Sinemascope

Jeff Darcy, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 28 October 2021.

 

Beating out the perpetually "concerned" Senator Collins in the adjective competition, Senator Sinema is actually  "alarmed", but she's not going to let that spoil her appetite:

Pre-empting a presidential visit to the Capitol to meet privately with Democrats, Ms. Sinema took to the floor to say that while she backed two new voting rights measures and was alarmed about new voting restrictions in some states, she believed that a unilateral Democratic move to weaken the filibuster would only foster growing political division.

“These bills help treat the symptoms of the disease, but they do not fully address the disease itself,” Ms. Sinema said. “And while I continue to support these bills, I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country.”

And "disappointed" too! Collins never imagined being disappointed, that's pretty original!

For the Record: Pipeline Talk

 

Getting Russian natural gas to Europe, via Radio Free Europe. It'l be a lot less complicated once Europe stops using natural gas—may it be soon!—but in the meantime, the Ukraine (the purple line) is not getting replaced...

And now for something completely different:

I have two things I say about this issue: (1) Trump administration had four years to impose sanctions on Russia over the pipeline, and frequently said they were going to do it https://t.co/YqXnHrV9df but never did for some reason...

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) January 12, 2022

Something is happening and I don't know what it is

So many signals and so much noise I don't even know who to quote on these developments. Maybe Uncle Dick—

I would hope—expect—they are moving to voting rights because there’s a plan to strike now. They’ve given themselves two weeks, which is a needless marker to fail by if there’s no plan. And yet.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) December 15, 2021

—but I'm getting the impression that the whole strategy in Congress and in the White House has turned upside down, with the BBB mess entirely postponed until the new year and some kind of voting rights bill replacing it as the administration's before-Christmas target, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. Are there commitments from Manchin and Sinema to skip the filibuster on voting rights legislation? Manchin yesterday seemed to be saying no, nothing's changed as far as he's concerned:

“A rules change should be done to where we all have input . . . because we’re all going to live with it,” he told reporters Wednesday. “Because we’ll be in the minority sometime.”

And Sinema as well. Even though they both seemed perfectly cheerful about ignoring the filibuster rule to raise the debt ceiling, as Senator Warnock noted:

This One Weird Trick

 

On Monday, Robert Kuttner/The American Prospect reported a really interesting little development in the reconciliation negotiations: the idea for a kind of finesse that would allow both Senator Manchin and the House progressives to claim a victory.

The idea his Hill sources were telling him about involved a key element of the Build Back Better proposals, the extension of the American Rescue Plan's one-year fully funded child tax credit for $3000 per child ($3600 for a child under six), the second installment of which went out to households yesterday, and which is temporarily cutting our child poverty rate by nearly half. The House Ways and Means proposal is to keep it going through 2025 and then reduce it to $1000, which would be a shame (reducing the reduction in child poverty to 8%), but making the full credit "permanent" (i.e., though 2030) would cost another $700 billion.

Shocked-shocked there is partisanship going on in this legislature

Strip by Brian McFadden/Kos.

Senator Joe Manchin, "Why I'm Voting Against the For The People Act", Charleston Gazette-Mail, 6 June 2021:

The right to vote is fundamental to our American democracy and protecting that right should not be about party or politics. Least of all, protecting this right, which is a value I share, should never be done in a partisan manner.

His grammar kind of fell off the back of the truck there—he was starting to write "Least of all should it be done in a partisan manner", but as he was clarifying that he is in theory for protecting the right to vote (as if to say "I just said it was fundamental to democracy but I want you to know I'm in favor of it anyhow"), he lost track of the structure and turned it into logical roadkill ("least of all should it never be done the way I'm telling you not to do it").

But we know what he means, and that, after all, is bad enough: this is a supremely important thing to do and therefore we shouldn't do it. Or we should only protect the right to vote in a way that's compatible with our opponents' desire to take it away. Or voting rights are sacred, so you shouldn't spoil them by fighting for them. The more important a thing is, the more important it is not to be too eager about it. Nutrition is vital to human life, so you shouldn't be eating stuff when your thinking is all distorted by hunger. 

But healthcare isn't fundamental, so it's OK to pass that in a partisan manner?

The Affordable Care Act passed the Senate on strictly partisan lines yet became so popular that Joe Manchin based his reelection campaign in 2018 on a pledge to fight attempts to repeal the law.

— Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) June 6, 2021

Bad writing can be a technique of hiding from one's own thoughts, as we've seen over the years with David Brooks. Joe Manchin actually doesn't care at all about protecting the right to vote, or thinks West Virginians are generally against it, which comes down to the same thing, I suppose. They care about affordable health care (suggesting they may actually be smarter than people in a lot of Southern and Midwestern states, or maybe it's just that they're historically so deprived that they're aware of it), and they care about infrastructure (which is why I still expect Manchin to vote for the huge reconciliation package later this year). His donors care about keeping the minimum wage at rock bottom, and truly low-income people don't vote much. But the right to vote? Not even their own, perhaps (at 57.6% of the voting-eligible population, the state's voter turnout in last year's record high election statistics came in at 48th of the 50 states plus DC).

Lot more from Steve, on the same subject. 

For the Record: Twitter Wars

 

Bearers of Trophies and Bullion. From Andrea Mantegna, Triumphs of Caesar (1482-94, now Royal Collection, Hampton Court Palace), via Wikipedia.

So much winning. Well, that's what I think.

Re Republican voting restrictions:

You compare them yourself, in order to make your case, so that's a completely ridiculous thing to say. And as you point out some proposals have similar motives (like 'the limit on Sunday voting... understandably considered an attack on the famous “souls to polls” events')

— Jumpin Jack Flash It's a Yas Yas Yas (@Yastreblyansky) March 23, 2021

Jim Crow measures also didn't seem overwhelming taken one at a time. What could be so bad about requiring a literacy test? It was the cumulative effect of all of them put together that made it work.

— Jumpin Jack Flash It's a Yas Yas Yas (@Yastreblyansky) March 23, 2021

Re filibuster:

For the Record: Interpretive dance in Kentucky, and much ado about voting.

Good idea. Nobody's done that shit for years. Dance times have changed. (Illustration from 1949 https://t.co/d1Jzv9FEES) pic.twitter.com/RfVqosP5jq

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 16, 2017

As I suspected, U Kentucky doesn't offer an interpretive dance major at all. https://t.co/uud7Bu75wq Governor can stop worrying about it.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 16, 2017

And in some possibly more serious news that almost got interesting for a few minutes,

Annals of Derp: Voter ID

Drawing by David Horsey/Los Angeles Times.

This great thread by Matthew Chapman welcoming the Supreme Court refusal to hear North Carolina's appeal on the quashing of its stupid and vicious voter ID law got me wound up into the battle:

@TexasSpecial1 @fawfulfan @RotNScoundrel This is an annoying and narcissistic mathematical mistake. It is not your vote that is offset. If 2000 ppl in your precinct voted same way

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 15, 2017

@TexasSpecial1 @fawfulfan @RotNScoundrel ...then it is 1/2000 of your vote, 1/2000 of your wife's, 1/2000 of your friend Joe's, etc. It has almost nothing to do with you.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 15, 2017

This one makes me completely insane. I've been through it before. "They're canceling out my vote!" What kind of egomaniac thinks that way? (A mathematically challenged one.)

Annals of derp: Et tu, Shankar?

Image via New Schoolers.

I love the fact that NPR runs regular reports on social science research, and especially the Morning Edition appearances of Shankar Vedantam, a kind of indirect corrective to the vagaries of David Brooks, but today they ran a bit off the rails in discussing an extremely elegant study by Matthew Mendez and Christian Grose of USC.

Old Cognitive Dissonance got me

I'm really happy about marriage equality, honest, and yet...

It's just the fact that it's written by somebody who 24 hours earlier stood for the destruction of the Voting Rights Act. What's up with that?

Kennedy can imagine what it's like to feel there's just one person in the world you want to marry and they have the same naughty bits as you do, but he can't imagine what it's like not to have a state-issued photo ID. I can only assume it's because the first is within the experience of wealthy people. After all, the Windsor case itself wasn't a heart-wrencher about hospital visitations—it was about the right not to pay what Republicans call a "death tax" of $363,000, a problem most of us, gay or straight, will never have to suffer through.

Swing vote.  Taylor Jones via Cagle Cartoons.

Quick round of Which Would You Rather:

Owe $363,000 in estate taxes or be deprived of the right to vote? I'd want to know if I take the first one, how much will I have left over? No, wait, I don't think that will be necessary. Though if the only reason was my sexual orientation it would be extremely unfair. But I can't believe that constitutional principle demands option 2.

I'm no lawyer but

So the prankish conservatives of the Supreme Court have left section 5 of the Voting Rights Act intact, but thrown out section 4, which specifies which states section 5 applies to--it is now unconstitutional to say that it applies to these states, although it wasn't before, because African Americans now register to vote in those states in about the same proportions as whites, as in the chart below:

Since the law has worked so well, there is clearly no need for it. Section 5 is now doomed to an eerie limbo of applying only to imaginary situations, unless our less than hyperactive Congress decides to apply it to something in reality. Maybe, as Erik Loomis suggests, anti-lynching laws are unconstitutional now too, since there hasn't been one of those in decades.

You probably just missed the part of the Constitution where it says if it's fixed, break it.

Uncredited image from Rockland Family Court.

Ed Kilgore quotes Justice Ginsburg making the same point funnier:

Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

The great Steve Benen has it down: Roberts's opinion literally does not attempt to explain what's unconstitutional about section 4! Like he knows why but it's just so hard to express. Is that a first?

Via Dr. Turk:

Plus, of course, times haven't changed!

Why do they hate democracy?

The New York Times reports from Beaumont, Texas, where they're waiting anxiously for the Supreme Court's decision on the Voting Rights Act:

Tempers have flared at school board meetings and lawsuits have been filed, as a mostly white group of critics have charged the black-majority school board with enabling corruption, wasteful spending and academic cheating. The school board’s majority denies the charges and says the whites simply cannot tolerate black control.

Determined to change the board but aware that the incumbents could not be beaten in the current districts, the critics pursued alternatives. Last December, they pushed for a new election method that was approved, along narrow racial lines, in a citywide referendum. The Justice Department, citing Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, objected to the new method and it was dropped. 

Then, in April, the critics took advantage of a little-noticed state statute that rendered three of the board’s black incumbents unexpectedly disqualified from the next election, a procedural maneuver affirmed by a Texas appeals court. This, too, was blocked by the Justice Department.

I don't know how they could make it any clearer, without wearing robes and pointy hoods to the press conference, or maybe white turbans. The "mostly white critics" (some of them have strawberry birthmarks?) are demanding the right to determine the results of an election beforehand, on account of the racial propensity of the majority to vote for the wrong people.

If the Supreme Court is OK with this, then the theory behind it is going to make pretty interesting reading.

Disqualification as a campaign technique. Guardians Council of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Via Robert Cargill.