The North Carolina State Board of Elections voted 5-0 in favor of a do-over in the mostly rural 9th Congressional District but did not immediately set a date. | AP
By Jesse Jackson 02/25/2019,
In North Carolina, the State Board of Elections has thrown out the election results in its 9th congressional district for fraudulent activity — probably the first time in U.S. history this has happened.
The fraud was committed by a campaign, not by voters, and by a Republican, not a Democrat.
OPINION
For years, Republicans have campaigned for voting restrictions claiming, as Donald Trump has repeatedly, that voter fraud is widespread. In fact, it’s not ineligible voters distorted election results, but rather the fraudulent efforts of an embattled Republican Party to rig the rules that has led to election irregularities.
The fraud in North Carolina’s 9th District — harvesting absentee ballots to pump up the Republican candidate’s votes — was blatant and illegal.
What’s undermining fair and free elections across the United States are laws and practices that are too often legal, designed to make voting more difficult for minorities and the poor, and to ensure that big money interests — the wealthy, corporations — speak louder.
Republicans have passed voter ID laws requiring voters to have a government-issued photo ID, which many minorities, students and the poor are less likely to have.
They have drawn districts — gerrymandering — to pack Democratic constituents in one district, allowing Republicans to have a better shot at winning two or three. Right-wing judges have ruled that corporations and the rich can give unlimited contributions — without disclosure — to dark money political operations. They combine these with a range of tricks and traps — purging voter lists, making voter registration difficult, shutting down polling places for bogus reasons in minority areas, causing long lines and confusion, disenfranchising felons who have paid their debt to society but are still turned away from the ballot box, and more.
Wisconsin under former Governor Scott Walker provided the model, courtesy of big money contributions from the billionaire Koch brothers and their network. In 2012, Barack Obama won Wisconsin by a margin of 7 percent. Democrats running for the state legislature won over 51 percent of the vote. But Republicans won 60 of 99 seats in the statehouse. At the national level, in 2012, Obama’s re-election year, Democrats won 1.4 million more votes across the country than Republicans in House races, yet the GOP won 33 more seats.
Voter suppression laws spread after Barack Obama stunned the country by winning a majority of the vote and the presidency in 2008. This isn’t an accident. Republicans, limited by race-baiting political strategies, have turned into a whites-only party anchored in the South, while the country has grown increasingly diverse. Voter suppression — as we saw most recently in the rule-rigging and egregious purging of the rolls in the Georgia governor’s race — is the weapon of a minority party intent on sustaining its power.
In 2016, these tactics surely helped elect Donald Trump. As Ari Berman has reported, an MIT study estimated that there were more than 1 million votes lost because eligible voters didn’t have the right ID or encountered long lines or couldn’t register. Trump won the election by a combined total of 78,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In 2018, though, even the rigged rules couldn’t save Republicans. Voters gave Democrats a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. It took the highest turnout — over 50 percent — in a nonpresidential election in over a century. Democrats won by the highest margin — 53.4 percent to 44.8 percent — ever recorded, and won 41 seats, the largest number since 1974.
The first order of business of the new Democratic House majority is H.R.1, the For the People Act of 2019, which contains sweeping election reform. H.R.1 would crack down on gerrymandering and reduce the influence of big money in congressional races. It would require dark money operations to disclose their donors and provide a federal matching program for small donations. It would institute nationwide automatic voter registration, Election Day registration, two weeks of early voting and limit purges of the voting rolls. It would also restore voting rights to ex-felons who have served their sentences.
Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, speaking of H.R.1, immediately announced, “That’s not going to go anywhere.” Until Democrats win a majority of the Senate and take back the White House, election reform will have to be fought at the state and local level.
Politics shouldn’t be a game of beanbag toss. Our democracy depends upon protecting the right to vote and on ensuring that elections are as free and as fair as we can make them. It is a sad testament to how twisted Donald Trump’s Republican Party has become that it has made election reform a partisan issue and voter suppression central to its platform.
Do you like or agree with the mad racist traitor that sold America out ???
President Donald Trump speaks during an event in the Rose Garden at the White House to declare a national emergency in order to build a wall along the southern border, Friday, Feb. 15, 2019, in Washington. | AP Photo/ Evan Vucci
By Jesse Jackson 02/18/2019
President Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency in order to fund his border wall triggers a crisis for our Constitution and our democracy.
This is no longer about the shameless lies, exaggerations and slanders that the president has trotted out to justify his silly campaign promise to build a wall (that he promised Mexico would pay for). It’s no longer about wasting billions of dollars, of shutting down much of the government for weeks or squandering the time and attention of the Congress and the American people for an inane campaign promise.
OPINION
Trump now poses a fundamental challenge to our democracy: Does Congress have the essential power of the purse that the Constitution gave it, or can a president at his whim declare a national emergency and spend what he wants on what he wills? This is the line between a constitutional republic and a presidential autocracy. Trump’s petulant response to not getting the money he wants now puts that question before the Congress and the courts.
This is no exaggeration. Trump wants money for the wall. Congress — both the Republican Senate and the Democratic House — voted not to give him as much as he demanded. So the president declares a national emergency and uses money appropriated by the Congress for other purposes to fund his wall.
Only there is no national emergency. Congress and presidents have been debating and legislating about our immigration policy and about border security for years. Contrary to the president’s hysterical lies, arrests for illegal entry have declined. With the economy near full employment, there is no economic crisis sparked by undocumented workers. Contrary to the president’s claims, the wall won’t stem the flow of illegal drugs into America, the vast bulk of which come through legal ports of entry.
Even the president in his news conference admitted that he didn’t need the money; he just wanted to build the wall faster. All we have is a normal dispute between a president and a Congress about spending priorities.
Trump is saying that since he can’t get what he wants, he’ll simply do it on his own. That effectively erases the congressional power of the purse — a foundation of a constitutional republic. If Trump’s decision is upheld by the Congress and the courts, a chilling precedent will be set.
Most Americans agree with the Congress and don’t support wasting money on the wall. Declaring a national emergency to build it is even more unpopular. When the White House invokes eminent domain to take over hundreds of miles of privately owned land on the border, public opposition will grow. But what will stand in the way of a willful president?
Under the National Emergencies Act of 1976, passed by Congress after Watergate to curb presidential abuse of national emergency declarations, the Congress can reject the president’s declaration. The House — with its Democratic majority — will surely vote to reject. Republicans in the Senate will then have 15 days to decide whether they are prepared to back Trump or stand up for our republic against the president, his Fox TV allies and the right-wing echo machine.
If the Senate rolls over, or the president vetoes the rejection, the issue will end up in federal courts, many packed with right-wing activist judges appointed by Trump.
Right-wing judges are normally skeptical of exaggerated claims of executive power, worried that they will be used by liberal presidents to expand the public sphere. But increasingly, these judges have put partisanship over constitutional precedent and their own judicial philosophy.
Most recently, for example, in Trump v. Hawaii, the right-wing gang of five on the Supreme Court voted — in a 5-4 decision — to overrule the lower courts and to uphold the president’s Muslim travel ban, emphasizing the need to show “deference” to presidential authority in matters of immigration and national security.
If the Senate folds and the courts roll over, we will be well on our way to an elected autocracy.
Many people treated Trump’s posturing over the wall as a diversion, a low-rent, off-color vaudeville act used to rouse his audiences. The racial and ethnic slurs that he spread always made it more poisonous than that. Now his declaration of a national emergency has turned it into a direct assault on our democracy.
Now we will see who stands with the Constitution, and who does not.
Jesse Jackson
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) (C) during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol to unveil the Green New Deal resolution. | Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
By Jesse Jackson 02/11/2019
The big guns are out for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the charismatic first-term legislator from New York.
In an apparent swipe at Ocasio-Cortez, Donald Trump used part of his rambling State of the Union address to say he was “alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country.”
Billionaire former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz cited Ocasio-Cortez’s support for a 70 percent tax rate on income above $10 million a year as one reason he may decide to run as an independent for president, and not as a Democrat.
OPINION
The young congresswoman isn’t easily cowed. She called out Trump, saying “I think he’s scared.”
“He feels himself losing on the issues. Every single policy proposal that we have adopted and presented to the American public has been overwhelmingly popular, even some with a majority of Republican voters supporting.”
Ocasio-Cortez is exactly right. Schultz may think calls for Medicare for all are “un-American,” but the vast majority of Americans support it. Consider the following:
Reuters poll: 70 percent support Medicare for all, including 52 percent of Republicans.
Fox News poll: 70 percent support raising taxes on those making over $10 million a year.
Bloomberg poll: 62 percent support tuition-free college.
Kaiser Foundation poll: 92 percent support having Medicare negotiate with drug companies to lower drug prices.
Hart poll: 63 percent support $15 minimum wage.
Yale/George Mason poll: 81 percent support the Green New Deal plan.
There is a wide gulf between the political center and the moral center.
Dr. Martin Luther King used to teach that “cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right? There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.”
Politicians worry about donors. They hear from lobbyists, from special interests, from corporations that can spend unlimited money in political campaigns without revealing it.
The moral center is concerned with what is right — and what can work.
What is different now is that the moral center — what is right — is also increasingly popular. The political class is running scared because more and more people understand that the rules have been rigged to benefit only the few. So Trump and Republicans and billionaires like Schultz yell “socialism,” “Venezuela,” “extremism,” “radicalism.” They need to spread fear to protect a discredited political center.
Don’t fall for it. Medicare for all isn’t socialism; it’s common sense. A living wage isn’t radical; it’s a moral imperative.
We now suffer an extreme inequality not witnessed since before the Great Depression. It is time for the moral center to make itself heard.
And now a new generation of leaders is rising that just may be ready to take on the fight. Like AOC, they will come under intense fire. They will succeed only if we build a popular movement strong enough to overcome the resistance.
AOC is young and smart and charismatic, and she and her colleagues may help us begin to heal a nation.
Demonstrators hold signs and chant outside the Governors Mansion at the Capitol in Richmond, Va., Saturday, Feb. 2, 2019. The demonstrators are calling for the resignation of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam after a 30 year old photo of him on his medical school yearbook photo was widely distributed Friday. | AP Photo/Steve Helber
By Jesse Jackson 02/04/2019
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has admitted that he blackened his face as part of a Michael Jackson costume for a dance party. He also initially admitted that he was one of the participants in a racist photo — of one person dressed in full Klan regalia and another in blackface —that appeared on his 1984 yearbook page.
OPINION
The next day, however, he reversed himself, saying it could not have been him, bizarrely arguing that given how difficult it was to get shoe polish off his face after the dance contest, he surely would not have done it again.
The governor apologized, noting: “In the place and time where I grew up, many actions we rightfully recognize as abhorrent today were commonplace.” Yes, 1984 was a long time ago, but it was two decades after the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights laws, and three decades after Brown v. Board of Education declared segregation unconstitutional.
In 1984, I made my first run for the presidency. In 1985, Douglas Wilder became the first African-American elected statewide as lieutenant governor in Virginia, on his way to being elected governor four years later. Northam’s actions were offensive and wrong even at the time he committed them.
America’s long, sordid tradition of blackface minstrelsy — white people in blackface — was designed to burlesque black people, to portray them as dumb, grotesque and lascivious and was not incidentally part of propaganda for slavery.
The governor said that his actions then do not reflect his attitude, his views or his policies now or at any time throughout his military, medical and public career. All of us are sinners. Grace and redemption must be accorded to all who atone. I believe deeply that a person can be redeemed from a hideous past.
Northam’s record has been positive. In stark contrast to President Trump, he acted bravely during the racist protests in Charlottesville, Va., that resulted in the murder of Heather Heyer. Trump infamously embraced the proto-Nazi protesters, arguing that there were “good people on both sides.” Northam has advocated taking down the Confederate statues in Virginia.
In stark contrast to Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, portrayed in an infamous picture celebrating the Confederate flag, Northam has pushed to advance voting rights in Virginia. McConnell recently scorned legislation to expand and defend voting rights as a “power grab” while defending Republican efforts to suppress the vote across the country.
Trump and McConnell remain in power, yet the right-wing talking heads who celebrate Trump and McConnell are condemning Northam, demonstrating not their virtue but their rapacious partisanship.
Trump and McConnell have plenty of company on their side of the aisle. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions contended the Voting Rights Act was “intrusive” on states’ rights.
Then there’s Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi. She was elected in November despite saying she’d happily sit in the front row of a “public hanging” if invited by a supporter. She didn’t say it 35 years ago. She said it a few months ago.
The recently elected Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, also played the race card with little to no blowback from his party. He warned the voters of his state not to “monkey this up” by electing his African-American opponent, Andrew Gillum.
And before narrowly defeating African-American gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, Brian Kemp was the Georgia secretary of state and purged hundreds of thousands of Georgians from the voting rolls, most of them African-Americans.
As a practical matter, it will be impossible for Northam to lead the state of Virginia after this revelation. His press conference in which he denied what he had admitted the day before did not help his cause.
Our leaders must represent the values that we espouse and honor the diversity of the coalition that we seek to build. Virtually the entire leadership of the Democratic Party in the state has called on the governor to resign. He would be wise to accept their advice.
