Just 6% of US House Seats Expected to Be Competitive Thanks to Rigged Maps

Gerrymandered congressional districts come alongside a wave of GOP voter suppression laws.

KENNY STANCIL

February 17, 2022

In a major blow to the democratic principle that lawmakers are accountable to voters who can remove them from office, the vast majority of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are becoming non-competitive—a trend that critics say threatens to exacerbate GOP extremism as incumbents in solidly red districts shift further right to fend off more reactionary primary challengers.

Several months into the decennial redistricting process, 335 congressional districts have been redrawn as of Thursday. Just 27 of them are considered competitive—meaning neither Democrats nor Republicans have an advantage of more than five points—according to FiveThirtyEight.

Dave Wasserman, an elections expert for the non-partisan Cook Political Report, told The Guardian on Thursday that by the time the remaining 100 boundaries are mapped, he expects just 30 to 35 seats—out of 435—to be competitive.

If as many as 94% of representatives are running in relatively safe districts, "that means that when voters show up at the polls in November to vote for their candidates, the contests will already be decided," The Guardian reported. "Their votes won't matter."

"Some of the decline in competitive seats is due to natural geographic clustering of likeminded voters," The Guardian noted. "That clumping means that when states draw new lines, it's harder to draw competitive districts. In 2012, there were 66 competitive districts, Wasserman noted. By 2020, under the same set of lines, there were 51."

However, "politicians are undoubtedly accelerating the decline in competition by distorting district lines to their advantage," the newspaper added.

Over the past year, as Common Dreams has reported, GOP-controlled states have supplemented their "tidal wave" of voter suppression laws by redrawing congressional and state legislative maps in ways that disenfranchise Democratic-leaning communities of color and give Republicans outsized representation, which could help them cement minority rule for at least a decade.

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'Time Is Really Running Out': Democrats Urged to Counteract GOP's Gerrymandering Spree

Kenny Stancil

In perhaps the most egregious example of gerrymandering in the past year, Texas Republicans rigged congressional boundaries to slash the number of competitive U.S. House districts from 12 to one, doubling the number of safe GOP seats from 11 to 22 in the process. In an essay published last fall, voting rights expert Ari Berman called it "an ominous sign of things to come in other Southern battleground states," including Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina.

"Despite gaining nearly two million Hispanic residents and more than 500,000 Black residents since 2010, Republicans didn't draw a single new majority-Latino or majority-Black congressional district," Berman wrote of Texas. "Instead, the two new House seats the state gained due to population growth were given to majority-white areas in Austin and Houston."

Meanwhile, the right-wing dominated U.S. Supreme Court's ruling last week on the constitutionality of Alabama's new electoral maps gave lawmakers the green light to continue partisan and racial gerrymandering, effectively gutting what was left of the Voting Rights Act.

The diminishing number of competitive U.S. House seats has far-reaching implications. If only 6% of congressional districts are considered up for grabs, most politicians no longer have to worry about the general election and instead play to the party's base.

GOP incumbents in solidly red districts, in particular, have moved further right to avoid being unseated by more reactionary primary challengers.

According to The Guardian's Sam Levine, map-rigging has enabled Texas lawmakers to take "the state's long history of chest-thumping conservatism to new levels" in recent months.

"Republicans are steamrolling a series of extremist laws, undeterred by demographic shifts in the state favoring Democrats," wrote Levine. That includes GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, who has been burnishing "his conservative bona fides" in anticipation of a challenge from the right in this year's primary.

The lack of competitive districts "will further increase polarization... it's also a reflection of polarization, but it'll also entrench polarization more deeply," Richard Pildes, a law professor at New York University, told The Guardian.

Michael Li of the Brennan Center for Justice has stressed that if Senate Democrats reform or scrap the filibuster and pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, racial and partisan gerrymandering of the sort being pushed by right-wing lawmakers in multiple states would be outlawed.

This article originally appeared at CommonDreams.org. Originally published on February 2nd, 2022. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. 

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Western Media Fall in Lockstep for Neo-Nazi Publicity Stunt in Ukraine

By JOHN MCEVOY

When the corporate media push for war,  one of their main weapons is  propaganda by omission. In the case of the recent crisis in  Ukraine, Western journalists have  omitted key context about the  expansion  of NATO since the end of the  Cold War, as well as US support for the  Maidan coup in 2014  (FAIR.org, 1/28/22).

'Shame on Them': DOJ Will Not Reopen Tamir Rice Case

"I think they're pitiful and pathetic, and at this point no one is going to get justice when it comes to police shootings in America," said Rice's mother.

Julia Conley

February 1, 2022                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

The mother of Tamir Rice, who was shot to death at age 12 by a Cleveland, Ohio police officer, condemned the U.S. Department of Justice's decision not to reopen her son's case.  "Shame on them," Samaria Rice told Buzzfeed News Monday after receiving a letter from the DOJ regarding the Biden administration's decision. "I think they're pitiful and pathetic, and at this point no one is going to get justice when it comes to police shootings in America. It's disgusting I don't have an indictment for my 12-year-old son."

"Curing a defective state process... is consistent with the fundamental purpose of the federal civil rights laws and squarely within the mandate of the DOJ."

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who heads the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, told the Rice family in a letter dated last Friday that federal prosecutors who looked at the case could not prove that Rice's civil rights were violated intentionally when he was shot and killed by the officer.

The letter referenced Section 242 of Title 18 in the U.S. Code, which states that "an officer acted ‘willfully’ if he did so with bad purpose—that is, with the specific intent to do something the law forbids—to deprive a person of their constitutional rights."

"After viewing, and exhaustively evaluating the available evidence in this matter," Clarke wrote, "career prosecutors determined that the federal government could not meet this high standard."

Rice was killed in 2014 after a witness called 911 to report that he was playing with a pellet gun outside a recreation center in Cleveland. Officer Timothy Loehmann shot and killed the boy less than two seconds after pulling up to the scene in a police car, according to video evidence.

The Trump administration said in December 2020 that it would not bring charges against the officer and a grand jury decided not to indict Loehmann as well.

The Cleveland Police Department has been under court-ordered supervision since 2015 after an investigation that began before Rice's killing found its officers had a "pattern or practice" of using excessive force and violating people's civil rights.

Samaria Rice sent four letters to the Biden administration asking the DOJ to reopen her son's case, citing the "long-standing and systemic excessive force problem" in the Cleveland Police Department as one reason to consider federal charges.

Fifty legal scholars signed one of the letters arguing that "covening a federal grand jury and prosecution under Section 242 is warranted."

The scholars cited two federal cases that demonstrate the fact of the case "satisfy the requirement" of Loehmann's intent to violate Rice's civil rights, including United States v. Couch:

The Sixth Circuit upheld jury instructions that explained the intent element to include "reckless disregard" of constitutional rights, and that intent could be inferred from circumstantial evidence. Specifically, the jury instructions in Couch included the explanation that "intent is a state of mind and can be proven by circumstantial evidence" and that it is "not necessary for you to find that the defendants were thinking in constitutional terms at the time of the incident, as a reckless disregard for a person’s constitutional rights is evidence of a specific intent to deprive that person of those rights."

In our view, the tragic and unnecessary shooting death of Tamir Rice presents an important opportunity for the Department to clarify and cement a clear, fair, and proper interpretation of Section 242 that fully realizes the purpose of the statute as enacted by Congress.

"Curing a defective state process—in this case, one that appears to have been impermissibly slanted to protect local white law enforcement officials from accountability in the shooting death of a young black child—is consistent with the fundamental purpose of the federal civil rights laws and squarely within the mandate of the DOJ," wrote the scholars.

This article originally appeared at CommonDreams.org. Originally published on February 2nd, 2022. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. 

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Right-Wing Supreme Court Takes Up Challenge to Affirmative Action

"We will vigorously defend access and opportunity in higher education," said head of civil rights legal group.

JESSICA CORBETT

January 24, 2022

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a pair of affirmative action cases related to college admissions, giving its right-wing supermajority an opportunity to strike down race-conscious selection policies in higher education.

"Without programs like affirmative action, my whole life could have gone in an entirely different direction."

Both cases, taking aim at the policies of Harvard and the University of North Carolina, were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by the conservative legal strategist Edward Blum. The high court has consolidated the cases.

Though the Supreme Court has previously allowed affirmative action policies to stand—most recently in 2016—the current makeup of the court is fueling concerns about a new course, whether the case is heard during this or the next term.

As writer and podcaster Touré tweeted in response to the decision: "RIP affirmative action."

Slate staff writer Mark Joseph Stern, who covers the U.S. legal system, pointed out that "like so many other grants this term, the affirmative action cases illustrate how Republicans have outsourced large chunks of their agenda to the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court, which now serves as the nation's most powerful policymaking body."

"Rather than expend time and energy prohibiting affirmative action through the democratic process," he added, "Republicans captured a sufficient portion of the federal judiciary—including the Supreme Court—to ensure that their judges will do it for them."

Democrats now control both chambers of Congress and the White House, but during former President Donald Trump's tenure, he and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) worked to reshape the federal judiciary with more than 200 appointees, including Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

NPR's Nina Totenberg noted that "starting in 1978, the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action programs three times. In each of these cases, the court's controlling opinion was authored by a traditionally conservative justice."

However, she explained, "three of the justices who voted against affirmative action in 2016—Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—are still on the court, and they now have been joined by three Trump-appointed conservatives."

Both Harvard and UNC won in federal trial courts, and the former's case was affirmed by an appeals court. The New York Times' Adam Liptak highlighted the potential significance of the nation's highest court deciding to take up both challenges:

The Supreme Court's decision to hear both cases may have been influenced by the differing legal regimes that apply to the two schools. Harvard, a private entity, must comply with a federal statute that bans race discrimination as a condition of receiving federal money; the University of North Carolina, which is public, must also satisfy the Constitution's equal protection clause.

Warning that the court's upcoming decision "could have a wide-ranging effect," HuffPost editor-in-chief Danielle Belton shared in a series of tweets Monday how affirmative action made a difference for her father's aerospace career and their family.

"There is this mistake people make when talking about affirmative action, that it 'rewards' unqualified people based on their race," Belton wrote. "This couldn't be further from the truth. It merely opens a historically closed door to level an uneven playing field."

"Race-conscious admissions policies are a critical tool that ensures students of color are not overlooked in a process that does not typically value their determination, accomplishments, and immense talents."

"How could my father compete with a system that rewarded nepotism and protected only those who'd always had access to power? The reality is, even with a college degree, he couldn't. Affirmative action had to happen," she continued.

"Because my father was able to have his career in aerospace, he could afford a home and raise a family alongside my mother. He could get us into good public schools and put all his daughters through college, leading to our future successes," Belton added. "Without programs like affirmative action, my whole life could have gone in an entirely different direction."

The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law represents Harvard and UNC students and alumni who helped defend their policies. The group's president and executive director, Damon Hewitt, vowed to keep up the fight in a statement Monday.

"Selective universities like Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill have long struggled to admit students of color, who have over time been excluded for access to elite institutions and are historically marginalized," Hewitt said. "Race-conscious admissions policies are a critical tool that ensures students of color are not overlooked in a process that does not typically value their determination, accomplishments, and immense talents."

"We will vigorously defend access and opportunity in higher education," he added, "alongside a diverse coalition of students of color, including our incredible clients whose testimony about their experiences on campus served as the cornerstone for the lower courts' favorable decisions in both of these cases."

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) president and director-counsel Sherrilyn Ifill similarly asserted Monday that "holistic, race-conscious admissions programs" not only enable universities to "bring together people of different backgrounds to learn from one other" but also "help mitigate systemic barriers to educational opportunities faced by many Black students and other students of color, ensuring that all hard-working and qualified applicants receive due consideration."

"Further, the court's decision today comes amidst the backdrop of widespread efforts to erase and deny the experiences of people of color," Ifill said. "As our country experiences a resurgence of white supremacy, it is as important now as ever before that our future leaders be educated in a learning environment that exposes them to the rich diversity that our country has to offer, so they may be fully prepared for the many challenges ahead."

This post has been updated with comment from the NAACP LDF.

This article originally appeared at CommonDreams.org. Originally published on January 25th, 2022. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. 

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bell hooks will never leave us – she lives on through the truth of her words

I was introduced to the work of bell hooks for the first time when I was 14 years old, sitting on my Nana’s porch, complaining about the mosquitoes and the heat.

My Nana, who was probably frustrated by my endless complaints about being bored, stuck a copy of “Ain’t I A Woman” in my hand and told me just to “shut up and read.” I remember that summer because after I read that book, all we talked about was bell hooks and who she was and who I wanted to be. I said then that I wanted to be a writer, like bell hooks, and change the world with my words.

Vaccine apartheid is prolonging COVID – not vaccine hesitancy

There’s a colonial tendency to portray people in Africa as anti-science and averse to progress, when the real problem is Big Pharma’s monopoly

By Alena Ivanova

Next week will mark the first anniversary of the NHS administering the first COVID-19 vaccine outside of clinical trials in a hospital in Coventry. Almost a year on from 8 December 2020, the Omicron variant threatens to ruin yet another holiday season and raises questions about the UK government’s approach.

But we already knew of the dangers of vaccine inequality. While the UK this morning announced it had ordered an additional 114 million COVID vaccine doses – despite around 85% of its adult population being fully vaccinated – just 6% of Africa’s 1.2 billion people have received two doses. And hastily reimposed travel bans on people from the African continent reveal more than the refusal of governments in the Global North to deal with the crisis at hand. The racist scapegoating of Black people has a history as old as public health itself.

There is no conclusive evidence that the new travel ban imposed by the UK on six countries in southern Africa will be effective. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to show that the new variant was circulating in Europe much before Omicron was identified in South Africa, thanks to the scientific rigour and openness of South African researchers. Arbitrary travel bans can affect scientific cooperation and knowledge-sharing, as Tulio de Oliveira, director of South Africa’s Centre for Epidemic Response & Innovation, has warned. He tweeted that travel restrictions mean laboratories don’t get essential supplies.

But politicians and CEOs in the Global North have been busy excusing their dreadful track record on cooperation with low- and middle-income countries, blaming the low vaccination levels in southern Africa on hesitancy. Soundbites such as Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla’s claim that vaccine hesitancy in low-income countries is “way, way higher than the percentage of hesitancy in Europe or in the US or Japan”, have angered many, who have accused them of being tropes grounded in racism – akin to those used during the HIV crisis. In reality, research has suggested a higher willingness to take COVID vaccines in lower- and middle-income countries. But portraying people in Africa as anti-science and averse to progress has long been the coloniser’s excuse to dominate and subjugate and we should not be surprised that it keeps rearing its ugly head. What’s worrying is the speed with which such excuses are adopted by the UK government, while being left unchallenged by the media.

Britain’s Africa minister, Vicky Ford, has repeatedly evaded the issue of vaccine supplies to low- and middle-income countries, focussing instead on their vaccine hesitancy when questioned in Parliament. But research shows no basis for such claims. Africa’s problem is not hesitancy but the fact that many of its healthcare systems are ravaged by privatisation, often imposed by countries such as the UK. Is it any wonder that most African countries are unable to respond quickly and efficiently to the uncertain supply of donated vaccines that arrive with little warning?

Even the so-called ‘level-playing field’ of the market doesn’t seem to deliver for African countries. Earlier this year, Botswana ordered 500,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine at a higher price than was paid by some richer countries. Delivery was expected in August, but as Zain Rizvi, a drug policy expert at US think tank Public Citizen, has noted, none had appeared by October.

What’s more, vaccine hesitancy exists everywhere. The early stages of the vaccination programme in Europe were marred by controversy around the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab, with several countries suspending the inoculation drive or switching vaccines by age group. Even now, enclaves of vaccine hesitancy and mistrust remain across the continent, yet nobody seems to deny European countries the right to an adequate supply of doses.

So where do we really stand on vaccine inequality? COVAX, the global mechanism that was supposed to facilitate equal sharing of doses through a centralised donation and purchasing scheme, has failed. Its original goal of distributing two billion doses across the world during 2021 won’t be met. Instead, COVAX now has a revised goal of distributing 1.45 billion doses by the end of the year. But at the time of writing, only 589 million doses had been shipped; shockingly half a million of those were delivered to the UK.

Pharmaceutical companies tell us that supply is not the problem. Yet, with rich countries guzzling the existing doses and refusing to share equally, the only just solution is to expand supply. But a waiver on intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and tests – a proposal to increase production that is supported by much of the world –is being blocked by the same countries that have hoarded doses and protected the financial interests of big pharma.

This article originally appeared at opendemocracy.net on and originally published on December 2, 2021.  This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. 

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Twenty Years After 9/11, 'The Only Way to Effectively Counter Terror Is to End War'

Anti-war voices reflect on two decades of the misguided hubris, failed policies, war profiteering, suffering, and death that resulted from the 2001 attacks.

BRETT WILKINS

September 11, 2021

As the United States on Saturday commemorates the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks with plenty of patriotic zeal but perhaps too little introspection, peace advocates have marked the occasion by reflecting on the costs and bloody consequences of the so-called "Global War on Terror" as they reaffirmed that the best safeguard against further terrorism—as many warned at the time—is ending war and respecting human rights.

"The U.S. response to 9/11 was corrupted by a toxic soup of revenge, imperialist ambitions, war profiteering, systematic brainwashing, and sheer stupidity."
—Medea Benjamin, CodePink

A sobering assessment 20 years after the 9/11 attacks lays bare a never-ending war abroad, an erosion of civil liberties and deadly neglect of dire social needs at home, and the further enrichment of corporations and wealthy investors—perhaps the only winners of perpetual conflict that progressive critics have long deemed unwinnable by design.

Just as it was on 9/11, Afghanistan is again ruled by the Taliban. The U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, opened in 2002, still holds dozens of men, many of them imprisoned without charge or trial for over a decade. Much of Iraq, whose 2003 invasion was sold on a pack of lies, has been destroyed not once, but twice, by U.S.-led wars whose toxic detritus is still killing and poisoning people years later. More than 900,000—and possibly many more—civilians have been killed in at least seven nations in the name of countering "terrorism"—a tactic, not an enemy.

In the two decades since 9/11, thousands of U.S. and allied troops have died. During that time, trillions of dollars that could have been spent on social uplift both home and abroad were instead expended on waging war without end.

"The U.S. government and military exploited the grief and shock following the 9/11 attacks to raise fears, promote Islamophobia, and launch forever wars which continue to this day," wrote Kathy Kelly, co-founder of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, on Friday.

Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), said, "Following the 9/11 attacks, the United States turned a horrific criminal act—which killed thousands of innocent people—into a platform to launch a shocking human rights crisis."

The U.S. government, Azmy continued, "used the same formula it had for centuries before 9/11: Launch foreign wars and establish domestic policies to oppress its own people in service of some broader ideological conflict."

In the aftermath of the attacks, he said, the Bush administration "constructed a dominant, destructive, and enduring 9/11 ideology building upon narratives of xenophobia, maximal security measures, and military power and profit that still largely permeates every facet of public life 20 years later."

Medea Benjamin, the CodePink co-founder who rose to prominence by confronting war criminals like Bush-era Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, says that "the U.S. response to 9/11 was corrupted by a toxic soup of revenge, imperialist ambitions, war profiteering, systematic brainwashing, and sheer stupidity."

Prescient warnings went unheard and unheeded—but were ultimately vindicated. Before casting the lone dissenting vote against the 2001 congressional authorization underpinning the so-called War on Terror, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) urged her colleagues to "think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control."

"We must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target," warned Lee—who quoting Rev. Nathan Baxter's post-9/11 sermon, added, "As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore."

As Vice President Dick Cheney ominously declared that the United States would wage the impending war on "the dark side" and "in the shadows," the George W. Bush administration was building the legal and physical framework of an edifice of war crimes. What followed was a series of cascading and intertwined human rights disasters: the offshore prison at Guantánamo; extraordinary rendition; CIA "black sites"; Abu Ghraib; and other prisons where men and boys caught up in the War on Terror, a great many of them innocent civilians, were tortured—sometimes to death—by U.S. military and intelligence personnel.

Instead of ending the war and closing Guantánamo as promised, President Barack Obama escalated the conflict. He sent tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, vastly expanded drone strikes, intervened in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, and, after withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011, launched a new war there after the so-called Islamic State's (ISIS) rise to power. And instead of investigating Bush war criminals as promised, the Obama administration actively protected them, while waging an unprecedented war against whistleblowers and expanding a global mass surveillance dragnet targeting Americans and foreigners alike. 

President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to "bomb the shit out of" ISIS militants and "take out their families." He was true to his words. As his administration relaxed rules of engagement meant to protect civilians, U.S. and allied forces laid waste to entire cities and towns, killing thousands of civilians and exacerbating the world's worst refugee crisis since World War II. Trump also did something that neither Bush nor Obama dared to do by negotiating the end of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, the longest conflict in American history.

While imperialists and war profiteers excoriated President Joe Biden for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan last month, Repairers of the Breach president Rev. Dr. William Barber II and Tope Folarin of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) note that "a significant majority of people in the U.S. supported the move," a "far cry from the 88% who supported the war when it was launched."

Barber and Folarin write for Common Dreams:

In part, this is a movement victory. Movements against the War on Terror emerged within days of the 9/11 attacks, even before the first U.S. bombers assaulted Kabul. This rising anti-war drumbeat played a major part in pulling public opinion away from support for Washington's "forever wars."

It wasn't a given that Biden would pull out of Afghanistan—other presidents have promised to do so and then failed. This time, there is no question that public opposition to the war was critical to Biden's decision.

"That shift also shows that people across the U.S. have learned some harsh realities that anti-war activists mobilized around for years," Barber and Folarin added. Among those "harsh realities" is the tremendous cost of war and deepening militarization—$21 trillion, according to a recent IPS report. Critics say that money could have been better spent on healthcare, education, infrastructure, climate action, and a host of other pressing social needs. 

Instead, the military-industrial complex has strengthened and other profiteers of the permanent war economy have grown stupendously rich from the death and destruction of forever war. Ten thousand dollars invested in the top five U.S. military contractors in 2001, according to a recent analysis, is worth nearly $100,000 today—nearly 40% more than an identical investment in an S&P index fund over the same period.

As Biden seeks to increase the Pentagon budget to $715 billion while stoking tensions with China and Russia and acknowledging the possibility of "over-the-horizon" strikes in Afghanistan, CodePink's Benjamin warns that "we can't continue down the path of deadly, destructive, and costly U.S. militarism" any longer.

This week, in a post explaining how the U.S. should extricate itself from the cycle of violence, Lee said, "It’s time we end these forever wars. With a coalition of partners, allies, and advocates both inside the halls of Congress and out, we are finally on the cusp of turning the page on this state of perpetual war-making."

And as Kathy Kelly concurred in her assessment: "The only way to effectively counter terror is to end war."

                                                                             ***

This article originally appeared at CommonDreams.org. Originally published on September 11th, 2021.It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. 

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