Immigration

Clean Elections could not possibly have caused SB1062

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Crossposted at DemocraticDiva.com

This FiveThrirtyEight piece has been getting passed around by both opponents of Clean Elections operating in bad faith and by well-meaning people who think it’s legitimate because it’s on Nate Silver’s site.

In 2010, Arizona enacted an immigration law so stringent that the U.S. Supreme Court was forced to intervene. Four years later, the governor had to veto a nearly successful effort to allow businesses to deny service to, among others, LGBT people. After that measure failed, the Arizona House of Representatives last month passed a bill meant to increase scrutiny of abortion clinics.

These bills are coming from lawmakers who’ve assembled the most conservative state legislature in the country. That’s according to Princeton University’s Nolan McCarty and University of Chicago’s Boris Shor, who tracked the ideology of state legislatures over the past 20 years and found that Arizona’s lawmakers are more conservative than those in Georgia, Mississippi and Texas. Modern, tea-party Republicanism has found no more accommodating home than the Arizona statehouse…

…Given all that, why do these hyper-conservative state legislators keep getting elected? Because the Arizona electoral system allows for extreme candidates to compete on an equal playing field with their more moderate competitors.2

Arizona has one of the most advanced clean election laws in the country. As long as a candidate for the state legislature reaches a minimum fundraising level ($1,250), the state essentially funds her campaign.3 (Only Connecticut and Maine have similar laws on public financing for state legislature candidates.) That allows candidates to stay viable even if they don’t have connections to the state party or local business leaders.

This is the perfect formula for the tea party to take on the GOP establishment. Imagine a tea partyer who doesn’t owe anything to established business interests in her district — that’s the kind of state legislator who might support a “religious freedom” law even if businesses are hurt by it. Indeed, a study by Harvard University’s Andrew Hall and a separate study by the University of Denver’s Seth Masket and the University of Illinois’s Michael Miller both show that clean election laws lead to more extreme candidates.

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The “Managerial Republican” is mostly a fantasy

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I will say that Ronald Brownstein’s recent column in the National Journal is a bit better than what we’ve been getting lately from the hordes of DC pundits attempting to analyze Arizona. In particular, I liked this bit at the end:

After Arizona’s tax revenues plummeted with the housing market collapse, Brewer backed a temporary 1-cent sales-tax increase to limit spending cuts. But even so, since 2008, the GOP majority’s commitment to squeezing government has produced the nation’s third-largest reduction in per-student K-12 spending; the largest percentage reduction in per-student support for public higher education; and the biggest public tuition hikes. No other choices capture as starkly the contrasting priorities of a ruling GOP coalition that still receives almost all of its votes from whites (many older, rural, and exurban) and a minority population that now represents the clear majority of students in Arizona’s public schools.

It’s refreshing to see a conservative admit outright that Arizona Republicans have slashed public education funding (instead of doing the Goldwater Institute song and dance about how the schools are really funded quite generously if you look at all these charts and squint) and that the cuts are ideological and not fiscal in purpose.

Brownstein’s main thesis is that Arizona’s politics operate along fault lines of age and race, with the older whites voting overwhelmingly GOP and the Democratic base being younger and browner. I take no issue with that assessment. What I do dispute is this:

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Rep. Paul Ryan embraces the racism and classism of Eugenics

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Last year, the Heritage Foundation caused a furor over its deeply flawed study on immigration reform, co-authored by Jason Richwine, Ph.D.,  whose doctoral dissertation at Harvard was titled “IQ and Immigration Policy”.  Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. He wrote, “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”

Richwine’s dabbling in the pseudo-science of Eugenics and the public backlash to this revelation eventually forced him to resign from the Heritage Foundation.

After today, the public should be demanding the resignation of Ayn Rand fanboy and zombie-eyed granny starver from Wisconsin, Rep. Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan Blames Poverty On Lazy ‘Inner City’ Men:

EddieMunsterHouse Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) previewed his upcoming legislative proposals for reforming America’s poverty programs during an appearance on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America Wednesday, hinting that he would focus on creating work requirements for men “in our inner cities” and dealing with the “real culture problem” in these communities. “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with,” he said.

[For those of you who are in doubt, yes he is employing racist dog-whistle politics.]

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Sen. Gail Griffin does not like ‘Mexican’

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State Senator Gail Griffin (R-Heber) from LD 14 is a major piece of work.

Earlier this year she floated the idea of stealing a big chunk of Pima County and handing it over to Santa Cruz County because some local teabaggers wanted to secede from Pima County. Also, Pima County objects to the proposed Rosemont Mine, which Griffin denied was a motivating factor, but no serious person believes her denial.

This week Griffin’s bills to thumb her nose at the federal “guvmint” and to challenge the protected endangered species status of Mexican gray wolves are coming up for a vote in the House. As Craig McDermott posted earlier today:

LOBOMEXICANO– SB1211, allowing the AZ Department of Agriculture and “livestock operators” to kill Mexican wolves, under certain circumstances, and imposing reporting requirements on the reintroduction of Mexican wolves into the wild in AZ (House Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources, Monday, 2 p.m., HHR4)

– SB1212, appropriating $250K to the AZ Attorney General’s office to pay for litigation against the reintroduction of Mexican wolves into Arizona (House Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources)

– SCR1006, a resolution using many words to state that the legislature doesn’t like Mexican wolves.  What a surprise (House Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources)

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The forgotten aspects of slavery in the Southern States

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By Karl Reiner

Slavery had always been a legal institution in the United States despite its degradation of a race and high cost in human misery. On the eve of the CivilSlave1 War, it was a robust enterprise in no danger of dying out.  It was the major cause of the war, the promoters of secession considered the defense of slavery the prime reason for establishing the Confederacy.

Slave ownership was protected by the Confederate Constitution.  Fifty percent of families in South Carolina and Mississippi owned slaves.  About a quarter of the families in Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, North Carolina and Texas were slave owners.

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