Voting rights advocates reiterated the need for stronger federal voting rights laws after the US Supreme Court allowed Alabama’s GOP-drawn, racially gerrymandered congressional map to stay in place, Jessica Corbett reported at CommonDreams.org (2/7).
After a panel of three federal judges in January threw out the map and ordered state lawmakers to redraw it, the high court reversed that decision in a 5-4 ruling for which Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three liberal justices in dissent.
Although Democrats have a decisive majority in the US House of Representatives, they have struggled to pass bills in the evenly split Senate due to the filibuster. Thanks to the GOP, along with Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Democrats have failed to send voting rights bills to President Joe Biden’s desk.
Manchin and Sinema joined with Senate Republicans in January to block an effort to change the Senate rules just for Democrats’ House-approved pro-democracy package, the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, sparking widespread outrage.
“We must end the filibuster so the Senate can pass voting rights protections,” declared the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Democrats’ stalled package is designed to combat Republican attacks on democracy at the state level, which experts warn will continue leading up to this year’s midterms.
Such attacks include maps like the one in Alabama, which the lower court said violated the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 by diminishing the electoral power of Black voters.
As the New York Times reported (6/7):
In November, Alabama’s Legislature, which is controlled by Republicans, redrew the state’s seven-district congressional map to take account of the 2020 census. It maintained a single district in which Black voters make up a majority.
That district has long elected a Democrat, while the state’s other six districts are represented by Republicans.
After the map was challenged by Black voters and advocacy groups, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Federal District Court in Birmingham ruled last month that the Legislature should have fashioned a second district “in which Black voters either comprise a voting-age majority or something quite close to it.”
In a dissent described by Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern as “furious,” Justice Elena Kagan—joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor—wrote that the Supreme Court’s new majority decision “is one more in a disconcertingly long line of cases in which this court uses its shadow docket to signal or make changes in the law, without anything approaching full briefing and argument.”
Staying the lower court’s decision as justices prepare to hear Alabama’s appeal, Kagan argued, “does a disservice to Black Alabamians who … have had their electoral power diminished—in violation of a law this court once knew to buttress all of American democracy.”
Roberts concluded that the court should hear the appeal but should not have granted a stay.
CNN noted that “the court’s order, the first dealing with the 2022 elections, means that the map will be used for the state’s upcoming primary, and likely be in place for the entire election cycle, while the legal challenge plays out.”
Voting rights activists have had better luck in some state courts. The Ohio Supreme Court struck down a congressional map skewed to favor Republicans (1/14), ruling that it was the equivalent of a dealer stacking the deck, in violation of the state constitution, and sent it back to state lawmakers to try again.
The Ohio map would have given Republicans 12 seats and Democrats only three in elections for the House of Representatives, even though Republicans have lately won only about 55% of the statewide popular vote.
The North Carolina Supreme Court (2/4) rejected newly gerrymandered congressional and state legislative maps that would have given Republicans 10 congressional districts and Democrats four in a state that is roughly evenly divided between the two parties. On a 4-3 vote, along party lines, the court declared “the fundamental right to vote includes the right to enjoy substantially equal voting power and substantially equal legislative representation.”
Although Republicans went into the redistricting cycle with control over drawing more districts, FiveThirtyEight.com reported (2/7) that with 31 states having finished the redistricting process, Democrats have gained ground from the process. So far, redistricting has created 11 more Democratic-leaning seats nationally, three fewer Republican-leaning seats and eight fewer highly competitive seats. This is due to aggressive map-drawing by Democrats in states such as New York as well as court decisions overturning Republican gerrymanders in Ohio and North Carolina. Dems hold a 222-212 House majority, with one vacancy.
After accounting for incumbency, however, Democrats’ gains should be smaller: Democrats will likely flip around three seats in 2022 due to redistricting. In addition, Republicans helped their own cause by converting light-red districts into safer seats in Indiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah.
TRUMPERS NOW GOING AFTER BUTTERFLIES AT THE BORDER. The National Butterfly Center near Mission, in South Texas, will be closed “for the immediate future” because of baseless attacks from right wingers stemming from a clash over immigration enforcement at the nearby US-Mexico border, the organization said (2/2), the Washington Post reported.
The nonprofit center has endured a firestorm in recent years amid an ongoing lawsuit against the former Trump administration, which sought to build part of a border wall on its property, and the fundraising organization We Build the Wall. Right-wing groups have falsely claimed the butterfly center illegally smuggles people into the US and facilitates sex trafficking.
The indefinite closure comes shortly after the center shut down for three days the previous weekend, citing “credible threats” regarding a nearby border security rally. The We Stand America event in McAllen featured Michael Flynn, President Trump’s disgraced first national security adviser, and other former Trump administration officials.
Indeed, the butterfly center has been the object of MAGA ire ever since it filed a lawsuit in 2017 seeking to halt construction on Trump’s border wall, Aldous Pennyfarthing noted at DailyKos (2/4). In the complaint, the center noted that the proposed wall would cut off two-thirds of its property and do serious damage to its operations.
Harassment of the butterfly center reportedly began after it filed the suit. Brian Kolfage, the founder of the “We Build the Wall” organization, claimed it would use private money to build Trump’s proposed border wall, accused the center of being involved in child sex trafficking.
[Kolfage was indicted in 2020 along with three associates — including former Trump advisor Steve Bannon — on wire fraud and money-laundering conspiracy charges in connection with the border wall fundraising. Trump pardoned Bannon and dozens of others on his last night in office, but he did not pardon Kolfage, who was indicted in May 2021 on additional counts of fraud and filing a false tax return.]
In a follow-up report on the center’s closure, the Post noted that the recent wave of harassment largely stemmed from the actions of Kimberly Lowe, a candidate in Virginia’s 9th Congressional District Republican primary.
Lowe’s visit preceded a three-day “We Stand America” border-security rally, during which some participants showed up at the butterfly center and repeated false claims about smuggling on the property, pushing the center over the edge as staff members feared for their safety at work. The event, which featured former Trump administration officials Thomas Homan and Michael Flynn, was billed as focusing on “Border Law Enforcement and the direct connection to Election Integrity from a Biblical worldview.”
The harassment, Executive Director Marianna Trevino Wright said, has made it difficult for her and her staff to focus on their work as butterfly scientists. She has been so stressed, she said, that she went to the emergency room for an electrocardiogram the week before the closing.
“It was one thing when MAGA mites were just loud, obnoxious, and wrong, but they’re increasingly pushing the boundaries of what can be considered socially acceptable and/or legal,” Pennyfarthing noted. “Election workers across the country are being threatened with violence because of Trump’s Big Lie, school board members are facing unprecedented harassment over their pro-education curricula and policies, and anti-vaxxers have gone out of their way to disrupt everything from mass vaccination clinics to public meetings.
“In short, our country has a serious problem, and it has nothing to do with nonexistent, frothing liberal fiends at the National Butterfly Center. Indeed, the blame can be laid directly at the feet of people who appear oddly predisposed to worshiping Donald Trump, who in turn encourages his supporters’ fuzzy thinking and fuels the unending conspiracy feedback loop that animates these buffoons.”
VA. SENATE BLOCKS YOUNGKIN POWER PLAY. Glenn Youngkin may be the new Virginia governor, but Democrats are using their state Senate majority to reject significant chunks of the Republican agenda and turn back attempts to undo legislation that became law under the previous two years of a majority Democratic legislature.
Despite last year’s Republican wins statewide and for control of the House of Delegates, Democrats are using their 21-19 edge in the Senate to stop GOP legislation on charter schools, the minimum wage, guns, social issues and some of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s tax proposals, Patrick Brown reported in the Richmond Times-Dispatch (2/4).
“We made generational progress over the last two years on a lot of issues, from access to health care, to education funding, to expanding voting, criminal justice reform, addressing climate change. And those are issues that are very important to us and are popular with Virginians,” said Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, the Senate Democratic caucus secretary.
“We expected the new administration and House Republicans to try to roll them back, but we’re standing firm to protect that progress.”
Some of the items on Youngkin’s legislative agenda that Senate Democrats have already rejected:
• Senators killed a bill aimed at “streamlining” state government regulations that Democrats feared would eliminate consumer protections.
• Senators in the Commerce and Labor Committee killed a bill that would have repealed a 2020 law allowing localities to give employees the ability to collectively bargain for a contract.
• Youngkin wants to rename the title of his Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to the Director of Diversity, Opportunity, and Inclusion. Democrats on the Senate General Laws and Technology Committee said no.
• Even with one Democratic senator joining Republicans to support a bill that would have made it easier for charter schools to open in Virginia, Democrats on the Senate Education and Health Committee killed the proposal by a vote of 8-7.
• The same committee voted 9-4 to reject a bill that would ban the teaching of “inherently divisive concepts” in public schools. That bill, in keeping with an executive order from Youngkin, stemmed from GOP efforts to prevent school divisions from teaching students about systemic racism.
• Although many of Youngkin’s tax proposals are awaiting action, Democrats rejected his proposal to require local governing bodies to take public actions up to a voter referendum if rising real estate assessments result in higher property taxes.
• Youngkin wants to double the standard deduction on income taxes, but a Senate panel has recommended that be studied for a year before any decisions are made.
Democrats also stopped GOP efforts to roll back an increase in the minimum wage to $12 an hour next year, and killed bills to allow people to carry a concealed handgun without a permit and repeal the state law limiting handgun purchases to one per month.
And what does Youngkin have to say about all this obstruction? “I’m disappointed at the partisan politics that I see being played in the Senate,” Youngkin told WTKR-TV in Hampton Roads (2/4). “Virginians are tired of this. This is why I won — to actually get things done.”
“Merlin 196357” notes at DailyKos (2/6): “If memory serves, Youngkin was elected to make sure that a subject that wasn’t taught unless you get into law school was never mentioned to those who were not learning it anyway: critical race theory. Or did I miss something about the VA governor’s race last year? Besides the fact Youngkin was going to do something about kids being in school during a pandemic. He was supposed to do some kind of magic that ended up being, ‘Take your masks off.’”
Darrell Lucus noted at DailyKos (2/6) that when Youngkin took office as governor, he issued executive orders banning the teaching of critical race theory and banning mask mandates. “The latter, in particular, has already blown up in his face. Not only did a judge overturn the ban on mask mandates as a violation of the state constitution, but a recent poll from Public Policy Polling shows Virginians favor mask mandates and vaccine mandates by double-digit margins. Small wonder that same poll shows Youngkin with only a +2 approval rating; at this stage, [former Gov.] Ralph Northam had a +18 approval rating.
On Saturday (4/5), something happened that shows that shows Youngkin is, at bottom, full MAGA, Lucus noted. “After a teenage state Senate intern called out Youngkin for his treatment of a historian at the Governor’s Mansion, Youngkin’s campaign team responded with a blatant cheap shot on Twitter.
Democratic state Senate intern Ethan Lynne noticed that Kelley Fanto Deetz, a historian who was tasked with teaching about slavery at the Virginia Governor’s Mansion, had resigned after she found the Youngkins had converted her classroom into a family room and emptied her office.
Youngkin’s press secretary replied with a tweet: “Nothing was moved by the Youngkin administration staff and the space has not been transformed into a living room. The previous mansion director oversaw the moving of Deetz’s desk. The First Lady looks forward to finalizing the executive mansion layout and tours.”
But Youngkin’s campaign team piled on with a tweet that showed Lynne alongside former Gov. Northam, along with pictures showing Northam in blackface in medical school.
By Sunday morning (2/6), that tweet had been deleted. But Youngkin was criticized on Twitter for going after a high school student
ST LOUIS POST-DISPATCH CALLS SEN. JOSH HAWLEY ‘UNFIT FOR OFFICE.’ Openly siding with Russia and their murderous kleptocratic leader, Vladimir Putin, appears to have exhausted the patience of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which stated in an editorial (2/3): “Something serious appears to have prompted Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., to label a fellow Republican, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, a ‘con artist’ and ‘one of the worst human beings.’ Perhaps it was Hawley’s public questioning of the need to defend Ukraine from a Russian invasion. Maybe it was when Hawley urged President Joe Biden to cave to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demand that Ukraine be officially denied membership in NATO. Or maybe it was when Hawley falsely asserted that Biden is to blame for Ukraine’s predicament.
“There once was a time when Hawley had presidential aspirations, but a badly timed fist-pump on Jan. 6, 2021, along with his appeasing advocacy of Russian supremacy just about closes the lid on his presidential dreams. We thought Hawley should’ve resigned his Senate seat for his role in the Capitol insurrection, but the idea that the United States should kneel down to Russia over Ukraine underscores how grossly unfit Hawley is to continue in office.”
The Post-Dispatch noted that before Biden became president a year ago, Donald Trump denied military aid to Ukraine in an effort to extort its leader into helping with Trump’s reelection effort. “The person who failed Ukraine was Trump, and it earned him an impeachment. Biden in the past year has shipped around $650 million in military aid to Ukraine as Russia amasses more than 100,000 troops on its border. So Kinzinger’s ‘con man’ critique of Hawley seems precisely on target.”
MEMPHIS ACTIVIST GETS 6 YEARS IN PRISON FOR CHECKING VOTING STATUS. Black Lives Matter activist Pam “P” Moses has been trapped in a legal nightmare since 2019, and Jan. 31 she was sentenced to six years in prison for pursuing her right to vote.
In 2015 Moses pleaded guilty to charges, including stalking, theft, forgery and tampering with evidence—a crime that permanently revokes a person’s right to vote in Tennessee, Rebekah Sager noted at DailyKos (2/3).
Moses claimed no one ever told her that her plea would lead to the loss of her voting rights. “They never mentioned anything about voting. They never mentioned anything about not voting, being able to vote … none of that,” Moses told The Guardian.
In November 2019, when Moses tried to kick off a mayoral run in Memphis and was asked for proof of her right to vote, she learned that right had been revoked. She filed an official Certificate of Restoration of Voting Rights, along with her voter registration, with the Shelby County Election Commission. That’s when things got very murky.
When Moses asked the court if she was still on probation, the court confirmed she was. But Moses questioned the judge’s calculations and asked a local probation officer to calculate it again. The officer filled out and signed a certificate confirming that, in fact, her probation had ended. In Tennessee, once a felon receives that certificate, they are allowed to vote. Moses submitted the document to officials, along with her voter registration (again), and thought everything was done.
The next day, she got an email telling her that the probation officer incorrectly calculated her probation, and the certificate was given to her in “error.” She was told she was still a felon on probation and ineligible to vote. The department offered no explanation for the mistake.
Submitting the certificate landed Moses back in court, this time facing charges of perjury and falsifying an election certificate.
During her trial, prosecutors claimed that Moses knew she was on probation when she filed her certificate, and thus she knew she wasn’t allowed to vote.
The judge said Moses was trying to “trick” the probation department.
“That seems absurd to me on its face,” Blair Bowie, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center working to challenge voter suppression in Tennessee, told The Guardian.
“The instructions on the certificate of restoration form are very clear to the probation officer or the clerk. They say you will check these records and you will sign off on this based on what the records say.”
“They’re saying that she tricked the probation officer into filling out this form for her. That creates a really scary prospect for people who think they’re being wrongly told they’re not eligible.”
Local prosecutor Amy Weirich has gone on a full media blitz about Moses, at one point telling WREG in Memphis that Moses refused to file the correct paperwork and fraudulently voted multiple times, an allegation Moses vehemently denies.
Moses says she simply registered, something she thought she could do. She maintains she thought her voting rights had been restored.
“I did not falsify anything. All I did was try to get my rights to vote back the way the people at the election commission told me and the way the clerk did,” she told the court on Monday.
She says one ever told her that the tampering with evidence charge would revoke her right to vote indefinitely.
“They included that charge on my indictment because [Weirich] knew that would keep me from voting forever and running from public office,” Moses told WREG.
Moses is currently in custody and an appeal is expected. But the case highlights the byzantine maze that people with felony convictions have to go through to figure out if they can vote, Sam Levine noted at The Guardian (2/3). And it shows the harsh consequences prosecutors can bring if people with felony convictions make a mistake.
DATA SHOWS EXTRA PROFITEERING IN FOOD, ENERGY. New data analysis from the advocacy group Food & Water Watch shows that pandemic-era inflation is being largely driven by the food and energy industries, where price increases over the past two years have grossly out-scaled economy-wide increases, and where corporate revenues in these sectors are soaring.
This analysis was prepared for a hearing in the House Energy & Commerce Committee on corporate price gouging during the pandemic.
“Companies are hiding behind the pandemic and supply chain disruptions as an excuse to gouge consumers. But in reality, 2021 revenues among the largest food and energy corporations topped pre-pandemic levels,” said Amanda Starbuck, research director at Food & Water Watch. “Many companies have subsequently fattened executive compensation while worker wages have stagnated or even dropped.”
Over the past two years (Dec. ‘19 - Dec. ‘21) the Consumer Price Index (CPI) has increased by 8.5%. However:
• Energy costs have increased by 20.3%.
• The cost to feed a family of four on a “thrifty” food plan has increased by 33.5%.
More specifically:
• Gasoline: +31.7% per gallon unleaded.
• Beef: +19.2% for ground beef and +25.5% for beef roast.
• Pork: +31.7% for bacon and +18.6% for pork chops.
• Poultry: +19.7% for chicken breasts and +15.5% for broiler composite.
• Milk: +17.4% for whole milk (gallon).
• Eggs: +16.5% for Grade A eggs (dozen).
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2022
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