The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
As lawmakers prepare to return to Washington after Labor Day, a few inside-the-Beltway pundits have blithely predicted that, “immigration reform is dead.”
This, in the face of headlines that uniformly declare that the forces of reform – and Progressives of all sorts – have dominated the August town meeting circuit. And the vaunted anti-immigration reform backlash is nowhere to be found — except perhaps in the imagination of Congressman Steve King.
In fact, there are many good reasons to predict that the odds are very good the GOP House Leadership will ultimately allow a vote on an immigration reform bill containing a pathway to citizenship this year. If such a bill is called, the odds are close to one hundred percent that it will pass.
That is because, right now, there are more than enough votes on the floor of the House to pass immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship if it is given an up or down vote. The only question now is whether the House Leadership decides that it is in their political interest to call the bill.
The GOP leadership understands that if an immigration reform bill passes, the Democrats will get the credit with key immigrant constituencies and many suburban swing voters. But they are also coming to realize that if they do not call the bill, they will get the blame with those same constituencies – and that could lead to both short-term and-long term disaster for the Republican Party.
Here are the top five reasons why immigration reform is likely to pass this year:
Reason #1: In order maintain control of the House, Republicans can afford to lose a maximum of seventeen seats in the mid-term elections. There are 44 districts currently held by Republicans where significant numbers of the voters (12% or more) are either Hispanics or Asian Americans. Of that number, as many as 20 may be seriously in play in 2014.
The mid-term elections are all about turnout. If Hispanic and Asian American voters are sufficiently enraged by Republican refusal to pass immigration reform, the GOP high command fears that they will register to vote and turn out in substantial numbers. That could easily tip the balance in terms of control of the House of Representatives.
And don’t think that immigration reform is “just another issue” for Hispanics and Asian Americans. It doesn’t matter whether you yourself would be personally impacted, a politician’s position on whether they are for or against immigration reform has become symbolic for “are you on my side?” – “do you stand for or against my community?”
To get a sense of the intensity of feeling, all you need do is attend any of the literally hundreds of pro-immigration reform events and town meetings that have been held over the August break. People are fired up and ready to go.
The polling is equally clear. A poll taken of voters in key swing districts currently controlled by Republicans conducted by Public Policy Polling (PPP) in early July showed:
Republican and Independent voters want Congress to pass a solution to our country’s broken immigration system. Many are less likely to support Republicans if the House fails to pass immigration reform this summer.

Read more…

Maddowblog’s Steve Benen has unearthed a quote from the right-wing Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly, which proves more than a little embarrassing for Republicans, who have been parroting the “voter suppression? who us?” defense. It goes like this:

The reduction in the number of days allowed for early voting is particularly important because early voting plays a major role in Obama’s ground game. The Democrats carried most states that allow many days of early voting, and Obama’s national field director admitted, shortly before last year’s election, that “early voting is giving us a solid lead in the battleground states that will decide this election.”
The Obama technocrats have developed an efficient system of identifying prospective Obama voters and then nagging them (some might say harassing them) until they actually vote. It may take several days to accomplish this, so early voting is an essential component of the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote campaign.

To which Benen responds, “Have you ever heard a political figure accidentally read stage direction, unaware that it’s not supposed to be repeated out loud? This is what Schlafly’s published column reminds me of.”
The Schlafly quote will be roundly ignored by the conservative ostrich pundits, like George Will, Russ Douthat, Peggy Noonan and David Brooks, who know perfectly well that Schlafly was telling the raw truth. They will refuse to acknowledge it in any way, because it offends their nostalgic view of their party as stout defender of conservatism, when really it has become the party of contempt for democracy and fair elections, with an increasingly high tolerance for racism.
They also know that there is essentially no voter fraud. But they won’t write about that either, because they can’t do so and still retain the thin veneer of credibility that they believe separates their columns from partisan hackery.
Like her more genteel conservative colleagues, Schlafly has been known to dance around the truth. But not this time. Credit her with telling it straight, as Benen concludes:

And then there’s Phyllis Schlafly, writing a piece for publication effectively saying Democrats are entirely right — North Carolina had to dramatically cut early voting because it’s not good for Republicans.
Remember, Schlafly’s piece wasn’t intended as criticism; this is her defense of voter suppression in North Carolina. Proponents of voting rights are arguing, “This is a blatantly partisan scheme intended to rig elections,” to which Schlafly is effectively responding, “I know, isn’t it great?”

It’s a sad time for opinion journalism, when the top ‘conservative’ columnists can’t take a stand, calling on their party to defend the democratic principle of fair elections with outcomes based on honest debate, instead of suppressing votes.

Douglas Williams and Cato Uticensis have an interesting post. “Creating a culture of unionism in the South,” which merits some thoughtful scrutiny from Democrats, as well as the labor movement. As the authors, both union organizers, explain:

One of the difficulties of organizing in the South is that the struggles here frequently occur under a veil of invisibility due to the lack of pro-worker media down here. Barring major fights like the United Food and Commercial Workers’ (UFCW) fifteen-year long trench war against Smithfield Foods, where everything from cops on the company payroll to enterprise corruption lawsuits were used against the union, most of our battles do not gain much in the way of attention outside of the communities where they occur, and when there is coverage it is almost always skewed against the union. Even when unionized businesses hit hard times or close, the workers are never part of the story.
This cannot be entirely blamed on the media: Southern workers are trained by everything around them to see unions as a threat. Some of this is the fault of labor: The failure of Operation Dixie, the weak response by both the AFL and the CIO to the first right-to-work law in Florida in the early 1940s, and the ongoing lack of investment in organizing in the South by all unions feed this notion, but it’s only part of the story. The fact of the matter is that Southern workers tend to be culturally conservative….

The authors note that Taft-Hartley was particularly effective anti-union weapon in the south and the socialist boogeyman is still a useful fairy tale parroted by conservative politicians in the region to this day. Williams and Uticensis say the remedy is to promote a “culture of unionism,” a “shared mindset necessary to build and exercise collective power on behalf of working people.” They suggest 8 key principles for meeting this challenge, four of which include:

2. Solidarity is non-negotiable. An attack on any union has to be considered as an attack on all unions and must be reacted to as such. The two most recently successful organizing drives in North Carolina were carried over the line by other unionists showing solidarity with Farm Labor Organizing Committee and UFCW and holding the line on boycotts. Additional actions that unions can do to show solidarity with other workers engaged in labor struggles include contributing to the strike funds of fellow unionists, turning up to protests organized by other unions, and engaging in joint community awareness campaigns to let neighbors know why supporting the union is also supporting themselves…
4. Right-to-work doesn’t prevent union organizing; it prevents shitty union organizing. The labor movement should always be engaged in an effort to repeal right-to-work laws at the state level, and the effects that those laws have on unions and organizing have long been documented elsewhere. But until that happens, the struggle for worker justice must continue to be fought, even where it seems to be the most difficult or intransigent. To that end, visibility is an absolute necessity, as there are people in Southern states who think that they can’t form unions because of right-to-work. Taking the time and energy to demystify the jargon and give a worker the information she needs to make an informed decision is, in a word, organizing. As an example, there are UAW-organized plants in North Carolina with membership levels rivaling those of plants in Michigan, and even in the explicitly open-shop federal government, where the union has to provide support to non-members, the American Federation of Government Employees’ locals representing the Bureau of Prisons have very high rates of organization. How these two very different unions manage this feat is similar: they are very proactive at getting new hires on-board the first day. When it comes down to it, servicing your members and showing people that there is power in a union can go a long way towards increasing union density, no matter where you reside…
6. Labor has to work for the broader interests of working people. An isolation from the community makes it much easier for our enemies to vilify the union and attack it using the political process. There is no better example of this than Wisconsin, where labor was isolated from the community and an ultimately successful campaign was waged against public sector collective bargaining by hardline right wing politicians. When labor works in the broader interests of the working public, it serves as a force multiplier. There is no better example of this than Chicago, where the Chicago Teachers Union has successfully changed the conversation about education in the city through a careful and deliberate strategy of community outreach combined with on-the-job action. In the end, what’s good for the broader community is good for labor, and working towards that can bring people who would otherwise be skeptical of organizing around.
8. If an action does not build power, you must seriously question whether or not to do it. This is a key to building union strength anywhere that union density is low, but especially in the South. When you get right down to it, unions are about power for working people. There are a lot of other things that get attached to them, but that is their original and main purpose: to serve as a defense against the exploitative characteristics of corporate power. No matter how noble the action or good the cause, if it does not build power, you must think critically about whether it is necessary and whether those resources can dedicated to another project that does build power.

The authors allow that these principles are universal, but they apply exceptionally well in the south, where suppression of unions has been most successful. They argue that “The desire to retrench to previously secure places and industries is an understandable if wrong-headed notion: it rests on the idea that there are certain regions or industries that are safer from attack than others.”

This notion should have been dispelled by the bill signing that made Michigan the twenty-fourth right-to-work state in America. It should have been dispelled by the bill signing that made Indiana the twenty-third right-to-work state. It should have been dispelled by Wisconsin gutting public sector collective bargaining rights. It should have been dispelled by putative political allies of labor trying to break the teachers union in Chicago. There is no one safe place left for labor anymore, and the only way we can preserve what we have is by going on the offensive and building power in places where we do not have a strong presence.

Above all, conclude Wiliams and Uticensis, “we must make sure that working people see collective bargaining as a solution for righting wrongs on the shop floor,” while “engaging workers and the community,” using the principles they suggest. It’s a good read, one that doesn’t write-off the south or whine about it, instead offering a path which can work well with the demographic transformation now underway.

From Reid Wilson’s WaPo Govbeat post, “Democrats push back on voting rights“:

Last week, operatives tied to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee launched what they call a 50-state initiative to promote voting reforms that would make it easier to cast a ballot. The effort is being run by American Values First, an outside group organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code and run by Michael Sargeant, the DLCC’s executive director. Democrats will push legislation similar to a Colorado measure signed into law earlier this year that requires all elections to be conducted by mail.
Legislators in at least seven other states will propose bills that would tweak election laws in other ways. In some states controlled by Democrats, the measures have a good chance to pass. In other states with divided control or that operate under Republican control, Democrats plan to use the measures as political cudgels, painting the GOP as opposed to basic voting rights.
The new push comes in response to Republican initiatives to rewrite election laws in key states. Republicans in North Carolina and Florida moved to cut the number of days on which a voter can cast a ballot early. Arizona and Florida both imposed new restrictions on groups that sign up voters for absentee ballots. And Republican-led legislatures in states from New Hampshire to Michigan to Florida passed legislation requiring voters to show photo identification before they receive a ballot.

Wilson notes that Colorado Dems passed a bill that will “require residents to vote entirely by mail,” joining Washington and Oregon, where automatic registration linked to drivers licenses failed by a single vote. Democrats are optimistic about passing it, however. Elsewhere Dems are fighting to establish “no fault” absentee voting, which is now in place in 34 states and to lengthen registration periods.
It’s good Dems are showing assertive leadership on restoring and strengthening voting rights in the states. It’s important, however, that their constituents are well-informed about which party is all about making it harder to vote. Some generic ads making that point in the states might be a worthy DNC project.

The following article by TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore, is cross-posted from The Washington Monthly:
So the RNC has unanimously approved the rather juvenile resolution “punishing” NBC and CNN for planning programming about Hillary Clinton by banning them from hosting Republican presidential candidate debates in 2016. I am sure heads will roll at the two networks.
More seriously, the resolution–and the “ultimatum” from Reince Prieubus that preceded it–has fed a more useful discussion in and beyond the Republican Party about candidate debate formats and who should control them.
Yesterday I wrote about the idea of Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity moderating GOP debates and how that reflected the conservative movement’s desire to create a closed loop of discourse in which conservatives would “vet” candidates for their willingness to rule out any compromise or even discussions with non-conservatives. In response, Atrios argued that internal party criteria are what nomination contests are for:

I’m all for Sean and Rush running Republican primary debates, and liberal people running the Dem ones. They’re in tune with what the actual voters of such elections are interested in.

Kevin Drum agreed that Democrats might begin moving in this direction as well:

I’m not sure how this translates on the Democratic side, but I wouldn’t mind seeing a few of the debates moderated by honest-to-goodness lefties rather than John King and Wolf Blitzer. Why not make the candidates defend themselves against criticism from the left? It’d be good for them to go up against Rick Perlstein and Katha Pollitt once or twice. Why not?

That all makes sense, but there’s something going on in the “let’s control our debates” drive in the GOP which isn’t about accountability to primary voters at all. Note this argument from National Review’s John Fund in his partial endorsement of the exclusivity approach:

None of this is to suggest that Republicans who want to install exclusively conservative commentators as debate moderators and panelists have got it right. Debates will not serve the party well if they become an echo chamber or if the moderators address only hot-button issues that spark the conservative base. But a political party has a right to do its best to project the kind of image it wishes, and if that involves greater “diversity” in debate formats and participants, all the better.

Huh: so parties have a “right” to “project the kind of image” they want! This sounds like less, not more, transparency about the actual views of candidates. I observed yesterday that a lot of conservatives would probably be happy if they could somehow prohibit non-conservatives from watching their nomination-contest debates. It’s one thing to “control” debates so that the interests of primary voters are better reflected in the questions. It’s another thing altogether to try to hide the answers from the general electorate.

Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei have a Politico post up that is so discouraging for the GOP that it has been titled ‘Eve of Destruction.” The entire post is a pretty devastating read for Republican office holders. But we’ll just share a enough to whet the Democratic appetite here:

It is almost impossible to find an establishment Republican in town who’s not downright morose about the 2013 that has been and is about to be. Most dance around it in public, but they see this year as a disaster in the making, even if most elected Republicans don’t know it or admit it.
Several influential Republicans told us the party is actually in a worse place than it was Nov. 7, the day after the disastrous election.
• The party is hurting itself even more with the very voters they need to start winning back: Hispanics, blacks, gays, women and swing voters of all stripes.
• The few Republicans who stood up and tried to move the party ahead were swatted into submission: Speaker John Boehner on fiscal matters and Sen. Marco Rubio on immigration are the poster boys for this.
• Republicans are all flirting with a fall that could see influential party voices threatening to default on the debt or shut down the government — and therefore ending all hopes of proving they are not insane when it comes to governance..
The blown opportunities and self-inflicted wounds are adding up:
• Hispanics. Nearly every Republican who stumbled away from 2012 promised to quit alienating the fastest-growing demographic in American politics. So what have they done since? Alienated Hispanic voters — again.
It is easy to dismiss as anomaly some of the nasty rhetoric — such as Rep. Don Young calling immigrants “wetbacks” or Rep. Steve King suggesting the children of illegal immigrants are being used as drug mules. But it’s impossible for most Hispanics not to walk away from the immigration debate believing the vast majority of elected Republicans are against a pathway to citizenship.
…• Swing voters. Republicans are in jeopardy of convincing voters they simply cannot govern. Their favorable ratings are terrible and getting worse. But there is broad concern it could go from worse to an unmitigated disaster this fall. Most urgently, according to a slew of key Republicans we interviewed, conservative GOP senators have got to give up their insistence that the party allow the government to shut down after Sept. 30 if they don’t get their way on defunding Obamacare.
The quixotic drive — led by Rubio, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) — is part of Rubio’s effort to make up with the conservative base after he was stunned by the backlash over his deal-making on immigration. Pollsters say the funding fight makes Republicans look even more obstructionist, and causes voters to worry about the effect a shutdown would have on their own finances.

Worse, the very few remaining Republican leaders who can accurately be described as open to a modicum of bipartisanship have grim prospects for getting any traction in their party. Indeed, some of them must be wondering if becoming a conservative Democrat might be a good move for their political survival.

The following article by TDS Founding Editor Ruy Teixeira, is cross-posted from Think Progress:
There is a vogue in Republican party circles these days for enhancing the party’s de facto commitment to white voters. One approach is to rely on turning out the “missing” white voters from the 2012 election. Alan Abramowitz and I have critiqued this approach in a series of TP Ideas posts (see here and here).
Another approach is to assume that the GOP can garner an ever higher share of the white vote, thereby counteracting the pro-Democratic effect from the continuing rise of the minority population. In a strict mathematical sense, proponents of this view are correct that if the GOP can get a high enough share of the white vote and then increase that share every election, they can be electorally successful even if they do not increase their share of the burgeoning minority vote. But how plausible is this approach? Can Republicans reasonably expect to continue increasing their share of the white vote every election, surpassing their (unusually high) 59 percent share in 2012 — which was not enough to win that year -by ever-wider margins?
I don’t think so. White voters are likely to become less, not more, conservative over time, presenting a huge obstacle to this ever-increasing white Republican vote strategy.
Start with the white working class. These are the most conservative white voters, regularly giving Republicans a 12-14 point larger margin than they receive among white college graduates. But white working class voters are declining precipitously as a share of voters (down from 54 to 36 percent between 1988 and 2012) while white college graduates are increasing their share (from 31 to 36 percent over the same time period). That means that the white working class is also declining as a share of white voters. Back in 1988, 64 percent of white voters were white working class; by 2012, that figure had dropped to just half of white voters. This trend is likely to continue for many years, making the white vote a harder not easier target for conservative appeals.
Another daunting obstacle to the GOP dream of an ever larger share of the white vote is the growing Millenial segment of the white electorate. The Millennial generation, as has been widely documented, is the most liberal generation in the overall electorate by a considerable margin. This is also true of white Millennials, who are considerably more progressive than their older counterparts. In the last two elections, the Republic margin among white Millennials has averaged 20 points below that among white voters as a whole. And Millennials are becoming a larger and larger proportion of the white electorate with every passing year. By the time the 2020 election is held, they will be around 37 percent of eligible white voters -close to 2 in 5 white voters.
Republicans in the future will thus be attempting to squeeze ever more white votes out of a white electorate which is being steadily liberalized both by educational attainment and generational replacement. This is not an impossible task, but it is surely very, very difficult. Perhaps it’s time for a re-think in Republican circles: the future of white people appears less promising for the GOP than they had supposed.

Harold Meyerson’s Washington Post column, “Messina’s misguided embrace of Cameron raises questions” makes important points about the Obama’s campaign manager and current chairman of organizing for America helping out Britain’s Tory Prime Minister’s reelection campaign.
“Messina works for pro-immigrant and anti-austerity causes on this side of the Atlantic and for anti-immigrant and pro-austerity causes on the other,” explains Meyerson. He acknowledges that other political consultants have done election work abroad.

Some consultants maintain a level of ideological consistency in their globe-trotting: Pollster Stan Greenberg, for instance, has worked for Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, the Labor Party’s Tony Blair and the German Social Democrats’ Gerhard Schroeder. Others consultants are less picky. Douglas Schoen polled for both Clinton and Silvio Berlusconi. (Whatever consistency that may reveal isn’t ideological.)

But Messina’s work for Cameron takes political fickleness to another level, argues Meyerson:

So why make an issue of Messina’s meandering? Isn’t it just illustrative of the proclivity of some consultants for high-dollar candidates?
There are two reasons why it’s more disquieting than the normal scramble for more clients. First, Messina isn’t just a consultant; he is also the chairman of Organizing for Action, which describes itself on its Web site as an “organization established to support President Obama in achieving enactment of the national agenda Americans voted for on Election Day 2012.” The site touts the necessity of investing public dollars in infrastructure and highlights the efforts of volunteers across the country to win passage of immigration reform. If Organizing for Action’s members had any say in the matter, they almost surely wouldn’t approve of the group’s chairman going to work for Britain’s anti-immigrant, anti-public investment prime minister. Indeed, if they had any say in the matter, they might ask Messina to choose between Obama’s agenda and Cameron’s. If he opted to keep working for Cameron, they might just opt for a less-conflicted leader. But as the structural continuation of Obama for America, the president’s official reelection campaign, Organizing for Action is no more controlled by its members than any other electoral campaign organization is controlled by its volunteers. If the organization’s leader spends part of his time opposing the president’s agenda in a land much like our own, there’s nothing the members can do about it.
The other disquieting aspect of Messina’s misalliance is that it reflects an emerging set of political beliefs among some younger Democratic Party leaders who have grown close to Wall Street, Silicon Valley or both — as Messina did while bringing both big money and technological wizardry to Obama’s reelection campaign. This umpteenth iteration of the New Democrats believes in such socially liberal causes as gay marriage but is skeptical of unions and appalled at economic populism. At times, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel exemplifies this breed of Democrat, but the group’s true poster child is Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who defended Wall Street during the 2012 controversy over Bain Capital’s plant closings (“stop attacking private equity,” he said on “Meet The Press”) and who has actually had a high-tech start-up personally bestowed on him by his Silicon Valley fans.
For Democrats such as these, Cameron’s Tories, in their support for gay marriage, their opposition to labor (and Labor) and their defense of big banks against the European Union’s efforts to regulate them, may look surprisingly simpatico. These synergies probably seem less apparent to the many thousands of Obama volunteers still active in Organizing for Action, but what do they matter? They can’t even keep their chairman from crossing the Atlantic to mock their beliefs.

You couldn’t blame OFA’s members for thinking that Jim Messina really, really needs to resign – or be fired — as head of OFA and let someone run it who actually believes in the organization’s goals and mission.

Here’s an excellent quickie teach-in for rebutting Republican economic mythology from former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, via HuffPo and YouTube:

From Jonathan Cohn’s post “The Big Savings Obamacare Critics Miss” at The New Republic about a new study for the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted by by Larry Levitt, Gary Claxton and Anthony Damico.:

The authors start by figuring out what the initial, upfront cost of insurance will be for people buying coverage on the exchanges. Based on Congressional Budget Office projections, the average across all households–that is, indivdiuals and families, of all ages–works out to $8,250 a year. That’s not a bad price for comprehensive coverage: It’s in the same ballpark as policies that employers provide employees. Still, it’s more than some families buying coverage on their own might pay today, because they have skimpy policies or benefit from preferential pricing for the healthy. thatObamacare prohibits. That’s why conservatives insist people won’t want to sign up for Obamacare’s insurance options.
…According to the Kaiser study, the subsidies on average will reduce premiums by $2,672, or about a third of the price. The averages mask a lot of variation, with more affluent people getting less assistance and less affluent people getting more assistance. People with incomes of more than four times the poverty line, or about $94,000 for a family of four, get no discount at all. That’s one reason why some people really will pay more for their insurance next year.
Still, the number of people receiving discounts is a lot larger than even many analysts seem to realize. It turns out that about half the people who buy their own insurance today will be eligible for subsidies. For them, the subsidies will be worth an average of $5,548 per household, effectively discounting the price by two-thirds…Keep in mind that people who choose less expensive options, like those that cover fewer expenses, will pay even less for their coverage.
“It makes sense to look at what people will pay for health insurance after taking tax credits into account, just like we do for things like 401(k) plans, child care, or educational expenses,” Levitt [one of the study’s authors] told me. “The law provides a surprising amount of financial relief for people who are buying their own insurance today, not to mention the uninsured, who tend to have lower incomes.” Len Nichols, a health economist at George Mason University, agrees. “In many ways, what the ACA is about is extending premium tax breaks to those without good employer offers today, and doing so through a sliding scale that provides the most help to those who need it most.”

No surprise that this all-important benefit is not addressed by GOP repeal advocates. Dems would be wise to not let them get away with this ‘oversight’ so easilly.