Since I used to be a county organizer for ACORN/Project Vote, I have first-hand experience with the challenges people in our inner cities have providing the documentation they need to get hired for a simple job like going out on the street and trying to get people to register to vote. Photo ID requirements for voting create the same set of challenges. In the state of Wisconsin, the subject of the Frank v. Walker Supreme Court case, more than 300,000 registered voters currently lack the required identification documents.
This is a subset of registered voters which represents 9% of the total registered electorate in the Badger State. These are people who could vote in previous elections but won’t be able to vote in future ones unless they get state-approved ID. Then there is another subset of unregistered voters who won’t be able to cast their votes without first getting a state-approved ID. Getting that ID may require them to take extra steps like replacing a lost birth certificate or Social Security card. Through a combination of expense, hassle, lack of information, and insufficient motivation, we should expect tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Wisconsinites to be shut out of the election process in 2016 if the Supreme Court upholds the state’s voter ID law.
That this group of future non-voters is browner and poorer than the electorate at-large, is the entire point of the legislation.
Meanwhile, though the state tries to justify its voter ID law as necessary to prevent voter fraud at the polls, after two years of investigations, Wisconsin “could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin at any time in the recent past.”
But the Supreme Court is unlikely to care. They didn’t care seven years ago when they upheld Indiana’s voter ID law in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board.
As a plurality of the Supreme Court admitted in Crawford, the record in that case contained “no evidence” of in-person voter fraud occurring “in Indiana at any time in its history.” Indeed, the Court’s plurality opinion was only able to cite a single example of such fraud occurring in the United States within the preceding 140 years! Yet the Court upheld Indiana’s law regardless.
The conclusion is obvious. The conservative bloc on the Supreme Court supports laws that have no other purpose than to make it easier for Republicans to win elections by making sure that fewer Democrats can vote.
That’s the kind of country we’re living in, and if those voters happen to be disproportionately black and brown, that’s just they’re own fault for provoking conservatives with their socialistic political beliefs.
The Supreme Court is all the reason I need to vote Democratic in 2016. I don’t care how cozy Hillary Clinton is with Wall Streeters or Henry Kissinger — the Supreme Court justices she’ll appoint will be good, and the ones Scott Walker or Jeb Bush will appoint will be abominable.
Adding: I’m 55 years old. The next president will decide the direction of the Supreme Court for the rest of my life. If only two people can win the president, you’d better believe I’m going with the lesser of two evils, because the greater of two evils is going to be a horrorshow for the country.
A voice of reason in a sea of progressive angst.
Voting rights- yes, the right wing has mobilized the JUDICIARY to attack this sacred right. We’ve just got to win anyway.
Then there’s this news from the radicalized right-wing judiciary this morning: Roy Moore is channeling his inner Governor Wallace and standing athwart history yelling “Stop”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/us/gay-marriage-set-to-begin-in-alabama-amid-protest.html?_r=0
Remember that, as the article notes, Moore is the Dominionist wingnut who conducted the losing legal battle in 2005 to install a Ten Commandments monument at a public building. He was ousted, but won election to the State high court again, because, you know, God stuff.
My favorite parts of the reporting are that some Counties in ‘Bama plan on trying to gain legal cover for their Federal court defiance by beginning starting now to refuse to issue marriage licenses to ANYONE. Remember when the entire Little Rock public school system closing for the 1958-59 school year because N——? Good times.
And then there’s this delightful bit:
“In Geneva County, Judge Fred Hamic said Wednesday he would issue licenses to gay couples but that they would have to go somewhere else to wed. “I believe I would be partaking in a sin, and I sin every day, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “This is one sin I do not have to participate in, not that you have to participate in any sin.””
This sin, above all sins, must be avoided. At least Judge Hamic admits he’s a filthy sinner every single day. But as long as he’s preventing adult couples from sanctifying their love and gaining access to benefits enjoyed by others in his State, God’s OK with it?
You are not thinking like an old, white, RW Alabama politician, centerfield.
Roy Moore is probably running for the Senate. Richard Shelby will be 80 when the ’16 senate elections come around and will probably be primaried.
Last time Moore got kicked off the court (2005 because he REPLACED the 10ton 10commandments he had previously moved off courthouse property) he was actually beginning a campaign for Governor. (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/alabama-judge-running-for-governor/)
Of course, the opportunity to enhance bigotry and enshrine discrimination is nothing to sneer at, either.
No, I’m highly aware that being a retrograde racist/sexist/corporatist/religious fundamentalist will help you do well in ‘Bama politikkkin.
Doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.
Actually, my point (which I didn’t make very well, sorry ’bout that) is that Roy Moore knows damn well he is in contempt of the federal court and will probably be kicked off the court, might actually be dis-barred and will LOSE either way. And he doesn’t care.
Not because he truly loves whatever asshole diety he worships but because he is running for another office.
After all, Jeff Sessions was elected senator after being rejected from by the Senate for a judgeship. Why can’t lightning strike again?
Moore has the morals of a louse … a very bad louse.
Our conservative “justices” generally only engage in judicial activism when a challenged law is seen as lib’rul. When an enacted statute is part of the approved conservative agenda, then Repub judges just can’t seem to find a constitutional objection, certainly not for something as low on the food chain as the “right” (haha) to vote. In any event, they are well aware that this is a coordinated strategy of Team Conservative, and they aren’t about to upset it.
The great exception of the Roberts Court is gay marriage, and that’s simply because it became a project of one conservative, Kennedy. One might also be able to include Obamacare as an exception, we’ll have anther great test of that coming up very soon with the conservative attempt to gut the subsidies.
It is possible that the Obamacare subsidy case was taken as a way to show some phoney “objectivity” by Roberts Repubs, since the legal arguments in favor of gutting the statute are so bad that even someone like Alito couldn’t sign his name to it. But I digress.
On voting rights, the hypocrisy of the New Right was made crystal clear in the seminal case of Bush v Gore, the tyrannical and lawless opinion from which the nation’s institutional (if not political) collapse originated. There, the five Repubs had to bend over backwards, eschew their (supposed) respect and deference for the state judiciary and make up newly manufactured (good for one time only) constitutional “rights”, all to ensure that the national popular vote was evaded and the nation was saddled with its first electoral college prez in 130 years. With the transparently obvious political goal of getting a Repub, any Repub, in the WH. The citizens’ votes were expendable.
After that, the idea that the Court was ever going to side with citizens (and their right to vote) over corrupt parties and overt election fixing was comic. We are a nation of rhetoric, not reality, most especially on voting and elections. One can’t really speak of “democracy” here, and certainly not a “right to vote”. I question if the US is seen as a legitimate democratic regime in the eyes of citizens of other democratic nations.
This situation will continue as long as those citizens of the USA allow it to. I keep wondering how much more of this type of blatant disrespect is going to be tolerated by citizens? One would believe that taking away the right to vote would be the last straw.
That this group of future non-voters is browner and poorer than the electorate at-large, is the entire point of the legislation.
Phooey.
That they are far more likely Democrats than the electorate at large is the point, and you know it perfectly well.
You even say it, further along.
The conservative bloc on the Supreme Court supports laws that have no other purpose than to make it easier for Republicans to win elections by making sure that fewer Democrats can vote.
There you are.
You close,
That’s the kind of country we’re living in, and if those voters happen to be disproportionately black and brown, that’s just they’re own fault for provoking conservatives with their socialistic political beliefs.
Correct that to read:
. . . if those voters happen to be disproportionately black and brown, so much the better for the Democratic narrative that the GOP is a white party moved by old time Klan sentiments and goals.
Were it not for that your complaints would be easy to spin as a constant whine that Democratic voters are dumber, more shiftless, or just less motivated than the much more civicly responsible GOP voters.
That wouldn’t play half so well for the Democrats on the evening news.
“Were it not for that your complaints would be easy to spin as a constant whine that Democratic voters are dumber, more shiftless, or just less motivated than the much more civicly responsible GOP voters.”
You assert a gigantic straw man which, by your own admission, doesn’t reflect anything BooMan posted here. I wonder why anyone here would reflect right wing talking points in this way.
It’s perfectly understandable why the lower classes are less likely to prioritize politics. Combine, on balance, a comparative lack of civic education and critical thinking skills with the fact that the poor and lower middle class must spend much more of their intellectual, time and financial resources on simple survival (housing, clothing, food, safety, etc.), and you have the equation for a less engaged voter. Recognizing these things does not imply that we always believe these people are definitively stupid. Simple- if you’re spending 24/7 of your time just surviving, it’s easier to see civic engagement as a lower priority, and know less about it.
It pisses me off no end to hear this turned into a “so you’re calling the lower classes gullible and stupid!” line, even at the distance you set here. It’s like an intentional misreading. Let the Frank Luntzes of the world and the people they’ve fooled engage in that sophistry, and let us work for ways to counteract those lies.
The poor, as a group, are being done wrong by the rich much more powerfully than the poor, as a group, are doing wrong.
A Supreme Court majority that has no qualms about throwing an election wants to ensure that the system stays thrown.
Remember, for them it is warfare, not politics.