The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century

If one wonders where America is likely headed with a Supreme Court firmly controlled by a reactionary majority, a very lengthy piece in The Atlantic suggests that we are headed back to Court decisions like those in the 19th Century which protected the powerful, especially corporations, and set the frame work for the Jim Crow laws.  Racial minorities and the LGBT community in particular should be very fearful if the lessons of history show us anything.  Through it all, a pretense of a support for "freedom" will be maintained even as discrimination is maintained.  The Christofascists and white supremacists of Trump and the GOP's base will be thrilled since they will be allowed to victimize and discriminate against others. The rest of the GOP supporters will be complicit in the wrongs done and will need to be held accountable when the day of reckoning does finally come after incalculable harm has been done.  Here are article excerpts (take the time to read the entire article):

When the Louisiana State Militia finally arrived at the Colfax courthouse on April 15, 1873, all it could do was bury the bodies. Two days earlier, a large force of white supremacists had taken control of the courthouse from the mostly black faction protecting it. J. R. Beckwith, the U.S. attorney for New Orleans, told Congress that in the aftermath the ground was “strewn with dead negroes,” their bodies plundered by whites who had come to watch the bloodshed. The dead remained “unburied and mutilated,” Beckwith said, until federal troops arrived days later to shovel them into a mass grave.

“Not a single negro had been killed until all of them had surrendered to the whites who were fighting with them,” The New York Times reported at the time, “when over 100 of the unfortunate negroes were shot down in cold blood.”

President Ulysses S. Grant called the Colfax massacre a “butchery” that “in bloodthirstiness and barbarity is hardly surpassed by any acts of savage warfare.” . . . Many white Southerners saw it differently. Robert Hunter, the editor of The Caucasian, a Louisiana newspaper, told Congress in 1875 that some of his own staffers had participated in the massacre. “I approved it, as most of our people did,” Hunter testified. “Had not the Colfax affair ended as it did, not less than a thousand niggers would have been killed later.”

Seventy-two men were ultimately indicted for their role in the Colfax massacre, charged under the Enforcement Acts of 1870, which were passed to help the federal government suppress the Ku Klux Klan. But their convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, which concluded that the federal government lacked the authority to charge the perpetrators. . . . And it wouldn’t have mattered if they had, argued the Grant-appointed Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, because the Fourteenth Amendment’s powers did not cover discrimination by individuals, only by the state. “The only obligation resting upon the United States is to see that the States do not deny the right,” Waite wrote.

This decision, in United States v. Cruikshank, the legal historian Lawrence Goldstone argues, provided a guide for the campaign of racist terrorism that would suppress the black vote and enshrine a white man’s government for generations.

Grant was enraged that “insuperable obstructions were thrown in the way of punishing these murderers … and the so-called conservative papers of the State not only justified the massacre, but denounced as federal tyranny and despotism the attempt of the United States officers to bring them to justice.” . . . By the end, racial segregation would be the law of the land, black Americans would be almost entirely disenfranchised, and black workers would be relegated to a twisted simulacrum of the slave system that existed before the Civil War.

The justices . . . carefully framed their arguments in terms of limited government and individual liberty, writing opinion after opinion that allowed the white South to create an oppressive society in which black Americans had almost no rights at all. Their commitment to freedom in the abstract, and only in the abstract, allowed a brutal despotism to take root in Southern soil.

The Conservative majority on the Supreme Court today is similarly blinded by a commitment to liberty in theory that ignores the reality of how Americans’ lives are actually lived. Like the Supreme Court of that era, the conservatives on the Court today are opposed to discrimination in principle, and indifferent to it in practice.

Chief Justice John Roberts’s June 2018 ruling to uphold President Donald Trump’s travel ban targeting a list of majority-Muslim countries, despite the voluminous evidence that it had been conceived in animus, showed that the muddled doctrines of the post-Reconstruction period retain a stubborn appeal.

In doing so, he [Roberts] embraced the logic of decades of jurisprudence from his predecessors on the high court, whose rulings ensured that the Constitution would not interfere with the emergence of Jim Crow in the American South. The nation’s founding document is no match for a dedicated majority of justices committed to circumventing its guarantees.

Not since the end of Reconstruction has the U.S. government been so firmly committed to a single, coherent program uniting a politics of ethnonationalism with unfettered corporate power. As with Redemption, as the end of Reconstruction is known, the consequences could last for generations.

The lesson of the post-Reconstruction Supreme Court is that a determined Court majority can prove stubbornly resistant to short-term swings of political fortune. Even if Democrats win the next election cycle, and the one after that, an enduring conservative majority on the Supreme Court will have the power to shatter any hard-won liberal legislative victory on the anvil of judicial review. It will be able to reverse decades-old precedents that secure fundamental rights. It will further entrench the rules of a society in which justice skews toward the wealthy, and the lives of those without means can be destroyed by a chance encounter with law enforcement. It will do all these things and more in the name of a purely theoretical freedom, which most Americans will never be able to afford to experience.

The Supreme Court’s moments of majesty, such as Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregated schools; and Loving v. Virginia, which struck down anti-miscegenation laws; and even Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage, are few and far between. For most of its existence, the high court has been committed less to upholding the rule of law or the Constitution than to preserving its own legitimacy, unwilling to shield the powerless from the mob unless convinced that it has the political cover to do so. Like many things in America, the ideal rarely resembles the execution.

The Colfax massacre is most often remembered as the single worst act of violence during Reconstruction, but it also set a template for the high court’s approach to the bloody restoration of white rule in the South. The men who carried out the massacre had popular support among Southern whites—according to the historian Ted Tunnell, “nearly half the white males” in New Orleans alone belonged to terrorist groups such as the White League, which was willing to use violence to secure political gains or prevent black Americans from voting. With Cruikshank, the justices sent the message that if white Southerners wished to overthrow their state government at gunpoint, the Supreme Court would bar efforts to prosecute them.

The Supreme Court’s growing hostility to federal efforts to protect black rights would come to its logical conclusion in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld segregation in public transportation. Justice Henry Billings Brown, a Rutherford B. Hayes appointee, wrote that “if one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.” Separate was not inherently unequal, he insisted. . . . As the historian Ibram X. Kendi has written, “Brown relied on racist ideas to support a policy that was clearly discriminatory in intent. It was his job to obscure those intentions.”

In 1898, in Williams v. Mississippi, the William McKinley–appointed Justice Joseph McKenna would write for a unanimous Court that literacy tests and grandfather clauses, two cornerstones of Jim Crow–era disenfranchisement, were constitutional because they also affected some whites. That the devices were consciously used to bar black voters from the polls was of no significance—the Court would avert its eyes and plug its ears.

“The Court increasingly used the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect corporations from state regulation rather than the civil rights of persons.” In case after case, “the U.S. Supreme Court had come to embrace the logic of corporations,” Painter wrote in Standing at Armageddon, her history of the Gilded Age. “These decisions outlawed virtually any attempt by states to limit maximum hours of work, of unions to strike, and of the federal government to curb or regulate monopolies or to curb the accumulation of vast fortunes.” . . . The redistribution of civil rights from American citizens to American corporations helped create the greatest disparities in wealth in the nation’s history, until the present day.

“The Supreme Court contributed to the inequality of the Gilded Age by reinforcing and encouraging racial segregation. By refusing to read the Fourteenth Amendment broadly for minorities, they allowed a system of racial apartheid to go up in the South,” Winkler said. “On the other side, the corporate rulings enhanced inequality by entrenching the power of industrialists, financiers, and wealthy elites at the expense of immigrants and the working class."

Chief Justice Roberts upheld the [Trump muslim] ban, writing that it was “facially neutral” and that “the text says nothing about religion.” His decision echoed the logic of the Supreme Court’s rulings in Redemption-era cases such as Cruikshank and Williams: that as long as the legal language itself did not explicitly mention the group being discriminated against, intent and effect were irrelevant. The implications are larger than one religion: As with the Redemption Court, which gave the Redeemers a blueprint for creating a segregated society through laws that “do not on their face discriminate between the races,” Roberts and the conservative majority have indicated that Trump’s bigotries can be made policy as long as they appear “facially neutral.”

With Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, there is no discriminatory voting restriction the justices will be unable to sanction, no immigration law born in animus they will be unable to approve, no expansion of corporate power they will be unable to accept, no grant of presidential immunity they will be unable to uphold, no financial or environmental regulation they will be unable to strike down, no religious objection to an anti-discrimination law they will be unable to recognize, no worker protection they will be unable to repeal, no limitation on abortion they will be unable to allow, and no abuse of power by law enforcement they will feel compelled to restrict. 

There is hope for the Democratic Party in its base. The black and brown workers intimately acquainted with the two-faced nature of American liberty, the rebellious teachers whose surprise strikes brought red-state politicians to heel, the young leftists whose cold-eyed understanding of power mirrors that of their Republican opponents, and the feminists who flooded the streets after Trump’s inauguration forced the nation to reckon with the ascension of predatory men to the highest levels of culture, clergy, and state. But they will have to contend with a party establishment that is so divorced from the lives of those the Trump administration has put in peril that it cannot comprehend what will be required to defeat Trumpism. Democracy is a fight, and the Democratic Party’s leadership has yet to show that it can even wrap its hands.

Be very, very afraid.  America could be poised to revisit some of its ugliest history.

Trump Tweets False White Supremacist "Talking Point" and Causes Rift with South Africa

Donald Trump may be the least knowledgeable individual to ever occupy the White House.  Rather than educate himself from multiple sources and reading lengthy reports, he watches Fox News which now basically broadcasts what Trump and his supporters want to hear and insists on single page briefing papers.  Add to this Trump's long history of racism - one significant detail arose right here in Hampton Roads when Trump's company was sued for anti-black discrimination - and its little surprise that Der Trumpenführer launched a totally erroneous and racially charged tweet the other evening.  Whether it was meant to be a distraction form the coverage of the conviction and guilty plea of his right hand men or pure ignorance and racial malice may never be known.  What is certain is that the story line derives from a white supremacist talking point used to spread the myth of "white genocide."  The New York Times looks at this latest falsehood peddled by the White House:

Trust President Trump, following his familiar tactic of deflecting attention from yet another scandal by issuing some outrageous tweet, to come down hard on the wrong side of an issue he knows nothing about, based on no more than a slanted Fox News program. In a late-Wednesday tweet, Mr. Trump said he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to look into land seizures and the “large-scale killing of farmers” in South Africa. It was the first time he has mentioned Africa by name in a tweet as president.

His source was a grossly one-sided report by the Fox host Tucker Carlson [who has been pandering to white supremacists] asserting that the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was seizing land from his citizens because they are the wrong “skin color.” There have been no large-scale killings of white farmers, and Mr. Ramaphosa’s proposal to change the Constitution to allow expropriation of land [in certain limited situations such as abandoned property and derelict urban buildings] without compensation has not yet passed.

The Natives Land Act of 1913 essentially reserved most of the land to the white minority, and the restrictions became more onerous in the apartheid era. When that system was finally dismantled almost 25 years ago, a new Constitution did provide for land reform, but the process has moved slowly. Statistics vary, but what is clear is that whites, who are less than 10 percent of the population, continue to own more than two-thirds of the land, while black South Africans, the overwhelming majority, own a much smaller share.

That “highly skewed” distribution of land and productive assets, according to the World Bank, contributes heavily to making South Africa “the world’s most unequal country.”

Mr. Ramaphosa argued in an op-ed article in The Financial Times that his proposal was “no land grab,” and that the A.N.C.’s land reform program would not undermine investment in the economy or damage agricultural production. The constitutional amendment he is seeking, he said, would strengthen the existing rules by making explicit the conditions under which land could be expropriated without compensation.
 Yet Mr. Trump’s tweet, and the Fox show on which it was based, were bereft of any context, sympathy or understanding. They pounced, instead, on the false narratives of right-wing white South African groups claiming widespread seizures of white-owned land and a continuing “white genocide.”
 In fact, the number of killings of farmers and farm workers is at a 20-year low, with 47 in the 2017-18 fiscal year, according to AgriSA, a farmers’ organization in South Africa.
 Not surprisingly, South Africa reacted angrily to Mr. Trump’s tweet, saying it reflected a “narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past.” Sadly, it probably reflects even less than that — a clueless grasp at a racially tinged political diversion. As Patrick Gaspard, a former American ambassador to South Africa and now president of the Open Society Foundations, tweeted, “This man has never visited the continent and has no discernible Africa policy.”

Personally, I doubt Trump cares about the truth of the situation in South Africa.  His tweet was likely aimed merely pleasing his racist base that is hysterical over its loss of perceived white privilege and terrified of those with different skin color.

Scalia’s Goal Of Unwinding Voter Rights Becoming A Reality

The late Antonin Scalia - a seeming racist and champion of Christofascist rights.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia embodied much of what is wrong with today's Republican Party and its agenda of special rights for right wing Christian extremists and deference to white supremacist inclinations.  This is especially true when one looks at Scalia's hostility to minority rights.  The irony is that given Scalia's own ethnic and religious background - Italian Catholic - that saw his own ancestors targeted for hate and bigotry, one would think the man might have had some tiny shred of empathy for other despised groups.  Any such assumption, however, sadly would be totally wrong.  Now, the entire GOP seeks to roll back voting rights protections to favor whites and to disenfranchise minority voters as the GOP finds it increasingly difficult to attract voters outside of vulture capitalists, Christian extremists and, of course, white supremacists.  A piece in Talking Points Memo by a law professor looks at the danger that the U.S. Supreme Court may further embrace Scalia's agenda and spread America's slide back towards pre-1964 voting obstacles to minority voting rights.  Here are highlights:

In a Supreme Court term already bursting with election cases, from two partisan gerrymandering disputes to a fight about the permissibility of Ohio’s voter purges to a lawsuit challenging bans on political clothing in Minnesota polling places, it’s easy to overlook yet another significant voting appeal the Court will hear later this month. In Abbott v. Perez, the Court will examine whether the state of Texas violated the Voting Rights Act and the United States Constitution when it drew congressional and state legislative district lines in ways that hurt Latino and African-American voters. The protracted and difficult litigation involves redistricting plans from way back in 2011 and shows how much was lost when the Supreme Court killed another key provision of the Voting Rights Act in its 2013 Shelby County v. Holder case.

We may soon fulfill the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s vision of an emasculated Voting Rights Act and much weaker protections for minority voters by the federal courts.

In the pre-Shelby days, the Voting Rights Act offered two main tools to protect minority Voting Rights. Under Section 5, states which had a history of racial discrimination in voting had to get “preclearance” (or pre-approval) from the U.S. Department of Justice or a federal court in Washington, D.C. before making any changes in voting rules and procedures. States had to show the DOJ or the court that any changes would not worsen the condition of minority voters. Under Section 2, the U.S. government or private plaintiffs could bring suit anywhere in the U.S. arguing that a redistricting plan (or other voting rule, like a state voter id law) deprived minority voters of the same opportunity as white voters to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.

The Roberts Court’s record on reading and enforcing the Voting Rights Act has been a disappointing one, which is no surprise given that Chief Justice John Roberts himself was an opponent of a strong Voting Rights Act when he worked in the Reagan Administration to weaken minority voter protections in Section 2.

Even before Roberts became chief justice, the Court already had a relatively weak record enforcing Section 2. . . . . And that’s all aside from non-Voting Rights Act cases cutting back on voting rights such as a 2008 case rejecting challenges to the constitutionality of discriminatory voter identification laws.

The Texas case that the Court will hear this term shows just how hard it is to protect minority voting rights. Texas’ 2011 redistricting plans originally could not be put in place because a federal court had not precleared it under Section 5. A separate lawsuit sought to block parts of the plans under Section 2, and the same federal court issued an interim remedy, which led to Texas passing a similar discriminatory plan in 2013 claiming the re-enactment solved Voting Rights Act problems. The Section 5 lawsuit went away when the Supreme Court decided Shelby County, but the Section 2 lawsuit has dragged on . . .

Since the case started, it is hard to find friends for the Voting Rights Act in any of the three branches of government. The Department of Justice, which came in on the side of minority voters in the Texas litigation, has switched sides now that the Trump Administration has taken over. That means U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco will be arguing in favor of Texas’s position in the case at the Supreme Court.

Congress, meanwhile, has not acted to fix the formula for deciding which states need to get Section 5 preclearance, even though the Court in Shelby County invited Congress to try.

And the Supreme Court is poised to make things worse. With rumors circulating that perennial swing Justice Anthony Kennedy could retire as soon as this term, the Court is likely to lurch to the right. As I argue in my new book, The Justice of Contradictions: Antonin Scalia and the Politics of Disruption, the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia took an even narrower view of Voting Rights than the Court as a whole, and now, after his death, Justice Scalia’s influence is only growing.

Justice Scalia openly expressed disdain for the Act, expressing the view at the Shelby County oral argument that Congress renewed the Act in 2006 by overwhelming majorities because of “a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

The bottom line is that the Court’s mixed record on enforcing the Voting Rights Act could soon get worse if Trump gets another Court appointment. Minority voters, already at a disadvantage in many parts of the country because of enduring racism and the unwillingness of white voters to support minority candidates for office, could soon have tougher political battles ahead. And the scariest part is that, thanks in part to Justice Scalia’s influence, the courts may soon no longer be there as a backstop.

Sadly, the bottom line is that the GOP would love to move the nation back to the Jim Crow era.  Yet another reason why a massive Democrat, moderate and progressive turn out is needed in November to flip the House of Representatives and - ideally - the U.S. Senate to Democrat control.

Supreme Court Deals Blow to Virginia Republicans

Click image to enlarge

For the majority of last 20 years, the number one goal of the Republican Party of Virginia - after totally prostituting themselves to the Christofascists at The Family Foundation - has been to disenfranchise non-white voters and to gerrymander Virginia Senate and House of Delegates districts to guarantee the election of Republican candidates.  These efforts have helped maintain the right wing Republican dominance in the House of Delegates.  Today, this framework was dealt a potentially major blow by the United States Supreme Court which reversed a district court ruling (the SCOTUS opinion is here) that had given a pass the Republican racially based gerrymandered districts.  Under the Supreme Court standards that are to be applied by the district court as it reexamines the issue. The ruling has the potential to force the redistricting of up to 30 House of Delegates districts.  The Washington Post looks at the ruling.  Here are excerpts:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday told a lower court to reexamine the redistricting efforts of Virginia’s Republican-led legislature for signs of racial bias and whether some legislative districts were gerrymandered to dilute the impact of African American voters.

The justices declined to take a position on that issue. But they said a lower court had not applied the right standards when it concluded that the legislature’s work was constitutional.

The decision was a win for black voters and Democrats who have challenged the General Assembly’s actions in drawing legislative as well as congressional lines.

A win at the Supreme Court last term resulted in redrawing the congressional map in a way that favored the election of a second African American congressman last fall.

[T]he decision buoyed Democrats, who are making a push to field candidates in most, if not all, of the 100 seats of the House of Delegates that are up for election.

The court ruling “contributes to the momentum that the Democrats believe they might finally have in actually being far more competitive in the Assembly elections this year than they have previously,” said longtime Virginia political analyst Bob Holsworth. “The redistricting case is on top of sort of the mobilization the Democrats are seeing in their local meetings, the increased attendance, the interest in actually running for election that you’re seeing among more people.”

Under Supreme Court precedents, the maps can sometimes require an examination of race to make sure minorities have a chance to elect candidates of their choice. But race cannot be the predominate factor in drawing districts. In Virginia and other states, challengers have said Republicans have packed minorities into a small number of districts to make surrounding areas more hospitable to GOP candidates.

[Justice] Kennedy said courts must look at the real reason for drawing the district, not whether it could be justified by other means.

“A state could construct a plethora of potential maps that look consistent with traditional, race-neutral principles,” Kennedy wrote. “But if race for its own sake is the overriding reason for choosing one map over others, race still may predominate.”

Marc E. Elias, who represented the challengers, said the decision will make it easier to win when the lower court reconsiders the 11 districts at issue. Its previous decision shut down efforts to show that Virginia was able to “hide the racial gerrymandering in districts that don’t look bizarre,” he said.

It is unclear if the case could play out before the November elections. But if the lower court rules that boundaries have to be redrawn at any point after that, Virginia would have to call special elections. Aside from the 11 districts affected by this case, an additional five are being litigated in Richmond Circuit Court, where a redistricting advocacy group has challenged them as being too sprawling to meet federal standards of compactness. That hearing is set for later this month.

If all the districts in both cases were found to be unconstitutional, they and the ones around them would have to be redrawn. That could amount to 30 districts or more in total — roughly a third of the Virginia House, said Brian Cannon, executive director of One Virginia 2021, the redistricting advocacy group that filed the Richmond case.

Additional analysis at Daily Kos can be found here. 

Trump Supporters View Everything Since the 1950's As Terrible

I have often argued that the goal of today's GOP has been to somehow turn the clock back to the 1950's when, according to the party base's view, everything was golden and perfection.  Unless, of course one is black, Hispanic, a woman, LGBT and/or non-religious.  Indeed, everything that has made America a more equal society is viewed as bad by Trumpkins who long for unchallenged white privilege and a time when open bigotry was more acceptable.  A piece in Salon looks new poll findings and at the troubling world view of Trump's base of support.  It is an indictment of what the GOP has become and the ugliness that it has long cultivated.  Now, it has spun out of control.  Here are article excerpts:

If you ever had the sneaking suspicion that “Make America Great Again” was code for “Turn America’s clock back to the 1950s,” a new poll suggests you were absolutely right.

According to a survey published by the Public Religion Research Institute, 72 percent of likely voters supporting Donald Trump say America has changed for the worst since the 1950s. By contrast, 70 percent of likely voters supporting Hillary Clinton say that America has changed for the better since that decade.

Not surprisingly, these findings are also sharply divided based on racial lines. While 56 percent of white Americans say America has changed for the worse since the 1950s, 62 percent of African-Americans and 57 percent of Hispanic Americans say that it has changed for the better.

That said, 56 percent of college-educated white Americans also believe that America has changed for the better since the 1950s; 65 percent of white Americans without college degrees say that it has not.

The group that most yearns for the 1950s? White evangelical Protestants, 74 percent of whom think things have gotten worse.

Across the board, the study found that Democrats were more likely to care about social justice issues than Republicans. . . . 61 percent of Democrats said race relations mattered to them personally compared to only 31 percent of Republicans.

Sixty-three percent of Democrats believe that immigrants strengthen American society, whereas 73 percent of Republicans say that immigrants threaten American customs and values.

Finally, 77 percent of Democrats say that America would benefit from more women serving in political leadership roles, a sentiment 62 percent of Republicans disagree with.

The 1950s is a decade closely associated with the Cold War, McCarthy era witch hunts, and violent backlash to the civil rights movement. Although not explicitly incorporated in the themes of Trump’s campaign, the Republican nominee’s critics have long noted that “Make America Great Again” could be viewed as a dog whistle for a return to an era before our society’s major strides in racial and gender equality.

[The] message where ‘I’ll give you America great again’ is if you’re a white Southerner, you know exactly what it means, don’t you?”

Note how southern evangelical Christians lead the way in longing for the bad old days of the 1950's. The remain among the most selfish and self-centered people (and racist) and display a contempt for the Gospel message they claim to support by their opposition to equality and social justice.  They should not be welcome in polite and decent society. 

The "Smoking Gun" Confirming the Racist Intent of NC's Voter ID Law

Racist homophobe, GOP Gov. Pat McCrory

As noted in a piece last evening, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down North Carolina's racially motivated voter ID law - a similar GOP backed voter ID law in Wisconsin was also struck down by a different court).  A piece in the Washington Post gives further analysis of the 4th Circuit's ruling and the blatant motivation of the North Carolina GOP in passing the measure.  Increasingly, the GOP cannot win elections except through gerrymandered districts and restricting likely Democrat voters from voting.  Rational individuals would get the message that they need a new message and agenda, but not in today's Christofascist and white supremacist controlled Republican Party.  Here are highlights from the Post article:

In addition to requiring residents to show identification before they can cast a ballot, the law also eliminated same-day voter registration, eliminated seven days of early voting and put an end to out-of-precinct voting. The federal court ruling reinstates these provisions, for now.

Supporters of the law, like North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, have long maintained that requirements like these were necessary to prevent voter fraud. But time and time again, scholars and legal experts have found that the type of fraud these laws are meant to combat is largely nonexistent.

One of the most comprehensive studies on the subject found only 31 individual cases of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion votes cast in the United States since the year 2000. Researchers have found that reports of voter fraud are roughly as common as reports of alien abduction.

 

The federal court in Richmond found that the primary purpose of North Carolina's wasn't to stop voter fraud, but rather to disenfranchise minority voters. The judges found that the provisions "target African Americans with almost surgical precision."

[T]he court found that North Carolina lawmakers requested data on racial differences in voting behaviors in the state. "This data showed that African Americans disproportionately lacked the most common kind of photo ID, those issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)," the judges wrote.

So the legislators made it so that the only acceptable forms of voter identification were the ones disproportionately used by white people. "With race data in hand, the legislature amended the bill to exclude many of the alternative photo IDs used by African Americans," the judges wrote. "The bill retained only the kinds of IDs that white North Carolinians were more likely to possess."

The data also showed that black voters were more likely to make use of early voting — particularly the first seven days out of North Carolina's 17-day voting period. So lawmakers eliminated these seven days of voting. "After receipt of this racial data, the General Assembly amended the bill to eliminate the first week of early voting, shortening the total early voting period from seventeen to ten days," the court found.

Most strikingly, the judges point to a "smoking gun" in North Carolina's justification for the law, proving discriminatory intent. The state argued in court that "counties with Sunday voting in 2014 were disproportionately black" and "disproportionately Democratic," and said it did away with Sunday voting as a result.

This is about as clear-cut an indictment of the discriminatory underpinnings of voter-ID laws as you'll find anywhere. Studies have already shown a significant link between support for voter ID and racial discrimination, among both lawmakers and white voters in general.

"Faced with this record," the federal court concludes, "we can only conclude that the North Carolina General Assembly enacted the challenged provisions of the law with discriminatory intent."

The take away?  When you hear Republicans blathering about the GOP being the party that supports the constitution, supports morality and decency, know that it is a lie.  The GOP has become the enemy of constitutional government, morality and decency.  

4th Circuit Rules North Carolina Voter ID Law Intended To Discriminate

Over the last decade, Republican legislators across the country have focused on two tools to remain in poer as the country's demographics have changed: (i) shockingly gerrymandered districts, and (ii) voter ID laws to disenfranchise as many minority voters as possible.   The voter ID law effort, of course, was hidden behind the smoke screen of protecting against "voter fraud" - fraud that has been documented to not exist. Among the more egregious voter ID laws was the one enacted in North Carolina after the GOP take over of the state legislature.  Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit saw the reality of the North Carolina GOP's agenda and struck down the heinous statute.  Talking Points Memo looks at the 4th Circuit's ruling (the full ruling can be found here).  Here are are highlights:

A three-judge panel of the U.S Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has found North Carolina's controversial GOP-backed voting restrictions were intended to discriminate against African American voters.

The Friday ruling is a huge win for voting rights activists in a closely watched case in a potential 2016 swing state. The appeals court reversed the ruling of a district court siding with the state.

"In holding that the legislature did not enact the challenged provisions with
discriminatory intent, the [district] court seems to have missed the forest in carefully surveying the many trees," the opinion said. It permanently blocked provisions in a 2013 North Carolina law that required certain photo IDs to vote, limited early voting, eliminated same day registration, ended out-of-precinct voting and prohibited pre-registration of young voters.

In the opinion, the panel of judges said that the law restricted voting in ways that "disproportionately affected African Americans" and that its provisions targeted "African Americans with almost surgical precision." It said the state's defense of the law was "meager."

"Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the state’s true motivation," the opinion said.

It noted that the legislation was passed as African American voter turnout had expanded to almost the rates of whites, and that the legislature enacted the legislation after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which had required North Carolina to seek federal approval for changes to its voting policies.  . . . . 

The appeals court -- citing a lower court's findings -- pointed out that state lawmakers sought data breaking down voting practices by race. The judges said that the law's provisions singled out the practices disproportionately popular among African Americans, such as preregisteration and provisional voting 

[T]he appeals court opinion said. "We recognize that elections have consequences, but winning an election does not empower anyone in any party to engage in purposeful racial discrimination."

The case was a consolidation of a number of lawsuits challenging the legislation, brought by various civil rights organizations and voter advocacy groups, on behalf of voters. The Department of Justice also participated in the litigation, siding with the challengers.

 Sadly, today's GOP's main motivations are racism, religious extremism and misogyny. 

Ben Carson: The Face of aHomophobia

Among the Republican Party base - especially the older elements - it is an unwritten rule that one must oppose same sex marriage and all too often gay rights in general.  These same folks, of course, take great offense at being labeled the bigots they are in fact.  More often than not, they cloak their bigotry in "deeply held religious belief" which in my book equates to being too ignorant and/or too fearful to admit that for their own screwed up psychological reasons, they cannot let go of the fantasy world brainwashing they endured as children.  Symptomatic of this phenomenon is GOP 2016 presidential candidate Ben Carson who played the victim card made the false assertion during last weeks GOP circus debate that opposing same sex marriage doesn't make one a homophobe.  A column in Huffington Post takes Carson to task and bursts his bullshit argument.  Here are column excerpts:

Ben Carson spoke for all those who are swept up by irrational fear and now see themselves as the victims of supposed "enemies" who won't allow those fears to bolster discrimination against people when he said: 

[The gay community] shouldn't automatically assume that because you believe that marriage is between one man and one woman that you are a homophobe. And this is one of the myths that the left perpetrates on our society, and this is how they frighten people and get people to shut up. . . . .

[W]hile there had been a debate in this country about marriage equality for, oh, 25 years or so, it is now the law of the land, after a Supreme Court ruling that decided the freedom to marry exists in the Constitution for every gay and lesbian American. And gay and lesbian people are -- and, for years, have been -- getting married by the thousands all across the country. None of the dire predictions of the anti-gay religious zealots -- of the destruction of society or the downfall of marriage as an institution -- have transpired.

So, if you're opposed to something that is now a right of every American and has been proven in court -- in the federal trial over California's Proposition 8 -- to harm no one, including children, then you do have an irrational fear of homosexuality. And certainly if you're a medical doctor yourself and you're opposed to something that the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association and American Psychiatric Association deem normal, natural and healthy and not harmful at all to anyone, then you have an irrational fear of homosexuality. And that is the essence of homophobia - a fear of homosexuality.



Just imagine if, after the Supreme Court ruled in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, which ended state bans on interracial marriage, that a presidential frontrunner said, "It doesn't make me a racist if I don't support mixed marriages." Imagine if that candidate said such a thing right now. Would we not call that person a racist? 

So, Ben Carson, you are not only a homophobe; you're a bigot, having spewed anti-gay remarks again and again, bizarrely claiming prison turns people gay and standing firm on reckless, hateful comments in which you said homosexuality leads to bestiality and pedophilia.

The fact that you couch the fears in religious beliefs -- or even that those beliefs may have nurtured or even created those fears -- doesn't change anything. Your religion cannot be used to excuse fears that embolden you to discriminate.

The problem is yours, not ours, Dr. Carson. Phobias, you certainly should know as a neurosurgeon, require hard work and psychiatric or psychological counseling to overcome. So, I'd say, "doctor, heal thyself," but, actually, you need to get yourself some help.

Throughout history religion has been used to justify all kinds of horrors.  It is far past time in America that all deference to religious belief cease.  Folks can worship as they wish, but once the step into the public square, the rest of us have no obligation to respect their beliefs - or them.  I'd go a step further and argue that blacks who are homophobes have no basis to complain about racial discrimination.  Bigotry is bigotry and if one is going to say that one form of bigotry is acceptable, then they have no grounds to complain when another form of bigotry is aimed at them.