Tag Archives: citizen

The Death Rattle of Immigration Reform is Nigh

by NigelG54 Posted on July 9, 2013

Mother Jones

A while back I downgraded my estimate of immigration reform’s chances from 50-50 to about one-third. In terms that Standard & Poor’s would understand, my objective, independent, rating of the bill dropped from BBB to B-. This week, however, it looks as though it’s entering junk bill territory:

The already narrow path to enacting comprehensive immigration reform pretty much disappeared in the past 24 hours.

At the Capitol, House Speaker John Boehner stated a specific policy preference Tuesday that will alienate the entire Democratic Party if he adheres to it….It amounts to a de facto endorsement of the conservative view that any steps to legalize existing immigrants should be contingent upon implementation of draconian border policies. As is Boehner’s custom, it also eschews the word “citizenship,” suggesting that even if Democrats agree to a trigger, he won’t guarantee that it would be aimed at a full amnesty program, and, thus, eventual voting rights for immigrants already in the U.S.

And then there’s this:

This morning, William Kristol and Rich Lowry, the editors of the two most important conservative magazines (the Weekly Standard and National Review) joined together to write an unusual joint editorial titled “Kill the Bill,” coming down in opposition to the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill that passed the Senate. The substance of their argument is familiar to anyone following this debate—the Obama administration can’t be trusted, it won’t stop all future illegal immigration, the bill is too long—but the substance isn’t really important. What’s important is that these two figures, about as establishment as establishment gets, are siding firmly with the anti-reform side.

Why are Republicans backing away from immigration reform? Probably because they never really liked it in the first place. But why are Republicans saying they’re backing away? Partly they’ve taken solace in Sean Trende’s “missing white vote” theory, which suggests that Republicans can gain more by increasing their vote share among whites than they can by appealing to Hispanics. And who knows? That might even be true in the short term. But in the last couple of days, critics have latched onto yet another argument: if President Obama can delay the employer mandate in Obamacare, then he can probably sabotage an immigration bill too if he feels like it. Steve Benen provides the summary:

The talking point appears to have started in earnest with this Washington Examiner piece from Conn Carroll, who argued that the Obama administration delayed implementation of the employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act — a move the right should, in theory, love — which proves the White House shows discretion when it comes to enforcing parts of major laws, which proves Obama might not enforce the border-security elements of immigration reform, which proves Republicans can’t trust him, which proves Congress should kill the bipartisan bill.

….Rep. John Fleming went on quite a rant yesterday, arguing, “Whatever we pass into law, we know he’s going to cherry-pick. How do we know that? … ObamaCare; he’s picking and choosing the parts of the law that he wants to implement. This president is doing something I have never seen a president do before: in a tripartite government with its checks and balances, we have lost the balances. We have a president that picks and chooses the laws that he wants to obey and enforce. That makes him a ruler. He’s not a president, he’s a ruler.”

All the signs of doom are here. Boehner is falling deeper into the tea party rabbit hole every day; the establishment has decided to cut its losses; the intellectual superstructure of opposition is gaining ground; and the hot-air crowd is finding ever more deranged conspiracy theories to rally the troops.

Immigration reform now has a C rating: “Currently highly vulnerable obligations and other defined circumstances.” It’s a hair’s breadth away from a D: “Payment default on financial commitments.” Let the death watch commence.

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The Death Rattle of Immigration Reform is Nigh

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GOP Super-Lawyer Jim Bopp Crashes Press Conference Call About Jim Bopp

by Cletus Posted on July 9, 2013

Mother Jones

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington today filed a whistleblower complaint with the IRS against campaign finance super lawyer James Bopp, the legal genius behind the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which opened the floodgates for corporate money in campaigns. CREW alleges that he’s using a nonprofit organization he controls to divert money into his law firm without paying taxes on it.

Bopp’s Terre Haute, Indiana-based law practice works with clients including the Republican National Committee, the National Organization for Marriage, and a variety of anti-abortion groups. He is also the general counsel to the James Madison Center for Free Speech, a nonprofit legal organization that shares an office with Bopp’s law firm.The Madison Center has only one employee: Bopp himself, and all of the money it raises is used to pay Bopp’s firm. (Much of the complaint seems spurred by this Slate story that detailed the unusual arrangement and which is included as an exhibit to CREW’s complaint.)

CREW sees this arrangement as a clear violation of federal tax law, which bans nonprofits from providing a substantial benefit for private parties. The group finds it especially egregious and possibly criminal that Bopp has signed forms saying that the Madison Center doesn’t employ any independent contractors who make more than $50,000, when it’s paid his firm hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past few years. The fees paid to his firm are listed on the center’s tax returns simply as legal fees, rather than fees to a contractor. CREW also alleges that the board of the Madison Center, which includes Amway heiress and deep-pocketed GOP donor Betsy DeVos, has violated its fiduciary duty by allowing this arrangement. It estimates in its complaint that Bopp is liable for more than $6 million in unpaid excise taxes and other penalties. (CREW has also made complaints against Bopp with the US Attorney in Indiana and the state attorney general.)

Bopp finds most of this preposterous. “I’m the only one that does any work, so I’m the only one that gets paid,” he told me. “I’m not on the board. My firm is hired. The vast majority of things we do pro bono.” He says he’s not worried about the complaint, noting that despite CREW’s long list of complaints filed against various people and organizations, “I can’t find that they’ve ever won one. I’ve represented some of the people they’ve complained about and the IRS didn’t do a damn thing.”

When CREW convened a conference call with reporters today to discuss its complaint, Bopp phoned in to defend himself. “You didn’t ask me questions before you filed this ridiculous complaint,” he exclaimed when CREW’s executive director Melanie Sloan told him to convene a conference call of his own. “So I’m going to answer the questions.” Reporters seemed happy to have him there to respond, but CREW cut him off after he started to dominate the discussion.

While liberals might like to see Bopp slapped down by the IRS, the CREW complaint seems like rather small potatoes, despite the high-profile target. The Madison Center’s budget is relatively small, especially compared to what Bopp makes representing various political groups and the legal fees he recoups in court when he wins First Amendment cases. The center averages a little more than $200,000 in annual income, much of it coming from the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group. If Bopp really were trying to use the nonprofit to avoid taxes, he’s not funneling much of his money through it.

Sloan admits the potential infraction is fairly small, but argues that the size is insignificant. “I grant you it’s not a ton of money, but anybody working in this sphere needs to follow the law,” she says. “People don’t just get to ignore the laws that are inconvenient for them. We have a lot of legal support for our claims. Sometimes I think when you’re as significant a figure as Bopp is, you think the law doesn’t apply to you.”

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GOP Super-Lawyer Jim Bopp Crashes Press Conference Call About Jim Bopp

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How the US Military Keeps Reporters in the Dark

by happyed014 Posted on July 8, 2013

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

There are hundreds, possibly thousands of US personnel—the military refuses to say how many—stationed in the ochre-tinted country of Qatar. Out in the searing heat of the desert, they fly fighter jets or fix them. They equip and arm troops headed to war. Some work in a high-tech command-and-control center overseeing US air operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere in the Greater Middle East. Yet I found myself sitting in a hotel room in Doha, Qatar’s capital, about 30 miles east of al-Udeid Air Base, the main US installation in the country, unable to see, let alone talk, to any of them.

In mid-May, weeks before my arrival in Qatar, I sent a request to the public affairs office at the base to arrange a visit with the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing, the unit that, according to the military, carries out a “criti­cal combat mission that spans nearly 6,000 miles from the Horn of Africa to Northern Afghanistan.” Or at least I tried to. Day or night, weekday or weekend, the website refused to deliver my message. Finally, I dug up an alternate email address and sent in my request. Days passed with no word, without even an acknowledgement. I followed up yet again and finally received a reply—and then it began.

The initial response came on May 28th from the Media Operations Chief at Air Forces Central Command Public Affairs. She told me that I needed to contact the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing’s Public Affairs liaison, Captain Angela Webb, directly. So I repeatedly wrote to Captain Webb. No response. On June 10th, I received an email from Susan Harrington. She was, she told me, “taking over” for Captain Webb. Unfortunately, she added, it was now far too close to my arrival in Qatar to arrange a visit. “Due to time constraints,” she wrote me, “I do not think it will be possible to support this request since we are likely already within that 30 day window.”

Don’t think I was surprised. By now, I’m used to it. Whether I’m trying to figure out what the US military is doing in Latin America or Africa, Afghanistan or Qatar, the response is remarkably uniform — obstruction and obfuscation, hurdles and hindrances. In short, the good old-fashioned military runaround. I had hoped to take a walk around al-Udeid Air Base, perhaps get a glimpse of the jumbotron-sized screens and rows of computers in its Combined Air and Space Operations Center. I wanted to learn how the drawdown in Afghanistan was affecting life on the base.

Instead, I ended up sitting in the climate-controlled comfort of my hotel room, staring at a cloudless sky, typing these words behind double-paned glass that shielded me from the 106 degree heat outside. For my trouble, on my return to the United States, I was detained at Kennedy Airport in New York by agents of the Department of Homeland Security. Their question for me: Was I planning to fight against US forces in Afghanistan?

Base Desires in Africa
If you are an American citizen, you’re really not supposed to know about operations at al-Udeid Air Base. The men and women there on your dime can’t even “mention the base name or host nation name in any unsecured communications.” Instead, they’re instructed to say that they are at an “undisclosed location in Southwest Asia” instead of “the Deid,” as they call it.

It isn’t the only base that the Pentagon wants to keep in the shadows. You’re also not supposed to know how many bases the US military currently has in Africa. I learned that the hard way. As a start, let me say that, officially speaking, there is only a single US facility on the entire continent that the military formally calls a “base”: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, a tiny nation in the Horn of Africa. US Africa Command (AFRICOM) is adamant about this and takes great pains to emphasize it. Internally, however, they do admit that they also have forward operating sites (aka “enduring locations”), contingency security locations (which troops periodically rotate in and out of), and contingency locations (which are used only during ongoing operations). But don’t try to get an official list of these or even a simple count—unless you’re ready for the old-fashioned runaround.

In May 2012, I made the mistake of requesting a list of all facilities used by the US military in Africa broken down by country. Nicole Dalrymple of AFRICOM’s Public Affairs Office told me the command would look into it and would be in touch. I never heard from her again. In June, Pat Barnes, AFRICOM’s Public Affairs liaison at the Pentagon, shot down my request, admitting only that the US military had a “a small and temporary presence of personnel” at “several locations in Africa.” Due to “force protection” issues, he assured me, he could not tell me “where our folks are located and what facilities they use.”

That July, with sparing assistance from AFRICOM, I published an article on “Secret Wars, Secret Bases, and the Pentagon’s ‘New Spice Route’ in Africa,” in which I attempted to shed light on a growing US military presence on that continent. This included a previously ignored logistics network set up to service US military operations, with critical nodes in Manda Bay, Garissa, and Mombasa in Kenya; Kampala and Entebbe in Uganda; Bangui and Djema in the Central African Republic; Nzara in South Sudan; and Dire Dawa in Ethiopia. I also drew attention to posts, airports, and other facilities used by Americans in Arba Minch in Ethiopia, Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, and the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean.

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How the US Military Keeps Reporters in the Dark

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Wall Street Dodges Financial Reform Again

by DorothyUn Posted on July 5, 2013

Mother Jones

The Dodd-Frank financial reform act, the law designed to clean up the abuses that led to the financial crisis, celebrates its third birthday this month. But only about a third of the rules required by the legislation have been finalized so far, and even those are not going into effect as scheduled. This week provided a perfect example of why that is: The Federal Reserve granted Goldman Sachs a two-year extension to implement a key Dodd-Frank rule that would require banks to move risky trading into separate affiliates that are not backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Several other of the nation’s biggest banks won the same exemption last month.

Financial reformers are not shocked. “Quelle surprise!” quips Bart Naylor, a policy advocate at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. “The Federal Reserve decides to heed the crush of Wall Street lobbyists.”

The Dodd-Frank rule, which Goldman Sachs was supposed to implement by July 16, requires FDIC-insured banks to move most of their derivatives trades into separate firms so that when a trade goes bad the bank will have to handle the fallout, not taxpayers. (Derivatives are financial products with values derived from underlying variables, like crop prices or interest rates; they were a major catalyst in the economic meltdown of 2008.) In its request for an extension, Goldman told the Federal Reserve—the main overseer of derivatives dealers—that complying with the deadline would mean the firm would need to either divest or stop a big portion of its swaps trading; a transition period, Goldman said, would be needed to ensure that the rest of the economy is not damaged by the shift. On Tuesday, the Fed agreed.

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Wall Street Dodges Financial Reform Again

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Dark Money Group Spent on House Race, Then Told IRS It Didn’t

by anjunonstennyao Posted on July 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the ProPublica website.

Shortly before Election Day last year, mailers went out to Texas voters featuring pictures of a Democratic congressional candidate and a rare species of spider, whose discovery had forced stoppage of an important highway construction project.

“The same left-wing extremists who support Pete Gallego want more burdensome regulations that put the interests of spiders above our need to create more jobs,” the flier declared, referring to discovery of the endangered Braken Bat Cave meshweaver. “The best way to stop left-wing extremists from killing jobs is to vote against their hand-picked candidate Pete Gallego.”

The group that put out the mailer, A Better America Now, reported to the Federal Election Commission it had spent about $65,000 for the mailer and TV advertising in the hard-fought race to represent Texas’ 23rd district.

But in a tax return recently filed with the IRS, the group claimed it did not spend any money at all on “direct or indirect political campaign activities.”

The tax return is signed under the penalty of perjury by the group’s president, Bob Portrie, and the accounting firm LBA Group. Neither responded to requests for comment.

We first reported on A Better America Now earlier this year, showing it had told the IRS in a 2011 application for nonprofit status that it did not plan to spend any money on elections. (That document was sent to ProPublica last year by the IRS, even though the application was still pending and thus not supposed to be released.)

“This type of inaccurate reporting by electioneering nonprofit groups has a long history,” says Public Citizen’s Craig Holman, when asked about the group’s most recent filing. “It is rooted in the fact that the IRS almost never holds these groups accountable for such false declarations.”

A Better America Now was a bit player in the elections. But it’s also an example of the kind of increasingly common outside groups that inject anonymous money into political campaigns.

Such social welfare nonprofits are not supposed to have political campaign activity as their primary purpose 2014 but the ambiguities around how the IRS measures such activity and how it screens the groups are at the center of the recent investigations of the IRS’s treatment of Tea Party groups.

ProPublica has documented how nonprofits that spent millions of dollars on ads in the 2010 elections failed to report or underreported that political spending to the IRS. The tax form that the groups are required to file with the IRS specifically asks for details on any campaign spending.

One of the curious things about A Better America Now is that, though the group spent money in a congressional and a state legislative race in southwest Texas, it is based a few miles off the beach near Jacksonville, Florida.

The president of A Better America Now, Portrie, is also the head of a consulting firm, the Fenwick Group. The two groups are listed at the same address. Fenwick’s website says it works with “organizations across the healthcare, financial services, insurance, retail and investment sectors.”

Portrie and Fenwick were also linked to ads run by another Florida-based social welfare nonprofit, America is Not Stupid, in last year’s US Senate race in Montana. Ads by America is Not Stupid featured a talking baby complaining about alleged cuts to Medicare by President Obama, and referring to the baby’s stinking diaper.

In 2010, the New York Times reported on links between the Fenwick Group and yet another politically active nonprofit, the Coalition to Protect Seniors. Ads by that group featured the same talking baby ad.

In last year’s race in Texas, which attracted a lot of outside spending on both sides, the Democrat, Gallego, prevailed over Republican incumbent Quico Canseco.

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Dark Money Group Spent on House Race, Then Told IRS It Didn’t

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Republicans Are Missing the Point on Immigration Reform

by Louise6qy Posted on July 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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A couple of weeks ago I speculated about the conventional wisdom that the Republican Party badly needs immigration reform to pass:

I wonder just how many House leaders are truly convinced that the party is doomed without the Hispanic vote anyway? I have a sense that a lot of them are in the process of convincing themselves that this is just a bunch of elite Beltway hooey.

Today, Benjy Sarlin puts some meat on this speculation, reporting that a growing number of mainstream conservatives are starting to move away from the belief that Republicans are in a demographic death spiral if they can’t win more Hispanic votes. Instead, they want to focus on winning a bigger and bigger share of the white vote:

At the moment, the anti-immigration argument appears to be gaining converts fast. On election night, Fox News anchor Brit Hume called the “demographic” threat posed by Latino voters “absolutely real” and suggested Mitt Romney’s “hardline position on immigration” may be to blame for election losses. On Monday, Hume declared that argument “baloney.” The Hispanic vote, he said, “is not nearly as important, still, as the white vote.”

Sean Hannity, a reliable bellwether on the right, has been on a similar journey since the fall. He announced days after President Obama’s re-election that he had “evolved” on immigration reform and now supported a “path to citizenship” in order to improve relations with Hispanic voters. Hannity has now flipped hard against the Senate’s bill.

….A new view on the right is taking hold: Romney lost because he didn’t go after whites hard enough…. Conservative commentators are convincing themselves they can find a few million more whites tucked between the couch cushions—at least enough for one more election. Two columnists have been particularly influential in this regard. Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics has argued that census data shows about 5 million mostly poor and rural white voters were “projected” to vote in 2012 based on population growth and past turnout but didn’t show up to the polls. Byron York, a columnist at the Washington Examiner, published a related piece noting that Romney would have lost even if he had racked up a majority of Latino voters.

Is this plausible? I doubt it. Sure, Republicans can reduce the non-white vote a bit by doubling down on their voter suppression strategy, and it might even work for a while. They might also be able to find some issues that directly boost the white vote by a percentage point or two. But look: Barack Obama almost certainly lost at least a few percentage points of the white vote because he’s black. In 2016, Democrats will have a white candidate, and that will give them a small leg up with the white vote right off the bat. It really seems unlikely that any kind of white outreach program can be so fabulously successful that it will make up for that.

But in a way, this doesn’t matter, because I think Republicans are missing the point. Conn Carroll, for example, tweets this response to Sarlin’s story:

there is no “growing” argument that “GOP should give up on Latino voters.” only the realization that pandering through amnesty won’t work.

In a narrow sense, it’s probably true that Republicans won’t get much credit if immigration reform passes. But that’s not what matters. What matters is that it eliminates immigration as an issue for Democrats. Democrats get tremendous mileage by demonizing Republicans and winning ever greater shares of the Hispanic vote. Once immigration reform passes, they can’t do that. There will always be smaller issues out there, but they just won’t have the same impact as immigration reform. Taking that off the table sucks the air out of the Dem balloon and gives Republicans a better chance of setting the terms of the political debate, both within and without the Hispanic community. That’s why it’s a net winner for them, not because they’ll get “credit” for allowing it to pass.

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Republicans Are Missing the Point on Immigration Reform

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The No-Fly List: Orwellian or Kafkaesque?

by grycjanekg Posted on June 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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A few weeks ago, Rehan Motiwala tried to board a flight home to Los Angeles. Here’s what happened when he changed planes in Bangkok:

Airline staff in Bangkok refused to issue him a boarding pass for his connecting flight. U.S. and Thai officials told him that he could not travel but offered no explanation, leading him to believe he’d been placed on the U.S. government’s secret no-fly list.

After dozing on benches and wandering the airport terminal for four nights, Motiwala was told that a Justice Department official had arrived from the United States to question him. When he declined to answer questions without a lawyer present, U.S. officials left him in the custody of Thai authorities, who tossed him into a detention center in the bowels of Suvarnabhumi Airport.

….Motiwala, whose parents are of Pakistani origin, was not told why he might be on the list. A likely possibility, however, is his contact with Tablighi Jamaat, a conservative Muslim missionary movement based in South Asia.

Obviously Motiwala wasn’t on the no-fly list when he left the country last year, and obviously he was on the list when he tried to return. The lesson is pretty clear: be careful who you talk to, citizen. You really don’t want to get on our list, do you?

The basic outrage here is obvious: in a liberal democracy, no citizen should be subjected to this kind of treatment without due process. And the no-fly list not only doesn’t incorporate due process, it goes out of its way to be the most Orwellian possible denial of due process imaginable. You are on a list. Maybe. But we won’t tell you. How can I get off the list? Well, who says you’re on a list in the first place? But I can’t fly. Sorry, we can’t comment on that. Rinse and repeat.

And here’s what I don’t get: If authorities wanted to question Motiwala, they obviously knew where he was. All they had to do was wait for him to disembark at LAX and take him into custody. So what’s the point? I guess the LAX option doesn’t give them the leverage of throwing him into a rat-infested hellhole if he doesn’t cooperate. Welcome to America.

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The No-Fly List: Orwellian or Kafkaesque?

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Here’s How Texas Republicans Will Crush the Wendy Davis Abortion Filibuster

by y3kyabkl Posted on June 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Update, 5:22 PM EDT: A spokeswoman for Gov. Perry confirmed to Mother Jones that he has called a special session that will begin on July 1. Perry said in a statement, “I am calling the Legislature back into session because too much important work remains undone for the people of Texas. Through their duly elected representatives, the citizens of our state have made crystal clear their priorities for our great state. Texans value life and want to protect women and the unborn.”

Donning pink tennis shoes, Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis (D-Forth Worth) waged an almost 11-hour filibuster Tuesday to thwart a GOP-backed bill that would have shuttered most of the abortion clinics across Texas. The bill was killed, despite efforts by Texas Republicans to throw the rule book at Davis for adjusting her back brace. GOPers also staged a vote approving the bill minutes after deadline, but the vote was too late and didn’t count. But Republicans are not accepting defeat, and an expert on Texas electoral law says the state’s GOPers know that Texas Gov. Rick Perry still has an opportunity to put an identical anti-abortion bill to the floor, in another special session that could be held any time. If that happens, even a state senator as heroic and unwilling to sit down as Davis might not be able to stop the bill from passing.

Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, says, “Republican Senate leaders realized they were on very shaky legal ground” when they declared victory on Senate Bill 5 a couple minutes after midnight—going so far as to change the time stamp on the Legislature’s official web page. “The practical route for them to follow is recognize defeat here, and focus on getting identical legislation passed in the second special session where time will not be an issue like in the first…Davis would need to filibuster for two weeks.”

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Here’s How Texas Republicans Will Crush the Wendy Davis Abortion Filibuster

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Message to Republicans: Don’t Mess With Texas Women on Abortion

by Jeff Howard Posted on June 25, 2013

Mother Jones

Texas Democrats launched a 13-hour filibuster in the state Senate on Tuesday to block a GOP-backed bill that would dramatically limit abortion access in the Lone Star State. The bill bans abortions after 20 weeks gestation, even in cases of rape and incest, and creates strict new building codes for abortion clinics that threaten to shut down nearly all of the state’s providers.

The bill passed through the House on Monday despite a 12-hour delay by Democrats and a citizens’ filibuster that brought hundreds of protesters to the State Capitol in Austin. “I saw the future of Texas last night, and it is not apathetic,” Heather Busby, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, told The Huffington Post. “It is ready for a change.”

State Sen. Glenn Hegar (R-Katy) introduced Senate Bill 5 in a special 30-day session that Texas Governor Rick Perry called, in which only a simple majority is needed to send the bill to the floor instead of the usual two-thirds majority. Today is the last day of the session, so filibustering past midnight will kill the legislation, unless Perry decides to call another session. The bill caps abortion access at 20 weeks, even though the 1973 Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade allows abortions up until the point that a fetus can live outside the womb (which is usually considered to be 24 weeks gestation). A dozen other states have already passed laws banning abortion after 20 weeks, but the laws have been struck down as unconstitutional in Arizona and Idaho.

The bill also requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic. Finally, the bill requires clinics to comply with building codes designed for out-patient surgery centers found in hospitals, a provision that the bill’s opponents say would force most of the state’s remaining abortion providers to close. Only five of the state’s 42 clinics are expected to be able to comply with the new standards—in a state of 26 million people where women already travel an average of 43 miles to get an abortion. Texas clinics have already taken a heavy financial hit in the last two years, as legislators slashed state funds and refused federal Medicaid money in an attempt to shut down Planned Parenthood providers.

Last Thursday, more than 700 protesters, many of them women who had traveled from other parts of Texas, showed up to protest the bill and waited in line to testify for hours. When the chairman tried to end the public testimony, this happened:

State Sen. Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth) is leading Tuesday’s filibuster (in pink sneakers) and is expected to hold the floor and speak—without bathroom breaks—until the Senate adjourns at midnight. This isn’t her first rodeo: In 2011, Davis temporarily stalled a plan from Governor Perry that would have slashed $5.4 billion from public schools, turning her into something of an overnight celebrity. That filibuster, however, was only a little over an hour. According to the Texas Observer, Texas Democrats knew that the abortion bill would pass through the House, but they delayed it Sunday night so that Democrats in the Senate would have time to launch a filibuster.

Senate rules require a 24-hour waiting period before the Senate can debate the bill. So House Democrats hoped to delay SB 5 long enough to give Senate Democrats a chance to filibuster the bill

“There’s an assault on women in this state and this legislation is a prime example of that,” the Senate’s Democratic leader, Kirk Watson (D-Austin) told The Star-Telegram. “It’s important that a woman like Davis who’s the mother of two daughters will be the one standing. We will all be there providing assistance and help.”

The protesters plan to continue to camp out in the capitol building throughout the filibuster.

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Message to Republicans: Don’t Mess With Texas Women on Abortion

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The Best Lines From Ginsburg’s Dissent on the Voting Rights Act Decision

by Aaron Duff Posted on June 25, 2013

Mother Jones

More MoJo coverage of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Voting Rights Act


Supreme Court Hands the GOP a Gift for 2014


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Chief Justice Roberts’ Long War Against the Voting Rights Act


This Study Said the South Is More Racist Than the North


Supreme Court Poised to Declare Racism Over


The Best Lines From Ginsburg’s Dissent on the Voting Rights Act Decision

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a fiery dissent to the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision Tuesday striking down the part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that determines which cities, counties, and states need to seek approval from the Department of Justice before changing their voting laws. The provision was designed to focus attention on areas with a history of discrimination. “Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA,” Ginsburg wrote.

Here are five key excerpts from her dissent:

“When confronting the most constitutionally invidious form of discrimination, and the most fundamental right in our democratic system, Congress’ power to act is at its height.”

“Demand for a record of violations equivalent to the one earlier made would expose Congress to a catch-22. If the statute was working, there would be less evidence of discrimination, so opponents might argue that Congress should not be allowed to renew the statute. In contrast, if the statute was not working, there would be plenty of evidence of discrimination, but scant reason to renew a failed regulatory regime.”

“Just as buildings in California have a greater need to be earthquake­ proofed, places where there is greater racial polarization in voting have a greater need for prophylactic measures to prevent purposeful race discrimination.”

“Congress approached the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA with great care and seriousness. The same cannot be said of the Court’s opinion today. The Court makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled. Instead, it relies on increases in voter registration and turnout as if that were the whole story. See supra, at 18–19. Without even identifying a standard of review, the Court dismissively brushes off arguments based on “data from the record,” and declines to enter the “debate about what the record shows”…One would expect more from an opinion striking at the heart of the Nation’s signal piece of civil-rights legislation.”

“Given a record replete with examples of denial or abridgment of a paramount federal right, the Court should have left the matter where it belongs: in Congress’ bailiwick.”

Ginsburg’s dissent also rattled off these eight examples of race-based voter discrimination in recent history:

“In 1995, Mississippi sought to reenact a dual voter registration system, ‘which was initially enacted in 1892 to disenfranchise Black voters,’ and for that reason was struck down by a federal court in 1987.”

“Following the 2000 Census, the City of Albany, Georgia, proposed a redistricting plan that DOJ found to be ‘designed with the purpose to limit and retrogress the increased black voting strength…in the city as a whole.'”

“In 2001, the mayor and all-white five-member Board of Aldermen of Kilmichael, Mississippi, abruptly canceled the town’s election after ‘an unprecedented number’ of AfricanAmerican candidates announced they were running for office. DOJ required an election, and the town elected its first black mayor and three black aldermen.”

“In 2006, the court found that Texas’ attempt to redraw a congressional district to reduce the strength of Latino voters bore ‘the mark of intentional discrimination that could give rise to an equal protection violation,’ and ordered the district redrawn in compliance with the VRA…In response, Texas sought to undermine this Court’s order by curtailing early voting in the district, but was blocked by an action to enforce the §5 pre-clearance requirement.”

“In 2003, after African-Americans won a majority of the seats on the school board for the first time in history, Charleston County, South Carolina, proposed an at-large voting mechanism for the board. The proposal, made without consulting any of the African-American members of the school board, was found to be an ‘exact replica’ of an earlier voting scheme that, a federal court had determined, violated the VRA…DOJ invoked §5 to block the proposal.”

“In 1993, the City of Millen, Georgia, proposed to delay the election in a majority-black district by two years, leaving that district without representation on the city council while the neighboring majority white district would have three representatives…DOJ blocked the proposal. The county then sought to move a polling place from a predominantly black neighborhood in the city to an inaccessible location in a predominantly white neighborhood outside city limits.”

“In 2004, Waller County, Texas, threatened to prosecute two black students after they announced their intention to run for office. The county then attempted to reduce the avail ability of early voting in that election at polling places near a historically black university.”

“In 1990, Dallas County, Alabama, whose county seat is the City of Selma, sought to purge its voter rolls of many black voters. DOJ rejected the purge as discriminatory, noting that it would have disqualified many citizens from voting ‘simply because they failed to pick up or return a voter update form, when there was no valid requirement that they do so.'”

Read the full dissent here.

This article has been revised.

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The Best Lines From Ginsburg’s Dissent on the Voting Rights Act Decision

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