Democrats persist with false Medicare claim

Sources:

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, DCCC launches "Accountability August," Aug. 4, 2011.

House of Representatives,Roll call vote on H. Res. 34, April 15, 2011.

U.S. Senate,Roll call vote on H. Res 34, May 25, 2011.

PolitFact Virginia, DCCC says Hurt voted again to end Medicare, June 1, 2011.

PolitiFact Rhode Island,Cicilline says he fought Republican budget that ends Medicare, May 1, 2011.

PolitiFact,Democrats say Republicans voted to end Medicare and charge seniors $12,000, April 20, 2011.

FactCheck.org, Medicare Misrepresentation, July 25, 2011.

THOMAS,2012 Budget Resolution, April 15, 2011

Congressional Budget Office,  Analysis of Paul Ryan budget proposal, April 5, 2011

House Budget Committee,The Path to Prosperity: Restoring America’s Promise (Republican budget proposal), accessed April 20, 2011

Researchers: Warren Fiske

Names in this article: Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Robert Hurt, Scott Rigell, Paul Ryan

We want to hear your suggestions and comments. Email the Virginia Truth-O-Meter with feedback and with claims you'd like to see checked. If you send us a comment, we'll assume you don't mind us publishing it unless you tell us otherwise.

View the original article here

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida is a Latino officeholder with national prominence, something the Democrats lack for the most part.

( Win McNamee / Getty Images / July 31, 2012 )

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida is a Latino officeholder with national prominence, something the Democrats lack for the most part.

View the original article here

Election law targets Democrats, favors the Republican vote

Respect.

Arizona Democrats have earned it. However, Gov. Jan Brewer and her political operatives have once again abused their power to marginalize Democrats. Signing House Bill 2305, which is designed to bolster the Republican Party's advantage in the 2014 election, is the latest example.

The victories of the past session are due in large part to the gains Democrats made in the Legislature in 2012. By restoring balance to the Legislature, moderate Republicans finally gained the confidence they lacked during the debate over Senate Bill 1070, the impeachment of a redistricting commissioner or the budget cuts that negatively impacted Arizona's schools, universities, cities and public safety, and left hundreds of thousands without health care these past five years.

Expanding health-care coverage this session was only possible because national Democrats risked and lost their political power in 2010 to pass health-care reform. Gov. Brewer is now being anointed sainthood status, though she merely swept in at the last minute to fix a problem that she helped orchestrate.

Brewer could have easily decided it would have been easier to side with the "tea party" and continue fighting Medicaid expansion, but thankfully, she decided to do what was best for Arizona. For this, she does deserve credit -- but we should not forget the foundation of her decision was prompted by 13 Democratic state senators and 24 state representatives.

The question surrounding a promise to kill or veto HB 2305 is irrelevant. The bill lacked compromise and transparency. It was designed not with the intent of making voting easier and more accessible, but with the intent of limiting voter participation and choice. It includes new restrictions on how Arizonans can exercise their right to vote early. Arizona lags behind in voter turnout and has failed to update outdated voter-registration deadlines, improve access to early-voting locations and remove antiquated precinct restrictions on Election Day.

The fight to preserve voting rights defines the modern-day Democratic Party. This right has been fought for and sealed with the blood of those who battled for civil rights. Given Arizona's dark history of discrimination and drawn-out arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Department of Justice, it is crucial that all election reforms require the highest degree of scrutiny, transparency and compromise.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected another Arizona law aimed at restricting voter participation, and the stage was set for Brewer to reverse the political bickering and continue the goodwill she built up with Medicaid expansion. Political decency could have once again prevailed in Arizona. Instead, Brewer and her political advisers did what they do best: divide Arizona.

Luis Heredia is government relations director for the Torres Consulting and Law Group and a Democratic Party national committeeman.

Copyright 2013 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

Posted

View the original article here

Finding Democrats to Run Where Republicans Win

She gained statewide popularity winning three full terms to the House of Representatives, where she voted against President Obama’s health care law, for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, and against cap and trade. That is the type of Democrat who is considered able to win elections in red states.

So when Ms. Herseth Sandlin recently announced that she would not run, it not only upended Democratic plans but spurred deeper reflection over exactly what kind of candidate should represent the party — one who adheres to the party’s core principles or someone moderate, even conservative, enough to appeal to more voters?

The debate in South Dakota could set a guidepost for Democrats nationwide weighing candidates’ electability versus their ideological purity.

South Dakota is among three states where the balancing act in choosing a candidate who reflects the party’s values, yet can attract enough voters to win, could be particularly important in next year’s Senate elections. There, and in West Virginia and Montana, the Democratic incumbent is retiring, but in all three states, voters went resoundingly Republican in last year’s presidential contest, suggesting that keeping the seat in Democratic hands will be an uphill battle.

And at the same time, the Democratic incumbents who are vying for re-election in three reliably Republican states — Arkansas, Alaska and Louisiana — expect difficult challenges as well.

That makes a total of six seats — precisely the number Republicans need to retake control of the Senate.

Democrats say the split in their party between ideological activists and moderates is not nearly as pronounced as it is in the Republican Party, where some are blaming right-wing purists for the party’s disappointing showing in the 2012 elections. But as Congress and state legislatures tackle core liberal issues like gun control, health care and gay rights, Democrats are starting to engage in their own soul-searching.

Several liberal groups, for instance, have said they might find candidates to challenge the Democratic senators who voted against tightening gun background-check laws.

“There’s a substantial population of the electorate coast to coast that wishes the Democrats would elect candidates who are stronger on certain issues,” said James R. Fleischmann, who has advised several red-state Democrats including Senator Max Baucus of Montana, who is retiring. “But there’s not a powerful organized strain of purists trying to correct what they perceive to be the incorrect position of the party.”

Here in South Dakota, with Ms. Herseth Sandlin opting out of the Senate race, the only declared Democratic candidate so far is Rick Weiland, a small-business owner who has said he would fight corporate interests. Mr. Weiland also favors same-sex marriage and universal background checks for guns, and he is concerned about the weakening of Social Security and Medicare.

Mr. Weiland has the support of his onetime boss, Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader (also a South Dakota Democrat), and of the party’s more liberal base. But his candidacy has upset some in the Democratic establishment.

Many South Dakota Democrats are hoping for a centrist to compete in a state where the number of registered independents has increased nearly 20 percent over the past five years, while Democratic registration has dipped 7 percent.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the current majority leader, had said he would prefer that someone other than Mr. Weiland run, according to Mr. Daschle. A spokesman for Mr. Reid declined to comment.

Mr. Daschle said he believed that Mr. Weiland would be able to earn the establishment’s support. “I’ve been through this hundreds of times — a candidate has to prove himself or herself before they get support of the D.S.C.C.,” he said, referring to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington. “I believe Rick will be able to do that.”

But Jason Frerichs, a state senator who leads the Democrats’ seven-member minority caucus, said, “We are a state that comes to the center.”

View the original article here

Senator’s Absence Worries Democrats as Gun Votes Near

Mr. Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat and the oldest member of the Senate at 89, has been out for weeks dealing with health complications partly from cancer treatment he received several years ago.

But with Democrats scrambling to come up with enough votes to overcome resistance to the most sweeping gun-control legislation in a generation, Mr. Lautenberg’s presence (or absence) is shaping up to be critically important.

Aides insist that Mr. Lautenberg, who has been undergoing physical therapy for weeks, will try to get to Washington once the voting begins on the assortment of gun-safety measures, which are expected to come to the floor in the coming weeks.

Mr. Lautenberg’s aides say he is eager to return, particularly given that he introduced an amendment to ban high-capacity ammunition magazines.

“Senator Lautenberg is feeling better and hopes to be in Washington for gun votes,” Caley Gray, a spokesman for the senator, said in a statement on Monday.

For weeks, rumors and concern have been swirling about the health of Mr. Lautenberg, who this year announced that he would retire rather than seek a sixth term in 2014. The senator cast his most recent vote in the Senate on Feb. 28.

The preoccupation with Mr. Lautenberg, one of the chamber’s most ardent advocates of gun control, has only intensified as the Senate moved in recent days to begin the most significant debate on gun legislation in two decades.

For the last few weeks, Mr. Lautenberg, who received a diagnosis of stomach cancer three years ago, has been grappling with debilitating and long-term consequences that powerful chemotherapy treatment has had on his leg muscles, according to people close to him.

As a result, he has been using a wheelchair while undergoing physical therapy to regain his strength. But Mr. Lautenberg, an extraordinarily proud man who served in World War II, has not wanted to show up in the Senate in a wheelchair, according to those who know him.

For Democrats, the interest in Mr. Lautenberg’s health goes far beyond the coming votes on gun legislation.

Should Mr. Lautenberg decide to retire before his term ends, his departure could have a significant impact on the balance of power in the Senate, where Democrats hold 53 seats and are typically joined by two independents.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican, would have the legal authority to make an interim appointment to the seat. And he would almost certainly select a Republican, depriving Democrats of a crucial vote in the Senate.

View the original article here

For Democrats, a Rare Force Commanding in Cowboy Boots

Had she not followed her grandfather’s instructions, Ms. Guerra, now a Democratic strategist, might have gone down a different path. Now 31, she recalls how voting in that local election — though she cannot remember what was on the ballot — started her on a journey that has included leading the bruising but successful recent campaigns of two state senators and a state representative.

Of her grandfather’s instructions, she said, “I just remember him yelling names at me, he was a couple of booths down.” She remembers thinking, “This is embarrassing.”

Her former employers say Ms. Guerra is a force behind the scenes, and more than a mere up-and-comer for the state’s beleaguered Democratic Party. She is viewed by some in the party as a rare weapon for progressives in a conservative stronghold.

Part of Ms. Guerra’s drive comes from a lack of patience with Democrats who think the party’s time will eventually come.

“We’ve been in this holding pattern for so long, like we have to wait until ‘this’ year before Texas turns blue,” she said. “I just think, I am not getting any younger. I don’t want to wait for it to happen. I just want to make it happen.”

The second of five children, Ms. Guerra was raised by her mother and her grandparents.

Her mother held a number of odd jobs, including part-time work at an Army surplus store, before landing a job at the state’s Health and Human Services Commission. She eventually joined the state employee’s union and became enthralled with Democratic politics.

Ms. Guerra, a graduate of Texas A&M University, said her mother’s passion, along with lessons in elections and politics from her grandparents, steered her toward her current path.

She became a field worker for the Texas Democratic Party, then eventually joined Representative Chris Turner, Democrat of Grand Prairie, when he was working for former United States Representative Chet Edwards. She became a consultant for Mr. Turner’s campaign when he decided to run for the Texas House.

Her latest victory came this month, when she helped propel State Senator Sylvia Garcia, Democrat of Houston, to victory. Ms. Garcia defeated Representative Carol Alvarado, a fellow Houston Democrat, in a special election that began late last fall and started with a field of eight candidates.

“We were both interviewing each other,” Ms. Garcia said. “I was looking for the right manager, and I think she was looking for the right candidate, and I think it was just the right match.”

“I saw her handle more than one problematic issue on the campaign to where you saw she was chiquita, pero picosa,” Ms. Garcia said, using a phrase meaning small but spicy. (Ms. Guerra is barely 5 feet tall in her signature cowboy boots.) “You saw where she was there to protect me as a candidate, there to protect our campaign.”

Ms. Guerra joined Ms. Garcia’s team a week after leaving the victorious campaign of State Senator Wendy Davis, Democrat of Fort Worth, who survived a challenge from former Representative Mark Shelton, Republican of Fort Worth, in the most expensive state Senate race of 2012.

Ms. Davis said Ms. Guerra was one of several people the senator interviewed, and though she lacked experience in a race of similar size and expense, Ms. Davis was soon won over.

“Despite how unassuming she can be, she was not at all afraid to ask for the job and assure me with tremendous confidence that she knew she was capable of doing it,” she said. “It’s a pretty rare quality for a person of her age, and for a woman, and probably even more rare for a woman of that age who is a Latina. But she has a tremendous self-confidence, and I think that’s one of the things that keeps her very happy to be behind the scenes.”

Ms. Davis came to believe her decision when she saw how Ms. Guerra commanded her field workers.

View the original article here

Senate Democrats Offer a Budget, Then the Amendments Fly

WASHINGTON — And on the 1,448th day without one, the Senate Democrats finally brought forth a budget, and Republicans saw that was good — but first, they made them pay.

After four years of hectoring Democrats to put their political and fiscal priorities to paper, Republicans got their wish on Friday and answered the effort with hundreds of amendments, some politically charged, others just odd, kicking off hours of laborious votes that sent the chamber into a marathon session just before spring recess.

There was the amendment thwarting regulations of greater and Gunnison sage grouse and eliminating funds to monitor the Utah prairie dog. In case a federal court ruling was not enough, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, wanted to make sure money would be there to prevent the regulation of the size and quantity of food and beverage.

Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, stood vigil against any attempt by the United Nations to register American guns. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, went one better, demanding that the United States withdraw from the United Nations. Another amendment demanded that President Obama buy his health coverage on the new insurance exchanges being created under the new law. Still another would withhold the pay of the president’s budget director if he was ever late again with a White House budget. It was approved by voice vote, without opposition.

And even if any of those were to be adopted, none of them would have any force of law. “We all know this will come to naught. The House will pass a budget. We’ll pass a budget, and we’ll never agree on it. There’s a lot of folderol about it,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa.

“It’s a charade,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

After all the complaints about Democratic irresponsibility on the budget front, what unfolded Friday boiled down to spectacle, hundreds of amendments, all advisory only, and more tailored to the next campaign than to actual governance.

Even the name of the session — the “vote-orama” — belied how seriously senators take the exercise. “Can’t hide from the vote-orama,” trumpeted a statement by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, pretty much showing the whole point of it.

In truth, a Congressional budget accomplishes far less than advertised. It sets top-line limits for the Appropriations Committees to live within as they work on the real, binding spending bills, and it sometimes sets up fast-track procedures to consider changes to tax and entitlement laws. Even those two functions can happen only if the Senate and House can reconcile their budget plans, a long shot this year.

Beyond that, all the details hung onto the document are largely meaningless, ignored by the committees that actually draft legislation.

“Are there political games being played? Yes, there always will be,” said Senator Tom Coburn,  Republican of Oklahoma, who had filed 66 amendments by evening.

Senators signaled widespread frustration on Friday night by adopting a nonbinding amendment, 68-31, to scrap the current budget process and start writing budgets every other year.

Most lawmakers expressed relief that finally, after so many years, the Senate was working on a budget. Its plan stands in stark contrast to the House plan that passed on Thursday. It includes $100 billion for an upfront job-creation and infrastructure program, instructions to expedite an overhaul of the tax code that would raise $975 billion over 10 years and could not be filibustered, and spending cuts and interest savings that total $975 billion, by Democratic calculations, and $646 billion in increases, by Republican accounting.

Even by Democratic estimates, the Senate plan would still leave a deficit of $566 billion in 2023, while adding $5.2 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade. The House plan ostensibly comes to balance that year.

That discrepancy did not dampen the enthusiasm.

“We’re doing our jobs. We’re doing the process,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota. “Our constituents are just so happy we’re moving forward on a budget.”

But such big numbers seemed almost beyond the point Friday, buried in a blizzard of meaningless amendments. The term “vote-orama” officially entered the Senate lexicon in 1977, according to the Senate historian’s office. By 2009, it had become ridiculous enough to prompt a hearing to demand changes. At that time, Democratic and Republican Budget Committee leaders lamented a process that had gone off the rails. In 2006, senators submitted 87 amendments. In 2007, there were 91, in 2008, 113.

This year, there were more than 500.

The main function of the vote-orama is to put senators on record on hot-button issues sure to show up in campaigns next year. Some votes were substantive, if nonbinding. On Friday evening, 62 senators — Republican and Democratic — voted in favor of building the Keystone XL pipeline. Democrats forced Republicans to vote on women’s access to employer-provided contraceptive coverage and to state whether they supported turning Medicare into a program that hands out vouchers for the purchase of private insurance. Republicans put almost all Democrats on the record opposing an amendment to block a carbon tax.

And though advisers to the Republican senatorial committee helped coordinate some of the amendments, the chairman of the campaign committee, Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, was not at all sure the votes would make a bit of political difference.

“I think voting records matter,” he said. “But I also know the public hears explanations about votes from Republicans and Democrats, and it’s hard to sort out what it really means. In the world of all this political activity and buzz, voters throw up their hands, shake their heads and say: ‘All these people in Washington, D.C., are a bunch of politicians. I don’t know what to believe.’ ”

Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting.

View the original article here

Democrats Aim to Turn Texas Shade of Blue

Republicans like to say they have won 100 of the last 100 statewide races. They are undefeated in those races, dating from 1996.

Sick of it, Democrats are trying to get off the ground. One piece of that effort is Battleground Texas, started by operatives from the Obama campaign to turn Texas into a blue state, or at least a competitive one.

Their opening patter is familiar: start a sustained, well-financed operation in Texas to register more voters, identify Democrats among registered voters and try to get those people to the polls. It’ll take time, they say, and it will be hard.

The organizers have started holding meetings, with two of the first in San Antonio and Austin this week. The Austin event drew more than 200 people, who volunteered their services and ideas, but they were also full of questions.

They asked who would get to take part, whether this group or that one would be embraced by the Battleground organizers, and about the long losing streak.

“Can you post a win in one race in 2014?” said Jeremy Bird, a Chicago organizer for Mr. Obama who is heading the initiative, repeating an audience question for all to hear. “We cannot let it be the benchmark, but we can’t ignore it. Would you tell a friend today to run statewide? Maybe not. We have to create the environment for people to run.”

He reminded the audience that Democrats lost the presidential race in Texas by 16 points — “just now.”

It would be easy to dismiss the whole thing. Big announcements like this come and go. It’s hard to raise enough money. It is tough to keep volunteers engaged over the long haul. Organization is difficult. Texans like the idea of democracy more than they like to participate in it, if the numbers are any indication. Only 43.6 percent of the state’s voting age population turned out for the general election in November. The Republican primary drew just 8.1 percent, and the Democratic primary drew just 3.6 percent. It was possible to win last year’s Republican primary — effectively, the election that counted in statewide races — with only 738,172 votes.

Mr. Bird told the prospects that they didn’t have to win everywhere in the state — just that they had to do better than they do now. Move the numbers in a Republican precinct to 32 percent Democratic from, say, 25 percent. It worked, he told them, in Colorado, Florida and Nevada — red states that came into the blue column in recent elections. He cautioned repeatedly against expecting quick results.

“This is a long battle,” he said. “We don’t win this marathon if we don’t do this first mile.” It’s an enormous state. Somehow, nobody in politics really understands that until they go out and run. Members of the Legislature, members of Congress, mayors and others from the provinces regularly enter statewide races confident in their popularity and political ability. Even those who prevail come back with the same lament: “This is a really, really big state.”

They are not talking about geography, but about scale. Nearly two dozen media markets, 254 counties and the time it takes to organize in so many places.

The Republicans have a leg up. The Democrats used to have it. The voters became acclimated to the Republicans over a long period, starting during the Carter administration, through the 1980 election that turned on “Reagan Democrats,” and through two decades of Texans named Bush at or near the tops of their ballots.

To compete, the Democrats will have to persuade a mob of people to change their habits, to start voting or to vote for their party instead of Republicans. They have to create the possibility in the minds of their own voters that it’s possible for them to win.

If they raise the money and sustain their efforts over several years — if it works the way they hope it will work — then they can tell their friends that the top of the Texas ballot is a reasonably safe place for a Democrat.

View the original article here

Senate Democrats Finally Take a Stand

It’s been four years since the Democrats who control the Senate produced a budget. That has meant four missed opportunities to demonstrate what they stand for, in hard numbers and clear spending priorities. On Wednesday, the chamber’s leaders stiffened their spines and issued a 2014 budget. If the result isn’t quite a courageous resistance to political winds, it at least makes most of the right choices and is a solid rebuttal to the heartless collection of obsolete dogmas that is the House budget.

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

The plan, assembled by Senator Patty Murray of Washington, would raise nearly a $1 trillion in new revenue over a decade by eliminating tax loopholes and breaks that benefit wealthy taxpayers and corporations. It recommends either limiting the overall itemized deductions of the top 2 percent of taxpayers or eliminating individual loopholes like the favorable tax rates given to hedge-fund managers. Corporations would no longer be able to avoid taxation by hiding money overseas.

At the same time, this budget cuts an equal amount of spending, $975 billion, in a way that avoids the reckless damage to vital programs and to the poor in the budget favored by the House. Nearly a third of the reductions come from new efficiencies in Medicare and Medicaid, building on the reforms in the Affordable Care Act. The rest comes from defense cuts after American troops withdraw from Afghanistan, along with cuts to wasteful programs like agriculture supports.

These cuts and revenue increases would replace the arbitrary reductions of the sequester, which does not distinguish between good and bad programs or pay attention to the heavy damage it would inflict on the economy, destroying up to a million jobs.

Ms. Murray’s plan, recognizing that government has to play a role in accelerating the recovery, would devote $100 billion to new job-creating investments: $50 billion for transportation projects, $10 billion for fixing dams and ports, $20 billion for repairing schools and $10 billion for an infrastructure bank for big projects.

The proposal could have gone further. Under pressure from the false Washington “consensus” that the deficit is an immediate problem, the plan fails to spend enough on education or even on President Obama’s proposal for universal preschool. Unlike the budget from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, it does not call for higher tax rates on the rich, or for a bigger estate tax, or for taxing capital gains as ordinary income.

But it rejects the hard-right insistence that the budget must be balanced in the short term, the destructive goal of Paul Ryan’s House version. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted on Friday, Mr. Ryan’s budget gets at least two-thirds of its $5 trillion in nondefense cuts from programs that benefit low- and moderate-income people. While providing the rich with a tax cut, it would cut trillions from Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches, nutrition aid and Pell Grants.

The Senate now needs to make a strong defense of the principles it has, at last, put on paper.

View the original article here

GOP: Voter maps aided Democrats

Republicans trying to discredit Arizona's current legislative-district map told a federal court Monday that the new political lines were drawn deliberately to benefit Democrats and dilute the power of GOP voters.

Monday's session kicked off a weeklong hearing before a panel of three federal judges who must decide if the new map was skewed so heavily that it unconstitutionally denied Republicans their right to equal protection under the law.

At stake is whether the new boundary lines, which were used in the 2012 election, will hold or whether the panel will send the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission back to the drawing board.

On Monday, attorney David Cantelme laid out his case that everything from the way the five-member commission picked its attorneys to the way it set about drawing 30 new legislative districts was designed to benefit Democrats.

And he suggested the commission had access to incumbent politicians' home addresses, which showed up in a computer file of the commission, although it later could not be found.

Access to such data, and using it to create a legislative map, would be a big "no-no," Cantelme observed as he questioned Commissioner Richard Stertz.

Stertz, a Tucson Republican appointed to the panel by then-Senate President Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, agreed it would be improper but said he had no knowledge of such a file.

The commission consists of two Republicans, two Democrats and a registered independent, who serves as chairman.

Through his questioning of Stertz, Cantelme established that the commission quickly split along partisan lines, with Chairwoman Colleen Mathis voting with the Democrats on the commission's more pivotal issues.

Cantelme zeroed in on the changes made to the commission's 10 "majority minority" districts, which were key to ensuring that the Arizona map would meet the criteria of the federal Voting Rights Act. The U.S. Department of Justice must preclear any changes to election law in Arizona to ensure the ability of minorities to elect a candidate of their choosing is not diminished.

Once it was clear the 10 districts would likely pass Voting Rights muster, Cantelme said, the commission continued to adjust the lines and in most cases reduced the number of minority voters in those areas while still keeping them at levels that would help boost Democratic candidates.

That, Cantelme argued, allowed the commission to "pack" Republican voters into a smaller number of districts while relying on a combination of minority voters and non-minority Democrats to dominate more districts than they otherwise should have. However, Stertz testified that he had complained that the commission was "hyperpacking" districts with Democrats.

After the commission completed its work in early 2012, it was widely believed that Republicans could stake claim to 16 or 17 of the 30 districts and Democrats to 10, with the remainder being competitive.

After the 2012 election, Democrats gained seats, ending the GOP's supermajority. The Senate has 17 Republicans and 13 Democrats, while the House is split 36-24.

A handful of Republican voters, including the wife of Senate President Andy Biggs, R-Gilbert, filed the lawsuit last year challenging the new boundaries.

Today, the court will hear from a state Democratic Party official who closely followed the redistricting process. Cantelme is expected to grill the official, D.J. Quinlan, over an e-mail he received from then-state Rep. Richard Miranda, D-Phoenix, outlining four districts that would favor minority candidates.

Quinlan forwarded the information to Democratic Commissioner Linda McNulty, and court filings have suggested that this might be evidence of a Democratic conspiracy.

The e-mail outlined the preferences of the Arizona Redistricting Minority Coalition for four minority-dominated districts. Other groups also submitted their own versions of legislative maps, which the commission welcomed.

Stertz testified that the four districts were "untouchable" as the map was being drawn.

Commission attorneys, who had just begun their cross-examination of Stertz late Monday and have yet to call their own witnesses, have said the plaintiffs' arguments are thin at best.

"In the end, plaintiffs can only point to the pattern that the Republican plurality districts are generally slightly overpopulated and Democratic plurality districts are slightly underpopulated, but that alone is not evidence of partisan bias," commission attorneys wrote.

Copyright 2012 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

Posted

View the original article here

Senate Democrats, Accusing G.O.P. of Obstruction, Try to Force Hagel Vote

Mr. Hagel’s nomination was endorsed by the Senate Armed Services Committee along party lines on Tuesday. But with Republicans demanding more information before allowing a vote on Mr. Hagel by the full Senate, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, took procedural steps to limit floor debate on his nomination and bring the partisan clash to a head by Saturday.

“This is the first time in the history of our country that a presidential nominee for secretary of defense has been filibustered,” Mr. Reid said on the Senate floor. “What a shame. But that’s the way it is.”

Republicans, sensitive to the accusation that they were filibustering Mr. Hagel, tried to draw a distinction between a filibuster and delaying the vote because of unanswered questions.

“There’s nothing unusual about this,” said Senator James M. Inhofe, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, who on Tuesday suggested without evidence that Mr. Hagel was “cozy” with Iran, an accusation that caused the committee meeting to erupt with Democratic outrage. “There’s not a filibuster,” he added.

Even if Republicans succeeded in dragging out the vote into the weekend, Democrats said they remained confident that he would be confirmed by Saturday because Republicans did not appear to have the 40 votes necessary to block the nomination. Such a move would be an extraordinary step, and one that Republicans seem wary of taking should they find themselves in the White House four years from now.

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, meanwhile, said on Wednesday that he intended to try to block the nomination of John O. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s choice to be director of the C.I.A., until Mr. Brennan provides answers to questions he had on the scope and legality of the Obama administration’s drone operations. Democrats have also sought to extract more information from the White House about those operations.

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the Intelligence Committee chairwoman, said she expected to schedule a committee vote on Mr. Brennan’s nomination when the Senate returned from recess the week after next. She said that Mr. Brennan would make a “strong and capable C.I.A. director.”

According to the Senate’s historian, Donald A. Ritchie, only 5 percent of presidential cabinet nominees have been blocked or rejected by the Senate. Only twice since 1917, when the Senate’s modern filibuster rules were created, has a cabinet-level nominee been subject to a supermajority vote of 60, as Republicans are forcing with Mr. Hagel.

In the case of Mr. Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, the opposition is especially striking because senators have traditionally afforded their former colleagues a high level of courtesy. But many Republicans still nurse a grievance against Mr. Hagel for his opposition to the war in Iraq, and others have sought to make an issue of statements he has made on Israel and Iran. Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona want the Obama administration to provide information about the timeline of its actions on the day of the attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, an episode that has become a point of conservative ire against the president.

When Mr. Hagel testified before the Armed Services Committee he was pummeled.

As Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, Mr. Brennan has been the chief architect of the administration’s drone policy, and his nomination has focused new attention on it. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Obama said that he planned in the coming months to work with lawmakers to “ensure not only that our targeting, detention and prosecution of terrorists remain consistent with our laws and system of checks and balances, but that our efforts are even more transparent to the American people and to the world.”

White House officials on Wednesday did not give any details about Mr. Obama’s plans for more transparency about the targeted killing program, which has long been shrouded in secrecy.

Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have expressed frustration that the White House has not allowed lawmakers to read the legal memos, written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which provide the justification for the targeted killing operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere and that have been expanded during the Obama administration.

The committee said that the Justice Department had written 11 secret legal memorandums related to the targeted killing of terrorism suspects but said the Obama administration had shown the committee only four of them.

Senator Feinstein did, however, provide new details about the extent to which her committee has been briefed by the administration about drone strikes.

“The committee has devoted significant time and attention to targeted killings by drones,” she said in a statement. “The committee receives notifications with key details of each strike shortly after it occurs, and the committee holds regular briefings and hearings on these operations” to review their basis and effectiveness.

She added that Intelligence Committee staff members had held 35 monthly oversight meetings with government officials “to review strike records (including video footage) and question every aspect of the program.”

Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

View the original article here

Small Shift in Numbers Gives House Democrats a Fresh Shot at Relevance

Joe Straus became the speaker of the Texas House in 2009, when Democrats and Republicans had nearly even numbers in that body.

Every deal had to be brokered. Party lines were soft.

Republicans clobbered the Democrats in the 2010 elections and ran over them in Mr. Straus’s second term as speaker. They had a supermajority, and they acted like it.

As a bloc of votes, the Democrats were broken. Demoralized, they never coalesced behind any particular leader. They had a caucus head in Representative Jessica Farrar of Houston. And they had a brawler, Representative Trey Martinez Fischer of San Antonio. But the Democrats did not show up as a unified force in 2011.

Now they get to choose between cooperation and resistance, and you can find Texas Democrats in both camps. The trick for their leaders is to figure out where they want to go. In Mr. Straus, they have a speaker who is probably less of what they fear from the right than any of his would-be replacements might be.

If Republicans who don’t like Mr. Straus are right, he is more moderate than the rest of the party. And if that’s the case, how could the Democrats do better? On the other hand, they are Democrats: any Republican successes weigh against them, and some would prefer to oppose Straus and Company no matter what.

Some important things have changed since the last time around.

The 2010 election left Republicans with the idea that they didn’t need to compromise on anything, what with a supermajority and the national mood coming out of those midterm elections. Moderate Republicans mostly stuck with their party even when they didn’t like what was being served, because the alternative was a potentially risky primary in 2012 with a more conservative Republican at home.

Two years ago, the governor was putting together his bona fides for what turned out to be a presidential run. Remember that list of “emergency issues” at the beginning of the session two years ago? Sanctuary cities, photo identification for voters, state-mandated pre-abortion sonograms and eminent domain protection were all tailored to please Republican primary voters.

The formula is different this time. Republicans don’t have a supermajority in either chamber of the Legislature, and the governor hasn’t declared anything worthy of emergency status that must be handled in the first two months of the session.

The Democrats are also in a better place. They have recovered from the spurning of 2010. Their overall numbers still stink, but not as much as before. Republicans suffered some lumps in the presidential race. The party’s urgent designs on Hispanic voters — spurred by the presidential results — has made some Republican lawmakers more interested in dealing with Hispanic lawmakers of either party.

Instead of Republicans pillaging and looting in 2011 in a Texas House that had previously been evenly balanced, this session finds Democrats seeking a way back into power and Republicans trying to woo Latinos and also needing alliances with Democrats on some votes.

The early days of a legislative session are marked with warm and optimistic feelings, so it’s hard to tell how the relationships will go. But even if the parties hated each other, they would have to work together on some things.

It’s a Republican room — 95 members versus 55 — but some things require 100 votes or more. The Republicans can’t get there alone, but members from both parties wonder whether anyone can pull together a regular Democratic voting bloc.

The Democrats started the session by electing Representative Yvonne Davis of Dallas to lead the caucus. She is not known as a great orator. You are unlikely to see her very often on television — she doesn’t particularly like having her picture taken. But she is one of the best in the House at working members and votes on the floor, putting deals together, and she can raise money for the caucus.

And Mr. Martinez Fischer, who heads the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, which includes 37 of the 55 Democratic members, is still around.

Last week, he was part of a bipartisan group working to restore some of the education cuts made last session. Ms. Davis was working the floor on a linked appropriations bill.

Mr. Straus and the others are in there, too, wondering if it will be different this year. Will anyone follow the leaders?

View the original article here

Senate Democrats Offer a Proposal to Head Off Automatic Cuts

The Democratic proposal would establish a 30-percent minimum tax rate on incomes over $1 million to raise about $54 billion over 10 years. It would raise $1 billion more by subjecting tar sands oil to a tax to pay for oil-spill cleanups and by ending a business tax deduction for the cost of moving equipment overseas.

The remaining $55 billion would come from $27.5 billion in defense cuts from 2015 to 2021 and $27.5 billion in farm-subsidy cuts.

The legislation is more a bargaining position than a solution. Republicans have said they will not accept any new taxes in a deal to head off the so-called sequester — across-the-board cuts to defense and domestic programs of 5 percent to 8 percent and totaling about $1 trillion over 10 years. But Senate Democratic leaders said Thursday that their party must rally support around an alternative to try to move negotiations forward.

“This bill is an important chess piece,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate.

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio on Thursday repeated his demand that the Senate take the first steps to replace the spending cuts before the House considers its move, but no one predicted that the Senate Democrats’ proposal would rally the bipartisan support needed to overcome a near-certain Republican filibuster and reach the House.

“I would hope that we can get to 51 votes, and that majority would rule,” said Senator Barbara Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, the chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I’m confident we will have the majority — if not the totality — of the Democratic caucus.”

Senate Democrats emerged from a protracted lunch meeting over the plan voicing only grudging support. Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee, said he worried that wringing savings from farm subsidies now instead of in a broad farm bill would make it harder to pass an overhaul of agricultural programs that has been stalled for nearly a year.

Senators Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, and Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, denounced the 50-50 mix of cuts and taxes, after Democrats have swallowed far more spending cuts than tax increases over two years of deficit-reduction efforts.

Republicans dismissed the proposal as a worthless gimmick.

“This is not a solution — even they know it can’t pass; that’s the idea,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader. “It’s a political stunt.”

The White House praised the package. Jay Carney, the press secretary, called it a “balanced plan to avoid across-the-board budget cuts that will hurt kids, seniors, and our men and women in uniform.”

“Republicans in Congress face a simple choice,” he added. “Do they protect investments in education, health care and national defense, or do they continue to prioritize and protect tax loopholes that benefit the very few at the expense of middle- and working-class Americans?”

As the cuts approach, warnings of disaster are growing increasingly dire. The Senate Appropriations Committee released a barrage of letters from agencies spelling out how the cuts would be meted out: 600,000 low-income women and children dropped from federal nutrition programs; meat and poultry plants forced to close because of furloughed federal inspectors; deep cuts to the poor school systems that rely most heavily on federal assistance; delayed permits for oil and gas production; and shorter seasons, reduced operating hours and possible park closings in the national park system. Job losses could reach 750,000 this year, said Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland.

While Republicans and Democrats agree the cuts would be destructive, neither side seems ready to negotiate a solution. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, reached out to Mr. Boehner on Thursday. Mr. Boehner said he told Mr. Reid what he has been saying publicly: The House will look at what the Senate can produce.

“This sequester was the president’s idea,” Mr. Boehner said. “His party needs to follow through on their plans to replace it.”

View the original article here

Duke Energy Loan for Democrats' Convention Remains Unpaid

When Duke Energy extended a $10 million line of credit to the committee organizing the Democratic convention in Charlotte, N.C., last summer, it seemed to be a sign that President Obama would not make good on his pledge to keep his party’s nominating festivities free of corporate favor banking.

The money would have to be paid back, organizers said.

Except that so far, it hasn’t been. The Los Angeles Times reports that the loan remains outstanding, with just a couple of weeks left until it is due to be paid back.

Democrats acknowledged over the summer that the president’s pledge had set a very high bar and that without corporate giving, they were having a hard time coming up with enough small-donor financing to fill the void. And the host committee had already begun to break the pledge by setting up a nonprofit corporation to collect corporate dollars for events outside of the convention hall – like a big welcome party for the news media showcasing Charlotte businesses and a Labor Day festival.

But the nonprofit corporation – called New American City and financed by companies including Duke and Bank of America – wound up paying $5 million for the convention hall itself at the Time Warner Cable Arena, as The Charlotte Observer reported last fall.

The newspaper also caught the first warning sign that the committee would default on the line of credit, noting that Duke had listed it as a loss in its third-quarter report.

Tom Williams, a spokesman for Duke, said that the loss of $10 million was recorded as an accounting requirement and that the company was still hopeful the committee would repay the full loan before it comes due Feb. 28. “We still hope there’s some chance to recover part or all of that money in some fashion,” he said. But, he acknowledged, a company generally counts a loss on a loan “when you think there’s a real likelihood it may not be repaid.”

With a default, the loan would effectively become a donation — a fairly large one given that the total budget for the convention was roughly $31 million.

The Democratic National Committee had no comment.

View the original article here

Democrats’ Man for Battles Will Lead New Senate Charge

Then his old boss, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, reluctantly took the helm of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, looking at another brutal map for Democrats eager to stay in control of Congress’s upper chamber. He had one demand: Keep Guy Cecil aboard.

“It was critically important that Guy stay in the job,” said Mr. Bennet, now reunited with Mr. Cecil, the former chief of staff who spent the last months of his 2010 campaign sleeping in the senator’s Colorado basement. “He is just excellent at what he does.”

Mr. Cecil’s return as executive director of the committee is notable in a city accustomed to political consultants cashing in for big money “downtown” — at lobbying firms and with influence peddlers off Capitol Hill. In 2010, Mr. Cecil helped engineer Mr. Bennet’s successful defense of his seat, one of the unexpected wins that kept Democrats in control of the Senate even as the party suffered a historic defeat in the House. Most assumed Democrats would lose the Senate as the 2012 season began. With Mr. Cecil directing forces, the party gained two seats.

But do not tell the reigning Democratic political wunderkind that he has a tough job. That only gets him started.

At 23, he was a Southern Baptist minister in Miami. Then he came out as gay, left a conservative church that would not accept him and went to Boston because it seemed diametrically opposite of the world he had fled. His first job was in retail, paying $19,990 a year.

His grandmother had started the family’s hard-knock cycle, running from an abusive marriage in Ohio to Miami, where she raised five children as a waitress for 40 years. His father is a boat mechanic in South Florida. His brother, born with a malignant neuroblastoma, was not supposed to walk, if he survived his first birthday. He is 32 now, with chronic health problems — and two children.

“I really have no need to complain about how hard my job is,” Mr. Cecil, 38, said with a shrug.

Which is a good thing, because he could have a lot to complain about.

After the struggles of 2010 and 2012, the road ahead for Senate Democrats does not look much smoother. Incumbents are likely to face tough races in the red states of Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana and North Carolina. Democratic retirements in Iowa and West Virginia have opened new fronts for Republicans eager to avoid a third strike in their quest to regain Senate control. Both parties are awaiting a decision by Senator Tim Johnson, a Democrat, about whether to run again in South Dakota.

Beyond that, freshman Democrats, swept to power in the Obama wave of 2008, face their first re-election campaigns in the swing states of Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Oregon. Only once in 75 years has the president’s party not lost seats in the midterm election of his second term.

Mr. Cecil’s goal: “To hold the majority, that’s it,” he says.

Rob Jesmer, who in 2012 was Mr. Cecil’s opposite number at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, called him “smart and relentless.”

“I’ve got a lot of respect for him,” he said.

Mr. Cecil’s approach to Senate elections goes back to the vicious 1998 re-election campaign of South Carolina’s Ernest Hollings, the last Democratic Senate victory in that state, and 2000, when he helped former Gov. Mel Carnahan of Missouri defeat John Ashcroft, a Republican, despite the fact that Mr. Carnahan had died in a plane crash three weeks before Election Day.

Mr. Cecil tries to resist national political winds and tailor each campaign to the particular candidates and the states they are running in. Republican campaigns tend to ride national waves, running on broad national issues like the size and scope of government, the level of taxation and the defense of the homeland. Mr. Cecil had different ideas for different Democratic candidates.

For instance, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota ran on “North Dakota values,” a languishing farm bill and essential air service to rural America. Sherrod Brown, practically buried under an avalanche of Republican advertising, ran as David against Goliath, even if he was the incumbent in Ohio.

View the original article here

Democrats Are Split Over How to Shape Approach to Gun Bills

Many Democrats, and some Senate Republicans, believe the only legislation that has a whisper of a chance of passing would be bills that are tightly focused on more consensus elements like enhancing background checks or limits on magazines, subjected to debate in committee and then brought to a vote after building bipartisan support.

That would be a departure from recent years, when the leadership often sidestepped committees and sought to take fights directly to the floor.

Others, particularly those senators who have long fought for gun control measures, believe a plodding process allows too much time for opposition to build, and prefer to fast-track measures by adding them as amendments to other bills, even blocking bills in ways that have angered Democrats, until they are granted votes on those ideas.

“We can’t sit around for months talking and letting the gun lobby run out the clock,” said Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey. “If we’re going to make progress, it’s essential that we move quickly and start voting as soon as possible.”

Democrats are united on one point: For any legislation to reach the Senate floor, Mr. Obama will have to put the full weight of his office and bully pulpit behind it.

Without constant public pressure and a concerted effort to woo conservative Democrats, especially those up for re-election in red states in two years, there will be little impetus, numerous Democrats said, to move legislation along. Democrats also may be forced to decide whether to endure a lengthy legislative battle on guns at the expense of priorities like immigration.

Recognizing that public pressure is going to be required to move such contentious measures, the president’s former campaign aides in the weeks ahead will convert the Obama for America operation into a different kind of outside political group led by Jim Messina, Mr. Obama’s former campaign manager, according to people familiar with the plans. The new organization will be able to raise money for grass-roots campaigning on behalf of the president’s second-term agenda, they said.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader who has spearheaded other legislation desired by the White House, will take a more passive role with any gun legislation, aides to Senate Democrats say, letting the administration set the agenda and allowing senators to press ahead through their committee leadership or interest in the issue.

Mr. Reid, who was deeply disturbed by the shootings last month in Newtown, Conn., is a longstanding gun rights supporter, a necessity for any statewide official from Nevada.

Mr. Obama’s efforts on Capitol Hill will provide the most crucial test of whether the mass shooting in Newtown, and the obdurate response from the National Rifle Association, has ushered in a new chapter in a legislative era that began in 2004 with the expiration of the assault weapons ban. Since that time, most new gun legislation has emerged in statehouses, and Washington has largely enforced gun rights.

The political sensitivity around guns can be gauged somewhat through the measured statements of lawmakers long associated with gun rights.

“Some have asked whether I will try to block or filibuster this debate because of my support of the Second Amendment,” said Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who in 2009 sponsored a successful measure that repealed a gun ban in national parks. “My goal is the opposite. I believe Congress has a responsibility to review all of our laws and make adjustments as necessary in a transparent, open and deliberative manner.”

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee and has a mixed legislative record on guns, said the first hearings he would schedule in the new Congress would be on gun legislation. Mr. Leahy was the only senator to attend an event with Mr. Obama this week to announce his push on gun laws.

Ashley Parker contributed reporting from Williamsburg, Va., and Michael D. Shear from Washington.

View the original article here

Democrats Behaving Badly

Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, couldn’t just stand back and relish the recent spectacle of House Republicans making callous fools of themselves by stalling aid to communities walloped by Hurricane Sandy. He wasn’t satisfied that these Republicans were vilified not only in the news media but also by some members of their own tribe, like Peter King and Chris Christie. No, he had to get into the ring himself, and his genius strategy once there was to pit one storm’s victims against another’s, to stage a bout between Atlantic City’s splintered boardwalks and Louisiana’s failed levees. What a titan of meteorological tact.

Noting that Congress had provided help after Hurricane Katrina more quickly and generously than after Sandy, Reid said: “The people of New Orleans and that area, they were hurt, but nothing in comparison to what happened to the people in New York and New Jersey. Almost one million people have lost their homes. One million people lost their homes. That is homes, that is not people in those homes.”

Let’s put aside, for the moment, his fleeting difficulty distinguishing a biped with a weak spot for reality TV from a wood, brick or maybe stucco structure in which several bipeds watch TV. Let’s focus instead on his math. The one million figure is easily more than twice the combined tally of domiciles not only destroyed but also damaged in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. It’s an invention. And if comparisons are to be made, consider this one: as a result of Katrina, 1,833 people died — more than nine times as many as died in connection with Sandy. Using the word “nothing” anywhere in the vicinity of Katrina defies both belief and decency, and Reid was indeed forced last week to apologize, his effort to shame his Republican foes having brought a full measure of shame to his own doorstep, yet again.

Why did he make the effort in the first place? Democrats came out of the 2012 elections looking good, and the country’s changing demographics suggest that they could come out of 2016 and beyond looking even better, especially if Republicans don’t accomplish a pretty thorough image overhaul. And that overhaul isn’t exactly proceeding at a breakneck pace. The perseverance of far-right obstructionists in the House stands in the way, leaving the party in grave trouble. If its foes were smart and humble, they’d do what a sports team with a big lead does. They’d play error-free ball.

Not Reid. And not President Obama, whose recent actions have been careless at best and cavalier at worst. There was the gratuitously provocative nomination of Chuck Hagel for defense secretary, followed by the gratuitously insulting invitation of Louie Giglio, a Georgia pastor, to give the inaugural benediction. That plan was abandoned after the revelation of Giglio’s past remarks that homosexuality offends God, that homosexuals yearn to take over society and that a conversion to heterosexuality is the only answer for them. Giglio would have been the second florid homophobe in a row to stand with Obama and a Bible in front of the Capitol — Rick Warren, in January 2009, was the first — and while it appears that this double bigotry whammy wasn’t the administration’s intent, it’s an example of vetting so epically sloppy that it gives an observer serious pause about the delicacy with which Obama and his allies, no longer worried about his re-election, are operating.

The pick of Hagel underscores that indelicacy. There’s a potent case to be made for his installation as secretary of defense, but there are potent cases for others, and it’s hard to believe that Obama couldn’t have found someone who shared his values and would further his agenda but wouldn’t be such a guaranteed lightning rod for his Jewish, LGBT and female supporters, all of whom played crucial roles in his November victory.

Regarding women, Hagel’s record on reproductive freedom is as conservative as his record on gay rights, and it included his support for a ban on abortions in military hospitals, even for servicewomen prepared to pay for the procedures themselves. What’s more, Obama rolled Hagel out in a cluster of other high-profile nominees (John Brennan, Jack Lew, John Kerry) sure to be noted for their gender uniformity and to rekindle questions about the predominantly male club of advisers and golf and basketball partners who have the president’s ear. The upset was predictable and avoidable.

It has been noted, rightly, that the president put two additional women on the Supreme Court and that his percentage of female appointees is as good as President Bill Clinton’s was. But given the march of time since then, and given the questions raised during his first term about how valued women in the administration felt, and given his drumbeat that he was a champion for women in a way Mitt Romney could never be, shouldn’t he be surpassing Clinton? Going out of his way? There’s a perverse streak of defiance in him, and as donors and even Democratic lawmakers have long complained, gratitude isn’t his strong suit.

While Hagel lurched toward his confirmation hearings and Giglio skittered away, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced that it was sending each of the 35 Republican freshmen in the House a “tea party membership card,” which spelled out their rights to put “ideology over solutions,” to be horrid to women, to coddle Big Oil and “to create and/or ignore any national crisis.” Thus did the Dems turn legitimate gripes into schoolyard taunts that were more likely to inflame G.O.P. freshmen than to bully them into bipartisanship. What, beyond the theater of the gesture, was the point of it?

Granted, Republicans had done their own adolescent taunting, calling Democrats lap dogs in the Nancy Pelosi obedience school. But Democrats pride and market themselves as the reasonable adults in the equation, and that’s part of their currency with many voters. Why fritter it away?

And why abide the overwrought antics of Reid? He once compared opponents of Obama’s health care reform to enemies of emancipation. He took valid questions about Romney’s low tax bill and spun them into the unsubstantiated claim that Romney hadn’t paid any taxes for an entire 10-year period. Then he said the burden was on Romney to prove the charge untrue. Good thing our criminal courts don’t work that way.

Just before and after the 2012 election, it looked as if Republicans might be successfully burying themselves. All Democrats had to do was hammer the nail in the coffin. But the way they’re behaving, they’ll raise the dead.

View the original article here

Democrats Bet on Shift in Hispanic Numbers to Win Arizona Race

Mr. Carmona, 62, is an untested candidate of vast experiences with a made-for-Hollywood biography. He was a high school dropout, born into poverty in New York City to Puerto Rican parents who struggled with alcoholism and drug abuse. He served in Vietnam, earning Bronze Stars, Purple Hearts and other combat decorations, and attended medical school before his eventual rise to surgeon general under President George W. Bush.

He is running for public office for the first time, challenging a six-term congressman, Jeff Flake, 49, a Republican. Both are vying for the seat held by another Republican, Senator Jon Kyl, who is retiring. Though there is little reliable polling in the contest, both camps acknowledged that the race is closer than they expected in such a heavily Republican state.

Beyond the balance of power in the Senate — enough states are in play that Republicans could regain the majority — the race carries enormous significance for Arizona, whose shifts in demographics threaten to upend its role as a Republican stronghold.

Mr. Carmona was handpicked by President Obama to run for the Senate because of his résumé and his ethnicity, which could help galvanize the state’s Latino voters. The Democratic Party then cleared the field for him, sparing him primary attacks but depriving him of the chance to test his skills before the big fight.

Mr. Flake, in the meantime, waged a feisty primary contest against Wil Cardon, a wealthy businessman who spent a small fortune on his campaign but lost by a considerable margin. Unlike Mr. Carmona, who often refers to himself as a “street kid,” Mr. Flake was raised on a ranch in Snowflake, a northern Arizona town named in part for his great-great-grandfather, the Mormon pioneer William J. Flake.

Mr. Flake says he is “for limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility and free trade,” tenets that have earned him staunch support from the Tea Party movement. He has also embraced issues of particular significance to rural voters, like environmental rules that he says have curbed the operation of coal plants, leaving many people unemployed and “devastating small-town economies.”

From his campaign headquarters in Phoenix on Tuesday, where he was surrounded by young volunteers polling voters on the phone, Mr. Flake said, “I’m fighting to have some rational policy,” singling out the Forest Service and the Environmental Protection Agency as agencies that “need to be reined in.”

Outside groups have been pouring money and resources into the state as the race has tightened. On Wednesday, FreedomWorks for America, a “super PAC” linked to the Tea Party, opened an office in Mesa. The operation at the heart of Mr. Flake’s base in suburban Phoenix will organize volunteers to solicit votes, said its executive director, Russell Walker, who flew in from Washington.

On Tuesday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee bought $526,000 in airtime on behalf of Mr. Carmona, its first direct expenditure in the contest. (The committee had previously given $500,000 to the state’s Democratic Party to help pay for the campaign’s field offices, among other things.) The National Republican Senatorial Committee has donated $500,000 worth of ads to the Flake effort.

Mr. Carmona, a longtime independent, is running as a Democrat. That is not because the party is “a perfect fit,” he said, but because “I was forced to pick a position, and when I looked at where the Republicans were, especially in this state — immigration, women’s issues — I chose the Democratic Party.”

He has nonetheless tried to stitch together what he has taken to calling “a coalition of reasonable people” to carry him to victory. He has focused on constituencies long believed to be Republican stalwarts, like veterans, who make up roughly 15 percent of eligible voters in the state, and seniors, many of whom dislike the Medicare plan proposed by Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Mr. Carmona has also appealed to women who are unhappy about the state’s attempts to curb reproductive rights.

All along, though, Mr. Carmona has courted Latino voters. He released his second Spanish-language commercial on Tuesday, which introduces him as “uno de nosotros” — one of us — while highlighting Mr. Flake’s vote against the Dream Act, which would have given certain immigrants brought to the country illegally as children a path to legalization.

Mr. Flake has begun to make his case to Latinos as well. He has started running his first Spanish-language ad on television and radio, trying to tap into whatever anti-Obama sentiment there is in that community by referring to Mr. Carmona as “el hombre de Obama” — Obama’s man.

A combination of factors, including the state’s legislative push to curb illegal immigration and the presence of a Hispanic candidate like Mr. Carmona in the race, — have been galvanizing among advocacy groups in Arizona, triggering the largest Latino voter registration efforts in memory.

Still, Tara Blanc, a lecturer at the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University who has studied Latino voting patterns in the state, said Latinos tended to be poorer, younger and less educated than the rest of the population. Those factors generally contribute to low turnouts, she said, so “whether they’ll go to the polls is anybody’s guess.”

Their transformative power lies, most likely, in the future. By 2030, Latinos are expected to make up 25 percent of all registered voters in Arizona, up from 15 percent in 2010, according to an analysis by the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State.

Chip Scutari, who runs a bipartisan political consulting firm in Phoenix, said a Latino on the ballot could be “the tipping point for the Latino vote.” But, he added, the state has “a lot of conservative, pro-life Latinos,” who are more likely to vote Republican.

“To say the Latino vote will automatically go to Democrats,” Mr. Scutari said, “is oversimplifying the situation.”

View the original article here

Easier Access to Ballot Is Pushed by Democrats

In the last few weeks, potential voters in California have been able to register online for the first time, and Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that will allow residents to register and vote on Election Day. Connecticut passed similar legislation this year, and voting rights advocacy groups hope as many as five states might join them next year.

Democratic lawmakers here described the legislation as a potential counterweight to Republican-backed laws in other parts of the country requiring photo identification to vote and making it more difficult to register.

“It’s extremely important that as some states in the nation are moving to suppress voter turnout, California is moving forward to expand voter participation,” said Mike Feuer, a Democratic state assemblyman who sponsored the Election Day registration law. “I hope California is the catalyst for other states to encourage civic engagement and participation.”

The changes in California are hardly revolutionary. Election Day registration, which is already in effect in eight states, began in the early 1970s in states like Maine and Wisconsin. Online registration has now expanded to more than a dozen states since it was first established, in Arizona in 2002.

But conservative efforts to require people to show photo ID, a step they say is necessary to prevent voter fraud, seem to have galvanized some Democrats to try to expand ballot access — long an item on the party’s agenda, but one that had not been a top priority in recent years in many states.

In May, Connecticut became the first state in five years to approve Election Day registration. When he signed the bill into law, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said in a statement, “Despite the pervasive climate across the U.S. to restrict voting rights, Connecticut has moved in the opposite direction.”

Demos, a nonprofit organization that has worked to expand ballot access since the contested 2000 presidential election, has identified five additional states — Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts and West Virginia — where they hope to pass Election Day registration laws next year.

In each of those states, Democrats control the governorship and at least one chamber of the legislature.

Voter registration laws were not always so infused with partisan politics.

In the 1990s, Republican strongholds like Idaho and Wyoming instituted Election Day registration. The National Conference of State Legislatures says that while little evidence of in-person voter fraud has been found, voter turnout in states with Election Day registration has been at least 10 percent higher than in states without it.

“Historically, this kind of work has been supported by Republican and Democratic states,” said Steven Carbó, state advocacy director for Demos. “There is no objective reason why we can’t be back at that point.”

Online registration has retained some measure of bipartisan support. The South Carolina Legislature unanimously approved it this year (although, in California, the vote broke along strict party lines).

But Election Day registration has become the exclusive province of Democrats. Since 1996, only four states have approved Election Day registration, and in each case it was a Democratic governor who signed the bill into law. Republican lawmakers in Maine and Montana have tried unsuccessfully to repeal their longstanding Election Day registration laws.

Mr. Feuer’s bill passed through the State Assembly with no Republican support.

“I think this really leaves the California voting system wide open to fraud,” said Connie Conway, the Republican leader in the State Assembly.

Mr. Feuer argued that both the online and Election Day registration laws included strong safeguards against voter fraud. Online registration will be an option only for residents who already have a California ID, and the Election Day registration law enhances penalties for fraud, and allows those who register that day to cast only provisional ballots.

Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “The Voting Wars,” said that neither side’s ostensible rationale for pushing changes to voting laws should be taken entirely at face value.

Republicans, he said, have advocated for ID requirements in part to restrict the number of voters from the other party, since many population groups whose members tend to lack photo IDs also tend to vote Democratic. Democrats, meanwhile, have opposed all efforts to purge noncitizens from the voter rolls, which he called “a relatively small problem, but a real problem, and one that in the off-season needs to be corrected.”

“On both sides there is the official story, and then the realpolitik,” Mr. Hasen said.

That is the one thing that just about everyone agrees on. “Has it gotten more politicized?” Ms. Conway said. “Oh yeah.”

View the original article here

A Sense of Waiting for Godot for Texas Democrats

We continue our Presidential Geography series, a one-by-one examination of the peculiarities that drive the politics in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Here is a look at Texas. FiveThirtyEight spoke with James R. Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin; Robert D. Miller, the chairman of the Public Law Group at Locke Lord L.L.P.; and Steve H. Murdock, a professor in the department of sociology at Rice University in Houston.

“It’s only a matter of time.”

For more than a decade, that thought has provided solace to the out-of-power Democrats who dream of turning Texas blue, much like it was before Ronald Reagan won the state in 1980. The appeal for Democrats is obvious. If President Obama, for example, were somehow able to carry Texas and its 38 electoral votes, the electoral math would become very difficult for Mitt Romney.

A Democratic-leaning Texas may seem like a dream, but for years such a shift has appeared almost inevitable. The Hispanic population in Texas (38 percent) is the second largest in the nation, and it is growing quickly. The African-American population (12 percent) has kept pace with the state’s overall growth. And non-Hispanic whites have been shrinking as a share of the population.

In fact, sometime after 2000, non-Hispanic whites became a minority in the state. They now make up just 45 percent of the population, making Texas the only majority minority state that reliably votes Republican.

Yet, for all the talk of a politically competitive state, the Republican grip on Texas has never loosened.

“We’ve had this discussion for 10 years now, and nothing has changed,” Mr. Miller said.

“There’s been a ‘Waiting for Godot’ nature in terms of Democrats and Latinos here,” Mr. Henson said.

All 29 statewide elective offices are held by Republicans, and Texas Democrats have been left with a series of if-onlys. If only the local party were better organized. If only national Democrats invested more money in the state. If only we could get a charismatic Hispanic candidate on the ballot. And, the most fundamental “if only” of them all: if only Hispanic turnout were stronger.

Poor turnout has dulled the impact of the state’s Hispanic population at the ballot box. Hispanics may make up 38 percent of the population, but they have never exceeded 20 percent of the electorate in presidential elections, according to exit polls.

“Latino turnout is even lower here than it is in a lot of other places,” Mr. Henson said.

Hispanic turnout is creeping up incrementally, but the non-Hispanic white vote in Texas has become overwhelmingly Republican.

The political landscape in Texas is relatively straightforward. The Democratic strongholds are limited to the major cities — Austin, El Paso, Dallas and to a lesser extent Houston and San Antonio — and the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley.

Republicans are dominant everywhere else, from suburbs to small towns to ranches and farms.

Each of the main cities has a different feel and contributes something unique to the state’s economy. Houston is a center for health care and energy jobs. Austin, the capital, has a flourishing music scene and is a major center for technology start-ups. Dallas has a large African-American community (25 percent) and a little bit of everything economically.

Outside of the cities, Texas has several distinct regions. East Texas is much like northern Louisiana. It is mostly rural, religious and conservative. The Panhandle is also deeply conservative, but feels more like the Great Plains, Mr. Henson said, and includes a streak of libertarianism.

West Central Texas around Midland and Odessa is the chief oil-producing region. Over all, Texas is among the nation’s top energy-producing states, particularly in oil, natural gas and wind. The state’s booming energy industries have helped its economy weather the Great Recession relatively well.

The Bellwether: Tarrant County

The Dallas-Fort Worth area is home to over six million people, and the two cities are often grouped together. But Tarrant County, which is home to Fort Worth, and Dallas County have separate identities. Dallas is more diverse than Fort Worth, a former cattle town that now revolves around industries like defense.

Non-Hispanic whites are still a slim majority in Tarrant County, which helps make it a much better statewide bellwether than Dallas County. Tarrant County exactly matched the statewide vote in 2008, and was just 1 percentage point more Republican in both 2004 and 2000.

The Bottom Line

There is little doubt that Mr. Romney will carry Texas. He is a 99 percent favorite in the state, according to the current FiveThirtyEight forecast.

But the long-term trend seems equally clear. Despite poor turnout, the Hispanic share of the electorate has steadily climbed, from 7 percent in 1984 to 20 percent in 2008, according to exit polls.

At the same time, the non-Hispanic white vote has consistently fallen. In 1984 it was 78 percent; by 2008 it was 63 percent.

The larger question is not if Texas will become more competitive, but when, both Mr. Henson and Mr. Miller said. And that largely depends on whether Democrats can improve turnout among Hispanics. They have a few things working against them.

First, the Texas Democratic Party has been out of power for a long time, with few elections to truly contest. “The party in the state has really atrophied,” Mr. Henson said.

Second, Hispanic culture in Texas has so far not placed a high value on participating in the electoral process, Mr. Miller said.

Even if Texas Hispanics do start punching their weight, the Republicans could make efforts to win their support. Partisan allegiances among Hispanics could become more balanced.

Those obstacles notwithstanding, there is no doubt that as the minority population in Texas has grown, so too has the potential for the state to become less firmly Republican. And there are already signs of a possible future: Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio, a rising star in Democratic politics, gave the keynote address at the national convention in Charlotte, N.C.

But that Democratic comeback — whether led by Mr. Castro or someone else — may still be years away. In the meantime, Democrats will have to continue to wait.

View the original article here