This Week in Voter Suppression

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

27 August 17

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

et's begin in the failed state of Kansas, whence has come Kris Kobach, the chairman of the president*'s Potemkin voter-fraud commission, leaving behind him a long trail of bright neon clues as to what he's really all about. From the AP Out There:

Only six states, "all among the top 10 in population," discarded more votes during the 2016 election than the 33rd-largest state of Kansas, according to data collected by the bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that certifies voting systems. Kansas' 13,717 rejected ballots even topped the 13,461 from Florida, which has about seven times as many residents. Critics of Kansas' election system argue its unusually high number of discarded ballots reflects policies shaped over several elections that have resulted in many legitimate voters being kept off voter rolls in an effort to crack down on a few illegitimate ones.

You have to give the man credit. He uses every club in the bag very well. Every glitch, an opportunity.

Some Kansas voters "although the exact number is unclear" even went to the polls incorrectly believing they had legally registered, misled by erroneous confirmations the online registration system generated. Emails Kobach's office provided to The Associated Press under an open records request show problems with the online system dated back months before the general election, although state officials did not recognize it as a systemic glitch until the month before the election. The office explained it didn't tell the public about the problem because it had received only "occasional reports of a few people." Instead, county officials were told to only count the ballots of unregistered voters who produced a computer printout of the online confirmation. Anyone without such proof received a provisional ballot, but those were later discarded.

Let's skip on up to Idaho and check out the manner of congressional candidate with whom the unsuppressed voters of that state have been blessed. Step on up, Michael Snyder. And what do you have to perform for us today? From Right Wing Watch:

As well as his work for Charisma, Snyder runs a prepper website called The Economic Collapse and has written a few books, including "The Rapture Verdict," which allows readers to be on the "cutting edge of what God is doing in these last days"; a prepper handbook called "Get Prepared Now"; and a novel set in a post-apocalyptic "near future" containing "explosive truths" that "could literally change the world." In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Snyder called Hillary Clinton a modern-day Jezebel and insisted that the election was God's "final test" for America. In October, he warned that the "elite" might launch an attack on Donald Trump and his family and blame it on a lone wolf, or create a "false flag" event or "some type of event so that they can cancel or suspend the election."

Everybody should have the chance to run for something. It's one of the glories of democracy. But guys that believe they have "explosive truths that could literally change the world" at least should be required to put those truths in their campaign spots. It's only fair.

In April, Snyder took to Charisma to warn of a vision that he said a nine-year-old boy had seen of an asteroid hitting the Atlantic Ocean followed by a nuclear war. "Yes," he wrote, "the most challenging times in all of human history are coming. But for the people of God it will be the greatest chapter of all as multitudes come into the Kingdom even in the midst of all the shaking." Just yesterday, Snyder wondered if an injured bald eagle found in Washington was sent by God as a warning about things like government regulations destroying American freedoms.

Wait. There's going to be a nuclear war after the asteroid hits? Who's going to launch it? Bacteria? And the idea that God is randomly snuffing bald eagles because of the EPA shakes my faith with a great shaking, indeed.

Meanwhile, as we slide across the great divide and into California, we find once we get there that the state's beleaguered Republican Party is eating itself with great gusto, and that the L.A. Times was at the next table, taking notes.

Mayes was one of eight Republicans, seven of them in the Assembly, who helped extend California's premier program on climate change. He defended his decision as a necessary step to increase support for Republicans in a state where voters overwhelmingly back taking action against global warming, but he angered conservative members of the party who viewed the legislation as bad policy and bad politics. Harmeet Dhillon, one of two of the state's representatives to the Republican National Committee, said Mayes had failed to protect "the integrity of the party's position on taxation and overregulation in California."

Of all the state Republican parties that could go cannibal on itself over the climate crisis, California's is the one you'd think of last. Wildfires, mudslides, and on and on. Along with Louisiana, it's one of the American index patients for an ailing planet. Of course, there are always earthquakes, which would make the whole thing moot.

Speaking of Louisiana, Governor John Bel Edwards is actually trying that whole "criminal justice reform" thing that was supposed to be the glory train to bipartisanship, back before we handed the Justice Department over to the likes of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. As the Times-Picayune tells us, the process is achingly slow.

The 16,000 prison terms being reconsidered are for nonviolent offenses only and many will likely remain unchanged, said Jimmy LeBlanc, secretary of the Department of Public Safety and Corrections. For example, some inmates who are serving sentences for multiple offenses won't be affected. Also, the majority of people whose sentences are affected won't necessarily be getting out anytime soon, LeBlanc said. Still, there will be an initial surge in releases from prison right after Nov. 1. About 3,000 to 4,000 of the 16,000 sentences being reviewed could be changed to make inmates eligible for release before the end of the year.

There are also a number of factors unique to Louisiana that complicate the process.

The bulk of Louisiana's state inmates are actually not housed in state prisons at all. About 55 percent of them -- 19,500 inmates -- are kept in local parish jails by sheriffs that get paid by the prison system to house them.

This sounds strange to me. I can't imagine that, if the state prisons are that bad, then the parish jails must be infinitely worse. Then again, it's Louisiana.

And we conclude, as is our wont, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Gravel Dowser Friedman of the Plains brings us yet another tale of how making government smaller makes it…smaller. From Tulsa public radio:

Despite eliminating 480 teaching positions since last year, Oklahoma school districts have 536 teaching vacancies right now. As a result, three in four districts will use more emergency certified teachers this year, and the state is on track to approve a record 1,400-plus emergency certificates by the end of the week. Hime said districts end up investing additional time and money on remedial training for teachers without an education background — and there's another common problem…More than half of districts have increased or will increase class sizes for this year. "And then eliminating fine arts, activity classes or even advanced courses that they can't find teachers in those areas," Hime said. "It's very difficult to find upper-level physics and science and mathematics courses."

Wait. You cut teachers and, suddenly, there are fewer of them? I don't think we need an upper-level mathematics course to figure out how this works.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

Emmanuel Macron Is No Model for Democrats

By Sarah Jones, New Republic

27 August 17

The French centrist is floundering in the polls, a warning for those who want to mimic his politics.

mmanuel Macron has suggested that France still wants a king, and that it “should think and move like a start-up.” In his official portrait, he included two iPhones as “symbolic objects.” At the G-20 summit in Hamburg in July, he reportedly brandished one of the iPhones in an impassioned defense of free trade. He has proposed policies that would weaken unions and is trying to pass an agenda that includes 11 billion euros in tax reductions and 20 billion euros in tax cuts; this would, according to one study, mostly benefit the top ten percent of France’s wealthiest families. He has dropped 26,000 euros on make-up since May, when he made history by winning the presidency as a “neither left nor right” independent candidate.

This is all preferable to the alternative: President Marine Le Pen, and another Western democracy falling to the tide of far-right populism. But Macron’s iPhone-wielding Sun King act contrasts starkly with the praise American liberals and centrists lavished on him. Barack Obama endorsed his candidacy. “Macron proves that that kind of [centrist] agenda, message, and politics can be incredibly powerful and winning,” Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, told the editorial board of USA Today in July. “Macron tapped into populist desire for change against the stale status quo, but he channeled it in a constructive, rather than destructive, direction,” John Avlon enthused at The Daily Beast. “We need an American Macron to lead a new centrist party—America on the Move?” Max Boot tweeted in June.

But say a prayer for Macron’s Jupiterian ambitions, and for the Americans who love him: His low approval rating is now the most exceptional thing about him. It sits at a remarkable 37 percent, pulling him dead even with our very own Donald Trump. “Macron is more unpopular at the three-month point of his first term than any of his immediate predecessors—François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac— were at the same point, according to Ifop, the Paris-based polling firm,” The Washington Post explained. His unpopularity is very good news for Le Pen and her xenophobic party the National Front—and a serious warning to anyone concerned with preventing the rise of the global far-right.

Suave, clean-cut, and well-spoken, Macron the candidate seemed like the product of a centrist basement lab. He never pitched himself as a progressive savior. Instead, he perpetuated a pretense that is popular among a Bloombergian Western elite: that what voters really want is a candidate who combines progressive social positions with an economic agenda that is friendly to corporations and austerity-minded bureaucrats.

His policies, if enacted, would transfer wealth from the French working and middle classes to the upper class, and would only worsen an austerity crisis that he helped create as a minister in the previous government of Francois Hollande, the most unpopular president in French history. “All in all, it’s a program nearly guaranteed to aggravate the problems at the heart of France’s political crisis: unemployment, inequality, and poverty,” Cole Stangler wrote in Dissent in April. “These are the same forces driving growing numbers of French people to withdraw from politics altogether—or worse yet, cast ballots for the National Front.”

If Macron is an avatar for anything, it is not for genuine progress but for the presidency as product placement. A former investment banker, he promotes a soft tech-utopianism that reinforces rather than challenges the very forces that drive inequality and popular disillusionment with Europe’s technocrats. According to The Financial Times, Macron’s premier, Edouard Philippe, laughed at suggestions that Macron’s policies are conservative. “Yes, what did you expect?” he said.

Much of the confusion surrounding Macron stems from a misreading of why he won the presidency and why his new party, En Marche!, won a majority in parliament. Voters were always skeptical of his actual agenda: A third of registered voters refused to vote for either Macron or Le Pen in the presidential runoff, “by far the highest rate in recent presidential elections,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Macron was the beneficiary of the total collapse of France’s two traditional parties, including the Socialist Party, which swept into power in 2012 on promises of taxing the wealthy and rolling back Berlin’s punishing austerity regime, only to crater when Hollande changed course and became a dogged supporter of austerity.

Macron was able to position himself as a political outsider, a man apart from France’s loathed political establishment—never mind that he served in Hollande’s administration, first as deputy secretary-general of the Élysée, then as minister of economy and finance, and in both positions established himself as an ally to the finance industry. Contra his maverick branding, he is not a real political outsider. His abysmal poll numbers are only the most obvious sign that his approach to politics is deeply, depressingly familiar. Marketing may put you in office, but it can only get you so far. You also need a philosophy, and Macron’s is intellectually and morally bankrupt.

There is no exact American analogue to Macron right now. Democrats and Republicans are both distrusted but there is no indication yet that a majority of voters would consider voting for a third party. But within the Democratic Party a similar choice is taking shape between a genuine vision for change and a centrist status quo—as well as a similar risk of producing a Macron-like presidential candidate in 2020.

On the one hand, Democrats have reason to hope. Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, consistently tops popularity polls. Single-payer health care, one of his signature issues, is increasingly popular too; Rep. John Conyers’ Medicare for All bill boasts the most co-sponsors it’s had since he started introducing it in 2003. The party’s platform now backs a $15 minimum wage. Democrats promising increased public spending—on public schools, specifically—just flipped two deep red seats in the Oklahoma legislature, and a Sanders supporter flipped a similar seat in the New York State Assembly in May.

It’s still too early to tell how successful a progressive populist strategy will be—populists lost special elections in Montana and Kansas, for example—and a populist candidate can’t immediately solve years of Republican efforts to gerrymander districts and suppress the vote. But the evidence strongly suggests there is a hunger for something bold and new.

On the other hand, there are plenty of reasons to worry. Despite the zeal of its base, which has led to competitive races across the country, Democrats are lagging behind Republicans in fundraising. The party’s leadership is ambivalent about the party’s platform, and has suggested it will compromise on social issues like abortion. Centrist groups like FTW and New Democracy and Third Way have sprung up alongside progressive alternatives like Our Revolution, and they boast the support of big names in official Democratic circles. Like Macron, the party has positioned itself as the only sane alternative to a right-wing fascist; but like Macron, the actual contours of its agenda are mostly vague, and when they are discernible they often reveal an overarching commitment to the status quo.

The lessons of Macron’s young presidency are clear. After decades of rising inequality, after years of inadequate and often counterproductive responses to the financial crisis, voters want real change, of the kind that strengthens entitlements, not weakens them; that makes it harder for corporations to lay off workers, not easier; that will raise taxes on the rich, not coddle them. An American Macron cannot fill that role; worse, it could play right into the hands of those on the right who are working toward a very different kind of change. Macron’s struggles reinforce a conclusion that has been a long time coming: Democrats must move left. And fast.