GOP Robber Barons

Marli links to a recent Rolling Stone piece making the case for a stolen election in 2004. Robert Kennedy, Jr., recently known for his environmental activism, documents the abuses of local authority in Ohio, most of which were explicitly directed by OH Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Kenneth Blackwell. Among the abuses: illegal voter challenges by a method called "caging," systematic challenges of new voters at the polls, intimidating calls to potential voters threatening illusory legal process, changing the method of registering new voters, and even requiring a last-minute change in paper stock weight to register new voters. In each case, the voters targeted were--unsurprisingly--black or from urban voting districts.

Two of the most incredible tricks the RNC and the OH GOP deployed were so blatant that I simply could not believe they happened, as did some source checking to verify it. (And big kudos to Kennedy for providing copious, if not uniformly helpful, citations). I'll choose one of these as an illustrative example. It involved "old-fashioned ballot-stuffing:"

Take the case of Ellen Connally, a Democrat who lost her race for chief justice of the state Supreme Court. When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn far more votes than Connally -- a liberal black judge who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget. And that's exactly what happened statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes -- a margin of ten percent.(181) The Conyers report -- recognizing that thousands of rural Bush voters were unlikely to have backed a gay-friendly black judge roundly rejected in Democratic precincts -- suggests that ''thousands of votes for Senator Kerry were lost.''(182)...

How might this fraud have been carried out? One way to steal votes is to tamper with individual ballots -- and there is evidence that Republicans did just that. In Clermont County, where optical scanners were used to tabulate votes, sworn affidavits by election observers given to the House Judiciary Committee describe ballots on which marks for Kerry were covered up with white stickers, while marks for Bush were filled in to replace them. Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI, described the testimony as ''strong evidence of vote tampering if not outright fraud.'' (184) In Miami County, where Connally outpaced Kerry, one precinct registered a turnout of 98.55 percent (185) -- meaning that all but ten eligible voters went to the polls on Election Day. An investigation by the Columbus Free Press, however, collected affidavits from twenty-five people who swear they didn't vote. (186)

I highly recommend reading the entire article.

Here's my reply to Marli's post:

Kudos on spreading the word on this, and providing the link. Rolling Stone isn't among my daily reads. Perhaps I shouldn't wonder why no other news source--among the many I cover each day--has even deigned to mention this important subject.

The circumstantial evidence is stunningly strong, and Kennedy has crafted a convincingly complete and well-sourced case. The devious machinations in Ohio make the "Brooks Brothers riot," Katherine "tammy Faye" Harris, and other Florida2000 happenings seem farcical and bumbling. Yet, the Republicans deployed their lessons on easy intimidation with skill in 2004. Operatives on the ground were well trained, and deftly took advantage of the impotence of the courts. As an earnest student of the law, it makes me cringe to read the opinions of these judges, flailing on paper, all sound and fury, achieving nothing because the election, once stolen, cannot be "reversed and remanded."

In the end, though, what's the answer? The trouble does in fact lie with "the entire system," and it is indeed this fact that causes the reticence of the MSM to question the results. That and their blood-boiling cynicism toward Democratic claims combined with their chummy wink-wink conviviality with the Bush Farce. But that is changing. The MSM is beginnning, à tâtons, to grow some teeth, however nubby, in investigating the Republican antics. And the Ohio GOP is reaping what it has sown. The Party in OH is reeling under crushing scandal--including the fiasco described here--and will suffer huge losses in 2006.

The answer is that we need a platform. If miracle-of-miracles, the Dems can pull out a win in Congress this year, the investigations will begin. Have faith. They have been trying to rig and steal elections since 1877. They have sometimes succeeded. Hopefully, we can continue working to make it ever-harder for them.

Less is more

Money quotation from Judge Posner, on why the proliferation of law clerks and resources at the Supreme Court has not led neither to better economies of decision, nor qualitatively superior outcomes:

The average opinion is longer today, and there are more dissenting and concurring opinions, and so the total word output of the Court is greater; but whether this spells improvement may be doubted.

But aren't the cases more difficult today? I don't think so. Although American law is more complex than it was in the 1930s, this is primarily because of developments in areas of law--securities regulation, antitrust, taxation, federal pension law, intellectual property in high-technology areas such as computer software and pharmaceutical drugs, and complex financial and other commercial transactions--that the Court tends to shy away from in favor of constitutional and criminal cases. (This aversion may reflect the tastes and the aptitudes of the law clerks, whose certiorari memos influence the justices' decisions to grant or deny review.) And constitutional cases are often "difficult" in the sense of eluding satisfactory resolution. They are not inherently more complex. Instead they are indeterminate, as a consequence of the vagueness and antiquity of the constitutional text, and of the emotionality and political sensitivity that so many constitutional cases engender.

Lamentable Lickers

What is the "L" word?

I've never seen an episode of this show. Recently lulled by my light summer schedule, I rented the first season. I couldn't make it...THROUGH THE FIRST EPISODE. I can handle some contrived plot line and predictable characters, if there's some other pay off. None here, though. Why were the couples, couples? Why were the friends, friends? Why the frak was I still watching?

Always one to attack my own predicate assumptions, I thought: is this truly any worse than QAF? Is the reason I love the latter, but detest the former, simply because QAF reflects elements of my own (past) life that I identify with...whereas lesbo drama doesn't? I don't think so. I contend that L-Word is substantively a worse show than QAF...and it's not simply because of Justin's hot bottoming action... I love lesbos. Women are hot to me, always have been. And I couldn't believe that I was shutting off a program starring Jackie Brown!

The Phelps Farce

A few weeks ago, Gov. Vilsack signed a law banning protests within a certain distance at funerals. This was part of a wave of laws signed by Governors in response to the Phelps family protests at military funerals. Estimating that they did not get enough media exposure from loudly proclaiming that "God hates fags" at services for "known or suspected" gay persons, the incestual "church" of topeka, KS, decided to target military funerals.
Today, the President used the Memorial Day holiday to sign a federal analogue of this bill that sailed through Congress virtually unopposed. In today's NPR coverage, the ACLU voiced their predictable opposition, and a law professor chimed in, agreeing that the law would likely be struck down on First Amendment grounds.
Should it be? I haven't taken Con Law II, so I can't speak authoritatively on the subject (as if I could had I taken the class!!), but it seems to me that this is far from a legal certainty. In fact, I think the aforementioned law professor is articulating a policy choice no more likely to sway courts than the policy supporting the bill. To survive a 1st Amd. challenge, there must be, among other tests, a compelling government interest supporting the statute. If there is ONE thing I have learned in Con Law, it is that these are entirely meaningless concepts. On a case of first impression, the court will create a vision of "compelling" that conforms to its previously-held ideological intuition. I might reason that the government indeed has a compelling interest in banning these protests because the symbolic nature of military funerals--as evidenced by public monetary support, the state-sanctioned presence of an honor guard, etc--is an important and over-riding public policy. I might argue that this is only a time/place/manner restriction that allows this statute an exemption from "compelling interest" scrutiny. Maybe I'd be even more creative if I were an actual lawyer :)
Point is...send those fuckers back to Kansas.

July 14, 1789

Nothing of interest happened today.

Of course, to be inclusive, we mustn't forget about polyandry.

Santorum's Slippery Slopes: One Down!

The Utah Supreme Court rejected a polygamist's arguments that his relationship with his second wife should be decriminalized. This insatiable lover--a Mormon, obviously--argued, in part, that his polygymist union deserves the same due process respect that gay persons now enjoy under the reasoning of the US Supreme Court's Lawrence decision.

In the Lawrence decision, Justice Kennedy wrote that private, consensual sexual acts were protected as fundamental liberty interests by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Here, Mr. Loverman argues that a similar liberty "shield" protected the relationship criminalized by the Utah statute. The Utah Court ruled that marriage, unlike private sex acts, was a "public institution," and thus explicity not covered by the language in Lawrence. And--oh, yeah--the second "wife" was only sixteen, which also put this case outside the scope of the Kennedy decision.

Actually, says the Utah Court, the holding of the Lawrence decision is much more narrow than its sweeping language would suggest, and has been limited to its precise holding affecting gay sodomy more than 40 times.

So, is this a good thing? It does not seem to me that, at least for the foreseeable future, Scalia's worries about this opinion leading inexorably to gay marriage by judicial fiat, à la Massachusetts. Should one argue for a more expansive reading of Lawrence--one that might allow marriage for both the man with his three financées as well as for the two womyn with their U-Haul? Is a reading that includes the latter, but excludes the former possible?