American Values Alliance | Practical voice for progressive valuesAmerican Values Alliance | Practical voice for progressive valuesThree columns in the print media over this past weekend had a common thread—the failures of our political system in dealing with the increasingly intractable problems our nation, state and community are facing. But who is to blame for those failures. Is it our elected leaders? Or do each of us share a large measure of the blame?
Yesterday The Indianapolis Star gave Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita a one-sided forum to argue the case for his beloved Photo ID Law, now under review by the U.S. Supreme Court.
After instructing his lawyers to fight ferociously to convince the Court not to hear the case, Rokita now says the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the appeal of the 7th Circuit’s decision upholding Rokita’s Law is “great” news for his side and that he is sure the Supreme Court will preserve Indiana’s reputation as a “national leader in election reform”. When asked by The Star why the State never presented evidence of a single person impersonating another voter to cast a fraudulent ballot, Rokita dodged and weaved. Impersonation fraud, he says, is “hard to prove” and the issue is so “politically volatile” that local prosecutors refuse to prosecute such cases. Again, Rokita cites no examples of any local prosecutor refusing to prosecute such a case. His argument, impersonation-fraud-exists-even-though-there-is-no-evidence-to-prove-it, is utterly disingenuous. Rokita knows that if a voter were to forge someone else’s name on the poll book in plain view of precinct officials and watchers he would leave a paper trail and subject himself to serious felony charges. There is a good reason for the lack of evidence of imposter voting—it is utterly implausible to think that it exists anywhere other than in Rokita’s paranoid fantasies.
In a comment/question appended to Bil Browning’s very generous post about the Supreme Court’s decision last Tuesday to hear the constitutional challenge to Indiana’s photo ID for voting law, Lalita Amos asks the question most frequently posed to those of us fighting this law: “What’s the big deal about requiring voters to show ID?” Lalita and others who have asked that same question deserve an answer.
Indiana conceded that there is absolutely no evidence that any voter in its history has ever been charged with impersonating another voter to cast a fraudulent ballot. The right of every adult citizen to vote is an inherent political right, one that can be interfered with or burdened by the State only upon a showing that a particular regulation or requirement is necessary to preserve the purity of elections. As the Supreme Court ruled over 40 years ago: “The right to vote freely for the candidate of one’s choice is of the essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government”. The right to vote is the only way to insure that our government is truly representative of our citizens.
The recent episode involving Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) in the Minneapolis airport men’s room tells us much about the state of values in red-state America. First, there are lessons concerning the values of liberty and privacy. It was only four years ago that the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas struck down a Texas law criminalizing sodomy between consenting adults in the privacy of their own home. Speaking for the Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy eloquently pointed out, 539 U.S. at 562, the close connection between liberty and privacy:
Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private place. In our tradition the State is no omnipresent in the home. And there are other spheres of our lives and existence, outside the home, where the State should not have a dominant presence. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought… and certain intimate conduct.
So I would ask in light of those pronouncements, what business is it of the police if consenting adults choose to engage in sexual activity behind closed stalls in public restrooms? Why are airport police, who should be busily attending to terrorism threats, lurking in airport restrooms waiting to be propositioned for sex? And why should private, discreet conduct (or in Sen. Craig’s situation, a mere offer to engage in such conduct) that occurs out of the sight of the public and that is in no way harmful to others be spotlighted and prosecuted by public authorities?
But it’s hard to feel too sorry for Sen. Craig. Had he been asked in the days before his arrest whether this conduct should be permitted in public restrooms, he would have pontificated ad nauseum about the importance of “values” and the evils of the “gay lifestyle” and urged law enforcement to aggressively root out and prosecute what he no doubt would have referred to as vile and disgusting conduct.
I filed the final brief with the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday, asking that Court to agree to review the highly controversial split decision of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals which upheld the constitutionality of Indiana’s 2005 law that requires all persons who wish to vote in person (the Law excludes mail-in absentee voters from the ID requirements) to produce a government-issued license with a photograph.
Among the remarkable features of this case is the fact that the State conceded that the General Assembly had no evidence that even a single person had ever been charged with, much less convicted of, the crime of imposter voting. The State defended its enactment of the Law simply referring to “reports” of such voter fraud from other states. In the past two years, every one of those “reports” has proved to be unfounded. In fact, it has since become clear that some of these “reports” were deliberately concocted and then widely-spread by Bush Administration political operatives to justify the enactment of restrictive voter-ID laws in an effort to game the political system in favor of the Republican Party. Congress is currently investigating whether at least two U.S. attorneys, David Iglesias and John McKay, were fired because they failed to play along with this political strategy.
The current “taxpayers’ protest” over the latest spike in property taxes, plus the decision by the City County Council last week to raise local income taxes, has aroused the public. Several columns and articles in Sunday’s Indianapolis Star provided examples of both the best, and worst, of people’s reactions to the current tax situation.
The Star gets credit for the most mature analysis of the root causes of the tax imbroglio. In an editorial entitled “There’s too much wrong to do anything but fix it”, it correctly predicts that the property tax reassessments ordered by Gov. Daniels are a band-aid on a bleeding wound and observes that the blame for the current tax mess lies squarely with certain politicians. However, those politicians’ last names are not Daniels or Peterson. They are more obscure politicians in the General Assembly with last names like Hinkle, Young (as in Michael), Bosma and Burton, each of whom not only voted against fire and township consolidation, but who even in the face of bipartisan support from the Mayor and the Governor, as well as from the local business community, killed off long overdue governmental reforms.
On May 17 the Indianapolis Clergy Committee, a project of Interfaith Worker Justice and in partnership with Faith Community Labor Coalition, engaged in acts of civil disobedience to dramatize the plight of Indianapolis janitors who are seeking collective bargaining rights through a labor union. Those participating clergy were:
My wife, youngest daughter and I attended the Indianapolis “sneak preview” of “Sicko” Saturday evening. Inside the sold-out Keystone Art Cinema, which included several well-known citizen-activists, the atmosphere was electric as together we eagerly anticipated the first local showing of the latest Michael Moore documentary. No one left disappointed.
The film exposed the serious flaws in this nation’s insurance-driven, for-profit health care system with a devastating blend of pathos, sarcasm, empathy and humor. Moore chooses largely to remain in the background, focusing on the real-life Americans whom the system has so miserably failed. While his criticism is withering, Moore never allows despair to distract from his ironic humor. He believes that the American people can and will dismantle the corporate and insurance cabals that control healthcare in this country, but not until we undergo a major change of attitude. Moore’s didactic point is that America’s broken health care system is in many ways a mirror of our own failings as a people. Americans have become too self-absorbed and addicted to consumerism to give a damn about the plight of the 50 million uninsured in this country. All the while our dysfunctional health care system widens the divide between the haves and have-nots in our society, creating two nations out of what we used to proudly call “one nation, indivisible”.
Judge Reggie Walton is the federal jurist who presided over the perjury trial of I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff. An appointee of the current President Bush, Walton is known as a tough-on-crime conservative. After a federal jury convicted Libby of perjury following a jury trial lasting several weeks, Judge Walton sentenced Libby to 2 ½ years in prison. Speculation is now rampant whether Libby will serve any time in prison or receive a pardon from President Bush.
A group of some twelve prominent mostly conservative law professors, including former U.S. Appeals Court Judge and failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, recently filed a friend-of-court brief urging Walton to delay Libby’s incarceration until he has exhausted all of his appeals, a process that could take years. Bork was especially outspoken during the Clinton sex scandal, proclaiming that President Clinton should be impeached and convicted for lying under oath to a federal grand jury after he denied having sex with Monica Lewinsky. In an Oct. 12, 1998 article in the National Review, Bork thundered that Clinton’s lying under oath “strikes at the heart of our system of justice and the rule of law. It does not matter in the least what the perjury is about”.
Judge Walton last Friday issued this order in the Libby case. In a priceless footnote to that Order, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, he had this to say about the brief filed by Bork and the eleven other academics seeking leniency for Mr. Libby:
Today is Memorial Day, a day dedicated to the memory of those who have given their lives in the service of their country. It is a solemn day for those families who have made the ultimate sacrifice. For others, it is a trip to the Indy 500 and a day of revelry and fun, or a golf outing, family picnic, or trip to the lake. It is a day of sharp contrasts and contradictions.
Sixty Minutes on Sunday featured a story about the mostly volunteer soldiers of Iowa National Guard who have been deployed again and again in President Bush’s Iraq folly. It told the tale of the many sacrifices these brave soldiers and their families back in Iowa have made fighting a nearly invisible enemy, carrying out supply missions through the Iraqi desert in which mortal dangers lurk around every bend and over every hill. Those soldiers, who were first deployed nearly two years ago, began their missions with a patriotic fervor, staunchly believing that they were helping bring “democracy” to the Iraqi people. Now, two years later, having just been told that their tours of duty have again been extended for another several months, many of these same soldiers have become disillusioned after seeing their comrades torn apart by IEDs or killed or wounded by small arms fire. Many of their families no longer believe that their fathers or husbands are engaged in a noble struggle; severe doubt has now crept into the minds of many of these loyal and patriotic Americans, as they begin to question whether the sacrifices they have made will ever be fully appreciated by either the Iraqi or American people. They have begun to doubt the wisdom of their political leaders, who led this nation into the Iraq war on false premises and now seek to save face by asking even greater sacrifices from those soldiers and their families, who have already disproportionately given of themselves in the service of their country, but for a cause that few any longer can comprehend.
I continue to be intrigued, and appalled, by the unfolding scandal over the firing of at least 9 U.S. Attorneys, some because they refused to prosecute weak or phony cases of voter fraud. The pressures put on these U.S. Attorneys were but part of a larger political strategy to win elections in battleground states by depressing voter turnout among demographic groups most likely to vote for Democratic Party candidates by propagating the myth of widespread polling place fraud. Indeed, the most recent academic study available confirms the Democrats’ fears that stringent voter ID laws reduce turnout significantly among minority groups.
We learned from Rick Hasen, a distinguished California election law professor, that the idea of massive polling place voter fraud is not just unproven, it is “inherently incredible”. Hasen notes that the Department of Justice in the past five years has devoted “unprecedented resources to ferreting out polling-place fraud…and appears to have found not a single prosecutable case across the country.” The political motivation behind those who have supported such laws is no longer to be guessed at. A former director of the Republican Party in Texas, where a battle over a photo ID proposal is currently raging, said that a strict voter identification requirement currently being considered in that State would depress the legitimate vote of the poor and immigrant populations and thereby add as much as 3% to the Republican vote, more than enough to change the outcome of many close elections, particularly in a State such as Texas with a growing immigrant population.
"Theocracy” is defined as “government of a state by officials who are regarded as divinely guided or who claim to have divine sanction.” I recently finished former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips’ book, American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, in which Phillips describes how self-interested religious zealotry contributed to the decline of former world powers such as ancient Rome, 17th century Spain, and the British Empire prior to 1914. He observes that one of the major symptoms of each empire’s period of decline was a growing religious fervor and a too-close link between government and religion leading to the elevation of faith over reason in the shaping of national policies and priorities. This in turn led to a de-emphasis of science (such as the Catholic Church putting Galileo under house arrest for heresy for his hypothesis that the earth revolved around the sun), and a “hubris-driven national strategic and military overreach” involving pursuit of “abstract international missions” that the nation could no longer afford. Sound familiar?
It is now clear that the burgeoning scandal over the firings of 8 U.S. Attorneys had nothing to do with their competence and much to do with the concerted GOP/Bush Administration efforts to politicize the federal justice system.
Last week my wife and I visited civil rights and cultural sites in Memphis and Little Rock. We learned about the important roles the federal judiciary played in the 1960s and 1970s to insure that black citizens enjoyed the same blessings of liberty as their white brothers and sisters. While in Little Rock, I received word that the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago had issued a decision in the voter ID case denying rehearing by the full 11-judge court. There was a vigorous dissent by 4 of the 11 judges. But I quickly observed that each of the 7 judges who voted to uphold Indiana’s new photo ID requirement for voters was appointed by a President named either Reagan or Bush.
The still unfolding scandal over the political firings of eight U.S. attorneys has a connection to Indiana that the traditional media has not yet reported on. We know that at least two of those fired district attorneys, David Iglesias of New Mexico and John McKay of Washington State, were replaced because they were unwilling to use the vast powers of their offices to indict Democrats for voter fraud. As reported on March 15 by Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog, “New Details on the Phony ‘Voter Fraud’ Angle in the U.S.Attorneys Purge Scandal”, Iglesias refused to cooperate with White House efforts to create headlines designed to convince the public of the existence of a “voter fraud” epidemic. Such disinformation was used to facilitate the passage in some states, including Indiana, of draconian voter ID laws, in much the same way the Bush Administration manipulated intelligence concerning alleged “weapons of mass destruction” to sell the war on Iraq to Congress and the public.
The chief cheerleader for the Indiana voter photo ID law, Secretary of State Todd Rokita, was forced to acknowledge in court that there was no evidence whatsoever of imposter voting in Indiana. More disturbingly it was revealed this past October that Rokita, a member of the Elections Assistance Commission’s (EAC) Voting Fraud Working Group, failed to disclose to the federal courts which were considering constitutional challenges to Indiana’s law a May 17, 2006 EAC report that was embargoed for over 4 months, a report which found “little evidence” of the voter fraud “problem” that Rokita and others had used to win the passage of the strict Indiana voter ID law. (See USA Today, “Report refutes fraud at poll sites”.) Moreover, while claiming to the courts that Indiana’s bloated voter registration laws increased the risk of imposter voting, Rokita at the same time was negotiating with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Voting Rights Section a consent decree in which the members of his own Election Division acknowledged that the State had grossly failed in its statutory duties under federal law to conduct periodic voter list maintenance programs designed to keep voting lists current.
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