Way back when OJ Simpson was on trial for the murders of Ron and Nicole, and later on, when the Goldman family filed a civil suit — one of the most telling moments was when Simpson's lawyers attempted to slander Ron Goldman.
Goldman was a hero, trying to defend Nicole — if OJ was truly innocent, the lawyers would have held Ron up as a hero. But instead, by attacking his persona they implied that Ron deserved to be murdered. And likewise Nicole.
If there was truly one moment that convinced me of the despicable corruption of OJ Simpson, it was that moment — that appalling betrayal of common human decency.
Today ... we have seen a thematic replay of that same betrayal.
Mueller is a lifelong Republican. He was appointed by a Republican president. He is a former marine who served honorably. He is a lawyer with a well-deserved reputation for fairness. As a prosecutor, he has a well-deserved reputation for recognizing the limits of the law. Whether one agrees with his report or not, one still has to respect the credential of this public servant.
And yet, today — the Republican members of the House of Representatives attacked him on every front, as if he were the guilty one — and not the man he was charged to investigate. Instead of thanking him for his service, instead of respecting his credentials, they made him out to be their enemy.
In that, they were no better than OJ Simpson and his cutthroat lawyers attacking the reputation of the man that OJ murdered in a fit of rage. That a jury of idiots did not vote to convict is their failure. The evidence was there.
Likewise, the failure of the House Republicans to recognize that they have sold their souls to a steaming pile of corruption — history will not be kind to them. But I hope the voters will be even more unkind in another 466 days.
NORTH CAROLINA VOTER SUPPRESSION WRIT LARGE!
Just when the rest of the World is avoiding use of Social Security numbers....see the potential?
In case you want to know how voter suppression works, take a look at this. It's from the North Carolina State Board of Elections website. This is the way to get a special "Voter Photo ID." Seems straightforward enough.
But there is a catch.
In order to give them the last four digits of your SS#, obviously you would have to show them your Social Security card.
But in order to get a Social Security card, per the Social Security Administration website, you have to show them -- a photo ID.
Joseph Heller would be proud.
There are workarounds. If you have a birth certificate and proof of residency, you can get a non-operator North Carolina ID card. IF, of course, you are willing and able to wait in line for several hours at the North Carolina DMV. (You can make an appointment there, but the very friendly and helpful operator explained to me that you can't get an appointment until mid-September). If you have a non-operator North Carolina ID card -- which is what low-income folks who don't drive have -- then you cannot renew your card online, like drivers can, so no matter what they had better be ready to wait for a loooong time. As always, it's very expensive to be poor.
Now, someone CAN navigate through all of this: if they have the time, and the resources, and can figure out how to get off work in order to spend several hours in line, and get to the appropriate office (two of the North Carolina DMV offices in Durham do not issue drivers' licenses). And of course they need to make sure that they do it in time. It took me several days and a bunch of work to figure all of this out, and I have a good bit of book learnin'. Imagine a smart and committed but low-income and not very sophisticated person trying to do it. If they make a mistake, they have to start all over again. (By the way, if you need to order your birth certificate and get an ID card, it will probably cost around $60, which poor people usually have lying around the house).
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is voter suppression.
In Tennessee, a draconian new law aims to penalize groups engaging in voter registration campaigns. Civil rights advocates have rightly compared the legislation to the racist voter suppression policies of the Jim Crow era and are contesting the law’s constitutionality. Having experienced the effects of similar legislation in the field, we can say with confidence that if the Tennessee law is allowed to stand, it will undermine voter registration efforts and keep eligible voters off the rolls.
In 2018, in Dallas, Texas, and Cleveland, Ohio, our team conducted a randomized controlled trial of a new policy idea: offering voter registration to people when they file their income tax returns at Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) sites. The experiment was a success: the program doubled voter registration rates among the initially unregistered.
A less encouraging finding was the sheer disparity between our two test states. Each year, millions of Americans register to vote or update their voter registration thanks to the tireless efforts of civil society organizations that run voter registration tables, go door-to-door with voter registration forms, or otherwise remind potential voters to get registered in time to vote. But running a voter registration campaign that would be uncontroversial in other states is extremely difficult in Texas, because Texas has some of the most severe limits on voter registration of any state in the nation. It takes a simple procedure and makes it needlessly bureaucratic and extremely intimidating to both voters and volunteers, while doing absolutely nothing to make voter registration more secure.
When a tax filer came into a Cleveland VITA site, they were met by an intake volunteer and presented with a voter registration form along with their standard IRS paperwork. If an individual wished to register, they would then complete the voter registration form and return it to the intake volunteer, who mailed the registration forms to the county within ten business days. No intimidation, no penalties, no additional burden on VITA intake staff.
Now, here’s how a similar voter registration drive works in Texas:
To collect a voter registration form in Texas, you must be a “Volunteer Deputy Registrar,” or VDR. A VDR must be a U.S. citizen, meaning that legal, longtime residents cannot do voter registration in the state. In immigrant communities, this immensely reduces the pool of people who can assist in a voter registration drive.
Moreover, VDRs must receive special training from the county, and their certification to register voters only applies to residents of the county in which they are trained. Texas has an astonishing 254 counties. A VDR who completed their training in Fort Worth, which resides in Tarrant County, cannot register voters in Dallas, less than 30 minutes away. If a Dallas resident were to be in Fort Worth and come across a voter registration table, the VDR trained in Fort Worth could not accept their voter registration form. If we had been trying to run an experiment in multiple counties, it would have required an immense additional investment in volunteer recruitment and training for every county in which we wished to work—luckily, we happened to work in only one county.
Just taking the VDR class is a hurdle. For our experimental work, we were lucky that Dallas County makes these courses accessible. In other counties, voting rights expert Ari Berman reports, the training to become a VDR “typically occurs once a month, sometimes less.” And one’s status as a VDR expires “on December 31st of every even-numbered year,” meaning VDRs must recertify for every federal election.
Texas voter registration forms require only your name, address, date of birth, and an identification number, either from your Texas ID or the last four digits of your social security number. Check a box that you are a U.S. citizen and will be 18 on or before Election Day, affirm that you are a resident and not precluded from voting because of your criminal history or mental incapacity, sign and date, and you are ready to vote.
Or you would be, but Texas adds additional hoops and hurdles to the registration process. Each time a VDR receives a completed registration form, they must return a signed receipt to the applicant—plus send duplicates to the county. All completed forms must be submitted to the county by hand (not by mail) by 5pm on the fifth day (not the fifth business day) after the date they are received. Each VDR is issued materials including a certificate of appointment, handbook, applications, and a receipt book, all of which must be accounted for and returned no later than the second day after their two-year appointment is terminated. VDRs are also barred from photocopying the information on the voter registration form, even just the names and addresses—adding an extra obstacle for registration campaigns that would want to follow up with newly registered voters to remind them to turn out on Election Day.
An additional challenge is the lack of clarity about these time-consuming and irksome procedures. It took several phone calls, for instance, to get in touch with an official who could answer definitively whether the five-day submission deadline included the day of collection or started the following day. We also had to clarify arcane details like this: while weekend days count towards the five-day deadline, if the fifth day falls on a weekend, a VDR actually has until Monday to submit the voter registration form.
To be clear, these procedures do nothing to assure the security of the registration process. The training explicitly notes that VDRs “may not determine if the applicant is actually qualified to register to vote.” It is red tape, pure and simple. But it is red tape accompanied by bolded warnings like this: “Failure to deliver an application in a timely manner is a criminal offense.” Fearing lawsuits, some national voter registration groups have opted not to work in Texas at all.
What did all this bureaucratic nonsense mean for our experiment? First, the duplicate forms made voter registration too much of a burden to combine with the intake procedure at the tax preparation sites. So instead, we had to bring in additional volunteers to offer voter registration and ensure that they were trained as VDRs.
The hurdles to becoming a VDR make it more difficult to find language-appropriate registrars. This likely reduced the effectiveness of the experiment for Spanish speakers. Nearly half of the Filer Voter participants in Texas signed our Spanish consent form; however, the results of the experiment showed that the program was over three times more effective at registering those who signed in English.
And because the forms had to be delivered by hand to the county, rather than dropped in the mail, we had to develop a carpool system to collect and deliver the forms within the allotted five days. Finally, if we wanted to confirm our findings by repeating the experiment, as all good scientists would, every one of the VDRs who participated in Texas in 2018 would have to be recertified if they wished to collect voter registration forms in 2020.
We knew going into the experiment that Texas was going to be a “hard case” for our registration idea. In fact, a number of voter registration organizations suggested we pilot our program elsewhere. But there is little point testing a policy only in the venues where it is most likely to succeed. So, we invested heavily in our Texas experiment, including hiring local voting procedure experts to guide the project.
In the end, we did successfully register voters in Texas, though at a much lower rate than in Ohio. In Ohio, the Filer Voter program increased registration among the initially unregistered by 9.7 percentage points while in Texas there was only a 3.6 point increase. To be fair, we can’t say how much of the difference is due to the Texas laws; the Dallas population likely also had a higher percentage of non-citizens than Cleveland did. But what is clear is that registering voters in Texas was astronomically more difficult, and no more secure, than in Ohio.
The new law passed in Tennessee does not impose precisely the same requirements on voter registration groups as Texas, but the outlines are similar. For example, organizers in Tennessee who fail to follow the new rules could face extremely stiff penalties: fines of up to $10,000 and close to a year in jail.
It does not actually require new data or direct personal experience to predict the impact of these laws, because voter suppression has a long and terrible history in the United States. There is no reason that the United States should, in the 21st Century, be debating the basic procedures of democracy. But since this debate is occurring, we should be very clear. Based on our experience in Texas, it is obvious that these new rules in Tennessee will intimidate civic organizations and keep eligible voters away from the polls. It is anti-democratic, unjust and of a piece with America’s most shameful political traditions.
Justice Clarence Thomas. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Justice Thomas Just Handed Down an Opinion That Would Make It Legal to Kick Black People Off Juries Ian Millhiser, ThinkProgress Millhiser writes: "The Supreme Court just undid the work of a prosecutor whose astounding incompetence was matched only by his racism. This prosecutor somehow managed to try Curtis Flowers, an African American man from Mississippi, six times for the same murders - and he botched every single trial." READ MORE
Protesters rally in St. Louis, where Missouri's last abortion might close Friday unless a judge intervenes. (photo: Jeff Roberson/AP)
Elizabeth Warren: 'There is no justification for further escalating this crisis - we need to step back from the brink of war.' (photo: Paul Sancya/AP)
Democrats Call for Oversight After Trump's Iran Airstrikes Reversal Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK Pilkington writes: "Senior US Democrats led the outcry on Friday against Donald Trump's dramatic almost-launch of military action on Iran and the last-minute pullback - calling the crisis 'self-inflicted' by America and pressing for a swift de-escalation." READ MORE
The Sunrise Movement demonstration. (photo: Getty)
No movement at all at this point on donations. “Someone else” is not the answer. We cannot serve a million readers per month with 30 per day donating. Not fair, not possible.
Paul Krugman | Mar-a-Lago Comes for British Health Paul Krugman, The New York Times Krugman writes: "Never mind what was going on in Trump's mind. Let's focus instead on the fact that no American politician, Trump least of all, has any business giving other countries advice on health care." READ MORE
National Socialist Movement members demonstrate against the LGBT event Motor City Pride. (photo: Reuters)
LGBT Pride Marches in US Interrupted by Neo-Nazis and Stampede Tom Embury-Dennis, The Independent Embury-Dennis writes: "Separate LGBT+ pride marches in the US were disrupted on Saturday, one by a stampede triggered over fears of a shooting and another by one of America's biggest neo-Nazi groups." READ MORE
Gov. Gavin Newsom discusses his revised state budget in Sacramento on May 9. (photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)
California Will Give Health Coverage to Undocumented Young Adults Alexei Koseff, The San Francisco Chronicle Koseff writes: "California will make young undocumented adults eligible for the state's health care program for the poor and require all residents to carry health insurance under a budget deal unveiled Sunday." READ MORE
Jessica Stallings says she was 12 when her uncle started raping her. Despite DNA tests that proved incest, her uncle has maintained parental rights to their two children. (photo: Audra Melton/WP)
In Alabama Rapists Have Parental Rights Emily Wax-Thibodeaux, The Washington Post Wax-Thibodeaux writes: "When a young woman came to the Family Services of North Alabama office last year for help with trauma, saying she had been raped by her step-uncle when she was 15, rape crisis advocate Portia Shepherd heard something that 'killed me, shocked me.'" READ MORE
Historically, American law has carved out a 'clergy-penitent privilege' for the confessional that is similar to attorney-client privilege. (photo: Annie Spratt/Unsplash)
Michael Bloomberg. (photo: Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
Michael Bloomberg Unveils $500 Million Initiative to Help Shutter the Nation's Coal-Fired Plants Nick Visser, Grist Visser writes: "Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will donate $500 million to fund a new initiative to shut down every remaining coal-fired power plant in America by 2030, a high-powered effort to counter the pro-fossil fuel agenda emanating from the White House, his foundation said Thursday." READ MORE
