Mark Herring: Virginia Must begin to Decriminalize Marijuana

For over a quarter century, Virginia Republicans have used Virginia's criminal justice system to aid in its effort to make voting more difficult, if not impossible, for minorities to vote in Virginia.  Along with voter ID laws disingenuously touted as being needed to prevent non-existent voter fraud, the agenda has been to minimize the minority vote.  Nowhere has this been more true than in the context of Virginia's marijuana laws that are disproportionately enforced against black Virginians who make up 20% of the population, but who are subject to 46-50% of marijuana arrests and convictions.  It's an insidious agenda and morally reprehensible, but such is the nature of today's Republican Party, both in Virginia and in Washington, D.C.  A growing number of Virginians want these laws changed.  Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring has an op-ed in the Daily Press that looks at this continuing shame on Virginia that needs to be rectified.  Here are column excerpts:

Virginia’s policy of criminalizing minor marijuana possession is not working. It is needlessly creating criminals and burdening Virginians with convictions. The human and social costs are enormous, in addition to the millions of dollars it costs Virginia taxpayers. And the negative consequences of the current approach fall disproportionately on African Americans and people of color.

That is why Virginia should decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, address past convictions and start moving toward legal and regulated adult use.

Overall arrests for marijuana possession have increased by about 115%, from around 13,000 in 2003 to nearly 28,000 in 2017. The number of first-time marijuana convictions in Virginia has also risen dramatically, from 6,500 in 2008 to 10,000 in 2017.

Even if a Virginian avoids jail time for marijuana possession, they can still be stuck with a criminal record, lose their job, student aid, certain public benefits including housing assistance, and it can even affect custody rights.

This punitive approach costs Virginia taxpayers an estimated $81 million every year, in addition to the staggering human and social costs. And it cannot be ignored that the burden of the current system falls disproportionately on African Americans and people of color.

The Virginia Crime Commission found that African Americans comprised 46% of all first offense possession arrests from 2007 to 2016, despite comprising just 20% of Virginia’s population and despite studies consistently showing that marijuana usage rates are comparable between African Americans and white Americans.

A study by the Daily Press similarly found that African Americans received half of all charges of first-time marijuana possession in Virginia and that African Americans are more likely to be convicted of marijuana charges and sentenced to jail.

So what does a more rational, just, and equitable cannabis policy look like in Virginia? It’s a question that will require thought, consideration, and input from a wide range of stakeholders, but the time is right to begin working toward legal and regulated adult use.

That process should begin as soon as possible with decriminalizing simple possession of small amounts of marijuana and taking action to release from jail, pardon and expunge the records of those whose convictions would not have occurred under more rational standards.

[W]e can’t avoid the conversation any longer, especially when our current system continues to saddle Virginians with convictions and even jail time, and black Virginians at a strikingly disproportionate rate. It is time for Virginia to embrace a better, smarter, and fairer approach to cannabis.

Marijuana reform will be yet another much needed legislative issue that can move forward if Democrats win control of the General Assembly in November, 2019.  So much reform is needed in so many areas of Virginia's laws that will only happen when the GOP is sent into a minority position (hopefully, permanently). 

How the Selfish Use Christianity as Their Cover Story

Paul Ryan at hate group FRC's "Values Voter Summit"

I write often about religion for a number of reasons, including but not limited to (i) it is the driving force that has made life hell for LGBT individuals for centuries, and (ii) it provides cover for some of the most hate filled and selfish individuals - and has done so for centuries.  In today's America, the most hypocritical are evangelical Christians  81% of whom voted for and continue to support, a thrice divorced, self-admitted serial sexual molester even as they throw a conniption fit over the broadcasting of a same sex kiss during the Macy's Thanksgiving parade. They share their hypocrisy with other regular churchgoers who feign piety while in the pews yet support Republican policies that seek to shred the social safety net and cut funding for children, the poor, the homeless and the hungry while they themselves clamor for additional tax breaks. And then, of course, there is the Catholic Church hierarchy that lives like princes even as they aided and abetted sexual predators so that their cushy positions would not be threatened by scandal.  A piece in The Raw Story looks at this reality:  Here are highlights: 

Anyone who has worked in the restaurant business will be happy to tell you that waiters always fight each other to avoid working Sunday lunch shift. Not because they want to sleep in, but because it’s a widespread belief that the post-church crowd is loud, demanding and unwilling to tip appropriately. In the food service industry, “Christian” is synonymous with “selfish.”

[W]aiters probably remember the bad Christian tippers more because the hypocrisy is so stunning. The image of a man piously preening about what a good Christian he is in church only to turn around and refuse the basic act of decency that is paying someone what you owe them perfectly symbolizes a lurking suspicion in American culture that the harder someone thumps the Bible, the more selfish and downright sadistic a person he is. And that perception—that showy piety generally goes hand in hand with very un-Christ-like behavior—is not an urban myth at all. On the contrary, it’s the daily reality of American culture and politics.

It’s absolutely disgusting how the politicians who make the biggest show of how much they love Jesus would be the first in line to bash him if he returned with a message of clothing the naked and feeding the poor. The Jesus of the Bible multiplied the loaves and fishes. His loudest followers these day gripe about feeding people, claiming it creates a “culture of dependency.” They may even comb through the Bible to take quotes out of context to justify their selfishness toward the poor, as Rep. Steven Fincher did when he claimed the Bible says, “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” The fact that those jobs are unavailable didn’t give him a moment’s pause when suggesting this very un-Christ-like plan to his fellow Americans.

There are plenty of progressive Christians who genuinely try to live out Jesus’ command to love your neighbor as yourself . . . . That said, statistics bear out the sense that people who are more invested in being perceived as pious also embrace the most selfish policies. Self-identified conservatives and Republicans claim go to church regularly at twice the rate of self-identified liberals. People who go to church more than once a week are far more conservative than the rest of the population.

The attempts to reconcile the correlation between displays of piety and support for selfish policies get complex on the right, with conservatives often arguing that hating your neighbor at the voting booth doesn’t count because church charities supposedly make up for it. (They don’t.) In reality, the relationship between Christian piety and support for selfish policies is fairly straightforward. It’s not that being Christian makes you conservative. It’s that being conservative makes being a loud and pious Christian extremely attractive.

Without Christianity, the underlying mean-spiritedness of conservative policies is simply easier to spot. . . . . Since Christians are “supposed” to be good people, people who really aren’t good are lining up to borrow that reputation to advance their agenda.

The fact that conservatism causes obnoxious Christian piety in American culture is most obvious when looking at some of the theological developments that have accrued since the philosophers of selfishness decided to use Christianity as their cover story. The “prosperity gospel” that has developed in recent years is a classic example.

The fact of the matter is that the purposes religion serves in America are shrinking in number. Our cultural identity is increasingly shaped by pop culture, not faith or ethnic identity. Our holidays are more about shopping and having a chance to catch up with far-flung family these days, not showing devotion to a deity. Spiritual needs are often addressed through modern means like psychotherapy and self-help. People build communities through hobbies and interests more than through faith communities bound by geography, ethnicity and family.

Increasingly, the only thing religion has left to justify itself is that it provides cover for people who want to have bigoted, selfish beliefs but want to believe they are good people anyway. As these social trends continue, we can expect the alignment between public piety and grotesquely selfish political beliefs to get worse, not better.

Meanwhile, the truly "good Christians" remain quiet and yield the field to the falsely pious and selfish.  It's little wonder that a growing number of the younger generations have walked away from religion entirely.

Trumpism: Cruelty and White Identity Politics

Hopefully, the pundits who claimed that Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election due to his "strong economic message" - one which had few if any details - have belatedly pulled their heads out of their asses and faced the reality that Trump's entire campaign and agenda since moving into the White House has been about white identity politics laced with a large dose of homophobia to thrill the Christofascists in the GOP base. Now, in the wake of the pipe bomb threat against CNN and numerous Democrats constantly attacked by Trump, one hears calls - disingenuous on the GOP side of the aisle - that people should not be labeled as bad or immoral because they hold differing "political beliefs."  The problem is, in my view, that when one supports racist policies, the brutal separation of immigrant families and efforts to strip LGBT citizens of legal protections - all things that cause very real harm - you are supporting immoral policies.  One cannot support immoral policies and then in the next breath whine that it is unfair to call you immoral or question your decency.  Trump supporters have a choice: they must either accept or reject the Trump/Pence regime's immoral policies.  If they accept them, then all the negative reflections on their lack of decency and morality are fully deserved. A piece in The Atlantic looks at Trumpism in all its ugliness.  Here are excerpts:

After Democrats lost the 2016 presidential election, a certain conventional wisdom congealed within the pundit class: . . . By failing to emphasize a strong economic message, the thinking went, the [Democrat] party had ceded the election to Trump.

That explanation ignored the uncomfortable fact that Trump’s economic vision was centered on a politics of white identity, charging that immigrants and unqualified minorities were obtaining advantages the average white American could not claim. That left his opponents with a choice: Contest that vision, or let him attack those groups uncontested. In the meantime, Trump’s administration has seen that economic message almost entirely subsumed by the focus of congressional Republicans on tax cuts for the wealthy and plans to shrink the social safety net. . . . The economics were never the point. The cruelty was the point.

Nevertheless, among those who claim to oppose identity politics, the term is applied exclusively to efforts by historically marginalized constituencies to claim rights others already possess. Trump’s campaign, with its emphasis on state violence against religious and ethnic minorities . . . . does not count under this definition, but left-wing opposition to discriminatory state violence does.

[T]he entire closing argument of the Republican Party in the 2018 midterm elections is a naked appeal to identity politics—a politics based in appeals to the loathing of, or membership in, a particular group. The GOP’s plan to slash the welfare state in order to make room for more high-income tax cuts is unpopular among the public at large. In order to preserve their congressional majority, Republicans have taken to misleading voters by insisting that they oppose cuts or changes to popular social insurance programs, while stoking fears about Latino immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and black criminality. In truth, without that deception, identity politics is all the Trump-era Republican Party has.

Trump considers the media “the enemy of the people” only when it successfully undermines his falsehoods; at all other times, it is a force multiplier, obeying his attempts to shift topics of conversation from substantive policy matters to racial scaremongering. The tenets of objectivity by which American journalists largely abide hold that reporters may not pass judgment on the morality of certain political tactics, only on their effectiveness. It’s a principle that unintentionally rewards immorality by turning questions of right and wrong into debates over whether a particular tactic will help win an election.

In the closing weeks of the campaign,[Trump] the president has promised a nonexistent tax cut to the middle class after two years in which unified Republican control of government produced only a windfall for the rich; he has spread falsehoods about a caravan of refugees traveling through Central America; he has invented wholesale a fiction about anti-immigrant riots in California to justify his policies; and his administration is considering revoking federal recognition of the existence of trans people. This is of a piece with the Trump administration’s general policy agenda, which has involved austerity for the working class and the poor and generosity to the wealthy or connected.

2016 campaign pledged both generous social-insurance benefits for working-class white Republicans and cruelty for undeserving nonwhites. The Trump White House delivered on the latter, but not on the former, and so Republicans are scrambling to insist that they will cut taxes on the middle class, offer robust health-care protections, and protect Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, even as GOP leaders in Congress plot to slash all three to cut the deficit created by their upper-income tax cuts.

In upstate New York, an embattled Republican incumbent attacks his black, Harvard-educated Democratic challenger as a “big-city rapper”; in California, an anti-immigrant Republican under federal indictment smears his Arab American rival as a terrorist; in Georgia, a state far from the Southern border, the Republican candidate for governor brags that he’ll drive around in his pickup truck and “round up criminal illegals and take ’em home myself.”

America is not, strictly speaking, a center-right or center-left nation. Rather, it remains the nation of the Dixiecrats, in which the majority’s desire for equal opportunity and a robust welfare state is mediated by the addiction of a large chunk of the polity to racial hierarchy. It is no coincidence that the Democratic Party’s dominant period in American history coincided with its representation of both warring impulses and ended when it chose one over the other. The midterms offer a similar choice for the American voter, in rather stark terms.

If you are one of my "friends" yet support the Trump/GOP agenda of lies, cruelty and inflicting harm on others, don't be surprised it I question your morality and decency.  Some things are more than "political differences" - they come down to basic morality.  If you support immoral policies, then it likely that you are not the moral, decent person you pretend to be.  You do not get to have it both ways. 

Democrats Seem Set to Equal or Exceed Republicans in Turnout

One of the most maddening things to me is the fact that Millennials and minority voters - those most likely to be harmed by the Trump/Pence/GOP agenda in the long term - do not vote and, as a result, contribute to self-harm.   Voting may not halt the regressive, racist GOP agenda, but not voting definitely furthers the agenda that seeks to take from the poor and give to the rich and restore white/Christofascist privilege not seen in decades (indeed, they Jim Crow laws would be restored if the federal courts would allow it - one reason Trump is packing the courts with reactionaries).  Polls indicate that Democrats may be poised to vote in record numbers for a midterm election, but Millennial and minority voters remain less likely to vote than their self-interest should dictate.  A piece in the New York Times looks at surging Democrat turn out in white suburban districts that may match or exceed Republican turn out levels.  Here are article highlights:

A wide range of evidence indicates that Democratic voters are poised to vote in numbers unseen in a midterm election in at least a decade.

Democrats have largely erased the turnout deficit that hobbled them during the Obama presidency, according to results from more than 50 New York Times Upshot/Siena College polls of the most competitive House battleground districts.

Democrats may even be poised to post higher turnout than Republicans, a rarity, in many relatively white suburban districts on Nov. 6.

But it’s not clear if this blue turnout surge will extend much further, particularly among young and nonwhite voters. Whether Democrats turn out broadly could make the difference between a fairly close fight for control of the House and sweeping Democratic gains of 40 or more seats.

Across the Times/Siena polls, Republicans have a six-point lead among voters who turned out in 2014. But Democrats counter with a 10-point advantage among voters who didn’t turn out in that election. Those voters are poised to represent more than one-third of the electorate, enough to essentially eliminate the Republican turnout advantage of the last decade.

A Democratic turnout surge would be consistent with the long history of midterm elections. When Democrats hold the presidency, Republicans generally have a big midterm turnout edge, based on voter file and survey data stretching back to the 1970s. And when Republicans hold the presidency, Democrats fight back to parity.

A similar pattern has played out in the special and general elections during the Trump presidency: Democratic turnout has surged over 2014 levels to essentially match that of Republicans.

Over the last two years, 60 percent of Democrats (defined by either party registration or primary vote history) voted compared with 58 percent of Republicans in the New Jersey and Virginia general elections, along with the special congressional elections in Kansas’ Fourth District, Pennsylvania’s 18th, Ohio’s 12th, Georgia’s Sixth and Arizona’s Eighth. In these same jurisdictions in 2014, Republicans had an eight-point edge, with 62 percent voting versus 54 percent of Democrats.

[T]urnout among young and nonwhite voters always trailing older and white turnout by a wide margin. That tends to cut against Democratic strengths. Across our polls, 58 percent of white registered voters say they’re “almost certain” to vote, compared with 50 percent of black registered voters and 43 percent of Hispanic voters. These figures are somewhat lower than in other surveys, in part because the Times/Siena surveys make a considerable effort to reach lower-turnout voters who respond to polls in low numbers. And just 38 percent of registered voters who are 18 to 34 years say they’re almost certain to vote, compared with 62 percent of those over age 65. It is entirely possible that these generational and racial turnout gaps will narrow over the election’s final weeks, as the campaigns work to mobilize irregular voters. There may also be individual races or states, like Georgia, where black voters turn out in large numbers. But there is no historical precedent for those gaps to close to the extent they do in a presidential election, at least not nationwide. Yet Democrats have still managed to fare extremely well in Trump-era special and general elections, in no small part because of a surge in well-educated voters. That’s what the Times/Siena polling shows as well. Over all, college-educated Americans represent 47 percent of likely voters in the districts we’ve polled, well above their 38 percent share of registered voters. And white voters without a degree — the president’s base — slip to 41 percent of the likely electorate, down from their 45 percent share of registered voters. The diverse districts in Arizona, California, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, New Mexico and Virginia include more than one-third of the tossup districts. If Democratic turnout remains somewhat depressed, these districts could help the Republicans fend off a blue wave and at least keep them in striking distance of retaining their majority. Democrats, though, can regard the districts as offering plenty of opportunities heading into the final stretch. The Democrats there are saying they’re less likely to vote and are likelier to be undecided, reflecting low political engagement.

If Democrats can lure additional young and nonwhite voters off the sidelines and out of the undecided column, the party could be poised to break through in many of the districts where they’ve struggled the most to this point.

If you have Millennial or minority family members of friends, stress to them the importance of voting and of thwarting the GOP agenda that is decidedly against their best interests.