Category: Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere, MLK jr

WASHINGTON — In the fall of 1981, a young conservative lawyer named John Roberts, fresh off a Supreme Court clerkship, arrived at the Justice Department at the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Hired as a special assistant to the attorney general, Roberts focused on voting rights, and in particular the battle underway in Congress over the reauthorization of parts of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. That included Section 2 of the law, which gave voters a tool to fight discriminatory voting laws and rules in the states.

As Roberts settled in at DOJ, a coalition of Democrats and Republicans in Congress wanted to reform Section 2. Under their plan, voters could strike down discriminatory voting laws by proving those laws caused discrimination, not that the people who made the laws had set out to discriminate. In other words, intent didn’t matter; outcomes did.

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John Roberts helped lead the fight to stop this change. He drafted op-eds, talking points, and memos arguing that the proposed reforms gave the federal government too much power to influence state voting laws and would lead to a quota system for who held elected office.

Roberts and the Reagan DOJ failed. The Voting Rights Act reauthorization passed with bipartisan support in 1982, and the number of lawsuits about discriminatory voting laws brought under Section 2 went from three in 1981 to 175 in 1988, according to the book Give Us the Ballot by the journalist Ari Berman. But Roberts would get his revenge. He claimed the Supreme Court chief justice’s seat once held by his mentor, William Rehnquist, in 2005. In the ensuing years, Roberts has chiseled away, piece by piece, at the nation’s laws for voting rights, campaign spending, and other democracy issues. Today, voting-rights activists and election-law scholars say the Roberts court, having dismantled chunks of the post-Watergate ethics reforms and the Voting Rights Act, is one of the biggest impediments to democratic reform at a time when the country needs those reforms more than ever.

The final two opinions of the most recent Supreme Court term put this phenomenon on full display. In Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, the court’s six conservative justices ruled that California’s requirement that charities disclose their biggest donors to state regulators was unconstitutional. Critics of anonymous political spending say the decision will fuel future challenges to transparency laws and empower anonymous donors at a time when American politics is awash in dark money from Democratic and Republican groups alike. “We are now on a clear path to enshrining a constitutional right to anonymous spending in our democracy, and securing an upper hand for dark-money influence in perpetuity,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in a statement reacting to the decision.

In the second decision, Brnovich v. DNC, the Roberts court knee-capped Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The Brnovich decision, legal experts say, will give greater leeway to state governments when they craft voting rules, and makes it much harder to prove that a voting law is discriminatory. “This is the rewrite of Section 2 that John Roberts couldn’t get in 1981,” Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, tells Rolling Stone. “I think it’s going to be extremely difficult now (to bring Section 2 challenges) except for the most egregious forms of voter discrimination.”

Combined, the AFPF and Brnovich decisions continue the Roberts court’s decade-plus track record of undermining the hard-fought voting laws enacted during the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-corruption reforms passed in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. And with a six-vote conservative majority on the Supreme Court in place for years — if not decades — to come, that trend shows no sign of ending soon. “As long as there’s a strong conservative majority on the court, any hope that the courts will do anything to rein campaign spending or states’ efforts to restrict the vote or tilt the playing field is indeed a hollow hope,” says Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America.

In the face of the Roberts court’s agenda, reformers in Congress and in state legislatures as well as election-law scholars say the need for new policies tailored to survive the high court’s scrutiny. Coming at a time when Republican state governments are seeking to restrict access to the ballot box, the Supreme Court’s latest decisions are “yet another affront to Americans’ right to pick their elected officials and know who is working to influence the democratic process,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) tells Rolling Stone. “This further underscores the need for Congress to pass legislation to protect the freedom to vote and ensure that our democracy works for the people, not for special interests and billionaires.”

Before surveying the options under consideration by reformers, it’s worth better understanding how far-reaching and potentially damaging the Supreme Court’s last two decisions were.

In the AFPF case, the court struck down California’s requirement that large donors to charities must be disclosed to the state government so that the state can root out possible fraud related to those donors. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a Koch-backed group, and the Thomas More Law Center challenged that requirement, saying it violated the group’s freedom to associate in private. They also cited the risk of harassment if the private donor information became public (as had happened in the past when some donor information was leaked).

The case harkened back to the influential NAACP v. Alabama decision in 1958, when the Supreme Court ruled that the NAACP didn’t have to disclose members who feared facing retribution in the Jim Crow South. In AFPF, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, ACLU, and other civil-rights groups invoked that earlier case in a friend-of-the-court brief that argued for the right to associate in private and urged the court to reach a narrow decision that would have struck down California’s rule without broader implications for transparency in civic and political life.

Instead, the majority’s opinion, written by Roberts, has broad implications for politics and activism. Before, the Supreme Court had made clear that disclosure was important enough to preserve even if it led to some nastiness or vitriol as a result. In his AFPF opinion, Roberts tossed that out the window. The mere possibility of a chilling effect on association was enough, he wrote in his opinion, to justify getting rid of certain disclosure requirements.

Roberts’ decision does more than wipe out California’s law, experts say. Under this reasoning, it opens the door to future challenges to longstanding laws on the disclosure of campaign donations put in place after Watergate, when untraceable money flooded into American elections and led to corruption. “Today’s analysis marks reporting and disclosure requirements with a bull’s-eye,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent in the AFPF case.

In Brnovich, the voting-rights case, the Roberts court took the opposite stance toward a state’s authority to set the rules. This time, in an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court deferred to the states to set their own voting rules and raised the bar almost impossibly high to challenge those laws for alleged discrimination, voting-rights advocates say. The majority’s opinion makes it so that a state can justify voting changes (cutting early voting, restricting absentee voting, reducing polling places) if it did so in the interest of preventing possible fraud, even if such fraud is vanishingly rare. The majority’s Brnovich ruling also takes as its benchmark the year 1982 — the year when Congress last passed major updates to the Voting Rights Act — for gauging the discriminatory nature (or not) of voting changes.

Rick Hasen, the election-law expert, describes the practical effect of the decision like this. Imagine that a state offered a week of early voting, he says, and there was evidence that a large number of African American voters used the Sunday before the election to do Souls to the Polls drives to get people to vote right after church. Then imagine that, post-Brnovich, the same state got rid of Sunday early voting and the evidence suggested the state did so to blunt African American turnout.

Under the Roberts court majority’s approach, Hasen says, this would likely not run afoul of Section 2. In his opinion, Alito says the benchmark for measuring whether a voting change is discriminatory is how it compares to the voting rules when the VRA was last reauthorized — in 1982. His test also implies that as long as a state can point to other voting opportunities, it can fairly justify cutting something like Sunday early voting. “For one reason, in 1982 there were very few early voting opportunities, so eliminating early voting can’t be a Section 2 violation because that wasn’t the norm in 1982,” Rick Hasen says. “For another thing, you have to look at the election system as a whole, so long as there are other ways to vote, then it’s not discriminatory under this court’s ruling.”

So what can — and what should — Congress do?

Lee Drutman, the New America political-reform expert, says the For the People Act, aka H.R. 1 and S. 1, contains a number of provisions that could repair some of the damage done by the Supreme Court’s two most recent decisions. That bill — which was recently filibustered in the Senate but Democrats have vowed to revive — would increase disclosure of dark-money donations, mandate paper ballots, and give the federal government more latitude to expand access to the ballot box.

But Drutman acknowledges that many of the most popular pieces of the For the People Act — which has a slim change of passing in the first place — will face challenges by conservative and libertarian legal groups. “Republicans are going to litigate the hell out of it,” he says.

As pressure builds inside the American democratic system because of hyper-partisanship, the nationalization of politics, and many other factors, what’s needed are release valves, Drutman says. He supports reforms that might break the “two-party doom loop,” as he puts it. Those include Alaska’s model of a top-four primary election and ranked-choice voting like in New York City but applied to, say, the U.S. Senate. “I think you’d see opportunities for more political parties and new coalitions forming,” he says. “You’d get the release valves.”

Rick Hasen says lawmakers should focus for now on the most immediate threat to American democracy: election subversion. He says the country narrowly avoided such a disaster in the 2020 election despite Trump’s attempts to pressure state and local election officials, like when he asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,870 votes to give him the victory in Georgia. But with the Trumpist wing of the GOP in full control, and Republican state legislatures moving to pass laws that empower partisans to dictate how elections are run and counted, subversion remains a threat, whether it’s the prospect of a state legislature selecting a rival slate of electors, a president pressuring election workers to change the count, or members of Congress disrupting the certification process in Washington, D.C.

Hasen says the universal use of paper ballots, tougher penalties for anyone who interferes with the election-counting process, and reform of the antiquated Electoral Count Act could all help prevent a future attempt to overturn or change an election outcome. It’s also a more narrowly tailored solution that, he says, could win over 10 Senate Republicans.

“We may not know until January 2025, when Congress has counted the Electoral College votes of the states, whether those who support election integrity and the rule of law succeeded in preventing election subversion,” Hasen wrote this spring. “That may seem far away, but the time to act to prevent a democratic crisis is now.”

After losing the presidency and the Senate thanks to Donald Trump’s disastrous management of COVID, Republicans look determined to try to ascend again in Washington by parroting his stolen election lies. If you can’t snap out of a slumber, it seems, the second best thing is to dive back into the delusions of your dream.

Consider Ohio, where a recent two-term Republican governor named John Kasich spoke up with intelligence and strength against Trump, and where the current Republican governor, Mike DeWine, correctly diagnosed the Jan. 6 insurrection, saying that the ex-president ”has started a fire that has threatened to burn down our democracy.”

The Kasich-DeWine GOP is nowhere to be found among the current crop of Republicans vying to replace the retiring Sen. Rob Portman next year.

Jane Timken, former state GOP chair, has boasted of turning the party into “a well-oiled, pro-Trump machine.” Another Senate candidate, former state Treasurer Josh Mandel, called Rep. Anthony Gonzalez a “traitor,” the likes of whom should be “eradicated from the Republican Party,” after Gonzalez voted to impeach Trump.

Then there’s J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy.” The Republican golden boy who grew up poor in Appalachia, went to Iraq, then graduated from Yale Law School and became a venture capitalist is in the midst of a bout of self-flagellation for telling the truth about Trump in 2016. Back then, he tweeted that Trump was “reprehensible” for his views on “immigrants, Muslims, etc.” and told NPR, “I can’t stomach Trump.” In his desperate bid to get on the right side of the monster, Vance has deleted the offending tweets, saying “I regret being wrong about the guy.”

If the Republican Party in not-long-ago-swing-state Ohio has been swallowed whole by Trump, even as his free-fall dive off the deep end continues, even as he and his confidantes, buying into a clinically insane conspiracy theory, seem to think his return to the Oval Office could come as soon as August, what hope does the national GOP have?

The wealth of the richest 0.00001% of the U.S. now exceeds that of the prior historical peak, which occurred in the Gilded Age, according to economist Gabriel Zucman.

In the late 19th century, the U.S. experienced rapid industrialization and economic growth, creating an inordinate amount of wealth for a handful of families. This era was also known for its severe inequality; and some have called the period that began around 1990 a “Second Gilded Age.” Back then, just four families represented the richest 0.00001% – today’s equivalent is 18 families.

Zucman, a French economist whose doctoral advisor was the historical economist Thomas Piketty, author of bestseller “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” released data this week showing that as of July 1, the top 0.00001% richest people in the U.S. held 1.35% of the country’s total wealth. These 18 families include those of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.

Zucman used real-time data from Forbes for the calculations. In 1913, at the end of the Gilded Age, the Rockefeller, Frick, Carnegie, and Baker families – names all tied to monopolistic power – held 0.85% of the country’s total wealth.

The richest 0.01% — around 18,000 U.S. families — have also surpassed the wealth levels reached in the Gilded Age. These families hold 10% of the country’s wealth today, Zucman wrote. By comparison, in 1913, the top 0.01% held 9% of U.S. wealth, and a mere 2% in the late 1970s.

The increasing concentration of wealth comes as the ultra-rich face more scrutiny for the money they’re not paying in taxes. Recent reports have highlighted that because so much of their wealth consists of unrealized gains in stocks and real estate, they pay little or nothing in income tax. Many CEOs and founders take small salaries given their outsized stock holdings, as lower capital gains tax is preferable to a higher tax on ordinary income.

Zucman gained fame in 2019 as an architect of then-presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax plan, which aimed to address the fact that the extremely rich pay little in taxes compared to their net worth. The plan would have imposed a 2% tax on net wealth above $50 million and 6% above $1 billion.

Since the pandemic began, the stock market’s gains have widened the gap between the wealthy and non-wealthy because stock ownership is largely concentrated among wealthy people. The number of millionaires globally jumped 5.2 million to 56.1 million, according to Credit Suisse. Though the pandemic’s wealth gains largely benefitted the richest Americans, “most” Americans did fare well financially during the pandemic, according to the Federal Reserve. Around $13.5 trillion of wealth was added to all households. Still, while a large portion of the country got somewhat richer, the rich saw most of that, with the top 1% seeing a third of the $13.5 trillion and the top 20% seeing 70% of it.

Ethan Wolff – Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance focusing on consumer issues, personal finance, retail, airlines, and more. 

For a certain kind of American liberal, it’s almost a reflexive gesture to wish the United States were more like Europe. There, health care is provided on a more egalitarian basis and a university education is much cheaper, if not free; sexual mores are more relaxed and gun ownership is rare; religion is vestigial and militant nationalism is strictly taboo. Widespread European distress over the presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump only confirmed what American liberals knew: that the Old Country was also the dreamland of their imagined liberal American future.

I wonder how it will feel when Europe becomes distinctly more right-wing than the United States.

It’s not an inconceivable prospect. The United Kingdom has a Tory government right now, and based on current polling their position looks increasingly secure. France’s centrist president Emmanuel Macron would likely be re-elected if the election were held today, but Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally party polls considerably higher today in a one-on-one contest with Macron than it did in 2017. Italy’s fragile coalition could be followed by a right-wing coalition of Matteo Salvini’s Lega and the neofascist-derived Fratelli D’Italia.

Even in Germany, where the Christian Democrat Angela Merkel’s 16-year rule is coming to a close, the next government may once again be a coalition led by the CDU/CSU, if not with the center-left SDP, then in a “Jamaica coalition” with a reinvigorated center-right FDP joining the Greens by their side.

Of course polls can and do change, and one election does not imply a radical cultural shift. But the overall political climate in Europe has been trending rightward for some time. After the financial crisis, and the austerity that followed, the traditional left-wing parties began to collapse, and more nationalist and extreme-right alternatives to the mainstream — the AfD in Germany, National Rally in France, UKIP in England — began to arise. The surge in immigration that followed Syria’s and Libya’s collapse into civil war were further sources of fuel. These parties and movements — critical of the European Union, strongly opposed to immigration, frequently more friendly to Russia — were initially and in many cases still are opposed by all the mainstream parties, but that opposition did little to stem their growth. Eventually, in countries like Hungary and Poland, they began to win elections and assume the powers of government.

In Europe today, the most viable traditional parties are often mainstream right-wing parties that have sought to coopt the nationalist right’s issues — most notably Boris Johnson’s Tory Party, which eclipsed UKIP by adopting Brexit for itself — or parties self-consciously constituted around the technocratic center so as to unite the mainstream against the far right. True left-wing parties like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s in France or Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour have largely fizzled. Meanwhile, the far right continues to produce new phenomena, most recently France’s Eric Zemmour, who has outflanked Le Pen on the right by being even more nationalist than she is.

If the result of all this ferment is a European political realignment that contains the far right by reviving a more inward-focused traditional conservatism, that would be good for Europe and, ultimately, for European relations with America. A Europe that was more oriented around national solidarity than global humanitarianism, open immigration, or free markets is a Europe America could readily live, work, and trade with. If by that means the continent achieved greater political stability and democratic accountability, most observers would consider it far preferable to either a lurch to the far right or a descent into civil strife.

But it might be startling for the American left to hear even centrist European politicians like Emmanuel Macron blame them for undermining national solidarity with their “woke” leftism. They might have to get used to it, though. Nothing is more useful for promoting national unity than a foreign threat. And while America’s foreign policy establishment would likely prefer that China be that threat, it makes far more sense for a Europe turning inward to decry pernicious American influence on their social fabric than China’s threats to Taiwan or its oppression of the Uyghur people.

The question then would be whether America’s left will take a lesson from the demise of their European cousins, and rethink their own approach to politics before they face a similar eclipse, and downgrade cultural questions in favor of bread and butter issues. Or, perhaps, whether Europe’s turn to the right will inspire America’s left to see unique promise once more in our own country’s distance from nationalism of the Old World, and redefine their own vision of a culturally egalitarian future not as a necessary redemption of our nation’s sinful history, but as a hoped-for fulfillment of distinctively American promise.