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  • Republicans Oppose Kristen Clarke for DOJ Job in Latest Attack on Voting Rights

    Republicans Oppose Kristen Clarke for DOJ Job in Latest Attack on Voting Rights

    Republican senators in Washington are attempting to block Kristen Clarke, a prominent voting rights advocate, from a top Justice Department position. The Senate Judiciary Committee has deadlocked on an 11-11 vote on whether to move Clarke’s nomination for assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to the Senate floor for a full vote. If she wins the vote, Clarke, who has served as the head of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and is a longtime champion of voting rights, a defender against hate and violent extremism, would be the first Black woman to hold the position. Ben Jealous, president of People for the American Way and former president of the NAACP, says the campaign against Clarke’s nomination is based on falsehoods, including baseless claims of anti-Semitism. “The way that they’ve lied about her really is a new low,” Jealous says, who links Republican obstruction to the party’s larger assault on voting rights.

    Please check back later for full transcript.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Wants Tax on Middle Class Instead of Rich for Infrastructure, Sanders Says

    Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a rally at the Las Vegas Academy of the Arts on October 25, 2018, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said on Wednesday that Republicans are “insistent” upon taxing the working class in order to pay for the upcoming infrastructure bill in lieu of raising taxes on the wealthy and large corporations.

    In an interview on CNN, Sanders said that Republicans’ infrastructure pay-fors would disproportionately affect the working class, which has been hit hard by recent economic crises.

    “For too, too long, the average American has seen government work for the 1 percent, for large corporations,” Sanders said to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “What some of us are trying to do with the president is have government start paying attention to the needs of the working class, which is struggling economically in a way we have not seen for a long, long time.”

    “In terms of paying for it, what the Republicans are very insistent upon, is they want the middle class and working families to pay for it,” the senator continued. “The president, correctly, is saying he wants wealthiest people, who are doing very, very well, large corporations, who, in some cases, are not paying a nickel in federal income taxes, to pay for it. The president is right, and we have got to move in the direction of progressive taxation.”

    Republicans have been recalcitrant in negotiations for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill. They have proposed cutting it to nearly an eighth of its original size with a spending cap of $800 billion as opposed to the $4 trillion that Biden has proposed.

    The GOP congress members are also unbending in their absolute refusal to hike taxes for wealthy people and corporations, instead clutching on to Donald Trump-era tax breaks that resulted in an estimated $1.9 trillion in lost revenue for the government. Despite weeks of negotiations on the issue, top Republicans are still refusing to allow higher tax rates on corporations and the wealthy, even though Biden’s corporate tax hike is already a compromise from what it could be.

    While Biden has proposed raising the corporate tax from 21 percent to 28 percent to help pay for the infrastructure bill, Sanders has proposed raising it back to what it was before Trump took office: 35 percent.

    Instead, Republicans have proposed a regressive tax to pay for the bill — favoring user fees over taxes, which would disproportionately affect the middle and lower classes.

    “They do want to raise taxes, but they want to raise regressive taxes — taxes on working families,” said Sanders. “I come from a very rural state; people drive long distances to get to work. Apparently, [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell wants those folks — working people — to pay more in taxes.” Sanders says he prefers that rich people and corporations pay their “fair share” instead.

    The senator went to say that the split between Republicans and progressive Democrats on taxation and what constitutes infrastructure is a “fundamental divide” that will be hard to reconcile.

    Sanders has not shied away from warning the president about the futility of trying to negotiate with Republicans despite their stated goal to block all of Biden’s proposals. Democrats should make every effort to make bills bipartisan, Sanders said, but they should not water down their proposals in the process. “The bottom line is, the American people want results,” he said on Axios on HBO earlier this week.

    Progressives have been learning that ignoring bipartisanship — at least, the Republican version of it, which is largely just capitulation and obstruction — can be a winning strategy for the left. After all, Senate Minority Leader McConnell (R-Kentucky) made it clear last week that his party’s only focus is to block the Biden administration, no matter what.

    Despite McConnell’s insistence on obstructing the Democratic agenda, however, many Democratic policies are widely popular among the electorate. Case in point: A poll last month found that support for Biden’s infrastructure plan, which is popular in itself, goes up when the corporate tax is mentioned as a means of financing it.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • McConnell Reportedly Assures GOP That He Thinks Sinema Will Kill Biden Tax Hike

    Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Bill Cassidy conduct a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on December 4, 2019.

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has privately assured his Republican colleagues that centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., is likely to block President Joe Biden’s proposed tax hikes on the wealthy and corporations, according to The Washington Post.

    Biden has introduced a $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan that would be paid for with tax increases on corporations and a $1.8 trillion “American Families Plan” that would be funded with higher taxes on the wealthy and investors and increased IRS enforcement. Republicans are pushing a much smaller infrastructure counterproposal that would shift the tax burden from corporations to workers, and have loudly objected to the proposed tax increases. McConnell, however, does not seem worried about the hikes clearing the 50-50 Senate where a single Democrat can block any party-line vote.

    McConnell has privately “reassured allies of Democrats’ long odds in approving tax hikes, pointing in particular to the voting record of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema,” according to the Post.

    That suggests McConnell sees Sinema as a bigger impediment to Biden’s proposals than Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who has called for raising taxes to pay for an infrastructure proposal as large as $4 trillion but wants a smaller increase on corporate taxes. Manchin has also rejected gas taxes and user fees proposed by Republicans as a tax on workers and commuters.

    It’s not the first time McConnell has touted the record of Sinema, who has angered many Democrats by opposing Biden’s proposed minimum wage increase and calls from her party to eliminate the filibuster.

    McConnell told Senate Republicans at a party meeting last month to “publicly praise” Sinema and Manchin for their opposition to Biden’s proposals, according to Politico. “It’s nice that there are Democrats left who respect the institution and don’t want to destroy the very essence of the Senate,” he told the outlet.

    Economists have argued that Biden’s proposed corporate tax increases would ultimately help corporations by improving critical infrastructure. A group of five former IRS commissioners last week wrote an op-ed backing Biden’s proposal to boost IRS enforcement after the cash-strapped agency estimated it loses $1 trillion each year to unpaid taxes.

    The IRS workforce has shrunk dramatically over the past decade due to repeated budget cuts and as a result “audit rates for millionaires have fallen more than 70 percent since 2011; audits of large corporations decreased from essentially 100 percent a decade ago to less than 50 percent,” the former commissioners wrote in a Washington Post editorial.

    “President Biden’s proposal would restore our tax administration system to make it far fairer and more effective. This would benefit everyone who pays their taxes. It would produce a great deal of revenue by reducing the enormous gap between taxes legally owed and taxes actually paid,” they added.

    In fact, Sinema and Manchin are not the only Democrats who may stand in the way of Biden’s tax proposals. Some Democrats worry that the IRS enforcement measure could result in “political backlash,” according to the Washington Post, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has privately warned that the tax plans could hurt vulnerable Democrats up for re-election next year. Although Democrats generally support a corporate tax increase, a “handful” of Democrats have balked at Biden’s proposed 28% rate even though that would not even fully reverse former President Trump’s 2017 tax bill, which cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%.

    Senate Finance Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Senate Banking Chairman Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., have released their own plan to tax multinational corporations, which is at odds with Biden’s proposal. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., has balked at Biden’s proposed tax increase on capital gains and investment income for those who earn more than $1 million per year. A group of about a dozen Democrats in farm states have expressed concerns about Biden’s proposed increase on assets passed down to heirs.

    Meanwhile, a growing coalition of Democrats in high-tax states like New York, California and New Jersey have called for Biden to use the proposals to repeal the $10,000 cap on the State and Local Tax deduction, a move that research strongly suggests would primarily benefit the wealthy.

    Biden has signaled that he is open to compromise and is scheduled to meet with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle this week, insisting he wants a bipartisan agreement — a prospect that seems out of reach. But the lack of a deadline on negotiations and numerous competing proposals show that Biden and his own party are also “worlds apart,” Republican economic adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin told the Post.

    “Biden deserves some credit for trying to pay for permanent programs, but congressional Democrats do not want the politics of these tax hikes on their record in the midterms,” he said. “There’s a major disagreement here.”

    Some Democrats have urged the administration not to fund the proposals completely and finance them instead through deficit spending, as with the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package passed in March.

    “The whole point is that we are making generational investments that will provide value for 30 or 50 or 100 years,” Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, told the Post. “With interest rates at a historic low, it makes sense to pay for these initiatives over a longer period of time.”

    But Biden insisted last week that he is “not willing to not pay for what we’re talking about. I’m not willing to deficit-spend.”

    Anita Dunn, a senior White House adviser, sent a memo to fellow Democrats last month seeking to tamp down concerns that the party may face political backlash next November if it supports tax increases, pointing to polls showing that the public supports tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy. Some polls even show that voters are more likely to support the infrastructure package if it is funded with higher corporate taxes than without a tax increase.

    “We need to restore basic fairness to the tax code, and in the process generate revenues to invest in our competitiveness, children, and economy,” Dunn wrote. “And, the American people agree.”

    “If critics want to turn this into a debate over taxing the wealthy and big corporations to pay for investments in the middle class, we’re happy to have that fight,” a White House official told Politico, which obtained the memo. “The American public is squarely on our side — it’s not even close.”

    Now it’s largely a matter of Biden convincing his own party.

    “This is a puzzle, and it’s a very personal puzzle to a lot of people who have parochial investment agendas trying to get their own things stuffed into these plans,” Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, told the Post.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Votes to Oust Liz Cheney for Not Peddling Trump’s Big Lie

    Rep. Liz Cheney talks to reporters after House Republicans voted to remove her as conference chair in the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center on May 12, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    House Republicans voted to remove Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) from her leadership position on Wednesday, in a move that cemented the right’s unending fealty to former President Donald Trump.

    Cheney had refused to continue perpetuating Trump’s big lie that the election was stolen, which many Republicans viewed as a sort of betrayal of their values — though Cheney herself has been a loyal rank-and-file GOP member over the years, often pushing the worst elements of conservative ideology.

    The lawmakers ousted her by a voice vote in a brief closed-door meeting. House Republicans booed Cheney as she made her final speech on Wednesday morning.

    In her speech from the House floor on Tuesday night, Cheney condemned her colleagues for being “at war with the Constitution” and “embolden[ing] the liar.” All but one of her fellow Republicans left the chamber during her speech.

    Republicans have chosen Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) to replace Cheney. Stefanik had previously branded herself as a moderate, which only got her dismissed by fellow Republicans. In recent months, however, Stefanik has pledged her allegiance to Trump — a move that, clearly, has been a boon to her career.

    Cheney’s ousting is largely viewed as the definitive move by the Republican Party to vow total loyalty to Trump and the authoritarian movement he created. They have especially doubled down on that stance in the past months; back in February, despite the fact that Cheney had just voted to impeach Trump, Republicans had voted 145 to 61 to keep her in her leadership position.

    Republicans like Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) have come to her defense in saying that she is being ousted for refusing to lie about the election.

    Indeed, in her final days as the third highest ranking Republican in the House, Cheney embraced a martyr-like status as moderate Republicans and even Democrats praised her for doing the bare minimum of recognizing that Joe Biden won the election.

    But that praise, progressives point out, is misplaced. As Truthout’s Will Pitt points out, Cheney was previously a leader in pushing Islamophobia during former President Barack Obama years and was instrumental in helping to send her party down the path to extremism that it is on now.

    “Now that her entire political career is trembling on the verge of extinction, Liz Cheney has recast herself as a sort of Joan of Arc character, a doomed victim of nefarious forces she has vowed to keep fighting,” wrote Pitt. “Train a pack of dogs with violence, ignorance and hunger, and they will turn and tear you to pieces sooner or later. For Cheney, it is sooner, and the ice beckons.”

    Even in the op-ed Cheney wrote for The Washington Post last week, she couldn’t help but condemn activists in the movement for Black lives while also criticizing her party for defending the Capitol attack on January 6.

    “We Republicans need to stand for genuinely conservative principles,” she wrote. “There is much at stake now, including the ridiculous wokeness of our political rivals,” she said, and then went on to hail former President Ronald Reagan as the gold standard in conservatism.

    Cheney is correct in observing that the Republican Party of today has been moving further away from “principles” and more toward a supposed ideology of following Trump and opposing Democrats — no matter what. But that doesn’t mean she deserves praise, as progressives have written.

    “To complain about ‘wokeness’ in this moment is more than a right-wing racist dog whistle. It is an air raid siren,” wrote Chauncy DeVega for Salon. Indeed, while Cheney purports to stand up for democracy, she has ignored the fact that her own party is hard at work at the state level trying to steal elections in plain sight. She has chosen instead to save her criticism for the progressives and activists standing up for racial justice.

    By contrast, recent moves by the Republican Party — such as pushing the big lie about the election — have led people like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to brand the GOP an “authoritarian cult.”

    “There is one issue, in my view, that is more important than any other issue and impacts every concern that we have, and that is the struggle to maintain democracy in the United States of America,” said Sanders in a video posted to Twitter on Wednesday. “Sadly, it is not a secret that over the last number of years, the Republican Party has ceased to be a conservative party, and has rather become an authoritarian cult which propagates big lies and conspiracy theories.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Second Stage Terror Wars

    We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

    – William Casey, CIA Director, February. 1981

    It is well known that the endless U.S. war on terror was overtly launched following the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and the linked anthrax attacks.   The invasion of Afghanistan and the Patriot Act were immediately justified by those insider murders, and subsequently the wars against Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.  So too the terrorizing of the American people with constant fear-mongering about imminent Islamic terrorist attacks from abroad that never came.

    It is less well known that the executive director of the U.S. cover story – the fictional 9/11 Commission Report – was Philip Zelikow, who controlled and shaped the report from start to finish.

    It is even less well known that Zelikow, a professor at the University of Virginia, was closely associated with Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Dickey Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Brent Scowcroft, et al. and had served in various key intelligence positions in both the George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. In 2011 President Obama named him to his President’s Intelligence Advisory Board as befits bi-partisan elite rule and coverup compensation across political parties.

    Perhaps it’s unknown or just forgotten that The Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Commission repeatedly called for Zelikow’s removal, claiming that his appointment made a farce of the claim that the Commission was independent.

    Zelikow said that for the Commission to consider alternative theories to the government’s claims about Osama bin Laden was akin to whacking moles.  This is the man, who at the request of his colleague Condoleezza Rice, became the primary author of (NSS 2002) The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, that declared that the U.S. would no longer abide by international law but was adopting a policy of preemptive war, as declared by George W. Bush at West Point in June 2002.  This was used as justification for the attack on Iraq in 2003 and was a rejection of the charter of the United Nations.

    So, based on Zelikow’s work creating a magic mountain of deception while disregarding so-called molehills, we have had twenty years of American terror wars around the world in which U.S. forces have murdered millions of innocent people.  Wars that will be continuing for years to come despite rhetoric to the contrary.  The rhetoric is simply propaganda to cover up the increasingly technological and space-based nature of these wars and the use of mercenaries and special forces.

    Simultaneously, in a quasi-volte-face, the Biden administration has directed its resources inward toward domestic “terrorists”: that is, anyone who disagrees with its policies.  This is especially aimed at those who question the COVID-19 story.

    Now Zelikow has been named to head a COVID Commission Planning Group based at the University of Virginia that is said to prepare the way for a National COVID Commission.  The group is funded by the Schmidt Futures, the Skoll Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and Stand Together, with more expected to join in.  Zelikow, a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program Advisory Panel, will lead the group that will work in conjunction with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.  Stand together indeed: Charles Koch, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, the Rockefellers, et al. funders of disinterested truth.

    So once again the fox is in the hen house.

    If you wistfully think the corona crisis will soon come to an end, I suggest you alter your perspective.  Zelikow’s involvement, among other things, suggests we are in the second phase of a long war of terror waged with two weapons – military and medical – whose propaganda messaging is carried out by the corporate mainstream media in the pursuit of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. Part one has so far lasted twenty years; part two may last longer. You can be certain it won’t end soon and that the new terrorists are domestic dissidents.

    Did anyone think the freedoms lost with The Patriot Act were coming back some day?  Does anyone think the freedoms lost with the corona virus propaganda are coming back?  Many people probably have no idea what freedoms they lost with the Patriot Act, and many don’t even care.

    And today?  Lockdowns, mandatory mask wearing, travel restrictions, requirements to be guinea pigs for vaccines that are not vaccines, etc.?

    Who remembers the Nuremberg Codes?

    And they thought they were free, as Milton Mayer wrote about the Germans under Hitler.  Like frogs in a pot of cold water, we need to feel the temperature rising before it’s too late.  The dial is turned to high heat now.

    But that was so long ago and far away, right?  Don’t exaggerate, you say.  Hitler and all that crap.

    Are you thankful now that government spokespeople are blatantly saying that they will so kindly give us back some freedoms if we only do what they’re told and get “vaccinated” with an experimental biological agent, wear our masks, etc.? Hoi polloi are supposed to be grateful to their masters, who will grant some summer fun until they slam the door shut again.

    Pfizer raked in $3.5 billion from vaccine sales in the first quarter of 2021, the first three months of the vaccine rollouts, and the company projects $26 billion for the year.  That’s one vaccine manufacturer.  Chump change?  Only a chump would not realize that Pfizer is the company that paid $2.3 billion in Federal criminal fines in 2009 – the largest ever paid by a drug company – for being a repeat offender in the marketing of 13 different drugs.

    Meanwhile, the commission justifying the government’s claims about COVID-19 and injections (aka “vaccines”) will be hard at work writing their fictive report that will justify ex post facto the terrible damage that has occurred and that will continue to occur for many years.  Censorship and threats against dissidents will increase.  The disinformation that dominates the corporate mainstream media will of course continue, but this will be supplemented by alternative media that are already buckling under the pressure to conform.

    The fact that there has been massive censorship of dissenting voices by Google/ YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc., and equally massive disinformation by commission and omission across media platforms, should make everyone ask why.  Why repress dissent?  The answer should be obvious but is not.

    The fact that so many refuse to see the significance of this censorship clearly shows the hypnotic effects of a massive mind control operation.

    Name calling and censorship are sufficient.  Perfectly healthy people have now become a danger to others.  So mask up, get your experimental shot, and shut up!

    Your body is no longer inviolable.  You must submit to medical procedures on your body whether you want them or not.  Do not object or question. If you do, you will be punished and will become a pariah.  The authorities will call you crazy, deviant, selfish. They will take away your rights to travel and engage in normal activities, such as attend college, etc.

    Please do not recall The Nuremberg Code.  Especially number 7: “Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability or death.” (my emphasis)

    “Now is the time to just do what you are told,” as Anthony Fauci so benevolently declared.

    I am not making a prediction.  The authorities have told us what’s coming. Pay attention.  Don’t be fooled.  It’s a game they have devised.  Keep people guessing.  On edge.  Relieved.  Tense.  Relaxed.  Shocked.  Confused.  That’s the game.  One day this, the next that.  You’re on, you’re off.  You’re in, you’re out.  We are allowing you this freedom, but be good children or we will have to retract it.  If you misbehave, you will get a time out.  Time to contemplate your sins.

    If you once thought that COVID-19 would be a thing of the past by now, or ever, think again.  On May 3, 2021 The New York Times reported that the virus is here to stay.  This was again reported on May 10.  Hopes Fade for Global Herd Immunity.  You may recall that we were told such immunity would be achieved once enough people got the “vaccine” or enough people contracted the virus and developed antibodies.

    On May 9, on ABC News, Dr. Fauci, when asked about indoor mask requirements being relaxed, said, “I think so, and I think you’re going to probably be seeing that as we go along, and as more people get vaccinated.”  Then he added: “We do need to start being more liberal, as we get more people vaccinated.”

    But then, in what CNN reported as a Mother’s Day prediction, he pushed the date for “normality” out another year, saying, “I hope that [by] next Mother’s Day, we’re going to see a dramatic difference than what we’re seeing right now. I believe that we will be about as close to back to normal as we can.  We’ve got to make sure that we get the overwhelming proportion of the population vaccinated. When that happens, the virus doesn’t really have any place to go. You’re not going to see a surge. You’re not going to see the kinds of numbers we see now.”

    He said this with a straight face even though the experimental “vaccines,” by their makers own admissions, do not prevent the vaccinated from getting the virus or passing it on.  They allege it only mitigates the severity of the virus if you contract it.

    Notice the language and the vaccination meme repeated three times: “We get more people vaccinated.” (my emphasis) Not that more people choose to get vaccinated, but “we get” them vaccinated.  Thank you, Big Daddy. And now we have another year to go until “we will be about as close to back to normal as we can.”  Interesting phrase: as we can.  It other words: we will never return to normality but will have to settle for the new normal that will involve fewer freedoms.  Life will be reset, a great reset.  Great for the few and terrible for the many.

    Once two vaccines were enough; then, no, maybe one is sufficient; no, you will need annual or semi-annual booster shots to counteract the new strains that they say are coming.  It’s a never-ending story with never-ending new strains in a massive never-ending medical experiment.  The virus is changing so quickly and herd immunity is now a mystical idea, we are told, that it will never be achieved.  We will have to be eternally vigilant.

    But wait.  Don’t despair.  It looks like restrictions are easing up for the coming summer in the northern hemisphere. Lockdowns will be loosened.  If you felt like a prisoner for the past year plus, now you will be paroled for a while. But don’t dispose of those masks just yet.  Fauci says that wearing masks could become seasonal following the pandemic because people have become accustomed to wearing them and that’s why the flu has disappeared. The masks didn’t prevent COVID-19 but eliminated the flu.  Are you laughing yet?

    Censorship and lockdowns and masks and mandatory injections are like padded cells in a madhouse and hospital world where free-association doesn’t lead to repressed truths because free association isn’t allowed, neither in word nor deed.  Speaking freely and associating with others are too democratic. Yes, we thought we were free.  False consciousness is pandemic.  Exploitation is seen as benevolence. Silence reigns.  And the veiled glances signify the ongoing terror that has spread like a virus.

    We are now in a long war with two faces.  As with the one justified by the mass murders of September 11, 2001, this viral one isn’t going away.

    The question is: Do we have to wait twenty years to grasp the obvious and fight for our freedoms?

    We can be assured that Zelikow and his many associates at Covid Collaborative, including General Stanley McChrystal, Robert Gates, Arnie Duncan, Deval Patrick, Tom Ridge, et al. – a whole host of Republicans and Democrats backed by great wealth and institutional support, will not be “whacking moles” in their search for truth.  Their agenda is quite different.

    But then again, you may recall where they stood on the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and the endless wars that have followed.

    The post Second Stage Terror Wars first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • GOP Lawmaker Claims Only 5 Republicans in the House Actually Buy Trump’s Lies

    Former President Donald Trump speaks during the final day of the Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC held at the Hyatt Regency Orlando on February 28, 2021, in Orlando, Florida.

    Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman from Illinois and an anomaly within his party for his frequent criticisms of former President Donald Trump, said this week that most GOP members within the House of Representatives don’t actually believe the election fraud lies that Trump has pushed since losing the presidential race last fall.

    Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper about the issue, Kinzinger explained that most Republicans in Congress who peddle Trump’s falsehoods (in which the former president claims election fraud cost him the election to President Joe Biden) only do so out of a desire for self-preservation.

    The number of true believers in the party, Kinzinger added, is actually quite small.

    “How many actually believe it? Five, probably, if that, maybe?” Kinzinger said on the program. “I don’t know, but it’s in the single, it’s low.”

    But because Trump’s base of supporters so ardently believe the former president’s lies about the election, it behooves lawmakers in Washington, whether they themselves believe it or not, to act like they do.

    “People don’t believe it,” Kinzinger maintained. “But what they are doing is they’re sitting around saying, ‘I need to continue to exist in this job so that I can make an impact. I don’t have the courage or the strength or the ability to swing this party, so I’m going to just kinda put my head down and go along.’”

    Kinzinger’s comments come as members of the GOP in the House are caught up in a battle among themselves over whether they should remove Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), who has also publicly stated that she doesn’t believe Trump’s election fraud lies, from her leadership position in the House GOP caucus. Cheney, who herself has put forward alarming and questionable claims criticizing the Obama administration, also voted to impeach Trump for his role in inciting a mob of his loyalists to attack the Capitol on January 6.

    Kinzinger said he wasn’t sure if backing Trump’s lies now would help Republicans in the 2022 midterms, but he was certain it wouldn’t help his party in the long term.

    “I guarantee you in the long arc of history, this is not going to bode well for Republicans,” he said.

    Kinzinger’s rhetoric matches similar comments recently made by veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who also believes that pushing Trump’s lies is detrimental to the party. But while Kinzinger sees it as damaging to the image of the GOP, Luntz believes pushing false claims of election fraud will foment distrust among the party’s base of voters.

    “This could cost the Republicans the majority in the House in 2022. What Donald Trump is saying is actually telling people it’s not worth it to vote,” Luntz said during a New York Times podcast. “Donald Trump single-handedly may cause people not to vote. And he may be the greatest tool in the Democrats’ arsenal to keep control of the House and Senate in 2022.”

    Although alarm bells like these are being rung by some in the party, others, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), have noted that Trump’s popularity among Republican voters makes it difficult to stand up to him and his lies.

    “The most popular Republican in America — it’s not Lindsey Graham, is not Liz Cheney; it’s Donald Trump,” Graham said during an appearance on Fox News Monday night.

    “To try to erase Donald Trump from the Republican Party is insane. And the people who try to erase him are going to wind up getting erased,” Graham added.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Liz Cheney Plays the Martyr — But She Helped Build the Monster That Is the GOP

    Liz Cheney

    While rewatching the third installment of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Night Batman series this weekend, a moment jumped out with palpable familiarity. A well-armed junta under the command of arch-fiend Bane had taken control of the city of Gotham, setting up kangaroo courts where everyone is guilty the moment they set foot in the room. Even some of the bad guys find themselves facing judgment, with one sputtering, “But… but I’m one of you!”

    Only two sentences were available in this court: death or exile. Death was straightforward. Exile involved being forced to cross the thin river ice that surrounded the winter-bound city. None survived exile; the ice devoured all comers. When Police Commissioner Jim Gordon is presented before this court, he defiantly chooses death rather than face the elongated humiliation of the river. The judge was nonplussed. “Death,” he pronounced as he brought down the gavel, “by exile.”

    The parallel was instantly evident: Rep. Liz Cheney! A once-prominent member of the junta formerly known as the Republican Party, which is now controlled by a cult leader with an unquenchable thirst for vengeance against whomever and whatever presents itself, Cheney has found herself on the far side of those who once championed her squalid family name.

    Her father, one of the more obvious war criminals in U.S. history and a force for decades within the party, has been equally excommunicated from the hearth of the faithful. Former Vice President Dick Cheney no longer holds elected office, however, while his daughter is currently the third-ranking GOP official in the House.

    For now.

    “The top Republican in the House on Sunday publicly endorsed the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney from the party’s leadership team,” reports The Washington Post, “paving the way for Cheney’s removal as early as this week and sending a clear message that allegiance to former president Donald Trump is a requirement to hold power in the GOP. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy threw his support behind Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) to become the new Republican conference chair, the No. 3 job in GOP leadership.”

    Why? What would motivate the GOP to immolate the political career of one of its more prominent up-and-comers? Cheney has faithfully adhered to the ghastly codex of modern Republican morality with grim enthusiasm over the years, but in the age of Trump, the only loyalty that matters is your loyalty to him.

    Because Cheney voted to impeach Trump after he incited his supporters to sack the Capitol, and because she refuses to peddle the fiction of a stolen 2020 election, Trump has commanded she tread the ice. She is not the only one who has aroused his ire, but at present, she is the entrée in this festival of retribution.

    If the reporting holds, Cheney’s moment of “death or exile” is coming on Wednesday, when the House returns to session. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, one of the more astonishing lickspittles in the annals of this age, is using Cheney as a meat shield to protect himself from the fact that he also denounced Trump after January 6, though he did not vote to impeach. That fact may be the only reason he still has a job.

    Imagine living every day in fear that Trump might remember something about you, or be reminded of something about you by some aide with an ax to grind or a friend to promote. That’s McCarthy’s whole existence today, and it is altogether pathetic.

    McCarthy hopes he will become speaker if the GOP retakes the House in ’22, but 40 miles of bad road lie between this moment and that outcome. “Some advisers are urging Donald Trump not to support McCarthy for Speaker if Republicans flip control of the House next year,” reports Politico. “Trump, who has been angry McCarthy helped defend Cheney’s role as conference chair in late February, is interested by the idea.”

    Cheney’s current plight stands as one of the more bizarre transmogrifications in the history of modern politics. For years, she was relentless in her pursuit of the worst elements of Republican “ideology:”

    During the Obama administration, Cheney was a Fox News regular who, as was the fashion at the time, insisted that the president was secretly sympathetic to jihadists. She enthusiastically defended the use of torture, dismissed the constitutional right to due process as an inconvenience, and amplified the Obama-era campaign to portray American Muslims as a national-security threat.

    Unfortunately, Cheney and her allies won their earlier fight for the soul of the party. During the Obama era, the Republican Party became ever more hostile to the fundamental rights of religious and ethnic minorities, and ultimately chose Donald Trump, a man who attacked those rights as an existential threat to the nation, as its leader.

    Cheney’s courageous stand against the party of Trump is a stand against a party she helped build, a monster she helped create. The tragedy is not that she might suffer for her folly, but that American democracy will. Her latter-day epiphany is welcome, but it also comes far too late.

    Even Maureen Dowd, The New York Times champion of D.C. insider snark, laid Cheney low in a blistering Saturday column: “Trump built a movement based on lies. The Cheneys showed him how it’s done.” Boom, thanks for playing, turn out the lights when you leave.

    Now that her entire political career is trembling on the verge of extinction, Liz Cheney has recast herself as a sort of Joan of Arc character, a doomed victim of nefarious forces she has vowed to keep fighting. The fact that those forces have “Made By The Cheney Family” stamped on their bootheels is but an accent in the symphony of hypocrisy that is consuming the GOP.

    The loss of her position within the party is all but a foregone conclusion. Cheney’s next task will be to see if her district in Wyoming, long a Cheney-GOP stronghold, will vote her out of office entirely next year. By every indication, Trump intends to make retaining her seat as difficult as possible, as he moves to purge the ranks of any and all who dare to offer less than seamless fealty to the scattered, violent nihilism that is now his brand.

    “History is watching,” Cheney wrote in a recent opinion piece that still managed to single out “wokeness” as a threat commensurate to Trump. “Our children are watching. We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process. I am committed to doing that, no matter what the short-term political consequences might be.”

    History has been watching for a while, Liz, and you are no hero. Train a pack of dogs with violence, ignorance and hunger, and they will turn and tear you to pieces sooner or later. For Cheney, it is sooner, and the ice beckons. Nothing on Earth can compel me to root for a Cheney, but I will be watching to see what she can do to prevent the monstrous party she helped make from eating itself.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • New Oklahoma Bill Bans Teaching About Racism Because It Causes “Discomfort”

    Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt speaks during a roundtable discussion in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on June 18, 2020.

    Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill into law on Friday barring grade schools from teaching lessons about race or sex that may make students uncomfortable.

    Schools in the state can no longer teach lessons about race that may cause “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress” to students. The bills passed the House and the Senate by wide margins. Both chambers are overwhelmingly controlled by Republicans, none of whom voted against the bill.

    HB 1775 also bars educators from teaching students that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex” and the Republicans sponsoring the bill claim that they’re concerned about the teaching of critical race theory — though the implicit claim that educators were teaching either of the aforementioned concepts is dubious at best.

    Critical race theory does not teach that any races are superior to others; rather, it simply holds that racism is deeply rooted in the country and is encoded in laws today, which the U.S. education system already largely fails to teach anyway. In trying to remove education on systemic racism in the country, Republicans have further embedded systemic racism into law, thus proving the point put forth by critical race theory.

    “It’s a law that protects white students from white fragility by banning any subject that forces them to think critically about American racism past, present or future,” wrote Zack Linly for The Root. “This isn’t about education, it’s about racism…. Banning [critical race theory] does just as much to further the divide as teaching it apparently does. Black feelings are being disregarded while white feelings are being catered to.”

    Many advocates and educators were appalled at the passage of the bill.

    The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission wrote, “We are extremely disappointed that Oklahoma Legislators, including Governor Stitt, chose to support HB1775 which diametrically opposes the work of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission.” The group was created with the aim of educating people about the white mob that killed hundreds in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Tulsa 100 years ago. Stitt is a commissioner in the group.

    “The intention of the bill clearly aims to limit teaching the racial implications of America’s history. The bill serves no purpose than to fuel the racism and denial that afflicts our communities and our nation,” writes the commission. “It is a sad day and a stain on Oklahoma.” The Black Wall Street Times has called on Stitt’s removal from the commission in light of his signing of the bill.

    Education officials in the state have also spoken out against the bill. Paula Lewis, the chairwoman of the Oklahoma City School Board, called HB 1775 “an outright racist and oppressive piece of legislation” on Twitter.

    “I am appalled at the flagrant attempt to erase factual, incomprehensible history that has occurred in the United States,” Lewis wrote in a Twitter thread. “Our history as a country and as a state, if told accurately, is uncomfortable and should be heartbreaking for Americans that look like me, white.”

    As with attacks on protesting, voting and trans people, Republicans in state legislatures have launched initiatives in half a dozen states to try and ban the teaching of critical race theory or their approximation of the subject, which is often flawed or outright wrong. The use of the term “critical race theory” is likely a distraction from their true aim of keeping white supremacy front and center in all curricula.

    “The term critical race theory is being used by Republicans in a loose way to capture all sorts of critical thought about the histories and legacies of racism in this country,” Amna Akbar, an associate law professor at Ohio State University, told The Hill. “It’s a bogeyman that they’re constructing around critical attention to the history of the country.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Warns Biden Against Pushing Too Hard for Bipartisanship With Republicans

    Chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a Senate Committee on the Budget hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on February 10, 2021.

    Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders rejected the idea of waiting for Republicans to come around to accept President Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure package, noting that voters don’t care about bipartisanship as much as people in Washington think they do.

    Speaking during an interview on the program “Axios on HBO,” Sanders was questioned about comments from Steve Ricchetti, who currently serves as counselor to the president in the Biden administration. Ricchetti has suggested that there’s still time for Democrats and Republicans to strike a deal on the infrastructure package, a notion that Sanders contended with.

    “In general I don’t agree with that. The bottom line is the American people want results,” Sanders pointed out.

    The Vermont senator used recent events to prove his point, noting there wasn’t much outrage over the COVID economic relief bill, which passed without a single Republican vote and among other things, provided stimulus checks for most American adults.

    “Frankly, when people got a, you know, $1,400 check or $5,600 check for their family, they didn’t say, ‘Oh, I can’t cash this check because it was done without any Republican votes,’” Sanders quipped.

    Compared to the economic stimulus bill, the White House has acted with less urgency on its proposed infrastructure package, which has been split into two distinct parts: one dealing primarily with what many view as “traditional” infrastructure policy (such as funding for repairing roads, rail, broadband internet, and more), and another bill providing much needed aid to American workers and their families, in the form of free preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, two years of free community college, and a paid leave program for every worker in the U.S.

    In taking its time with the infrastructure package, the Biden administration is hoping to strike a deal with Republicans to give the appearance of a cooperative spirit, a move that will likely water down many of the proposals Biden has made, especially those put forth by progressives.

    “I’m prepared to negotiate as to the extent of my infrastructure project as well as how we pay for it,” the president said in April.

    But while Biden is hoping to have bipartisan support for the bills he has proposed, he also seems wary of waiting too long, and has suggested he will move forward without Republicans if all they can offer him is obstruction. There appears to be a timeline for how long Biden will wait, as White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has said the president wants to see bipartisan progress on the bill by Memorial Day so that the infrastructure bills can get passed sometime this summer.

    The Biden administration has also tried to redefine what bipartisanship really means, seeing it less as lawmakers from two parties in Washington coming together to pass a bill and more as getting a wide coalition of voters to support the proposals.

    Polling has shown that Biden’s plans on infrastructure do appeal to most Americans, with nearly three-in-five voters (58 percent) in a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll supporting the part of the package that deals with improvements to child care, paid leave and education.

    There is also significant bipartisan support among Americans when it comes to funding the other half of the administration’s infrastructure package. Indeed, a majority of both Democrats and Independents, as well as nearly one-third of Republicans (32 percent), voiced support for how physical infrastructure projects across the country are to get funded — through raising taxes on those earning over $400,000 per year and making modest increases on taxes for corporations.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump’s “Big Lie” Could Hurt Republicans in 2022, GOP Pollster Says

    Paul Roblyer of Portland holds a flag with the face of former President Donald Trump during a 2nd Amendment rally on May 1, 2021, in Salem, Oregon.

    A veteran pollster for Republican candidates and officials over the past several decades has a warning for his party: pushing President Donald Trump’s “big lie” about election fraud may cause a GOP midterm election loss.

    Midterm elections usually go badly for the political party associated with the president currently in office. Only two presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have seen gains in Congress for their own political party in a midterm race after winning a presidential election: Bill Clinton in 1998 and George W. Bush in 2002.

    On average, presidents can expect their party to lose 25 congressional seats in the first midterm after their inauguration. f this holds true in 2022, Democrats could lose control of the House, and perhaps the Senate as well. But there’s a wild card in all of this: Trump, and his influence on conservative voters next year.

    Frank Luntz, a pollster famous for teaching Republicans how to use language in the 1990s to win elections in arguably Orwellian ways, commented on the possible outcome of GOP lawmakers and candidates pushing Trump-fueled election fraud myths into the 2022 midterm races. Doing so, he said in an interview with The New York Times’ “Sway” podcast, could cause supporters to view the voting process with distrust, resulting in losses across the board for the party.

    “This could cost the Republicans the majority in the House in 2022. What Donald Trump is saying is actually telling people it’s not worth it to vote,” Luntz said. “Donald Trump single-handedly may cause people not to vote. And he may be the greatest tool in the Democrats’ arsenal to keep control of the House and Senate in 2022.”

    Luntz added that GOP losses in the midterm races could also cause a Republican backlash against Trump.

    “If the Republicans lose the majority in the House, they will lay the blame at the feet of Donald Trump for telling people it’s not worth it to vote,” the pollster said.

    Luntz’s fears for the GOP echo similar concerns that were raised earlier this year by Republicans, who warned that Trump’s insistence on spreading baseless claims about fraud in the presidential election played a significant part in reducing voter turnout in the runoffs for Georgia’s Senate seats, particularly damaging Republican incumbent candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. More than 752,000 voters that participated in the first round of their races in November failed to show up in the January runoffs, according to reporting from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which noted that most of those voters were white and from rural areas, constituencies that typically favor the GOP.

    Trump’s insistent and baseless voter fraud claims are not the only factor threatening the GOP’s chances in the midterm elections: recent NBC News survey finds that a plurality of voters, 47 percent, currently want Democrats to retain control of Congress, while 42 percent say they want Republicans to run things halfway through Biden’s first term.

    For comparison, at the same time in Trump’s first term (in April 2017), that same NBC News Survey showed similar numbers, with 47 percent saying they wanted Democrats to run Congress (which was then controlled by Republicans) and 43 percent saying they wanted the GOP to do so.

    The midterms are a long way away, so it’s still anyone’s guess what will happen a year and a half from now. But beyond Trump’s influence in the race (and his potential to depress turnout for Republican candidates across the country with his continued pushing of the “big lie”), experts are also saying outcomes will depend heavily on how successful the Democrats are in delivering what Biden promised to the American people during the 2020 campaign.

    “The last four or five months of next year will be key, especially evaluating Biden’s performance, Democratic enthusiasm (which will help determine turnout), and the degree of lingering Republican disillusionment (which will determine their participation rate),” veteran analyst Charlie Cook wrote in February.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Texas Democrats Fought GOP Voter Suppression Bill Through the Night

    Voters approach the door at a polling location on October 13, 2020, in Austin, Texas.

    Texas House Republicans passed a voter suppression bill early Friday morning despite a tough fight put up by Democrats, who offered over 130 amendments from late Thursday into the night.

    Democrats were able to water down the bill, SB 7, and cut into some of the most punitive proposals, but the final vision retained restrictive proposals like limiting ballot drop boxes and prohibiting counties from sending unsolicited absentee ballots.

    The House voted at 3 am to advance the bill, which contained 20 of the provisions proposed by Democrats, who had slim chances of outright stopping the bill. Texas’ House is controlled by Republicans by a wide margin; the bill passed 81-64.

    The bill will head to committee to reconcile the differences with the version passed by the Texas Senate and clear another vote in both chambers before it goes to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk. Abbott, a Republican, is expected to sign the bill.

    Previous versions of SB 7 had many restrictions that raised alarms for racial justice and disability advocates, including a ban on drive-through voting, restrictions on early voting hours, and limits on polling places in areas with larger populations of Black and Latinx residents.

    It also contained language plucked straight out of Jim Crow which was eventually removed from the bill. The original text written by Republicans stated that the bill’s purpose was to “preserve the purity of the ballot box,” which Democratic Rep. Rafael Anchía pointed out was explicitly racist.

    “You may have missed it then — and this would’ve been very obvious I think to anyone who looked at that language — that provision was drafted specifically to disenfranchise Black people, Black voters in fact, following the Civil War,” Anchia said, per the Texas Tribune. “Did you know that this purity of the ballot box justification was used during the Jim Crow era to prevent Black people from voting?”

    Unfortunately, reconciliation in committee could end up removing the Democrats’ amendments, and much of the restrictions could be put back in place in the final bill. Former federal Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), through Twitter, encouraged Texans to call their representatives and urge them to vote down the ultimate version of the bill.

    He also encouraged residents to call their federal senator and voice their support for Democrats’ For the People Act, which could help undo some of the harmful voter suppression legislation that Republicans have been putting forth in states across the country.

    “This bill would not only stop voter suppression efforts in Texas, but would do so in Georgia, Arizona, Kansas, etc,” tweeted O’Rourke. “This is the most important thing we can do for voting rights in America.”

    Florida was the latest state to pass Republican-led restrictions on elections, joining Georgia in imposing racist voter suppression laws. On Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Florida) signed a bill acutely limiting ballot drop boxes, banning handing out food and water in voting lines, and empowering partisan poll watchers to challenge ballots.

    DeSantis locked out all media except for Fox News when he signed the bill that would affect the millions of voters in his state. Democrats balked at the decision.

    “The bill signing of a voter suppression bill by our Governor is a ‘Fox Exclusive’ — when did public policy become an exclusive to any media company, let alone a hyper conservative one?!” wrote Florida Democratic State Rep. Anna Eskamani on Twitter. “This is how fascism works y’all — and if you’re proud about the bill let people see you sign it!”

    Several groups have filed lawsuits over the Florida bill. The League of Women Voters of Florida and Black Voters Matters Fund have alleged that the bill is unconstitutional. The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Common Cause soon followed with a lawsuit against the Florida secretary of state, saying that the bill causes undue restrictions on voting. And the League of United Latin American Citizens is suing the state and asking the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the Republicans who sponsored the bill.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Rand Paul and ALEC Are Working Together to Suppress the Vote

    Senator Rand Paul walks through the Senate subway without a face covering on February 13, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) last month said he has spoken with state legislators through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) about passing state bills that restrict voting rights and impose greater legislative control over how elections are run.

    In a live-streamed video on April 19, Paul told Kevin Roberts, executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an affiliate of the right-wing State Policy Network, that he has “been speaking to legislators through ALEC” about conservative electoral reform priorities since the November 2020 election.

    Paul’s statement comes on the heels of the revelation that ALEC and the State Policy Network are working with Heritage Action for America on its $24 million plan to push new voting restrictions in eight states.

    While admitting that challenges to the 2020 election results — many filed by former President Donald Trump and his allies — failed to convince courts of voter fraud or unlawful conduct by local or state elections officials, Paul insisted state legislatures must forge ahead with his proposals to curtail mail-in voting and politicize the administration of elections.

    ALEC, registered as a nonpartisan, tax-exempt organization, claimed to have suspended its work on voting and elections in 2012 when it disbanded its Public Safety and Elections Task Force in the wake of public outcry and the departure of corporate members seeking to distance themselves from ALEC’s role in pushing controversial voter ID and “Stand Your Ground” legislation.

    However, ALEC revived a secret Political Process Working Group in 2019, which has actively pushed voter fraud myths and partisan gerrymandering strategies to a receptive audience of GOP lawmakers.

    A Center for Media and Democracy examination of voter suppression bills in six battleground states found more than 100 Republican politicians listed as lead sponsors or co-sponsors of 2021 legislation are connected to ALEC. In the first three months of 2021, lawmakers in 47 states introduced more than 360 bills that would restrict voting access, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

    Rand Paul’s Voter Suppression Checklist

    In addition to repeating lies about “election fraud” in Wisconsin and elsewhere during the 2020 general election, Paul outlined three policy reforms, which have already been introduced in various iterations in state legislatures across the country:

    • Suppressing the vote. “Absentee voting needs to be individualized,” Paul said, repeating Trump’s unfounded claims linking absentee voting to voter fraud to third-party ballot collection of absentee ballots. “Vote harvesting,” or “ballot harvesting,” is a pejorative term for the practice of third parties collecting completed ballots from voters’ homes and delivering them in bulk to polling places or election offices. Paul and other right-wing individuals and groups including the Heritage Foundation claim it is “a recipe for coercion and election fraud,” but election experts say it is good for democracy.
    • Enacting state control over local electoral policy. Local election officials developed a variety of approaches last year for managing a national election in the midst of a sweeping pandemic. Paul and ALEC take the hard line that only legislatures have that authority and are pushing legislation to prevent local and county elections officials from altering election protocols in the future.
    • Giving state legislatures authority over governors and secretaries of state. Paul argued that secretaries of state were “basically soliciting voters” when some chose to send mail-in ballots to all voters for the 2020 general election due to public health and safety concerns during the Covid-19 pandemic. “You may even have to put into law what they can’t do, instead of putting into law what they can do,” Paul said, having seen fellow Republicans repeatedly fail in legal challenges to states’ voting practices.

    Paul recycled falsehoods about voter fraud that Trump and many GOP politicians perpetuated after the 2020 election, alleging that in states where many voters vote by mail, “drip by drip, [Democrats] keep finding votes. They keep harvesting the votes until they get it.”

    The reality is that mail-in ballots take longer to count, and in some GOP-led states, lawmakers prevented election officials from beginning the mail-in vote count until Election Day. Thus, there were huge backlogs of ballots for officials to carefully count, and results trickled in after much of the Election Day votes were already tabulated. Republicans cynically used the vote counting delays to falsely allege the election was rigged against Trump.

    Paul called Travis County, Texas, which is home to the state capital of Austin, “a communist oasis in the middle of conservative Texas.” He said that “rebellious” election officials in Travis County and Harris County, which set records for voter participation by instituting 24-hour voting, should not have the ability to set their own voting practices, claiming they overruled state law. Republican state lawmakers are currently attempting to outlaw some of the voter access methods that Harris County used in its hugely successful elections last year.

    Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Election Protection Project

    The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a member of the State Policy Network, a web of right-wing think tanks and tax-exempt organizations in 50 states, Washington, D.C., Canada, and the United Kingdom that works to “defund and defang” unions, oppose climate change regulations, lower wages, cut taxes and business regulations, tighten voter restrictions, privatize education, and hide the identities of political donors.

    Not surprisingly, CMD found one of largest state delegations to ALEC in Texas, with 31 percent of the state’s House and 35 percent of its Senate having documented ties to ALEC.

    During its 2021 Policy Orientation in January, which was scheduled to coincide with the start of the legislative session, Texas Public Policy Foundation announced a national Election Protection Project led by Congressman Michael McCaul (TX-10). In a press release, TPPF said the project would seek to restore “election integrity” by “working with state officials and organizations to propose legislative measures to enhance and bolster the security and integrity of our nation’s election system.” These measures include pursuing voter ID requirements for in-person and mail-in voting and monitoring voter rolls.

    The 2021 Policy Orientation also featured two panels dedicated to voter suppression. ALEC-tied Texas state Reps. Stephanie Klick (R) and Valoree Swanson (R) and voter suppression expert J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation participated in the Election Protection: Securing the People’s Voice and Choice at the Ballot Box panel. The panel discussion centered around unfounded fears of voter fraud with mail-in balloting.

    The second panel, Election 2020: What Happened and What Does it Mean for the Future?, included Rachel Bovard, senior policy director with the Trump administration-tied Conservative Partnership Institute; The Federalist’s political editor, John Davidson; and Matt Braynard, executive director of the Trump-tied voter suppression group Look Ahead America.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • McConnell Says Republicans’ Only Priority Is to Block Biden Administration

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell walks through the Senate Subway at the U.S. Capitol on April 29, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, when asked about the direction of the Republican Party and the right’s attacks on Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), said on Wednesday that he and his party are “100 percent” focused on blocking the Biden administration.

    “One-hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration,” McConnell said. “I think the best way to look at what this new administration is: The president may have won the nomination, but [Sen.] Bernie Sanders won the argument.”

    The senator has said before that he plans to fight Democrats and progressives on their agenda, though the recent comment was a more direct representation of his stated goals. Ironically, within the same press conference, McConnell also said that he wanted to pass an infrastructure package on a bipartisan basis — as long it was based on the Republicans’ plan.

    While McConnell has declared that Republicans will stand united in opposition to the Democrats’ infrastructure plan, he claimed Wednesday that the massively watered-down plan offered by his party could garner Democratic support and would thus be a “bipartisan” offer that his party could go for.

    In reality, many political commentators have noted that the people acting as a roadblock to bipartisanship are the Republicans, and McConnell’s own comments are reflective of that. As columnist Eugene Robinson noted in February for The Washington Post, “Bipartisanship is nice, but you can’t negotiate with fantasy and lies.”

    Though President Joe Biden has only been in office for a few months, Republicans have already put the absurdity of their cries of “bipartisanship” on display multiple times. They stand opposed to the pay-fors offered by Democrats for the infrastructure package, for instance, but refuse to pass a bill that isn’t paid for; and so far, their only offering toward dealing with the fallout from the pandemic have been more tax cuts — ones that even the usually staid Politico calls “mostly unrealistic.”

    President Biden immediately dismissed McConnell’s comments on Wednesday, saying, “[McConnell] said that about the last administration — about Barack [Obama], that [McConnell] was going to stop everything — and I was able to get a lot done with him.”

    Indeed, McConnell gained a reputation while he was Senate majority leader during the Obama administration for blocking everything that Obama and the Democrats put forth with a legislative weapon: the Senate filibuster. Use of the filibuster has skyrocketed in modern times, partially thanks to McConnell’s repeated and skillful use of it.

    The knowledge that the filibuster is one of McConnell’s only tools left in a Democratically controlled Congress and White House is likely why he has threatened to go “scorched earth” on the Senate if Democrats get rid of the archaic rule.

    Meanwhile, many of the Democrats’ proposals, like the $15 minimum wage, infrastructure plan and coronavirus relief checks, poll well with a wide swath of the public, including Republicans — a fact that throws a wrench into GOP lawmakers’ cries for “unity.”

    This is perhaps part of why political commentators say that, while Republicans might say their stated purpose is to block Democrats, in reality, they’re fighting against democracy itself; Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) said as much on Wednesday.

    “Mitch McConnell just admitted that 100 percent of his focus is on obstruction. And with the filibuster, he can exercise a veto over the will of the majority,” tweeted Padilla. “We can’t keep letting one person who’s hell-bent on standing in the way of progress also stand in the way of democracy.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Florida’s DeSantis Bars All Media Except Fox at Voter Suppression Bill Signing

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis responds to a question from the media at a press conference at the Eau Gallie High School aviation hangar in Melbourne, Florida, on March 22, 2021.

    Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law on Thursday imposing new restrictions on voting, such as making it harder to vote by mail and criminalizing the handing out of food and water to people in voting lines.

    The governor made the signing of the bill, which would affect millions of voters in his state, a “Fox exclusive,” as a spokesperson said, according to South Florida Sun-Sentinel columnist Steve Bousquet, allowing only the conservative media outlet to show the signing. DeSantis claimed in an interview with “Fox & Friends” that the bill was about “integrity and transparency” even though voting rights advocates have decried the measures that make it harder to vote, especially for nonwhite voters.

    The bill, SB 90, adds new ID requirements for those requesting an absentee ballot and requires those requesting an absentee ballot to file a request before each election, rather than allowing them to remain on an absentee voter list. It also limits the number of ballot drop boxes, places restrictions on who can drop off ballots and requires drop boxes to be monitored by an election official.

    Democrats and voting advocates have criticized the law, saying that it places undue restrictions on a voting process that had shown no evidence of widespread fraud.

    The League of Women Voters of Florida, Black Voters Matters Fund and Florida Alliance for Retired Americans filed a lawsuit against SB 90 on Thursday, saying that multiple elements of the bill, such as banning the handing out of food and water, are unconstitutional and a violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Voters from every county in the state also joined the suit.

    “SB 90 is a bill that purports to solve problems that do not exist, caters to a dangerous lie about the 2020 election that threatens our most basic democratic values, and, in the end, makes it harder to vote without adequate justification for doing so,” reads the groups’ complaint. “SB 90 does not impede all of Florida’s voters equally. It is crafted to and will operate to make it more difficult for certain types of voters to participate in the state’s elections” — especially nonwhite, older and young or first-time voters.

    The bill isn’t about election integrity for Republicans, say the bill’s opponents, but about the continuation of an attack on voting started by former President Donald Trump.

    “We are not here because we have a problem with our elections,” said Democratic State Rep. Omari Hardy. “We are here because the Republican former president lost his re-election in November, and, rather than admitting his defeat, he spun a web of lies, radicalized those lies, in an attempt to explain away the loss.” Hardy also described the bill as “the revival of Jim Crow in this state.”

    The oppressive nature of the bill was underscored by the fact that the governor wouldn’t allow local news outlets to show the bill’s signing.

    “It’s extremely telling that DeSantis claims new Florida voter suppression law intended to boost ‘election integrity’ but barred all media except Fox News from covering bill signing,” wrote Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman on Twitter.

    “This isn’t a story about the press being locked out of an event. It’s about Floridians who had their eyes and ears in that room cut off,” wrote Jay O’Brien, a reporter for CBS 12 in West Palm Beach. “Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law today that will impact ALL Floridians. And only some viewers were allowed to see it. That’s not normal.”

    Texas is up next for voter suppression bills. The Republican-led HB 6, which would make it a felony for election officials to mail an absentee ballot to a voter who didn’t request one, among other restrictive provisions, advanced to a floor vote on Thursday. Republicans control the House in the state by a wide margin.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • While Democrats Work on Infrastructure, Republicans Are Busy Defending Slavery

    U.S. Senate Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) speaks during a news briefing after the weekly Senate Republican Policy Luncheon on April 27, 2021.

    As the nation grapples with fighting for racial justice and against police murders of Black Americans, Republicans have evidently found a different cause worth fighting for: making racist, seemingly unprompted defenses of slavery.

    On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said that he doesn’t believe that 1619, the year that enslaved Africans first arrived in the U.S., is an important date in history. People have “exotic notions” about important points in U.S. history, and 1619 isn’t one of them, McConnell said.

    “I just simply don’t think [racism is] part of the core underpinning of what American civic education ought to be about,” McConnell continued, speaking at the University of Louisville. McConnell has gone on a tirade against The New York Times’s 1619 Project about slavery in the U.S. and Democrats’ anti-racism agenda — though anti-anti-racism, as commentators have pointed out, is simply just racism.

    Nikole Hannah-Jones, who headed the 1619 Project on slavery that has Republicans up in arms, spoke on CNN about McConnell’s comments. “This is not about the facts of history — it’s about trying to prohibit the teaching of ideas they don’t like,” she said.

    Indeed, many Republicans have long embraced racism but have been emboldened by Donald Trump’s style of being openly and brazenly so — to the point that some political journalists have noted that the GOP wants to be called racist so that they can play the victim and claim to be silenced by anti-racists.

    Perhaps that’s why Tennessee Republican state Rep. Justin Lafferty on Tuesday suggested that the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted enslaved people as less than one whole person in population counts, was actually a good thing because it helped to end slavery. But it didn’t; it only further “sanctioned slavery more decidedly than any previous action,” as historian Staughton Lynd wrote.

    Or maybe it’s why Colorado Republican state lawmaker Rep. Ron Hanks also defended the Three-Fifths Compromise last month, saying that it “was not impugning anybody’s humanity” to count an enslaved person as less than one human being.

    Republicans evidently don’t believe that it was just some elements of slavery that were positive, however; Louisiana Republican state Rep. Ray Garofalo Jr. last week said that schools should teach “the good” of slavery alongside the bad. “If you are having a discussion on whatever the case may be, on slavery, then you can talk about everything dealing with slavery: the good, the bad, the ugly,” Garofalo said.

    There is, of course, no “good” to slavery, and it’s abhorrently racist to suggest as such. Garofalo later retracted his statement, but only after Democrats circulated a video of him speaking on the “good” of slavery that now has nearly a million views.

    Regardless of the GOP’s intentions, it’s no coincidence that they are raging an attack on anti-racism just as rallies and protests for Black Lives have swept the country. Though the GOP’s overt defenses of slavery all happened in recent weeks, the right has been waging racist attacks prominently in the past year.

    For months, the right has been railing against critical race theory — scholarly work with the goal of dismantling oppression and white supremacy — despite lacking a clear understanding of what it is. They are claiming that racism has been eradicated in the U.S. even as Black Americans face death at the hands of the state simply for walking down the street or while sleeping in their homes.

    It’s evidently not enough for the GOP that racism is alive and well in the U.S. — the party seems to be operating on a mandate to enshrine racism in the nation forever — and normalizing defenses of slavery appear to be part of that strategy.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Conspiracy Theorist Hired by GOP to Lead Arizona Recount Cost Taxpayers $150,000

    Cameras stream live footage from the Arizona vote audit in Maricopa County, Arizona, on May 4, 2021.

    Nearly six months after voting ended in the 2020 presidential election, Republicans are leading an effort in Arizona to throw undue doubt into President Joe Biden’s win in the state — and they’ve hired conspiracy theorists to help lead the charge.

    Republican legislators in the state, who hold a majority in the legislature, successfully subpoenaed 2.1 million ballots earlier this year. Senate Republicans demanded the ballots from election officials in Maricopa County, which put Biden over the top and then didn’t have anywhere to put the ballots once they got them.

    The GOP obtained the ballots with the goal of completing their own audit of the election results, despite the fact that the state’s own audits, as well as Maricopa County’s audit, found no evidence of voter fraud.

    Still, Republicans think that they can conduct a better audit — perhaps one with different results — and have hired a company with zero experience with elections to do so. As Judd Legum of Popular Information wrote, “The counting will continue until results improve.”

    The company Republicans have hired, for $150,000 of taxpayer money, is called Cyber Ninjas. Cyber Ninjas is a Florida-based cybersecurity company which has been described by its founder, Doug Logan, as a “Christian company.” Logan has espoused views supporting the conspiracy theories put forth by “Stop the Steal” groups and QAnon-affiliated Ron Watkins, who propagate the false claim that it was Donald Trump, not Biden, who truly won the election.

    Arizona is not Logan’s first rodeo in challenging election results. He was previously listed as an expert witness in a lawsuit in Michigan where the plaintiffs claimed that voting machines were rigged.

    Though the company has tried keeping their audit methodology under wraps, they’ve been ordered by a judge to disclose documents with procedures for the audit. The procedures “[don’t] make any sense, and I’ve seen a lot of audits,” Tammy Patrick, senior elections adviser for Democracy Fund and former Maricopa County elections worker, told USA Today.

    The documents detailing procedures for “forensics” are vague and unclear. One such procedure evidently being employed by Cyber Ninja is using UV lights to check for watermarks on the ballots. Arizona’s ballots don’t have watermarks, and the Brennan Center for Justice has warned that the lights could make the ballots deteriorate, but that hasn’t stopped conspiracy theorists from believing that using the UV light might reveal a secret watermark.

    Observers and election experts have also caught the auditors making basic mistakes like using blue pens that might alter the vote on a ballot or not securing the area where ballots are being counted by locking the doors.

    Cyber Ninjas has also recruited former state lawmaker Anthony Kern to help validate ballots. Kern is a Trump supporter who was at the Capitol on January 6 with the mob trying to get the election results overturned.

    State Republicans are also evidently trying to raise funds beyond the $150,000 from the government for the audit effort, Legum reports. The Arizona Senate is soliciting donations to raise $2.8 million for the effort on a website, Fund the Audit.com, owned by an organization created by former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, also a known Trump supporter.

    Trump himself has been bragging about the audit, despite the fact that Arizona lawmakers don’t have the authority to overturn election results. Still, he’s been telling Mar-a-Lago guests that the audit will perhaps help reinstate him — although, even if the legislators could overturn the result of the state’s election, and if there were any evidence of fraud, the 11 electoral votes it would give the former president would still not be enough to give him the win he wants.

    So then why are Republicans still chugging along to overturn Arizona’s results? It’s unclear, but the audit is already likely having harmful effects. Most Republican voters still believe that the election was rigged; and the very fact that Republicans are conducting an audit may indicate, to some, that there are legitimate reasons to believe that there was fraud, no matter how spurious the real reasons for the audit are.

    Political observers warn that the results of the audit, even if they’re falsified or based on flawed methodology, could end up adding fuel to the Republicans’ voter suppression fire in Arizona and across the country.

    “The idea, obviously, is to create a new truth for Republicans,” wrote MSNBC’s Steve Benen, “at which point pro-Trump forces can exploit the lie to justify new voter-suppression efforts and perhaps even related efforts in other states, where Republicans can hire Cyber Ninjas of their own.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Accuses McConnell of Hypocrisy & Corruption in Scathing Kentucky Speech

    Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Mitch McConnell

    In a rally for the progressive movement in Kentucky on Sunday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) criticized Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) for “working overtime” for corporations and the wealthy, while working to “undermine” the lower and middle classes.

    “I’m here today because Mitch McConnell is working overtime to represent the needs of the wealthy and the powerful and to undermine the needs of working families,” Sanders said, while drawing attention to McConnell’s leadership in opposing proposals like the American Rescue Plan, a $15 federal minimum wage, universal child care, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the For the People Act.

    “The question, I think, that people should be asking is, ‘why is Mitch McConnell doing what he does?’” in blocking legislation that would improve the lives of working Americans while working to help the wealthy, Sanders said. “The answer is pretty simple: follow the money.”

    Sanders pointed out that McConnell often receives large sums of money from Wall Street, health care companies, pharmaceutical companies, the National Rifle Association and fossil fuel companies. These groups oppose proposals like raising the minimum wage and reducing the cost of pharmaceutical drugs, among many things, he points out.

    “Mitch McConnell’s top campaign contributors want to do exactly the opposite of what the American people want and need. And so does Mitch McConnell,” said Sanders.

    Sanders went on to criticize McConnell’s hypocrisy in whingeing over government spending for the working class while working to provide tax breaks for the rich.

    “This I will never forget: on New Year’s Eve, Mitch McConnell blocked legislation I was offering to provide working class Americans with a $2,000 direct payment because, get this, he claimed it was ‘socialism for the rich,’” said Sanders.

    “In Mitch McConnell’s world, if you are a multi-millionaire campaign contributor, it’s okay to receive a $1.4 billion tax break,” as the Koch family received as a result of Republican tax cuts in 2017. “But if you are a working class person, apparently, it’s not acceptable to get the help you so desperately need,” Sanders said. “If you are a teacher or a construction worker who makes 75,000 [dollars] a year, a 2,000 [dollar] direct payment is, according to McConnell, ‘socialism for the rich.’”

    Sanders pointed out that the ideology of the GOP as a whole is not actually about limiting government, as they claim — rather, it’s about who can help them raise more money on the campaign trail.

    “The difference in ideology between Senator McConnell and myself, between the Republican Party and the progressive movement, is not a question of big government versus small government,” the senator went on. “It’s a question of whose interests the government represents. It’s a question of whether you fight for the needs of the wealthy and large corporations who fund your campaigns, or the working families of our country.”

    By contrast, Sanders said, the progressive movement is fighting for the interests of the working classes, who have suffered during the pandemic.

    “What I want to do now — which, I think, as a nation, we don’t do enough — is to simply compare Senator McConnell’s ideology, his Republican ideology, his votes, his actions, and his vision for America with the progressive vision for America,” said Sanders. “And our vision is that the government should represent all of the people, not just the 1 percent. Our vision believes that the foundations of government should rest on the pillars of justice — economic justice, racial justice, social justice, environmental justice.”

    “While tens of millions of Americans have been living in economic desperation, the wealthiest people in this country have become obscenely richer,” Sanders noted. “We have a worse level of income and wealth inequality today than we’ve had since the 1920s. In America today, two people now own more than the bottom 40 percent of our nation, while the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 92 percent.”

    Indeed, economists have shown that the top 1 percent of households own a hugely disproportionate share of wealth in the U.S., and that share has continually been growing over many decades. A recent study showed that the billionaires’ profits from just the pandemic alone amount to over $1.6 trillion combined, or a growth of 55 percent in a little over a year.

    “This is a pivotal moment in American history,” Sanders said. “In the coming months, we have a fundamental decision to make. Will we build a government, an economy and a society that works for all of us and not just the 1 percent? Or will we continue the drift towards oligarchy and authoritarianism in which a small number of incredibly wealthy and powerful billionaires own and control a significant part of the economy and exert enormous influence over the political life of our country?”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans Are Suing to Use Stimulus Relief to Cut Taxes. It’s All Theater.

    Dave Yost gives his victory speech after winning the Ohio Attorney General race on November 6, 2018 at the Ohio Republican Party's election night party at the Sheraton Capitol Square in Columbus, Ohio, in 2018.

    States were told by the federal government that they can’t use pandemic relief funds passed by Congress in March to lower taxes. In response, 16 states have filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of that restriction in the US$1.9 trillion legislation, known as the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

    The rescue plan makes $350 billion available to state and local governments over the next four years to cover costs associated with COVID-19. It guarantees every state at least $500 million, but more can be provided based on unemployment numbers and poverty rates.

    The law, however, forbids states from using this money “to either directly or indirectly offset a reduction in net tax revenue” over those four years. In other words, rescue plan money cannot pay for state tax cuts.

    That restriction prompted the lawsuits, which are pending in Ohio, Arizona, Missouri and Alabama federal courts.

    The states claim that the rescue plan’s policies violate the 10th Amendment, which helps define the relationship between the federal government and the states.

    Historically, the Supreme Court has interpreted this provision to prevent the federal government from directing state policy rather than to limit what the feds can do themselves.

    The rescue plan might run afoul of the 10th Amendment if it dictated what laws state legislatures must or must not adopt. That would mean states could use the federal money to offset tax cuts.

    But as a constitutional law professor who has written extensively about federal powers, I think it’s unlikely that the rescue plan violates the 10th Amendment. That’s because it does not order states to do anything.

    Supreme Court Precedent

    In 1992, the Supreme Court declared that a federal law ordering states to pass legislation for the safe disposal of nuclear waste violated the 10th Amendment. And in 2018 the high court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which forbade states from authorizing sports betting.

    But the rescue plan does not explicitly require or forbid states to enact legislation, as the nuclear waste and sports gambling laws did.

    It offers states a deal: If you want federal money, you can’t use it to subsidize tax cuts. States get to choose whether they prefer tax cuts or federal funding. So I believe the 10th Amendment challenge will likely fail.

    The plaintiff states rely more heavily on a claim that the tax provision imposes an unconstitutional condition on receipt of their funds. They have two main arguments.

    The states assert that the law forbids them from cutting taxes, even though it does not.

    They rely on the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a provision of the Affordable Care Act that withheld all federal Medicaid funding from states that refused to expand the health coverage program.

    This was a real penalty: The feds were already providing more than half of all Medicaid money and would pay virtually all of the additional costs of expanding the program. States that refused to expand Medicaid would get no federal Medicaid money at all, leaving them much worse off than they were before.

    But the rescue plan does not put the states in a worse position.

    The rescue plan seeks only to make sure that the federal spending goes to cover the costs of the pandemic. It imposes a condition on federal spending, something that the Supreme Court has consistently approved.

    Funds for Pandemic Expenses

    The rescue plan tax provision more closely resembles a law that withheld federal highway money from states that had a drinking age below 21. The Supreme Court upheld that law in 1987.

    The Supreme Court recognized that a condition could be unconstitutionally coercive. But it dismissed that concern because states would lose only 5% of their highway money if they failed to raise their drinking age. Every state except South Dakota complied with the condition.

    The same principle should apply here. The rescue plan withholds federal relief if the funds offset state tax cuts. The feds need not provide any relief, but it can make sure that the relief it does provide is used to defray pandemic expenses.

    The plaintiff states also maintain that the broad scope of the rescue plan’s tax provision – which covers “direct or indirect” reductions in net tax revenue, such as by lowering tax rates or providing tax rebates – makes its coverage ambiguous. That, states claim, violates the requirement that conditions on federal spending be “clearly stated.”

    But at least one state, Missouri, concedes that the provision simply forbids applying stimulus money “to offset a specific tax reduction of a similar amount.” That concession could hurt the states in court.

    And Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has authority to promulgate regulations to clarify any ambiguity. She recently issued guidance under the law, stating that changes to state tax laws that take account of recent changes to federal tax law will not be treated as tax cuts under the rescue plan.

    Other Payment Methods

    Suppose, however, that the rescue plan does have a broader sweep.

    States still could provide economic help to their residents and keep all of their COVID-19 money. They could do so by using ARPA money to pay people directly instead of reducing their taxes.

    Maybe states should be careful not to label those payments as rebates, which might run afoul of the restriction. But they could avoid that problem by calling them, in the rescue plan’s words, “assistance to households, small businesses, and nonprofits” and “aid to impacted industries.”

    However these cases get resolved, we should view them as the latest round in the political battle between the states and the federal government over contentious federal policy.

    Legal doctrines might evolve, but in many respects these lawsuits are really performances: They allow state officials to score political points with their constituents, whether or not their legal arguments ultimately prevail.The Conversation

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Observers Look to Upcoming Texas Election as Marker of Trump’s Influence on GOP

    Former President Donald Trump speaks during the final day of the Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC held at the Hyatt Regency Orlando on Sunday, Feb 28, 2021, in Orlando, FL.

    Voters in Texas’ 6th Congressional District will head to the polls on Saturday to choose a successor to former Rep. Ron Wright (R-Texas), who died after contracting the coronavirus in February. And the contest may prove to be a referendum on former President Donald Trump.

    A whopping 23 candidates — 11 Republicans, 10 Democrats, one Libertarian and one independent — are on the ballot. If no single candidate wins more than 50 percent, voters will return to the polls later to decide a runoff between the top two candidates.

    Wright’s widow, Susan Wright, picked up a key endorsement from Trump earlier this week and is currently favored to walk away from Saturday’s election with the most votes. She is a member of the Texas Republican Executive Committee and picked up a long list of endorsements from Texas GOP lawmakers following her decision to run for office in February.

    Wright is running on a platform nearly identical to her late husband’s. In 2020, he won re-election by 9 percentage points in the solidly-conservative district.

    “Susan Wright will be a terrific Congresswoman (TX-06) for the Great State of Texas,” Trump said in a statement. “She is the wife of the late Congressman Ron Wright, who has always been supportive of our America First Policies.”

    Since announcing her candidacy, Susan Wright has raised more than $286,000. Less than 8 percent of that total came from individuals giving $200 or less. A PAC affiliated with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) contributed $10,000 to Susan Wright’s campaign, and a PAC dedicated to electing Republican women to federal offices contributed the same amount. Wright had around $128,000 on hand as of April 11.

    Jana Lynne Sanchez, a former journalist and advertising executive, leads the Democratic candidates in both recent polls and in fundraising. Frustrated by rising anti-immigration sentiment during the Trump administration, Sanchez ran for the 6th District House seat in 2018. She won the Democratic primary, but ultimately lost to Ron Wright. Sanchez has raised just shy of $300,000 and has more than $96,000 remaining in the bank. Approximately 16 percent of her warchest came from small dollar donors. The CHC-BOLD PAC, which gives to pro-immigration candidates, contributed $5,000.

    Sanchez has also benefited from nearly $31,000 in outside spending by Nuestro PAC, a super PAC dedicated to helping Democratic candidates reach Latinx voters.

    Jake Ellzey, a Republican, has raised more than $500,000. Ellzey ran against Ron Wright in the 2018 Republican primary but lost by a little more than 4 percentage points in a Republican run-off. In 2021, Ellzey picked up the endorsement of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and has benefited from a combined $354,000 in outside spending by two super PACs, American Patriots PAC and the newly-formed Elect Principled Veterans Fund.

    Still, Ellzey lags behind both Susan Wright and Sanchez according to a recent poll of the race.

    Club for Growth Action, a conservative super PAC, has laid down more than $260,000 in independent spending to oppose Ellzey. An ad produced by the super PAC highlights a $250 contribution to Ellzey’s 2018 primary campaign from Bill Kristol, an GOP pundit who has criticized Trump. Club for Growth has not endorsed a candidate in the race or spent any money supporting any of the other Republicans vying for the seat.

    Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who has received support from Club for Growth in the past, voiced his opposition to Ellzey in a statement to the Texas Tribune.

    “Texans in CD-6 deserve a strong conservative voice in Congress,” Cruz said. “Jake Ellzey’s financial support from never-Trumpers, openness to amnesty, and opposition to school choice should concern Texans looking for a conservative leader.”

    Cruz has not endorsed a candidate, though former wrestler Dan Rodimer — a Republican who released an ad that went viral in March — reportedly claimed that Cruz and “the Trump family” encouraged him to enter the race. He has raised approximately $337,000.

    Two former Trump-administration staff members are also competing for the seat. Brian Harrison, former chief of staff in the Department of Health and Human Services, and Sery Kim, former assistant administrator in the Small Business Administration, both hope that their link to the former president will boost their chances. In 2020, Trump won the district by 3 percentage points.

    Harrison has raised almost $641,334 — more than any other candidate in the race — with fundraising help from former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and other GOP insiders.

    One Republican, Michael Wood, is running on his opposition to the former president.

    “The Republican Party has lost its way and now is the time to fight for its renewal. We were once a party of ideas, but we have devolved into a cult of personality,” Wood says on his campaign website. “This must end, and Texas must lead the way.”

    Anti-Trump GOP groups coalesced behind Wood, making Saturday’s contest the first test for center-right Republicans after Trump’s departure from the Oval Office. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), a vocal Trump critic, pledged to support Republicans who opposed the former president. Kinzinger’s campaign committee donated $2,000 to Wood, and his leadership PAC endorsed him. Still, Wood’s fundraising lags behind many of his opponents, totaling only $98,627.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Arizona Is on the Verge of Adopting Voter Suppression Laws

    Voters enter Burton Barr Central Library to cast their ballots on November 3, 2020, in Phoenix, Arizona.

    Arizona is taking center stage in the relentless effort to rein in voter participation in the name of “election security,” advancing the first in a batch of bills aimed at making vote by mail harder. These Republican-led efforts are based on the discredited lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and mail-in voting is insecure. Yet, it was only after the statewide federal elections in Arizona were won by the opposing political party suddenly Arizona’s mail-in voting processes became untrustworthy.

    The Democratic wins at the top of the ticket, albeit narrow, were driven by high turnout and a rise in mail voting usage. Arizona had historically high turnout in 2020, about 10 percent higher and about 800,000 more voters than in 2016. In 2020, out of 3.4 million ballots counted, 2.4 million were cast by mail. Indigenous voters and especially those living on tribal lands played a decisive role. State legislative races were very close in some districts, with both houses of the Arizona Legislature almost evenly divided

    Arizonans are extremely concerned that proposed changes to the “permanent early voting list,” also known as the PEVL, would disrupt longstanding practices that encourage voting. The list is wildly popular in the state. It makes voting much easier because voters on the list automatically receive their ballot in the mail without having to affirmatively request it. About 3.2 million voters are on the list right now, and voters of all political stripes are almost equally represented. The list currently consists of 36 percent Republicans, 35 percent Democrats, and 29 percent unaffiliated voters or those registered with other parties.

    At the same time as attacks on mail in voting are moving through the legislature, the Arizona Senate is engaged in an unprecedented legislative “audit” of the ballots of a single county — Maricopa — in a quest to discover irregularities in those ballots. The senate is proceeding with the audit even though Maricopa County already conducted its own audit of ballots and a forensic audit of the voting machines, and both confirmed the outcome of the 2020 election.

    This audit could also be used as an excuse for passing bills that restrict access to voting. In fact, a Republican senator has announced she is holding up all voting bills — positive or negative — until the results of the audit are reported because she is convinced the review of Maricopa ballots will reveal issues that need a legislative remedy. But it’s only a temporary reprieve because as long as the legislature remains in session, anti-democratic bills can be brought to a floor vote, passed, and head over to the governor.

    One of them is S.B. 1485, which the Arizona House passed last week, failed in the Senate, and is currently under a motion for reconsideration. It would require counties to purge from the early voting list voters who did not vote an early voting ballot in both the primary and general election in two consecutive election cycles. Even if they voted in person in every election during the four-year period, they would still be removed from the early voting list because they didn’t use their early ballot.

    Removing voters from the permanent early voting list makes it more likely that those people will not participate in elections. Increasing opportunities for mail-in voting brings marginal voters into in elections and retains voters who might otherwise choose not to participate. Current estimates predict that 125,000 to 150,000 voters will be jettisoned from the early voting list if this bill is signed into law. If it had been enacted in 2019, approximately 126,000 Arizonans who voted in 2020 would have been removed. A voter who does not receive their mail ballot will have to vote in person, which can be difficult for some people, especially those living on remote tribal lands. The predicted number of voters who risk removal are well above the margins of victory in both the 2018 and 2020 statewide federal elections.

    Unfortunately, S.B. 1485 is just one in a series of bills introduced this year that aim to limit access to mail voting. S.B. 1713 would require voters to include their date of birth and one of two acceptable ID numbers when they return their early ballot: an Arizona driver’s license number or voter registration number. By excluding other types of ID, the state is closing the door on many voters who do not have these numbers. Moreover, the universe of voters who do not have a driver’s license disproportionately consists of voters of color and older voters. While the bill allows voters to use their voter registration number on the return envelope, most voters do not have that number readily available. This bill would force voters to jump through additional hoops to send back their early ballot. Importantly, failure to include this additional information gives election officials a reason to toss out those ballots.

    Several other restrictive bills would make it harder for voters to fix — or “cure” — a mail ballot that has problems, and they threaten criminal penalties for both election officials and citizens for trying to encourage mail voting. S.B. 1003 would limit the time for curing a missing signature on a mail in ballot to 7 p.m. on Election Day. The cure period for mismatched signatures and other missing information is longer: voters have until the fifth business day after the election to do so.

    H.B. 2792 would make it a felony for an election official to send a voter an early ballot unless the voter requests it. S.B. 1106 would, among other things, subject any person to criminal liability for knowingly assisting another person that resides in another state in voting including by forwarding an early ballot to that person. The broad contours of the bill could encompass seemingly benign action, like a parent sending a mail ballot to their child away at college in another state.

    All of these bills have already been passed by one chamber of the legislature and have been passed out of committee by the other, so they stand a real chance of heading to the governor’s desk soon. Compounding these attempts to limit voter participation, the legislature has already tied the hands of local election officials by enacting a new law this month that prohibits state and local election officials from receiving or spending “private monies” in the administration of elections. This legislation, like others around the country, is a backlash against the philanthropic grants to help election officials to cope with the increased costs of running the 2020 election amidst a pandemic. True to form, Arizona did not attempt to remedy the shortfall with additional tax dollars.

    As state legislatures perpetuate the myth that mail voting is insecure, it’s vitally important to call out these blatantly undemocratic efforts to prevent certain people from voting. Grassroots organizations in Arizona deserve enormous credit for beating back the worst bills in Arizona during this session. While the Arizona legislative “audit” and its attendant political gamesmanship plays out, it’s still necessary to guard against dangerous attacks on mail-in voting that could result in disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters.

    The nationwide dislike of voter suppression measures has left little doubt: Americans, from everyday people to high-ranking corporate executives, understand that laws seeking to deter participation constitute an unacceptable attack on democracy. It’s well past time for state legislators to stop these efforts.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Rebuttal to Biden’s Speech Flopped Because Progressive Policies Are Popular

    Sen. Tim Scott walks through the U.S. Capitol before he delivers the republican response to President Biden's address to congress on April 28, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) was given an unenviable task on Wednesday evening. His job was to give the GOP case in a speech televised live across the country rebutting President Joe Biden’s first address to both houses of Congress.

    Scott’s problem was multifaceted: First, unlike Biden, who is still riding high in the polls — and, 100 days after being sworn in as president, getting higher approval ratings than Trump did at any point in his presidency — Scott, who has been a U.S. senator since 2013, has only a limited national profile. Second, Biden has perfected a speech-making style over the past several months that allows him to pitch progressive policies to his audience while coming across as genial, simply spouting common sense platitudes and a sort of happy populism, in stark contrast to the divisiveness of former president Donald Trump. It’s an approach that makes him a more difficult target for conservative politicians. And, third, most of Biden’s key policies, especially on the economy, on vaccine distribution, on health care, on job investments in clean energy, on tackling climate change and on reimagining the social safety net and tax code, have majority support among the voting public.

    Distinctly absent from Biden’s speech to Congress were any of the pyrotechnics of Trump or the poetic oratorical skills of Obama. Instead, his approach is methodical. Over the course of a little more than an hour Biden described a series of policy changes that, if even partially enacted, would represent the biggest shift in American governance in generations.

    The president talked openly about the need to unionize workers and about the urgency of tackling economic inequality. He asserted that “trickle-down economics has never worked” and argued that there is something wrong with a system that allowed a few hundred billionaires to accumulate over 1 trillion dollars in new wealth during the pandemic at the same time as 20 million American workers lost their jobs. He called for targeted tax increases on wealthy individuals and large corporations. He demanded comprehensive immigration reform, gun control legislation and huge investments in green technology. He called for the creation of a Health Advanced Research Projects Agency to fund medical innovation and seek cancer cures. He demanded legislation to enforce equal pay for women in the workplace, to ban anti-LGBTQ discriminatory practices, to mandate a $15 per hour minimum wage, as well as 12 weeks a year of paid family and sick leave. He urged Congress to create universal pre-K education and to fully fund community college education for all students using those institutions. He also announced an international vaccination drive to be fueled by American surplus vaccines and technology.

    Meanwhile, in a move that disappointed anti-war activists but removed a possible avenue of attack from the right, Biden pledged toughness against Russia and China, and in a regrettable but unsurprising continuity with previous administrations, asserted a foreign policy goal of maintaining economic and military dominance over the two nations.

    All of this left Senator Scott little to work with, and, for a purported rising star of the GOP, he really didn’t seem too engaged in the task of delivering an all-out rebuttal of the progressive measures that Biden discussed.

    The senator, whose speech lasted just a little over 15 minutes, focused his critique mainly on the “partisanship” of the COVID relief bills passed since Biden’s inauguration, rather than attacking the substance of the bills themselves. “Republicans support everything you think of when you think of infrastructure,” he said. “But again, Democrats want a partisan wish list. They won’t even build bridges to build bridges.”

    At a time of massive economic dislocation, much of it triggered by a pandemic that, under Trump’s presidency was allowed to spiral out of control, Scott couldn’t come up with more than a few predictable platitudes about the dynamism of the pre-pandemic Trump-era economy, and clichéd insults with which to critique Biden’s series of complex and big-picture economic proposals. He accused Biden of using the idea of infrastructure and COVID relief investments as a Trojan horse to pass a “liberal wish-list of Big Government waste … plus the biggest job-killing tax hikes in a generation.” But there were no real specific, hands-on critiques of the infrastructure plan — probably because most Americans, including large numbers of Republican voters, support that plan.

    Meanwhile, Scott made the usual rhetorical gifts expected by the GOP base — accusing Biden of promoting taxpayer-funded abortions and of wanting to pack the Supreme Court (a particularly strange claim given that Biden has been remarkably reluctant to countenance the idea pushed by other Democrats of expanding the court). He also accused Biden of pushing open borders, promoting “Washington schemes or socialist dreams,” and “pulling us further apart.”

    At one point Scott did latch onto one actual weak spot for the Democrats: the fact that, as a pandemic response, many Democratic governors allowed public schools in their states to shut down for a whole year — a policy that many parents across the political spectrum were unhappy with. Yet, instead of hammering on this point, Scott merely mentioned it and then moved on to touch on the infrastructure plan and then attack “virtue signaling” activists on America’s left.

    Scott’s speech reflected the smallness of the political imagination of the party he represents, and it summed up the modern GOP’s problem. Still in hock to the Trump personality cult, the party has been unable to move on and shape comprehensive, and politically popular, responses to the vast number of big-picture policy changes that Biden is advocating.

    And Biden, a skillful politician comfortable in working Washington’s levers of power, is proving to be a surprisingly forceful advocate for an array of big-picture changes to the way the U.S. defines itself.

    Biden is taking the public with him, and is using events such as his non-state-of-the-union address on Wednesday night to explain, in easy-to-follow language, the urgency of passing bold and long-lasting legislation on the economy, on health care access, on green investments, on education, on policing, and on moving the needle on racial justice.

    In a year convulsed by protests against the police-perpetrated killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many other Black men, women and children, the party line on race pushed by Scott and others in the GOP will be hard for many to stomach. Barely three months after a race-baiting Trump reluctantly left office, Scott — who spoke at some length about his own experiences of racial discrimination and being pulled over for no reason as a Black driver — then looked at the cameras and asked his audience to “Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country.”

    And in a period in which Republican state legislatures are doing everything in their power to restrict voting rights in ways that disproportionately impact Black communities, Scott argued that all the GOP lawmakers were doing was trying to “make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.” How Georgia’s law banning the practice of giving water to people waiting in line to vote fits that analysis, he didn’t attempt to explain, although he did bemoan the “misplaced outrage” of those who argue that voter suppression is discriminatory.

    “The real story is always redemption,” Scott said, attempting to rebuff Biden. But the problem with this strategy is that Biden himself, a one-time moderate who has, under considerable pressure from social movements, adopted progressive policies and become more determined to tackle the crises confronting the U.S., would entirely agree. And, on Wednesday night, unlike Senator Scott, he had the policy prescriptions to boost his case.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The More Biden Expands ACA, the Harder It Will Be for the Right to Cut It

    Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden delivers remarks after meeting with Pennsylvania families who have benefited from the Affordable Care Act on June 25, 2020, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

    Last year, on the campaign trail, President Joe Biden released a $750 billion, 10-year plan designed to massively expand the reach of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It would create a public option, allow undocumented immigrants to buy into that public option, lower the age at which Americans become eligible for Medicare, take Medicaid expansion into the 12 Republican heartland states that chose not to expand it themselves, and permit Americans to buy prescription drugs from overseas at a cheaper cost.

    Since assuming office, such sweeping health care ambitions have taken a back-burner to getting COVID relief passed, to developing a large-scale infrastructure plan, and to initiating a reset on environmental policy. But that doesn’t mean there is less urgency to lock into place big-picture health insurance changes. After all, the Biden administration inherited a barn-on-fire situation from the previous president, and we are still in the middle of a pandemic.

    There are, in 2021, more than 2 million low-income American adults who live in states that didn’t expand Medicaid, and who can’t access private insurance on the exchanges because their income is deemed too low to qualify for tax credits. Of these 2 million, more than a third live in Texas. All told, by the middle of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, about 30 million non-elderly Americans remained without insurance. That’s down from 48 million in 2010, but it’s up from 28 million at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency. The increased numbers of uninsured in the years from 2017 to now are the clear result of former President Donald Trump’s effort to eviscerate his predecessor’s central legislative accomplishment and make it ever-harder for Americans to enroll in the subsidized insurance plans.

    From 2017 through to January 20, 2021, health care advocates had to play defense pretty much all the time. From day one of his administration, Trump, with the full backing of most of the GOP, had the ACA, known more popularly as Obamacare, in his sights. In his first months in office, the Senate came within one vote of rolling back the legislation that had created the ACA. It was that one vote, cast by an ailing Sen. John McCain against dismantling the ACA, that fueled Trump’s loathing for, and mockery of, the dying Arizonan.

    After Republicans failed in Congress to repeal the ACA, Trump sought to kill it by a thousand cuts: to make it harder for patients to enroll on health care exchanges, to limit Medicaid expansion, to cut funding for outreach campaigns to educate people on how to enroll. Finally, having failed to destroy the program this way, Trump’s administration decided to side with Texas and other GOP states in their Hail-Mary lawsuit attempting to have the entire thing declared unconstitutional.

    That case was heard by the Supreme Court last year, and a decision on it should come down in the next few months. Given the extraordinarily conservative composition of today’s Supreme Court, it’s at least possible — though perhaps not likely, given previous rulings on the issue — that they’ll end up taking a judicial axe to the entire project.

    Which is why it’s all the more vital that, in the interim, state and federal officials work to expand the ACA as rapidly as possible. After all, the more people are covered, and the more the ACA is seen to be an indispensable, life-saving pillar of the country’s health care delivery edifice, the harder it will be to pull the rug out from under it. Given that neither party seems likely to push for a more rational, more equitable universal health care system anytime soon, ironing out the kinks in the ACA and expanding its reach seem to represent the best short-term path toward near-universal coverage.

    An ACA expansion would inevitably still fall short of a truly universal, single-payer system, and it would do little to address systemic problems such as over-billing and the profiteering of middle-men institutions, which go hand in hand with for-profit insurance systems as a primary delivery system for medical services. But it would, nevertheless, bring additional millions of uninsured Americans under health care umbrellas.

    Earlier this year, the Biden administration extended the special enrollment period for the ACA insurance exchange through August 15 of this year, arguing that, because of the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic, it was imperative to make it as easy as possible for Americans to find affordable health insurance coverage. California and other states with their own exchanges also followed suit in keeping enrollment open.

    The result of this has been encouraging: In the first weeks of the special enrollment period, well over 200,000 people signed up for coverage, eclipsing, by orders of magnitude, the numbers from the first weeks of earlier special enrollments. Hundreds of thousands more have begun the application process to get insurance via these exchanges; and additional tens of thousands have been declared eligible for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

    Moreover, the latest COVID relief package in Congress freed up billions of dollars to increase subsidies to lower-income people buying coverage on the state exchanges. In many cases, premiums for people around the country will be cut in half. And in some states, funds will be used to essentially eliminate premiums for poorer residents. In California’s case, for example, this means an additional $3 billion for subsidies. As a result, come May, some low-income Californians will be paying only $1 per month for their health insurance. Hoping to get more Californians to take up insurance through the exchange, the state will spend $20 million on an outreach and advertising campaign promoting the new lower rates.

    For a state that has already managed to cut its uninsured population from about 17 percent down to roughly 7 percent, all of this is a huge deal. Combine it with the ongoing efforts to expand Medi-Cal to cover all low-income undocumented adults, and one sees a road-map being drawn in California that would, over the coming years, get the state as close to having universal coverage as possible given the nature of the current U.S. health insurance system.

    Where California goes on health care coverage, the nation might one day follow – especially with California’s former Attorney General Xavier Becerra now in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, and pushing an emphasis on health equity and public health readiness. Already, California has self-funded Medicaid expansion to include young undocumented adults up to the age of 26. Quite possibly, later this year the state may expand the expansion to include a much larger proportion of the undocumented population. This jibes well with the proposals then-candidate Biden put out on the campaign trail. Hopefully, once California paves the way, Biden and the Democratically controlled Congress will follow through on their health care commitments at a federal level too.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans Are Quietly Giving Up On Anti-Trans Bills

    Bills targeting the transgender community have stalled all over the country this week as legislators debate the effects these laws will have on trans youth.

    2021 has marked an onslaught of hate in state legislative sessions across the country as Republicans sponsored bills that seek to limit trans youth’s access to gender affirming health care as well as prohibit their ability to participate in school sports. While several have passed, multiple bills in at least six states have been set aside or gotten veto threats from governors this week.

    In Missouri, after a contentious debate between Republicans and Democrats, the state house agreed to put a proposal on hold that would require athletes to participate on sports teams based on the sex written on their birth certificate.

    The post Republicans Are Quietly Giving Up On Anti-Trans Bills appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Bills Targeting Local Officials Could Allow GOP to Overturn Election Results

    Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp puts on a mask after speaking at a press conference on August 10, 2020, in Atlanta, Georgia.

    Republicans in at least 14 states have introduced legislation that would seize power from election officials or limit their authority, apparently in response to unfounded attacks from former President Donald Trump and allies who sought to overturn his election loss.

    Republican state legislators across the country have responded to Trump’s baseless election challenges, which were roundly rejected by dozens of judges, by rolling out more than 360 bills aimed at restricting voting access in nearly every state. But while much of the attention has focused on measures that would limit ballot access, like Georgia’s sweeping election bill, which Democrats have compared to Jim Crow-era restrictions, some of the proposals include provisions that would strip election officials of power and even impose criminal penalties for officials who defy the new restrictions.

    Coverage of Georgia’s massive bill has largely focused on provisions that would restrict absentee ballot access and make it a crime to provide water or food to voters in long lines. But the bill also includes more insidious measures that could allow Republicans to give “themselves power to overturn election results,” Sylvia Albert, director of the voting and elections program at the nonpartisan voter advocacy group Common Cause, said in an interview with Salon.

    For instance, the new law would allows the Republican-led state legislature to replace Georgia’s secretary of state — currently Brad Raffensperger, who pushed back on Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat — as chair of the state elections board, and then fill a majority of the panel with their own appointees. The bill further allows the newly-appointed election board majority to suspend and temporarily replace local election officials and take over county election offices. County boards determine voter eligibility and certify election results, meaning the state board appointee would theoretically have the power to disqualify certain voters or to refuse to certify the results, according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The law also bars local election officials from sending unsolicited absentee ballot applications or accepting grant money that is used by some cash-strapped counties to run elections. Voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams decried the provision as an “unprecedented power grab” intended to “alter election outcomes.”

    “This bill is a tragedy for democracy, and it is built on the lie of voter fraud,” Lauren Groh Wargo, who heads the Abrams-founded voter advocacy group Fair Fight Action, said in a press call last month. “It means that radical, right-wing legislators, if they don’t like how elections are being run … can wholesale replace those election administrators and put folks from the other side of the state in charge.”

    It remains to be seen how this would work in practice. Some election experts have noted that there are guardrails that could prevent officials from overturning election results. The law limits such takeovers to four counties at a time and includes measures requiring the board to show multiple violations in at least two election cycles and a process that would drag out for at least 30 days. But it would be easy for the board to find multiple violations in “any county,” argued Marilyn Marks, the executive director of the nonpartisan Coalition for Good Governance.

    The law could “absolutely” be used to overturn election results, Albert said, given the repeated attempts by Trump supporters, including many Georgia Republicans and even Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, to overturn the state’s results last year. “Politicians will look to use any avenue available to them to maintain power. Just because it might have a few steps doesn’t mean that they won’t do it or figure out ways to get around those steps.”

    But it’s more likely this law would be used to “ensure that their suppression measures are successful,” Albert added. “What this is doing is saying, ‘Hey, we enacted suppressive state laws and we want to make sure no local election official actually attempts to help people overcome the burdens of those state laws.’”

    Some of the provisions in the Georgia law appear directly aimed at heavily Black and Democratic Atlanta-area Fulton and DeKalb counties. Texas lawmakers have introduced their own sweeping set of proposed voting restrictions that similarly target Harris County, the state’s most populous, including the city of Houston, where Democratic officials expanded ballot access last year.

    Texas Senate Bill 7 explicitly bans 24-hour early voting, drive-through voting, and the mailing of unsolicited absentee ballot applications, all of which were measures taken or attempted by Harris County officials last year. Texas House Bill 6 would make it a felony for election officials to mail pre-filled absentee ballot applications or even encourage eligible voters to cast ballots by mail or take any action to change election rules without the consent of the state’s Republican secretary of state.

    While those two bills have already advanced in their respective chambers, a third proposal that is still pending would shift all power over voter registration and voter roll maintenance from county officials to the Republican secretary of state.

    Republicans in Arizona also pushed a proposal that would have allowed the GOP-led legislature to overturn election results and appoint their own electors, though that effort was ultimately quashed. But the state legislature, which has introduced two dozen restrictive bills, is still looking at bills that would bar the secretary of state from sending unsolicited mail-in ballots and another proposal that would shift approval of the state’s election manual to the legislature.

    “They don’t serve any purpose, except for the Legislature just trying to insert themselves into the process, create obstruction, and say that they did something in the name of election integrity without actually doing anything that does that,” Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, told The New York Times. “The Legislature wasn’t interested in control over elections until I got here and happened to have a ‘D’ by my name.”

    Iowa Republicans have already passed a package of voting restrictions that include measures making it a felony for election officials to disobey any guidance from the Republican secretary of state and imposing $10,000 fines for any “technical infractions” of the state’s election laws. It also bars county officials from sending unsolicited absentee-ballot applications and restricts their ability to open satellite early-voting sites.

    “This is a total takeover of elections by the state,” Linn County Auditor Joel Miller, who was among several local election officials in Iowa targeted by Trump and Republicans, told the Associated Press. “We did everything we could to increase participation and engagement in the democratic process, and evidently some people thought that more people participated than they wanted and they decided to put limitations on it.”

    Arkansas Republicans have advanced bills that would give partisan county election boards total power over local election officials, move oversight of election law violations from county officials to the state election board, and ban officials from mailing unsolicited absentee-ballot applications. A pending proposal would also allow the state election board to take over local election offices.

    Missouri lawmakers recently advanced a bill that would allow the secretary of state to audit and purge voters from any local election office’s voter rolls. The bill threatens to cut funding to noncompliant offices and restricts mail-in voting. Another pending proposal would impose misdemeanor penalties on election officials who failed to purge voters within 10 days of their death.

    South Carolina Republicans have rolled out a bill that would give the state legislature more oversight over the members appointed to the state’s independent election commission.

    An analysis by FiveThirtyEight identified 14 states with bills aimed at undermining election officials, including proposals to ban the mailing of unsolicited absentee-ballot applications in Michigan, Tennessee, Connecticut and South Dakota and bills restricting the mailing of absentee ballots in New Jersey, New York, Illinois and Wisconsin.

    While the measures are not expected to get far in Democratic-led states — except in Michigan where Republican state lawmakers are plotting to subvert Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s vow to veto any voting restrictions — they are likely to advance in states where the GOP has attacked “election officials who did not support Trump’s lies,” Albert said.

    Republicans have justified the proposals by arguing that election officials overreached in their efforts to expand mail-in voting amid the coronavirus pandemic and took “the law into their own hands” against the wishes of elected state lawmakers.

    “It’s a bunch of BS,” Albert said in response to the Republican argument. “It is clearly an attempt to take power away not just from local election officials, but from Americans.” Republicans, she added, are effectively giving themselves “the power to eliminate democracy in elections … what they’re saying they want to do is take away the rights of Americans to elect their representatives.”

    Some advocates have also warned that many of these measures are aimed at counties with quickly changing demographics after record turnout among voters of color in 2020.

    “The part that I think is so concerning is the retaliation,” Myrna Pérez, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told FiveThirtyEight. “Look at who on the ground would actually be impeded [by these laws]. That suggests to me a real opposition to an expanded electorate.”

    Democrats have responded to the voting restrictions proposed in dozens of states by championing the For the People Act, also known as H.R. 1 and S. 1, a massive legislative package including voter protections, anti-corruption measures and other provisions. It is unlikely to pass in its current form unless Democrats can reform the filibuster and convince conservative Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., to back it. But while the bill could protect voters from some restrictions, it would do little to prevent partisan power grabs of local election powers.

    That issue has been raised as the bill goes through the Senate, but “off the top of my head, I honestly don’t know what type of provision one would add to H.R. 1 that would address this,” Albert said.

    Some members of the Congressional Black Caucus have urged Democrats to focus instead on passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore the Voting Rights Act requirement for states with a history of racial discrimination to pre-clear any electoral changes with the Justice Department, which was scrapped by the Supreme Court in 2013.

    Albert argued that there may be a legitimate way to address these attacks on local authorities through pre-clearance. “A strong argument could be made that changing the power of local election officials is definitely a change to election law that would have an effect on Black and brown communities,” she said.

    Albert compared the Republican push to take over local election powers to authoritarian regimes in Russia and North Korea.

    “America is one of the only democracies that does not have elections run by a nonpartisan government entity,” she said. “What you’re seeing right now is the danger of politicians running elections. We should all be very much on guard.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Eyes Tax Hikes on the Wealthy to Pay for Free Community College

    President Joe Biden removes his mask to speak from the Treaty Room in the White House on April 14, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    President Joe Biden is expected to propose nearly doubling the capital gains tax rate for people making over $1 million a year in order to fund aspects of the second half of his two-part infrastructure package.

    The proposal from the White House, expected to be officially announced next week, aims to increase the capital gains tax to 39.6 percent for wealthy earners, up from its current rate of 20 percent.

    During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden campaigned on proposals to increase taxes on capital gains, derived from income on things like investments that many wealthy individuals receive, so that they would equal taxes on incomes made primarily from labor. Currently, those who receive income from investments are taxed at a much lower rate than those who are taxed for work.

    The Biden White House is also considering increases on the estate tax for the wealthy, and has proposed raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent — still significantly lower from the 35 percent rate that Republicans slashed in 2017. These tax increases will go toward funding the first half of the infrastructure package, which includes more “traditional” infrastructure projects like repairs to roads, bridges, rail and expanding broadband internet.

    Revenues generated from the increased taxes on capital gains would help pay for the second half of the infrastructure plan Biden is proposing, dubbed the American Family Plan. This part focuses on spending $1.5 trillion on social projects, including lowering child care costs, creating universal prekindergarten across the country, making community college free and establishing a national paid leave program, among other initiatives.

    Such programs could help bolster work on the more traditional infrastructure projects as they allow working-class Americans the opportunity to get back into the workplace or advance their own career paths.

    “Child care is infrastructure. Paid leave is infrastructure. Caregiving is infrastructure. Because if we don’t invest in all three, families can’t get back to work,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) recently tweeted.

    The plan to raise taxes on the wealthy, a policy that the vast majority of voters in the U.S. support, faces stiff opposition from Republicans in Congress, creating roadblocks to passing the bill. Republicans have instead introduced a basic outline of their own infrastructure plan, in the form of a two-page “breakdown” on projects they want to prioritize.

    Their proposal, which costs $568 billion over five years, has zero spending on social projects that would help workers and spends significantly smaller funds on some of the projects that Biden’s plan includes. For example, while the Republican plan includes $35 billion for “drinking water and wastewater” initiatives as well as $14 billion in water storage projects, the White House is proposing $111 billion in clean water and drinking water plans. That includes a goal to remove 100 percent of lead service lines throughout the country, which the Republicans’ plan doesn’t mention and would likely not provide sufficient funding for.

    The plan by the GOP would also not raise any taxes on the wealthy, keeping in place the Trump tax cuts that resulted in an estimated $1.9 trillion in lost revenues. Instead, Republicans aim to repurpose “unused federal spending,” which will likely mean cuts to other services, as well as user fees on thing such as electric vehicles, gas or flights. Unlike Democrats’ tax hikes on the wealthy, Republicans plans for user fees shift the tax burden to the lower and middle class.

    Democrats have blasted Republicans’ proposal as doing too little to address the country’s needs.

    Republicans don’t realize “the needs are far, far greater from what they’re proposing,” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) agreed, stating that the GOP proposal “does not meet the moment,” Politico reported. “We have underspent for generations now. And it shows in our airports, on our roads, in our mass transit, in our rail,” Warren said. “The Republicans are not willing to make the investments we need.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Oklahoma Governor Signs Law Granting Immunity for Drivers Who Kill Protesters

    National Guard and police officers stand before anti-Trump protestors in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 20, 2020.

    Republican Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt has signed a new law that would grant protections for drivers who hit and kill protesters while attempting to drive away from a protest and implements harsher penalties on people who block roads or highways during a protest. Democrats and activists decried the law as stifling protest and citizens’ First Amendment rights.

    HB 1674, which Republican legislators passed earlier this week, grants civil and criminal immunity for drivers who “unintentionally” harm or kill protesters while “fleeing from a riot,” as long as there is a “reasonable belief that fleeing was necessary.”

    “This legislation is not about safety,” said Nicole McAfee, director of policy and advocacy at the Oklahoma American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in a statement. “It is about centering the convenience of people who already have the power and protections of the law. It is about responding to calls for transparency by protesters and the media with the criminalization of those transparency efforts.”

    Broad language in the law may allow for clashing interpretations on how protections are granted. Without a definition in the bill for what circumstances would be deemed “necessary” or “unintentional,” the bill leaves the language up to potentially broad interpretation.

    Brandon Tucker, policy director of the ACLU in Tennessee, noted the danger of laws with such broad language on CNN when talking about similar legislation being considered by legislators in Tennessee that would grant immunity to drivers who “unintentionally” kill a protester and criminalize certain forms of protest. “This vague and troubling suppression of free speech can easily be abused, leading to the criminalization of protesters’ words and beliefs,” Tucker said.

    The bill also increases penalties for protesters who block roadways during a protest. It makes blocking a roadway a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in prison and a hefty $5,000 fine. In the wake of nationwide protests for Black lives, many have said the bill is racist and seeks to push harsher penalties on oppressed people who often need to protest in order to make their voices heard.

    Oklahoma State Sen. Kevin Matthews, a Democrat, denounced the bill. It’s not right “that we’re trying to … keep people from protesting when African Americans are killed unarmed,” Matthews told The Oklahoman.

    “In this state, it is oftentimes the marginalized voices that aren’t oftentimes heard, and these are why they do the protests that they’ve done,” Young Democrats of America President and Oklahoman Joshua Harris-Till told Public Radio Tulsa last month.

    The bill comes as Republicans are pushing through a wave of anti-protest legislation across the country. Just in this legislative session, the GOP has filed 81 anti-protest laws in 34 states as backlash against the growing movement for Black lives. Many, such as the bill just passed in Florida, similarly grant protections to drivers who harm protesters. Others seek harsh penalties on protesters and widen the definition of the word “riot” in order to target demonstrators.

    “These bills talk about ‘riots,’ but the language that they use is so sweeping that it encompasses way more than what people imagine,” Elly Page, legal adviser for International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, told USA Today. Many bills, Page said, criminalize “legitimate First Amendment-protected protest.”

    Some bills also target low-income protesters by making them ineligible for government aid like student loans and food stamps if they’re convicted with protest-related charges. “It’s so devious, selectively silencing people,” Page told USA Today. “This is the kind of penalty that really impacts certain communities and not others.”

    Republicans are likely passing these bills with the knowledge that right-wing protesters are much less likely to face violence and hostility from law enforcement than left-wing protesters are. Many of the states considering anti-protest laws already have punishments for rioting, so activists have been left to speculate about what Republicans are actually trying to achieve.

    “These anti-freedom policies are passed with a veil over their true intentions,” said Tamya Cox-Touré, executive director of the Oklahoma ACLU, in a statement about the recently passed law, adding that the laws aim “to chill speech, criminalize accountability, and let us all know that a majority of the legislature cares more about protecting the deadly power of the state than they do about rights and liberties, or even public safety.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans Have Introduced 81 Anti-Protest Laws in 34 States Just This Year

    Participants in a Black Lives Matter Protest march past a Dallas Police car during a peaceful protest against police brutality and racism on June 6, 2020 in Dallas, Texas.

    As protesters have rallied across the U.S. over the past year against police-perpetrated violence and brutality, Republicans in state legislatures have been busy cooking up anti-protest laws. Reporting has found that, just in the 2021 legislative session, Republicans have introduced 81 bills in 34 states aimed at suppressing protests.

    This is double the number of anti-protest laws that have been filed in any other year, Elly Page, senior legal adviser at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which tracks protest laws, told The New York Times. Many of the bills are a direct attack on the right to protest, as set by the First Amendment.

    The bills range from criminalizing protests to making it easier for people to harm protesters without consequences.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday signed a bill into law that grants protections for people who drive their car into a protesting crowd, potentially injuring the protesters, and penalizes those participating in uprisings.

    The penalties are exceedingly harsh: The bill makes “aggravated rioting” and blocking traffic on a highway a felony. Those convicted of a felony in Florida get their voting rights taken away. Many other states like Oregon, Arizona and Alabama are also considering bills seeking harsher penalties for those who block traffic as part of a protest.

    Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma and Iowa have passed similar protections for drivers who strike and harm protesters. In Alabama, legislators are considering a bill that allows people to kill anyone on their property as long as they “reasonably believe” that that person might attempt to trespass.

    Other bills seek to take rights away from protesters in ways other than those outlined in the Florida bill. In Minnesota, where last year’s protests against George Floyd’s murder originated, the GOP is trying to make it so that those convicted on protest-related charges are ineligible for many types of government programs, like housing assistance, food stamps and student loans — programs on which many poor residents and students rely.

    And yet other bills are focused on labeling protests or protesters with negative-sounding terms like “terroristic” or “riots.” Several bills, like the ones in Alabama and Georgia, seek to expand the definition of “riot” or “unlawful assembly” and seek harsh penalties for those convicted of protest-related charges.

    The anti-protest bills seek to worsen a system that already allows for protesters, especially those on the left, to be treated harshly, as countless videos and activist accounts showed during last summer’s protests. They are almost undoubtedly filed as backlash to those protests, which both the right and center painted as violent, despite the fact that it was police officers who started and perpetuated the violence.

    The bills, if passed into law, have the potential to seriously harm the Black Lives Matter movement that activists have painstakingly uplifted and fought for through blood, sweat and tears over the years. As activists and progressives have called for fundamental systemic change in the face of police-perpetrated murders, Republicans are seeking to stifle the growing movement, which threatens their power.

    “The new Florida anti-protest law that penalizes protests puts a formidable obstacle in the path to this kind of systemic change by subverting the movements that have been the principal catalysts for change,” explains Barbara Ransby for Truthout. “It is unimaginable how such a law could be fairly enforced. Conceivably, a political argument on a street corner could be cause for arrest. If this is not censorship, I don’t know what is.”

    Many have noted that the spirit of these bills is contrary to the First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly. “You have just declared war on the First Amendment in the state of Florida,” said Democratic Florida State Sen. Shevrin Jones after DeSantis signed the anti-protest bill.

    There is also a glaring double standard in what issues are okay to protest about in Republicans’ eyes, and what types of crowds Republicans consider dangerous. While Republicans spewed lies about the Black Lives Matter protests for racial justice throughout last year, they downplayed the actual violence on display from supporters of former President Donald Trump on January 6.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Amid COVID Surge, NH Governor Lifts Mask Mandate and Orders Kids Back to School

    Chris Sununu

    This past Friday saw 78,932 official diagnoses of new COVID-19 cases nationally. On the same day, New Hampshire’s Republican Gov. Chris Sununu officially lifted the state’s mask mandate, while making it clear that he still thinks wearing masks is really important, you guys. This move came only days after Sununu ordered all children back into full-time on-site schooling, beginning today.

    Boy, things must be clearing up nicely around here, yeah?

    “New Hampshire’s trends in managing the pandemic are as troubling as any point over the past several months, with several key measures of progress getting worse in recent weeks,” reports New Hampshire Public Radio.

    “We are seeing a real spike in COVID-19 cases,” says New Hampshire Health Care Association President Brendan Williams, “and with new variants like B.1.1.7 circulating, we will be the only New England state without a mask requirement — including for visitors from states hot with the virus.”

    In other words, at a critical moment when vaccinations and safe behavior are in a headlong race to outrun the virus and its multiple and multiplying variants, Mr. Sununu has chosen to govern in the typical modern Republican way: Throw the parachute out of the plane, jump out after it, and hope you catch up to it before the ground catches up to you.

    Is the mask requirement absolute at all moments? As the weather warms across the country, states could feel safe about lifting the outdoor mask mandate. “Governments need to give Americans an off-ramp to the post-pandemic world,” argues Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. “Ending outdoor mask mandates — or at the very least telling people when they can expect outdoor mask mandates to lift — is a good place to start.”

    The risk of infection in an out-of-doors setting is comparatively low. Indoor spaces are the petri dishes where this thing thrives. Lapsing the mask mandate at the same time as you send the kids back into the building for full-time school seems tantamount to taunting the virus to its face. It puts teachers and administrators as well as children in the line of fire for these new variants, some of which don’t seem to give much of a damn about how young or healthy you are.

    The variants, you see, are the whole ballgame right now. Republican defenders of watering down our COVID precautions point to declining death rates and hospitalizations. They are correct that the mortality rate has dropped; battlefield surgeons know more about saving lives in the middle of a war than they did at the beginning. The vaccines are also doing their part keeping people from getting so sick that they require hospitalization. This is all to the good.

    The overall infection rate, however, is terrifying: Nearly 80,000 in one day, and at a moment when more than 130 million people have been vaccinated. The variants like B.1.1.7 out of Britain and P1 out of Brazil come into being when there are sky-high infection rates (like we have right now), because every single infection provides the virus with a chance to mutate. Letting this thing burn the way it is while cutting back on basic protections like masks invites the rise and takeover of a variant that could look at our miraculous vaccines and see nothing more muscular than tap water.

    Why, for the love of Jonas Salk, is this happening?

    Jim Justice, the Republican governor of West Virginia, dropped a big clue in early March of this year when he whomped Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, for declaring his state to be clear of the virus. “I don’t want to be critical,” said Justice, “but some people want to just move because it’s the most politically correct thing they can do. It becomes almost a macho thing and everything.”

    The penny drops. “Political correctness,” the current right-wing bugaboo about the left, is about more than word choice and sensitivity. The concept brings with it the idea of a whole world view that looks down on all things disapproved of by the left. Preposterous in the main, the argument resonates strongest with the segment of the population that sees no problem with racist voting laws, hyper-violent cops and Confederate battle flags carried down the marbled halls of a sacked Capitol dome.

    Jim Justice, in castigating Abbott for disdaining the science of COVID, revealed a very strict version of political correctness burning like a bonfire in the center of the Republican Party. Puddings like Abbott and Sununu feel compelled to dance around it with the rest, lest they be cast into the flames. The price for this furious fealty to a fiction: The damaged health of the body politic and the elongation of the pandemic. If a protracted pandemic harms the present administration, perhaps that is an end unto itself.

    To be a Republican today usually requires, among a variety of things including the vocal belief that Trump won last November, a staunch anti-science worldview that equates masks with manacles and the very death of God. This is the “political correctness” of the right, and it comes with lethal baggage: The least vaccinated portions of the country are also the places where Trump performed well in the election.

    The culture war has become one of the only reasons for the GOP to exist. As it happens, that war is also spectacular for GOP fundraising. The best way to raise money if you’re a Republican today? Adhere to Republican political correctness: Trump yes, science no.

    The fight over COVID is the beating heart of that lucrative phenomenon. Beyond that, anything that makes governing harder for President Biden increases GOP prospects for the ’22 midterms, and if you think that’s not part of the equation, I humbly suggest you have some more reading to do (see: Mitch McConnell).

    New Hampshire, now the only New England state without a mask mandate while on the verge of a fourth-wave surge of infections, has fallen victim to another Republican official’s lemming-like need to dive off the cliff of GOP political correctness. Thanks to “leaders” like Chris Sununu, the end of this ordeal remains nowhere in sight, and more variants are just waiting to hatch.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Oklahoma Lawmakers Pass Bill Granting Immunity to Motorists Who Kill Protesters

    People gather outside of Cup Foods in a mass action

    Amid the Republican-led push to crackdown on protestors in the wake of the Georgia Floyd protests, state lawmakers throughout the country are now attempting to lessen penalties for drivers who unintentionally kill protestors blocking roadways.

    In Oklahoma, Republican lawmakers approved a bill that grants civil and criminal immunity to motorists who kill or injure protestors “fleeing from a riot.” The bill, HB 1674, now headed to the Republican governor’s desk, states the following:

    “A motor vehicle operator who unintentionally causes injury or death to an individual shall not be criminally or civilly liable for the injury or death, if […] the injury or death of the individual occurred while the motor vehicle operator was fleeing from a riot […] under a reasonable belief that fleeing was necessary to protect the motor vehicle operator from serious injury or death.”

    The bill, just the state’s latest in a series of GOP-backed bills taking aim at protestors, according to The Oklahoman.

    “Maybe the way to prevent something like this from ever happening again is to make reforms on the broader systemic issue,” Oklahoma Rep. Monroe Nichols said in a sharp rebuke of the bill in a floor debate, pointing to the undergirding biases within the criminal justice system. He added that he did not look forward to having to tell his son that Oklahoma “made it so that folks who may advocate for people who look like [his son] can be run over with immunity.”

    State Republicans have countered that the bill merely attempts to protect drivers in harm’s way, as Rep. Kevin McDugle, the Republican who introduced the bill to the Oklahoma House, argued. “This bill simply says, ‘please stay to the peaceful protests. Don’t block roads. Don’t impede on the freedoms of others.”

    A similar legislative effort is being mounted in Tennessee, where last month state legislatures proposed a bill that would grant immunity to drivers who hit protestors and allow the state to charge protestors blocking roadways with a felony.

    The bill, HB 0513, “provides that a person operating a motor vehicle who is exercising due care and unintentionally causes injury or death to another person […] will be immune from prosecution for the injury or death.” Tennessee tried to enact a similar bill in 2017, but the bill died in the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to CNN.

    Brandon Tucker, the policy director of the ACLU’s Tennessee chapter, called HB 0513 “disturbing.”

    “This legislation would suppress protest by turning obstruction of traffic into a felony offense, robbing individuals of their right to vote if they are convicted of these new felony charges,” he told CNN. “It also offers immunity to drivers who run over protesters in the road and criminalizes speech that causes ’emotional distress’ to or ‘frightens’ another person. This vague and troubling suppression of free speech can easily be abused, leading to the criminalization of protesters’ words and beliefs.”

    “It’s the Republican response to the social justice protests a year ago, but nothing to the insurrection we saw in Washington D.C.,” NAACP Tennessee legal redress Van Turner echoed. “I shouldn’t lose my right to vote because I’m exercising my first amendment right to peacefully assemble in a protest,” he added, drawing on the fact that felons are stripped of their right to vote.

    Controversial as they might be, anti-protest bills of this nature are nothing new. Although Republican state lawmakers have been emboldened by Democratic President Joe Biden’s election to pick fights at the state level, they were similarly activated by Trump’s election back in 2016.

    As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye noted, “In the week following Donald Trump’s stunning presidential victory, Republicans elected to lower-level offices across the nation have pushed forward some radically right-wing legislation, including a total ban on abortions and the sanctioning of protest as ‘economic terrorism.’” Washington state Republican Senator Doug Ericksen introduced a bill that would allow state authorities to charge protestors with “economic terrorism” if they participated in illegal demonstrations or coerced private citizens into doing so.

    “We are not just going after the people who commit these acts of terrorism,” Ericksen explained. “We are going after the people who fund them. Wealthy donors should not feel safe in disrupting middle-class jobs.”

    Back in 2017, states like North Dakota and Utah saw similar bills seeking to protect drivers against penalties for hitting protestors. Similarly, the Kentucky state Senate passed a bill just this year criminalizing the act of insulting a police officer. This week, a spate of four anti-protest bills were also introduced to the Ohio state legislature, all designed to protect citizens from the “lawlessness” seen during the Georgia Floyd protests. And Florida is on the cusp of passing an anti-protest bill that would similarly criminalize protestors for blocking roadways.

    According to the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law, which tracks anti-protest bills around the country, 27 bills have been enacted that restrict the right to peaceful assembly, with 71 bills still pending. Just about every U.S. state legislature has considered a bill of this nature.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans Who Voted to Impeach Trump Are Outraising Pro-Trump Challengers

    Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler arrives at the Capitol during a vote on the Protecting America's Wilderness and Public Lands Act, on February 26, 2021.

    The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump brought in sizable campaign cash to start the 2022 cycle — and outraised their primary challengers — amid scathing attacks from the former president and his allies.

    The GOP lawmakers’ historic Jan. 13 votes made Trump’s second impeachment the most bipartisan in history, but sparked tensions both nationally and in their own districts. Trump has said he will use his leadership PAC to help primary challengers take them down.

    House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) raked in about $1.5 million from January through March, far more than she raised in previous years during the same period. Much of that total came from wealthy donors and corporate PACs, while roughly 11 percent came from small donors giving $200 or less.

    The most prominent Republican to vote to impeach Trump, Cheney has faced backlash from her own caucus and drawn notable primary challengers. Wyoming state Sen. Anthony Bouchard, who announced his run on Jan. 20 after rebuking Cheney’s impeachment vote, raised around $335,000 in the first quarter. Most of his contributions came from small donors, who, in total, gave around $230,000.

    Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio) — another top Trump target — raised nearly $557,000 through the first three months of the year, leaving his campaign with $438,000 in the bank. A leadership PAC associated with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) poured $10,000 into Gonzalez’ campaign, putting the GOP leader at odds with the president who has endorsed a primary challenger.

    Max Miller, a former Trump administration official, is challenging Gonzalez with the former president’s blessing. Trump held a fundraiser for Miller last month, boosting his $508,000 first-quarter haul. Miller has around $439,000 in the bank, less than half of the incumbent’s total. Miller announced his bid after Gonzales voted for impeachment, stating that the congressman “betrayed” Northeastern Ohians.

    Cheney and Gonzalez are among several pro-impeachment Republicans who used campaign funds to pay for personal security after speaking out against Trump. The Federal Election Commission recently ruled that candidates could use campaign money on “bona fide, legitimate, professional personal security personnel” after anti-Trump Republicans recieved death threats.

    Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) had his best-ever fundraising period over the last three months, raising $1.1 million for his campaign and another $1.1 million for his leadership PAC, which has already bankrolled anti-Trump Republicans. He’s being challenged by Catalina Lauf, who unsuccessfully ran for another Illinois seat in the 2020 election. Lauf, an unapologetic Trump supporter, raised $163,000 after launching her campaign in late February. She reported having $100,000 on hand, compared to Kinzinger’s $2.5 million.

    Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) saw her fundraising spike in the first quarter after her impeachment vote and her claim that Trump privately sided with Jan. 6 Capitol rioters. Herrera Beutler raised around $745,000, far more than any of her primary challengers could muster.

    Three notable candidates are raising money to challenge Herrera Beutler. Former CIA employee Joe Kent poured $205,000 of his own money into his campaign, and collected around $64,000 in donations. Heidi St. John, a Christian author, raised around $131,000 for her primary bid. Former Trump administration employee Wadi Yakhour raised $9,500 and loaned his campaign roughly $25,000.

    Pro-Trump challengers face some of the same hurdles primary challengers have for decades: incumbents typically have a big fundraising advantage. And while pro-Trump lawmakers such as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) have bolstered their campaign accounts (largely through small-dollar contributions) by tying themselves to the former president, these challengers haven’t received the same kind of boost.

    Reps. Peter Meijer and Fred Upton were the only Michigan Republicans to vote to impeach Trump, and they also had the largest fundraising hauls in the state’s GOP delegation, easily outraising their primary opponents. Intra-party challengers to Reps. David Valadao (R-Calif.), Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) and Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.) haven’t yet raised significant sums. Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.) hasn’t even drawn a primary opponent.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.