Tag: Republican War on Voting

Monday Wake Up Call, North Carolina Edition – March 6, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Early blooming Bradford Pear trees, near Cana, VA – March 2023 photo by Lee Ogle

North Carolina is in today’s news for two reasons: First, North Carolina Republicans, who control the state legislature, announced a deal to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. North Carolina would be the 40th state to expand Medicaid after a decade of Republican resistance.

From the WaPo:

“The deal marks a stark turnaround for Republican leaders that played out over years in North Carolina and in states across the country, as more and more governors and legislatures expanded Medicaid to low-income residents.”

NC’s governor, Democrat Roy Moore will sign the bill if it gets to his desk. Passage would extend Medicaid coverage to 600,000 of the state’s poor citizens. Dozens of rural hospitals in NC closed during Covid, so maybe it dawned on NC’s Republican Party that dead constituents have a difficult time voting for them.

As with other states, this will allow North Carolina, at no cost to the state government, to give health insurance to the state’s working poor. The federal government will pay for 90% of the cost, and the rest will be covered by a new tax on hospitals and insurance companies.

Wrongo wrote about how the Medicaid expansion was a great source of revenue to state governments here. The NC House Speaker, Republican Tim Moore said that since the federal government will pay North Carolina a $1.8 billion bonus if expansion passes, the GOP was motivated to sign on.

The extra money is part of the 2021 stimulus package signed into law by Biden, that offered signing bonuses to states that expanded Medicaid. In NC’s case, $1.8 billion. Biden reacted:

“This is what I’m talking about….That’ll be 40 states who’ve expanded. 10 more to go.”

It’s doubtful that any other states will sign on this year.

Shouldn’t Red states be taking care of their residents? Instead of wasting time with anti-trans bills and anti-woke bullshit? But that’s too much to expect.

A second North Carolina story involves a case in front of the US Supreme Court, Moore vs. Harper. Last fall the Supremes heard this case about the “Independent State Legislature Theory“. The case started out as a challenge to a Republican-gerrymandered voting map that the NC Supreme Court ruled was unconstitutionally partisan.

NC’s GOP then appealed to the US Supreme Court, arguing that the Constitution’s election clause gives state legislatures freedom to do whatever they decide about their own elections, and that no court can intervene in that. A decision was expected in June, 2023.

But the Supremes may not get a chance to weigh in, since the case is back before the NC high court. Why you ask? Well the NC Supreme Court is elected. And in November, the Republicans won a majority of the seats on the court.

Unsurprisingly, the court decided to review two cases that were decided against Republicans. What’s remarkable is the extent to which NC Republicans are willing to go in order to take control over the outcome of elections away from voters. And they’re not even trying to be covert about it.

On February 3, the NC Supreme Court granted a petition to rehear the case. That means the state supreme court may reconsider a case that is already in front of the US Supreme Court.

On March 2, the US Supreme Court asked for a supplemental briefing. They’re asking the NC Republicans, (the plaintiffs that originally challenged the maps), and the Biden administration to submit supplemental briefings about what effects the state court’s reconsideration might have on the Supreme Court’s ultimate decision.

So the legal jousting about voting rights in North Carolina continues. Maybe the state’s decision to embrace Medicare expansion after a decade means that we simply have to wait for the GOP to come around to an idea that most Americans favor. In the case of voting rights, Wrongo suggests continuing the fight, not waiting.

Time to wake up America! The Biden administration won’t be sending free money to the states to get them to embrace universal voting rights. That may have worked with Medicare, but not with voting rights.

To help you wake up, watch, and listen to Roy Rogers play “Walkin Blues” from his video “Slide Guitar For Rock & Blues” on a 12 string resonator guitar. Rogers makes it his own, and the playing and vocals are terrific:

This is dedicated to our friend Rene S, who also plays a mean guitar. “Walkin Blues” is a blues standard that’s been recorded countless times, often with different lyrics. Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton and the Grateful Dead all have their own versions.

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Monday Wake Up Call, MLK Jr Day – January 16, 2023

The Daily Escape:

It’s MLK day, so let’s talk about a topic that was near to his heart: economic inequality. Since 1980, economic inequality has been increasing between the top 1% and the bottom 90% of Americans. It’s become so great that today, America now faces the same level of economic inequality that existed before the Great Depression.

Here’s a chart from Elise Gould and Jori Sandra of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) showing the percentage change in annual wages by income group for the last 40 years:

From the EPI article: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The level of earnings inequality that existed in 1979 could have simply continued…to today. Instead, we have seen a growing concentration of earnings at the…very top of the earnings distribution, while the bottom 90% has experienced meager gains. Wages for the top 1% grew more than seven times fast as wages for the bottom 90% between 1979 and 2021. The top 1% now amasses a record share of total earnings, while the bottom 90% share of earnings has hit a historic low.”

Slow growth in real (inflation-adjusted) hourly wages for the vast majority of workers has been a defining feature of the US labor market for most of the last 40 years. Only for about 10 years after 1979 did workers see consistent positive wage growth: in the tight labor market of the late 1990s and in the five years prior to the pre-pandemic labor market peak in 2019.

While some low-wage workers have experienced high wage gains after America reopened from Covid, the truth is that most haven’t even kept pace with where they were in 1979.

Today is Martin Luther King Day in America. We mostly celebrate Dr. King’s birth rather than acknowledging what he was arguing for when he was killed. His focus at the end was on both economic justice, and voting rights. Perhaps more than any other leader in American history, King could see the different strands of political and social injustice. He was able to tie them together to form a coherent narrative, one that was capable of leveraging dissent for concrete policy change.

Those were the enduring lessons of Dr. King’s life.

There’s less than three months between the observance of King’s birthday and his death. The way each is recognized by politicians reveals the contradictions in his legacy. Most politicians extol the virtues of racial equality, while most ignore King’s criticisms of economic injustice.

From his April 30th speech in Atlanta: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

“A true revolution of values will…look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, ‘This is not just’…this business of…injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane….cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense
than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

As the EPI report above shows, over the last four decades, policies promoted by the GOP have reduced the opportunities for most workers to achieve wage growth at rate similar to the top 10%.

Time to wake up America! Develop your narrative, one that fights against economic injustice and for voting rights. Add any other issues that are pertinent to you. Take your narrative to your neighbors. Then work to get out the vote.

To help you wake up, watch “People Get Ready”, a Curtis Mayfield tune that foretold the turning tide in the battle for racial equality. It topped the R&B charts after its 1965 release by The Impressions. It’s been covered by scores of artists, including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and by Rod Stewart and the late Jeff Beck, who died last week. Early in their careers, in 1969, Beck and Stewart performed together in the Jeff Beck Group. Here’s Beck’s official music video for “People Get Ready” featuring Rod Stewart:

Jeff Beck was one of one as a guitarist. There was no one better. He had the mindset of a jazz musician playing blues rock. His guitar sound wasn’t anything like traditional jazz guitar. He didn’t cut his teeth playing the old jazz standards, but he could improvise something fresh every time. OTOH, Wrongo didn’t love Beck the recording artist.

Rod Stewart has a secret hobby; he builds model trains. He would take his trains on tour with him, requesting an extra room so he could work on them while staying in hotels. Stewart recently unveiled his 1,500 square-foot replica of post-war Chicago and New York railway systems that took him 23 years to build.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – October 2, 2022

Hurricane Ian should remind us of one thing: We’re all in this life together. It’s easy to let your partisan flag fly with “gotchas” since we’re talking about Florida.

We could be smug watching Republicans like Governor DeSantis, who happily stoked outrage about “government tyranny” over vaccines and masks, getting frustrated when his constituents fail to follow evacuation orders.

We could go for the schadenfreude when watching the up-by-your-bootstraps types in Florida line up for government assistance from FEMA. Or what was the best part? Watching DeSantis, whose entire MO is trolling Biden and the Democrats, happily accepting help from Dark Brandon and the federales.

JVL says it best:

“But here’s the thing: We’re not talking about debating points. We’re talking about human beings…. Who’ve had tragedy visited on them. And the only responses should be empathy, charity, and love.”

On to cartoons.

Uncle Sam does his job, regardless of politics:

Some say that stronger hurricanes aren’t an indication that the climate is changing:

Has DeSantis seen the light?

How to win elections:

The Former Guy gets inspiration for next time:

Putin now has fewer options:

Did hitting the asteroid give us any ideas?

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Tuesday Wake Up Call, Voter Fraud Edition – August 16, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Monsoon season, Sonoran Desert, Tucson, AZ –  August 2022 photo by Rene Martinez

The November mid-term election is 12 weeks away. Some Republicans who do not accept our country’s democratic tenets are focusing on getting elected in the battleground states in an effort to energize a future coup. From the WaPo:

“…in the six critical battlegrounds that ultimately decided the 2020 presidential contest, where Trump most fiercely contested the results…..Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, at least 54 winners out of 87 contests — more than 62% of nominees — have embraced the former president’s false claims.”

As an aside, reporters must stop using the term “election deniers”. It doesn’t convey what these Republicans believe. They know Trump lost, but they tried to steal the 2020 election anyway.

And they’re promising to steal the next one. These people call the government their “enemy”. Now, they’re calling for violence against the FBI. They say our elections can’t possibly be fair, yet they’re doing all they can to make them less fair.

There are many tools in the GOP tool kit to help a state create election-related chaos. They could decertify voting machines or block the electronic counting of ballots. They could empower their legislatures to determine how many of a presidential candidate’s votes are actually counted.

The GOP says that our local electoral processes and voting machines are highly suspect. In 2020 we saw Republican efforts to find voter fraud in several states, all of which failed. Still, in 2022, the GOP persists in saying there are voting machines that flipped votes in 2020 from Trump to Biden.

The gold standard for voting in America is hand-marked paper ballots. They leave a paper trail that is hard to challenge. Today states (including Connecticut where Wrongo votes) use digital scanners to read those hand-marked ballots. The machine tabulators can be checked before voting for accuracy and ballots can be re-scanned in random precincts afterwards to verify totals, along with hand counts.

Verified Voting a non-partisan firm that promotes the responsible use of technology in elections, rates the integrity of voting machines at the county level throughout the US. They have an interactive US map that allows anyone to check the quality of the voting machines in their county. Here’s a screenshot image of that interactive map:

You should go to the interactive map for greater detail. The green portion of the map represents the 69.2% of US registered voters that use highly reliable hand-marked paper ballots. The yellow portion of the map represents the 23.4% of our registered voters that use mostly reliable Ballot Marking Devices (BMD), with marked pre-printed ballots; some print summaries of voter selections, often with those selections encoded in barcodes or QR codes. Together, these account for 92.6% of America’s registered voters.

The red portion of the map represents the 7.4% of American voters who use a less-reliable direct recording electronic (DRE) voting system. DREs allow voters to record their selections directly into computer memory.

Despite what Republicans think, most of America can vote with total confidence that their voting machines are accurate, and that their votes will be counted accurately. So relax Republicans, election fraud just isn’t very possible in the US.

But there are plenty of other shenanigans that can be pulled at the local and state level. And that’s a concern given what the GOP is focusing on for the November mid-terms. They could take away voting rights by canceling voter registrations. They can close polling places or gerrymander more districts. The WaPo has a chart showing how close the GOP is to controlling the voting process in the six battleground states:

By weakening trust in our election system, Republicans are paving the way for America to become a one-party state led by an authoritarian strongman. They intend to take away the single and best power the people have, our vote. These Republicans aren’t election deniers, they’re anti-democracy. If they are elected, they will end democracy as we know it.

Time to wake up America! We can’t leave the vote-counting to people who won’t count all of our votes! America has a long tradition of subverting the voting process and denying millions of people the right to vote, and these Republicans want to take us right back to those days in our past. To stop that, they must be beaten in November’s mid-terms.

To help you wake up, watch, and listen to “Queen Bee” played by Taj Mahal and friends in this Playing For Change video, that features Ben Harper, Rosanne Cash, and many others from around the world.

The tune is from Taj Mahal’s 1997 album, “Señor Blues”, which won a Grammy. It’s an album that Wrongo highly recommends:

 

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DeSantis vs. Disney

The Daily Escape:

Sea glass, Provincetown, MA – April 2022 photo by Nancy Kaplan

Today we continue discussing the growing Republican culture wars, this time in Florida against Disney. NBC News reported:

“The Florida Senate passed a bill Wednesday that would dissolve the special taxing district that allows the Walt Disney Co. to self-govern in its theme park area.”

Walt Disney World has effectively operated as its own municipal government in central Florida since a 1967 state law established what’s called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, an area encompassing 25,000 acres near Orlando. The law grants Disney a wide range of authority, including the power to issue bonds and provide its own utilities and emergency services, such as fire protection.

That law is in large part what convinced Disney originally to come to Florida. It has since become the state’s largest private employer with 80,000 jobs.

On Wednesday, the Florida senate passed a bill that would dissolve all independent special districts established before 1968, including Reedy Creek. Lawmakers voted 23 to 16 in favor of the bill during a special session of the state Legislature.

This is part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) and the Republican-controlled  legislature‘s escalating culture war with Disney over the company’s opposition to recently passed legislation in Florida that Disney considers to be anti-gay. Disney’s leadership has criticized the legislation that prevents classroom discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in kindergarten through the third grade.

Disney later said it would pause making campaign donations in Florida and also said it hoped that the law would either be repealed or struck down by the courts.

Wrongo is old enough to remember when the GOP believed that corporations had free speech and should be pretty much immune from regulation. But it now seems that corporations can be harassed or investigated unless they fall in line with the goals of the Republican culture war.

Targeting Disney only became a thing after the company spoke out about the “don’t say gay” law. Charles Cooke in the National Review notes that:

“Until about a month ago, Walt Disney World’s legal status was not even a blip on the GOP’s radar. No Republicans were calling for it to be revisited….”

Cooke says that Florida’s legislature has had five opportunities over the past 50 years to remove Disney’s sweetheart deal and didn’t. But context is everything. After the DeSantis effort to punish Disney, the legislature piled on, pretending that it’s doing so out of a concern for “good government”.

The fun part is that Disney’s status is not unique. Florida has 1,844 special districts, of which 1,288, like Walt Disney World, are “independent.” Charlie Sykes at the Bulwark offers up examples of a few more of these districts:

  • The Villages (where Governor DeSantis announced his review of Disney’s status)
  • Orlando International Airport
  • The Daytona International Speedway

Wrongo isn’t defending Disney’s right to special treatment, despite he and Ms. Right having a granddaughter who works for Disney in CA.

Wrongo would be fine if Florida took away all special breaks from these large corporations.

The Disney special district is really a form of corporate welfare. And no Republican with serious national ambitions wants to be against corporate welfare. So instead, DeSantis tries punishing Disney as part of his red-hot culture war. If this move was really about good public policy, then Republicans would have done it through their regular legislative process. But that clearly wasn’t their intent.

Overlooked in the anti-Disney hype, was that this bill was attached to other legislation approved by the Florida senate, a Congressional redistricting map that eliminates two predominantly Black Congressional districts and tilts the balance of the Florida delegation even more to the Republicans. Democrats were especially critical of an amendment added Tuesday that requires all lawsuits challenging the redistricting map to be filed in Leon Circuit Court. This is an attempt to sidestep the federal court in Tallahassee where in the past, most election law cases have been challenged and found to be unconstitutional.

The new map is expected to boost Republicans’ current 16-11 Congressional advantage to 20–8. Republicans would likely own roughly 71% of the state’s Congressional seats in a state where Trump won with 51.2% of the vote in 2020. Florida also gained a seat during the most recent census.

The Party claiming to be against “Big Government” is using the government to punish a private company for permissible business decisions. As Heather Cox Richardson says:

“The Walt Disney Company delivers to the state more than $409 million in sales taxes for tickets alone, employs more than 80,000 Florida residents, and supports more than 400,000 more jobs. Today, the Miami Herald reported that repealing the company’s governing authority would raise taxes on families in the area by $2,200 each.”

Anyone else getting really tired of Republicans telling us we can’t say certain words, we can’t read certain books, we can’t teach certain things, or that we can’t talk about certain history? And why are they taking away our freedom to vote?

What’s Conservative about any of that?

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – January 23, 2022

The Dems need to build Biden back better before the mid-terms if they expect an outcome that’s different than what the polls are currently showing.

The question is how to do it. One thing that won’t be happening is support from the mainstream media for the makeover. There’s been a blizzard of over-the-top headlines such as the NYT’s, “Biden Can Still Rescue His Presidency,” or Time’s “How the Biden Administration Lost Its Way” and Axios’s “Biden’s Epic Failures.”

These headlines could say: “Biden Fails to Fix All of the World’s Problems in a year.”

What’s driving much of this “presidency in peril” coverage is Biden’s approval ratings. Some results are truly discouraging, while CNN’s poll of polls, released Thursday, found that 41% of Americans approve of the way Joe Biden is handling his job while 54% disapprove.

Still, Biden and the Dems need a mid-course correction. On to cartoons.

Can diplomacy solve the crisis in Ukraine?

The Senate failed to pass voting rights. Republicans wouldn’t help:

Republicans don’t want to look back one year, but they certainly don’t mind looking back at the 1950s:

The administration is sending rapid tests via the post office. Have they heard about Amazon?

Plenty of news this week about Trump and January 6. The dogs are gathering:

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Monday Wake Up Call – Remembering MLK, Jr.

The Daily Escape:

After an ice storm, Taos NM – January 2022 photo by Bob Benson

“Freedom without consequences is a myth. Our actions always have consequences. The question is: who will bear them?” – Seth Godin

The year 1968 was pivotal. In addition to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., it brought the Tet Offensive, student protests across the country, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the student and police riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention, Black Power salutes at the Olympics, and the triumph of Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy.

MLK, along with others in our churches and a few courageous politicians, came together to support the Big Idea that Separate was not Equal. MLK gave a voice to that Big Idea. His presence, power and persuasiveness drove our political process to an outcome in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that was completely unthinkable in 1954 when Brown vs. Board of Education was decided by the Supreme Court.

Wrongo participated in the Civil Rights movement from 1958 to 1962. He left active participation in the movement believing good ideas and a morally sound position would change our politics. He was wrong.

Legislation has recently passed in eight states that will restrict what students can be taught about our past. This is an effort to segregate certain subjects from our common history. These Republican states want to diminish or exclude the stories that speak to slavery, to Jim Crow, and to other moments in which America’s deepest shortcomings around the subject of race in America are told.

Wrongo wishes that this represented a minority of the Republican Party. But when Biden spoke in Atlanta, he said:

“I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

Dr. King had said that stripping the right to vote from Black southerners laid the groundwork for laws that further disadvantaged poor people, even across racial lines. Then as now, Southern legislatures justified limiting the franchise to vote with specious claims about electoral shenanigans.

Biden’s words set Republican teeth on edge. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that Biden:

“…called millions of Americans his domestic enemies…and that if you disagree with him, you’re George Wallace….If you don’t pass the laws he wants, you’re Bull Connor, and if you oppose giving Democrats untrammeled, one-party control of the country, well you’re Jefferson Davis.”

Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer tweeted:

“Now he says disagreeing w/him on voting laws means you’re a segregationist, like George Wallace or Bull Connor. How low can he go?”

The linkage between trying not to teach America’s true history with the censorious outrage shown by Republicans over Biden’s comments is clear. Biden said America needed to be on the side of voting rights.

That was Dr. King’s great struggle, and his great success.

But Republicans want to whitewash that history. They also condemn Biden’s efforts to tie today back to our undemocratic past. As Jelani Cobb says this week in the New Yorker:

“This holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., sees a nation embroiled in conflicts that would have looked numbingly familiar to him. As school curricula and online discourse threaten to narrow our understanding of both past and future, it’s more important than ever to take stock of our history and its consequences….

Time to wake up America! We are docile sheep heading back to the barn, the place where we will be shorn of our democracy, just as surely as wool is shorn from the sheep. The smoking guns are all around us, and yet, we seem hopelessly divided about what we should do to change course.

To help you wake up, let’s listen to Wrongo’s favorite MLK song, “Southern” by OMD from their 1986 album “The Pacific Age“. On April 3, 1968, in Memphis, King delivered his last speech, which we remember as his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech. He was assassinated the next day. OMD samples some of the content of that speech in “Southern”:

Although everyone knows the “I’ve been to the mountaintop” part of the speech, Wrongo thinks our focus should be on the following:

I want young men and young women, who are not alive today
But who will come into this world, with new privileges
And new opportunities
I want them to know and see that these new privileges and opportunities
Did not come without somebody suffering and sacrificing
For freedom is never given to anybody

Why focus on that part of the speech? One day down the road, and it will not be long, young people will have forgotten what MLK meant to America, or how whatever remains of their civil rights, came to be.

Or, how the 13th Amendment ending slavery came about, and why, 100 years later in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed, or how 48 years later, in June, 2013, the Roberts Court eviscerated it.

So, take the time to teach a child about why MLK is so important.

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Whose Side Are You On?

The Daily Escape:

Capitol Reef NP -December 2021 photo by Jonathan Vandervoorde

Shouldn’t we be on the side of democracy? Georgia’s Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock says yes. He spoke in the Senate on Tuesday, and what he said is consistent with Wrongo’s thinking.

Warnock asked why the Senate could suspend its rules in order to pass an increase in the debt ceiling by a simple majority but couldn’t do the same thing for something as critical to our democracy as voting rights. From Warnock:

“Before we left Washington last week, we in this chamber made a change in the Senate’s rules in order to push forward something that all of us think is important. We set the stage to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, and yet as we cast that vote to begin addressing the debt ceiling, this same chamber is allowing the ceiling of our democracy to crash in around us….Be very clear, last week we changed the rules of the Senate. To address another important issue, the economy. This is a step, a change in the Senate rules we haven’t been willing to take to save our broken democracy, but one that a bipartisan majority of this chamber thought was necessary in order to keep our economy strong.”

The Jan. 6 attempted coup and the many state anti-voting laws passed by Republicans subsequent to that, come from the same poisonous well: A growing anti-democratic movement of fellow travelers including American conservatives, Right-wing extremists, and political entrepreneurs on the Right who have made the Republican Party their political vehicle.

They’re close to winning in the 2022 mid-terms. If the Senate adjourns without acting on voter suppression, it will help them get there. Buzzfeed reports that in some states, Republicans are going door-to-door in order to “check” to make sure there aren’t any illegal voters in your home:

“Individual election deniers and grassroots groups are canvassing for election fraud in states…including New Hampshire, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Utah, and Nebraska.”

They’re targeting registered Democrat voters. It’s part of a broader effort by Trump supporters and Republican Party leaders to cast doubt on our elections going forward. In Colorado, a member of the Three Percenter militant group is helping lead the canvassing effort. According to the Colorado Times Recorder, that member suggested volunteers carry firearms to provide security for the group as they went door-to-door.

Let’s call this what it is: Voter intimidation on a multi-state scale. It’s a message that if you are a registered Democrat, the Trump cultists know who you are, and where you live. This intimidation should be illegal, but it’s not.

And it’s another part of the problem that the Senate needs to address right now.

The Democrats have what amounts to less-than-a-majority in the Senate in favor of suspending the filibuster rules for voting rights. In June, Majority Leader Schumer outsourced an effort to garner a filibuster-proof majority on voting rights to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WVA), but Manchin’s effort failed.

Despite that, Schumer was able to finesse the filibuster to act without Republican votes to increase the debt ceiling. He was also able to corral all Democratic Senators, including Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, who are on the record as being against any change in the filibuster rules.

But voting rights, the most fundamental of all Democratic principles, are being sacrificed to the crusty parliamentary rule that these same two Democrats have so far refused to consider. This week, Schumer appointed a group of Democratic senators, who lead the talks on voting rights legislation, to spearhead discussions with Joe Manchin about how to change the Senate rules. They met with Manchin on Tuesday.

It’s time for Sen. Schumer to wrestle Manchin and Sinema to the ground, and make them vote to suspend the filibuster rules a second time.

Barton Gellman, who wrote a recent Atlantic magazine article that Wrongo quoted last week, recently told Terry Gross of NPR:

“This is, I believe, a democratic emergency, and that without very strong and systematic pushback from protectors of democracy, we’re going to lose something that we can’t afford to lose about the way we run elections.”

We’re facing a crisis. Biden and all Democrats have to make this a “whose side are you on?” issue for Washington politicians and for voters everywhere.

Warnock has a powerful message. He’s the one Democrat willing to speak about the elephant in the room. Watch his speech:

 

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Freedom to Vote Act is Worth a Filibuster Exemption

The Daily Escape:

Indian Neck Beach, Wellfleet MA – October 2021 photo by Marilyn Cook

It’s been a little over a month since Wrongo wrote that the next 30 days would be make-or-break for the right to vote and for democracy itself. Well, times up. There haven’t been any votes on Sen. Manchin’s Freedom to Vote Act, or on Biden’s social policy and infrastructure bills that the Democrats continue to try to build consensus on.

Charles M. Blow in the NYT alerts us that the voting rights bill is supposed to be taken up today:

“Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, has indicated that he plans to schedule a vote for Wednesday to open debate on a new voting rights bill, the Freedom to Vote Act.”

Blow went on to say:

“This is a once in a generation moment, one pivotal to the very survival of the country as we know it.”

Indeed, without it, it’s unclear what the way forward will be for our democracy.

The bill is a compromise worked out by Sens. Manchin (D-WVA) and Klobachar (D-MN). It would set national standards for early voting, allow the use of more forms of voter identification, make Election Day a federal holiday and institute measures to counter voter suppression tactics.

In addition, it would force states to give voters the option to register on Election Day and offer safeguards against voter purges. It overhauls portions of the campaign finance system, prohibits partisan gerrymandering, and prevents the politicized removal of election officials.

The bill is unlikely to get the 60 votes needed to pass. Even assuming all 50 Democrats agree, it will need support from 10 Republicans to overcome a certain Republican filibuster. That seems unlikely to happen. BTW, the last time the voting rights act was up for renewal, it passed 98-0.

We’re probably looking a two failures: Sen. Manchin will probably fail to find the necessary 10 Republican votes, and then, the bill will fail to go to an up or down vote.

The real questions are whether Manchin and Schumer will then try to carve out an exception to the filibuster rules allowing for a simple majority to pass legislation that effects voting rights, and whether Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) will agree to support the exception. That’s what pro-democracy advocates are hoping to see.

Since it’s no secret that Democrats need Manchin’s and Sinema’s votes to get anything done, their frustration with both Senators is understandable. Wrongo gave money to Sinema’s Senatorial campaign, and he hopes that it wasn’t in vain.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has called the Dems voting reform effort “a solution in search of a problem,” driven by “coordinated lies about commonsense election laws that various states have passed.” But the Brennan Center notes that since January, “19 states have enacted 33 laws that will make it harder for Americans to vote.”

Does McConnell think these are examples of “commonsense election laws”?

When Trump runs again in 2024, unchecked voter suppression will give him a better chance of winning than he had last time. And Blow rightly points out that if the Republicans happened to be in the position the Democrats are in now, they wouldn’t bat an eye at eliminating the filibuster if it helped them further suppress voting on the federal level.

A final message from Blow:

“For Democrats, this voting rights bill is a top priority, but from now until something is passed, it should be the only priority…. But even if you have glistening infrastructure in a fascist state, you are still in a fascist state. If you get two years of community college free in a fascist state, you are still in a fascist state. If more people get broadband access, more people will be able to search for what it means to live in a fascist state.”

Without this bill, our democracy is in real peril. A few months ago, Schumer said he would pass voting rights by any means necessary, echoing Malcolm X.

Let’s see if he has what it takes to win in a divided Senate.

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The Continuing, Slow-Rolling Coup

The Daily Escape:

Stormwatchers II by Jamie Perry

There is a storm brewing. You can see it’s coming. It’s the danger our democracy faces from the Americans who would overturn our elections. After the Arizona recount found statistically zero difference with the officially certified 2020 vote, you would think that we could move past the Big Lie, and settle into no drama, mid-term elections in 2022, but that won’t be happening.

Several Republican-led states are conducting or threatening to conduct recounts in Democrat-leaning counties. They are still pushing both to undermine the 2020 presidential election results and change the way our future elections are run.

That effort to undermine elections has been fully embraced by the GOP and is gathering momentum at the state and county levels. Robert Kagan wrote in the WaPo on the dangers we face heading into the next few election cycles:

“Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.”

Read his whole article.

So, the failed Arizona recount hasn’t even been a speed bump for Republicans. MSNBC reported that Virginia Republican congressional candidate Jarome Bell went even further, tweeting:

“Audit all 50 states. Arrest all involved. Try all involved. Convict all involved. Execute all involved. #MaricopaCountyFraud.”

Really? Sounds harsh, but hey, that’s today’s Republican Party. Their only move is to threaten everyone with violence until we all shut up. Wrongo reminds us:

“…Reuters interviewed nine of the 15 declared Republican candidates for secretary of state in five battleground states  ̶  Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada….Only two of the nine candidates said that Biden won the election.”

Trump-lovers love conspiracies. They don’t trust the government. They don’t trust our election process. They don’t trust vaccine science. They believe Democrats are teaming up with Antifa to destroy all that Republicans hold dear. Their conspiracies always involve people who intend to harm them. That’s one big reason why they are continually arming themselves.

Kagan started his article with this sobering viewpoint:

“The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.”

The Big Lie is morphing into an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Kagan says the stage is set for chaos: Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to seize power.

Imagine if they’re armed.

The Eastman Memo, written by a conservative law professor, advised the Trump campaign in 2020 that Mike Pence could unilaterally overturn the election. Plan in hand, Trump urged Pence to reject the votes of the Electoral College, with the mob outside as the stick to compel Pence’s obedience. Pence tried to find a way to do Trump’s bidding, but in the end, he blinked.

Still, on Jan. 6, Trump had both a plan and a large violent crowd. That was a coup attempt, and he came very close to pulling it off. All that prevented it was a handful of state officials who showed courage and integrity, and the reluctance of a vice president to obey orders he believed were wrong.

It has always been theoretically possible to manipulate the voting rules to seize power. 2020 taught us that it’s now a real option, that with the right pieces in place, a coup can succeed. Trump is the first sitting president in American history to attempt to overturn a certified presidential election. Now, his Party has adopted his lies and are attempting to install on state and local levels, lackeys who support rigging election results.

The coup didn’t die, it rolls on, and the people who plotted it are still welcome inside “Beltway” society. Aside from the 600+ insurrectionists who broke into the Capitol, no one involved in planning and carrying out the coup has faced any legal consequences. They are still collecting their government pensions, their speaking fees, and their corporate consultancies. Some still appear on the Sunday pundit shows.

They launched what is tantamount to a civil war on our democracy, and that’s why Democrats should be focused on passing the Manchin-approved version of the voting rights bill as soon as possible. And by any means necessary.

After losing the White House and the Senate, Republicans are willing to rig voting in their favor. Protecting the integrity of America’s electoral system and the voting rights of its citizens should be priority #1, not because it helps Democrats, but because it will preserve our democracy.

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