Desmond Meade won the MacArthur genius grant earlier this week for his campaign to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions in Florida. Michael Morse recently wrote about his historic effort and what Amendment 4 means for the future of felony disenfranchisement reform. Below is the abstract for Morse’s California Law Review article:

This Article offers an empirical account of felon disenfranchisement and legal financial obligations in the era of mass incarceration. It focuses on a 2018 ballot initiative, known as Amendment 4, which sought to end lifetime disenfranchisement in Florida. At the time, the Republican controlled state accounted for more than a quarter of the six million citizens disenfranchised across the United States. Marshaling hundreds of public information requests, the Article analyzes the petitions collected to qualify the initiative for the ballot, the ballots cast for its remarkable bipartisan victory, the voter registration records of people whose voting rights were restored, and the outstanding fines and fees that still prevent most people with felony convictions from voting. Part I offers a history of the campaign and the tradeoffs it made to win Republican support, including its decisions to deemphasize race and limit the scope of reform. Part II validates the campaign’s effort to depoliticize disenfranchisement by demonstrating the limited partisan consequences of restoring the right to vote to people with felony convictions. Finally, Part III shows how unpaid fines and fees undermined the campaign’s attempt to dismantle disenfranchisement. Despite Amendment 4, Florida continues to disenfranchise more citizens than any other state.

AP:

In their fight over trillions of dollars, their paramount policy goals and perhaps their political fate, this isn’t helping: Democratic progressives and centrists say they don’t trust each other. They’re tossing around words like “stupid” and “insanity” and they’re drawing lines in the sand.

Congressional majorities of both parties have rich histories of infighting when it comes to enacting their priorities, even when they control the White House and both chambers of Congress. Democrats had to overcome stark internal divisions in 2010 to enact President Barack Obama’s health care law. The GOP fell short in 2017 when it failed to repeal that statute, President Donald Trump’s top goal.

This time, Democrats’ internal battling over a 10-year, $3.5 trillion package of social and environmental initiatives comes with virtually no margin for error and lots at stake….

Yet instead of waiting for that accord to be struck, House leaders were honoring “some stupid, arbitrary deadline” that moderates demanded to debate and vote on the infrastructure bill this week, complained Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who heads the nearly 100-member Congressional Progressive Caucus.

As for moderates, Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., told reporters Wednesday that she wanted Biden, party leaders and outside allies like labor unions to lobby House Democrats to back the infrastructure measure.

“If the vote were to fail tomorrow or be delayed, there would be a significant breach in trust that would slow the momentum in moving forward in delivering the Biden agenda,” said Murphy, leader of the centrist House Blue Dog Coalition….

“It either shows Democrats can be trusted to govern” or not, he said of how the party will handle the current fight.

“It’s like the gunfight at the OK Corral,” Lawrence said. “Everybody has their guns pointed at each other. You either pull the trigger or go back into the saloon and try to work this thing out.”

Washington Post:

This is an example of how other democracies often choose their party leaders who then compete to lead the country (hint, they do not use American-style primary elections):

Fumio Kishida, Japan’s former foreign minister, who is set to become the country’s new prime minister after winning his party’s leadership vote on Wednesday, has vowed to counter China’s growing influence and redistribute the nation’s wealth to close the income gap.

Kishida, 64, will become prime minister on Monday following a special parliamentary session, replacing Yoshihide Suga, who decided to step down after just one year in power amid plummeting popularity over his handling of Japan’s coronavirus response.

The selection of Kishida, who served as foreign minister for many years under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, ensures a stable transition of power. After running in an unusually wide-open race that revealed frustrations among younger members of the party, Kishida said he would listen to feedback and work to restore public trust for a “rebirth” of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party….

But his first order of business will be preparing to fight a general election before the end of November. The LDP is expected to win, which would reaffirm Kishida’s ascent as prime minister.

Axios again:

Why it matters: LinkedIn is one of the only large American social media platforms to agree to the Chinese government’s demands to censor content, and is tasking its own employees with restricting what users in China can see.

“If LinkedIn’s behavior is normalized, it sends a message to companies across the globe that it is business as usual to enforce Beijing’s censorship demands globally,” PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said in a statement.

“This is a flashing red light that unless big tech firms like LinkedIn — owned by Microsoft — stand up to censorship, free speech worldwide will suffer.”  

From Politico’s Ally Mutnick:

Colorado’s new independent redistricting commission passed a congressional map late Tuesday that would give Republicans a decent shot at controlling four of eight House seats in a fast-growing state that’s become reliably blue.

In a marathon, six-and-a-half-hour Zoom meeting, all but one of the 12 commissioners agreed on one of nine proposals just minutes before their midnight Mountain Time deadline. The map now goes to the state Supreme Court, which is almost certain to give its sign-off…

The commissioners’ virtual meeting Tuesday oscillated between friendly banter, terse sniping and emotional pleas as the hours ticked by. But, ultimately, their seventh round of voting resulted in an 11-1 tally for the new map, with only one Democratic commissioner opposing it.

“We had our spats. We had our Kumbaya moments,” said Simon Tafoya, the Democratic commissioner who voted against the plan. “And I think at the end of the day we’ve all learned a lot, and through this experiment we call democracy.”…

In considering a new map, the commission had to take into account communities of interest, the location of existing counties and towns and the competitiveness of a given district. They are not, however, allowed to enact any map that has “been drawn for the purpose of protecting one or more members of or candidates for congress or a political party.”

“The plan we have is competitive,” said Danny Moore, a GOP commissioner, “But we didn’t sacrifice community of interest for competitiveness. No plan itself is perfect, but I believe this plan reflects the will of the people of the state of Colorado.”

This map would leave all incumbents in a strong position to win reelection.

Axios AM:

The rise of celebrity politicians is fueling record ad spending that will likely continue to flood American airwaves through next year’s midterms, industry watchers tell Axios.

Why it matters: Firebrand congressional freshmen and sophomores are raking in grassroots donations — and starring in ads from both allies and opponents alike. It’s part of an explosion in small-dollar fundraising that’s translating into a huge spike in paid political advertising.

What they’re saying: One such lawmaker, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), has become such a fixture of both Democratic and Republican ads that advertising intelligence company AdImpact built a facial recognition tool to pick up on her likeness in TV spots.

• Politicians like AOC or Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) are huge fundraising draws not just for themselves, but for other candidates — on both sides — who invoke them in their own appeals, according to John Link, AdImpact’s vice president of sales and marketing.
• One particularly vivid example was a 2019 ad from the Republican group New Faces GOP, in which a photo of AOC was literally set on fire.
• “It’s a politically charged environment,” Link told Axios. “And because of that you create more emotional responses, and the way folks feel that they can respond to that emotionally is of a financial nature.”

From Rick’s latest in the Washington Post:

Congress has the power to put up barriers to election theft, but the window is quickly closing. That’s because Democrats may soon lose control of one or both Houses of Congress, and Republicans, fearful of Trump or complicit in his plans, cannot be expected to take the lead on deterring election subversion.

Election integrity should be a nonpartisan issue, but like everything else it’s been polarized, and reforms seem unlikely to pass the current Senate despite a razor-thin Democratic majority, given Republican intransigence — unless Democrats blow up the filibuster so a simple majority can decide the issue.

So what should Democrats do? Setting aside the filibuster for this one issue ultimately is the right way to go, because election subversion poses the gravest threat imaginable to American democracy. But we should recognize that there are dangers in this route. Voting reform passed with only Democratic support may persuade Republicans that efforts to avoid subverting election results are themselves meant to rig the outcome. So it’s important for Democrats to reach out to Republicans, and for responsible Republicans to join Democrats in this cause, which is sensible and nonpartisan….

We also learned in 2020 about potential choke points within some states in the process of certifying presidential election results. Procedures need to be streamlined so that political hacks charged with ceremonial roles in certifying results don’t insert themselves into the process, as almost happened in Michigan in 2020. (Republicans later replaced the courageous Republican canvassing board member in that state who voted to affirm Biden’s victory.) The rules that worked in the 1880s no longer make sense for our deeply divided modern democracy.

Congress could provide for meaningful federal court oversight when there is reason to believe election officials have tampered with vote counts. At present, federal courts play only a limited role in assuring fair vote counts, and state court processes might not be sufficient everywhere to assure such fairness.

Congress could also increase the criminal penalties that apply to election tampering, whether done by election officials or others. These activities are already illegal, but the threat of serious jail time should hang over those who would not report a fair vote count. In 2020, election officials like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger stood up to Trump’s demand that he “find” over 11,000 votes to flip the state’s results from Biden. Someone with less integrity next time might still be deterred by a sufficiently severe criminal penalty.

Republicans have so far blocked all election reform that Democrats have proposed: Witness Senate Republicans’ filibustering a few months ago of the For the People Act, designed to counter a wave of ballot restrictions in Republican-led states. But much of Democrats’ efforts have been focused not on election subversion per se, but with issues related to voting rights or campaign financing. Legislation like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore some aspects of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the conservative Supreme Court, raise important and serious issues and deserve to be passed. But considering voting rights issues separately from anti-subversion issues increases the chance for bipartisan compromise on the latter.

Some Republicans might well be enlisted in the cause — including the few Republican House members and Senators who voted either to impeach Trump or to convict him after the insurrection in Washington on Jan 6. The importance of election integrity knows no party, so a bipartisan bill would be the ideal.

But if Republicans won’t act, that shouldn’t stop Democrats from moving ahead on this issue. If protecting elections isn’t worth setting the filibuster aside for — if only temporarily — it’s hard to know what would be.

From CalMatters:

California congressional districts are drawn by an independent citizens commission, but it’s hearing from candidates and party officials who don’t disclose their partisan affiliations.

In August, Christopher Rodriguez phoned into an online meeting of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, the 14 volunteers who will draw new congressional and legislative maps that will be used for the next decade. 

Rodriguez argued that no matter how the commission determines the state’s 52 congressional districts, Camp Pendleton, the sprawling Marine Corps base in north San Diego County, should be grouped together with the nearby cities of Fallbrook and Oceanside to keep “our military population together.” 

If necessary, he argued, the commission should jettison cities farther down the coast, including Del Mar and Encinitas, which are “just completely foreign to us here in North County. They don’t come up here, we don’t go down there.”

Rodriguez introduced himself as “small business owner,” a “Marine Corp combat veteran” and “a father of seven.”…

He neglected to mention that he’s also an Oceanside city council member — and a Republican running for Congress in 2022 whose prospects could be buoyed by a district that is anchored around the Marine base and his hometown and that excludes the Democratic areas to the south. The current 49th District, represented by Democrat Mike Levin, is 36% Democratic and 33% Republican by voter registration, but the San Diego County portion is about 38% Democratic.  …

In 2008, California voters passed Proposition 11, handing the once-in-a-decade task of drawing 40 state Senate and 80 Assembly districts to the independent commission. Two years later, voters added the state’s 53 congressional districts to the commission’s duties.

Its task is more difficult this year because for the first time ever, California lost a U.S. House seat after the 2020 census. Its work may also be more consequential: Democrats hold a slim 220-212 majority in the U.S. House, while Republican-leaning states are gaining seats after the census….

As early as the California citizen commission’s first redistricting following the 2010 census, it became clear how difficult it is to completely remove politics from the process. As detailed by ProPublica, California Democrats organized a statewide campaign, disguised as grassroots activism, by drafting a small army of advocates, elected leaders and innocuously-named nonprofits to lobby for districts to favor the party. …

Despite the potential pitfalls, public participation is a key selling point for the commission. 

“It’s a thousand times better than a dude like me going in to meet with the state’s top elected leaders smoking cigars and drawing lines,” said Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc., which provides voter tracking services to both Democratic and Republican campaigns.

“The most important thing is for the commission to have a clear set of standards and values,” he added. “If you have good footing as to what you want to achieve in the redistricting process and what kind of values you have, it’s hard for someone to trick you into drawing bad maps.” 

It’s now widely known that the educational divide — or the diploma divide, as some leading scholars have put it — is a major driver across most Western democracies in explaining voting patterns and the realignment of the parties of the left and right. Over at The Dispatch, David French has an interesting essay (behind a paywall) related to these issues.

French begins:

I’m going to start by asking you two questions to help you determine where you fall on America’s great educational divide. This is for parents and grandparents only.

1. When you hear that your child (or grandchild) has done remarkably well on the SAT, is your first thought, “They can get into a GREAT school” or “They can go to school for FREE”? 

2. When you heard of the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal—where parents engaged a broker to help bribe their children into elite colleges—did the parental obsession with elite college admissions feel utterly alien to you? Or did it resonate in some small way with your own parenting experience?

The reason I’m asking is that I think one of America’s great political, cultural, and class divides is driven in part by parenting cultures that possess fundamentally different educational priorities. 

The piece continues:

I’m thinking through parenting differences in part because of a rather dramatic statistic that made waves online yesterday. It turns out that Donald Trump finished third in the presidential vote of Harvard University’s incoming freshman class. Joe Biden earned a whopping 87 percent of the vote, Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins won 6.7 percent, and Trump gained a paltry 6.3 percent…..

I’ve spent my entire adult life (including of course my entire parenting life) living in either deep-blue or deep-red regions of the United States, and I can tell you that the parenting cultures are substantially different. To go back to the questions above, in my experience the upper-middle-class families in deep-blue America are extremely focused on accessing prestige education. In some small way they understand the obsessions of the Varsity Blues parents, and they look at high test scores primarily as an opportunity to gain access to elite schools.

Where I live, however, the Varsity Blues parents might as well live on a different planet, and tremendous test scores are much more often viewed as the ticket to free tuition. College prestige is much less important than the overall college experience. Parents and kids set their sights on, say, the University of Alabama, and the difference between a 1200 SAT and a 1500 SAT lies in the cost, not the choice of school. And in fact in 2018-2019, more National Merit Scholars joined the Crimson Tide than enrolled in Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Michigan the University of Chicago, and virtually every other top university in the land.

What’s one school that beat Alabama? The University of Florida. So the Gators can occasionally beat ‘Bama in something.

Parents (rightly) understand that graduating from Alabama or Florida not only is no impediment to prosperity, in Southern communities it can bond you to your peers for life. Indeed, this can be a healthy way to approach college. The prestige of your school is hardly make-or-break, and placing that level of stress on your children can make them anxious and unhappy. 

But here’s the catch—while you can do very, very well coming from, say, an SEC school, there is still an Ivy or Ivy-equivalent hiring preference in many of the nation’s top institutions. Choices always involve tradeoffs. 

The result, then, is the world we live in now, where many millions of Americans can live prosperous lives and enjoy the respect of their communities, yet still feel as if they’re not quite fully respected by the American cultural elite. They don’t feel welcome everywhere in American life. There’s a barrier to entry to the apex of American cultural and economic institutions that not all their high-performing peers face….

Moreover, the sense of cultural isolation can be self-reinforcing and self-sustaining. The fewer conservatives who attend the Ivy League, the more alien it can feel. The fewer conservatives who work in Silicon Valley or in the white shoe law firms, the more alien they can feel. As important as those institutions may be, they’re just not part of the normal conservative career plan.

This level of ideological and educational separation is bad for our culture and our nation. It breeds groupthink and extremism. As Cass Sunstein argued years ago in his brilliant formulation of the “law of group polarization,” when like-minded people gather and deliberate, they tend to grow more extreme, sometimes dramatically more extreme. In many ways, the “Great Awokening” is a product of group polarization.

Should more conservative parents orient their kids towards Harvard and away from Alabama? Yes, I think so. Should more companies intentionally recruit top students from a deeper and more diverse pool of schools? Sure. But when competing American cultures are locked deeply into habits of life, it becomes increasingly difficult to cross the streams. 

In the meantime we’re left with two Americas living two very different educational realities. At Harvard, Joe Biden wins almost 90 percent, and Donald Trump finishes third. At the University of Tennessee? Two weeks ago I sat in the student section with my son as the students led an entire stadium in a sing-song chant, “F**k Joe Biden.” 

College students are woke? Not everywhere and not at the same rates. Different cultures yield different choices, and those different choices continue to drive this nation apart.

Yesterday was National Voter Registration Day. The Civics Center, an organization devoted to n high school voter registration and civic engagement, notes that four million young people turn 18 every year, and the vast majority of them are eligible to register before they graduate from high school.  But most are never even asked to register in their schools.  The Civic Center’s report, Future Voter Scorecards, is the first effort measure how school districts are doing in getting new 18 year olds registered to vote. 

See also their report from back in March, on youth voting.

David Daley in NYT points to troubling developments with independent redistricting commissions. It’s early to reach any definitive judgments about these processes, but there are certainly disturbing signs.

From Arizona in 2000 to California, Michigan, Colorado, Missouri, Utah and Virginia since then, voters took it upon themselves via ballot initiatives to put independent commissions in place for the 2021 redistricting cycle. The clear message: to keep politicians and partisan operatives as far away as possible from drawing districts and tilting state legislative and congressional maps in their party’s favor for the next decade.

Yet as a new cycle begins, the ballot-initiative efforts and independent commissions on redistricting appear to have been undermined by partisans. Operatives have managed to exploit loopholes and, in some states, shredded the very notion of fair maps before a single line has been drawn….

Voters wanted the partisan manipulation to end. What they’ve got instead is partisans in too many states twisting redistricting commissions into something resembling the old back rooms, determined to continue contorting legislative maps — and democracy itself — into something all but unrecognizable.

From Mother Jones, by Stephanie Mencimer, who has been covering this issue since 2018 (Hat tip to Howard Bashman at How Appealing):

It’s become a predictable pattern: The Supreme Court issues a controversial ruling on a hot-button social issue, and then Justice Brett Kavanaugh trends on Twitter. Earlier this month, it happened again after the court refused to block the recent Texas law that all but bans abortion. Almost immediately, hashtags like #WhoOwnsKavanaugh and #BrettsDebts blossomed across social media. The tweets are driven by frustrated liberals who continue to believe that the Trump-appointed justice has been bought off by a secret, deep-pocketed benefactor who has allowed him to live well above his judicial salary.

The frenzy is not merely predicated on the antipathy liberals have for this particular conservative justice, but on to the fragile hope that it might lead to ousting him from his lifetime appointment….

The idea that Brett Kavanaugh has taken bribes to sustain his country club lifestyle is one of the hardiest conspiracy theories on the political left. And like most conspiracy theories, this one suffers from some internal logic problems. Yet lots of otherwise smart people who see conspiracy theories as solely a scourge of the right seem to believe it, in part because, as with so many such myths, the Kavanaugh conspiracy theory originated with a few facts. …

The vanishing debts, and their size, raised enough suspicion that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) even asked Kavanaugh in written follow-up questions whether he might have a gambling problem. (He said no.) Further concerns involved the purchase of his tony Chevy Chase, Md., house in 2006 for $1.225 million. How did Kavanaugh come up with a $245,000 down payment at a time when his financial disclosure forms indicated that he had a mere $10,000 in the bank outside of his federal retirement account?

As it turned out, there were rather simple answers to most of those questions. Kavanaugh explained to the Senate Judiciary Committee that much of his credit card debt stemmed from either work on his fixer-upper mansion or buying Nats season and playoff tickets for himself and a handful of dudes who’d been going to the games together for years. They had paid him back in full, the White House said at the time. As for the rest, while he was maddeningly obtuse in admitting it, Kavanaugh seems to have gotten lots of money from his parents.

As I explained back in 2018, gifts from family don’t have to be reported on federal judicial disclosure forms, and Kavanaugh’s family had deep pockets. He’s the only child of a “swamp creature,” Ed Kavanaugh, a longtime lobbyist for the cosmetics industry who spent his career schmoozing with Beltway insiders to fend off health and safety regulations and dueling with activists who wanted to ban cosmetic testing on animals. When the elder Kavanaugh retired in 2005, his compensation package that year from the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association totaled $13 million, according to the nonprofit group’s IRS filing….

Meanwhile, the current Twitter bounty for a successful investigation into Kavanaugh’s finances continues to grow. Cooper says he’s up to $85,000 from luminaries offering to chip in, and he’s been urged to start a Go Fund Me he estimates could rake in $250,000. He doesn’t want to create a fund, but he does hope his original offer will kickstart an investigation by journalists into Kavanaugh’s debts. I told to him that such an investigation would likely turn up exactly what I discovered three years ago. But like so many liberals I’ve explained this to, Cooper wasn’t convinced. He’s suspicious as to why Kavanaugh hasn’t just come out and admitted that his parents helped him financially.

From Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers said Tuesday that municipal and county clerks should get “lawyered up” as the attorney overseeing the effort sought to meet with Milwaukee County’s clerk during a partisan review of the 2020 election. 

“All’s I can say is if I were a clerk I’d be lawyered up,” Evers told reporters at the World Dairy Expo in Madison. “I hate to see them in this position when they’re being told they have to prove this was a good election. Everybody knows it was a good election.”

Evers made his comments as Assembly Republicans seek to comb through how the 2020 election was conducted. Recounts and court rulings have repeatedly found Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Wisconsin by 0.6 percentage points.