We begin today's roundup with
Ari Berman at The Nation, whose latest piece chronicles the distributing progress Republicans have made in curtailing the right to vote:
Since the 2010 election, the Republican Party has waged a long and aggressive war on voting. In 2011 and 2012, at least 180 new voting restrictions were introduced in forty-one states, with twenty-seven election changes passing in nineteen states. [...] Voters in fifteen states will face new restrictions for the first time in a major election when they go to the polls in November, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Many are in states with highly contested Senate and gubernatorial races, like Kansas and Wisconsin.
The biggest impact could be felt in North Carolina, where there’s a razor-thin Senate race between Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan and Republican speaker of the state house Thom Tillis, who spearheaded the new voting restrictions. Hundreds of voters, including an Afghan War vet, were disenfranchised in the primary after North Carolina Republicans eliminated same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting, which tens of thousands of voters used last midterm. Turnout will be much higher come November, with a corresponding increase in problems at the polls.
To help voters, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law is leading an “election protection” coalition of 150 organizations, recruiting up to 4,000 volunteers to staff the 1-866-OUR-VOTE hotline and putting legal observers in nineteen states.
USA Today's editors:
You'd think the world's oldest democracy would be constantly working to make sure that as many people as possible vote in elections such as the one two weeks from today, which will decide who runs everything from city governments to Congress.
Instead, what's clear in the countdown to Nov. 4 are the ways a nation built on the proposition that the vote is the great equalizer limits the number of people who actually go to the polls.
Rebecca Leber at The New Republic:
Texans casting a ballot on Monday, when early voting begins, will need to show one of seven forms of photo ID. A concealed handgun license is okay, but a student ID isn't. The Supreme Court on Saturday allowed Texas to go forward with this controversial voter ID law. A federal judge had previously struck down the law, arguing that it could disenfranchise 600,000 voters or a full 4.5 percent of registered voters, many of them black and Latino.
Critics say voter ID laws, especially the one in Texas, amount to voter suppression, because it can be both difficult and costly to get the required identification. In a powerfully worded dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagen, wrote, “The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.”
Much more on the day's top stories below the fold.
Michael Hiltzik at The Los Angeles Times examines the discriminatory effect of voter ID laws:
Are voting laws requiring photo IDs inherently racially discriminatory, as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg maintained in her blistering dissent Saturday morning?
A team of politician scientists from Appalachian State, Texas Tech and the University of Florida took on that question for an article just published in Political Research Quarterly (h/t: Justin Levitt). Their conclusion is that the claims of proponents that they're just upholding the principle of ballot integrity can be discounted; the photo ID laws aim to disenfranchise Democratic voters; they cite findings that the raised cost of voting imposed by photo ID requires "falls overwhelmingly on minorities." In other words, the answer is yes.
The Baltimore Sun:
In the decade leading up to the photo ID law's passage, Texas convicted all of two individuals for in-person voter fraud (the only kind of fraud a photo ID requirement might prevent). And as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in her seven-page dissent this weekend, the GOP-controlled Texas legislature refused all efforts to make it easier under the law for voters to obtain ID or otherwise lessen the measure's discriminatory effects.
"The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters," Ms. Ginsburg wrote.
Matt Yglesias has an interesting take on the voting rights issue, arguing that there is no constitutional right to vote, and there should be a clear and unequivocal such right enshrined in the constitution:
The legal arguments around these kinds of voter ID laws, which tend to disproportionately disqualify non-white voters, hinge on whether they constitute a form of illegal (or unconstitutional) racial discrimination. But the fact that the legal, political, and constitutional arguments need to get pushed into a narrow racial discrimination frame is itself a symptom of the real problem: it's about time American citizens obtained a constitutional right to vote. [...] When the Constitution was enacted, it did not include a right to vote for the simple reason that the Founders didn't think most people should vote. Voting laws, at the time, mostly favored white, male property-holders, and the rules varied sharply from state to state. But in the first half of the nineteenth century, the idea of popular democracy took root across the land.[...] Subsequent activists sought to further expand the franchise by barring discrimination on the basis of race (the 15th Amendment) and gender (the 19th Amendment) — establishing the norm that all citizens should have the right to vote.
But this norm is just a norm. There is no actual constitutional provision stating that all citizens have the right to vote, only that voting rights cannot be dispensed on the basis of race or gender discrimination. A law requiring you to cut your hair short before voting, or to dye it blue, or to say "pretty please let me vote," all might pass muster. And so might a voter ID requirement.
Switching topics in today's roundup,
The New York Times calls on President Obama to bar the use of overseas torture sites:
As Charlie Savage of The Times reported on Sunday, some military and intelligence lawyers in the administration are pressuring the White House to adopt a Bush-era position that there is no bar against the use of torture by the United States outside American borders. And, unfortunately, the White House is considering the proposal. [...] State Department lawyers want the administration to abandon the position of the George W. Bush administration and state plainly that it will not engage in torture or cruel treatment of prisoners anywhere in the world, including at detention camps on foreign soil. [...] Nearly six years after he stopped the practice, President Obama should not consider any legal loophole that might permit an American official to engage in torture or cruelty, no matter where it takes place. A clear position in Geneva would send a strong message that humane treatment isn’t just an Obama administration policy, but rather permanent national and international law.
Vikas Bajaj examines Republican hypocrisy on toll roads:
The Wall Street Journal published a story today about a public backlash against toll roads in Texas, where people increasingly have to pay to drive on many major highways, including several in the Dallas area.
The allure of “free”— at the point of access—is hard to resist, even for conservatives.
Steve Munisteri, chairman of the Texas Republican Party, told The Journal that “a large segment of our party believes in having free access to transportation.”
On a final note,
Eugene Robinson examines Sen. Elizabeth Warren's latest:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren says she isn’t running for president. At this rate, however, she may have to.
The Massachusetts Democrat has become the brightest ideological and rhetorical light in a party whose prospects are dimmed by — to use a word Jimmy Carter never uttered — malaise. Her weekend swing through Colorado, Minnesota and Iowa to rally the faithful displayed something no other potential contender for the 2016 presidential nomination, including Hillary Clinton, seems able to present: a message.
“We can go through the list over and over, but at the end of every line is this: Republicans believe this country should work for those who are rich, those who are powerful, those who can hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers,” she said Friday in Englewood, Colo. “I will tell you we can whimper about it, we can whine about it or we can fight back. I’m here with [Sen.] Mark Udall so we can fight back.”