Disenfranchising the Weakest Among Us from their basic Constitutional Rights

There are elements in the Republican’s Tea Party movement and in many of their supporters that are so obviously misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist that it is difficult to stomach their political discourse.  I continue to find the Tea Party movement to contain some of the most unhinged individuals we’ve see influence American governance in some time. Here’s the latest example from Tennessee.

Conservatives and Tea Party activists in Tennessee have recently pushed several Republican Party county organizations to pass resolutions criticizing the state’s Republican governor for, among other things, employing Muslims, gay people, and Democrats.

“The action or actions of the Republican elected Governor of the Great State of Tennessee and his administration have demonstrated a consistent lack of conservative values,” a resolution passed by the Stewart County Republican Party reads in part, according to a copy obtained by The Tennessean. (The Tennessean obtained two of the resolutions.)

We’ve known for some times that the right wing would like to completely remove basic rights from women and minorities.  They are striking at not only our immigration laws, our rights to use birth control and abortion, but our basic right to vote and participate in our Democracy.

I’ve read several things just this week that I find terribly disturbing.  The first is that many folks expect that the Supreme Court will strike down the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It’ll be tough to top the drama of the Supreme Court season that just ended. Or so it would seem. When the justices reconvene in October, they’re likely to consider some of the most contentious social issues dividing the country. And judging from snippets in past opinions, that could mean an upheaval in U.S. civil rights law.

The court has already announced that it will hear a challenge to affirmative action in higher education. In that case, a white student rejected by the University of Texas is arguing that the school doesn’t need to choose students based on racial preferences because it already achieves diversity by guaranteeing admission to state residents in the top 10 percent of their high school class.

Affirmative action was upheld nine years ago, but the composition of the court has changed since then. Five members are now openly skeptical of racial preferences. As Chief Justice John Roberts put it in a 2007 case involving integration at the K-12 level: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

The justices could also deal a blow to minorities if they take up a challenge to the 1965 Voting Rights Act brought by Shelby County, Ala. Officials there say a provision in that law requiring jurisdictions in 16 mostly southern states to get federal clearance before changing their voting rules—so as not to disenfranchise blacks and other minorities—unfairly targets jurisdictions for racial crimes of the past.

“I expect the Voting Rights Act to go down,’’ says Kermit Roosevelt, who clerked for former Supreme Court Justice David Souter and now teaches constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “The court has foreshadowed that result, and Roberts seems to want it.” In a 2009 challenge to the landmark law, the justices granted some local governments more leeway in changing their election procedures, and Roberts in particular hinted he’d be sympathetic to striking down the so-called preclearance provision, saying that it raises “serious constitutional questions.”

The approach of the right wing has been to whittle away at basic rights by forcing appointment of extremist judges to the benches on Republican Presidents and blocking appointments to the bench by Democrats.  It also has been using each red state to create serpentine regulations that basically make exercising rights nearly impossible.  Many are set up to create challenges in the courts to long standing precedent like Roe v Wade or Brown v Board.Witness the Mississippi law to shut down the state’s sole abortion clinic by tailor fitting a regulation to that one specific clinic to drive it out of business.   It may be working according to news released today.

The clinic argues that the law will effectively ban abortion in the state and endanger women’s health by limiting access to the procedure. It argued that the law is unconstitutional and would close the clinic “by imposing medically unjustified requirements on physicians who perform abortions.” Lawyers also cite statements from Mississippi officials who said the law was intended to close the clinic.

A denial of admitting privileges could bolster the clinic’s arguments that the law is unconstitutional, a lawyer for the state has suggested. But a final ruling could come only after a trial, and the loser could appeal.

The state argues that the law is intended to enhance the safety of patients. The state’s lawyers have argued that Jordan should disregard statements about trying to close the clinic, a claim he greeted with skepticism in court.

More administrative steps would have to follow before the clinic could be shut. Sharlot said the clinic would have 10 calendar days to respond to any findings. The state’s lawyers have said that a facility not complying with a law would get at least 30 days before an administrative hearing. If a license is revoked at a hearing, the clinic would get 30 days to appeal that decision. Health department officials have said it could take as long as 10 months to close the clinic if it failed to comply.

This is the same shenanigans with Voter ID laws.  Use incremental laws that “sound” reasonable to many low information, Fox-propaganda-challenged citizens that have devastating results on the weakest and the poorest among us.  Then, keep it up and take any legal challenge as far as you can to whittle away at long standing precedent.  The extremists are well aware of the dog whistles scattered throughout these laws and media blitzkriegs.  Also, they frequently cloak their real purpose in some high minded rhetoric.  They want to stop nonexistent voter fraud in the Voter ID case.  It’s making sure ignorant little women are truly informed in the case of exercising abortion rights.  Neither of these are real problems.

Here is a study worth reading.

The Challenge of Obtaining Voter Identification Publications

By Keesha Gaskins and Sundeep Iyer
– 07/17/12

Ten states now have unprecedented restrictive voter ID laws. Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin all require citizens to produce specific types of government-issued photo identification before they can cast a vote that will count. Legal precedent requires these states to provide free photo ID to eligible voters who do not have one. Unfortunately, these free IDs are not equally accessible to all voters. This report is the first comprehensive assessment of the difficulties that eligible voters face in obtaining free photo ID.

Download the Report (PDF)

Here’s some basic data found in the study and reported in the executive summary.

The 11 percent of eligible voters who lack the required photo ID must travel to a designated government office to obtain one. Yet many citizens will have trouble making this trip. In the 10 states with restrictive voter ID laws:

• Nearly 500,000 eligible voters do not have access to a vehicle and live more than 10 miles from the nearest state ID-issuing office open more than two days a week. Many of them live in rural areas with dwindling public transportation options.
• More than 10 million eligible voters live more than 10 miles from their nearest state ID-issuing office open more than two days a week.
• 1.2 million eligible black voters and 500,000 eligible Hispanic voters live more than 10 miles from their nearest ID-issuing office open more than two days a week. People of color are more likely to be disenfranchised by these laws since they are less likely to have photo ID than the general population.
• Many ID-issuing offices maintain limited business hours. For example, the office in Sauk City, Wisconsin is open only on the fifth Wednesday of any month. But only four months in 2012 — February, May, August, and October — have five Wednesdays. In other states — Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas — many part-time ID-issuing offices are in the rural regions with the highest concentrations of people of color and people in poverty.

More than 1 million eligible voters in these states fall below the federal poverty line and live more than 10 miles from their nearest ID-issuing office open more than two days a week. These voters may be particularly affected by the significant costs of the documentation required to obtain a photo ID. Birth certificates can cost between $8 and $25. Marriage licenses, required for married women whose birth certificates include a maiden name, can cost between $8 and $20. By comparison, the notorious poll tax — outlawed during the civil rights era — cost $10.64 in current dollars.

The result is plain: Voter ID laws will make it harder for hundreds of thousands of poor Americans to vote. They place a serious burden on a core constitutional right that should be universally available to every American citizen.

This November, restrictive voter ID states will provide 127 electoral votes — nearly half of the 270 needed to win the presidency. Therefore, the ability of eligible citizens without photo ID to obtain one could have a major influence on the outcome of the 2012 election.

This is disturbing beyond words.  We’ve already heard personal stories from friends here with disabilities of their struggles to obtain these kinds of ID cards.  Right wingers laugh this off with careless disregard for the very things that make our country precious.  It is obvious that winning their agendas by any means necessary is at the heart of all of these kinds of laws.  Every one should be highly concerned about all these laws aimed at whittling away at our basic rights.  This strategy is being used to usurp more of them everyday.  Most of them are aimed at women, racial and religious minorities, and the GLBT community.  What makes this worse is the amount of money being poured into creating these awful laws by religious institutions like the LDS Church and the Catholic Bishops and business sponsored organizations like ALEC.   Tax exempt churches were instrumental in funding efforts to defeat the ERA and push anti-marriage equality and family planning defunding at all levels of government.  Removing votes from voters unaligned with their causes is just one more way to relieve the vulnerable among us of basic rights.

We should be fighting this tooth and nail.