As 2022’s primaries approach, an unprecedented wave of public and private efforts are underway to foster trust in election operations and election officials in response to ongoing claims by Donald Trump and his supporters, including many officeholders and candidates, that President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected.
Public-facing efforts include creating an election official appreciation day on April 12, a newly launched Election Official Legal Defense Network to counter new Republican-drafted laws that criminalize mistakes in administering elections, and federal lobbying to protect election officials and their families from threats. There also are behind-the-scenes efforts to educate local civic, business and faith leaders so that trusted voices can help to respond to election deniers.
The efforts come as scores of candidates for statewide and local office, including many seeking reelection, have made the unproven claim that Trump’s second term was stolen a key feature of their 2022 campaigns, and, as a supermajority of Republicans — a figure unchanged since late 2020 — still believe that Democrats and election insiders stole the presidential election.
“You can’t have 30 percent of the county not believing in elections,” said Benjamin Ginsberg, a veteran Republican Party election lawyer who has spoken out against the “big lie” — Trump’s assertion of victory — and a co-chair of the Election Official Legal Defense Network.
“Where we are really lacking is how we talk to that 30 percent,” he continued, speaking on a March 28 podcast with Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark, a media outlet featuring Republicans who reject the big lie. “There is a dialog that really has to take place about the election system and how reliable it in fact is… That’s an important conversation that we’re trying to figure out how to have, but haven’t really succeeded yet.”
The comments by Ginsberg, who said he has “spent 30 years doing Election Day operations for Republican Party committees and candidates” and “never” found evidence of Democrats or an election official who rigged the results, underscore both the challenge and, so far, the limited impact of trying to convince Trump’s base that elections are trustworthy and 2020’s results were accurate.
Nonetheless, the efforts to instill confidence and build new guardrails is a departure from more traditional election protection work, where teams of lawyers help voters cast their ballots and sometimes sue to ensure their votes are counted. Those efforts, led nationally by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, usually focus on the fall’s general elections and not the earlier primaries. Yet the primaries tend to draw the most partisan candidates and voters.
2022’s primaries feature an unprecedented number of candidates who deny that Biden won and who cite an array of doubts and conspiracies to press their case.
“As of April 4, 2022, in two out of three governor and secretary of state contests, there is an Election Denier running. This is true for one out of three attorney general contests as well,” reported States United Action, a group supporting inclusive and accurate elections, in an update to a March report that detailed how the post-2020 trend of pro-Trump Republicans pushing for more restrictive voting laws has evolved into candidates who deny Biden won, spread conspiracies about the election, and attack election officials and voting systems.
“Replacing the refs — the people who administer our elections — is a key pillar of the anti-democracy playbook. Voters across the political spectrum should be paying attention to who these Election Deniers are, where they are running, and the seriousness of their false claims about the 2020 election results,” said Thania Sanchez, senior vice president of research and policy development at States United Action.
What remains to be seen is how 2022’s candidates and their base will react — in words and actions — if they lose in the primaries, as many of them will because some of them are seeking their party’s nomination for the same office. And, moreover, what would or should be done if Election Day and vote-verifying steps that follow are intentionally disrupted or contested by conspiratorial assertions that hidden hands have tampered with the results.
Election officials, some of whom were threatened by right-wingers in recent months, have been steeling themselves for 2022’s elections and preparing to respond to emotion-laden threats.
“Not only are our elections technically more complex, [but] we are expected to know a lot of things that… wouldn’t be typical of a public servant,” Natalie Adona, Nevada County, California, assistant clerk-recorder, told a national organizing call for April 12’s Thank Election Heroes day organized by Public Citizen, one of many groups supporting the effort.
“I had to learn all that I can about de-escalation — and it’s something that I would normally depend on the police to offer,” Adona said. “Our workers, who I train to serve at our vote centers, are increasingly being confronted by more and more aggressive people. I, myself, have been confronted by people who have threatened me.”
Challenges Are Clear, Answers Are Not
There have been numerous webinars and reports from organizations that work with current and former election officials seeking to counter Trump-led disinformation. These efforts, which usually feature civil service professionals who are highly regarded for their election work, reveal a deepening understanding of the election deniers in their midst. But acquiring a new understanding of their critics and adversaries is not the same thing as changing their minds.
At the National Association of State Election Directors’ semi-annual meeting in early March, one session open to the press featured Colorado’s Judd Choate, who recounted how his office had surveyed voters last summer and identified some contradictory beliefs. Many voters distrusted 2020’s national results but had confidence in local elections. Choate said his state’s response was “not so much countering misinformation but getting good information out.”
An April 6 report and briefing on neutralizing partisan impulses among election officials from the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center and Election Reformers Network differentiated between which election officials and workers were more and less likely to be partisan, which may be an index of who can best attest to the reliability and accuracy of elections.
Kevin Johnson, Election Reformers Network executive director, noted that the U.S. was unique among democracies because (as Business Insider’s Grace Panettapointed out) about 60 percent of the approximately 8,000 state and local election administrators across the country had “pretty substantial ties to political parties.”
These officials, who run for office or are appointed, include secretaries of state, many county or municipal officials, canvass boards (which assess voter intent on ambiguously marked ballots and other documents) and partisan observers appointed by their political party. “[They] see each other as existential threats to the nation and its democracy,” Johnson said.
On the other hand, most election administrators “run their offices in a professional way and want to get the count right” despite their personal views, said Matt Weil, Bipartisan Policy Center elections project director. But Weil added that partisan local officials were more of a concern than high-profile statewide officials because they “have access to witnesses, and they have access to ballots… [And there’s] no real good way of monitoring that on any kind of comprehensive scale.”
At a late-March webinar on countering disinformation, Chris Piper, the former Virginia election commissioner, whom Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican elected last fall, recently replaced with Susan Beals, suggested that poll workers could attest to the legitimacy of elections and convince “those folks in the middle that could be swayed either way [by facts or fiction].”
“What we really focused on… was how elections are run by everyday people,” Piper said. “Not only are they run by everyday people, but there are thousands and thousands, literally hundreds of thousands of people that are required to put on a national election… It’s important for us to explain [that] these are your friends, these are your neighbors, co-workers.”
The voices of local poll workers largely have been missing from the responses to election denial. Some Republicans, such as the Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell and GOP election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg, believe these and other locally respected voices might be persuasive to less ideological voters. During their March 28 podcast, they both said that little else has changed people’s minds.
“I really agree,” said Longwell, whose podcast included comments from focus groups she had convened where Trump supporters would not consider that he lost in 2020. “It has to be hyperlocal because [with] the breakdown of trust, it can’t come from national sources. It has to be from people like them in their communities that they know.”
“Going into 2022 and 2024, I would like to hear from a lot of the poll workers themselves,” she continued. “The people from the community talking about how seriously they take it; and how they stand side by side with other people who [they politically] disagree with… That, to me, is trying to inject some of that civic virtue back into it.”
“I completely agree with that. I think it’s got to be local,” said Ginsberg. “If you need an example of why the national approach doesn’t work: For the past 15 months, the mainstream media, every organization, has repeatedly talked about the big lie… And, as you know from your polls, the number of people who still don’t believe that the elections were accurate has not budged one iota in those 15 months. If anything, it’s gone up.”
“That just tells you that the national messaging from the big media outlets is not getting through, and people do not believe the national entities,” he continued. “We’ve got to start going local, and the communities where you’ve got to go first is pretty self-evident.”
Those communities are the handful of swing counties in swing states, especially jurisdictions targeted by election deniers since 2020. In Georgia, this includes metro-Atlanta counties and outlying areas where pro-Trump Republicans have ousted longtime election officials who are elected Democrats. In Michigan, they are urban counties where Republicans have replaced moderates on canvass boards with pro-Trump loyalists.
On Thursday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) announced that it has unanimously voted to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has been responsible for overseeing presidential debates since the 1980s.
The RNC says that, from now on, it will require candidates to sign a pledge that they won’t participate in general election or primary debates unless the debate has been sanctioned by the party, according to the Wall Street Journal.
This is a significant decision and an escalation from President Donald Trump’s previous grievances with the debate commission. The vote means that unless there is a considerable shakeup in the way that presidential debates are held, Republicans will not participate in presidential debates the way they have been run for decades — though the RNC says that it won’t be pulling candidates out entirely.
RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said in a statement that the RNC believes, without evidence, that debates have been “biased” against Republicans. The committee will work to “find newer, better debate platforms.”
The debate commission was formed as a nonprofit in 1987 with sponsorship from both Republican and Democratic parties.
The RNC has signaled in the past months that it will be withdrawing candidates from debates. Earlier this year, the committee sent a letter to the debate commission threatening to leave if the commission didn’t reorganize its format.
Trump regularly complained that debates were biased against him; in 2020, he withdrew from the second presidential debate with now-President Joe Biden, which was slated to be held virtually after Trump contracted COVID-19. At the first debate,Trump had taken issue with moderator Chris Wallace, then a Fox News anchor, and talked over both Wallace and Biden nearly the entire time.
Before Trump, Republicans had been complaining for years that the debates were biased; in 2012, Republicans took issue with the fact that a debate moderator corrected Mitt Romney during a debate.
Ironically, in their current TV-friendly format, debates are actually biased toward Republicans, political commentators have pointed out. The current format allowed Trump to hog speaking time during the Wallace-moderated debate and gave a huge litany of lies a legitimized platform.
Trump essentially used the debates to lie about the climate crisis, health care, election fraud, and other issues; although fact checkers — who often carry a right-wing bias at corporate news outlets — had flagged many of Trump’s lies as false, not all viewers follow the fact checkers as they watch.
Left-leaning commentators have long taken issue with the current presidential debate format, which they argue is more about spectacle for cable news audiences than about substantial policy debates — though the current format is still preferable to whatever the GOP could come up with, they say.
Former President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he pressured then-Attorney General Bill Barr to pursue bogus voter fraud claims after his election loss even if it meant being impeached.
Trump claimed in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that Barr did not want to investigate his baseless voter fraud claims because he was worried about being impeached even though Barr has repeatedly said the Justice Department did not pursue the claims because there was no evidence of any widespread fraud that could have affected the election outcome.
“Look, we also had a chance, but Bill Barr, the attorney general, didn’t want to be impeached,” Trump said. “How do you not get impeached? You sit back and relax and wait out for your term to end. That’s what he did. And it was a sad thing and a sad day for our country.”
Trump also lashed out at Barr for writing what he called a “crummy book” that was “so false.” Barr in his book rejected Trump’s debunked fraud claims and blamed him for the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot, arguing that Trump was not fit for office.
“Had Bill Barr had the courage, a lot of this could’ve been taken care of,” Trump said. “The U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia said Bill Barr told him not to investigate the fraud in the elections, and he said ‘Don’t do it.’ And he wrote a letter to that effect and you know, had Bill Barr had the courage to do what he should’ve done instead of being worried about being impeached.
“I said, ‘Look, get impeached. I went up a lot in the polls when I got impeached. You have to get impeached, maybe,’” Trump added. “But he was so afraid of being impeached that he refused to do his job.”
Here’s what Trump told Hannity he instructed Bill Barr to do:
Barr had been a top Trump loyalist who helped run interference in special counsel Bob Mueller’s investigation and led the administration’s violent crackdown on Black Lives Matter protests. But Barr told MSNBC that Trump became enraged at him after he told him the election fraud “stuff was bullshit.” Barr blindsided Trump in December 2020 by giving an interview revealing that the DOJ had found no evidence of widespread fraud, which led him to being pushed out just weeks before Trump left office. Trump continued to pursue the false fraud claims, culminating in the Capitol riot and his record-setting second impeachment. He left office with the lowest approval rating on record.
Barr in his book wrote that Trump surrounded himself with “sycophants” and “whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories.” He said that the “absurd lengths” to which Trump took the conspiracy theory “led to the rioting on Capitol Hill.”
But despite criticizing his former boss, Barr vowed to vote for Trump if he is the Republican nominee in 2024 even though he is “going to support somebody else for the nomination.”
Barr isn’t the only former DOJ official Trump has lashed out this week for not doing enough to help him try to steal the election. The former president issued an anti-endorsement of sorts against Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Bill McSwain, the former U.S. attorney in Philadelphia that Trump mentioned in his Hannity interview.
“He was the U.S. Attorney who did absolutely nothing on the massive Election Fraud that took place in Philadelphia and throughout the commonwealth,” Trump said in a statement on Tuesday.
McSwain last year sent Trump a letter seeking his endorsement and blaming Barr for stopping him from investigating the bogus fraud claims.
“He should have done his job anyway,” Trump said. “Do not vote for Bill McSwain, a coward, who let our country down. He knew what was happening and let it go. It was there for the taking and he failed so badly. Many of the U.S. Attorneys were probably told not to do anything by Barr. Hence, our Country is going to hell.”
While Trump has not endorsed a candidate in the race, every viable candidate in the race is an election conspiracist. Leading GOP candidates Doug Mastriano and Lou Barletta even took part in Trump’s fraudulent elector scheme.
But as Trump and his allies continue to stoke debunked claims about the 2020 election, the schtick seems to be wearing thin on Republicans concerned the conspiracy theory mongering could cost them key seats in the midterms. Trump’s recent endorsements have prompted infighting among his supporters and his rally attendance has dwindled, suggesting a “very shrinking base,” one Republican strategist said.
“Many Republicans are tired of going back and rehashing the 2020 election,” longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz told The Daily Beast. “Everybody else has moved on and in Washington, everyone believes he lost the election.”
The ACLU and Planned Parenthood announced late Wednesday that they are suing Kentucky after the state’s GOP-dominated Legislature voted to override the Democratic governor’s veto of a sweeping 15-week abortion ban, an extreme measure inspired by the Mississippi law that is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Kentucky Legislature’s vote put the new ban into effect immediately, forcing the state’s only two abortion providers to stop offering care. The law, sponsored by state Rep. Nancy Tate (R-27), imposes sweeping restrictions on medication abortion, which accounts for roughly half of all abortions carried out in Kentucky.
By forcing the state’s providers to cease operations, the law will effectively ban all abortions in Kentucky, reproductive rights advocates said. Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute told the Wall Street Journal that the ban could make Kentucky the first state in nearly five decades to block access to abortion at any stage of pregnancy.
Planned Parenthood, the national ACLU, and the ACLU of Kentucky announced just on the heels of Wednesday’s vote that they are taking legal action in an effort to keep the providers open and operating while the ban, known as H.B. 3, is litigated. They hope, ultimately, to overturn the law, which they deemed “cruel and unconstitutional.”
The groups argued that compliance with the new law is impossible by design. Specifically, they noted that in order to offer medication abortion under the new restrictions, providers must complete a registration process that the state has not even set up yet. The organizations also contended that some of the law’s reporting requirements amount to violations of patient privacy.
“Make no mistake: the Kentucky Legislature’s sole goal with this law is to shut down health centers and completely eliminate abortion access in the state,” Planned Parenthood said in a statement. “But we haven’t lost hope — we’re getting to work. Trust us when we say that we will do everything in our power to stop this insidious law from preventing Kentuckians from accessing the vital, time-sensitive healthcare they need and deserve.”
Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, argued that “the Kentucky Legislature was emboldened by a similar 15-week ban pending before the Supreme Court and other states passing abortion bans, including in Florida and Oklahoma, but this law and others like it remain unconstitutional.”
“We urge the court to block this law immediately,” Amiri added, “and ensure that people in Kentucky can continue to access abortion care.”
BREAKING: KY lawmakers just overrode @GovAndyBeshear’s veto of #HB3, a slate of abortion care restrictions that includes a total ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
No person should be forced to carry a pregnancy against their will.
The Kentucky Legislature’s move came less than 48 hours after Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt signed into law a measure that bars healthcare professionals from performing abortions at any stage of pregnancy. Similar to the new Kentucky law and the Mississippi ban, the Oklahoma measure contains a narrow exception for pregnant patients whose lives are at risk.
The Oklahoma ban is set to take effect in August.
“With the Texas six-week ban in place, many people are traveling to Oklahoma to get care,” Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement earlier this week. “We’ve sued the state of Oklahoma ten times in the last decade to protect abortion access and we will challenge this law as well to stop this travesty from ever taking effect.”
In 2022, according to the Guttmacher Institute, Republican lawmakers in 41 states have introduced 529 legislative proposals to restrict abortion, and such restrictions have taken effect in a number of states, from Arizona to Idaho to Wyoming.
The growing wave of state-level abortion bans comes as legislation aimed at codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law remains stuck in the U.S. Senate due to the opposition of every Republican and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who joined the GOP in filibustering the legislation in late February.
In a statement following the Kentucky Legislature’s vote on Wednesday, U.S. Senate candidate Charles Booker — who is vying for Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) seat — said that “women have officially been told their lives don’t matter in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.”
“H.B. 3 is abhorrent, unconstitutional, and absolutely shameful,” said Booker. “Today’s actions only underscore how critical it is that the United States Senate pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which is exactly what I intend on doing when I am elected this November.”
Republicans have been denying corporations’ role in rising prices and instead blaming inflation on Democrats. But a new investigation has found that the same corporations that profited greatly from rising inflation last year have also donated millions to those same Republicans.
A new report by Accountable.US finds that 18 Republicans who have been the most vocal in shielding corporations from being blamed for rising prices have received over $5.7 million in donations from roughly 30 top companies that reported making $151 million more in 2021 than they did in 2020.
These Republicans have gone to great lengths to blame the inflation on Democrats in the face of mounting evidence that corporations are at least partially responsible for the current squeeze on consumers.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) was the leading fundraiser among these Republicans; McConnell has taken $1.24 million from companies like Walmart, ExxonMobil and Pfizer during his time in office. Earlier this year, he issued a press release saying that the Biden administration is “failing” the working class and that this administration cannot take credit for the current economic recovery.
In reality, McConnell has gone to great lengths to harm middle- and lower-income workers during the pandemic. He voted against last March’s economic stimulus, which provided a much-needed boost to working Americans’ bank accounts, and decried Democrats’ social safety net bill last year as a “liberal wish list.” Those bills contained provisions like the expanded child tax credit that helped the poor and might have done much more if they had not been slashed.
Meanwhile, as inflation reaches new highs, corporations have been reaching into the pockets of the working class in order to pad their own profits and pay out shareholders. Recent data has shown that corporate profits reached record highs in 2021, growing by 25 percent year-over-year to $3 trillion. At the same time, price hikes, especially for essential goods, are hitting low-income people the hardest,
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Missouri), another loud inflation critic, has taken $946,000 in donations from the top profiting companies. Last month, he specifically criticized Democrats for saying that corporations are responsible for high prices, saying instead that inflation was due to the COVID relief package. Other Republicans, like Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania) and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington), have made similar claims while sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from top corporations.
While economic experts say that the relief package may have added to inflation, they also say that pandemic-driven uncertainty like supply chain issues are a much stronger driver of inflation rates. Meanwhile, corporations claim in public that inflation is what’s causing them to raise prices – when, in shareholder calls, they are bragging about raising prices beyond inflation costs and buying back stocks at record high rates.
“You don’t see any correlation between inflation and the generosity of fiscal relief. Inflation is up everywhere, regardless of whether countries were stingy or generous,” Economic Policy Institute director Josh Bivens told Salon. “You also have to think, ‘What did we get for a couple of percentage points of inflation?’ We got 6.5 million jobs created over a 13-month span – that is an incredibly fast rate of growth that just absolutely dwarfs any other recovery we’ve had before.”
Republicans are also opposed to policies suggested by Democrats that could stop the price gouging and ease the burden on working class Americans. Last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) introduced a bill that would levy a 95 percent tax on all excess profits for large corporations in order to ensure that companies aren’t taking advantage of crises like the pandemic and conflict abroad to price gouge.
GOP lawmakers roundly opposed the idea. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) called the idea a “disaster,” while Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said – without evidence – that Democrats were “misdiagnosing the cause of inflation.”
On Monday, a group of House Democrats introduced a bill guaranteeing that workers get paid time off to vote in federal elections as other voting rights initiatives have fallen flat.
The Time Off to Vote Act, introduced by Representatives Nikema Williams (D-Georgia), Matt Cartwright (D-Pennsylvania), Cheri Bustos (D-Illinois) and Andy Levin (D-Michigan), would require employers to give their employees at least two hours off of work to vote, either on election day or on a day with early voting.
Many states have no regulations requiring that workers get time off to vote; even in states that do guarantee that right, many only require that workers get unpaid time off, meaning that workers may not be able to take advantage of the benefit without suffering financially.
The bill would help to normalize regulations for paid time off across the country, a critical step toward expanding voting access. It requires that the paid time off be separate from workers’ existing benefits.
“No one should be forced to choose between earning their full paycheck or participating in our democracy,” Williams said in a statement. “In the last two elections, countless Georgians waited in line for hours to vote. Many waited all day. The Time off to Vote Act will make it easier for working people to exercise their sacred right to vote.”
For months, Democrats have tried — and failed — to pass legislation to protect voting rights. President Joe Biden emphasized the issue during his first year in office, but Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) killed Democrats’ hope of being able to pass sweeping anti-corruption election bills like the For the People Act, which voting rights advocates have said are crucial to protecting democracy.
The Time Off to Vote Act has been introduced in previous years, but has never been taken to a vote. Proposals like making Election Day a federal holiday also aim to ensure that work isn’t a barrier to being able to vote, but about a quarter of workers don’t receive days off on federal holidays, according to a 2018 federal survey.
Not being able to get time off to vote is a major barrier to voting, making it hard or impossible for people to cast their ballots. According to a FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll conducted after the 2020 election, waiting in long voting lines and not having time off are two of the top barriers to voting. With Republicans creating stricter guidelines for mail-in ballot access, some people may be blocked from voting at all.
These barriers affect Black and Latinx voters disproportionately. Racist voter suppression policies have led to fewer polling stations in predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods, meaning that people in these communities often have to wait in line for hours to vote; data has shown that Black and Latinx voters wait about 45 percent longer on average than white voters.
Voters in poorer neighborhoods are also more likely to face long lines while waiting to vote — and for many low-income people, this is an impassable hurdle. Some workers aren’t allowed to take time off to vote, and those that have the option of taking unpaid time off often can’t afford to do so, especially when they may have to wait hours in line.
While the Time Off to Vote Act could help expand voting access, two hours may still not be enough in places like Georgia, where some workers waited 10 hours or more to vote in the 2020 presidential election.
The Alabama state legislature passed a measure on Thursday that would ban transgender students in public schools from using restrooms that correspond to their gender identities. If the bill is signed into law by the state’s Republican governor, it would also restrict teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender in K-5 classrooms.
The bill originally only included restroom restrictions for transgender youth. Republican lawmakers who sponsored and supported the discriminatory bill did so under the guise of protecting children, specifically young girls.
However, numerous studies have shown that there are no dangers at all when it comes to allowing transgender students to use restrooms that correspond to their gender identities. In fact, the opposite is true: Restrictive bathroom bills actually endanger trans students, as transgender children face higher rates of harassment, sexual assault and violence when they are forced to use the incorrect restrooms.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Alabama condemned the legislation, describing it as being discriminatory and “in violation of the United States Constitution and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act.”
“This legislation is part of a systematic and growing attack on trans people, particularly trans youth, in all aspects of life,” the organization said in a statement.
Democratic lawmakers lambasted the Republican-sponsored legislation as being cruel to trans students.
As the bill was being debated, lawmakers added another amendment at the last minute — a rider that would ban teachers in K-5 classrooms from discussing issues related to sexuality or gender identity, similar to the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation that was recently signed into law in the neighboring state of Florida.
Sally Smith, executive director of the Alabama Association of School Boards, said that the amendment wasn’t necessary, as such topics aren’t brought up in those grades to begin with. But the amendment would still be harmful to LGBTQ kids, she added, as it “could make it even more difficult for school faculty to create safe environments for some students and families.”
The bill now goes to Gov. Kay Ivey’s (R) desk for consideration. Based on recent political ads from her campaign that target trans kids in the state, there’s a high likelihood that she will sign the bill into law.
This week, the Alabama legislature also passed a bill that would criminalize the provision of gender affirming care to transgender youth — treatment that can often be life-saving. If Ivey signs the bill into law, it would create the strictest regulations on such care in the country, banning treatments for individuals up to the age of 19 and punishing doctors and nurses who provide such care with up to 10 years in prison.
“If passed and signed into law, Alabama will have the most deadly, sweeping, and hostile law targeting transgender people in the country,” trans lawyer Chase Strangio said.
The Senate has confirmed Kentanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, making her the first Black woman Supreme Court justice in history.
Senators voted 53 to 47 to confirm Jackson on Thursday. Three Republicans joined all Democratic senators in voting “yes.” Jackson will be replacing Justice Stephen Breyer, who announced his retirement earlier this year. She is expected to be sworn in sometime mid-summer.
Jackson was the most progressive person being considered for the job by President Joe Biden, who had pledged to nominate a Black woman to the High Court. Jackson, a former public defender, is the only person on the Supreme Court who has represented criminal defendants, including people detained in Guantánamo Bay. The last justice with experience as a public defender was Thurgood Marshall, who retired in 1991.
As a D.C. Circuit Court judge, Jackson made rulings favoring unions, including one in 2018, when she rejected executive orders crafted by former President Donald Trump to limit federal workers’ ability to collectively bargain.
With several confirmation hearings for other federal judgeships under her belt, most recently for her role as a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, she is the most highly vetted modern Supreme Court justice.
During her confirmation hearing, Jackson faced a slew of baseless attacks from far right lawmakers, who used the hearing to bring up their bigoted grievances about racial justice and LGBTQ people. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) berated Jackson seemingly just for being Black, framing her as a proponent of the right’s fabricated version of movements for racial justice, while Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) demanded that Jackson define what a woman is in a series of questions aimed at attacking trans people.
“Watch your step, concrete ceiling just shattered,” wrote Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts). “Congratulations to the Honorable SUPREME. COURT. JUSTICE. Ketanji Brown Jackson. Now read that again.”
A new national survey has found that the daily lives of a majority of adults in the U.S. have not fully returned the pre-pandemic “normal,” and large majorities of people of color and lower-income adults — who are more likely to work frontline jobs — say everyone should remain diligent about COVID precautions such as masking in public.
Despite the lifting of COVID restrictions across the country and media hype about “pandemic fatigue,” six in ten U.S. adults agree that people should continue wearing masks in some public places to avoid future surges of infections, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. A slim majority said they continue to wear protective masks in indoor public places all or most of the time, while 19 percent said they never mask in public, including 37 percent of Republicans and, alarmingly, 44 percent of unvaccinated adults.
The survey found sharp divisions on pandemic precautions, falling along class, partisan and racial lines, as well as between the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. People of color, people suffering from chronic medical conditions and lower-income adults are much more likely to support continued pandemic precautions, while nearly seven in ten Republicans and 67 percent of unvaccinated adults say people should stop masking in public so life can “get back to normal.”
The survey comes as the initial Omicron surge fades, leaving a daily average of roughly 27,000 new cases nationally. The number of cases reported by public health officials and the media are likely an undercount because more people are using at-home COVID tests, resulting in less available data.
While infection rates have fallen sharply since peaking January, more than a dozen states have seen an increase in cases over the past two weeks, including in the heavily populated northeast. Cases in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts are up by more than 30 percent, according to the New York Times COVID tracker. Public health experts remain concerned about future surges fueled by BA.2 and other Omicron variants, which pose an acute risk to the unvaccinated, especially if they were not infected recently.
The survey also highlights the uneven burdens of the pandemic. Large majorities of Black and Latinx respondents (88 percent and 69 percent, respectively) said that people should continue masking in some public places to prevent future surges. Researchers said this may be because more people of color work in service industries than white people. Notably, 68 percent of respondents making less than $40,000 per year said everyone should continue masking in public places. Lower-income people were also more likely to say that the pandemic has had negative impacts on employment and finances.
“Masking works best in all situations if the masking is universal,” said Abdullah Shihipar, a narrative projects director at the People, Place & Health Collective at the Brown University School of Public Health, in a statement on Monday.
Nearly 60 percent of adults say they have not fully returned to activities they did before the pandemic, with 42 percent reporting that they have returned to some but not all activities, and 17 percent reporting that they engage in few pre-pandemic activities. These numbers are even higher among Democrats, who overwhelmingly support continued masking in public.
However, majorities of Republicans (55 percent), unvaccinated adults (57 percent) and nearly half of all white adults say they never changed their activities due to COVID or have basically returned to “normal.”
In comparison, only 25 percent of Black respondents said they never changed their activities due to the pandemic or their lives have returned to “normal.” More than 80 percent of Black adults say they are masking in public all or most of the time. Among adults with chronic health conditions, 65 percent said they are still avoiding at least some activities due to COVID.
Proponents argue that lifting masking requirements poses a deadly threat to frontline workers and people facing health risks.
The federal masking requirement for public transportation — including airplanes — is set to expire on April 18. Fifty-one percent of survey respondents said the requirement should be allowed to expire, while 49 percent say the requirement should be extended, a reflection of the current deep divisions over whether masking should be a personal choice.
In an open letter to President Joe Biden last month, CEOs for major airlines and a lobbying group argued that the federal government should allow mask requirements for airplanes to sunset. The letter sparked a debate among public health experts and masking proponents, with some experts suggesting that masking requirements could be lifted for vaccinated travelers, and airlines could designate a special section of the airplane for people who want extra protection and prefer to sit with others wearing masks.
Shihipar said airlines are unlikely to separate passengers based on masks, and if the transportation requirement is allowed to expire, airplane travel would likely reflect the situation on the ground, with the decision to mask left up to individuals.
“A masking section [on planes] makes little sense; the air is shared and there would be people without masks in [close] proximity to people with masks,” Shihipar said. “It also has the potential to open up those who are masking to harassment” by anti-maskers who see them separated from other passengers.
On Tuesday, the Arizona state Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit from the state’s Republican Party that sought to completely eliminate mail-in voting.
The Arizona Republican Party’s attempt to abolish or severely curtail mail-in voting in the state is part of a nationwide push by the GOP to place more restrictions on voting in response to former President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
Republicans issued the request to Arizona’s highest court earlier this year, asking it to dismantle the mail-in voting system, or, failing that, to eliminate the “no excuse” provision of its statute that allows any eligible voter in the state to request an absentee ballot. That provision has been allowed in the state since 1991, meaning that it has been utilized in the last eight presidential election cycles.
Nevertheless, the party argued in its lawsuit that “in-person voting at the polls on a fixed date (election day) is the only constitutional manner of voting in Arizona.”
“This is yet another attempt by the Arizona Republicans to make it harder for people to vote,” said state Sen. Raquel Terán, who is also the chair of the Arizona Democratic Party.
Earlier this week, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat and a defendant in the lawsuit, condemned the state GOP’s attempt to eradicate mail-in voting.
“Abolishing early voting doesn’t make our elections more secure — it just makes it harder for eligible Arizonans to vote,” Hobbs, who is also running for governor, wrote in a tweet. “These partisan attacks on our freedom to vote are about suppressing the vote, not protecting it.”
Although the ruling is a win for voting rights, the victory may be short-lived. In its ruling, the Arizona state Supreme Court said that they rejected the Republican Party’s lawsuit because it hadn’t gone through the proper channels. The party can resubmit their complaint in lower state courts, the court said.
Still, the temporary win for voting rights will likely be enough to ensure that mail-in voting remains an option for registered voters in the state, at least through the 2022 midterm elections later this year. Arizona Republicans were hopeful that the state Supreme Court would rule in their favor before November, tossing out mail-in voting before this year’s races.
Any attempt to dismantle mail-in voting would be an unpopular choice in the state. Recent polling indicates that Arizonans overwhelmingly support keeping voting by mail as an option in elections, with 74 percent backing the measure and only 10 percent saying they oppose it.
Republicans in Tennessee are pushing a bill through the GOP-controlled legislature that would establish an “alternative form of marriage,” creating a class of common-law marriage that would be limited to heterosexual people and circumvent age limits.
The bill, HB 233, would make it so that children of any age could be married. The bill’s main sponsor, Republican state Rep. Tom Leatherwood, told WKRN that the bill would create “an alternative form of marriage for those pastors and other individuals who have a conscientious objection to the current pathway to marriage in our law.” He has confirmed that “[t]here is not an explicit age limit.”
Only heterosexual people would be allowed to be married under the new class of marriage, which defines marriage as being between “one man” and “one woman.” It was likely filed as a homophobic response to a ruling against former Kentucky clerk Kim Davis last month, in which a federal judge found that Davis had violated couples’ constitutional rights when she refused to marry them because they were gay.
“I don’t think any normal person thinks we shouldn’t have an age requirement for marriage,” said Democratic state Rep. Mike Stewart, adding that Republicans are essentially seeking to give people a free pass for “statutory rape.”
Lawmakers, along with gender-based violence and sexual assault survivor advocates, have raised concerns that eliminating an age limit for marriage would open up doors for children to be abused. In recent years, some states have been considering raising their age limit for marriage in order to prevent child abuse.
“The Sexual Assault Center does not believe the age of consent for marriage should be any younger than it already is,” the Sexual Assault Center of Middle Tennessee told WKRN. “It makes children more vulnerable to coercion and manipulation from predators, sexual and other.”
Research from 2021 found that nearly 300,000 children were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018. Although the age of consent in most states is 18, children can be married as young as 16 with parental consent in many states — meaning that a child could potentially be coerced into marriage with their rapist. Only five states currently bar marriage for children.
Republicans across the country, including in Tennessee, have been passing bills specifically targeted at LGBTQ youths; advocates say that these bills would similarly lead to child abuse. GOP lawmakers in Tennessee have passed especially strict bills specifically targeting transgender children, banning them from participating in sports that align with their gender and barring school districts from freely teaching about sexual orientation or gender.
In Florida, Republicans passed a bill last year that would allow adults to inspect children’s genitals if they think that the child is transgender. The bill would leave children vulnerable to both discrimination and sexual abuse.
A former Trump administration official who is running for Congress in New Hampshire voted in two different states’ Republican primaries in 2016, potentially violating federal law, according to the Associated Press.
Matt Mowers, who served as a White House adviser under Trump before landing a senior job at the State Department, voted via an absentee ballot in New Hampshire’s pivotal 2016 presidential primary while he was still working as the head of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s presidential campaign in the state, according to records obtained by the AP. But after Christie’s White House bid sank, Mowers cast another ballot in the New Jersey presidential primary after re-registering to vote using his parents’ address.
Mowers is the latest former Trump aide to potentially run afoul of voting laws after former chief of staff Mark Meadows registered to vote at a North Carolina mobile home that he may have never visited. Meadows, who helped Trump push repeatedly debunked lies about his election loss, is facing a state investigation into whether he committed voter fraud.
Legal experts say Mowers may have violated a federal law against “voting more than once” in “any general, special, or primary election,” which includes voting in separate jurisdictions “for an election to the same candidacy or office.”
“What he has done is cast a vote in two different states for the election of a president, which on the face of it looks like he’s violated federal law,” David Schultz, an election law expert at the University of Minnesota Law School, told the AP. “You get one bite at the voting apple.”
The issue could also create campaign headaches for Mowers, who is the leading Republican candidate to take on Rep. Chris Pappas, D-N.H. The Republican-led New Hampshire state legislature last week advanced a bill aimed at preventing short-term residents from participating in its first-in-the-nation primary.
Critics hammered Mowers for potentially running afoul of voting laws as Trump and his Republican allies continue to stoke voter fraud lies, especially after Meadows was implicated.
“Their concerns about voter fraud were always projection,” tweeted Miranda Yaver, a political science professor at Oberlin College.
“Funny how all the voter fraud we have found was committed by the GOP,” quipped Tim Fullerton, a former Obama administration aide.
“Weird that this keeps happening,” wroteNew York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. “I guess we know why Republicans are so certain voter fraud is a problem.”
But it’s unlikely that Mowers will face any accountability despite recent high-profileinstances of Black voters facing steep punishments for running afoul of voting rules.
“There is little chance Mowers could face prosecution,” the AP reported, noting that the statute of limitations has lapsed and there is no record of anyone being prosecuted under this specific section of federal election law. A separate state law bars double-voting in different states but includes an exception if the voter “legitimately moved his or her domicile.”
John Corbett, a spokesman for Mowers, did not directly comment on the double-voting in a statement to the AP.
“Matt was proud to work for President Trump as the GOP establishment was working to undermine his nomination,” he told the outlet. “Matt moved for work and was able to participate in the primary in support of President Trump and serve as a delegate at a critical time for the Republican Party and country.”
Republican election lawyer Charlie Spies, who contacted the AP at the request of Mowers’ campaign, told the outlet that the matter was “silly” and that double-voting was “at worst a gray area” of the law and “not the sort of issue anybody would spend time on.”
Independent legal experts say the issue is not cut-and-dried.
“With the right set of facts, it could be construed as a violation, but it’s just not at all obvious to me that it is,” Steven Huefner, an election law expert at Ohio State University law school, told the AP. “It is a pretty murky question.”
Mowers, who also ran and lost to Pappas in 2020 despite Trump’s endorsement, grew up in New Jersey and worked for Christie when he was the state’s governor. He was ultimately embroiled in Christie’s 2016 “Bridgegate” scandal, which led to the convictions of two top Christie allies, though Mowers was not accused of wrongdoing himself. He moved to New Hampshire in 2013 to take on a top job at the state Republican Party and then joined Christie’s 2016 campaign. After Christie bowed out, Mowers moved back to New Jersey to work for a lobbying firm before joining the Trump campaign in July 2016 and later Trump’s administration.
Trump has not publicly backed Mowers’ latest congressional bid but WMUR reported that former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski would have an “active role” in Mowers’ campaign. Trump’s former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley also recently stumped for Mowers.
Mowers has backed the Republican Party’s voting crackdown in the wake of Trump’s loss. His website touts so-called “election integrity” as a top issue to “provide every American citizen with the certainty that their vote counts.” He also backs Republican state legislation to ensure “only legal residents of New Hampshire are entitled to vote.”
More than 50 civil society organizations on Friday accused Republican senators of engaging in “baseless and harmful attacks” on U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings last week.
In a letter taking aim at — but not naming — GOP senators including Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Josh Hawley (Mo.), and Tom Cotton (Ark.) who questioned the nominee’s assigned public defense advocacy on behalf of Guantánamo Bay detainees, the 56 groups said that “attacks made on Judge Jackson’s service as a federal public defender and the clients she vigorously represented are spurious and undermine one of the central tenets of our democracy.”
“As Judge Jackson noted at the hearing, ‘federal public defenders don’t get to pick their clients,’” the organizations wrote. “‘They have to represent whoever comes in and it’s a service. That’s what you do as a federal public defender: You are standing up for the constitutional value of representation.’”
BREAKING: With 55 other groups, we wrote to the Senate raising serious concerns about some senators’ baseless & harmful attacks on Judge Jackson’s record.
History will remember this moment. We urge all senators to bring fairness & honesty to this process. https://t.co/J2gzVDZy6Z
— The Leadership Conference (@civilrightsorg) April 1, 2022
The letter continued:
The right to counsel is one of our nation’s most bedrock principles, helping to fulfill the constitutional promise of a fair trial and the Sixth Amendment’s right to counsel. The Supreme Court has reinforced the right to counsel, considering it a ‘fundamental right essential to a fair trial.’
Thus, the work of public defenders and criminal defense lawyers is critical. Those who enter public service as public defenders and criminal defense lawyers—like Judge Jackson and so many others—should be commended, not maligned.
The letter also addressed the Republican committee members’ incessant grilling of Jackson over her sentencing record in child pornography cases.
“As those who have closely studied this issue explain, Judge Jackson’s sentences were well within the range of her peers,” the groups wrote. “The 2021 U.S. Sentencing Commission report noted that less than 30% of people convicted of nonproduction child sexual abuse material offenses received a sentence within the guideline range. Such discrepancies were also described to Congress in a 2012 report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission. In these reports, the commission recommended Congress change the guidelines, yet… Congress has not implemented the commission’s statutory or guideline recommendations.”
“It is within Congress’ authority, not the courts’, to update sentencing guidelines,” the letter stressed.
The groups contended that “the attacks on Judge Jackson’s record grossly mischaracterize her work and threaten the ideals of our democracy.”
“Despite these inappropriate and knowingly misleading attacks,” the signers said, “Judge Jackson showed a poised and patient judicial temperament, reminding senators that constitutional protections are not privileges reserved for a select few, but rights afforded to us all. This is a much-needed perspective on our highest court.”
A circuit judge on Thursday found the Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, in contempt of court for refusing to turn over documents relating to the state’s recount of the 2020 presidential election.
“Robin Vos had delegated the search for contractors’ records to an employee who did nothing more than send one vague email to one contractor,” wrote Dane County Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn. “Putting aside for the moment the impropriety of making a contractor responsible for a records request … Robin Vos did not tell [sic] that contractor which records to produce, did not ask any of the other contractors to produce records, and did not even review the records ultimately received. Still worse, the Assembly did nothing at all.”
Bailey-Rihn has ordered Vos to release the materials within fourteen days or pay a daily fine of $1,000 any time after that, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Bailey-Rihn established that, if the documents aren’t provided, Vos must provide an explanation.
Wednesday’s ruling stems from an inquiry Vos launched back in May off the back of Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. According to The Washington Post, Vos’ sham audit, which has a taxpayer-funded budget of $700,000, has enlisted the help of retired police officers and an attorney. Thus far, Vos has also subpoenaed scores of election officials across the state in metropolitan areas like Green Bay, Racine and Milwaukee.
In October, nonpartisan watchdog American Oversight filed a lawsuit against Vos and the Wisconsin State Assembly demanding that the judge release records detailing the investigation — a request that Bailey-Rihn has now affirmed.
“Speaker Vos and the Assembly have had ample opportunity to comply with the court’s order and produce records,” Bailey-Rihn wrote.
Still, Bailey-Rihn’s ruling only deals with one of three suits filed by American Oversight.
Vos, for his part, has suggested that Bailey-Rihn’s ruling is part of a politically-motivated smear campaign.
“It’s a liberal judge in Dane County trying to make us look bad. I don’t know about you, but when you have deleted emails, how do you get deleted emails back if they’re from Gmail?” he said, according to Madison.com. “We already have an expert saying they can’t be done. You have a judge who’s focused on making a name for herself, and that’s all she’s doing.”
Thus far, no substantive evidence has emerged to justify the Vos’ recount, for which he is being paid $11,000 a month. President Biden defeated Trump by a margin of 21,000 votes in Wisconsin, a result that a conservative law firm confirmed in December after a ten-month review of the election.
The ruling against the GOP speaker comes amid another outrage over the Republican takeover of the state’s Natural Resources Board, which, like Vos’ sham audit, is benefiting from a highly partisan State Assembly willing to defy the norms of good government.
On Friday, the Wisconsin State Journal editorial board called on Fred Prehn to resign from the Natural Resources Board over his refusal to step down eleven months after his term expired. Prehn will theoretically be able to continue serving until his replacement is confirmed by the State Assembly, whose Republican caucus is indefinitely delaying the transition.
“Prehn seems to think he can serve for life, like an emperor,” the Wisconsin State Journal editorial board wrote. “If that’s true, then good government in Wisconsin is further eroded — along with the public’s ability to hold government officials accountable.”
Civil rights defenders on Thursday welcomed a ruling by a federal judge who struck down parts of a Florida voter suppression law, calling racism “a motivating factor” in the GOP-backed legislation’s passage.
In a 288-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker blocked provisions of Florida’s Senate Bill 90, a massive attack on voting rights signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2020. The law empowers partisan poll watchers, imposes strict voter ID requirements, criminalizes so-called “ballot harvesting,” limits ballot drop boxes, and bans advocacy groups from handing out food or water to voters waiting in long lines.
“At some point, when the Florida Legislature passes law after law disproportionately burdening Black voters, this court can no longer accept that the effect is incidental,” Walker wrote. “Based on the indisputable pattern set out above, this court finds that, in the past 20 years, Florida has repeatedly sought to make voting tougher for Black voters because of their propensity to favor Democratic candidates.”
Cecile Scoon, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida — the lead plaintiff in the case — said in a statement that “for democracy to work, it must include all voices. A federal judge has ruled that the Florida Legislature has engaged in decades of intentional discrimination against Black voters with a series of voting laws” like S.B. 90.
In an extraordinary move, the judge also placed Florida under preclearance requirements for the next decade — a power granted to federal courts under Section 3(c) of the VRA if they find that jurisdictions have engaged in intentional discrimination in voting practices.
“Senate Bill 90 was clearly an anti-voter measure that raised barriers to voting for marginalized groups with specific impacts on elderly voters, voters with disabilities, students, and communities of color,” Scoon added. “The league is gratified that once again the constitutional rights of all of Florida’s voters have superseded partisan politics and that the targeted attack on Black voters will be stopped.”
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) senior counsel Amia Trigg said that “today’s decision is a huge win for Florida voters. This decision recognized that S.B. 90 is the latest stain in a long history of voting laws which restrict Black political participation.”
Walker’s ruling also placed Florida in Voting Rights Act preclearance status — meaning the state must receive federal approval before passing new voting laws — for the next decade, because its Republican officials have “repeatedly, recently, and persistently acted to deny Black Floridians access to the franchise.”
“Without preclearance, Florida could continue to enact such laws, replacing them every legislative session if courts view them with skepticism,” the judge wrote. “Such a scheme makes a mockery of the rule of law.”
Walker also took aim at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holderruling, accusing the justices of “gutting” the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance regime.
“As Judge Walker acknowledged, this is part of a larger assault on voting rights that continues across the country,” Trigg said. “We’re seeing the right to vote being targeted at every level of government. Therefore, it is crucial that we continue this fight.”
“Every voice deserves to be heard in our democracy, and state officials must ensure that by making elections fair and accessible — not by creating unnecessary obstacles to the ballot box,” she added. “This ruling is extremely encouraging for those of us on the frontlines.”
Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at the advocacy group Common Cause, said that “our ‘government by the people’ is stronger and more representative when all of us can participate in it.”
“But as the court found today, for the past 20 years, ‘Florida has repeatedly sought to make voting tougher for Black voters’ as the Legislature worked to pick and choose the voters they want to participate in our government — and the voters they want to exclude,” she added. “This is completely antithetical to our ideals of what a government ‘by the people’ ought to look like. We particularly appreciate that Judge Walker is insisting on 10 years of preclearance through his court.”
According to Edward Hailes, the then-general counsel for the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the intentional disenfranchisement by GOP-led Florida officials of thousands of Black voters “was outcome-determinative” in the state’s — and therefore the nation’s, given the decisive role played by Florida — 2000 presidential election results.
Some observers noted the unlikelihood of Walker’s ruling surviving an appeal to the 11th Circuit or the U.S. Supreme Court, with its 6-3 right-wing supermajority.
This opinion in Florida voting rights case is extraordinary. It’s a full throated (and in my view entirely appropriate given Congress’s intent) application of the Voting Rights Act, calling out Fla for its discrimination against Black voters, knowing it will likely be reversed.
“We’ve seen other district courts do aggressive things in election law cases, and we’ve seen a lot of those decisions get reversed by appellate courts or the Supreme Court,” Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law School professor and election law expert, toldThe New York Times.” I wouldn’t be shocked if this litigation falls into that pattern.”
A favorite quote from Stanley Kunitz, two-time poet laureate of the United States, hangs on a wall in my classroom: “Poets,” he writes, “are not easily domesticated… and they can be outrageous; but they are also idealists and visionaries whose presence is needed… to clear the air of corruption and hypocrisy, to mock oppression, and to challenge [spiritual] apathy.”
Poets, yes, by all means, and teachers and students too, along with citizens and community members, researchers and artists, residents of every stripe and kind. Everyone is invited to clear the air of corruption and hypocrisy, to mock oppression, to challenge apathy — everyone, yes, and with a special duty and burden for teachers.
I’ve taught for more than 50 years, and my students today are all studying to become teachers themselves. They’re an idealistic bunch: They all want to do meaningful work, they all want to do good, and mostly they want to unleash the dreams of youth and change the world — step by step, one student at a time.
The idealism Kunitz describes is a vision most of my students aspire to — not a submissive naïveté nor the willful abandonment of reality, but rather a kind of leaning toward an ideal, embarking on the never-ending pursuit of new knowledge, novel insights and understandings, and that complex, fugitive concept called “truth.” Of course, they fall short — falling short is guaranteed, for enlightenment is always partial, and the truth, in any finished sense, always elusive — but that in no way diminishes the significance of their labor.
This immense journey asks these teachers to reject dogma, orthodoxy and superstition; to unstick themselves from a fantasized past when everything was settled and putatively perfect; and to dismiss the idea that the present moment is in any sense a point of arrival with nothing much up ahead. It encourages them to disregard notions of a fixed, preordained future with every conflict resolved, every synthesis achieved, every mystery explained. It urges them to get busy in projects of repair and renewal, posing new questions, struggling with unique problems. They feel — mostly — up to the challenge.
But, of course, this is not an easy time to become a teacher: The perennial problems of too few resources and too little support are now joined by a weaponized opposition to curiosity and inquiry itself. When Texas State Representative Matt Krause released a list of 850 books and advised school libraries to report whether they had any of the titles on his list, a school district in San Antonio removed more than 400 books. When the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board voted unanimously to ban the Holocaust graphic novel Maus from the school’s classrooms and library, aTennessee pastor organized a book burning, live-streamed on Facebook, where books with “demonic influences,” including Harry Potter and Twilight, were fed to the flames. When Florida passed the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill recently, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s press secretary made its bigoted subtext explicit, calling it an “anti-grooming” law.
As governors and senators join thetroglodyte chorus, it becomes increasingly clear that as terrible as banning authors like Art Spiegelman is in itself, the main targets are my idealistic students and English teachers anywhere in the country.
The main victims of this galloping censorship are children and youth, of course, but it’s important to note that while truth-telling can and is being banned in schools by state legislators and local boards, it’s a wide, wide world out there, and repression activates resistance. Neither kids nor teachers are simply one-dimensional victims of ignorant policy. Teachers are launching Banned Books Clubs and after-school local history study groups at high schools around the country, and the message is clear: You need no one’s permission to interrogate the world.
We’re reading The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht in my class now, and the drama, the tensions and the contradictions feel eerily contemporary. Galileo’s breath-taking discoveries about the movement of the planets and the stars ignite in him the desire to pursue a particularly radical idealism: “The cities are narrow and so are the brains,” he declares boldly. “Superstition and plague. But now the word is: since it is so, it does not remain so. For everything moves, my friend.” Galileo seems at first unstoppable: “It was always said that the stars were fastened to a crystal vault so they could not fall,” he says. “Now we have taken heart and let them float in the air, without support, they are embarked on a great voyage — like us, who are also without support and embarked on a great voyage.”
Here Galileo ups the ante, questioning Church orthodoxy and challenging the establishment in the realm of its own authority. For the Church, the great voyage is a sanctioned and planned journey, the steps mapped out with precision and certainty, and with all the support we will ever need in the institution of the Church itself.
Clearly more than theories of astronomy are at stake. The findings of his research, surely, but also the joy, the excitement, the reckless hope, all mark Galileo as a radical visionary — he wanted to open people’s minds and change the world.
Galileo’s struggle is punctuated with joy and grief, hope and despair, pain and torment and pressure, but when he finally capitulates and denounces what he knows to be true, when he is received back “into the ranks of the faithful” by the Church, he is exiled from humanity — by his own words. In the end, he is confronted by a former student, one of his crestfallen disciples: “Many on all sides followed you with their eyes and ears,” he says, “believing that you stood, not only for a particular view of the movement of the stars, but even more for the liberty of teaching — in all fields. Not then for any particular thoughts, but for the right to think at all. Which is in dispute.”
The liberty of teaching and the right to think at all is a right that is in deep dispute in our schools now, and in the larger society.
Winding 336 miles through Maricopa, Pinal and Pima counties, the Central Arizona Project supplies water from the Colorado River to 80 percent of the state’s population and 40 percent of its farmlands. A drought has prompted the U.S. Department of Interior to implement a Tier-1 shortage for the first time, which will cut 18 percent of Arizona’s water supply from the Colorado River. But during Arizona’s legislative session thus far, bills to address the water shortage have been overshadowed by the 140 bills aimed at preventing so-called election fraud.
Arizona residents like Perri Benemelis, a white 61-year-old water policy analyst, are tired of “election fraud” talk, and many are turning away from the Republican and Democratic parties and registering or identifying as independents.
Benemelis cited proposals for a desalination project in Mexico and the monitoring of groundwater pumping in Mojave County as ways to address the water shortage, but is doubtful it will gain ground in the state legislature.
“Considering the focus on election law probably means we’re not going to see a lot of substantive legislation addressing water availability,” Benemelis said. “We [Arizonans] keep chasing this fantasy that there was fraud in the last election that needs to be addressed. And because of this obsession by our Republican legislature, substantive issues — important issues to the citizens of the state of Arizona — are being largely ignored.”
Independents now make up the largest voter group in the country. As of mid-January, 46 percent of those surveyed by a Gallup poll reported they identify as independents, 28 percent identify as Democrats and 24 percent as Republicans. According to 2018 figures, Independents are most likely to be younger, male and white, but more recent data show their numbers growing among other demographic groups. This group is deciding election outcomes — or at least making election results less predictable. Independent voters, pivotal in swing states including Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, favored Donald Trump by 4 percentage points in 2016 and Joe Biden by 13 percentage points in 2020.
Since April 2021, President Biden’s approval rating among independents declined from 68 percent to 36 percent, according to a recent NBC poll. And if the early Texas primaries are any indication for other upcoming primaries later this year, twice the number of Texan independents came out to vote for Republican Gov. Greg Abbott than Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke. Republican primary turnout exceeded the Democratic primary turnout by nearly 74 percent, far greater than the 45 percent difference in the 2018 midterm elections. Most independents polled are opposed to efforts to remove books from schools and a total abortion ban.
What this means is that while most independents are opposed to culture war politics and extreme political views, which prompted their abandonment of Trump in 2020, the disillusionment with the Biden administration among independents may result in low voter turnout rates for Democratic candidates. Independents could unwillingly propel Republicans towards a congressional majority this year and in 2024 if the Democratic Party does not capture the energy of this growing group of voters.
For the first time in Maricopa County, registered independents and third-party voters, at 35 percent of the total number of registered voters, exceeded the number of registered Republicans and Democrats. Statewide, independents and third-party voters make up 34.2 percent, just behind Republicans but ahead of Democrats, according to the Arizona secretary of state’s voter registration report. The Open Primaries Education Fund, a nonprofit organization that advocates for reform of the primary election system, projects this trend to continue and for independents and third-party voters to reach 43 percent of the state voting population by 2036.
Hugh McNichol is one of many veterans who identify themselves as independent. According to a March 2020 Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America member survey, 41 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans identify as an independent or third-party voter, 36 percent as Republican and 22 percent as Democrat.
McNichol, who is a 39-year-old white man, resides in Lansing, Michigan, where he owned his own mechanic shop before being hired as a mechanic by Tesla. Prior to this, McNichol served as a mechanic in the U.S. Army for eight years and was stationed in Iraq from 2006 to 2007. McNichol says he voted for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in 2016 and Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2020, because they didn’t support the Iraq War.
“Veterans are realizing that neither one of the major parties have our best interests at heart,” McNichol told Truthout. “The vast majority of people in our country don’t care about what’s going over there…. But the politicians who sent us over there, they should be obligated to us, they should be obligated to those people there too. And I don’t feel like they held up their promises in either case.”
McNichol started to observe that promises to build infrastructure in Iraq turned into profits for private contractors, particularly for Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), which received $39.5 billion in war-related contracts. Dick Cheney was the chairman and CEO of former KBR parent company Halliburton until he became George W. Bush’s vice president in 2001.
“While I was there, I started hearing things like KBR gets $100 for a bag of laundry, KBR gets $100 for a plate of food, $6 for a can of soda, all these inflated expenses. And they weren’t keeping their promises of getting the infrastructure back up and running,” McNichol said.
Like McNichol, some veterans of the Afghanistan War report they feel as if they broke a promise to Afghans when U.S. troops withdrew from the country. Meanwhile, when McNichol returned home, he found the Department of Veterans Affairs inundated and unprepared to help returning soldiers.
McNichol worries about the lack of affordable housing and pollution in Lansing’s water sources. For years, the city has given tax cuts and subsidies to General Motors (GM), which polluted Lansing’s groundwater with dioxane, an industrial chemical that GM uses to clean oil off car parts. The pollution was discovered after the Revitalizing Auto Communities Environmental Response Trust was established by the federal government to take over the GM sites following the company’s bankruptcy in 2009. Earlier this year, GM announced it would invest $7 billion in manufacturing sites across Michigan. In Lansing, GM would partner with LG Energy Solution to spend $2.6 billion to build a new battery cell plant in Lansing and offer 1,700 new jobs to the area.
However, McNichol is wary about the long-term impact. “These toxins from the GM plans are still not cleaned up. They have no plans. The politicians in Lansing don’t care. They just want GM to come back again,” McNichol said.
Independent voters Truthout interviewed described a “rigged electoral system.” Despite the growing numbers of independents and third-party voters from diverse demographic and ideological groups, these voters face hurdles at the ballot box. Twenty-three U.S. states — including the battleground states of Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania — have closed presidential primaries. Fifteen states, including Florida and Pennsylvania, have closed congressional and state primaries. Thirty states — including Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania — require voters to declare a party affiliation upon registration. Those registered as independents are thus excluded from the two major parties’ closed primary elections, which, according to data from Ballotpedia, determines 35 percent of state legislative elections. In 11 states, more than half of all state legislative seats did not have major party competition in 2020. Registering with the two major parties often dictates the drawing of electoral districts, and poll workers are often only chosen from voters who register with the two major parties.
Advocacy groups such as Independent Voting and Open Primaries Education Fund want to see voter registration without party affiliation, nonpartisan primary elections and a restructuring of the Federal Election Commission to ensure nonpartisan election operations. According to the National League of Cities, 73 percent of the largest cities in the country already hold nonpartisan municipal elections.
“Independents began to see that the control of the electoral process by the two parties was fused with the larger economic and social circumstances in the country,” said Jacqueline Salit, president of IndependentVoting.org. “They began to feel that this was a country being run by a set of insiders, that the insiders had control over the political apparatus, and that unless and until we could change and transform the political apparatus, we weren’t going to be able to address issues of economic instability.”
Beyond open primaries, those interviewed support electoral reform measures, such as independent redistricting and having the top two or top four winners from primary elections compete in general elections. California, Washington State, Alaska, Nebraska and Louisiana already have such a system. Others support ranked choice voting, already adopted in 23 jurisdictions.
In Florida, for all the mainstream media talk of Latinos shifting their loyalties to the Republican Party after Trump made gains among Latino voters in Arizona, Texas and Florida in 2020, the data on independents present a less certain picture. According to the Florida Department of State’s October 2020 voter registration records, 36.5 percent of Latinos in the state registered as a third-party member or unaffiliated, behind Democrats and well ahead of Republicans. Data from earlier this year show independents now make up 28.7 percent of all registered voters statewide. If this trend continues, the state’s independent and third-party voters will exceed Republicans and Democrats by 2035.
Jose Torres, who is 65 years old, identifies as Hispanic, and lives in Jacksonville, Florida, begrudgingly voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Andrew Gillum for governor in 2018 and Biden for president in 2020. Torres describes himself as economically conservative and socially liberal. He identifies as an independent and advocates for open primary elections in Florida because he is tired of having to vote for the “lesser of two evils.”
“The Democrats have taken Hispanic voters for granted for 20 years. We are not monolithic,” Torres told Truthout.
Torres says that Republicans were able to use anti-communist rhetoric to make gains among Cubans in South Florida. Even though he doesn’t buy into this rhetoric, Torres says that the Democratic Party has also failed to address issues of concern to him: high prescription drug prices, stagnant state minimum wages and climate change, citing rising sea levels that threaten to immerse parts of Miami two feet underwater within the next 40 years.
Young first-generation Latino-American voters have even less affiliation to either of the major parties. According to the Open Primaries Education Fund report, 60 percent of Latinos in the U.S. are under the age of 35 and over 50 percent of Latino millennials are independents.
Dariel Cruz Rodriguez, currently a 17-year-old senior at Colonial High School in Orlando, Florida, will vote for the first time this year. Rodriguez identifies as an independent. He said he will probably vote for Democrats this year, because of the state’s Republican-dominated legislature’s efforts to restrict voting rights, but he is also frustrated with the Democrats and the Biden administration.
“I supported Joe Biden, mainly because I wanted to get the other guy out. But Biden made a lot of promises on the campaign trail, and failed to follow through with a lot of them, especially on student loan forgiveness, which is really important to me and a lot of my other classmates,” Rodriguez told Truthout.
Besides student loan forgiveness, Rodriguez wants to see the government address climate change and improve public transit. He also opposes Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which recently passed the State House Legislature.
“Politicians are using Florida’s children and students as playing cards in the state legislature,” Rodriguez said.
Originally from the city of Ludowici in southern Georgia, Ron Dumas, a 23-year-old Black man, is currently finishing up his bachelor’s degree at the University of North Carolina in Asheville. He is majoring in ethics because, as he states, “I care about what is right.”
Dumas describes his hometown in Georgia as lacking in educational opportunities and job mobility: “I always say that there’s just a gas station and a high school in Ludowici.” Ludowici, with a population of 2,442, according to 2020 census figures, is 56 percent white and 36 percent African American, and votes largely conservative. Dumas says the Democrats “abandoned the community when they believed they couldn’t compete for the vote.”
Dumas’s mom is a medical assistant and his stepfather a veteran and truck driver. He recalls being 9 years old when his mom allowed him to stay up late to watch Barack Obama’s 2008 inauguration ceremony. It was the first time his parents had ever voted — his mom told him she didn’t vote in 2004 because “it would not have mattered.”
Dumas voted for the first time in 2020, supporting Bernie Sanders in the primaries. He noted that there was less excitement among his peers when Biden had become the Democratic nominee.
Dumas’s and Rodriguez’s sentiments echo the findings of a September 2020 survey conducted by Politico among Gen Z voters. Almost half of the Gen Z respondents reported they voted more against Trump, rather than for Biden. Forty-two percent of the poll’s Gen Z respondents identify as independent, 39 percent as Democrats and 20 percent as Republican.
“There is a consensus that people are tired of polarization and tired of the sort of politics where you’re always voting against something and never for something,” Dumas said. He wants to see Biden follow through with his promises on voting rights legislation, affordable health care, affordable child care, affordable housing and passing the Build Back Better plan.
While on the campaign trail, Biden ignited backlash and had to apologize to Black voters when he said, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me, or Trump, then you ain’t Black.” But more than a quarter of Black voters registered as independent and may be looking for an alternative to both major parties. Since last April, the president’s approval rating has declined from 83 percent to 64 percent among Black voters.
Like Dumas, Jarrell Corley, a 35-year-old Black man, emphasizes that Black voters are not a monolith and that there are more than two sides to an issue.
Corley identifies as an independent because he says he is tired of seeing nothing change for the Black community under Republican or Democratic administrations. He voted for Clinton in 2016, but did not vote in the 2020 presidential election, saying, “There was no point in voting. I didn’t have a dog in the fight.”
Corley is originally from Chicago. He cites that in most urban centers with large Black populations, local governments are dominated by the Democrats, but conditions, including displacement and police brutality, are getting worse.
“The only reason Black people don’t feel comfortable voting for Republicans is because the Democrats are a mouthpiece for the issues of Black people. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything is getting done,” Corley told Truthout. “If you look into all these major cities run by Democrats, what’s going on? Gentrification. They’re displacing poor, marginalized groups of people for new high economic development. So you may talk about progress and police brutality and all these issues, but what are you really doing? It’s all a facade. Using Black tragedy as a means to galvanize power.”
At the University of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison, Sam Clayton, a 21-year-old white student, studies horticulture. Clayton is nonbinary, using they/them pronouns, and is the treasurer of the campus’s chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America. Clayton recently led the UW-Madison local chapter to work with other organizations to stop a city attempt to shut down homeless encampments in Madison’s Reindahl Park and instead helped push the city to use federal COVID relief money to construct shelters there instead.
Clayton said they voted for Biden in 2020 out of “duress” and with “no excitement,” and has not seen any improvement in their material conditions.
Millennials were reported to be the first generation to do worse economically than their parents, a trend that has continued for Gen Z as housing and college costs soar. Clayton describes how their parents paid off college expenses and bought their first home by the time they were in their 20s. “It’s generally hard for young people to imagine a good future. And the Democrats don’t inspire much confidence in anything other than the status quo,” Clayton said. “The Democrats rely on this assumption that because they’re using progressive language, that’ll translate into youth voters. But more and more people that I talk to, even folks who are not politically inclined, don’t like what’s going on. The phrase ‘settled’ encompasses how people feel about voting for Democrats.”
While Politico reported that young voters are less likely than registered voters of all other age groups to consider voting impactful, they are just as likely to believe they can affect politics and political affairs. Young voters are more likely to support protests than older voters. Millennial and Gen Z voters interviewed for this article expressed a distrust of the government to address the country’s problems, and believe they must rely on their communities instead.
Clayton is worried about rising temperatures, housing prices, utility bills and student loans. As a nonbinary person, they do not feel they would be safe under a Republican administration, but believes that the Democrats may lose in 2022 and even in 2024 because young people are not relying on the electoral system to affect change.
“I think the Democrats have done a very good job of turning young people off from voting because they haven’t done much for us,” said Clayton. “But there is an increase in people’s political militancy and political agitation in terms of protesting, not necessarily just at the ballot box.”
In Pennsylvania, which holds closed presidential, congressional and state primaries, several bills to open up primary elections have stalled in the state government. According to January 2022 voter registration data from the Pennsylvania Department of State, 14.8 percent of voters registered as unaffiliated or “other.”
Third-party or independent candidates lack access to voter rolls and funding that the two major parties have. Furthermore, they often face legal challenges from the two parties who fear a third-party candidate will draw voters away from them or “spoil” their race.
Matt Nemeth, a 27-year-old white man and chair of the Green Party Allegheny chapter in Pennsylvania, regrets his vote for Clinton in 2016 and expresses frustration with the argument that their members are “spoiling” the vote, as both Clinton and Trump “serve private interests.”
Nemeth’s parents voted for Trump twice because he promised to bring manufacturing jobs back to Pennsylvania. Nemeth, on the other hand, says that manufacturing jobs should not come at the cost of corporate accountability and clean air, a promise he believes that both Democrats and Republicans have not delivered on.
Last year, U.S. Steel canceled plans for a $1.5 billion upgrade to bring three plants in Pennsylvania’s Monongahela Valley up to health department regulations. The regulations were implemented after two fires erupted, releasing benzene and hydrogen sulfide into the air and causing asthma-related emergency visits among residents. While the plants currently remain idle, U.S. Steel is challenging the Allegheny Health Department’s regulations.
“Both parties made promises that they don’t want to keep or can’t keep, and then every four years, we switch to another party, and the cycle repeats,” Nemeth told Truthout.
If the voices of this growing group of independents and third-party voters are excluded or unheeded, it could spell further volatility in our elections in the coming years.
In Chattanooga, Tennessee, independent Amber Hysell, a 37-year-old white woman, is making another bid for a seat in the state’s 3rd Congressional District. Hysell is a working mom still paying off student loans for a college accounting degree she was unable to finish when her financial aid ran out with only two classes left to take. For much of her adult life, she worked graveyard shifts in service and retail jobs so that she could have time to spend with her child during the day.
Fed up with issues of concern to her being overlooked — wealth inequality, child care, health care, underfunded schools and affordable housing — Hysell decided to run for Congress. When she was courted by the Hamilton County Democrats in 2020, she was given a Democratic strategy book from the 1970s.
“The way they described how a campaign is supposed to work, it made me feel like they didn’t realize they were in Tennessee, that they were just incredibly out of touch with the problems in this district and in this state. It really did not seem to me to have an actual plan or the actual desire to win down here,” Hysell told Truthout.
As an independent, Hysell doesn’t automatically get access to voter contact information or funding sources as candidates from the two major parties do. But when asked why she was bothering to run when there were so many hurdles, Hysell replies: “Life is going to be difficult for the next generation. We’re not addressing climate change. We’re not addressing inequality in any meaningful way. Republicans and Democrats are two sides of the same coin and neither one of them is paying the bills. They have created a system that blockades anyone who doesn’t fall on one side or the other. And the best thing that I can do for my kid is do whatever I can to change that outcome.”
The Arizona Senate on Wednesday passed a Republican-authored bill that advocates warn could prompt “the most extreme voter purge in the country” by requiring state residents to retroactively provide proof of citizenship to stay on the rolls.
Marilyn Rodriguez, founder of the Arizona-based firm Creosote Partners, argued in a Twitter thread that H.B. 2492 is a “monumentally terrible attack on our elections.”
“Take the proof of citizenship requirement for voter registration, which was adopted in ’04. By making this a requirement for voters, this bill would retroactively apply it to the millions of AZ voters registered before the proof of citizenship law took effect 18 years ago,” Rodriguez explained. “Arizona is the only state in the nation with a documentary proof of citizenship requirement currently in force, but it exempts previously registered voters. But this bill would do away with that protection.”
Without intervention by the Arizona Supreme Court, Rodriguez continued, “the clear language here means that to be eligible to vote — regardless of when you registered — you need to have shown proof of citizenship.”
“Imagine how many of Arizona’s 4.35 million registered voters would be immediately forced off the rolls or given just 30 days to provide proof of their citizenship, such as a birth or naturalization certificate,” she wrote. “This is a recipe for chaos, not election integrity, and it would likely cut the state’s electorate in half overnight. If Arizona proceeds with this bill, it will draw numerous lawsuits and be in lonely, uncharted waters defending the indefensible.”
Just one of a slew of voter suppression measures that the GOP-controlled Arizona legislature is currently working to advance — including a bill to abolish early voting — H.B. 2492 now heads to Republican Gov. Doug Ducey’s desk, having passed the state House last month along party lines.
Arizona, which President Joe Biden carried narrowly in 2020, emerged as a flashpoint in efforts by former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies to overturn the election results.
Following the November 2020 presidential contest, state Republicans fueled by Trump’s baseless claims of fraud hired the now-defunct firm Cyber Ninjas to conduct an audit of ballots in the state’s most populous county. The review ultimately found that Biden won the election.
But Arizona Republicans, as evidenced by H.B. 2492 and other legislation, have yet to abandon their unfounded narrative that the state’s election system is riddled with unlawful voting and “foreign interference.”
“A group of Arizona legislators continue to directly attack democracy and voting rights using every tool at their disposal,” Alex Gulotta, Arizona state director of All Voting Is Local, said in a statement Wednesday. “Ducey must veto H.B. 2492, which creates illegal barriers to voting for the people of Arizona by imposing improper requirements on voter registration.”
Gulotta warned that the legislation, sponsored by state Rep. Jake Hoffman (R-12), requires “anyone who registered to vote before 2005 to provide additional documentation” and “targets voters born outside the United States for special scrutiny and investigation.”
“Bills like this one are being passed through the Arizona legislature to appease a small, but loud group of legislators who are basing their decisions on unfounded claims from the sham election review conducted by the discredited and defunct Cyber Ninjas,” said Gulotta. “This is the latest anti-voter measure from a group of legislators who are more interested in grabbing power than protecting the will of the people. Even though their own Senate rules attorney told them this bill was illegal, they continue to recklessly squander taxpayer money by provoking inevitable and expensive litigation.”
H.B. 2492 is one of more than 250 bills that state-level Republicans nationwide have introduced, pre-filed, or carried over into 2022 in an effort to restrict ballot access, according to the latest tally by the Brennan Center for Justice.
“Across the country, Republican state legislators are trying to purge voters and erect massive barriers to the ballot box in order to choose their voters and exclude everyone else,” said Christina Harvey, executive director of Stand Up America. “Arizona’s H.B. 2492 is one of the most egregious examples of anti-voter legislation being peddled by the GOP under the guise of election integrity.”
“But there’s no hiding their true intentions; this bill places a disproportionate — and often insurmountable — burden on older, minority, and low-income voters,” Harvey added. “A vote for H.B. 2492 is a vote to disenfranchise Arizonans. Governor Ducey must now decide whether he’s on the side of everyday Arizonans or the Republican legislators who are trying to silence their voices.”
On Tuesday, Sen. Mike Braun (R-Indiana) suggested that precedent-setting Supreme Court rulings on abortion and interracial marriage should be undone — and then attempted to walk back his comments after they were met with widespread criticism.
Braun, who was on a conference call with reporters about the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, had been discussing what kind of qualities he looked for in a potential justice. Braun is not a member of the Judiciary Committee, which is currently questioning Jackson about her qualifications to serve on the nation’s highest bench, but he will eventually vote on Jackson’s nomination when the full Senate decides whether or not to approve her to the Court.
Braun explained that he wouldn’t view it as such because he saw the original 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling as activism, adding that justices shouldn’t “homogenize” issues for the entire nation. Instead, he said, they should leave matters like abortion up to the states.
The reporter then sought to clarify Braun’s position. “So, you would be OK with the Supreme Court leaving the question of interracial marriage to the states?”
“Yes,” Braun responded, adding:
I think that that’s something that, if you’re not wanting the Supreme Court to weigh in on issues like that, you’re not going to be able to have your cake and eat it too. I think that’s hypocritical.
After the interview was published, the Republican senator’s remarks were widely condemned, including by Indiana Democratic Party Chair Mike Schmuhl.
“When Indiana Democrats say the Indiana Republican Party’s culture wars are diminishing our nation’s future, this is exactly what we mean,” Schmul said. “Democrats implore all Hoosiers to ask themselves if they want to be associated with someone as embarrassing as Mike Braun.”
Braun also faced pushback on social media.
“My God. GOP @SenatorBraun of IN just condemned the Supreme Court 1967 ruling to end the ban on interracial marriage,” wrote human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid. “He makes this racist statement while evaluating Judge Jackson — who is Black and married to a white man.”
Braun attempted to walk back his remarks later that day, claiming that he had “misunderstood a line of questioning that ended up being about interracial marriage” — in spite of the fact that the reporter had asked the question twice, in clear and simple language.
“Let me be clear on that issue — there is no question the Constitution prohibits discrimination of any kind based on race, that is not something that is even up for debate, and I condemn racism in any form, at all levels, and by any states, entities, or individuals,” Braun said in a statement to The Hill.
But many didn’t accept Braun’s explanation as legitimate, particularly because the question was posed so clearly.
“Don’t let Mike Braun walk back his insane comments & claim that he misunderstood,” wrote political commentator Lindy Li. “He said exactly what he meant: that the Supreme Court was wrong to legalize interracial marriage [and] that Roe should be destroyed.”
Christopher Kelley, a political science professor at Miami University of Ohio, agreed.
“There is no way Braun misheard the question based on the answer he gave,” Kelley said.
Former President Donald Trump has rescinded his endorsement of Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Alabama) for Senator over the congressman’s decision to focus less on peddling false claims regarding the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
“Mo Brooks of Alabama made a horrible mistake recently when he went ‘woke’ and stated, referring to the 2020 Presidential Election Scam, ‘Put that behind you, put that behind you,’” Trump said in his statement.
The former president went on to wrongly claim that the 2020 presidential election was “rife with fraud and irregularities,” even though every claim of election fraud has been debunked or deemed unfounded by fact-checkers and judges alike.
“Very sad but, since he decided to go in another direction, so have I, and I am hereby withdrawing my Endorsement of Mo Brooks for the Senate,” Trump said. “I don’t think the great people of Alabama will disagree with me.”
Trump’s decision to rescind his endorsement of Brooks could also be interpreted as a warning to other Republican candidates – a message that they should keep talk of bogus election fraud alive or else face the consequences from the Republican Party’s de facto leader.
Brooks, a longtime Trump loyalist, spoke onstage with the former president during his “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021, the day that the Electoral College results were certified by Congress. Brooks was the first lawmaker to cast a vote against certifying the election, justifying his vote by citing baseless claims of election fraud.
During that rally, Brooks asked Trump loyalists whether they were “willing to do what it takes to fight for America” following Trump’s election loss to President Joe Biden. Brooks also told members of the crowd, some of whom went on to attack the Capitol that day, to “start taking down names and kicking ass” when it came to the lawmakers who voted in favor of certifying the election.
Despite his continued insistence that the election was stolen, Brooks’s decision to move past rehashing the 2020 election may be out of recognition that Americans are no longer interested in false claims of election fraud. A Morning Consult/Politico poll from February, for example, shows that 64 percent of American voters want the Republican Party to move on from Trump’s claims of fraud, while only 23 percent want the party to continue focusing on the issue.
More than one-third of the estimated 150,000 transgender youth and young adults in the United States are at risk of being denied gender-affirming health care as politicians push a deluge of anti-LGBTQ bills through multiple state legislatures, and authorities in Texas threaten to tear apart families over transphobic allegations of “child abuse.”
Fifteen states have restricted access to gender-affirming care or are considering laws to do so, putting an estimated 54,000 transgender youth ages 13 to 17 at risk of losing access to health care that is shown to be essential for improving mental health and saving lives, according to a new report from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. Another 4,000 young adults are also at risk of losing access to care under proposals in Alabama, North Carolina and Oklahoma that target people between the ages of 18 and 20.
The report comes as Republican politicians across the country attack the rights of LGBTQ youth and their families in an attempt to capture media attention and rally their base to the polls in 2022 and 2024. More than 100 bills attacking trans and gender-nonconforming people have been introduced in state legislatures since 2020, and 2021 was the “worst year for anti-LGBTQ legislation in recent history,” according to civiland human rights groups. The bills in 15 states currently targeting trans youth would punish and, in some cases, criminalize parents and medical providers.
Right-wing lawmakers across the country have already pushed to bar trans athletes from school sports, and now they demand that the government interrupt or even criminalize health decisions that advocates say should be left up to youth, parents, counselors and doctors. All major health organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatricians (APA) and the American Medical Association, oppose legislation that would ban gender-affirming care for adolescents.
While gender-affirming medical care may include the use of hormones to delay puberty and to promote physical development that is consistent with a child’s identity — which is recommended by the APA for trans youth when they reach an appropriate age but exploited by the right to spark outrage — these treatments are only one part of a much broader model of care for trans, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people.
Many hospitals will only offer hormone treatment to patients ages 16 and older, and some patients may choose other services instead. The gender-affirming care model includes counseling and psychological evaluations, as well as support during and after social and legal transitions, with an emphasis on affirming a patient’s identity in health care settings. Some patients receive speech therapy or laser hair removal, for example. Research has shown that rates of attempted suicide are lower among transgender people who want and receive gender-affirming health care.
Victoria Kirby York, deputy executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, an LGBTQ+ and racial justice group, said Black youth are facing a suicide crisis, and bills peddled by lawmakers that could “take a child’s life” are a “disgrace.”
“Gender-affirming care is a model with a range of treatments, not just hormones or surgery, which is getting lost in the national conversation about these bills,” York said in an email. “For instance, gender-affirming care treatment from a mental health therapist could include the recommendation of social transition for transgender youth (name, clothing, pronouns shift, use of a binder, etc).”
While many of the anti-trans bills target hormonal treatments for transgender youth, advocates say the legislation threatens an entire medical model that has become standard treatment for trans people. Right-wing politicians cling to false claims that minors are undergoing gender-reassignment surgery, but these procedures are typically only available to adults.
One thing we hear over and over from those seeking to ban trans care is that we don’t have enough evidence that it “works”. First of all, we do have a lot of evidence that the care is safe and effective, which is why it is supported by every major medical association.
Last year, lawmakers in Arkansas succeeded in passing a law to ban gender-affirming care for transgender and gender-nonconforming minors. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott, both Republicans, have been widelycondemned for declaring gender-affirming care “child abuse” and ordering the state’s child protective services to investigate parents of trans kids. The policy is terrorizing families and putting youth at risk of being removed from their homes, forced into a brokenfoster caresystem and made to suffer serious emotional harm. Health officials in the Biden administration call Abbott’s order “discriminatory and unconscionable” and vowed to extend federal protections to Texas families.
The anti-trans efforts in Texas and Arkansas face lawsuits and are currently blocked by courts, at least for now. However, an anti-trans bill introduced in Missouri would rip a page from Abbott’s playbook and enshrine gender-affirming care as “child abuse” in state law. Anti-trans bills in 10 states would allow private citizens to file civil lawsuits against medical providers who violate proposed bans on gender-affirming care for youth, a tactic that mirrors the Texas “bounty hunter” anti-abortion law that has devastated reproductive health care services in the state.
The anti-trans bills across 15 states carry severe penalties for health care providers and, in some cases, family members and parents of trans youth, according to the Williams Institute. In each of these states, the bills would either criminalize providers of gender-affirming care or subject them to discipline from state licensing boards. Thousands of frontline doctors already oppose any legislation that criminalizes patient care for trans and gender-nonconforming patients.
Additionally, bills in six states would penalize parents who facilitate gender-affirming care for their children. The report continues:
About half of these bills would further limit access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth by barring certain insurance providers from offering coverage for gender-affirming care, by placing restrictions on the use of state funds or state facilities to provide this care, or by excluding gender-affirming care as a tax-deductible health care expense. Bills in seven states would prohibit certain health insurance plans from offering coverage for gender-affirming care. In eight states, bills would prohibit the use of state funds for gender-affirming care or more broadly prohibit distribution of state funds to any organization or individual that provides gender-affirming care to minors, seemingly regardless of what the funding is used for. In five states, bills would prohibit gender-affirming care by or in government-owned or operated facilities, and by individual providers employed by government entities. In four states, bills would exclude gender-affirming care as a tax-deductible health care expense.
The right’s onslaught of anti-trans policies is already taking a heavy toll on the mental health of trans youth and their families, and research shows that anti-trans messages in the media are associated with adverse mental health outcomes in adults. Advocates and researchers say trans and other LGBTQ youth are particularly vulnerable due to discrimination, the harms of negative media messaging and bullying by their peers, especially if they are also youth of color.
With experts warning that a new Covid-19 surge in the U.S. may be imminent as an Omicron subvariant spreads in Europe and Asia, congressional leaders are making little progress toward a deal to approve funding needed for the continuation of key pandemic response programs — including free vaccines and therapeutics for the uninsured.
Hampered by obstruction from Republican lawmakers who have questioned the need for any new coronavirus funding, Democratic leaders are scrambling to find a path forward for a roughly $16 billion aid package that was yanked from an omnibus spending measure last week.
The same omnibus spending bill provided $29 billion more for the Pentagon than President Joe Biden requested.
The Covid funding was removed after rank-and-file Democrats learned that the aid package was financed by repurposing previously approved pandemic money from states — a scheme, advocated by GOP lawmakers, that some feared would undermine local public health initiatives.
On Friday, the House is set to leave for recess without any coronavirus funding agreement in sight. The Department of Health and Human Services is completely out of coronavirus response money, and the White House is warning that “critical” testing, vaccine, and treatment efforts will be halted in the coming weeks without an infusion of funds.
“Without additional resources from Congress, the results are dire,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said during a press briefing last week. “Just to give you some specifics: In March, testing capacity would — will — decline… In April, free testing and treatments for tens of millions of Americans without health insurance will end. In May, America’s supply of monoclonal antibodies will run out.”
In a Twitter post on Thursday, the advocacy group Public Citizen called such a scenario “horrifying.”
“A program that pays to test, treat, and vaccinate uninsured people for Covid will end next month without funding,” the group wrote. “We’re running out of money to fight Covid, but critical aid is stalled in Congress. We can’t let this happen.”
“Without funding,” Public Citizen added, “we won’t have the resources to expand global vaccination that decreases risk of new variants, keeps cases low, and saves lives.”
We’ve only begun to see how lack of Congressional funding will impact COVID relief. https://t.co/Vl7jbNcqM6
In an interview on Thursday, Dr. Anthony Fauci — the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — said the U.S. could soon see an increase in coronavirus cases and noted that, without new funding from Congress, “a lot” of programs aimed at fighting the pandemic “are going to stop.”
“It really will be a very serious situation,” Fauci said. “It just is almost unconscionable.”
Dr. Ashish Jha, the incoming White House Covid-19 response coordinator, similarly cautioned Thursday that “we are very likely to see more surges of infections.”
“As much as I wish otherwise,” Jha wrote on Twitter, “the pandemic is not over.”
Overall, Covid-19 cases in the U.S. have been declining in recent weeks, though more than 1,200 Americans are still dying each day on average from the virus.
The rapid spread of the BA.2 subvariant, which is highly transmissible, is fueling concerns of another coronavirus wave in the U.S., particularly given that the country has been relaxing public health restrictions over the past several months.
“Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows BA.2… has been tripling in prevalence every two weeks,” ABC Newsreported Thursday. “As of the week ending March 11, BA.2 makes up 23.1% of all Covid cases in the U.S. compared to 7.1% of all cases the week ending Feb. 26, according to the CDC.”
The White House has requested more than $20 billion in funding to sustain pandemic response programs, but Republican and Democratic lawmakers last week could only agree to provide $15.6 billion in the omnibus package — and only after accepting the GOP push to take the money from states.
Now, Democratic leaders are attempting to move ahead with the coronavirus aid package as a standalone measure, an approach that appears doomed to fail given that 36 Senate Republicans have said they feel “it is not yet clear why additional funding is needed.” Psaki told reporters earlier this week that a number of Republicans aren’t returning the White House’s phone calls about the necessity of Covid-19 funding.
Dr. Michael Mina, a former Harvard University epidemiologist, said Thursday that “to think we’re at a stage to stop appropriating funds and advocating for pandemic preparedness” is “one of the worst decisions that our government could make.”
In remarks to the press on Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said of the Covid-19 funding: “We’re just going to have to pass it, and we’ll pass it when we have the votes to pass it.”
“In order to have bipartisan votes, we want it to be paid for, and that’s what we’re doing,” she added.
The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent argued in a column Thursday that Republicans won’t hesitate to lay blame for any new Covid-19 surge at the feet of Democrats, even as the GOP undermines efforts to secure new relief funding that would be used to prevent a wave of infections.
“Democrats have seemed generally skittish about really going hard at Republicans for their role in actively sabotaging our recovery from Covid,” the pair wrote. “Republicans, for their part, don’t seem all that worried about the politics of a new surge… They’ve trained their supporters to stop caring about the pandemic much at all, no matter how many people in their communities get sick and die.”
“Right now, only one party has any interest in fighting the pandemic,” Waldman and Sargent continued. “Democrats need to figure out how to rebut political attacks that make protecting public health harder, and how to make Republicans pay a political price for not caring about our national recovery at best and sabotaging it at worst.”
As Vladimir Putin’s wretched war against Ukraine grinds on with no definitive end in sight, Republicans have found a way to once again be disruptive and destructive at the worst possible juncture. After voting against $13.6 billion in assistance for Ukraine last week, dozens of GOP senators have demanded the U.S. send more weapons.
“‘We should send more lethal aid to Ukraine which I voted against last week’ is making my brain melt,” tweeted Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz.
Among the more belligerent Republicans — and more than a few Democrats who should damn well know better by now — the idea of establishing a no-fly zone over Ukraine has become a rallying cry.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy set the stage for this with an impassioned plea for such help to Congress on Wednesday.
As Noam Chomsky explained in Truthout last week, a no-fly zone is not simply a rule or guideline: “A no-fly zone means that the U.S. Air Force would not only be attacking Russian planes but would also be bombing Russian ground installations that provide anti-aircraft support for Russian forces, with whatever ‘collateral damage’ ensues. Is it really difficult to comprehend what follows?”
A no-fly zone is essentially a commitment to ensure that no enemy aircraft can enter a designated area. In order to make good on this pledge, the U.S. and NATO would have to patrol the skies above Ukraine with thousands of flights and shoot down any Russian planes that violated the banned airspace. Given that Putin has already ignored America’s warnings not to invade Ukraine and not to target Ukrainian civilians, it’s exceptionally unlikely that he would suddenly heed threats to stop sending planes into Ukraine. And destroying Russian aircraft would trigger all-out war between Russia and the West.
Plus, a no-fly zone could end up provoking a war even before American planes entered Ukrainian airspace. According to the Atlantic Council’s Damir Marusic, America would most likely build up to a no-fly zone by destroying the Russian military’s substantial anti-aircraft batteries in Belarus and Russia so that American pilots could fly without the constant threat of being shot down. Violating Russia’s sovereignty and bombing Russian military bases outside of Ukraine would also result in direct conflict.
To boil it down, implementing a no-fly zone would amount to a declaration of war with Russia. There’s virtually no other way to slice it.
Of course, this simple fact won’t preclude Republican wreckers from trying to shove President Biden into a shooting war to make him look weak in an election year, just as hundreds of thousands of deaths did not preclude them from deranging COVID policy to score points with their benighted base.
One might ask, what’s the big deal? Much media coverage has depicted Russia’s vaunted military might as turning out to be a lot of shadows and noise. Russian forces are bogging down all over Ukraine, losing vital supply lines, and its troops — a great many of whom are young conscripts — are beginning to cotton to the notion that something is out of joint. In short, this mighty power is looking awfully shaky out where the metal meets the meat. Let’s go kick Putin’s ass, right? ‘MURICA-STYLE BABY!
Reality, as ever, intrudes. Most of the damage being done by Russia to Ukraine’s civilian population has come by way of artillery barrages fired from within Russian and Belarusian territory. To be “successful,” U.S. warplanes would not only have to attack two sovereign countries within their borders in order to disable the batteries, but would also have to take out any and all surface-to-air missile defense emplacements in order to keep the skies safe for their jets. There is nothing “limited” about any aspect of this scenario.
…and the problem with no limits is where you might find yourself without them. I give you, for your edification, Anthony Faiola of The Washington Post and the most terrifying paragraph I have read in years:
The advent of tactical nuclear weapons — a term generally applied to lower-yield devices designed for battlefield use, which can have a fraction of the strength of the Hiroshima bomb — reduced their lethality, limiting the extent of absolute destruction and deadly radiation fields. That’s also made their use less unthinkable, raising the specter that the Russians could opt to use a smaller device without leveling an entire city. Detonate a one kiloton weapon on one side of Kyiv’s Zhuliany airport, for instance, and Russian President Vladimir Putin sends a next-level message with a fireball, shock waves and deadly radiation. But the blast radius wouldn’t reach the end of the runway.
Leaving aside the potential doomsday scenario emerging from a U.S./Russia shooting war, there is the fact that a no-fly zone or other aggressive NATO action would play directly into Putin’s hands. He knows his war is not going as planned. This propaganda coup would help him consolidate support back home as he intensifies his misleading cries of victimhood.
Of course, watching Putin’s monstrous attacks on civilians makes most folks want to do something, by God, and soon. However, responding with support for escalating military action would pivot this conflict into a cascading confrontation between nuclear powers that could easily spin out of control. Responding, instead, with support for the courageous antiwar activists who are organizing against Russia’s invasion from within Russia, Ukraine and across the globe, is a far better course of action.
The Ohio Supreme Court has rejected Republican-drawn district maps in the state for the third time, sending the majority-Republican Ohio Redistricting Commission back to the drawing board yet again.
In a 4-3 decision, the judges found that the maps were unconstitutional and didn’t reflect the will of voters in the state. “Substantial and compelling evidence shows beyond a reasonable doubt that the main goal of the individuals who drafted the second revised plan was to favor the Republican Party and disfavor the Democratic Party,” the majority wrote.
The majority, including one conservative justice, said that Republicans have inflicted “chaos” on themselves in the map-drawing process. They directed the commission to turn in new maps by March 28. At least part of the primary election set to take place on May 3 will almost certainly have to be delayed.
“Resolving this self-created chaos thus depends not on the number of hands on the computer mouse but, rather, on the political will to honor the people’s call to end partisan gerrymandering,” the ruling reads. Republicans have already had their maps rejected by the court twice for gerrymandering, and the commission has missed numerous deadlines to pass maps.
Ohio’s state legislative redistricting process thus far:
– Missed deadline – Vote w/o bipartisan support – @OHSupremeCourt rejects gerrymandered maps – Vote w/o bipartisan support – Court rejects again – Missed deadline – Vote w/o bipartisan support – Court rejects a third time
Democratic state lawmakers criticized Republicans for trying to pass gerrymandered maps yet again.
“For a third time, the Supreme Court has ruled that the majority party is not above the law and cannot blatantly disregard the will of Ohio voters and the Ohio Constitution,” said Ohio House Minority Leader and Democratic redistricting commission member Allison Russo in a statement. “Democrats have a state legislative map proposal ready to go that is fair, constitutional, and closely reflects the statewide voting preferences of Ohioans. Now, it is up to the Republican Commissioners to work with us to adopt the fair maps Ohioans deserve.”
The most recent maps were adopted by the redistricting commission 4 to 3, with only Republicans voting for the map and one Republican joining the two Democrats in the group to vote against them. Because they weren’t passed with a bipartisan majority, they would only have been in place for four years.
When the commission redrew the maps after they were rejected for the second time in February, the justices ruled that the maps gave unfair favor to Republicans, giving them 58 percent of seats when previous election data has shown that about 54 percent of Ohio voters preferred Republicans. The maps then would have created a 42 percent seat ceiling for Democrats, the justices found.
Under the newly rejected maps, Republicans would have gotten 54 percent of seats in the state, matching voter preferences on a surface level. But voting rights advocates said that the maps would have put a hard cap on the number of districts that Democrats could win, regardless of voter preferences in that election.
Democrats weren’t given a chance to contribute to the map-drawing or even review the maps when they were presented in February, justices said in their decision. “The evidence shows that the individuals who controlled the map-drawing process exercised that control with the overriding intent to maintain as much of an advantage as possible for members of their political party,” the justices wrote.
On Thursday, GOP Gov. Mike DeWine suggested that Republican and Democratic mapmakers “work together” on the fourth draft, which is theoretically the entire purpose of the redistricting commission. The group was created in 2015 in a constitutional amendment approved by voters, in order to stamp out partisan bias in the map-drawing process, but Republicans have been able to commandeer the commission and create gerrymandered maps anyway.
Sixteen Republican lawmakers — most of whom are members of the House Freedom Caucus — voted against a measure this week that would recognize locations where Japanese American internment camps were once operated as historical sites, and direct the National Parks Service to promote education about the country’s treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
If the bill is passed by the Senate and signed into law by President Joe Biden, it would establish a program known as the “Japanese American World War II History Network” at various sites throughout the country. It would also direct the National Parks Service to oversee the program in order to expand educational opportunities about internment camps across the country.
The Republicans who voted against the measure include Reps. Lauren Boebert (Colorado), Mo Brooks (Alabama), Louie Gohmert (Texas), Chip Roy (Texas) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia). Most of the lawmakers who voted against the bill have not publicly stated why they are opposed to it, but some said that the federal government should not be in the business of rectifying historical wrongs and educating the public.
“Rep. Roy believes this matter should not be the responsibility of the federal government and that it would be best handled by private and charitable entities,” a spokesperson for the GOP lawmaker said.
Republican Rep. Andy Harris (Maryland), who also voted against the bill, justified his opposition by saying that Congress should be focused on other issues, such as the war in Ukraine or gas prices. But the same day that the bill on Japanese American internment was voted on, Harris voted in favor of another bill that would help preserve a different historical landmark in Eunice, Louisiana.
The Republicans’ opposition to the bill comes amid a far right push to censor or ban lessons on race in K-12 classrooms across the country. Indeed, bans on the teaching of Critical Race Theory have even gone as far as to forbid lessons that discuss the history of racism in the U.S. altogether.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) has been fashioning herself as a rank-and-file Republican to GOP donors and mocking President Joe Biden while defending far right members of Congress, according to an upcoming book.
In This Will Not Pass, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns describe how, at a private fundraiser with mostly Republican lobbyists, Sinema marketed herself as anti-tax and anti-government. While disparaging Biden, the Arizona senator reportedly spoke fondly of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California), who, like Sinema, has workedto sabotage Democrats throughout Biden’s presidency thus far.
“I love Andy Biggs,” Sinema said. “I know some people think he’s crazy, but that’s just because they don’t know him.” Biggs, in return, has praised Sinema and her partner-in-obstruction Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) for their work in keeping the filibuster.
Biden aides have said that Sinema doesn’t sound like a Democrat, but more like Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), according to the book.
Aides have also said that Sinema is incredibly recalcitrant when it comes to masking policies around Biden. Last spring, “she became the first-ever lawmaker to argue with White House aides when they asked her to wear a face mask in the company of the president, repeatedly asking why that was necessary when she had been vaccinated,” the authors wrote.
Sinema is the first lawmaker to oppose masking around Biden, who is in an age group that’s especially at risk for severe COVID infection. Her choice is especially notable considering how Republicans have vehemently opposed masking rules.
If what’s written in the book is true, it means that Sinema was against masking around the president even before Republicans were, despite Republican members’ willingness to rack up fines to defy House mask mandates beginning around the same time.
The reporting altogether appears to paint Sinema as an unreliable lawmaker who is ready to pick fights and throw her own party under the bus.
Sinema’s insistence on destroying the Democrats’ agenda over the past year has led people to speculate that she may switch parties, though other political observers say that she makes strategic alliances with Republicans in order to fuel her own ambitions and ego. Indeed, Sinema has raked in donations from deep-pocketed Republicans, and Manchin’s single-minded quest to destroy Democrats’ Build Back Better Act last year made them the stars of headline after headline.
Sinema has been infamous for refusing to communicate her goals with the press or even with the president, frustrating activists and progressive groups who have launched early campaigns to primary her. Polls have found that that effort may be successful: Though she isn’t up for reelection until 2024, Sinema loses handily to potential progressive challengers in polls.
The mood in Costa Mesa on Feb. 2 was more love bomb than fire bomb: yet another school board meeting packed with impassioned parents. But this time they’d come out, on a mild Southern California evening, not to let the board know how angry they were, but how delighted.
The parents who rose to speak at the monthly meeting of the Orange County Board of Education weren’t shouting about mask mandates, vaccine requirements, trans kids on sports teams or books about racism. They didn’t have to. Instead, mother after mother, with young children in tow or on their hips, came to the podium to say that their kids used to cry before going to school, but now were filled with confidence and wonder; that they had found a transformative community among the school’s other moms; that the teachers were giving their children “the best education in the entire country.”
One former homeschooler said she’d always sworn to keep her kids out of public school, but the one they attended now had changed all that. One father was moved to talk about sunsets in explaining how the school’s mission was uniquely equipped to guide children toward goodness, beauty and truth. From the dais, the board members beamed back at the parents, and when a lone trustee protested that they should address a conflict of interest that appeared to undermine the entire proceedings, the audience burst into laughter and the trustee’s colleagues, amid jokes, voted her down.
The school under discussion that night wasn’t a regular public school. It was a recently-launched charter called the Orange County Classical Academy (OCCA), which is funded with taxpayer money but follows a private school-like curriculum centered “on the history and cultural achievements of Western civilization” and an ambiguous mission to instill “virtue.”
The public face of OCCA is its charismatic co-founder, Dr. Jeff Barke, a Newport Beach “concierge physician” who gained national notoriety as one of the most outspoken skeptics of pandemic public health policies and has voiced vitriolic opposition to today’s public schools.
Barke’s wife Mari, as it happens, is president of the Orange County Board of Education, which was deciding whether to allow OCCA to expand to new campuses throughout the affluent suburban county of nearly 3.2 million people. (That was the evident conflict of interest that sparked laughter from the crowd.) Although Orange County is more a purple than a deep-red jurisdiction these days, that board is dominated by a conservative majority, swept into power over the last several years thanks to an unprecedented influx of right-wing cash.
But OCCA isn’t only a school, or even a network of schools. It’s just one facet of a national movement driven by the vision and curriculum of Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in southern Michigan that has quietly become one of the most influential entities in conservative politics.
In an era of book bans, crusades against teaching about racism, and ever-widening proposals to punish teachers and librarians, Hillsdale is not just a central player, but a ready-made solution for conservatives who seek to reclaim an educational system they believe was ceded decades ago to liberal interests. The college has become a leading force in promoting a conservative and overtly Christian reading of American history and the U.S. Constitution. It opposes progressive education reforms in general and contemporary scholarship on inequality in particular. It has featured lectures describing the Jan. 6 insurrection as a hoax and Vladimir Putin as a “hero to populist conservatives around the world.”
If you thought that Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission — a jingoistic alternative to the New York Times’ “1619 Project” that was roundly panned by historians — died with his presidency, that effort is now being amplified and exported, on a massive scale, around the country. If you wonder what conservatives hope to install in place of the books they’re trying to ban, the answer often lies in Hillsdale’s freely-licensed curricula.
And as Republicans move into a new phase of their long-game efforts to privatize public education, Hillsdale has become a key resource. Across the nation, conservative officials from state leaders to insurgent school board members are clamoring to implement Hillsdale’s proudly anti-woke lesson plans, including the “patriotic education” premises of its recently released 1776 Curriculum, or add to its growing network of affiliated classical charter schools.
In late January, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, used his State of the State address to tease the most ambitious Hillsdale-inspired plan to date: building as many as 50 new charter schools in partnership with the college; using its 1776 Curriculum to foster what Lee calls “informed patriotism”; and launching a university civics institute to combat “anti-American thought.”
These linked trends amount to a vision of things to come if Republicans win their current war on public education. And war is how they see it. As one Republican leader promised at Hillsdale last spring, if conservatives can “get education right,” they’ll “win” the country “back.” Or as Hillsdale’s president himself likes to say, “Teaching is our trade; also, I confess, it’s our weapon.”
***
In the video that introduced most Americans to Jeff Barke, the doctor stands on the steps of a municipal building in Riverside, California, in May 2020, wearing green scrubs and a white lab coat and claiming to speak for thousands of silenced medical workers who believed the experts were wrong about COVID. In Barke’s improbable telling, the video was an accident: He asked his wife to take a picture of him addressing the anti-lockdown rally for their adult children, but she inadvertently hit her phone’s “record” button. The resulting footage was too large to email, so they posted it to Facebook instead, and the rest was unintentional history.
The video went viral, and Barke began meeting fellow “freedom fighters” around the country. He helped organize America’s Frontline Doctors, the right-wing group that became famous that July when around a dozen of its members stood before the Supreme Court, again in white coats, to call for reopening the country without delay. As later became clear, America’s Frontline Doctors was organized in cooperation with the Trump campaign, and Barke’s supposedly accidental activism was no more organic.
Barke has been involved for years in right-wing politics in and around Orange County, a realm of beaches and upscale suburban sprawl that has been a centerpiece of American pop culture and is perceived as the birthplace of modern conservatism. Those 948 square miles south and east of Los Angeles are the “Nixonland” that helped create the prosperity gospel and served as the case study for Lisa McGirr’s seminal history “Suburban Warriors.” It’s the place, Ronald Reagan often said, where “good Republicans go to die.”
Jeff Barke is a member of Orange County’s Republican Central Committee and the conservative donor organization the Lincoln Club. When Mari Barke was a delegate at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Jeff and their son attended as alternates, wearing matching stars-and-stripes suits. For 12 years, Jeff Barke was a member of the Los Alamitos school board, where he led a successful effort to require that a new course on environmental science also include dissenting opinions about climate change.
But in 2020, he graduated from local activism to national right-wing stardom as one of the most provocative voices around pandemic policy. He wrote a book, “Covid-19: A Physician’s Take on the Exaggerated Fear of Coronavirus,” with a foreword by Dennis Prager, co-founder of the right-wing video outlet PragerU. (Its fifth edition was published last month.) Barke also became a combative presence on social media, under the handle @rxforliberty, calling for fast-tracking herd immunity through widespread virus infection, and suggesting that masking children is child abuse.
In one livestream interview, Barke whipped out a Sig Sauer pistol, describing it as his preferred pandemic protection. More recently, he has compared widespread COVID testing to unnecessary breast biopsies for healthy women.
Although the Barkes are Jewish, Jeff undertook a regional mini-tour of megachurches that refused to shut down during the early days of the pandemic, and befriended a number of high-profile evangelical leaders, such as Chino megachurch pastor Jack Hibbs (himself somewhat notorious for blaming the violence of the Capitol insurrection on removing “God from the courts and from the schools”). The headmaster Barke hired to run OCCA is a member of Hibbs’ congregation. For her part, Mari Barke is a former Trump 2016 campaign volunteer and an adviser to the Unity Project, a conservative coalition formed in 2021 to oppose vaccine mandates that has since become involved in the U.S. “trucker convoy” protesting pandemic restrictions (although Mari says she has no involvement with that effort).
Along with all this advocacy, Jeff Barke was also working to get his school up and running, and the two campaigns appear strongly connected. Amid his short viral speech in Riverside, he pulled out a pocket version of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, telling the crowd they were written to restrain the government, not the people. The booklet, he later explained, was published by Hillsdale, where his son — after taking a break to work for Trump’s Department of Agriculture — is an undergraduate.
In an interview, Jeff Barke told me that attending multiple parents’ weekends at Hillsdale had led him to see the school as “a beacon of liberty” that is “fighting to return America back to its founding roots.”
In appreciation, the Barkes became members of Hillsdale’s top-tier donor “President’s Club,” and were listed on Hillsdale’s website as members of its Parents Association Steering Committee. (In an interview with Salon, Mari Barke said she turned the invitation down, but her election biography includes the committee as one of her volunteer affiliations.) It was also through Hillsdale that Jeff Barke became friends with Tea Party activist Mark Meckler, cofounder of the right-wing group Convention of States, which seeks to hold an Article V convention that could lead to rewriting the U.S. Constitution, and where Jeff holds the puzzling title of “head physician.”
In 2018, Jeff Barke lost his seat on the Los Alamitos school board, which his critics say was the result of controversial positions, such as his advocacy of climate-change denialism, although he blames a campaign against him by the local teachers’ union. But as he later told Hibbs’ church, “God had bigger plans.” In that same year, Mari Barke was elected to the Orange County Board of Education (OCBE) on a platform of “school choice and parental rights.” Her campaign amassed an unheard-of war chest of around $425,000, more than half of that donated by the Charter Public Schools PAC. She also benefited from the support of the California Policy Center (CPC), a state-level affiliate of the State Policy Network, a coalition of more than 150 right-wing groups that promote model conservative legislation. According to a 2018 lawsuit, a CPC offshoot hired Mari Barke — shortly before she announced her OCBE candidacy — to instruct an ESL course for some of its Spanish-speaking pro-charter parent activists, thus enabling her to campaign “as a teacher.” Today, she serves as the director of a CPC initiative that provides conservative policy analysis and training to state and local politicians.
Through his wife’s campaign, Jeff Barke got to know Mark Bucher, the California Policy Center’s co-founder and a fellow member of the Lincoln Club. Bucher had been involved in local education politics for decades, promoting a series of school privatization and charter initiatives and using funds from far-right Christian philanthropist Howard Ahmanson to orchestrate a mid-’90s conservative takeover of the Orange Unified School Board — one of the county’s 28 independent school districts, in and around the city of Orange (a different elected body than the OCBE). But by 2019, Barke said, Bucher had developed “a vision about classical education.” Barke told him about Hillsdale, and history was made again.
***
For decades, 1,500-student Hillsdale College — a liberal arts school in rural southern Michigan, founded by Baptist abolitionists in 1844 — has been known as a “citadel of conservatism.” Its campus features prominent statues of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, its curriculum leans heavily into the Western canon of “Great Books” and it describes itself as “a trustee of modern man’s intellectual and spiritual inheritance from the Judeo-Christian faith and Greco-Roman culture.”
In the 1980s, the college earned right-wing adulation for refusing to accept any federal funding, including student aid, to maintain its “independence in every regard”; in practice, this means it doesn’t have to comply with federal regulations, such as Title IX prohibitions on sex discrimination or the reporting of student racial demographics. (In 2013, Hillsdale president Larry Arnn complained to a Michigan legislative committee about state officials visiting campus to assess whether the student body included enough “dark ones.”) Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas once summoned up Reagan and American colonist John Winthrop in calling Hillsdale a “shining city on a hill.”
But in recent years, Hillsdale has greatly expanded its influence, becoming one of the most significant actors in U.S. conservative politics — if also one of the least conspicuous. Throughout the Trump years, there was a virtual revolving door that shuttled Hillsdale staff and alumni back and forth between the school, the White House and Capitol Hill. (Vanity Fair described the college as “a feeder school for the Trump administration.”) Right-wing politicians and thought leaders vie to give speeches at Hillsdale, which are then disseminated to a claimed audience of 6.2 million through the school’s monthly publication, Imprimis.
Arnn, who has led the school for the last 22 years, is a Churchill scholar from Arkansas with a penchant for folksy and antiquated diction. For him, college is “a hoot,” freshmen are “little wigglers,” his sons (affectionately) are “wastrels,” and the emotional namesake patron of Hillsdale’s charter school program, conservative philanthropist Stephen Barney, is (also affectionately) “a blubber baby.” Arnn came to the college in 2000, in the wake of a shocking scandal that appeared to threaten Hillsdale’s future. (The previous president allegedly had an affair with his son’s wife, who subsequently killed herself.)
But Arnn’s mission went well beyond restoring stability. He was co-founder and later president of the Claremont Institute, an influential right-wing think tank that has spent the last six years trying to ret-con an intellectual platform for Trumpism and is also home to John Eastman, the law professor who tried to convince Mike Pence to throw out electoral votes and overturn Trump’s defeat. Given those connections, Arnn seemed destined to deepen the school’s ties to the conservative movement. He has succeeded, probably more than he could have expected.
In 2009 Hillsdale hired right-wing activist Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Thomas, to help the college launch a Washington campus on Capitol Hill, across the street from the Heritage Foundation (where Arnn is a board member). From that facility, which inspired a 2018 Politico feature entitled “The College that Wants to Take Over Washington,” Hillsdale initially ran a joint fellowship program for senior congressional staff with Heritage and the Federalist Society.
Ben Domenech, founder of right-wing publication The Federalist, has used a studio at Hillsdale’s Washington campus to record his podcast, and Federalist editor in chief Mollie Hemingway teaches journalism there. Michael Anton, a former Trump White House adviser and author of the notorious essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” which made an apocalyptic case for the necessity of electing Trump, has joined Hillsdale’s Washington staff to lecture on politics. The school’s cheerleaders have included many of the biggest names in right-wing media, including the late Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and Hugh Hewitt, who for years has run a weekly interview series with Arnn and other Hillsdale faculty members that now includes hundreds of episodes.
Arnn endorsed Trump in 2016 (along with a number of Hillsdale staff, who dominated a group endorsement titled “Scholars & Writers for America“) and was on the short list to serve as Trump’s secretary of education. The new president of course picked Betsy DeVos instead, and she too has Hillsdale ties. Her brother Erik Prince, founder of the “military contractor” company previously known as Blackwater USA, is a Hillsdale graduate, and her family’s foundations have made extensive donations to Hillsdale over the years. For a small liberal arts school, it has amassed an astonishing endowment of more than $900 million.
DeVos is philosophically aligned with Hillsdale’s mission as well. In 2001, she called on conservative Christians to embrace the Republican “school choice” agenda as a more efficient means of advancing “God’s Kingdom” than merely funding private Christian schools, since, as she told one group of wealthy believers, “everybody in this room could give every single penny they had, and it wouldn’t begin to touch what is currently spent on education every year in this country.” Nineteen years later, in a speech at Hillsdale shortly before the 2020 election, DeVos invoked Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper (perhaps questionably) to argue that government should have little role in education and parents should be able to direct taxpayer funds to private schools.
Two months later, Arnn was tapped to lead Trump’s 1776 Commission, drafting a blueprint for “patriotic education” as a rebuttal to “The 1619 Project.” (The vice president of Hillsdale’s Washington operations was also appointed to serve as the commission’s executive director.) Although President Biden disbanded the commission the day he took office, Hillsdale released a closely related project last July: the 2,425-page 1776 Curriculum, offered as a free download on the school’s website. In his own speech at Hillsdale in September, former secretary of state and potential 2024 presidential candidate Mike Pompeo called for the curriculum to “be taught each place and everywhere.”
Hillsdale’s alumni are not unanimously happy with the direction Arnn has taken the school. Julie Vassilatos, who attended Hillsdale in the ’80s, said that in those heady Reagan days, the school was certainly a world unto itself, “but not like Republican bubbles are now. I don’t know if I can get this across — it wasn’t insane.”
By the time Vassilatos neared graduation, she said, the first signs of a shift were visible, as students began trickling in from homeschooling “survivalist” families. Nevertheless, Arnn’s endorsement of Trump left her speechless. “When I was there, it was very ideologically oriented in a Great Books kind of way, towards ‘the higher things,’ ‘the permanent things,’ ‘the good, the true and the beautiful.’ So I have never been more shocked in my life than that they went for Trump, because he’s the absolute opposite of everything I thought I was taught in college.”
Another alumnus, Tennessee writer and podcaster Sam Torode, who graduated in the late-’90s, likewise saw Arnn’s support for Trump — particularly his 2020 re-endorsement, after the first impeachment, the family separation crisis and Charlottesville — as “a betrayal of everything I learned at Hillsdale.” When Arnn’s 1776 Commission released its report less than two weeks after the Jan. 6 attack, Torode drafted an open letter, signed by a few dozen former students, chastising Arnn for promoting the project in the immediate aftermath of “the greatest threat to the Constitution and America’s representative democracy in our lifetimes.”
But Hillsdale’s actual and planned expansion is much broader than its direct links to political power. In 2020, the college began building a Center for Faith and Freedom in a replica Monticello mansion in Connecticut, donated to the school along with a $25 million endowment by Friendly’s restaurant magnate S. Prestley Blake.
In December, Hillsdale launched a new Washington project, the Academy of Science and Freedom, to highlight the arguments of three prominent COVID-19 skeptics, including Dr. Scott Atlas, Trump’s former pandemic adviser. In recent months Hillsdale has acquired a sizable tract of land outside Sacramento as part of plans to establish an education center in California. It’s adapting its curricula for homeschooling parents and this year will launch a master’s program to train teachers to staff its charter schools. Arnn recently said that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem offered to build Hillsdale “an entire campus” in that state.
A newly leaked video shows far right Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-North Carolina) calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “thug” and deriding the Ukrainian government as “evil” and “woke.”
In a short video obtained by WRAL, Cawthorn says, “Remember that Zelenskyy is a thug. Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies, and really there’s a new woke ruling.” The video was likely taken at a town hall in Asheville, North Carolina, over the weekend.
It’s unclear what Cawthorn is referring to when he says that the Ukrainian government is pushing “woke ideologies,” but the actual meaning is likely inconsequential, as the right often lies and bends the truth to propagandize.
However, Cawthorn’s rhetoric seems to tie the invasion to the American political right’s battle against “woke” agendas, a concerning statement as conservatives openly embrace fascism while scapegoating “woke” progressives and Democrats – or essentially, anyone who opposes them – for any and all problems that the right claims are plaguing the country.
About an hour after the video was leaked, Cawthorn appeared to double down on his comments on Twitter. He denounced Vladimir Putin, but said that Ukrainian “[p]ropaganda is being used to entice America into another war,” and that “leaders, including Zelensky, should NOT push misinformation on America.”
Cawthorn linked an article about “Ukrainian misinformation” that is supposedly goading the U.S. into entering into war with Russia. The linked article relied on multiple stories about the Russian invasion that have since been debunked.
— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) March 10, 2022
In response to the video, Republican state Sen. Chuck Edwards wrote on Twitter that the real “thug is Vladimir Putin” and that anything other than support for Zelenskyy and Ukraine is “counter to everything we stand for in America.” Former George W. Bush deputy chief of staff Karl Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal, where Cawthorn’s speech was first reported, that Cawthorn’s words “[don’t] reflect Republican opinion.”
It’s unclear why Cawthorn made these claims. It’s true that Zelenskyy has asked the U.S. for aid, specifically requesting that the U.S impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which would be an act of war with likely devastating consequences. There’s no evidence that Zelenskyy is pushing disinformation in his pleas as Cawthorn claims, however.
While it has been popular amongst Republicans in recent weeks to denounce war with Russia, this stance is an odd flip for the party that typically jumps at the chance to enter war or otherwise lift up militarism. It’s possible that Republicans are hedging their bets that President Joe Biden will enter war with Russia, in which case they can claim that they were right all along, similarly to how they flipped on exiting Afghanistan when Biden did it instead of Donald Trump.
In recent social media posts, Cawthorn appears to be saying that he thinks that Biden is somehow at fault for injuries in Ukraine. Meanwhile, supporters of QAnon, which Cawthorn has denounced but spouted conspiracy theories from, have begun repeating Russian conspiracy theories that the U.S. is developing bioweapons in Ukraine.
The Republican-controlled Florida legislature passed a bill on Wednesday that would create a special elections police force meant to monitor elections at the behest of far right Gov. Ron DeSantis, who says that he will sign it into law.
The bill would establish an Office of Election Crimes and Security within the Department of State, which is overseen by DeSantis. The 25-person office would allow DeSantis to appoint 10 police officers to investigate supposed election crimes —despite the fact that experts have repeatedly proven that election fraud doesn’t exist at a scale that would even begin to approach affecting election results.
Appointing police officers to monitor elections to probe for non-existent voter fraud is nakedly fascist. This move is indicative of the fact that the U.S. is in fascism’s “legal phase,” as fascism scholar Jason Stanley noted in The Guardian late last year.
The bill is the most extreme yet in Republicans’ push to suppress voters en masse, and voting rights advocates say that it will disproportionately affect Black voters.
“The governor’s personal goon force will exist to do only one thing: intimidate Black voters,” Walter Shaub, senior ethics fellow for the Project on Government Oversight, said on Twitter.
“It’s also gonna be a felony to take your sick grandma’s ballot to a drop box for her, unless you strap her in a cart and wheel her down there with you,” Shaub continued, referencing the fact that the bill makes it a felony for a voter to bring other people’s ballots to a dropoff location, which would disproportionately affect disabled or elderly people. The punishment for that is a hefty fine of up to $50,000 and five years in prison.
Even before Republicans began passing exceedingly punitive voter suppression laws, Black voters were already punished harshly and disproportionately for supposed election fraud, often in cases where they had just made a simple mistake. Black people are also disproportionately the target of police violence and surveillance.
Republicans claim —as they have for over a year as they pass dozens of voter suppression bills across the country —that the new bill is about election integrity. But the laws are actually an extreme reaction to former President Donald Trump’s loss in 2020, and an attempt to give Republican lawmakers more control over election results in the future.
Republicans haven’t provided any evidence that widespread voter fraud is a legitimate issue. Though increased voter suppression laws from Republicans have already alarmed voting rights advocates, the current bill is one of the starkest signs yet that the GOP is openly embracing authoritarianism.
“Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis is taking Orwell’s 1984 and running with it into a despotic dystopia of his own feverish imagining with his hoped-for, first-in-the-nation creation of an Office of Election Crimes and Security to ensure ‘elections are conducted in accordance with the rule of law,’ though, in fact, they already are,” wrote Abby Zimet for Common Dreams.
The blatant voter suppression is just one example of the right’s increasing embrace of facism; as Henry Giroux noted for Truthout in November, DeSantis and the GOP’s attacks on education, and their efforts to punish educators for teaching about race, LGBTQ issues, and diversity, are also a sign of rising fascism on the right.
Republicans’ attacks on public and higher education are “closely aligned to a fascist politics that despises anyone who holds power accountable and sees as an enemy anyone who fosters liberating forms of social change or attempts to resist the right wing’s politics of falsehoods and erasure,” Giroux wrote.
Sen. Rick Scott’s (R-Florida) plan to force every American to owe income tax in his recently released platform for the Republican Party would raise taxes by over $1,000 for the bottom 40 percent of income earners, a new analysis found.
In a report released on Monday, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) estimated that the poorest Americans would be the most affected by Scott’s plan — meaning that the GOP’s tax plan would essentially be to tax the poor.
The poorest 20 percent of Americans, who make $12,300 a year on average, would owe about $1,050 more in federal taxes, or about 9 percent of their income. The next 20 percent, who make $34,700 on average, would owe $1,390 more, or 4 percent of their income, ITEP found. The middle 20 percent of Americans would owe about $500 more on average. The top 5 percent would essentially owe $0 more.
Scott’s outline says that he wants to make sure all Americans pay some income tax in order “to have skin in the game.”
“Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax,” Scott wrote. Indeed, a large portion of Americans don’t owe federal income taxes. Many don’t owe taxes because they simply don’t make enough income to qualify. People with disabilities, retirees and other Social Security beneficiaries don’t owe taxes because much of the program is tax-exempt.
Some people don’t owe federal income taxes because they receive tax credits; because of programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, many Americans have a negative tax burden.
ITEP calculated these estimates by assuming that Scott’s plan would make it so that all Americans owed at least $1 in taxes, taking credits into account. So, if a household had an income tax liability of $1,000, and would normally have received a credit of $1,500 from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), they would not receive their expected $500 tax refund under Scott’s plan, ITEP wrote.
The poorest states would be most affected by this plan, the report found. Over 50 percent of Mississippi residents would see a tax increase, with other Southern states like West Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana and Alabama trailing closely behind.
If Scott’s plan were passed, and carried out in the way that ITEP interpreted, it would have a devastating impact on the people in the country who are most in need.
According to the Federal Reserve, about 36 percent of Americans said in 2020 that they would have difficulty paying for an emergency expense of $400, with 12 percent saying that they wouldn’t be able to. This statistic is similar to that of previous years, despite the fact that COVID relief packages, extra unemployment insurance and expanded child tax credits helped lower financial worries for the public, even if they were laid off during the pandemic.
A recent survey showed that a large portion of Americans would have difficulty paying an emergency $1,000 bill. About 56 percent of survey respondents said that they would have to take steps like charging a credit card and paying it over time, cutting other expenses or borrowing the money in order to pay the bill.
Scott’s tax plan reflects Republicans’ stubborn opposition to raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Some of the world’s richest people, like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, regularly owe $0 or an otherwise miniscule amount in taxes. But GOP lawmakers have worked to maintain low tax rates for the richest Americans and slash funding for the IRS so that they can keep dodging taxes.
BREAKING: In a sweeping victory for voting rights in Florida. Federal federal judge STRIKES DOWN key provisions of voters suppression law SB90. Congrats to our clients 
