When Don Yelton, North Carolina Republican Party Executive Committee Member and GOP Precinct Chair of Buncombe County, NC tried to explain to The Daily Show that the state's new polling place Photo ID restriction law wasn't racist at all, things went from bad to worse.

Mind you, the "bad" was when he (actually!) claimed that one of his best friends was black! So...you can only imagine what the "worse" was...

Yeah. Pretty amazing. In an interview with Mountain Xpress after the show aired Wednesday night, Yelton said he was pleased with the way the Daily Show had edited the conversation. "The comments that were made, that I said, I stand behind them. I believe them," he told the paper. "To tell you the truth, there were a lot of things I said that they could've made me sound worse than what they put up."

But the Republican Party --- currently fighting in court to support the most restrictive voter suppression law to be passed in the nation since the Jim Crow era --- is not quite as pleased. The Buncombe County GOP said in a statement on Facebook, that "Mr. Yelton's comments do not reflect the belief or feelings of Buncombe republicans, nor do they mirror any core principle that our party is founded upon."

And, late Thursday, as Prachi Gupta at Salon reports, despite initially standing behind his comments, Yelton has now stepped down as the GOP precinct chair in Buncombe County:

Um, artificial damage?

Gawker reports that Yelton has now also stepped down from his state Republican Party leadership position as well. Moral for Republicans: It's okay to think it and pass laws based on it, just don't say it out loud, please and thanks, and certainly not in front of a TV camera!

UPDATE: Yelton has a new story. He now says The Daily Show took him out of context (in contrast to what he said previously, as seen above), then goes on to use the n-word to defend himself and calls his local Republican Party "gutless" because says they could have "turn[ed the interview] into a positive" by using it to show they accept all points of view. Seriously. See TPM for more...

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[This is article now been cross-published by Salon...]

This is nothing less than remarkable. The 7th circuit court judge who wrote the majority opinion in the landmark Crawford v. Marion County Election Board case, has now admitted he got it wrong!

"I think we did not have enough information," Judge Richard Posner said in remarks at HuffPo Live today. "If the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently."

Crawford is the Indiana polling place Photo ID restriction case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court where it was upheld in 2008. It is the case cited, usually inaccurately, by Republican advocates of such restrictions, who argue that such disenfranchising laws are not in violation of the U.S. Constitution. For example, it is the case cited (inaccurately) by TX Attorney General Greg Abbott, in his argument against the U.S. Dept. of Justice's current lawsuit attempting to block the Lone Star State's most recent attempt to institute that voting restriction at their polling places. "The U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that voter ID laws do not suppress legal votes," Abbott said misleadingly in response to the DoJ's suit, as explained in detail last month by BRAD BLOG legal analyst Ernest Canning.

But, setting aside the misuse of SCOTUS' very limited ruling on Crawford, the remarkable news today comes via UC Irvine election law professor Rick Hasen, who transcribes remarks made today by Judge Richard Posner, author of the original 7th circuit majority opinion in Crawford, now completely recanting his original opinion on the case!

Read this from Hasen. It's amazing...

The U.S. Justice Department announced today that it will be filing suit to block the central provisions of North Carolina's new, draconian restrictions on voting.

The DoJ will also ask the federal courts to require preclearance for new election-related laws in the state.

The Tar Heel State's massive new, controversial restrictions on voting were passed by Republicans this Summer just after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act in June. We've previously described the new measure as the nation's worst voter suppression law since the Jim Crow era.

The DoJ lawsuit is the latest element of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's vow this summer to use "every tool" at the DoJ's disposal to fight for voting rights after SCOTUS dismantled a key provision of the VRA that required jurisdictions with a long history of racial discrimination in election laws, such as North Carolina, to seek federal approval, or "preclearance" before new election related laws could be enforced.

The suit follows similar action by the DoJ in Texas, where new polling place Photo ID restrictions and Congressional redistricting --- both previously found by the DoJ and federal courts to be purposefully discriminatory in the Lone Star State --- are also being challenged as violations of the VRA and the U.S. Constitution. The federal suit in NC is the latest of several complaints filed against the state's massive new voting restrictions, all of them alleging, with no small amount of evidence in support, that the law is a racially motivated attempt to suppress minorities and other Democratic-leaning voters.

From the DoJ announcement today:

Note the important point in the above alleging that the NC law is not only discriminatory, it is also purposely so. That argument will be key to the DoJ's case that the new law is in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, as well as its argument that the state should be "bailed in" to require preclearance, as per Section 3(c) of the Act...

Note 1: Pardon the herky-jerky Skype web cam video.

Note 2: The BRAD BLOG article about Eric Holder that I believe my friend Mike Papantonio cited during our conversation, was actually written by our legal analyst Ernest Canning. But, of course, I'm proud to stand behind it 100%! Just wanted to give credit where due.

Note 2a: There are several different issues currently in court between TX and the DoJ, and they get a bit conflated during my conversation with Pap. One issue is the filing by the DoJ asking the court to order that the state of Texas be added, or "bailed in", to the list of jurisdictions requiring federal preclearance for all new voting-related laws, given their history of purposeful discrimination with such laws. The current list of jurisdictions is now empty, since the U.S. Supreme Court killed the Voting Rights Act formula used to determine who should be on that list. The other TX/DoJ case we discuss is the DoJ's suit to block the TX GOP's disenfranchising polling place Photo ID restriction. That law, though it was found discriminatory in 2012 by both the DoJ and a federal court, was re-enacted by TX immediately after SCOTUS gutted the VRA. The DoJ, and other parties, are now suing to block it under the still-existing Section 2 of the VRA, as well as on Constitutional grounds. (We hope to have more details on the lawsuits against the TX GOP's polling place Photo ID restriction law soon. And, I'll add, our coverage should offer some pretty encouraging news for voting rights advocates who, unlike Ernest Canning, may not have dug into all the legal details and already-established facts of the case. --- UPDATE: That article is now here, and offers some very encouraging news indeed about the likelihood that the TX Photo ID law is already doomed in court!)

Note 3: Enjoy!

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Warren Rojas at Roll Call reported some encouraging news yesterday.

Jason Thigpen, a rookie Republican candidate for the U.S. House in North Carolina, is swimming against the GOP tide. He is describing the state's new voter suppression law --- passed on party lines by a super-majority Republican legislature and signed by the state's new Republican Governor --- for what it is: a "turd" meant to keep legal voters (certain ones, the ones who tend to vote for Democrats) from casting their legal vote.

He's also been able to see through the GOP/Fox "News" smokescreen about the facts in regard to in-person impersonation polling place voter fraud, namely, that it is virtually non-existent.

We've called NC's new law the worst voter suppression law since the Jim Crow era. But Thigpen, described as a "political newcomer looking to unseat Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-NC)" in next year's primary, was even far more direct than that...

Last week, civil rights groups filed two lawsuits in a North Carolina U.S. District Court, seeking to block what Brad Friedman aptly described as "the most extreme anti-voter bill passed by any state since the Jim Crow Era."

The Tar Heel State has a sordid history of official discrimination, a history that includes 30 successful challenges to discriminatory voting laws under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) over the past 30 years. Until the recent Republican takeover of the state, NC had become somewhat more progressive in the area of election law, even allowing for same day registration and voting which is lacking in even most of the more progressive states in the union.

Then, everything changed. Republican Gov. Pat McCrory signed a sweeping new election "reform" bill. The breadth the new law is unprecedented. It targets "nearly every aspect of the voting process," according to one of the new lawsuits. Both complaints allege that the newly minted Voter Information Verification Act ("VIVA" aka HB 589) reflects nothing less than a deliberate, racially-motivated attempt to deprive African-Americans of their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.

The two federal lawsuits are NAACP v. McCrory [PDF] and League of Women Voters v. North Carolina [PDF].

The League also filed a separate legal challenge in state court, Currie v. North Carolina [PDF]. The state case alleges that VIVA's polling place Photo ID restrictions violate the NC Constitution, which treats voting as a "fundamental right." (A legal analysis of the state challenge will be covered in a subsequent article).

Earlier this Summer, when the U.S. Supreme Court carved out the very heart of the federal Voting Right Act with their 5 to 4 Shelby County v. Holder decision, they acknowledged that their ruling "in no way affects the permanent nationwide ban on racial discrimination." The controversial decision rejected the formula established by Congress in the VRA's Section 4, used to identify jurisdictions to be covered by the Act's Section 5 requirement for those covered jurisdictions to receive preclearance from the DoJ or a U.S. District Court before enacting any new election-related laws. The SCOTUS decision did not, however, eliminate the right of individuals, civil rights organizations, or the DoJ to file lawsuits seeking to block discriminatory laws under the VRA's Section 2, which bars discrimination in all 50 states.

Therefore, the new federal lawsuits filed in NC do not, and need not, challenge the Shelby County decision. Their factual allegations, however, suggest that Chief Justice John Roberts was in grave error when asserting, on behalf of the Court's right-wing majority, that "the conditions that originally justified [Section 5 preclearance] no longer characterize voting in covered jurisdictions"...

On this week's BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio, I covered both the nation's most extreme voter suppression law in North Carolina (and the facts behind its passage) and the precedent setting verdict in the Bradley Manning case.

But at the heart of it all is something else --- a primal, patriot scream perhaps, as exemplified by the arrest of 83-year old Robert Plummer, Jr. at the state capitol in NC last week (Plummer is a Korean War hero who was also arrested on the Edmund Pettus Bridge with Martin Luther King on Bloody Sunday in Selma, AL during the 1965 march for voting rights, and by the arrests of 80- and 85-year old Joan and Tom Kemble for singing in the Wisconsin state capitol in the same dark week.

The Kembles joined me live on the show to talk about their arrests at the daily sing-along that has been going on every day since Gov. Scott Walker's radical anti-union bill was passed two years ago, and to sing a song or two before their next trip to the pokey for peacefully singing in protest to petition their government for redress of grievances. (Please help all of the WI arrestees pay their legal bills and fines at SolidaritySingAlong.org!)

As usual, there was much more, including Desi Doyen and the latest Green News Report, in between. I hope you'll give it a listen. I think you'll enjoy it.

Download MP3 or listen online below...

It's not only North Carolina which is passing extreme Rightwing laws and then slapping the cuffs on those meddlesome octogenarian war hero delinquents displaying the temerity to exercise their 1st Amendment rights in protest against them.

In Wisconsin, where demonstrators against far Right Republican Governor Scott Walker have been holding a protest sing-along in the state capitol building every single day, without incident, for over two years since the passage of a radical anti-union bill, police have begun to use a similar tactic.

Below is video of Tom and Joan Kemble, the 85- and 80-year old parents of journalist Rebecca Kemble of The Progressive, being hauled away for singing peacefully in the state Capitol last week. Read Kemble's full story here where she notes: "It was awkward to be part of the swarm of journalists crowding around my own parents as the police were closing in on them."

"When Mom was surrounded by cops who were handcuffing the woman next to her and Mom looked her in the eye singing the verse of We Shall Overcome that says, 'We are not afraid,' I burst into tears," writes Kemble. I must admit, so did I when watching the video.

"The courage, care for her friend and incredibly centered and peaceful defiance she showed in the face of the overblown police action was deeply moving," Kemble continued. "And when Mom and Dad were handcuffed and led downstairs singing the words, 'Walker won't be governor, Walker won't be governor, Walker won't be governor someday,' my daughter's heart swelled with pride."

"So far, seventy-nine Wisconsinites have been arrested and ticketed," at the "Solidarity Sing Along", reports WI native John Nichols at The Nation today, "from 85-year-olds to young moms with kids."

Seriously, what the hell have we come to in this country?!...

[Hat-tip Nicole Desautels Schulte at Facebook.]

UPDATE 8/1/2013: Joan and Tom Kemble were my guests on this week's BradCast. And they even sang for us! Listen here...

The Department of Justice (DoJ) will not idly remain on the sidelines as the GOP seeks to illegally game the electoral system in the wake of what U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder referred to as the "deeply disappointing and flawed" Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder.

That decision, which carved out the very heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by finding unconstitutional the formula used to determine which jurisdictions with a long history of racial discrimination are required to "pre-clear" new election laws with the federal government before they can be enacted, has been a dramatic "setback", as Holder described it, to the voting rights movement, and has even proven to be a great leap forward for vote suppressors.

But, in a speech last week to the National Urban League Conference in Philadelphia, Holder signaled his intentions to fight back against the activist Court:

The DoJ then promptly filed a July 25, 2013 "Statement of Interest" in Perez v. Texas, a federal court case challenging the imposition of new Congressional redistricting maps in the wake of the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act, despite the fact that both the DoJ and a panel of federal judges nixed the same map last year after it was found to have been purposefully discriminatory just last year.

The DoJ argued in its filing last week that, because the evidence presented both in Perez and in Texas v. United States, revealed intentional violations of the 14th and 15th amendments in the redistricting schemes at issue, the court should impose a ten year preclearance requirement upon the State of Texas as an equitable remedy available pursuant to Section 3(c) of the VRA.

In short, while SCOTUS gutted the VRA's existing Section 4 formula for determining jurisdictions to be covered by Section 5 pre-clearance requirements, it left Section 3, which allows for jurisdictions to be added or "bailed in" to the list of those subject to preclearance intact. The DoJ now wants Texas added to the list of such jurisdictions.

It is of critical importance to note, however, that Holder's Urban League speech made clear that his intentions of pushing back were neither limited to Texas nor to Section 3.

"This is the Department's first action to protect voting rights following the Shelby County decision, but it will not be our last," Holder vowed.

He then stated (emphasis added): "My colleagues and I are determined to use every tool at our disposal to stand against discrimination wherever it is found."

As observed by University of California Irvine Law Prof. Rick Hasen, Holder's pledge to have the DoJ "use whatever tools it has remaining in its arsenal to protect minority voting rights" is "a big deal."

It's a "big deal" not just because of the creative use of Section 3 in Perez, but also because the DoJ is joining a case originally brought "under Section 2 of the [VRA] to enforce the guarantees of the [14th & 15th] Amendments against racial discrimination in voting." The DoJ's actions here suggests that they are finally prepared to add the power and resources of the federal government to legal efforts to protect the right to vote that had been primarily made during the last election cycle by privately-funded, public interest groups like the ACLU and League of Women Voters...

So this is what it's come to, North Carolina? Really?...

[Hat-tips @utbrp and @enmarshall.]

UPDATE 7/29/13: The arrestee seen above has now been identified, as 83-year old Robert Plummer, Jr. of Carthage NC. He is, according to We Act Radio, "a Korean War Vet who was one of the first African-American Navy UDT divers (AKA Frogmen, the precursors to the US Navy SEALs)."

When asked about his voting rights concerns in NC, as seen their video posted below, Plummer responds: "I am very despondent on that matter, because that's what I went to war for --- for protection of voting rights. And I can't see us going and saving democracy all over the world when our voting rights are being deteriorated right here in the United States."

He also says his arrest last week was not his first run in with the law. He says he was arrested on the Edmund Pettus bridge with Martin Luther King during the 1965 march for voting rights on Bloody Sunday in Selma, AL. Though, when asked for details by the reporter in the video, he demurred, saying, "I don't want to go back that far. I'm a young man!"

When asked if he was going to keep fighting for voting rights, he responded: "Most emphatically"...

UPDATE 7/30/2013: I've now spoken to Plummer, to invite him on to my radio show. Unfortunately, he has bible class tomorrow at his church, where he is a Deacon, and won't be able to join me. But he was an extraordinarily pleasant man, with a sharp sense of humor. He confirmed the information above, and added these thoughts during our conversation when I asked why he was willing to be arrested at the Capitol. His reply:

He also added, as he was looking up the phone number of his church for me on his iPad and his new "32gigabites iPhone", that he is "half way up to speed on what is going on," because, after all, he says, "I'm an old pirate, man."

[This article now cross-published by Salon.]

Late Thursday night, the North Carolina state legislature approved a radical voter suppression bill on a party line vote. The measure, easily the most extreme anti-voter bill passed by any state since the Jim Crow Era, now heads to Republican Governor Pat McCrory for his signature. Court challenges, many of them, will most assuredly follow.

I discussed the Tar Heel State Republicans' horrendous voter suppression law as it moved through the state legislature earlier this week in an article focused on the public pushback against both it, and other radical laws being hurriedly enacted in the state while the Republicans hold veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the state house, as well as the Governorship there. It's the first time in 150 years that that has been the case, and the GOP is making all they can of it, voters be damned.

I also discussed the bill on this week's KPFK BradCast. But I want to highlight just how draconian this massive restriction on voting rights actually is in North Carolina, which, until the complete Republican takeover of the state government in 2012 (thanks to gerrymandering in 2010), had actually been a fairly progressive state by southeast standards, particularly in regard to voting laws.

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's recent gutting of the important pre-clearance provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act --- the provision which had required states with histories of racial discrimination, like NC, to obtain federal approval before making any changes to voting laws --- NC and other states now "freed" from the yoke of not being able to discriminate, have been on a tear to pass discriminatory laws previously denied under the VRA.

NC has now done that in a way that no other state has yet even tried. They have, in essence, included in this bill every conceivable voter suppression tactic that has ever been dreamed up over the past decade by the Republican Party --- and then some.

UC Irvine election law professor Rick Hasen described the bill as "a nightmare for voting-rights advocates."

It includes draconian polling place Photo ID restrictions (despite any evidence of polling place impersonation in the state), shortens the early voting period and eliminates NC's very successful same-day voter registration program. "But," Hasen adds, "it's also a laundry list of ways to make it harder for people to vote, and which cannot plausibly be justified on antifraud grounds."

Just take a look at the list of some of the other provisions including in this "nightmare" of an anti-democratic --- as well as anti-Democratic --- voter suppression bill...

On this week's BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio, we spent zero time on the royal baby or Anthony Weiner! You're welcome!

Instead, economic policy reporter/muckraker David Dayen joined me for a quick discussion about Obama's "big" economic speech at Knox College in IL on Wednesday afternoon; Then it was on to Sen. Ron Wyden's Tuesday warning about NSA "secret" surveillance laws (and we took a bunch of great listener phone calls along with it); We spent some time on the high-ranking Kentucky election official fraudsters convicted of 156 years but now ordered by an appellate court to receive a new trial and the massive voter suppression legislation moving its way through the North Carolina statehouse; and more!

It was a very lively show! Enjoy!

Download MP3 or listen online below [appx 58 mins]...

I've always wondered why non-Rightwing Christians have allowed Rightwingers to take "God" and "Jesus" as their own, particularly since progressive principles are far more in line with those said to be the teachings of Jesus.

The folks in North Carolina --- who are now under siege by Republican control of both congressional houses and the governorship for the first time in 150 years --- have been going about reclaiming the moral high ground with a series of massive (and growing larger) "Moral Monday" protests at the state house, so far resulting in about 900 arrests for civil disobedience as of this week's twelfth consecutive Monday protest.

The protests are being held by a wide coalition of groups in response to the radical Republican legislation --- much of it written out of state by the Koch-funded corporatist lobby, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) --- meant to see the state government shut down women's health clinics, cut education funding and, of particular note, suppress voters by truncating early voting, ending Sunday voting, banning NC's successful Election Day registration program, instituting tax penalties to parents whose children vote at their college residences, and by putting in place draconian polling place Photo ID restrictions. (See Ari Berman today at The Nation for more on the NC Republican's attempt to institute all of these "extreme voter suppression measures".)

At Salon, Kristin Rawls explains that the "Moral Monday" protests in NC, "that include support for LGBT and abortion rights", seem to be "confounding to the Tea Party", but not to the many groups of faith (as well as "atheists, agnostics and members of other faiths in attendance every week") who are finally taking back the moral high ground from the Rightwing hypocrites who have claimed it, but never earned it, for so much of the past decade.

It's an interesting read, and an interesting phenomenon that, Rawls notes, "is supported by a 150-organization coalition spearheaded by the NC-NAACP that includes everything from Occupy Raleigh to Planned Parenthood-NC to the NC Association of Educators."

Her point about why the voter suppression laws Republicans are now trying to pass are so important for the NC GOP radicals, is explained in this key passage...

Nearly a quarter century has passed since the U.S. Supreme Court, in Symm vs. United States, ruled that college students had a right to treat their dorms as their residence for voting purposes. It's a fact which Republicans seem to find very inconvenient --- especially given the fact that, in 2008, the youth vote, heaviest in precincts where college campuses are located, favored Barack Obama over John McCain by a two-to-one ratio. The numbers were similar against Mitt Romney in 2012.

Thus, in 2011, despite the fact that his investigation failed to establish a single instance of voter fraud by any student, Maine's Republican Secretary of State Charlie E. Summers sent an intimidating letter to lawfully registered student voters seeking to convince them to "cancel" their voter registration where they go to school.

"Back in February," of this year, writes Laura Conaway at Maddow Blog, "an Indiana Republican proposed revoking the right for students to register at their colleges. After college Democrats and Republicans in Indiana joined in pushing back, the sponsor promised to amend her bill so that it would be constitutional, by which she meant dropping the idea."

Not to be outdone, this month three North Carolina Republican State Senators have introduced the appropriately numbered S666, which would strip the right of the parents of students from claiming a personal state tax exemption, which ranges from $2,000 - $2,500, if the student lawfully uses their dorm as their residence for voting purposes.

A related bill, S667, deceptively titled the "Equalize Voter Rights" act, would also strip tax exemptions for parents whose student children fail to register their car at the same place they register to vote. According to WRAL, "That also could cut down on college student registration, since many students maintain their vehicle registration in their home counties."

As the state's Democratic House Minority leader notes, both bills "would raise taxes on middle-class families who are trying to put their children through college." But, apparently Republicans are now in favor of tax increases, at least in NC, as long at it might help curb the increase in the youth vote seen over the last several elections.

But what may be most troubling of all, is that it seems the esteemed GOP state Senators in NC must be entirely unaware of the provisions of the 24th Amendment which, long ago, outlawed all poll taxes.