News & Comment

When I hear conservatives like Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant, Alabama State Senator Scott Beason, and Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Representative Mike Turzai try to rationalize their bid to disenfranchise minority, elderly, and student voters, I pivot quickly to memories of the terror I witnessed in the early 1960s. At that time, just out of high school, I joined the Southern civil rights movement's efforts to register hundreds of thousands of black Mississippians. read more »

For once, the Republicans were right. They have been obsessively claiming that voter-suppression measures are necessary because of widespread “ballot fraud.” However extensive investigations by the mainstream media have shown that ballot-fraud is a convenient myth. Even the Bush administration, in an extensive five-year search, turned up no evidence of the kind of voting fraud—fake IDs, voting in the name of dead people, folks being bribed to vote—that the Republicans routinely allege. Now, however, Republicans can claim some vindication. Serious voter fraud has emerged in Florida. But the ballot fraud is being perpetrated by Republicans! read more »

Golly, I'm so old I can remember when the Republicans used to go into a fugue state and start speaking in tongues upon hearing tales of Democratic campaign organizers offering free cigarettes to homeless people to get them them to vote: read more »

President Barack Obama has received unexpected help from the unlikeliest of quarters: The Republican National Committee. Devoted to bashing Obama, the RNC gave the president’s reelection campaign a political contribution of sorts by insisting that state parties, such as Florida’s, hire a vendor that’s now under investigation for voter-registration fraud by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in as many as 10 counties involving at least 220 suspect forms. Remember all that talk from Republicans about voter fraud? Well, it ain’t just for ACORN anymore. Now, instead of being on offense against Obama, Republicans are playing defense over voter-registration fraud. Some organized Republican voter-registration drives have virtually ground to a halt as Republicans fired the firm, Strategic Allied Consulting, in seven battleground states. It’s such a mess that the Republican Party of Florida has filed an elections complaint against the Strategic Allied Consulting, which then turned around and bashed…. The Republican Party of Florida. read more »

The American experiment began on an exclusive note: only white male property owners who paid taxes, met religious prerequisites, and were 21 or older were allowed to vote. The next 200 years saw a fight over the franchise that pitted progress (elimination of religious tests and property requirements, passage of the Fifteenth Amendment) against reaction (Jim Crow literacy tests, poll taxes and grandfather clauses). It was only in the twentieth century that Native Americans, African-Americans, women and 18-year-olds were accorded the place in the democratic process that should have been theirs at the founding of the Republic. What is so alarming about voting in the twenty-first century is that the forces of reaction are again on the march. Unsettled by their inability to “manage” an expanded and changing electorate, the corporations that fund the American Legislative Exchange Council and other right-wing groups are waging a war on voting. read more »

It's a lot easier to talk about a law—and pass one—than to implement it. Just ask Pennsylvania lawmakers—and Pennsylvania citizens, and judges, and voting-rights activists.  The state's voter ID law, passed by Republican lawmakers in March, is best known for threatening to disenfranchise more voters than laws in any other stae. But in mid-August, Pennsylvania Judge Robert Simpson refused to grant an injunction to stop the state from implementing the law in November. The judge said that he believed state officials' assurances that they had plans in place (though some were still not in action) to prevent widespread disenfranchisement.  Those promises are not enough for the state supreme court. read more »

You already know that President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have radically different positions on Medicare, abortion rights and rebuilding the economy. What’s less clear is how effectively they’ll be able to implement their agendas. While the makeup of the next Congress remains unknown, a recent report from the Center for American Progress (and a nifty corresponding infographic, below) lays out what a single Obama — or Romney — appointee could mean for some of the Court’s most contentious rulings. Chief among them? Citizens United. It was, after all, only a 5-4 vote that allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. An Obama second term — and his third SCOTUS appointment — could mean the highly polarizing, highly influential case might be reconsidered — and overruled. read more »

The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and Jamie Raskin, constitutional law professor and Maryland state senator, join Bill to discuss how the uncontested power of the Supreme Court is changing our elections, our country, and our lives. The two joined forces for a special upcoming issue of The Nation entitled “The One Percent Court.” “We wanted to bring attention to how this court has empowered the 1% at the expense of the 99%,” says vanden Heuvel. “How it is now working for big business, for corporate power against the interests of ordinary citizens in this country.” read more »

The problem in America’s democracy that Citizens United has come to represent can be simply stated: The People have lost faith in their government. They have lost the faith that their government is responsive to them because they have become convinced that their government is more responsive to those who fund your campaigns. As all of you, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike, find yourselves forced into a cycle of perpetual fundraising — spending anywhere between 30 percent and 70 percent of your time raising money to get back into office or to get your party back into power — you become, or at least most Americans believe you become, responsive to the will of “the Funders.” But “the Funders” are not “the People.” read more »

One of the oldest dirty tricks in politics is running candidates in your opponent’s primary to distract them from the general or even potentially knock them out entirely. The FBI is reportedly investigating Rep. David Rivera for backing a fake Democrat with envelopes stuffed with cash, and Republicans in Wisconsin openly supported “fake Democrats” there in order to give Gov. Scott Walker an edge in the election’s timing. But the rise of super PACs has opened up a new venue for this tactic, allowing operatives to anonymously deploy hundreds of thousands of dollars of ads while deceitfully pretending to be partisans of the other side. read more »