US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9493

stuff like the "gangster" lifestyle and dress, glorifying crime. don' cooperate with police at all, don't even be a witness, just never tell the polic eanything.
the pants hanging low so underwear is visible style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagging_(fashion)
allegedly higher rates of criminality; out of wedlock birth, absentee fathers.

On December 12 2017 23:40 Mohdoo wrote:
Jones should have just said fuck abortions and walked into the Senate.

On December 13 2017 00:48 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
What does “and would do anything for them” mean?

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The Senate election in Alabama on Tuesday is not just about the choice between Doug Jones and Roy Moore. It’s also about a voter suppression campaign that may well sway the result of a close race.

In 2011, Alabama lawmakers passed a photo ID law, ostensibly to combat voter fraud. But “voter impersonation” at polling places virtually never happens. The truth is that the lawmakers wanted to keep black and Latino voters from the ballot box. We know this because they’ve always been clear about their intentions.

A state senator who had tried for over a decade to get the bill into law, told The Huntsville Times that a photo ID law would undermine Alabama’s “black power structure.” In The Montgomery Advertiser, he said that the absence of an ID law “benefits black elected leaders.”

The bill’s sponsors were even caught on tape devising a plan to depress the turnout of black voters — whom they called “aborigines” and “illiterates” who would ride “H.U.D.-financed buses” to the polls — in the 2010 midterm election by keeping a gambling referendum off the ballot. Gambling is popular among black voters in Alabama, so they thought if it had remained on the ballot, black voters would show up to vote in droves.

Photo ID laws may seem innocuous. For many of us, it might be easy to take a few hours off from work, drive to the nearest department of motor vehicles office, wait in line, take some tests, hand over $40 and leave with a driver’s license that we can use to vote. But this requires resources that many rural, low-income people around the country simply do not have.

I work with poor, black Alabamians. Many of them don’t have cars or driver’s licenses and make under $10,000 a year. They cannot afford to pay someone to drive them to the motor vehicles or registrar’s office, which is often miles away.

Photo ID laws are written to make it difficult for people like them to vote. And that’s exactly what happens. A study by Zoltan Hajnal, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, comparing the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, found that the voter ID law kept black voters from the polls. After Alabama implemented its strict voter ID law, turnout in its most racially diverse counties declined by almost 5 percentage points, which is even more than the drop in diverse counties in other states.

The study controls for numerous factors that might otherwise affect an election: how much money was spent on the races; the state’s partisan makeup; changes in electoral laws like early voting and day-of registration; and shifts in incentives to vote, like which party controls the state legislature.

In Alabama, an estimated 118,000 registered voters do not have a photo ID they can use to vote. Black and Latino voters are nearly twice as likely as white voters to lack such documentation.

In other words, Alabama’s law is nothing but a naked attempt to suppress the voting rights of people of color. That’s why my organization, Greater Birmingham Ministries, with the help of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, has sued the state to block the photo ID law. The case will go to trial in February.

When the law was passed in 2011, it so reeked of discrimination that state politicians didn’t bother to submit it to the federal government for approval, as Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required. For decades, Section 5 had acted as a crucial prophylactic, stopping discriminatory voting laws before any election. Instead the ID law remained dormant until June 2013, when the Supreme Court’s devastating ruling in Shelby County v. Holder suspended Section 5’s preclearance requirement.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then a United States senator, applauded the ruling as “good news” for the South. For Mr. Sessions, who called the Voting Rights Act an “intrusive” piece of legislation, it was a victory. But for voters in Alabama and the rest of the South, it was terrible news.

It left states like Alabama, Texas and North Carolina free to test the limits of voter suppression. Indeed, after the decision, Alabama announced the photo ID law would go into effect without federal approval.

The photo ID law isn’t the only obstacle in front of Alabama voters. My organization is also challenging the state’s felon disfranchisement law, which affects an estimated 250,000 people here — 15 percent of Alabama’s black voting age population, but fewer than five percent of whites.

The law bars people with felonies of “moral turpitude” from voting. For decades such crimes were ill defined, but once included things like miscegenation. A new law narrowed the list of disfranchising crimes, but a federal judge ruled this summer that the state is not required to inform people with convictions who couldn’t vote under the old law that they may now register to vote.

Sadly, on Tuesday, many of the voters who would most benefit from picking lawmakers who will represent their interests in the Senate will be kept away from the polls. Those voters are disparaged for their purported disengagement with the election, while the state’s voter suppression campaign is largely ignored.

We’ve made too much progress to tolerate this. Federal courts must reject the voter ID law. Congress needs to restore the Voting Rights Act to its full strength. Nothing less than our democracy is at stake.

On December 12 2017 23:40 Mohdoo wrote:
Jones should have just said fuck abortions and walked into the Senate.

On December 13 2017 01:16 Logo wrote:
Out of all the issues that Democrats ignore or are sheepish on voter suppression is the most baffling to me. It's a great hill to die on, has incredible influence on elections, and there's plenty of room to deflect or defeat any counter point. Even if you can't completely defend the current open system we have most places, you could at least push for sensible voter ID laws that don't have a bias against poor people.

On December 13 2017 01:16 Logo wrote:
Out of all the issues that Democrats ignore or are sheepish on voter suppression is the most baffling to me. It's a great hill to die on, has incredible influence on elections, and there's plenty of room to deflect or defeat any counter point. Even if you can't completely defend the current open system we have most places, you could at least push for sensible voter ID laws that don't have a bias against poor people.

On December 13 2017 01:19 LegalLord wrote:
Is Jones competent at all at campaigning? I mean by the way you hear about his campaign nationally he’s a warm body against pure evil, so you should vote against child molesters. But I wonder if Democrats will ever try to compete on more than just painting the opposition as evil. All that accomplishes is a contest of “vote for the lesser evil” that Republicans will usually win because they’re better at that game. Whereas if Jones or any other Democrat could convince their locals that they actually herald positive change it might be a different story.

On December 13 2017 01:13 TheTenthDoc wrote:


I mean he publicly said he was uninterested in implementing changes to abortion legislation in an interview in November after the wild inflation of his abortion stance from an interview question about federal legislation passed by the House restricting abortion before the third trimester.

It literally didn't matter, the MSNBC interview was enough to convince people that he has a psychotic stance on "late-term" or "full-birth" abortion, complete with a "rich history" of support, because the right-wing mediasphere is a monster and one interview is enough to damn you.

On December 13 2017 01:18 mahrgell wrote:


You say "We should allow more black people to vote" convinces a Moore voter to change his vote for you?

I'm not convinced.

Requiring a photo ID to vote seems perfectly reasonable to me. It is a useful document in other situations such as bank visits or any other occasions requiring personal verification on the spot. Though here it is getting less useful as we move more services online that used to require it.

If the problem is cost then have one weekend day a month and one late evening a week where offices are required to be open. Then add a refund when you register for the cost of it and public transport there and back if you are already on subsidies due to low income.

On December 13 2017 01:22 Logo wrote:


You don't need to frame it that way and it wasn't specific to this election.

As far as I can tell it's not inherently a racial issue insofar as the laws target a specific demographic set. It *is* a racial issue because that specific demographic set is specifically disproportionately black (and intentionally so). But you don't have to fight it on that front if you think it will alienate white voters you need.

The same way Republicans don't always blast out the fact that these laws are designed to suppress minority votes (except when they do) a Democrat wouldn't need to frame it as about race so much as a basic reasonable thing that's good for a healthy democracy.



And what about when you're working double jobs, have kids, and/or don't own a car and the office is far way? Even if you get compensated for the drive that doesn't necessarily make the hour trip + time at the DMV easier to manage.