Yesterday, I got to visit with Virgil and we got to play cards – there was a brand new deck. It kind of made me chuckle – because it included, besides the 52 cards and 2 jokers, a 55th card with tips on authenticating the cards. (You can look it up if you’re cutious; it’s Motor Brand #976.) But they were brand new and sturdy, which helped in shuffling. The drive was fine both ways. On the way down, I could see that it was the northbound lanes where the bridge was missing, and on the way back up I could see that they had done a quick-and-dirty paving and paint job which made it driveable just fine. Since Interstates are a part of the Federal Highway system, I should probably drop a thank-you note to Pete Buttigieg. Just now I’m pretty tired, but I may feel better later. I also noted that the missing bridge (at mile marker 107) is between two exits (104 and 108) both of which can take one to the Pueblo West neighborhood – that would be a heck of a lot shorter detour than going through Cañon City if it comes to that. Also, Virgil returns all greetings.
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SPLC – SPLC SUES LOUISIANA CITY ON BEHALF OF NAACP, CHALLENGING UNFAIR VOTING MAP
Quote – In Abbeville, as elsewhere, the makeup of voting maps can have a very tangible impact on the lives of voters. Local officials determine everything from whether a street is paved to how far someone has to travel to visit a park or playground – and how well maintained those public works might be. “There’s a complete difference or two different worlds in the city of Abbeville,” said Linda Cockrell, president of the Vermilion Parish NAACP chapter in Abbeville. “I was told that in the higher-up neighborhoods, city workers are in these neighborhoods at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning washing down the roads, removing trash, and everything else.” Click through for details.The smaller the city, and the farther away from actual big cities it is, the truer that probably is too.
Civil Discourse – The Week Ahead
Quote – The most important pending question in Georgia is, when does the next trial get set, and will it include all of the remaining defendants? A September 14 scheduling order sheds a little light on that matter. It applies to all defendants other than Powell and Chesebro and orders the parties to complete initial discovery by October 6. We are well past that deadline. The Judge also gave the parties until December 1, just a bit more than a month away, to file all motions other than motions in limine. That means substantive motions…. The September order doesn’t set a hearing date for any of those motions. Presumably the Judge will set them once the motions are in…. Fani Willis could leave it up to the Judge to rule, but look for her to file a motion this week asking him to set that date. Remember, Willis was willing to try all of the defendants October 3. She’s ready to go. Click through for what to expect. Since Both Ken andd Sidney have accepted plea deals, the trial supposed to start today will look different from the one we initially expected.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
Sometimes those who are the most engaged in political activism can also be the most naive. I don’t know how otherwse to explain how those of us who have been working on civil rights, civil liberties, and voting rights since the 50’s, and gained so much, have also lost so much. Did we fail to watch our backs? Did we miss the signs? Or did we see the signs, but were unsure of how to respond? Now it appears we need to do it all over again – or our kids and grandkids do, those of uswho have any. We and/or they will need to come up with better plans for how to keep what has been won. I know, it sounds tiring. I feel exhausted myself. But it’s that or slide into fascism.
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Civil rights legislation sparked powerful backlash that’s still shaping American politics
A group of voters lining up outside the polling station, a small Sugar Shack store, on May 3, 1966, in Peachtree, Ala., after the Voting Rights Act was passed the previous year. MPI/Getty Images
For nearly 60 years, conservatives have been trying to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. As a scholar of American voting rights, I believe their long game is finally bearing fruit.
In that case, the court struck down a portion of the Voting Rights Act that supervised elections in areas with a history of disenfranchisement.
The Supreme Court is currently considering a case, Merrill v. Milligan, that might gut what remains of the act after Shelby.
Conservative legal strategists want the court to say that Alabama – where African Americans make up approximately one-quarter of the population, still live in concentrated and segregated communities and yet have only one majority-Black voting district out of seven state districts – should not consider race when drawing district boundaries.
These challenges to minority voting rights didn’t emerge overnight. The Shelby and Merrill cases are the culmination of a decadeslong conservative legal strategy designed to roll back the political gains of the civil rights movement itself.
A number of Southern states had a poll tax that was aimed at preventing by Black people, many of whom couldn’t afford to pay it. This is a receipt for a $1.50 poll tax paid in 1957 by Rosa Parks. Library of Congress, Rosa Parks Papers
Victory – and more bigotry
The realization of civil and voting rights laws during the 1960s is often portrayed as a victory over racism. The rights revolution actually gave rise to more bigotry.
The Voting Rights Act criminalized the use of discriminatory tests and devices, including literacy tests and grandfather clauses that exempted white people from the same tests that stopped Black people from voting. It also required federal supervision of certain local Southern elections and barred these jurisdictions from making electoral changes without explicit approval from Washington.
In fact, the VRA worked so well that it gave rise to another seismic political shift: White voters left the Democratic Party in record numbers.
As Washington protected Black voting rights, this emerging Republican majority capitalized on fears of an interracial democracy. Conservatives resolved to turn the South Republican by associating minority rights with white oppression.
In 1981, conservative political consultant and GOP strategist Lee Atwater recognized that Republicans might exploit these fears. He argued:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.“
‘Retard civil rights enforcement’
It wasn’t just Southerners who aimed to undo the revolution enabled by the Voting Rights Act.
Conservative political consultant and GOP strategist Lee Atwater, center, at the GOP National Convention in Dallas, Aug. 23, 1984, recognized that Republicans might capitalize on white people’s fears of rising Black political power. AP Photo/Ed Kolenovsky
Reagan’s administration, according to voting rights expert Jesse Rhodes, used executive and congressional control to reorganize the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and the Supreme Court.
The objective?
To undermine how Washington enforced the Voting Rights Act – without appearing explicitly racist.
One of the Reagan administration’s strategies was to associate minority voting rights with so-called reverse discrimination. They argued that laws privileging minorities discriminated against white voters.
Undoing progress
Here’s the background to that strategy:
The years following 1965 were characterized by the dilution of Black Southerners’ voting power. Realizing that they couldn’t keep African Americans from voting, Southerners and segregationists resolved to weaken votes once they’d been cast. They gerrymandered districts and used other means that would dilute minority voting power.
Conservatives during the early 1980s had become increasingly alarmed by the Supreme Court’s and Department of Justice’s preference for drawing racial district boundaries to give minorities more influence in elections in such ”majority-minority districts.“ These districts aimed to guarantee that minorities could elect candidates of their choice free from machinations such as vote dilution.
With little regard for vote dilution itself, conservative politicians and their strategists argued that majority-minority districts discriminated against whites because they privileged, like affirmative action policies, equality of outcomes in elections rather than equal opportunity to participate.
Edward Blum, a longtime conservative legal activist, has brought and won many cases at the Supreme Court rolling back civil rights gains. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
By the 1990s, conservatives replaced federal officials who might protect the Voting Rights Act. In time, these developments, and growing conservatism within the courts, prompted conservative litigation that continues to shape civil rights laws.
A tidal wave of anti-civil rights litigation, led by a well-funded man, Edward Blum, flooded the court system. Blum sought to undermine the Voting Rights Act’s supervision of local elections and undo racial quotas in higher education and employment.
These cases, at their core, attacked the rights revolution of the 1960s – or rights that privilege minorities. The argument?
These protections are obsolete because Jim Crow segregation, especially its overt violence and sanctioned segregation, is dead.
New claim, old game
Nearly 30 years of Republican or divided control of Congress and, to a lesser degree, the executive office gave rise to increasingly conservative Supreme Court nominations that have not just turned the court red; they all but ensured favorable outcomes for conservative litigation.
These include the Shelby and Merrill cases and, more recently, litigation that seeks to remove racial considerations from college admissions.
In the Shelby case, the court held that the unprecedented number of African Americans in Alabama – and national – politics meant not merely that racism was gone, it meant that the Voting Rights Act is no longer relevant.
In fact, the rise of voter fraud allegations and contested election results is a new iteration of old, and ostensibly less violent, racism.
The Voting Rights Act was not only effective; Washington was also, initially, committed to its implementation. The political will to maintain minority voting rights has struggled to keep pace with the continuity of racist trends in American politics.
The work of protecting minority voting rights remains unfinished.
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, what wouldn’t I give to see you, in your most terrifying appearance, swoop into the House and carry off Jim Jordan (and others, but if I started naming all the names we’d be here all week.) I know that’s not going to happen. But it does seem it will take something about that drastic, and at least that effective, to make any inroads. But it felt like that in the 50’s too. Maybe I’m just getting too old.
Yesterday, I heard from James on how he is doing after his amputation. He is working aain, and is taking his beloved dog, Cinnamon, for walkies every day. Last Monday, while the weather was pretty good, they took a walk of four and a half miles. Wow. I have long believed that how well one recovers after surgery, any surgery, is pretty much determined by the amount of work one puts in on recovering (bearing in mind, of course, that varous factors may affect one’s ability to do so.) James has worked hard both in prescribed and self-motivated physical therapy and I would say it shows.
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HuffPo – She Was The Most Powerful Woman In Ohio. But There Was One Big Problem She Couldn’t Fix.
Quote – Out of office, [Maureen] O’Connor hasn’t lost sight of the fight for fair districts. She says she’ll work to build support for a constitutional amendment in the state to create an independent redistricting process and “get the politicians, the elected officials, off the redistricting commission.” But for now, the product of the GOP-drawn maps is clear: It’s a stacked deck. Click through for details. Unless we want to continue to live under permanent minority rule (and such a deluded minority at that), we need a new voting rights act. Among other things, in needs to require an independent commission to draw new district maps for every state (not necessarily the same commission, just that every state must have one.) Every state. The last I looked, Ohio was not in Alabama.
Wonkette – Could Anything Have Prevented Diabetic Child From Dying In Arizona Foster System? Guess We’ll Never Know!
Quote – Type 1 diabetics are insulin-dependent and require regular blood glucose monitoring. If they are deprived of insulin, they will go into ketoacidosis, which if untreated will result in brain swelling (cerebral edema) causing a coma and eventually brain death. It just wouldn’t happen if the kid had been getting his insulin. Does that really count as a natural death? Richard Blodgett says he believes the Arizona Department of Child Safety failed to take care of his son, which they obviously did. He would very much like to know if his insulin pump was removed, if his blood glucose was monitored, if his regular doctor was consulted. So far, the Department of Child Services has not given him any answers. Click through for story. This is worse than a tragedy (in a tragedy, the hero brings his fate upon himself through a tragic flaw. Type 1 diabetes does not constituta a tragic flaw.) I would call it a travesty (in the metaphorical sense of destruction through absurdity, not in the original sense of cross-dressing.) I wonder whether there will ever be any accountability here. The author thinks not, and I fear she is right.
Yesterday, the radio opera was “Almira” by Georg Friedrich Händel. It was his first, and he was so young when he wrote it that the libretto was in German (which is why I used the German spelling of his name – He was in fact 19), with recitatives in Italian (because he was at the time in Italy, studying Italian opera). The Early Music Society of Boston presented it in Bremen. It was 4 hours 30 munites long (in 1705 they didn’t have many other forms of entertainment to choose from or take up their time.) It’s about three couples, where the men are in love with the wrong women, and it’s complicated by Almira’s father’s dying wish, but everything gets sorted out at the end, through a twist much like Figaro’s birthmark. The music seems quite mature. The human brain may not fully develop until about the age of 25, but it appears that talent and creativity develop faster than logic and reason. If that’s an excuse for poor choices made by our ancestors, particularly in the areas of politics and gocernment, it should be no excuse for us. We live longer, and know better. But I digress. In 1712 Handel arrived in London, preceding George I by two years, where he remained the rest of his life, becoming a naturalized British citizen as George Frederick Handel. King George I latched on to him (as had Queen Anne) – though he had 6 opera coompanies, he also did a lot of work for the throne. There was a popular little verse abou him (similar to being a subjet of a meme today): “Some say compared to Bononcini that Mynheer Handel’s but a ninny. Other aver that he to Handel is scarcely fit to hold a candle. Strange that such difference should be twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” As you see, it had a more lasting impact on the languange than most such verses Also (burying the lede), I got an email response confirming my visit to Virgil who is now in Pueblo (much closer). So I’ll be late commenting.
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Robert Reich – The Worst Memo in American History
Quote – We almost take for granted big corporate money in American politics. But it started with the Powell memo. In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, then an attorney in Richmond, Virginia (and future Supreme Court justice) to report on the political activities of the Left. Richard Nixon was still president, but the Chamber (along with some prominent Republicans like Powell) worried about the Left’s effects on “free enterprise.” … Powell urged businesses to mobilize for political combat. Click through for what and why. The United States Chamber of Commerce is not your friend. This was the start of the path to Citizens United.
The New Yorker – State Legislatures Are Torching Democracy
Quote – Longtime Ohio politicians have been shocked by the state’s transformation into a center of extremist legislation, not just on abortion but on such divisive issues as guns and transgender rights. Ted Strickland, a Democrat who served as governor between 2007 and 2011, told me, “The legislature is as barbaric, primitive, and Neanderthal as any in the country. It’s really troubling.” When he was governor, he recalled, the two parties worked reasonably well together, but politics in Ohio “has changed.” Click through for full reporting. Jane Mayer is very good at this, and in fact Steve Schmidt recommended this article. The trend may not surprise you, but how far it has come and how fast may.
Glenn Kirschner – AG Garland: “DOJ Will Hold All Accountable”, Starting w/”Cases in Front of Us & Build From There”
Meidas Touch – Ban Putin Propaganda
American Bridge – America is on the move
No Dem Left Behind – Don’t Say Gay Bill, the GOP’s Long Strategy of Weaponizing Fear & Hate
Liberal Redneck – Gas Prices and Joe Biden
Sky World- By Bear Fox performed by Teio Swathe – [In English and a Native language, I do not know which] Words: “Let us put our minds together and remember those who have passed on, their lives’ duties accomplished, they are living peacefully in the Sky World.”
Beau – Let’s talk about North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and the Supreme Court….
Yesterday, the opera was a historic broadcast (next week they will get back to live broadcasts for the rest of the season.) They had a list of around 10 and asked listeners to vote (I didn’t because I didn’t have aa favorite.) The voting went to “Tha Daughter of the Regiment” from 1973, with Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti. What’s primarily historic about it is that it was Pavarotti’s broadcast debut, and includes the aria which gave him the nickname “Monarch of the high C’s.” I’m not a dedicated Pavarotti fan, but there’s no question he deserved that title. Those C’s were beautiful to hear, as well as inspiring to so many tenors who have come after him. (It’s also the opera in which RBG famously played the [speaking] role of the Duchess of Krakenthorpe – but that was not in this production, it was in Washington DC in 2016 – and again in 2021.) in esearching those dates. I also discovered she loved new opereas as much as lder ones, as do I. But this one – and the one written about her and Scalia, must have held special places in her heart.
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Vox – The fate of American elections is in Amy Coney Barrett’s hands
Quote – Four members of the Court have already endorsed [the independent state legislature] doctrine, despite the fact that the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected it over the course of more than a century. Along with Gorsuch, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh all embraced it in lawsuits seeking to alter which rules would govern the 2020 election. Meanwhile, the three liberal justices plus Chief Justice John Roberts have all signaled that they will not overrule the more than 100 years’ worth of Supreme Court decisions rejecting [this] doctrine. So, unless Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, or Kavanaugh has an unexpected change of heart, the fate of American democracy is now in Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s hands. Click through for details. I sense a possible subtext here, though I may be wrong – if it isn’t just random, if someone decides which justice gets to consider each case, it could be that someone is willing to throw Barrett under the bus if (when) the backlash is overwhelming.
Aeon – The many deaths of liberalism
Quote – Not coincidentally, all of these critics are living, writing and publishing in liberal countries. And they are demonstrating one of liberalism’s most successful features simply by participating in the quintessentially liberal enterprise of dialogue and disagreement under constitutional protections (with liberal limitations). These are, in fact, the only states in which actual competition for power and dissent is not just allowed but fostered. No one living in a totalitarian society has had the luxury of declaring liberalism, let alone totalitarianism, dead. Click through for essay. There’s very little new information here, but it’s a strong reminder that the fight to make our nation more liberal – closer to the actual ideals of liberalism – will never ne over, by its very nature. So we always need to keep going. And as Samuel Johnson said, human beings do not need to be instructed so much as they need to be reminded
Women’s History – Smithsonian: Women’s Futures Month
Quote – Calling all citizen scientists, do-gooders, plant lovers, activists, advocates, dreamers, and creators! Join us in March 2022, when the Smithsonian shakes up Women’s History Month with a new Women’s Futures Month: a forward-looking celebration of the power of women and girls in STEM to shape a better world. Click through for background and programs. The Smithsonian wants to focus on the future rather than the past, and that is certainly also useful – not just for women.
