
-
05 June 23 Live on the homepage now! Reader Supported News ANOTHER FAILED MONTH OF FUNDRAISING ISN’T GOING TO WORK — We haven’t covered ou...
-
04 August 22 Live on the homepage now! Reader Supported News Murtaza Hussain | Al Qaeda Honcho Zawahiri Got Droned and No One Gave a S...
