John Doar Worked for Civil Rights

Wisconsin native John Doar passed away yesterday.

Doar personified why the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice became for many Americans the fulfillment of the promise of equality.

Today, the likes of John Doar are the political enemies of the White Party, what used to be the Republican Party.

Nice work by Roy Reed in the Times this morning.

Betting when John Doar did his work for the DoJ in the 1960s, he did not imagine the hostility of the Republican Party of 2014 to the fundamental civil rights of all Americans.

Likely, Doar would have been appalled by the statements of the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court John Roberts that racism is now over in America.

Secret Strategy in Play, or This Is Dumbest Civil Rights Bill in History

Update III: NYT: "The deletion of voter ID laws from the list of discriminatory violations is a steep price to pay for [GOP] support."

Update II: The Grio notes Rep. Conyers and Sen. Leahy gave in to the GOP voter obstruction forces, generally exempting "voter ID" laws from federal scrutiny in the Voting Rights Act Amendment. Are pro-civil rights forces in Congress really going to throw in the towel on photo voter ID obstruction, in the name of the Voting Rights Act no less? And if they are not, what are they waiting for in opposing this travesty of democracy through voter ID obstruction, inserted by Rep. Sensenbrenner?

Update: Yes,  Joshua A. Douglas of Slate Magazine, voting is mostly a state right. Hence, the Pocan-Ellison Right to Vote Amendment to correct this defect. But there are these things called the 14th, the 15th and the 24th Amendments that speak to voting clearly. In any event, the proposed Voting Rights Act Amendment that would contain language explicitly protecting GOP-crafted photo identification as a condition of receiving a ballot for voting in an election for Federal, State, or local office is a disgrace.
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Here's one of the latest pieces of foolishness on the newly proposed Voting Rights Act Amendment that still, inexplicably, has not been met with a 'are you kidding me' reaction.

Some other brilliant, well-crafted legislative strategy must be at work as HR 3899 resides at the Judiciary committee.

Kevin Drum discusses Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in a piece as though the good CJ went on an objective, epistemological quest arriving at the honest conclusion that the old coverage formula for federal preclearance in the Voting Rights Act is simply outdated, 1,000s of congressional pages of social scientific evidence aside.

Drum writes that now, "a bipartisan trio of lawmakers introduced legislation that would partially reverse the Supreme Court's handiwork in Shelby County. Basically, it takes up John Roberts' challenge to create a new formula for preclearance that takes into account current conditions. In particular, any state with five or more violations of federal election law over the most recent 15 years would be subject to preclearance. Preclearance would last for ten years from the most recent violation, and states would roll in or out of the preclearance requirements depending on their performance over the preceding 15 years."

Five or more violations of federal election law over the most recent 15 years would be subject to preclearance?

This is the new formula? No heads exploding? Drum notes this legislation not with disgust.

Representative of this conventional wisdom of pretending this bill is worth a damn is Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Michigan), the Dean of the House:

"I commend my friends, Congressman John Conyers and Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, for working to write a bipartisan bill to amend the Voting Rights Act. Having voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, I am supremely honored to have worked on this legislation with these civil rights champions, as well as the incomparable Congressman John Lewis and Assistant Democratic Leader Jim Clyburn. I urge the House and Senate to move forward with this bill in order to restore the critical voter protections to minorities, seniors, and students invalidated by the Supreme Court's ill-advised Shelby County decision."

This really is crazy.

The Voting Rights Act Amendment would protect GOP state voter obstruction laws that specifically target minorities, seniors, and students.

While it's true that in 1982, "Congress amended Section 2 to provide that a plaintiff could establish a violation of the Section without having to prove discriminatory purpose," providing dueling sections of the law if passed, the bill's author, Sensenbrenner, in the House openly brags that the act "(i)ncludes modest provisions that continue to permit states to enact reasonable photo identification laws."

This legislation is no first step, it's a con that would stall civil rights challenges and protect GOP state voter obstruction schemes.

Stop Playing Dumb on Voter Obstruction

Update: Steve Schmidt, McCain-Palin top strategist: "It’s part of the mythology now in the Republican Party that there’s widespread voter fraud all across the country. In fact, there’s not."

One of the first public reactions to the Romney-Ryan ticket getting trounced at the 2012 polls was Paul Ryan's complaint about the urban vote.

"The surprise was some of the turnout, some of the turnout especially in urban areas, which gave President Obama the big margin to win this race," Ryan told WISC-TV. (Shear, Steinhauer. NYT)

Ryan knows what that mysterious "urban vote" means.  It means black votes, and they must be stopped. Voter fraud.

In the Wisconsin voter ID trial next Monday, November 4, as predictable as cold in a Wisconsin winter, we'll be treated to uncritical false equivalence press reports of "voter fraud" v. "voter rights".

That there is no in-person voter fraud is irrelevant, the media feels an obligation to play it dumb and present Ryan and the GOP fabrications as fact.

No matter the idiocy of the GOP lie, no matter the empirical truth of 100,000s being disenfranchised by the GOP-crafted photo voter ID law, the GOP objective of disenfranchising voters will not be reported.

I work as an elections inspector (poll worker). Most of the people voting are known by one or more of the poll workers, and the registered voter has to state her address and name, verified by two poll workers just to vote.

Election protection is not the objective of voter ID, GOP protection is.

The problem for the GOP is the Wisconsin Constitution is broad in the protection of voters against temporary partisan majorities, and the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, though not as sweeping is a powerful weapon used against those imposing voting obstruction.

The GOP has been working for years to add an additional qualification to vote, a photo voter ID, in violation of the Wisconsin Constitution.

This is a nationwide project, which is why there was a flurry of state voter ID laws right after five GOP justices declared section 4 the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional.

Voting rights remain under GOP attack.

Wisconsin Circuit Court Judge David T. Flanagan issued a permanent injunction on July 17, 2012 that remains in effect, writing:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has often used the term "constitutionally qualified elector" to describe one eligible to vote in our state. That is because the Constitution, not the legislature or any law enacted by the legislature, is the source of the right to vote and unlike the United States Constitution, the Wisconsin Constitution sets forth explicitly the requirement for eligibility to vote, Art III, Sec 2 (4). The court must begin any consideration of voter eligibility legislation with the recognition of this bedrock constitutional foundation of Wisconsin voter eligibility.

The GOP is still passing legislative burdens to make voting more difficult or impossible for as many non-GOP voting citizens as the GOP can get away with.

That's the truth.

Wisconsin Voter ID Trial to Feature Mountain of Social Scientific Evidence

Update: See also Nicholas Stephanopoulos' piece on the Voting Rights Act and Section 2. "[E]ach [challenge under Section 2] failed because the plaintiffs couldn’t show that minorities were less likely than whites to possess valid IDs—proof that is now becoming more available. This means that Section 2 should be an increasingly useful weapon against the voting restrictions popping up around the country." Stephanopoulos points to a collaboration between Cal Tech and MIT by Charles Stewart III, entitled Racial Differences in Election Administration. The League of United Latin American Citizens of Wisconsin et al v. Deininger case is the first trial post- Holder v. Shelby County claiming a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

GOP War on Voting, Spotlight Moving to Wisconsin

Those with even a passing interest in voting rights will be watching Wisconsin on November 4 when a highly politicized photo voter ID trial begins.

The entire, years-long Republican Party lie, or if one prefers falsehood, of purported massive in-person voter fraud will be put to trial and is in jeopardy, as will the GOP objective of disenfranchising non-GOP voters.

The trial follows the highly publicized recantation of Judge Richard Posner, the author of a federal appellate opinion that upheld Indiana’s voter ID law, whose theory of photo voter ID was used by the US Supreme Court in the case of Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, that has been touted as justification for voter obstruction laws in states across the country.

Once in power, GOP legislatures and governors across the nation raced to enact restrictive photo voter ID law since 2011.

"Defendants (Scott Walker et al) have not put forward any compelling government interest that their stringent photo ID law actually addresses—such as a single prosecution for in-person voter impersonation fraud in all of Wisconsin history—that would justify these oppressive burdens. For all these reasons, the law as applied to these classes violates the Fourteenth and Twenty-Fourth Amendments [poll tax] to the United States Constitution," reads the PLAINTIFFS’ CIVIL L. R. 16(c) PRETRIAL REPORT in Frank v. Walker.

The witness list includes academic experts, veterans, students and civil rights workers who will establish the undue burden imposed on 100,000s of Wisconsin citizens by Wisconsin Act 23, passed in 2011 with sole GOP support and unanimous opposition from civil rights groups.

For witness list, see PLAINTIFFS’ CIVIL L. R. 16(c) PRETRIAL REPORT in Frank v. Walker, and PLAINTIFFS’ CIVIL L. R. 16(c) PRETRIAL REPORT in League of United Latin American Citizens of Wisconsin et al v. Deininger et al.


The trial is expected to last some two weeks.

League of United Latin American Citizens of Wisconsin et al v. Deininger is the first trial post- Holder v. Shelby County claiming a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Judge Lynn Adelman (1997-present) will preside in Milwaukee.

Fed Appellate Judge Recants: We Blew Voter ID Opinion

Authoring Judge of Voter ID case recants

Republican Party Voter Obstruction Project Could Be Heading for Trainwreck

Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (1981-present) is a sitting justice who writes a column for Slate Magazine and regularly intones on the abundant rightwing, judicial idiocies of our time.

In an amazing, audacious and perhaps bizarre interview featuring Posner and Mike Sacks (Host/Producer with HuffPost Live) first reported by Rick Hasen, Posner has recanted his 2007 decision in Crawford heard before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and authored by Posner, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008.

 "The purpose of the Indiana law is to reduce voting fraud, and voting fraud impairs the right of legitimate voters to vote by diluting their votes," Judge Richard Posner wrote in his majority opinion in 2007, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in CRAWFORD v. MARION COUNTY ELECTION BD. (Nos. 07-21 and 07-25) (2008).

Posner has now publicly recanted his opinion.

The Brad Blog reports, "This is nothing less than remarkable. The 7th circuit court judge who wrote the majority opinion in the landmark Crawford v. Marion County Election Board case, has now admitted he got it wrong! 'I think we did not have enough information," Judge Richard Posner said in remarks today. "If the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.'"

Posner made his comments in an interview with Mike Sacks discussing jurisprudence and Posner's new book, Reflections on Judging (Harvard University Press, 2013).

Writes Hasen:

In response to Mike Sacks’s questions about whether Judge Posner and the 7th circuit got it wrong in Crawford case, the one upholding Indiana’s tough voter id law against constitutional challenge (Posner says):

'Yes. Absolutely. And the problem is that there hadn’t been that much activity with voter identification. And … maybe we should have been more imaginative… we…. weren’t really given strong indications that requiring additional voter identification would actually disfranchise people entitled to vote. There was a dissenting judge, Judge Evans, since deceased, and I think he is right. But at the time I thought what we were doing was right. It is interesting that the majority opinion was written by Justice Stevens, who is very liberal, more liberal than I was or am ... But I think we did not have enough information. And of course it illustrates the basic problem that I emphasize in book. We judges and lawyers, we don’t know enough about the subject matters that we regulate, right? And that if the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.'

Here’s the quote from Posner’s book, which Mike Sacks flashed on the screen: 'I plead guilty to having written the majority opinion (affirmed by the Supreme Court} upholding Indiana’s requirement that prospective voters prove their identity with a photo id—a law now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than fraud prevention.'

The repercussions for protecting voter rights of Americans against the Republican and Tea Party are stunning.

The whole nationwide Republican Party project of obstructing the voting of Americans could be in dire jeopardy.

This is because Crawford is the landmark case that, for example, the Wisconsin DoJ, Scott Walker and even the historically (and formerly) non-partisan Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau (and every other GOP state hack) have hyped (erroneously) as the controlling legal case on challenges to the GOP's photo voter-obstruction statutes.

The Crawford case was challenged as unconstitutional on its face, so no evidence was presented demonstrating how voters were obstructed.

This lack of the evidence will not be a problem in Wisconsin.

In Wisconsin, two federal challenges to the state Voter ID law are set to heard on November 4: Frank v. Walker, (Case 11cv1128), (U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin) and Jones et al v. Deininger et al (Case 2:12-cv-00185), (U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin).

There is a mountain of social scientific evidence accumulated in Wisconsin Courts in state cases and by the federal plaintiffs demonstrating how voters were intended by this GOP legislation and the practice of the legislation to be obstructed from voting.

Look for a federal decision finding that Act 23, Wisconsin's Photo Voter ID law, is discriminatory and not supported by valid neutral justifications.

Mike Sacks interview with Judge Richard A. Posner:

Remembering a Hero, Jefferson Thomas, May He Never Be Forgotten

- America has many unsung heroes, some we remember, others are forgotten. One of the latter died this week, a man who helped to try bring ‘change’ to America before it became ‘official policy’. -

By Robbie Brown in MyCatBirdSeat

Jefferson Thomas, one of the nine black students who integrated an all-white high school in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 in a landmark confrontation of the civil rights movement, died Sunday in Columbus, Ohio. He was 67.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, according to a statement from Carlotta Walls LaNier, another of the students — known as the Little Rock Nine — who desegregated Central High School and the current president of the Little Rock Nine Foundation.



The Little Rock Nine presented the first major test of the federal government’s ability to enforce a 1954 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed racial segregation in public schools.



After Gov. Orval Faubus refused to integrate the school, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered federal troops to escort the students. Central High’s desegregation began the agonizing, decade-long process of integrating schools across the country.

The students faced protests and racial slurs as they went to class beside Army soldiers. In the classroom, Mr. Thomas, a 15-year-old sophomore and track athlete, was subjected to hostile stares and was once punched from behind by a white student.

“That’s natural that somebody is going to stare,” Mr. Thomas said in a 1959 interview with The New York Times. “It’s like kids going to a circus for the first time and seeing an elephant there. They stare.”

All nine students received Congressional Gold Medals from President Bill Clinton in 1999. The other seven are Melba Patillo Beals, Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Terrence Roberts and Thelma Mothershed Wair. Mr. Thomas is the first to die.

The Little Rock Nine Foundation Web site describes Mr. Thomas as “a quiet, soft-spoken, unique and special person.” After graduating from Central High, he served in the Army in Vietnam, leading field campaigns against enemy troops, the site says. He earned a business degree and spent his career as an accountant at private companies and the Department of Defense.

In 2008, he was invited to the inauguration of Barack Obama, along with the other Little Rock Nine members. He called his former classmate, Ms. LaNier, in delight after the Obama campaign carried Ohio, the swing state where he lived.

“I delivered my state,” he told Ms. LaNier, according to her memoir, “A Mighty Long Way.” “It’s all over now!”

In an interview with The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 1987, Mr. Thomas called his years at Central High one of two periods in his life, along with Vietnam, that were “very trying.” The students endured taunts and ridicule to demonstrate a principle, he said.

“If one of us had quit, that would have shown a weakness in our unity,” he said at the opening of a memorial visitors center in Little Rock in 1987.

In her memoir, Ms. LaNier wrote that Mr. Thomas’s father was laid off from his longtime job at a machinery company, probably as punishment for his son’s decision to attend a white school.

Mr. Thomas is survived by his wife, Mary; a son, Jefferson Jr.; a stepson, Frank; and a stepdaughter, Marilyn.

In 2007, Mr. Thomas told The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that prayer had helped him through the integration struggle. He said that one Sunday at church he heard the hymn “Lord, Don’t Move My Mountain, Just Give Me the Strength to Climb,” inspiring him to pray for strength, rather than for the acceptance of his classmates.

“It seemed that overnight, things stopped being so bad,” he said. “The same things were happening, but they didn’t hurt me as much. I didn’t feel like I was a failure. I felt victorious because I made it through the day.”

Enjoy this presentation from one that was there to help make the change…