Holder's Texas Two Step: voter ID challenge begins

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (adapted from British Foreign and Commonwealth Office Flickr photo)
and Texas Gov. Rick Perry (adapted from photo by Jonathan Mallard)

It's a battle on two fronts, necessitated by the Supreme Court's decision, last year, to nullify the pre-clearance formula sections of the Voting Rights Act, in Shelby County v. Holder. That left Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott free to pursue what is alleged to be targeted, minority voter disenfranchisement.

On Tuesday, the United States Department of Justice joins other plaintiffs, including Texas voters and candidates, in Veasey v. Perry, challenging the Lone Star State's quick-trigger, post-Shelby resumption of its previously struck voter ID law. Later this fall, DoJ will participate in another round of Perez v. Perry, the case which alleges the state's 2011 redistricting plan is discriminatory, giving Texas' rising Latino minority less representation in government than they are actually due.

A verdict for the plaintiffs in either case could allow Justice to place Texas back on the pre-clearance list for ten years, a "bail in" under Section 3 of the VRA, since, the DoJ maintains, it would demonstrate a persistent pattern of minority voter discrimination. It is their only recourse, since Congress won't act on a new pre-clearance formula.

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What do women want? Not Republicans

It’s tough to be the one at the party the girls don’t want to dance with.

That’s not to say the Democrats have women swooning. The GOP has a 49 percent disapproval rating among female voters, according to their own poll, while the Democrats are disliked by 39 percent. But this is a Republican poll, and the relatively narrow margin, when one is talking about half the electorate, has given the party of Palin a way to claim that there aren’t any winners.

“If Republicans talk about things like the economy, the debt, make the case for jobs and schools and education, and push back,” Republicans will win, RNC Chair, Reince Priebus said.

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Real crisis at border is one of American conscience

From Flickr/Public Domain

Angry White people screaming at busloads of minority children should frighten any American with a knowledge of our own recent history. Voices of fear and bigotry have risen like an oily mess on the tides that have brought waves of young immigrant children across our borders.

The boys and girls are buoyed ashore by a 2008, George W. Bush signed law - the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act - that is supposed to protect them from the rampant dangers of murder and sex trafficking in their home countries. You have likely heard, by now, that the GOP has wrongly hung this on Obama, citing his executive action that delayed deportation of minors that were brought here by their parents, as children, as the reason for the sudden influx. But the law and the president's order are distinct issues.

That law says we cannot turn them directly around, without detention and a deportation hearing, unless they are citizens of Mexico or Canada. Salvadorans, Hondurans and Guatemalans (as well as the rest of the world) all have the opportunity for due process, allowing them to stay in this country until they have their day in court. In a small number of cases, the administration has said, they will be allowed to stay.

Republicans in Congress have fought against giving President Obama the nearly $4 billion he asked for to help expedite hearing the cases. Instead, they are looking at a much smaller bill, that includes rescinding the human rights exemption in the 2008 law for non-contiguous, near border states, so that the refugee children can be returned to their home countries as if they were refugees from Mexico (or Canada). The Senate bill, which was endorsed by the administration Monday, also cuts the amount of money by about a third, but does nothing to reverse the policy of treating the children like the asylum seekers they are.

Here's the insidious part, though. The "humanitarian crisis" (perhaps an overly appropriated diagnosis of a plethora of refugee issues) the act was meant to address is now being framed by Republicans as the children risking their lives to cross our borders, and what to do with them once they get here.

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AROMA – creating sustainable activism across Atlanta movements

What AROMA seeks to do is “to build community and solidarity across existing groups, and across the entire social justice movement.” AROMA will “recruit for all of our organizations, all of our movements, and help new activists get involved more easily and comfortably, and really invest in their growth and their development as leaders.”

The idea is for the group to be a resource for Atlanta area activists by providing a directory of hundreds of organizations to whom they may want to lend their time and talents. But it’s also a resource for the organizations themselves, by being a place where they can find trained, committed activists who have been through AROMA’s mentoring program, and where, eventually, they can send their own budding activists for training.

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