Civil & Human Rights

GOP rebranding fail on immigration: Rep. Steve King

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

House GOP leaders have embraced something called the "KIDS Act,"
which is basically a scaled down Republican version of the DREAM Act. It is a cynical attempt by Weeper of the House John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor to offer something to soften the political impact to the GOP if Boehner allows the radical Tea-Publicans in the House to kill comprehensive immigration reform.

Let's  be clear: the fate of comprehensive immigration reform rests squarely in Boehner's hands and whether he will allow a comprehensive immigration reform bill to go to the House floor for a vote.

Former GOP Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott tells the Philadelphia Inquirer today that he’d
bring the Senate immigration bill up for a floor vote in the House,
even though a majority of fellow Republicans oppose the idea. Lott says he'd allow a House immigration vote. “If you don’t have the majority of your conference that you’re leading, and you do that too much, you won’t be the leader very long,” Lott said. “As for myself, I would do it even if it meant losing my job,” he added.

GOP voter suppression in North Carolina

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Hey, Chief Justice Roberts. Yeah I'm talking to you. Does this look like race-based GOP voter suppression — the Southern strategy — is a thing of the past to you? Ed Kilgore writes at the Political Animal blog, Supreme Court Decisions Have Consequences:

So do you think the Supreme Court decision
largely invalidating the preclearance requirement imposed by Section 5
of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was no big deal, since southern
discrimination is largely a thing of the past and other
anti-discrimination measures are available?

Check out what the North Carolina legislature is about to do, per this depressing report from The Nation’s Ari Berman:

This week, the North Carolina legislature will almost
certainly pass a strict new voter ID law that could disenfranchise
318,000 registered voters who don’t have the narrow forms of accepted
state-issued ID. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the bill has since been
amended by Republicans to include a slew of appalling voter suppression
measures. They include cutting a week of early voting, ending same-day
registration during the early voting period and making it easier for
vigilante poll-watchers to challenge eligible voters. The bill is being
debated this afternoon in the Senate Rules Committee.

(Update) Voter ID on trial in Pennsylvania

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The AP wraps up the first week of trial. Pennsylvania voter ID law trial wraps up first week:

A professor who specializes in political communication gave low
grades Friday to the 2012 multimedia campaign to educate Pennsylvania
voters about the state’s new voter-identification law as part of a court
trial on its constitutionality.

Diana Mutz, a faculty member at
the University of Pennsylvania and its Annenberg School for
Communication, said the centerpiece of the campaign — TV ads in which
people holding up photo ID cards urged voters to “show it” — seemed
confusing.

“It wasn’t always clear what ‘it’ was,” said Mutz, the
author of several books, who testified as an expert witness on behalf of
plaintiffs who sued the state in an attempt to overturn the
yet-to-be-enforced March 2012 law.

The “show it” slogan, which was
also incorporated in radio and print ads, also provided little guidance
to voters who lacked a Pennsylvania drivers’ license or other
acceptable IDs.

“To say ‘show it’ presumes you have it,” she said.

Her testimony wrapped up the first week of the trial in Commonwealth Court.

New study confirms the Supreme Court is wrong in Shelby County v. Holder

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I previously posted about the richly detailed data analysis by Morgan Kousser at Reuters, Gutting the landmark civil rights legislation, which blows away the disingenuous sophistry of Chief Justice John Roberts in Shelby County v. Holder. Research data proves the Supreme Court is wrong.

Key takaeway: updating the data, as the court suggests in Shelby County, would produce nearly the identical coverage as the current formula that the court found "outdated" and thus "unconstitutional" under a previously heretofor unknown constitutional standard of review ("we don't like it"):

Congress did not update the formula because it knows it still works. The comprehensive database that I assembled proves this.
Consider, from 1957 through 2006, almost 94 percent of all voting
rights minority lawsuits, legal objections and out-of-court settlements
occurred in jurisdictions now subject to federal oversight under the
Section 4 formula.

* * *

My database, however, shows that Congress acted wisely because it knew
that the formula works. Of 3,874 voting rights actions from 1957 through
2006, 3,636 — or 93.9 percent — came from jurisdictions covered under
the Section 4 formula. Many depended on the coverage formula because
they were based on Justice Department objections, or drew “more
information requests” or lawsuits to enforce Section 5.

Suppose we look instead at cases and consent decrees filed under Section
2 — which can be filed anywhere in the country, in areas not subject to
federal jurisdiction as well as in covered jurisdictions. I have
identified 1,244 Section 2 actions from 1957 through 2006 — and fully
83.7 percent occurred in the jurisdictions subject to federal oversight.