GOP War on Voting: New Laws Could Block Five Million From Polls. Voting Law Changes in 2012. See our updated roundup of voting law changes in 2013.
Ahead of the 2012 elections, a wave of legislation tightening restrictions on voting has suddenly swept across the country. More than 5 million Americans could be affected by the new rules already put in place this year — a number larger than the margin of victory in two of the last three presidential elections. In October 2011, this report was the first full accounting and analysis of this year's voting cutbacks. Click here to read an up-to-date summary of both the bills that have been proposed and the legislation that has been passed since the beginning of 2011. Download the Report (PDF) Read Voting Law Changes Summary (UPDATED 10/5/12) Download the 2011 Appendix (PDF) Download the Overview (PDF) View the Report Executive Summary Over the past century, our nation expanded the franchise and knocked down myriad barriers to full electoral participation.
Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult. Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!
" Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten. " -"Double Indemnity" (1944) Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election?
Both parties are captives to corporate loot. But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. Why Republicans Oppose the Individual Health-Care Mandate. On March 23, 2010, the day that President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, fourteen state attorneys general filed suit against the law’s requirement that most Americans purchase health insurance, on the ground that it was unconstitutional.
It was hard to find a law professor in the country who took them seriously. “The argument about constitutionality is, if not frivolous, close to it,” Sanford Levinson, a University of Texas law-school professor, told the McClatchy newspapers. Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California at Irvine, told the Times, “There is no case law, post 1937, that would support an individual’s right not to buy health care if the government wants to mandate it.” Orin Kerr, a George Washington University professor who had clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy, said, “There is a less than one-per-cent chance that the courts will invalidate the individual mandate.” It was not an isolated case.