CONTEXT
Republican Party opposition to free and fair elections is now openly poisoning state courts. That anti-democracy mindset has poisoned the US Supreme Court (SC) for years. On June 25, 2013, the SC gutted the most powerful enforcement provision in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The case was Shelby County v. Holder. That decision basically obliterated a voting rights law that was regarded by many as the most effective piece of civil rights legislation in American history. Within one day of the Shelby County decision, Texas announced it would move to clamp down on voting rights by imposing more stringent voter ID requirements.[1]
Killing free and fair elections
The NYT writes on how radical right hostility to free and fair elections is playing out in North Carolina:
An extraordinary pair of orders by North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Supreme Court is highlighting how the partisan tug of war has pervaded the state’s courts and, by extension, the nation’s.
On Friday, the court moved to rehear two major voting rights cases that it had previously decided, one striking down a gerrymandered map of State Senate districts and another nullifying new voter identification requirements.
Such rehearings by the court are exceedingly rare. In fact, North Carolina’s Supreme Court ordered as many rehearings on Friday as it has in the past three decades. What also made the rehearings exceptional was that the cases had been decided less than two months ago — by a court that, at the time, contained four Democratic and three Republican justices.
The court that voted to rehear the cases has a 5-to-2 Republican majority, courtesy of the party’s sweep of state Supreme Court races in November. And the potential beneficiary of those reviews is the Republican leadership of the state General Assembly, which had both drawn the political map and enacted the voter ID law that the court struck down in December.
Lawyers for those leaders asked the court to reconsider the cases in petitions filed last month.
“Quite literally the only thing that changed is the court’s composition,” Joshua Douglas, a professor and expert on state constitutions at the University of Kentucky College of Law, said in an interview. “The whole thing simply smells of partisanship.”
Conservative in NC argue that the two decisions being reheard were partisan and out of whack with existing state laws. Even if that is true, it conveniently ignores the fact that existing state laws were already out of whack with the 1965 Voting Rights Act after the five Republicans on the SC gutted it in 2013. The fact that the now Republican NC court granted rehearing is strong evidence that the Republicans will overturn the prior two decisions.
This is what the ongoing fall of democracy and civil liberties at the hands of America's authoritarian radical right Republican Party looks like. The GOP is the enemy of democracy, civil liberties and inconvenient truth.
Footnote:
1. The Brennan Center for Justice wrote this in 2020:
Within 24 hours of the Shelby County ruling, Texas announced that it would implement a strict photo-ID law. In the years since, Brennan Center has consistently found that states previously covered by the preclearance requirement have engaged in significant efforts to disenfranchise voters. Our 2018 report, to cite one example, concluded that previously covered states have increased the purging of voters after Shelby when the purge rates in non-Shelby states stayed the same.Just this month, voters — including many voters of color — faced faulty voting machines, long lines, and extended wait times to cast their ballots in Georgia, one of the states previously subject to preclearance requirement. If Section 5 were still in effect, the state, which has closed hundreds of polling places since Shelby, would have been required to clear its voting changes before enacting them.
Chief Justice John Roberts, in his Shelby opinion, asserted that the Section 5 requirements were no longer necessary, that times had changed since 1965. “The conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions,” he wrote.
That those conditions — conditions of racial discrimination and injustice — persist in voting and other American institutions is clearer than ever, both from the plain evidence of Black voters braving hours-long waits in this year’s primaries to the demands for racial justice rising from the streets all over the country.
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Earmarks are making a comeback in congress: The NYT writes:
In 2020, Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, told C-SPAN that his constituents were not in favor of earmarks, so he wasn’t either.
Two years later, he earmarked a total of $37.9 million in two separate spending bills for projects in his district.
When House Republicans voted to place their own moratorium on earmarks in 2010, Representative Ken Calvert, Republican of California, said the decision was a statement to Americans that “House Republicans are ready to lead the fight for lower spending, more transparency and responsibility in Washington.” In 2022, he secured $56.1 million in earmarks. In a statement, he said that with new, more stringent rules in place, the House was “reasserting its traditional and constitutional role in deciding how our tax dollars are spent.”
And while the House Freedom Caucus, the hard-right Republican group, called last summer for reinstating a ban on earmarks that took effect in 2011, one of its members, Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, secured $25.2 million for projects in his district. In an interview, he too said the changes put in place to make the practice more transparent had made him “more comfortable” with partaking in the age-old congressional ritual.
The totals still pale in comparison to the heyday of earmarking — lawmakers claimed $32 billion worth in the 2010 fiscal year, before the prohibition went into effect — but the uptick reflects a bipartisan return in enthusiasm for the practice.
Republican lawmakers claimed eight of the 10 most expensive earmarks, with Representative Brian Mast of Florida, securing the largest: $447 million for an ecosystem restoration project in South Florida.
But many lawmakers and scholars argue that earmarks fulfill a vital function of Congress, and help to grease the wheels of the legislative process by giving individuals members tangible reasons to negotiate spending deals.
“Building coalitions to get things done can often require horse trading and trades between members, and so when you have something like an earmark, it can serve that function,” said Molly E. Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan research group.
Maybe bringing earmarks, a/k/a pork barrel spending, back will be a good thing. Some experts have claimed that the loss of earmarks led to more extremism in the House. Committee chairpersons had nothing to offer to buy votes. Earmarks used to at least partly reign in the nuttery that Republican extremists and crackpots tend to promote. Maybe there is truth in that.
It is odd that the Florida Republican got $447 for ecosystem restoration. He is in the party that constantly claims that climate change is a socialist hoax, overblown alarmism and/or not something that humans can deal with. Hypocrisy just does not faze any Republican in congress. Shameless hypocrisy is the norm for the GOP leadership.
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