Harvey Kronberg's Quorum Report makes the good point that insurance reform is so popular with voters that the Republicans blocking a rules suspension may pay a price in 2010.
Quorum looks at the popularity of insurance reform in a recent poll, and concludes:
[The poll's release is]a message to the Republican signators blocking a suspension of the rules.
Democrats have offered several times to suspend the rules to take up critical policy matters falling beneath Voter I.D. on the calendar. But Voter I.D. is the GOP's top 2009 priority, and they are willing to sacrifice insurance reform and other critical issues to get what they want.
Fifty-nine or 60 of them are on the record in the House journal opposing suspension. (They've filed three such suspension blocking letters. I can only find one online so far in the official House Journal.) Not hard to link that on-the-record block to the failure of insurance reform. Here's the list of GOP members, taken from the House Journal, who are on the record against insurance reform.
The following members gave notice of a standing objection to suspending the regular order of business:
Isett, F. Brown, Bohac, B. Brown, Anderson, Smithee, Keffer, Truitt, Flynn, Eissler, Fletcher, J. Davis, Berman, Jackson, Hardcastle, Paxton, Cook, Driver, Lewis, Hunter, Jones, Hartnett, Orr, Taylor, Laubenberg, Harper-Brown, D. Miller, Button, Parker, Zerwas, Kolkhorst, Sheffield, Hamilton, W. Smith, Branch, Kleinschmidt, Hancock, Swinford, Madden, Weber, Aycock, S. King, Otto, Creighton, S. Miller, Craddick, Crownover, Geren, Bonnen, Christian, T. Smith, McCall, Shelton, Hughes, P. King, Woolley, Patrick, Darby, and Hilderbran.
UPDATE -- It's also clear this afternoon that the GOP, including Speaker Straus, is today trying to spin a spurious connection between this year's GOP voter suppression bill and a '97 proposal involving ID requirements for voters not on the rolls and without a voter registration card. Straus called it "complete hypocricy" for Dems to oppose this year's proposal if they supported the '97 proposal. This year, of course, the GOP wants additional IDs from voters on the rolls and with a voter registration card. This sort of poor, half-baked opposition research is laughable. The bills are radically different.
UPDATE # 2 -- Here is language from bill analysis of the '97 bill being spun by Republicans as equivalent to this years bill.
Current election law does not allow for a separate ballot box for the affidavit ballot. Quickly locating ballots voted by affidavit is essential to a smooth-running, non-controversial election.
Get it? The '97 proposal applied to people not on the registration rolls and without registration cards -- and it gives them a way to vote by affidavit. It made it easier to vote. This year's proposal restricts voting even by people on the registration rolls and with a registration card. And under the '97 proposal, a voter not on the rolls and without a registration card could vote just by signing an affidavit.
This is a weak and deceitful argument from Republicans.
Back in January, Senate Democrats rightly argued that the Legislature should take up serious issues -- unemployment, insurance reform, etc. -- before getting bogged down in the GOP's top 2009 priority: protecting their power by building a wall between Texans and the ballot box with burdensome, multiple-ID requirements for voters. Republicans even trashed the Senate rules in order to protect themselves.
Now, House Republicans have once again made voter suppression their priority. It was placed at the top of the calendar, ahead of Texas Department of Insurance Sunset, ahead of unemployment insurance, ahead of windstorm. House Dems have made several good faith efforts to get on with work on these issues. They attempted several times to suspend the rules to move these issues ahead of Voter I.D. Republicans said no. Over and over and over again.
In other words, the GOP is holding these important bills hostage while claiming that it's their opponents' fault. They've kidnapped insurance reform, then called the police (the press) to report the kidnapping, claiming its others doing the hostage-taking. And right there in broad daylight they're refusing over and over again to release their hostages. It's just a version of the old story about the adulterer caught red-handed, "Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?"
The GOP Strategy: Our Way Or the Highway.
We've seen this before. Under Tom Craddick. You know, the former speaker chased from office because of his disregard for his own members, the state's interests, or any interest other than his own.
Craddick's back. The Strausian waltz of good feeling, never much more than a tenuous hope, has disappeared altogether into Craddick-driven ugliness and ill-will. Make no mistake, Craddick is pulling the strings, and he is greatly enjoying the fact that he has organized an impasse that's making Straus squirm.
This is a case of a very old and mangey tail wagging a young dog.
Straus can cut off that tail. And return the House to more pressing matters. This is Straus' first real opportunity to show he's not Craddick. He can, if he will find a way to put the critical bills ahead of voter I.D., demonstrate that the interests of Texans and the membership of the House come before partisanship. Or, he can catch the Craddick Mange.
A reminder: At stake in the House proceedings this weekend is a proposal that will disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters, voters in the cities, voters in the country, voters along the coast, voters in Austin.
The fight over voter I.D. is this era's civil rights fight. Republicans want to diminish voting by the elderly, the poor, people of color, by women -- in other words, voters who tend to vote for Democrats.
Richard Posner, the federal appeals court judge who wrote the opinion approving an Indiana voter I.D. law admitted it: the law will diminish votes for Democrats. Posner said he just didn't care.
There is no more fundamental issue in a Democracy than the right to vote. Republicans deny they want to suppress votes. They say they want to diminish voter impersonation. There are no cases of voter impersonation. Their argument is laughable. Their intent is to return Texas to the era of poll taxes and segregation. This time, the segregated will be women, the elderly, and those who, like my daughter before this year's city election, have their license stolen two days before an election.
These last few days the fight has been carried out through procedural means. Legitimate procedural means. That can lead people to forget the moral stakes. Tactics take focus and planning, and the core issue can temporarily be lost in such an effort.
This is an issue that defines who we are. It's no less than that. Do any legislators really want to be known as members of the Legislature that returned our state to a pre-civil rights era? I don't think so.
Paul Burka asked me to tell him what the "end game" was of the Democrats' valiant effort this weekend. I asked him how Martin Luther King Jr. would have answered that question in 1960. Because the answer to that, evidenced by today's legislative fight, is that we have still not reached the end of King's historic battle.
There's a lot of sound and fury from Republicans about the need for new bureaucratic restrictions on the right to vote. They've never produced any evidence of a problem such burdens will fix. They can't explain how their complicated identification requirements for voters will be administered or enforced. They simply guarantee that all voters will face a lot more hassle dealing with underpaid federal and state bureaucrats. For instance, if one follows the law, a Texan can't get a new driver's license without a birth certificate, but you can't get a birth certificate without a driver's license.
All that said, nothing speaks so eloquently to the pathetic arguments of the Republican empty rhetoric as Sen. Troy Fraser's "worst-list" job trying to defend his proposal. Intent on ignoring Texas' major problems in health care, jobs, college tuition, public education and the environment to advance their power, Republicans are putting partisanship before progress. And that's sad. House hearings on voter restrictions begin today. It's a good time to review their argument, or lack of argument, in the Senate.
(Putting this excellent post back atop the page. - promoted by Phillip Martin)
Airport Security Checkpoint or Polling Place?
Here is an honest and easy-to-understand statement of a Republican belief that lies behind their efforts to place burdensome and bureaucratic barriers between citizens and the ballot box:
Few citizens have the formidable intellectual and moral capacities (let alone the time) required for the role that [popular democracy] assigns to the citizenry, although defenders of the concept believe that participation in democratic political activity strengthens these capacities, enabling a virtuous cycle.
That quote is from Judge Richard Posner, of the Seventh U.S. Court of Appeals. It's in his book, "Law, Pragmatism and Democracy." Posner wrote the appeals court opinion approving Indiana's restrictive voter identification requirements. The restrictions on voting, he said in that opinion, would harm many citizens. But we shouldn't care.
Let the quote sink in.
Because so many of us lack the intellectual and moral capacity to participate in our governance, restrictions on voting are no big deal to Posner and his ilk.
In Texas this week, debate opens on a proposal that places extraordinary identification requirements on citizens who wish to vote. The proposed law's ambiguous language appears to grant part-time, amateur polling place officials the absolute power to accept or reject a would-be voter based solely on that citizen's appearance or other subjective judgments. For the first time since women and blacks were granted the vote, appearance alone may disqualify a would-be voter. We'll return to this in a moment.
Posner is an open opponent of popular democracy. Most anti-democrats simply lie, not wishing to fuel what is the ultimate "wedge" issue in a democracy: should all citizens share equally in the decision-making of their communities and country? Some Republican backers of restrictions on voting may not share Posner's belief in the inferiority of many citizens. They simply want to use the law to reduce the number of people inclined to vote against them.
As Barack Obama spoke of hope in a Wilmington park named for Harriet Tubman and abolitionist Thomas Garrett, just north of the Mason-Dixon line, some Republicans were still setting loose the dogs along the freedom trail.
Last week, Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and some embarrassed but silently capitulating GOP state senators destroyed legislative tradition and subverted procedures intended to protect against "the tyranny of the majority" to pass a regressive voter identification bill. Twelve Angry Democrats in the Senate did their best. But they were outnumbered. In the Right's theory of democracy, minorities should sit down, shut up, and do what they're told.
The U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the way for barriers to voting, of course. The court's opinion in the Indiana voter ID case was bad enough. But Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, did a more honest job of articulating the elitist logic of voter suppression when he penned his opinion approving the Indiana law.
I'd been thinking about posting some summary thoughts on Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst's sad and reckless attack on voting rights and the legislative process. Then I noticed that elliotk had just posted a BOR journal more eloquent than, well, more eloquent than the words of mere mortals.
Isaiah 10
1 Woe to those who make unjust laws,
to those who issue oppressive decrees,
2 to deprive the poor of their rights
and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,
making widows their prey
and robbing the fatherless.
3 What will you do on the day of reckoning,
when disaster comes from afar?
To whom will you run for help?
Where will you leave your riches?
4 Nothing will remain but to cringe among the captives
or fall among the slain.
Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away,
his hand is still upraised.
The headline from this piece of honest journalism read "Photo ID law didn't hurt turnout in Indiana." Imagine my surprise. Could it be that all this time Phil King and the Texas republicans were right? Were all those adocacy groups simply lying to me so that they could help dangerous illegal immigrants infiltrate our democratic process? Was all the political maneuvering and fighting in the last session all in vain?
Of course not...this is the Washington Times after all.
So what evidence does the times present to prove that our worst fears about voter ID were really "just overblown rhetoric and fear-mongering?"
"Jeffrey D. Milyo, a professor at the University of Missouri, compared the 2006 midterm elections - the first since Indiana's law was enacted - to the 2002 elections and said voter turnout increased about two percentage points. He said the increase was consistent across counties with the highest percentage of Democrats"
That's right, the only "evidence" that the voter ID bill didn't inhibit turn out is an increase in the number of Democrats in Democratic leaning districts. Did the wise professor from Mizzou think to study changes in minority or elderly turnout regardless of partisan identification? Of course not. After all, he is a professor at the exhaulted institution of higher learning called The University of Missouri, so why would he need to really PROVE anything?
So, I'd like to thank Professor Milyo for pointing out what I already knew: People in this country are getting sick of the Republican party...even in Indiana.
Long as I've been involved in politics, it still stuns and sickens me when Americans of any sort would, with malice, pass laws and, when necessary, break the law to keep their fellow Americans from voting.
Back in my days in the Capitol press corps, we wrote stories about the GOP's voter suppression efforts. In 1982, when Karl Rove worked for GOP Gov. Bill Clements, then-GOP Secretary of State David Dean sent local election officials a deeply flawed, 29,000-person "felons list" with demands those voters be purged from the rolls. Dean was forced to withdraw the list when it was discovered that a Democratic House candidate, Jerry Angerman, no felon, was one of many law-abiding citizens included on the list.
We wrote stories, but we had no real sense of outrage. Just politics as usual, we thought. For years we'd written obligatory pieces about voter intimidation and suppression. Hired thugs dressed in costumes of border guards lingering around polling places to intimidate Hispanics. Gun-wielding local cops checking IDs of African Americans, hoping word would spread through the community that heads were being busted, that it was safer to stay home than vote.
Stories are still written, but these kinds of profoundly anti-democratic. subversive and shameful acts deserve much greater attention from the watchdogs of democracy. Voter suppression proposals like HB218 are killing the franchise, killing democracy, and betraying every political value our red-white-and-blue-faced legislators claim to champion.
