Cox: Gerrymandering and voter-ID laws are systemic racism

I'll say it again: I'm not necessarily against voter ID in order to vote, although I think it's an extravagant non-necessity.  But any such ID should be a national  ID; it should be free of charge (because voting must be free/poll taxes are illegal); it should have a very long duration (at least 10 years) and be renewed at any number of places; and any kind of photo-ID law should be grandfathered in, along with state and national outreach programs, hotlines, etc.  

But really, given modern technology, voting doesn't require a photo-ID to avoid the rare case of fraud. Voting can and should be as easy and secure as using an ATM. Polling stations, while they should always probably exist in some quantity to serve poor areas, are as outdated as tricorn hats.

If the true goal was to prevent voter fraud (even though there is none to begin with) while preserving citizens' most sacred democratic right -- the right to vote -- then we would certainly go about it otherwise, not making people who are lifelong eligible voters suddenly ineligible, as Republican state legislatures have. 

Voter-ID laws are a cynical and desperate ploy coordinated by the national GOP; and they a prime example of systemic racism that conservatives deny even exists.

Voter ID's last stand: let's finally declare laws what they are – racist on purpose

By Ana Marie Cox

July 16, 2014 | Guardian

This week, the US Department of Justice and the state of Texas started arguments in the first of what will be a summer-long dance between the two authorities over voting rights. There are three suits being tried in two districts over gerrymandering and Texas's voter identification law – both of which are said to be racially motivated. In its filing, the DoJ describes the law as "exceed[ing] the requirements imposed by any other state" at the time that it passed. If the DoJ can prove the arguments in its filing, it won't just defeat an unjust law: it could put the fiction of "voter fraud" to rest once and for all.

These battles, plus parallel cases proceeding in North Carolina, hinge on proving that the states acted with explicitly exclusionary intent toward minority voters – a higher standard was necessary prior to the Supreme Court's gutting of Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) back in January. Under Section 3, the DoJ had wide latitude to look at possible consequences of voting regulation before they were even passed – the "preclearance" provision. Ironically, because the states held to preclearance had histories of racial discrimination, some of the messier aspects of the laws' current intentions escaped comment.

But meeting that higher standard of explicit exclusionary intent comes with the opportunity to show some of the many skeptical Americans the ugly racism behind Republican appeals to "fairness" and warnings about fraud. Progressives have tried, and mostly failed, to show the institutional racism underpinning the sordid history behind voter ID laws; that may have been too subtle. In courts in Texas and North Carolina, the DoJ will make the jump from accusations that laws have a racial impact to straight-up calling voter ID laws racist.

This ought to be interesting.

The DoJ filing in Texas lays it all out pretty clearly, putting the voter ID law in context of a concerted legislative strategy to deny representation to the state's growing Hispanic population, including Republicans advancing more and more aggressive voter ID bills over the years. The filing points to the anti-immigrant rhetoric that laced the floor debates over the law, and to the measures taken by the Republican-controlled state house to limit the participation of Democratic minority lawmakers in considering or amending the legislation (the bill was heard in front of a special committee selected by the governor, on an expedited schedule). And, the DoJ notes, lawmakers produced "virtually no evidence during or after enactment of SB 14 that in-person voter impersonation – the only form of election fraud addressed by the identification requirements of SB 14 – was a serious problem."

Perhaps the most significant piece of context in the voter ID suit is how Texas's voter ID law came on the heels of the redistricting that the DoJ claims was also racially motivated. In the redistricting cases, DoJ's allegations of malicious intent have been helped along by the admission of the state that it had malicious political intent. The Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, chose as his defense in that case what only can be called the Lesser Evil Strategy – stating up front that the state's GOP legislators had ulterior motives, but not the ones that the VRA outlaws:

[R]edistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party's electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats ... [They] were motivated by partisan rather than racial considerations and the plaintiffs and DOJ have zero evidence to prove the contrary.

Abbott's smugness – and his apparent faith in partisanship as a permissible and distinct form of discrimination – will take center stage as the DoJ presses on with both suits. In court, Abbott will be asked to prove his ignorance of demographics for the very state in which he is currently running for governor. Out of court, other GOP defenders of the law will have to do more or less the same. And they will need to defend the outrageous details of the law – such has how a concealed carry permit is a permissible form of voter ID but a federally-issued Medicare card carried by an elderly woman is not.

Some people of Texas may support the kind of bullying Abbott has prepared to defend, and most progressive activists are hardened to it, but I think average Americans hate it. Putting malice under a national spotlight might be the best way to turn people against voter ID laws in general.

Right now, Americans support the idea of voter ID laws by huge margins: polls show favorable attitudes toward a generic "ID requirement" to be between 70 and 80%. Approval exists across all demographic groups – even among black voters (51%), one of the groups that is, of course, disproportionately disenfranchised by these laws.

But the reasons that the public supports such laws aren't the same as the GOP's reasons for pursuing them: Republicans want to prevent specific types of people from voting; the American public wants voting to be fair.  That's why conservatives have had to hammer so hard on the false narrative of "voter fraud" – to convince everyone that it's what the laws are really about.

Add context to the "ID requirement" poll question that Americans get behind, though, and public support changes dramatically. Asurvey in North Carolina (taken as the state was considering taking up an amendment on the issue) found initial support for voter ID to be 71%. Pollsters then drilled further down and came up with numbers that speak to a truly democratic impulse:

• 72% say it's wrong to pass laws that make it harder for certain people to vote.
• 62% say they oppose a law that makes it harder for people of one party to vote.
• 74% say there should be demonstrated problems before legislators apply a fix.

If nothing else, these results suggests that Abbott's argument that supposedly party-based redistricting isn't the free pass – at least, from the public's standpoint, if not the court's – that he thinks it is.

In North Carolina, pollsters found that support for the law decreased as the 2012 election neared and voters started to pay attention and become educated on the issue. Voting rights advocates filled yet another suit based on disenfranchising young voters, which could make a further difference. (Way to keep pissing off millennials, GOP!)

That context effect is true nationwide. A different survey found that informing respondents that "Opponents of voters ID laws argue they can actually prevent people who are eligible to vote from voting" brought support for voter ID down by 12 points.

Pollsters have not publicly investigated whether Texan voters would show a similar shift, though it could be significant that support in the state for voter ID has remained at around 66% for the past two years, less than its support nationwide. Of course, 77% of Texasbelieve "voter ID laws are mainly used to prevent fraud," an alternate-reality bubble that attention to these cases may just yet pop.

It's the Department of Justice that'll have to bring this to pass. The GOP has always easily waved away "systemic" racism charges, like those made under the non-gutted VRA, as either outright inventions or the result of looking for equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities. Making clear the racist intent of voter ID laws will bring the discussion back to where it belongs: on equal opportunities, in the voting booth.

Taibbi: GOP's attitude, not policies, is screwing them

Like me, Taibbi has been checking out Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing outlets to see how they're reacting to Obama's re-election.  BTW, yesterday there was a good summary at HuffPo of the 11 excuses Republicans are giving for Romney's defeat.

Post-election, finally Republicans are addressing the elephant in the room: that only white men vote GOP.  They're "soul-searching" what to do about it.  Folks like Limbaugh ask rhetorically if the GOP should just give in and throw tokens at minorities and women to get their votes.  Rush even coined a new term: "Hispandering."  Yeah, that's gonna help, Rush.  Please, for us Democrats, keep it up.  

His dismissive attitude echoes that of conservative pundit Edward Klein, who complained on FOX that, "[David] Axelrod and his team had already succeeded in pandering to special interest groups, such as Hispanics, gays, and women."  It was such an unconscious, perfect giveaway of the GOP mindset: anybody who is not a straight white guy is a "special interest group" to them!  Here's how Taibbi put it:

[T]he fact that so many Republicans this week think that all Hispanics care about is amnesty, all women want is abortions (and lots of them) and all teenagers want is to sit on their couches and smoke tons of weed legally, that tells you everything you need to know about the hopeless, anachronistic cluelessness of the modern Republican Party. A lot of these people, believe it or not, would respond positively, or at least with genuine curiosity, to the traditional conservative message of self-reliance and fiscal responsibility.

But modern Republicans will never be able to spread that message effectively, because they have so much of their own collective identity wrapped up in the belief that they're surrounded by free-loading, job-averse parasites who not only want to smoke weed and have recreational abortions all day long, but want hardworking white Christians like them to pay the tab. Their whole belief system, which is really an endless effort at congratulating themselves for how hard they work compared to everyone else (by the way, the average "illegal," as Rush calls them, does more real work in 24 hours than people like Rush and me do in a year), is inherently insulting to everyone outside the tent – and you can't win votes when you're calling people lazy, stoned moochers.

It's hard to say whether it's good or bad that the Rushes of the world are too clueless to realize that it's their attitude, not their policies, that is screwing them most with minority voters. If they were self-aware at all, Mitt Romney would probably be president right now. So I guess we should be grateful that the light doesn't look like it will ever go on. But wow, is their angst tough to listen to.

Not all Democrats are smart, but you don't have to be smart to sense it when somebody despises you and looks down on you.  Republicans can't even begin to start persuading people that their policies are right when the best they can do is faking genuine concern and respect for others.  Repeat: faking it is the best the GOP can do.  On an ordinary day the GOP is downright hostile to them. 

Hey, Rush Limbaugh: 'Starting an Abortion Industry' Won't Win You Female Voters

By Matt Taibbi

November 8, 2012 | Rolling Stone

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/hey-rush-limbaugh-starting-an-abortion-industry-wont-win-you-female-voters-20121108#ixzz2BoosszAu

Rush says what Republicans think: Non-whites hate work, wipe their a**es with American flags, and vote Democrat

Rush Limbaugh and other Republicans have a racist view of blacks and immigrants as people who choose government handouts over honest work and therefore they support Democrats. For their part, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and even Mitt Romney are echoing this line to win support from the radical GOP base.

Rush, "The Titular Head of the GOP," couldn't make it any clearer:

"But Obama is going to be campaigning exclusively to the people who are being pulled in the cart: The people that aren't paying income tax, the people that are on the federal dole. He has made the calculation that that's where he wins. It's clear to me that the Democrat Party has now made the determination that, of the people that vote in this country, a clear majority of them don't work. A clear majority of them don't want to work. A clear majority of them live and breathe on this class envy stuff, and are gonna vote for somebody who's gonna make sure their contraception pills keep coming; their welfare checks keep coming, their disability checks keep coming, their unemployment checks keep coming. Food stamps, you name it.

"That's his group. That's his constituency. Illegal immigrants or families of illegal immigrants. As many minority groups as he can create and convince they are victims of an oppressive America. And, in that calculation, he just casts aside white working-class families while setting up African Americans for Obama."

Yet today, 49 percent of Americans live in a household receiving some form of government assistance. Will that make Republicans' "welfare queen" arguments less effective this election?

Never mind that, even in these tough economic times, only about 1.9 million families receive "pure" welfare (cash assistance) in the form of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, down from 5 million in 1994 before President Clinton's welfare-to-work reforms. And never mind that, as far as welfare goes, Medicaid ($274 billion) and refundable tax credits ($102 billion) far outweigh food stamps ($71.8 billion) and cash assistance ($6.9 billion).

Is the mental image of the black "welfare queen" -- a made-up story by Ronald Reagan that changed with each re-telling -- so deeply embedded in Republicans' brains that no amount of information can erase it?

Should I Just Declare the Republican Primary Over and Anoint Mitt Romney?

February 29, 2012 | The Rush Limbaugh Show

'Press zwei for German'? America's lost heritage

Too bad we didn't have the the Internet, talk radio, and cable news back in the mid-19th to early 20th centuries to whip up hysteria about Germans trying to take over English with their language. For generations, German immigrants insidiously preserved their mother tongue and traditions, until thankfully WWI, Prohibition, and WWII put a stop to their Gemütlichkeit nonsense like a 1-2-3 combination to the dumbkopf.

Seriously though, read and remember this pair of articles snagged by my Deep Web fishing net next time you're about to forward another stupid e-mail about "press 2 for Spanish" or "press 3 for Arabic." Specifically, mull over these two facts:

• In 1910, 25 percent of Americans told the U.S. Census that they spoke only German, no English. That was 50 years after the bulk of German immigrants had arrived in the midwest United States.

• And in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Cleveland and other cities, taxpayer-funded public schools taught half the school curriculum in German.

That's right. The more things change, the more they stay the same. So please, my fellow Americans, chill out. Or, as my Spanish-speaking friends might say, if I had any, ¡tranqui tronco!

In Rural Wisconsin, German Reigned For Decades

By Jennifer Ludden

April 1, 2009 | All Things Considered on NPR

In the contentious debate over immigration, critics often assert that immigrants and their children aren't learning English as quickly as previous waves of newcomers did. But did European migrants of yore really assimilate quickly?

You might be surprised if you explore that question in the tiny town of Hustisford, Wis., an hour west of Milwaukee. There, local members of the town's historical society can give you a tour of the well-appointed, two-story white frame house of the town's founder, an Irishman from New York named John Hustis.

Hustis bought some 200 acres of rolling prairie here in 1837 and attracted enough Irish and English settlers to create a frontier town. But within a decade or so, a new wave of pioneers had arrived. In the mid-19th century, in a pattern repeated across the Midwest, large numbers of Germans began buying homes and farms. It was part of a mass migration that would profoundly change Hustisford — and the nation.

Speaking German At Home

Mel Grulke's great-grandparents came to Hustisford from a German speaking part of Europe in the 1880s, toward the end of the big migration. Some say Wisconsin's cold winters and good soil reminded the Germans of home. In any case, they brought a lot of home with them. Soon, two of three schools in Hustisford were teaching all their classes in German. Two churches worshipped in the hallowed language of Martin Luther. And German was the language of commerce.

As Grulke strolls down Hustisford's now largely abandoned main street, he points out the places where he remembers his parents chatting in German with the shopkeepers.

"This was a grocery store on the bottom; it was called Siefeldts." As with several other buildings, the German name of this one is still engraved along the top of the facade. "They had hand-packed ice cream cones, the best in town."

Though Grulke was born in 1941 — a fourth-generation American on one side and third on the other — his first language at home was German. He says of his grandmother, who was born in the U.S., "I don't recall her ever saying any more than three words in English. In fact, my grandfather was rather staunch. He would reprimand us that it was more like a slang language, English. He wanted us to speak German in his presence, which we did."

Grulke's grandparents apparently had plenty of people in Hustisford with whom to speak German.

"In 1910," says Joseph Salmons, a linguist at the University of Wisconsin, "a quarter of the population told the census taker they spoke only German and didn't speak English — a quarter of the population."

That fact stunned Salmons. When he set out to study the area's census, church and court records, he had no idea the language had thrived for so long. The year 1910 was already a full generation after the mass migration had dropped off, yet Salmons discovered not only that many in Hustisford and other farm towns were still bilingual, but that a sizeable portion was monolingual.

"It turns out a lot of these people were born in Wisconsin," Salmons says. "And a fair number were born of parents born in Wisconsin. That is, these guys were not exactly killing themselves to learn English."

Salmons says some Anglos in town even learned German to be able to do business. Court records show some of them used it to swindle the non-English speaking immigrants. Salmons also found records of Anglo children baptized in German churches, even attending German schools. And Wisconsin was not alone.

Taxpayer-Funded Bilingual Schools

"A number of big cities introduced German into their public school programs," says Walter Kamphoefner, a historian at Texas A&M University. Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Cleveland and other cities "had what we now call two-way immersion programs: school taught half in German, half in English," Kamphoefner says. That tradition continued "all the way down to World War I."

In other words, there were taxpayer-funded bilingual public schools in the U.S. a century ago.

How did that happen? "The simplest explanation is ethnic politics, ethnic lobbying," Kamphoefner says, "especially just after the Civil War, when the German vote was kind of up for grabs."

Not that the notion wasn't contentious. In 1889, Wisconsin and Illinois passed laws mandating that schools teach only in English. But Kamphoefner says the ethnic backlash was strong, and the laws were soon repealed. He has come across evidence that as late as 1917, a German version of the "Star Spangled Banner" was still being sung in public schools in Indianapolis.

[Imagine what would happen to the poor school that told its students to sing the "Star Spangled Banner" in Spanish or Arabic today! - J]

It has always taken immigrants a generation or two to fully transition to English, Kamphoefner says. Languages like Italian, Polish and Czech also popped up briefly in public schools. But German was unique.

"It was in a similar position as the Spanish language is in the 20th and 21st century," he says. "It was by far the most widespread foreign language, and whoever was the largest group was at a definite advantage in getting its language into the public sphere."

A Fading Legacy

At St. Michael's Lutheran Church in Hustisford, Bob Scharnell and other historical society members pore over musty, handwritten records of religious life. The baptisms, confirmations and marriages are still noted in German through the 1920s — well after the anti-German hysteria sparked by World War I. Then, in the 1930s, Wisconsin record keepers switched to English. Historians say not much daily use of German lingered anywhere in America after World War II.

In fact, the folks gathered around these old books represent a turning point. Bill Germer, who is the oldest at 79, can speak German but cannot read it. Mary Zastrow, 65, says when she's frustrated, she blurts out a German phrase her Dad used to say, but she's not exactly sure what it means. Scharnell, 68, never learned German, but he has held on to one small tradition. "We can say, 'Come Lord Jesus.' That's a table prayer that we pray around our table, that's in German. And every time we get together, that's what we do," Scharnell says.

Scharnell likes to recite that prayer in German when his grandchildren visit. But that may be about all that gets passed on around here. After all, Hustisford schools don't teach German anymore. Instead, these local keepers of history say, their grandchildren are studying Spanish.

Keeping Up The Mother Tongue

While the German language is a cherished but distant legacy for most folks in the tiny town of Hustisford, Wis., 67-year-old Mel Grulke works hard to keep it up. Grulke's great-grandparents immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1880s, yet three generations later, his farmer parents still spoke German at home, attended German language church services and chatted in German with shopkeepers when they brought their farm eggs into town to sell. As a child, Grulke remembers feeling shame about this.

"It was old-fashioned," he says — just like the homemade summer sausage his mother put in his lunchbox, instead of the coveted Oscar Meyer hot dogs and Twinkies that his town friends ate.

But by high school, Grulke says, it dawned on him that being bilingual was a great asset. He joined the military hoping to be stationed in Germany (he was sent to France instead). He did eventually travel to his ancestors' homeland, and keeping in touch with friends there is one way he hones his language skills. Grulke married into a family of German heritage, and he and his wife practice speaking together.

Grulke also sings with Madison Maennerchor, founded in 1852, the second oldest German singing organization in the U.S. Its goal is "the perpetuation of choral music, both German and American, German culture, and Gemuetlichkeit."

Even as German died out in every other aspect of daily life in Hustisford, Bethany Lutheran Church offered German language services into the 1970s. Last Christmas, in an effort to make its holiday service special, the church asked Mel Grulke to deliver a Bible reading in German.

Pastor Timothy Bauer says worshippers enjoyed it, even if many didn't understand every word, "because it's how they were raised." He says some feel so strongly, "it's almost as if they believe God spoke German."

[Again, imagine if some American said without any guile about his immigrant relatives: "It's almost as if they believe God spoke Arabic"! Instant hysteria. Glenn Beck would be organizing a protest rally on the guy's front lawn. - J]