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Voter ID trial in Wisconsin

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A federal trial scheduled to begin Monday in Wisconsin could set the stage for legal challenges in a number of states to laws requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls.
Wisconsin’s photo voter ID law has been on hold since Dane County judge declared it unconstitutional soon after it passed in 2011.
Supporters say the law helps combat voter fraud. Opponents say it disenfranchises poor and minority voters who are less likely to have state-issued identification.
The trial involves a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of a now-deceased Wisconsin woman who was born at home in Jackson, Tenn., in 1935 and never received a birth certificate. Her daughter says that without a birth certificate, Bettye Jones had to fight for months to get a state ID to vote.

Here are the plaintiffs:

BETTYE JONES; LEAGUE OF UNITED LATIN AMERICAN CITIZENS (LULAC) OF WISCONSIN; CROSS LUTHERAN CHURCH; MILWAUKEE AREA LABOR COUNCIL, AFL-CIO; and WISCONSIN LEAGUE OF YOUNG VOTERS EDUCATION FUND

The complaint is that the law will burden African American and Latino voters disproportionately.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racially discriminatory voting practices, will have its day in court when a judge hears a challenge to Wisconsin’s voter ID law. The Advancement Project and pro bono counsel from the firm Arnold & Porter will argue against the requirement, implemented in 2011, on Nov. 4.
“After Shelby, Section 2 provides one of the last lines of defense against legislatures that would disenfranchise voters of color,” said Advancement Project co-director Penda Hair. “Yet we are witnessing the greatest assault on voting rights in decades.”
According to the Advancement Project, evidence shows that 28,000, or 16 percent, of African-Americans in the state do not have a driver’s license or state ID, compared to 9.3 percent of whites.

h/t commenter Omnes Omnibus

Voter ID trial in WisconsinPost + Comments (39)

Where is ACORN when you need it?

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Tuesday is Election Day and I’ll be following the results on the school bond issue I’ve been helping with here. I’ve been working primarily with two younger women – one is the head of the Young Republicans, a stay-at-home mom and school volunteer and the other is a young woman who was the volunteer coordinator for our local Obama effort in 2012.

The (mostly) Republicans on the bond committee approached me and asked me to help and I then asked the Obama volunteer, Amanda, for help. She was generous enough to agree and she’s put together all of the information we’ve collected canvassing so we have a list of “yes” voters for GOTV on election day. Amanda is a single mom, her son is 9 years old, and he attends the public school that will benefit most from the bond issue. She went from agreeing to help because I called her and begged her to taking this whole thing very personally and emailing me every 4 minutes with completely speculative “updates” on what she overheard at McDonalds or whatever.

I don’t have any sense of how it’s going to go. We have a mayoral race that is on the ballot so that might generate some turnout, but our mayoral races are non-partisan and we have a “weak mayor” structure where the city council has all of the power so it doesn’t matter who wins that, really. I voted for the incumbent because I like him personally. He canvassed my house yesterday. After I told him I already voted for him he asked me how I think the school bond will go and I told him I don’t know. Republicans here over-rate my political predicting abilities, generally, after they all thought Obama would lose in 2008 and then again in 2012 and I told them he would win, so the mayor asked in a pleading way, hoping for good news or thinking I was going to pull some ACORN magic out of my hat. He then said with real certainty “it will be close” in this sort of grim way, and maybe he’s right.

The unofficial count on local races and issues here are announced in the entry area of the courthouse, so people who are candidates or otherwise very invested in the results gather at the courthouse and wait for the Board of Elections member to arrive and read the vote totals. This count will be quick because they’re only tallying about 5000 votes. I don’t go as a general rule, and I probably won’t go this time either because the GOTV will be run out of my house and it’s unlikely I’m putting my shoes back on once I’m back at my house after the polls close.

What races are you watching?

This is a pretty good preview of state and local races one might want to watch.

Where is ACORN when you need it?Post + Comments (139)

Certain people have gone from “questionable” to “felonious” and I think you know who you are

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First, a recently enacted law in Arizona:

In the closing hours of this year’s legislative session, Republican lawmakers pushed through an overhaul of Arizona’s election laws.
It wasn’t an easy lift. Parts of the legislation were contained in separate bills that had stalled earlier in the session before getting folded into House Bill 2305 as adjournment approached. HB 2305 died on the Senate floor on the final night of the session as GOP supporters struggled to round up enough backing to get it across the finish line, but the legislation then came back to life via a reconsideration motion. It passed with the bare minimum 16 votes necessary when Senator Steve Pierce switched from opposing the bill to supporting it after the Prescott Republican was the target of an intense lobbying effort that included a phone call from National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Daniel Scarpinato.
Supporters of the bill say they are just trying to make a few administrative changes to make the voting process more efficient and eliminate the potential for fraud, but critics of the legislation say it’s aimed at suppressing voters—particularly the growing Latino slice of the electorate—and making it more difficult to get an initiative on the ballot.
The changes are drastic enough that a coalition of different groups—including the Arizona Democratic Party, Mi Familia Vota, the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood Arizona, and more than half a dozen union groups—have launched a referendum campaign to try to force a vote on the new law on the November 2014 ballot. The group must collect more than 86,000 valid signatures from voters before Sept. 12 in order to put the measure on hold until voters can decide whether it should stand.

This week:

On Tuesday, Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett (R) certified that a referendum on the law, known as HB 2305, will be on the ballot in next year’s general election.
HB 2305 passed earlier this year. Considered a voter suppression effort by opponents, the law would raise the bar for third parties getting on the ballot, add obstacles to citizens initiative efforts, and kick voters off that state’s permanent early voting list if they fail to vote in two consecutive elections, among other things. The referendum effort began just days after the law was signed by Gov. Jan Brewer (R) in June.
Robbie Sherwood, a spokesperson for the referendum effort, touted how quickly the signatures had been gathered.
But the fight may not be over. Barrett Marson, a spokesman for two political committees that support the law, told Tucson Weekly that his groups will go to court to try to invalidate some of the signatures collected.
“It’s still early in the process,” Marson said. “There are thousands of signatures gathered by circulators who have questionable backgrounds and residency issues. Actually, let me change the word questionable to felonious.”

These referendums on voting rights are a great idea. It’s an opportunity to put voters on notice that their rights are being narrowed and gives them a chance to do something about it without waiting for lawyers or a court.

This Arizona referendum is limited to election issues, but when we’re passing one petition for signatures we may as well pass two and doing that is a great way to link voting rights to other issues. Combining and connecting the voting rights referendum with something that has broad appeal (like an increase in the minimum wage, just throwing one possibility out there!) would be wonderful, because voting rights and issues that benefit working class people should be a natural fit, but haven’t necessarily been linked in the past. I don’t know if one can do that in Arizona – referendum rules vary from state to state – but if you’re gathering signatures anyway, who not link issues?

I saw this work in Ohio when we passed petitions to repeal Ohio’s union-busting law along with a petition to “stay” a new voter suppression law. People who may had never given a second thought to voting rights (rural white people who have a driver’s license) were all of a sudden enthusiastic about backing voting rights protections. We were able to connect voting rights to their labor issue and remind them that in a state like Ohio they rely on a coalition that includes people who are targeted by suppression efforts, even if they are not targeted.

Certain people have gone from “questionable” to “felonious” and I think you know who you arePost + Comments (11)

Judge Posner recants the recant on voter ID

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Says it was out of context. Read his explanation yourself and see what you think.

Here’s the reporter’s reaction:

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Mike SacksVerified account‏@MikeSacksHP
Aw Judge , no @huffpostlive #LegaleseIt link? Richard Posner: I Did Not Recant My Opinion on Voter ID @tnr http://feedly.com/k/1dfgdHG

Follow
Mike SacksVerified account‏@MikeSacksHP
Let’s go to the tape. Cut to 9:04: http://huff.lv/GJHJS0 via @HuffPostLive #LegaleseIt!

Judge Posner recants the recant on voter IDPost + Comments (63)

Depends on where you’re standing

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This is from commenter Phoenix Rising :

My wife had cancer in 1994. The small business where she worked at the time lost their insurance over it. She hasn’t been insured for 19 years. The only bright spot: the indications that your leukemia is back include full-body bruising and blood coming out your ears when you floss. At least we haven’t spent the decades wondering if something was lurking that regular followups might have found.
In January 2005 her mammogram showed a mass. We knew that we were going to lose everything, as the best-case outcome. My wife went outside after listening to the voicemail (left at 4:55pm on a Friday asking her to come back in Monday morning but not saying why…) and smoked her last cigarette.
By Monday we’d found the baseline film, by Wed. the radiologist that Planned Parenthood referred her to (paid by the YWCA program for uninsured women) had matched them up. The lump was scar tissue from a bee sting in childhood. She still hasn’t smoked again, but that was the longest weekend of my life.
This is what it means to be uninsured: the news that your 5 year old may lose a parent in elementary school takes a backseat to ‘we’re going to lose the house…unless my wife dies quickly’.
I have melanoma, the cancer that lurks. I’m now on a followup schedule that continues until I die of something else, or the lurking semi-solid cells that are statistically likely to be somewhere in my body hit a switch and start to multiply again.
Our business has never been big enough to offer insurance. We knew from 1994 that plans to cover fewer than 50 people wouldn’t pay out or would take the premiums and run if we ever made a claim, so we didn’t bother to offer the option to make Blue Cross richer in order to feel insured. Obviously this has affected recruiting at our company.
Two critical points:
-In the past 4 weeks, I have received 5 resumes from exactly the kind of people we would like to hire more of. All say they’ll be available around the 1st of the year. Demographically they’re very different from the resumes I’ve seen over 15 years in this business. They’re younger and looking for fewer hours doing something they already know is hard in ways they enjoy. They can afford to leave Big Ugly Death Star Corp. because they can buy health insurance.
-I was diagnosed in Sept. 2011. Because my state had already implemented the part of the ACA that requires insurance companies to continue policies at similar rates EVEN IF the individuals on them make claims–not something we expected, after our earlier experience–I’m still insured.
We’re going to buy an exchange plan that puts our family on one deductible and OOP max, for the first time ever, next week.
The technical issue we discovered with the web site was after applying: whoever coded the ‘citizenship for adopted people’ section of the eligibility database chose the wrong field type for the only way our government has to verify my kid lives here legally. So we have to talk to a manager with superpowers before we can choose among the 57 (!) options to get our family covered.
We can afford any of these plans. Fifty-seven choices. Sure, some of them aren’t appropriate for our family’s health profile (rare cancer=must have some out of network coverage; hearing aids for kid must be covered, etc.). Some of them cost more than I’d prefer to spend, once we add up the premium and deductible–which we anticipate meeting sometime in Feb. 2014, with the backlog of preventive and screening that Mrs Phoenix hasn’t had access to since before PET scans were invented.
But we get to buy insurance, in a market that has to take our money and has to pay for the health care we may need.
As a parent, a spouse and a small business owner, I would carry the Congresscritters and President who got us these solutions across a river of acid on my back to keep them.

I feel like this about community health centers, because I relied on one once for pregnancy care so I get Phoenix Rising’s devotion.

Speaking of community health centers, oh look! Here’s a GOP supporter of community health center funding under Obamacare, but only when he’s in Kansas, not when he’s in DC:

moran

(Moran breaking ground at an Obamacare-funded clinic in Kansas. Photo credit: Moran’s Facebook page)

Depends on where you’re standingPost + Comments (139)

Perspective

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This is from 2009:

They came for new teeth mostly, but also for blood pressure checks, mammograms, immunizations and acupuncture for pain. Neighboring South Los Angeles is a place where health care is scarce, and so when it was offered nearby, word got around.

For the second day in a row, thousands of people lined up on Wednesday — starting after midnight and snaking into the early hours — for free dental, medical and vision services, courtesy of a nonprofit group that more typically provides mobile health care for the rural poor.
Like a giant MASH unit, the floor of the Forum, the arena where Madonna once played four sold-out shows, housed aisle upon aisle of dental chairs, where drilling, cleaning and extracting took place in the open. A few cushions were duct-taped to a folding table in a coat closet, an examining room where Dr. Eugene Taw, a volunteer, saw patients.
When Remote Area Medical, the Tennessee-based organization running the event, decided to try its hand at large urban medical services, its principals thought Los Angeles would be a good place to start. But they were far from prepared for the outpouring of need. Set up for eight days of care, the group was already overwhelmed on the first day after allowing 1,500 people through the door, nearly 500 of whom had still not been served by day’s end and had to return in the wee hours Wednesday morning.
The enormous response to the free care was a stark corollary to the hundreds of Americans who have filled town-hall-style meetings throughout the country, angrily expressing their fear of the Obama administration’s proposed changes to the nation’s health care system.

PerspectivePost + Comments (100)

Texas voter ID law gets off to a great start, if the goal was to deny Latinos and women the right to vote

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In a new and exciting twist on voter suppression, women voters are targeted by Texas:

Texas’s new voter ID law got off to a rocky start this week as early voting began for state constitutional amendments. The law was previously blocked as discriminatory by the federal courts under the Voting Rights Act in 2012, until the Supreme Court invalidated Section 4 of the VRA in June. (The Department of Justice has filed suit against the law under Section 2 of the VRA.) Now we are seeing the disastrous ramifications of the Supreme Court’s decision.
Based on Texas’ own data, 600,000 to 800,000 registered voters don’t have the government-issued ID needed to cast a ballot, with Hispanics 46 to 120 percent more likely than whites to lack an ID. But a much larger segment of the electorate, particularly women, will be impacted by the requirement that a voter’s ID be “substantially similar” to their name on the voter registration rolls.
“What I have used for voter registration and for identification for the last 52 years was not sufficient yesterday when I went to vote,” 117th District Court Judge Sandra Watts said.
Watts has voted in every election for the last forty-nine years. The name on her driver’s license has remained the same for fifty-two years, and the address on her voter registration card or driver’s license hasn’t changed in more than two decades. So imagine her surprise when she was told by voting officials that she would have to sign a “voters affidavit” affirming she was who she said she was.
“Someone looked at that and said, ‘Well, they’re not the same,’” Watts said.
The difference? On the driver’s license, Judge Watts’s maiden name is her middle name. On her voter registration, it’s her actual middle name. That was enough under the new, more strict voter fraud law, to send up a red flag.
“This is the first time I have ever had a problem voting,” Watts said.
The disproportionate impact of the law on women voters could be a major factor in upcoming Texas elections, especially now that Wendy Davis is running for governor in 2014.
Getting a valid photo ID in Texas can be far more difficult than one assumes. To obtain one of the government-issued IDs now needed to vote, voters must first pay for underlying documents to confirm their identity, the cheapest option being a birth certificate for $22 (otherwise known as a “poll tax”); there are no DMV offices in eighty-one of 254 counties in the state, with some voters needing to travel up to 250 miles to the closest location. Counties with a significant Hispanic population are less likely to have a DMV office, while Hispanic residents in such counties are twice as likely as whites to not have the new voter ID (Hispanics in Texas are also twice as likely as whites to not have a car). “A law that forces poorer citizens to choose between their wages and their franchise unquestionably denies or abridges their right to vote,” a federal court wrote last year when it blocked the law.
Texas has set up mobile voter ID units in twenty counties to help people obtain an ID, but has issued new IDs to only twenty voters at the sites so far.

Is anyone surprised that Texas’s law also harms women voters, in addition to all the other targeted groups? To predict where voting restrictions are going, look to whatever group might be drifting away from the GOP. Gender gap? Check!

We’ve seen a judge and a justice admit they got a voter ID case completely wrong. What are the odds the conservatives on the SCOTUS admit they got the VRA case wrong?

Texas voter ID law gets off to a great start, if the goal was to deny Latinos and women the right to votePost + Comments (108)

A fraudulent vote is an outrage, but a vote denied is a trifle

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Some voters are more important than others:

Two weeks ago, Richard Posner, one of the most respected and iconoclastic federal judges in the country, startled the legal world by publicly stating that he’d made a mistake in voting to uphold a 2005 voter-ID law out of Indiana, and that if he had properly understood the abuse of such laws, the case “would have been decided differently.”
For the past ten days, the debate over Judge Posner’s comments has raged on, even drawing a response from a former Supreme Court justice.
Judge Posner claimed, during an Oct. 11 interview with HuffPost Live, that at the time of the ruling, he “did not have enough information … about the abuse of voter identification laws” to strike down the Indiana statute. But he also said the dissenting judge on the panel, Terence Evans, had gotten it “right” when he wrote that the law was “a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout” by certain voters who tended to vote Democratic. (It was passed on a straight party-line vote by a Republican-controlled legislature.)
Last Thursday, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens sounded several of the same notes, telling the Wall Street Journal that while he “isn’t a fan of voter ID,” his own 2008 opinion upholding Judge Posner’s ruling was correct — given the information available at the time. Incidentally, Justice David Souter dissented for roughly the same reasons as Judge Evans, and Justice Stevens now says that “as a matter of history,” Justice Souter “was dead right.”
In other words, both the Seventh Circuit and the Supreme Court got the balance of burdens wrong, as Indiana University law professor Fran Quigley rightly noted. Given that voting is a fundamental right, Quigley wrote, “the burden should have been on the State of Indiana to prove the law was necessary, not the challengers to prove how it would trigger abuse.”
Judge Evans put it more pungently in his 2007 dissent, saying the law was effectively using “a sledgehammer to hit either a real or imaginary fly on a glass coffee table.”
Rather than acknowledge this reality, Judge Posner’s original opinion dismissed the importance of the voters’ claims, contending that since no election gets decided by a single vote, the “benefits of voting to the individual voter are elusive.”

I’ve written about this twice before and some commenters (understandably angry) said that it doesn’t matter what Posner (and Stevens) say now because the deed is done.

It does matter, because we’re finally reaching the heart of this dispute. The conservative view on voting never made any sense. Voting is so unimportant that it doesn’t matter if people (here and there, whatever) are wrongfully disenfranchised AND so important that we need ever-increasing restrictions to “fight fraud.”

If one fraudulent vote is such an insult to the system that even the chance of that occurring justifies more and more restrictions, then one wrongfully disenfranchised voter is also vitally important and should justify protections. They can’t have it both ways, and they didn’t. They had it one way. Their way.

Their votes are important and can’t be “diluted” by the rest of you riffraff and their faith in the validity of elections is central and can’t be threatened even in the abstract, but your vote or your faith in the validity of elections when voters are disenfranchised? Get over it.

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Ohio expands Medicaid to…low-wealth people

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I was confident this would eventually happen, because Ohio has a lot of uninsured working class people and providers want to get paid.

Huge blow for the Tea Party in Ohio, though. They have a single issue and that issue is opposition to Obamacare. I think they should immediately shut down the state government if they haven’t done so already:

A little known budgetary panel today voted 5-2 to accept $2.56 billion in federal funds to pay for the controversial expansion of the federal-state health insurance of last resort.
Two Republicans joined the panel’s two Democrats and Gov. John Kasich’s appointed chairman to do what the 132-member General assembly would not — expand eligibility for Medicaid to some 275,000 additional Ohioans.
But the maneuver is expected to draw a legal challenge.
Mr. McGregor, a moderate Republican known to occasionally break with his caucus, voted “yes,” joining with Sen. Chris Widener (R., Springfield), Rep. Chris Redfern (D., Catawba Island), Sen. Tom Sawyer (D., Akron), and Mr. Kasich’s board chairman, Randy Cole.
Mr. McClain, whose district stretches as far north as Seneca County, joined Sen. Bill Coley (R., West Chester) in the minority.
“Our members want to seriously quicken the pace of a series of bills that relate to Medicaid reforms and improving the opportunities for low-wealth and struggling citizens to move up and off of having a need for Medicaid,” Mr. McCain said.

“Low-wealth”? What is this new phrase? Is it a way not to give them credit for working?

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Judge Posner’s admission, Round Two

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We talked about Judge Posner’s admission that he made a mistake in the Indiana voter ID case – that case cleared the way for the voter suppression efforts we’re now seeing all over the country.

Posner’s admitting a mistake is a big deal in voting rights circles because he’s a very high-profile conservative and his owning up takes away one more fig leaf for these laws. However, Posner blamed the advocate in the case for not presenting enough information. The lawyer who argued the case wrote this in response:

As the lawyer who argued the constitutional challenge to the Indiana Voter ID law in the Supreme Court in 2008, I was both fascinated and pleased to hear that Judge Richard Posner – the author of the Seventh Circuit majority opinion affirmed by the Supreme Courtin Crawford v. Marion County Elections Board – has now publicly stated that he was wrong. It is refreshing, if not unprecedented, for a jurist to admit error on such a major case.

I was a little less pleased to see that he attempted to excuse his error by blaming the parties for not providing sufficient information to the court. As he put it in an interview quoted in the New York Times, weren’t given the information that would enable that balance to be struck between preventing fraud and protecting voters’ rights.” Really? The information provided was enough for the late Judge Terence Evans, dissenting from Judge Posner’s decision, to say quite accurately: “Let’s not beat around the bush: The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by folks believed to skew Democratic.”

There had never been a single known incident of in-person voter impersonation fraud in the history of Indiana and there have been precious few nationally – yet the Indiana law targeted only in-person voting. The law was passed immediately after Republicans took complete control of the legislature and governorship of the State of Indiana.
Every Republican legislator supported the law, while every Democratic legislator opposed it.

Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, the primary supporter of the bill, himself stated that there are certain “groups of voters for whom compliance with [the Voter ID law] may be difficult” because they are “registered voters who do not possess photo identification; who may have difficulty understanding what the new law requires of them; or who do not have the means necessary obtain photo identification.” As examples he mentioned “elderly voters, indigent voters, voters with disabilities, first-time voters, [and] re-enfranchised ex-felons.” Moreover, the district court had conservatively estimated that there were 43,000 voting-age Indianans without a state-issued driver’s license or identification card, and that nearly three-quarters of them were in Marion County, which includes Indianapolis. In other words, the persons most likely to be affected were poor and minority residents in the state’s largest city, who tended to vote Democratic and lived in a city that was trending Democratic.

And by the time of the Seventh Circuit ruling, the facts also showed that following passage of the Voter ID law, voter turnout in Marion County in the 2006 midterm general election had fallen significantly, relative to turnout in the rest of the state, as compared to the 2002 midterm general election that preceded the passage of the Voter ID law. In 2002 Marion County turnout was only three percentage points lower than turnout in the rest of the state. In 2006, the gap rose to eight percentage points.

But the unfortunate approval of the Indiana law that the Seventh Circuit provided cannot fairly be blamed on how the case was litigated. As Judge Posner now recognizes, voter ID laws are “widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention.” But Judge Posner’s dissenting colleagues recognized that all along.

Wrongfully denying people the right to vote creates a real conundrum. The targeted voters can’t throw out the politicians who passed the laws because they can’t vote as a result of the laws. In that way, voting laws and restrictions are unlike other legislation, say, a law like Obamacare.

We really can’t allow elected politicians to put in election laws that protect them from the political repercussions of the election laws they put in.

On the other hand, this might be another dumb strategy. The GOP voter suppression efforts in 2012 drove up turnout among Democrats. Florida voters were downright inspiring in their absolute determination to get around the mix of incompetence and malice with which their state chose to administer an election.

Judge Posner’s admission, Round TwoPost + Comments (97)

We’re all just props on Sean Hannity’s set

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Great piece of real reporting that is also entertaining:

I happened to turn on the Hannity show on Fox News last Friday evening. “Average Americans are feeling the pain of Obamacare and the healthcare overhaul train wreck,” Hannity announced, “and six of them are here tonight to tell us their stories.” Three married couples were neatly arranged in his studio, the wives seated and the men standing behind them, like game show contestants.
As Hannity called on each of them, the guests recounted their “Obamacare” horror stories: canceled policies, premium hikes, restrictions on the freedom to see a doctor of their choice, financial burdens upon their small businesses and so on.
“These are the stories that the media refuses to cover,” Hannity interjected.
But none of it smelled right to me. Nothing these folks were saying jibed with the basic facts of the Affordable Care Act as I understand them. I understand them fairly well; I have worked as a senior adviser to a governor and helped him deal with the new federal rules.
I decided to hit the pavement. I tracked down Hannity’s guests, one by one, and did my own telephone interviews with them.
First I spoke with Paul Cox of Leicester, N.C. He and his wife Michelle had lamented to Hannity that because of Obamacare, they can’t grow their construction business and they have kept their employees below a certain number of hours, so that they are part-timers.
Obamacare has no effect on businesses with 49 employees or less. But in our brief conversation on the phone, Paul revealed that he has only four employees. Why the cutback on his workforce? “Well,” he said, “I haven’t been forced to do so, it’s just that I’ve chosen to do so. I have to deal with increased costs.” What costs? And how, I asked him, is any of it due to Obamacare? There was a long pause, after which he said he’d call me back. He never did.

They’re all like that, so go read the rest.

Eric Stern lives in Helena, Montana. He was senior counsel to Brian Schweitzer, former Governor.

A couple of weeks ago I was picking up free mulch at the town recycling center. A landscaper I know, Brian, was also there. He told me he had to buy health insurance for his employees “by October 1st”.

Brian doesn’t do any landscaping for me but he does plow the law office parking lot in the winter, and he has at most, in the summer, maybe ten employees. I think he has “zero” employees in the winter because he personally plows my parking lot, alone. I told him “you don’t have to buy anything for your employees by October 1st, or ever” and we left it at that, but if we’re wondering where the “job killer” belief is coming from, well, we have a partial answer.

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Judge Posner was wrong

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In response to Mike Sacks’s questions about whether Judge Posner and the 7th circuit got it wrong in Crawford case, the one upholding Indiana’s tough voter id law against constitutional challenge:

“Yes. Absolutely. And the problem is that there hadn’t been that much activity with voter identification. And … maybe we should have been more imaginative… we…. weren’t really given strong indications that requiring additional voter identification would actually disfranchise people entitled to vote. There was a dissenting judge, Judge Evans, since deceased, and I think he is right. But at the time I thought what we were doing was right.

It is interesting that the majority opinion was written by Justice Stevens, who is very liberal, more liberal than I was or am…. But I think we did not have enough information. And of course it illustrates the basic problem that I emphasize in book. We judges and lawyers, we don’t know enough about the subject matters that we regulate, right? And that if the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.”

Of course, a lot has happened since Crawford. Many more states added voting restrictions and Justice Roberts stripped out protections that we had in the Voting Rights Act. Now have a new tactic directed at Latinos where we may have first and second- class voters.

I disagree with Judge Posner on his diagnosis of the problem. I don’t think it was a lack of subject matter knowledge, really – a lack of imagination comes closer. I think it’s a lack of interaction with a broad cross-section of people on a daily basis. The municipal court judge across the street is no expert on election process, but I think if I asked him “in your experience, do poor people who move a lot and lack reliable transportation have trouble producing valid photo ID?” he would say “yes.” He would go into it knowing that. Not everyone has a bank account and a driver’s license, and there is a huge group of people who will never, ever board an airplane. They should be able to vote without navigating an ever-changing thicket of laws.

via: Election Law Blog

Judge Posner was wrongPost + Comments (28)

“Mostly what we did was pray and sing.”

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The Moral Monday protestors who were arrested were offered a deal, which many of them didn’t take:

Although I have never met Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby, according to news reports he has kindly offered me a deal. To avoid Wake County’s mounting court costs, he wants me to forgo my court date Monday and instead perform 25 hours of community service at an agency of my choice. Then my record would be wiped clean.
You see, on May 6, I was arrested in front of the appropriately colored golden doors of the N.C. General Assembly chambers. I was charged with three misdemeanors: failing to disperse when ordered to by the chief of the Capitol Police, illegally assembling with three or more people and singing, shouting and waving a placard. More than 900 other people decided to join me in the pokey. If all of us Moral Monday arrestees go to trial, the Wake County Courthouse will be a very busy place for the next several years.
I am not going to accept his nice offer as I did nothing wrong. I did not resist arrest, and the legislature continued its sessions without interruption. All that we protesters did was shine a light in the darkness of the actions of Gov. Pat McCrory, Speaker Thom Tillis and Senate President Phil Berger.

It’s good they didn’t take the deal, because the testimony at trial has been interesting:

North Carolina police covertly spied on protesters who were part of the widespread ‘Moral Monday’ demonstrations that shook the state this summer, according to testimony given at a trial for a protester who was arrested in an act of civil disobedience.
At the hearing of Saladin Muammad, a U.S. Army veteran and labor activist arrested on May 13 while at a Moral Monday protest, General Assembly Police Chief Jeff Weaver testified that he received advanced intelligence reports from officers about protesters’ plans ahead of events in which arrests were made.
Deck-Brown told AP over the phone that a plain-clothes officer attended two meetings at the Davie Street Presbyterian Church on May 6 and May 13 at the height of the Moral Monday protests.
“The purpose of the officer’s presence was to determine how many people were expecting to be arrested to allow the department to gauge the sufficiency of the logistical support, such as transport vehicles, available at the Legislative Building,” Deck-Brown told AP.
As Weaver testified that his department had targeted “anarchists” in the region and collected intelligence on them, there was “a murmur of disbelief among the many lawyers attending the Wake County District Court hearing,” the News & Observer reports.
Weaver said his officers, who worked with Raleigh city police, scanned the many Moral Monday rallies for who they believed might be anarchists.
State NAACP president Rev. William Barber said that news of the Raleigh police behavior was concerning. “It’s not like we were planning a bank heist,” Barber said after learning of the surveillance. “Mostly what we did was pray and sing.”

Art Pope is a wealthy person who purchased a political appointment to run the State of North Carolina. Mr. Pope early on developed an extensive database on the protestors, so I’m not clear why police had to spy on them.

Here’s a thought experiment. What if this were happening to members of the Tea Party? Full-bore national scandal with 24/7 media coverage? Some political speech is more equal than others, I guess.

Remember the African-American college student North Carolina county officials tried to keep off the ballot?

He won.

“Mostly what we did was pray and sing.”Post + Comments (64)

The entire country is now being held hostage to protect a single House member

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I don’t know: does it get more idiotic, insular and out of touch than this?

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said Sunday that no Senate Republicans would vote to advance a government spending/debt-limit increase bill that replaces the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration, which Senate Democrats are reportedly considering.
Graham suggested that such a deal would damage House Speaker John Boehner’s position by putting pressure on him to pass a bill with significant Democratic votes.
“Here’s what I’m worried about a deal coming out of the Senate, that a majority of Republicans can’t vote for in the House, that really does compromise Speaker Boehner’s leadership,” Graham said. “And after all this mess is over, do we really want to compromise John Boehner as leader of the House? I don’t think so.”

That’s what he’s worried about. John Boehner’s position. I can see why! Boehner’s leadership has been so outstanding since 2010!

All Americans should rally ’round a single House member. The fate of the tens of millions of people who are not John Boehner hinges on whether he keeps his job. Who among us isn’t willing to sacrifice for John Boehner and the Republican Party?

The Hastert Rule? Of primary and fundamental importance to most Americans, don’t you think?

Let’s just call this what it is. Conservatives fucked up, big time, and they’re now demanding that all of us take a hit to protect their sorry, pampered asses.

The entire country is now being held hostage to protect a single House memberPost + Comments (148)