Various Republican defenders of Georgia’s new voting law have the audacity to claim, with a straight face, that the law “expands” voting rights. They must not have read the plain words of the 98 page law. If they have read it, they must be assuming their listeners will not. 

On Friday April 2nd Nick Corasaniti and Reid J. Epstein of the New York Times went to the trouble of actually reading and analyzing the law that has resulted, among other things, in Major League Baseball pulling the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest. The article itself is a scathing point by point layout of the meaning of the words of the law. If you have access to the NYTimes (or haven’t used up your free articles) here’s the link: What Georgia’s Voting Law Really Does. I’ve pasted the article’s summary below. (Note that clicking any one of the bullet points will take you to the NYTimes article.) 

Here are the most significant changes to voting in the state, as written into the new law:

• Voters will now have less time to request absentee ballots.
• There are strict new ID requirements for absentee ballots.
• It’s now illegal for election officials to mail out absentee ballot applications to all voters.
• Drop boxes still exist … but barely.
• Mobile voting centers (think an R.V. where you can vote) are essentially banned.
• Early voting is expanded in a lot of small counties, but probably not in more populous ones.
• Offering food or water to voters waiting in line now risks misdemeanor charges.
• If you go to the wrong polling place, it will be (even) harder to vote.
• If election problems arise, a common occurrence, it is now more difficult to extend voting hours.
• With a mix of changes to vote-counting, high-turnout elections will probably mean a long wait for results.
• Election officials can no longer accept third-party funding (a measure that nods to right-wing conspiracy theories).
• With an eye toward voter fraud, the state attorney general will manage an election hotline.
• The Republican-controlled legislature has more control over the State Election Board.
• The secretary of state is removed as a voting member of the State Election Board.
• The G.O.P.-led legislature is empowered to suspend county election officials.
• Runoff elections will happen faster — and could become harder to manage.

The no food and water clause has gotten quite a bit of press, simply because it is so blatantly inhumane, but it is actually one of the least of the sweeping efforts to differentially strangle voting rights that are contained in this law. The words of the law result in cutting the number of drop boxes in most of metropolitan Atlanta (a predominantly Democratic area) from 94 to 23 while at the same time limiting access to them to government hours only. As a Washington State voter who often drops his ballot in a drop box in that late evening or early morning at an outdoor drop box at the local library, that restriction hits home. Still more chilling is the partisan legislature’s takeover of election control from the Georgia Secretary of State and county election officials. Recall that Brad Raffensperger, the current SOS, stood up to Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn Georgia’s election result—and recorded the conference call as evidence. Raffensperger succeeded Brian Kemp as Secretary of State. Kemp became the current governor (and signer of this law) by purging the voter roles and then overseeing his own election to the governorship. 

For a close look at Brian Kemp and the history of voter suppression in Georgia (and elsewhere) watch All In: The Fight for Democracy available on Amazon Prime. 

There are several ways to fight this egregious attempt to breathe new life into Jim Crow. Support the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Georgia NAACP, and other groups that have filed legal challenges to the law. Support the growing chorus of corporations that have issued statements condemning this anti-democratic power grab—and urge them to quit funding the political campaigns of those who voted for the law. (See Judd Legum, Popular Information.) But most importantly, learn about H.R.1/S1, the For the People Act, currently under consideration in the U.S. Senate, a bill that would supersede not only Georgia’s voter suppression but that of other states as well. (Of course, that also means encouraging Senators to scrap the filibuster.) 

You will hear the howl of “states’ rights!!” a howl that arose from the South in response 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to our Constitution enacted following the Civil War. These are Amendments that for some years (under federal oversight) expanded the right to vote against the will of many white Southerners. The descendants those Southerns are the ones seen tear-gassing and beating voting rights marchers, including John Lewis, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in film clips from the 1960s. Having made that connection, and having traveled a little in the South in that decade, the words “states’ rights” are forever tainted. 

You will also hear that H.R.1/S1 is “unconstitutional.” Those people need to read the Constitution. The U.S. Constitution, in Article I, Section 4 Elections reads [the bold is mine]:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

H.R.1/S1, the For the People Act, polls well among both Democrats and Republicans for the simple reason that it defends what most Americans feel is important: bolstering the voice of the people and shining light on big money influence in politics. The Act is so popular that wordmeisters hired by wealthy Republican cannot find an argument that sways voters against it. They conclude that to block the Act they will have resort to “under the Dome” strategies—a scathing indictment of their intent.¹

There is no issue that is more fundamental to the preservation and furtherance of our democracy than the passage of the For the People Act. Pay attention. Add your voice. Write to your Senators. Talk with people—this should not be a partisan issue. Donate your support. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry1

From Thom Hartmann’s April 2 column, “There’s a Bizarre Strategy Behind the GOP Culture Wars & Obstruction.”

When Grover Norquist’s research showed that HR1, the For The People Act, was popular even with conservatives because it “prevents billionaires from buying elections,” the Republicans on the phone call decided they’d have to double down on their “under the dome strategy.”

“Under the dome” is GOP-speak for political obstruction in the state and federal capitols. Buying off legislators and twisting arms. Threatening the political futures of people who may do what’s best for the country but doesn’t enrich the billionaires. The sort of thing they’ve been all about for 40 years now, instead of the people’s business.

“Under the Dome” wealthy conservative anti-democratic strategy

Jerry LeClaireApr 2

Amid the rollout of the Biden Infrastructure Plan and the trial of Derek Chauvin one might have missed an exposé published in The New Yorker on March 29, 2021. Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money (and my favorite investigative journalist) reported on a presentation of conservative billionaire-funded messaging research intended to generate methods to swing public opinion against H.R.1/S.1, the For the People Act. The conclusion? The bill is too popular. The only way to stop it is to resort to “under-the-dome-type strategies” political maneuvering, calling in political chits from purchased Republican senators.

Along with expanding access to voting, the For the People Act would require exposure of the sources of funding of “independent” groups bankrolling political influence campaigns. The law would roll back some of the widely-hated effects of the infamous 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. FEC. Citizens United applied First Amendment speech protections to corporations, setting up “corporate personhood” and fueling a vast increase in untraceable money invested in political speech. 

The corporate billionaires funding the messaging research learned that the general public, including a majority of Republicans, are very much in favor of more transparency—and there is no effective argument against this public opinion. Jane Mayer’s article, copied below, is a must-read. 

In the online version of her New Yorker article contains the leaked 10 minute audio presentation. I encourage you to spend the time if you have access (and consider subscribing if you don’t). This recording should rank right up there with Mitt Romney’s famous video-recorded 2012 declaration that 47% of the population is made up of people who believe they are “victims,” and are “dependent on government” and Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” gaffe. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Inside the Koch-Backed Effort to Block the Largest Election-Reform Bill in Half a Century

On a leaked conference call, leaders of dark-money groups and an aide to Mitch McConnell expressed frustration with the popularity of the legislation—even among Republican voters.

In public, Republicans have denounced Democrats’ ambitious electoral-reform bill, the For the People Act, as an unpopular partisan ploy. In a contentious Senate committee hearing last week, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, slammed the proposal, which aims to expand voting rights and curb the influence of money in politics, as “a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats.” But behind closed doors Republicans speak differently about the legislation, which is also known as House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1. They admit the lesser-known provisions in the bill that limit secret campaign spending are overwhelmingly popular across the political spectrum. In private, they concede their own polling shows that no message they can devise effectively counters the argument that billionaires should be prevented from buying elections.

A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groups—including one run by the Koch brothers’ network—reveals the participants’ worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors. The participants conceded that the bill, which would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors as the billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch, was so popular that it wasn’t worth trying to mount a public-advocacy campaign to shift opinion. Instead, a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress.

Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a “spoiler.” “When presented with a very neutral description” of the bill, “people were generally supportive,” McKenzie said, adding that “the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.” In fact, he warned, “there’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.”

As a result, McKenzie conceded, the legislation’s opponents would likely have to rely on Republicans in the Senate, where the bill is now under debate, to use “under-the-dome-type strategies”—meaning legislative maneuvers beneath Congress’s roof, such as the filibuster—to stop the bill, because turning public opinion against it would be “incredibly difficult.” He warned that the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to “engage with the other side” on the argument that the legislation “stops billionaires from buying elections.” McKenzie admitted, “Unfortunately, we’ve found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives.” He said that when his group tested “tons of other” arguments in support of the bill, the one condemning billionaires buying elections was the most persuasive—people “found that to be most convincing, and it riled them up the most.”

McKenzie explained that the Koch-founded group had invested substantial resources “to see if we could find any message that would activate and persuade conservatives on this issue.” He related that “an A.O.C. message we tested”—one claiming that the bill might help Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez achieve her goal of holding “people in the Trump Administration accountable” by identifying big donors—helped somewhat with conservatives. But McKenzie admitted that the link was tenuous, since “what she means by this is unclear.” “Sadly,” he added, not even attaching the phrase “cancel culture” to the bill, by portraying it as silencing conservative voices, had worked. “It really ranked at the bottom,” McKenzie said to the group. “That was definitely a little concerning for us.”

Gretchen Reiter, the senior vice-president of communications for Stand Together, declined to respond to questions about the conference call or the Koch group’s research showing the robust popularity of the proposed election reforms. In an e-mailed statement, she said, “Defending civil liberties requires more than a sound bite,” and added that the group opposes the bill because “a third of it restricts First Amendment rights.” She included a link to an op-ed written by a member of Americans for Prosperity, another Koch-affiliated advocacy group, which argues that the legislation violates donors’ freedom of expression by requiring the disclosure of the names of those who contribute ten thousand dollars or more to nonprofit groups involved in election spending. Such transparency, the op-ed suggests, could subject donors who prefer to remain anonymous to retaliation or harassment.

The State Policy Network, a confederation of right-wing think tanks with affiliates in every state, convened the conference call days after the Democrats’ twin victories in the Senate runoffs in Georgia, which meant that the Party had won the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress, making it likely that the For the People Act would move forward. Participants included Heather Lauer, the executive director of People United for Privacy, a conservative group fighting to keep nonprofit donors’ identities secret, and Grover Norquist, the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, who expressed alarm at the damage that the disclosure provisions could do. “The left is not stupid, they’re evil,” he warned. “They know what they’re doing. They have correctly decided that this is the way to disable the freedom movement.”

Coördinating directly with the right-wing policy groups, which define themselves as nonpartisan for tax purposes, were two top Republican congressional staffers: Caleb Hays, the general counsel to the Republicans on the House Administration Committee, and Steve Donaldson, a policy adviser to McConnell. “When it comes to donor privacy, I can’t stress enough how quickly things could get out of hand,” Donaldson said, indicating McConnell’s concern about the effects that disclosure requirements would have on fund-raising. Donaldson added, “We have to hold our people together,” and predicted that the fight is “going to be a long one. It’s going to be a messy one.” But he insisted that McConnell was “not going to back down.” Neither Donaldson nor Hays responded to requests for comment. David Popp, a spokesperson for McConnell, said, “We don’t comment on private meetings.”

Nick Surgey, the executive director of Documented, a progressive watchdog group that investigates corporate money in politics, told me it made sense that McConnell’s staffer was on the call, because the proposed legislation “poses a very real threat to McConnell’s source of power within the Republican Party, which has always been fund-raising.” Nonetheless, he said that the close coördination on messaging and tactics between the Republican leadership and technically nonpartisan outside-advocacy groups was “surprising to see.”

The proposed legislation, which the House of Representatives passghts in a half-century.” It would transform the way that Americans vote by mandating automatic national voter registration, expanding voting by mail, and transferring the decennial project of redrawing—and often gerrymandering—congressional districts from the control of political parties to nonpartisan experts. Given the extraordinary attempts by Donald Trump and his supporters to undermine the 2020 election, and Republicans’ ongoing efforts to deter Democratic constituencies from voting, it is the bill’s sweeping voting-rights provisions that have drawn the most media attention. During his first press conference, last week, President Joe Biden backed the bill, calling Republican efforts to undermine voting rights “sick” and “un-American.” He declared, “We’ve got to prove democracy works.”

But as the State Policy Network’s conference call demonstrated, some of the less noticed provisions in the eight-hundred-plus-page bill are particularly worrisome to conservative operatives. Both parties have relied on wealthy anonymous donors, but the vast majority of dark money from undisclosed sources over the past decade has supported conservative causes and candidates. Democrats, however, are catching up. In 2020, for the first time in any Presidential election, liberal dark-money groups far outspent their conservative counterparts, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending. Nonetheless, Democrats, unlike Republicans, have pushed for reforms that would shut off the dark-money spigot.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, from 2010, opened up scores of loopholes that have enabled wealthy donors and businesses to covertly buy political influence. Money is often donated through nonprofit corporations, described as “social welfare” organizations, which don’t publicly disclose their donors. These dark-money groups can spend a limited percentage of their funds directly on electoral politics. They also can contribute funds to political-action committees, creating a daisy chain of groups giving to one another. This makes it virtually impossible to identify the original source of funding. The result has been a cascade of anonymous cash flooding into American elections.

The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reports that in the 2020 federal election cycle more than a billion dollars was spent by dark-money groups that masked the identity of their donors. Of that total, more than six hundred and fifty-four million dollars came from just fifteen groups. The top spender was One Nation, a dark-money social-welfare group tied to McConnell. The For the People Act requires greater disclosure of the identities of donors who pay for election ads—including those released on digital platforms, which currently fall outside of such legal scrutiny. It also requires that donors who give ten thousand dollars or more to social-welfare groups be identified, if that donation is spent to sway elections. Donors who fund non-election-oriented activities by such groups can remain anonymous. And, notably, the legislation calls for the disclosure, for the first time, of large donors trying to exert control over the selection of judicial nominees. This provision appears to target groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network, on the right, and Demand Justice, on the left, which have mounted multimillion-dollar public-advocacy campaigns to influence the confirmation of Supreme Court nominees.

Brendan Fischer, a campaign-finance-reform advocate in favor of the legislation, said that the conference call showed that “wealthy special interests are working hard to protect a broken status quo, where billionaires and corporations are free to secretly buy influence.” After listening to the recording, Fischer, who directs the Campaign Legal Center’s Federal Reform Program, added that it exposed “the reality that cracking down on political corruption and ending dark money is popular with voters across the political spectrum.”

On the call, McKenzie, the Koch operative, cited one “ray of hope” in the fight against the reforms, noting that his research found that the most effective message was arguing that a politically “diverse coalition of groups opposed” the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union. “In our message example that we used, we used the example of A.C.L.U., Planned Parenthood, and conservative organizations backed by Charles Koch as an example of groups that oppose H.R. 1,” he said. “I think, you know, when you put that in front of people . . . they’re, like, ‘Oh, conservatives and some liberal groups all oppose this, like, I should maybe think about this more. You know, there must be bigger implications to this if these groups are all coming together on it.’ ”

However, that test message was inaccurate. Planned Parenthood does not oppose the For the People Act. It is, in fact, on a list of organizations giving the legislation their full backing. And the A.C.L.U. supports almost all of the expansions of voting rights contained in the bill, although it has sided with the Koch groups and other conservative organizations in arguing that donors to nonprofit groups could be harassed if their names are disclosed. Advocates for greater transparency in political spending argue that there is no serious evidence of any such harassment. Asked if she could cite any examples, Kate Ruane, a senior legislative counsel at the A.C.L.U., said that the only one she knew about was atypical—the online backlash experienced by the actor Mila Kunis, after she had made a donation to a pro-abortion group in the name of Mike Pence, a staunch opponent of abortion rights.

With so little public support, the bill’s opponents have already begun pressuring individual senators. On March 20th, several major conservative groups, including Heritage Action, Tea Party Patriots Action, Freedom Works, and the local and national branches of the Family Research Council, organized a rally in West Virginia to get Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat, to come out against the legislation. They also pushed Manchin to oppose any efforts by Democrats to abolish the Senate’s filibuster rule, a tactical step that the Party would probably need to take in order to pass the bill. “The filibuster is really the only thing standing in the way of progressive far-left policies like H.R. 1, which is Pelosi’s campaign to take over America’s elections,” Noah Weinrich, the press secretary at Heritage Action, declared during a West Virginia radio interview. On Thursday, Manchin issued a statement warning Democrats that forcing the measure through the Senate would “only exacerbate the distrust that millions of Americans harbor against the U.S. government.”

Pressure tactics from dark-money groups may work on individual lawmakers. The legislation faces an uphill fight in the Senate. But, as the January 8th conference call shows, opponents of the legislation have resorted to “under-the-dome-type strategies” because the broad public is against them when it comes to billionaires buying elections.

The Dog and Pony Alternative Universe

Matt Shea, former WA State Representative from LD4 (Spokane Valley north to Mt. Spokane) has been transformed into the pastor of the Covenant Church. In a non-denominational church like Covenant, becoming pastor requires no theological training and no vetting by a wider church organization. It only requires a congregation willing to be led, in this case a congregation groomed by Ken Peters, the former pastor who has moved on to a congregation in Knoxville, Tennessee, with time off to attend the January 6th insurrection in Washington, D.C. Matt Shea’s new post is located at 3506 W. Princeton Ave on the near north side of Spokane. 

The general feel of the Covenant Church website is familiar to anyone who grew up in any form of Protestantism. “In authentic church community, there is true friendship, grace and a full life of learning and growing together in faith, holiness, love, community and a focus on eternity,” (from the “About” webpage) is pretty standard Protestant wording. Photos of large, smiling families abound. 

Matt Shea has interwoven conspiracy theory and religion for years. One glaring clue appeared with his featured speaking engagement with the “Red Pill Expo” held in Spokane in June of 2018 while he was still in office as a state representative. (For the flavor of Red Pill Expo, check out this year’s offerings.) These people never met a conspiracy theory they wouldn’t buy into. 

I imagine most of you know what to expect at a Sunday morning 11AM Protestant church service, right? On March 14, 2021, at Matt Shea’s Covenant Church the 11AM service was, shall we say, unusual by Protestant standards. Dr. Simone Gold, M.D., was the featured guest speaker. The following link to the youtube video of the service covers the entire hour and a half. I recommend that you slide to the 37:00 mark and check out the short video introducing Dr. Gold and the first two or three minutes of her talk. She begins with a political conspiracy theory around the naming of the pandemic. She goes on to address the safety of hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) (it’s pretty safe) while failing to mention there are no reputable studies that support its utility against Covid-19. Then she tries to tie current day scientific consensus to the Nazi’s embrace of eugenics, all of this from a podium adorned with a cross.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyXQkxY0RPk

Dr. Gold is the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, composed of a small cadre of M.D.s who gained notoriety for making unsubstantiated claims about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of Covid-19 in a video taken in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. The video went viral with the help of Trump family promotion. It was later removed from Facebook for promoting misinformation. Dr. Stella Emmanuel, M.D. was briefly made infamous as the featured speaker for the group. (Notably, Dr. Emmanuel now practices in a strip mall in Texas and is the founder of Fire Power Ministries where Dr Stella is self-proclaimed, “God’s Warrior Princess.”)

Dr. Gold is also notable for her participation in the January 6 insurrection. Listen to just the first few minutes of her presentation Covenant and decide for yourself if this is a church service or a far right wing political rally promoting conspiracy theories.

Pastor Matt Shea hasn’t converted to a career of tending his Covenant flock and comforting the ill and dying. With his sidekick at Covenant, Caleb Collier (former City of Spokane Valley councilperson and current field coordinator for the John Birch Society), Shea is still pedaling conspiracy theories to the gullible all over the Inland Northwest. 

Unfortunately, tiny groups of true believers like America’s Frontline Doctors can seem far bigger, more credible, far more authoritative than is reasonable. A person with an M.D. behind their name (no matter their actual expertise and credibility in the medical community), who is possessed of a true believer mentality, a yen for self promotion, a gift for posing as a victim of “cancel culture,” and the basic funds and knowhow to produce a website like AFLDScan appear far more believable than their numbers or claimed expertise can possibly justify. 

The only antidote to this is sunshine and a little research. The conspiracy theories of Matt Shea, Simone Gold, and “America’s Frontline Doctors” are only believable if one is insulated from wider reality and not taken in by a flashy website or a pastor’s endorsement.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

A filibuster sea-change?

Last week on Friday, March 26, the Spokesman printed an article by Orion Donovan-Smith that brings home to us the controversy over the filibuster in the U.S. Senate: Sen. Patty Murray backs overturning filibuster to pass Democrats’ sweeping voting reform package. 

This is a big deal. Patty Murray (D-WA) has served in the U.S. Senate for twenty-nine years. She is the sixth-most senior member of the Senate and the third-most senior Democrat. Often when you see a video clip of Senate Majority Leader Charles (Chuck) Schumer speaking on the Senate floor, you see Senator Murray at her desk right behind him. When Patty Murray indicates a shift in her position on legislation, the shift is well-thought-out. 

“The For the People Act is essential to making sure our democracy stays a democracy,” Murray told The Spokesman-Review in a statement, “and I will consider every legislative option, including an exemption to the filibuster, to ensure it can be signed into law.”

Last Thursday the Republican dominated legislature of the State of Georgia passed the most naked act of voter suppression since the Jim Crow laws of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp took pains to sign the bill into law that evening. Operating under the duplicitous banner of unsubstantiated “voter fraud” pushed by Donald Trump the new law:

…requires voters to submit ID information with both an absentee ballot request and the ballot itself. It limits the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, allows for unlimited challenges to a voter’s qualifications, cuts the runoff election period from nine to four weeks, and significantly shortens the amount of time voters have to request an absentee ballot. (The Guardian)

But the most twisted and petty part of the law, a part that should catch the eye of everyone, is the piece that outlaws giving food or drink to voters, conjuring up an image of long lines of Georgia voters waiting for hours in the hot sun to cast their ballots at a restricted number of polling places. The words of the law are, of course, less obvious, but the anti-democratic effect is clear, when considered in the context of the rest of the restrictions: 

“No person shall solicit votes in any manner or by any means or method, nor shall any person distribute or display any campaign material, nor shall any person give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink, to an elector,” the new law states.
The law applies within 150 feet of a polling place or within 25 feet of any voter at a polling place. Violators are guilty of a misdemeanor. (CNN)

Republican operatives in Georgia were in such a rush to get this law enacted that didn’t pick their words carefully enough to adequately disguise their intent. And, in a final act of anti-democratic transparency, Governor Kemp signed the bill into law attended by six white men standing below an image of a road in a plantation in a state that is nearly a third black. Meanwhile, Black female Georgia State Rep. Park Cannon was arrested, handcuffed, and escorted away by Georgia State troopers for knocking on Governor Kemp’s office door arguing for transparency in the bill signing. (It was an all white closed-door affair.) So much for attempts at political optics.

Surely there will be court challenges to the Georgia law, but the question is whether there will be injunctive relief from the law in time to blunt its effect on the 2022 midterm elections. It should be lost on no one that the election by Georgia’s voters of Raphael Warnock, a Black pastor, and Jon Ossoff, a Jewish investigative journalist, both Democrats, to the U.S. Senate in 2020 is the motivation for Georgia Republicans’ bald-faced anti-democratic power grab. 

As long as the Republican minority in the U.S. Senate under Mitch McConnell can stonewall all House-passed legislation with nothing more than the email threat of a filibuster, state-level Republicans anti-voter legislation (all 253 bills) will strangle the ability of Americans to vote. 

That’s where Patty Murray’s recent endorsement of “consider[ing] every legislative option, including an exemption to the filibuster” to get the For the People Act passed. The For the People Act would cut short much of these state level Republican efforts to suppress voting by populations that are statistically less likely to vote Republican.

Like every Senator and Representative, Patty Murray tries to keep her finger on the pulse of the people that keep her in public office. She senses a tidal change. As the tide turns those Senate Democrats still reluctant to tinker with the filibuster will feel the tidal pressure, especially for this particular bill. 

I used to think one didn’t need to register one’s opinion with an elected official one sensed as being on one’s side. I was wrong. These people do not operate in a vacuum. There has been a concerted effort to encourage Senator Murray to make this announcement. Now is the time to contact her office and register your approval of her stance. Then call Senator Cantwell’s (D-WA) office and urge her to add her voice to the chorus.

Patty Murray (D-WA)
D.C. Office (202) 224-2621
Spokane Office (509) 624-9515
Yakima Office (509) 453-7462
Maria Cantwell (D-WA)
D.C. Office (202) 224-3441
Spokane Office (509) 353-2507
Richland Office (509) 946-8106

Senator Maria Cantwell has served in the U.S. Senate since squeaking past two-term incumbent Republican Senator Slade Gorton in November of 2000. She has roundly trounced three subsequent challengers (including current Spokane County Treasurer, Michael Baumgartner, in 2012, 60% to 40%). 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

P.S. Attributed to “@DearAuntCrabby”: “The cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal is blocking so much important and useful stuff they have decided to rename it ‘The Mitch McConnell.’”

True to form, McConnell is so uncomfortable with the legislation that might be passed if the filibuster thrown out that he threatened a “scorched earth Senate” of partisan gridlock. The best response I’ve read to McConnell’s bluster is:

…the Republican leader’s pitch is burdened by a circular, self-defeating message: McConnell’s core argument is that if Democrats try to pass legislation, he’ll make it more difficult to pass legislation, so they should simply be satisfied doing nothing, or he’ll take steps to make sure they do nothing. (MSNBC)

McConnell himself, in modifying the rules in order to take over the Supreme Court, is the personification of what the Democratic Senate majority must do now. Unless they wish to return to minority status in 2022 the Democrats need to pass the legislation they promised in 2020. First and foremost is the promise to restore voting rights.

Indivisible–The High Ground has migrated to Substack from Mailchimp. Last Wednesday there were scattered reports (via “Reply” emails) that regular recipients of the Indivisible email did not find the copy sent from Substack anywhere in their email, that is, not in Junk, Spam, or Promo folders either.

Here’s the way Substack suggests to convince the internet system that the Substack-sent email isn’t spam :

Click:  https://jerrysindivisible.substack.com/account/email-test, enter your email and follow the directions and suggestions found there. (When I did this with one of my email addresses, the Substack-sent email appeared in my Junk folder.) One other option is to simply re-signup either with the same or a different email address at  https://jerrysindivisible.substack.com.

Let me know how it goes. I apologize that this process isn’t as smooth as I had hoped. Lesson learned: Email delivery, especially from large mailing lists, is never a sure thing. 

Keep to the high ground,
Jerry

P.S. Today’s email from Substack should appear as from “Jerry LeClaire” with a Subject line “Indivisible-WA Public Disclosure Commission-F” It should arrive in your inbox at around 5AM, Friday, March 26. If you go to  https://jerrysindivisible.substack.com you should see it second from the top. 

In 2017 I thought it was only fitting when Fox News quietly dropped its motto, “Fair and Balanced,” and replaced it with “Most Watched, Most Trusted.” Having captured the eyes and ears of a substantial section of the American public, Fox no longer wished to be judged based on the disgraced Roger Ailes’ pretentious claim. “Fair and Balanced” was hard to justify with commentators like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity spewing opinion from Fox studios. 

I receive “news” feeds from Fox News and from The Epoch Times, and I often read coverage of the same news events presented in other media. The bias evident in the headlines fed to my cell phone by Fox and Epoch is striking. One morning last week first on my feed from Fox was “One of Gov. Cuomo’s accusers claims he once said he would do this to her if he were a dog.” How’s that for National Enquirer style eye-catching and imagination-grabbing tabloid coverage? She said he said. (The title of the article on the Fox News website is toned down a little from the title on the feed.) 

How often do you read a headline, skim a line or two, form a tentative opinion, and then move on? That is certainly the way I read the news most of my life. The details in the body of the article? Why bother? Truth? I already had my truth and reading this article probably wouldn’t add much.

I wrote of the The Epoch Times in “Dr. Seuss, The Epoch Times and Fear” on March 12. The Epoch Times is a rapidly expanding, rabidly conservative, international “news” outlet backed by and guided by the Falun Gong, a Chinese religious cult now based in New York City. Their bent is evident from their consistent labelling of Covid-19 as the “CCP Virus” (Chinese Communist Party Virus). The ET is slickly presented in both electronic and paper form asking for donations to support “Honest Journalism.” Increasing numbers of Trump supporters (including local Spokanites like my former neighbor) have adopted The ET as their primary news source.

The reader who gleans article titles for support of a preconceived anti-Chinese, pro-Trump bias will find much to like in The Epoch Times. Here I cite one glaring example of twisted journalism that caught my eye last week. 

The headline (both in the news feed and the ET’s website) was clear: “Intelligence Officials Believe China Meddled in 2020 Election to Damage Trump: Report” Wow, the FBI or CIA or some major U.S. government agency just confirmed that China slammed Trump before the 2020 election and probably contributed to the fraud that cost Trump the election, right? Right? Wrong. This is the half truth of extremely biased coverage, a title bias that becomes evident even in the body of the article itself when closely read:

The National Intelligence Council (pdf) report from March 10th, ” ‘…that China “did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election,’ adding: ‘We have high confidence in this judgment.’ ” The misleading nature of the title comes out further down in the article where it says, “ ‘The National Intelligence Officer for Cyber assesses that China took at least some steps to undermine former President Trump’s reelection chances, primarily through social media and official public statements and media,’ says the report in its minority view section.” [the bold is mine]. 

The “minority view section” is a short box on the 13th page of the 15 page report. Headlining the minority report of one officer is a gross example of journalistic malfeasance on the part of The Epoch Times. How many readers will leave the newspaper and their morning coffee and walk away with the idea in their heads that the U.S. intelligence community solemnly judged that China messed with the 2020 elections in favor of Biden? Had I placed trust in the “Honest Journalism” of The Epoch Times that deluded idea might have been my own.

That same morning I had just read Heather Cox Richardson’s post from March 18 concerning the gunman in Atlanta who killed eight people, six of them Asian women. I focused on a paragraph that reads, “This week, the intelligence community reported that, in fact, China did not try to influence the election because it did not ‘view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling.’ ” The contrast between that quote and The Epoch Times headline led me to the report itself and the truth therein.

Should anyone trust the “Honest Journalism” of The Epoch Times? Familiarize yourself with this outlet so you know what to expect from it.

Keep to the high ground,
Jerry

Do you wonder why Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor, is still Postmaster General of the United States Postal Service (USPS) under the Biden administration? DeJoy’s actions under the Trump administration certainly looked like an attempt to undermine mail-in voting, a storyline entirely in keeping with Trump’s Big Lie that his election loss was a fraud. One might imagine DeJoy remains at his post just because the Biden administration has dozens of bigger fish to fry at the moment, like dealing with the pandemic and its economic fallout. The real story is more complicated. Trump didn’t have the direct power to appoint his major donor as Postmaster General, nor does Biden have the direct power to fire him. 

The story of the USPS is itself more complicated than is widely appreciated. I once chatted with my mail carrier about my efforts to tell advertisers to quit wasting paper and energy sending me circulars that I immediately pitch into the recycling bin. Her response took me aback. “Don’t do that!” she said, “If we didn’t have advertisements to deliver I wouldn’t have a job!” It was a vivid reminder for me of how things have changed.

I came upon the following article in the March 16, 2021 Washington Post. I reproduce it here partly as an advertisement for the clarity articles in the Post often bring, and partly because, amid all the other things one might read, this might easily have been missed. (Note: if you have a WaPo subscription or haven’t yet read your free monthly article limit, click on the title below to read. There are some useful illustrations that did not copy well. Better yet, sign up for a subscription.)

Keep to the high ground,
Jerry

What you should know about USPS — and how it descended into crisis

By Jacob Bogage

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is expected to roll out his plan to reshape the nation’s mail service, making a deeper imprint on a government agency that has weathered a pandemic, a historic election and a crushing holiday season during his brief tenure.

The blueprint is sure to cause further delivery slowdowns — DeJoy said as much during a recent hearing on Capitol Hill — at a time when the U.S. Postal Service already is recording some of its worst performance metrics in generations. Cost-cutting measures the postal chief implemented over the summer have been blamed for much of those declines.

But the agency — along with DeJoy’s role — is widely misunderstood. Here’s eight common misconceptions:

FALSE: DeJoy was appointed by Trump

One of DeJoy’s habits in congressional testimony is to remind lawmakers that he was appointed not by then-president Donald Trump, but by the Postal Service’s bipartisan governing board. That’s true, but it’s more complicated than that.First, DeJoy was appointed by the board of governors, whose members are nominated by the president, confirmed by the Senate and are supposed to run the Postal Service as an independent agency. But the Trump administration had an outsize, unprecedented — and as numerous experts claim, improper — role in shaping postal leadership.

Trump has falsely claimed that the Postal Service undercharged express package carriers, namely Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post. Trump assigned his treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, to look at overhauling the Postal Service. Mnuchin then used its deteriorating financial condition to edge out then-Postmaster General Megan Brennan and compel the board of governors to select a Trump loyalist to replace her, The Post has reported.

The board chose DeJoy, a former supply chain logistics executive and major Trump donor. He had not been identified for the role by either of the two executive search firms the governors hired to find candidates. Then-Board Chairman Robert M. Duncan, a former Republican National Committee chair, submitted DeJoy’s name for vetting, Duncan told a House panel in August. DeJoy took office in June.Second, the board is indeed bipartisan, but to some, in name only. The board was empty when Trump took office, and he appointed every sitting governor: four Republicans and three Democrats. When DeJoy was hired, only three Republicans and two Democrats held seats. Before the governors could vote to hire DeJoy, Democratic Vice Chair David C. Williams resigned, upset, according to people familiar with his thinking, over the Trump administration’s meddling and the board’s obsequiousness. The board held the vote and DeJoy was hired.

TRUE: Biden can’t fire DeJoy

Democrats have been howling for DeJoy’s ouster since he started, and those calls have only intensified since President Biden’s inauguration. Many have appealed to Biden to remove DeJoy on his own. But it doesn’t work like that. Just as DeJoy was hired by the governors, he can only be fired by the governors.

Biden inherited a USPS crisis. Here’s how Democrats want to fix it.

Biden can, however, fire governors, but he has to show “cause,” a concept whose meaning in this context is nebulous. Does “cause” mean the governors have to do something wrong? Or does it mean that they have ideological disagreements with Biden about the mail? Regardless, Biden has signaled he’s not likely to go that route. He announced plans last month to nominate two Democrats and a voting rights advocate to fill the remaining three open seats on the board, giving Democrats and Biden appointees a majority with enough votes to remove DeJoy, if desired.

FALSE: The Postal Service bungled the election

Actually, the Postal Service did its job during the November general election and the Georgia Senate runoff in January. The agency delivered 135 million ballots to or from voters in the Novembercontest, according to its post-election report, and 97.9 percent of ballots were delivered on time, or within three days. On average, the Postal Service reported, it took 2.1 days to deliver ballots from election officials to voters, and 1.6 days for completed ballots to reach vote counters.So why, folks often ask, did it take days and days to get the election results in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona?

Two main reasons:

In Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, state election officials raised alarms with legislators months ahead of the November vote about potential problems. Ballot acceptance deadlines in those states didn’t necessarily line up with mail service. In some cases, vote counters were not allowed to start counting ballots until the day of the election, even if mail ballots came in days or weeks ahead of time. Officials asked all three GOP-controlled state houses to pass laws to make things easier. All three state legislatures declined. So theprocess took longer.

In Georgia and Arizona, the answer is more simple: It was a close race! Biden won Arizona by fewer than 10,000 votes, and Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes. In races that tight, it takes a while to make sure all the counts are accurate.

FALSE: DeJoy removed sorting machines and mailboxes to make it harder to vote

The root of this claim, which took hold over the summer, is linked to Trump’s constant attacks on mail-in voting and DeJoy’s connections to Trump and Republican causes, to which DeJoy has given more than $2 million since 2016, according to the Federal Election Commission. DeJoy has not made any donations reported to the FEC since taking office.So when the agency started dismantling high-speed sorting machines and removing public mail collection boxes shortly after DeJoy took office, many Democrats accused DeJoy of tinkering with postal infrastructure they saw as vital to the election.

Here’s why the Postal Service wanted to remove hundreds of mail-sorting machines

The truth is that the Postal Service had long planned to remove collection boxes and sorting machines, though that program accelerated under DeJoy, according to an inspector general report. Commercial mailers had for years complained about overcapacity in the Postal Service’s network — that the agency had too many machines to maintain, which were jacking up costs. Public mailboxes, according to industry experts, are getting far less use. So the Postal Service removed a bunch of both, causing an uproar from liberal activists.

DeJoy suspended the machine and mailbox removals in August, days before he was grilled about them before House and Senate committees, but he also said the Postal Service would not reconnect any sorting machines or replace any mailboxes.

FALSE: Republicans used a 2006 law to tank the Postal Service

One of the most controversial provisions in postal policy is the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), which is broadly misunderstood. The statute did two main things: It created a system for postage rate setting, and it changed the way the Postal Service funds its retirees’ health benefits.It’s the health benefit fund that all these years later gets most of the attention. It’s a hefty burden on the Postal Service, and undoubtedly, the agency’s balance sheet would look a lot better without it. Without the pre-funding mandate, which costs around $5 billion annually, the Postal Service would have more money to invest in vital services.

Even more, left-leaning activists like to accuse Republicans — especially Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who sponsored the bill — of purposefully creating this expensive program to bankrupt the Postal Service and drive it to privatization.

Not true.

The Postal Service needs a bailout. Congress is partly to blame.

PAEA (it’s pronounced “paella,” like the Spanish rice dish, in postal circles) had bipartisan sponsors in both chambers of Congress. It passed on voice votes, meaning there was almost zero dissent among lawmakers.“This bill is critically important to the long-term fiscal health of our Postal Service. It is equally important to the well-being of all our postal workers as well as the needs of all citizens and businesses, large and small, which use our Postal Service,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said on the Senate floor before the bill was passed.

The pre-funding mandate was a compromise between the George W. Bush White House and Democratic bill sponsors. Bush wanted to take those retiree health-care costs off the federal government’s books. Democrats wanted to make sure money for workers who retired from a physical and taxing profession was socked away. They arrived at this deal: The Postal Service, which was making plenty of money at the time, would set aside the cash to take care of retirees.

Then, the agency stopped making money. The iPhone came out in 2007. The Internet matured. The Great Recession hit. As a result, residential and commercial customers sent far less mail, and it cost the Postal Service billions of dollars. By 2011, the agency wasn’t even paying into the retiree health-care fund. And yes, the obligations from that fund look really ugly on the agency’s balance sheet. But that doesn’t have anything to do with privatizing the Postal Service.

FALSE: Eliminating the pre-funding mandate would fix USPS’s problems

Sure, wiping the pre-funding obligation off the books would make the Postal Service’s finances look better, but it wouldn’t solve its biggest monetary crunch. Here’s why:The Postal Service lost $9.2 billion in 2020, it reported to Congress. Of that, $4.6 billion was supposed to go into the pre-funding account. In 2019, it lost $8.8 billion, and $4.5 billion should have gone into the account.

But the Postal Service hasn’t paid into the retiree health-care fund since 2011, without any ramifications. Lawmakers in both the House and Senate, and officials within the Treasury Department, according to numerous current and former aides involved with the mail agency’s finances, say policymakers have largely given up on making the Postal Service pay off its debts to the federal government.

The Postal Service has realized this, too. “The Postal Service has not incurred any penalties or negative financial consequences as a result of not making these payments,” it wrote in its most recently quarterly report.In other words: We know that you know that we’re not good for the money. And we know that you know that this debt isn’t our biggest problem.

The Postal Service’s biggest problem is the mail. Americans are not sending enough of it to keep up with the agency’s growing expenses. We sent nearly 40 billion fewer pieces of first-class mail, the Postal Service’s top profit generator, in 2020 than we did in 2008. The numbers are nearly as bad for marketing mail, coupons from your local tire shop or big-box store and another big profit engine: Thirty-five billion fewer items flowed through the system in 2020 than in 2008.

In fact, 2020 was the first year in which the Postal Service earned more from packages than it did from first-class mail, which says something about the agency’s dire circumstances. By law, each package shipped has to cover its own costs and contribute a percentage to agency overhead. But packages are harder and costlier to transport than small paper envelopes. Ergo, they generate less profit than first-class mail.

Turning around the Postal Service’s finances, experts say, requires reining in costs, creating new or more efficient revenue streams and stabilizing declining first-class mail volumes. Offloading the retiree health-care pre-funding requirement makes sense, they say, because the Postal Service doesn’t make enough money anymore to support that kind of annual expense. But it’s not enough to solve the Postal Service’s deep financial troubles.

TRUE: Democrats want you to bank at the post office

The Postal Service needs new revenue streams, and some Democrats are outspoken about one big idea: postal banking.

Liberals, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), want post offices to offer financial services as a way to serve the roughly 66 million Americans who are unbanked or underbanked, and help raise more money for the agency. The idea would have the post offices provide simple banking features, like check cashing and small savings and checking accounts, so customers wouldn’t have to use risky or high-interest financial vendors, like payday lenders.

Biden appears to support the proposal, including it among recommendations from a “unity task force” between his and the Sanders campaign.

FALSE: Republicans want to privatize USPS

To be clear, most Republicans don’t want to privatize the Postal Service, but some do. The Trump administration in 2018 recommended transitioning the Postal Service “from a government agency into a privately-held corporation.” And the Heritage Foundation, a right-leaning think tank where former vice president Mike Pence now serves as a distinguished visiting fellow, has pushed postal privatization for years.

But the public Postal Service is still the dominant policy position in the GOP, and there are a bunch of complex policy reasons why. You really only need to know two simple ones:

First, Republican-leaning areas need the Postal Service more than Democratic-leaning areas. Conservatives tend to reside in more rural or suburban parts of the country. Because those places are more far-flung and are less populousthan cities, delivery costs more. Think about it: It takes longer to deliver fewer items to people who don’t live near one another.

No private shipping company delivers to every American address, and many enter into “negotiated service agreements,” volume-discount contracts, with the Postal Service for last-mile delivery from a post office to a consumer’s home or business. They give those items to the Postal Service to deliver instead, because the agency must deliver to those addresses under its universal service obligation (which means just what it sounds like: You live in America, so we have to deliver your mail). If the Postal Service privatized and had to turn a profit, it would also avoid going to less profitable rural and suburban areas, and folks — many of whom vote Republican — wouldn’t get their mail.

Second, private companies do not want to compete with the Postal Service on mail delivery. For all of its warts, the Postal Service is actually really good at delivering the mail, and private express carriers do not want to try to crack that market. The carriers also need the Postal Service, through its vast network and skilled workers, to handle less lucrative deliveries. Carriers also would need to retrain their workforces, buy new machinery, reconfigure their logistics and transportation operations and so much more. Could you really expect a UPS driver to go to every home and business on your street six days a week? Of course not, and neither could the Postal Service’s private-sector contemporaries.

END OF QUOTED ARTICLE

There may be fuel in this last paragraph for a subsequent post on private enterprise v. government.