Rahmblin' Man

Anyone who read this blog during the 2006 midterms (i.e. my Mom) knows how many, uh, suggestions I had for the way Rahm Emanuel should do his job as DCCC chair. But I tried not to lose sight of the fact that Rahm and I are still on the same team, even if we don't see eye to eye all the time. That's why I was so happy to see the text of his recent speech to the Brookings Institute.

Rahm's speech was about the over-politicization of government that the Administration has engineered. As anyone who has read this blog lately knows, I've been interested in the purposeful destruction of the Enlightenment principles of liberalism that have shaped our government since at least 1789. So it would seem that Rahm and I have some real common ground here.

Some choice quotes from the speech:

[T]he U.S. Attorney scandal will be to public corruption what Hurricane Katrina was to incompetence in the Bush Administration.
...
Instead of promoting solutions to our nation's broad challenges, the Bush Administration used all the levers of power to promote their party and its narrow interests.
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The Attorney General could offer no coherent explanation for the [US Attorney] fiasco, because to do so would unveil the guiding principle at the core of this White House—insinuating partisan politics into every aspect of government and bringing politics into what used to be a political-free zone—the Justice Department.
...
The corporations don't have to lobby the government, because they are the government.

Unfortunately, just when it looks like Rahm might have gotten himself re-invited to my birthday party, he ends up not going far enough. After mentioning examples of politicization such as cronyism in Iraq reconstruction contracting, outsourcing Walter Reed hospital operations, quashing climate change data, revelations from former White House insiders O'Neill and DiIulio about the lack of policy interest, the student loan scandal, the recent GSA/Hatch Act controversy, and the RNC email controversy, his analysis basically peters out. He concludes that political appointees are a good thing but that these particular ones are too political.

It's not that he's wrong, it's just that he undersells the danger the Administration poses. The corruption we've seen isn't some freak occurrence of corruption, it is a purposeful occurrence of an active effort to destroy our way of government. It's not a culture of corruption, it's an ethos of corruption.

Mark Schmitt, in a review of the new Rahm book The Thumpin’: How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution, emphasizes the essence of the Rahm situation. As he says, it is probably an exaggeration to claim that the Democrats won in spite of Rahm rather than because of him. After all, he did raise a lot of money, and he did seem to understand some things. To wit,

And that is what makes Emanuel a little different from, say, former Democratic National Committee chair Terry MacAuliffe: he understands that politics has to be
about something, and more than just a vague statement of values.

However, the need to drag Rahm kicking and screaming into talking about the war and contesting more seats still haunt his record. Plus, he's kind of a jerk. As Schmitt explains,

[A]s a twenty-five-year-old working on Senator Paul Simon’s first campaign, Emanuel was known as “the nuclear fund-raiser,” and colleagues would gather to eavesdrop on him loudly accusing elderly Jewish donors of betraying the state of Israel if they failed to max out, in their grandchildren’s names as well as their own, to Simon’s campaign. Apparently the strategy worked.

Together, all this evidence highlights the Rahm dilemma: you like having someone feisty on your team who won't take no for an answer, who knows it takes more than statements of values to win. You just wish he could take it to the next level, where he would understand the bigger philosophy instead of just the list of violations or the intimidation of elderly donors.

Exit Strategy

Also, Student Government Elections are happening this week. Many people on the Dems Exec Board are running.

Vote here.

Unitary Execution

When people describe Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as a "loyal Bushie", they are essentially referring to his support for the wacko 'theory' of the unitary executive. For example:

As long as Gonzales remains front and center in the furor over last year's mass firing of U.S. attorneys -- as long as his goofy stonewalling continues to distract attention from all the elements of the purge that point so incriminatingly toward the White House -- he simply enhances his position as the ultimate "loyal Bushie."

The 'theory' basically holds that the President is an elected autocrat who doesn't need one or even two coequal branches of government in order to preside. It is the unifying principle behind basically every disgusting thing the Bush Administration has done. To wit,

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez sent a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter “clarifying” testimony he gave on February 6. In what amounted to a “By the way, I kind of perjured myself before you,” Gonzales said that when he said the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was “all that [President Bush] has authorized” in the area of warrantless surveillance, “I was confining my remarks to the Terrorist Surveillance Program as described by the President.” This tautological sleight-of-hand can lead one only to conclude that there are other “programs” of surveillance. But don’t ask what they might be.

Gonzales also noted that when he said—three times—that the Justice Department had not conducted any analysis of whether purely domestic wiretapping without a warrant might be legal, he might have left the “misimpression” that the Justice Department had not conducted any analysis of whether purely domestic wiretapping without a warrant might be legal. Oops.

The response from the Judiciary Committee, of course, was a great big pile of nothing. By now such admissions have become so routine, they fail to bring attention beyond a story buried deep in the back pages of The Washington Post. After all, this is the administration that leaked the identity of a CIA operative in order to discredit a political opponent. (Remember Bush’s promise to fire anyone involved?) This is the president that claims “we don’t torture,” then fights to retain his prerogative to torture. When forced by political fallout to sign a law outlawing said torture, he issues a “signing statement” making clear his intention to ignore the law when he feels like it. Potential appointees to scientific panels are asked whether they voted for President Bush. Regulations on environmental and occupational safety that the administration finds distasteful lie fallow and unenforced. Treaties signed by the United States are derided as “quaint,” then cast aside. When the Government Accountability Office issues a ruling that the administration’s use of phony “video news releases” purporting to be real news constitutes “covert propaganda” and is therefore illegal, the White House simply ignores them and continues the propaganda campaign.

Gonzales' testimony before the Senate last week on the US Attorney scandal was another perfect example of the unitary executive in execution. The Justice Department is of course a cabinet department, and cabinet departments are part of the executive branch, which make them virtually indistinguishable from the (Bush) White House. For example, since Clinton left office, the number of White House officials who are allowed to comment on ongoing DoJ investigations has increased by over 10,000%!

Bush issued some effusive praise yesterday and over the weekend for the outstanding (but plainly awful) performance Gonzales gave last week. I believe it comes back to two explanations, the first of which is the heavy involvement of the White House, and especially Karl Rove, in the US Attorney firings.

One White House adviser (who asked not to be ID'ed talking about sensitive issues) said the support reflected Bush's own view that a Gonzales resignation would embolden the Dems to go after other targets—like Karl Rove. "This is about Bush saying, 'Screw you'," said the adviser, conceding that a Gonzales resignation might still be inevitable.

The other reason, though, is this business with the unitary executive. If the executive branch really is allowed to govern without the other branches of government (bear with me here), then testifying before Congress is a sort of optional theatricality at best.

For anyone who regularly reads the progressive blogs, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick was a little late to the party, but her article on Friday was still right on (and still lightyears ahead of the media establishment):

Assuming the president watched so much as 10 minutes of his attorney general being poleaxed by even rudimentary questions from the Senate judiciary committee, it strains credulity to believe that Gonzales still has Bush's "full confidence."
...
For six impressive hours, the attorney general embodied the core principles that he is not beholden to Congress, that the Senate has no authority over him, and that he was only there as a favor to them in their funny little fact-finding mission.
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This record reflects either a Harvard-trained lawyer—and former state Supreme Court judge—with absolutely no command of the facts or the law, or it reveals a proponent of the unitary executive theory with absolutely nothing to prove. Gonzales' failure to even mount a defense; his posture of barely tolerating congressional inquiries; his refusal to concede that he owed the Senate any explanation or any evidence; his refusal to even accept that he bore some burden of proof—all of it tots up to a masterful display of the perfect contempt felt by the Bush executive branch for this Congress and its pretensions of oversight. In the plainest sense, Gonzales elevated the Bush legal doctrine of "Because I said so" into a public spectacle.

This is yet another reminder of why fighting Bush tooth and nail is so important. This battle isn't just about whether some bad policies get enacted and whether some bad people get positions in government. This isn't just about what happens in Iraq or what happens to the economy. This is about government itself, about our way of life and our very identity as Americans. The Administration is attacking liberalism itself, and it is absolutely imperative that Bush be stopped if we have any intention of continuing to live in a democracy.

Told Ya So

On Monday, gunman Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, plus himself. On Wednesday, bombs killed 178 people in Baghdad. In 1993, some guy killed 8 people in San Francisco. More children die in swimming pools each year than die from guns. How do we talk about tragedies? And what do we say when we do?

On Tuesday, there was a vigil for the fallen 32 at Virginia Tech, which politicians tripped over themselves to appear at. President Bush was there, within one day of the event itself. On a side note, it took him 4 days to even show up in New Orleans after Katrina, which killed over 1,300.

So where was the vigil for the 178 killed in Baghdad yesterday? Or the 650,000 needlessly killed there since the ill-conceived invasion began? That question is obviously rhetorical, since there are some pretty big differences in the two situations. (a) It's different having a tragedy in your own community instead of half way around the world, and (b) it's not like 650,000 have to die before you can call something a tragedy.

But another difference between Iraq and Tech is how we talk about them. On Iraq, we are told that anything we say or do that contradicts the Administration is hurting the troops. It's a pretty ridiculous claim, not unlike Walter's claim that little Larry is killing his father:

Even worse is the claim by conservatives that we shouldn't say anything about how our every endeavor in Iraq is a failure (it is), since this would make the families of fallen soldiers feel bad for having lost their loved one in vain. I'm sorry, but this is a classic instance of the blame the messenger mentality, and it doesn't hold up. Eventually these families are going to have to face the fact that indeed they did lose their loved one for George W. Bush's vanity war.

To pretend otherwise is deeply dishonest and counterproductive. It's like knowing your friend's boyfriend cheated on her and not telling her about it. When she finds out, it's going to really suck for her, and she's going to be really mad. But she's going to figure it out eventually, and whatever you say about it doesn't change what it actually was. It may seem like something that's not very respectful to say, but it has to be said. (Note to all my attached female friends: this example is purely hypothetical.)

Fortunately, we haven't seen the same kind of timidity from gun control advocates in the wake of Monday's shootings. The right wingers usually love to trash anyone who disagrees with them on anything. But Bush merely used the vigil to talk about something near and dear to him (but irrelevant to public policy): prayer. The usual conservative hit men don't seem to be stepping in to call the gun control advocates any names this time. However, gun control has more or less disappeared from the Democratic agenda since 1994, the last time meaningful legislation was enacted.

In 1993, Gian Luigi Ferri went to the 34th floor of the 101 California Street office building in San Francisco and opened fire with a pair of TEC-9 handguns. Then he took the elevator down to the 33rd floor and opened fire there. It is extremely fortunate that in the end only 8 people died. But it's also fortunate that the specter of anonymous gunmen spraying bullets around office buildings provided enough legislative momentum for a ten year ban on assault weapons, which Democrats forced through Congress in 1994.

Democrats went on to be routed in historic fashion in the 1994 midterms, and gun control has basically been regarded as a politically untouchable bogey man ever since. I was a little young, but I remember when 101 California happened. I remember more clearly gazing out at the 101 California building from the windows of the downtown San Francisco firm where I worked in 2004, thinking about the Republican Congress letting the assault weapons ban expire on September 13th of that year.

The shooter at Virginia Tech, Cho Seung-Hui, reportedly used a couple of basic sidearms, rather than the powerful killing machines favored by Ferri and the Columbine shooters. Nonetheless, unlike that other notorious killer--swimming pools--all guns are designed for one purpose only: killing things. You just can't say that about swimming pools or really anything else. I'm not taking a position at this point on swimming pool policy, but it seems fairly clear that we don't have anything to lose by restricting gun sales.

Conservatives are fond of making the argument that if only more people had guns, we could just shoot everyone who tried to start something, and then he wouldn't be able to kill 32 people. They call it "self defense". Some conservatives are even saying that if only all those Tech students hadn't been so cowardly, things would have turned out better. This canard is easily disposed of, since tales are emerging of the brave and heroic things many of the victims and would-be victims actually did do.

No one likes to politicize tragedy, but the fact is that politics is designed to respond to tragedy. I'm sure no one at the vigil on Tuesday wanted to hear every politician using the occasion to grind whatever political ax he's always had. And no one wants the sacrifices our nation's families have made in Iraq to be cynically exploited for votes. But we need to talk about gun control, and we need to be honest about the situation in Iraq. To do otherwise won't help anyone in the long run.

Volunteer for Dick Durbin

On Friday, May 4th, there will be a gala dinner downtown to fête (and raise money for) Illinois' senior senator, Dick Durbin. All the big shots will be there, including Senate leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And guess what? you can be there too!

Kate Hermann with the Durbin campaign is recruiting volunteers to help out at the event, hob nob, get free food, and I believe receive a free T shirt. Plus you get to spend a glamorous evening at a swank downtown hotel ballroom without actually being swank yourself. (N.b. You do have to dress up a little: for gentlemen, jacket and tie--for ladies, whatever the chick equivalent of jacket and tie is.)

The other catch is that you need to spend one evening next week (either Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday) doing a phone bank in Near North. There will be pizza provided at the phone bank. So please, post a comment or email Kate Hermann at katherine.hermann@gmail.com as soon as you can if you want to take advantage of this exciting opportunity.

Picking Nits?

Now that Democrats run Congress, some interesting investigations are getting underway, just as Republicans warned us they would. There are now some big, sexy scandals brewing as a result. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has been holding hearings on pretty much every aspect of the corruption and incompetence surrounding Iraq. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has been pursuing the sordid US Attorney firing scandal. But there is a much less sexy scandal brewing as well: White House staffers have been misusing their email accounts.

Various rules and regulations demand the following of White House employees:

• Using official government resources for political/party purposes is prohibited
• Using political/party resources for official government business is prohibited

Many White House employees do political work in addition to their official government duties, which is not prohibited. In order to comply with the demands of the rules, the Republican National Committee provided many White House employees, especially Karl Rove, with laptops and Blackberries to use in performing their party duties. You see, it would be not just unethical but illegal for them to use their White House email accounts to conduct party business.

The problem is that they also used their RNC emails for official government business. Business such as the politically motivated firings of US Attorneys. Froomkin explains:

The use of non-government e-mails first became an issue about four weeks ago, when some of the e-mails turned over in a congressional investigation of the firing of eight U.S. attorneys showed that Rove deputy Scott Jennings repeatedly used an RNC e-mail address (sjennings@gwb43.com) in his official communications. One e-mail to Rove was sent to a kr@georgewbush.com address.

But the problem extends beyond just using the wrong email account for the wrong job function. The White House email servers are set up to automatically back up every single email, while the RNC email servers allow users to permanently delete whatever they want. Sure enough, many vital emails were in fact deleted:

Countless e-mails to and from many key White House staffers have been deleted -- lost to history and placed out of reach of congressional subpoenas -- due to a brazen violation of internal White House policy that was allowed to continue for more than six years, the White House acknowledged yesterday.
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Since 2004, White House staffers using those accounts have been able to save their e-mail indefinitely -- but have also been able to delete whatever they felt like deleting. By comparison, the White House e-mail system preserves absolutely everything forever, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.

It is fairly easy to come up with some knee-jerk objections to Waxman's pursuit of such a minor 'scandal'. One could argue that Republicans all warned everyone during the 2006 campaign that a Democratic Congress would just do non-stop investigations instead of pursuing a positive agenda, and the email scandal plays right into that narrative. Since there are so many other scandals going on right now, one could argue that citizens will get so-called "scandal fatigue", whereby the marginal increase in shame per scandal goes down as the number of scandals goes up. One could also argue that by pursuing small-bore stuff like email archiving, the Democrats are just going to look like they're being vindictive as a result of the Clinton impeachment.

But, assuming Democrats handle themselves correctly, I believe this email scandal could be an essential piece of the narrative Democrats ought to be creating for 2008. For one thing, all the fishiness around Iraq and the US Attorney scandal has established a narrative of malfeasance in the White House that puts the onus on to the Administration to counter. Even if people don't pay too much particular attention to it, the email scandal could help contribute to this narrative.

An analogy can be drawn to the Mark Foley scandal from last October--it's not that Republican leadership really influenced policy by protecting a sexual predator, it's they helped people condense the narrative of corruption and arrogance that surrounded the Republican Congress. We also know from the groundbreaking work of Samuel Popkin that voters tend to form a narrative and then adjust it with new information, rather than constantly weighing and reweighing all the evidence. The email scandal could thus be extremely helpful as one more thread in a richly woven tapestry of corruption.

But better yet, since RNC email accounts were involved, it provides a link between the Bush White House and the entire Republican party (by definition) that, if properly invoked, could help in virtually every other campaign around the nation next year.

Brinkmanship

One of the things you can always count on Republicans doing is sticking to their guns, no matter how misguided. George W. Bush didn't spend the last six plus years ignoring reality just to start acknowledging it now. That's why it's so important for Democrats to be firm in their opposition to Republicans. On two crucial issues, taxes and Iraq, the Democrats will have prime opportunities to make their stand.

Taxes
The elephant in the room, as it were, when it comes to taxes is the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). The AMT was instituted in the late 60's to stop millionaires from taking advantage of so many loopholes they ended up not paying any taxes at all. One potential solution would have been to close the loopholes, but instead this crazy, complicated parallel tax system was invented. The problem is, no one ever indexed it to inflation, so next year it is set to affect way more people (middle class people, specifically) than it was ever intended to. There is bipartisan agreement that this is a bad state of affairs, but no agreement has yet been reached on how to fix things.

This article from the NYT details Democrats' intention to overhaul the AMT so that it once again only affects the truly rich. The problem is that by doing so, billions of dollars of currently projected government revenue will dry up. The article has what I consider to be a fairly limited view of the range of options Democrats face:

House Democrats see multiple political benefits from seeking a permanent fix. Some are eager to position themselves as tax cutters. Others want to show their ability to tackle a big and difficult initiative. Last but not least, the alternative minimum tax has a disproportionate impact on states with higher average incomes and high state and local taxes — like New York and California — which tend to vote Democratic.

“It’s a tax cut to the 23 million American families who have no concept that they’re going to get hit with this tax increase,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.

Rahm's comment at the end there demonstrates the political peril of the AMT situation. Politics is NOT an arena in which, as the saying goes, "when you've done your job right, no one will be able to tell you've done anything at all. " In politics, when you do something right, you hit the road and the airwaves to make sure everyone and his sister knows. Fix the AMT now, and no one will really know you helped them because they will simply continue not paying a ridiculously high AMT. Don't fix it, and everyone will be mad at you for not having fixed it. What to do?

If the Democrats can stomach the brinkmanship, this could be a prime opportunity to reverse a core piece of Republican ideology. You see, for the last 25-30 years, it has been political poison to suggest raising taxes. But the sentiments that drove that political reality look like they may be fading, and fixing the AMT might be a good opportunity to get the ball rolling on our counterattack.

John Edwards, the candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, has already announced that his universal health care plan will have to involve some higher taxes. Even some supply-side conservatives are now admitting that it is unrealistic to constantly lower taxes without ever raising them. As Mark Schmitt wrote in Washington Monthly recently, taxes will have to go up soon if we are to retain a government that can act on behalf of its people, but it's going to take some smart political planning to get us there. Schmitt goes on:

But the truth is that we are heading down a path toward fiscal crisis that will inevitably require a major increase in revenues. In case that sounds like a euphemism, I’ll say it plainly: Taxes must go up. If Democrats try to avoid that fact, they’ll become mired in trench warfare with Republicans over small-bore increases that will cost them political support and won’t really address the problem. But if Democrats seize the opportunity to define a new era of the politics of taxes, as Republicans did 30 years ago, they can shape the debate in a way that may actually help them to achieve some of their most-cherished policy goals.
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[T]o make it possible to talk about revenues when the opportunity arrives to actually do something about revenues, Democrats and anyone else who is serious about avoiding economic crisis must spend the next two years thinking and planning how to condition the political environment so that politicians can move with courage. That will require, first, establishing the idea that taxes must increase as a non-debatable fact; second, fixing the political process that has greased the way for tax cuts; and, third, setting the framework in which we talk about taxes.

Fixing the AMT could be the opportunity to lay some effective groundwork for a new era in which taxes can actually be raised when appropriate. Democrats should use AMT debates to highlight the enormous loss of revenue that fixing the situation will cause. They should frame a choice between continuing popular programs and letting government wither away. They can offer Republicans the chance to work with them on overhauling other parts of the tax code to make up for the lost revenue. After making this offer, though, it gets tricky.

The Republicans will hear the offer, and their knees will jerk, and they will reject any form of increasing government revenue, no matter if the net effect keeps revenue constant. Republicans will offer their usual style of compromise (see below): you give up on your position and we get everything we want, in this case rolling back the AMT without doing anything about replacing revenue.

At this point in the process, there will be enormous pressure on Democrats to cave and do what the Republicans want. Instead, they must have the courage to let people get hit with a year's worth of really high taxes, if necessary. People will be furious. But, if Democrats have done their job right, they will have made sure everyone knows that they are paying more as a result of Republicans refusing to come to the table. Once a precedent like this has been set (that sane debate over revenue can and should take place), Congress' budget talks might start taking place in a whole new paradigm.

Iraq
The Democratic-controlled House and Senate recently passed supplemental funding bills for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that set dates for American withdrawal from Iraq. Since that isn't precisely what Bush wanted, he's naturally kicking and screaming a bunch of nonsensical BS about how Democrats hate the troops. In times gone by, Democrats would have immediately run away with their tails between their legs at the very invocation of troop support.

One such bygone time was two weeks ago, when Barack Obama did precisely that. Obama was busily admitting that after Bush vetoes the Democratic supplemental bill, Congress will go right ahead and give him the money with no strings attached anyway. The best part was when he said that no one "wants to play chicken with our troops," which is such a great Republican talking point it might as well have been said by Karl Rove.

In times gone by, Democrats would have been sensitive to calls for compromise with Republicans. Such calls would lead to some very earnest press conferences and meetings, at the end of which Republicans would have everything they wanted and Democrats would have done all the compromising. This is Joe Lieberman's idea of compromise, and it's what snarky bloggers call "date-rape bipartisanship". It's also what the insider's insider (and noted U of C alumnus) David Broder thinks of as compromise.

Fortunately, the Democrats look like they are going to abandon Obama's idea of negotiating and Broder's idea of compromise in favor of principled action. (To be fair, Obama apparently improved his post-veto rhetoric this evening.) When Bush accuses Democrats of playing political games with troop safety, the correct response is what it looks like Dems might actually do: point out how we passed the damn bill already and now he's the one playing the games.

In particular, Harry Reid's statement hits all the right notes. Quoth Reid (emphasis added):

"The American people want the President and the Congress to work together to bring a responsible end to the war in Iraq. Congressional Democrats are willing to meet with the President at any time, but we believe that any discussion of an issue as critical as Iraq must be accomplished by conducting serious negotiations without any preconditions. Our goal should be to produce an Iraq supplemental bill that both fully funds our troops and gives them a strategy for success.

"With his threat to veto such a plan for change in Iraq, President Bush is ignoring the clear message of the American people: We must protect our troops, hold the Iraqi government accountable, rebuild our military, provide for our veterans and bring our troops home.

"The President is demanding that we renew his blank check for a war without end. Despite the fact that the President persists in trying to score political points at the expense of our troops, congressional Democrats have repeatedly reached out in the spirit of cooperation. We renew our request to work with him to produce a bipartisan bill that provides our troops and our veterans with every penny they need, but in turn, demands accountability."

In a way, Obama's right: no one truly wants to throw our troops out on the curb. But the solution to that problem is not to cave to Bush, especially when we can fund the military through July without passing the supplemental funding bill. The correct solution is to stand our ground as long as we can and keep making sure the American people realize this is Bush's mess, and he's the one who is refusing to get us out of it.

Conclusion
Cautious observers are partly right: it is a dangerous game of brinkmanship for Democrats to call Republican bluffs on taxes and Iraq. But these are very dangerous times. The last twelve years of Republican Congressional dominance have proven there is nothing for Democrats to gain from timidity. I am encouraged by their refusal to blink on Iraq so far, and I hope they can bring that same resolve to our fiscal mess.

The Tides of Change Reach Vote Fraud

News from Florida
First, the big story: Florida has rolled back its odious voting restrictions for ex-felons. The story begins many years ago, at the tail end of the Civil Rights era. Many states were frustrated at their powerlessness to deny the vote to black people, so they restricted voting by ex-felons, who they knew would be mostly black as a result of other existing inequities.

As bad as that sounds, in Florida's case it has actually been worse than that. The 2000 presidential election is mostly remembered for the recount debacle in Florida, but there is a racial story behind that debacle. What jumps to mind about that election are images like little old ladies (lifelong Democrats) having their ballots counted for Pat Buchanan, chads hanging, and protesters (who turned out to be paid GOP operatives rather passionate citizens) demanding an end to the recount.

It just so happens that there is pretty solid evidence that Gore really did win that election by a couple hundred votes, which would be common knowledge if the recount had been allowed to proceed. Unfortunately, in one of the most disgraceful moments in its history, the Supreme Court stepped in with a highly biased, partisan, and poorly reasoned ruling to stop the recount, which legal scholars have strongly criticized.

But Gore would have won by a much more comfortable margin if ex-felons, who are disproportionately black and therefore disproportionately Democratic, had been allowed to vote. And Gore's margin would have been much larger still if the ex-felon voting restriction hadn't been illegally applied to tens of thousands of non-felons. Greg Palast explained in 2002:

Two of these “scrub lists,” as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida's electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters. Most of the voters (such as “David Butler,” (1); a name that appears 77 times in Florida phone books) were selected because their name, gender, birthdate and race matched - or nearly matched - one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States. Neither DBT nor the state conducted any further research to verify the matches...

Thomas Alvin Cooper (2), twenty-eight, was flagged because of a crime for which he will be convicted in the year 2007. According to Florida's elections division, this intrepid time-traveler will cover his tracks by moving to Ohio, adding a middle name, and changing his race...

Rather than release this whacky data to skeptical counties, Janet Mudrow, state liaison to DBT, suggested that “blanks would be preferable in these cases.” (Harper’s counted 4,917 blank conviction dates.) The one county that checked each of the 694 names on its local list could verify only 34 as actual felony convicts.

(my emphasis; original emphasis removed)

Florida's move to finally allow many ex-felons to vote is therefore not just a breakthrough for the civil rights of ex-felons. It also has huge implications for the civil rights of every black person in Florida, any one of whom could have been removed from voter roles very easily through this type of chicanery.

Nationwide Implications
The roll-back of ex-felon restrictions in Florida was spearheaded by a Republican, new Governor Charlie Crist. I was shocked to hear that a Republican had led the charge, but apparently Crist was genuinely struck by a sense of injustice tugging at his conscience. It's an inspiring example that goes to prove that merely being a Republican doesn't automatically entail being a bad person inside.

But it helps. For example, former governor Jeb Bush, who presided over the illegal felon disenfranchisement in 2000 to help his brother, is a rotten shell of a human being. Less publicized than even the 2000 disenfranchisement in Florida was the 2004 disenfranchisement there, which Jeb also presided over.

The 2004 edition was actually led by Karl Rove protégé Tim Griffin. After the recent purge that has become such a scandal, Griffin was nominated to take over as US Attorney in Arkansas. As I mentioned in Wednesday's entry, it should be no surprise that Republicans want subpoena powers for one of their dirtiest thugs in the state where Hillary Clinton spent most of her adult life.

The 2004 voter suppression, as orchestrated by Griffin, is emblematic of the new approach Republicans take to voter suppression in general: challenging the ballots and registrations of regular minorities, regardless of their criminal record. Griffin was challenging absentee ballots from black communities in Florida, but a favored tactic in other states has been to challenge registrations from registration drives by Democratic groups. This tactic is likely to have played a large role in deciding Ohio in 2004, for example.

But Griffin isn't the only connection between this tactic and the US Attorney scandal. It turns out some of the purged attorneys were fired for inadequately prosecuting such cases of alleged voter fraud.

This recent tactic is directly connected to Karl Rove (via Griffin), but aggressive pursuit of voter fraud has Rove written all over it, anyway. The defining Rove strategy, generally speaking, is to take your own weakness and turn it into your opponent's weakness. Think of how in 2004 draft-dodging George W. Bush somehow looked like the patriotic defender of his country while decorated veteran John Kerry looked like the pansy. It's the same deal in this case: Republicans commit massive voter suppression, yet they try to make it look like Democrats are the ones manipulating the voter roles.

Conclusion
The recent Florida decision and the uncovering of the crass politicization of justice represented by the US Attorney purge are steps in the right direction. I compliment Crist for listening to his conscience and helping more people vote instead of less, like the rest of his party seems to be doing. Ken Blackwell, the Ohio Secretary of State in 2004, lost badly in his bid for the Ohio governor's mansion last year. Conscientious liberals have launched a project to get responsible people in Secretary of State offices across the nation. We're not there yet, but the tides of voter suppression may be turning.

Enlightenment Watch - April

In a liberal democracy, the government is the people. You may be familiar with this concept from examples such as the times I have written about it or ambient culture, like The People vs. Larry Flynt. The concept of the government and the people being coterminous stems from the Enlightenment philosophers. The ultimate power in any society, according to that view, rests with its people--agents of a state are only using power delegated to them by the people.

In a totalitarian dictatorship, by contrast, the government is the party. You may be familiar with this concept from the examples of the Soviet Union or Mussolini's Italy. The concept of the government and the party being coterminous stems from the legacy of every warlord, despot, and regional strongman in the history of humanity--whatever faction seizes control is the only one with a right to power.

The Bush Administration, Karl Rove, and other Republicans have made it more clear than ever that under their watch, the government of the United States will be coterminous with the Republican Party. The continuing sagas of the US Attorney firing scandal and the suddenly disputed right of habeas corpus, joined by a new scandal at the General Services Administration, all reveal the sad truth of this Republican governing philosophy.

Habeas Corpus
Glenn Greenwald, the blogging jewel in Salon.com's crown, filed a little-reported update in the Republican war on the 800-year-old right this weekend. According to Greenwald, two of three Republican frontrunners for the 2008 nomination are convinced habeas corpus exists. As far as I know, John McCain still supports habeas, but neither Romney nor Giuliani do.

We're not just talking about some contemporary issue like trade deficits or abortion here: habeas corpus is the very foundation of all democracy. The importance of this issue was summed up nicely by that famous bleeding heart hippie liberal Winston Churchill (as quoted by Andrew Sullivan by way of Greenwald):

The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgment by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments whether Nazi or Communist. [emphasis added]

GSA Corruption
It was revealed this month that the General Services Administration, which oversees office supplies and real estate for the federal government, was being directed to help Republican candidates win elections in 2008. The GSA is not the first place you would look for partisanship, especially since using its resources and capabilities for partisan purposes is illegal. But one of Karl Rove's deputies was dispatched to give a slideshow on such strategies this January.

US Attorneys
A typical Republican defense for the firing of the eight US Attorneys is that all US Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President, and he may remove them for any or no reason. I don't know of anyone who is disputing that fact. But the Justice Department initially claimed that the USA's were fired for performance reasons, yet it has become obvious that they were removed for political reasons. We probably wouldn't have had a scandal if the Administration had just been up front about that. But, like the best mystery novel detectives, sometimes the best way to solve a case is to wait for the perp to slip up.

"But detective, how did you know I committed the murder?"
"I didn't. You just told me."

The politicized aspect of the US Attorney firings that gets the most attention is the involvement of many of the fired prosecutors in corruption and fraud probes. For example, Carol Lam was fired from her position in Southern California after getting a conviction on Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) in a defense contracting corruption case. Recently it also became apparent that Lam's ongoing corruption probe was getting close to the Vice President's office. US Attorneys in New Mexico and Washington were allegedly fired for failing to adequately prosecute election fraud, which turned out to mean they didn't manufacture the evidence their superiors wanted to see on Democratic election fraud.

Less attention has been paid to the proposed (and subsequently withdrawn) appointment of Tim Griffin to replace Bud Cummins as US Attorney in Arkansas. You may be thinking, "So what? It's a politically appointed post, why not install a former Karl Rove protégé like Griffin?" It just so happens that Griffin used to be an opposition researcher for the RNC. During that time, Griffin likely committed grave voter fraud felonies himself. More to the point, it would seem like an unlikely coincidence that the Administration wants to give their top opposition researcher subpoena power in the home state of Hillary Clinton, just in time for her presidential candidacy.

As Johnathan Alter summarizes it in this Olbermann clip,

what Rove was trying to do is in jurisdiction by jurisdiction, protect Republicans, go after Democrats, and essentially turn our criminal justice system into what they have in a banana republic [i.e. any totalitarian system].

Conclusion
I should qualify that I don't think most rank and file Republicans are interested in destroying democracy from its very foundations. But the Republicans in power sure seem to be. This means that in this case the opponents of liberalism are probably not accurately described as conservatives. But what, then?

Andrew Sullivan makes a crucial distinction between membership blocs of the Republican party: "If conservatism is about preserving one's own past, fundamentalism is about erasing it and starting afresh." There is no question that things like habeas corpus are part of "one's own past" for most Americans, and the people in power are obviously not interested in "preserving" them. Yet, Bush & Co. also don't seem to be interested in "starting afresh" so much as in recreating the type of despotism that dominated the world prior to 1776.