Lock him up!

Looks like Clay didn't do so well in court this morning.

While he was on the witness stand, the judge zeroed in on Schexnayder, one of the state's most powerful leaders.

The most dramatic moments of the hearing took place when Dick asked the speaker why he should not be held legally accountable because he filed a bill that mirrors the current map the judge rejected, not one with a second majority-Black district that she ordered.

She noted that federal penalties for failing to follow a court order include imprisonment and fines.

Unfortunately, by now, we should all know that putting politicians in prison is too much to hope for.  Which is why I have no idea why anyone is even watching the January 6 hearings this week. I mean they couldn't even put Mitch Landrieu under house arrest.  What makes anyone think they would actually put Trump in jail?  It should be clear we're well beyond even the pretense that anyone in our elevated political class will be held accountable for anything anymore.  It's pretty much granite countertops for all from here on out. 

So Clay might as well go on bucking the judge's orders.  Otherwise, why spend all this money on lawyers you aren't going to use?

About midway through the first redistricting session in February, the Illuminator reported that GOP leadership contracted with a private law firm for “redistricting advice” at taxpayers’ expense, which the contract now places at $60,000 per month. Few details have been made public about the work BakerHostetler is doing for lawmakers, and only a few select GOP legislative leaders have been given access to their counsel.

And then what happens?

 The Louisiana Legislature is the Bad Place

The Senate initially opted not to accelerate debate on bills by Fields and Hewitt, the latter of which mirrors the current map.

"I have a bad taste in my mouth on how we just started this short session," said Sen. Gerald Boudreaux, D-Lafayette. "I think we are in a bad place."

After a plea from Cortez, the Senate voted to send both bills to the Senate & Governmental Affairs Committee, which Hewitt chairs.

On Friday at 10 a.m. the House & Governmental Affairs Committee will hear four bills, including measures to create a second majority-Black congressional district by Duplessis and one by Schexnayder that mirrors the current outline.

They've got six days to either do what the court ordered them to do and make a fairer map that better represents the electorate or.. not do that and see what happens.  It's hard to imagine they're very worried about what might happen.

Will they get what they paid for?

There was an update this week on the law firm contracted by Louisiana Republican leaders in the legislature to help them draw up their redistricting maps. This week, the legislature interrupted its regular business to hold a one day special session during which it overturned the Governor's veto of their congressional district map. Civil Rights groups have immediately sued in response.  So now we will find out whether or not that legal advice was worth what the legislators paid for it. 

Which raises the question, how much did they pay and what did they even pay for in the first place? Recall back in February, Republican leadership was being coy with reporters about this contract and, as the Illuminator also pointed out in that story, they had been trained to be as secretive as possible about such matters through "email hygiene."  Well, there's an invoice now but it doesn't really say much. 

 An out-of-state law firm has charged the Louisiana Legislature $78,081 for providing “redistricting advice,” according to an invoice obtained Thursday through a public records request. It’s unclear when the law firm performed the work and what type of services it provided.

BakerHostetler sent the Legislature a bill that only provides the lump sum of money it’s charging the state for assistance on new political maps. There is no itemized list of  expenses on the invoice, such as individual attorneys’ billable hours or a breakdown of what portion of the bill might have been spent on the lawyers’ travel.

The invoice also doesn’t detail the any range of months or specific dates during which the law firm performed its work. The Legislature received the bill March 14 and it must be paid by April 14, according to the invoice. Money Louisiana makes from taxpayers and state fees will be used to cover the cost.

Well whatever advice that money bought, we'll see if the courts think it was worth it. If they decide to re-up the contract, maybe it will come with a refresher on how federal laws apply to the states. It's not clear the legislators have a terrific grasp on that right now. 

Another gaffe from Stefanski came Wednesday when he was arguing for a veto override in the House for the congressional redistricting bill Gov. John Bel Edwards rejected. Stefanski’s comments came after Rep. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans, had just finished telling colleagues how the failure to add a second majority-minority seat in Congress was a clear violation of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“The Voting Rights Act is federal law. It is not (in the) Louisiana Constitution,” said Stefanski, who had started his floor speech with what he called a “constitutional lesson” about the veto override process and separation of governmental powers. 

After the House voted 72-31 to override the governor’s veto, the bill moved to the upper chamber where Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, called out Stefanski for those remarks.

“This federal constitution, not the state – yeah, I get the difference – quoting the chairman on the other side (Stefanski) who made a point that we are Louisiana and this (override) is not federal law,” Peterson said. “I happen to disagree, that we do have to follow federal law, and what this bill represents is a violation of, yes, the U.S. Constitution.”

And a plague descends upon Louisiana

No no, as of this morning, there are no reports of coronovirus cases in the state yet. This means we still don't have to cancel Jazzfest which may or may not be good news depending on how many Airbnbs you own. [UPDATE: Well halfway through typing this up I see that we have one now so ignore this joke]  Instead, today's top reason for existential dread is occasioned by the convening of the 2020 Louisiana Legislative Regular Session. May God have mercy on our souls.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A Louisiana Legislature packed with dozens of new members starts its first lawmaking session of the term Monday, with a grab bag of topics for debate and none of the budget woes that preoccupied the last term.

Lawmakers will consider whether to legalize sports betting and recreational marijuana, whether to do away with Louisiana’s use of the death penalty or change the means of execution, how to spend a multimillion-dollar surplus and what approach they’ll try to combat high car insurance rates.

And they’ll do it without the financial gaps that became the primary focus of lawmakers and governors for a decade, after a tax deal brokered by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards and the majority-Republican Legislature last term stabilized the budget picture.

*Record scratch*

Whoa hold up a sec there with all that surplus talk.  Have you seen the oil prices, lately? This isn't supposed to be a fiscal year but we could be digging deep into the budget anyway depending on how bad the panic gets. What to do, what to do?  Would you guess, make sure we hand out bigger corporate tax breaks with less local oversight?  If so then you do know this legislature pretty well already.

The preliminary media analysis of this session talk a lot about a new spirit of "cooperation."  The Governor has been reelected so Republicans won't be trying to undermine his agenda just for the sake of it.  The presumably more "moderate" candidate was elected Speaker. And, prior to the virus induced economic panic, the budget fight wasn't expected to be quite so intense.  But this is still the most right wing legislature elected in decades. And the Senate, which had been a moderating force in recent years, is now more firmly in Republican hands. So expect plenty of bad things on the agenda even if the struggle over each item is less dramatic.

The Governor seems resigned to this, in fact, surrendering on a few potential flash points in advance.  He's already reversed his own policy with regard to the industrial tax exemption. And had declined to seek a teacher pay raise before being goaded back into it by what was thought to be one of his most valued constituencies. He's more likely to dig in a little bit in the coming fight over "tort reform" which is likely to be the toughest fight of the session.  See this latest article in an ongoing Bayou Brief series for a preview of that.

Again, it's an extremely conservative legislature so be on the lookout for nuttiness. There's a bill in there to ban transgender high school students from sports teams, for example.  With the virus on everyone's minds, you would think this bill by Mandie Landry to help people vote by mail would be a good idea this year, but something tells me that's going to hit a wall in this House.

Meanwhile, Stephanie Hilferty wants to impose mandatory minimum jail sentences for car burglaries. We would have thought that retrograde approach to criminal justice was long since discredited. But, since the guy who wrote the 1994 mass incarceration bill is now the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, all that stuff is back in style.

Anyway, ready or not, the #LAlege is back.  Better make sure we've stocked enough disinfectant. They can be a nasty strain.

Ok now let's ban the background check

City Council advanced a "ban the box" ordinance out of committee today.  It's expected to pass the full Council easily.  That's good news. But it's really just a small step.  To begin with, the ordinance only writes a currently established city policy into law. It broadens the rule to include city contractors as well.  But it can't stop there. Ex offenders looking for private sector work have rights too.  It's only the anti-democratic practice of state level preemption that keeps our locally elected government from extending its protection to them.

Another reason we can't stop here is banning "the box" doesn't actually remove the stigma ex offenders face when applying for a job. It only pushes it further back in the process.

The ordinance bars the city from requesting information on job applicants’ criminal history on initial employment applications and requires that criminal background checks only be conducted after an applicant has been through an initial interview. Advocates argue that the delay gives people with criminal history a chance to make the case for a job before their record comes into play.

“Moving this screening further into the process allows applicants to show the best version of themselves at the outset,” Palmer said.

That's a helpful change but it's not really justice. Why not ban the background check altogether?  People can't be held in a second class of citizenship simply because they've been processed through our criminal legal system. And employment discrimination isn't the only barrier they face.

Even after a much lauded voting rights reform law passed this year, felons still have to endure five years of disenfranchisement after their sentence has ended. That's not good enough.  Even after a law barring ex-cons from running for office for 15 years was declared unconstitutional, the legislature has created a constitutional amendment that would restore that ban at 5 years. That would be a step back in the wrong direction.  Louisiana voters have an opportunity to defeat that amendment on their November ballot this year. They probably won't, though. Which, again, means there's a lot of work to do beyond just banning the box.

The end of the democratic social contract

The Trump years are gonna be fun. Which of these are we going to decide we're no longer going to even go through the motions of attempting to provide for people?

Health care?

If House Speaker Paul Ryan has his way, the 115th Congress won’t just repeal Obamacare, it will dramatically reform Medicare, turning the program into a form of private insurance.

Ryan has long supported the controversial idea and, immediately after the election, he suggested that any Obamacare reform should include Medicare reform. Another key player, House Budget Chairman Tom Price, said Medicare reform was a top priority for the unified Republican government.

President-elect Donald Trump has yet to commit to further privatization of Medicare—which could cause a tidal wave of unease among senior citizens—and a Trump spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment. At a minimum, though, Ryan’s Medicare plans are a topic of negotiation between the speaker and the president-elect.

It's hard to know if we should even count health care given the sorry state of what even our puny somewhat public programs actually provide. But it's clear we're not moving that ball in the right direction.

How about public education? 

Donald Trump’s choice to be secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, is a woman who never went to public school, nor sent her children to public school, nor worked for public schools. She does, however, come from a wealthy family that has donated millions to the Republican Party. And she would be terrible for public education in this country.

As AlterNet explained in a 2011 profile on the DeVos family, the DeVos family is a prominent right-wing donor. Betsy Prince DeVos’ father-in-law co-founded Amway, while her brother, Erik Prince, founded the notorious private military contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater USA).

While many wealthy campaign donors have pet causes, the DeVoses have been particularly driven to promote school vouchers.

In 2000, the DeVoses launched one of their most ambitious campaigns, spending millions of dollars on an unsuccessful effort to convince Michigan voters to support a voucher initiative, which would have let parents steer tax dollars to private schools instead of public ones.

The 2000 ballot initiative was voted down by 68 percent of Michiganders.

After the loss, the DeVoses shifted gears, focusing instead on pushing voucher bills through state legislatures, which they have been doing ever since. They founded a group, All Children Matter, devoted to pushing vouchers. In 2013, the group, now known as the American Federation of Children, was fined $5.2 million in Ohio for breaking campaign finance laws, which it has not yet paid. The PAC was never registered in Wisconsin, where it was hammered by the press.

American Federation for Children has worked closely with Religious Right groups that can motivate voters from their homes and churches. It also coordinates its planning through the Council for National Policy, a secretive right-wing group that meets several times a year and gives members of the Christian right access to sympathetic donors.

Betsy also serves on the board of the Acton Institute, which merges corporate interests with dominion theology, or the belief that Christians should take control of political and social institutions. Earlier this month, the Acton Institute published a blog post titled, “Bring back child labor: Work is a gift our kids can handle.”

Not gonna spend our education dollar on your poor kids anymore unless they pray real good the way we tell them.  Failing that, it's send them down into the mines or whatever.  Doesn't matter anyway since we aren't expecting to develop an informed and educated citizenry anymore. Who needs that when we're not going to let anybody vote anyway? Which brings us to...

The basic right to vote? 

Bruce Ackerman, a constitutional law scholar at Yale University, tells me he worries it could all amount to the “beginning of the end of the Second Reconstruction.” This is the name some historians use to describe the sustained 20th Century effort to codify civil rights and full equality for African Americans after decades of voting and institutionalized discrimination, just as the original Reconstruction period tried to expand democracy after the end of slavery — an effort that was followed by the sort of retreat that could conceivably happen again.

“The rest of the Voting Rights Act will become a dead letter,” Ackerman suggested, adding that he expects nothing less than a wholesale rollback of “the fundamental achievements of the Second Reconstruction."

One memory I have from the (later) heyday of the Rush Limbaugh radio program comes from  Election Day 2004.  Those of you who were alive back then might remember some mid-day exit poll reports being circulated which seemed to suggest that John Kerry could maybe possibly have been in the process of ousting George W. Bush.  Turns out these must have been "fake news" or something.  It's a good thing everyone avoids these errors today by just using Facebook.

Anyway, Rush, under the impression that Kerry might win, was in full panic mode and launched into a long loud diatribe about the need to seriously consider bringing back the property requirement for voters.  It was funny at the time because 1) that's crazy and 2) I was as hopeful at that point in the day as Rush was despondent and was getting a kick out of listening to him whine.   But it's also an indicator of where the right wing mind goes when it decides the democratic process needs "fixing."

And when a radical right wing party controls the Presidency, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and very nearly enough state houses to amend the Constitution, this stuff gets less funny and more scary.

Shelby decision is just the worst

Read this.

The majority opinion in Shelby acknowledges that racial discrimination in voting continues, but notes that the situation has improved since 1965 and that the procedures in the current Voting Rights Act do not make a clean fit with the current forms and pattern of discrimination. Ordinarily however a federal statute is not invalidated on the ground that it’s dated. I hardly think the Supreme Court justices believe (as did Alexander Bickel) that “desuetude” is a constitutional doctrine. And the criticisms of the statute in the majority opinion are rather tepid. That’s why the court’s invocation of “equal sovereignty” is an indispensable prop of the decision. But, as I said, there is no doctrine of equal sovereignty. The opinion rests on air.

Yay DOMA is dead

So what we've learned from the court this week is that equal protection under the constitution is a pretty important thing.. except for when it applies to your right to vote, I guess.

I'm not someone who buys into the feel-good line about the "arc of history bending toward justice."  I don't think there really is much of an arc to history.  And justice under the law is a thing that exists sometimes for some people in some places but only until it doesn't anymore. Or until someone inevitably shows up and tries to take it away.  For example, get ready to watch last night's situation in the Texas legislature play out again in several states next year as Republicans try to re-write the voting laws in light of the Shelby decision.  Can't imagine they'll lose every filibuster.

But let's not be too grouchy.  A stupid stupid law is gone and that's a good thing. Even if it only took two decades to happen. 

So that was quite a day

First there was this.

Let's be clear about what has just happened. Five unelected, life-tenured men this morning declared that overt racial discrimination in the nation's voting practices is over and no longer needs all of the special federal protections it once did. They did so, without a trace of irony, by striking down as unconstitutionally outdated a key provision of a federal law that this past election cycle alone protected the franchise for tens of millions of minority citizens.

And then tonight, hundreds of thousands of people watched a YouTube feed (because all of cable news was busy running repeats of its talking heads shows) of the Texas Legislature. There Republicans decided to shut down a 10 hour filibuster of a draconian crack down on women's right to reproductive health care by arguing that comparing it to other draconian crack downs on women's right to reproductive health care isn't "germane" to the topic.

After that, it got wacky.  I'm fading right now and I'm sure you'll read about this somewhere by tomorrow anyway.  Basically the last ten minutes of the session involved legislators struggling like a hurried football team to get a vote off before the clock ran out at midnight as they were being disrupted by deafening crowd noise. Nothing could be more Texas than that, when you think about it.

As I type this nobody knows what happened.  The Senate hasn't even officially adjourned. I'm sure they'll get around to that sooner or later. And then the whole thing will be argued in some court somewhere. I'm sure this will come up at some point.  The legislative website originally recorded the vote on the abortion bill as taking place on June 26... which would mean after the deadline.



But then this was altered to read June 25.

Suffice to say the clock has been turned back in more ways than one today.  From the looks of things there are still plenty of protesters left at the capitol in Austin.  (Of course nothing on cable news about that still.) But I'm too tired to stay up and watch them get arrested so I'm turning in.

Can't wait to see what happens with DOMA tomorrow.

Turning back the clock

"Turning back the clock" is actually an insufficient metaphor. It implies a progressive interpretation of history where issues are decided one time and then never revisited. In reality, though, every victory is temporary. In politics you never really defeat the other side. You just every now and then get to institute a policy which eventually gets undermined somehow.

Take Social Security, for example. Conservatives have always been opposed to the very idea of a retirement trust fund that benefits every citizen. It may have taken nearly 80 years of chipping away but they're finally about to sink it. The same story applies to the current griping about contraception. It's not new. It's just something so-called "progressives" assumed they had "won".

But nothing is ever won permanently because contrary to fashionable belief, power.. even in a democracy.. isn't about changing people's minds through rational discussion. It's about struggle between permanently and irreconcilably opposed interests. The wealthy don't give as shit about your retirement. They can pay for their own. It's completely rational for them to take this position and you're never going to change their minds about it. Religious fundamentalists are never going to agree that women who want to make their own decisions about their own bodies are anything other than "sluts". You're not going to change their minds either. So they need to be made to behave.

But you can only make people who don't want to behave do so temporarily and imperfectly anyway. So you're always having to re-fight old battles. And that's as it should be. But let's not pretend there's anything unnatural or anachronistic about fighting these fights. Otherwise you allow the other side to pretend that they're presenting you with something new when, in fact, they're just trying to bring back something very old.

Texas filed an amended complaint today [UPDATE, actually Tuesday] in its action to overcome the US Department of Justice’s objection to its voter identification law. The complaint now says that the Voting Rights Act section 5, as amended in 2006, “exceeds the enumerated powers of Congress and conflicts with Article IV of the Constitution and the Tenth Amendment.”

Quote of the Day

Bill Clinton:

There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today

Once more for the record

The Clinton campaign is truly hideously awful.