Miranda Blue's blog

Back in April, two Alaska House committees approved a bill that would require voters to show a photo ID at the polls – a particularly damaging measure in a state where many rural communities don’t even require photos on drivers’ licenses. Now, the Anchorage Daily News is reporting that there is a familiar face behind the measure. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the driving force behind voter suppression and anti-immigrant measures around the country, reportedly coordinated with Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell to push the bill in what looks like an effort to damage Democratic Sen. Mark Begich in his 2014 reelection bid. (Treadwell denies that he worked with Kobach on the bill, which he says he opposes.)

Alaska Natives say a photo ID rule would be a roadblock to voting in the Bush. A decline in turnout there, with its traditionally heavy Democratic vote, could affect the 2014 reelection hopes of U.S. Sen. Mark Begich, a Democrat running in a Republican-leaning state. One of his potential rivals is Alaska's top election official, Republican Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell.

Treadwell says he doesn't support the voter ID bill, but Kobach says Treadwell was instrumental in getting him involved in promoting the Alaska legislation.

In an April statement to reporters that didn't mention Kobach or Kansas, Treadwell touted the cross-checking as having found 14 people suspected of "actually voting in both Alaska and another state" in 2012. Treadwell threatened to prosecute the voters if the allegations were confirmed.

Alaska elections director Gail Fenumiai recently said 12 of the 14 voters cited in Treadwell's April statement were wrongly identified as duplicate voters and actually voted only in Alaska.

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Kobach told the Daily News it was he who suggested to Treadwell that Alaska get involved in the Kansas project. "I personally talked to Mead Treadwell, your lieutenant governor, and encouraged him to join, and he did so," Kobach said.

And his testimony on the photo ID bill, Kobach said, was the result of a conversation with Treadwell.

"I spoke to Mead about it at one of our national conferences -- he mentioned that you guys were considering a photo ID law," Kobach said. "I said I'd be happy to share some of the experiences we've had in Kansas."

Treadwell, who said he doesn't support the Alaska bill because of the difficulty for Bush residents to get photo identification, said he didn't recall talking to Kobach about it.

As the Daily News explains, a photo ID bill would be especially damaging to Alaska Natives living in rural communities where DMVs are hard to access and where many towns don’t even require photographs on drivers’ licenses:

Photo ID measures are controversial across the country. Advocates say they help prevent fraud. Opponents say they make it more difficult for particular groups of people to vote: the elderly, students and the poor who don't own cars. In Alaska, the situation is compounded by the difficulty of getting to a Division of Motor Vehicles office in a regional hub like Nome or Bethel from a small village. Alaska doesn't even require a photograph on a driver's license in dozens of Bush communities.

Democratic activists say photo ID bills have the effect of disenfranchising more Democratic voters than Republicans. In his annual address to the Alaska Legislature this year, Begich criticized the bill as making it more difficult for Alaska Natives and Hispanics -- two traditional Democratic groups -- to vote.

The sponsor of Alaska’s bill, who has acknowledged that he drafted the measure using materials from the corporate-funded conservative group ALEC, had odd words of consolation for those concerned about the suppressive impact of the bill: at least it wouldn’t be as bad as Iraq!

Rep. Bob Lynn, an Anchorage Republican who is prime sponsor of the voter ID bill, said he wasn't trying to disenfranchise anyone. He dismissed opponents as complainers who should be happy they don't face the kind of obstacles voters do in places like Iraq.

"Terrorists have threatened to kill anyone who voted, but they voted anyway, and then these voters put ink in their finger to prove they had voted -- evidence that could have gotten them killed. Now that's a hassle, to say the least. Needing a photo ID to vote in Alaska wouldn't even come close to that," Lynn said when his State Affairs Committee first heard the bill in February.
 

Wisconsin state legislators are in the final days of negotiations on a plan that would expand private school vouchers statewide (they are currently only available in Milwaukee and Racine). The current deal on the program would cap voucher enrollment at one percent of a districts students, but Gov. Scott Walker and other lawmakers would like to expand them further. That includes Republican state Sen. Glenn Grothman, who told Jack Craver of The Capital Times today that not allowing wealthy families who can already afford to send their children to private school to participate in the program would “penalize married couples.”

One of the major concerns in recent years about school vouchers is that they often benefit families who already have the money to send their kids to private schools.

At the same time, the Legislature expanded the state-paid voucher program to Racine. And now, data show that nearly half of the students receiving vouchers in that city were already enrolled in private schools before the program was put in place.

But Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, an outspoken advocate for expanding vouchers to all people and all school districts, says he believes there’s a good side to higher-income families participating in the program: It promotes marriage.

“I think the major thing is we cannot allow the voucher program to penalize married couples,” he told me in a brief phone conversation Monday morning. “In Milwaukee, we raised (the limit) to 300 percent of the federal poverty line and we began to get more married couples in the program, and I don’t want to back off on that.”

The veteran legislator is worried that current negotiations over a further expansion of vouchers to other districts may result in lower income thresholds for voucher recipients and thus reduce the number of two-parent families participating in the program.

Grothman is the same state senator who authored a bill last year to label single parenthood as “a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.”

Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt is a big fan of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a group of Tenther county sheriffs who have declared that they answer directly to the Constitution (or their interpretation of it), rather than to the federal government. Unsurprisingly, the organization and the movement it represents have grown substantially during the presidency of Barack Obama.

Pratt often praises the Constitutional Sheriffs in his speeches, and was a guest of honor at their annual convention last week, where he presented the “High Noon Award” to the Milwaukee County Sheriff who took out an ad urging people to arm themselves rather than calling 911. Pratt also presented the “Nullifier of the Year” award to Sheriff Denny Peyman of Jackson County, Kentucky, who has announced that he will not enforce federal gun laws in his county, warning that there would be a “bloodbath in our community when they come in to take guns.”

Pratt himself summed up the gist of the Constitutional Sheriffs movement when he told WND:

There is a misconception in our time that the court somehow is the arbiter of what is constitutional; that’s not true! Every official that raises their right hand and says they’re going to adhere to the constitution, seek to protect it to the best of their ability, ‘so help me God’ – that’s something that they’re all obligated to do.

The nullification movement is growing in popularity in conservative state legislatures – for instance, Kansas has passed a law declaring that "Any act, law, treaty, order, rule or regulation of the government of the United States which violates the second amendment to the constitution of the United States is null, void and unenforceable in the state of Kansas."

The nullification concept dates back to South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun, who argued that if the federal government did not allow a southern states to “nullify” an 1828 tariff act, they would be within their rights to secede from the Union. Historian Cody Carlson explains, “The unspoken fear, of course, was that if the federal government could levy a tariff to profoundly alter the economy of the South, was the institution of slavery safe from federal interference? Could not the North, in the guise of instituting new economic policies, virtually prohibit slavery?”

David Gans of the Constitutional Accountability Center, via Steve Benen, explains why nullification has long been discredited:

Nullification was a 19th century theory, identified most closely with South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, based on the notion that the states created the Constitution and retained the power to determine whether the federal government complied with limitations on its power. This theory has been universally rejected throughout the course of American history by the courts as inconsistent with the Constitution. As the Constitution's preamble makes clear, 'We the People,' not the states, 'ordain[ed] and establish[ed] th[e] Constitution.'

The Constitution's Supremacy Clause provides that federal law is the 'supreme Law of the Land,' and Article III of the Constitution gives to the federal judiciary the power to decide "all cases arising under the Constitution.' States, thus, cannot simply declare that the acts of the federal government are null and void. But, despite the rock-solid arguments against nullification, state governments continue to press the idea that they have the power to treat certain federal laws as null and void. These arguments, while not new, have no basis in the Constitution."

Center for Immigration Studies director Mark Krikorian, like Phyllis Schlafly, is trying to sell Republicans on the idea that if they support comprehensive immigration reform they will face electoral doom for years to come. In an interview with Right Wing News published today, Krikorian insists that comprehensive reform would not only “destroy the Republican Party,” it would imperil “the future of the republic.”

Krikorian’s reasoning for this doomsday rhetoric is something we hear frequently from immigration opponents:  that “Hispanic voters and immigrant voters generally are predisposed to be Democrats” because “a party that’s promoting tax cuts is of no interest to them.” CIS, like Schlafly, has been urging the GOP to abandon its Latino outreach efforts and instead focus only on turning out white voters opposed to immigration reform.

Elsewhere in the interview, Krikorian mocked policies that would let legal immigrants stay in the U.S. with their U.S.-born children because “look, they’re so cute.”

How do you think we’re looking on this bill? What are you hearing? Are we on track to beat this thing or not?

There’s still an outside chance to beat it in the Senate, which would be kind of remarkable if that happened. The likelihood of it actually getting through the House is obviously dramatically less. I’m less worried about that part, although what I fear is that the House may pass something small and narrow, but as long as it has the word immigration in it, then Boehner can just get together with Reid and re-write immigration law between the two of them and then send it back saying, “Look, Conference Committee did this. This is what we came up with; vote for it or else.” Most Republicans won’t vote for it, but if Boehner is willing to bring it to the Floor for the Democrats to vote for, with 15 Republicans passing it, then we’re screwed. But it seems to me that’s the thing. In a sense, the whole thing comes down to whether Boehner is willing to destroy the Republican Party or not. It’s kind of melodramatic, but the future of the republic rests on him.

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The flip side is that they have taken one part of the family immigration program which is limited and made it unlimited — and that is the spouses and minor children of Green Card holders. So, if you’re married when you get your Green Card, then your spouse gets a Green Card, too. …Also, I put air quotes around this “temporary” employment program; this legislation exempts all family members from the numerical caps on those programs. So those numbers increase dramatically under the bill and they all get to work, too. Of course, there’s no change in the citizenship laws. So all the kids that these “temporary” workers have while they’re in the United States are U.S. citizens and then, these very same people who are pushing this bill are going to say, “Well, we can’t make them leave now just because their Visa expired. They have U.S. born kids and look, they’re so cute. Look, they all have to stay; come on.” It’s just ridiculous.

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Final question: One of the ways this is being sold is that it’s a way that’s going to fix everything with the Republican Party with Hispanics — that suddenly, all Hispanics are going to vote Republican after this. That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense if you – I mean, after Reagan’s amnesty, the GOP’s numbers with Hispanics dropped. So, what’s going to happen? Is this going to be a big boom for the GOP with Hispanics if we pass this bill?

No, it’s going to be a disaster for the Republican Party for several reasons. One is Hispanic voters and immigrant voters generally are predisposed to be Democrats. They make much heavier use of public services. So, a party that’s interested in tightening up on welfare and government spending is not going to be appealing. They pay much less in taxes. Current illegal immigrants, if you look at their wages — a large majority of them have no income tax liability and that’s not going to change significantly if they’re legalized. So, a party that’s promoting tax cuts is of no interest to them. If anything, it’s quite the opposite.
 

In a Washington Times column today, Concerned Women for America’s Janice Shaw Crouse repeats her frequent claim that progressive social policies are to blame for what she once called “realities that are evident should one take a risky drive into certain neighborhoods of our cities.”

Crouse writes that the results of “taxpayer-funded contraceptives, abortions and expanding government welfare” and “the decline of marriage, including no-fault divorce and the sexual revolution” are “there for all to see – at least on TV— in areas where married-couple families are already too scarce to provide the necessary critical mass for a healthy environment.”

In particular, Crouse cites the 1991 classic “Boyz N The Hood" as an illustration of the results of liberal social policies.

Participants at the Sydney congress were reminded that throughout history and across all cultures, marriage has been the foundation of families and the bedrock of civilized nations. Married moms and dads having babies and raising the next generation of children have been so much the norm of personal experience in every nation that now with birthrates sinking below replacement levels, it is hard to imagine the long-term impact of their absence. The result is there for all to see — at least on TV — in areas where married-couple families are already too scarce to provide the necessary critical mass for a healthy environment. Without strong families to exert moral authority, neighborhoods echo scenes from the classic 1991 movie “Boyz N The Hood” that take the viewer inside the gang-infested communities of South Central Los Angeles, where marauding gangs, constantly at war with each other, illustrated what happens when there are not enough strong fathers to control and civilize the young males.

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For decades, liberals, progressives, feminists and welfare advocates have tried to find solutions to the problems associated with out-of-wedlock childbearing, single motherhood and child poverty — without advocating marriage in public policy. Their solutions? Taxpayer-funded contraceptives, abortions and expanding government welfare. We don’t need to ask how that has worked out. The answer is obvious. The decline of marriage, including no-fault divorce and the sexual revolution, is a luxury popularized by celebrities but it is a dead-end trap for the poor that exacts a price from their children.

Kids that come from healthy marriages are vital to the future of society, but the contributions of good marriages do not end there. By building strong, healthy families, married couples create virtue. In some immeasurable way, the goodness they create — simply by living according to the natural order and moral law designed by the Creator — is of benefit not just for the couple, but their success also contributes vitality to the whole. Anytime a marriage nurtures, shelters and protects, it becomes a stage for all to see where scenes of love and joyful celebration are played out again and again. Equally important, both communities and nations also benefit.
 

Joe Miller, the Tea Party candidate who won the Republican Senate nomination in Alaska in 2010 only to be defeated by incumbent Lisa Murkowski’s write-in campaign in the general election, has announced that he’s planning on running again, and he’s started hitting the conservative media circuit to build support. Yesterday, Miller talked with Steve Deace, and explained that unlike establishment candidates, he’s “not afraid to use the word ‘tyranny’” and isn’t “afraid about being labeled an extremist” because “it’s the extreme component of the grassroots that’s going to elect you.”

You gotta tell the truth. And really that’s the core of, you need to tell the people why the country is headed down the path. You know, I’m not afraid to use the word ‘tyranny.’ And the fact is, and I said this in our exploratory announcement a couple of months ago, that I really believe our government is in basically a soft tyranny state. And this was even before the story about the IRS came out. But there is actions that the government is taking disrespectful of the fundamental values that made this nation great: the idea that the sovereignty of the individual, the fact that we have rights given by God [inaudible]. Don’t be afraid to talk about that.

And don’t be afraid about being labeled an extremist because the reality is, you know, it’s the extreme component of the grassroots that’s going to elect you. And, you know, you may say as a candidate, ‘What am I going to do in the general? I can’t put myself too far off to the right in the primary.’ The fact is, people resonate with truth. And the fact is, is that even if that truth makes you looks a little bit too far to the right from some perspectives, even those that disagree with you are going to respect the position. And I would suggest that many, many people want to challenge the establishment. They’re far to political, they want to be a politician. And that’s not what you can do. You’ve got to go out and tell the truth about where we’re at as a nation and not be afraid to speak it, even though you may think you’re reflecting something that is not all that political, too extreme if you will.
 

The Far North Dallas Tea Party posted a video this week of a PowerPoint presentation that Cathie Adams, president of the Texas Eagle Forum, gave recently on “Radical Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Unsurprisingly, Adams sees the influence of “stealth jihad” everywhere in American society – including in the Republican Party. In her speech, Adams claimed credit for personally bringing down the candidacy of Amir Omar, an Iranian-American Republican who ran for Congress in Texas in 2006. She also railed against former Bush administration official and conservative activist Suhail Khan, wondering, “Where did he come from? How did this man get here? Did he overstay a visa?” (The short answer, if she really wants to know, is that he was born in Colorado, so no.)

But Adams saved her true vitriol for anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, who has provoked the wrath of anti-Muslim activists for his marriage to a Muslim woman and his efforts to reach out to Muslim conservatives. Adams warned that although “oftentimes we like what he says about economic issues,” Norquist is in fact “Trouble with a capital T” and is “showing signs of converting to Islam himself.”

Her evidence for Norquist’s secret conversion? “As you see, he has a beard.”

Phyllis Schlafly has been getting some strong pushback – including from the conservative Commentary Magazine –  for remarks she made this week urging the Republican Party to abandon attempts to win back Latino voters and instead focus exclusively on turning out “the white voters who didn’t vote in the last election.”

But Schlafly’s far from alone. In a press release today, the prominent anti-immigration reform group Center for Immigration Studies echoes Schlafly’s advice, urging the GOP to abandon comprehensive immigration reform and instead pour its resources into  increasing white turnout.

Citing new census data, CIS warns Republicans that “one of their biggest problems in the last presidential election was that so many less-educated whites sat home.”

“It seems likely that by supporting the Schumer-Rubio amnesty, GOP legislators would further alienate these voters,” CIS Research Director Steven Camarota adds.

Camarota’s warning, like Schlafly’s, is not far removed from Pat Buchanan’s call for the GOP to create a new Southern Strategy, pitting white voters against Latino immigrants rather than trying to expand the party’s base.

"As Republicans think about how they can expand their voter base, the new data suggest that one of their biggest problems in the last presidential election was that so many less-educated whites sat home," said Steven Camarota, the Center's Director of Research and author of the report. "These voters, who have been hard hit by the recession, have traditionally supported Republicans. It seems likely that by supporting the Schumer-Rubio amnesty, GOP legislators would further alienate these voters."

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The president received five million more votes than Governor Romney. What would have it taken for Romney to have won at least a plurality of the popular vote?

   -- If Romney had increased his share of the women's vote by four percentage points, from the 44 percent he actually received to 48 percent, then he would have won the popular vote. Each percentage point of the female vote equaled 714,000 votes.

   -- If Romney had increased his share of the black vote by 15 percentage points, from the 6 percent he actually received to 21 percent, then he would have won the popular vote. Each percentage point of the black vote equaled 172,000 votes.

   -- If Romney had increased his share of the Hispanic vote by 23 percentage points, from the 27 percent he actually received to 50 percent, then he have won the popular vote. Each percentage point of the Hispanic vote equaled 112,000 votes.

   -- If Romney had increased his share of the white vote by three percentage points, from the 59 percent he actually received to 62 percent, then he would have won the popular vote. Each percentage point of the white vote equaled 980,000 votes.

The New York Times reported this week that President Obama is planning to nominate three judges to fill long-vacant seats on the influential D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. This is hardly unheard of: every president since Jimmy Carter has placed at least three judges on the D.C. Circuit, and Obama only just had his first nominee confirmed to the court.

But Senate Republicans and conservative activists really, really don’t want President Obama to put any more judges on the D.C. Circuit – perhaps because it is currently dominated by Republican nominees who are intent on rolling back things like clean air regulations, cigarette labeling requirements, and National Labor Relations Board rulings.
      
So the Senate GOP is threatening to filibuster anybody Obama names to the court and even trying to push through a law permanently deleting the vacant judgeships in order to prevent Obama from filling them.

What has resulted is one of the more bizarre manifestations of Obama Derangement Syndrome. The talking point that Senate Republicans and their allies have landed on to defend this planned obstruction is that President Obama, in nominating judges to existing judicial vacancies as is required by his job, is in fact “packing” the D.C. Circuit in the style of FDR. (Or, in the words of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board,  like a “king”).

In a column for Breitbart News yesterday the Family Research Council’s Ken Klukowski goes even further, writing that by merely planning to nominate judges to the court – a constitutional requirement of his job fulfilled by every one of his predecessors – Obama has launched an “attack on the independence of the federal courts,” “declared war on judicial independence,” and is “trying to declare law by executive fiat.”

Now that Obama has declared war on judicial independence, Republicans are planning a counter-strategy. There are 13 federal appeals courts. The D.C. Circuit’s caseload is light, while several other circuits are overloaded. Sen. Charles Grassley and Senate Republicans are proposing moving those three seats to courts that could very much use them. Obama would still appoint those three judges, but not to the D.C. Circuit.

It takes legislation to create or move federal judgeships, so this is shaping up as a major part of the battle over courts that are independent of political manipulation.

There are only 80 slots on the Supreme Court’s docket every year. For 20,000 federal appeals each year, whatever the appellate court says is the final word. Obama is hoping that if he can overhaul the judicial balance of the court, his unprecedented claims of federal power might withstand court challenges. From Obamacare to EPA requirements, labor rules, and IRS rules, all these topics and more are going before the D.C. Circuit.

Obama cannot enact major liberal legislation now that he’s lost the House and might also lose the Senate next year. Instead, he’s trying to declare law by executive fiat. Whether he gets away with it likely turns on whether he can change Senate rules and then pack the D.C. Circuit with sympathetic judges.

This attack on the independence of the federal courts should be of concern to all Americans.
 

WorldNetDaily founder and prolific conspiracy theorist Joseph Farah has a message for America: “See, I told you so.”

In a WND column Tuesday, Farah writes that he takes “little comfort” in reminding us that he warned us of “radical, Chicago-style gangster” President Obama’s “Marxist connections” and “cover-up of his eligibility problems,” only to be ignored by the “low-information voters” who reelected him.

The result, Farah writes, is “three of the biggest political scandals in American history,” a health care reform law that “will result needlessly in immense pain, death and suffering,” and a president whose “enemies include the Constitution of the United States.”

Farah writes that the only solution, as he has said before, is his upcoming  9/11 day of prayer, which is also being promoted by Rep. Michele Bachmann.

It gives me little comfort to say, “See, I told you so.”

Starting in 2008, there were many voices warning what an administration headed by a radical, Chicago-style gangster like Barack Obama would mean for America. But none of those voices were as relentless and prolific as WND.

We exposed his background.

We exposed his associations.

We exposed his policy positions as a “community organizer,” an Illinois state senator and during his brief career as a U.S. senator.

We exposed the lies in his books.

We exposed the still-unanswered questions and cover-up of his eligibility problems.

We exposed his Marxist connections, appointments and leanings in “The Manchurian President.”

And we continued by exposing what he would do in a second term if he got the chance in “Fool Me Twice,” a book, by the way, as relevant today as the day it was published in 2012.

We hoped for the best, but, at the end of the day, “the low-information voters” prevailed.

Am I surprised Obama is now simultaneously caught up in three of the biggest political scandals in American history?

No.

I’m surprised it took this long.

It’s in Barack Obama’s nature and character to do “whatever is necessary” to prevail over his enemies. And his enemies include the Constitution of the United States.

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Will the dysfunctional political system and the dysfunctional media do what needs to be done?

I hope so. But I can’t help but think Obama and all he has wrought on America – including a health-care system that violates the consciences of Americans and will result needlessly in immense pain, death and suffering – actually represent justice for the country. We’re getting just what we deserve – not only because we allowed him to be elected twice, but because Americans have lost their moral bearings.

Obama is only a symptom of the disease that plagues us.

We can’t win unless we recognize that what we are seeing happen to America is part of a divine judgment of those who were given so much, who were so blessed by God, yet turned our collective backs on Him.
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Our nation is literally imploding morally and spiritually. Every man and woman does what’s right in his own eyes. The church is asleep.

Do you want to see miracles happen in America? Do you want to see the nation restored? Do you want to see us return to the godly principles that shaped the nation and provided blessings beyond imagination to us all for so long?

I am persuaded this is the way.

I hope and pray you will join me.

If you do, I look forward to saying, “See, I told you so!”