Immigration

That time Bernie Sanders voted to protect the Minutemen

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As I was planning to do a post about Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ problems attracting black and Hispanic voters earlier yesterday afternoon, the news broke that Bernie’s wife Jane Sanders visited Maricopa County’s Tent City Jail in Phoenix. She was there for the laudable purpose of calling attention to mistreatment of inmates and immigrants but, of course, Arpaio hijacked the event and turned it into a PR photo op. Most of the local news coverage (warning, autoplays) featured Sanders and Arpaio disagreeing amicably about the jail and about Donald Trump’s candidacy, with Arpaio getting (yet another) earned media opportunity to promote himself in an election year.

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Liberals explain angry white voters. I remain skeptical.

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One such piece is by Thomas Frank, the gifted prose-crafter who has made a career out of arguing that angry white voters angrily voting for Republicans are guileless rubes tricked into voting against their own economic interests.

I call it a “mystery” because the working-class white people who make up the bulk of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers for the candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers. On their opinion pages, these publications take care to represent demographic categories of nearly every kind, but “blue-collar” is one they persistently overlook. The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe that when New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wanted to “engage” a Trump supporter last week, he made one up, along with this imaginary person’s responses to his questions.

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Arizonans are the last people on earth who should act surprised about Trump.

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Surprising? Not to me!

Joanna Allhands, like many of her colleagues in the Arizona MSM, is simply mystified by the success of Donald Trump.

But why? That’s the question I keep asking myself.

We could blame it on our pocketbooks. Most of us feel worse off than we were eight years ago, despite assurances that the economy is on better footing. Wages have stagnated. We’re working longer hours with fewer benefits. And for what?

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Diligent voters are now the “angriest mob”, per Paul Johnson

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Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

johnson top two
Paul Johnson, Open and Honest Coalition

It used to be, not long ago, that voters who never missed any election were known as “good citizens”. But as the country has become more polarized and increasingly ungovernable, thanks entirely to one party (the GOP) being overtaken completely by rabid reactionaries, there is an increasing tendency by the Serious People to blame the voters for what they sat back and allowed to happen for decades*. This has certainly been the strategy of the people behind the Open “Primary”** initiative (AKA Top Two) in Arizona, which is currently getting signatures for the 2016 ballot.

The Arizona Republic has relentlessly promoted Top Two for years now, running numerous favorable articles and editorials on it since the first version (which failed) was introduced in 2012. Last Saturday, there was this softball interview with former Phoenix Mayor Paul Johnson, a main backer of the initiative.

Why did the Open and Honest Coalition form?

The existing system discriminates against the 1.2 million voters who choose to not affiliate with a party, the largest group in Arizona. All taxpayers pay for primary elections, but independents are barred as candidates from those ballots and forced to choose a party ballot which they have already chosen to reject. Arizona had a 30-year record-low voter turnout in 2014 because voters aren’t given the freedom of choice.

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If SCOTUS acted like judges and not politicians on immigration

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Linda Greenhouse, the legal columnist for the New York Times, argues that if the Justices “approach their task as judges and not as politicians, the administration will easily prevail” in United States v. Texas, the challenge to the Obama administration’s deferred-action policy for immigration. The Supreme Court vs. the President:

Hard-wired into the Supreme Court’s DNA is the notion that the court doesn’t reach out to decide a constitutional issue if it can resolve a case by interpreting a statute. “The court will not anticipate a question of constitutional law in advance of the necessity of deciding it,” is how Justice Louis D. Brandeis expressed this principle of judicial restraint 80 years ago in a concurring opinion to which the court often makes reference.

ImmigrantsSo the court’s action two weeks ago in accepting the Obama administration’s appeal in a major immigration case was startling. The surprise was not that the court agreed to hear the case, United States v. Texas, an appeal from a ruling that the president lacked authority under the immigration laws to defer deporting undocumented immigrants whose children are American citizens or lawful permanent residents. It was rather the blockbuster constitutional question that the justices added to the case, a question the court had not been asked, and one that neither of the lower federal courts had even addressed when they ruled on purely statutory grounds against the administration.

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