Monthly Archives: July 2021

The first day of the Texas Legislature's special session began last week at the Capitol in Austin. Republicans, who control the state, are attempting to pass new voting laws that will add penalties and make it more difficult to cast a ballot. Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images hide caption

The first day of the Texas Legislature's special session began last week at the Capitol in Austin. Republicans, who control the state, are attempting to pass new voting laws that will add penalties and make it more difficult to cast a ballot.

Texas Republicans introduced another set of sweeping bills that voting rights advocates say could make it harder to vote in a state that already has some of the most restrictive election laws in the country. Democrats left the state on Tuesday in a second effort to block the legislation from moving forward.

The bills House Bill 3 and Senate Bill 1 were filed during the special legislative session called by Gov. Greg Abbott, which started last week. Republican leaders vowed to take another pass at approving voting legislation after Texas House Democrats blocked a previous effort in May to pass more voting restrictions.

HB 3 and SB 1, however, do not include some of the more controversial measures that were added to that previous bill in the final hours of the legislative session in May. Those included a provision that would have restricted voting on Sundays as well as a measure that would have allowed election officials to overturn election results if there are voter fraud allegations.

The bills are part of a nationwide effort by state-level Republicans to enact more restrictive voting laws following former President Donald Trump's loss in the 2020 election. Trump and his allies have falsely claimed that the election was stolen. Twenty-eight restrictive voting laws in 17 states have been enacted since January, according to the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice.

The latest bills in Texas include new identification requirements for people voting by mail and prohibit local election officials from sending a vote-by-mail application to someone who hasn't requested one.

They also ban drive-through voting and extended hours during early voting. Republicans in the state argue that these innovations which were mostly used by Houston officials during the pandemic opened the door to voter fraud.

James Slattery, a senior staff attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said voters of color and shift workers benefited the most from these methods of voting last year.

"And so you can consider the bans on those forms of voting to be a direct attack on voters of color in particular," he said.

In addition, the bills expand what partisan poll watchers can observe during elections and prohibits poll watchers from being removed for violating election law. If passed, these bills would also create new criminal penalties for any election worker who "intentionally or knowingly refuses to accept a [poll] watcher."

Slattery said these bills basically give a host of new powers to partisan poll watchers.

"Both bills make it harder to control disruptive partisan poll watchers when they are acting aggressively or disrupting voting," he said.

The bills also create a slew of new criminal penalties and requirements for folks who assist voters at the polls, or people who assist others planning to vote by mail.

For example, they require that people fill out paperwork if they are taking someone who is not a relative to vote in person. And they require people to exit a car if there is someone voting curbside in that vehicle.

And while Republicans have backtracked on another provision that would have made it easier to overturn election results, Slattery said these bills kept other parts of that measure.

He said that includes a way for losing candidates to "harass winning candidates in court" through a new election contest process that allows the former to allege various kinds of voter fraud. Slattery said this process could mire the results of an election.

"When you think about it, what this is, this is part of the efforts that we have seen especially in other states after the 2020 election to undermine the legitimacy of election results," he said.

Republicans in Texas have argued that concerns about election integrity are serious and should be addressed, even though they haven't offered evidence of any widespread problem with voting in the state.

State Rep. Travis Clardy, a Republican from Nacogdoches who is a member of the Texas House Elections Committee, told NPR in June that he has "zero doubt about the legitimacy of elections" in the state.

"This is a preventative measure for us," he said. "We do have and heard testimony throughout our session of problems of voter irregularities, of voter fraud, of cases currently being investigated. It is an issue. It is a real thing. But I think it's our job to make sure that doesn't blossom into a problem."

Slattery said the provisions in these bills, however, do nothing to make elections more secure in Texas and would instead further the false claims Trump and his allies have made that the 2020 election was stolen.

"There isn't any election security benefit to nearly any of these provisions," he said. "It's all in service of the big lie and enshrining the big lie even further into the laws of this most restrictive state in the country."

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Texas Republicans Have A New Voting Bill. Here's What's In It - NPR

The ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee is pressing the Biden administration to account for how much money it is costing taxpayers in litigation and settlement costs after President Biden halted construction on the wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, canceling government contracts in the process.

Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., accused the Biden administration of "effectively undermin[ing] efforts to protect our southern border" by ceasing border wall construction and demanded to know what the financial impact of that decision will ultimately be. In a letter to Undersecretary of Defense Michael McCord sent Tuesday evening, Smith said that "historic levels of illegal migration to our southern border as well as a national security, humanitarian, and public health crisis" are the result of this and other administration decisions.

ARIZONA AG SEEKS INJUNCTION TO REVERSE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION'S ENDING OF BORDER WALL CONSTRUCTION

"It is important that the American people are aware of any costs DOD is incurring or will incur due to the resulting litigation and contract disputes that will come from the Administrations misguided actions,"the letter said.

At a June 24 House Budget Committee hearing, McCord had agreed to provide this information, and Smiths letter followed up on that agreement. Additionally, Smith is now asking how many contracts the Biden administration has canceled, how much more money it plans on spending to settle contracts, and for any remaining contracts if the Department of Defense is now "paying contractors to not construct a border wall along the southern border[.]"

GAO SAYS BIDEN HALT OF BORDER WALL CONSTRUCTION DOES NOT VIOLATE LAW

Fox News reached out to the Department of Defense for comment but it did not immediately respond.

"President Biden's decision to ignore the will of Congress by halting border wall construction is part of a broader failure by his administration to respond to the devastating circumstances at our southern border that are enriching violent cartels and undermining the safety and security of the America people," Smith said in a statement. "The American people are picking up the tab for President Bidens failed policies, and we intend to find out exactly how much this disastrous decision is costing hard working families."

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Meanwhile, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich announced Monday he is seeking an injunction against Biden's efforts to stop border wall construction. Brnovich's office first sued the Department of Homeland Security in April, allegingthe administration has not complied with its obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) when it ended border wall construction and the "Remain in Mexico" policy which kept migrants in Mexico until their hearings were processed.

Fox News' Adam Shaw contributed to this report.

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House Republican demands Biden admin reveal cost of canceling border wall construction - Fox News

President Joe Biden delivered a major voting rights speech in Philadelphia Tuesday, excoriating the Republican Party for election subversion and urging Congress to pass the For the People Act.

President Joe Biden: This year alone, 17 states have enacted not just proposed, but enacted 28 new laws to make it harder for Americans to vote, not to mention and catch this nearly 400 additional bills Republican members of the state legislatures are trying to pass.

But Biden stopped short of calling for an end to the filibuster, which many now see as the only way to circumvent Republican obstructionism and to pass voting rights legislation at the federal level. Well have more on voting rights later in the broadcast with two of the Texas Democratic state representatives who helped lead this weeks walkout to block the passage of Texas Republicans voter suppression bills.

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Biden Condemns Republican Election Subversion But Does Not Call for End to Filibuster - Democracy Now!

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) North Carolina Republicans advanced legislation on Wednesday that defines how teachers can discuss certain concepts about race and racism inside the classroom.

GOP Senate leader Phil Berger said his chamber is taking action as Republicans across the country seek to counter their understanding of critical race theory, a framework legal scholars developed in the 1970s and 1980s that centers on the idea that racism is systemic in the nations institutions, maintaining the dominance of white people in society.

The latest version of the North Carolina bill would prevent teachers from compelling students to personally adopt any ideas from a list of 13 beliefs, even though though they cannot identify a single case of this happening inside the states classrooms, which serve about 1.5 million K-12 public school students.

We dont want to indoctrinate folks in what I think is the core of critical race theory, which is that race is determinative of whether or not someone is going to be successful, that race is determinative of all matter of things that happen in society and that past discrimination justifies current discrimination, Berger told The Associated Press in an interview before unveiling the updated education measure.

Architects of the theory accuse Republicans of hijacking a national conversation on race and inaccurately representing their ideas. The theory does not argue that people are inherently racist and its early adopters do not say they are advocating for a new form of discrimination to remedy past injustices. Instead, they view race as something that is culturally invented. They say the GOP is simply appealing to its largely white base of supporters ahead of next years elections.

This is a 2022 strategy to weaponize white insecurity, to mobilize ideas that have been mobilized again and again throughout history, using a concept or set of ideas that they can convince people is the new boogeyman, Kimberl Crenshaw, an early proponent of the theory, said earlier this year.

Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is likely to veto any final bill that reaches his desk. Republicans would almost assuredly lack the Democratic votes theyd need in both the House and Senate to override a veto.

Berger also announced that his party will seek a constitutional amendment that would go before voters in March 2022 aimed at affirming our commitment to the principles of the Civil Rights Act.

Critical race theory emerged in response to a lack of progress toward racial equality that legal scholars observed years after the landmark 1964 legislation.

Republicans backing the bill being discussed in an education committee Wednesday afternoon have thus far identified three counties Durham, Mecklenburg and Wake where groups of teachers have either attended or could soon attend events where they are presented with ideas GOP members link to the theory. Republicans worry views espoused in those trainings could trickle down to students.

The theory caught the attention of former President Donald Trump last year after a conservative activist appeared on Fox News and discussed racial bias trainings within the federal government that he found objectionable. Trump subsequently issued an executive order barring federal contractors from conducting racial sensitivity trainings and teaching any of nine divisive concepts he outlined.

Though a federal judge blocked Trumps directive and President Joe Biden rescinded the diversity training ban, Republican-controlled legislatures have adopted language from Trumps executive order in bills largely targeting schools.

As of Monday, 26 states have considered legislation or other steps to limit how race and racism can be taught, according to an analysis from Education Week.

Berger, who previously expressed concern with the bill the House passed along party lines in May, said it now clarifies that its OK for teachers to discuss these ideas involving race, as long as they dont promote them by compelling students, teachers or other school workers to personally adopt the beliefs.

His revisions to House Bill 324 added five prohibited concepts, including any claim that the U.S. government should be violently overthrown or that all Americans are not created equal.

School districts would have to provide instruction materials promoting any of the 13 concepts to members of the public upon request. People also could get detailed information about speakers, consultants or diversity trainers hired by a district who discussed or previously advocated for such concepts.

The new language is unlikely to assuage fears among Democrats, education groups and racial justice advocates that the bill would reduce education about the lingering of effects of slavery and discrimination, stifle teachers ability to lead open conversations and make aspiring educators question whether they want to enter the workforce.

It is a bill that is intended to put a chilling effect on anti-racist teaching and to make it hard to talk about those uncomfortable and difficult but much-needed conversations around racism and sexism in our classrooms, said Tamika Walker Kelly, president of the North Carolina Association of Educators.

Berger believes the concerns are overblown.

If theyre not indoctrinating students, then there should be no concern about the bill as drafted because all the bill prohibits is that indoctrination. So if its not happening, they shouldnt be up in arms about the existence of the bill, Berger said.

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Follow Anderson on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BryanRAnderson.

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Anderson is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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N. Carolina GOP would ban K-12 promotion of views about race - Associated Press

Defund the police a rallying cry during the 2020 protests following the unwarranted deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others at the hands of police is now a congressional football that Democrats and Republicans keep throwing up as Hail Mary passes without anyone scoring a touchdown.

First, Republicans accused Democrats of embracing defund the police to take police off the street, which they said would fuel lawlessness and make communities less safe. U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy and other Republicans pushed for a COVID-19 relief package for local governments that would help save the jobs of first responders and teachers.

This is about robust growth. We have to do as much as we can for as many as we can, Cassidy said at the time This is about taking care of first responders. I dont want to be the guy defunding the police.

According to Democrats, Cassidy is that guy. Last month, Democrats accused Republicans of defunding the police. Not one Republican voted for President Joe Bidens American Rescue Plan. Biden urged cities with increasing crime to use $350 billion of coronavirus relief funds to hire more police officers and to pay more overtime. He added that the funds could be used to increase the number of programs that help people dealing with substance abuse and help fund mental health services that we know will make a difference in the prevention of crime.

Fortunately for Louisiana, state officials stopped playing games long enough to approve several police reform bills that Gov. John Bel Edwards signed into law. These new state laws:

Even though Republican state senators defeated an important bill that would have limited police use of qualified immunity, our state still has done more than Congress has. The state formed the Police Training, Screening and De-escalation Task Force, which included lawmakers from both parties, representatives from law enforcement, professionals, academics, activists and other community stakeholders. The taskforce submitted 18 recommendations for police reform.

Congress has been trying to pass a police reform bill since Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer, murdered George Floyd. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed the House by a 236-181 vote on June 25, 2020. The Senate, however, cant get the job done.

If approved, the federal bill would create a national police misconduct registry and require all federal, state and local law enforcement to submit reports about complaints and discipline. The bill also would ban the use of chokeholds and no-knock warrants in drug cases. Those bans would only apply to federal officers, a small portion of the nations police forces.

While the national parties are playing political games in the Senate, police are still killing Black people unjustly, gun violence continues to soar, and carjackings are on the rise. In New Orleans, for example, residents are afraid to pump gas at local stations because carjackings have increased by 91.3% so far this year. According to the New Orleans City Council Crime Dashboard, other violent crimes also are rising: fatal shootings have increased by19%, murders without a gun are up 71%, aggravated assaults have increased by 47% and non-fatal shootings have increased by 75.8%.

Nationally, there was an 18% increase in murders for the first three months of 2021 compared with the same time period in 2020, according to a New York Times study.

The protestors who shouted defund the police last year were demanding that money be reallocated from policing to fund other agencies, such as those that provide mental health services. According to Arjun Singh Sethi, adjunct professor of law at Georgetown Law School, there are two camps: reduce funds and reform aspects of policing, or completely abolish police forces as we know them.

Both camps have merit.

We cant defund the police while violent crimes are rising. At the same time, we must eliminate the systemic racism responsible for the injustice and unnecessary deaths of Black people by police. We must strive to stop the long history of police violence against Black people; to prevent the unequal treatment in the criminal justice system; and to keep everyone regardless of race, nationality or income safe.

In other words, the U.S. Senate needs to stop passing the ball and help fix whats broken.

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Republicans and Democrats accuse each other of 'defunding the police' | Tammy C. Barney - Louisiana Illuminator

Republicans are questioning Amazons relationship with the Pentagon after newly released emails show that defense officials praised tech executives vying for a $10 billion contract during the Trump administration.

On Tuesday, The New York Times reported on previously unreleased emails that show Pentagon officials applauding Amazon executives while the company sought out a lucrative defense contract between 2017 and 2018. The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, or JEDI, set out to find a tech company that would move the Defense Departments computer networks over to the cloud.

In one instance, the Times reports that former Trump Defense Secretary Jim Mattis traveled to Silicon Valley to meet with executives from companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google in 2017. During this trip, Mattis was made uncomfortable while Amazon representatives aggressively pitched their cloud-computing products to him. A former Mattis adviser, Sally Donnelly, also referred to Bezos as the genius of our age. Donnelly, who later sent Mattis a list of reasons he should meet with Bezos, had previously worked at a consulting firm where her clients included Amazon.

This is exactly what we were concerned about, and it contradicts Amazons insistence that there is nothing to see here, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said in a joint statement Tuesday. Its become more and more clear that Amazon used its market power and paid-for connections to circumvent ethical boundaries and avoid competition in an attempt to win this contract.

Microsoft won the multibillion-dollar contract in 2019 after a closely watched bidding fight between Amazon. In the months leading up to the contracts winner announcement, former President Donald Trump dialed up his criticism of Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos, accusing the Bezos-owned Washington Post of unfair media coverage.

But earlier this month, the Defense Department announced that it would cancel its contract amid an ongoing legal battle alleging that Trump wrongfully interfered in the bidding process. In canceling the prior contract, Amazon is given a second chance to win the $10 billion deal. But Republicans in Washington are calling for the company to testify regarding its Pentagon relationships in light of the newly released emails.

Now, more than ever, we need to ask Amazon, under oath, whether it tried to improperly influence the largest federal contract in history, the lawmakers wrote.

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Republicans call for Amazon to testify on Pentagon relationship - The Verge

Jocelyn Kiley, associate director for political research at Pew, argues, however, that her data shows something quite different. The Pew analysis is based on responses to 10 questions, each of which asks subjects to pick between two alternatives for example, government is almost always wasteful versus government often does a better job than people give it credit for, or homosexuality should be discouraged by society versus homosexuality should be accepted by society.

In recent years, Kiley wrote in an email,

on a few basic values most notably, views around gay and lesbian people and same-sex relationships society as a whole (including both Republicans and Democrats) has moved in a more liberal direction.

In addition, Kiley noted,

members of both parties hold more positive views of immigrants than in the past, even as the partisan divide on these views has become more pronounced.

The Democratic shift to the left reflects in large part a parallel shift in the general public. The median voter has become more liberal, and as a result, in 2017 Democratic voters were modestly closer to the median voter than Republican voters (by one point on a 20-point scale).

I asked Brian Schaffner, a principal investigator at the Cooperative Election Study and a political scientist at Tufts, about the Drum and Linker columns. Schaffner made an argument similar to Kileys:

The overall median among the population of Americans has moved leftward from 1994 to 2017. Even if Republicans have shifted less than Democrats, compared to their views in 1994, this hardly makes them less extreme in the current moment. To put a finer point on it, imagine an individual who supported school segregation in 1965 and who still held that same view 50 years later. Clearly it is the lack of a shift in views over five decades that would have made that individual extreme in the year 2015.

Schaffner observes that the data

shows a very clear shift among Democrats, while Republicans hardly move at all. But independents are also moving in the same direction as Democrats on these issues. Sure, Republicans arent shifting their views, but their unwillingness to update their assessments of racism in America is essentially leaving them behind as the rest of Americas attitudes are evolving.

Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, took the Schaffner argument a step further:

Most importantly, I think we should question whether the culture war metaphor is appropriate war gives the idea that there are aggressors trying to change society to match their preferences, but much of the change in opinion we see from both parties is necessarily a reaction to society changing around them.

Democrats, Enos continued,

moved to the left on gay marriage because more of them were beginning to know gay people who had come out of the closet despite the legal and social pressures not to. And Democrats moved to the left on immigration because the Western world, not just the United States, is diversifying as economic and social trends have moved people from one part of the world to another. On these and other issues, Democrats attitudes change then not because they are trying to shape society, but because they are merely reacting to it.

It would be wrong, Enos concluded, to think cultural change is all about politics.

The Pew data is based on questions first developed in 1994 and include none of the contentious contemporary issues that have provoked pushback against the left wing of the Democratic Party.

In a March 12 column published before his Myth of asymmetric polarization essay, Linker himself assigned responsibility to Trump and to Republicans for a climate in which it sometimes seems as if the culture war has swallowed up everything in American politics. Linker traces this phenomenon to

Donald Trumps presidential campaign and victory against Hillary Clinton in November 2016. Trump won, in part, by blending strong support from religious conservatives with firm backing by more secular conservatives and moderates who responded to Trumps strong, culturally inflected defense of immigration restrictionism, gun rights, and Americas distinctive national identity. Through his four years in office, Trump used Twitter, public rallies, and other presidential statements to frame many of his policy commitments in culture war terms, casting his opponents on these issues as morally alien from American culture and history. By the last year of his presidency, Trump had gone far beyond abortion, immigration, and guns to culturalize crime, race relations, economic policy, voting rights and even mask-wearing in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory, expanded on this point in an email:

The questions that comprise the Pew index are not necessarily what is driving concern about extremism today. Today, we are concerned about who is more likely to believe in QAnon or which group is more likely to believe that armed resistance to government might be necessary to save America.

Recent data, Gillespie wrote, shows that Republicans are far more likely to believe in QAnon or that significant proportions of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary. This, Gillespie contends, is the reason that the public discourse is focusing on right-wing extremism right now.

As the 2022 election comes into view, the key issue is less the question of which party is the aggressor in the culture wars than whether Republicans can gin up enough controversy over the so-called woke agenda to make it salient to voters on Election Day, regardless of whether or not responsibility for these issues can reasonably be attributed to the Democratic Party.

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Opinion | Lean Into It. Lean Into the Culture War. - The New York Times