“The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has agreed to review the illegal voting conviction of Crystal Mason, a Tarrant County woman facing a five-year prison sentence for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election while she was on supervised release for a federal conviction,” the Tex[...]
Posts Tagged ‘elections’
March 31st, 2021 - 3:04 pm § in Law and Courts, Racism
Only in Texas: How can voting provisionally even be a crime?
PHOTOGRAPHY: Voting in Georgia
While white men in masks sign a Jim Crow law to keep blacks from voting, a black legislator is arrested (and later charged with a felony) for knocking on the governor’s door. (They’ll argue, “You can’t have it both ways. Either protesting is a crime or it isn’t. If the [...]
March 20th, 2021 - 12:31 pm § in Politics
Leveling the political playing field
The voting rights bill snaking through Congress is pushing GOP buttons. “‘H.R. 1 is an attempt to use the Democrats’ slim majority to unlevel the playing field and take away the rights of roughly half of the voters in the country,’ said Mark Weaver, a GOP consultant based in [...]
GOP is losing business support
The GOP, once the party of business, has morphed like a mutating virus into a petrie dish teeming with conspiracy nuts, racists and bigots, anti-maskers, and violent insurrectionists. In Georgia, where GOP legislators are ramrodding a huge voter suppression bill, the Chamber of Commerce is distancin[...]
March 18th, 2021 - 9:02 pm § in Politics
Republicans are trying to steal elections
From an NBC News story on Thursday, March 18, 2021 (here): “In Georgia on Wednesday,” while the U.S. reeled from the Atlanta spa shootings, “state Senate Republicans quietly introduced and fast-tracked a 93-page voter suppression bill” that replaced a 2-page bill on absentee [...]
March 17th, 2021 - 7:12 pm § in Politics
The filibuster isn’t sacrosanct
It’s not in the Constitution; it’s an arbitrary Senate rule, and the Senate can change its rules. It has a disreputable history; CNN calls it “a relic of Jim Crow.” (Read story here.) “Southern senators took advantage of the filibuster for years to block civil rights l[...]
“Written in hell by the devil”
That’s how Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT, photo) describes the Democrats’ voting rights bill. “Written in hell.” That’s how Sen. Lee, one of the most strident members of Congress, and other GOP senators, feel about American citizens exercising their right to vote. He added, ̶[...]
House Dems pass voting rights bill, now comes World War 3 in the Senate
“House Democrats passed sweeping voting and ethics legislation over unanimous Republican opposition” Wednesday night, sending to the Senate “what would be the largest overhaul of the U.S. election law in at least a generation,” AOL News said. (Read story here.) The bill takes[...]
The Supreme Court’s next big voting rights case
In 2013, when the Supreme Court struck down the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act by a 5-4 vote along ideological lines, Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote the opinion, said the VRA could prevent racially discriminatory voting laws through the act’s Section 2, which laws that pla[...]
February 26th, 2021 - 1:38 pm § in Politics
What’s at stake if Democrats don’t kill the filibuster
For years now, Republicans have practiced scorched-earth politics. In 2009, when America faced its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, their goal was not to help newly-elected President Obama save the economy, but make his presidency a failure. Since then, their legislative policy has [...]