GOP Officials Already Ignoring RNC Autopsy of 2012 Loss

As noted yesterday, the Republican National Committee released a 97 page autopsy on the party's 2012 loss and an outline of what needed to be done to ensure better results going forward.  It appears that in addition to the Christofascists within the party base there is another obstacle to a revival of the GOP: the racists within the party base and in high elected office.  Yesterday  this phenomenon became apparent as two Deep South Senators attacked Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez who has been nominated by President Obama to be Secretary of Labor.  Perez's offense?  Bring laws suits to enforce voting rights laws and acting to protect minorities.  You know, members of demographic groups that the RNC says the GOP must attract even as the party base and GOP controlled state legislatures work to disenfranchise these groups.  Think Progress looks at yesterday's attack on Perez and the continued racism that is a pillar of the GOP.  Here are highlights:

Well, that didn’t take long.  This morning, the biggest political story in Washington was a Republican National Committee “autopsy” of the GOP’s 2012 election loss. In it, the RNC proclaimed that “[i]t is imperative that the RNC changes how it engages with Hispanic communities to welcome in new members of our Party” and that “the Republican Party must be committed to building a lasting relationship within the African American community year-round, based on mutual respect and with a spirit of caring.” Within a few hours, three top Republicans already took the first steps to doom this effort.

Earlier today, President Obama nominated Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez to be the next Secretary of Labor. Perez is eminently qualified for this job, having served in a similar role for the state of Maryland before becoming the top civil rights attorney in the Justice Department. As head of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, Perez restored that office’s historic commitment to protecting voting rights,  .  .  .

Before the President even announced Perez’s nomination, Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R-AL) released a statement attacking him for serving as President of the Board of an organization that advocates on behalf of low-income immigrants and Latinos. The words “illegal immigrant” appear three times in Sessions’ statement, which is barely more than a paragraph long.

Not long thereafter, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) raised the specter of Perez supposedly sticking up for scary black men. According to Vitter, “Thomas Perez’s record should be met with great suspicion by my colleagues for his spotty work related to the New Black Panther case,” an allegation that does far more to discredit Vitter than Perez. Two separate investigations, one of which was released just last week, concluded that DOJ acted entirely without improper motive when it dismissed this case.

It’s important not to exaggerate the importance of these two senators’ statements. Sessions has a long history of opposition to civil rights. Many of his future senate colleagues voted to reject his nomination to the federal bench after a DOJ attorney revealed that Sessions once called the NAACP and the ACLU “un-American” and “Communist-inspired.” 

Sessions and Vitter’s crusade against Perez is certain to have powerful supporters among the GOP’s most powerful messengers, however. Rush Limbaugh compared Perez to “Hugo Chavez” on his radio station today, and he claimed that nominating Perez to head Labor is the same thing as a Republican nominating the “Grand Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan a cabinet position where he would be deciding on discrimination lawsuits.”

 The rank ugliness of today's GOP just continues to fester.  So much for renewed minority outreach.

 

Can The South Be Trusted On Voting Rights Yet?

Racial polarization in the 2008 presidential election: A comparison of states covered by Section 5 with the rest of the nation

Having lived in different parts of the South - Virginia, Alabama, Texas and back to Virginia - since early 1970's, the answer to the question posed in the caption of this blog post is, in my opinion, a resounding NO!  The Alabama of 2013 strikes me as more reactionary than the Alabama of 1977 and Texas outside of the large cities seems to be another example of going backward in time.  And then there's Virginia where the Republican Party of Virginia and its Christofascist and Tea Party puppeteers who seem to wan to take Virginia back to circa 1850.  Racism is alive and well in conservative circles and, as it is losing more and more of the sane voter pool, the GOP seeks to disenfranchise as many minority voters as possible to make up the declining numbers of the Christofascist/Tea Party base.   Despite this frightening reality, conservative justices on the U. S. Supreme Court seemed to suggest that the Voting Rights Act is no longer needed.  A piece in Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball - Sabato and I were classmates at the University of Virginia - looks at why the Voting Rights Act may be needed now more than ever (candidly, here in Virginia GOP efforts to disenfranchise minority voters is a case study in why the Voting Rights Act is still greatly needed).  Here are highlights:

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the latest challenge to what many consider the most important civil rights law of the past century — the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The challenge involves Section 5 of the law, which requires nine states — all but two in the South — to obtain prior approval from the Justice Department before implementing any changes in voting laws, regulations or procedures.

The Voting Rights Act, including Section 5, was last renewed in 2006. At that time, overwhelming majorities of Democrats and Republicans in both the House and Senate voted to renew the law for 25 years based on extensive evidence of continued attempts to suppress or dilute the votes of racial and ethnic minorities in the states covered by Section 5.

Despite this legislative record, the justice’s questions and comments during last week’s oral arguments suggest that there is a good chance that the court will vote to strike down Section 5. The five conservative justices on the court, including Chief Justice John Roberts, were clearly skeptical about the continued need for federal supervision of the states covered by Section Five. At one point, Roberts asked whether “the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North.”

There is no doubt that old-fashioned racism has greatly diminished over the past 40 years throughout the nation and in the states covered by Section 5. However, there are good reasons to be concerned about how a decision to overturn Section 5 would affect the voting rights of African Americans and other minorities in these states — for reasons that are more political than racial. That’s because regardless of whether white political leaders in these states hold racist views, they have substantial political incentives for engaging in actions to suppress or dilute the minority vote.

[A]nother key difference between these two sets of states is that the covered states are now dominated by the Republican Party. All nine covered states currently have Republican governors and Republican majorities in both chambers of their legislatures. This means that political leaders in these states have a powerful incentive to suppress or dilute the votes of African Americans and other minorities because these groups make up the large majority of the Democratic electoral base in their states. Moreover, as the majority party, they also have the ability to enact laws and regulations to accomplish these goals.

Recent history shows that Republican leaders in the states covered by Section 5 have frequently attempted to suppress or dilute the minority vote through actions such as enacting voter identification laws, changing voting dates, changing poll locations, replacing partisan elections with nonpartisan elections, switching from district-based to at-large elections and changing district boundaries. While such actions have occurred in other states, the evidence collected by Congress in 2006 showed that they occurred much more frequently in the states covered by Section 5. In numerous instances, only the power of the federal government to block such discriminatory laws and regulations has prevented their implementation.

The nonwhite share of the electorate in the states covered by Section 5 is expected to increase over the next few decades. Given the racially polarized pattern of voting in these states, this trend is likely to pose a growing threat to the dominance of the Republican Party in many of them. As a result, the political incentives for Republican leaders to pursue changes in election laws, rules and regulations in order to suppress or dilute minority voting strength will almost certainly increase in the future, making continued federal review of proposed changes crucial in order to ensure fair elections. Far from being outdated, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act may be needed more than ever in the coming decades.

Sadly, the GOP has become a party of open racists, white supremacists and religious fanatics all of whom view blacks and other racial minorities as less than human - a view similar to how they view gays - and whom they would like nothing better than to bar from voting entirely.   It is yet another reason of why I left the GOP long over a decade ago.

 

Why Marco Rubio Is Not "The Republican Savior"’

In its desperation to change its "messaging" rather than its increasingly unpopular theocratic/Tea policies, the Republican Party is grasping for anyone who could be the modern day Moses and lead the GOP out of the wilderness as demographic changes make the party's long term survival more questionable.   One such perceived savior is Florida Senator Marco Rubio who in the racist minds of the GOP mavens can make voters forget failed policies by simply putting a Hispanic face on the party in a form of putting lipstick on a pig.   Time Magazine bought into the GOP insanity and did the cover shown above.  Sadly, for the country, Rubio isn't the savior the irrational GOP perceives him to be.  A piece in Think Progress lays out exactly why Rubio is not going to succeed in transforming the GOP.  Here are excepts:

Since Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) abandoned his opposition to providing undocumented immigrants with a pathway to citizenship and embraced a bipartisan framework for comprehensive immigration, political pundits and Republican leaders have anointed the Florida Congressman the future of the GOP.

Consequently, the likely 2016 presidential candidate has become a media darling, appearing on conservative talk shows and mainstream outlets to tout his reform principles and convince skeptics of the wisdom of reforming the nation’s broken immigration system. The media idolization reached its zenith on the cover of this week’s issue of TIME magazine.

But dig beyond Rubio’s newfound embrace of immigration reform, and you’ll find that the GOP’s future appears stuck in the past, as the great hope of the party still espouses many of the extreme policies voters rejected in November:

1. Refused to raise the debt ceiling. Rubio voted against the GOP’s compromise measure to temporarily suspend the debt limit through May 19 in order avoid defaulting on the national debt. In a statement posted on his website, Rubio insisted that he would hold the debt ceiling increase hostage “unless it is tied with measures to actually solve our debt problem through spending reforms.”

2. Co-sponsored and voted for a Balanced Budget Amendment. “Now more than ever, we need a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Rubio proclaimed in 2011. A Balanced Budget Amendment would force the government to slash spending during an economic downturn, driving up unemployment and making the downturn worse, in a vicious cycle. If the amendment were in place during the last financial crisis, unemployment would have doubled.

3. Signed the Norquist pledge. Rubio pledged to never raise taxes under any circumstances and even voted against the last-minute deal to avert the fiscal cliff, since the deal included $600 billion in revenue. “Thousands of small businesses, not just the wealthy, will now be forced to decide how they’ll pay this new tax,” Rubio noted in a statement.

4. Backed Florida’s voter purge. Rubio defended Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) attempted purge Democratic voters from the rolls, brushing off its disproportionate targeting of Latino voters. He also defended Florida’s decision to shorten its early voting period from two weeks to eight days by pointing to “the cost-benefit analysis.” After Election Day, several prominent Florida Republicans admitted that the election law changes were geared toward suppressing minority and Democratic votes and researchers found that long voting lines drove away at least 201,000 Florida voters.

5. Doesn’t believe in climate change. During a recent BuzzFeed interview, Rubio claimed has “seen reasonable debate” over whether humans are causing climate change. Scientists have long agreed that the debate is now over.

6. Opposed federal action to help prevent violence against women. Rubio voted against the motion to proceed to debate the Violence Against Women Act, noting that he disagrees with portions of the bill. Rubio claims he supports a scaled-back version of the legislation.

7. Believes employers should be able to deny birth control to their employees. Rubio co-sponsored a bill — along with Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) — that sought to nullify Obamacare’s requirement that employers provide contraception to their employees without additional co-pays by permitting businesses to voluntarily opt out of offering birth control.

8. Recorded robo calls for anti-gay hate group. Rubio has previously boasted the endorsement of anti-gay hate groups like the Family Research Council and during the election recorded robocalls for the National Organization of Marriage urging Americans to deny equal rights to gays and lesbians. He recently wouldn’t take a position on legislation that would prohibit employers from firing employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identify and wouldn’t say “whether same-sex couples should receive protections under immigration law.”

 Rubio is nothing more than a new shade of lipstick on the same old GOP pig.