The so-called 'Nuclear Option' has been detonated by Senate Democrats, neutralizing the ability of Republicans to filibuster presidential nominees. The vote removes key leverage from Senate Republicans who have tried to stifle President Obama at every turn. The ability of Republicans to use Senate rules to pander to the Tea Party and troll for right-wing votes has been vastly reduced. Over Two hundred years of political precedent is vanquished and the power of the ruling party has been drastically increased. However, the vote could spell disaster for Democrats if the Republicans ever regain control of the Senate.
Senator Harry Reid campaigning for Barack Obama in November of 2008. (Photo: Brian Finifter)
By Paul Kane, Updated: Thursday, November 21, 12:51 PM The partisan battles that have paralyzed Washington in recent years took a historic turn on Thursday, when Senate Democrats eliminated filibusters for most presidential nominations, severely curtailing the political leverage of the Republican minority in the Senate and assuring an escalation of partisan warfare.
The rule change means federal judge nominees and executive-office appointments can be confirmed by a simple majority of senators, rather than the 60-vote super majority that has been required for more than two centuries.
The freshman Congressman (Republican, FL), said he was a fan of ERIC B and BIG DADDY KANE. He said he liked PUBLIC ENEMY in particular because some of their raps had "a conservative message."
First-term US congressman Trey Radel of Florida has been arrested for possession of cocaine, court documents showed Tuesday. A form filed with Washington DC Superior Court says Radel, a 37-year-old Republican, will be arraigned Wednesday on misdemeanor…
The November 18 cover of Time magazine about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie caused a stir because of this line of text: "The Elephant in the Room." Many saw that as a swipe at Christie's weight, as well as a feeble pun about Republicans. But the bigger problem with the Time piece, as with so much of the coverage of Christie, is more fundamental: The real elephant in the room is that Christie has an actual record of governing a state, and yet journalists seem almost totally uninterested in discussing it.
Media Advisory: FAIR There is no doubt that Christie is a media darling (Extra!, 5/11). On Meet the Press (11/10/13), Time's Mark Halperin said:
"Chris Christie is someone who is magical in the way politicians can be magical, like our last three presidents. People like having them on TV. He's a good talker. He won."
The actual Time article, while not crediting Christie with magical powers, presented him in glowing terms. Christie "has run the Garden State with combustible passion, blunt talk and the kind of bipartisan dealmaking that no one seems to do anymore," Michael Scherer writes. "He's a workhorse with a temper and a tongue, the guy who loves his mother and gets it done."
To Time, the Christie story that matters is how he can get the conservative base of the Republican Party to support him. Pushing the major political parties to the "center" is a well-worn, bipartisan media pattern; it's what caused much of the press enthusiasm for John McCain in 2000 and 2008 (Extra!, 7/08). But as Jonathan Martin of the New York Times (11/11/13) wrote, "The more the news media and the establishment cheer on Mr. Christie, the more grassroots activists--especially members of the Tea Party--resent it."
This framing prioritizes criticism of Christie from the right. As Time put it:
"Like McCain and Romney before him, Christie is wide open to attack from his right. He opposes gay marriage, but in October he called off a legal fight to block same-sex unions in New Jersey, earning the ire of Christian conservatives who promptly complained of "serious" concerns about Christie's 'reliability.'"
So Christie, after successfully blocking marriage equality in New Jersey for years with his veto, eventually gave up what increasingly appeared to be an unwinnable legal battle--that's what Time means by Christie being "wide open to attack from his right."
But what about other policy outcomes in the state Christie governs? Christie made the rounds of the Sunday chat shows on November 10 after winning a landslide election, as seemingly every journalist made clear. But the journalists avoided Christie's record as governor, instead focusing squarely on whether Christie is right-wing enough to win the Republican presidential nomination. "Can you play in places like Iowa and South Carolina?" asked ABC This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos. On NBC's Meet the Press, David Gregory wondered: "Mitt Romney told me here last week that you could save the Republican Party. Does it need saving and are you the guy to save it?"
(Photo: Bob Jagendor)
Gregory did at one point mention an actual policy issue, noting that the Wall Street Journal editorial page had deemed Christie's economic record "the biggest area of disappointment." But that was the exception, despite the fact that there's plenty to examine.
New York Times reporter Kate Zernike (10/30/13) wrote one of the few pieces that focused on Christie's actual record. She noted that Christie, who won election in 2009 attacking Democrat Jon Corzine's budget gimmicks,
"has relied on the same kind of short-term strategies, diverting money for things like affordable housing and property tax rebates to balance the budget, and tapping funds intended for development of new sources of energy to keep the lights on in state buildings."
Zernike added that
"Christie has issued more debt for transportation projects than any of his predecessors. Overall spending has risen 14 percent, and while state surpluses nationwide are growing, New Jersey's has shrunk to its lowest percentage in a decade. The state's bond rating is among the worst in the country."
And while Christie touted the state's private-sector jobs record on all of the Sunday shows, none of the reporters interviewing him thought to bring up the state's dismal jobs performance Compared to other states, New Jersey ranks near the bottom--with the 41st highest unemployment rate, and the 44th worst job growth record (Daily Beast, 11/11/13).
As media portrayals stick with the "moderate" storyline, The Nation's John Nichols (6/3/13) had a different, more factually based analysis:
"Christie is no moderate. He's a social conservative who opposes reproductive rights, has defunded Planned Parenthood and has repeatedly rejected attempts to restore state funding for family planning centers. He has vetoed money for clinics that provide health screenings for women, including mammograms and pap smears. He vetoed marriage equality.
(Photo: Bob Jagendor)
"Christie's consistent when it comes to reading from the right's playbook. The governor announced early in his tenure that he was pulling New Jersey out of a regional carbon emissions reduction program, and then declared his intention to scale back the state's renewable energy targets."
Christie, Nichols added, has a record very much like controversial Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker:
"Christie is at his most militant when it comes to implementing the austerity agenda associated with the most conservative Republican governors. There's a credible case to be made that he is 'doing a Scott Walker on New Jersey,' as a Garden State headline suggested in early May, after the governor proposed gutting civil service protections. Christie makes no bones about his admiration for the Wisconsin governor, whose anti-labor crusade inspired mass protests, a recall attempt and miserable job-creation numbers."
But those serious issues remain off the corporate media radar as they lavish praise on the supposedly straight-talking, bipartisan Republican governor. "There is no doubt that Christie's personality is the dominant feature of his political style," as Washington Post reporter Dan Balz (11/4/13) put it. The same goes for the way media are covering Christie--which is surely exactly the way he likes it.
Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.
By Peter Hart During his interview with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney (11/3/13), NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory offered up this fanciful account of the Tea Party movement's origins during a discussion about internal GOP fights:
Look, the reason there is a Tea Party right now goes back to President Bush. I actually think it goes back to the beginning of a more robust security state after 9/11; the government expands to deal with security. There's also Medicare Part D. There's a lot of government spending, and then there's ultimately the bailouts, which conservatives start to rebel against. And then President Obama continues that.
This is the kind of rhetoric Tea Party figures like to trot out when critics note that a movement that claims to be concerned about government spending was sure quiet (or nonexistent) during the Bush years. But Gregory arguably manages to take it one step further by linking the right-wing movement to a critique of the national security state and Medicare Part D.
NBC Meet the Press Host, David Gregory interviews Mitt Romney.
Which Tea Party movement is this? As a refresher: The movement really geared up in the wake of comments by CNBC host Rick Santelli (2/19/09), who was outraged by government plans to offer help to distressed homeowners (i.e., not the Wall Street bailouts). His call for "tea party" protests against policies to help these "losers"–issued just a month after Obama's inauguration–resulted in the first wave of such protests. Glenn Beck, then a host at Fox News Channel, took up the cause too. Some of the most visible examples of Tea Party activism were the "town hall" protests against what would eventually become the Affordable Care Act. The Tea Party "brand" was adopted by many well-known, well-connected figures in the Republican Party, like Dick Armey.
What did they all want? It wasn't always clear; as Steve Rendall and I wrote (Extra!, 5/10), the movement is full of political contradictions that media often failed to explore, but
there's one consistency they ignore in painting Tea Partiers as wholesome adherents to small government, constitutional principles and so on: the movement’s singular and often racialized loathing of Barack Obama.
Corporate pundits have spent years coming up with more flattering descriptions of the Tea Party than what they most clearly seem to represent. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman said they "began as a protest against Republicans for being soft on deficits." His colleague David Brooks wrote that the "Tea Parties are right about the unholy alliance between business and government that is polluting the country." Someone should alert the Koch Brothers!
Newsweek's Jon Meacham once wrote that the Tea Party could be good for everyone, since it was about "the recovery of the spirit of the American Founding." Time's Michael Crowley suggested the movement was animated by disgust with Wall Street; they believe that "Washington and Wall Street are in bed together, colluding for power and profit at the expense of the little guy." He also argued that Tea Partiers are about calling out "an elite Washington–New York establishment that lies to the public to cover for policies that enrich the wealthy and strengthen the powerful."
This is a remarkably charitable view of an obviously right-wing movement that began just as soon as a black Democrat took office. That's not to say that all Tea Party activists are motivated by a racialized loathing of Barack Obama; but to suggest that the Tea Party exists to express dissatisfaction with both major parties and the national security state, and that Obama's presidency just so happened to coincide with the rise of this movement, stretches even the most active imagination.
Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.
After the Supreme Court's Citizen's United decision unleashed unlimited money into election campaigns, right-wing millionaires used their cash to launch an attempted takeover of the presidency, congress, governorships, and state legislatures. Now they have set their sights on state judicial elections. They seek control over who becomes a state Supreme Court justice. Judges feel "trapped."
In America, we expect that our courts are fair and impartial — that their primary interest is to serve justice under the law. But increasingly, state high courts are falling prey to the same out-of-control, post-Citizens United election spending that…
A look at those states where Republicans are using the Supreme Court's recent decision on the Voting Rights Acts to turn back the clock on voting rights.
by Kara Brandeisky and Mike Tigas ProPublica, Nov. 1, 2013. Last year, we wrote extensively about photo ID laws and the Supreme Court's decision to strike a key section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Now, with gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and the debt ceiling and healthcare debates already shaping the 2014 midterms, we're revisiting voting policies to see which states have enacted tougher restrictions since the Supreme Court ruling in June.
President Johnson signs Voting Rights Act in 1965, surrounded by elected
officials and Civil Rights leaders. Almost 50 years later, minorities, the
poor, and the elderly are still fighting to maintain full voting rights.
Remind me – what is Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act? Under the Voting Rights Act, states and localities with a history of racial discrimination needed to get permission from the federal government to enact any changes to their voting laws, in a process called "preclearance." As of June 2013, nine states, mostly in the South – Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia – needed to get any new voting laws pre-approved. Some counties and townships in California, Florida, New York, North Carolina, South Dakota and Michigan were also subject to preclearance. Section 5 first applied to states that imposed literacy tests or other unfair devices, and had low voter registration or turnout. Congress later expanded the law to add jurisdictions with sizable minority populations and English-only election materials. States and localities could "bailout," or get off the preclearance list, after 10 years of elections without any problems. Several smaller jurisdictions bailed out over the years, including parts of Connecticut, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, Wyoming, Hawaii, and Colorado. Of course, some of the biggest voting law battles of the 2012 election were in states not covered by Section 5 at all, such as Pennsylvania and Ohio.
What did the Supreme Court strike down in Shelby County v. Holder? The Supreme Court decided, 5-4, that the preclearance formula was unconstitutional under the 10th Amendment, which gives states the power to regulate elections. The Court ruled that the coverage formula was "based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relation to the present day." From the decision:
One important technical point: the Supreme Court actually left Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act – the part of the law that describes how preclearance works – intact. Instead, the Court struck down Section 4, which explains which states and localities are subject to preclearance. If Congress amends Section 4, the Justice Department can start enforcing Section 5 again.
Why does this matter? While literacy tests are a thing of the past, voting rights advocates say that statutes that limit early voting and registration, require voters to show photo ID, and purge voter rolls still disproportionately affect poor and minority voters. The Supreme Court's June 2013 decision also effectively shifted the burden from states to citizens. Before, a state subject to preclearance had to demonstrate that a new voting law was not discriminatory and let voting law experts in the Justice Department evaluate it before it could be implemented. Now it is up to voters to challenge voting laws by filing lawsuits under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination. But most court cases involving Section 2 have been limited to redistricting, not other controversial voting measures, says Yale University law professor Heather Gerken.
Four leaders of the Civil Rights Movement: From left: Bayard Rustin,
Andrew Young, (N.Y. Cong.William Ryan), James Farmer, and John Lewis
in 1965. John Lewis is now a member of the House Representative
representing Georgia's 5th District, now forced to continue voting rights
fight — thanks to the Supreme Court and the Republican Party.
"With redistricting, there's always one very wealthy political party or another who can hire some very good lawyers and go into court and challenge it," Gerken said. "But a lot of the types of things that were challenged under Section 5 were smaller questions, like, ‘Can you change a polling place? Can you shut down early voting hours in ways that might affect the black community?' There are things smaller than redistricting that can fall through the cracks."
What have preclearance states done since the Supreme Court ruling? NORTH CAROLINA: Two months after the Supreme Court decision, North Carolina passed a number of measures, including strict new photo ID requirements. The law also eliminates same-day voter registration, shortens the early voting period by seven days, and specifies that ballots cast at the wrong polling station will be thrown out. Some changes will be phased in starting in 2014, and the photo ID provision goes into effect in 2016.
The North Carolina NAACP and a civil rights group called the Advancement Project have filed a lawsuit challenging the changes. The Justice Department also filed a suit of its own. But the suits venture into some new legal territory.
"What North Carolina did was definitely at the extreme of practices in this country," Gerken said. "So if anything is vulnerable to a suit, it's likely to be the North Carolina law. But again, the case law was built around redistricting cases. It wasn't built around this kind of work."
TEXAS: Last year, a federal court rejected Texas' voter ID law, calling it "the most stringent in the country." The panel also rejected the state's redistricting maps, finding that they protected white incumbents while altering districts with minority incumbents. But on the very day of the Supreme Court ruling, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said the state would "immediately" enact both measures.
The photo ID law requires voters to present an approved form of photo identification, where before they could present mail, utility bills or other proof of voter registration. The Justice Department had refused to approve the law based on the state's findings that Hispanic registered voters were far less likely to have the approved photo IDs. The new law also requires the photo ID presented on voting day to match the state's voter rolls — complicating voting for some married women and others with name changes.
The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against the newly enacted photo ID requirements and joined an ongoing lawsuit against the disputed redistricting maps.
FLORIDA: After the Supreme Court ruling, Florida resumed its plans to remove non-citizens from its voter rolls using the federal SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) database. The Department of Homeland Security database helps government agencies check the immigration statuses of people applying for government benefits like drivers' licenses, housing assistance, or Medicaid. But opponents of Florida's measure say that SAVE data is faulty and not meant for elections, and that using the database to verify voter rolls will disenfranchise eligible voters. (Colorado legislators rejected a bill to purge rolls based on SAVE data for this very reason, but that didn't stop Secretary of State Scott Gessler from moving ahead with the plan.) The Miami Herald found that Florida voters flagged for verification were disproportionately Hispanic, and most turned out to be citizens. The Department of Justice has also said that SAVE is not meant to be "a comprehensive and definitive listing of U.S. citizens," especially since it doesn't include data about people born in the United States.
A nonprofit group has challenged the law, but a federal court dismissed the lawsuit after the Supreme Court ruled that Florida was no longer subject to preclearance. Another group has appealed a similar case to the 11th Circuit.
VIRGINIA: Virginia passed a number of voting laws this spring that seem likely to go into effect in wake of the Supreme Court ruling.
The Virginia legislature passed a photo ID law last year (which the Justice Department approved), but the more recent measure goes further to limit what kinds of voter identification are acceptable. Voters can no longer show utility bills, bank statements, government checks or paychecks before they vote, but they can get an ID for freeif they don't already have one.
Voters wait in long lines in Virginia, Tuesday, Nov 5, 2013.
The new laws also require the Virginia State Board of Elections to remove ineligible voters by comparing state voter rolls with the SAVE database and other states.The Democratic Party of Virginia has sued the state over the interstate crosschecks, contending that the database has erroneous information and the law will disenfranchise poor, elderly and minority voters, but a federal judge rejected the suit for lack of evidence. As of Oct. 17, the Board of Elections had already purged more than 38,000 voters.
SOUTH CAROLINA: In October 2012, a federal court blocked the implementation of South Carolina's photo ID law until 2013. The court found that although the law was not discriminatory, there was not enough time to implement changes before the 2012 election. South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said the Supreme Court ruling now allows states to "implement reasonable election reforms, such as voter ID laws similar to South Carolina's."
MISSISSIPI: Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann said Mississippi will enact a strict photo ID law by 2014. The state says it will provide free transportation to government offices where voters will be able to obtain free photo IDs.
ALABAMA: Secretary of State Beth Chapman said Alabama would also enact changes to its photo ID law by 2014. Like Virginia, Alabama used to accept other kinds of non-photo identification, such as utility bills and Social Security cards. But the new law requires voters to present photo IDs (the state will also provide free voter IDs to those who don't have them). Legislators passed the measure in 2011, but Alabama stalled in submitting the law for preclearance.
ARIZONA: The Supreme Court issued another significant ruling on voting laws this summer: In Arizona et al. v Intertribal Council of Arizona, Inc. et al., the Court ruled that Arizona, formerly a preclearance state, could not unilaterally require voters to show proof of citizenship before registering to vote in a federal election. But the Court said Arizona could sue the Election Assistance Commission to get the federal voter registration form amended to require proof of citizenship. Now, both Arizona and Kansas have sued the commission.
In case their legal challenges are unsuccessful, the states are setting up two-tiered systems of voter registration, requiring proof of citizenship for state and local races but not federal ones. So far, Kansas has suspended registration for about 17,500 voters until those they submit proof of citizenship.
SOUTH DAKOTA: Four Directions Inc., a Native American voting rights group, has asked the Justice Department to investigate why Secretary of State Jason Grant has so far refused to use federal money to fund satellite voting centers for registration and early voting on some Native American reservations.
What about non-preclearance states? The 35 states that were not subject to any kind of preclearance were unaffected by the Supreme Court decision. But several of those states have also moved to tighten voting rules this year.
ARKANSAS: This spring, Republican legislators overrode the governor's veto to pass a law requiring voters to show photo IDs. If voters don't have them, they can cast provisional ballots and return with IDs by the Monday after the election. The state will also provide free IDs to people who do not already have them.
IOWA: In late March, Iowa implemented an administrative rule allowing Secretary of State Matt Schultz to begin a voter roll purge using the SAVE database. Activists have sued Schultz in an attempt to stop the purge.
INDIANA: In May, Indiana enacted a law requiring officials to check voter rolls for individuals registered to vote in other states. The advocacy group Project Vote worries that the measure could lead to voter purges.
TENNESSEE: This spring, Tennessee passed a bill restricting the kinds of IDs that can be used to vote. Previously, voters could show student IDs, out-of-state IDs, library cards, or any other IDs issued by counties or municipalities. Now only photo IDs issued by the state of Tennessee or the federal government are acceptable. The Green Party of Tennessee has sued the state over the law.
So, where does all of this leave the Voting Rights Act? The Supreme Court left it up to Congress to write new preclearance criteria. In a July hearing, House Republicans showed little interest in rewriting Section 4. But Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., says there's actually quiet Republican support for the issue. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., made headlines when he publicly supported restoring the law.
"There is at least one Republican, and you'll find out in the future a lot more, that is committing to putting life in this most important civil rights act that got a stab in the back from the Supreme Court," Sensenbrenner said.
Gerken, the law professor, isn't optimistic that Congress will come up with a new Section 4 formula. But she said there are other actions Congress could take. For example, she has advocated that Congress adopt an "opt-in" approach and allow civil rights groups to file simple complaints for the Justice Department to investigate. Then the agency could halt the implementation of discriminatory laws as necessary.
Yale law professor Travis Crum has also suggested a "bail-in" measure, by which Congress could instead strengthen Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act, letting courts put states under preclearance if their voting laws violate the 14th or 15th amendments.
As part of the Justice Department's lawsuits against Texas and North Carolina, the federal agency has asked the courts to put those states back under preclearance.
This post will be kept up-to-date. Has your state or local government restricted voting rights since June 2013? Tweet at me, email me at kara.brandeisky@propublica.orgor leave a comment below.
For this report, which focuses on ALEC’s 2013 legislative agenda, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) researched five areas: 1) Voter ID and Stand Your Ground legislation, 2) wages and worker rights, 3) public education, 4) the environment, and 5) citizen access to the courts. Research continues on other areas of ALEC’s agenda. Key Findings:
ALEC's having a big party - at our expense.
• CMD identified 466 ALEC bills from the 2013 session. 84 of these passed and became law. ALEC bills were introduced in every state in the nation and the District of Columbia in 2013. The top ALEC states were West Virginia (25 bills) and Missouri (21 bills).
• Despite ALEC’s effort to distance itself from Voter ID and Stand Your Ground by disbanding its controversial Public Safety and Elections Task Force, 62 of these laws were introduced: 10 Stand Your Ground bills and 52 bills to enact or tighten Voter ID restrictions. Five states enacted additional Voter ID restrictions, and two states passed Stand Your Ground.
• CMD identified 117 ALEC bills that affect wages and worker rights. 14 of these became law. These bills included so-called “Right to Work” legislation, part of the ALEC agenda since at least 1979, introduced in 15 states this year. Other bills would preempt local living or minimum wage ordinances, facilitate the privatization of public services, scrap defined benefit pension plans, or undermine the ability of unions to organize to protect workers.
• CMD identified 139 ALEC bills that affect public education. 31 of these became law. Just seven states did not have an ALEC education bill introduced this year. Among other things, these bills would siphon taxpayer money from the public education system to benefit for-profit private schools, including the “Great Schools Tax Credit Act,” introduced in 10 states.
ALEC wants American Justice weighted in favor of rich.
• CMD identified 77 ALEC bills that advance a polluter agenda. 17 of these became law. Numerous ALEC “model” bills were introduced that promote a fossil fuel and fracking agenda and undermine environmental regulations. The “Electricity Freedom Act,” which would repeal state renewable portfolio standards, was introduced in six states this year.
• CMD identified 71 ALEC bills narrowing citizen access to the courts. 14 of these became law. These bills cap damages, limit corporate liability, or otherwise make it more difficult for citizens to hold corporations to account when their products or services result in injury or death.
Read the full report with charts of ALEC bills HERE.
