Texas Primaries Await U.S. Supreme Court Ruling

Texas Tribune

If Texas is going to hold primary elections on April 3, the federal courts will have to pick up the pace. (see revised schedule)

A panel of federal judges in Washington, D.C., is deciding whether congressional and legislative district maps drawn by the Legislature last year give proper protection to minority voters under the federal Voting Rights Act. At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court is deciding whether an interim map drawn by federal judges in San Antonio is legal.

In the meanwhile, there are no maps in place for the impending Texas elections.

A panel of federal judges in San Antonio has the job of deciding whether the maps legislators drew last year properly account for population growth and representation, and that court will also finally approve maps to be used for this year's elections. But since the D.C. judges moved slowly in deciding whether the maps follow the Voting Rights Act, and the election season was almost under way, the San Antonio judges drew interim maps to be used in the meantime.

Instead of starting with the Legislature's maps, the San Antonio court started with the maps currently in use. As a result, their maps weren't as strongly Republican as the ones that lawmakers drew.

The state objected and took its case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which put everything on ice and scheduled hearings for next week.

Read the full story @ Texas Tribune

Texas Medicaid Cuts Leave Elderly And Cancer Patients Without Care

By Alex Branchabranch @ star-telegram.com

A new state Medicaid policy could leave some elderly and low-income Texans without access to certain treatments, including crucial cancer medications, critics say. Starting today, Medicaid will no longer cover the full co-payment of patients who also qualify for Medicare, a change that would affect 333,000 people known as "dual-eligible" clients.

The change is expected to save $1.1 billion over the remainder of the two-year budget cycle, about $475 million of which will be state funding, according to state health officials. However, the Texas Medical Association and state Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, say the financial ramifications for physicians could force them to limit the number of dual-eligible patients they treat because the cost of service would not be adequately covered.

In particular, providers who treat cancer patients with chemotherapy medications have raised concerns that the change could make it "difficult to impossible" for patients to receive their medications, Davis wrote in a letter last week to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. "I would like to know how the Heath and Human Services Commission evaluated the anticipated impact of these reimbursement cuts," she wrote.

Stephanie Goodman, a health and human services spokeswoman, said in an e-mail response to the Star-Telegram that the state is looking into Davis' concerns and has asked the state medical association to help identify doctors or specialists disproportionately affected. The process will reveal whether "we need to make any changes or exempt certain kinds of providers or services from the new policy," she said

Read more @ star-telegram.com

US AG Holder’s Voting Rights Gamble - The Supreme Court Voter ID Showdown

During 2011, this blog published many articles about the GOP's push to pass legislation requiring one of a very limited selection of government-issued photo IDs (like a driver’s license, passport or gun permit) to vote.

The new laws require specific identification not carried by a disproportionate portion of certain demographic groups that tend to vote Democratic. These groups include Blacks, Hispanics, the poor, seniors, and the young.

Because such laws do have a disproportionate on certain demographic groups, the U.S. Department of Justice, last Friday, blocked South Carolina's new voter photo ID law. It is widely thought the Justice Dept. will move to also block Texas' new voter photo ID law in the coming weeks.

Two of our articles looked at the pending show down down between the U.S. Department of Justice and the conservative leaning justices on the Supreme Court of the United States overt the voter photo ID laws and possibly the 1965 Voting Rights Act, itself:

• Does Texas Want the USDOJ To Reject Its Voter Photo ID Law?
• DOJ v. SCOTUS On Texas' Voter Photo ID Law

On Friday, Slate published an article that also looks at the pending USDOJ v. SCOTUS showdown:

On the Friday before Christmas Day, the Department of Justice formally objected to a new South Carolina law requiring voters to produce an approved form of photo ID in order to vote. That move already has drawn cheers from the left and jeers from the right. The DoJ said South Carolina could not show that its new law would not have an adverse impact on racial minorities, who are less likely to have acceptable forms of identification.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley denounced the DoJ decision blocking the law under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act: “It is outrageous, and we plan to look at every possible option to get this terrible, clearly political decision overturned so we can protect the integrity of our electoral process and our 10th Amendment rights.” The state’s attorney general vowed to fight the DoJ move in court, and thanks to an odd quirk in the law, the issue could get fast-tracked to the Supreme Court, which could well use it to strike down the Voting Rights Act provision as unconstitutional before the 2012 elections.

The current dispute has an eerie echo. More than 45 years ago in 1966, South Carolina also went to the Supreme Court to complain that Section 5 unconstitutionally intruded on its sovereignty. Under the 1965 Act, states with a history of racial discrimination like South Carolina could not make changes in its voting rules—from major changes like redistricting to changes as minor as moving a polling place across the street—without getting the permission of either the U.S. Department of Justice or a three-judge court in Washington, D.C. The state had to show the law was not enacted with the purpose, or effect, of making minority voters worse off than they already were.

... In its 1966 South Carolina v. Katzenbach decision, the Supreme Court said the law requiring “preclearance” of voting changes, while an extreme intrusion on states’ rights, was necessary because lesser measures—like federal government suits over each discriminatory voting practice—had not worked. ... Today, Some conservatives argue that Section 5 is no longer constitutional, because the states subject to preclearance don’t present a special danger of racial discrimination.

... If South Carolina argues in court [in 2012] that it is unconstitutional to require it to submit its voter ID law for federal approval, and the three-judge court rejects that argument, it is hard to imagine the Supreme Court conservatives refusing to hear that case.

... Why did the Obama DoJ deny preclearance, knowing it could well set up this massive confrontation and potentially lead to the downfall of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act? There are both principled and political reasons.

First of all, it was the right thing to do. As the DoJ letter explains, South Carolina presented no evidence that its law was necessary to prevent voter fraud, and the evidence was uncontested that minority voters were less likely to have ID

Second, if the Court is going to strike down Section 5, it might be politically better for this to happen before the 2012 elections, so that Obama can run against a Supreme Court, and the possibility that a President Romney could appoint a young version of Justice Scalia to take a retiring Justice Kennedy’s seat on the court, solidifying the court’s conservative majority for a generation.

It’s a gamble, both legally and politically, and no one knows for sure how it will turn out. But South Carolina may fare much better before the Roberts court this spring than it did before the Warren court in 1966.

Read the full article @ Slate.

Voter Photo ID Related Stories:

Keeping Students From the Polls

Among the findings of the latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Dec. 7-11, 2011:

"There is a sharp difference by age when it comes to the word liberal – while 61% of people under age 30 react positively, just 34% of those age 65 and older say the same. By contrast, reactions to the word conservative are almost identical across all age groups."

In 2008, enthusiasm about Obama’s message of “hope” and “change” toward more liberal (progressive) ideals drew college students and other young adults to volunteer for political groups, to register to vote and to head to the polls on Election Day. In 2008, nearly 70 percent of voters 29 and younger voted for Obama — the highest share of youth votes ever to go to any one candidate, according to exit polls. (note: for the Nov. 2012 election, those young 2008 voters will be age 34 and younger.)

In a national survey of Americans, ages 18-29, conducted by Harvard’s Institute of Politics in March 2011, 80 percent said they have a Facebook account. Among college students, 90 percent use the account. Facebook friend statuses were second only to major national newspapers in sources that young adults said they would be interested in turning to for information about the 2012 campaign.

Republican state lawmakers in seven states, including Texas, have passed strict laws requiring one of a very limited selection of government-issued photo IDs (like a driver’s license or a passport) to vote. Many college and university students carry only their student ID cards and don’t have one of the newly required voting IDs. Many of those new photo ID laws have been interpreted as prohibiting out-of-state driver’s licenses from being used for voting, which will further restrict the states' "non-resident" students for voting.

It’s all part of a widespread Republican effort to restrict the voting rights of demographic groups that tend to vote Democratic. Blacks, Hispanics, the poor and the young, who are more likely to support President Obama, are disproportionately represented in the 21 million people without government IDs. On Friday, the Justice Department, finally taking action against these abuses, blocked the new voter ID law in South Carolina.

Republicans usually don’t want to acknowledge that their purpose is to turn away voters, especially when race is involved, so they invented an explanation, claiming that stricter ID laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud. In fact, there is almost no voter fraud in America to prevent.

"I don't want everybody to vote," Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and other conservative organizations, said while addressing a conservative Republican audience. "Our leverage in the elections goes up as the voting populace goes down," he added after he denigrated those who seek "good government" through maximum, informed voter participation as people who suffer from the "goo goo syndrome." Weyrich was also a co-founder of the Council for National Policy, a strategy-formulating organization for social conservatives; co-publisher of the magazine Conservative Digest; and national chairman of Coalitions for America, an association of conservative activist organizations.

William O’Brien, the speaker of the New Hampshire State House, told a Tea Party group earlier this year that students are “foolish” and tend to “vote their feelings” because they lack life experience.

“Voting as a liberal,” he said, “that’s what kids do.” And that’s why, he said, he supported measures to prohibit students from voting from their college addresses and to end same-day registration.

New Hampshire Republicans even tried to pass a bill that would have kept students who previously lived elsewhere from voting in the state; fortunately, the measure failed, as did the others Mr. O’Brien favored.

Many students have taken advantage of Election Day registration laws, which is one reason Maine Republicans passed a law eliminating the practice. Voters restored it last month, but Republican lawmakers there are already trying new ways to restrict voting. The secretary of state said he was investigating students who are registered to vote in the state but pay out-of-state tuition.

Wisconsin once made it easy for students to vote, making it one of the leading states in turnout of younger voters in 2004 and 2008. When Republicans swept into power there last year, they undid all of that, imposing requirements that invalidated the use of virtually all college ID cards in voter registration. Colleges are scrambling to change their cards to add signatures and expiration dates, but it’s not clear whether the state will let them.

Imposing these restrictions to win an election will embitter a generation of students in its first encounter with the machinery of democracy.

- CHECK: REFRAMING THE WORD 'LIBERAL' http://on.fb.me/Who-Framed-Liberals