After months of scheming and maneuvering to boost their national poll standings and thus qualify for the ten-candidate first Republican candidates’ debate on Fox News, the hammer finally fell on seven would-be presidents who did not make the cut. I talked about the implications today at the Washington Monthly:

Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki and Jim Gilmore…have been relegated to a 5:00 PM “forum” on Fox tomorrow that will last an hour; the top ten will rumble for two hours at 9:00 PM.
One of the story-lines for the next couple of weeks will be the fate of the candidates who didn’t make the cut. Will the media start treating them like the Walking Dead? Will donors and previously committed activists abandon them? Will any of them see the handwriting on the wall and just drop out? Or could this whole make-the-top-ten obsession of the last couple of months turn out to have been a chimera?
You’d have to figure that three of the leftover candidates have a survival advantage. Perry has gotten off to a good start substantively and in terms of early Iowa impressions. He also has a lifeline to Texas and Christian Right money. Fiorina remains a candidate other Republicans want to push in front of cameras to savage Hillary Clinton without the appearance of male pigginess. And Lindsey Graham is this cycle’s clown prince, beloved by media for his jokiness, his moderation on some domestic issues, and his mad bomber hawkiness on foreign policy, making him a nice matched set with Rand Paul.
As long as Rick Santorum has Foster Friess willing to finance his Super-PAC, however, he can probably stick around. And what else does Bobby Jindal have to do? Govern Louisiana? Hah!
In the wake of not making the Fox cut, Team Jindal has settled on an interesting reaction: predicting Bobby will overwhelm the field with his Big Brain (per Buzzfeed‘s Rosie Gray):

The Bobby Jindal campaign likewise responded with a certain level of disdain for its fellow undercard debaters.
“Unlike other candidates, Bobby has a tremendous bandwidth for information and policy,” said Jindal spokesperson Shannon Dirman. “He’s smart, has the backbone to do the right thing, and his experience has prepared him well for debates on any number of policy topics. If anyone thinks they can beat him in a debate I’d love to learn about it.”

Bobby used the term “bandwidth” himself a couple of times during Monday’s Voters First Forum in NH. It’s apparently the new term for “smartest guy in the room,” which will probably be etched on Jindal’s political tombstone. He’s got all the arrogance of Donald Trump, but without the poll numbers.

Another theory is that the “undercard” debaters tomorrow will benefit from not having to share a stage with Donald Trump. If no one much is watching, though, the 5:00 PM forum will just be another place in America without a spotlight tomorrow.

In his New Yorker article, “Donald Trump’s Sales Pitch,” James Surowiecki shares some salient thoughts about white working-class support for Donald Trump:

Donald Trump’s campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again!” A better one might be “Only in America.” You could not ask for a better illustration of the complexity of ordinary Americans’ attitudes toward class, wealth, and social identity than the fact that a billionaire’s popularity among working-class voters has given him the lead in the race for the Republican Presidential nomination. In a recent Washington Post/ABC poll, Trump was the candidate of choice of a full third of white Republicans with no college education. Working-class voters face stagnant wages and diminished job prospects, and a 2014 poll found that seventy-four per cent of them think “the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy.” Why on earth would they support a billionaire?
Part of the answer is Trump’s nativist and populist rhetoric. But his wealth is giving him a boost, too. The Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who’s published reams of work on white working-class attitudes, told me, “There is no bigger problem for these voters than the corruption of the political system. They think big companies are buying influence, while average people are blocked out.” Trump’s riches allow him to portray himself as someone who can’t be bought, and his competitors as slaves to their donors. (Ross Perot pioneered this tactic during the 1992 campaign.) “I don’t give a shit about lobbyists,” Trump proclaimed at an event in May. And his willingness to talk about issues that other candidates are shying away from, like immigration and trade, reinforces the message that money makes him free.
Trump has also succeeded in presenting himself as a self-made man, who has flourished thanks to deal-making savvy. In fact, Trump was born into money, and his first great real-estate success–the transformation of New York’s Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt–was enabled by a tax abatement worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet many voters see Trump as someone who embodies the American dream of making your own fortune. And that dream remains surprisingly potent: in a 2011 Pew survey, hard work and personal drive (not luck or family connections) were the factors respondents cited most frequently to explain why people got ahead. Even Trump’s unabashed revelling in his wealth works to his benefit, since it makes him seem like an ordinary guy who can’t get over how cool it is to be rich.

Surowiecki goes on to point out that Trump’s ‘winner’ image is packaged in a veil of distractions, since his business losses have included four bankruptcies, which he shrewdly projects as biz as usual for a courageous, visionary entrepreneur. “…The businessman he most resembles is P. T. Barnum…Barnum’s key insight into how to arrest public attention was that, to some degree, Americans enjoy brazen exaggeration. No American businessman since Barnum has been a better master of humbug…”
Surowiecki says it is “highly-improbable that he could ultimately win the nomination.” Yet “his bizarre blend of populist message and glitzy ways” resonates well “with precisely the voters that any Republican candidate needs in order to get elected.” As Greenberg says, “Trump is a huge problem for the Party. He’s appealing to a very important part of the base, and bringing out the issues the other candidates don’t want to be talking about.”
Democrats have known at least since FDR, and later JFK, that working-class voters don’t care how much money a candidate has, as long as the candidate seems honest and unafraid to support bold policies that can improve their lives.
Trump gets credit for being honest, just because he has no filter between his brain and his mouth, and that makes him look candid in comparison to his equivocating opposition, all of whom seem to be beholden to one sugar daddy or another. But that’s only part of what is needed to get elected. When the novelty fades, and Trump is held accountable to explain how his policies can benefit working people, that’s when he will tank as gloriously as he has risen.

From Jonathan Martin’s New York Times article, “Democrats Unveil a Plan to Fight Gerrymandering“:

The Democratic Governors Association is creating a fund dedicated to winning races in states where governors have some control over congressional redistricting, the party’s first step in a long-range campaign to make control of the House more competitive.
Billed as “Unrig the Map,” the effort will target 18 of the 35 states in which governors play a role in redistricting, and where new congressional maps could allow Democrats to win House seats that are now drawn in a way to favor Republicans. The fund will be used for governors’ races over the next five years, leading up to the 2020 census.
Democratic officials said that they hoped to raise “tens of millions” for the effort and that they believed they could gain as many as 44 House seats if lines were more favorably redrawn in the 18 battleground states. Many of those states still have Republican-controlled legislatures, but with Democratic governors in place they could at least veto the next round of congressional maps and send the disputes to the courts.

“About time” or “What took them so long?” seem like appropriate responses, before we settle for “better late than never.” But this campaign is really a call to arms for Democrats, who get it that all the good we do in presidential election years is rigged to be undone in the following midterm elections, and without a congressional working majority Democratic presidents will be doomed to nibbling at the fringes of social change into the forseeable future.
Martin reminds his readers of one of the most disturbing political statistics in recent memory — that Democrats won 2 million more votes than Republicans in 2010, but still we got “shellacked.” The presidential race gets all of the media glory, but the midterms define the limits of the majority’s hopes and dreams, thanks in large part to gerrymandering. Yes, political apathy and voter suppression also play important roles in the midterm “correction.” But having no plan to fight gerrymandering has proven to be a loser.
But ther DGA initiative won’t be cheap. As Martin points out,

..Democrats have also been badly outplayed and outspent in the battle for statehouses. Both parties operate networks of political committees intended to channel national money into governor and state legislative races. But the Republican version is far better financed: The Republican Governors Association, for example, spent $170 million during the 2014 cycle, compared with $98 million for the Democratic Governors Association.
Democratic governors and strategists have often complained that their donors are too focused on more glamorous presidential and Senate races, while Republicans have been pouring money into state-level contests.

Martin concludes by quoting top Democratic donor Peter Emerson, who said, “We’re late to the game, but we don’t have to come up with a new strategy — we just have to adapt to their strategy.”
Better we should improve on their strategy and use our edge in social media and small donor contributions to fund the campaign. Dems simply must make this campaign a priority or accept the alternative — perpetual gridlock.

Following what HuffPo’s political commentaors Michael McAuliffe and Christine Conetta call “The GOP’s Epic Month Of Dysfunction,” Michael Tomasky puts the Republicans’ current situation in perspective with his Daily Beast post “The GOP: Still the Party of Stupid,” which calls the current GOP pack of presidential wannabes “an astonishingly weak field.” Tomasky notes the GOP field’s “hostility to actual ideas that might stand a chance of addressing the country’s actual problems,” and adds, “The Democratic Party has its problems, but at least Democrats are talking about middle-class wage stagnation, which is the country’s core economic quandary.”
“If Jeb Bush wants to be a different kind of Republican, he should end GOP war on voting,” writes Paul Waldman at The Plum Line. Walkman explained, “And while Jeb will happily tout his record on things like charter schools as helping African-Americans, one topic he didn’t raise [when he recently spoke at the Urban League] was voting rights. That may be because on that subject, his hands are as dirty as anyone’s…When he was governor of Florida, Bush’s administration ordered a purge of the voter rolls that disenfranchised thousands of African-Americans, in a happy coincidence that made it possible for his brother to become president. The private corporation they hired to eliminate felons from the rolls did so by chucking off people who had a names similar to those of felons; people who had voted all their lives showed up on election day to be told that they couldn’t vote….At a moment when his party is fighting with all its might to limit the number of African-Americans who make it to the polls, it’s going to be awfully hard to make a case that the GOP has their interests at heart.”
NYT’s Jonathan Martin presents an interesting argument that Jeb Bush benefits from Trump’s campaign because Bush wasn’t going to get those voters anyway, and Trump draws support away from Scott Walker. “Mr. Trump’s bombastic ways have simultaneously made it all but impossible for those vying to be the alternative to Mr. Bush to emerge, and easier for Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor, to position himself as the serious and thoughtful alternative to a candidate who has upended the early nominating process.” Bush can’t have Trump as his running mate, unless he wants to run alongside a loose canon. So how would he keep Trump from running a third party campaign? Cabinet post?
John Sides interviews David Shor at The Monkey Cage on the topic, “Do early campaign polls tell us anything? Let’s ask a campaign data guru.” Much of their discussion is about the utility of early polls to political scientists (they agree that early polls don’t help much with outcome predictions). But I think they missed an important benefit of early polls, which is they help candidates to better hone their messaging.
Marian Cogan’s “Everyone Is Already Freaking Out Over the 2016 Election Polls” at New York Magazine has more to say about the misuse of early polling.
At The Upshot, Lynn Vavreck mulls over “2016 Endorsements: How and Why They Matter,” and shows that there is a relationship between a presidential candidate’s success and his/her endorsements. It’s just not quite so clear that it’s a causal relationship.
In his post at AlJazeera America, “Most Americans don’t vote in elections. Here’s why,” Demos research associate Sean McElwee contends that “The rise of the donor class and the influx of corporate cash have caused many voters to lose faith in politics.”
But many want to vote, but are still being denied their voting rights by Republican-driven suppressive state legislation and court rulings. Jim Rutenberg’s excellent “A Dream Undone” in the New York Times Magazine takes a thorough look “inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”
For Kasich’s campaign, there’s good news and bad news.

The New York Times screwed up badly on July 22nd, when ‘the newspaper of record’ ran a disastrously-flawed story saying that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has been targeted by criminal referrals from two inspectors general relating to her e-mail usage during her tenure as Secretary of State.
The Times report included some astounding errors, and the newspaper’s clumsy walkback compounded the mess exponentially. Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri responded with a devastating letter to executive editor Dean Banquet. The Eric Wemple blog at The Washington Post frames Palmieri’s letter and the stunningly inadequate Times response:

Thanks to a letter from Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri shared this evening with the Erik Wemple Blog, we now know that the version of events from within the Times was incomplete. In a lengthy, detailed and merciless letter, Palmieri documents just how rushed and reckless was the Times’ push to publish the story that night.

You can read more about it right here.

Those who follow the role of American labor unions in politics will find “Hillary Clinton’s multi-step strategy to woo labor: Before winning over AFL-CIO, she hopes to gain backing of individual unions” by Brian Mahoney and Gabriel Debenedetti of interest. Writing in Politico, the authors explain:

…The Democratic front-runner’s machine is turning its attention to individual leaders one by one, looking to methodically win over unions as she faces off against an insurgent Bernie Sanders — a longtime union ally whose fiery rallies have riled up rank-and-file labor members across the country.
Clinton spent about an hour with the AFL-CIO’s executive council on Thursday, with the ultimate goal of securing the formal endorsement of the federation of 57 labor unions and the political organization and millions of dollars in campaign money that would come with it. But while Sanders shows staying power in the early-voting states, the organized labor movement sees an opportunity to gain leverage over the party’s likely nominee, whose labor bona fides are still a topic of debate among some activists.
As a result, Democrats associated with multiple campaigns don’t see the AFL-CIO taking the rare step of backing a candidate in the Democratic primary anytime soon, even if they expect it to eventually back Clinton and to keep urging local groups to stop backing Sanders…The Clinton campaign’s targets in the meantime? Some of the prominent unions that make up the AFL-CIO.

Debenedetti and Mahoney go on to note that Clinton has secured a key endorsement from the influential1.6-million member American Federation of Teachers, and is actively wooing the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, United Food and Commercial Workers and the 1.8 million member Service Employees International Union.
As for issues, the authors report that Clinton is focusing on “the AFL-CIO’s central demand for 2016: raising wages,” while remaining undecided regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which Sen. Bernie Sanders and former MD Governor Martin O’Malley oppose, joined by key unions, including the United Steelworkers.
Meanwhile, Sen. Sanders is reportedly racking up support from rank and file, as well as local labor leaders. Sanders, who is held in high regard by American labor leaders across the nation has a near-perfect track record on his votes on issues of critical concern to unions. Any union would be more than comfortable with a Sanders presidency. Should Clinton win the Democratic nomination to run for president, however, a Clinton-Sanders ticket would be hugely popular with unionized voters, who would likely also be fine with O’Malley against any Republican.
Despite numerous articles in recent years about organized labor’s declining membership and impact, when it comes to elections, no progressive constituency provides more support for Democrats in terms of both money and manpower than unions. That is a leading reason why Republicans are constantly seeking to destroy and undermine labor and worker rights.
Conversely, the next Democrat to win a landslide victory in a presidential election would be smart to strongly support and work for policies to revive the American labor movement, which remains the best hope for reducing income inequality and improving living standards for millions of American families.

One of the frustrating things about the immigration debate is that many conservatives have gotten into the habit of complaining about any solution to the problem of 11 million undocumented people that involves citizenship or even legalization. But when it comes to an alternative the Right typically changes the subject to “securing the border,” which does nothing about the 11 million already here. Mitt Romney articulated the implicit position of many Republicans in 2012–“self-deportation”–favoring harassment of suspected undocumented people and immigrants generally until they choose to go “home.” But that was a political loser. And so most anti-immigration-reform Republicans now shut up or stay vague on the subject. But this week, Donald Trump kind of blew up the conspiracy of silence, which I wrote about at Washington Monthly.

The Donald has done a signal service to public debate by coming right out and endorsing the implicit immigration policy of much of the Republican Party (per a report from CNN’s Jeremy Diamond):

Donald Trump, the Republican presidential hopeful who shot up to the head of the pack over his controversial comments about illegal immigrants, is finally starting to lay out an immigration policy.
Trump said Wednesday in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash that as president he would deport all undocumented immigrants and then allow the “good ones” to reenter the country through an “expedited process” and live in the U.S. legally, though not as citizens….
Trump would not say how he would locate, round up and deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants he says must go. Instead, he deflected, saying that while it may be a task too tall for politicians, it isn’t for a business mogul like himself.
“Politicians aren’t going to find them because they have no clue. We will find them, we will get them out,” Trump said. “It’s feasible if you know how to manage. Politicians don’t know how to manage.”

Yeah, sure: it’s just a management problem, and any tycoon worth his salt can figure out a way via universal hourly traffic stops and police raids on workplaces and maybe house-to-house searches to “find them,” and then it’s just a matter of setting up a few thousand transit camps and deploying a few hundreds of thousands of cattle cars to round ’em up and “get them out.”
Estimates of the cost of mass deportation of the undocumented start at about $265 billion and range on up from there; one key variable is whether a sufficiently terroristic atmosphere would encourage some of these people to “self-deport,” as Mitt Romney surmised. Trump might even claim some of these folk will self-deport to get a prime place in the line to reenter the country as a permanent helot class if they pass muster. In any event, it would indeed make this country a very different place.
Now that Trump’s forced this issue right out in the open, it’s time for us all to ask him and other Republicans who won’t endorse a path to legalization exactly how much they are willing to spend in money and in lost civil liberties to implement their plans. No sense weaseling around and dog-whistling this issue any more.

We can only hope the subject comes up early and often in next week’s first GOP presidential candidates’ debate.

It was fifty years ago today (July 30, 1965) that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Medicare into law. Pictured above with LBJ are: fellow Democrats former President Harry S. Truman; Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey; First Lady Lady Bird Johnson; former First Lady Mrs. Bess Truman and other Democrats: “At the bill-signing ceremony President Johnson enrolled President Truman as the first Medicare beneficiary and presented him with the first Medicare card.”
From a DCCC e-blast: “Before Medicare was signed into law 50 years ago, fewer than 50% of seniors had insurance; 35% of seniors lived in poverty; Life expectancy was 8 years less for men and 5 less for women. Now, 5 decades later, 54 million people are enrolled in Medicare! It’s helped millions of older and disabled Americans across the country access quality health care. It’s truly been life-saving! And as Republicans try to tear Medicare to pieces, President Obama has fought to protect it for decades to come. Thanks to his Affordable Care Act, we’ve extended the life of the Medicare trust fund by 13 years.” More Medicare stats here.
Jonathan Cohn notes at HuffPo that “In the years leading up to Medicare’s creation, conservatives fought it bitterly, with Ronald Reagan famously warning it would create some kind of socialist apocalypse: “We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” Here’s an audio clip of the sainted Reagan dissing Medicare:
Yet, back then Medicare was passed with significant bipartisan support — the House passed the bill 313-115 on April 8, 1965. The Senate passed another version 68-21 on July 9. All of today’s Republican presidential candidates want to eradicate, eviscerate or weaken the program. Jeb Bush recently said the U.S. needs to “phase out” Medicare. Send. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz recently voted against a measure to protect Medicare benefits from a “voucher” measure.
Economically, Medicare has proved to be a huge bargain for taxpayers. As NYT columnist/Nobel laureate Paul Krugman notes, “It’s true that for most of Medicare’s history its spending has grown faster than the economy as a whole — but this is true of health spending in general. In fact, Medicare costs per beneficiary have consistently grown more slowly than private insurance premiums, suggesting that Medicare is, if anything, better than private insurers at cost control. Furthermore, other wealthy countries with government-provided health insurance spend much less than we do, again suggesting that Medicare-type programs can indeed control costs..Medicare spending keeps coming in ever further below expectations, to an extent that has revolutionized our views about the sustainability of the program and of government spending as a whole.”
A major ‘side benefit’ of the program: Medicare Helped To Desegregate Hospitals.
Medicare is enormously popular. As Kenneth T. Walsh reports at U.S. News: “…The basic program of Medicare now covers an estimated 55 million people, and three-quarters of Americans consider Medicare “very important,” according to a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Seventy percent say it should remain as it is. So politicians who propose major changes do so at their peril.”
Robert Pear’s New York Times article commemorating Medicare’s 50th anniversary concludes with this paragraph: “In a comment echoed by other Medicare beneficiaries, Judith M. Anderson, 69, of Chicago said: “After a lifetime of an utterly boring personal health care history, I was diagnosed with cancer in 2013. Without Medicare, I would be bankrupt and probably dead by now. I had three surgeries and chemotherapy and paid less than $1,000 out of pocket. I love Medicare.”

The heavy maneuvering among Senate Republicans to get a vote on a symbolic, sure-to-be-filibustered-and-if-necessarily-vetoed amendment cutting off all federal funding to Planned Parenthood in response to the series of videos an antichoice sting operation is generating sure looks like Kabuki theater to most Democrats. But it reflects a bit of a panic among Republicans dealing with the fury of antichoicers over the failure of the GOP to keep its promises. I wrote about this at Washington Monthly yesterday.

[W]ho really cares how far down the road to perdition the [Planned Parenthood defunding} amendment was allowed to proceed?
But for serious antichoice types, the answer to this question would be: We do, and thus the entire GOP we’ve been propping up for decades should, too. That’s pretty much the message sent by conservative columnist Emmanuel Gobry at The Week today:

I sincerely believe in the pro-life agenda. And it frustrates me to no end that even as pro-lifers have delivered electoral majorities to the GOP over and over again, the GOP has not kept up its end of the bargain. Five Republican-appointed justices sit on the Supreme Court, and yet Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land.
Early this year, the GOP failed at what should have been a simple task: Pass an enormously popular late-term abortion ban. Passing a bill that polls well, and is symbolically very important to your biggest constituency, ought to be the no-brainer to end all no-brainers. But Republican politicians couldn’t even do that.
And now, after the devastating revelations that Planned Parenthood routinely engages in the sale of baby organs for profit — something that is illegal, unethical, and disgusting on at least 12 different levels — GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell couldn’t bring himself to allow to the Senate floor a bill to defund that activity by Planned Parenthood. Why not? Because he wants to pass a highway bill instead — a pork-laden monstrosity that comes with the disgusting cherry on top that is the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, a corporate welfare program that free-market conservative activists particularly detest.

The road Gobry wants the GOP to take on abortion legislation will inevitably end at a government shutdown that will backfire on Republicans. And Lord knows Senate Republicans have used every code word imaginable to elicit a negative position on Roe v. Wade from judicial nominees, especially since the Souter “stab in the back,” but hey, the current fly in the ointment, Anthony Kennedy, was the appointee of The Gipper himself, the man who made uncompromising opposition to reproductive rights an unchanging part of the GOP platform.
But I guess if you think legalized abortion is an American Holocaust, as folks like Gabry often suggest, then you’re probably going to insist on results for your decades-long investment of energy, money, votes and agitprop. I mean, if anti-choicers can successfully convey the lie that they are only concerned about a tiny number of late-term abortions that “shock the conscience” of the casual, murder-tolerating Good Germans in the political center–when their real goal is to ban the vast majority of abortions that occur in the first trimester, that do not shock that many consciences–then can’t the GOP contrive some way to get the ball over the goal line? So that leads to the sort of strict liability, “no excuses” demand that Gobry issues:

We should rule with fear. For the past 30 years, we’ve been bringing a hymnal to a gunfight. The Tea Party has shown how it’s done: Don’t like someone? Primary them. End their political career. That’s the only thing politicians fear.
I’m done waiting. I hope you are, too.

Before you chuckle at the arrival of another intra-GOP fight over priorities, keep in mind that if Republicans win the White House and hang onto the Senate, they will indeed run out of excuses for saying “later” to their antichoice activists. Perhaps they’ll be forced to resort to the “nuclear option” to get rid of any possible filibuster against antichoice legislation or the next Republican Supreme Court nominee. As for said nominee, I think we will see an end to all of the dog-whistling about abortion; no matter how much it violates every premise of our legal system to pre-commit judges to a position on future litigation, we’ll see nominees who are all but visibly frothing to overturn Roe. In other words, if 2016 goes their way, the antichoicers may be able at long last to call in what I’ve referred to as a balloon payment on their mortgage on the soul of the GOP.

Don’t be surprised if the antichoicers keep Republicans hopping.

None of the declared Republican presidential candidates could be considered even remotely-friendly to voting rights and all would likely rejoice in further suppression of demographic groups who tend to cast their ballots for Democrats.
But if you had to pick the three most dangerous advocates of voter suppression among the GOP wannabe field, you would likely pick Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Jeb Bush. These three, more than any of the others have demonstrated an eagerness to manipulate, eliminate or even violate voting rights laws.
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee sets the standard for lowbrow voter suppression advocacy among current GOP presidential candidates. As Mollie Reilly explained in her HuffPo article “Ohio Issue 2: Mike Huckabee Urges Voter Suppression Against Opponents Of Anti-Union Measure“:

As reported by MasonBuzz, the 2008 presidential candidate spoke to a crowd of about 350 Issue 2 supporters at a pancake breakfast and rally in Mason, Ohio on Friday. Huckabee expressed his support for the referendum, and outlined what supporters could do to ensure the measure’s passage in next month’s general election.
“Make a list,” said Huckabee, referring to supporters’ family and friends. “Call them and ask them, ‘Are you going to vote on Issue 2 and are you going to vote for it?’ If they say no, well, you just make sure that they don’t go vote. Let the air out of their tires on election day. Tell them the election has been moved to a different date. That’s up to you how you creatively get the job done.”
The crowd laughed at Huckabee’s remarks. In 2009, he made a similar joke in Virginia, saying, “Let the air our of their tires … keep ’em home. Do the Lord’s work.”

When it comes to higher-brow voter suppression, Sen. Ted Cruz is the GOP’s top advocate. Cruz, like Chief Justice Roberts, clerked for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who had a particularly sordid history as an advocate of voter suppression. In 1999, Cruz been working as a domestic-policy adviser on the George W. Bush Presidential campaign. In the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin explains some of Cruz’s role in opposition to voting rights of pro-Democratic demographic groups.

When the result of the 2000 campaign devolved into a legal struggle over the vote in Florida, Cruz was well situated to play an important role. By the Thursday after Election Day, he was in Tallahassee. “Through an odd bit of serendipity, it happened that I was the only practicing lawyer, and, in particular, constitutional litigator, who had been on the full-time campaign team,” Cruz told me. “One of the realities of the recount and life is that lawyers and political folks don’t really speak the same language. By the accident of being in that place I found myself, there was sort of a small leadership team that consisted of Jim Baker and Josh Bolten and Ted Olson and George Terwilliger and Ben Ginsberg and me. And I’m twenty-nine years old, this kid, and all of these other folks are Cabinet members and masters of the universe.” Ginsberg, the national counsel to the Bush campaign, and his associates set up seven teams of lawyers to address the sprawling controversies generated by the recount, and Cruz was the only lawyer who served on all seven. His job was to encourage communication and assure consistent positions.
“I’ve been amused at some of the subsequent descriptions of Bush versus Gore, because they sort of described us as this fine-oiled machine with a careful strategy,” Cruz said. “It was one tiny notch slightly below utter chaos.”
Cruz’s initial assignment was to assemble a legal team. His first call was to his former mentor Carvin, who wound up representing Bush before the Florida Supreme Court. Cruz’s second call was to a Washington lawyer named John Roberts. “John had been a friend and a Rehnquist clerk–I’ve known John a long time,” Cruz said. “Everyone we called, without exception, dropped everything and came down…”

Toobin recounts Cruz’s role as a successful advocate in cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and notes:

In another case, a major challenge to Texas’s 2003 electoral redistricting on the ground that it discriminated against minorities, the number of plaintiffs before the Court was so large that Cruz was allowed to file a hundred-and-twenty-three-page brief in response, well above the usual page limit. He won that case as well.

Should any Democrats find themselves feeling indifferent about the prospect of Jeb Bush getting the GOP 2016 nomination, take a stroll down memory lane with Greg Palast and feel the burn once again:

WI Governor Scott Walker could also be added to the short list of the GOP candidates who are most invested in voter suppression, given his history and relationship to the Koch brothers and their sponsorship of ALEC’s voter suppression template legislation. And don’t be shocked if two of these candidates end up on the GOP ticket. If Bush or Walker wins the nomination, Huckabee could be on their veep short lists, if they need an attack-dog/bomb-thrower. Cruz or Huck might end up as any other GOP nominee’s running mate. It’s hard to imagine Bush settling for a second spot, but there are quite a few plausible Republican ticket scenarios that have one of these four candidates on the 2016 GOP ticket.
Even more voter suppression will be the order of the day if the GOP wins the white house and control of the Senate, especially with Justice Roberts at the helm of the U.S. Supreme Court. A rigged electoral system designed to disenfranchise millions more voters and permanently disadvantage Democrats will then become a top priority of the federal government.
It’s a nightmare scenario, not just for Democrats, but also the integrity of Democracy itself. That’s why Democrats must support the party’s 2016 nominee with unprecedented unity, energy and resources.