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      Congress has a massive voting rights bill in its grasp. It must pass it, now | Dennis Aftergut

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      OpinionUS politicsCongress has a massive voting rights bill in its grasp. It must pass it, nowDennis AftergutThe Freedom to Vote Act rivals the 1965 Voting Rights Act as the greatest expansion of ballot access in our history Wed 22 Sep 2021 06.25 EDTLast modified on Wed 22 Sep 2021 07.00 EDTImagine it’s November 2020, and you are 59-year-old Laura Roundine, living on tribal lands in Montana. Days before the election, you’re home-bound after open heart surgery. The reservation has no at-home mail delivery.Your right to vote is saved by Renee LaPlante, a Blackfeet community organizer. She drives your ballot to a distant election office as part of her job.In 2021, that no longer works. Montana Republicans’ new voter-suppression law forbids such delivery of ballots.These barriers to voting on reservations are part of a larger Republican power grab. In 2018, the Democratic senator Jon Tester carried seven out of eight Montana counties containing the headquarters of a federally recognized Native American tribe. He won the state by a single point.The constitution’s elections clause points the way to protecting Laura Roundine and millions of other voters in the 18 conservative states with new state laws making it harder to vote. The clause gives Congress authority to override such measures in federal elections.On 14 September, Senator Joe Manchin and colleagues introduced the new Freedom to Vote Act. It rivals the 1965 Voting Rights Act as the greatest expansion of ballot access in our history.If the bill is adopted, 16-year-olds applying for a driver’s license will be automatically registered to vote at 18. That is huge. Similarly, the act guarantees ballot access in federal elections for citizens who were once imprisoned.As a result, 2022 could be the first time a man convicted 20 years ago, at age 18, for selling a bag of marijuana in Birmingham will be able to vote. Alabama is one of 13 states that enacted Jim Crow statutes from 1865 to 1880 disenfranchising former convicts with the aim of keeping black people from the polls. In Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama and Wyoming, more than one in seven African Americans are without a right to vote.The Freedom to Vote Act will transform voting in America. For in-person voters, 15 days of early voting are guaranteed. Election day becomes a holiday. The bill makes it a felony to communicate election lies or to interfere with citizens’ access to the polls.The act also stops Georgia’s inhumane ban on providing food or water to people standing in line to cast ballots. There were 10-hour lines in Georgia last year.Meanwhile, absentee voting will become available universally. States such as Georgia have been reducing the number of drop-box locations, but the bill will set a floor on absentee ballot drop-boxes, more than tripling the number of locations in counties in and around Atlanta – where 51% of the population is black. And to help voters like Laura Roundine, the act allows tribes to designate local buildings where anyone can drop off a ballot.The bill also helps level the campaign finance playing field. It requires disclosures of “dark money” and creates an option for states to implement “small donor” funding for candidates who choose it, with a sixfold match for contributions under $200.There are curbs on gerrymandering and on “fraudits” like the one currently under way in Arizona.To combat Republicans’ attempts to manipulate election results in states such as Georgia by imposing partisan vote-counters, the act allows removals of election officials only for misconduct and gives them a right to sue for wrongful removal. As Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born playwright who escaped from Nazism, once put it: “It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.”The right to vote protects all our other freedoms. Electing responsible public officials helps to free us from Covid-19, to reduce child poverty, to expand infrastructure, to ensure a living wage. The 2020 election of two Georgia senators in January 2021 allowed the Senate to pass bills giving families $1,400 in pandemic relief checks, expanding unemployment payments, and creating temporary protections from eviction.What was the main compromise that Senator Manchin engineered to obtain Republican support? States that already required voters to validate their identities may continue to do so. But now a utility bill, bank statement or school ID will be accepted as ID – rather than only a driver’s license, which some voters don’t have. That is progress.Because Manchin is sponsoring the new Senate compromise, it has the best chance of any bill to secure his critical swing vote to revise Senate filibuster rules. Multiple pathways are on the table, including restoring the “talking filibuster”. If senior senators must stand and deliver for hours, a filibuster would be short-lived.Ultimately, passage of the bill depends on the people. A 15 September poll by ALG Research shows that a whopping 72% of the American public supports policies in the Freedom to Vote Act. Citizens should write, email and phone their representatives in support.As Howard Zinn, the activist and the author of the bestselling People’s History of the United States, put it: “Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power that can transform the world.”Our freedom depends on exercising that power now.
      Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor and chief assistant city attorney who argued an elections law case at the US supreme court. He is currently of counsel at the Renne Public Law Group in San Francisco
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      Capitol attack panel said to be considering subpoenas to Trump White House aides

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      US Capitol attackCapitol attack panel said to be considering subpoenas to Trump White House aidesMark Meadows, Dan Scavino and former campaign manager Brad Parscale are among those being targeted Hugo Lowell in Washington DCWed 22 Sep 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 22 Sep 2021 02.02 EDTThe House select committee investigating the 6 January attack on the US Capitol is considering issuing a blitz of subpoenas for top Trump White House aides including the former chief and deputy chief of staff, according to a source familiar with the matter.The subpoenas – which are expected to be authorized as early as this week – would place House select committee investigators inside the White House and Trump campaign war rooms at the time of the insurrection as the panel prepares to ramp up the pace of its inquiry.Republicans in crosshairs of 6 January panel begin campaign of intimidationRead moreHouse select committee investigators are considering subpoenas for call detail records or testimony of key aides including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, the source said.The scope and subjects of the subpoenas are not yet finalized and discussions about who to include in the first tranche are still ongoing, the source said, although the three Trump officials are presently considered likely targets.Taken together, the developing move from the select committee marks perhaps the most aggressive investigative actions since the panel made an array of records demands and records preservation requests for Trump officials last month.It is also likely to further inflame tensions with Trump, already furious at the select committee for opening a line of inquiry into what he knew in advance of plans to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win, as well as Republicans under scrutiny over 6 January.Trump officials such as Meadows, Scavino and Parscale played a major part in advancing baseless and disproven lies about a stolen 2020 election that precipitated the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally which descended into the insurrection as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.The former White House chief of staff, who remained by Trump’s side as the violence unfolded, is among several aides who may hold the key to unlock inside information pertaining to the Capitol attack that left five dead and nearly 140 injured.But House select committee investigators are also taking a special interest in the role played by Scavino, the source said, since he held the additional role of being the director of social media – Trump’s preferred messaging platform.Subpoenas for call detail records, testimony or other material from those Trump officials and other individuals involved in the 6 January attack would cast a close net around the former president’s inner circle while simultaneously putting them at the center of the probe.House select committee investigators first signaled their intention to pursue a close inquiry into the potential role played by the Trump White House and House Republicans when they asked 35 telecom and social media companies to preserve records in case of later subpoenas.In the records preservation requests, the select committee instructed the companies to avoid destroying the records of several hundred people, including House minority leader Kevin McCarthy and, as the Guardian reported, the White House chief of staff Meadows.Much of the investigative work by the select committee has so far been focused on gathering evidence, as a prosecutor might, to build a case backstopped by empirical data that would safeguard its final report from criticism of partisanship or built-in bias.To that end, the select committee is also in the process of scheduling closed-door depositions with key persons of interest included in and beyond the subpoenas, the source said, though the agenda and potential subjects of the interviews were not immediately clear.A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment about subpoena discussions for Trump administration and campaign officials. But the panel’s chairman, Bennie Thompson, previously told the Guardian he would investigate 6 January conversations involving Trump.House select committee investigators are showing a new urgency to jolt the investigation into higher gear after the panel held its first hearing before members departed Washington for an extended summer recess. The full select committee – members, counsel and advisors – met for the first time on Monday for more than five hours in the Capitol, taking only short breaks to vote, grab dinner and make an occasional dash to the toilet.Members and staff for the select committee say they remain in discussions about when and on what topic to schedule a second hearing. At least two members told the Guardian they now expect the next public hearing will be delayed until October, though plans remain fluid.Congressman Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee, told reporters after the meeting that new facts about the Capitol attack were surfacing every day and that he expected the panel to ultimately receive all the records and testimony it sought.Raskin added that he was pushing to secure testimony under oath from anyone with relevant information. “We should see it as an honor and a privilege to be able to provide evidence to Congress about this violent insurrection,” he said.House select committee investigators are expected to present the subpoenas as non-negotiable, and 6 January select committee member Adam Schiff told reporters that subpoenas were imminent for individuals expected to resist requests for testimony.“In some cases, we’re making requests we think will be complied with,” said Schiff. “In other cases, we’re going straight to subpoenas where we think we’re dealing with recalcitrant witnesses.”Schiff, a former Trump impeachment manager from the 2019 trial and the chairman of the House intelligence committee, said he hoped the justice department would also help the select committee hold subpoena defiers in contempt of Congress.Trump has threatened in recent weeks to mount challenges to the select committee’s work, enraged at the prospect of his embarrassing private efforts to subvert the 2020 election results and reinstall himself in office being made public.“Executive privilege will be defended, not just on behalf of my administration and the patriots who worked beside me, but on behalf of the office of the president of the United States and the future of our nation,” Trump said in a statement.It was not clear whether his claims of executive privilege carried weight. The justice department has declined to assert the protection over Capitol attack testimony after the White House office of legal counsel determined it did not exist to benefit private interests.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationnewsReuse this content More

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      To protect the supreme court’s legitimacy, a conservative justice should step down | Lawrence Douglas

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      OpinionUS politicsTo protect the supreme court’s legitimacy, a conservative justice should step downLawrence DouglasIf presidents do not get to replace justices in an election year, then Coney Barrett’s confirmation is illegitimate; if presidents do, then Gorsuch’s is illegitimate. You can’t have it both ways Tue 21 Sep 2021 06.15 EDTLast modified on Tue 21 Sep 2021 06.19 EDTIn Planned Parenthood v Casey, a landmark decision from 1992, the US supreme court memorably noted that its “power lies … in its legitimacy”. If the people come to question the court’s legitimacy, they will cease to accept the “the Judiciary as fit to determine what the Nation’s law means and to declare what it demands”.It appears that Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett share these worries. In separate remarks this month, both justices sought to assure the public that, in Coney Barrett’s words, “this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks”. Thomas said much the same, seeking to disabuse his listeners of the belief that justices “are just always going right to [their] personal preference”.Triggering the justices’ concerns was the withering criticism that has been directed at the court’s recent decision to leave in place, at least for now, a Texas law that turns ordinary citizens into de facto bounty hunters empowered to sue anyone who performs or “aids and abets” an abortion for a woman past her sixth week of pregnancy. The Texas law cannot be squared with the court’s ruling in Planned Parenthood, which recognized that a “woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy before viability … is a rule of law and a component of liberty we cannot renounce”. To renounce that principle, the court warned, would cause “profound and unnecessary damage to the Court’s legitimacy, and to the Nation’s commitment to the rule of law”. But that is precisely what the court did in letting Texas’s transparently unconstitutional law take legal effect.But far from recognizing or examining their own role in contributing to the erosion of the court’s legitimacy, the two justices turned to other precincts to assign blame. It’s the media, Thomas whined, that are “destroying our institutions” – this from a justice who dissented from the court’s refusal to hear Trump’s challenge to a Pennsylvania state court decision that extended the deadline for the receipt of mail-in ballots by three days. Thomas acknowledged that the volume of mail-ins at stake had no material bearing on the outcome of the Pennsylvania race; all the same, he was prepared – in a stunning display of either partisanship or tone-deafness – to have the supreme court, scant weeks after the 6 January insurrection, offer tacit support to Trump’s attack on the 2020 election results. And, in now blaming the media for the court’s self-inflicted wounds, Thomas is effectively echoing Trump’s toxic rhetoric about “fake news”. Who is the institution-destroyer here?Alas, Justice Coney Barrett joined Thomas in attacking the press. The media, she charged, makes decisions such as the Texas case “seem results-oriented”. It is worth noting that the justice made her remarks at the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, with Senator Mitch McConnell, the center’s namesake, in attendance. It was McConnell, of course, who in the wake of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death six weeks before the 2020 election, pushed through Coney Barrett’s nomination, in transparent violation of the very justification he had offered four years earlier to deny President Obama the right to name a justice to fill a court vacancy that ultimately went to Neil Gorsuch. That McConnell’s cynical manipulation of the rules was designed to compose a court that would produce dependably conservative results appears lost on Coney Barrett. Indeed, it was her vote that was determinative in the Texas case. Had Ginsburg still been on the court, the decision would have gone 5-4 the other way. McConnell secured the results he wanted.If Coney Barrett were genuinely concerned with promoting the court’s legitimacy, she might consider resigning. Or rather, she and Gorsuch might agree to flip a coin to decide who should leave the court. If presidents do not get to replace justices in an election year, then Coney Barrett’s confirmation is illegitimate; and if presidents do get to replace, then Gorsuch’s confirmation must be illegitimate. You can’t have it both ways – not if you believe that the composition of the court should be the product of a principled process.Coney Barrett appears to willfully overlook the fact that she has been elevated to a rarefied position through a tarnished process that will taint all decisions in which her vote plays a crucial role. And just as we might hope that a person who, through no fault of their own, has come into possession of a good not rightfully theirs, would return that object, Coney Barrett and Gorsuch could do the right thing for the nation by agreeing that one of them should step down.Clearly, this isn’t going to happen. Yet it would powerfully bolster the legitimacy of a court the very composition of which smacks of illegitimacy.
      Lawrence Douglas is the author, most recently, of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020. He is a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian US and teaches at Amherst College
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