BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG
We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
I am a Pennsylvania Yankee living in Virginia (NOVA / Metro D.C.) and this is about as far South as I could live. There is a voluntary ignorance grounded in racism that I just can't stand among the electorate that is pathetic. These people keep electing gop / tea-bagger extremest that work against the best interest of those who elect them, denying them fair wages, workers rights and the social safety net programs so many of them need while making the rich richer. The picture above is a perfect depiction of many of these people in the deep South and rural South (as well as many of the rural areas of the North, including the part of PA I am from). This from +Daily Kos shows the results of their votes. Also from +The New York Times & +New York Magazine .....
Why any ostensibly rational person living in Kentucky, Tennessee, the
Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana who saw this
map, and still would think their states' Republican leaders' policies
were delivering the economic growth their region so sorely needs is
beyond comprehension. Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.?
The toughest places to live in America
Almost every county in the U.S. has its share of haves and have-nots.
But there are some regions where it's just plain harder for Americans
to thrive, places where the poor far outnumber those living in
middle-class comfort.
Ten counties in America stand out as the most challenging places to
live, based on a survey of six criteria including median household
income, disability rate and life expectancy, according to an analysis by
The New York Times.
The county with the dubious distinction of being the worst of all is
Clay County, Kentucky, where residents can expect to die six years
earlier than the average American.
The other four counties ranked at the bottom of the survey
include four counties in the rural south: Humphreys County, Mississippi;
East Carroll Parish, Louisiana; Jefferson County, Georgia; and Lee
County, Arkansas.
The findings highlight an often overlooked issue in the debate about income inequality -- the stubbornness of rural poverty. In
the U.S., the number of poor rural residents outnumber those in the
cities, with 14 percent of rural Americans living below the poverty
line, compared with 12 percent in urban areas, according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development's Rural Poverty Portal.
Of course you'd never get an inkling of any of this from watching Fox
Noise. The right's hired boobs like to characterize America's urban
areas as teeming with desperately poor people.
Of course, Appalachia and the South aren't the only parts of
the country where people struggle, The Times' study found. Pockets of
economic and social hardship extend from Maine to Alaska.
By Roberto A. Ferdman
Meanwhile, there are a number of states — all of them in the South — you might want to avoid. Mississippi,
which scored lower than any other state, barely broke 50. Arkansas and
Alabama, which tied for second to last, each scored 51.3. West Virginia,
which was fourth to last, scored 52.2. And Tennessee, which was fifth
to last, scored 52.9.
The South, which performed the worst of any region in the country, is
home to eight of the poorest performing states. Only Virginia was in
the top 25. And just barely — it placed 22nd.
The average person's life is harder in the South and in Appalachia. The
economic safety net in these states is bare bones and have gaping gaps
that let many their citizens fall through into the economic margins. The
South's and Appalachia's craven political leaderships that grovel
before wealthy interests are the main reason why the region consistently
lags behind the other states across a range of measures.
Originally posted to Lefty Coaster on Sun Oct 19, 2014 at 10:12 PM PDT.
Annie Lowrey writes
in the Times Magazine this week about the troubles of Clay County, Ky.,
which by several measures is the hardest place in America to live.
The
Upshot came to this conclusion by looking at six data points for each
county in the United States: education (percentage of residents with at
least a bachelor’s degree), median household income, unemployment rate,
disability rate, life expectancy and obesity. We then averaged each
county’s relative rank in these categories to create an overall ranking.
(We tried to include other factors, including income mobility and measures of environmental quality, but we were not able to find data sets covering all counties in the United States.)
The
10 lowest counties in the country, by this ranking, include a cluster
of six in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky (Breathitt,
Clay, Jackson, Lee, Leslie and Magoffin), along with four others in
various parts of the rural South: Humphreys County, Miss.; East Carroll
Parish, La.; Jefferson County, Ga.; and Lee County, Ark.
Slide Show
Slide Show|12 Photos
The Hardest Place to Live in America
CreditLuke Sharrett for The New York Times
We
used disability — the percentage of the population collecting federal
disability benefits but not also collecting Social Security retirement
benefits — as a proxy for the number of working-age people who don’t
have jobs but are not counted as unemployed. Appalachian Kentucky scores
especially badly on this count; in four counties in the region, more
than 10 percent of the total population is on disability, a phenomenon
seen nowhere else except nearby McDowell County, W.Va.
Remove
disability from the equation, though, and eastern Kentucky would still
fare badly in the overall rankings. The same is true for most of the
other six factors.
The
exception is education. If you exclude educational attainment, or lack
of it, in measuring disadvantage, five counties in Mississippi and one
in Louisiana rank lower than anywhere in Kentucky. This suggests that
while more people in the lower Mississippi River basin have a college
degree than do their counterparts in Appalachian Kentucky, that
education hasn’t improved other aspects of their well-being.
As
Ms. Lowrey writes, this combination of problems is an overwhelmingly
rural phenomenon. Not a single major urban county ranks in the bottom 20
percent or so on this scale, and when you do get to one — Wayne County,
Mich., which includes Detroit — there are some significant differences.
While Wayne County’s unemployment rate (11.7 percent) is almost as high
as Clay County’s, and its life expectancy (75.1 years) and obesity rate
(41.3 percent) are also similar, almost three times as many residents
(20.8 percent) have at least a bachelor’s degree, and median household
income ($41,504) is almost twice as high.
Wayne
County may not make for the best comparison — in addition to Detroit,
it includes the Grosse Pointes and some other wealthy suburbs that could
be pulling its rankings up. But St. Louis, another struggling city,
stands alone as a jurisdiction for statistical purposes and ranks even
higher over all, slightly, with better education and lower unemployment
making up for a median household income ($34,384) that is lower than
Wayne County’s but still quite a bit higher than Clay County’s $22,296.
At
the other end of the scale, the different variations on our formula
consistently yielded the same result. Six of the top 10 counties in the
United States are in the suburbs of Washington (especially on the
Virginia side of the Potomac River), but the top ranking of all goes to
Los Alamos County, N.M., home of Los Alamos National Laboratory, which
does much of the scientific work underpinning the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The lab directly employs one out of every five county residents and has a
budget of $2.1 billion; only a fraction of that is spent within the
county, but that’s still an enormous economic engine for a county of
just 18,000 people.
Here
are some specific comparisons: Only 7.4 percent of Clay County
residents have at least a bachelor’s degree, while 63.2 percent do in
Los Alamos. The median household income in Los Alamos County is
$106,426, almost five times what the median Clay County household earns.
In Clay County, 12.7 percent of residents are unemployed, and 11.7
percent are on disability; the corresponding figures in Los Alamos
County are 3.5 percent and 0.3 percent. Los Alamos County’s obesity rate
is 22.8 percent, while Clay County’s is 45.5 percent. And Los Alamos
County residents live 11 years longer, on average — 82.4 years vs. 71.4
years in Clay County.
Clay and Los Alamos Counties are part of the same country. But they are truly different worlds.
The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
There
are many tough places in this country: the ghost cities of Detroit,
Camden and Gary, the sunbaked misery of inland California and the
isolated reservations where Native American communities were left to
struggle. But in its persistent poverty, Eastern Kentucky — land of
storybook hills and drawls — just might be the hardest place to live
in the United States. Statistically speaking.
The team at The Upshot,
a Times news and data-analysis venture, compiled six basic metrics to
give a picture of the quality and longevity of life in each county of
the nation: educational attainment, household income, jobless rate,
disability rate, life expectancy and obesity rate. Weighting each
equally, six counties in eastern Kentucky’s coal country (Breathitt,
Clay, Jackson, Lee, Leslie and Magoffin) rank among the bottom 10.
Clay
County, in dead last, might as well be in a different country. The
median household income there is barely above the poverty line, at
$22,296, and is just over half the nationwide median. Only 7.4 percent
of the population has a bachelor’s degree or higher. The unemployment
rate is 12.7 percent. The disability rate is nearly as high, at 11.7
percent. (Nationwide, that figure is 1.3 percent.) Life expectancy is
six years shorter than average. Perhaps related, nearly half of Clay
County is obese.
It’s
coal country, but perhaps in name only. In the first quarter of this
year, just 54 people were employed in coal mining in Clay County, a
precipitous drop from its coal-production peak in 1980. That year, about
2.5 million tons of coal were taken out of the ground in Clay; this
year, the county has produced a fraction of that — just over 38,000
tons. Former mines have been reclaimed, and that land has been
repurposed in scattershot ways: a golf course, shopping centers, a
medium-security federal prison. But nothing has truly come to replace
the industry on which Clay County once depended.
The
public debate about the haves and the have-nots tends to focus on the 1
percent, especially on the astonishing, breakaway wealth in cities like
New York, San Francisco and Washington and the great disparities
contained therein. But what has happened in the smudge of the country
between New Orleans and Pittsburgh — the Deep South and Appalachia — is
in many ways as remarkable as what has happened in affluent cities. In
some places, decades of growth have failed to raise incomes, and of
late, poverty has become more concentrated not in urban areas but in
rural ones.
Despite
this, rural poverty is largely shunted aside in the conversation about
inequality, much in the way rural areas have been left behind by broader
shifts in the economy. The sheer intractability of rural poverty raises
uncomfortable questions about how to fix it, or to what extent it is
even fixable.
The
desperation in coal country is hard to square with the beauty of the
place — the densely flocked hills peppered with tiny towns. It’s
magical. But it is also poor, even if economic growth and the federal
safety-net programs have drastically improved what that poverty looks
like.
Fifty
years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared his “war on poverty”
from a doorstep in the tiny Kentucky town of Inez, and since then,
Washington has directed trillions of dollars to such communities in the
form of cash assistance, food stamps, Medicaid and tax incentives for
development. (In some places, these transfer payments make up half of
all income.) Still, after adjusting for inflation, median income was
higher in Clay County in 1979 than it is now, even though the American
economy has more than doubled in size.
There
have been periodic attempts to flood persistently poor counties with
federal dollars in an effort to jolt them into higher growth rates. The
Obama administration this year named southeastern Kentucky a “promise
zone,” putting it at the top of the list for federal grants. It’s an old
idea: Draw in businesses, create jobs, help finance infrastructure,
turn the cycle virtuous.
On
the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, Kentucky’s libertarian
senator, Rand Paul, has proposed a more supply-side-oriented strategy:
Let certain counties eliminate capital-gains taxes and institute a
special federal income tax of 5 percent in those areas. “I’m just
letting you keep more of your own money,” Paul said to a small crowd in a
college auditorium in eastern Kentucky last winter. “The difference
between this and a government grant is I don’t choose who gets it.” On
either side of the aisle, the underlying assumption is the same: Places
like Clay County just need a kick-start. But what if that isn’t true?
In
many cases, a primary problem in poor rural areas is the very fact that
they’re rural — remote, miles from major highways and plagued by
substandard infrastructure. Think about the advantages of urban areas,
described by thinkers going back to Jane Jacobs and beyond. Density
means more workers to choose from, more potential customers, more
spillover knowledge from nearby companies. As such, cities punch above
their weight, economically speaking. The 10 largest metro regions
produced more than a third of the country’s entire economic output as of
2012.
The
converse is true for rural areas. Take eastern Kentucky, grappling with
the decline of coal — and perhaps looking at an even bleaker future for
the industry, given recent carbon-reduction efforts by the E.P.A. Those
rolling hills might be picturesque. But those country roads make it
hard to ship goods in and out, in turn making it more expensive to build
a warehouse or a factory.
“One
of the challenges that faces eastern Kentucky is the remoteness of the
area,” said James P. Ziliak, the director of the Center for Poverty
Research at the University of Kentucky. “It’s difficult to get to a lot
of places. The communities are small, and they’re spread apart, so you
lose that synergy that you want to spark development a lot of times.”
Even with additional government subsidies, would businesses really want
to move there? “It’s this chicken-and-egg problem,” Ziliak said. “My
view is that firms will never locate into a community with an unskilled
labor force, unless the only labor they need is unskilled. And there has
been a historic lack of investment in human capital in these areas.”
The
queasy answer that economists come to is that it would be better to
help the people than the place — in some cases, helping people leave the
place. Generally, the wealthier and better educated the family, the
more mobile they are. It takes resources to pack up all your things,
sign a new lease, pay for gas or a flight and go. That might help
explain why more Americans aren’t flocking from places with high
unemployment rates to places with low ones, even if those places are
surprisingly close together. College graduates, for instance, are
several times as responsive to differences in labor demand as those who
completed only high school, according to a study in The Journal of Human
Resources.
But
government policy based less on place and more on people might help
ameliorate that trend. “Let’s say I was a hardworking person who lost my
job in Harlan, Ky. — the ideal place, really, to go is Williston,
N.D.,” Senator Paul said. “People need to be mobile to go there. Some
government programs prevent mobility or discourage mobility.” And none
encourage it: There are scant federal resources to help the unemployed
or the poor in rural areas move to a job or even just a better
neighborhood. (Imagine Senator Mitch McConnell running for re-election
on the campaign slogan: “I’ll get you out of this moribund area and up
to the wilderness of North Dakota!”)
Of
course, thousands of families in places like Kentucky, South Dakota and
West Virginia manage to cobble together enough resources to make the
move themselves; the share of Americans living in rural areas has slowly
drifted down. In Clay County, the population has declined for the last
decade. And the overall population in rural areas declined for the first
time from 2010 to 2012, according to the Census Bureau.
Jeff
Whitehead runs the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program,
which helps retrain laid-off coal miners and find them new jobs.
“There’s just very limited opportunity for the people who were working
in the region,” he said, adding that he helped 220 families move out of
the area in recent years, despite many workers’ understandable
resistance. “That’s a really hard pill to swallow. People are really
connected to place here. For a lot of people, it’s the last thing
they’re doing. They’re holding off until they have no other choice.”
But
the number and proportion of people living in poverty in places like
eastern Kentucky persists, despite all the trillions of dollars spent to
improve the state of the poor in the United States and promote
development. Ziliak thinks that efforts focused on human capital —
meaning education initiatives, from prekindergarten all the way through
college — might be the best use of any new money. But, of course, that
also might mean more people moving away.
Annie Lowrey was, until recently, an economics reporter for The Times. Alan Flippen contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on June 29, 2014, on page MM13 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Bluegrass-State Blues.
repiglicans and tea-baggers, with their racist supporters, will twist this into a liberal assault on white people. They will use it to promote fear and ignorance, to divide the people of our nation, making us more vulnerable to political and economic manipulation by the 1% who control Congress for their own gain. They are already using these tactics to prevent any congressional action on amending the 1965 Voting Rights Act, to block real immigration reform and in ongoing budget negotiations. The fanatical right wing and their racist allies fear the one thing Rev Martin Luther King alluded to in his I Have A Dream speech at the 1963 March On Washington (Monday, 28JUL13 was the 50th anniversary), that THE PEOPLE, UNITED, WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED! We are still marching, more and more of us, to make his dream a reality. From Mother Jones, and check out the NY Times article & voting rights act map. You may also want to see one of my earlier post on this Bob Cesca - Supreme Court Helps the GOP Revive the Era of Jim Crow 27JUN13
http://bucknacktssordidtawdryblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/bob-cesca-supreme-court-helps-gop.html As a side note, I have lived in Virginia since April 1986 and have seen the racism that is still alive here, though I also see more and more people rejecting racism. Though I live in Virginia, home is still Scandia, PA. I am still a Yankee, and I am very ashamed Pennsylvania is listed as one of the most prejudiced states in the nation....
But that didn't seem to matter on Tuesday, when the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act.
| Published Tue Jun. 25, 2013 3:00 AM PDT | Updated Tue Jun. 25, 2013 8:00 AM PDT
Participants, some carrying American flags, marching in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. BuyEnlarge/Zuma
"Is
it the government's submission that the citizens of the South are more
racist than the citizens of the North?" John Roberts, the Chief Justice
of the Supreme Court, asked that in February during oral arguments over the fate of the Voting Rights Act,
a 1965 civil rights law. Donald Verrilli, the government's chief
lawyer, said no. Not surprisingly, the Obama administration was not
willing to assert that citizens in Southern states were statistically
more likely to hold racist beliefs. Without making such a claim, though,
it was harder for the government to defend the VRA's requirement that
some states—but not others—seek federal approval (which lawyers call
preclearance) before changing their voting laws.
More MoJo coverage of the Supreme Court's ruling on the Voting Rights Act
The eight states that are required to seek pre-clearance are determined by a formula
intended to pick out areas with a history of discrimination. (Places
that go for 10 years without discriminating can escape the requirement.)
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to strike down that formula as
unconstitutional. Here's the idea that led to that decision: If all
states are equally racist (or not racist), why not treat them equally?
Certainly plenty of people outside of the South are racist, and
plenty of people in the South are not. But here's the trouble: There's
social-science evidence that, 150 years after the Civil War, Southern
states do have bigger racism problems than states outside the South. And
many of them are the same states that the VRA requires to seek federal
approval before changing their voting laws.
The key study on this subject is new. In May, Christopher Elmendorf
and Douglas Spencer—law professors at the University of California-Davis
and the University of Connecticut, respectively—released a paper
arguing that the list of states required to obtain federal approval
under the VRA "remarkably" mirrors "the geography of anti-black
prejudice" in the United States. "What we have generated," Elmendorf
says, "is an answer to the question that the chief justice asked during
oral arguments and [Verrilli] was either unable or unwilling to answer."
The answer, they argue, is yes.
.
Elmendorf
and Spencer used data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey,
which asked nonblacks to rank their own racial group and blacks
regarding intelligence, trustworthiness, and work ethic. Respondents
ranked their racial group above blacks by an average of 15 points in
each of these categories, perhaps proving the Avenue Q claim that "everyone's a little bit racist." Elmendorf and Spencer, however, only counted a person as "prejudiced" if he thought his racial group was more superior to
blacks than the average person—and only if he thought so in two or more
of the three categories. That is, a respondent could think his race was
a lot better than blacks and still not count as racist under their
methodology.
The results were striking: The researchers' mathematical model
suggests that of the seven states in the country with the highest
percentage of people who are biased against black people, six are
Southern states—Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, and
South Carolina—required to seek federal approval for election law
changes under the VRA. Arizona and Alaska, the other two states required
to get the feds' permission before changing their election laws, ranked
much lower in anti-black bias. But as Elmendorf and Spencer note, these
states are presumably required to seek that permission because of other
bias—anti-Latino in Arizona and anti-Native American in Alaska—which
their study did not measure. (Besides the eight states mentioned above,
the VRA requires some counties and municipalities in seven other states
to seek federal permission to change election rules.)
The researchers crunched the data several different ways to make sure
they were getting valid results. But "whichever approach you pick, the
Deep South states are close to the top," Elmendorf says.
Elmendorf and Spencer's study came too late: On Tuesday, the Supreme
Court struck down the portion of the VRA that governs which states are
and are not required to seek the feds' permission to change their
election rules. Now Congress will have to come up with new rules to
determine which states this section of the VRA should cover. If
lawmakers decide to embrace Roberts' implication that states with more
racist attitudes should receive special scrutiny, Elmendorf and
Spencer's study suggests they could end up with a list of VRA-covered states that looks a lot like today's. This story has been updated to reflect the Supreme Court's ruling Tuesday morning.
Senior EditorNick Baumann covers national politics and civil liberties issues for
Mother Jones' DC Bureau. For more of his stories, click here. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Email tips and insights to nbaumann [at] motherjones [dot] com.
The Supreme Court ruled that a formula used to
define which areas fell under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was
unconstitutional. Section 5 required some places, mostly in the South,
to obtain federal permission before changing voting laws.Related Article »
Places covered by the law
Covered since 1965
Section 5 was first applied to places that had voter registration or
turnout rates below 50 percent in 1964 and also “devices” to discourage
voting, like literacy tests.
Added in 1970 or 1975
On renewal, the law used data from 1968 and 1972 and defined a “device”
to include English-only ballots in places where at least 5 percent of
voting-age citizens spoke a single language other than English.
Bailed out
Places that had been free of any voting discrimination for 10 years could be released from coverage by a court.
What if the Formula Were Different?
Without the formula, Section 5 is largely without significance — unless
Congress chooses to pass a new bill for determining which states would
be covered. It's unlikely Congress could agree on a new formula, but
here are some of the variables that have been discussed by lawmakers,
judges and legal scholars.
States and counties with estimated citizen turnout below 50 percent in 2012
Places with low turnout now
When Congress reauthorized the law in 2006, one amendment proposed to use data from more recent elections. It failed by a wide margin.
While the places with low turnout now are very different from those with low turnout in the 1960s and 1970s, a trial court ruling in the case considered by the Supreme Court, Shelby County v. Holder, suggested the more recent data was irrelevant.
The
years used as triggers, Judge John D. Bates ruled, “were never selected
because of something special that occurred in those years; instead,
they were chosen as mere proxies for identifying those jurisdictions
with established histories of discriminating against racial and language
minority voters.”
White-black gap of at least 5 percentage points in 2008, 2010 and 2012 (citizens only)
States with consistently large registration gaps
During oral arguments,
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. noted that Massachusetts, a state
that is not covered, had the greatest disparity in registration between
whites and blacks, referring to data from 2004.
While that data comes with a high margin of error, five states — none covered — had registration gaps of at least five percentage points in all of the last three elections.
Some
members of the court dismiss these sorts of statistics. According to
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “Congress said up front: We know that the
registration is fine. That is no longer the problem. But the
discrimination continues in other forms.”
At least 1.1 cases between 1982 and 2005, per million people
Lost the most voting discrimination lawsuits
Lawsuits brought
under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which applies to the entire
nation, offer one way to compare discrimination across the country. A study
of cases that were published on two legal databases, Westlaw or Lexis,
between 1982 and 2005 found that jurisdictions covered by Section 5 lost
more such cases than the rest of the country, even though being covered
might seem to deter discrimination.
Judge Stephen F. Williams, who dissented from
the federal appeals court decision reviewed by the Supreme Court,
considered this data in his opinion. Based on it, he found that “a more
narrowly tailored coverage formula — capturing only Mississippi,
Alabama, and Louisiana, and possibly the covered portions of South
Dakota and North Carolina — might be defensible.” But, he continued,
“beyond these, the covered jurisdictions appear indistinguishable from
their uncovered peers.”
At least 2.0 cases between 1982 and 2005, per million people
Lost or settled the most voting discrimination suits
Some voting discrimination suits, including those with a court-approved settlement, are resolved without a published opinion.
Judge David S. Tatel, writing for the majority in the appeals court's decision,
found that “the difference between covered and non-covered
jurisdictions becomes even more pronounced,” when including cases
settled in favor of minority voters.
Critics of this metric, as well as one that includes only published
cases, argue that adjusting for population is unfair to small states and
that patterns have changed since the data was assembled.
At least 75% of non-blacks more prejudiced than the U.S. average
The most ‘prejudiced’ states
Law professors at the University of
California, Davis, and the University of Connecticut have created an
estimate of prejudice using survey data from 2008.
The National Annenberg Election Survey asked people to rank the
intelligence, trustworthiness and work effort of different groups of
people, on a scale from 0 to 100. Christopher S. Elmendorf and Douglas
M. Spencer estimated prejudice based on how people rate their own ethnic
group, compared with how they rate blacks.
“It may be argued that Virginia and perhaps South Carolina should not
be covered, but the rest of the covered states in the Deep South top
the list of the most prejudiced states by anti-black stereotyping,” the professors found.
Sources: Justice Department (covered and bailed out
jurisdictions); Census Bureau (population estimates, citizenship
estimates; 2012 registration statistics); Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S.
Presidential Elections (2012 turnout); The Voting Rights Initiative at the University of Michigan Law School (published Section 2 cases); Declaration
of Peyton McCrary, historian at the Department
of Justice (unpublished Section 2 cases); Christopher S. Elmendorf,
University of California, Davis and Douglas M. Spencer, University of
Connecticut, "The Geography of Discrimination in Voting: MRP Meets the VRA" (prejudice estimates)
THE 1965 Voting Rights Act, which protects the right of all Americans to vote, is before the Supreme Court. This is just another example of the gop / tea-bagger assault on our civil liberties as they try to dismantle, piece by piece, the US Constitution, their goal being the evisceration of the government a la grover norquist and the consolidation of power by the rich and corporate America. The effectiveness or their propaganda campaign, based on lies, manipulation and misrepresentation, can be seen in the glaring example of how the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court misconstrued census data. Obviously he is getting his information from fox news, and that doesn't bode well for the decision on this case. And there is further reason for concern. Read Mother Jones' article on Justice Roberts' long running battle to totally destroy the VRA. From NPR and Mother Jones......
Chief Justice John Roberts, shown here during a presentation last June in Pennsylvania, questioned the U.S. solicitor general about voting statistics during this week's arguments on Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
Ann Wilkins/AP
At the voting rights argument in the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts tore into Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, grilling him on his knowledge of voting statistics.
The point the chief justice was trying to make was that Massachusetts, which is not covered by the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act, has a far worse record in black voter registration and turnout than Mississippi, which is covered by Section 5 of the act.
But a close look at census statistics indicates the chief justice was wrong, or at least that he did not look at the totality of the numbers.
So, let's start with the exchange in court:
Roberts: "Do you know which state has the worst ratio of white voter turnout to African-American voter turnout?"
Verrilli: "I do not."
Roberts: "Massachusetts."
Roberts went on to add that the state with the best record, where African-American turnout actually exceeds white turnout, is Mississippi.
Roberts' questions and conclusion appear to be taken from a census survey cited in a lower court dissent. But upon close examination, the numbers are less than reliable, according to the Census Bureau itself.
Here's the deal. The Census Bureau does voting surveys to look at voting patterns nationwide, but the survey is based on a very small sample. Most recently, in 2010, the survey looked at 94,208 voters nationwide. Break that up into roughly proportional samples in each state, Census officials say, and it is really not possible to compare states because those with relatively low minority populations have a much higher margin of error.
The number of black citizens eligible to vote in Massachusetts is 236,000, while it is 721,000 in Mississippi, more than three times that number. Therefore, according to Census officials, when looking at the estimated turnout rate in Massachusetts, the voting percentage for African-Americans at first blush is estimated at 39.3 percent. But the margin of error is 11.5 percentage points, meaning that the black voter turnout actually could be as high as 50.8 percent (or, conversely, as low as 27.8 percent).
Now, look at Mississippi, where black turnout is listed at 48.7 percent. But because of the large size of the African-American population that was sampled, the margin of error is only 5.4 percentage points.
That means that factoring in the margin of error, the black turnout rate in Mississippi could be as high as 54.1 percent, or as low as 43.3 percent.
So, if you factor in the margins of error at their extremes — with Mississippi at the low end and Massachusetts at the high end — Mississippi could have had a black voter turnout rate that was 7.5 percentage points lower than Massachusetts.
Bottom line, as Census officials told me, these numbers are simply not reliable for state-by-state comparisons because of the high margins of error in some states
Then-President George W. Bush nominates John Roberts as chief justice on September 5, 2005.Wikimedia
When he was in his late 20s, John Roberts was a foot soldier in the Reagan administration's crusade against the Voting Rights Act. Now, as chief justice of the Supreme Court, he will help determine whether a key part of the law survives a constitutional challenge.
Memos that Roberts wrote as a lawyer in President Reagan's Justice Department during the 1980s show that he was deeply involved in efforts to curtail the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act, the hard-won landmark 1965 law that is intended to ensure all Americans can vote. Roberts' anti-VRA efforts during the 1980s ultimately failed. But on Wednesday, when the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, he'll get another chance to gut the law. Roberts' history suggests a crucial part of the VRA may not survive the rematch.
At issue in Shelby County is whether a major portion of the Voting Rights Act, called Section 5, is constitutional. Section 5 compels jurisdictions with a history of discrimination, mostly in the South, to ask the Justice Department for permission—preclearance, in legalese—before making any changes to election laws. Shelby County, Alabama, is arguing that Section 5 is an extreme measure that is no longer justified because racism is no longer the problem it once was. If Section 5 is overturned, voting rights groups say, the federal government's ability to ensure Americans are not denied the right to vote on the basis of race—at a time when race has been used as a proxy for party identification—will be severely weakened.
Shelby County offers Roberts an opportunity to complete a mission he began three decades ago. When the chief justice was a young lawyer, in 1981, Southern legislators hoped an ascendant conservative movement could pressure Reagan into opposing an extension of the VRA. In June of that year, Reagan wrote a letter to Attorney General William French Smith requesting an "assessment" of the law. "I am sensitive to the controversy which has attached itself to some of the Act's provisions, in particular those provisions which impose burdens unequally upon different parts of the nation," Reagan wrote. "But I am sensitive also to the fact that the spirit of the Act marks this nation's commitment to full equality for all Americans, regardless of race, color, or national origin." Reagan didn't go as far as former segregationist and then-Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) by opposing the Voting Rights Act in its entirety, but his administration fought efforts to strengthen the law.
Roberts was a major player in the Reagan administration's VRA policy, drafting numerous op-eds and memos for top Justice Department officials that argued for a weaker version of the law. At the time, crucial parts of the VRA were due to expire, but congressional Democrats and moderate Republicans weren't just trying to renew the law—they were also trying to strengthen the law. After the VRA was enacted, it was interpreted as barring all discriminatory voting practices. In 1980, however, the Supreme Court, in a case involving the election rules in Mobile, Alabama,weakened the law by rulingthat, except in those jurisdictions with a sordid history of blocking minority voters, the VRA only forbade intentional discrimination. Civil rights activists wanted to fix that by modifying the law to make it crystal clear that all discrimination in voting practices, not just intentional discrimination, was illegal.
Roberts wasn't having it. Voting rights violations, according to one memo he helped draft in 1981, "should not be too easy to prove since they provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable." If Roberts and the Reagan administration had gotten their way, discriminatory voting systems in most of the country could only be barred when discrimination could be shown to be intentional. That would make it much tougher for the feds to intervene in states and localities and guarantee equal voting rights. The Reagan administration argued that they were just trying to preserve the Voting Rights Act, but it was really attempting to preserve a Supreme Court ruling neutering the law.
Read more of MoJo's coverage on voter suppression efforts.
Roberts helped the administration hone its argument. He wrote that it made sense for parts of the VRA to require proof that discrimination was intentional. "Broad aspects of criminal law and tort law typically require proof of intent," Roberts wrote in a draft op-ed in 1981. Allowing the VRA to apply in cases of unintentional discrimination all over the country and not just those places with a history of disenfranchising minorities, Roberts insisted, "would raise grave constitutional questions." In the case of Mobile, the Justice Department's voting rights attorneys eventually did prove the discrimination was intentional—by heading to Alabama and poring over the historical record to establish the election law had been passed deliberately to disenfranchise blacks.
To Roberts, that demonstrated there was no problem with requiring the government to prove that discrimination was intentional. "John Roberts and others used that case to say anyone who wants to prove intent could do it," explains Gerry Hebert, an attorney now with the Campaign Legal Center who was part of the Justice Department team that went to Alabama. But proving intent "took enormous resources that only the Justice Department could have." More important, says Hebert, having to prove "intent" placed voting rights attorneys in a difficult position: "You basically have to get judges to call local or state officials racist."
Despite the best efforts of Roberts and others in the Reagan Justice Department, civil rights activists outmaneuvered Southern conservatives and the Reagan White House, forging large bipartisan alliances in the House and Senate to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act in 1982. And they strengthened the law, amending it to explicitly ban all discriminatory voting rules across the country, whether the discrimination is intentional or not.
Civil rights leaders and Voting Rights Act supporters in Congress had succeeded by embracing an idea that they had initially opposed—and that Roberts and the Reagan administration supported. It was called the bailout provision, and it provided a way for jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to prove they no longer needed close Justice Department supervision under Section 5. By accepting this compromise, VRA backers won the overall political battle.
Now, VRA defenders are hoping that it's Roberts who is in a conciliatory mood and not set on eviscerating the law as the Reaganites wanted to do three decades ago. Is there reason for such hope? Roberts' defenders have long argued that his Justice Department writings merely show that he was being a good soldier when he was in the Reagan administration. "The defense was that Roberts was just a government lawyer taking the position of his boss," explains Rick Hasen, a professor at the University of California-Irvine School of Law who wrote about the memos during Roberts' 2005 confirmation hearings.
But in 2009, when an earlier challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act reached the Supreme Court, Roberts sounded a lot like Reagan during oral arguments. He echoed the late president's view that Section 5 represented an unconscionable punishment for the South's past sins. "Congress can impose this disparate treatment forever because of the history in the South?" Roberts asked the government attorney defending the law.
Roberts and conservative opponents of a strong Voting Rights Act may have lost in 1982, but in 2012, they're poised for a victory: The Supreme Court appears ready to strike down Section 5. Defending Reagan's support for the bailout provision in 1982, Roberts wrote that bailout rules "should be addressed by Congress, and not pushed into the courts." Roberts was arguing that elected officials, not judges, should make the rules governing when jurisdictions like Shelby County should be able to escape Section 5.
Has he changed his mind?
Reporter
Adam Serwer is a reporter at the Washington, DC, bureau of Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. You can also follow him on Twitter. Email tips and insights to aserwer [at] motherjones [dot] com. RSS | TWITTER
