The Republican Threat to Voting
Less than a year before the 2012 presidential voting begins, Republican legislatures and governors across the country are rewriting voting laws to make it much harder for the young, the poor and African-Americans — groups that typically vote Democratic — to cast a ballot.
Spreading fear of a nonexistent flood of voter fraud, they are demanding that citizens be required to show a government-issued identification before they are allowed to vote. Republicans have been pushing these changes for years, but now more than two-thirds of the states have adopted or are considering such laws. The Advancement Project, an advocacy group of civil rights lawyers, correctly describes the push as “the largest legislative effort to scale back voting rights in a century.”
Anyone who has stood on the long lines at a motor vehicle office knows that it isn’t easy to get such documents. For working people, it could mean giving up a day’s wages.
A survey by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found that 11 percent of citizens, 21 million people, do not have a current photo ID. That fraction increases to 15 percent of low-income voting-age citizens, 18 percent of young eligible voters and 25 percent of black eligible voters. Those demographic groups tend to vote Democratic, and Republicans are imposing requirements that they know many will be unable to meet.
Kansas’ new law was drafted by its secretary of state, Kris Kobach, who also wrote Arizona’s anti-immigrant law. Voters will be required to show a photo ID at the polls. Before they can register, Kansans will have to produce a proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate.
Tough luck if you don’t happen to have one in your pocket when you’re at the county fair and you pass the voter registration booth. Or when the League of Women Voters brings its High School Registration Project to your school cafeteria. Or when you show up at your dorm at the University of Kansas without your birth certificate. Sorry, you won’t be voting in Lawrence, and probably not at all.
That’s fine with Gov. Sam Brownback, who said he signed the bill because it’s necessary to “ensure the sanctity of the vote.” Actually, Kansas has had only one prosecution for voter fraud in the last six years. But because of that vast threat to Kansas democracy, an estimated 620,000 Kansas residents who lack a government ID now stand to lose their right to vote.
Eight states already had photo ID laws. Now more than 30 other states are joining the bandwagon of disenfranchisement, as Republicans outdo each other to propose bills with new voting barriers. The Wisconsin bill refuses to recognize college photo ID cards, even if they are issued by a state university, thus cutting off many students at the University of Wisconsin and other campuses. The Texas bill, so vital that Gov. Rick Perry declared it emergency legislation, would also reject student IDs, but would allow anyone with a handgun license to vote.
A Florida bill would curtail early voting periods, which have proved popular and brought in new voters, and would limit address changes at the polls. “I’m going to call this bill for what it is, good-old-fashioned voter suppression,” Ben Wilcox of the League of Women Voters told The Florida Times-Union.
Many of these bills were inspired by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a business-backed conservative group, which has circulated voter ID proposals in scores of state legislatures. The Supreme Court, unfortunately, has already upheld Indiana’s voter ID requirement, in a 2008 decision that helped unleash the stampede of new bills. Most of the bills have yet to pass, and many may not meet the various balancing tests required by the Supreme Court. There is still time for voters who care about democracy in their states to speak out against lawmakers who do not.
Bad Numbers
If there was any lingering doubt, the latest data confirm that housing is still in a deep and broad recession. In the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price report for 20 large cities, house prices in February fell to a level last seen in April 2009 — their lowest point in the bust. In a Census Bureau report, new home sales in March remained near their lowest levels since records were first kept in 1963.
It would be comforting to believe that housing-market distress represents a normal, if painful, correction after a period of excess. But all housing trends — in prices, sales, construction and foreclosures — indicate a market that is likely to decline even more, and far more than is needed to erase the artificial gains of the bubble.
High postbubble unemployment coupled with falling home equity will lead to more defaults and foreclosures. The resulting downward pull on prices will probably not be offset by adequate demand because potential buyers will be afraid they are still buying high in a declining market. Rather than a virtuous self-correcting cycle, the housing market is caught in a negative self-reinforcing one.
The best response would be for government to adopt policies to attack joblessness and foreclosures, including public investment in infrastructure and high-technology manufacturing and a renewed emphasis on negotiating new loan terms for homeowners whose homes have declined in value. Unfortunately, Washington is moving in the opposite direction on the mistaken belief that cutting budget deficits and leaving wounded markets to their own devices will somehow spur the economy.
For a while it looked as if struggling homeowners might get some relief soon: Fines on banks responsible for foreclosure abuses could be used to modify troubled mortgages. But that is looking less likely, as state and federal officials differ over whether the banks can afford to pay up. They can.
Without a healthy housing market, there cannot be a healthy economic recovery. The family home is still most Americans’ biggest asset, so declining values destroy wealth and curtail spending. Homes are also the source of local-government property tax revenues and the collateral for many small business loans. They hold families and neighborhoods and communities together.
The numbers are getting worse, and that is bad for everyone. The question is how much worse they will need to get before regulators, lawmakers and the Obama administration make an all-out effort to fix the problem.
Hiding the Truth About Factory Farms
A supermarket shopper buying hamburger, eggs or milk has every reason, and every right, to wonder how they were produced. The answer, in industrial agriculture, is “behind closed doors,” and that’s how the industry wants to keep it. In at least three states — Iowa, Florida, and Minnesota — legislation is moving ahead that would make undercover investigations in factory farms, especially filming and photography, a crime. The legislation has only one purpose: to hide factory-farming conditions from a public that is beginning to think seriously about animal rights and the way food is produced.
These bills share common features. Their definition of agriculture is overly broad; they include puppy mills, for instance. They treat undercover investigators and whistle-blowers as if they were “agro-terrorists,” determined to harm livestock or damage facilities. They would criminalize reporting on crop production as well. And they are supported by the big guns of industrial agriculture: Monsanto, the Farm Bureau, the associations that represent pork producers, dairy farmers and cattlemen, as well as poultry, soybean, and corn growers.
Exposing the workings of the livestock industry has been an undercover activity since Upton Sinclair’s day. Nearly every major improvement in the welfare of agricultural animals, as well as some notable improvements in food safety, has come about because someone exposed the conditions in which they live and die. Factory farming confines animals in highly crowded, unnatural and often unsanitary conditions. We need to know more about what goes on behind those closed doors, not less.
Cynical Games With Title IX
The number of women who participate in college sports has more than quintupled — from fewer than 30,000 to 186,000 — since 1972, when Congress banned sex discrimination in federally financed education programs. But as Katie Thomas reported in The Times on Tuesday, as women have become a majority on many campuses, some schools are trying to evade Title IX and undermine the goal of gender equality by cooking the books when they report statistics to Washington.
Administrators and coaches have used a variety of dodges to inflate the number of women on athletic teams so that positions can be added to men’s sports team. Double-counting and phantom athletes are shockingly common. Some schools exploit a loophole that allows them to identify men who practice with women’s teams as women.
One of the most striking cases was uncovered at the University of South Florida, which created a football team in 1997, adding more than 100 male athletes. In an effort to comply with Title IX, the school reported in 2008 that the number of women on its cross-country running team had increased from 21 to 75 — more than four times the size of the average Division I college cross country team.
In 2009, when the school reported 71 members, records showed that only 28 women had ever competed. One woman told The Times that she was kept on the roster through her junior year even though she had quit the team and returned her scholarship as a sophomore.
These practices are cynical and might be illegal. Congress clearly needs to tighten the reporting standards, so that schools are required tell the whole truth about their athletic teams and their efforts to ensure gender equality. Boards of trustees and alumni need to take immediate responsibility, pressing their schools to comply, not just with the letter of the law, but with the spirit.
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