PEOPLE FOR BLOG

Earlier this week, PFAW’s Right Wing Watch caught this rant by American Family spokesman and all-purpose bigot Bryan Fischer, who declared on his radio program that American Latinos voted Democratic in record numbers this year because “they want big government goodies.”

 Hispanics are not Democrats, don’t vote Democrat, because of immigration. That’s not the main reason why they vote for Democrats. It doesn’t have anything to do with lax immigration policy. It has to do with the fact that they are socialists by nature. They come from Mexico, which is a socialist country. They want big government intervention. They want big government goodies. It’s primarily about that.

Now, they want open borders, make no mistake, because they’ve got family and friends that they want to come up and be able to benefit from the plunder of the wealth of the United States just as they have been willing to do. Republicans can pander all they want to Hispanics, to immigrants, and it will not work. There is no way on Earth you’re going to get them to leave the Democratic party, it’s one reason we’ve got to clamp down on immigration.

Fischer’s racist diatribe echoes generations of right-wing innuendo about “handouts” for minorities. It also, as it happens, lines up pretty closely with the worldview of 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. In a call with donors today, Romney blamed his presidential loss on the “gifts” President Obama offered to African Americans, Latinos, women and young people. What “gifts” did he mean? Universal health care, contraception coverage, college loans and the DREAM Act.

The New York Times reported on the call:

A week after losing the presidential election to President Obama, Mitt Romney blamed his overwhelming electoral loss on what he said were big “gifts” that the president had bestowed on loyal Democratic constituencies — including young voters, African-Americans and Hispanics.

In a conference call on Wednesday afternoon with his national finance committee, Mr. Romney said that the president had followed the “old playbook” of wooing specific interest groups — “especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people,” Mr. Romney explained — with targeted gifts and initiatives.

“In each case they were very generous in what they gave to those groups,” Mr. Romney said.

“With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest, was a big gift,” he said. “Free contraceptives were very big with young college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008.”

….

“You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity, I mean, this is huge,” he said. “Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus. But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group.”

Sure, Bryan Fischer is more willing than Mitt Romney to say outright racist things. But the content of what they’re saying is pretty much the same. Bill O’Reilly put it even more clearly when he opined that “traditional America” was being lost to people of color who “want stuff.”

I have to guess this is not going to be the way for Republicans to win back non-white voters, women and young people, all of whom have been fleeing their party in droves.

For the entirety of President Obama's first term, the GOP has grossly abused Senate rules in order to stymie his every initiative, including addressing our nation's courtroom vacancy crisis. Under Senate rules, you need unanimous consent to schedule a confirmation vote; yet even for consensus nominees, Republicans have withheld that consent for month after month after month. As a result, while George W. Bush's confirmed judicial nominees on average received floor votes 34 days after committee approval during his first term, the average wait time has skyrocketed to 104 days for President Obama's nominees.

Last week, the American people responded to these four years of GOP obstructionism by resoundingly reelecting President Obama and enlarging the Democratic majority in the Senate. The message could not have been any clearer: Republicans, stop obstructing and start acting like a responsible partner in government. Now that Congress has returned for the lame duck session, there is simply no excuse for Republicans to keep blocking the 19 highly qualified judicial nominees who should have been confirmed months ago.

Yet some Republicans appear dead set on continuing to obstruct, no matter the cost to their party or the country. This week, Roll Call reported that Senate Republicans expect few if any nominees to be confirmed this year:

Senate action on "judicial nominees in a lame-duck session of a presidential election year are very rare," a senior GOP Senate aide said. The re-election of President George W. Bush in 2004 "is the only time in recent memory that it happened, and even then, only a few district court nominees were processed," the aide added.

According to Republicans, no circuit court nominees have been processed in a lame duck of a presidential election year since the administration of President Jimmy Carter, and then it was only one.

First off, the distinction the Republicans are trying to draw between a lame duck session following a presidential election vs. a lame duck session following a midterm election is a difference totally without any meeting. Whether it's after a presidential reelection or a midterm election, there is no change in the president who is making the nominations. So what possible reason could they have to say lame duck sessions only count if they come after a presidential election? For anyone who is even remotely familiar with the strategies Republicans routinely use to mislead the American people, that is a clear signal that they desperately don't want you to look at what happened in other lame duck sessions.

And – surprise, surprise – it turns out that the Senate has vigorously confirmed nominees during previous lame ducks sessions. Immediately after the 2002 midterm elections, the Democratic-controlled Senate confirmed 18 of President Bush's judicial nominees in one day, both circuit and district court nominees, all by voice vote. They confirmed two more circuit court nominees within the next few days. And this was even though the Senate control was about to change hands as a result of the elections. Even though the Democrats could have used their majority to obstruct President Bush's nominees, they didn't. This is what responsible governing looks like.

During the most recent lame duck, two years ago after the 2010 midterms, the Senate confirmed 19 judges in less than a week, including five circuit court nominees. And 19 just happens to be the number of long-pending nominees we have today, four of them for circuit courts. It can be done.

That said, the presidential election years that the GOP focuses on deserve a closer look, because they do not support the Republicans' argument. Unlike 2004 and 2008, 2012 saw persistent, universal obstruction of every judicial nominee. That is why we now have so many long-pending nominees. If you look at the number of nominees who were confirmed after June 1 in these three election years, the difference is clear: 30 in 2004, 22 in 2008, and a mere 12 so far in 2012.

A look at the circuit courts in particular is instructive: Five of President Bush's nominees who were approved by the Judiciary Committee in 2004 were confirmed later in the year. In stark contrast, because of Republican obstruction, even this late in the year, the Senate has confirmed only two circuit court nominees who had been approved by committee this year, and both required a cloture petition to end Republican filibusters. (It wasn't until late May of this year that the Senate finally confirmed a nominee who had not been languishing on the floor since 2011.)

Confirming all 19 of the long-pending nominees during the current lame duck is not difficult. Unlike with the budget negotiations, all the hard work has been done already: The Judiciary Committee approved these nominations many months ago. Almost every one of them was approved by the committee with overwhelming bipartisan support. Every nominee has had the support of their home state senators, whether Democratic or Republican.

There are no questions left to be asked. All the Senate has to do is vote. All Republicans have to do is to let the Senate vote.

The Supreme Court announced today that it will accept a case arguing that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional: Shelby County v. Holder. Given the hostility of the Roberts Court's conservatives to voting rights and minority rights, this was not a surprise.

Since its adoption in 1965, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act has been an essential protection against those who seek to deny Americans the right to vote based on race. Congress specified areas of the country with a history of discrimination where, in its judgment, any changes in voting laws would need federal approval before going into effect, either from the Justice Department or from a federal court. The Supreme Court upheld this as constitutional in 1966. Congress has reauthorized the VRA several times since then, most recently in an overwhelming vote in 2006. After considering the history of voter suppression in the years leading up to the most recent reauthorization, Congress chose not to alter the list of states and counties subject to Section 5 preclearance. As recently as 2009, the Court declined to rule on Section 5's constitutionality when it was raised in a case called Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One [NAMUDNO] v. Holder.

These past few months have seen a number of examples showing the vital role Section 5 plays in protecting the right to vote. Due to preclearance, a discriminatory redistricting scheme adopted by Texas, a Texas voter ID law with a racially discriminatory impact, and a severe cutback in early voting that disproportionately hurt minority voters in several Florida counties were all prevented from going into effect. Without Section 5, the discrimination and damage would occur before voters could go to court to try to stop it; they would have had a harder time enjoining enforcement of such laws, which could have remained in effect throughout the long months or years of litigation.

Far-right opponents of the Voting Rights Act note that racial discrimination in voting rights in the mostly southern states covered by Section 5 is not rampant as it was in the 1960s. (Hmmm, could Section 5 itself have something to do with that?) They argue that Congress's decision in 2006 to maintain the same list of covered areas from 1965, regardless of changes in intervening decades, was unconstitutional. Specifically, they argue that it exceeds congressional authority under the 15th Amendment (preventing denial of the right to vote based on race), violates the states' rights to regulate elections under Article IV and the 10th Amendment.

In announcing that it will hear the case, the Court threw another factor into the mix. The question it asked parties to brief was slightly different from what the plaintiffs asked for:

Whether Congress' decision in 2006 to reauthorize Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act under the pre-existing coverage formula of Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act exceeded its authority under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and thus violated the Tenth Amendment and Article IV of the United States Constitution. (emphasis added to show new issue)

Many Court watchers expected the Court to strike down Section 5 in 2009 in the NAMUDNO case, but it declined then to address the constitutional issue. Clearly, the Court's conservatives feel it is time to do so.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many brave Americans gave their lives so that African Americans would no longer be denied the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act – and especially Section 5 – was the triumph of the best of American principles over the worst of American racism, often couched as "states' rights." By next June, we will learn whether Section 5 will fall before that all-too familiar altar of "states' rights."

One of the few things that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney agreed on during the campaign for the presidency was that this election was a choice between two very different visions of America, two very different directions for our country's future. The American people have made their choice -- a resounding victory for President Obama and Vice President Biden and a mandate for their policy agenda.

The Constitution, the Role of Government and the Common Good

In reelecting President Obama, Americans embraced the need for effective, vigorous government action to protect the rights, interests, health and well-being of every American.

In rejecting Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, Americans rejected the notion that our communities and our country would be better off with a drastically restricted federal government demanded by the Tea Party and a "you're on your own" philosophy represented by Paul Ryan's budget.

Romney picked Ryan as his running mate for a reason -- it was a full embrace of the Tea Party wing of the GOP. The public looked at Ryan's record and his positions and said, "no thanks." John Boehner tried to reassure his Tea Party caucus with election-night bluster about taxes, but the American public had a very clear choice on economic policy. President Obama's call for the wealthiest among us to contribute their fair share to our economic recovery carried the day.

Voters embraced a sense of national purpose expressed by the authors of our Constitution: "in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." Voters rejected the cramped and twisted interpretation of the Constitution promoted by small-government extremists.

Equality Under the Law

Voters also embraced constitutional values such as equality under the law, and rejected the call to turn back the clock on progress toward equality for LGBT Americans. President Obama urged voters in Maine, Maryland and Washington State to vote for marriage equality, and encouraged Minnesotans to reject an anti-gay constitutional amendment. Three states were wins for equality, and Washington appears headed in that direction. These victories should give new support to President Obama's backing for marriage equality and new momentum to efforts to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act. Mitt Romney, in contrast, pledged to strip the freedom to marry from same-sex couples and write discrimination into the Constitution.

The Supreme Court, Individual Rights, and Democracy

Another thing that the Obama and Romney campaigns agreed on was that this election would also determine the future direction of the Supreme Court. Both candidates made their approaches to the Court clear -- Obama with his nominations of the widely respected Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Romney with his choice of right-wing ideologue Robert Bork to head his judicial advisory team and his pledge to appoint nominees in the mold of the court's backward-looking conservative activists.

The Citizens United ruling and related decisions by this Supreme Court have dismantled decades of carefully crafted laws that protected the interests of individual voters by limiting the power of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence elections. The vast spending by Super PACs and other organizations created to take advantage of this new reality gave corporations and the wealthiest Americans an unprecedented ability to influence and sometimes dominate races at all levels. Those moneyed interests will start sooner, go bigger, and be even more relentless in 2014 and 2016 and forever until the Citizens United decision is either overturned by the Court or reversed by a constitutional amendment, which President Obama has endorsed.

Citizens United is just part of a broader problem with the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which has the rights and interests of people, actual human beings, to the interests of corporations. Consider Romney's "corporations are people, my friend." The public didn't buy this, but a majority of the Supreme Court has. If this flawed philosophy is allowed to stand, it would be devastating to the well-being of Americans and the health of our democracy. President Obama should take whatever opportunities he has in his second term to nominate Supreme Court justices whose commitment is to upholding the rights of flesh-and-blood Americans, not powerful corporate "persons."

Women's Rights

Another key issue is women's rights. Romney made it clear that he would roll back women's rights, and not only at the doctor's office, but also on the job. While President Obama campaigned proudly on having signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Romney's campaign refused to give a straight answer about where he stood on that law. Instead he promised to give us more Supreme Court justices like the ones whose decision to make it harder for women to fight job discrimination required the Ledbetter law in the first place.

One stark contrast between the two candidates was in their positions on women's access to reproductive health care. President Obama had made access to contraception a major policy initiative, and he has warned of the threat to Roe v. Wade. In contrast, Romney and Ryan staked out extreme and more extreme positions on restricting access to legal abortion. Not only did they not carry the day, but radical positions on abortion and rape played a significant role in the defeat of Romney ally Richard Mourdock in Indiana and Todd Akin in Missouri. Women's rights played a major role in this election, and an exciting group of women senators and representatives will be in office to help President Obama move these issues forward.

Comprehensive Immigration Reform

The candidates also took sharply contrasting positions on issues of particular concern to Latino voters. President Obama embraced America's promise of opportunity by moving to protect from deportation young people brought to the U.S. by their parents. Obama supports permanent solutions to our broken immigration system through the DREAM Act and comprehensive immigration reform. Mitt Romney's harsh anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric, and his plan for making people so miserable that they will choose to "self-deport," may have won him hard-right votes in the primary, but it alienated Latino voters and others -- even some Romney allies among evangelical Christians. Polls make it clear that the American public supports President Obama's commitment to comprehensive reform that gives the millions of hard-working undocumented immigrants in the U.S. a path to citizenship.

A Mandate for Progressive Governance

After the most expensive election in our history, voters defeated the relentless efforts of billionaire bullies, voter-suppressing politicians, and political strategists who broke new ground with campaigns built on blatant falsehoods.

Americans reelected a president who has offered a vision of an American community in which equality and opportunity are for everybody, a vision of government that is willing and able to advance the common good while protecting the rights of individuals, and a vision of society in which we embrace our growing diversity as a unique strength of the American Way, not a threat to it.

With an Electoral College victory larger than that of Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and George W. Bush -- both in 2000 and 2004 -- and a popular vote victory margin of millions of votes, President Obama unquestionably has a national mandate to pursue the policies he campaigned on, among them:

• Building a Supreme Court majority that protects the legal and constitutional rights of individuals rather than sacrificing them to corporate interests;
• Overturning Citizens United and returning common sense to campaign finance laws;
• Advancing equality and opportunity for all Americans, including women, LGBT Americans and immigrants; and
• Asking the wealthiest Americans to contribute their fair share to needed investments in the common good and to the reduction of long-term deficits.

Americans are ready to move forward. They will have little patience with the petty partisan obstructionism that Republican congressional leaders are already promising.

This post originally appeared at the Huffington Post.

The importance of the Supreme Court as an election issue – which was clearly predicted by pre-election polls – made itself clear in President Obama's overwhelming victory last night. Americans recognized that Mitt Romney would have driven the Court even further to the right, and they cast their votes accordingly.

Last month, People For the American Way, the Alliance For Justice Action Campaign, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights released a poll demonstrating that the Supreme Court was not only an important issue for voters, it was one that significantly favored President Obama over Mitt Romney.

A remarkable 63 percent of voters said the issue of who will serve on the Supreme Court was an important consideration in their vote for president. By a five-point margin, voters said they trusted President Obama over Mitt Romney to nominate Supreme Court justices. President Obama had an 18-point advantage among swing voters overall and a 26-point advantage women swing voters.

The survey also explained why: What most concerned voters – a full 54 percent – was that Romney would nominate justices who would consistently favor corporations over ordinary Americans. After all, Romney very openly said that he would nominate Justices like John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito – the solid backbone of the current Corporate Court. And every corporate-funded hit job TV viewers were assaulted with just served as reminder of their handiwork and what more Justices like them would do to our country.

So it was no surprise that President Obama, Vice-President Biden, and Senators-elect Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), Chris Murphy (Connecticut), and Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) reminded voters of the importance of the Court during the campaign.

Conservatives will try to say the election tells us nothing about the Court. Like Karl Rove on Fox News when the election was called, they will try to wish the hard numbers away, but they can't. Yesterday, the American people repudiated the conservative vision of the Supreme Court, giving President Obama a clear mandate to nominate strong progressives to restore the nation's highest court as a place where Americans can be confident in Equal Justice Under the Law.

As we await the results of today's elections, it is important to remember that the next president will likely be able to nominate multiple Supreme Court Justices which could cause dramatic shifts in the ideological make-up of the Court. Do Americans want a more diverse Supreme Court with justices committed to a balanced approach that treats all Americans fairly or do they want justices who, like the current far right majority on the Court, routinely favor large powerful corporate interests over the rights of individuals? The implications are huge.

A review of a large number of editorial boards that have weighed in on this subject are evidence that Americans understand the magnitude of what is at stake here.  That being said, a giant number of regional and student newspapers as well as a significant number of national newspapers have endorsed President Obama for reelection. And an overwhelming majority of  these endorsements cite the Supreme Court as an enormous contributing factor to keeping President Obama in office due to very real fears that the ever-flip-flopping Mitt Romney will be forced by his radical Republican electorate and team to nominate justices who intend to overturn Roe v. Wade, expand special interests' power like in the the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, and guarantee an extremist conservative majority.

From the Washington Post to the New York Times to the Economist, publications of every political stripe cite the concerns over what a Romney Court would do to women, the LGBT community, immigrants, and the rights of the common American as reason to deny Romney the presidency.

Be sure to check out PFAW’s new report on the Court’s importance.

As we head into the last weekend before the presidential election, U.S. PIRG and Demos have released an analysis of outside spending up to last week. The quick take-away: Secret and wealthy donors are drowning out the rest of us like never before. Some highlights:

• Outside spending organizations reported $ 1.11 billion in spending to the FEC through the final reporting deadline in the 2012 cycle. That's already a 400% increase over total 2008 outside spending.

With regard to individual donations to super PACs, which have been permitted without limit in the wake up post-Citizens United rulings:

• More than 60% of the 440.9 million raised by Super PACs from individuals came from just 91 people giving at least $1 million each. 97% came from just over 1,900 donors who gave at least $10,000 apiece.
• Super PACs have received as much from 629 wealthy individuals as the two presidential campaigns have received from all small donors giving less than $200, who are at least 1.9 million people. That means the voice of the average wealthy super PAC donor is more than 3,000 times more powerful than the average small donor.

With regard to corporate spending, which Citizens United unleashed:

• Restore Our Future (Mitt Romney's super PAC) has received over 20% of its $156 million in donations from for-profit businesses.
• Freedomworks for America has received 45% of its funds from for-profit businesses.
• While most corporate money is likely being funneled through dark money organizations, businesses are nevertheless providing 12% of all super PAC funds.

And with regard to unreported dark money:

• When all types of outside spending on television ads related to the presidential race are taken into account, 32% the spending has come from by "dark money" groups that do not disclose their donors.

While big business tries to take advantage to silence the voices of ordinary people during the campaign, another assault on the integrity of our elections and of our democracy is seen in right-wing efforts to obstruct certain groups of people from voting. Earlier this week, our affiliate People For the American Way joined with more than fifty other organizations to express concern about both corporate influence in elections and voter suppression.  Calling for "Money Out, Voters In," the joint statement reflects a growing recognition that these two closely related problems threaten our democracy and a commitment by the dozens of signing organizations to tackle both problems together.

Last week, People For the American Foundation released a report highlighting examples of voter suppression efforts in the states. The Right to Vote Under Attack, 2012 Update follows up on a 2011 report.

Undercutting the legitimacy of campaigns and undercutting the legitimacy of elections are two aspects of the same long-term game plan: To weaken the foundations of our democracy, take power away from We the People, and hand it to corporate interests.