|
Police Departments - Not Taxpayers - Should Pay the Bill for Misconduct Settlements |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58925"><span class="small">Miriam Aroni Krinsky, MarketWatch</span></a>
|
|
Thursday, 01 April 2021 12:19 |
|
Krinsky writes: "The recent $27 million settlement between the city of Minneapolis and the family of George Floyd is the largest pretrial settlement in a civil rights wrongful death case in U.S. history. It's also a glaring signal that our system to hold police accountable for wrongdoing is woefully broken. "
Police in riot gear. (photo: Getty)
Police Departments - Not Taxpayers - Should Pay the Bill for Misconduct Settlements
By Miriam Aroni Krinsky, MarketWatch
01 April 21
Cash-strapped cities and ordinary citizens bear the financial and social cost of police violence
 he recent $27 million settlement between the city of Minneapolis and the family of George Floyd is the largest pretrial settlement in a civil rights wrongful death case in U.S. history. It’s also a glaring signal that our system to hold police accountable for wrongdoing is woefully broken.
Civil settlements for police misconduct have become more frequent — and in the many cases where criminal charges fail to materialize, this is the only recourse for victims and families to seek accountability and remediation for the harm they have suffered. What is lesser known is that these payouts don’t actually achieve accountability, nor do they serve as a deterrent for police misconduct because the funds almost never come from police budgets.
Instead, these payouts are often covered by insurance policies or settlement budgets where taxpayers — as opposed to the wrongdoers or the institutions that fail to correct practices that perpetuate misconduct — are left footing the bill. And this structure offers little risk-management incentive to address the underlying problems.
If we are serious about reducing police violence and promoting police accountability, we need to place responsibility for systemic failures at the foot of those who can correct them by holding police departments financially liable for problems that lead to wrongdoing. More importantly, we must proactively transform policing to prevent deadly incidents from occurring in the first instance and stop forcing taxpayers to subsidize misconduct while police departments and unions face no financial accountability and often actively obstruct reforms that could prevent the very situations that lead to these costly settlements.
More than $3 billion paid to settle misconduct lawsuits
Over the past 10 years, 31 of the 50 U.S. cities with the highest police-to-civilian ratios in the country have spent more than $3 billion to settle misconduct lawsuits. That’s not even the most shocking statistic: three of those cities — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — have shelled out $2.5 billion in settlements. As cities become more strapped financially, public resources should be invested in healthcare, housing and education — not paying for the misconduct of law enforcement. In Minneapolis, for example, it’s unclear where the $27 million will come from or what services might be cut to pay for it, as the city’s fund covering these payouts is already depleted.
Police budgets have remained at the same percentage of state and local budgets for the past 40 years, despite violent crime falling 74% since the early 1990s. Police departments — not cash-strapped local governments — should fund these settlements, or at the very least departments should have to purchase liability insurance policies where implementation of proactive practices to avoid liability would be factored into pricing.
There also need to be mechanisms to impose accountability on police unions that frequently oppose common sense reforms aimed at enhancing police practices and addressing misconduct. Too often officers with a history of wrongdoing are put back on the job due to union advocacy or negotiated contract provisions. Civil service and union protections that enable officers who engage in misconduct to continue to police our streets are in need of reform, just as a national database is needed to ensure law enforcement members who have been discharged from one department for misconduct cannot be hired elsewhere without disclosing their history.
Yet these are the exact reforms that unions have blocked time and again. When the lack of these protections result in a tragedy that forms the basis for a large settlement, the unions don’t feel the financial pain; instead taxpayer coffers are depleted.
While civil settlements provide some relief for families, individual officers often avoid any culpability. We need legislative solutions that enhance the ability to hold individual officers accountable, regardless of the uniform they wear.
Even as one considers efforts to recalibrate accountability, we also must shrink the footprint of policing to avoid situations that can escalate into tragedy. More than 80% of all arrests nationwide are for low-level, nonviolent offenses. George Floyd was apprehended for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill, a misdemeanor that was met with a death sentence. It is time to reevaluate whether police resources are best invested in these victimless crimes when more than half of reported crimes — including almost 40% of homicides — go unsolved.
Similarly, mental health, substance use, and other medical emergencies should not be responded to by guns drawn. It is not enough to train officers on de-escalation; we need alternative responder models that remove the criminal justice system from the equation altogether and recognize these human challenges as public health issues best addressed by treatment and support systems, not police.
It’s also time for these civil settlements and the underlying data on misconduct to come out of the shadows so the general public can understand the extent to which their tax dollars are paying for the consequences of police brutality. There are 18,000 police departments across the country and each is collecting information on misconduct differently — if at all — so any available data is incomplete and inconsistent. As such, it’s nearly impossible to discern whether settlements are having any impact on the prevalence of misconduct. We need national standards for data collection and disclosure so that communities are aware of these settlements —- including how they are paid — and can hold their local officials accountable.
Among the leaders who can promote accountability are elected prosecutors. Prosecutors should have the ability to independently investigate and prosecute officer-involved shooting incidents and fatalities, while also implementing practices to identify troublesome police conduct and proactively avoid reliance on officers with credibility concerns. Too many people remain behind bars because this misconduct has gone unchecked for too long; prosecutors should also have conviction integrity processes that correct these past injustices.
The widespread failure to address police misconduct has rightfully fractured trust between law enforcement and the communities they are meant to serve, particularly communities of color. Civil settlements should not be the only recourse for victims of police wrongdoing. But when they are, we should ensure that those responsible for the systemic failures — or for standing in the way of reform — pay the price for the resulting tragedies. And we must implement structural reforms that address the root causes of police misconduct so that we create a justice system that lives up to its name.
 |
|
FOCUS: There Are No Borders in a Climate Crisis |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35861"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, The New Yorker</span></a>
|
|
Thursday, 01 April 2021 11:44 |
|
McKibben writes: "The 'crisis' at the border is dominating the news, and, as my colleague Jonathan Blitzer has written, the immediate focus is on the political battle to prevent Joe Biden from passing meaningful immigration reform."
Unlike climate refugees en route to the U.S., climate change is unconstrained by national boundaries. (photo: Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters)
There Are No Borders in a Climate Crisis
By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
01 April 21
Greenhouse gases will still sail right across even the biggest, most beautiful wall.
he “crisis” at the border is dominating the news, and, as my colleague Jonathan Blitzer has written, the immediate focus is on the political battle to prevent Joe Biden from passing meaningful immigration reform. But this might also be a moment for thinking about what globalism means in a world where borders ultimately can’t offer protection against the most serious threats.
To give an example: owing in part to climate change, there was a record hurricane season last year, with the last two storms, Eta and Iota, striking Central America. As Nicole Narea explained in a recent article in Vox, the Northern Triangle countries—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—have been afflicted by climate-induced drought for a decade, leaving 3.5 million people facing food insecurity, but the floods from those two storms produced even more savage damage. Twelve hundred schools were damaged or destroyed; forty per cent of corn crops and sixty-five per cent of the bean harvest were lost. As a percentage of G.D.P., the damage is greater than that done by the worst storms ever to hit the United States, yet the people of these countries did comparatively little to cause the climate crisis—whereas the four per cent of us who live in this country have produced more greenhouse gases than the population of almost any other nation. So there’s really no way to pretend that migrants arriving at our southern border have no claim on America. Honduras could have built the biggest, most beautiful wall on its northern border, and our CO2 would still have sailed right across it.
And it’s not as if this is an isolated case. As early as 2017, according to the organizers at climate-refugees.org, sixty per cent of displaced people around the world were on the move because of “natural” disasters, not civil conflict. In the past six months, according to the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, about eighty per cent of displacements have been the result of disasters, “most of which are triggered by climate and weather extremes.” As Axios reported last week, using a projection model created by the Times, ProPublica, and the Pulitzer Center, “migration from Central America will rise every year regardless of climate change,” but, “in the most extreme warming scenarios, more than 30 million migrants would head toward the U.S. border over the next 30 years.”
There’s a rough analogue emerging right now around access to COVID-19 vaccines. The U.S. and other rich countries are stockpiling more doses than they need. This is morally dubious; unlike with climate change, we didn’t actively cause other countries’ health crises, but it’s hard to make a case that the people living through them need inoculations any less than we do. It’s also epidemiologically dangerous: if we allow the virus to continue to ravage poorer nations, new variants will keep emerging and keep crossing into privileged ones. “As long as the virus continues to circulate anywhere, people will continue to die, trade and travel will continue to be disrupted, and the economic recovery will be further delayed,” the head of the World Health Organization said recently. According to the Times, for example, “even under the best of circumstances,” just thirty per cent of the population of Kenya will be vaccinated by mid-2023.
We could solve some of these problems by donating lots of vaccine, encouraging cross-national coöperation, and overriding patent protections and other intellectual-property restrictions. That would allow everyone to access cheap versions of these remarkable drugs—just as we need to make sure that the use of solar power and cheap batteries spreads globally, because we can’t solve climate change in one country. The pandemic and climate change are defining events in our century, and it’s useless to pretend that national boundaries are the best way to think about them. Biology and physics are mandating new ideas about human solidarity, and demand action in real time.
Passing the Mic
One of the decade’s key questions is whether large banks can be persuaded to end their lending to the fossil-fuel industry. Two weeks ago, more than four hundred advocacy groups called on the Biden Administration to end public financing for coal, oil, and natural-gas projects. Meanwhile, researchers at the Rainforest Action Network issued their annual report on the private-banking sector. They found that, though financing for fossil-fuel projects dropped a tad during the pandemic, it’s higher now than it was in 2016, shortly after the Paris climate accord. Funding for the hundred fossil-fuel companies with the biggest expansion plans—projects that will build new infrastructure—has actually increased in the past five years. JPMorgan Chase maintains its position as the biggest lender, with Citibank, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America in second, third, and fourth. (Inside Climate News points out that the same banks are also financing food companies implicated in rain-forest destruction.)
The biggest changes need to come from government regulators, but there are lots of interesting ideas for how consumers can avoid aiding climate destruction. A new app from GenE can round up your purchases to the next dollar and donate the change to environmental groups. There are alternatives to regular banking, too. Scheduled to open later this year, in Tampa, is the Climate First Bank, where “eco-conscious customers will find dedicated loan options for solar photovoltaic (PV), energy retrofits and infrastructure.” On the East Coast, the Amalgamated Bank has committed to divesting from fossil fuels; Beneficial State, on the West Coast, is also fossil-fuel-free. (Bank of the West has been positioning itself in the same space, but RAN’s annual report shows that its French parent, BNP Paribas, actually increased fossil-fuel funding by more than ten billion dollars last year.) And there are online banking options, too, such as Aspiration.
Ben Jealous, an Aspiration board member and a leader of the environmental-justice movement, helped highlight the role that banks play when he served as the youngest-ever executive director of the N.A.A.C.P., from 2008 to 2013. He is currently the president of the advocacy group People for the American Way. (Our conversation has been edited for length.)
You’ve been an activist at the highest level. How does banking fit into the effort to fight climate change?
Finance shapes the destiny of the communities we live in and the planet we live on. My great-great-grandfather started a bank shortly after the Civil War to help build strong communities for people like him, who had been recently freed from slavery. It feels good to have another way to help insure that our planet and humanity thrive for generations to come.
Can we actually measure the scale of change: carbon saved, trees planted?
Yes. It starts with measuring dollars moved. This is critical because, while account holders at the major banks may not realize it, most of those financial institutions are financing oil pipelines and other destructive fossil-fuel projects.
We refuse to finance destructive projects like pipelines and offshore drilling. We estimate that, for every dollar you pull out of a big bank and put into a place like Aspiration, you are eliminating up to five pounds of carbon that would have gone into the atmosphere.
Moreover, Aspiration’s Plant Your Change program allows consumers to plant a tree every time they swipe their card. Already, in less than a year’s time, we have funded the planting of five million trees, which has the impact of offsetting the carbon emissions of twenty-three thousand cars.
Between the fossil-fuel-free deposits and the trees planted by Aspiration members, we’ve had up to almost six billion pounds of carbon impact. That’s like taking every car in West Virginia off the road for a year.
And is this just a niche, or are there ways that these signals start to reach the giants at Chase and Citi and so on, who are funding the fossil-fuel industry?
Every time an account holder leaves them to come to us, or any of the small yet growing number of banks who have pledged never to loan one cent to Big Oil and Big Gas, they get that message. Every time the broader anti-fossil-fuel divestment movement we have all helped build announces a new major partner, pulling billions more out of circulation from them, they get that message.
Increasingly, they get that message from their richest customers, too, as more of them are demanding that their dollars be invested in companies that are actually good stewards of our planet. The message is this: the old economy is dying because it was unsustainable. A good economy is coming that will better sustain us all. Join us or be left behind.
It’s the same message my great-great-grandfather sent to his old owners, when he helped start that bank right after slavery ended.
Climate School
We are in a remarkable stretch for environmental journalism. Last week, Jonathan Foley, the executive director of Project Drawdown, listed seven reasons that artificially capturing carbon from the air will not make a major contribution in the climate fight. (The Swedish academics Andreas Malm and Wim Carton offered a European perspective on direct air capture.) Politico’s Michael Grunwald contributed what will likely be the definitive piece on the indefensible idea of burning trees to generate electricity. (“Biomass emits more carbon than coal at the smokestack, plus the carbon released by logging, processing logs into vitamin-sized pellets and transporting them overseas. And solar panels can produce 100 times as much power per acre as biomass.”) Look for a Pulitzer citation for the Tampa Bay Times, for a truly remarkable investigation of the lead poisoning of the workforce at a battery-recycling plant in Tampa. (“It’s not unusual for water to hit liquid lead, triggering violent explosions that send molten metal flying. Scars from lead splashes are so common workers refer to them as ‘tattoos’ and consider them a rite of passage.”) And the Wall Street Journal offered a compelling graphic analysis of how much better electric vehicles are for the climate, noting that “by the time we get to 200,000 miles, the lifespan of a typical car, the emissions comparison isn’t even close.”A Tesla, it turns out, produces less than half the carbon of a comparably sized internal-combustion car.
The United Nations Human Rights Commission has launched an investigation into government suppression of climate protest, inviting people to submit examples. “This repression has taken many forms, from protest bans and laws criminalizing legitimate acts of peaceful assembly, to attempts to paint climate defenders as ‘eco-terrorists,’ to online harassment and physical persecution,” according to the call for inputs. “The COVID-19 pandemic has only amplified the existent restrictions on climate and environmental defenders as states have been enacting emergency measures that further enhance their powers. There is a danger that such new powers and restrictions may outlast the pandemic and may become the new norm.”
A new report from the U.K.-based New Weather Institute, “Sweat Not Oil,” details the sponsorship links between the fossil-fuel industry and athletics. “Sport floats on a sea of sponsorship deals with the major polluters,” Andrew Simms, the report’s co-author, said. “It makes the crisis worse by normalising high-carbon, polluting lifestyles, and reducing the pressure for climate action.”
Visual artists and climate researchers have combined to form a new group, Scientists and Artists for Net Zero. They’re starting their efforts with a letter to John Kerry advocating for a six-month collaboration between scientists, policymakers, and artists to plan for rapid energy transitions—and with a logo employing a new font, Climate Crisis, designed by Finland’s leading newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, which is inspired by melting Arctic sea ice, and can be downloaded here.
Follow-ups: I wrote last year about the emerging Clean Creatives campaign to persuade ad agencies to stop working with the fossil-fuel industry. An article in the Times makes clear that the effort is gaining adherents, citing a major Swedish firm that has sworn off work for oil companies. “There will be a point when it won’t be culturally acceptable to work with these clients,” a principal at a Los Angeles communications firm said. Last week, environmental groups took out a full-page ad in the Financial Times in an effort to pressure the head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, to improve the agency’s annual World Energy Outlook report, which, as I have noted before, has routinely underestimated the power of renewables.
Scoreboard
Last week, Ireland, which has some of the most remarkable climate activists in the world, adopted a plan that calls for a fifty-one-per-cent reduction in emissions from 2018 levels by 2030. That’s one of the most ambitious targets in the world—a decade’s worth of seven-per-cent annual cuts. That legal spur to action is as necessary there as it is in countries around the world, because, as Sadhbh O’Neill writes, in the Irish Times, “We have an impressive record in Ireland of using distant targets as an excuse to postpone action and in the hope that a magical technology will appear, or better still, a different government with fewer financial constraints on public expenditure.”
Matt Leacock, who sold more than two million copies of his board game Pandemic, is hard at work on a new game that tackles the climate crisis. “I’ve got a big opportunity to come up with a coöperative game that makes a difference,” he said. “I don’t want to blow it.”
Methane emissions from the oil wells in Texas’s Permian Basin are back at pre-pandemic levels, after tumbling sixty per cent last spring, when producers shut down wells in the face of plummeting crude-oil prices.
An extraordinary win in the divestment campaign, as the University of Michigan says that it is dropping fossil fuel from its $12.5-billion endowment. Not only is Michigan regularly ranked alongside the (already divested) University of California as one of the nation’s premier public universities but it’s also situated miles from the heart of the auto industry. President Mark Schlissel had refused to divest in 2015. Last week, he told me that “what’s changed for me is my growing appreciation of the long-term financial risks to the university.” Meanwhile, students are embarking on a legal fight to persuade the bitter-enders at Harvard that the time has come to join their peers and divest. And on Wednesday, Amherst College announced that it, too, was phasing out investments in fossil fuels.
Solar power is already the cheapest way to generate electricity across most of the planet, but the Department of Energy announced plans to drive the cost down a further sixty per cent by 2030, to two cents a kilowatt-hour.
Warming Up
The California-based punk band Neighborhood Brats asks a question increasingly on the minds of state residents: “Who Took the Rain?”
|
|
|
The Bigot Party |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51635"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog</span></a>
|
|
Thursday, 01 April 2021 08:15 |
|
Reich writes: "Republicans are outraged - outraged! - at the surge of migrants at the southern border."
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)
The Bigot Party
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
01 April 21
 epublicans are outraged – outraged! – at the surge of migrants at the southern border. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, declares it a “crisis … created by the presidential policies of this new administration.” The Arizona congressman Andy Biggs claims “we go through some periods where we have these surges, but right now is probably the most dramatic that I’ve seen at the border in my lifetime.”
Donald Trump demands the Biden administration “immediately complete the wall, which can be done in a matter of weeks — they should never have stopped it. They are causing death and human tragedy.”
“Our country is being destroyed!” he adds.
In fact, there’s no surge of migrants at the border.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended 28 percent more migrants from January to February this year than in previous months. But this was largely seasonal. Two years ago, apprehensions increased 31 percent during the same period. Three years ago, it was about 25 percent from February to March. Migrants start coming when winter ends and the weather gets a bit warmer, then stop coming in the hotter summer months when the desert is deadly.
To be sure, there is a humanitarian crisis of children detained in overcrowded border facilities. And an even worse humanitarian tragedy in the violence and political oppression in Central America, worsened by U.S. policies over the years, that’s driving migration in the first place.
But the “surge” has been fabricated by Republicans in order to stoke fear – and, not incidentally, to justify changes in laws they say are necessary to prevent non-citizens from voting.
Republicans continue to allege – without proof – that the 2020 election was rife with fraudulent ballots, many from undocumented immigrants. Over the past six weeks they’ve introduced 250 bills in 43 states designed to make it harder for people to vote – especially the young, the poor, Black people, and Hispanic-Americans, all of whom are likely to vote for Democrats – by eliminating mail-in ballots, reducing times for voting, decreasing the number of drop-off boxes, demanding proof of citizenship, even making it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote.
To stop this, Democrats are trying to enact a sweeping voting rights bill called the For the People Act, which protects voting, ends partisan gerrymandering, and keeps dark money out of elections. It already passed the House but Republicans in the Senate are fighting it with more lies.
On Wednesday, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz falsely claimed the new bill would register millions of undocumented immigrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots too.
The core message of the Republican party now consists of lies about a “crisis” of violent immigrants crossing the border, lies that they’re voting illegally, and blatantly anti-democratic restrictions on voting to counter these trumped-up crises.
The party that once championed lower taxes, smaller government, states’ rights and a strong national defense now has more in common with anti-democratic regimes and racist-nationalist political movements around the world than with America’s avowed ideals of democracy, rule of law, and human rights.
Donald Trump isn’t single-handedly responsible for this, but he demonstrated to the GOP the political potency of bigotry and the GOP has taken him up on it.
This transformation in one of America’s two eminent political parties has shocking implications, not just for the future of American democracy but for the future of democracy everywhere.
“I predict to you, your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy?” Joe Biden opined at his news conference on Thursday.
In his maiden speech at the State Department on March 4, Antony Blinken conceded that the erosion of democracy around the world is “also happening here in the United States.”
The secretary of state didn’t explicitly talk about the Republican Party, but there was no mistaking his subject.
“When democracies are weak … they become more vulnerable to extremist movements from the inside and to interference from the outside,” he warned.
People around the world witnessing the fragility of American democracy “want to see whether our democracy is resilient, whether we can rise to the challenge here at home. That will be the foundation for our legitimacy in defending democracy around the world for years to come.”
That resilience and legitimacy will depend in large part on whether Republicans or Democrats prevail on voting rights.
Not since the years leading up to the Civil War has the clash between the nation’s two major parties so clearly defined the core challenge facing American democracy.
|
|
Democrats' Only Chance to Stop the GOP Assault on Voting Rights |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51556"><span class="small">Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic</span></a>
|
|
Thursday, 01 April 2021 08:15 |
|
Brownstein writes: "It's no exaggeration to say that future Americans could view the resolution of this struggle as a turning point in the history of U.S. democracy."
Protesters gather during a rally held by the group Common Cause in front of the U.S. Supreme Court January 10, 2018. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
Democrats' Only Chance to Stop the GOP Assault on Voting Rights
By Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic
01 April 21
If the party doesn’t pass new protections, it could lose the House, Senate, and White House within the next four years.
he most explosive battle in decades over access to the voting booth will reach a new crescendo this week, as Republican-controlled states advance an array of measures to restrict the ballot, and the U.S. House of Representatives votes on the federal legislation that represents Democrats’ best chance to stop them.
It’s no exaggeration to say that future Americans could view the resolution of this struggle as a turning point in the history of U.S. democracy. The outcome could not only shape the balance of power between the parties, but determine whether that democracy grows more inclusive or exclusionary. To many civil-rights advocates and democracy scholars I’ve spoken with, this new wave of state-level bills constitutes the greatest assault on Americans’ right to vote since the Jim Crow era’s barriers to the ballot.
“This is a huge moment,” Derrick Johnson, the president and CEO of the NAACP, told me. “This harkens to pre-segregation times in the South, and it goes to the core question of how we define citizenship and whether or not all citizens actually will have access to fully engage and participate.”
In Georgia, Texas, Arizona, Iowa, and Montana, Republican governors and legislators are moving forward bills that would reduce access to voting by mail, limit early voting, ban ballot drop boxes, inhibit voter-registration drives, and toughen identification requirements—measures inspired by the same discredited claims of election fraud that Donald Trump pushed after his 2020 loss. Earlier this week, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in Georgia, for instance, passed a sweeping bill that would do almost all of those things.
The Supreme Court’s 6–3 conservative majority is unlikely to block many, or perhaps any, of these state laws. As a result, Democrats may have a single realistic opportunity to resist not only these proposals, but also GOP plans to institute severe partisan congressional gerrymanders in many of the same states. That opportunity: using Democrats’ unified control of Washington to establish national election standards—by passing the omnibus election-reform bill known as H.R. 1, which is scheduled for a House vote today, and the new Voting Rights Act, which is expected to come to the floor later this year.
Democrats may have only a brief window in which to block these state-level GOP maneuvers. Typically, the president’s party loses House and Senate seats in the first midterm election after his victory. Democrats will face even worse odds if Republicans succeed in imposing restrictive voting laws or gerrymandering districts in the GOP’s favor across a host of red states.
If Democrats lose their slim majority in either congressional chamber next year, they will lose their ability to pass voting-rights reform. After that, the party could face a debilitating dynamic: Republicans could use their state-level power to continue limiting ballot access, which would make regaining control of the House or the Senate more difficult for Democrats—and thus prevent them from passing future national voting rules that override the exclusionary state laws.
“There’s an increasing appreciation,” Democratic Representative John Sarbanes of Maryland, H.R. 1’s chief sponsor, told me, that “if we can’t get these changes in place in time for the 2022 midterm election, the efforts that Republicans are taking at the state level to lock in this voter-suppression regime” and maximize their advantage via partisan gerrymanders “will reshape the environment in a way that makes it impossible to get this, or frankly many other things, done.”
The outcome in the House for both H.R. 1 and a new VRA isn’t in much doubt. No Democrat voted against either bill when the chamber first passed them in 2019. This year, every House Democrat has already endorsed H.R. 1, ensuring its passage today. Although some Senate observers have questioned whether the moderate Democrat Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, will support H.R. 1’s Senate equivalent, most election-reform advocates I’ve spoken with expect that, in the end, Manchin and every other Senate Democrat will back both voting-rights bills, as they did in the previous Congress.
How far the party will go to make them law remains in doubt, however. Senate Republicans are likely to try to kill these bills with a filibuster. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the principal sponsor of H.R. 1’s Senate analogue, has been urging his colleagues to consider ending the filibuster for these bills alone, even if they are unwilling to end it for all legislation. But so far, at least two Democrats remain resistant to curtailing the filibuster in any way: Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
One White House official, who asked not to be identified while discussing internal strategy, told me that “the president is committed to defending the voting rights of all Americans, and keenly aware of the ongoing threats to those rights.” But several activists and scholars who support the election-reform bills told me they fear that neither the Biden administration nor Senate Democrats are sufficiently worried about the threat to small-d democracy coalescing in the red states. They are especially dumbfounded that Manchin and Sinema—and maybe others—would protect the filibuster on the grounds of encouraging bipartisan cooperation when Senate Republicans would be using it to shield red-state actions meant to entrench GOP control. “What’s the point of being a Democrat if you are just going to let Republicans systematically tilt the playing field so that Democrats can’t win?” Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the centrist think tank New America, told me. “At that point, you should just be a Republican.”
Although Democrats first introduced H.R. 1 and the new VRA long before the 2020 campaign, everything that has happened since Election Day has underscored the stakes in this struggle. The GOP’s state-level offensive amounts to an extension of the assault Trump mounted in the courts, in state legislatures, and ultimately through the attack that he inspired against the Capitol. If nothing else, the GOP’s boldness can leave Democrats with little doubt about what they can expect in the years ahead if they do not establish nationwide election standards. “This is a very brazen effort by lawmakers across the country to enact provisions that make it harder for Americans to vote,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, a counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice who is tracking the GOP’s state-level measures, told me. “There is no subtlety and no attempt to obfuscate what is going on here.”
In its latest tally, the Brennan Center counts 253 separate voter-suppression proposals pending in 43 states. That’s significantly more than the number of bills it tracked after the 2010 election—180 bills, in 41 states—when significant GOP gains in the states triggered a similar wave of laws.
Some advocates remain optimistic that the most extreme proposals (such as repealing some states’ on-demand absentee balloting) will be thwarted by public resistance; many Americans are now accustomed to the expanded voting options that many states have offered amid the pandemic. Such measures can also backfire by angering voters, who then become more determined to cast their ballot. But there’s no question that election law can heavily influence how easy or difficult participation is for voters—particularly low-income, young, and minority voters less attached to the political system. Among the laws under consideration in the states are these:
- On a pure party-line vote, Iowa’s legislature has approved a bill that cuts the number of early-voting days, reduces by one hour how long polls are open on Election Day, and requires all absentee ballots to be received by the time the polls close on Election Day. (The current rule allows all mail-in ballots to be counted so long as they are postmarked within one day of the election.)
- In Georgia, the state Senate approved legislation last month imposing new voter-ID requirements for requesting an absentee ballot, a step that critics say will disproportionately burden low-income voters. A state Senate committee voted Friday to end the policy that automatically registers voters when they obtain a driver’s license or access other government services, and to eliminate the on-demand absentee-ballot system the state has employed since 2005. Earlier this week, the state House approved a bill that would mandate the absentee-ballot voter-ID requirement, curtail the window during which voters can request an absentee ballot and the availability of ballot drop boxes, and retrench early voting on weekends, when Black churches traditionally hold “souls to the polls” mobilizations. Taken together, the state Democratic Party recently calculated, these provisions and others under consideration would outlaw the manner in which more than 2.2 million Georgians cast their ballots in 2020.
- In Arizona, the Republican-controlled legislature is advancing bills that would purge as many as 200,000 people from the roll of voters who automatically receive absentee ballots; reduce the number of early-voting days; impose tougher ID requirements for absentee ballots; require that absentee ballots be mailed by the Thursday before the election and received by the time the polls close on Election Day; and create new reporting requirements for groups conducting voter-registration drives. The purge alone could disenfranchise as many as 50,000 of the state’s Latino voters, Randy Perez, the democracy director at LUCHA, a community-organizing group, told me. “That could be 7 percent of our state’s Latino voters gone in a flash.”
The GOP is on the offensive elsewhere too. Republicans in Montana and New Hampshire are pushing proposals that would make voting more difficult for college students. In Florida, state House Republicans are moving a bill that would require voters to reapply for mail-in ballots more frequently, and Republican Governor Ron DeSantis wants to reduce the availability of drop boxes and create more stringent standards for signature verification on absentee ballots, among other measures. Republican legislators in Texas recently introduced a bill to ban voting at night, after Harris County (which includes Houston) generated huge turnout last year by, in part, holding one session of all-night voting meant to provide access for workers who could not get to the polls at any other time.
In red states, civil-rights and government-reform groups are struggling to combat these restrictions. Courts have uniformly rejected Trump’s illusory claims of fraud, but polls show that the majority of Republican voters believe them—and that’s translated into substantial pressure on GOP legislators to impose new obstacles to voting. “We are getting drowned out,” Perez said. “Every legislator I talk to tells me the same thing: ‘I get thousands of emails a day telling me the election was stolen and I need to fix it.’” Voters, he added, “might be in for a big shock if we can’t stop this.”
Federal courts are unlikely to step in: Although the Supreme Court refused to intervene in the far-fetched efforts of Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election, under Chief Justice John Roberts, the conservative Court majority has consistently refused to block state limits on voting access or to prevent partisan gerrymanders. Critics argue that in the Court’s 2013 Shelby County decision, Roberts fired the starting gun for the current barrage of voter-suppression measures—by eviscerating the provision of the original VRA that required states with a history of discrimination to receive “preclearance” from the Justice Department for changes in their voting laws.
Assessing this turbulent landscape, Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida who specializes in voter turnout, recently concluded: “We are witnessing the greatest roll back of voting rights in this country since the Jim Crow era.”
H.R. 1 would reverse many of the restrictive policies advancing in red states. As I wrote recently, the bill would require all states to provide online, automatic, and same-day registration; ensure at least 15 days of in-person early voting; provide all voters with access to no-excuse, postage-free absentee ballots; and offer drop boxes where they can return those ballots. It would also end gerrymandering by requiring every state to create independent commissions for congressional redistricting and by defining national criteria to govern the process.
Against the backdrop of the red-state voting offensive, the fate of H.R. 1 looks like a genuine inflection point. If Democrats can’t persuade Manchin, Sinema, and any other filibuster proponents to kill the parliamentary tool, Senate Republicans will be able to shield their state-level allies from federal interference. And that could produce a widening divergence between elections in red and blue states—as well as a lasting disadvantage for Democrats in the battle for control of Congress. Such a chasm will fuel “competing narratives that are inherently corrosive and destructive,” Sarbanes told me. “The more you have this bifurcated system of how elections are conducted in this country, the more oxygen you are going to give to some of the conspiracy theories that come from the other side.”
Yet even that equilibrium—with blue states expanding the franchise and red states restricting it—might not be stable. First, voter-suppression laws and gerrymanders in red states could help Republicans regain one or both congressional chambers in 2022. Then, efforts to restrict the vote could help Republicans recapture the presidency in 2024. Today, Democratic governors in key swing states—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—can block any restrictive laws, but if the party loses any of those governorships in 2022, it’ll be virtually powerless to stop new voter-suppression efforts from the Republican-controlled state legislatures.
In that nightmare scenario for Democrats, new laws across the Rust Belt, combined with what’s already happening in Arizona and Georgia, would put enough states at risk to seriously endanger Democratic hopes of holding the White House in 2024. If Republicans win unified control of the White House and Congress that year, they could try to set national voting standards that impose the red-state voting rules on blue states. Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida, for instance, has already proposed legislation that would bar all states from offering automatic voter registration and using drop boxes, and would require them to adopt stiff voter-ID rules. In his speech to CPAC on Sunday, Trump also called for establishing a national voter-ID requirement, as well as rules banning early voting and most mail balloting.
More and more Democrats, Sarbanes said, are coming to recognize that “this isn’t just about trying to do something now that we can do later. This is about doing something now that we may not get the chance to do again for another 50 years.” Democrats face an unforgiving equation: a fleeting window in which to act, and potentially lasting consequences if they don’t. “If you look at all the stakes that are involved,” Sarbanes continued, “the notion that you would miss this opportunity becomes incomprehensible.”
|
|
