The Merits of Statehood for the District of Columbia

In terms of population, the District of Columbia has a population larger than those of the states of Vermont and Wyoming, the latter of which has a population significantly smaller than those of the combined populations of the cities of Norfolk and Virginia Beach (Alaska and North Dakota have only slightly larger populations).  Yet residents of the District of Columbia have no voting member of in the House of Representatives and no Senators. Worse yet, laws passed by the District's democratic legislative body can be over ruled by Congress.  In short, so much for concepts such as one man one vote or no taxation without representations - concepts that go to the heart of America's democratic principals.  Now, Democrats in Congress seek to end this injustice and embarrassment by pushing for full statehood for the District of Columbia (naturally, anti-democratic Republicans oppose the effort).  A piece in the New Yorker looks at the movement,  Here are highlights:

In the coming days, the House will vote on, and likely pass, H.R. 51, a bill that would make Washington, D.C., the fifty-first state. The bill, which has two hundred co-sponsors, was introduced by Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat who for nearly thirty years has served as the non-voting representative for D.C.’s single at-large district. During her time in Congress, Holmes Norton has introduced more than a dozen statehood bills; this will be the first since 1993 to receive a vote. But because Washington, D.C., is not a state, Holmes Norton cannot vote on her own bill, or on final passage of other legislation on the House floor.

In the Senate, a companion piece of legislation, introduced by Senator Tom Carper, a Democrat from Delaware, has twenty-eight co-sponsors, including all of that chamber’s candidates for President: Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. A few weeks ago, I asked Warren about her interest in statehood and why she thinks the issue should galvanize Democrats. “It matters,” she said. “Here’s an example. In 2017, when Republicans tried to rip away health care from millions of Americans, including tens of thousands of people in D.C., Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton didn’t have a vote. This is not right. The right to vote is at the heart of our democracy.”

Warren noted, too, that Congress has authority to overturn the district’s laws, which Republicans have exercised more boldly in recent years. “A Republican-led Congress has actually overturned laws that the people of the District of Columbia have determined through the democratic process that they want,” she said, noting that Congress has effectively blocked laws on domestic partnerships, providing abortion services, and legalizing medical marijuana.

For Holmes Norton, another clarifying moment had come in 2009, when Democrats were prepared to pass the D.C. Voting Rights Bill, which would have given D.C. a vote in the House. Then the National Rifle Association successfully lobbied to include a provision that would have overturned the city’s gun-control laws. “That was very heartbreaking,” Holmes Norton told me. “Since then, we’ve just gone for full-fledged statehood.”

Most Republicans, predictably, are less open to the idea. When, in 2016, the Washington Post’s editorial board asked the Presidential candidate John Kasich why he was opposed to giving D.C. voting representatives, he said, “What it really gets down to, if you want to be honest, is because they know that’s just more votes in the Democratic Party.”

Republican opposition aside, though, Holmes Norton and statehood advocates are beginning this latest push under favorable conditions. On Friday, the House passed H.R. 1, a large package of pro-democracy reforms—including public campaign financing and automatic voter registration—advanced by Democrats. The bill also contained a nonbinding endorsement of statehood for Washington, D.C. This made H.R. 1’s passage the first time that a house of Congress has backed statehood for the district. Both H.R. 1 and H.R. 51 have arrived at a moment when disenfranchisement, particularly for African-Americans—who make up forty-seven per cent of D.C.’s population—has become a galvanizing issue for Democrats.

H.R. 51 has also arrived at a moment when progressives and other voices on the left are pushing the Democratic Party to adopt structural reforms and strategies that would facilitate the passage of bold left-wing legislation, within a federal government designed to thwart sudden change. One of the more prominent advocates of this strategy is David Faris, a professor of political science at Roosevelt University, who has urged Democrats to support statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico, and even to consider breaking up the state of California. “The Constitution’s unchangeable writ that each state have an equal number of senators means that no matter how many more votes Democrats get nationally, they are going to win the Senate only during wave election years, and then probably only for a relatively brief period of time,” Faris wrote in his book “It’s Time to Fight Dirty,” from 2018. “Therefore, to make any lasting changes to U.S. politics and society, Democrats are going to have to admit more states to the union and create further entities out of the ones that already exist. And they must start with Washington, D.C.”

In Washington’s case, there remains a divide between statehood advocates who believe success will lie in overcoming factional divisions and those open to owning them. Holmes Norton hopes that consensus can be built on the democratic merits of statehood alone. “Somehow or the other,” she told me, “the overriding issue of whether you could deny people paying federal income taxes and do not have equal rights has to rise to the level where people are not intimidated by it and where people don’t think that they will be endangered by it.”

[T]o get to democracy as it should work, Democrats will have to push statehood through democracy as it is. The House vote on H.R. 51 will be an important first step in building the public’s awareness of an issue of real salience to all those troubled by how undemocratic our democracy can be.

Movement to End Electoral College Gains Momentum

The Founding Fathers designed the Electoral College as a backstop to prevent an unfit individual from becoming President of the United States.  For the system to work, of course, electors had to put the good of the nation first and be willing to take political heat if they acted to prevent the election of an unfit demagogue.  Sadly, it 2016 the Electors failed to do their constitutional duty and the consequence was that we now have the most unfit and foul individual in the history of the nation occupying the White House and doing incalculable damage to America both at home and abroad.  Making matters worse, congressional Republicans utterly failed to restrain the misconduct of the executive branch.  The result is now that there is a growing movement among states to amend their own laws so that their electoral votes will go to the winner of the popular vote nationally and not simply whichever candidate wins in their state.  If the movement grows, the consequences for the GOP could be catastrophic since its candidates have failed to win the popular vote in two out of the last five presidential elections.  Needless to say, Republicans who increasingly cannot win on their policies and who want to rid the votes of those who do not support their extreme agenda do not support the concept of one person, one vote.  A piece in NPR looks at this urgent need - a true national emergency - to avoid future presidents who failed to win the popular vote.  Here are highlights: 

An attempt at an Electoral College workaround is gaining momentum in the Mountain West.

Democrats in Colorado and New Mexico are pushing ahead with legislation to pledge their 14 collective electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote — no matter who wins each state.

The plan only goes into effect if the law passes in states representing an electoral majority. That threshold is 270 votes, which is the same number needed to win the presidency.

Democrats have been stung by the fact that President Trump's victory marked the second time in five cycles that a Democrat lost the presidency while winning the popular vote. 2016 was the most egregious example, with Hillary Clinton winning 3 million more votes than Donald Trump, but losing the election. It was the largest margin ever for someone who won the popular vote, but lost the Electoral College.

Proponents of the national popular vote measures have argued that it's not political, but Republicans, who have benefited in recent elections from the Electoral College system, disagree.

And while a majority of the country has expressed support for giving the presidency to the person who wins the most votes — 55 percent in the latest Pew Research Center poll — there are sharp partisan divides.

So far, 11 states — including New York, California and New Jersey — have joined the effort along with the District of Columbia, putting the effort 98 votes short of its goal.

Colorado appears poised to join as the 12th state. The state legislature passed the bill Thursday, and Gov. Jared Polis is expected to sign it. In New Mexico, the legislation is awaiting consideration in the state Senate after the House approved it earlier this month.

[A] potential loophole in the Constitution — that while the Electoral College is in the Constitution, nothing says a candidate who wins a state has to get all of its electoral votes. . . . . In fact, Maine and Nebraska do not have "winner-take-all" systems. They allocate their electoral votes to presidential candidates by congressional district, with an additional two electoral votes going to the winner of the state.

Colorado state Sen. Mike Foote, who's sponsoring legislation, insisted that it's not a partisan response to Trump's 2016 win. Rather, he said, it's about upholding the democratic principle of one person, one vote.

"It's about time that every vote in the country counts equally," he said. "Right now, if you live in a state that is not a battleground state, then your vote doesn't count nearly as much."

Republican state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, who represents the plains east of Denver, worries about the impact of a popular vote on rural America. He said it would lead candidates to only campaign in the largest media markets, like New York and Los Angeles. Only Democratic-leaning states have joined so far. Swing states, like Ohio and Florida, have the least reason to sign on, which means it likely needs support from deep red states.

There's also a broader question as to whether it would be constitutional. The Electoral College is clearly written into the nation's founding document. Some insist that Congress would have to approve it since it would overhaul national election procedures. Other scholars have argued that states can't bind their electors to voters outside their boundaries.

Koza insists Article II gives states broad power to decide how they choose electoral delegates. Still, he expects a series of lawsuits if enough of the National Popular Vote efforts went into effect.

"It's about saying the status quo is unacceptable," he said. "This might not be the best way of changing it, but it's at least a way of forcing some change and forcing some discussion of it."

As for weakening the influence of rural voters, I am all for it.  Rural areas are the principal base for the racism and religious extremism that the GOP seeks to inflict on the majority of Americans.  Their ability to do so needs to end.  

Republicans Call out Northam For "Racism" and Give Trump a Pass

Democrats do not have a monopoly on hypocrisy when it comes to the the Northam controversy.  At the Virginia level. the GOP Speaker of the House of Delegates has called for Northam's resignation citing the concerns of the black caucus.   Meanwhile, everything the Virginia GOP does is aimed at harming black Virginians on an everyday basis in current real time be it pushing efforts to disenfranchise them through voter ID laws and, among other things, refusing to reform Virginia's marijuana laws which have been used disproportionately against blacks.  At the national level, the GOP has Donald Trump, an out right racist with a history of racism stretching back for over 40 years. A column in the Washington Post highlights Republican hypocrisy when it comes to matters of race.  Here are highlights:

Finally, the GOP is calling out a chief executive for his appalling insensitivity on an issue of race: Saturday, via Twitter, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) decried that chief executive’s “past racist behavior” and said “He should resign.

Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel listed off what she sees as that same chief executive’s callousness on race, including, apparently, his appearance in a photo, 35 years ago in which one person is in blackface and the other is wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood. The conduct that these Republicans denounced clearly deserves condemnation, no matter how or when it occurred.

Unfortunately, they’ve reserved their scorn for one chief executive, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, and have held back when it comes to criticizing a chief executive from their own party, President Trump, for his racially divisive statements and public positions. That is naked hypocrisy.

Republicans, sensing a relatively rare moment when, for once, the other party had to own a race-relations debacle, joined Democrats in calling for Northam’s ouster. In addition to McCarthy and McDaniel, Virginia GOP chair Jack Wilson called on Northam to step down, saying the governor has “lost the moral ability” to lead. Ever since Election Day 2016, when Trump’s supporters promised he wouldn’t be as awful as his critics — including me — warned he would be, Republicans have longed for a moment when they could at least pretend to gain the high moral ground. Republicans who continue to support a party dominated by Trump can’t be taken seriously on this point. Trump’s record on race-related issues is abysmal. For years, he fueled birtherism to attack President Barack Obama. He once argued that a federal judge, Gonzalo P. Curiel, couldn’t be impartial in a case involving Trump because, as Trump said, “He’s a Mexican. We’re building a wall between here and Mexico.” Early in his presidential candidacy, Trump called for a “total and complete ban on Muslims entering the country.” In office, he ruminated on the United States needing more immigrants from places such as Norway and fewer immigrants from “shithole” countries, referencing Haiti, El Salvador and African countries. Despite polls taken at various times during his presidency that show significant percentages of Americans either see Trump as racist or, at a minimum, someone who has “emboldened” racists, the president still enjoys the support of Republicans in Congress and 78 percent approval among Republicans in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. For the most part, the party has indulged his race-baiting comments and his crude handling of racial issues.
 But somehow party leaders, who stand firmly behind him, and a national party that just passed a resolution expressing “undivided support” for him, seems to have no qualms about calling out Northam. [W]hen commentators such as David Limbaugh ask if Trump supporters must “forfeit the right to pass any moral judgments” because of their continual excuse-making for him, the only reply is: yes. Criticizing Northam for “past racist behavior” and his present equivocation after more than two years of overlooking an astonishing record of divisiveness reflects little more than a self-serving, morally repellent double standard.

Don't be Duped by a Media Seeking Sensation and False "Balance" by Attacks on Northam

The media has engaged in an orgiastic frenzy over images from a 35 year old yearbook that outwardly depict Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a personal friend, in an unflattering way and designed to suggest that Northam is somehow a closet racist. These are my reflections based on the Ralph Northam I know and the knee jerk reactions of some “progressives” and members of the LGBT community who trash their strongest advocates in an apparent quest for perfection that Christ himself could not satisfy.  Meanwhile, why isn't anyone asking why Eastern Virginia Medical School allowed such content in the school's yearbook in the first place?

Sadly, it is part and parcel with the media’s desire to stir sensationalism – which sells publications and prompts page views on online sites –and an obsession for “balance” that is employed time and time again to support a false equivalency between the Republican Party –which IS a racist party – and the Democrat Party. The truth and surrounding circumstances truly do not matter as long as publications are sold and page views are generated.

Governor Northam has apologized for a “racist and offensive” costume seen on his 1984 medical school yearbook page (the photo shows a person in blackface and another in full Ku Klux Klan robes). The governor did not say which costume (if any) he was wearing. Northam, in a statement said the behavior was not in keeping with his values and he will work to heal the damage he has caused. I have known Northam since 2007 when he ran for the Virginia Senate.  We first met at a fundraiser at the home a mutual friend.  In that successful campaign, Northam defeated Nick Rerras who I had known since my days on the City Committee for the Republican Party of the City of Virginia Beach.  In that election, Northam’s opponent, Rerras was a religious extremist and, in my view, like most “Christian conservatives” in Virginia, basically a racist. Northam’s lack of prejudice and religious extremism is what helped him secure victory.

I note Northam’s history from 2007, because locally, one of the publications engaging in the effort to trash Northam - and no doubt boost its own flagging revenues is the Virginian Pilot. I know from firsthand experience from my own run for political office a quarter century ago, that the Pilot cares absolutely nothing about the truth if it interferes with sensationalism that might sell newspapers or, nowadays, generate page views.  In that campaign despite have been provided with information that my opponent had a fraudulent PhD, the Pilot sat on that information.  The Pilot also went on to label me “Christian Right” – time has shown what a lie that was.

But, back to the immediate controversy involving Governor Northam.  For regular blog readers, it is no secret that the mindless effort to present “balance” on the part of the media drives me to distraction. Here we have a yearbook page from 35 years ago that is seemingly being used to equate Northam with the overt racists of the GOP base and the occupant of the White House who described white supremacists in Charlottesville who rioted and murdered one woman as “very fine people” in 2017.  Then, of course, we had the racist GOP rhetoric in the 2018 midterm elections and the ongoing GOP effort across the nation to disenfranchise black voters, something Northam adamantly opposes.  There is NO equivalence between incidents 35 years ago and those that are happening today. Shame on the media by a slight of hand for trying to make the two equivalent.

The last things I want to say are my first hand knowledge of Ralph Northam and his wife Pam. Unlike most people, my husband and I know them well and have shared private moments most will never have the opportunity to experience. During the 2017 Democrat primary, our home was the Northam headquarters for the Northam campaign.  We were able to see Ralph interact with the campaign volunteers, many of whom were black.  Ralph was gracious, kind and displayed zero prejudice. Indeed, I have never seen him treat anyone as less than his equal or take himself too seriously.  When not in campaign mode, we have spent time with the Northams, spent the night in their home and talked and laughed over drinks and dinner and seen them as their true selves. Never, ever, did we see even a hint of racial prejudice.  

I sincerely hope that past Northam supporters will take a deep breath and NOT fall for the sensation that the media – and behind the scenes, the GOP – must be enjoying.  It is sad to see a very fine man being trashed for events from 35 years ago while the modern day racists all too often get a free pass. I stand by Northam without hesitation. 

In closing, I pose a question someone posted on Facebook: It’s also funny the same Republicans that want him {Northam] to step down are the ones that celebrated Confederate generals during the current legislative session. Why didn’t these Republicans get asked to step down?

Nov. 6th: Last Exit Off the Road to Autocracy

It is election day and today's election results will determine many things.  First, as note in the previous post, whether or not America regains its moral compass and rejects Trumpism and the racist and discriminatory agenda of the Republican Party that is striving to restore the worse abuses of the Gilded Age.  Secondly, today may may well determine whether true democracy continues in America. If Republicans prevail today, expect voter disenfranchisement efforts to sky rocket - tactics employed in Georgia will go nationwide in GOP controlled states - and the social safety net will be shredded to pay for tax cuts for the most wealthy and privileged.  I'm not being overly dramatic in this latter issue.  One need only look at what has happened in other purported democracies where one party rule is now in place.  Even the early Roman emperors  maintained the trappings of the old Roman Republic  even though democracy had in fact died.  A column in the New York Times looks at this other key element of America that is at stack today.  Here are highlights:

Whatever happens in the midterms, the aftermath will be ugly. But the elections are nonetheless a fork in the road. If we take one path, it will offer at least a chance for political redemption, for recovering America’s democratic values. If we take the other, we’ll be on the road to autocracy, with no obvious way to get off.

It’s a near-certainty that Democrats will receive more votes than Republicans, with polling suggesting a margin in votes cast for the House of Representatives of seven or more percentage points — which would make it the biggest landslide of modern times. However, gerrymandering and other factors have severely tilted the playing field, so that even this might not be enough to bring control of the chamber.

And even if Democrats do climb that tilted slope, anyone expecting Republicans to accept the result with good grace hasn’t been paying attention. Remember, Donald Trump claimed — falsely, of course — that millions of immigrants voted illegally in an election he won. Imagine what he’ll say if he loses, and what his supporters will do in response. And if and when a Democratic House tries to exercise its powers, you can be sure it will be met with defiance, never mind what the Constitution says.

But ugly as the scene will be if Democrats win, it will be far worse if they lose. In fact, it’s not hyperbole to say that if the G.O.P. holds the line on Tuesday, it may be the last even halfway fair elections we’ll ever have.

Look at what’s happening in Georgia, where Brian Kemp — the Republican secretary of state, who oversees elections — is running for governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams. In any other democracy, letting a man supervise his own election would be inconceivable. But that’s how it is in Georgia, and Kemp is abusing his power to the max.

A political party with any kind of commitment to democracy and fair play would treat Kemp as a pariah. Instead, he has the full support of the national G.O.P.

And Georgia is far from unique. There have been similar if less spectacular attempts to rig the vote in Kansas and North Dakota, where would-be absentee voters were told that they had to use the right color ink — and were given conflicting information about what color was acceptable.

The lesson we learn from all these abuses of power is that today’s Republicans are just like their fellow white nationalists in Hungary and Poland, who have maintained a democratic facade but have in reality established one-party authoritarian regimes. Everything we’ve seen says that Republicans will do anything they can to take and hold power, and Tuesday’s elections may be the last chance to stop them from locking in permanent rule.

Oh, and in case you’re tempted to bothsides this: No, both sides don’t do it. Voting restrictions are almost entirely a Republican thing. As always, Democrats aren’t saints, but they appear to believe in democracy, while their opponents don’t.

Democrats haven’t made the clear and present danger to democracy a central theme of their campaigns; they’ve been running mainly on health care instead. And it’s hard to fault their judgment. After all, health care is indeed on the line in these elections: Millions of Americans, especially but not only those with pre-existing conditions, will lose coverage if Republicans hold the House, because they’ll finally repeal the Affordable Care Act and will soon go after Medicare and Medicaid.

[W]ith the crucial moment here, everyone should bear in mind what’s at stake. It’s not just tax cuts or health coverage, and anyone who votes based simply on those issues is missing the bigger story. For the survival of American democracy is on the ballot.

If you are registered to vote, be sure to do so and vote a straight Democrat ticket - even if you have to hold your nose to do so.  It really is that critical.

Trump/the GOP Can’t Win the War on Demography

I for one hope that 2016 and the nightmare election of Der Trumpenführer will prove to be the last gasp of aging right wing/Christofascist whites in their attempt to turn back time and magically stop the demographic changes sweeping the nation.  True, wherever possible, Republicans will strive to disenfranchise non-whites and the young, but those efforts will sooner or later fail to stop the wave of demographic change that will make both whites and traditional Christians a minority in America.  Candidly, in my view, that ultimate defeat of the GOP and Trump voters cannot come soon enough.  Perhaps being gay - a hated minority to many - makes one open their eyes to the failings and ugliness of the majority as well as the common humanity of other minorities.  Whatever the cause, I simple cannot understand the hysterical fear of those who are different. A column in the New York Times looks at the unwinnable war Trump and the racist GOP are fighting.  It also looks at the distortions in policies and funding that the quest to maintain "whiteness" will have on the country.  Here are column highlights:

Since the early days of his campaign, from his proposal to build a wall along the Mexican border to his discredited committee on voter fraud, President Trump has declared war on America’s changing demography. His administration has followed through on that strategy with a proposal to add a question to the 2020 census asking about citizenship.

If it is added to the census form, the citizenship question will distort our understanding of who resides in the country. What this selective underenumeration will not do is make America’s growing racial minority populations disappear. The losers from this undercount include members of Mr. Trump’s older white base, who will suffer from lost investments in a younger generation, whose successes and contributions to the economy will be necessary to keep America great.

The demographic trends make this plain. America’s white population is growing tepidly because of substantial declines among younger whites. Since 2000, the white population under the age of 18 has shrunk by seven million, and declines are projected among white 20-somethings and 30-somethings over the next two decades and beyond. This is a result of both low fertility rates among young whites and modest white immigration — a trend that is not likely to change despite Mr. Trump’s wish for more immigrants from Norway.

The likely source of future gains among the nation’s population of children, teenagers and young working adults is minorities — Hispanics, Asians, blacks and others — most of whom are born in the United States.

Indeed, the only part of the white population that is growing appreciably is older people, the same group to whom Mr. Trump is appealing. Thanks to aging baby boomers, the older retirement-age white population will grow by one-third over the next 15 years and, with it, the need for the government to support Social Security, Medicare, hospitals and the like. Revenue for these programs will have to come from the younger minority population.

Although the slowly growing, rapidly aging white population will be accurately counted, the fast-growing minority school-age and young adult populations that represent the nation’s future will not get their due — demographically, politically or economically.

An in-house Census Bureau analysis based on 2010 survey data found that the inclusion of a citizenship question reduced the response rate among households that have at least one noncitizen individual. While 7 percent of United States residents are themselves noncitizens, 14 percent live in households that include one or more noncitizens. The latter figure rises to 46 percent among all Hispanics and to 45 percent among Asian-Americans, compared with just 8 percent among blacks and 3 percent among whites.

Let’s assume that one in three people in Hispanic and Asian noncitizen households refuses to answer the census. If that’s the case, the Hispanic share of the United States population would drop by 2.1 percentage points (from 17.3 to 15.2 percent) and the total white population share would rise by 2.2 percentage points (from 62 to 64.2 percent).

This imbalance would influence congressional reapportionment, hurting large, immigrant-heavy states. It will also shape how congressional and state legislative districts are drawn, favoring rural and small areas at the expense of large metropolitan areas, since noncitizen households are far more prevalent in the latter.

The underenumeration of racial minorities would also misallocate billions of dollars in state and federal funds for housing assistance, job training, community development and a variety of social services that should be distributed on the basis of census counts. It would provide a faulty framework for surveys that will inform thousands of policy and business decisions, such as where to locate schools, hospitals, employment sites or retail establishments catering to different population groups, over the next decade.

Through his rhetoric and actions, Mr. Trump stands for keeping America white, appealing to his base by implicitly promising to preserve the racial status quo. But Mr. Trump’s supporters, and the country in general, must not ignore the generational dependency between older whites and younger minorities. Forcing an inaccurate accounting of who resides in the nation will have long-term negative consequences for everyone.

For the record, both the husband and I have extended family members who are of mixed race..  Some are half Asian and others are part black.  All are decent and responsible individuals - far more decent than Trump's bigoted and hypocrisy-filled base.

British Court: U.S. Prison System is a Human Rights Violation

British High Court building.

The United States is known among developed nations for its broken and insanely expensive health care system where millions are deprived of appropriate health care access. Now, a British court has highlighted another broken aspect of America: our broken prison and criminal justice system.  America has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with minorities disproportionately represented thanks to draconian laws, lack of first class legal representation for many defendants, and an increasingly privatized prison system where a drive for profits overshadows non-barbaric conditions for inmates.  (In Virginia, archaic marijuana laws help disenfranchise minorities of their voting rights which, unlike as is the case in most other states are not reinstated once sentences are fully served.) With Attorney General Jeff Sessions seeking to reignite the failed war on drugs and calls for stiffer sentencing - which aids Sessions' goal of disenfranchising minorities - the situation will likely worsen.  But back to the British court ruling which refused to send defendants to the United States because it found that America's penal system is a human rights violation.   A piece in the Washington Post looks at the stunning ruling.  Here are excerpts: 

President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have repeatedly highlighted the importance of international cooperation in tackling international, cyber and cross-border crime. But as a decision of the United Kingdom’s High Court on Monday shows, human rights abuses in the U.S. criminal justice system are putting that cooperation at risk even with our closest allies. In the ruling, the High Court refused to order the extradition of British-Finnish activist Lauri Love to the United States, where he is wanted on hacking charges, on the grounds that sending him to an American jail would be “oppressive” due to poor conditions there. The court accordingly found that the interests of justice required the case to be prosecuted in Britain instead. This decision marks the first time a U.K. court has used the “forum bar,” a 2013 extradition reform that allows British courts to halt extraditions in situations where defendants could be prosecuted instead in the United Kingdom.  The U.K. Parliament adopted the forum bar after an outcry over a stringof cases in which the United States asserted prosecutorial jurisdiction over conduct that occurred entirely in the U.K. Although several political factors were at play, the extradition reform movement was largely fueled by public concern that defendants’ basic rights will not be respected in U.S. custody. The findings of the High Court in Love’s case paint an unembellished but unmistakably grim portrait of the reality of the American carceral state, in which harsh sentences, poor access to medical care and excessive use of solitary confinement mean that U.S. authorities cannot reliably ensure the survival of vulnerable prisoners. In finding that extradition to the United States would be “oppressive” to Love, the High Court found that conditions in American jails were “not adequate to prevent suicide.” The court found that Love, who has Asperger’s syndrome and suffers from severe depression and other health problems, was likely to be held in solitary confinement as a suicide prevention measure and that he wouldn’t have adequate access to mental health treatment. The court also found that the heightened risk that Love would commit suicide was due in part to the excessive length of sentence Love anticipated in the United States, substantially longer than what he would be subject to in a prosecution for similar crimes in the U.K. In short, the court found that the U.S. prison system is a mortal threat.

All of the issues flagged by the High Court — poor treatmentfor the majority of prisoners who suffer from mental illness, sentences far longer than those in other countries, and excessive use of solitary confinement — are sadly well-documented realities for many prisoners in the United States. The High Court’s conclusion that U.S. authorities can’t reliably prevent suicide for prisoners such as Love is borne out by the fact that suicide is the third-leading cause of death in U.S. prisons and jails — and has risen sharply in recent years.

When the United States can’t assure its closest allies that their citizens will be fairly treated in criminal proceedings, our domestic human rights crises do more than ruin lives — they undermine international cooperation and public safety. Defendants such as Love, who are vulnerable to illness and violence, are prosecuted and imprisoned every single day in the United States. The fact that a British court has found that the United States can’t be entrusted to keep such people alive in custody is at once shocking and undeniable. [T]here is no indication that respect for the rights of the accused is likely to improve under Sessions’ Justice Department, despite sustained state- and national-level movements for reform. In fact, Sessions has signaled that he is doubling down on punitive prosecutorial practices that will exacerbate the human rights crises in U.S. jails and prisons. Unless it changes course, the United States will likely have to accept further blows to its ability to cooperate with its allies in its efforts to tackle international crime.

North Carolina Congressional Map Ruled Unconstitutionally

Back in 2016, a panel of federal judges struck down several of Virginia's congressional districts for being unconstitutionally gerrymandered.  The change in districts resulted in one long time Republican congressman to decide not to run for re-election in his district and ultimately Democrats picked up a congressional seat.  Now, something similar has happened in North Carolina where all of the GOP drawn districts were ruled unconstitutional.  The panel of judges gave the North Carolina legislative assembly a short period to redraw the districts even as the judges go about redrawing the districts themselves.  With the midterms just 10 months away, the ruling could cause Republicans to lose seats in November if they must run in non-gerrymandered districts.  Two of the pillars of Republican electoral success have been (i) disenfranchising minority and Democrat leaning voters, and (ii) gerrymandered districts that throw seats to Republicans overall even in cases where they win a minority of votes statewide.  A glance at the GOP drawn map shows how ridiculous some of the districts were in fact.   Here are the highlights from the New York Times:

A panel of federal judges struck down North Carolina’s congressional map on Tuesday, declaring it unconstitutionally gerrymandered and demanding that the Republican-controlled General Assembly redraw district lines before this year’s midterm elections.

The ruling was the first time that a federal court had blocked a congressional map because the judges believed it to be a partisan gerrymander, and it deepened the political chaos that has enveloped North Carolina in recent years.

“We agree with plaintiffs that a wealth of evidence proves the General Assembly’s intent to ‘subordinate’ the interests of non-Republican voters and ‘entrench’ Republican domination of the state’s congressional delegation,” Judge James A. Wynn Jr. wrote in a 191-page opinion that another judge joined in full.

Later in the ruling, Judge Wynn, . . . . added that the judges believed that Republicans in the Legislature had been “motivated by invidious partisan intent.”

Although the judges said that the state could not conduct its 2018 congressional elections with the existing map, they said they would allow the General Assembly to try again.

The judges gave lawmakers until Jan. 24 to propose a “remedial plan,” but cautioned that the court would begin preparations to issue a map of its own if it found the new district lines deficient.

GOP Voter Suppression Laws May Have Won Wisconsin for Trump

With their aging white, heterosexual, conservative Christian voter base literally dying off, Republican efforts around the country have shifted increasingly towards disenfranchising voters who they believe will vote against their agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy, special rights for Christofascists, emboldening white supremacists, and taking from the poor to give to the rich.  This effort takes many forms, but a favored method is to pass so-called voter ID laws under the guise of fighting non-existent voter fraud.  Other efforts include wrongfully purging voters from voter records and here in Virginia making it difficult for convicted felons who have served their time to regain their voting rights.  Hand in hand with this, of curse, is the disproportionate prosecution of minorities under Virginia's often very low threshold felony laws.  Now, a study suggests that these efforts bore fruit last year when Wisconsin's efforts to disenfranchise voters may have thrown Wisconsin to Trump.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this disturbing situation which Republicans will no doubt seek to replicate in other states (Mother Jones also has coverage here).  Here are highlights: 

Close elections almost by definition conjure up countless explanations of what might have changed the result. As the fine voting-rights journalist Ari Berman notes, one of the more shocking and significant developments on November 8, 2016, was Donald Trump’s win in Wisconsin, a state that had not gone Republican in a presidential election since the 49-state Reagan landslide of 1984. Explanations were all over the place. . . .

Virtually no one, says Berman, talked about voter suppression, even though Scott Walker’s hyperpolarized state had enacted and fought successfully to preserve one of the nation’s strictest voter ID laws, expected and designed to reduce minority turnout.

Yet there is evidence, both anecdotal and academic, that voter suppression efforts had a lot to do with a sharp reduction in minority and student voting in Wisconsin.

After the election, registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County were surveyed about why they didn’t cast a ballot. Eleven percent cited the voter ID law and said they didn’t have an acceptable ID; of those, more than half said the law was the “main reason” they didn’t vote. According to the study’s author, University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Mayer, that finding implies that between 12,000 and 23,000 registered voters in Madison and Milwaukee—and as many as 45,000 statewide—were deterred from voting by the ID law. “We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law,” he says.

Trump carried the state by less than 23,000 votes.

Wisconsin’s voter ID law was designed to create complex hoops prospective voters had to jump through to secure an ID, particularly for those without driver’s licenses, and also for college students attending schools that did not issue the kind of IDs the law demanded. Berman found abundant evidence that election personnel in the state went beyond the letter of the law to discourage compliance.

And voter ID was just part of the arsenal of voter suppression techniques at the GOP’s disposal:

The voter ID law was one of 33 election changes passed in Wisconsin after Walker took office [in 2011], and it dovetailed with his signature push to dismantle unions, taking away his opponents’ most effective organizing tool. Wisconsin’s Legislature cut early voting from 30 days to 12, reduced early voting hours on nights and weekends, and restricted early voting to one location per county, hampering voters in large urban areas and sprawling rural ones. It also added new residency requirements for voter registration, eliminated staffers who led statewide registration drives, and made it harder to count absentee ballots.

It all added up, and for Republicans, it paid off handsomely in 2016.

One lesson of the Wisconsin saga is that control of the federal courts matters a great deal in vindicating voting rights and political representation; this is, after all, the state where a GOP gerrymander of the legislature was so overtly partisan that the U.S. Supreme Court may find it unconstitutional.

Republican-controlled statehouses have already passed more voting restrictions in 2017 than they did in 2016 and 2015 combined. Taken together, “there’s no doubt that these election changes affected the turnout among young voters, first-time voters, voters of color, and other members of the Obama coalition that overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton,” . . .

If you think of voting rights as a wonky “process” issue that’s less important than health care or the environment or avoiding war with North Korea, think again. It’s entirely possible we wouldn’t be dealing with a President Trump at all if voting rights were regarded as a fundamental right of citizenship that should be strongly and universally encouraged.

I only meet one of the GOP's preferred voter base of white, heterosexual, conservative Christians - Like author Anne Rice, I don't call myself Christian anymore given the hideousness that Christianity has taken on under the Christofascists.  What will the GOP try to come up with to disenfranchise people like me?  If Republicans win the Virginia statewide elections next month, expect a new wave of voter disenfranchisement in Virginia. Be very afraid. Get out and vote while you still can. 

Trump Nominee's Illegal Vote Exposes the Voter-Fraud Charade

If one listens to Republicans - especially the vulgarian-in-chief in the White House - voter fraud is rampant and millions of illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 presidential election.  The truth, of course, is something very different with study after study showing that voter fraud is rare and not a pressing concern for anyone other than Republicans who are increasingly desperate to disenfranchise voters as their aging white voter base literally dies off.  To win, the GOP must decrease the votes of minorities and younger voters who wisely see the GOP as an enemy of their own future and prosperity.  Thus, it is delicious irony that one of Der Trumpenführer's nominees cast an illegal vote in Virginia in last year's presidential election.  True, it wasn't part of any insidious plan, but it shows the farce of the Republican charade that voter fraud is a pressing national concern.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the issue and Jeffrey Gerrish's illegal vote.  Here are highlights:

Jeffrey Gerrish made a mistake. Not a big one, although he did break the law. But it’s a mistake many people make, and for the most part, they aren’t called out by the Senate Finance Committee and in the pages of The New York Times.

Most of the people who make the error, however, are not nominees of a president who has alleged that there were 3 to 5 million fraudulent votes cast in the 2016 election, or who empaneled a commission to consider voter fraud that is on a dubious hunt to try to validate that wild, unsubstantiated claim. Jeffrey Gerrish, however, is President Trump’s nominee to be deputy U.S. trade representative, so it happens that investigators realized he cast his vote in the 2016 election in Virginia, even though he had moved to Maryland—a far less competitive state in national elections.

Actually, Gerrish broke two laws. Although Virginia allows people to vote there 30 days after moving—after all, they probably know the candidates and issues in their old home best—he was outside that grace period. The Times adds: “A Trump administration official, who asked for anonymity to discuss the case in detail, said that Mr. Gerrish had a Virginia driver’s license at the time of the election and was under the impression that the state granted a longer grace period for former residents.” But Maryland also requires that new residents get a Maryland license within 60 days of moving, which he had not done. Of course, such laws about getting new licenses are routine and routinely ignored. Many people just wait for their old license to expire before getting a new one, no one gets hurt, and no one launches a commission of inquiry. But that’s just the point about Gerrish’s old vote. The story isn’t so much a gotcha on Gerrish as it is a statement about the folly of Trump’s vote-fraud commission. The commission is chaired by Vice President Pence, but its co-chair and driving force is Kris Kobach, the Republican secretary of state in Kansas. Kobach is a long-time advocate for tighter voting laws, which he says are needed because of widespread voter fraud. In particular, he’s concerned about what’s known as in-person voter fraud: Someone actually shows up and casts an unlawful ballot, either because they aren’t registered, because they’re registered unlawfully, or because they vote in someone else’s name. The problem is that this is highly unusual. Repeated studies have shown that voter fraud is extremely rare, . . .
 Kobach is particularly into the idea of databases of voter lists from various states, which can then be crosschecked against each other to find people who are unlawfully double-voting—or at least double-registered—in several states. That was the motivation behind his controversial request that states provide full voter rolls to the commission. The problem is that the technique has repeatedly failed to find widespread fraud, even as it produces lots of false positives from similar names. In one instance, Kobach dramatically announced more than 2,000 dead voters who were still on rolls, only for the supposedly dead to be revealed as still alive quite quickly. More recently, Kobach declared in a Breitbart column that there was proof of widespread fraud in New Hampshire, then saw the state’s secretary of state shred his claim. Many people, including some of Trump’s closest relatives and advisers, are registered in two states (probably because they, like most people, didn’t bother to cancel their old registrations), but also almost certainly don’t vote twice. When there really is in-person voter fraud, however, it’s probably more likely something like what Gerrish did. He’s not the first person to decide to vote in his old home in the hopes of casting a more consequential vote. . . . . This is illegal, but it’s unlikely to be prosecuted, and it’s also naively idealistic: Those occasional ballots mailed back home to Nevada and Ohio and Florida are unlikely to swing any election. The same is true for Gerrish’s ballot. Even with his vote, Clinton won Virginia by more than 200,000 votes, and she won Maryland by more than 700,000. Contra the Trump voting commission’s starting assumptions, there’s very little in-person voter fraud, and where it occurs, it’s usually individuals exercising poor judgment—not massive, coordinated campaigns that stuff the ballot boxes with Trump’s fictitious millions of illegitimate votes. Then again, that doesn’t make much of a story, does it?

I have heard Kobach in a number of interviews and try as much as he might to  pretend he's not a racist, he most certainly is one.  He's a white supremacists in all but formal affiliation with a white nationalist group.  Sadly, Kobach is all too representative of more and more of the GOP.  If one is not a white, heterosexual right wing Christian, they don't view you as fully human or someone they want having the right to vote. Just one more example of the "Christian values" of today's Republican Party. 

Kris Kobach - High Priest of the Voter Fraud Myth

While Jeff Sessions is busy seeking a crackdown on marijuana users as a means to disenfranchise blacks and youth with a goal of adding Republican electoral chances, Kris Kobach, the de facto head of President Trump’s commission on voting integrity, is seeking to use the myth of voter fraud to disenfranchise even more Americans.  Besides minority voters, Kobach is especially hostile to young voters who disapprove of the GOP by some 70+%.  College students are a particularly favored target of Kobach who I have heard on radio interviews engaging in lots of fancy footwork to hide his still very discernible racism.  Rather than admit that a majority of Americans dislike the GOP's increasingly Christofascist/white supremacist and pro-wealthy agenda, Kobach's solution is to mere winnow the voter pool to eliminate potential Democrat voters.  The man embodies some of the ugliest elements of today's GOP.  A main editorial in the Washington Post looks at the fraud Kobach seeks to work on the American public.  Here are excerpts:

NEW HAMPSHIRE is a small state whose biggest residential college and university campuses are dominated by out-of-state students — tens of thousands of them. Under New Hampshire law, they are entitled to vote in state elections, an unremarkable and widely known fact that easily explains why several thousand ballots were cast there last November by voters who registered on Election Day using out-of-state driver’s licenses.

Yet to Kris Kobach, the de facto head of President Trump’s commission on voting integrity, those votes are somehow “proof” that an invading horde of out-of-staters took advantage of the Granite State’s same-day registration law to cast “fraudulent votes.” In fact, there’s no evidence of that.

The real fraud is Mr. Kobach himself, Kansas’s Republican secretary of state and a gubernatorial candidate, who will torture any truth, distort any data and fudge any fact in service to his long-standing goal of suppressing votes, specifically those likely to favor Democrats. Having established himself in his home state as a propagandist, he is now peddling his claptrap on the national stage.

His method is to cite real numbers, then draw risible and extravagantly sinister conclusions from them.

In the case of the Granite State, he cites official figures from last fall’s elections, when 6,540 voters registered to vote and cast a ballot on Election Day. Of those voters, more than 80 percent, or 5,313, had neither been issued a New Hampshire license nor registered a car in the state 10 months later.

Aha, says Mr. Kobach, writing at Breitbart, the right-wing website, “now there’s proof” of fraud: “It seems that they never were bona fide residents of the State.”

In fact, when New Hampshire Public Radio examined the data earlier this year, it found that more than two-thirds of 5,900 day-of-election registrants who had out-of-state driver’s licenses lived in college towns, indicating most were students voting perfectly legally. 

[O]n Tuesday Mr. Kobach attempted to defend his baseless claim at a meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Under fire for his tendentious claims, which he used to cast doubt on the narrow victories in New Hampshire of Hillary Clinton and now-Sen. Maggie Hassan, both Democrats, he said: “Until further research is done, we will never know the answer regarding the legitimacy of this particular election.”

That’s Mr. Kobach at his most insidious, using innuendo, but never actual evidence, to impugn and subvert American democracy.
 

The fact that Kobach is a Breitbart columnist speaks volumes about his detachment from objective reality and his racist, alt-right tendencies.  It goes without say that his gubernatorial campaign webpage is hysterically anti-immigrant.  I can only wonder what he will try to concoct to disenfranchise LGBT voters three quarters of whom or more vote Democrat.