Lamar W. Hankins : Texas Sen. Donna Campbell's Dishonesty on Abortion

Texas Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, speaks to an anti-abortion group outside the state capitol in Austin, Monday, July 1, 2013. Photo by Eric Gay / AP.

Extremism trumps libertarian views:
Donna Campbell’s dishonesty on abortion

Campbell allows her extremist views opposing the constitutional right of a woman to seek an abortion to interfere with a physician’s normal practice of medicine.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / July 23, 2013

Texas State Senator Donna Campbell has been identified as a Libertarian Republican by LibertarianRepublican.net and as a libertarian by the Austin Chronicle.

She is one of the strangest libertarians I know of. She must have great difficulty reconciling her libertarian views with the demands of her right-wing Republican cohorts and constituents. And when it comes to abortion, she allows her religious views to override her libertarian views, and she allows her allegiance to the Tea Party to override the views of physicians who care primarily for women.

On Campbell’s website, in a brief statement about abortion, she exposes a glaring conflict:

God bestowed the gift of life upon us, and this gift begins at conception. I am 100% Pro-Life and believe one of the greatest privileges I will have as a State Senator will be to fight for the rights of the unborn and protect innocent life. No issue is closer to my heart and I will do everything in my power to make abortion as rare as possible. I support strengthening the family at every level and believe parental rights are key to protecting Texas families.

It hardly strengthens families and parental rights to oppose abortion. If a family has three children and does not want another, Campbell would force that mother to have another if she becomes pregnant. The Pope may be proud of her, but her claim about supporting families is deceitful.

Campbell’s efforts to make abortion rarer also deny funding to Planned Parenthood, making contraception harder to obtain and cancer screening less available for poor and uninsured women, effects that are the exact opposite of supporting Texas families.

In her recent op-ed in The Austin American-Statesman Campbell would appear to argue that the opinions of three Republican physicians in the Legislature are more important and should be given greater weight than the views of the medical community that specializes in women’s health care.

The Texas District of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has found that the anti-abortion legislation supported by Campbell is “not based on sound science” and is an “attempt to prescribe how physicians should care for their individual patients.”

The group has concluded: “(The bill) will not enhance patient safety or improve the quality of care that women receive...(and it) does not promote women's health, but erodes it by denying women in Texas the benefits of well-researched, safe, and proven protocols."

Campbell claims that the purpose of the new requirement that abortion clinics be fully-licensed surgical centers is for the safety and well-being of the woman seeking an abortion. The best example of Campbell’s deceit about such safety is her support for requiring abortion-inducing drugs to be administered only at fully licensed surgical centers located within 30 miles of a hospital that allows the prescribing physician to practice there.

Yet the FDA-approved practices allow the administration of abortion-inducing drugs (what is called the “Mifeprex regimen” and often referred to as RU-486) in a physician’s office or clinic.

Campbell allows her extremist views opposing the constitutional right of a woman to seek an abortion to interfere with a physician’s normal practice of medicine and a woman’s right to seek a treatment found safe by the FDA. Further, this new regulation will interfere with the right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy within seven weeks of pregnancy -- the period during which the Mifeprex regimen is permitted by the FDA.

Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s landmark, four-decade-old ruling on abortion rights forbids state regulation of abortion during the first 13 weeks after conception. Such disregard for the constitutional rights of women cannot be justified by one’s personal religious views or one’s experience as an emergency room physician -- Campbell’s current occupation.

The Texas Medical Association opposes the legislation Campbell wholeheartedly endorses. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists made this statement about the sort of legislation Campbell advocates:

While we can agree to disagree about abortion on ideological grounds, we must draw a hard line against insidious legislation that threatens women’s health like [the Texas anti-abortion legislation]... That’s why we’re speaking to the false and misleading underlying assumptions of this and other legislation like it: These bills are as much about interfering with the practice of medicine and the relationship a patient has with her physician as they are about restricting women’s access to abortion. The fact is that these bills will not help protect the health of any woman in Texas. Instead, these bills will harm women’s health in very clear ways.

Campbell’s op-ed disingenuously states that “every abortion facility in Texas is within 15 miles of a hospital.” But she provides no evidence that the physicians practicing in those abortion facilities will be granted admission to practice in nearby hospitals.

Many Texas hospitals have moved to a system of using physicians hired directly by the hospital -- hospitalists they are called. My primary care physician, who used to be able to treat me and follow my progress in the hospital nearest to my home, is no longer allowed to do so. And most hospitals affiliated with religious groups do not permit physicians who perform abortions at nearby clinics to practice in their hospitals.

Two years ago, a Catholic bishop in Texas forbade physicians at two Catholic hospitals in Texas from performing procedures to tie the fallopian tubes of women at the hospitals. Other Catholic bishops have interfered in other medical practices at Catholic hospitals within their domains.

In a case in Phoenix, Catholic Diocese officials that owned a hospital preferred forfeiting a mother’s life in order to save her fetus. Religiously-controlled hospitals deny both women and men medical treatments and procedures that violate religious dogma, but Campbell doesn’t discuss these obstacles to supporting women and their families.

A 2012 study by a legal group found that

Medicare and Medicaid provide religiously-affiliated hospitals with one-half of their funding. Religious hospitals also enjoy certain benefits like tax exempt status, low-cost financing through government bond programs, and, in some areas, use of municipal buildings. Thus, while reliant on funds from a diverse population of taxpayers and serving a diverse population of patients, religious hospitals use specific institutional doctrine to dictate patients’ medical options. Such choices can be contrary (to) their patient’s health needs and personal beliefs.

In her op-ed, Campbell once again argues for the shibboleth that abortion is a dangerous procedure, ignoring the facts. Numerous studies have concluded that one in every 10,000 women dies during childbirth, and fewer than one in every 100,000 women die from medical abortion.

The book Clinician’s Guide to Medical and Surgical Abortions reports that “Death occurs in 0.0006% of all legal surgical abortions (one in 160,000 cases). These rare deaths are usually the result of such things as adverse reactions to anesthesia, embolism, infection, or uncontrollable bleeding.”

Medical abortions are safer than childbirth and almost as safe as naturally occurring miscarriages. But Campbell would rather make law on the basis of a few anecdotes from her time as an emergency room physician than on the fact that fewer than 0.3% of patients who have had an abortion experience a complication that requires hospitalization.

Something else that Campbell fails to mention is that abortion facilities are few and far between in Texas, largely due to previous Republican efforts to limit the availability of such services to women, in contravention of their rights. There are at present 47 abortion clinics in the entire state of 254 counties, where 13.1 million women live. A report from Media Matters concludes that the legislation Campbell has strongly supported could reduce these 47 clinics to five.

But Campbell’s illogic seems to know no bounds. During a hearing on the abortion legislation during the regular 2013 session of the Legislature, Campbell said:

After a colonoscopy on a man, he comes in bleeding in the emergency room from the rectum and we’ve got a surgeon on call. But we don’t have somebody on call for a lady who is hemorrhaging in the uterus from a procedure that was done at a facility that was held at less standards. So I applaud this bill. I jumped on this bill as a physician and as a woman.

Campbell did not explain why an emergency room would be able to handle a man’s (and presumably a woman’s) bleeding from a colonoscopy, but not a woman’s bleeding from an abortion procedure. There are no reasons why hospitals in Texas can’t have OB/GYNs available to them.

David Leonhardt, writing in The New York Times, provides a view of abortion that is as close to mine as I have found:

Most Americans are uncomfortable with abortion yet believe there are circumstances -- and not just a narrow few -- when it should be legal. They believe that women should have control over their bodies and also that an abortion is akin to a death. Where they struggle is in deciding when each principle deserves to take priority.

Would that Donna Campbell had as nuanced and thoughtful a view as this. But in the fight over women’s health and reproductive rights, Campbell has shown that her claims to support liberty and freedom are belied by the dominance of her religious views and her distortion of libertarian philosophy, both of which continue to endanger women’s health in support of an extreme agenda.

Generally, libertarians and Republicans claim to want to keep the government out of our private lives, but when it comes to abortion, some libertarians and most Republicans can’t get government involved enough.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Voter Suppression is Republican Hallmark

Political cartoon by John Darkow / Columbia Daily Tribune. Image from FireIntheBelly.

Voter suppression is a hallmark 
of today’s Republicans

If it took nearly 100 years to assure racial fairness in voting under law, then it might take longer than 48 years to remedy that problem in actual practice.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / July 17, 2013

I have never seen a modern definition of democracy that was not based on near-universal suffrage. It seems that the five Republicans on the Supreme Court prefer a political system that allows states to pass voting laws that suppress the vote, denying voting to many U.S. citizens.

They found section 4(B) of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) unconstitutional because it was not based on current data about voting rights violations in the nine states identified by Congress that have historically engaged in race discrimination in voting. As a result, those nine states, including Texas, no longer are required to get pre-clearance of changes to their voting laws from the attorney general or a three-judge court (section 5) until, or unless, the old data are updated.

Because section 2 of the act was unchanged, state and local governments continue to be prohibited from engaging in election practices that discriminate against and disenfranchise minority voters. However, without pre-clearance, costly and time-consuming lawsuits must be brought against discriminatory voting practices to enforce Section 2.

Congress decided in 1965, and most recently in 2006, that section 2 was not a sufficient remedy for voting discrimination. That’s why it established the pre-clearance requirement.

The U.S. began as a political system that distrusted universal suffrage, limiting the right to vote to those who owned property, were male, were not slaves, and were 21 years of age or older. One of our most revered founders and later president, John Adams, explained in a letter written in May 1776, why women, those under 21, and those who do not own property should be excluded from the voting franchise:

But why exclude women? You will say, because their delicacy renders them unfit for practice and experience, in the great business of life, and the hardy enterprises of war, as well as the arduous cares of state. Besides, their attention is so much engaged with the necessary nurture of their children, that nature has made them fittest for domestic cares. And children have not judgment or will of their own.

True. But will not these reasons apply to others? Is it not equally true, that men in general in every society, who are wholly destitute of property, are also too little acquainted with public affairs to form a right judgment, and too dependent upon other men to have a will of their own? If this is a fact, if you give to every man, who has no property, a vote, will you not make a fine encouraging provision for corruption by your fundamental law?

Such is the frailty of the human heart, that very few men, who have no property, have any judgment of their own. They talk and vote as they are directed by some man of property, who has attached their minds to his interest...”

In 1969, an acquaintance who rented an apartment and wanted to vote in a bond election in the City of Georgetown went to City Hall and rendered his wrist watch for taxation and paid the taxes so that he could vote in the election. At that time, only those who paid property taxes were allowed to vote in bond elections in that town. That same year, the Supreme Court found such voting restrictions violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and thereafter bond elections were open to voting by all citizens.

The Voting Rights Act was renewed by Congress in 2006 by overwhelming margins (Senate -- 98-0; House -- 390-33). The data used in 2006, when the act was reauthorized were data from 1975. However, extensive hearings conducted before the 2006 vote yielded 15,000 pages of new testimony showing that persistent voting discrimination based on race continued to exist in the nine targeted states after the 1975 data were compiled.

And the VRA prevented more than 700 discriminatory laws from taking effect in the last 30 years -- over 100 of them occurred in Shelby County, Alabama, since 1982. Shelby County was the plaintiff in the case just decided. Now, many recently-passed laws that suppress the vote (such as the Texas voter ID law) or unfairly discriminate against minorities (such as redistricting that dilutes minority voting) are being implemented.

More than 140 billboards, playing on the myth of "voter fraud," were placed in black and Latino neighborhoods in Ohio and Wisconsin in 2012. Image from Colorlines.

While the VRA eliminated explicit legal barriers to minority voting registration (such as poll taxes and discriminatory literacy tests), the dissent recognized newer forms of discrimination, such as racial gerrymandering to dilute minority votes; at-large voting in cities with large minority populations, which prevent representative elections; and racially-discriminatory annexation by cities to dilute minority votes.

And more recently, we have experienced voter identification laws that require obtaining expensive documents (which may be impossible for poor people to pay for, even if the documents are available), purges of voting rolls aimed at minorities (which often erroneously delete eligible voters from the voting rolls), voter intimidation at the polls, and practices that have yet to be addressed in most jurisdictions, such as tricking voters to vote on non-election days or at the wrong locations, all of which have the effect of reducing minority voting.

Since the voting rights decision, some states are making plans to eliminate early voting, same-day registration, and Sunday voting hours. But the voter ID laws, which are now being rushed into place (including in Texas) are the least justified because there is almost no in-person voter fraud in the U.S. according to a national investigative reporting project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which called such fraud “infinitesimal.”

It found that the “photo ID laws disproportionately affect minorities, students, the disabled and the elderly,” which is just what today’s Republicans want.

Of course, it was Chief Justice John Roberts’ predecessor, Republican William Rehnquist, who was accused by four witnesses, during his 1986 confirmation hearings as Chief Justice, of voter intimidation and harassment at polling locations in Phoenix in the early 1960s. So it is not surprising that the Republican members of the Supreme Court are insensitive to, or look favorably on, minority voting discrimination.

Another insensitive Republican and Arizona member of the Supreme Court famously ridiculed voters in Florida during the 2000 presidential election case decided by the court in favor of George W. Bush. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor thought that any voters who could not follow voting instructions were too stupid to have their votes counted, even if their intent could be determined by a close examination of the ballots. Evidently, she thought confusing ballot presentations should be blamed on the voters, not the election officials who created the confusion.

But not all Republicans seem to agree with the Supreme Court about the Voting Rights Act. House Speaker John Boehner, commenting on the act’s renewal in 2006, said that it is "an effective tool in protecting a right that is fundamental to our democracy." It is gratifying to see that a majority of Americans seem to agree with Boehner’s assessment. An ABC/Washington Post poll released near the end of June showed that one-third of those polled approve of the Supreme Court’s decision, but just over half (51%) disapprove.

Paul Krugman had this to say in a recent column about voting rights:

America today... (is) a place where everyone celebrates the right to vote, yet many politicians work hard to disenfranchise the poor and nonwhite... But that very hypocrisy is, in a way, a good sign. The wealthy may defend their privileges, but given the temper of America, they have to pretend that they’re doing no such thing. The block-the-vote people know what they’re doing, but they also know that they mustn’t say it in so many words. In effect, both groups know that the nation will view them as un-American unless they pay at least lip service to democratic ideals -- and in that fact lies the hope of redemption.

I wish I shared Krugman’s optimism. But I view the likelihood that America will be redeemed from its sins of hypocrisy about discrimination about as much as I believe that most Republicans will embrace the Affordable Care Act. The Americans who work to deny voting rights and disenfranchise minorities without admitting that this is what they are doing are like those who will not utter racially and ethnically derogatory names in polite company, but who are under their skin vicious racists. I know these people because some of them are my relatives and acquaintances.

A few years ago, these people who would deny fundamental rights if they have sufficient cover to do so included both Democrats and Republicans. But now, most of these hypocrites have moved over to the Republican Party or are members of fringe groups. This movement is as true of Supreme Court Justices as it is of politicians. The Republicans on today’s court torture logic and routinely ignore precedent in their efforts to justify their political conclusions. They often seek indirect ways to achieve the results they favor, as they have done in the VRA case.

Justice Ginsburg’s dissent to the VRA ruling raised the point that it took nearly 100 years after passage of the Fourteenth Amendment (adopted in 1866 to guarantee equal protection of the laws for African-Americans) and the Fifteenth Amendment (adopted in 1870 to guarantee the right to vote for African-American men), to pass the Voting Rights Act to end the discrimination those amendments were intended to address.

If it took nearly 100 years to assure racial fairness in voting under law, then it might take longer than 48 years to remedy that problem in actual practice. Fixing society is not a mechanical process like fixing a car that has broken down. Human beings and societies are more difficult to fix than engines.

Republicans want to suppress the vote of people who may vote for Democrats. That is the clear purpose of unneeded and unjustified laws that impact the voter turnout for elections. And gerrymandering is almost always used to reduce the election of members of the opposite party. The evidence supports these facts, even if most Republicans are too disingenuous to admit it.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Women's Freedom and Texas Republicans

Demonstrator at the Texas State Capitol, Austin, Texas, July 1, 2013. Photos by Deborah Kirksey Coley / The Rag Blog.

Women’s freedom and Texas Republicans

A political party that actually loves liberty would not seek to deny it to any of our citizens, especially pregnant women who may be vulnerable and in need of compassion.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / July 3, 2013

Any reader of this column is undoubtedly aware of the actions last week of Texas State Senator Wendy Davis, who successfully filibustered the anti-abortion bill known as SB 5, filed in the first 2013 special session of the Texas Legislature called by Gov. Rick Perry.

Gov. Perry has now called another special session to give the Legislature another chance to pass this anti-abortion legislation. What Davis did was try to stop a bill that not only would deprive Texas women of their reproductive freedom without improving women’s health services, but was a clear violation of the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe. v. Wade.

While there are many opinions about when and if a pregnancy should be terminated, I won’t dwell on that debate because a woman’s right to an abortion is settled constitutional law. The Supreme Court held 40 years ago that a woman’s right to privacy, guaranteed by the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment, allows her to decide when and if to terminate a pregnancy.

The court established a trimester framework for state regulation of abortion that was not based on the best medical knowledge at the time, and has been widely criticized by both proponents and opponents of abortion.

Clearly, though, under our constitution, a state cannot completely deny a woman the right to terminate a pregnancy. But under Roe v. Wade and its successor cases, states have a legitimate interest in protecting a woman’s health when she undergoes medical procedures, and states have an interest in protecting the potentiality of human life depending on how far along the fetal development is.

These two matters have been the focus of most abortion rights battles over these past four decades.

Under the trimester approach of the court, a state’s regulatory authority over abortions is restricted. During the first trimester (approximately 13 weeks), a state cannot regulate abortion. During the second trimester (weeks 14 through 26), a state may focus on its concerns for the health of a pregnant woman by regulating abortion procedures that can reasonably affect the woman’s health. During the third trimester, a state may regulate or prohibit abortion except when it is necessary to protect the life or health of a pregnant woman.

Opponents of abortion rights have argued that abortion is unsafe and expanded medical protocols are necessary to protect women. But according to research by the Guttmacher Institute, a research, policy-analysis, and educational organization, “Abortion is one of the safest surgical procedures for women in the United States. Fewer than 0.5% of women obtaining abortions experience a complication, and the risk of death associated with abortion is about one-tenth that associated with childbirth.”

Media Matters reports that “Associations representing the OB/GYNs and hospitals of Texas say that a Texas bill mandating new restrictions on doctors and clinics that provide abortions does nothing to improve women's health care and has no medical basis...”

In SB 5, abortion opponents decided to focus their anti-abortion efforts on trying to severely reduce the number of clinics where women can seek an abortion by requiring such facilities to be upgraded by adding expensive services and equipment that do not appear justified by any concern for women’s health. The effect of these new requirements would reduce the number of available clinics, thus limiting abortion facilities to only the most populated metropolitan areas of Texas.

In 2008, there were 67 abortion providers in Texas, and 92% of Texas counties had no abortion provider, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The number and distribution of abortion providers severely impedes access to abortions for one-third of Texas women. Now there are 47 abortion clinics in the entire state of 254 counties. A report from Media Matters concludes that the proposed law Rep. Davis filibustered would reduce abortion clinics in Texas to five.

The old SB 5 and the new HB 2 require that a physician who performs an abortion or induces one with drugs must have “active admitting privileges at a hospital” that is no more than 30 miles from where the abortion or induction is performed. Further, the hospital must provide obstetrical or gynecological health care services that are not offered by all hospitals in Texas.

Oddly, the legislation also requires that the patient be given a telephone number to contact health care personnel 24 hours a day after the procedure, and requires providing the name and telephone number for the hospital nearest to the home of the patient in case emergency care is needed after the abortion is performed. In my experience, providing contact information after a medical procedure or surgery is standard medical practice in Texas, though most physicians may assume that their patients know where the nearest emergency room can be found.

The Texas Hospital Association states that the anti-abortion legislation does nothing to improve women's health because emergency room physicians would be the ones treating a woman who needs emergency care due to complications from an abortion. Emergency room physicians can contact the physician who performed the abortion by telephone, regardless of whether that physician has privileges at the hospital providing the emergency room treatment or how far away the physician may be.

The requirement that an abortion provider have hospital privileges at a hospital 30 miles from where the abortion is performed does nothing to assure that women “receive high-quality care and that physicians (are) held accountable for acts that violate their license.”

Some of the most severe restrictions on physicians in the legislation, which are contrary to practices approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), concern the administration of “abortion-inducing drugs.” Those FDA-approved practices allow the administration of such drugs (namely, what is called the “Mifeprex regimen” and often referred to as RU-486) in a physician’s office or clinic.

Texas State Capitol.

The legislation, however, allows the administration of the Mifeprex regimen only “at an abortion facility” licensed under the Texas Health & Safety Code. This interference in a physician’s normal practice of medicine and a woman’s right to seek the treatment is not justified by FDA regulations, nor by any concern for pain felt by a fetus since the drug regimen is approved only for use within 49 days (seven weeks) of conception. Abortion opponents claim that a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks, which justifies further regulation of abortion at that point in a pregnancy, but not before then.

The only purpose of this Mifeprex regimen provision is to interfere with the constitutional right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy within seven weeks of pregnancy -- a period well within Roe’s 13-week time frame during which states may not regulate the right to an abortion. And it prevents her from using the services of her primary care physician unless he or she works at an abortion clinic and has privileges at a nearby hospital that provides obstetrical or gynecological health services.

Such a blatant violation of Roe. v. Wade is a sufficient reason, standing alone, to oppose the legislation.

The Texas District of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has found that SB 5 is “not based on sound science” and is an “attempt to prescribe how physicians should care for their individual patients.” Without question, the organization of OB/GYNs is, as it describes itself, “the Nation's leading authority in women's health.”

Its “role is to ensure that policy proposals accurately reflect the best available medical knowledge.” Its conclusion about this legislation is clear: “(The bill) will not enhance patient safety or improve the quality of care that women receive...(and it) does not promote women's health, but erodes it by denying women in Texas the benefits of well-researched, safe, and proven protocols.”

Republican claims that the anti-abortion legislation the party is pushing enhances women’s heath are dishonest and bogus.

The way the Republican Party has been behaving, especially in Texas, demonstrates that (to paraphrase the words of George W. Bush) they hate American women for their freedoms. The GOP has become the domestic political equivalent of al-Qaeda when it comes to women’s health care and the right to terminate a pregnancy.

The party of Lincoln constantly conspires to reduce the freedom and liberty interests of Texas women. It works with anti-abortion activists to terrorize Texas women who want to terminate their pregnancies, as well as the physicians who provide them health services.

Rep. Wendy Davis’s valiant filibuster and the efforts of her supporters in the closing hours of Gov. Perry’s first called special session of the Texas Legislature show that many women and men in Texas will not sit idly by while the tribe of Texas Republicans maneuver to take away the constitutional rights of women.

A political party that actually loves liberty would not seek to deny it to any of our citizens, especially pregnant women who may be vulnerable and in need of compassion, understanding, and unfettered medical assistance.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Tom Hayden : The Right-Wing War on Democracy

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, 1965. Photo from AP.

The right-wing war on democratic rights:
Voting rights, immigration reform imperiled

Lost in both the partisan spin and rhetorical legalisms is that the scale of political power is being tipped far to the right in spite of progressive majorities which elected and reelected President Obama.

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / June 27, 2013

With the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington approaching, is the time at hand for mass protest and civil disobedience against the Republican/Tea Party's war against voting rights and immigrant rights?

That's among the immediate questions as the Roberts Court has dropped its hammer on the 1965 Voting Rights Act while a dubious "immigration reform" bill passed the Senate on its likely way to an even worse fate in the Tea Party-controlled House.

Together with the Court's Citizens United decisions protecting secret money in campaigns, Republicans are doing everything possible to cement a grip on power as a numerical white minority bloc. Successful Republican efforts to gerrymander House seats to gain ground in the Electoral College, combined with the rising tide of anti-abortion restrictions in southern states, reinforce the drift towards a new civil war -- one fought by political means with recurring episodes of mass violence.

The Court's narrowing of affirmative action also guarantees a widening of the racial divide in education and economic opportunity.

The Court's composition reveals its underlying partisan character, with the decisive tilt occurring after the 2000 election between Al Gore, Ralph Nader, and George Bush, in which the Court usurped the verdict of a majority of voters, thus becoming a de facto branch of the Republican apparatus.

Photo by Richard Ellis / Getty Images.

The Republican bloc now includes: Roberts [Bush, 2005], Alito [Bush, 2006], Scalia [Reagan, 1986], Kennedy [Reagan, 1988], and Thomas [Bush, sr., 1991]. The Democratic bloc includes Ginsberg [Clinton, 1993], Stephen Breyer [Clinton, 1994], Sonia Sotomayer [Obama, 2009], and Elena Kagan [Obama, 2010].

The Republican tilt is likely to continue indefinitely, with Obama only able to appointment replacements to retiring liberals. The tilt will become a lock if a Republican president is elected in 2016.

Lost in both the partisan spin and rhetorical legalisms is that the scale of political power is being tipped far to the right in spite of progressive majorities which elected and reelected President Obama.

In the voting rights decision, the Court has prevented aggressive action by the Justice Department to deter egregious methods of suppressing voter turnout among communities of color. University surveys show that most whites in the Southern states, with the addition of Pennsylvania, are more prejudiced than the national average [Annenberg survey, 2008 data].

Most lost or settled voting rights cases have occurred in the South. {New York Times, June 23]. It is true that both blatant and more subtle cases of voter suppression occur outside the states covered by the Voting Rights Act, but that is an argument for expanding the Section 5 protections, not weakening them.

The point is that Barack Obama was elected twice with the support of 75-95 percent of African-American, Latino, and Asian-American voters, and any government-imposed inhibitions on their registration and turnout will make the difference in close national and state elections. Without federal intervention, the challenge of protecting voting rights will be left largely to massive volunteer efforts by civil rights and labor organizations.

With respect to the immigrant rights bill passed by the Senate this week, the measure shifts U.S. military buildups from the Muslim world to the Mexican border, airports, and coastlines. The Statue of Liberty is replaced by a Minuteman at the watchtowers.

Border wall boondoggle. Photo by
Scott Olson/Getty Images.

The projected cost is $40 billion, which is sure to rise with overruns, making the costs comparable to other major military operations. The total number of Border Patrol agents will double to 40,000, and the fencing is to cover 700 miles. Sen. Patrick Leahy was right in calling the bill a boondoggle for Halliburton. [For the historical record, the original fencing metal strips came from Halliburton's corporate predecessor, Brown and Root; the metal was from landing strips installed for U.S. aircraft during the Vietnam War.]

The billionaires' boondoggle aside, the question is whether -- and when -- the immigrant rights bill will include voting rights, if ever. Obama temporarily legalized the DREAM Act youth who participated heavily in the 2012 election. Their future now is linked to the immigrant rights bill, or will require an extension of Obama's executive order.

It is estimated that between 800,000 and 1.2 million of the DREAM Act generation could become empowered to vote. In addition, there are one million projected voters in the category of Title II, the Agricultural Worker Program. That would leave about 9 million immigrants facing the pitfalls of the so-called "pathway to citizenship" which will take perhaps 13 to 20 years.

According to an analysis by Peter Schey, it is likely that 4 to 5 million mostly low-income immigrants will be unable to adjust their status because of roadblocks to eligibility.

It is anyone's guess whether the Tea Party Republicans in the House will accept any immigration reform, especially reform that will empower low-income, brown-skinned people to vote. That would shift the political balance of power towards the multicultural majority, now represented by Obama, for the coming generation.

The all-important electoral balance will shift away from the Republican Party in Florida, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and elsewhere -- through the fault lines of the Mexican War of the 1840s.

The point is that the Tea Party, the Republican Party, and Corporate Agriculture will consent to between 2 and 7 million brown-skinned people becoming new voters. If the conservatives finally acquiece, it is reasonably certain that they will make the "pathway to citizenship" as uphill, filled with obstacles, and gradual as possible.

This is not only about raw partisan political power, but about the last stand of the xenophobes and nativist elements in America's political culture. Those who consider these words an exaggeration should read again Patrick Buchanan's State of Emergency [2006] with its foaming fear of a new reconquista in California, or Reagan Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger's prediction of war with Mexico.

Historically, it was difficult enough to achieve democracy in America as a form of minority rule. The British had to be defeated and a new republic given birth where the minority of while male property owners were enfranchised. Each expansion of democratic voting rights has come in the wake of war or massive civil strife.

Now, even with a new and more tolerant American majority coming into view, the resistance from the Right will harden in every way. Politics, including the politics of American progressives, will be seen increasingly through this lens.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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ELECTION 2012 / Ed Felien : Forward Over the Fiscal Cliff?

Taking the dive! Image from Photobucket.
The next step:
Forward over the fiscal cliff?

If John Boehner wants to give the car keys to the crazies, and they’re willing to drive over the cliff, then the rest of us should step back and begin to talk to our moderate Republican friends.

By Ed Felien / The Rag Blog / November 12, 2012

Obama’s victory is a victory for women’s rights, for the rights of immigrants to dignity and a path to citizenship, a victory for African-Americans in their continuing struggle against racism, and a victory for working people.

Romney vowed to defund Planned Parenthood, appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe v Wade and, by making abortion illegal, he would have made women’s bodies the property of the state. He would have made immigrants unwelcome in this country. He would have strengthened the hand of racists in this country.

And he would have phased out social security and medicare, eliminated Obamacare (that has guaranteed medical coverage for all Americans), cut health and safety standards for workers, and driven down wages in the public and private sectors.

That didn’t happen. We’re not moving backwards. But there’s no guarantee that we’ll move forward unless the Democrats put some starch in their backbones and get ready for the fight of their lives. The battle for the future has not been won. That battle has just begun.

Democrats just added to their majority in the Senate. They now have 53 Democrats and two Independents who will probably vote with them against 45 Republicans. But one senator can filibuster a bill and stop it, and it takes 60 votes to override that filibuster.

The Republicans have demonstrated that they will do everything to obstruct progress in the Senate. They have used the filibuster 370 times in Harry Reid’s tenure as Majority Leader of the Senate. During an even more contentious period Lyndon Johnson, who served as Majority Leader for the same amount of time as Harry Reid, had to face just one Republican filibuster.

There is nothing sacred about the filibuster. It is not part of the Constitution. It is a relatively modern invention meant to protect the state’s rights of southern racists.

The rules of the Senate are adopted on the first day of the session. The Democrats must adopt rules eliminating the filibuster, and they also must eliminate the rule that allows one senator to put a hold on a presidential appointment. If we are to move forward, then we have to smash through these barriers that Mitch McConnell and his Southern racist pals have set in our way.

The Democrats made some gains in the House but not enough to control it. There are still some races that are too close to call, but it seems the Republicans will have a 40-vote edge. In order to hold his caucus together, John Boehner has had to cater to the crazies.

But the Tea Party Caucus had only 61 members during the last session, and two of the worst of that lot were defeated: Roscoe Bartlett and Joe Walsh (another Republican expert on women’s health, who said abortion isn’t necessary to protect the life of the mother because women never die from childbirth any more. According to Amnesty International: “During 2004 and 2005, more than 68,000 women nearly died in childbirth in the USA. Each year, 1.7 million women suffer a complication that has an adverse effect on their health.”).

All the Democrats need is 21 Republicans to join with them in a Congress of National Reconciliation -- a bi-partisan Congress that will put the good of the country ahead of partisan wrangling. Up to now, the threat against moderate Republicans has been, “If you don’t cooperate with the Tea Party, then we’ll run against you in the Primary and beat you.”

But what has happened when they’ve done that? What happened to Todd Aikin, Richard Mourdock, and Christine O’Donnell when those Tea Party darlings won their party’s primary? They went down to defeat when faced with Democratic moderates. If 21 moderate Republicans would caucus with the Democrats, then the Democrats must offer them the Speaker’s role and the chairs of all the committees.

But more than that, the Democrats should offer them help in their next election: if they stand with the Democrats in trying to move this country forward, then the Democrats must stand with them when the Tea Party reactionaries try to move this country backwards by trying to run over them.

There is a lot at stake. We need to make our tax laws more fair. The rich must pay their fair share. We need to make sure Social Security and Medicare are solvent, but we cannot cut any of the benefits.

And in order to get this country back on the road to prosperity we need to help the people at the bottom of the ladder of opportunity. If we raise the federal minimum wage, that will translate immediately into more goods purchased, more homes built, and more prosperity for everyone.

Right now we are looking over a financial cliff. What would happen if we went over that cliff? If Congress does nothing, then there would be automatic cuts in Defense that would close down unnecessary military bases in Southern states and foreign countries.

The Bush tax cuts would expire. That means working people would have a slight increase in their payroll taxes, but it would also mean rich people would begin to pay their fair share. It should be easy to restore the tax cuts for working people in the next Congress.

So, if John Boehner wants to give the car keys to the crazies, and they’re willing to drive over the cliff, then the rest of us should step back and begin to talk to our moderate Republican friends. This financial cliff could be a driveway where we could work together for a bi-partisan Congress of National Reconciliation.

[Ed Felien is publisher and editor of Southside Pride, a South Minneapolis monthly. Read more articles by Ed Felien on The Rag Blog]

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Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman : Will E-Voting Machines in Ohio Give Romney the Election?

Political cartoon by Dan Wasserman / Boston Globe
Will Ohio’s H.I.G.-owned e-voting machines
give Romney the White House?

The widespread use of electronic voting machines from ES&S, and of Diebold software maintained by Triad, allowed Blackwell to electronically flip a 4% Kerry lead to a 2% Bush victory in the dead of election night.

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / October 16, 2012

See Thorne Dreyer's interview with journalist Harvey Wasserman and author Tova Andrea Wang about voter suppression and voter theft -- including issues discussed in this article -- at The Rag Blog, and listen to the Rag Radio podcast.

Electronic voting machines owned by Mitt Romney’s business buddies and set to count the votes in Cincinnati could decide the 2012 election.

The narrative is already being hyped by the corporate media. As Kelly O’Donnell reported for NBC’s Today Show on Monday, October 8, Ohio’s Hamilton County is “ground zero” for deciding who holds the White House come January 2013.

O’Donnell pointed out that no candidate has won the White House without carrying Ohio since John Kennedy did it in 1960. No Republican has EVER won the White House without Ohio’s electoral votes.

As we document in the e-book Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election?, George W. Bush got a second term in 2004 thanks to the manipulation of the electronic vote count by Ohio’s then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell served as the co-chair of the state’s committee to re-elect Bush/Cheney while simultaneously administering the election.

The widespread use of electronic voting machines from ES&S, and of Diebold software maintained by Triad, allowed Blackwell to electronically flip a 4% Kerry lead to a 2% Bush victory in the dead of election night. ES&S, Diebold and Triad were all owned or operated by Republican partisans. The shift of more than 300,000 votes after 12:20 am election night was a virtual statistical impossibility.

It was engineered by Michael Connell, an IT specialist long affiliated with the Bush Family. Blackwell gave Connell’s Ohio-based GovTech the contract to count Ohio’s votes, which was done on servers housed in the Old Pioneer Bank Building in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Thus the Ohio vote tally was done on servers that also carried the e-mail for Karl Rove and the national Republican Party. Connell died in a mysterious plane crash in December, 2008, after being subpoenaed in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit focused on how the 2004 election was decided (disclosure: we were attorney and plaintiff in that suit).

Diebold’s founder, Walden O’Dell, had vowed to deliver Ohio’s electoral votes -- and thus the presidency -- to his friend George W. Bush. That it was done in part on electronic voting machines and software O’Dell happened to own (Diebold has since changed hands twice) remains a cautionary red flag for those who believe merely winning the popular vote will give Barack Obama a second term.

This November, much of the Ohio electorate will cast its ballots on machines again owned by close cronies of the Republican presidential candidate. In Cincinnati and elsewhere around the state, the e-voting apparati are owned by Hart Intercivic. Hart’s machines are infamous for mechanical failures, “glitches,” counting errors and other timely problems now thoroughly identified with the way Republicans steal elections.

As in 2004, Ohio’s governor is now a Republican. This time it’s the very right-wing John Kasich, himself a multi-millionaire courtesy of a stint at Lehman Brothers selling state bonds, and the largesse of Rupert Murdoch, on whose Fox Network Kasich served as a late night bloviator. Murdoch wrote Kasich a game-changing $1 million check just prior to his winning the statehouse, an electoral victory shrouded in electronic intrigue. The exit polls in that election indicated that his opponent, incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland, had actually won the popular vote.

Ohio’s very Republican Secretary of State is John Husted, currently suing in the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent the public from voting on the weekend prior to election day. As did Blackwell and Governor Robert Taft in 2004, Husted and Kasich will control Ohio’s electronic vote count on election night free of meaningful public checks or balances

Hart Intercivic, on whose machines the key votes will be cast in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, was taken over last year by H.I.G. Capital. Prominent partners and directors on the H.I.G. board hail from Bain Company or Bain Capital, both connected to Mitt Romney. H.I.G. employees have contributed at least $338,000 to Romney’s campaign. H.I.G. Directors John P. Bolduk and Douglas Berman are major Romney fundraisers, as is former Bain and H.I.G. manager Brian Shortsleeve.

U.S. courts have consistently ruled that the software in electronic voting machines is proprietary to the manufacturer, even though individual election boards may own the actual machines. Thus there will be no vote count transparency on election night in Ohio.

The tally will be conducted by Hart Intercivic and controlled by Husted and Kasich, with no public recourse or accountability. As federal testimony from the deceased Michael Connell made clear in 2008, electronically flipping an election is relatively cheap and easy to do, especially if you or your compatriots programmed the machines.

So as the corporate media swarm through Ohio, reporting breathlessly from “ground zero” in Cincinnati, don’t hold your own breath waiting for them to also clarify that the voting machines in what may once again be America's decisive swing state are owned, programmed, and tabulated by some of the Romney campaign’s closest associates.

[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are authors of Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election?, their fifth book on election protection. It is available as an e-book at harveywasserman.com and freepress.org. Read more of Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis' writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Carl Davidson : 'Lazy' People and Voting Rights

Political cartoon by Adam Zyglis / The Buffalo News / The Cagle Post.
‘Lazy’ people, voting rights, and
Republicans caught with their pants down

As the saying goes, most people work for their money, but a few people are able to let their money work for them

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / October 3, 2012

Sometimes Republicans just can’t help themselves. Put a little heat on them, and they blurt out the truth, showing what they’re really thinking.

The latest case in point: The retrograde Pennsylvania "Voter ID" law was rejected on October 2, at least in part, by a state judge, Robert Simpson, allowing people to vote normally at least on this November 6. The decision was a victory for labor, the NAACP, retiree groups, and all who care about defending civil rights and liberties.

The main author of the bill, State Rep Daryl Metcalfe (R-Butler), however, chimed in with this comment:

Justice Simpson’s final decision is out of bounds with the rule of law, constitutional checks and balances for the individual branches of state government, and most importantly, the will of the people. Rather than making a ruling based on the constitution and the law, this judicial activist decision is skewed in favor of the lazy who refuse to exercise the necessary work ethic to meet the commonsense requirements to obtain an acceptable photo ID.

Yes, you heard that right. This guy thinks those objecting to this bill are "the lazy who refuse to exercise the necessary work ethic." And all of us here in Western Pennsylvania not fresh out of the pumpkin patch know exactly who he thinks he’s talking about.

When Gov. Romney went over the top in a recent closed session with his upper crust friends talking about a 47% of the population who wouldn’t "take responsibility" for their lives, I thought things had pretty much hit bottom in the racist dog whistle department. Little did I know!

Metcalfe has done us all a favor in self-exposing the racist mindset behind this GOP voter suppression effort, and revealing exactly why they thought that, if implemented, it could tip the state to Romney. Now they’ve been monkey-wrenched, at least for the time being.

But here’s an interesting thought. I’m not a constitutional lawyer, even though I’ve studied it some. But, where in the Constitution, or in our state voting laws, does it suggest that lazy people or people with a hampered work ethic don’t have the same right to vote as energetic workaholics?

The wealthy had best be careful here. As the saying goes, most people work for their money, but a few people are able to let their money work for them. They can laze about, enjoying the good life of the idle rich. There’s a slippery slope here they may want to avoid for the future.

[Carl Davidson, a longtime activist and author, is a member of Steelworker Associates. He lives in Western Pennsylvania and writes for BeaverCountyBlue.org, the website of the 12th CD Progressive Democrats of America, and blogs at Keep on Keepin' On. Read more articles by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman : Could Nine GOP Governors Flip the Vote?

Boss Tweed: "As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?” Cartoon by Thomas Nast / Harper’s Weekly, October 7, 1871. Image from Scoop Independent News.
Will nine GOP governors electronically
flip Romney into the White House?

In tandem with the GOP's massive nationwide disenfranchisement campaign, they could -- in the dead of election night -- give Romney a victory in the Electoral College.

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / September 27, 2012

Journalist Harvey Wasserman and author Tova Andrea Wang will discuss Voter Suppression in America with Thorne Dreyer on Rag Radio, Friday, October 5, 2012, 2-3 p.m.(CDT), on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the Internet. Rag Radio is rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA, Sunday mornings at 10 (EDT).

Nine Republican governors have the power to put Mitt Romney in the White House, even if Barack Obama wins the popular vote.

With their secretaries of state, they control the electronic vote count in nine key swing states: Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Arizona, and New Mexico. Wisconsin elections are under the control of the state’s Government Accountability Board, appointed by the governor.

In tandem with the GOP's massive nationwide disenfranchisement campaign, they could -- in the dead of election night -- flip their states' electronic votes to Romney and give him a victory in the Electoral College.

Thankfully, resistance has arisen to the disenfranchisement strategy, which seems designed to deny millions of suspected Democrats the right to vote. The intent to demand photo ID for voting could result in some 10 million Americans being disenfranchised, according to the Brennan Center at New York University. Other methods are being used to strip voter rolls -- as in Ohio, where 1.1 million citizens have been purged from registration lists since 2009. This "new Jim Crow" -- personified by groups like Houston-based True the Vote -- could deny the ballot to a substantial percentage of the electorate in key swing states.

This massive disenfranchisement has evoked a strong reaction from voting rights activists, a number of lawsuits, major internet traffic and front page and editorial coverage in The New York Times.

But there has been no parallel campaign to guarantee those votes are properly counted once cast. Despite serious problems with electronic tabulations in the presidential elections of both 2000 and 2004, electronic voting machines have spread further throughout the country.

In Ohio, former Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell awarded a no-bid state contract to GovTech -- a well-connected Republican-owned company which no longer exists -- to help count Ohio’s vote. GovTech contracted with two equally partisan Republican companies: Smartech for servers and Triad for IT support (Push and Pray Voting).

Electronic voting machines with ties to Republican-connected companies have proliferated throughout Ohio. Federal money from the Help America Vote Act has helped move electronic voting machines into other key swing states in substantial numbers that are not easy to track.

The machines can quickly tabulate a winner. But their dark side is simple: there is no way to monitor or double check the final tally. These partisan Republican vote counting companies have written contracts to avoid transparency and open records laws.

American courts have consistently ruled that the hardware and software used in e-voting machines is proprietary. For example, California’s Public Records Act (CPRA) contains a Trade Secret Exemption. The courts in California apply a “balancing test” to determine whether the Trade Secret Exemption applies, but the contracts with voting machine vendors are written in such a way that the court usually has no other choice but to side with the vendors and the state and county election officials who inked the contract. High priced attorneys like Daniel McMillan of the Jones Day firm are often hired to "clarify" the law for the court.

In a filing with the Voting Systems Procedures Panel of the California Secretary of State’s office during the 2004 election, McMillan hammered out a “Stipulated Confidentiality Agreement” that states in part that a public records request by a voting activist “contain[s] confidential proprietary or trade secret information” and thus, is not a public record.

Also that year, McMillan showed up in Georgia on behalf of the infamous Diebold Election Systems company and invoked the Peach State’s Trade Secret Exemption to the open record law. McMillan wrote: “If information constitutes a trade secret under the Georgia Trade Secrets Act, the government agency in custody of the information has a duty to protect the information” from public scrutiny.

McMillan goes on to argue that there’s also a Computer Software Exclusion that, “To the extent that any request is made for Diebold’s computer program or software, such a request would not be a valid request for a public record.” Diebold’s attorney cited the concern that “...it makes it easier to sabotage and hack the system and circumvent security features” if there’s transparency.

That same year in Ohio, Diebold’s secret pollbook system "accidentally" glitched 10,000 voters in the Cleveland area from the registration rolls. During the 2004 election in Toledo, thousands of voters lost their votes on Diebold optiscan machines that were improperly calibrated or had the wrong markers. How the calibration and markers work is a trade secret.

So, even the election boards that buy them cannot access their tabulation codes. The bulk of the major e-voting machine companies are owned by Republicans or by corporations whose roots are difficult to trace. While We Still Have Time by Sheila Parks of the Center for Hand Counted Ballots warns that we enter the 2012 election with no reliable means of guaranteeing that the electronic vote count will be accurate.

In fact, whether they intend to do it or not, the Republican governors of the nine key swing states above have the power to flip the election without significant public recourse. Except for exit polls there is no established way to check how the official electronic vote count might square with the actual intent of the electorate. And there is no legal method by which an electronic vote count can be effectively challenged.

There is unfortunate precedent. In the heat of election night 2000, in Volusia County, Florida, 16,000 electronic votes for Al Gore mysteriously disappeared, and 4,000 were erroneously awarded to George W. Bush, causing an incorrect shift of 20,000 votes. This was later corrected. But the temporary shift gave John Ellis at Fox TV News (Ellis is George W. Bush’s first cousin) an opening to declare that the GOP had won the presidency. NBC, CBS, and ABC followed Fox’s lead and declared Bush the winner based on a computer error. That "glitch," more than anything else, allowed the Republicans to frame Gore as a “sore loser.”

In Ohio 2004, at 12:20 election night, the initial vote tabulation showed John Kerry handily defeating Bush by more than 4%. This 200,000-plus margin appeared to guarantee Kerry’s ascent to the presidency.

But mysteriously, the Ohio vote count suddenly shifted to Smartech in Chattanooga, Tennessee. With private Republican-connected contractors processing the vote, Bush jumped ahead with a 2% lead, eventually winning with an official margin of more than 118,000 votes. Such a shift of more than 6%, involving more than 300,000 votes, is a virtual statistical impossibility, as documented in our Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election?.

That night, Ohio’s vote count was being compiled in the basement of the old Pioneer Bank building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The building also housed the servers for the Republican National Committee and thus the e-mail of Bush advisor Karl Rove. Secretary of State Blackwell was co-chair of the Ohio Committee to Re-Elect Bush and Cheney. He met earlier that day in Columbus with George W. Bush and Karl Rove. That night, he sent the state’s chief IT worker home early.

The official Ohio vote count tabulation system was designed by IT specialist Michael Connell, whose computer company New Media was long associated with the Bush family. In 2008 Connell died in a mysterious single-engine plane crash after being subpoenaed to testify in the federal King-Lincoln-Bronzeville voter rights lawsuit (by way of disclosure: Bob is an attorney and Harvey a plaintiff in this lawsuit).

FreePress.org covered the vote shift in depth. The King-Lincoln suit eventually resulted in a federal injunction ordering Ohio’s 88 counties to turn over their ballots and election records.

But 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties violated the injunction and destroyed their election records. Thus no complete recount of Ohio 2004 has ever been done. More than 90,000 “spoiled” ballots, like those in Toledo, went entirely uncounted, and have since been destroyed.

No way was ever found to verify the 2004 electronic vote count. There are no definitive safeguards in place today.

In 2008, swarms of election protection volunteers filled the polling stations in Ohio and other swing states. They guaranteed the right to vote for many thousands of Americans who might otherwise have been denied it.

They had no means of guaranteeing the accuracy of the electronic vote count. But Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan all had Democratic governors at the time. Florida’s governor was the moderate Republican Charlie Crist, not likely to steal an election for a party he would soon leave.

At the time, we advocated banning money from electoral politics, abolishing the Electoral College, universal automatic voter registration for all U.S. citizens, universal hand-counted paper ballots, and a four-day weekend for voting, with polls worked and ballots counted by the nation's students.

But as Sheila Parks puts it in her new book, which is subtitled The Perils Of Electronic Voting Machines and Democracy's Solution: Publicly Observed, Secure Hand-Counted Paper Ballots (HCPB) Elections: "In 2010, ultra-right-wing Republican governors were elected in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin. In several of these states, these governors were not part of a long line of Republican governors. In fact, in some of these states, these governors interrupted a long line of Democratic governors."

So this year Rick Scott is governor in Florida, Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania, John Kasich in Ohio, Rick Snyder in Michigan, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and Jan Brewer is in Arizona. All are seen as hard-right Republicans unlikely to agonize over flipping a Barack Obama majority into a victory for Mitt Romney.

That doesn’t mean they would actually do such a thing. But the stark reality is that if they choose to, they can, and there would be no iron-clad way to prove they did.

Another stark reality: hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to win this election by multi-billionaires Sheldon Adelson, Charles and David Koch, the Chamber of Commerce, and other corporate interests. For them, spending a few extra million to flip a key state's electoral votes would make perfect sense.

While Obama seems to be moving up in the polls, the huge reservoir of dollars raised to elect Mitt Romney will soon flood this campaign. We might anticipate well-funded media reports of a “surge” for Romney in the last two weeks of the election. Polls could well show a "close race" -- for Congress as well as the presidency -- in the early hours of election day.

And then those electronic voting machines could be just as easily flipped on election night 2012 as they were in Ohio 2004.

Would this batch of swing state Republicans do that for Romney? We don’t know.

COULD they do it? Absolutely.

Would you be able to find definitive, legally admissable proof that they did it? No.

Would the courts overturn such a tainted victory? Not likely.

What could ultimately be done about it?

In the short term: nothing.

In the long-term, only a bottom-up remaking of how we cast and count ballots can guarantee this nation anything resembling a true democracy. It is, to put it mildly, a reality worth fighting for.

[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are authors of Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election?, their fifth book on election protection. It is available as an e-book at harveywasserman.com and freepress.org. Read more of Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis' writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Marilyn Katz : The Ties That Bind Paul Ryan and Todd Akin

Graphic from Eclectablog.
Paul Ryan and Todd Akin:  
The ties that bind

Rape-denier Todd Akin is right in line with the GOP’s staunchly anti-abortion platform. And so is Ryan.

By Marilyn Katz / The Rag Blog / August 22, 2012

Republicans, heeding their media strategists, are trying to distance themselves from Todd Akin’s absurd comment that women cannot get pregnant from “legitimate rape.” But we shouldn’t let them get away with it. Rather than making him an outlier, Akin's comments are consistent with the words and actions of the Republican Party -- including its latest darling, presumptive vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan.

Ryan is being touted as an economic expert, but his legislative focus on economics is relatively new, whereas his anti-choice record is pages long and more than decade old. Of the 81 bills Ryan has sponsored or cosponsored in this congressional session, only three have dealt with the economy. The greatest number of bills he has backed on a single topic -- 10 -- have to do not with controlling the economy but controlling women’s bodies and what we can and cannot do with them.

And that’s not new. Over the 13 years he’s been in Congress, Ryan has voted 59 times -- every time possible -- to deny women access to abortion and even to forms of contraception. The 59 pieces of legislation range from declaring a fetus a human being with full legal rights to allowing hospitals to refuse treatment to a woman who needs post-abortion care -- even if she is at death’s door.

Nor are Ryan and Akin anomalies or renegades. Republicans have introduced more than 1,000 anti-choice and anti-contraception bills in state legislatures in the past two years, many of which passed, especially in the 27 state legislatures under GOP control. And yesterday the national party approved a platform plank declaring abortion unconstitutional and calling for a wholesale ban without any exception for rape or incest.

Not all Republicans are as careless in their speech as are Todd Akin or Illinois's Joe Walsh, but they all share the position that they have the right to impose their controls on women’s lives and bodies.

The record is clear: pro-gun and anti-choice, Akin, Ryan, and their Grand Old Party are a danger to women and other living things.

[An anti-war and civil rights organizer during the Vietnam War, Marilyn Katz helped organize security during the August 1968 protests at the Democratic National Convention. Katz has founded and led groups like the Chicago Women’s Union, Reproductive Rights National Network, and Chicago Women Organized for Reproductive Choice in the 1960s and 1970s, and Chicagoans Against War in Iraq in 2002. The founder and president of Chicago-based MK Communications, Katz can be contacted at mkatz@mkcpr.com. This article was also published at In These Times. Read more articles by Marilyn Katz on The Rag Blog.]

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Don Swift : Paranoid Politics and the Legitimacy Crisis

Graphic from Framing the Dialogue. Inset images below from NeoRepublica and Pushed to the Left.
Paranoid politics:
How the legitimacy crisis helps the Republicans

The growing lack of confidence in government and democracy occurred most with white, blue-collar people. The extent to which this was directly connected to racial antipathy is difficult to sort out.

By Don Swift / The Rag Blog / July 25, 2012

[See earlier articles in this series.]

The Paranoid Style

Throughout American history, there have been numerous highly emotional and somewhat irrational movements that were marked by paranoia, rage, and acceptance of conspiracy theories. They include the McCarthyites of the 1950s, the anti-Catholic “Know-Nothings” of the 1850s, the White Citizens Councils, the anti-Masonic and anti-Illuminati movements, and the populists of the 1890s. The angry farmers in the latter were not right-wingers.

The late Richard Hofstadter, an expert on status politics and the populists, lumped them together under the heading of the “paranoid style in American politics.” They all have in common the fear that they are about to lose or have lost something important, including social status.

He found that these people have a way of projecting their own undesirable traits onto the people they hate. Frequently, there is a hang-up with illicit sex. They are given to paranoid theories and fantasies, and there are “heroic strivings for evidence to prove… the unbelievable.”

Movements that exhibit the paranoid style generate a great deal of emotional energy and commitment among followers, and the Republicans have been the beneficiaries of this sort of zeal and commitment since Richard Milhouse Nixon unveiled his “Southern Strategy.”

To a degree, that strategy was anticipated by Barry Goldwater's 1961 Atlanta speech in which he said, “We're not going to get the Negro vote as a block in 1964 or 1968; [we ought] to go hunting where the ducks are.” Both strategies were designed to mine Southern racial antipathies for votes.


Populism -- with an emphasis on right-wing populism

Right-wing populism was an even more successful ploy for using hot button issues and cultural differences to recruit voters. Of course, this strategy sometimes overlapped with the Southern Strategy.

The New Right, which includes the Religious Right, is an example of right-wing populism, and it too clearly is an example of the paranoid style. It has added a great deal of heat to the political environment and could well have paved the way for more extreme manifestations of the paranoid style.

The Religious Right draws upon evangelical and conservative Protestants and traditionalist Roman Catholics, and the religious element has allowed them to claim for themselves a special legitimacy that their opponents supposedly lack. The religious dimension has also helped push the Republican Party toward fanaticism.

Retiring Democratic Congressman Gary Ackerman learned from a Republican friend that Republicans in their caucus pray, hold hands, and call upon God to work against measures proposed by their opponents. There is nothing wrong with praying, but it might be more helpful if they preyed for wisdom and open hearts.

Modern day right-wing populism appeals to people who feel dispossessed; they think some sinister elite looks down upon them and has betrayed them. Contemporary right-wing populism appeals to social groups who believe they are losing status and control of the national culture.

Hofstadter's basic definition of populism still holds, but today's scholars have rehabilitated the Populist Party of old, choosing to overlook their xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and weakness for conspiracy theories.

His probing of what he called the “reactionary” far right of Joseph McCarthy has been faulted because it could distort people's understanding of conservatism. His point was that the reactionary far right is not conservative by definition or tradition.

For him, the McCarthyites and John Birch Society were pseudo-conservatives. He noted that the McCarthyites called themselves “conservatives” and usually employed the rhetoric of conservatism. The problem was that they evinced “signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions, and institutions." He called them “pseudo-conservatives.”

Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset clearly indicated that McCarthy, who used some populist rhetoric, was something other than a populist, and this is also true of today'a Tea Party movement.

McCarthyism and the Tea Party are distorted manifestations of extreme nationalism. The identity crisis noted by Huntington helped fuel the movement. It points in the direction of a nationalistic movement rather than populism.

The second development that points to something other than populism is a growing legitimacy, wherein people question the value of our government. It too laid the groundwork for the Tea Party and is known for the kind of anti-government sentiment that marks the Tea Party.


Legitimacy crisis

Political scientist Stanley B. Greenberg relates today's strong anti-government sentiment to a legitimacy crisis in which more and more people question whether democratic government can work. Scholars have been tracking a legitimacy crisis for decades, and it has recently grown to very substantial proportions as only a quarter of citizens have a positive view of government.

The growing legitimacy crisis made it possible for political fundamentalism in the form of the Tea Party to become a great political force almost overnight. The legitimacy crisis reflects high levels of disenchantment and feelings of betrayal. The term “legitimacy crisis” strictly can mean that a major breaking point has arrived and or that many perceive that the future existence of a healthy state is threatened.

The crisis should be acute rather than chronic, and one would expect it to come in response to dramatic adverse changes. However, scholars have decided not to use the term in its strictest sense because a legitimacy crisis can be relative and exist for some people and not others. If people perceive that a legitimacy crisis exists, then it exists for them.

Pollsters like Daniel Yankovich have been tracking ebbing confidence in our institutions since the last half of the 1960s, and it has only recently gathered critical mass. Declining confidence led to dissatisfaction and alienation. President Jimmy Carter's pollster, Pat Caudell, thought the problem was so great that he persuaded the president to give an ill-advised television speech on the subject in 1979.

Carter was careful in the way he broached his topic, and he never used the word “malaise” but an effective opposition information strategy made that word the keep to the speech and Carter's tone was even switched from cheerleading and optimism to that of gloom and doom. The problem after that was unaddressed by public officials.

By 1980, there were many scholarly references to a legitimacy problem. President Ronald Reagan, whose job should have been to help our political system work, perhaps unwittingly contributed to greater skepticism about its value. Today, some of these anti-government themes are standard Republican talking points, and some people who were once in the extremist fringe groups are now recognized Republican leaders.

Reagan taught people to believe that government helped folks conservatives thought irresponsible, not hard-working dutiful people like themselves. In 2011, only 25% of the American people expressed confidence in the future of the American system of government.


Anti-government rhetoric

Much of the anti-government rhetoric now spouted by the Tea Party members can be traced to the various fringe movements of the recent past -- the militias, the Constitutionalists, the Alaska Independence Party, the Christian Identity movement, the West Virginia Mountaineer Militia, and others.

All these communities of resistance and defiance of change have authoritarian and nativist characteristics. The two go hand in hand. Above all, they react against change. They see the government as an agent of unwanted change and they set out to disrupt and replace it. 

They are serious about destroying government as it is and are attracted by the anti-government tactics of Republican politicians who claim to hate government but really want to control it.

Retired Republican Congressional aide Mike Lofgren wrote that several years ago a superior explained to him that it was Republican strategy to obstruct and disrupt government. By damaging the reputation of government, the Republican Party will benefit at the polls because it is programmatically against government.

A few months ago, he was told that the party would create an artificial debt limit crisis for the same reason, to win votes by making government look bad.

Though academicians and pollsters have been tracking declining confidence in our system for a long time, it was only in 1974 that ABC began asking about confidence in the future of democracy and liberalism. People identified the Democrats and liberalism with government, so distrust of government hurt the Democrats and made it easier for Republicans to make liberalism a dirty word.

Most Democrats had little idea that any of this was going on, and they suffered electoral disasters in 1972 and 1984 in part because many voters thought they were more concerned about helping those not working than those who were.

Compared to today, the situation in 1980 now does not appear very serious and the scholars who addressed it look like alarmists. British and European social scientists seem to think legitimacy problems grow out of the conditions of late capitalism that produce status stress and challenging economic conditions for middle class people.

That explanation is a bit difficult to apply to the United States where most people are impatient with talk about growing economic inequality. Some tie the growing lack of confidence to increasing social and cultural fragmentation. There is less cohesiveness, which in the past generated civility and sympathy across various cultural and social boundaries.

An essential characteristic of this growing sentiment was the idea that our political system was becoming increasingly illegitimate because it did not respond to what voters wanted. It appeared that government had become a powerful entity that was somehow removed from the voters who were supposed to control it.


Blaming the Democrats

This building sentiment doubtless helped pave the way for the Tea Party movement. The Greenberg study found that people who doubted the legitimacy of government associated the Democrats with big government and blamed the Democrats for the nation's problems. A majority of people interviewed, who reflected a deep legitimacy crisis, agreed with Democratic positions on the issues but believed the party simply could not deliver on its promises.

They saw the venality of many progressive leaders, who valued contributions, perks, and reelection over serving the middle class. They came to think that representative government no longer worked and they gave up on the Democrats.

After the bailout of Wall Street, many of them moved to the right and into the Tea Party. This is probably when a full-blown legitimacy crisis arrived, because so many people had suspected for so long that government was some sort of evil, alien force.

Dismay with Wall Street over the financial collapse was brief. A retired University of North Carolina history professor accompanied Tea Party people on a bus trip to the Capitol and had a chance to explore their thought. He found that Tea Party folks blamed everything wrong, including the financial crisis, on government. They saw Washington in the same way many viewed Moscow in the Cold War era. Perhaps the Cold War conditioned many to see all problems coming from a single evil source.

Somehow, they had been persuaded not to blame the bankers. It was government regulations. Distrust of government had been growing for so long among these people that they readily accepted the view that government caused the financial crash.8

Greenberg did not think they would take a favorable view of the Democrats until that party moved to get big money out of politics and prove they put the middle class over Wall Street and big business. So long as national politics remains dysfunctional and the economy is weak, these people will not back Democrats, and their distrust of government will continue to help the Republicans.

They see Democrats as wanting to grow a government that does not work. These people are weary and impatient and not likely to see through the Republican tactic of using across the board obstructionism to prevent passage of economic stimulus legislation. They are still likely to blame the Democrats for not rescuing the economy overnight.


Blaming the poor

Focus group research shows that many of the most disaffected citizens lump together the poor, Wall Street, and big business among the irresponsible elements that Ronald Reagan warned about.

As these people on the Right focused more on what they thought was wrong, they exaggerated how dire the situation was. They equated programs to assist the poor with government's illegitimacy. When William Jefferson Clinton became president, a legitimacy crisis occurred for them in an ideological and cultural sense, and they set out to remove Clinton from office.

It is not difficult to see how the crisis mentality mounted for people on the Right. What was occurring was that the Republican Party was becoming the home for people deeply affected by the legitimacy crisis and also for people on the Religious Right who were disturbed that they had lost control of American culture.

In time, beginning in the Reagan years, many came to see the Republican party as their primary identity group. Increasingly they would come to assess what was fact and “true” according to this primary identity and what the admired leaders of their political identity group said and thought. It was quite different from the 19th century, when ethnic and religious identities usually came first.

An interesting phenomenon appeared among gay Republicans who were members of the Abraham Lincoln Society. With time, the party became more and more anti-gay and homophobic, but the Abraham Lincoln people continued to be active Republicans, placing their primary identity over that of being gay.

Thinking about poverty seems to have shifted over 50 years and has contributed to the mounting legitimacy crisis. When Michael Harrington published The Other America: Poverty in the United States, many shared his desire to deal with the problem. He wrote about a “culture of poverty,” which was the product of poverty and included emphasis on short-term gratification, low expectations, and a variety of social pathologies.

Lyndon Johnson made headway in addressing the problem, but too many Americans bought Charles Murray's claim that Johnson's War on Poverty had been a failure. Even worse, Murray successfully sold the idea that the poor are trapped by an unhealthy culture, which then produces poverty. Murray said welfare programs only make things worse, abetting more dependency.

In other words, Murray managed to turn Harrington's careful findings upside down. As a result, many saw the poor as responsible for their own problems. Murray's research was not all that strong or convincing but people were increasingly receptive to it in a harsher America where people were less inclined to respond positively to their better instincts.


Republicans and victimhood

For people who increasingly saw government as illegitimate, Barack Obama's Affordable Health Care Act set off two major alarms. They saw government getting larger and more powerful, and they saw billions being spent to help poor people and the likelihood that taxes would eventually be increased to cover the costs. People who distrusted government and doubted its legitimacy simply went into orbit.

Republicans came to see themselves as the honest taxpayers who were victims of a State that did too much for the poor. By 2012, this concept of victimhood was expanded to seeing taxpayers as victims of greedy public employee unions.

Beginning in 2010, some states like Minnesota and Wisconsin stripped public employees of the right of collective bargaining. Other states followed, and some states slashed pension benefits for new public employees. This was followed by the beginning of efforts to slash pensions of public employees who were already retired.

Increasingly Republicans, who had long defended the contract clause rights of corporations, were saying that retired public employees had no contractual rights because their pensions seemed overly-generous.

The growing lack of confidence in government and democracy occurred most with white, blue-collar people. The extent to which this was directly connected to racial antipathy is difficult to sort out.

When Barack Obama led the Democratic ticket in 2008, it lost among white working class voters by 18 points. Two years later, when the Great Recession had not yet abated, the Democrats lost among these people by 30%. 

The Gallup organization found that the number of Americans who called themselves conservative grew from 37% in 2007 to 41% in 2011, suggesting that the Great Recession has helped theRepublicans.12

Ours is not a direct democracy; it is a representative democracy. Most voters pay little attention to the details of politics. When things are not going well, the "throw the bums out" mechanism kicks in. This mechanism can be gamed and can be used in combination with a legitimacy crisis.

Newt Gingrich took a decade to end Democratic rule in the House by creating havoc in the chamber and convincing voters that the institution had lost legitimacy, and in 1994 the voters pitched the bums out. After the death of Ted Kennedy, Barack Obama lost the ability to pass recovery measures in the Congress. Republicans stonewalled him and slowed recovery.

Frustrated that he had not worked an economic miracle, the voters punished the Democrats in 2010, and the voters gave the Republicans a huge victory in the House and six more seats in the Senate. The same strategy is at work in 2012, and the Republicans are banking on the voters not being very attentive to detail.

Romney, like Tom Dewey in 1948, is being vague and misleading. Things were very unsettled in 1948, and people blamed Truman. This time, we have lingering unemployment, due largely to Republican policies and obstruction.

Truman in 1948, had a badly divided party and was not well-funded, but he managed to educate the voters and carry the battle to the GOP. In 2012, the question is whether the voters are as educable as those in 1948. Can Obama catch Truman's fire and persuasiveness?

[Don Swift, a retired history professor, also writes under the name Sherman DeBrosse. Read more articles by Don Swift on The Rag Blog.]

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