Voter Suppression Comes into Full View as the Voting Rights Act … · 2019-01-18 · carry guns and avoiding recommendations on age restrictions for the purchase of guns. The final

January 9, 2019 Volume 2, Issue 10

Democracy with Dignity

Deborah Holbrook, Editor

Healthcare: Medicare for All – Why not???

Voter suppression was one of the major stories of the 2018 election in the Georgia governor’s race. The state became the battleground for something deeper than the ideas of the candidates themselves; it’s now emblematic of a larger struggle over voter suppression as an accumulation of everyday annoyances, legal barri-ers, and confusion.

In Georgia, voter suppression efforts had been under way for years. The eventual winner of the election was Kemp who oversaw voter suppression efforts in his role as Georgia’s Secretary of State. He had embarked on what his critics say is a series of naked attempts to con-strict the electorate. Since 2010, his office reports that it had purged upwards of 1.4 million voters from the rolls, including more than 660,000 in 2017 and almost 90,000 in 2018. Many of those voters found their registration canceled because they had not voted in the previous election. Additionally, under an ‘exact match’ law passed by the state legislature that requires handwritten voter registrations be identical to personal documents, 53,000 people had their registrations moved to ‘pending’ status because of typos or other errors before a district court enjoined the policy. More than 80% of those registra-tions belonged to black voters.

Much of the research on election law and voter turnout shows that it’s the combination of major policies and minor barriers—like polling-place changes, long lines at the polls, and small bureaucratic hurdles—that have real, measurable impacts on turnout.

According to Harvard professor Desmond Ang, protections against those cumulative assaults against democracy have all but been erased in the past five years. Ang studied the effects of a provision in the Vot-ing Rights Act (VRA) that required the federal preclear-ance of election laws in places where Jim Crow had kept black people from voting, a requirement that was ex-panded in 1975 to some states and districts outside the Deep South. Preclearance forced districts with significant

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Voter Suppression Comes into Full View as the Voting Rights Act Disappears

June auctions off the latest trend in reading glasses at IC holiday party

last meeting

The question most commonly asked of the grow-ing number of Americans who support replacing America's uniquely inefficient and immoral for-profit healthcare system with Medicare for All is ’how do we pay for it?’ A paper by researchers at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) shows that financing a single-payer system would actually be quite simple, given that it would cost significantly less than the status quo.

According to the 200-page analysis of Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) Medicare for All Act of 2017, the research-ers found that ‘based on 2017 US healthcare expenditure figures, the cumulative savings for the first decade operat-ing under Medicare for All would be $5.1 trillion, equal to 2.1% of cumulative GDP, without accounting for broader macroeconomic benefits such as increased productivity, greater income equality, and net job creation through lower operating costs for small- and medium-sized businesses.’

The most significant sources of savings from Medi-care for All, the researchers found, would come in the ar-eas of pharmaceutical drug costs and administration. The author said his research makes abundantly clear that the moral imperative of guaranteeing decent healthcare for all does not at all conflict with the goal of providing cost-effective care. ~Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, 11/30/18

Higher Education: The city of Nashville will start offering financial assistance to local community college students to help pay for textbooks, transportation costs and more. It takes Tennessee's free college programs a step further in one of the state's biggest cities and was launched after a city report found the majority of adult students struggled with the financial burdens beyond tuition including child care, textbooks and course materials. ~Politico Morning Education, 12/10/18 Guns and Schools: The long road to banning bump stocks in the wake of the Oct. 1, 2017, Las Vegas mass shooting will come to an end in 90 days when a final rule drafted by the Department of Justice and prompted by President Donald Trump becomes law, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal. The Trump school safety group has backed off his call to arm teachers. The panel took a far less confrontational approach by sidestepping Trump's call for trained teachers to carry guns and avoiding recommendations on age restrictions for the purchase of guns. The final report in many ways is largely symbolic, amounting to a list of ideas states and school districts can take or leave on issues like school mental health. The advisory group also went after a policy put in place by the Obama administration that deals with school punishment. The group recommended scrapping that civil rights policy, which was intended to keep minority students from being punished more often than whites. ~Playbook PM, 12/18/18

Healthcare: The only remaining abortion provider in Nashville has suspended all abortions, referring women to clinics in Knoxville and Memphis. ~The Tennessean, 12/11/2018 Women’s rights: Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said Democrats should make a renewed effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which Congress passed in the 1970s, but which was never ratified by the states. ‘We need to ensure that women's equality has the bedrock protection of the Constitution so that our lives and our rights are not subject to the whims of political tides.’ ~Politico MorningEducation,12/10/18

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We’ve Got Issues

Whither Indivisible? Some of us travelled to an eastern Tennessee regional Indivisible retreat on December 13th.

We went in search of strategies, inspiration, and possible coordinated activities for Indivisible Crossville over the next two years. We found that much of what we have been talking about locally is consistent with other groups. Also, we are in the middle as to size of membership and ahead of the pack in terms of candidates rising out of our ranks. In light of this and other discussions, the OT has distilled a few goals for the next year. (If these do not inspire you, please tell us what will!!!)

Service: Gaining respect and visibility for Indivisible Crossville through sincere efforts in civic engagement. Our first identified priority, also an identified Drawdown strategy for reducing climate change, is to become advo-cates for girls and young women in Cumberland County. We had Rebecca Wood, chief academic officer for the CC schools, speak on Dec. 13th, and we are considering extending that conversation with the senior school nurse. Pleasant Hill Elementary has been rock bottom of academic achievement in the county for decades, so it is identified as the school where help might most be appreciated. Another possibility is Phoenix, the alternative high school. Wood noted that 71 girls were pregnant in the school system in 2016-17. We will be fleshing out ideas on how to be part of the solution to these problems: reading buddies or a mentoring group for middle-school age girls, for examples. Our second identified priority is tackling a specific project to reduce single-use plastics, a project which will ramp up in April.

Advocacy: Leveraging any clout we have as participants in local and state government. This means we show up and speak out at public governmental meetings, not just IC and political party meetings.(Note the expanded calendar). These are true grassroots efforts and require consistency and real self-education. Example: As a Cumberland County event center continues to be debated, we need advocates to attend Buildings and Grounds and general commission meetings to emphasize environmental impact and sustainable materials and practices. Lobbying on the state level requires more research and maybe some travel, but not necessarily. Cameron Sexton and Paul Bailey are on the other end of emails pretty consistently. Log onto Google News Alerts so you know what they are doing.

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proportions of minority voters and low minority turnout to submit all changes to election laws for federal approval. The federal litmus test approved new provisions only if they were found not to decrease minority turnout relative to the status quo. Thus, the VRA was not only a protective shield against scorched-earth Jim Crow policies—it was also in-tended to guard against more subtle restrictions, all while promoting higher minority turnout as an explicit goal.

Ang found that in the districts covered by preclearance from 1975 to 2013, federal oversight was a major factor in sustained increases in minority turnout relative to counties not covered by the VRA. Ang’s findings indicate that the act of continued federal monitoring alone was responsible for a good deal of minority turnout across the country, rang-ing from 4 to 8 percentage points.

The Justice Department and the US Congress in the 1960s and ’70s predicted that southern election officials would employ clever incremental policies that, over time, would bring back Jim Crow—and cloak it in an even thicker aura of legitimacy than existed before. But the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 reversed the federal doctrine of proactiveness when it effectively ended preclearance. Since that decision, Ang has tracked what appears to be a troubling trend. Minority turnout in the past two federal elections has plummeted, specifically in the counties in which preclearance was once a first step for creating new election laws. The data don’t yet exist to confirm causality between Shelby County and the recent dips in turnout, but Ang writes that the numbers imply that ‘recently enacted election laws may have negated many of the gains made under preclearance.’

Included in those recently enacted laws are most of Kemp’s most controversial policies. In late October, US District Court Judge Leigh Martin May enjoined the exact-match law, a policy that allowed election officials to reject absentee ballots because of signature mismatches. On Kemp’s watch, Georgia has lost almost a tenth of its polling places since 2012, with the majority of closings in poor counties and those with significant African American populations.

And Georgia is representative of a nationwide trend. Kemp’s Kansan counterpart, Kris Kobach also adminis-tered his own election. He has been held in contempt of court for his attempts to disenfranchise Latino voters in the state, has rejected thousands of registrations and ballots, and has overseen the relocation of the polling place in Dodge City to a location outside the city, a move that forced the city’s Hispanic majority to travel farther in order to vote. In North Dakota, courts have upheld a voter-ID law that disproportionately affects the state’s American Indian voters, possibly influencing the defeat of Heidi Heitkamp.

Carol Anderson, author of One Person, No Vote and who studies voter suppression, said the thing about the suppression-by-frustration regime is that it provides dozens of potential exit points for voters burdened by bureauc-racy. Yes, black people were lynched for attempting to vote. But Jim Crow states were also administrative states, and the bureaucracies they developed came about as a result of a drive among white politicians to discriminate within fed-eral law. That meant poll taxes and literacy tests, which were originally perfectly legal. It also meant recitations of pre-ambles, long walks to county registrars, and frustration among black people who even managed to register and vote. It meant all-white primaries and at-large districts and intense gerrymandering. It relied on obsessive tinkering along the margins to come up with a system that was passable under the Constitution, but in the aggregate became an impossi-ble impediment for black people voting in any real numbers.

Those are important considerations for elections to come. Regardless of the outcomes of individual races, in-centives for disenfranchising black and Latino voters may only be increasing as their share of the electorate increases, and as they steadily back Democratic candidates. And that’s as the main tool for protecting voters, the VRA, has been rendered partially inert. The rudiments of massive voter suppression appear to already be in place.

~ Vann R. Newkirk II, 11/6/18

(Voter Suppression, continued from page 1)

‘In battle men kill, without hating each other; in political contests men hate without killing, but in that hatred they commit murder every hour of their lives.’ Benjamin Rush

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Prisons may be a rural county's only chance at survival, or not For more than three decades, when farms and factories failed them, rural Americans could depend on prisons.

The prisons gave them jobs, and in return the government could lock up more people. At the same time, the war on drugs began producing waves of people sentenced to long terms behind bars. Since the 1980s, dozens of state and fed-eral prisons have been built in Appalachia. The economic need hasn’t diminished as rural America still seeks a path out of the Great Recession. But building prisons is no longer as promising as it once was.

Prisons were considered ‘recession-proof,’ but the number of people behind bars is steadily dropping, a trend that spans 36 states and the federal system. The decline, which began a decade ago, has been driven by a number of factors: a drastic drop in crime, state fiscal crises and a bipartisan acknowledgment of the damage wrought by mass incarceration.

The Trump administration has steered the government back toward stricter law enforcement and tougher sen-tencing. But even the Trump administration has questioned the need for new federal prisons. President Obama’s Clean Power Plan sought to help communities reliant on coal retrain former miners and nurture small businesses. That trans-formation has yet to happen, but officials involved in local economic development say that the federal government’s investment in creating a ‘new economy’ in Appalachia is beginning to bear fruit, in the form of tourism, health care and the arts.

Prison proposals are part of an old story of exploitation and poverty and of government attempts to help. John Kennedy set in motion events that led his successor, Lyndon Johnson, to initiate the War on Poverty. Billions of dollars flowed into Appalachia to pay for roads, utilities and medical care. And yet much has not changed in Appalachian counties today.

Under Obama, the government pursued policies that lowered drug penalties and prosecuted fewer nonviolent offenders. State governments made similar moves, and the most aggressive of them were closing prisons. A new per-spective on criminal justice policy began to take hold across the country, centered on reversing mass incarceration. The Trump administration abandoned Obama’s approach to federal law enforcement and turned the focus toward tougher prosecutions. Counties, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump, thought they had the ally they needed to bring in prison projects. But his 2018 budget called for a drastic reduction in domestic spending, including the elimination of prisons.

Research on whether prisons bring jobs is mixed. Some studies confirm that prisons can lift local employment and, because prisoners are counted in the US census as residents of where they are locked up, deliver more population-based grant money. But other researchers have found that local residents are often shut out of the hiring proc-ess because they lack the required education or experience or are too old. Long term, studies say, prisons may offer some reprieve from economic downturns, but may not actually offer any lasting improvement in unemployment rates or poverty levels. John Eason, a researcher in prison building in rural America, said he has found that poorer communi-ties are more likely to host such projects, and those that do fare better than those that do not. Poverty rates, unem-ployment, household incomes and home values all improve in prison towns, he said.

But a prison isn’t enough to pull a community out of economic distress, said Dee Davis of the Center for Rural Strategies. Davis said counties would be better off focusing on developing themselves as places where people would want to live while working from home, or where they can retire. That means broadband internet, good schools and health care, and more restaurants and coffee shops. [A conversation with a Bledsoe State prison guard indicated that Bledsoe is understaffed, but finds that hirees often have terrible work ethics and are undereducated. DH]

~Jon Schuppe, 3/22/18 Shaming: Benjamin Rush, founding father and doctor, detailed his reasons for opposing the death penalty and all pub-lic punishments. A new state regulation, the Wheelbarrow Law, allowed courts to sentence criminals to public work gangs instead of to prison. Convicts in work gangs wore special uniforms to mark them as criminals. Rush felt this form of punishment subjected them to psychological damage that would increase recidivism. ‘Far from preventing crimes by the terror they excite in the minds of spectators,’ he wrote, such pubic punishments ‘are directly calculated to produce them.’ He was against mandatory sentencing for a similar psychological reason: criminals would be more likely to com-mit crimes if they knew exactly what punishments they could expect. ~Benjamin Rush by Fried is available at the ACPL

Focus on prisons, mass incarceration, local economies

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What does a winning, responsive strategy look like? Those who live cosmopolitan lives should take an interest in the practices and beliefs of who the late Father

Andrew Greeley called ‘neighborhood people.’ They are people who do not aspire to being citizens of the world and who love the particular patch where they were raised and which they have adopted as their own. Too many liberals and conservatives alike insufficiently appreciate what makes neighborhood people tick and why they deserve our re-spect. Liberals are instinctive cosmopolitans who often long for the freedom of the big metropolitan areas. Free-market conservatives typically say that if a place can’t survive the rigors of market competition, if the factories leave, the peo-ple left behind are best off if they simply find another place to live.

There are no simple answers to address the needs of those neighborhood people who believe themselves to be under siege by social, cultural, and economic transformations. But to write them off and to abandon the places they love (as so many of Trump’s economic policies, contrary to his rhetoric, threaten to do) is morally unacceptable and politically dangerous. If there are limits on what government can do to help such places help themselves, this does not mean that nothing can be done. Their affections and loyalties are civic gifts that those who oppose Trumpism must come to appreciate.

Empathy is a mutual, universal obligation to try to understand the situations in which others find themselves and the complexities of their thoughts and feelings. Those who would turn back Trumpism must embrace a new patri-otism built on a capacity for empathy. Civil society is an idea so wholesome that it is often not taken seriously. It refers to all the nongovernmental institutions we take for granted, from Little Leagues and service clubs to Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, churches, synagogues, and mosques, local Chambers of Commerce, unions, and service clubs like Rotary. Yet it is precious, complicated and essential.

Rebuilding community and civil society across America is vital to dealing with the social and economic prob-lems that Trump exploited and that our nation must begin to solve. Ask the typical economist about place-based (as opposed to individually oriented) policies, and the answer will usually focus on the inefficiency of remedies aimed at redeveloping or renewing local and regional economies. It makes more economic sense, they argue, to give individuals financial help to move to where the jobs are than to try to move jobs to languishing areas. The gains made in areas helped by place-based policies, they say, are often offset by negative effects in other places. And revitalizing particular places can often end up helping the more privileged members of these local communities rather than those most in need of assistance.

The shortcomings of policies aimed at reviving areas on a downward trajectory have played out in the disap-pointments of a variety of federal efforts to help regions grow. But these should be taken as a sign that place-based policy-making is hard, not that it is impossible. Large-scale infrastructure measures – e.g., the Tennessee Valley Author-ity and rural electrification in the New Deal – have often created new opportunities in places once mistakenly deemed ‘backward’ by outsiders. Investments in educational institutions have not only helped individuals rise but also reinvigo-rated whole states and regions. The Research Triangle in North Carolina is the product of both private endeavor and large investments in education.

Ours is a complex, pluralistic, representative democracy, one in which political parties play an essential role in elections and policymaking. Getting into the fight means devoting ourselves to the often-hard work of politics, even when it makes us uncomfortable. We will not always be successful but each experience will sharpen our skills. It de-mands creative approaches to effecting change. It means becoming involved with some of the oldest forms of political action, inside parties and at the precinct level, while at the same time being willing to embrace new political alliances.

There are many structural reforms that could make our system work better and confront the challenges of-Trumpism. These include changes to voting practices and new rules for regulating the financing of campaigns. But the most important obstacles we face are cultural and normative. If one group of Americans sees another as evil, or as ‘not like us,’ or as promoting policies designed to undermine the American way of life, our democracy is in jeopardy. If Americans in large numbers start with premises built on faulty information, or facts that are not facts, the finest and most carefully constructed institutions will not function properly. ~One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported by E.J. Dionne, Jr., Norman J. Ornstein, and Thomas E. Mann

Elections

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Democracy with Dignity

Mark Your Calendars!

January 11: Organizing Team meeting, 2:00, Art Circle Public Library January 17: County Planning, small conference room, county courthouse, meets 3rdThursday January 22: Cumberland County Commission, 6:00, county courthouse, meets 3rd Monday, shifted for MLK day January 24: County Buildings and Grounds, 4:30, at fire hall at Community Complex for tour, meeting to follow January 28: Democratic Party, 5:00 (women’s group) and 6:00 (executive and general), CC Housing Authority, meets 4th Monday February 6: County Rules, 4:00, small conference room, county courthouse, no regular meeting time February 12: Lobbying training in Nashville, carpool to be arranged February 12: County Election Commission, 4:00, CC elec-tion offices (often canceled so check ahead of time) February 12: Pleasant Hill City Council: 6:00, PH city hall, meets 2nd Tuesday February 12: Crossville City Council,6:00, city council chambers, meets 2ndTuesday February 12: Crab Orchard City Council: 6:00, CO city hall, meets 2ndTuesday February 13: General IC meeting, 6:00, CC Housing Au-thority, meets 2nd Wednesday

Indivisible Crossville’s Mission Statement

Indivisible Crossville’s mission is to encourage citizens to come together around local, state, and national issues in order to create a more just society. Goals:

Educate voters about issues and candidates (Indivisible cannot endorse candidates but can educate about them); bridge national and state issues to local situations

Influence elected officials around current issues Promote respectful civil discourse and create caring relationships among voters Promote informed voting on the Cumberland Plateau with special focus on young people Surface and encourage appropriate and realistic candidates at all levels of government

Board Members: Deborah Holbrook, President; Judy Barnett, Treasurer; Mary deWolf, Co-Secretary; June Zettelmeyer, Co-Secretary Members at large: Marvin Albright, Pat McKean, Stu Napear, Anne Quillen, Dennis Schumacher, Sean Siple

Contact through [email protected]

No one above the law: Laurence Tribe is a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School. He has argued cases before the Supreme Court 36 times and has taught such students as Barack Obama, John Roberts, Elena Kagen, and Ted Cruz. Tribe is going after the Justice Department’s pol-icy that bars prosecutors from grand jury indictment of a sitting US president. Tribe tweeted, ‘Some people claim that, even if Rosenstein gives Mueller permission to indict Trump as DOJ rules allow, the Constitution forbids such indictment. No! Nothing in its text, structure, or history supports a ‘POTUS-is-above-the-law’ view, nor does any SCOTUS precedent support it.’ ~Tribe’s Twitter feed