A New Movement Can Help Reboot America’s Voting System

(TakePart)  Earlier this week, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for bold reforms to America’s voting system. She suggested that all Americans be automatically registered to vote at age 18, and that voting privileges be extended to ex-felons. She also called for the full restoration of the Voting Rights Act, which lifted many of the barriers to black people participating in our democracy.

Clinton’s remarks underscore the need for voters of color to be engaged—and, ultimately, increase our participation in the political process. Republican-controlled state legislatures are promoting various measures—such as requiring voter identification cards—to limit the risk of voter fraud. The truth is, voter fraud rarely occurs.

State of Black America report: Blacks are treated 72 percent equal to whites

(theGrio)  The U.S. economy is rebounding, the stock market is thriving, and unemployment is down to levels not seen since the Great Recession. But how is black America doing these days? Not well.

This week, the National Urban League released its 39th annual State of Black America report. And according to the civil rights organization, there is something we should know — black America is in a state of crisis.

The report — available for the first time exclusively in E-book form — provides a detailed and sobering assessment of where African-Americans and Latinos stand with regard to injustice and inequality. Among the major topics covered are civic engagement, criminal justice, education, employment, healthcare, housing, income and poverty. The report was unveiled at a press conference Thursday in Washington, DC.

Fifty Years After Selma, America Retreats On Civil Rights

(The Progressive) Half a century after the Selma march, the United States is turning its back on civil rights.

March 7 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the historic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Depicted in the highly acclaimed recent movie “Selma,”the brutal police assault on nonviolent protesters became a turning point in the civil rights movement and a factor leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Today, the political heirs of those who stood in the way of equality back in the 1960s are doing whatever they can to roll back these gains.

Fifty years after Mississippi murders, America retreats on civil rights

Fifty years ago this month, three young civil rights workers were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan near Philadelphia, Miss. One was an African-American, and the other two were Jewish-Americans. Their last names — Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner — stand for the martyrdom of that era.

On June 21, 1964, James Chaney, 21, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, were murdered while in Mississippi to register African-Americans to vote during Freedom Summer. The men, all members of the Congress of Racial Equality, were investigating the burning of a black church when they were stopped and jailed by a deputy sheriff who was a member of the Klan. The three were released on bail but later shot to death by a lynch mob of Klan members, who buried them in an earthen dam.

50 years later, the Civil Rights Act would not pass

On this Independence Day — as we celebrate the struggles that were fought and the sacrifices that were made in the name of freedom — we also commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The landmark legislation was one of the most important laws in this nation’s civil rights history.

And sadly, the Civil Rights Act wouldn’t stand a chance of passing in today’s harsh political climate.

Continue reading

A civil war rematch over voting rights

Today in the Guardian I discuss the current Republican war on voting rights taking place in the South.  

Nearly 150 years after the end of the US civil war, the South and the federal government are poised for a rematch over the voting rights of black Americans, and ultimately over the fundamental rights of all Americans. Once again, the former Confederate states are determined to defend their traditions and way of life, while the Union forces in the North – the federal government – are positioning themselves to defend justice and equality.

But this time, in an ironic twist, two black men – President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder – are leading the charge.

Click HERE for more.

Trayvon to Voting Rights: Blacks Screwed by 2010 Election

This week I spoke with Denis Campbell, publisher of UK Progressive magazine and the host of Worldview, based in Wales.  We talked about a number of things, including the Trayvon Martin murder trial, the Voting Rights Act, Republican obstruction and my article in theGrio on the impact of the 2010 election on African Americans.  Watch below or follow the link:

This week in theGrio: Secret Spying Court and Racist Ron and Rand Paul

Check out these latest pieces from me in MSNBC's theGrio this week:

The first deals with the African American judge who presides over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret Supreme Court that rubber stamps the government's efforts to get into our business.  Click HERE for more.

The second story is a look at the racist history of libertarian-conservative politicians Ron and Rand Paul, and how Rand's affiliations with a neo-Confederate admirer of John Wilkes Booth could damage his presidential chances in 2016.  Click HERE for more.

Supreme Court Throws Voting Rights Act Under the Bus

It is no understatement to say that the U.S. Supreme Court committed a crime of the highest proportion when it decided to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a few days ago. The victory for gay marriage and against DOMA was bittersweet, given a disappointing voting rights decision in the same week.

The lesson learned from the high court’s opinion in Shelby County v. Holder is clear: Don’t look to the federal government to protect your voting rights, which you no longer have, in any case. The extreme majority on the Supreme Court cares little to nothing about you. And as for the states, it’s Jim Crow all over again. States, do what you will. Disenfranchise black voters if that suits you. Give them literacy tests and block their votes. Make them tell you how many bubbles are in a bar of soap in order to register. This was a clear victory for states’ rights and for the Old Confederacy and those who waved and continue to wave the Stars and Bars with prideful glee.

And this was a victory for Bull Connor and the domestic terrorists who killed Medgar Evers and those four little girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. And it was a big win for the murderers of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Cheney in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and those who killed and maimed countless others for the right to vote.

Essentially, the Supreme Court eliminated Section 4 of the Act, which determines which states fall under the preclearance requirement of Section 5. I suppose none of this matters anymore, but under Section 5, certain jurisdictions with a history of voter disenfranchisement against African Americans were required to seek permission from the federal government or a federal court before making changes to their election laws. In recent years, the Voting Rights Act was invoked to put the brakes on voter suppression efforts in South Carolina and Texas. Now, with no more Voting Rights Act, these states are free to pursue their Voter ID schemes with reckless abandon. That goes for other states as well. No need to ask the feds for permission.

The Voting Rights Act covered nine states  -  Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia  -  and numerous other counties and localities across the nation.

It is clear that when you look at map of places covered by the Voting Rights Act, you’re essentiallylooking at the South. Law professors Christopher Elmendorf and Douglas Spencer at the University of California, Davis and the University of Connecticut, respectively, conducted a study on which states exhibit the most anti-black prejudice. Under their study, the professors asked nonblacks to rate blacks and their own racial group concerning work ethic, intelligence and trustworthiness. The professors found that the states requiring preclearance under the Voting Rights Act closely mirror the most racist states under their research. In other words, welcome to Dixie. There’s a little Alabama in places such as Pennsylvania and other “Up South” states, but this is a South-dominated phenomenon.

Known for its culture of violence and dehumanization of people through slavery and segregation, the South is also home for much of the so-called Bible Belt, as well as the Death Belt, where the lion’s share of America’s executions take place. But that’s the subject for another story.

Nevertheless, despite the abundance of evidence pointing to the continued need for the Voting Rights Act - including the protracted nature of racism in this country, and the prolonged threat to the franchise in the land of the free - the Tea Party justices would have you believe that we live in a colorblind society where racism no longer exists. And their evidence is because they said it is so.

Writing for the five justices in the majority - including himself and Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito - Chief Justice John Roberts proclaimed that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional because Congress did not revise the formula subjecting jurisdictions to preclearance. And after all, things have changed, right? Look at all the black people who are voting!

“Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically,” wrote Roberts. “In the covered jurisdictions, “[v]oter turnout and registration rates now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels…. The tests and devices that blocked access to the ballot have been forbidden nationwide for over 40 years.”

Roberts continued, “There is no denying, however, that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions. By 2009, ‘the racial gap in voter registration and turnout [was] lower in the States originally covered by section 5 than it [was] nationwide.’”

“Since that time, Census Bureau data indicate that African-American voter turnout has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six States originally covered by section 5,with a gap in the sixth State of less than one half of one percent,” he added.

Meanwhile, for proof that voter suppression of people of color and others still exists, just remember all of the states which have enacted or tried to enact voter ID laws. Certainly the Voting Rights Act has protected voters from discrimination at the ballot box, an argument for protecting the law itself. “The sad irony of today’s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her dissent on behalf of Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan. “The Court appears to believe that the VRA’s success in eliminating the specific devices extant in 1965 means that preclearance is no longer needed.”

Clarence Thomas, that cruel joke of a gift from Poppy Bush that just keeps on giving, wrote in his own concurring opinion that section 5 of the VRA is unconstitutional as well. “As the Court aptly notes:’[N]o one can fairly say that [the record] shows anything approaching the ‘pervasive,’ ‘flagrant,’ ‘widespread,’ and ‘rampant’ discrimination that faced Congress in 1965, and that clearly distinguished the covered jurisdictions from the rest of the Nation at that time.’” Thomas wrote. “Indeed, circumstances in the covered jurisdictions can no longer be characterized as ‘exceptional’ or ‘unique.’ The extensive pattern of discrimination that led the Court to previously uphold section 5 as enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment no longer exists.”

Thomas plays a particularly shameful role in this case and on the Supreme Court in general, as the descendant of slaves who believes that no African American is a victim unless their name is Clarence Thomas, and the venue is a high-tech lynching before the U.S. Senate.

Thomas has shown nothing but contempt for the civil rights establishment and black people in general, and yet he owes so much to the movement that paved the way for him. He is one of the most powerful people in America, selected by the President and confirmed by the Senate, yet he accuses Obama of elitism. He depended on the patronage of white Republicans who took a liking to him, yet he demands that everyone else pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Justice Thomas was a beneficiary of affirmative action, yet in his concurring opinion in the recent Fisher v. University of Texas affirmative action case, he condemned programs of inclusion. “Slaveholders argued that slavery was a ‘positive good’ that civilized blacks and elevated them in every dimension of life,” Thomas wrote. “A century later, segregationists similarly asserted that segregation was not only benign, but good for black students.”

Most of all, Clarence Thomas is a key player of the destruction of the civil rights legacy of Thurgood Marshall and others. And this small, bitter, wayward man takes glee in gutting a law that came from the blood of peaceful civil rights protestors beaten by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and through the lynching of Viola Liuzzo by the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. His court is in league with the Dred Scottand Plessy courts, and for this he can never be forgiven.

Let’s make it clear: Republicans have been jonesing for a repeal of the VRA for awhile, as they have suppressed the votes of Democratic constituents and redistricted themselves into perpetual rule, despite the demographic browning and blackening of America. They don’t want black and Latino votes and couldn’t win them if they wanted to, so why not change the electorate from the one you cannot win with to the one you can?

Since an African American came to the presidency, conservatives have decided to give this whole voting thing a critical eye.

The pathway to restoring the VRA is leadership from President Obama and action from Congress. However, don’t expect anything from this partisan Tea Party Congress, which in collaboration with SCOTUS have brought us to the end of voting rights in America. And so the crooks have changed the law to justify their own theft.

Ultimately, our only hope is in next year’s midterm election. Vote.

Scalia's shameful stance on the Voting Rights Act

From theGrio:

On Monday at the University of California Washington Center, the high court judge said that the law an “embedded” form of “racial preferment.”  According to Scalia’s interpretation, the Voting Rights Act was enacted as an emergency measure, but now amounts to a federal racial preference system for black people that discriminates against whites.

“Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes,” Scalia said. “Even the name of it is wonderful, the Voting Rights Act. Who’s going to vote against that?”

Read MORE.

It's the Old South vs. the New South

The American South can't seem to shake off the Civil War.  Or Jim Crow.  And yet, that region of the U.S. is undergoing some dramatic changes.  How the South responds to these changes will determine how easily it will enter the modern world and usher out the racial demons of its past.

Latinos are on the rise in the new South, with the nation's fastest growing Hispanic populations in the states of the former Confederacy.  Georgia and North Carolina are now among the ten largest Latino communities in the nation.

Further, African Americans are coming back home to the region, reflecting the nation's largest demographic shift.  The South now has its highest share of black folks in half a century.  As northern states and California have witnessed a loss in their black populations, Atlanta has gained half a million black people in a decade.  The largest black city after New York is no longer Chicago, it is Atlanta.

The migration of Latinos and the reverse migration of blacks mean that people of color are poised to become a majority in some areas of the South, as is the case in Texas.  Add to that the influx of white professionals and high-tech workers in states such as North Carolina -- a red state that Obama turned blue in 2008 -- and you have the makings of noticeable change.

Then again, you have Alabama.  After the state enacted the harshest anti-immigration law in the land, Latinos are leaving Alabama.  Now, farmers are hoping to replace migrant workers with prisoners to work the fields because, after all, we know how forced agricultural labor worked out the first time around.

Alabama, as an aside, has a majority black prison population.  African-Americans are 27 percent of the population and 63 percent of the prisoners.   The state is 23rd in the nation in population, but was second in the number of executions in 2011.  And over the past decade, nearly two dozen death penalty cases were overturned because prosecutors illegally struck black jurors.

Last year, like Alabama, South Carolina also passed its own bad anti-immigration law -- modeled after Arizona's SB 1070 -- key parts of which were thrown out by a federal judge in Charleston.  And the U.S. Department of Justice blocked the state's new voter ID law, which would require voters to present a photo idea at the polls, and discriminate against racial minorities in the process.  Under the Voting Rights Act, states such as South Carolina and Texas, because of their history of racial discrimination, require federal approval of any changes to their election laws.

The old South meets the new, as South Carolina's Governor Nikki Haley signed both of these cruel, atrocious pieces of legislation into law, and vows to fight in court to have them upheld.  Governor Haley is the children of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India.  The Sikh-American community has endured its share of discrimination in the post-911 era, branded as terrorists and persecuted for the traditional turban and beard worn by Sikh men. 

And so, a woman of South Asian ancestry, a person of color and darling of the Tea Party, has chosen to channel the angry white segregationist governors that came before her.  Some names that come to mind are George Wallace of Alabama, who stood in the schoolhouse door to block black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama; Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi, who kept blacks from voting, and Ross Barnett, who denied James Meredith, an African-American, admission to the University of Mississippi. 

Haley's policies, not unlike those of her predecessors, are the unjust laws that Martin Luther King discussed in Letter from Birmingham Jail.  As King said, "Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. ... An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal."

Even today, such laws are designed to keep communities of color isolated, scared and disempowered, down and out of the process.  That the dominant party in the South has changed its affiliation from Democratic to Republican since the Civil Rights era really is beside the point.  The old mentality remains.  We're talking old South vs. new South, a steadfast resistance to civil rights, and clinging to a segregationist mindset, even well into the twenty-first century.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, a black man named Troy Davis was executed last year under the rules of the old South -- a justice system of mob rule, in which racial vengeance and scapegoating take precedence over guilt or innocence.  In the end, what mattered was not the evidence pointing to Davis's innocence, or the seven out of nine witnesses who recanted or changed their testimony, but rather that the victim was a white police officer and Davis was a black man.    

Although I was born and raised in New York and now live in Philadelphia, I always regarded the South as a second home, if not something of an ancestral homeland.  My mother was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and my late father was from Augusta, Georgia.  I have lots of family there, not to mention fond childhood memories of visiting cousins.  Many good people in the South, to be sure, but there's a great deal of ugly in the South. 

The problem arises when some people can't pick a century to live in and stick with it.   

Draconian laws could disenfranchise 5 million voters

Voting is supposed to be a right in this country, but many states are sabotaging that right.

According to a new report released by the Brennan Center for Justice, a number of states have passed new laws that block people from registering to vote. Some of these states have gone to ludicrous lengths to deny the franchise to their citizens.

Read more of my article at the Sacramento Bee

Voter ID Is the GOP's "Block the Vote" Effort for 2012

When Newt Gingrich suggested that America impose a poll test in U.S. history as a requirement for native-born citizens to vote, it was too much even for black Tea Party Congressman Allen West (R-FL). "That's going back to some times that my parents had to contend with," West said of the notion of a Jim Crow-style literacy test. "I think that we need to do a better job educating our young men and women in school, but we don't need to have a litmus test, no."

For Gingrich, who recently called Obama a "food stamp president," this is part of a pattern of racially offensive remarks, policy positions and affiliations -- against African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims and others. But Gingrich is merely a spoke in the wheel. There is nationwide effort by the Republican Party to suppress voter turnout in next year's presidential election. Devoid of any ideas to beat Obama and win over the electorate, and crippled by a roster of candidates consisting of empty suits, wingnuts and the otherwise unelectable, this is their election strategy for 2012.

And it is a game-plan perfected by Dixiecrats in the days of segregation, and for the same reasons. Segregationists employed the poll test, poll tax, threat of physical violence and other tactics to keep blacks out of the political process and maintain Jim Crow rule. Such a regime would become untenable once African-Americans were able to exercise their right to vote, and the racists in power knew that.

In a healthy, authentic democratic system, we benefit from broad and inclusive participation. Sadly, throughout this country's history, this land of the free, the right to vote was secured for more and more people through protest. People were compelled to struggle for the franchise through hardship, bloodshed, and in some cases martyrdom.

As the party of the Southern Strategy from the 1960s onward, the GOP assumed the mantle of white Christian conservatism, and with it, a mindset characterized by racial resentment over the gains of the civil rights movement, and the continued presence of blacks, Latinos and others. This resentment was then disguised as opposition to taxes, social programs and big government, on the grounds that people of color benefited more from these programs.

Often an effective means to divide and conquer in the short term, the Southern Strategy has revealed its fatal flaw: In an increasingly diverse nation such as the U.S., Republican dependence on a dwindling demographic of angry, rightwing Tea Party folks for their electoral victory leaves them with only one of two options: Fade into oblivion, or, as thugs would do in corrupt regimes and banana republics, suppress the vote. And that's why the GOP, predicting their own failure to prevail on the merits of their positions before a national audience, has taken it to the gutter.

This time, it's called Voter ID. This year, conservative lawmakers in 20 states such as Montana, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin are pushing bills that would require voters to produce an ID, typically a driver's license, state-issued ID, passport, Legislation recently passed in the Florida and Texas legislatures, and the governors of Kansas and South Carolina just signed Voter ID bills into law. And 13 of 27 states that already have such a law are considering beefing up their requirements.

The stated reason for the need for such laws is the ever-present scourge of voter fraud. But as the Brennan Center for Justice points out, fraud is extremely rare, the way that being struck by lightning is rare, except that voter fraud is even less common. Moreover, these policies, which are costly to implement, would disenfranchise millions of voters without tackling any real problem.

But for Republicans, there is an unstated problem that the Voter ID bills address -- those pesky black and Latino voters who have the nerve to want to go out and vote, not to mention those seniors, people with disabilities, low-income voters, and students. These groups are less likely to possess a government-issued ID. And it is no accident that they are traditional Democratic constituencies, so this law is for them. And to that end, the GOP plays the role of the bully who beats you up every day and takes your lunch money.

In a normal world, when you want to win an election, it's all about "Get Out The Vote" efforts. But when your goal is to snatch victory from the gutter, "Block The Vote" will do.

The Tea Party Spirit Is Corroding Public Discourse In America

When we witnessed the spectacle of the anti-Obama protesters at the McCain-Palin rallies in 2008, we should have realized they wouldn't go away without a fight. And after Obama won the presidency, well, it was clear that some people had lost their minds. Aggrieved, angry and racist, some working class white folks threw a collective temper tantrum. The mobs of angry unwashed masses assembled, and the result is the Tea Party.

But of course, it isn't quite as simple as that. This lynch mob is a perfect example of top-down, corporate sponsored outrage. Rich benefactors such as the Koch Brothers joined with lobbyists and the Republican Party to help create the Tea Party and harness its energy for their own nefarious purposes. In the end, a "movement" which appears angry and populist is in reality a front group for the worst, most regressive oligarchic policies. And the people who are chosen to do the bidding of these wealthy interests, the candidates for office in this election season, are the most amazing assemblage of crackpots, extremists and white supremacists. They found their opening in the Great Recession the GOP created. Moreover, they capitalized on the missteps of an Obama administration that, however noble its intentions, cozied up too much with Wall Street, failed to attack the jobs problem right away, and wasted too much time appeasing fascists across the aisle who awoke daily praying for the demise of this president. Add to that a half-stepping stimulus program that steered us clear of a depression, but was not nearly enough to get the nation out of the morass.

The Tea Party is not merely a subsidiary of the GOP. It is the GOP. The Tea Party and the Republican Party are one and the same. The Tea Party is the base, and yet the base is all that is left, due to the years of Lee Atwater's race baiting that drove away all the people who are free from mental defect.

Some media outlets have declared the results of this election a foregone conclusion. And while a Republican victory across the nation is a possibility, we really don't know until we know. However, what we do know is that in this campaign season, the Tea Party has scored a victory. Whether they win an election or not, they have succeeded in contaminating the waters. The Tea Party is a corrosive acid that is eating away at the public discourse.

And the spirit of the Tea Party is one which has no shame in its game. It is a hateful and heartless spirit that strives to elevate demagogues, bullies and criminals. In this political environment, some people believe they can say or do whatever comes to mind. One Tea Party group has called for the ouster of a Congressman Keith Ellison not because of his stance on the issues, but because he is a Muslim. Carl Paladino, the Republican gubernatorial candidate from New York, recently went on a homophobic tirade in the wake of gay teen suicides throughout the nation. Sharron Angle, the GOP-Tea Party Senate candidate in Nevada, aired a television ad designed to tap into white racial fears of Latinos.

A volunteer for Tea Party nominee Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) boot stomped the head of a MoveOn protestor outside of a debate. A California man planned an assassination plot on the Tides Foundation and the ACLU because Glenn Beck, the Fox news jester and Tea Party televangelist, demonizes these and other progressive groups on a daily basis. And NPR has received death threats after firing Islamophobic Juan Williams, also a Fox news analyst. Apparently not realizing that he is susceptible to racial profiling, the African-American journalist channeled his inner Teabagger and proclaimed that he is scared of Muslims on a plane.

In my state of Pennsylvania, you can see the harshness of the times. There have been cross burnings in recent months, including two crosses burned on the lawn of a white teenage girl because she invited black friends to her home. And at a parade in Lancaster County a few weeks ago, the crowd greeted a multiracial high school marching band with rocks, taunts and racial epithets. The crowd also sprayed soda on the students, who were from William Penn Senior High School in York, PA, and were black, white and Latino. This is the lynch mob in action. This is the Tea Party. These are the people who beat, punched and kicked civil rights workers at segregated lunch counters in the 50s and 60s, who spat at Negro or "colored" students on their way to school, and blocked the schoolhouse door as the federal government enforced desegregation orders.

And so the spirit of the Tea Party lives on, albeit on borrowed time. With the U.S. poised to become a majority of-color nation in the coming years, the backward racists are outnumbered and will be outvoted through a process of attrition. The Republican Party, now primarily a Southern regional party, will likely implode due to the upcoming civil war that will play out in the former party of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass--a party that once boasted 1,500 black political officeholders nationwide during Reconstruction, yet is now the functional equivalent of the Afrikaners' National Party in apartheid South Africa. Nevertheless, for now, we live in a country full of pain and suffering--and hate. These times demand scapegoats, and the Tea Party is more than willing to oblige and hunt them down. We need to be very careful and look out for one another.

Will the New Black Panthers become another ACORN?

From theGrio:

Did the New Black Panther Party intimidate Philadelphia voters on Election Day in 2008? Is the Obama Justice Department guilty of an anti-white voter bias when it dropped most of the charges against the Panthers? A former Justice Department lawyer would have you believe that the answer to both of these questions is yes. And he would also have you believe he is a whistle-blower, but don't believe the hype.

On Tuesday, J. Christian Adams testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. A career official at DOJ, Adams claims that the department's civil rights division instructed its lawyers to ignore voter intimidation cases involving black defendants and white victims. He quit his position in May 2010.

All of this stems from an incident on Election Day 2008 in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia, which, oddly enough, is my neighborhood. King Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson, two members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, placed themselves at the entrance to a polling place in a heavily African-American area. They were dressed in black militant attire, and Shabazz was carrying a nightstick. The two men allegedly hurled color-coded slurs and insults such as "white devil" and "you're about to be ruled by the black man, cracker." Police told Shabazz to leave but allowed Jackson to stay.

On its way out the door, the Bush administration brought a case against the group, accusing them of violating the Voting Rights Act. The Obama administration -- under the nation's first black attorney general, Eric Holder -- dismissed most of the charges for lack of evidence.

I certainly heard about the incident when it happened, but as the police officer says, "Keep moving, nothing to see here." And if there was anything to see, certainly we would have been talking about it in Philly, don't you think? Certainly, the right-wing noise machine at FOX News will attempt to make something out of this, but they will try in vain.

"The New Black Panther case was the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career," Adams said in a recent Washington Times opinion piece following his resignation. "Based on my firsthand experiences, I believe the dismissal of the Black Panther case was motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law.... The department abetted wrongdoers and abandoned law-abiding citizens victimized by the New Black Panthers. The dismissal raises serious questions about the department's enforcement neutrality in upcoming midterm elections and the subsequent 2012 presidential election." But Adams' allegations appear weak. He failed to mention that when he worked under the Bush Justice Department in 2006, they declined to charge the Minutemen for voter intimidation against Latinos in Arizona, a case similar to the Panthers.

If Adams believes that the New Black Panther case was the worst case he has seen in his career, then he must not get out that much. The watchdog group Media Matters calls the whole thing a "manufactured story" from "a political operative with an ax to grind" and who wants to make Obama look bad right before the midterm elections. And even Abigail Thernstrom--Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a conservative member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights who has shown nothing but open hostility towards minority voting rights--called this case "very small potatoes." Thernstrom said in the National Review that "There are plenty of grounds on which to sharply criticize the attorney general -- his handling of terrorism questions, just for starters -- but this particular overblown attack threatens to undermine the credibility of his conservative critics."

Nevertheless, under the Bush administration, Karl Rove politicized the Justice Department. In those days, officials purposefully ignored racial discrimination against people of color, did not enforce the civil rights laws, and ran the department based on a mixture of smoke and mirrors, and incompetence. They filled the once-prestigious department with 150 graduates of televangelist Pat Robertson's Regent University Law School. They focused on distractions and scams such as reverse discrimination, anti-Christian religious discrimination, and voter fraud, which is little more than right-wing codeword for suppression of the black and Latino vote. Remember all of the drama over the community nonprofit group ACORN and those bogus charges of voter fraud? Conservatives were really angry because ACORN registered all of those new black, brown and poor voters that subsequently brought about an Obama victory.

So, it is no surprise that the Bush attorneys would care so much about the New Black Panthers. And conservative witch hunters, conspiratorial and deceptive as they are, are trying to make the Panthers the new ACORN. In the end, they are prejudiced against the president because he's black, and they believe, as Glenn Beck once claimed, that Obama is a racist who doesn't like white people. It doesn't help that his attorney general is black either.

Like the saying goes, where there is smoke, there is a fire. But with the case against the New Black Panthers, there's only smoke and mirrors, and lots of racial hating on Barack Obama--a man who has restored integrity, competence and the rule of law to the White House. So let's keep moving.

140 years after the 15th Amendment, more progress must be made on voting rights

From the Progressive:

It has been 140 years since the 15th Amendment was ratified, but we still have a ways to go to ensure the right to vote.

The 15th Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on March 30, 1870. It states: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” And it adds: “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

With voting rights granted to former slaves, the change to the American political landscape was dramatic. There were more than 1,500 black political officeholders during Reconstruction, all of them Republicans. They included a governor and a lieutenant governor, state legislators and members of Congress and the Senate.


Despite the new voting rights protections guaranteed under the 15th Amendment, there was considerable Southern white resistance to black participation in American civic and political life. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan were formed to intimidate blacks. And as federal troops left the South and Reconstruction came to a close, the South descended into an era of Jim Crow segregation. States engaged in the wholesale disenfranchisement of blacks, wiping them off the political map.

It was not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that full citizenship rights would be restored to black people. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, dozens of people died securing that right.

And sadly, now, in 2010, remnants of Jim Crow remain.

An estimated 5.3 million Americans are denied the right to vote because of felony convictions, including 4 million who are out of prison. A third of them are black. That means one in eight black men can’t vote.

“As of 2004, more African-American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the 15th Amendment was ratified,” says Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

Some politicians want to return us to the days of Jim Crow laws. At a Tea Party convention in Nashville, Tenn., in February, former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo told an audience he lamented that “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.” He added, “People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House.”

Tancredo’s objectionable statement was a not-so-subtle reference to literacy tests, a weapon of choice used by Jim Crow states to disenfranchise black voters.

On the 140th anniversary of the 15th Amendment, Tancredo and others would have us turn back the clock, and return to a time when people of color were denied the right to vote.

Let’s expand democracy rather than shrink it.

Second Chance for Michael Vick and Other Ex-Felons

Much has been said about Michael Vick’s return to the NFL after serving 18 months in a federal prison for dog fighting.  And I don’t have too much more to add to the discussion.  As a pet owner, I cringe at the thought of someone torturing puppies.  At the same time, there are many people in this world that are not treated as well as dogs.  And not so long ago, this country used dogs as a weapon to torture other people.

I’d imagine that Vick has had more than ample time to ponder over his poor life choices, and the stupidity and cruelty that cost him a $130 million contract with the Atlanta Falcons.  The Philadelphia Eagles are giving him a second chance, and I guess that’s their decision.

But there are thousands, no, millions, of everyday people who have served their time and paid their debt to society, yet they can’t get a minimum wage job flipping burgers.  They need a second chance just to survive. 

This army of lost men and women is unable to support their families and become productive members of society because society will not let them.  They wear a scarlet “F” for felon on their shirt.  And they are punished not only for the crimes they committed.  They receive extra punishment above and beyond their sentence, in the form of life, career and educational opportunities from which they are forever barred.  A person with a criminal record cannot work in certain occupations, is ineligible for certain college tuition loans, and may not qualify for public housing and other public welfare benefits.  That is the sign of a society built on vengeance and retribution, rather than rehabilitation.  It is what some observers call a public banishment or civil death.  Society has cast out the individual in a sense— unable to fully participate in a free society after regaining freedom, remaining a virtual prisoner even after the bars are removed.

And what has all of this punishment for punishment’s sake actually done for America?  The tough on crime approach has helped the careers of some politicians, but surely it hasn’t made us any safer.  I suppose there are some crimes that merit prison time, and people must be held accountable for the harm they do.  But there are few creative, constructive forms of alternative punishment that make the community whole and make the prisoner a better individual. 

At the same time, the U.S. has an overdependence on incarceration, if not an addiction to it.  The nation uses prison bars as its primary method of social control, and as a way to earn profits, too.  The so-called “land of the free” has the most prisoners— in absolute numbers and per capita—in the world.  One in four of the world’s prisoners are locked up in a nation with only 5% of the world’s population.  Brutal dictatorships and repressive communist regimes don’t even come close. 

Broken schools, poor healthcare and early childhood development, and the disappearance of jobs prepare many poor children for little else than a cradle-to-prison pipeline.  Prison walls do not create nurturing environments, but more proficient criminals, who during their lives walk through a revolving prison door.  Many are imprisoned for nonviolent, drug-related offenses for longer and longer periods of time.  Three-strikes laws and other draconian sentencing schemes are way out of proportion to the crimes committed.

The consequences of over-punishment are seen across the country, as states in need of cash cannot afford their ballooning prison budgets.  In California, a federal court has ordered the state to reduce its overcrowded prison population by 40,000 inmates.  If so many inmates are to be released, it makes you realize that many of them probably shouldn’t have been in there in the first place.

America’s reliance on punishment only serves to break up families and communities, rarely helping to rebuild them or those who have served their time.  Many would be surprised to know that the right to vote, a cherished right of citizenship, is denied to 5.3 million Americans with felony convictions.  These felony disenfranchisement laws are a holdover from the Jim Crow era, a time filled with all sorts of bad intentions.  This madness must stop, and Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI) and Representative John Conyers (D-MI) have introduced legislation to restore voting rights in federal elections to millions of disenfranchised people.  How do you expect ex-felons to become productive citizens when they can’t find a job, can’t afford to better themselves through education, and can’t even vote?       

Some are behind bars for the crimes they have committed.  Others are there for crimes they did not commit.  Either way, when they return to the street, the punishment continues.  Punishment on top of punishment does not work, and we have to build up the formerly incarcerated so they do not fall down again.  We have to ensure that they have the opportunity to contribute as full-fledged members of society.

Everyone’s vote needs to be counted on Election Day

By David A. Love
Progressive Media Project
October 21, 2008

In the land of the free, everyone's vote should be counted. But at the rate we're going, millions of votes could be discarded on Election Day.

First, some of the voting machines are not reliable. Their software and hardware are faulty, and they lack safeguards to prevent election officials from tampering with ballots and election tallies. Already, in early voting in West Virginia, six voters in two counties claim that electronic voting machines changed their votes from Democratic to Republican.

Due to a backlog by the Election Assistance Commission (the federal agency that oversees voting), defective voting machines throughout the nation will not be repaired in time for the presidential election, the New York Times reports. That’s unacceptable.

But malfunctioning machines may be the least of our problems. Republican operatives are again engaged in voter suppression efforts, with some officials trying to purge the voter rolls again, as they did in Florida in 2000.

Scheming to restrict the vote has a sordid past in American politics. In the Jim Crow South, election officials used poll taxes, literacy tests, physical threats and Klan violence to suppress the black vote. Sometimes, black voters were forced to answer questions as inane as "How many bubbles in a bar of soap?" 



Today, the Republican Party is worried that mass voter registration efforts across the country will dampen its chances of victory at the polls. So it is making grandiose allegations about people fraudulently registering to vote. Sen. John McCain accused one group of possibly “destroying the fabric of our democracy.”



But the issue of voter fraud is a ruse. There has been no significant evidence of voter fraud in recent elections.

“The incidence of election fraud is minimal across the 50 states and rarely affects election outcomes,” notes a report by the nonprofit group Demos entitled “Securing the Vote.” “The disenfranchisement of voters through antiquated voting systems, system error, and improper management of registration databases, as occurred in Florida in the 2000 election, is a far bigger problem than traditional forms of election fraud.”

Already, in the last few months, thousands of legitimate voters have been illegally purged, according to the New York Times. Another 200,000 new voters in Ohio were at risk of being challenged until the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in. The high court struck down a federal court ruling that would have challenged these new registrants, whose information was not a perfect match with government databases due to typographical and data entry errors. 



What’s more, some states simply will be unprepared to handle the dramatic swelling in their voter rolls, according to a study by the Advancement Project, another nonprofit group. It predicts that in many jurisdictions, there will be insufficient numbers of voting machines, privacy booths and poll workers. This study of the battleground states of Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia also finds that polling place resources are misallocated in some precincts, which is likely to result in long lines disproportionately in communities of color. 



With broken machines, voter purging and insufficient resources, an outsider might conclude that the United States runs its elections like a banana republic. A citizen should not have to worry about his or her vote being thrown in the garbage can. We must protect our voting rights.

Will YOUR vote count? State's polls lack uniform standards

By Kathryn Boockvar and David A. Love

The Patriot-News (Harrisburg, PA), September 28, 2008

ON NOV. 4, will the vote of every Pennsylvanian be counted? Sadly, unless changes are made before Election Day, the answer is no. 

The main culprit is a lack of uniform standards in Pennsylvania. 

For example, there are currently no uniform standards governing when emergency backup paper ballots should be issued to voters. As a result, during the Pennsylvania primary, when voting machines broke down, some voters were provided with emergency paper ballots, others were told by poll workers to go home and come back later, and still others had to wait for hours until the machines were repaired. 

The procedures varied from polling place to polling place, and from county to county. This failure to treat each of our votes equally, and failure to ensure that each of us gets to vote and have our vote counted without undue burden, violates our state and federal constitutional rights. 

Another example is the lack of uniform and comprehensive poll worker training and support. Poll workers have been called the "champions of democracy." They are the last defense between a well-run democracy and an unstable, ineffective political system, and they deserve respect, support and appreciation for their service. Yet, instead, the biggest question mark in Pennsylvania's voting system may not be what has changed since 2004, but the one thing that has not --inadequate poll worker training and support. 

The sheer magnitude of vital Election Day responsibilities requires intensive training. Pennsylvania law requires that county boards of election "instruct election officers in their duties" and inspect the conduct of elections, "to the end that primaries and elections may be honestly, efficiently, and uniformly conducted." Poll workers are the direct links between election officials and voters, and their actions and inactions can make the difference between a vote counted and a vote rejected. 

Yet despite this, Pennsylvania counties rarely require that all election officials be trained regularly -- most commonly, only new poll workers are asked to attend training. And when they don't? Nothing. In most if not all counties, there is no penalty for skipping training, and no system to assess whether poll workers are qualified and able to perform their duties. As a result, countless untrained poll workers work every Election Day. This is contrary to Pennsylvania law, which states that "No judge or inspector shall serve at any primary or election ... unless he shall have been found qualified to perform his duties ..." 

Of course, it is the voter who suffers. According to the Fels Institute of Government, in 2006 the Keystone State had the nation's highest number of complaints about poll workers and election staff, the second highest number of complaints about coercion or intimidation, and the third highest number of complaints about requests for identification. Election Day complaints that were caused or worsened by poor poll worker training or support have included equipment operation problems, failure to distribute emergency ballots, late opening of polling places, language barriers, improper demands for voter identification, improper provisional ballot administration, intimidating polling place behavior, and ineffective polling place design and procedures. 

Of even greater concern, these problems have tended to occur disproportionately in poorer neighborhoods and in communities of color. 

All these problems cause longer lines, frustration and disenfranchisement, which not only burden voters, but also make Election Day much more difficult for the poll workers, who are already working an incredibly long day for little pay. 

Looking ahead to November, it is expected that Pennsylvania's surge in voter registrations this year and anticipated surge in turnout, combined with these problems, will mean longer lines, longer wait times, and more machine breakdowns and errors at polling places throughout the commonwealth. 

The solution to avoiding these problems is clear: the secretary of state, as chief election official of the commonwealth, must play a stronger role in mandating that all counties provide their citizens with equal access to the voting booth, and equal opportunity to vote and have their vote counted. Included in this: 

* Emergency paper ballots must be offered uniformly to voters when machines break down, and must be treated and counted as regular ballots. 

* Comprehensive poll worker training and support, with clear, uniform qualifications and assessment, must be mandated for all poll workers. Funding should be increased to allow adequate compensation for training. 

* State and local governments and other organizations should play a stronger role in recruiting poll workers, with modernized and energized recruiting messages, increased compensation, and other non-compensation incentives for becoming part of this vital process. 

If these things do not happen, then we might find ourselves with another Florida or Ohio disaster on our hands in the Keystone State. 

Voting is one of our most cherished fundamental rights as citizens. If we cannot guarantee an equal right to vote in the birthplace of American democracy, and ensure that all our votes are counted here, then where can we? 

KATHRYN BOOCKVAR is the senior attorney and DAVID A. LOVE is the voter protection advocate for Pennsylvania for the Advancement Project, a Washington, D.C.-based civil rights organization.

Supreme Court's voter ID decision is a blow to democracy

By David A. Love
Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service
May 7, 2008

By upholding Indiana's voter ID law, the Supreme Court struck another blow to civil rights and equality in the United States.

In its 6-3 decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the court ruled that the law, which requires Indiana voters to show photo identification at the polls, is constitutional.

But the law was devised with partisan motives in mind. The Republican-dominated legislature enacted it in 2005 against the wishes of Democrats and civil rights advocates who were concerned that it would deny equal access to the voting booth.

Why? Because the law places an unfair burden on the poor, minority groups, students, the disabled and the elderly, groups that are least likely to have proper ID.

Voter ID laws like Indiana's harken to the days of Jim Crow, when states required blacks to pay poll taxes and pass literacy tests, or answer questions as inane as "how many bubbles are in a bar of soap?" in order to vote.

In the majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, said the burden the law imposes is minimal and even-handed, and that the law is justifiable since it aims to "protect the integrity and reliability of the electoral process itself." Also siding with the majority, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that the Indiana law is "eminently reasonable.

The burden of acquiring, possessing and showing a free photo identification is simply not severe, because it does not `even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.'"

The dissenting justices, Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, concluded that the law "threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting right of tens of thousands of the State's citizens." They added that a "significant percentage of those individuals are likely to be deterred from voting."

The dissenting opinion also took issue with Indiana's provisional ballot system. Voters who do not have an ID can cast a provisional ballot. The ballot becomes validated only if the person appears in court or before the county election board within 10 days of the election and can establish his or her identity. Someone without an ID would be required to repeat this process in every subsequent election. This is a burden for indigent voters in a state that lacks public transportation in many areas.

Ironically, the issue of voter fraud - the reason that some Republican lawmakers use to justify voter ID laws - is a red herring. There is very little evidence of voter fraud in the United States. Yet the Supreme Court cited voter fraud as the primary reason for upholding the Indiana law.

It is unfortunate that the highest court in the land has turned its back on voting rights for all Americans. Voting should be made easier, not harder. By giving the green light for states to enact such repressive laws, they are enabling those who would turn the clock back on civil rights in this country.

In an election year where millions of new voters are being brought into the democratic process, this should concern us all.