Monthly Archives: March 2021

Cars enter and leave a drive-thru voting site in Houston on Election Day in 2020. Texas Republican lawmakers are looking to ban the practice. David J. Phillip/AP hide caption

Cars enter and leave a drive-thru voting site in Houston on Election Day in 2020. Texas Republican lawmakers are looking to ban the practice.

Last year, when Isabel Longoria had to figure out how to safely hold an election during a pandemic, she saw the daunting task as an opportunity to do things differently.

"I just started dreaming," says Longoria, the elections administrator for Harris County in Texas. "And I just said, 'OK, let's start from the beginning not with what's possible first but what do voters want, and what's going to make it safer?' "

Harris County is home to Houston, and is one of the most populous and diverse areas of the country. Longoria says figuring out how to make polling locations less crowded was a main focus in the leadup to the 2020 elections, but she had always wanted to make voting easier as well.

One of her solutions was to increase the hours that voting centers were open. Some polling locations were open 24 hours at one point. Longoria says being open late at night gave shift workers including first responders more opportunities to vote. She says it also "spread out the number of people voting at any time" at a location.

Longoria also looked to local businesses, which were shifting to curbside options for their customers. She came up with drive-thru voting.

"Most folks who are fortunate to have a car use it to do all sorts of things banking, grocery shopping," she says. "What makes voting different? In my opinion, nothing."

Longoria and her team also tried to make mail voting easier by sending out ballot applications to all eligible voters, in case people didn't know they had that option.

But Republican leaders in Texas say all of these efforts were an overreach.

During a recent news conference, Gov. Greg Abbott argued that local election officials including those in Harris County were doing things not explicitly allowed by law. He also accused them of effectively opening the door to voter fraud.

"Whether it's the unauthorized expansion of mail-in ballots or the unauthorized expansion of drive-thru voting," Abbott says, "we must pass laws to prevent election officials from jeopardizing the election process."

In response to those local efforts, Republicans who control the state legislature filed a series of restrictive voting bills. Researchers last year said "Texas is the state with the most restrictive voting processes," but it's likely its laws will become stricter.

One measure that's been proposed would make distributing ballot applications to voters who didn't ask for one a felony. Others would outlaw drive thru-voting, and not allow polling locations to be open for more than 12 hours specifically beyond 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Another would require that election administrators put the same amount of voting machines in every one of their polling sites, no matter what.

That last one makes no sense to Chris Davis, the election administrator in Williamson County, a swing county in central Texas.

"If you have a smaller-size room in one part of your county that can only fit eight [voting machines]," he says, "well, by golly, eight is as many as you can have in an arena, or a lecture hall or high school gym."

Davis says the proposed changes to how local officials run elections are "incredibly short-sighted" and could lead to a misuse of public resources. And he also takes issue with proposals that would allow people to record video and sound in polling locations and ballot counting sites. He says that creates election security concerns.

But mostly Davis says he feels like lawmakers are accusing election administrators of doing bad things, which he says just isn't true.

"We contend that this isn't based in reality," he says. "It's a perception brought on by very, very visible candidates. And that perception has taken on a life of its own."

Committees in the Texas House and Senate began hearing two of the most notable Republican voting bills this week including House Bill 6 and Senate Bill 7.

Texas Democrats have raised concerns that certain bills would make running elections harder because of the fear of prosecution looming over many possible mistakes.

Harris County's Longoria says the reaction from state leaders has been disappointing because she was successful in getting more people to vote while also limiting the potential spread of the coronavirus. Turnout in Harris County hit about a 30-year high in 2020.

"We were really proud," she says.

Longoria, as well as voting rights advocates in Texas, are also worried these voting bills could make it harder for marginalized communities to vote. Longoria says it's difficult to disregard the role of race in this effort as lawmakers zero in on things like drive-thru voting.

"One hundred twenty-seven thousand voters did drive-thru voting the majority of which were Black and brown voters," she says. "It's hard to not draw a line and say, 'Why are you going after this innovation?' "

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Texas Republicans Look To Curb Local Efforts To Expand Voting Access - NPR

Even after being elected to the Senate in 2012, the Hawaii Democrat Mazie Hirono was, by her own choosing, a politician little known outside her home state. Then, around 2016 and the election of a particularly divisive president, Hirono, who was born in Japan and is the Senates only immigrant, decided that staying under the radar was unsustainable. She frequently made herself available to the national media. She publicly said President Trump was a misogynist and a liar and called for his resignation (as early as 2017, mind you). She unabashedly punctuated her comments with salty language. And it wasnt just her unexpected transition that raised her profile: Senator Hironos forceful questioning during the Kavanaugh and Barrett Supreme Court confirmation hearings, as well as, more recently, calling on President Biden to nominate more diverse people for senior positions in his administration, have also been central to her earning national stature. Its not the easiest thing for political people to speak candidly with the national media, says Senator Hirono, who is 73 and whose memoir, Heart of Fire, will be published on April 20. Im not doing it for effect. I dont go out there and spew things. Ive thought things through.

The Senate is supposed to be the worlds greatest deliberative body, and instead its where so much legislation goes to die. Do you feel that its broken? What I see in the Senate is how important one person is. That person on the Republican side is Mitch McConnell. There are very pragmatic reasons that he holds his caucus together: He is the money person. The Republican senators having tough races, they go to him, and he provides resources. If Mitch McConnell said, OK, were going to work with the Democrats, it would happen even if there would be holdouts like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and Tommy Tuberville and that handful of people who I dont know who they think theyre representing except themselves. Mitch McConnell is a guy who single-handedly made the Supreme Court an eight-person court. Whoever heard of such a thing? And he got away with it. When one person has outsize influence like Mitch McConnell, we need to figure out ways to deal with it, and one way is filibuster reform. It could be totally removing the filibuster. I dont think a lot of my colleagues are there.

Senator Mazie Hirono, then a state legislator, at a committee hearing in Honolulu around 1993. From Senator Mazie Hirono

I dont think anyone doubts that McConnell and the Republican caucus would, if it were in their best interest, eliminate the filibuster. But there are questions about the Democrats resolve in that regard. Are those questions warranted? I think the Democrats have been much more concerned about the process. We actually care about the fairness of it all. Then you have another party that just wants power. I would say that is a fair assessment. Not every Republican is that bad, but Ill tell you, they pretty much toe the line. As we try to enact legislation that weve been talking about supporting, and that the House is going to keep sending over to us, there will be a growing recognition that we cant just go, Oh, well, the process is so important. The process cannot overtake the substance of results that we need to have.

What does it mean to say both that Democrats believe in process and also that process cant overtake what the party is trying to achieve? I never thought that the ends should justify the means. You know fairness when you see it. Like you know art when you see it. We still need to be fair, and therefore the talking filibuster, if we go there, would apply to everybody; there might come a time when the Democrats are in the minority, and that would apply to us. Limitations or changes in the process should apply to everyone. That strikes me as fair.

Hirono at her congressional campaign headquarters in Honolulu in 2006. Marco Garcia/Associated Press

What, if any, pressure is being exerted to move the Democratic senators hesitant about eliminating the filibuster like Manchin and Sinema in the direction that you think the party needs them to go? While were going to have differences, the bottom line is that the Democrats want to do things that help people as opposed to just trying to help the richest and most powerful. And for Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, as we try to get bipartisan legislation and it continues to be stymied, slow-walked or watered down to such an extent that its not tenable for us to support anymore, the realization will sink in that were going to need to take dramatic steps in order to pass legislation that Joe Biden wants and that we support.

Senator Manchin is mentioned in your book. Its after Al Franken has said hes resigning, and Manchin gives you a hard time for going to his resignation speech after you said he should step down without realizing that Frankens office had given you the OK to be there. What was your intention in including that scene? The whole thing was painful. Al Franken, I really liked him. But this unacceptable behavior on the part of people with power I and so many others are sick of it. So anyway, I mentioned Joe because he was the only one who said, What a bunch of hypocrites you are to show up after you forced him to resign. No, we did not force him to resign. He made that decision. I think that he made the right decision, although he has since said that he didnt. But I like Joe. He sits in front of me. I said to him during the long period, Do you think it should have taken 11 hours for your concerns to be resolved? He said he thought he had made it plain to our leadership that he didnt want to extend unemployment insurance benefits longer than July. He had his perspective.

Should Governor Cuomo resign? These kinds of allegations should be investigated. That certainly didnt happen in the Kavanaugh case, by the way. The sham FBI investigation was so limited in its scope that Dr. Blasey wasnt questioned, and other people who could have corroborated the allegations were never questioned.

You wrote in your book about a meeting you had with Dr. Blasey in Hawaii after Kavanaughs confirmation. She wanted to thank you for saying you believed her allegations. What else did she say about how that situation played out? She said it was bad enough when he was a federal judge and she was hoping, hoping, hoping that he would not be nominated to the Supreme Court. But when that did happen she had to come forward. She said she was prepared: She knew that he was probably going to be confirmed but she still had to go through with it. She conducted herself with such grace. It was such a contrast to Kavanaugh, who is just a political operative. In my view hes not a very good lawyer. Ive gotten to know Merrick Garland a little bit, and he told me he was watching the Kavanaugh hearings. Merrick Garland is not somebody who says anything bad about anybody, but the Garza case when Kavanaugh said that was a parental-consent case, did you almost fall off your chair, as I did?

Garland said that to you about the Garza case? No, I said that to Garland. He just kind of looked at me like, Yeah. I knew that he was astounded.

Hirono with Joe Biden, then the vice president, in 2013. Joshua Roberts/Reuters

In your eyes, did the way that the Justice Kavanaugh and Barrett confirmations were rammed through hurt the legitimacy of the Supreme Court? The Supreme Court has become ideologically far to the right. So youre going to see 6-3 decisions along ideological lines, and that is not good for our country. Its not good for all the circuit courts and district courts. Its going to lead to a lot more cases being brought to the Supreme Court by right-wing groups. Janus was a case in point.

Wouldnt the left be doing the same things if Democrats had appointed the last three Supreme Court justices? I get that kind of argument often. I expect the Supreme Court to actually expand peoples individual rights and freedoms. I dont expect the Supreme Court to be constraining voting rights and a womans right to choose. I expect the Supreme Court to be protective of minority rights, and that is not where this Court is. So this is not an equivalency. I dont mind conservatives on the Court. I mean, of the three new ones Gorsuch is pretty conservative, but hes a literal person: If it says so right there in black and white, then hell go with it. Sometimes it results in really stupid decisions, in my view. If the law was there to protect people from falling through a round hole and a person fell through a square hole too bad for you. Hes smart enough to know thats a ridiculous posture.

When you questioned Barrett at her appeals-court nomination hearing, it seemed as if you were trying to figure out how her Catholicism might influence her rulings. That avenue of questioning made some people uncomfortable. Wheres the line with religious questions for judicial nominees? It wasnt her Catholicism. It was her position. She was a co-author of an expansive law-review article talking about how judges should decide death-penalty cases. It was an area of inquiry, but her Catholicism frankly, Im a Buddhist. Im not even a daily-practicing Buddhist because I find all religion to be very Buddhism accepts other religions more so than many other religions I can think of. So it wasnt that she was a Catholic, but that theres supposed to be this thing called separation of church and state, which is becoming blurred. Her religion, I didnt care. What I care about is the use of religion as basically trumping every other right. I was presiding over the Senate, and Senator Tuberville says something like we should bring morality back and God and prayer should come back into our schools. Im sitting there going, What? But that is the view of too many Republicans.

Hirono at the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett in October 2020. Shawn Thew/Getty Images

You cut yourself off earlier. You find all religion to be very what? I find a lot of religion to have all of the proscriptions and not openness and acceptance of other peoples legitimately held faiths. That is why I describe myself as a Buddhist. Buddhism, we dont even have a book. It is a way of living and being, which is to be compassionate and kind. I think those are two good things to try to follow. Im not perfect in that. I can be very terse with people. Part of it is that I dont think many of my colleagues have dealt with short Japanese women. So here I come, and Im saying, [expletive] you to them, and they dont quite know how to react.

Can you think of an example? Ted Cruz. I was his ranking on his Constitution subcommittee and we had a number of these hearings; not very many of my Democratic colleagues would come. A reporter asked me why and I said they have better things to do than to come to these half-assed hearings. There was one in which all these Republicans who showed up went over their five minutes, and it got me kind of irritated. I said to Cruz, Are you going to let everybody go eight minutes, nine minutes? And he said, When you get the gavel, you can do whatever you want. I put my hand on his shoulder this was pre-Covid and I said, It cant happen soon enough. At that same hearing we had a break so the mics were not on; its not like Im saying this in an open hearing he said, Look, its not my fault that your people are not here. I said, I dont give a flying [expletive] what your reasoning is. He stopped and said, I will always treat you with decorum, even if its not reciprocated. I said, I wasnt swearing at you.

Lately theres been a real rise in anti-Asian racism and violence. What steps need to be taken to stop it? Racism is never far below the surface in our country. The Chinese Exclusion Act, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the Muslim ban. By now this kind of overt racism is frowned upon to say the least, but President Trump brought it to the surface, calling the virus the China virus. We have an environment now where random acts of violence against Asian-Americans happen way too often. We need to prosecute these people. There are a number of bills that some of us have introduced. But it helps that you have a president who says this is totally unacceptable and an attorney general who is on that page.

Is there something distinct about how we understand anti-Asian racism as opposed to anti-Black or anti-Muslim racism? Well, were very identifiable as Asian, and it is very clear that we all look alike to people who think that we are the other. The systemic racism against Blacks in our country has been ongoing. Thats a huge issue. The racism against Asians comes up in certain instances, like World War II, but weve always been the other. Were probably not as threatening to whites as Blacks are. Maybe thats one distinction.

There is the model-minority myth. And we all know thats a myth! But were not as threatening maybe, and when you raise that, in a way its easier to target a minority group like Asians. But this is the U.S. of A., and people who do this kind of thing should be prosecuted to the ultimate.

Im curious about interpersonal relationships in the Senate after Jan. 6 and also in the light of continued threats of violence at the Capitol. Have things changed on a human level with you and your Republican colleagues since then? It is hard to talk with them in any other way than purely transactional. What am I going to say? How could you not condemn the incitement to insurrection? I often wonder how they wake up in the morning and face themselves, but they are obviously able to bifurcate. They act as if nothing happened. Thats the amazing thing. You have Cruz, Hawley and all these guys who continued to protest the counting of the electoral votes even after what we experienced. I dont know how they live with themselves. Then you have people like Lindsey Graham: When you enter the moral dead zone that is the Trump ambit, youve lost your soul. So I am pretty much just transactional with them. Some of them can be nice. But then when they vote en masse to screw people over, its hard to be all warm and fuzzy and Im not a warm and fuzzy person to begin with.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations.

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Sen. Mazie Hirono Wonders How Some Republicans Live With Themselves - The New York Times

Republicans are outraged outraged! at the surge of migrants at the southern border. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, declares it a crisis created by the presidential policies of this new administration. The Arizona congressman Andy Biggs claims, we go through some periods where we have these surges, but right now is probably the most dramatic that Ive seen at the border in my lifetime.

Donald Trump demands the Biden administration immediately complete the wall, which can be done in a matter of weeks they should never have stopped it. They are causing death and human tragedy.

Our country is being destroyed! he adds.

In fact, theres no surge of migrants at the border.

US Customs and Border Protection apprehended 28% more migrants from January to February this year than in previous months. But this was largely seasonal. Two years ago, apprehensions increased 31% during the same period. Three years ago, it was about 25% from February to March. Migrants start coming when winter ends and the weather gets a bit warmer, then stop coming in the hotter summer months when the desert is deadly.

To be sure, there is a humanitarian crisis of children detained in overcrowded border facilities. And an even worse humanitarian tragedy in the violence and political oppression in Central America, worsened by US policies over the years, that drives migration in the first place.

But the surge has been fabricated by Republicans in order to stoke fear and, not incidentally, to justify changes in laws they say are necessary to prevent non-citizens from voting.

Republicans continue to allege without proof that the 2020 election was rife with fraudulent ballots, many from undocumented migrants. Over the past six weeks theyve introduced 250 bills in 43 states designed to make it harder for people to vote especially the young, the poor, Black people and Hispanic Americans, all of whom are likely to vote for Democrats by eliminating mail-in ballots, reducing times for voting, decreasing the number of drop-off boxes, demanding proof of citizenship, even making it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote.

To stop this, Democrats are trying to enact a sweeping voting rights bill, the For the People Act, which protects voting, ends partisan gerrymandering and keeps dark money out of elections. It passed the House but Republicans in the Senate are fighting it with more lies.

On Wednesday, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz falsely claimed the new bill would register millions of undocumented migrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots too.

The core message of the Republican party now consists of lies about a crisis of violent migrants crossing the border, lies that theyre voting illegally, and blatantly anti-democratic demands voting be restricted to counter it.

The party that once championed lower taxes, smaller government, states rights and a strong national defense now has more in common with anti-democratic regimes and racist-nationalist political movements around the world than with Americas avowed ideals of democracy, rule of law and human rights.

Donald Trump isnt single-handedly responsible for this, but he demonstrated to the GOP the political potency of bigotry and the GOP has taken him up on it.

This transformation in one of Americas two eminent political parties has shocking implications, not just for the future of American democracy but for the future of democracy everywhere.

I predict to you, your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy? Joe Biden opined at his news conference on Thursday.

In his maiden speech at the state department on 4 March, Antony Blinken conceded that the erosion of democracy around the world is also happening here in the United States.

The secretary of state didnt explicitly talk about the Republican party, but there was no mistaking his subject.

When democracies are weak they become more vulnerable to extremist movements from the inside and to interference from the outside, he warned.

People around the world witnessing the fragility of American democracy want to see whether our democracy is resilient, whether we can rise to the challenge here at home. That will be the foundation for our legitimacy in defending democracy around the world for years to come.

That resilience and legitimacy will depend in large part on whether Republicans or Democrats prevail on voting rights.

Not since the years leading up to the civil war has the clash between the nations two major parties so clearly defined the core challenge facing American democracy.

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Republicans have taken up the politics of bigotry, putting US democracy at risk - The Guardian

The American Rescue Plan, President Bidens $1.9 trillion relief effort, is law. But its only a short-term measure, mainly designed to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic and its immediate aftermath. The long-term stuff which is expected to combine large-scale infrastructure spending with tax increases on the rich is still being formulated. And everyone says that turning those longer-term plans into law will be much harder than passing the ARP.

But what if everyone is wrong?

Just about every analyst I follow asserted, almost until the last moment, that $1.9 trillion was an opening bid for the rescue plan and that the eventual bill would be substantially smaller. Instead, Democrats who, by standard media convention, are always supposed to be in disarray held together and did virtually everything they had promised. How did that happen?

Much of the post-stimulus commentary emphasizes the lessons Democrats learned from the Obama years, when softening policies in an attempt to win bipartisan support achieved nothing but a weaker-than-needed economic recovery. But my sense is that this is only part of the story. There has also been a change on the other side of the aisle: namely, Republicans have lost their knack for demonizing progressive policies.

Notice that I said policies. Theres certainly plenty of demonization out there: Vast numbers of Republican voters believe that Biden is president thanks only to invisible vote fraud, and some even buy the story that it was masterminded by a global conspiracy of pedophiles. But the G.O.P. has been spectacularly unsuccessful in convincing voters that theyll be hurt by Bidens spending and taxing plans.

In fact, polling on the rescue plan is so positive as to seem almost surreal for those of us who remember the policy debates of the Obama years: Something like three-quarters of voters, including a majority of Republicans, support the plan. For comparison, only a slight majority of voters supported President Barack Obamas 2009 economic stimulus, even though Obama personally still had very high approval ratings.

Why the difference? Part of the answer, surely, is that this time around Republican politicians and pundits have been remarkably low energy in criticizing Bidens policies. Where are the bloodcurdling warnings about runaway inflation and currency debasement, not to mention death panels? (Concerns about inflation, such as they are, seem to be mainly coming from some Democratic-leaning economists.)

True, every once in a while some G.O.P. legislator mumbles one of the usual catchphrases job-killing left-wing policies, budget-busting, socialism. But there has been no concerted effort to get the message out. In fact, the partisan policy critique has been so muted that almost a third of the Republican rank and file believe that the party supports the plan, even though it didnt receive a single Republican vote in Congress.

But why this somnolence? Republicans may realize that an attempt to revive Obama-era critiques would expose them to ridicule over their record of hypocrisy: After declaring deficits an existential threat under Obama, then dropping the issue the minute Donald Trump took office, its hard to pull off another 180-degree turn.

They may also be inhibited by the utter failure of their past predictions, whether of inflation under Obama or a vast investment boom unleashed by the Trump tax cut, to come true although inconvenient facts havent bothered them much in the past.

And at a deeper level, Republicans may simply have lost the ability to take policy seriously.

Jonathan Cohn, author of The Ten Year War: Obamacare and the Unfinished Crusade for Universal Coverage, argues that the most important reason Trump failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act was that Republicans have largely forgotten how to govern. They no longer know how to think through hard choices, make the compromises necessary to build alliances and get things done.

That same loss of seriousness, Id suggest, inhibited their ability to effectively oppose Bidens rescue plan. They couldnt do the hard thinking required to settle on a plausible line of attack. So while Democrats were pushing through tax credits that will cut child poverty nearly in half and subsidies that will make health insurance more affordable, Republicans were focused on cancel culture and Dr. Seuss.

And looking forward, why should we expect the G.O.P. to do any better in opposing Bidens longer-term initiatives?

Bear in mind that both infrastructure spending and raising taxes on the rich are very popular. Democrats seem united on at least the principle of an invest-and-tax plan and these days they seem pretty good at turning agreement in principle into actual legislation.

To block this push, Republicans will have to come up with something beyond boilerplate denunciations of socialists killing jobs. Will they? Probably not.

In short, the prospects for a big spend-and-tax bill are quite good, because Democrats know what they want to achieve and are willing to put in the work to make it happen while Republicans dont and arent.

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Opinion | The Decline of Republican Demonization - The New York Times