Tag: GOP has to cheat to win

Republicans increasingly look to ballot initiatives as way to enact voting measures

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Voting rights advocates say they fear the efforts in three states will prove successful and spread to others where such initiatives are legally possible.

Republicans seeking to change state voting laws in the face of opposition from Democratic governors or unwilling legislatures are zeroing in on another path — enacting fresh restrictions via ballot initiatives.

In Michigan and Pennsylvania, key battlegrounds that President Joe Biden flipped back blue in 2020, as well as in Massachusetts, Republicans are at the beginning stages of a lengthy process to put proposed limits directly to the voters.

Voting rights advocates who connect the moves to the proliferation of restrictive voting laws advanced in states where the GOP enjoys total control say they fear those efforts will prove successful and spread to other states where such initiatives are legally possible. Continue reading.

A Republican official’s comment accidentally exposes the party’s ‘Snowflake Syndrome’: columnist

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A recent op-ed piece published by The Washington Post highlights the problem of Snowflake Syndrome among voters who cast ballots for former President Donald Trump. The author, Greg Sargent, notes that the current Republican agenda centers on the following: restricting voting rights, sowing doubt about the COVID-19 vaccine, and downplaying the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The problem is that there is no justification or substantial evidence to support any of their arguments regarding these initiatives. In fact, all are connected to false narratives and misinformation that has been, in some way, influenced by Trump. For example, the nationwide push for voting rights restrictions is supposedly an incentive to increase voters’ confidence in the integrity of the United States’ voting systems. But Sargent pushed back against that argument describing it as “bad-faith nonsense.”

“Broadly speaking,” Sargent wrote, “this “confidence” storyline is bad-faith nonsense: It’s being widely abused to keep alive the myth of the stolen election and to justify an unprecedented wave of efforts to disenfranchise the opposition’s voters. It is not designed to build confidence in our elections, but to further undermine it, for illicit purposes.” Continue reading.

Seventh Circuit Upholds Ruling Against Indiana’s Faulty Voter Roll Purges

Indiana’s purge law lacks safeguards to prevent removal of eligible voters; district court had issued summary judgment against the state.

Yesterday the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in League of Women Voters of Indiana v. Sullivan (previously called Indiana NAACP v. Lawson), rejecting the state of Indiana’s appeal of the lower court’s summary judgment order. The Court of Appeals found that Indiana’s purge law was inconsistent with the federal Motor Voter law, legislation that Congress passed in 1993 to increase voter registration across the country. While that federal law, the National Voter Registration Act, could be improved, it continues to block state legislation that undermines voting access.

Indiana’s purge law would have allowed the state to remove Indiana registrants from the list of eligible voters without direct communication from the voter and without following the notice and waiting period required by the National Voter Registration Act.

“We won again in this four-year-old lawsuit on behalf of Indiana’s voters,” said Barbara Bolling-Williams, president of the Indiana State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). “The laws Indiana passed in 2017 and 2020 risked improper purges of Indiana voters, particularly Black and brown voters. This decision is a win for democracy and racial justice.” Continue reading.

Former Trump official: GOP has become America’s biggest ‘national security threat’

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In an interview with MSNBC’s Jason Johnson, a former Department of Homeland Security official who served under former president Donald Trump claims that he believes the Republican Party has become a threat to the security of the country and warned what could happen if they reclaim the House and the Senate in the 2022 midterms.

According to Miles Taylor — a Republican who served as chief of staff at the DHS until 2019 before leaving in disgust — should the GOP take over the House, current House minority leader Kevin McCarthy will likely be Donald Trump’s puppet if he is handed the gavel by his party.

“The number one national security threat I’ve ever seen in my life to this country’s democracy is the party that I’m in, the Republican Party,” Taylor warned. “If my party retakes the House of Representatives in the next cycle, it’s going to become a haunted house. And the ghoul and the specter haunting that house is going to be Donald Trump.” Continue reading.

Biden calls passing voting legislation ‘a national imperative’ and castigates voting restrictions based on ‘a big lie’

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PHILADELPHIA — President Biden on Tuesday delivered his most forceful condemnation yet of the wave of voting restrictions proposed in Republican-led states nationwide — efforts the president argued are the biggest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.

Biden’s speech was an attempt to inject new life into flagging efforts to pass federal legislation addressing the issue. But while he intensified his explanation of the stakes, his speech did not include a call for the Senate to change the filibuster, which is seen by advocates as the best, and perhaps only, way to usher in the kinds of changes Biden is seeking.

At the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, in a room filled with images of Benjamin Franklin and quotes from Daniel Webster and Theodore Roosevelt, Biden compared the new laws to voter suppression by the Ku Klux Klan and to the Jim Crow-era laws that disenfranchised nearly all voters who were not White and male. He railed against laws that restrict access — calling them “raw and sustained election subversion” — and said that the 2022 midterm elections could highlight the damaging effects of the new laws. Continue reading.

Top Biden ally pleads with him to scrap filibuster for election reform

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Rep. Jim Clyburn said it’s time for the president to embrace more aggressive changes to the Senate rules.

After months of setbacks and gridlock on voting rights, one of President Joe Biden’s top allies in Congress is calling for him to support amending the Senate filibuster.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) told POLITICO Biden “should endorse” the idea of creating a carveout to the legislative filibuster in the Senate for legislation that applies to the Constitution. In effect, the reform would make it possible for Democrats to pass their sweeping elections reform bill and another bill reauthorizing key sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act with just Democratic support.

It’s a sentiment the congressman says he’s shared with White House counselor Steve Ricchetti and Office of Public Engagement Director Cedric Richmond as well. “I’ve even told that to the vice president,” Clyburn said. Continue reading.

Why There’s Even More Pressure Now on Congress to Pass a Voting Rights Bill

Congress faces growing pressure to pass new federal voting legislation in the wake of a Supreme Court decision last week that will make it more difficult to challenge a spate of new Republican-backed state-level voting restrictions. 

Democrats already wrestling with a loaded agenda on voting rights now face the additional complication of how to address the ruling, beyond a slew of stronglyworded statements. 

Congressional leaders say legislation to expand ballot access is their top priority in the aftermath of the 2020 election, but they have struggled to advance it. Last month, a sweeping package that would have set a new national baseline for election laws while overhauling campaign finance and government ethics provisions ran into a solid wall of Republican opposition in the closely divided Senate.  Continue reading.

Texas Republicans renew efforts to pass voting restrictions in special session

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Republican lawmakers in Texas on Thursday launched their second effort this year to pass new voting restrictions after Democrats blocked them in May with a dramatic walkout at the state Capitol.

The legislature convened Thursday for a special session called by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to enact a laundry list of conservative priorities, including a ban of transgender athletes on youth sports teams and beefed-up border security. But Abbott has made clear that “election integrity” is a top priority, and Republicans filed bills in the House and Senate that include many of the same voting provisions they sought to enact earlier in the year.

The new election proposals include a number of restrictions championed by former president Donald Trump. The measures would ban several election programs implemented last year to help people vote during the coronaviruspandemic, including drive-through voting and 24-hour and late-night voting. Voting rights advocates noted that voters of color used these programs disproportionately, meaning they could disproportionately feel the impact of the restrictions. Continue reading.

Civil rights leaders find meeting with WH ‘encouraging’ amidst voting rights battle

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President Biden met with civil rights leaders for almost two hours on Thursday as part of a broader effort by his administration to focus on voting rights, a key part of his agenda that has struggled to overcome the roadblock that is the evenly split Senate. 

The civil rights leaders emerged from the meeting, which included discussions on voting rights legislation and police reform, describing the U.S. as in a state of emergency. 

They cited restrictive voting laws imposed this year in states such as Georgia and Florida, and a recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld Arizona’s voting restrictions. Continue reading.

Republicans weigh ‘cracking’ cities to doom Democrats

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GOP officials from D.C. and the states are debating how aggressively to break up red-state cities to maximize the party’s advantage in redistricting.

Kentucky’s GOP congressional delegation entered the redistricting cycle with an unusual request for their state legislative counterparts: leave Democratic Rep. John Yarmuth alone.

The group, which includes Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, wants the state’s Republican supermajority to refrain from cracking Yarmuth’s Louisville-based district into three, even if that might deliver them control of all of Kentucky’s six House seats.

“It’s been my experience in studying history that when you get real cute, you end up in a lawsuit — and you lose it. And then the courts redraw the lines,” said Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.). “So my advice would be to keep Louisville blue.” Continue reading.