Category Archives: Commentary

Court Eviscerates Barr Attempt to Whitewash Mueller Report

Leave a reply

Federal District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson yesterday issued a 35-page opinion (exclusive of attachments) rejecting the claims of the Department of Justice that it can withhold  a memorandum behind then-Attorney General Barr’s attempt to whitewash the Mueller Report.  Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington v. U.S. Department Of Justice,  Civil Action No. 19-1552 (DC DC May3, 2021). [Note: bolding of text is mine]

You may recall that, as brilliantly reported by Judge Jackson, and at the risk of giving away the conclusion,

 On Friday, March 22, 2019, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III delivered his Report of the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election to the then-Attorney General of the United States, William P. Barr.

But the Attorney General did not share it with anyone else.

Instead, before the weekend was over, he sent a letter to congressional leaders purporting to “summarize the principal conclusions” set out in the Report, compressing the approximately 200 highly detailed and painstakingly footnoted pages of Volume I – which discusses the Russian government’s interference in the election and any links or coordination with the Trump campaign – and the almost 200 equally detailed pages of Volume II – which concerns acts taken by then- President Trump in connection with the investigation – into less than four pages. The letter asserted that the Special Counsel “did not draw a conclusion – one way or the other – as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction,” and it went on to announce the Attorney General’s own opinion that “the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

The President then declared himself to have been fully exonerated.

The Attorney General’s characterization of what he’d hardly had time to skim, much less, study closely, prompted an immediate reaction, as politicians and pundits took to their microphones and Twitter feeds to decry what they feared was an attempt to hide the ball.

When, almost a month later, Barr presented the Mueller Report to Congress, “He asserted that he and the Deputy Attorney General reached the conclusion he had announced in the March 24 letter “in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel and other Department lawyers.” CREW immediately filed Freedom of Information Act requests for any documents related to those consultations. Predictably, DOJ resisted, citing exemptions from disclosure based on “deliberative process” and “attorney-client privilege.”

At issue then before the Court were two memoranda to the Attorney General. The DOJ justification for withholding the first one, the Judge noted, was poor, but the Judge conducted an in camera [private, in chambers] review of the document and gave DOJ a helping hand:

there was a particular, immediate decision under review to which the document pertained, that it also addressed another specific issue that was likely to arise as a consequence of the determination made with respect to the first, and that the entire memorandum was deliberative with respect to those decisions.

Judge Berman therefore held that document need not be disclosed to CREW.

The other document, however, was another cup of joe entirely. It was dated just two days after Mueller gave Barr the report and “specifically addresses the subject matter of the letter transmitted to Congress.” Most of the document is redacted in the Judge’s opinion but she also conducted, over DOJ’s strenuous objections, an in camerareview of that document.

Noting first CREW’s objections to the timeline represented by DOJ attorneys:

DOJ’s . . . arguments rest on the demonstrably false proposition that the memo was submitted to the Attorney General to assist him in making a legitimate decision on whether to initiate or decline prosecution of the President for obstructing justice . . . . [H]owever, the Special Counsel already had made final prosecutorial judgments and the time for the Attorney General to challenge those judgments had passed. Whatever the contents of the March 24, 2019 OLC memo, it was not part of a deliberation about whether or not to prosecute the President….

The absence of a pending decision for the Attorney General to make necessarily means the memo did not make a recommendation or express an opinion on a legitimate legal or policy matter. Instead, it was part of a larger campaign initiated by Attorney General Barr to undermine the Special Counsel’s report and rehabilitate the President . . . .”

The Judge concluded:

the redacted portions of Section I reveal that both the authors and the recipient of the memorandum had a shared understanding concerning whether prosecuting the President was a matter to be considered at all. In other words, the review of the document reveals that the Attorney General was not then engaged in making a decision about whether the President should be charged with obstruction of justice; the fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given.

In a footnote, most of which is redacted, the Judge noted, “DOJ made a strategic decision to pretend as if the first portion of the memorandum was not there.” Ooof.

Similarly, Judge Jackson later observed,

the in camera review of the document, which DOJ strongly resisted …. raises serious questions about how the Department of Justice could make this series of representations to a court in support of its 2020 motion for summary judgment

and,

summary judgment may be granted on the basis of agency affidavits in FOIA cases, when “they are not called into question by contradictory evidence in the record or by evidence of agency bad faith.” … But here, we have both.

Noting a previous court opinion (the EPIC case) that found,

The speed by which Attorney General Barr released to the public the summary of Special Counsel Mueller’s principal conclusions, coupled with the fact that Attorney General Barr failed to provide a thorough representation of the findings set forth in the Mueller Report, causes the Court to question whether Attorney General Barr’s intent was to create a one-sided narrative about the Mueller Report – a narrative that is clearly in some respects substantively at odds with the redacted version of the Mueller Report.

Judge Jackson found,

the [DOJ] affidavits are so inconsistent with evidence in the record, they are not worthy of credence.

and,

the suspicions voiced by the judge in EPIC and the plaintiff here were well-founded, and that not only was the Attorney General being disingenuous then, but DOJ has been disingenuous to this Court with respect to the existence of a decision-making process that should be shielded by the deliberative process privilege. The agency’s redactions and incomplete explanations obfuscate the true purpose of the memorandum, and the excised portions belie the notion that it fell to the Attorney General to make a prosecution decision or that any such decision was on the table at any time.

and,

A close review of the communications reveals that the March 24 letter to Congress describing the Special Counsel’s report, which assesses the strength of an obstruction-of-justice case, and the “predecisional” March 24 memorandum advising the Attorney General that [redacted text] the evidence does not support a prosecution, are being written by the very same people at the very same time.

As to the claim of attorney-client privilege, Judge Jackson was equally incisive and for similar reasons:

… since the memorandum was being written at the same time and by the same people who were drafting the Attorney General’s letter to Congress setting forth his views on the basis for a prosecution, and the record reflects that the priority was to get the letter completed first … one simply cannot credit the declarant’s statement that the Attorney General made the “decision” he announced based on the advice the memo contains.

Finally,

The Court emphasizes that its decision turns upon the application of well-settled legal principles to a unique set of circumstances that include the misleading and incomplete explanations offered by the agency, the contemporaneous materials in the record, and the variance between the Special Counsel’s report and the Attorney General’s summary.

These devastating (for the DOJ attorneys) findings confirm the suspicions that I and many other expressed at the time that the fix was in at the Barr Justice Department and that Barr was acting more as personal counsel to Trump than doing his job as Attorney General of the United States.

Judge Jackson gave DOJ until May 17 to move for a stay pending appeal, but it is unlikely that AG Merrick Garland is going to do anything to resist the force of Judge Jackson’s definitive analysis. Stay tuned. The release of an unredacted version of the Judge’s opinion will be an explosive eye-opener about the extent of corruption in the Trump-Barr Justice Department.

 

Faux Election Integrity Fever Identified in Texas & Florida

Leave a reply

Like coronavirus, “Faux Election Integrity Fever” (hereafter “FEIF 2021”) moves quickly across state lines and attacks Republicans with a vengeance. In this case the evidence indicates that Georgia’s sudden post-election awakening to the realities of demographic change and resistance to racism (see https://bit.ly/3njQqbC and https://bit.ly/3aGt0rQ) has morphed into a collection of proposed voter suppression legislation in Texas and Florida.

The odd thing is that Trump won 2020 Texas handily and the state’s two Republican senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, are among Trump’s most devoted sycophants. Cruz in particular is an avid member of the Sedition Caucus that voted to overturn the 2020 election and hand it to Donald Trump as, in effect, Dictator of the United States. So what is going on with the Texas variant to FEIF 2021?

Trump also won Florida — by more than 370,000 votes, split largeyn,ly by urban (Biden) and non-urban (Trump) preferences. Florida also sports two Trump shills in Senators Rubio and Rick Scott.

Disclosure: I am relying on published reports regarding the content of the legislation that, based on past experience, are highly reliable sources for such information. Texas GOP Targets Access for City Voters [print headline 4/25/21] https://nyti.ms/3gls1vc and Florida Legislature OKs Bill That Limits Voting By Mail, Ballot Drop Boxes, https://n.pr/2RgSnte 

The NY Times online report regarding Texas notes:

Republicans Target Voter Access in Texas Cities, but Not Rural Areas

In Houston, election officials found creative ways to help a struggling and diverse work force vote in a pandemic. Record turnout resulted. Now the G.O.P. is targeting those very measures.

The NPR report indicates many of the Florida provisions are similar to those recently adopted in Georgia.

Defenders of these bills argue that they include some provisions that make voting easier and more secure. The problem is that there are other provisions that either make voting harder or create the danger that Republicans, motivated as they have shown regarding the 2020 election to overturn important election losses, will use the tools contained in the legislation to simply override the voters’ choices in the future. This is not fantasy.

Given that (1) there is no credible evidence of voter fraud in any of the states where Trump challenges were mounted, (2) these states all had highly detailed vote regulatory laws in place before the new legislation, (3) these are states where 2020 turnout set records, creating (4) reasonable doubts that the Republican-controlled legislatures’ real goal is to enable even great turnout in the future. No, the most reasonable inference is that the huge turnouts in 2020 that resulted in Trump’s defeat have led not to sudden enthusiasm to increase Democratic opportunities going forward but have inspired renewed efforts to suppress Democratic voting in future elections.

These areas of focus are more than a little curious, considering certain other facts about Texas and Florida that one might think would be the real subjects of interest by the governing bodies of those states.

For example, Texas ranks 36th nationally in per-student education spending. While some conflicts exist about the exact amounts spent, https://bit.ly/2S8gyuz, the real losers in the squabbling over the state’s stinginess are the students. As for the mothers of those students,

While maternal mortality is decreasing in most countries, maternal death rates in the U.S. have been increasing and Texas is recognized as having the highest maternal death rate in the country. Texas’ own study on maternal deaths indicates that Texas’ rates have nearly doubled in recent years.

[https://www.texmed.org/MMM/]

U.S. News https://bit.ly/3noOXRc ranks Texas in these categories among the states:

Health Care – No. 31

Education – No.34

Opportunity – No. 39

Economic Opportunity – No. 40

Equality – No. 45

Crime & Corrections – 37

Natural Environment — 40

Population without Health Insurance

                   Texas 24.5 %

                  National Average 12.9 %

And that’s despite having the nation’s 9th largest economy and net inbound population growth, due, it is reported, to little regulation, low taxes and low labor costs.

The Florida story is similar. Despite its famously aged population, Florida ranks:

Health Care                25

Infrastructure            20

Opportunity               33

Crime & Corrections  26

Florida ranks 3rd in Education, driven, however, by the large higher education establishments. It’s only 16th in PreK-12.

You would think that with those standings, the governing parties would be focused on more than just voter suppression but apparently not.

Much of the Republican hullabaloo about voting has no factual or logical foundation. Putting aside the absence of meaningful evidence of voter fraud (all this legislation is directed at a non-existent problem), if you can file taxes online, then why not voting online?  Maybe we need to reconsider leaving all this to the states. Maybe, just maybe, the federal government could do a better job of securing voting systems under a well-crafted legislative plan.  Surely there is a way to do this safely. And, if not, then why not establish through federal legislation a uniform system of manual voting that affects everyone the same way across the country?

Beyond actual voting, why is there a concern that sending out absentee ballot applications, or real ballots, to everyone is a problem, given that voting is highly regulated with detailed checking and matching of ballots to registrations before votes are counted?  Why are drive-through voting sites a problem? In many places you can get a COVID vaccination at a drive-through. And millions routinely do bank transactions at drive-through windows. What is the problem, other than the fact that these practices make it easier for more people to vote?

Biden Speaks & Republicans Whine

Leave a reply

President Biden gave a long address to a joint session of Congress. Within minutes, Republicans cynically rolled out Republican Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina to criticize him.

The genius of Biden’s speech was that it was presented largely in plain speak, addressed to the real audience, the American people, rather than the collection of politicians in the chamber with him. Biden went big. His proposals were designed to say to the people: these are the benefits you can have  that will make America competitive in the 21st Century and that will reward you with good-paying jobs, better educational opportunities and improved/more affordable healthcare, among other things. This is bold stuff, designed to look forward and not back to the mythological past favored by white supremacists. Being the old pro that he is, I have no doubt Biden is quite aware of the challenges his agenda faces from the Republican Party of No.

Republicans sat like statues throughout, resisting the slightest show of support for anything Biden had to say, no matter how much it might address real problems of people not included in the richest upper class to whom the GOP owes its primary allegiance. During Biden’s speech, McConnell could have been replaced by a blow-up doll and no one could have distinguished the doll from the immobile person.

The Republican official response, delivered by Sen. Scott, was entirely predictable: NO. NO. NO. You can read the NPR fact-check here if you like. https://n.pr/3eDUCPC  I will not waste my time or yours with the details.

Suffice to say that the Republicans are in a bad place here. They are going to adopt the same agenda of obstruction they used against President Obama even as the country and the world were on the precipice of a major economic catastrophe. Republicans really didn’t care. Mitch McConnell made clear the agenda was to make Obama a one-term president, regardless of the cost to the country.

That plan failed. But we got Trump instead, perhaps because many Americans believed that Obama’s election represented a real turning point away from the country’s checkered past and that voting wasn’t necessary. It doesn’t much matter now. Trump was elected, almost certainly with the help of foreign powers, and the rest is history. We are approaching 600,000 dead Americans because Trump downplayed the virus and refused to accept the science. Yeah, sure, he started Operation Warp Speed, but it was going nowhere fast when Biden took over. Now over 200 million doses of vaccine have been injected in Biden’s first 100 days in office.

Turning to the Republican rebuttal, and at the risk of touching on touchy subjects, the fact is, I believe, that the Republican Party, in an effort to blunt accusations that it has become the party of white supremacy, produced Sen. Scott to assure us “it ain’t so.” ­The data strongly indicates it is so, but OK, what else could we expect from their chosen mouthpiece? Other than the standard Trumpist party lines, he had no real data to offer in support of his gaslighting generalizations.

Scott assailed President Biden with the all-too-familiar Republican trope that Biden promised to unite the country, be bi-partisan, “lower the temperature” etc. and so on. Ad nauseum. “We need,” Scott said, with rhetorical flourish:

policies and progress that bring us closer together. But three months in, the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further and further apart.

I won’t waste your time tonight with finger-pointing or partisan bickering. You can get that on TV anytime you want. I want to have an honest conversation about common sense and common ground. About this feeling that our nation is sliding off its shared foundation, and how we move forward together.

But first, a word about me, me and me. Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. But, surprise, God saved me. And He will save you too if, four or five paragraphs later, we had opened our schools the way other (unnamed) countries did.

Any time a Republican politician tells you he/she wants to have an “honest conversation,” secure your wallet and your mind. Scott saying he’s not going to engaged in finger-pointing or partisan bickering is just cognitive priming in the hope you won’t notice that is exactly what he is doing.

The English translation of Scott’s rebuttal is simple enough: the stimulus bill Biden got passed was not the bill Republicans wanted so we voted against it. “Closer together” means doing things the Republican way, period: it’s not bi-partisan unless it’s the Republican agenda. If Democrats did things our way, we’d be all in on bipartisanship. But if you won’t let us control all the legislation, we’ll just whine about lack of bipartisanship and vote ‘no’ on everything.

I evaluated his statement in categories, as a primer to what was really going on. His statement was comprised of 1908 words in 39  paragraphs (New York Times version of transcript).

My categories were:

Racial messaging (overt or covert)

Trigger words/phrases & religious messaging for Republican base

            Anti-partisanship/reverse partisanship

Victimhood

Racial messaging accounted for 14 paragraphs and 778 words, or 36 percent of the total paragraphs and 40 percent of the total words in Scott’s statement. The central message was “I’m Black and I have suffered as a Black man in America so you can trust me when I tell you Republicans are not racist and neither is America.” Perhaps, but likely not, accidentally, he used one of Donald Trump’s standard lines, “believe me,” and claimed his efforts to fund police body cameras  and his “even bigger police reform proposal”  were blocked by Democrats who even rejected debate by using the filibuster. Implication: the real racists are Democrats.

The problem with that song-and-dance number is that Scott’s legislation was rejected by Democrats in 2020 because it did not include bans on chokeholds or “no-knock” search warrants and did not address qualified immunity that prevents effective lawsuits against police officers using excessive force. Democrats saw the bills as non-starters because Republicans made clear that the protective umbrella of qualified immunity was non-negotiable. Our way or the highway. So much for bipartisanship.

My second category includes classical Republican talking points/trigger words & phrases/religious references to appeal to the GOP base. These accounted for a small share of the total words, but were center cut from the Donald Trump playbook and calculated to get the biggest rise from the base:

“Even more taxing, even more spending, to put Washington even more in the middle of your life — from the cradle to college”

“Weakening our southern borders and creating a crisis is not compassionate”

 “The beauty of the American dream is that families get to define it for themselves”

“Washington schemes or socialist dreams”

“America is not a racist country”

            “Washington power grab”

Details were sparse but when you’re throwing fresh meat at the mob, you don’t need them.

Scott’s assault on the bona fides of Biden’s appeal to unity and bipartisanship accounted for 16 paragraphs and 621 words. Race-related messaging thus won the day as a share of Scott’s statement.

He also played the victim card. Since he remains a disciple of Donald Trump, asserting victimhood is hardly a surprising move. It accounted for six paragraphs and 278 words.

Finally, Scott closed out his statement with a blessing, comprised of 2 paragraphs and 141 words. This seems bizarre because while Scott is reportedly an evangelical Protestant, he is not ordained as a minister.

So, there you have it. No doubt the Republican base will love Scott and believe that he effectively showed up President Biden. More important, however, is the question how this struggle is going to play out with the American population as a whole. Biden has shown the country what is possible, what they can have if they have the courage to get it. Republicans will continue to fulfill their role of obstruction with a side of commitment to the wealthiest Americans whose financial welfare is the prime mover of Republican philosophy and policy.

If Republicans really wanted bipartisanship, they would stop saying ‘no,’ to almost everything Democrats propose. They have now undergone their standard re-conversion back to “conservative” principles, by demanding smaller government, less regulation and rejection of science. With those as their touchstone, there is little prospect for bipartisan solutions to anything resembling a real problem. Biden has offered the people a roadmap to a future of possibilities and promise for better lives in an increasing complex and uncompromising world. The question now is: how will they choose?

 

Is DC Sinking?

Leave a reply

Since returning to live in DC four months ago, one thing that has struck me, literally and figuratively, is the condition of the District’s streets. Roads I drive on frequently, long sections of I Street NW, Pennsylvania approaching Washington Circle from the east and in the 24-to-25th block, and long stretches of L Street NW, are in really poor condition. A remarkable number of axle-busting holes are everywhere and either jolt you out of your kidneys or cause cars to suddenly veer out of their lanes in avoidance maneuvers. And then there are the manhole covers. Some streets are “littered” with them and they seem to be set in the precise path that car wheels follow if the car is centered in the lane. All too frequently the covers are an inch or more below the road surface. These are not acceptable conditions for the capital city of what purports to be the greatest nation on earth.

I recently learned, courtesy of the DCist newsletter, https://bit.ly/3sWOXZT, that a monster machine, named Chris, has just finished digging and lining the walls of a 5-mile, 23-foot-wide tunnel 100 feet below the city. The 650-ton machine is reportedly longer than a football field (100 yards for the unknowing). We better hope that Chris does not become sentient one day and decide it doesn’t like working underground anymore.

Anyway, the purpose of the tunnel is to “prevent sewage overflows into the Anacostia River and stop flooding in low-lying neighborhoods, including Le Droit Park and Bloomingdale,” which seems like a really good idea. My theory, however, is that one explanation for the condition of the roads may be subsidence induced by Chris’s underground excavation.

My theory is no doubt a bunch of hooey, but I need to understand why Washington’s roads are in such terrible shape, so I make up stuff. There is, however, some hope. This morning I noticed, as I was flung about the interior of my car, that a long section of I Street NW has been “shaved,” perhaps by a relative of Chris, in preparation for resurfacing. Now the manhole covers protrude above the road surface. It was dodge-em cars the entire stretch as drivers tried to avoid blowing tires on the edges of the covers that, as I have noted, seem to be everywhere and in all the wrong places.

I am now aware that Mayor Bowser “has committed to eliminating all poor quality roads in the District by 2024.” More details than you want to know may be seen at the DDOT Paving Plan. https://bit.ly/3dZbpxh Hmmh. 2024? That’s easier to grasp if you look at the history of road improvement expenditures. https://tabsoft.co/3nqSxKM To paraphrase a paraphrase, it’s a long road ahead.

 

Congress is Failing the Country Again

Leave a reply

The Washington Post reports that the prospects for Congress establishing an independent commission to investigate and report on the January 6 attack on the Capitol are dimming. https://wapo.st/3v3Nh2o In a report that could have emerged from Alice in Wonderland, the Post says,

Congress’s pursuit of an independent investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection is facing long odds, as bipartisan resolve to hold the perpetrators and instigators accountable erodes, and Republicans face sustained pressure to disavow that it was supporters of former president Donald Trump who attacked the U.S. Capitol.

Once again, it seems, “political interests steadily overtake lawmakers’ appetite to push for accountability.”

Apparently, the Republicans in the House are demanding “equal representation” and “subpoena authority” despite their position as the minority party in Congress. If Republican resistance continues, which seems a virtual certainty, Speaker Pelosi reportedly could appoint a “select committee” or allow the multiple Congressional committees already bogged down in multiple proceedings. Republicans have undermined efforts to move ahead in the manner of the post-9/11 commission by demanding, in classic deflection style, that any such commission also investigate “left-wing extremism” which would include the “antifa” movement.

Republican resistance is reportedly still driven by the bizarre reality that “a majority [of rank-and-file Republicans] still believe the election was stolen from Trump.”

Norm Ornstein, an emeritus scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, was quoted in this confession:

“The political imperative at this point is to discredit any investigation, to deny any ties either to Donald Trump or to the members of Congress . . . who either helped to plan the [riot] or helped to incite it.”

The Republican strategy is apparently working, as

“public hearings held by the House Judiciary and Armed Services committees have devolved into shouting matches, as GOP members accuse Democrats of ignoring threats from the far left, while Democrats accuse them of equivocating to distract from the fact that far-right extremists have become an active force in the Republican Party.”

Much of the current focus appears to be on the question of how the government security apparatus was caught off-guard and failed to respond properly to the unfolding threat to the Capitol. Those are certainly important questions that must be addressed. But the most significant forward-looking issue is how the attack came to pass: who planned it, who inspired it, who coordinated it, who supported it? Those questions include not only the active participants in the insurrection but the critical question whether Members of Congress were involved in any actions related to planning and/or executing the attack. The purpose of the assault was to stop the Constitutional process of final accounting for the election outcome and certification of the Electoral College votes. There are numerous indications of involvement by Members of Congress in both houses.

It is time to move this process forward rapidly and to focus on the key questions. It is obvious now that the Republican Party is 100 percent dedicated to preventing any substantive accountability for the attack that led to multiple deaths, many severe injuries and exposed members of Congress to possible capture and even death. Recall the battle cry of the insurrectionists: “Hang Mike Pence!”

The stalling and deflection by the minority party are unconscionable. It’s time for the Biden administration to take charge and get his task done. There is no space for “bipartisanship” here – Republicans have no interest in that, so it’s fine to ignore them.

The administration should bring this to a head by having the Justice Department take charge of the investigation on a top priority basis. Every passing month with no answers to the complicity of the Republican Members of Congress makes it that much harder to get political accountability in the mid-term elections as memories fade and new bright objects overtake the public consciousness of the threat to democracy that the January 6 attack represented. If Members of Congress are culpable, action should be taken against them promptly. They do not enjoy the same privileges regarding indictment and arrest for criminal conduct as does the President. https://bit.ly/3n1lH2H  Gravel v. United States, 408 U.S. 606 (1972).

Attacks on the central elements of our democracy cannot be tolerated. The First Amendment allows Americans in most circumstances to advocate many types of change in the operation of government. It does not sanction violence to stop the execution of Constitutional duties related to national elections. That is what was attempted on January 6 and justice must be brought to bear on the perpetrators inside as well as outside the Congress.

Fill In the Blanks

2 Replies

You wake up in the morning to yet another mass shooting. https://cnn.it/3spRvPS

Forty-five in the last month alone. https://cnn.it/3afv5eb

Just another day in America.

This one was in Indianapolis. Tennessee. Texas. But it could have been anywhere in the United States. Small town, big city, rural, urban, suburban. Anywhere. Any time.

More than one a day for the last month alone.

Eight dead in Indianapolis. So far. Details at 11.

Mass shootings are now so common, reporters don’t need to write new stories. They can make a standardized form for reporting mass shootings. Then just fill in the blanks between/with the clichés. The news is not new. It often doesn’t rise to the level of news.

Police arrived to ______ [a very chaotic scene] [shocking carnage]

The motive for the shooting was _____ [not immediately known] [suspected terrorism] [not suspected terrorism]

The gunman had at least _____ [one weapon — “a rifle of some sort”] [an AR-15 with high-capacity magazines] [multiple firearms] [a massive arsenal legally acquired] [rifles, a shotgun & pistols] [a machine gun]

Witnesses heard _____ [ten shots] [dozens of shots] [too many shots to count] [a pause while the gunman reloaded & resumed firing]

The number of dead is _______ [any number four or larger up to 60 (so far)] and the number injured is [any number up to 867 (so far)]

The company was _________ [deeply shocked and saddened] [heartbroken] [shaken] by _______ [senseless act of violence] [tragic loss of life]

Safety is _______ [our top/highest priority] [taken very seriously]

The Governor/Mayor/Police Chief/Members of Congress offer_______ [condolences] [heartfelt sympathies] [thoughts and prayers to ________ [victims and their families] [friends and co-workers] [all who are affected] [everyone]

        Flags will be _______ [lowered] [at half mast]

The shooter ______ [took his own life] [was killed by responding police] [died at the scene of unknown causes]

Number of security guards employed by the company to defend employees _____ [none]

Statement from the National Rifle Association said _______ [thoughts and prayers to victims] [nothing]

Number of “good guys with guns” who stopped the shooter ______ [none]

Steps taken by state governments and Congress to limit access to rapid fire weapons of war and keep weapons from hands of unstable people [none] [none] [none]

Old White Guy Has Some Questions for the Sedition Caucus

1 Reply

Having gone to the trouble of creating the Congressional Hall of Dishonor, it seems, upon further reflection, appropriate to pose some questions to some of the more illustrious, and seemingly most proud, members of the Sedition Caucus. I refer to Senators Cruz, Hawley and the others who voted to overturn the 2020 election on January 6.  See Congressional Hall of Dishonor – Updated at https://bit.ly/3rOT89t Think of this as a final exam that determines who these politicians really are and what they are destined to become.

As an Old White Guy, I report (confess, if you prefer) that I grew up, partially, in Memphis, Tennessee. The standing joke was that Memphis was really in Mississippi because its racial attitudes and conduct toward Black people most closely resembled that of Mississippi. But, alas, Tennessee was destined, it seems, to grow more like Mississippi as Mississippi was, perhaps, growing less like Mississippi.

Growing up in Memphis, one was exposed to naked racism everywhere. As a child I was reprimanded for drinking from a “Negroes only” water fountain in Sears. The idea was that  it was socially unacceptable to behave as if “Negroes” were the equal of white people. Go along to get along. I was embarrassing everyone. Nothing to discuss or debate. That’s how it was and how it was supposed to be according to … something no one could or would identify. Raise the question and people looked at you like you were insane and dangerous. I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now.

We are now 70+ years on from those days. Sometimes it feels as if nothing much has changed.

I have some questions for the Sedition Caucus and all those who support them:

  1. Are you prepared to say that QAnon is a ridiculous concept, impossible for a rational person to believe? If not, why not?
  2. Are you prepared to denounce the Proud Boys as a domestic terrorist organization? If not, why not?
  3. How about the Three Percenters? The Oath Keepers?
  4. OK, here’s an easier one: the Ku Klux Klan?
  5. Further on No. 4, are you prepared to state, without qualification, that the Ku Klux Klan is a racist organization/entity/group/assemblage/collection/aggregation?
  6. Reversing field for a moment, are you prepared to state, without qualification, that the Charlottesville march by the Proud Boys and others was a racist action? If not, why not? Are you prepared to state, without qualification, that in Charlottesville there were not “fine people on both sides?”
  7. Are you prepared to say, without qualification, that the murders of children at Sandy Hook & Parkland were not staged?
  8. Are you prepared to say, without qualification, that the 9/11 attacks were not an “inside job” by the American government?
  9. Are you prepared to state, without qualification, that anyone who claims the California wildfires were started by Jewish space lasers is delusional?
  10. United States leads world in firearms per capita. Why is the population armed to that extent? You may not answer “ because they can” or “Second Amendment allows it.” The question is: WHY are so many people armed? Be precise. Very precise and specific.
  11. Do you believe that in general Black males are more prone to violence than white males? Why?
  12. Do you believe that police generally treat Black people the same as white people? If yes, upon what facts/data do you base that belief ?
  13. What, exactly, do you believe is the symbolism in the year 2021 of monuments to Confederate soldiers/generals/politicians? Define your terms – nothing like “southern culture” – be specific.
  14. Do you believe it is alright, ethically or morally, for one human being to own another human being and treat that person as property?
  15. Do you believe females should have the same rights and be treated with the same deference and respect, as males?
  16. Do you believe that non-white people should have the same rights and be treated with the same deference and respect as white people?

If you think these are fair questions to ask men and women who purport to lead the country, who seek our approbation for their views of our values and ideals, send the questions to your senators, congresspersons, mayors, councilmen and others in positions of “power” and who are members of the Sedition Caucus. You are among the grantors of those powers so it’s entirely appropriate to ask them to answer these questions. They’re mostly easy to answer – a yes or no will suffice. Some of the explanations will be … harder. But that’s why it’s a test.

If you get any answers and want to share them, please do so via the Leave a Reply.

Georgia’s New Voting Law – Truth or Consequences?

6 Replies

One of the two replies reacting to my post, Caw! Caw! Jim Crow Returns to Georgia, asserts that I am “spreading lies” about the new Georgia voting law and that “Even the Washington Post gave Biden four Pinocchios for what he said about it. Today’s Washington Examiner explores what’s behind all the lies and misrepresentations:” The Examiner article mentioned can be read at https://washex.am/31Lo8g1

Since the responder is known to me to be an intelligent person with extensive education and professional experience, I cannot just let the accusation of lying pass without comment. Quite a bit of comment, actually. I apologize for the length of this post, but accusations of lying require detailed responses. I have strong opinions about many things but work very hard to cite authorities and avoid false statements.

When someone does something inconsistent with normal practice, the action often raises questions of motive and intent. Doubly so when the asserted rationale has no factual foundation. Examples from the Trump years abound. The call with the President of Ukraine comes to mind. Demand is made for an investigation of something that has no factual basis for the apparent purpose of undermining a political opponent. No other plausible explanation of the event is presented and the documentary record of it is sequestered in a secret server by attorneys for the then president. Strange behavior causes suspicion to arise about what was really going on.

It is more than curious, then, that the new Georgia law was rushed through as if an imminent emergency faced the state’s electoral system. I am not aware that such an emergency existed. What then was going on?

The Washington Examiner tells us  that the “voting reform law contains simple, commonsense measures, most of which … will make it easier for people to vote.” That much is actually true of some parts of the law.

But then the Examiner exposes what I had argued was the underlying reality: the claim that the conduct of the 2020 election showed real risks of fraud that needed to be stamped out immediately when in fact no such fraud was found in Georgia (after, I believe, three audit/recounts [https://cnn.it/3dMbAuL] and the Governor’s own aggressive investigations). No fraud was found in Georgia or anywhere else. More than 60 lawsuits claiming fraud were brought and all were promptly dismissed, mainly for lack of evidence or other legal deficiencies. One of the principal attorneys bringing those cases on behalf of Trump has stated in court filings that, in effect, the fraud allegations made were so outlandish that no rational person would have believed them as being factual allegations. https://bit.ly/3fEhfFr

The only fraud that occurred in Georgia was the attempt by Donald Trump to induce the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” just enough votes to overturn the official results and award Trump the state’s electoral votes. It’s on tape and cannot be denied. https://wapo.st/3wn2Nrr

Thus, the stated rationale for this massive, intricate detailed rewrite of Georgia’s already intricate, detailed election statute was false. There was no fraud requiring the law to be changed and certainly not so urgently.

The Examiner, and my commenter, note that President Biden was wrong is saying that the new law forced polling places to close at 5 p.m. Fine. The President appears to have been wrong on that one point. In fact, that was the only thing the Washington Post fact checkers addressed. See https://wapo.st/3cNHTu0

Maybe Biden was recalling an earlier version of the Georgia statute or was misinformed by staff. Whatever. He apparently made a mistake about one provision in the massive changes to what turned out to be 95 pages of legislative text.

The Examiner was also up in arms over the objections noted to criminalizing the provision of food and water to voters waiting in lines at polling places, claiming that’s the law in New York and “many states.” My research suggests the Examiner is wrong about New York but even if true, it doesn’t much matter. The rest of the Examiner article is just argument about the Democrats’ motives and other things that I decline to waste time addressing. Let’s address the facts and whether I have spread “lies” about the Georgia law, bearing in mind, again, that the entire stated rationale for the changes, in Georgia and a multitude of other Republican states, is a mirage, a political fantasy about voter fraud that never happened.

In a related vein,  by the way, the state of New York is moving toward no-excuse absentee voting, a process that requires a state constitutional amendment. In each vote on this, with one exception, all the negative votes have come from Republicans. https://bit.ly/3rHh1jq

Turning back to Georgia, in drafting my post I did not actually rely on what President Biden said about the Georgia law. I cited a Washington Post article (https://wapo.st/2QIONbe) for a number of specific actions in SB202, all of which I confirmed independently. Recognizing the possibility that I could have made a mistake in reading the complex and detailed language of SB202, I re-examined the legislation after the “spreading lies” accusation. I found the following about what I had written:

  • new identification requirements for casting ballots by mail. TRUE
  • curtails the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots. TRUE
  • allows electors to challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters and requires counties to hold hearings on such challenges within 10 days. TRUE
  • makes it a crime for third-party groups to hand out food and water to voters standing in line. TRUE
  • blocks the use of mobile voting vans. TRUE
  • prevents local governments from directly accepting grants from the private sector. TRUE
  • strips authority from the secretary of state, making him a nonvoting member of the State Election Board. TRUE
  • allows lawmakers to initiate takeovers of local election boards. TRUE

Given that the predicate for the legislation was false and that these “improvements” were rushed through and signed behind closed doors, I stand by my conclusion that the legislation “is voter suppression in the guise of “cleaning up” issues that never existed in the first place.”

My view of this is apparently supported by a large number of major companies that do business in Georgia, including Delta Air Lines and Major League Baseball. The Georgia legislature’s reaction to the criticism from those companies was to attack those companies. See, e.g.,  https://bit.ly/3dwyZjt and any number of many other publications reporting on this. The Georgia Republican Party often rants about “cancel culture” but when faced with “consequence culture,” it has a conniption fit of outrage.

There is more. In looking again at the actual statute adopted in Georgia, I noted some other interesting details.

The Secretary of State was chair of State Elections Board and elected by popular vote.. This is supposed to be a non-partisan position but is now selected by entirely partisan General Assembly. The Secretary of State is reduced to an ex officio nonvoting member of the Elections Board.

There is a new procedure for suspending and replacing county or municipal superintendents. New provisions provide for politically-controlled demands for review of performance of individual local election officials. Toe the expected political line or face loss of your position.

Neither the Secretary of State, election superintendent, board of registrars, other governmental entity, nor employee or agent thereof may send absentee ballot applications directly to any voter except upon request of such voter or a relative authorized to request an absentee ballot for such voter. New restrictions limit who can “handle or return” a voter’s completed absentee ballot application.

“All persons or entities, other than the Secretary of State, election superintendents, boards of registrars, and absentee ballot clerks, that send applications for absentee ballots to electors in a primary, election, or runoff shall mail such applications only to individuals who have not already requested, received, or voted an absentee ballot in the primary, election, or runoff.” The State Election Board is authorized to fine, apparently extra-judicially, anyone claimed to have violated the new rules on handling absentee ballot applications and ballots.

The law limits the days when advance voting can occur and forbids registrars from providing for advance voting on other days even if local circumstances indicate it would be helpful to people voting.

For counting absentee ballots, the process must be open to the view of the public, but no observer may make electronic records of what is observed.

“The Secretary of State shall be authorized to inspect and audit the information contained in the absentee ballot applications or envelopes at his or her discretion at any time during the 24 month retention period. Such audit may be conducted state wide or in selected counties or cities and may include the auditing of a statistically significant sample of the envelopes or a full audit of all of such envelopes. For this purpose, the Secretary of State or his or her authorized agents shall have access to such envelopes in the custody of the clerk of superior court or city clerk.”

What happens if “audit” reveals problems many months after the election result is declared? Who decides? How? The Secretary of State, as noted earlier, has been demoted to ex officio status on the Election Board. Will the solution be produced by the legislature?

Extending poll hours to accommodate a number of voters who were unable to vote during a particular period requires a court order. It is unclear what problem was this intended to resolve & how will it work in practice. Most likely, time and other practical considerations mean that no extended poll hours will be possible.

The “food and water” issue that has garnered much attention might have been more acceptable if it had stopped with “no campaigning,” which is common in many places, but instead, regardless of circumstances, no one, including non-partisan community groups, may provide foo­­d or water to voters in line. An exception was provided for “self-service water from an unattended receptacle,” whatever that means. Can party partisans set up passive food/water stations for self-service immediately adjacent to the voter waiting line and brand them with party or candidate labels?

There is a curious and unexplained disparity in treatment of two particular election offenses. If you “intentionally observe” a voter’s candidate selection, you have committed a felony. But if you “use photographic or other electronic monitoring or recording devices, cameras, or cellular telephones, except as authorized by law [??], to: (1) Photograph or record the face of an electronic ballot marker while a ballot is being voted or while an elector’s votes are displayed on such electronic ballot marker; or (2) Photograph or record a voted ballot,” you are only guilty of a misdemeanor.

Finally, special rules adopted by the State Election Board during a state of emergency “may be suspended upon the majority vote of the House of Representatives or Senate Committees on Judiciary within ten days of the receipt of such rule by the committees.” Politicians will apparently decide whether a declared public health emergency warrants changes to election processes.

To conclude, the legislation is not all bad. For example, I think that replacing signature- matching with identification requirements is a step in the right direction, provided that the identification requirements are reasonable for all classes of voters and do not have disparate effects on, for example, minority voters. It is not clear to me, and apparently to many others more expert in this, that the identification requirements adopted in Georgia satisfy that test, but I suppose we will find out soon enough.

Another provision I think is acceptable is the prohibition on campaigning while monitoring the processing of absentee ballots, although one wonders why it was necessary to impose a communications blackout on what absentee ballot monitors observe during that process and how that ban will work if litigation results and eye-witness testimony is needed.

It is, in short and overall, impossible to accept that, having lost the presidential election and two senatorial run-off elections, the Republican Party in Georgia was suddenly struck with over-powering public-spirited inspiration to straighten out the state’s already incredibly detailed, specific and, based on recent experience, reliable election processes with a bunch of politically neutral repairs that no one thought necessary before the election.

Thus, I remain steadfastly suspicious of massive and rushed legislative actions claimed to address problems that have been found, after multiple deep investigations, to be non-existent. The Georgia legislation, considered in detail and as a whole, seems to lack a rationale other than voter suppression. That’s what I called it, and I believe that’s what it is. Equally important for present purposes, everything I said about what was in the legislature was factually correct. It will take much more than an editorial in the Washington Examiner, the New York Post of the District of Columbia, to show otherwise.

 

Great Expectations Meet Legal Reality

Leave a reply

Politico appears to have joined the ranks of journalists who, having lost their matinee idol (Donald Trump), have turned their attention to throwing dirt at the Biden administration. It’s apparently hard doing political journalism when the President is a normal human being who actually works at his job and doesn’t spend all day demeaning others while praising himself.

In any case, Politico reports that for some reason, not entirely clear to me, the Biden administration may be embarrassed by the prospect that many of the insurrectionists who invaded and debased the Capitol on January 6 may not do much, if any, hard jail time. https://politi.co/3wbBBMj

There is nothing new or surprising about that possibility and no reason for the Biden administration to be “embarrassed” about it.

This click-bait story suggests that it was reasonable to believe that every one of the crazed mob of Trump supporters would be charged with felonies and imprisoned under very long sentences for their crimes. At the same time it notes that the many “lower-level cases” are clogging the District of Columbia federal trial court where all these cases are being “heard.” Those lower-level cases involve misdemeanor charges that typically plead out.

The reason for this is not ‘justice.” If justice were to be had here, all of the people who invaded the Capitol to stop the final approval of Biden’s election victory would be charged with felonies and required to plead to deals involving meaningful jail time.

But practical reality governs in these situations. Mass arrest scenarios rarely lead to jail time for  many who are swept up in the arrest net. This has been true for as long as mass arrests have occurred. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_arrest  The court system simply cannot handle trials of hundreds of people on top of its already heavy case load.

The result is that “deals” are made between prosecution and defense to an agreed sentence, often probation for first-offenders when only property damage is involved, in exchange for a guilty plea that avoids the time and cost of a jury trial. This is true almost regardless of the circumstances, although, as a society, we generally do not treat white people who commit “light crimes” with the harshness meted out to minority defendants.

There is, of course, an unusual amount of visual evidence in these cases — hundreds of hours of video of the crime scene. While the videos show a staggering amount of violence by the mob that led to dozens of injuries to police, it is apparently also true that many of those identified and arrested so far were not actually engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the Capitol Police or in physical desecration of the building. These people allegedly just “went along for the ride.” If so, they almost certainly will end up “pleading” to some misdemeanor offense and may indeed be spared jail time. That is an outrage given the threat to our democratic system that they attempted to achieve, but the judicial system simply cannot cope otherwise.

Politico takes this simple reality to the extreme of making a “federal case” out of nothing in stating that,

The prospect of dozens of January 6 rioters cutting deals for minor sentences could be hard to explain for the Biden administration, which has characterized the Capitol Hill mob as a uniquely dangerous threat. Before assuming office, Biden said the rioters’ attempt to overturn the election results by force “borders on sedition”; Attorney General Merrick Garland has called the prosecutions his top early priority, describing the storming of Congress as “a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.

Justice Department prosecutors sent expectations sky-high in early statements and court filings, describing elaborate plots to murder lawmakers — descriptions prosecutors have tempered as new details emerged.

Nonsense. There are plenty of serious cases of violence that will lead to meaningful jail time and other penalties for the perpetrators. Many felons remain to be identified and arrested. This is not going away. It was a “uniquely dangerous event.”

The report is accurate in noting the time pressure on the prosecution, but again this is not unusual in mass-arrest cases. Speedy trial is a constitutional right, sometimes ignored, but a right nonetheless. And we can be sure that these virtually all-white “protestor insurrectionists” will get every advantage to which they are accustomed.

Other than the target of this particular mob, and the inspiration for their attack (the former president), there is nothing especially unusual about these cases. Mayhem has degrees just like other violence and the law treats each case individually. It’s likely that violent “protestors” in Portland and other places are facing the same issues, and opportunities, as the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol.

I, at least, deeply hope that none of the Capitol attackers is going to receive what Politico refers to as a wrist-slapping. This attack was not a response to a prior event (as, for example, the protests after George Floyd’s murder) – it had a specific goal: to stop Congress from carrying out its constitutional duty to certify the election. The article refers to people “who walked into the building that day without authorization.” That, I  believe, fails to recognize the gravity of what was happening that January 6. Few, if any, of the insurrectionists just “walked into the building” – the proof is in the videos.

Politico says, “the Justice Department will soon be in the awkward position of having to defend such deals, even as trials and lengthy sentences for those facing more serious charges could be a year or more away.” Again, there is nothing “awkward” about this, beyond the simple inability of the judicial system to cope, in a constitutional democracy, with mass-type arrests, whether all at once or individually later for crimes that occurred together. Politico adds to its hyping of a non-existent issue by noting that Trump continues to lie about what happened on January 6, claiming this adds to the “political awkwardness” of the situation.

Wrong. Trump will continue lying and blathering to his last breath. Except for his die-hard political base, no serious person thinks Trump has any substantive contribution to make to the American political situation. It is certainly and indisputably true that Trump can be expected to keep lying about January 6 in an effort to thwart what he rightly fears as criminal prosecution of himself personally. No one is more deserving.

Unfortunately for journalism, Politico uses a common Trump formula in referencing “what many in the court system are referring to as “MAGA tourists,” a phrasing of unknown provenance (who, actually, are the “many” who call the insurrectionists “MAGA tourists?”) and calculated to diminish the significance of what happened on January 6.

Finally, I note that some of the January 6 defendants continue to run off at the mouth on Twitter and other social media, claiming they did nothing wrong and remain proud of their actions that day. Those defendants should face the full weight of the law – no deals for them. Let them stand trial if they like and face sentencing for their January 6 conduct and their continuing indifferent or outright hostility to the rule of law. Unless the judges in these cases want a repeat of January 6 or worse, they had better take a direct approach to such cases that are deserving of no leniency or special treatment.

Caw! Caw! Jim Crow Returns to Georgia

2 Replies

Acting on the pretext that there is legitimate and widespread lack of public confidence in Georgia election processes, Governor Kemp, behind closed doors guarded by state police, signed a new law restricting voting in Georgia. The bill, 95-pages in length, was introduced in the Georgia Senate on February 17, passed on March 8, read in the House the next day, passed by the House on March 25 and that same day sent to the Senate, passed by the Senate that same day and sent to the Governor who signed it that same day. https://bit.ly/3lVoudr

When engaged in world-class voter suppression, the Georgia government can move faster than a scalded cat. Georgia joins a mob, the current Republican favorite form of action, of 43 states and more than 250 blatant vote suppression bills.

The only significant lack of confidence in state election laws comes from the Republicans’ whining, led by Donald Trump, starting well before the 2020 election, that the election was going to be rigged, if, and only if, Trump lost. If he had won, well then, no problems – voting systems working just fine. The intellectual and moral vacuity of the Republican reasoning behind this idea needs no elaboration. Nevertheless, ….

The sole reasons now given for the “voter fraud” claim are that “many people believe there was fraud.” That, need I point out, is no reason to believe anything. Large shares of the population believe that the Earth has been visited by aliens from other planets/galaxies and large shares of millennials are not sure the Earth is a spheroid shape (yes, they appear to be somewhat convinced that Earth is or may be flat). Remarkable, but that’s what the surveys show. It is what it is. I am not going to touch, beyond this sentence, on the belief of millions that the Earth, in fact, was formed out of the void in seven days.

That many people believe something is not is a justification for any rational person to believe in those ideas. You can believe them, of course; no one will lock you up for those beliefs (you may want to keep them to yourself in job interviews, though; just saying). But just because many people believe something is no reason for everyone else to believe it. Nor is it reason to legislate restrictions on behaviors and processes that are central to the function of our democracy. Unless, of course, your real motive is to undermine democratic processes and thereby ensure that your party, and people who think just like you, remain in power. That, friends, is not democracy; it’s fascism, communism and other similar forms of authoritarianism.

One tip-off to what’s really going on is that the Governor of Georgia has developed vertical pupils in his eyes. New studies confirm that “Vertical-slit pupils are most common among nocturnal predators that ambush their prey.” Science Advances, August 2015. They are also typically associated with poisonous reptiles.

While you’re recoiling at the thought of that, though you recognize it as satire, remember that the Republicans who are advancing this legislation in their states have already tried and failed more than 60 times to persuade courts that they had evidence of election fraud. Even Trump’s own Attorney General, and part-time Trump personal counsel, said there was no evidence of fraud that would have affected the outcome of the election. Even Mitch McConnell, whose relationship with truth is, well, tenuous at best, said Trump lost the election.

So, what to do, what to do? If you’re in the leadership of a Republican-majority state, you fix things (“rig” is, I believe, the correct verb here) so that Republicans don’t lose any more elections. How do you do that? Look no further than Georgia’s SB202.

As reported in the Washington Post, https://wapo.st/2QIONbe,

The new law imposes new identification requirements for those casting ballots by mail; curtails the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots; allows electors to challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters and requires counties to hold hearings on such challenges within 10 days; makes it a crime for third-party groups to hand out food and water to voters standing in line; blocks the use of mobile voting vans, as Fulton County did last year after purchasing two vehicles at a cost of more than $700,000; and prevents local governments from directly accepting grants from the private sector.

The vertical pupil infection has spread throughout the Republican side of the Georgia legislature.

The 95-page law also strips authority from the secretary of state, making him a nonvoting member of the State Election Board, and allows lawmakers to initiate takeovers of local election boards — measures that critics said could allow partisan appointees to slow down or block election certification or target heavily Democratic jurisdictions, many of which are in the Atlanta area and are home to the state’s highest concentrations of Black and Brown voters.

Those steps, according to Governor Kemp’s reasoning , “will take another step toward ensuring our elections are secure, accessible and fair. … the facts are that this new law will expand voting access in the Peach State” and expanded early voting on weekends in every Georgia county.

This legislation was essential, according to Kemp, because of the “many alarming issues” in how the 2020 election was handled, leading to a “crisis in confidence.” Blathering on, in the model favored by Trump himself, Kemp gave himself credit for aggressive investigations of the election frauds, saying that the investigation he directed “got to the bottom of each and every allegation of fraud.”

OK, but then what? Turns out, there were no findings of fraud. Kemp’s own aggressive investigations found no fraud. Kemp then proceeds to simply ignore that reality while claiming that immediate legislative action was essential to fix the fraud problems.

One of the most notable provisions of the Georgia legislation adds to the ability of one voter to challenge the qualifications of another voter. The prior law provided for an elaborate process, including subpoenas and a hearing. The challenger had the burden of proof at the hearing and a right of appeal was provided to both parties to the dispute. The principal change was to add this:

There shall not be a limit on the number of persons whose qualifications  such elector may challenge.

That means that one voter can now challenge thousands of ballots cast by voters of the opposing party. Thus, one Republican voter working with the party in power can undermine the voting process and compel hearings, appeals and other steps that will lead many, if not most, challenged voters to simply give up. And that, I suggest, is the entire idea behind this change in the election law. It is voter suppression in the guise of “cleaning up” issues that never existed in the first place.

The Governor chose to sign the “historic legislation” behind closed doors, guarded by state police and in the presence of six white male legislators. This decision was not accepted by Black Democratic state Rep. Park Cannon who, after knocking on the Governor’s chamber door after being told, apparently, not to knock, was arrested by state troopers.  See  https://bit.ly/3dagtx7 for a disturbing but accurate connection of Georgia’s decision and the history of suppression in the origin story of America.

It comes down to this: some Georgians, though not a majority of Georgia voters, were unhappy with the outcome of the 2020 election. The state went for Biden and for two Democratic Senators in runoff elections. Extensive, repetitive investigations were conducted with the full resources of the Georgia state government to uncover fraud that could have overturned the election results. No such evidence was found. Nevertheless, the Republican-dominated legislature says it had to act. It’s true they withdrew controversial and widely condemned provisions that were aimed squarely at suppressing Sunday voting by Black-majority districts, but that did not stop them from, for example, criminalizing the act of giving snacks or water to people forced to stand in long lines at the polls. Anyone with a reasonably open mind can see what’s coming.

There can be little doubt that Georgia, along with the other Republican-dominated states, is employing an explicit voter suppression strategy to prevent Democrats from challenging their power in the future. Lawsuits have already been filed to overturn these blatant anti-democratic acts.

But we don’t have to wait for the protracted court battles that will ensue. Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution states:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

As stated by Justice Ginsburg in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, 576 U.S. __ (2015):

There can be no dispute that Congress itself may draw a State’s congressional-district boundaries.

There is little doubt that the Congress is also authorized by the Fourteenth Amendment, among other provisions, to stop state voter suppression legislation in its tracks if it has the will to do so. This power is analyzed in detail in a Congressional Research Service report at https://bit.ly/31s6j5H

Democrats have the power. Use it. It’s time for the United States to choose between democracy and authoritarianism, whatever its technical form. End Jim Crow … again.

Note: if you are unfamiliar with the Congressional Research Service, see this https://bit.ly/3rqyOuT