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10 March 21
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We May Be One Election From Permanent Minority Rule
Peter Certo, In These Times
Certo writes:
Donald Trump has been defeated, but American democracy remains in peril. Here’s how we can reverse the trendline.
resident Donald Trump was impeached for inciting a mob to violently overturn the 2020 election. He failed. Now, Republican officials across the country are openly radicalizing against democracy by attempting to codify Trump’s efforts.
In dozens of states, with little media scrutiny or public debate, the GOP is introducing bills with the express intent of rigging elections, disempowering voters and setting itself up for minority rule. And given how creaky our political institutions have become, the GOP is well on its way to stealing the next election — and perhaps every one after that.
This effort is perhaps an even greater emergency than Trump’s attacks on the 2020 election results. Unless social movements pressure Democrats to act now, both could be locked out of power for generations to come.
Republicans are accelerating their crackdown on voters
The Republican Party has been rolling back voting rights at a state level for years, but those efforts have accelerated since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Following that decision, Republican-controlled states have enacted wave after wave of strict voter ID laws, closed thousands of polling sites, and as one federal judge put it, targeted voters of color with “almost surgical precision.”
Trump’s war on the 2020 election supercharged this process. Since November, the Brennan Center for Justice calculates that Republican lawmakers in 33 states have introduced at least 165 new bills to curtail voting rights in dozens of states.
In Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona, where Biden narrowly beat Trump on the strength of absentee ballots, the GOP has moved to end no-excuse absentee voting altogether. Republicans in these and many other states are also demanding more stringent voter ID and signature matching, even though evidence of voter fraud is virtually non-existent.
Because historic mobilizations allowed Democrats to recapture the Senate, Georgia Republicans have systematically targeted Black voters, as Ari Berman reports in a crucial new feature for Mother Jones. In a state that already had 10- and 11-hour lines to vote in Black precincts, lawmakers are seeking to greatly restrict early voting — measures that include closing polls on the Sundays before elections, days many Black churches lead get-out-the-vote drives.
As Common Cause Georgia Director Aunna Dennis tells Berman, “This bill is Jim Crow with a suit and tie.”
The Electoral College makes voter suppression much more effective
President Joe Biden won 7 million more votes than Trump in 2020, but Biden’s real margin of victory was much, much narrower. Why? Because the popular vote doesn’t decide presidential elections — the Electoral College does. And most states award their entire slate of electoral votes to whichever candidate comes out ahead, no matter the margin.
The way these votes are counted privileges smaller, whiter and predominantly Republican-leaning states. A vote in lightly populated Wyoming, for instance, carries far more weight than a vote in densely populated California. Meanwhile, a razor-thin victory in swing states like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania means the losing candidate walks away with nothing.
Over the past three decades, this system has overwhelmingly favored Republicans, who have held the White House for 14 years despite winning the popular vote only once. But even these numbers understate the Democrats’ structural disadvantage. Biden’s 7 million-vote victory in 2020 won him no more electoral votes than Trump’s popular vote defeat of 3 million in 2016.
Just over 40,000 votes in Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia determined the 2020 election. With margins this narrow, voter suppression in even a few states can have a massive impact.
Some Republicans want to toss out election results altogether
Republican authoritarianism goes well beyond voter suppression. When the GOP lost gubernatorial races in North Carolina in 2016, and Wisconsin and Michigan in 2018, state officials used gerrymandered majorities to strip newly elected Democrats of their powers.
In other cases, Republicans used these rigged majorities to undermine or overturn voter-decided election reforms, such as enfranchising former convicts in Florida and redrawing legislative districts in Michigan. Now, after losing the White House in 2020, the GOP is growing increasingly brazen.
In states like Wisconsin, GOP lawmakers want to split state’s electoral votes by congressional districts, which have been drawn in their favor. That means that, even if Biden were to win Wisconsin again in 2024, he might lose several electoral votes to the Republican candidate. At the same time, GOP lawmakers are pushing to abandon this system in Nebraska—because Biden won a single electoral vote there in 2020.
Perhaps most outrageously, one Arizona bill would let Republican state lawmakers throw out the popular vote altogether and cast the state’s presidential votes themselves. In Pennsylvania, where judges rejected a Republican effort to toss Biden’s 2020 state victory, lawmakers in a gerrymandered GOP legislature are pushing for more control over judge appointments—a clear sign they hope to try again with a friendlier court.
Similar types of bills are likely to surface in more states. Should these bills pass, Republicans could lose the same states they lost in 2020 and win in 2024.
Republicans are already absurdly overrepresented in Washington
How could Biden or another Democrat overcome these handicaps? They would need to run up even bigger popular vote margins and win even more states. To do that, they would have to rebuild the base of their party by increasing union membership and creating a pathway to citizenship for immigrants.
Ending the pandemic, raising wages and improving healthcare would improve the standing of the Democratic Party. But even good governance may not be enough to reverse the country’s anti-democratic trendlines.
Consider the Senate, where 50 Democrats represent 40 million more people than the 50 Republicans. Thanks to the arcane filibuster, it takes just 41 of those Republicans — representing just over 20% of the U.S. population — to block Democrats from passing most legislation.
Republican Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) spent weeks using the filibuster to block newly elected Democrats from their committee seats, and there’s every indication he will use the same tactic to quash new laws regulating everything from labor conditions to carbon emissions.
On the House side, a fresh round of gerrymandering this year could put that chamber out of reach for Democrats even if they earn millions more votes nationally than the GOP. Democrats currently hold a nine-seat advantage, but Republicans will get to redraw at least 188 districts this year. Many are in vote-rich states like Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, all of which have long histories of voter suppression.
It’s not difficult to envision McConnell and company easily blocking Biden’s agenda and Republicans retaking the House, Senate and White House in the next two election cycles. And thanks to gerrymandered state legislatures and Trump’s packing of the federal courts, the GOP could be well on its way to near-permanent minority rule.
Eliminate the filibuster. Expand voting. Curb gerrymandering. Add new states
We may not be able to change the Republican Party, but we can change the political institutions it has deftly exploited.
Ideally, we’d toss out the Electoral College and restructure the Senate. Both have their constitutional roots in compromises designed to protect slaveholders, and both have warped our democracy. But amending the Constitution would require votes from the GOP, the very party that’s currently gaming the system.
So what to do?
An obvious first step is to eliminate the filibuster, which is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. With a simple majority vote (plus Vice President Kamala Harris), Senate Democrats could set a new Senate precedent.
The demand to end the filibuster is growing in popularity among progressive groups, 60 of which recently wrote Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D‑N.Y.), calling on him to scrap it. The only obstacle may be the Senate Democrats themselves.
While progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑Vt.) now support ending the legislative procedure, more conservative Senators like Kyrsten Sinema (D‑Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D‑W.V.) have vowed to oppose such efforts (although the latter recently expressed an openness to filibuster reform.)
Biden is also said to be reluctant to end the filibuster.
Democrats might, then, consider weakening the filibuster, without eliminating it. As it stands, 60 votes are required to stop a filibuster; this number could simply be reduced. Or, perhaps the filibuster could be suspended for votes on expanding voting rights or admitting new states. Senators already can’t filibuster court nominees or budget reconciliations (such as the most recent Covid-19 relief package), so there is plenty of precedent for this move.
With the filibuster gone or limited, the next priority must be passing the For the People Act.
Already passed this year in the House, the For the People Act would greatly modernize voter registration, restrict the voter purges that have become commonplace in GOP-controlled states, expand mail-in voting and restore the civil rights-era Voting Rights Act, among many other measures.
The bill would also restrict the partisan gerrymandering that’s become the norm across the country—particularly in Republican-controlled districts. The practice has already rendered many states essentially non-democracies. (In my home state of Ohio, Democrats typically win between 40% and 50% of the statewide vote, but hold just four of 16 congressional seats — and may lose one of those after redistricting.)
The bill also contains a laundry list of reforms that social justice activists have promoted for years. Because it has virtually no Republican support, it will only pass the Senate if the filibuster is successfully neutralized.
Getting more voters to the polls will help, but Republicans will still remain vastly overrepresented in both the Senate and the Electoral College. The only solution, then, may be to add more states to the union.
While a few creative thinkers have proposed breaking California up into seven states, it might be more realistic to offer statehood to the millions of U.S. citizens living in different districts and colonial territories without federal representation. These include the approximately 700,00 residents of the District of Columbia (which does have three electoral votes, thanks to the 23rd Amendment) and the more than 3 million U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico.
The same is true of other overseas territories such as the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, none of which are represented in Congress or can vote in a presidential election. (Virgin Islands Delegate Stacey Plaskett helped manage the Democrats’ last impeachment proceedings despite being unable to vote in the trial itself.)
If the residents of these islands vote to join the union, Democrats should welcome their entry. A basic commitment to democracy demands it. (As colonial territories, they should also be allowed to choose independence, a subject for another column.)
If Republicans succeed in imposing minority rule, it won’t just make addressing crises like climate change and economic inequality through democratic means impossible. It will also presage a massive crackdown on activism of all kinds. Republican state officials have already passed laws making it a felony to nonviolently protest new fossil fuel infrastructure, as my colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies have documented. In these states and others, the GOP has also pushed laws protecting drivers who ram their cars into Black Lives Matter protesters.
The future of elections and the future of social movements are in grave jeopardy. Given the stakes, grassroots activists must push Democrats to swiftly and decisively fight back — if not for their constituents, then for their own political prospects.
If Democrats fail to act now, American democracy — and millions of lives — could be at stake.
A business closing in California. (photo: Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: House Set to Pass $1.9 Trillion Covid Relief Bill
The $1.9 Trillion Covid-19 Relief Bill Is Here
Ivana Kottasová, CNN
Kottasová writes:
S President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill is expected to pass Congress this morning, dramatically reshaping the country's economy and giving a big push to its fight against the pandemic.
The bill includes stimulus checks of up to $1,400 for many Americans, and billions of dollars for states and municipalities, schools and small businesses.
There's also $14 billion to research, develop, distribute, administer and strengthen confidence in vaccines. This financial boost comes at a crucial time.
Nearly one in 10 Americans -- more than 32 million people -- are fully vaccinated against Covid-19, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows. The rollout has been progressing well, but the growing number of vaccinations is still not high enough to suppress the spread of coronavirus; a CNN analysis shows the US could reach herd immunity by the summer.
That's why Americans must not abandon safety measures -- especially now dangerous variants are circulating and threatening to fuel another spike within weeks.
"Where the pandemic goes from here is really dependent on our collective behaviors and continued commitment to follow the public health measures we know work to stop the spread of the virus: wearing well-fitted masks, avoiding traveling in crowds, social distancing and washing hands," Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during the Health Action Alliance National Business Summit yesterday.
The bill reflects the need to continue with the measures, putting $47.8 billion toward testing, contact tracing and mitigation, including investing in laboratory capacity, community-based testing sites and mobile testing units, particularly in medically underserved areas.
YOU ASKED. WE ANSWERED.
Q: How much will my stimulus check be?
A: The payments included in the Covid relief package are worth up to $1,400 per person, including dependents. This means a couple with two children could receive up to $5,600. Families will now receive the additional money for adult dependents over the age of 17.
Roughly 90% of American households will be eligible, according to an estimate from the Penn Wharton Budget Model.
Individuals who earn at least $80,000 a year of adjusted gross income, heads of households who earn at least $120,000 and married couples who earn at least $160,000 will be completely cut off from the third round of stimulus payments -- regardless of how many children they have.
Use our calculator here to see what you can expect to get.
Hundreds of people stand in line outside an immigration office in San Francisco on Jan. 31, 2019. (photo: Eric Risberg/AP)
Biden Administration Ditches Trump's 'Public Charge' Immigration Rule
Pete Williams, NBC News
Williams writes:
The Department of Justice told the Supreme Court that it was dropping its defense of the Trump-era expansion of the "public charge" rule.
he Biden administration notified the Supreme Court on Tuesday that it will no longer defend a government policy seeking to impose new limits on the admission of immigrants considered likely to become overly dependent on government benefits.
The Department of Homeland Security announced in 2019 that it would expand the definition of "public charge" to be applied to people who could be denied immigration because of a concern that they would primarily depend on the government for their income.
In the past, the designation was largely based on an assessment that an immigrant would be dependent upon cash benefits. But the Trump administration proposed to broaden the definition to include noncash benefits, such as Medicaid, supplemental nutrition and federal housing assistance.
Anyone likely to require that broader range of help for more than 12 months in any three-year period would be swept into the expanded definition.
The federal government has long had authority to refuse admission of immigrants who were likely to become public charges, but the term has never been formally defined.
The Trump policy proposed to fill that void, adding noncash benefits and such factors as age, financial resources, employment history, education and health, arguing that the expansion would reinforce "the ideals of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility, ensuring that immigrants are able to support themselves and become successful here in America."
In response to a series of lawsuits, lower courts were divided on whether the revised rule violated federal law, but its enforcement was eventually blocked, so the Trump administration appealed. The Supreme Court agreed in late February to consider the issue.
But on Tuesday, the Justice Department notified the court that the Biden administration agreed with the local governments challenging the policy that the cases should be dismissed.
President Joe Biden signaled his intent to change the policy in February, signing an executive order that ordered federal agencies to review the Trump rule.
Voting in Ohio. (photo: David Goldman/AP)
The New Republican War on Voting Rights
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes:
GOP lawmakers in states trending toward Democrats hope to arrest that trend by making it harder to vote.
resident Joe Biden is the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state of Georgia in nearly three decades. He’s the first Democrat to win Arizona in nearly a quarter of a century. And both of these former Republican strongholds just sent two Democrats to the United States Senate.
So it’s probably not surprising that GOP lawmakers in these states and elsewhere want to rewrite election laws to prevent Democrats from repeating Biden’s success in the future. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, state lawmakers filed “253 bills with provisions that restrict voting access” in just the first seven weeks of 2021, with more likely to come in the future.
These bills include longtime staples of conservative anti-voting legislation. Georgia Republicans, for example, appear keen to restrict or even eliminate early voting on Sundays in that state. Why target Sunday? The most likely explanation is that Black churches frequently hold “souls to the polls” voter turnout drives on Sundays leading up to the election, so eliminating Sunday voting makes it less likely that Black Democrats will cast a ballot.
But Republicans in states like Georgia and Arizona also have a new target — they hope to limit or even abolish mail-in voting. According to the Brennan Center, lawmakers in Arizona introduced at least 11 bills that seek to restrict absentee voting in 2021 alone.
This new focus on mailed ballots likely stems from the fact that Democrats were much more likely to vote by mail than Republicans in 2020. An August 2020 poll conducted by five political scientists found that “half of all Democrats said they want to vote by mail this election, while only a quarter of Republicans said they would.” In Pennsylvania, Democratic voters were nearly three times more likely to vote by mail than Republicans. In Texas, voters who cast mail-in ballots were about 150 percent as likely to have recently voted in a Democratic primary as they were to have voted in a Republican primary.
It’s likely that this gap emerged in 2020 because then-President Donald Trump spent much of the year railing against mail-in voting, often fabricating lies about widespread voter fraud in mailed ballots. These lies undoubtedly influenced many Republicans to cast their votes in person.
Before 2020, however, there was little evidence that greater access to voting by mail benefited either party. As political scientist Lee Drutman wrote last May, “as states have expanded their use of mailed ballots over the last decade — including five states that conduct all-mail elections by default — both parties have enjoyed a small but equal increase in turnout.”
Indeed, it’s far from clear that restricting voting by mail will actually shift the overall electorate toward the GOP. A new study by Stanford University’s Democracy and Polarization Lab compared 64-year-old Texas voters to Texans who are just a year older — Texas has an unusual law that allows citizens over the age of 65 to easily vote by mail, but doesn’t permit voters under 65 to do so. The study found that “the proportion of voting 65-year-olds who were Democrats in Texas in 2020 ... was only slightly larger (0.2 percentage points) than the proportion among voting 64-year-olds, despite the much larger rate of absentee voting among 65-year-olds.”
That suggests that restricting absentee voting will only have a marginal impact on partisan turnout rates, if it has any impact at all.
Republicans have not yet rallied behind one plan to limit mail-in voting. In Georgia, state House Speaker David Ralston, a Republican, said that “somebody’s got to make a real strong case” to convince him to bar many Georgians from voting absentee — though the state House recently passed lesser restrictions on absentee voting. A memo co-authored by Democratic campaign consultant Dylan Sumner and Republican consultant Mark Zubaly argues that broad access to voting by mail “benefits both parties, and both should push laws that make vote by mail more accessible.”
Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini offered a similar view on Twitter shortly after the 2020 election.
But many Republican lawmakers appear to be betting that Democratic voters will continue to be more likely to use mail ballots, and that making it harder to vote by mail will make it less likely that Democrats will vote.
These Republicans, in other words, appear quite eager to enact new voting restrictions even if there’s only a chance that doing so will benefit the GOP. And that’s terrible news for democracy, even if it doesn’t turn out to be a significant burden on the Democratic Party.
The US House recently passed an ambitious voting rights bill that would arrest many of these attempts by state lawmakers to limit the franchise, but this bill has little chance of becoming law unless Senate Democrats unite to reform the filibuster to enable voting rights legislation to pass by a simple majority vote.
The question of whether Republican state lawmakers will succeed in restricting the franchise rests largely with conservative Democrats like Sens. Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), who have thus far been unwilling to abolish the filibuster (although Manchin recently expressed openness to weakening the filibuster without eliminating it).
So what do the latest round of voter suppression bills do?
State lawmakers have introduced a variety of bills seeking to make it harder to vote, and these bills cover a wide range of topics. At least 18 states have bills that would impose stricter voter ID requirements on voters, for example, including an Arizona bill that would require voters to show one of a short list of government-issued photo IDs in order to vote.
Voter ID laws are a common voter restriction favored by many Republicans. Proponents of such legislation claim it helps prevent voter fraud at the polls, but this kind of fraud is so rare that it is virtually nonexistent.
Similarly, many states are considering legislation that will make it harder to register to vote, including a Georgia bill that would end automatic registration of eligible voters who apply for a driver’s license in the state. And at least 12 states have bills that “would expand voter roll purges or adopt flawed practices that would risk improper purges,” according to the Brennan Center.
It’s likely that Republican lawmakers would have introduced these sorts of bills regardless of what happened in the 2020 election. The Supreme Court gave the green light to voter ID laws in 2008, and it permitted at least some forms of voter purges in 2018. So state lawmakers had a fair amount of leeway to restrict voting long before the pandemic led millions of Americans to vote by mail for the first time in 2020.
The new element in 2021 is an array of bills seeking to restrict voting by mail.
Currently, at least 34 states and the District of Columbia either mail a ballot automatically to all registered voters in the state, or allow any voter to request an absentee ballot without having to explain why they want one — this latter category of states are known as “no excuse” absentee voting states. Arizona and Georgia are both no-excuse states, so they do not provide mail-in ballots automatically to all voters, but any voter can request one.
At least nine states currently have bills that would either eliminate no-excuse absentee voting, or make existing limits on who can vote absentee more strict. An Arizona bill would permit absentee voting “only if the elector is physically unable to cast a ballot within the period for early voting, or has a physical disability, is confined to a nursing home or other similar facility, is on military duty or is temporarily residing outside the state.” A similar bill in Georgia would prevent most new Georgia voters from voting by mail unless they are overseas, or elderly, or have a disability.
Some state bills make it harder to sign up for or remain on a state’s permanent absentee voter list — a list of voters who automatically receive their ballot in the mail every election without having to reapply. An Arizona bill would eliminate the permanent list entirely within that state.
Other bills impose burdensome obligations on absentee voters, such as an Arizona bill that would require all ballots returned by mail to be notarized, or a Georgia bill that forbids election officials from collecting absentee ballots in drop boxes.
It’s still early in the year, so it remains to be seen just how many of these bills will be signed into law. But there’s good reason to believe that at least some of them will be enacted. Last week, for example, the Georgia House passed a lengthy elections bill that eliminates most Sunday voting (although counties have the option of allowing Sunday voting on one weekend), imposes voter ID requirements on absentee voters, and drastically limits the use of drop boxes to collect ballots. It would also ban “line warming,” where volunteers offer water, chairs, and other items to voters waiting in line.
The state Senate version of this bill, which passed on Monday, is even more restrictive of voting rights. Among other things, it would end no-excuse absentee voting.
It’s worth noting that this latest round of restrictive voting bills does not include what is likely to be the most important election-related issue debated by state legislatures in 2021: redistricting. The Constitution requires states to redraw their congressional and state legislative districts every 10 years, to account for population shifts. But the census is not expected to release the data needed to draw such maps until late September. So an inevitable fight over gerrymandering in many states will have to wait until the fall.
Republicans may be fighting the last war by targeting vote-by-mail
There’s quite a bit of evidence that increased access to mailed ballots did not favor either party prior to the 2020 election. A June 2020 study by four Stanford University researchers, for example, is titled “Universal vote-by-mail has no impact on partisan turnout or vote share,” and this study is fairly typical of the scholarship in this space.
That study finds that in states which automatically mail a ballot to every registered voter, voting by mail “modestly increases participation while not advantaging either party.”
Yet most — but not all — of this scholarship studied voter behavior before Trump spent much of 2020 falsely accusing Democrats of using mail-in ballots to “steal an election.” And there is some evidence that Trump’s lies may have a lasting effect on how partisans view voting by mail.
A January 2021 paper by the Covid States Project, a joint project by Harvard, Northeastern, Northwestern, and Rutgers universities, found that “Republicans were much more worried than Democrats about mail-in voter fraud (80% vs. 32%).” It also highlighted a slightly older survey finding that Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to support increasing access to mailed ballots.
So it’s entirely possible that Democrats will continue to use mailed-in ballots at higher rates than Republicans in upcoming elections. And that means that Republican attempts to limit access to such ballots could wind up giving a partisan advantage to the GOP.
Republican lawmakers who hope to restrict voting by mail face some risks if they do so. The Sumner-Zubaly memo argues that “the decisive factor” allowing Biden to win Arizona in 2020 was “Republicans abandoning no-excuse vote by mail.”
“When Republicans decided to abandon a voting method designed to make it easier for their (overwhelmingly older) base to vote,” the memo claims, “vote by mail in Arizona went from just another way to get votes to a Democratic windfall.”
Other research suggests that, while restricting absentee ballots might make voting less convenient for many Americans, it won’t actually benefit the GOP because voters will just cast their ballots in person.
As mentioned above, Texas is one of a handful of states that discriminate on the basis of age when determining who may vote absentee: Voters over the age of 65 are allowed to request an absentee ballot, but most voters under that age are required to vote in person. The researchers at Stanford’s Democracy and Polarization Lab compared turnout rates among 65-year-olds in Texas’s 2020 elections — that is, among voters who were eligible to vote absentee — to the turnout rates among 64-year-olds who mostly could not vote by mail.
They found that “65-year-olds in Texas turned out in 2020 at almost exactly the same rate as 64-year-olds, even though roughly 18% of 65-year-olds voted absentee while only 3% of 64-year-olds voted absentee.”
While absentee voting among 65-year-old Texans did increase in 2020, that increase was offset by less in-person voting by voters in the same age cohort. The result was that, even though Democrats were more likely to vote absentee than Republicans, turnout among 65-year-old Democrats was only marginally higher than it was among 64-year-old Democrats. The “proportion of voting 65-year-olds who were Democrats in Texas in 2020” was only 0.2 percentage points higher than the “proportion among voting 64-year-olds.”
Thus, while this study suggests that Democrats were more likely than Republican to vote by mail if given the opportunity to do so, it does not suggest that Democrats are significantly more likely to vote if they can cast an absentee ballot. As David Shor, a Democratic data guru and veteran of the 2012 Obama campaign, told me over email, “Even though Covid made Democrats use vote-by-mail at higher rates, in-person voting declined by the same amount and the overall effect on the partisan composition of the electorate was null.”
Indeed, according to Shor, Trump slightly overperformed in states that saw the sharpest rises in voting by mail during the 2020 election. “If you look at the seven states that went from having very little vote by mail to having massive amounts (AL/CT/MO/MS/NJ/NY/PA),” Shor wrote, “they trended about 0.2% toward Trump relative to the other 43 states.”
Shor emphasized that more research needs to be done on the impact of voting by mail on partisan turnout. “There’s going to be more complex econometric analysis down the road,” he told me.
But his sense that states probably can’t change the partisan makeup of the electorate by making it harder to vote by mail was shared by Charles Stewart, a political scientist at MIT.
“There is very little that politicians can do to alter election administration in such a way that it would have a permanent, obvious effect on turnout or the composition of the electorate,” Stewart told me in an email. Though states may try to change the rules to discourage methods of voting that members of one party favored in the past, Stewart argues that “the most important factor influencing turnout, both its level and composition, are the efforts by the campaigns to turn out voters.”
If Republican lawmakers take away Democratic voters’ ability to vote by mail, Stewart said, then Democratic campaigns will simply “work harder to get their voters to the polls” — as Democrats did in 2018, when there was no pandemic and fewer voters were inclined to vote by mail.
In any event, more research needs to be done to determine with any amount of certainty whether liberal vote-by-mail regimes favor Democrats. But the research that does exist suggests that efforts to restrict absentee voting may not wind up benefiting the GOP. Such legislation may make voting more inconvenient for many Democrats, but that does not mean that those Democrats won’t vote in person.
All that said, restricting the franchise will make it more difficult for many Americans to exercise their most important right, the right to vote.
The Supreme Court could make it much easier for Republican lawmakers to suppress the vote
The 2022 midterms are more than a year and a half away, so state lawmakers still have plenty of time to enact voting restrictions that go far beyond anything that’s currently on the table in places like Georgia and Arizona. And there’s a significant chance that the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 Republican majority, will give state legislatures more authority than they’ve had in the recent past to place obstacles in the way of Democratic voters.
Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, a major Voting Rights Act case that could strip away many federal safeguards against racist election laws. In Brnovich, both a legal team representing the Arizona Republican Party and Arizona’s Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich asked the Court to embrace such a narrow reading of the Voting Rights Act that federal law would effectively no longer provide meaningful protection against race discrimination in elections.
In fairness, several key justices appeared unlikely to go that far during Tuesday’s oral argument, but the case is still a looming threat to voting rights (a decision is likely to be handed down in June). And if the Court does narrow the Voting Rights Act significantly, then Republican lawmakers could gain broad new powers to target Black and brown communities that tend to vote for Democrats.
A second, potentially even greater threat to voting rights is a legal doctrine, embraced by at least four members of the Supreme Court, known as the “independent state legislature” doctrine.
This doctrine, which the Supreme Court rejected in a long line of cases stretching back more than a century, provides that state legislatures get to decide how a state conducts federal elections, potentially at the expense of state governors and a state’s judiciary. As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in an opinion last fall, “the Constitution provides that state legislatures — not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials — bear primary responsibility for setting election rules.”
In its most extreme form, the independent state legislature doctrine forbids governors from vetoing state laws governing federal elections (because the governor is not the legislature), and it forbids state courts from enforcing state constitutional safeguards against voter suppression (because a court is not the legislature).
It’s unclear whether the Supreme Court will embrace this most extreme form of the doctrine — indeed, it’s not at all clear if there are five votes to implement this doctrine in any form. Currently, four justices have endorsed it, while four others have indicated that they will not overrule the long line of cases rejecting the independent state legislature doctrine. The fate of the doctrine rests with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative Trump appointee who has yet to weigh in on whether she supports it.
Should five justices embrace this doctrine, the consequences would be profound. It could potentially prevent Democratic governors in swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania from vetoing voter suppression laws enacted by a Republican legislature. And it could give Republican state legislatures carte blanche to draw gerrymandered maps, even in states whose constitutions forbid such gerrymandering.
The new round of attacks on voting rights generally and on voting by mail in particular, in other words, is unlikely to be the last attempt to curtail voting rights before the 2022 midterms. State lawmakers have lots of time to legislate before the next major election. And the Supreme Court could make it much easier for them to restrict the franchise in the very near future.
Arkansas gov. Asa Hutchinson on Tuesday signed into law a bill banning nearly all abortions in the state, a sweeping measure that supporters hope will force the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit its landmark Roe v. Wade decision. (photo: Andrew Demillo/AP)
Arkansas Passes Near-Total Abortion Ban as Lawmakers Push for Supreme Court Case
Jaclyn Diaz, NPR
Diaz writes:
rkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Tuesday signed into law one of the country's most restrictive abortion bans, a measure supporters hope will force the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit its 1973 decision sanctioning the procedure.Under Senate Bill 6, abortion would only be allowed in cases where it's necessary to save the life or preserve the health of the fetus or mother. The law does not allow any exceptions in situations of rape or incest — a line that anti-abortion rights activists and lawmakers have supported in the past.
Performing or attempting to perform an abortion is considered an unclassified felony under the measure. Anyone convicted under the law could face a fine up to $100,000 or face a prison sentence.
The measure's supporters expect the law to be challenged by abortion rights activists. It's future is uncertain, as similar attempts to restrict access to abortion services in Ohio, Georgia, and Alabama in the last two years have failed after federal courts struck down local laws.
But that's no matter, according to Hutchinson. He said Tuesday the goal of the legislation is to bring the fight over abortion to the Supreme Court.
"SB6 is in contradiction of binding precedents of the U.S. Supreme Court, but it is the intent of the legislation to set the stage for the Supreme Court overturning current case law," Hutchinson said in a statement. "I would have preferred the legislation to include the exceptions for rape and incest, which has been my consistent view, and such exceptions would increase the chances for a review by the U.S. Supreme Court."
Republican lawmakers across the country have been emboldened by last year's confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Lawmakers in Texas and Tennessee have also pushed new abortion restrictions believing a conservative majority at the nation's highest court will strike down the landmark abortion decision, Roe v. Wade.
But abortion rights activists are keen for a court fight as well.
Holly Dickson, the executive director of the ACLU of Arkansas said, "Abortion is legal in all 50 states, including Arkansas, and we'll fight as long as it takes to keep it that way. Governor Hutchinson: we'll see you in court."
Brazil's former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on February 18, 2020. (photo: Sergio Lima/AFP/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Lula: Brazil Ex-President's Corruption Convictions Annulled
Lula Is Back - and He Can Save Brazil From Bolsonaro
Benjamin Fogel, Jacobin
Fogel writes:
After yesterday’s ruling declaring former Brazilian president Lula da Silva eligible to run in next year’s election, Brazil’s ruling class is panicking. But for Brazilian workers struggling with economic hardship and the COVID-19 pandemic, Lula’s return means there is finally some hope for change.
esterday, Brazilian Supreme Court judge Luiz Edson Fachin ruled to annul all of former president Lula da Silva’s convictions. Fachin said that the court that convicted Lula in the southern city of Curitiba did not have the legal authority to convict Brazil’s first Workers’ Party (PT) president. As such, he must be retried by a federal court in the capital city of Brasília.
The most important effect of the overturning is that it restores Lula’s political rights, allowing him to run in next year’s presidential election. Under Brazil’s Ficha Limpa (“Clean Slate”) law — ironically passed by the PT government — politicians convicted of crimes or impeached are unable to run for elected office.
Lula was convicted of money laundering and corruption in 2016 for receiving improvements to a beachfront apartment he never lived in and served 580 days in prison before being released on appeal in November 2019.
The case against Lula was always weak, but it didn’t stop him from getting convicted due to the fact that Sergio Moro, the judge hearing the trial, was illegally colluding with prosecutors to make a case against the former labor leader. His conviction was the crowning achievement of Brazil’s historic Operação Lava Jato (“Operation Car Wash”) investigation, but we now have clear evidence that prosecutors and judges conspired to imprison him explicitly to prevent him from competing in the 2018 elections, which saw the election of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro.
Lula’s legal team declared on Twitter that “The decision that today affirms the incompetence of the Federal Justice of Curitiba is the recognition that we have always been correct in this long legal battle.” Another twist in this saga is possible, however. The Supreme Court still has to affirm this ruling, and another court could convict him again. But, for now, the center-left Lula is back.
Lula vs. Bolsonaro
Lula’s return to the political arena has already sent shock waves throughout Brazil, and judging by the latest polling, he is still the most popular politician in Brazil even after being imprisoned and years of media smears. And while he may not have the historic approval ratings he enjoyed after leaving office, his PT is still the largest party in the country.
A recent poll published in the Estado de S. Paulo newspaper found that 50 percent of those surveyed would definitely or probably vote for Lula as opposed to 38 percent for Bolsonaro. Lula’s disapproval rate of 44 percent is also lower than any of the other potential candidates such as right-wing São Paulo governor João Doria and the vacuous TV personality Luciano Huck. In fact, Lula was the only one of the ten candidates surveyed that outperformed Bolsonaro.
Brazil’s center-right is also in full-on panic mode as their own electoral chances are going to sink rapidly. Despite their official opposition to Bolsonaro, many of them would prefer a second term of the far-right president to a PT government. The “moderates” have been vainly searching for somebody — a Brazilian Macron — who can pose as the leader of the broad front for democracy against Bolsonaro, while pursuing the more or less same economic agenda as Brazil’s president.
For all the moderate opposition’s talk about democracy, it is unlikely that they would back a center-left candidate in the second round against Bolsonaro. Brazil’s centrists not only removed Dilma Rousseff from office in 2016 but helped elect Bolsonaro in his contest against the PT’s Fernando Haddad. Some of the names being floated as potential candidates like former health minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta served in Bolsonaro’s cabinet and others like Doria and Huck supported Bolsonaro in 2018.
Bolsonaro himself shrugged off the news, claiming that “I believe that the Brazilian people don’t even want to have a candidate like this in 2022, much less think of the possibility of electing him.” The manufactured disasters of the Bolsonaro government could make many who voted against the PT in 2018 or voted null consider Lula as a viable alternative candidate in 2022.
It’s telling, though, that Brazil’s stock market fell by 4 percent, and the real slipped to record lows against the dollar following the news of the verdict. Investors apparently were not too worried about the apocalyptic COVID-19 death numbers coming out of Brazil — but the return of Lula led to full-on panic.
Bolsonaro’s Homicidal COVID-19 Response
Last week was the deadliest week for the country since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic with a record 1,910 deaths recorded on Thursday alone. Brazil has recorded over 265,000 deaths and 11 million cases. Intensive care wards across the country are fast running out of space, cities are running out of vaccines, and government appears to be encouraging the virus to rage out of control.
The Department of Health is warning that Brazil could see as many as three thousand deaths per day in the coming weeks, and the country still lacks a national vaccination campaign. Health experts are warning the effects of letting a pandemic spread uncontained in such a large country could even threaten the global COVID-19 vaccination campaign as the virus mutates and new variants emerge.
Bolsonaro’s latest gambit involves pushing an untested nasal spray as the latest miracle cure. All the while, he continues to attack public health responses and incite his supporters against anyone who tries to control the spread of COVID-19. Congress has so far done almost nothing to hold Bolsonaro and his government accountable for its homicidal response to the pandemic.
Despite Bolsonaro’s murderous response to the COVID-19 crisis, open criminality, and the fact that Lula presided over one of the greatest economic booms in Brazilian history, big capital, much of the mainstream media, and Brazil’s centrists continue to depict Lula and Bolsonaro as two sides of the same coin. This type of mendacious “pox on both sides” type of politics is backed up by the united hostility to the Left among Brazil’s respectable opposition and the forces that back Bolsonaro.
The Military Threat
The elephant in the room is how the Brazilian military will respond. In a recent book, former Armed Forces head Eduardo Villas Boâs admitted that he and other senior generals attempted to exert pressure on the Supreme Court through Twitter the night before a ruling that would determine if Lula would be imprisoned and ineligible to run in the 2018 elections. Lula was leading all the polls at the time by a significant margin over Bolsonaro.
Over six thousand members of the Armed Forces are serving in Bolsonaro’s government, and military officers are leading Brazil’s COVID-19 response. Under the disastrous leadership of the health minister, General Eduardo Pazuello, Brazil’s Department of Health has failed to secure vaccines and basic medical equipment, spending its time pushing snake oil cures on the population while people died on the street and major cities ran out of oxygen. Despite their self-cultivated image of guardians of democracy and moderation, Brazil’s Armed Forces are Bolsonaro’s strongest supporters and have hardly hidden their antidemocratic sentiments in recent years.
Lava Jato Is Finally Dead
Moro still needs to face the legal consequences of turning “anti-corruption” into a political crusade. This latest verdict does not hold him responsible for his misdeeds, but he may still face a reckoning in the coming days.
The verdict is perhaps the final nail in the coffin for the Lava Jato investigation, which was officially shut down in January. Moro thought he had finally caught his white whale in Lula, but it just might be the case he may be the one whose political career is over. Moro brought Bolsonaro to power in the name of “anti-corruption,” and in his own hubris believed he was untouchable. He is now working for a law firm that includes Odebrecht, the company at the center of the Lava Jato investigation, as one of its clients.
Brazil’s anti-corruption crusade will go down as a politically motivated campaign that shredded the rule of law, paralyzed Brazil’s economy, and ensured the election of the worst president in the country’s history. A recent study by Brazil’s largest trade union federation found that Lava Jato may have cost the economy as much as $30 billion in investment and 4.4 million jobs as it more or less paralyzed the entire construction and petroleum sectors in Brazil for years.
Lava Jato may have begun its life as an investigation, but it transformed into a powerful faction within the Brazilian state that sought to pursue its own political agenda; in this, it was able with the help of capital, the Department of Justice, the international anti-corruption industry, and the media seizing enough power to destroy governments.
Bolsonaro’s election as the candidate of anti-corruption has closed down Lava Jato and destroyed anti-corruption protocols, and he has blatantly used his position to protect and enrich his clan. Despite all of this, he has yet to face any new anti-corruption movement; the same forces that took to the streets against the PT government for corruption are now mostly indifferent to the fact that Bolsonaro is now ruling in coalition with the most venal forces in Brazilian politics, known as the centrão (“big center:). Leaders of the centrão allied with Bolsonaro are now in control of both the lower and upper houses of Brazil’s Congress.
However, the legacy of Lava Jato extends beyond Brazil. As I pointed out in Jacobin last month, the Biden administration is promising to make anti-corruption a centerpiece of its foreign policy agenda, and the model they have in mind is based on Lava Jato. The investigation was actively enabled by the US Department of Justice, likely in violation of both international treaties and Brazilian law. The exposure of Lava Jato’s criminality first by the Intercept and later by Brazil’s Supreme Court has yet to inspire any public introspection among much of the international anti-corruption industry or among US foreign policy types who are still pushing it as the paradigm for fighting corruption.
Brazil’s 2022 elections are still a year and a half away, but the playing field is becoming clearer — the PT remains the largest electoral force in Brazil, and unless more legal chicanery keeps him out of power, Lula will have a chance to assemble the forces needed to save the country from Bolsonaro.
Oil and gas refinery. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Texas Industrial Facilities Released Millions of Pounds of Illegal Pollution During the Winter Storm
Amal Ahmed, The Texas Observer
Ahmed writes:
Many of them won’t face any consequences for the excess emissions that they pumped into the air, endangering the lives of communities downwind.
hen the lights went off during the winter storm last month in Galena Park, a city of 10,000 people on the east side of Houston, an eerie orange glow emanated from across the bayou that borders its southern edge as the refineries that line the Ship Channel lit up the night sky. Chemical plants and refineries which hadn’t shut down in preparation for the brutal cold of the February 15 winter storm, and the massive power outages it triggered, burned off thousands of pounds of dangerous and unprocessed chemicals as they rushed to shut down during the emergency.
Over the course of the week-long winter storm in mid-February, industrial plants statewide emitted more than 3 million excess pounds of pollution, according to an independent analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund, Air Alliance Houston, and Environment Texas. After Hurricane Harvey, for comparison, plants along the Gulf Coast emitted 1 million pounds of excess pollution. The process is like an out-of-control pressure cooker: chemicals and gasses had to be let out of the facility before the power went out, or the whole plant could explode. This led to massive amounts of air pollution that far exceed the volume that the plants have permits for.
Juan Flores, a resident of Galena Park who works for Air Alliance Houston, an environmental advocacy group, knows that this time, his neighborhood was lucky. “You could see the flaring, you could hear it, like a buzzing sound coming from the channel,” he says. “But the winds were blowing into the south.” Galena Park residents, trapped in their homes because of the icy roads and power outages, couldn’t smell the toxic chemical soup that was wafting out of the Ship Channel. Instead, the fumes were blown into Pasadena.
“There was a really nasty smell,” says Pat Gonzales, the director of an environmental advocacy group called Caring For Pasadena Communities. “It gives people headaches and nausea, especially for people with compromised immune systems.”
Nearly a fifth of the pollution during Winter Storm Uri occured in the Houston area. Statewide, 54 counties experienced some level of dangerous, excess pollution. It typically takes several days to safely shut down industrial plants without excess pollution. But refineries didn’t start to shut down until power outages were imminent. So from Corpus Christi to Port Arthur, they began burning off chemicals like benzene, methane, nitrogen oxides, and butane, all harmful carcinogens that can cause a myriad of health issues. Emissions also increased in every major oil field in the state, as drillers in the West Texas Permian Basin, South Texas’ Eagle Ford Shale, and the Barnett Shale in North Texas flared off natural gas that they couldn’t store or transport as pipelines started to freeze.
If the past is any indicator, many of these facilities won’t face any consequences for the excess emissions that they pumped into the air, endangering the lives of communities downwind. Some were repeat offenders from Hurricane Harvey, says Catherine Fraser, a clean air advocate at Environment Texas.
While these facilities are required to self-report emissions violations to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the agency rarely issues fines or citations. Companies often use a loophole known as “affirmative defense” to claim that the emissions from hastily shutting down their plants was unavoidable and unpredictable. In 2017, the year that Harvey hit, polluters invoked the affirmative defense loophole in 97 percent of emission events. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) issued fines in 56 out of 4,000 cases. But with most natural disasters, there’s a window of time to prepare, even if companies claim otherwise. That was certainly true during Hurricane Harvey, although it’s unclear if companies knew of the risk of power outages during the winter storm beforehand. Valero, which operates a refinery between Galena Park and Pasadena, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“Oftentimes, what we see is that it’s more economical to keep producing, because penalties are so low,” Fraser says. “It’s cheaper to potentially violate the law than to comply.”
Democratic lawmakers filed two bills in the Texas Legislature this year that could finally change that. State Representative Erin Zwiener’s House Bill 1820 would increase the fines that TCEQ can levy from a cent per pound of pollution to $1. State Senator Cesar Blanco’s bill would go a step further, eliminating the affirmative defense loophole altogether. “Allowing companies to continue to pollute without any repercussions has a lasting impact on Texans’ health,” Blanco said in a statement. “There needs to be a way for the Commission to ensure that companies took the proper steps to prepare their facilities for the expected weather.”
Both bills will face an uphill battle in the regulation-averse, Republican controlled legislature. Absent any regulation, when these facilities choose to shut down improperly and emit excess pollution, the cost is often borne by the communities that breathe in the polluted air. According to one report, 10 percent of African Americans in Texan live within a half-mile of oil and gas facilities, and the rates of cancer in those communities are above average. Near the Houston Ship Channel, Latinx communities like Galena Park and Pasadena are disproportionately impacted.
Year-round exposure to pollution from these plants has caused high rates of asthma and other respiratory issues, which are exacerbated during air pollution spikes. Longtime residents by the Ship Channel are accustomed to flares during natural disasters and plan accordingly. “I’ve heard of people just leaving the area [before a hurricane] in some cases,” Flores says. For those who tried to wait out Harvey, there was nowhere to go once the floodwaters started to rise. When the fumes reached their homes, Flores says, “All we could do was sit here and take it.”
In Pasadena, during the winter storm, companies didn’t give residents any warning about who was downwind from the flares, Gonzales says. As families lost power and running water, they weren’t tracking wind patterns to figure out if they needed to evacuate from the plumes of carcinogens from the Ship Channel. Weeks after the storm, she still hasn’t heard from anyone at TCEQ or the refineries about the full extent of the potential harm residents may have faced. According to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, 39 of TCEQ’s air monitoring stations lost power during the storm.
In the zipcode that Bryan Parras lives in near the refineries, COVID-19 has hit the community of about 37,000 residents hard. Since last year, 57 people have died, and close to 4,000 have tested positive for the virus. Researchers have found that the air pollution that residents breathe can make the virus more deadly as it attacks the respiratory system of its victims. “We have so many overlapping illnesses in this community,” says Parras, an environmental advocate with the Sierra Club. Days before the storm hit, he was working to get community members registered for coronavirus vaccine appointments. By February 15, he was dropping off generators for residents who had lost power and had no way to keep their oxygen machines running.
“People are beginning to understand that the world we live in is going to include these natural disasters every year,” he says. “It’s exhausting. But we are learning to do what we can for ourselves and our loved ones.”
