By a 7-2 vote (Alito and Thomas dissenting), the Supreme Court struck down Arizona’s law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote in a federal election. They held that the 1993 National Voter Registration Act trumps the more restrictive state law. The federal law requires that you show I. D. like a driver’s license and sign a statement that you are a citizen.
The ruling will strike down similar laws in Georgia, Alabama, and Kansas.
Federal judge Edith Jones from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was considered a possible Supreme Court pick during the Bush 43 Administration.
Now a judicial misconduct complaint has been filed against her for alleging in a February speech that African-Americans and Hispanics are “predisposed to crime.” If you’re looking for justice in her court, you’d damn well better be lily white.
The GOP plan to win presidential elections by allocating electoral college votes based on congressional districts rather than winner-take-all in states Obama won twice is finally getting attention. Rachel Maddow has been raising the alarm, and here’s Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:
“Rather than going by the overall vote in a state, they’d allocate by congressional district. And this is where it gets real good, or bad, depending on your point of view. Democrats are now increasingly concentrated in urban areas and Republicans did an extremely successful round of gerrymandering in 2010, enough to enable them to hold on to a substantial House majority even though they got fewer votes in House races than Democrats.
“In other words, the new plan is to make the electoral college as wired for Republicans as the House currently is. But only in Dem leaning states. In Republican states just keep it winner take all. So Dems get no electoral votes at all.
“Another way of looking at this is that the new system makes the votes of whites count for much more than non-whites — which is a helpful thing if you’re overwhelmingly dependent on white votes in a country that is increasingly non-white.
“This all sounds pretty crazy. But it gets even crazier when you see the actual numbers. Here’s a very illustrative example. They’re already pushing a bill to do this in the Virginia legislature. Remember, Barack Obama won Virginia and got 13 electoral votes. But… if the plan now being worked on would have been in place last November, Mitt Romney would have lost the state but still got 9 electoral votes to Obama’s 4. Think of that, two-thirds of the electoral votes for losing the state. If the Virginia plan had been in place across the country, as Republicans are now planning to do, Mitt Romney would have been elected president even though he lost by more than 5 million votes.
“Remember, plans to do this are already underway in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and other states in the Midwest.
“This is happening.”
Got that? Mittens would be president today with five million fewer votes than Obama. If the GOP can’t win with women and minorities, they’ll just win with gerrymandering. Be afraid, be very afraid. They know demographics are against them, but if they soften their crazier stands, they will lose their base. So desperate times call for desperate measures, and this is pretty damn desperate.
David Brooks* is all ecstatic about the New GOP:
“Over the past month, the Republican Party has changed far more than I expected. … There has been an epidemic of open-mindedness as Republicans try to win minority votes and create a version of their party that can be competitive in states like Connecticut and California.” Emphasis added.
An epidemic of open-mindedness? Does he mean like all the GOP Senators who irrationally voted to kill the U. N treaty on the disabled? Looks like the same group of unrepentant crazies to me.
* “The Republican Glasnost,” NYT
“The GOP’s Favorite New Punching Bag: Mitt Romney”
The story, up at Talking Points Memo, begins:
“On the Sunday talk shows, senior Republicans, former Romney surrogates and prominent conservatives piles on their defeated presidential nominee for telling donors that he lost because President Obama bought off minorities and young voters with ‘gifts.'”
The GOP is making some progress. They still believe what Mitt said. But they’ve figured out you’re not supposed to say it.
Moderate Mitt from the debates is gone. Now that he’s lost, Mitt has returned to the persona he’s most comfortable with — the one we all saw secretly recorded at the Boca Raton fundraiser where he railed against the 47%. That’s really who he is, and that’s really how he feels about his country.
Mitt had a conference call today with hundreds of his donors and fundraisers. One of them let the NYT listen in!
Rather than criticize himself, his campaign, and/or his party for their loss, Mitt blamed it on Obama giving “free stuff” to young people, African Americans, and Hispanics.
I’m no longer young, and I’m white. I voted for Obama because I thought his policies were fairer and truer to who we are as a people, not because I was getting free stuff.
If I had just wanted to vote my own economic interest, I would have voted for Mitt.
“If we lose the election, there is only one explanation — demographics.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R – SC)
No, Senator, you have it backwards. It’s your wingnut policies that alienate huge swathes of Americans — young people, women, African-Americans, Hispanics, anybody who doesn’t take the Bible literally.
In an interesting piece at New York Magazine*, Jonathan Chait wonders why the Obama campaign seems so confident and the Romney campaign so concerned, given that the national polls have been close. Chait thinks it may be because national polls are over-counting the white vote compared to what the campaigns believe it will be.
Chaits says that both campaigns think the white vote will be about 74%, but notes that a recent ABC poll assumed 78%. That poll had Mitt up among whites by 18%, but if the 74% figure is correct, Mitt needs to win whites by 22%. Chait says that Gallup consistently under-counts minorities.
So in looking at the internals of polls, check out the percentage of white voters they are assuming.
* “Why Is Obama So Confident?”
Embattled Farmers 