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Home > Blog > All > Gov. Rick Perry

Gov. Rick Perry

  • August 30, 2012

    Federal Courts Slow Efforts in Texas and Florida to Suppress the Vote

    by Jeremy Leaming

    Whether it’s outrageous and wholly unwarranted new restrictions on voting or new voting districts concocted to keep minorities from participating in democracy, rightwing lawmakers and their corporate backers, over the past two years, have stridently pushed an ignoble and tawdry campaign of voter suppression.

    But federal courts this week dealt the anti-democracy campaign some setbacks. First, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia’s in State of Texas v. U.S. swept aside the state’s redistricting plans as discriminatory. The new Texas voting districts, the federal court found violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because they discriminated against Latino voters.

    Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Hinkle said he would sign a permanent injunction against a provision of Florida’s voting overhaul law that made it much more difficult for groups like the League of Women Voters to conduct voter registrations.

    Deidre Macnab, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida told The Associated Press that the state’s “anti-voter law created impassable roadblocks for our volunteers, who have been bringing Floridians into our democratic process for over 72 years.”

    Florida, along with Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas, has sought to implement some of the more onerous restrictions on voting. Not only did Florida seek to shut down voter registration drives, it also enacted rigid voter ID requirements and sought to greatly limit early voting opportunities.

    Earlier this month the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia held that Florida’s curtailment of early voting opportunities ran afoul of the Voting Rights Act, which applies to states and localities that have a history of voter discrimination. The court held that curtailing early voting opportunities in Hillsborough, Monroe, Collier, Hardee and Hendry counties would have a discriminatory impact on African American voters. The state, the court held, “failed to satisfy its burden of proving that those changes will not have a retrogressive effect on minority voters,” and that the restrictions on early voting was “analogous to closing polling places in disproportionately African-American precincts.”

    Today the efforts of Texas to manipulate the vote were dealt yet another blow. The state’s onerous voter ID law also violates the Voting Rights Act, the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia ruled in State of Texas v. Holder.

    More
    Tags:
    Redistricting, Other courts, Voting rights, Democracy and Voting, Attorney General Eric Holder, Brennan Center, Florida voter overhaul, Gov. Rick Perry, Justin Levitt, State of Texas v. Holder, State of Texas v. U.S., Texas, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Hinkle, Voting Rights Act of 1965
  • August 28, 2012

    Federal Court Blocks Texas Redistricting Plan, Says it Discriminates against Latinos

    by Jeremy Leaming

    Texas lawmakers’ plans to create new voting districts fail the parameters of the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against Latino voters, a federal court ruled today.

    Texas like a number of other states and localities must abide by the Voting Rights Act, which includes a section that requires those jurisdictions to receive preclearance for redistricting plans. The Voting Rights Act applies to states and localities that have a history of discriminating against classes of voters. Texas did not seek administrative preclearance and instead sought approval of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

    The federal government opposed preclearance for some of Texas’s redistricting plan, but the three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court concluded that none of the state’s redistricting plan “merits preclearance.” (Texas sought to create new voting districts for its congressional delegation and its State House of Representatives as well as for the Texas Senate.)

    In attaining preclearance Texas needed to prove that “its redistricting plans have neither the effect nor the purpose of abridging minority voting rights.” The federal court found that Texas whiffed on that requirement. Texas tried to persuade the federal court that precedent allows the state to use its own method to determine whether its new voting districts would harm minority voters. The federal panel said, the state “is entitled to advocate its preferred methods of measuring minority voting strength, as we address those arguments below, but we need not defer to a state’s legal theory on how best to measure minority voters’ ability to elect.”

    After meticulously going through the various plans for the new voting districts, the federal court concluded in State of Texas v. U.S. that Texas failed to prove that its U.S. congressional and State House plans would not undercut Hispanic voters, “and that the U.S .Congressional and State Senate Plans were not enacted with discriminatory purpose.” The state therefore failed to “carry its burden” in showing its proposed voting districts would not “have the purpose or effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group under section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.”

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    Tags:
    Redistricting, Other courts, Voting rights, Gov. Rick Perry, Latino voters, minority voters, preclearance, Sec. 5, State of Texas v. U.S., U.S. District Cour for the District of Columbia, Voting Rights Act of 1965
  • July 16, 2012

    The Tired, Offensive States’ Rights Argument Against Health Care Reform

    by Jeremy Leaming

    Although it can be argued that the state governors threatening to forgo implementing the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid have a skewed idea of state sovereignty, likely closer to the truth is that most of the governors are carrying on a tawdry tradition of denying help to the most vulnerable.

    S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley, Fla. Gov. Rick Scott, La. Gov. Bobby Jindal and Texas Gov. Rick Perry have all vowed that their states will not expand their Medicaid programs to millions of uninsured, even though pursuant to the ACA the federal government will cover most of the costs of implementing the expansion. The New York Times reports that the expansion of Medicaid would add “17 million people to the rolls, accounting for half of all uninsured people expected to gain coverage nationwide.”

    All those governors have offered typical, but disingenuous complaints that the federal government is forcing the states to spend money they don’t have. They also predictably paint the federal government as pushing wasteful domestic programs or offering more free things to people.

    It is the same tired, offensive and often racially tinged complaint that conservative politicians have been peddling for decades in their nonstop attack on government.

    Gov. Scott called the ACA’s Medicaid provision “a massive entitlement expansion,” and Gov. Rick Perry (pictured) who presides over a state with the largest number of uninsured said the Affordable Care Act “would make Texas “a mere appendage of the federal government.”

    University of Maryland School of Law professor Sherrilyn Ifill in an opinion piece for CNN said the governors are carrying on a long tradition of not doing a terribly good job of governing.

    “These elected leaders are following a longstanding tradition in American politics of Southern states acting against the best interest of their residents,” she writes.

    More
    Tags:
    Economic inequality, Racial justice, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, ACA, Affordable Care Act, Gov. Rick Perry, Gov. Rick Scott, Medicaid expansion, Professor Sherrilyn Ifill, superrich, wealth gap
  • July 13, 2012

    Preserving Freedom with Medicaid Expansion

    by Joseph Jerome

    After declaring that Texas would not be expanding Medicaid to include millions of uninsured Texans, Gov. Rick Perry insisted that “the real issue here is about freedom.” South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley argued that the Affordable Care Act reveals a federal government that “simply [doesn’t] believe states should be trusted to govern themselves.” Speaking on the Meet the Press, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal invoked the principles of federalism when he suggested universal health care was akin to having Mardi Gras in Vermont.

    This rhetoric reveals a profoundly state-centric view on what freedom means, and while the Tenth Amendment certainly speaks to the rights of states vis-à-vis the federal government, it also talks about the rights of individual citizens. “If anything, the Tenth Amendment recognizes potentially expansive federal power,” Professor Steven Schwinn wrote on SCOTUSblog, rebutting “states’ rights” arguments against the Affordable Care Act.

    The problem is that “we are all hypocrites” when it comes to power struggles between the state and federal governments, Professor Garrett Epps explains. “The basic view of ‘states' rights’ is that they extend to any policy that the speaker thinks will go his or her way at the state level,” he writes.

    Though Gov. Perry (pictured) has long been a “states’ right stalwart,” he too falls into Epps’s trap. The governor supports federal efforts to restrict marriage equality and ban abortions, and the real issue was not freedom when $17 billion in federal stimulus money was used to balance Texas’ budget. When it comes to the Medicaid expansion, however, millions of Americans in these states must find comfort in being told they will go without health insurance as a matter of principle.

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    Tags:
    Supreme Court, Separation of Powers and Federalism, Affordable Care Act, Gov. Bobby Jindal, Gov. Nikki Haley, Gov. Paul LePage, Gov. Rick Perry, Medicaid expansion, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, states' rights, Tenth Amendment
  • December 13, 2011

    Despite Increasing Wealth Gap, Conservatives Push Big Tax Breaks for Rich

    by Jeremy Leaming

    In late October, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and Republican presidential hopeful, unveiled tax policy that despite the already historically low tax breaks for the nation’s wealthiest would advance even more tax benefits for that tiny, but politically powerful, group. As reported by TPM’s Brain Beutler, Newt Gingrich’s tax policy, reviewed by the Tax Policy Center, continues the Republican Party presidential candidates’ formula of advancing tax policy geared to coddling the super wealthy.

    As Beutler writes, “And like all the plans that came before it, Gingrich’s constitutes a massive tax cut for the rich. Indeed, no matter how you stack the numbers, Gingrich wants a tax system that permanently holds tax rates on the highest earners lower than the tax rates on the middle class."

    With study after study showing the decline of the nation’s middle class and sharp increase in poverty, the GOP presidential candidates are either oblivious to the research or are collectively shrugging their shoulders. It was Fox’s Britt Hume who said earlier this year of growing economic inequality, “who cares?”

    The Tax Policy Center, Beutler notes in conclusion, would drastically “reduce federal revenues.” Groups, such as Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, have advocated this type of policy for years – that is starve the federal government of revenues, so policies intended to help the less fortunate dwindle. The group’s mission, as noted on its website, is directed at shrinking what it sees as an unwieldy federal government. “The government’s power,” the group’s mission statement reads, “to control one’s life derives from its power to tax. We believe that power should be minimized.”    

    The Republican Party, as Tim Dickinson explores in this piece for Rolling Stone, has evolved to become a movement beholden to the nation’s wealthiest.

    Dickinson writes, “Today’s Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometime required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.”

    Earlier this month in Osawatomie, Kan., President Obama echoed some of the concerns that the Occupy Wall Street protestors have brought, in dramatic fashion, to the fore in recent months, when he decried economic policies that have damaged the middle class while benefiting a tiny few.

    “Look at the statistics,” the president said. “In the last few decades, the average income of the top 1 percent has gone up by more than 250 percent to $1.2 million per year. I’m not talking about millionaires, people who have a million dollars. I’m saying people who make a million dollars every single year. For the top one hundredth of 1 percent, the average income is now $27 million per year. The typical CEO who used to earn about 30 times more than his or her worker now earns 110 times more. And yet, over the last decade the incomes of most Americans have actually fallen by about 6 percent.”

    In a Dec. 11 column for the Chicago Tribune, Geoffrey R. Stone, a distinguished law professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and an ACS Board member, called Obama’s speech “groundbreaking,” for likely speaking to whom he dubbed “The Concerned Majority.”

    More
    Tags:
    Economic inequality, Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation, Americans for Tax Reform, Brian Beutler, Dean Baker, Gov. Rick Perry, income inequality, Newt Gingrich, President Obama, Professor Geoffrey R. Stone, tax policy, Tax Policy Center, Tim Dickinson, wealth gap
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