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Ongoing US GOP Debacle Thread: Seditious Republicans march toward authoritarianism

Kris Kobach’s Voting Sham Gets Exposed in Court

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The modern American crusade against voter fraud has always been propelled by faith. That is, an insistent belief in things unseen — things like voters who show up at the polls pretending to be someone else, or noncitizens who try to register and vote illegally.

Fraud like this is so rare as to be almost unmeasurable, and yet its specter has led to dozens of strict new laws around the country. Passed in the name of electoral integrity, the laws, which usually require voters to present photo IDs at the polls or provide proof of citizenship to register, make voting harder, if not impossible, for tens of thousands of people — disproportionately minorities and others who tend to vote Democratic.

The high priest of this faith-based movement is Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and gubernatorial candidate who has been preaching his gospel of deception to Republican lawmakers for years. He has won plenty of converts, even though he has failed to identify more than a tiny handful of possible cases of fraud. In his eight years as secretary of state, he has secured a total of nine convictions, only one of which was for illegal voting by a noncitizen; most were for double-voting by older Republican men.

For the past two weeks, however, Mr. Kobach has been forced to make his case in a far more rigorous setting — the fact-finding process of a federal trial. In a Kansas City courtroom, Mr. Kobach and his fellow true believers have struggled to defend a 2013 state law that requires prospective voters to prove their citizenship before they can register.

It has not gone well for Mr. Kobach. The lawsuit, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Kansas residents who were blocked from voting under the new law, contends that the legislation violates federal law, which requires only that prospective voters attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury. Meanwhile, it disenfranchised tens of thousands of Kansans, who were disproportionately younger voters or voters with no party affiliation.

And how many noncitizens did the law stop from voting? Squint really hard. One would think that after all these years, Mr. Kobach would have something to show for his dogged efforts. Yet according to his own witnesses, Kansas, which has 1.8 million registered voters, has identified 129 noncitizens it says registered or tried to register since 2000. Of those 129 people, 11 actually voted, and it’s not clear how many of these cases represent intentional fraud, as opposed to honest mistakes or clerical errors. But Mr. Kobach is convinced, calling these findings “the tip of the iceberg.” If so, the iceberg is melting fast.

Mr. Kobach’s game may work with partisan lawmakers, but not with federal judges. At the beginning of the trial, Mr. Kobach, who is representing himself, tried to introduce what he said were new data on the number of Kansans whose voter registrations were suspended for lacking proof of citizenship. Judge Julie Robinson of Federal District Court said no, reminding him that the deadline for introducing pretrial evidence had passed the night before. “We’re not going to have a trial by ambush here,” the judge said when Mr. Kobach tried again a few days later.

How does it feel to have your papers out of order, Mr. Kobach?

Of course, restrictive voting laws like these have never been about protecting electoral integrity. They’re about keeping certain people away from the ballot box, often based on who they are — or are assumed to be. On Tuesday, one of Mr. Kobach’s witnesses, a political scientist, Jesse Richman, testified that up to 18,000 noncitizens have registered or tried to register in Kansas. When the A.C.L.U.’s lawyer asked him about his methods for analyzing the state’s list of suspended voters, Mr. Richman said that, among other things, he flagged foreign-sounding names. What about a name like “Carlos Murguia,” the lawyer asked. Would he flag that one? Yes, Mr. Richman said. He was then informed that Carlos Murguia is a federal district judge who sits in the courthouse where the trial is being held.

It all seems like a big joke until you remember that laws like these have already had their intended effect. In Kansas, more than 22,000 people who tried to register had their applications suspended or canceled for not having proof of citizenship. And in Wisconsin, which President Trump won by fewer than 23,000 votes, a strict voter-ID law kept at least 17,000 voters from the polls in 2016.

Remember also that just days after the 2016 election, Mr. Kobach scored a meeting with President-elect Trump in which he urged the passage of a nationwide proof-of-citizenship requirement. A few months later, Mr. Trump appointed Mr. Kobach to lead his so-called election integrity commission. In January, after months of futility and infighting, the commission folded, having made no findings and issued no recommendations. No surprise there — there’s virtually nothing to find. There has been no epidemic of noncitizens voting, despite Mr. Trump’s baseless claim (endorsed by Mr. Kobach) that he lost the popular vote only because of millions of illegal voters. And there are hardly any examples of in-person voter fraud, the only kind that could conceivably be stopped by voter-ID laws. A federal judge once compared such laws to using “a sledgehammer to hit either a real or imaginary fly on a glass coffee table.”

Unfortunately, the courts have not always brought the appropriate degree of skepticism to these laws. The Supreme Court upheld the first voter-ID law it considered, in 2008, even though the Indiana lawmakers who passed it had not identified a single case of fraud that the law would have prevented. Former Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the opinion in that case, later called it a “fairly unfortunate decision.” Richard Posner, a former federal appeals court judge who also upheld the Indiana law, later said that voter-ID laws are “now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention.”

More recently, courts have gotten better about questioning the evidence and rationale for these laws, striking down some of the strictest ones, in Texas and North Carolina, for deliberately discriminating against minority voters. That’s the right approach. These laws masquerade as common-sense measures, but they are in truth anti-democratic shams, and it is gratifying to see them unravel in the harsh light of a federal courtroom.
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PWNED.

"When the A.C.L.U.’s lawyer asked him about his methods for analyzing the state’s list of suspended voters, Mr. Richman said that, among other things, he flagged foreign-sounding names. What about a name like “Carlos Murguia,” the lawyer asked. Would he flag that one? Yes, Mr. Richman said. He was then informed that Carlos Murguia is a federal district judge who sits in the courthouse where the trial is being held."

 
wakephan09 said:
PWNED.

"When the A.C.L.U.’s lawyer asked him about his methods for analyzing the state’s list of suspended voters, Mr. Richman said that, among other things, he flagged foreign-sounding names. What about a name like “Carlos Murguia,” the lawyer asked. Would he flag that one? Yes, Mr. Richman said. He was then informed that Carlos Murguia is a federal district judge who sits in the courthouse where the trial is being held."
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Haha incredible
 
The fact Republicans widely use that tactic instead of admonishing it is telling. I wish they’d just be upfront and explain why gun rights and more important than voting rights.
 
Amodei defends his office's response to a 'vulgar' phone call from a student

A congressman's staff called a high school to get a kid suspended for using curse words in a phone call about gun control.

ACLU officials said Christiansen called the congressman’s office Wednesday and pleaded for lawmakers to “get off their f—ing asses” and enact gun-reform legislation that would help keep children safe at school. Specifically, Christiansen asked the congressman to support raising the minimum age to buy a gun and to ban bump stocks, the weapon modification that accelerates the rate of gunfire.

“That very day the constituent was called to the principal’s office and given a two-day suspension for ‘disrespectful behavior/language,’” the ACLU’s executive director, Tod Story, wrote Monday in a letter to Amodei. He also noted that the punishment occurred after “a staff member from your office contacted the constituent’s school to report this phone call.”

The suspension wasn’t the only form of discipline, though. The school also isn’t letting the student assume his elected role as the class secretary-treasurer because of the incident, ACLU officials said.

Christiansen told The Nevada Independent that, in retrospect, his wording wasn’t ideal. But the student said he’s disappointed a staff member in Amodei’s office breached his “political privacy” by calling the school.
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“He related the guy was vulgar,” Amodei said in a brief interview Monday. “He didn’t ask [the school] for any specific thing or beat the kid up. He just said ‘I wanted you know that this guy was really vulgar. We had a lot of calls and nobody else was,’ and that was it.”
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Almost started a new thread to highlight, for me, a new word.

But it really belongs here.

I read today’s David Brooks column in the NYT and then a few selected comments. One I’ll post in its entirety:

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Mr. Brooks, you might take this well-written article as an occasion to reflect on who, in the current iteration of the republic, represents the greatest threat to someone like the great Mr. Whitman and the red-blooded Amercan ideal of freedom of expression and literate citizenship that he espouses: Let's name names, shall we? There's Donald Trump, who's every waking breath is an insult to literacy, spirituality and thoughtfulness. And then there's his handmaid, Mike Pence, who would love nothing more than to 're-educate' Walt Whitman into no longer being gay. It matters nought to the likes of Mr. Pence that Whitman spent many long grueling hours tending to the wounds of American soldiers. He'll never be a legitimate 'American' to many current residents of this country, thanks to the toxic politics of those on the right. And until 'conservatives' like you are willing to name names and join the fight unambiguously, we are all cursed to live with kakistocracy.
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So...I had to look up that word: Kakistocracy: Wikipedia article.

From there...

American Kakistocracy [article in The Atlantic]

Degeneration nation: It takes a village of idiots to raise a kakistocracy like Donald Trump’s [a piece in Salon]

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...All of this means that we need to rescue a word that is more relevant today than ever. As Amro Ali explains in a piece calling for a revival of the term “kakistrocracy”: “In a world where stupidity penetrates multiple levels of government, policies and personalities; it is strange that the term coined to best describe it has actually ended up in the endangered and forgotten words books.”

The key for Ali is that kakistocracy is not only a term that captures rule by the “stupid” and the “worst;” it also describes a desire to push “human relationships, that form the controlling governmental machinery, into a degenerative state.”
Forbes contributor Michael Lewitt reminds us that “kakistocracy” should be used to describe a state or government run by the most unscrupulous or unsuitable people: “Corrupt, dishonest and incompetent politicians, regulators and bureaucrats were put in charge by self-absorbed, selfish and ignorant citizens.” He goes on to acknowledge that we are probably not the first society to consider our leaders as part of a kakistocracy, but the problems with the Trump team go beyond perception.
The word kakistocracy comes to us from Greek. Kakistos means “worst,” which is superlative of kakos — “bad” — and if it sounds like shit, that’s because it is.

Kakistrocracy is simply the best umbrella term for the form of government we are heading into. It aptly combines the realities of a team that represents nepotism, oligarchy, plutocracy, kleptocracy, demagoguery, alt-right values and a disturbing tendency toward fascist white nationalism.

I suppose it could be worse. Rational Wiki lists 41 types of government; among them is a capracracy, or rule by goats. Goats could be worse. Although considering the slate of folks in line to run our government starting next year, we might all end up wishing they were goats instead.
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And so forth.

Of course, well-intended yet somewhat simplistic and paranoid conservative stalwarts will tend to see this as mere partisan gamesmanship. But I don’t think so. And agree with that NYT commenter quoted above.
 
Only a matter of time before this tactic travels across the pond.

 
unscrupulous Nunes at it again...lock him up!
 
Claudia Tenney blames 'deep state' for Ben Carson dining set controversy

Tenney, a Republican, made the comments on Talk of the Town, a Utica radio show. Tenney said the whole incident had been misunderstood.

"Somebody in the deep state, it was not one of his people apparently, ordered a table, like a conference room table or whatever it was for a room, and that's what the cost was," Tenney said.
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Tenney recently found herself in the national spotlight when she said that "many" mass murderers are Democrats during an interview on an Albany radio show. She argued later that the comment was taken out of context.
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