Democracy is not a state; it is an act -John Lewis

National Voter Registration Day is a non-starter in San Diego and most of California. 

Nearly five million people statewide who could vote don’t currently have that power at their disposal, even though we have automatic voter registration via the DMV. The state makes it ridiculously easy to vote, something that stirs the ire of wannabe vote suppressors like Carl DeMaio. 

Today’s nearest voter registration drive listed on the website of the non-profit coordinating this day’s events is a chapter of Indivisible in Lancaster, California seeking to register students at Antelope College.

Yes, I know there will be a lot more registration drives next year. That doesn’t change the fact of widespread complacency about the single most powerful tool for citizens. The act of voting, even in places with lopsided partisan registrations, will be the critical measure affecting the future of our nation in 2024.

In the 2020 general election nearly 30% of eligible voters did not vote. Now, in terms of who got elected president that year those missing voters presumably would not have changed the outcome. But those non -voters should have been important in many down ballot contests.

The 2022 “off-year” general election saw nearly 60% of eligible voters (and 50% of registered voters) not casting ballots. A common (and long-standing) presumption is that those elections aren’t as important. We’re safe, the thinking goes; individual ballots aren’t all THAT important. 

Those assumptions, should current trends continue, could be dangerous to democracy as practiced in the US. As important as registration is, getting people signed up and voting has to be a priority.

Next time out, while the top of the ballot candidates will dominate election discussions, school board elections (and other down ballot contests) will see a host of candidates with antipathy toward tolerance of diversity, school libraries, and the very existence of public education.

From President Biden’s proclamation on National Voter Registration Day:

• Yet, even today, the voting rights of so many hang in the balance.  The Supreme Court weakened the landmark Voting Rights Act, and in the years since, States have enacted dozens of anti-voting laws.  On January 6, 2021 — one of the darkest moments of our Nation’s history — we saw the violent and deadly insurrection at the Capitol perpetrated by election deniers.  It is clear that the fight to preserve our democratic values and norms is not over.  Just as generations of Americans past rose to the occasion, protecting and securing the right to vote, we must answer the call to fight for our democracy today.  

A very few legislators representing a small minority of Americans are doing their darndest to hold the nation hostage as government funding ends on September 30. Speaker McCarthy’s attempt to placate them, via an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, has flopped. It’s not enough for these nihilists. Take a look at the chart below showing how Americans feel on the issues at hand versus the Freedom Caucus demands.

Given that these recalcitrant Republicans are likely to have also seen these numbers, I don’t think it’s possible to attribute their motives to anything other than a desire to create distrust in governance. In other words they want to propagate the idea that the system –which has its foundation in elections– isn’t working.

Over and over and over again, this cynicism and distrust are the only logical reasons for why extremists do what they do. It fits right in with saying the 2020 election wasn’t fair, saying COVID inoculations are bad, and conspiracism in general. It even extends to the courts, where extremists in the Republican Attorney Generals Association shop for judges to issue rulings in line with extremist positions.

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A few smart observers have caught wind of the State of Alabama’s ploy to get the Supreme Court to end, once and for all, the remaining key protections established by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. 

Currently, Alabama’s legislature is openly defying a Supreme Court ruling concerning redistricting. A new map drawn up fails to meet the standards of the ruling, and the State is appealing a challenge to its legality. 

There is reporting this latest challenge has been driven by “intelligence” that Justice Kavanaugh is willing to rule in a manner overturning Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. At the center of this is Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society member involved with finding right wing judges for then-President Donald J Trump.

Via the Alabama Political Reporter:

• The Alabama Legislature’s open defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Allen v. Milligan ordering the creation of a second majority-Black district baffled and infuriated the federal three-judge panel that initially ordered the state to redraw its 2021 congressional map. 

• APR has now identified connections between Alabama officials who led the 2023 redistricting process — which disregarded the U.S. Supreme Court’s order — with far-right power broker Leonard Leo’s dark money network, described this past week by Politico as “a billion-dollar force that has helped remake the judiciary and overturn longstanding legal precedents on abortion, affirmative action and many other issues.”

• APR’s reporting shows the extent to which Alabama’s calculation to defy the Supreme Court was made not simply by state legislators in Alabama but has been driven by nationally connected political operatives at the center of the well-documented right-wing effort to reshape the composition and jurisprudence of the Supreme Court and to overturn the remaining key protections established by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. 

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The 2024 elections are not about the current president versus the former president. That’s why all the punditry about President Joe Biden’s age and Vice President Kamala Harris’ competency is either ignorant or evil.

How can you consider those questions when a candidate for President posts garbage like this:

We’re not going to be voting on domestic or foreign policy; the 2024 election is about continuing American democracy. It’s not perfect or even close, but it beats the heck out of living in a nation where book burning is acceptable behavior for politicians, like the two Missouri State Senators pictured below using flamethrowers to burn (what they said were) school history books.

Outrageous? Yes it is. Almost as outrageous as the Business Insider article describing them as “Pro-Flamethrower Republicans.”  Does this mean there’s an anti-flamethrower Democrat somewhere?  

If you’re needing more convincing, check out this video from the Mission Democracy PAC

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Tuesday’s Learning Curve Links

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Lawmakers are spending way more to keep themselves safe. Is it enough? Via the Washington Post:

• Candidates running for House and Senate offices increased campaign spending on security by more than 500 percent between the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms, a new Washington Post analysis of filings with the Federal Election Commission found, a measure of the extraordinary rise in threats against elected officials in recent years and the country’s increasingly volatile political climate…

• …But even as significant changes have been made to facilitate that increased spending, lawmakers say more has to be done to help protect themselves and their staff from a dramatic rise in daily threats.

• The challenge was put in sharp relief on Jan. 6, 2021, when supporters of former president Donald Trump overran the U.S. Capitol in hopes of overturning the 2020 election results, threatening to kill officials who stood in their way. How close lawmakers came to physical violence that day became a key impetus to addressing Congress members’ vulnerability as public figures — a concern most often reserved for presidents and presidential candidates.

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Chinese Spy Balloon Hysteria Was Baseless, Milley Says Via SpyTalk

• Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CBS national security correspondent David Martin that the balloon was merely blown far off course by upper atmospheric winds and, if it carried working spy gear, was rendered inoperative.

• "Those winds are very high," Milley said on the CBS Sunday Morning News, saying the balloon was originally on a course toward Hawaii before it was blown northeast over Alaska then the continental U.S.  "The particular motor on that aircraft can't go against those winds at that altitude," he said.

• And for whatever reason, it didn’t collect any intelligence, the general said. 

Eds. Note: “for whatever reason” means the General was protecting sources and methods.

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How Exxon tried to twist climate science for profit Via HEATED

• Two major news items this week illustrate well why people are so fed up with inaction on climate change.

• The first is a historic new lawsuit from California, which claims that ExxonMobil and four other oil giants deceived the public by downplaying the climate risks of fossil fuel development, thereby costing the state tens of billions of dollars. The lawsuit, as Amy Westervelt explains masterfully for Drilled, is essentially “a super-case” combining all the arguments of other state lawsuits against Big Oil. It’s a big deal.

• The second is new Wall Street Journal investigation of Exxon, which reveals just how far that cover-up extends. According to never-before-seen documents, the company undermined climate science to protect their bottom line from the 1970s to at least 2015—and specifically tried to twist the science of the IPCC, the world’s leading scientific body on climate change.