Voter Suppression – R&R – Reachout and Rebuild

Our democracy is broken. H.R. 1 can combat voter suppression and fix it

David Posnett — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 17:00:14 +0000

Mondaire Jones

Special to the USA TODAY Network: link here.

March 9, 2021

Our democracy is badly broken. Right now, Republicans in Arizona, Georgia and elsewhere are working hard to break it even further. But last week, my Democratic colleagues and I rose to repair and reconstruct it.

The For the People Act (H.R. 1), which passed the House of Representatives last week, will be the most significant improvement to our democracy since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. My colleagues in the Senate should act swiftly to send this bill to President Biden’s desk. It is required to save our democracy from the people who incited the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th.

The For the People Act is a comprehensive bill that establishes automatic voter registration, combats voter suppression, protects our elections from foreign interference, and ends partisan gerrymandering — a process by which representatives choose their voters rather than voters choose their representatives.

But I want to focus on how H.R. 1 changes how campaigns are funded, amplifying the voices of everyday Americans.

Our current campaign finance system gives the wealthy a megaphone and silences the rest of us. In 2016, just 400 mega-donors contributed a total of $1.5 billion – more than every small donor combined. Those donors are predominantly wealthy white men, and they predominantly contribute to white candidates.

Congress isn’t just funded by wealthy people — it’s full of them. More than 50% of lawmakers in the 116th Congress have a net worth of more than $1 million, compared to just three percent of the population. This is not by accident: our campaign finance system is rigged to favor wealthy candidates. They can fund their own campaigns. They’re more likely to have nest eggs they can rely on while campaigning. And when they need extra funds, they can lean on networks of affluent family and friends.

I experienced our broken campaign finance system firsthand in my own run for Congress. When I was considering running for office, the first question insiders asked me was not what I would fight for, not whether my community was behind me, but how much money I could raise.

My leading primary competitor never had to answer that question. As the son of a pharmaceutical billionaire, he didn’t have to raise any money at all. Instead, he spent $5.4 million of his inherited wealth to blanket the airwaves with TV commercials three months out from the primary election. In the general election, I faced yet another self-funding candidate who outspent me by pumping $1.5 million into his campaign.

Against these long odds, I was elected to Congress. As an openly gay, Black, working-class candidate whose community sent him to Congress, I’m an exception. But I shouldn’t be. With the small-donor matching system in H.R. 1, candidates like me could be the norm.

Small-donor matching is simple: for every dollar a regular person donates up to $200, public financing matches that dollar with $6. A $50 donation becomes a $350 donation. As a result, small donors would matter — fixing the toxic power dynamics that threaten our democracy.

Small-donor matching has already transformed New York politics for the better. The donors in New York City elections, which have a matching program, are by far more racially and socioeconomically diverse than the donors in New York State elections, which do not. H.R. 1 would take that transformation nationwide.

The same goes for candidates. Candidates of color disproportionately rely on small donations. But because big money drowns out small donors’ voices, we typically raise less money than our opponents. Thus, we are often prevented from even making the ballot. By multiplying the power of the people candidates of color rely on most, small-donor matching empowers more people to take their seats at the table.

When we can elect people who really represent us, we get a government that really serves all of us — not just the wealthy and well-connected. If Congress had more ordinary Americans, it surely would not be so indifferent to the needs of working families. My Democratic colleagues and I in this Congress are already proving that by passing real COVID-19 relief in the American Rescue Plan. And we’re just getting started.

For at least a decade, Democrats have promised that when we had the chance, we would fix our broken campaign finance system. It’s taken over 10 years, but we’re here. It’s time. If the Senate fails to follow through — if we compromise with corruption — we risk confirming many Americans’ beliefs that billionaires and corporations have captured both parties, that our elections offer no real choices, and that our democracy is a swamp in need of a strongman to drain it.

So let’s fight for H.R. 1 and its small-dollar matching program like our democracy depends on it — because it does.

Rep. Mondaire Jones represents New York’s 17th Congressional District, which includes most of Westchester County and all of Rockland County.

Voter “Integrity” and Republican Hypocrisy

David Posnett — Tue, 04 Jul 2017 00:48:32 +0000

You have to love the sheer effrontery of the Trump Administration’s new Presidential Advisory Commission on Voter Integrity, set up to validate Trump’s absurd claim that he only lost the popular vote because of the votes of millions of undocumented immigrants. Headed by Kris Kobach, longtime crusader against the hordes of “illegal aliens” descending on Kansas to try swinging elections (an alleged effort that based on results must be deemed a flat failure), this “commission” is requesting that every state in the Union turn in personal and public data on its voting rolls to the federal government. (For a frightening deep dive into the history of Kobach’s campaign of voter suppression see https://resistancesuffolk.blog/2017/07/03/if-you-care-about-the-right-to-vote-here-are-six-things-you-need-to-know-about-kris-kobach/)

Sure, let’s create a national database of the nation’s 200 million voters including names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliations, voting records, felony convictions, and the last four digits of social security numbers. What could possibly go wrong? Our friends in Russia, Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, not to mention Crouching Yeti, must be drooling. All of this data on 200 million American voters on one big database in one place! At last! No more pesky state and local databases to deal with, with their tiresome different standards and formats.

So glaring is the blatant stupidity of this enterprise that it threatens to drown out the blatant hypocrisy behind it. Remember when the Republican Party was the supposed stalwart defender of “state’s rights”? Remember the fear and terror that the federal government might somehow acquire a serviceable national registry of gun purchases? Which is why the ATF is hog-tied by restrictions prohibiting the consolidation or centralization of records, severely hampering law enforcement efforts to gauge and combat gun violence. Last March the House (including our very own Lee Zeldin of course) voted in favor of ending federal checks preventing more than 167,000 veterans deemed “mentally incompetent” from keeping or purchasing firearms. This was an effort to reduce the shocking incidence of veteran suicide by firearms. It seems the problem with preventing these individuals from acquiring firearms was that it relied on a less than perfect Social Security database, which flags individuals incapable of handling their own affairs. Same reasoning when Congress refused to bar individuals on a terrorist watch list prohibited from boarding aircraft from purchasing firearms. In spite of all this fuss and bother about federal government “overreach” in these cases and the worries about “due process” (not to mention “Second Amendment rights”), the Republican administration has no issue with putting every registered voter in America on a centralized database when the political stars align its way. The blatant hypocrisy of this led even Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, to state (to his credit) that he would not co-operate with Kobach’s commission: “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch from. Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our state’s right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes.”

There are plenty of other examples of this hypocrisy. On June 28 of this year the House passed H.R. 1215, a bill which overrides state laws on medical malpractice by placing a federal cap of $250,000 on “non-economic” injuries (which includes such things as trauma, elder abuse, or reproductive harm) as well as overriding state joint and several liability laws. The following day the House passed H.R. 3003 which tramples on the Fourth and Tenth Amendments of the Constitution in its haste to punish cities and states using “community trust” policing policies and failing to do the bidding of ICE to arrest and detain all undocumented immigrants contacted by law enforcement officials, no matter what. No problems with “due process” here. Welcome to the big government Republicans; limited government ideals have mysteriously gone missing! In the words of a writer for the right-leaning libertarian Cato Institute, this bill “violates a basic principle of federalism, which many conservatives have long championed, that the federal government should leave states to experiment with their own policies. I wonder whether Republican members of Congress would still support this legislation if they could imagine Democrats applying this same principle to federal gun laws in the future.” Even so, it passed in the House of Representatives with a mere seven Republicans voting “No” (Rep. Zeldin, needless to say, was not one of the seven, although Rep. Peter King, a fellow Long Island Republican, was, on the grounds that the bill endangers anti-terrorism funding that would go to New York City).

What are we to make of this blatant hypocrisy? The lesson to be drawn, I believe, is that all the protestations about “state’s rights” and the Constitution are tactical only, quickly abandoned when politically expedient. Such “principles” are not really principles at all, they are merely tactical gambits.

In fact there’s a pattern here. For decades the GOP has been a fierce defender of “strict constructionism” and “originalism”, i.e. the view that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the original meaning of its writers in 1787. Yet when the opportunity arose to blockade President Obama’s constitutional right to appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court after the death of Scalia Sen. Mitch McConnell jumped at it, Constitution be damned, declaring “The American people are perfectly capable of having their say on this issue, so let’s give them a voice. Let’s let the American people decide.” Never mind that this is flagrantly at odds with the clear meaning of the Constitution, which specifically does NOT provide that the selection of Supreme Court Justices be contingent on a popular vote. So much for “strict construction” and “original meaning”. What about the “principle” of limited government, particularly at the federal level? Kobach’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Voter Integrity simply dumps this principle – a mere inconvenience.

More broadly take the supposed “principle” of wholesome “family values” that is supposedly at the heart of the Republican brand, at least if we are to believe what Republicans love to tell voters. Is it possible to imagine a less wholesome and family-value oriented President than Donald Trump? A man who openly brags about sexual assault, prides himself on bullying his detractors, has no discernible religious or spiritual beliefs, worships material success only, has an insatiable lust for self-enrichment, has no scruples about lying his head off, mocks the disabled, despises service and self-sacrifice in general and the service of military heroes he doesn’t like in particular, and seems to violate every value that earnest educators attempt to instill on impressionable young children. Family values? Really? Yet party leaders as well as most of the Republican rank and file in Congress (with a few honorable exceptions of which Lee Zeldin is not one) have no problem overlooking all this as long as it doesn’t impede the implementation of their “agenda” (aka deregulation and tax cuts for the rich). No, the only way to understand the so-called “principles” of the Republican Party is as propaganda, designed to throw dust in the eyes of voters, not to be taken seriously and acted on consistently. Where is the “integrity”? In the words of the immortal Bard: “words, words, no matter from the heart.”