D.C. Court Upholds Constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

May 18, 2012 By SDMowrey Leave a Comment

D.C. Circuit Upholds Constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 18, 2012 – Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the constitutionality of the Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, affirming the summary judgment of the D.C. District Court.  In Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder, the court rejected an argument advanced by attorneys for Shelby County, Alabama, that the legislative record did not support the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, identifying numerous examples of modern instances of racial discrimination in voting that sustain Congress’s findings.  

“The court properly found that this key provision of the Voting Rights Act is still needed to ensure that minorities can fully exercise their constitutional right to vote free from discrimination,” said Lawyers’ Committee Executive Director Barbara R. Arnwine. “This is an important victory in the defense of Section 5.”

Originally enacted in 1965, Section 5 requires that states and localities with a history of voting discrimination submit any changes in their voting practices and procedures for federal review before putting them into effect.  It is a monumental piece of civil rights legislation and continues to serve as a shield protecting minority voters’ right to be free from racial discrimination in voting.

“The Court properly found that Congress’s decision to maintain Section 5 was grounded in the many instances of recent voting discrimination,” said Jon Greenbaum, chief counsel for the Lawyers’ Committee, who argued before the district court in this case.

In April 2010, Shelby County (a largely white suburb of Birmingham) filed suit in federal court in Washington, DC asking that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act be declared unconstitutional.  Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, No. 1:10-cv-00651 (D.D.C.).  The county, naming Attorney General Holder the defendant in the case, claimed that Congress did not have the constitutional authority, in 2006, to reauthorize Section 5 for another 25 years.  On August 25, 2010, the Lawyers’ Committee, representing Bobby Lee Harris, a former council member of the Town of Alabaster (located in Shelby County), intervened in the lawsuit to defend the constitutionality of Section 5.  Other defendant interveners include Shelby County residents, represented by the NAACP LDF and the ACLU Voting Rights Project.

On September 21, 2011, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia upheld the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act against Shelby County’s challenge.  Shelby County filed an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is the subject of today’s ruling.

The Lawyers’ Committee has been at the forefront in seeking to ensure that Section 5 continues to protect minority voters against discriminatory voting changes.  In 2005, the Lawyers’ Committee established the National Commission on the Voting Rights Act to determine whether serious and widespread discrimination in voting has continued in the jurisdictions covered by Section 5.  In February 2006, the Commission issued a detailed report on its findings, and Congress then relied on the Commission’s report when it concluded, later that year, that Section 5 should again be reauthorized.   Many of the factual findings cited in today’s opinion were taken from the Commission’s work.

Please click here for the court’s decision.

About the Lawyers’ Committee

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (LCCRUL), a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, was formed in 1963 at the request of President John F. Kennedy to involve the private bar in providing legal services to address racial discrimination. The principal mission of the Lawyers’ Committee is to secure, through the rule of law, equal justice under law, particularly in the areas of fair housing and fair lending, community development, employment discrimination, voting, education and environmental justice.  For more information about the LCCRUL, visit www.lawyerscommittee.org.

Occupy Kingwood Featured on CNN.com

May 14, 2012 By SDMowrey Leave a Comment

Link To Our Saturday’s Occupy Kingwood Video Made It On CNN.com US Main Page

May 14, 2012 By Egberto Willies Leave a Comment

Even as our local media is not covering our Occupy Kingwood weekly event, he video of this week’s event was picked up by CNN. A link to it is currently featured on the CNN.com US main page.

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Link To Our Saturday’s Occupy Kingwood Video Made It On CNN.com US Main Page

May 14, 2012 By EW Leave a Comment

Even as our local media is not covering our Occupy Kingwood weekly event, he video of this week’s event was picked up by CNN. A link to it is currently featured on the CNN.com US main page.

Obama, the Black LBJ

May 14, 2012 By SDMowrey Leave a Comment

By Jason Stanford
http://jasonstanford.org/2012/05/obama-the-black-lbj/
The black Kennedy has become the black LBJ.
In the hyper-political circles I travel in, the release of Robert Caro’s latest Lyndon Johnson biography, The Passage of Power, was received with the glee that’s usually reserved for an Obama rally. To paraphrase Joe Biden, the fourth book in Caro’s promised five-volume LBJ biography is a big flipping deal.  
So when Obama came out for gay marriage, I couldn’t help thinking about a passage early in Caro’s book in which his aides cautioned him against spending political capital on the Civil Rights Act. “What the hell’s the presidency for?” asked Johnson. Johnson rose through the legislative ranks as a segregationist Southerner, so when he ended a speech to a joint session of Congress with the phrase “We shall overcome,” Johnson fundamentally changed the American political landscape.
That’s the nearest equivalent to Obama’s evolution on gay marriage, but apparently it’s not change that Republicans can believe in. The leader of the Log Cabin Republicans, the pro-gay outhouse for the Republicans big tent, even called Obama’s support for marriage equality “offensive and callous” because it came the day after North Carolinians banned same-sex marriage in their constitution.
When LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, Johnson told an aide, “We have lost the South for a generation.” Obama should have an easier time of it because Democrats have already lost the Deep South, where a good chunk of people still don’t approve of interracial marriage. The rest of the country has moved on.
The real question isn’t how Obama’s support for marriage equality will affect his re-election chances. Romney’s family, after all, is only a couple generations away from living in Mexico to avoid laws against polygamy. And that’s before you bring up the letter he wrote to the Log Cabin Republicans to seek their support for his 1994 race against Sen. Ted Kennedy in which he claimed, “I am more convinced than ever that as we seek to establish full equality for America’s gay and lesbian citizens, I will provide more effective leadership than my opponent.” All this makes Romney a slightly damaged floor model for traditional marriage.
Where does the Republican Party go from here? Yes, Democrats have lost the South, but Republicans have lost blacks in the process. Republicans only get a third of the Hispanic vote on a good day, and they haven’t had one of those for a while. Republican opposition to equal pay, reproductive healthcare and nice manners has widened the gender gap, and now gays and lesbians will be part of the Democratic base vote for a generation.
But what of the moderate Republicans who are staring in horror as their party digs foxholes on the wrong side of history’s last civil rights battle?
“Long term it’s probably not a comfortable place to be,” said <http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/former-republican-rep-tom-davis-gay-marriage-opposition-164151646.html>  former Republican congressional leader Tom Davis. “It’s a generational issue.”
Socially conservative Republicans are so, um, married to their opposition for gay rights that the party can’t moderate on the issue without losing their church-going base. But Republicans can’t stand pat without losing moderates such as Ted Olson, the lawyer who argued Bush v. Gore for the Republicans.
“It is very sad to me that people who belong to the party of Abraham Lincoln are resisting so strenuously the equality and decency and integrity and treatment of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters,” Olson said.. “This seems to be one of the last major civil-rights battles of our country. And for people in our country to come out in numbers like this and say, ‘Well, we don’t want the persons next door—who are decent, God-fearing, taxpaying, obeying-the-law citizens who simply want to have happiness like the rest of us’—to say ‘No, I have that right and you can’t have it.’ That just seems mean to me.”
It’s going to be hard for the Republican Party to claim the mantle of freedom and liberty if they oppose those values for people they don’t like. In order to function as a viable political party, Republicans will have drop their opposition to marriage equality just as they eventually had to do with racial integration.
The alternative is to stay on the wrong side of history. The rest of us are moving on.
Also:
Here’s a link to my column in HuffPo about David Frum’s novel and Rick Perry’s fictitious budget compact:
http://jasonstanford.org/2012/05/2109/

The Human Cost of Ideology

May 11, 2012 By SDMowrey Leave a Comment

Editorial

The Human Cost of Ideology

Published: May 10, 2012

For more than a year, House Republicans have energetically worked to demolish vital social programs that have made this country both stronger and fairer over the last half-century. At the same time, they have insisted on preserving bloated military spending and unjustifiably low tax rates for the rich. That effort reached a nadir on Thursday when the House voted to prevent $55 billion in automatic cuts imposed on the Pentagon as part of last year’s debt-ceiling deal, choosing instead to make all those cuts, and much more, from domestic programs.

If this bill were enacted, estimates suggest that nearly two million Americans would lose food stamps and 44 million others would find them reduced. The bill would eliminate a program that allows disabled older people to live at home and out of institutions. It cuts money that helps low-income families buy health insurance. At the same time, the House bill actually adds more than $8 billion to the Pentagon budget.

In all, the bill would cut $310 billion from domestic programs; a third of that comes out of programs that serve low- and moderate-income people. Other provisions would slash by half the budget of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was set up after the financial meltdown to protect consumers from predatory lending and other abuses, and reduce the pay of federal workers.

Fortunately, it will never be taken up in the Senate, where the majority leader, Harry Reid, has said it would “shred the social safety net in order to protect tax breaks for the rich and inflate defense spending.”

House Republicans are already claiming that this bill, along with the equally inhumane overall 2013 budget written by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, shows their seriousness in reducing the deficit and why they should keep control of the House in November. In fact, it does the opposite on both accounts — and serves as a reminder of their destructive priorities.

As a resolution to the debt-ceiling crisis, Republicans had already agreed to $109 billion a year in automatic spending cuts — half from defense, half from the domestic side — if lawmakers failed to agree to lower the deficit in more reasonable ways such as mixing targeted cuts with tax increases on the rich. Even Democrats who supported big defense cuts wanted them chosen carefully, not with the sequester’s cleaver. But Republicans refused to take that path when the supercommittee deliberated and now are trying to make all of the cuts on the domestic side.

In just one particularly destructive example, the bill would eliminate the social services block grant, a $1.7 billion fund that is given to the states to help people struggling the hardest. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the fund provides services to 23 million people, including Meals on Wheels and other programs that help older Americans. It also helps pay for child care assistance, foster care and juvenile justice at a time when states are cutting back these programs.

House Democrats offered an alternative bill that would replace the $109 billion sequester by raising taxes on the wealthy, ending oil company tax loopholes and cutting farm subsidies, but it was rejected. Republicans are determined to protect millionaires and defense contractors, no matter the costs to the country.

A version of this editorial appeared in print on May 11, 2012, on page A30 of the New York edition with the headline: The Human Cost of Ideology.

The People Behind the Lawmakers Out to Destroy Public Education: A Primer

May 6, 2012 By SDMowrey Leave a Comment

Published on Wednesday, May 2, 2012 by Bridging the Difference Blog / Ed Week

The People Behind the Lawmakers Out to Destroy Public Education: A Primer

What You Need To Know About ALEC

by Diane Ravitch

Since the 2010 elections, when Republicans took control of many states, there has been an explosion of legislation advancing privatization of public schools and stripping teachers of job protections and collective bargaining rights. Even some Democratic governors, seeing the strong rightward drift of our politics, have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon, seeking to remove any protection for academic freedom from public school teachers.

This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own "reform" ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the "reform" agenda for education.

ALEC operated largely in the dark for years, but gained notoriety because of the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. It turns out that ALEC crafted the "Stand Your Ground" legislation that empowered George Zimmerman to kill an unarmed teenager with the defense that he (the shooter) felt threatened. When the bright light of publicity was shone on ALEC, a number of corporate sponsors dropped out, including McDonald’s, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Mars, Wendy’s, Intuit, Kaplan, and PepsiCo. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said that it would not halt its current grant to ALEC, but pledged not to provide new funding. ALEC has some 300 corporate sponsors, including Walmart, the Koch Brothers, and AT&T, so there’s still quite a lot of corporate support for its free-market policies. ALEC claimed that it is the victim of a campaign of intimidation.

The campaign to privatize the schools and to dismantle the teaching profession is in full swing. Where is the leadership to oppose it?

Groups like Common Cause and colorofchange.org have been putting ALEC’s model legislation online and printing the names of its sponsors. They have also published sharp criticism of ALEC’s ideas. This is hardly intimidation. It’s the democratic process at work. A website called alecexposed.org has published ALEC’s policy agenda. Common Cause posted the agenda for the meeting of ALEC on May 11 in Charlotte, N.C. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has dropped out of ALEC and also withdrawn from the May 11 conference, where it was originally going to be a presenter.

A recent article in the Newark Star-Ledger showed how closely New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s "reform" legislation is modeled on ALEC’s work in education. Wherever you see states expanding vouchers, charters, and other forms of privatization, wherever you see states lowering standards for entry into the teaching profession, wherever you see states opening up new opportunities for profit-making entities, wherever you see the expansion of for-profit online charter schools, you are likely to find legislation that echoes the ALEC model.

ALEC has been leading the privatization movement for nearly 40 years, but the only thing new is the attention it is getting, and the fact that many of its ideas are now being enacted. Just last week, the Michigan House of Representatives expanded the number of cyber charters that may operate in the state, even though the academic results for such online schools are dismal.

Who is on the education task force of ALEC? The members of the task force as of July 2011 are here. Several members represent for-profit online companies, including the co-chair from Connections Academy; many members come from for-profit higher education corporations. There is someone from Jeb Bush’s foundation, as well as right-wing think tank people. There are charter school representatives, as well as Scantron. And the task force includes a long list of state legislators, from Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Quite a lineup. Common Cause has asked why ALEC is considered a "charity" by the Internal Revenue Service and holds tax-exempt status, when it devotes so much time to lobbying for changes in state laws. Common Cause has filed a "whistleblower" complaint with the IRS about ALEC’s status.

The campaign to privatize the schools and to dismantle the teaching profession is in full swing. Where is the leadership to oppose it?

© 2012 Education Week

Diane Ravitch is a historian of education at New York University. She is a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. She has written many books and articles about American education, including: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform, (Simon & Schuster, 2000); The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Knopf, 2003); The English Reader: What Every Literate Person Needs to Know (Oxford, 2006), which she edited with her son Michael Ravitch.

more Diane Ravitch

Court Lifts Stay; Planned Parenthood Back in State Health Program

May 4, 2012 By SDMowrey Leave a Comment

By Chuck Lindell | Friday, May 4, 2012, 03:34 PM

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today lifted its emergency stay in the legal battle over the Women’s Health Program, meaning that once again Texas is banned from excluding Planned Parenthood from the initiative.

A three-judge appeals court panel said no emergency existed to support its stay, granted late Monday.

A state brief had declared that without a stay, Texas would have to end the program “upon termination of federal funding,” the court said today. But later briefing by Planned Parenthood showed federal funding will continue until November.

“This supplemental filing undermines the State’s assertion of irreparable harm if the injunction is not stayed pending appeal,” the court order said.

By lifting the stay, the court reinstated a preliminary injunction, imposed Monday afternoon by U.S. Judge Lee Yeakel of Austin, that halted state plans to ban Planned Parenthood’s participation in the program, which provides health and contraceptive care to about 130,000 low-income, uninsured Texas women each year.

Under a state rule adopted in February, all Women’s Health Program participants had to certify by last Tuesday that they do not promote abortion or affiliate with organizations that perform or promote abortions. A day before the rule took effect, Yeakel found that the rule violated Planned Parenthood’s First Amendment rights and placed thousands of women in danger of losing vital health care.

Yeakel set a May 18 conference to schedule a trial date to determine whether the injunction should be made permanent.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott quickly appealed Yeakel’s order to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and followed with a late Monday night request for an emergency stay, which was granted by one judge – Jerry Smith – shortly before midnight, when the abortion affiliate rule was to take effect.

Smith was among the three judges who lifted the stay today. In their order, the three-judge panel ordered the court clerk to place Abbott’s appeal on the next available slot for oral arguments and set a faster schedule for briefing from both sides.

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War On Women Rally In Austin Video–Interviews, Speech Highlights, and Voyage

May 1, 2012 By EW Leave a Comment

War On Women VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

On April 28th it all came together. The work paid off. Thanks to the work of many in Houston three buses and a van along with hundreds carpooling left Houston Texas to the Texas Capitol in Austin for the War On Women Rally.

Many thanks must be given to the Houston leaders of this event. We thank Diane Mosier and Kingwood Area Democrat Andrea Gardner for their continuous work in promoting the event around Houston and for getting donations from several unions. Their work was immeasurable. Andrea Gardner even did a stint at promoting the event at KPFT.

Kingwood Area Democrats Angelo and Susana Palma were instrumental in getting a North bus which they generously underwrote. When it was clear we had to get a van, Angelo Palma volunteered to drive. In addition the Palmas provided the North bus with more than enough snacks and drinks. Kingwood Area Democrat Deborah Mowrey provided the North bus with very stylish goodie bags filled with snacks as well as several cases of water.

This type of selfless cooperation from those mentioned above and from many not mentioned is what makes democracy work, people taking the lead to make things happen. We must not forget some of the early supporters and originators of this movement like Lois McGee who I interviewed early on and Julie Burns who came onto my Coffee Party USA radio show Politics Done Right on April 14th, 2012.

Checkout the video below. It is a compression of the entire twelve hour event for those traveling from Houston to Austin and back in 24 minutes.  It includes bus activities, interviews with participants from both Houston and other cities in Texas, and most importantly highlights from the great speakers at the event. The Speakers at the event included State Representative Dawnna Dukes; Reverend Jim Rigby, St. Andrews Presbyterian Church, Austin; Cathy Miller, Texas Freedom Network; Perla Cavazos, Austin Latino activist and mentor; and Genevieve Van Cleve, Deputy Political Director, Annie’s List.

Harris county Republicans: Learning to Disenfranchise Voters from the Best

May 1, 2012 By SDMowrey Leave a Comment

April 30, 2012

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Rebecca Acuña

Office: 512-478-9800; cell: 956-206-5853

Harris County Republicans: Learning to Disenfranchise Voters from the Best

Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart attended the national voter suppression summit held by the King Street Patriots this weekend to “observe and learn.” As Harris County Clerk, Stanart is in charge of administering elections and voter registration. Additionally, Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos will debate Former Republican Judge Mike Anderson this Thursday at the King Street Patriots’ headquarters. The KSP made national news in the 2010 election cycle when numerous reports began coming in from minority polling sites documenting poll watchers deployed by the KSP intimidating voters. Anthony Gutierrez, an advisor to the Texas Democratic Party, released the following statement:

“Harris County citizens should be highly outraged that the Republican officials are so close to this group of extremist group with a history of voter intimidation.” [1]

It’s fine for these TEA Party allies to have a position but it’s a big problem when they try to prevent those who don’t share that position—particularly people who don’t look like them—from participating in the democratic process.  The King Street Patriots are overtly racist and partisan in their use of intimidation tactics.   If Stanart’s objective is to learn how to disenfranchise voters, he’s learning from the best. He’s essentially admitting to being part of their larger voter suppression scheme.

It is beyond ironic that candidates for a law enforcement position are participating in a debate before a group that is in federal court trying to eliminate several Texas state statutes that guarantee political transparency.  Lykos and Anderson appearing at the King Streets Patriots’ headquarters validates the group’s disenfranchisement efforts, confirms its partisanship, and is a slap in the face to all Houstonians. 

The sole purpose of the King Street Patriots is to harass and intimidate minority voters. We’re baffled about what exactly Stanart could possibly learn from the King Street Patriots. In case he forgot, the Department of Justice had to be deployed to monitor the 2010 elections because these right-wing bullies were intimidating voters.”

[1] Don Sumners, the Republicans Tax Assessor Collector & Voter Registrar, also has ties to the KSP as demonstrated by this piece published during 2010 campaign.

The Texas Democratic Party in 2010 filed a lawsuit against the King Street Patriots (KSP) upon the group’s emergence in Harris County. The KSP is a Tea Party Republican group which was registered as a nonprofit corporation but was clearly operating as an illegal, unregistered political action committee intent on electing Republicans. The 261st District Court granted summary judgment to the Texas Democratic Party on all issues on which the Court had jurisdiction.

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Statement of Senator Rodney Ellis on Women’s Health Program

May 1, 2012 By SDMowrey Leave a Comment

For Immediate Release                                                                      Contact: Jeremy Warren

April 30, 2012                                                                                       (512) 463-0113

Statement of Senator Rodney Ellis on Women’s Health Program

(Houston, Texas)//Senator Rodney Ellis (D-Houston) released a statement today regarding the injunction granted to Texas Planned Parenthood against the Texas Health and Human Services Commission’s plans for the Women’s Health Program.

“I am very pleased that Judge Yeakel made the right choice to stop HHSC’s reckless attempts to weaken the Texas Women’s Health Program.  It is a very important first step in this effort and I hope it forces the Texas leadership to stop their damaging and dangerous attack on women’s health.

“Over the past several months, we’ve witnessed a rapid and comprehensive assault on women’s health in Texas and across the US.  We’ve moved well beyond the issue of choice into issues that most Americans believed were settled decades ago and are focusing time, effort and money fighting these battles while ignoring the needs of millions of Texans.  Policymakers in Texas and all across the nation are pushing legislation to enact laws that infringe on the rights and health of women.

“Sadly, over the past year Texas has enacted drastic measures to limit women’s ability to access health care, from intrusive, unnecessary trans-vaginal sonogram legislation, to cutting and eliminating cost-effective programs which provide basic preventative services for hundreds of thousands of Texas women.  The effort to de-fund Planned Parenthood and to essentially eliminate the Women’s Health Program is yet another part of this fight.

“The same people who cut $5 billion from our schools, another $5 billion from health care and underfunded Medicaid by another $5 billion – when we had nearly $10 billion in our savings account – now are willing to sacrifice millions in federal funding and preventive health care for more than 100,000 low-income Texas women.

"Texas can do better. We need to take the politics and heated rhetoric out of these discussions and focus on what matters: improving the health of women and families in Texas. Cutting essential services and implementing rules that limit access to providers simply is not the way to do it.

“Judge Yeakel made the right decision today.  As this case weaves its way through the court system, we can only hope that the system will continue to stand by Texas women and against these ideological assaults on women’s health.”

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