Tag: North Carolina
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Justice Dept. Takes Action Against North Carolina GOP’s Voter Suppression Laws
Another humiliation for my old home state. Until now, North Carolina was one of the few Old Confederacy states that was not covered by the Voting Rights Act, because, unlike the others, the Democrats who ran the state insisted that voting be open to all who were eligible. Now, just 10 months electing the first Republican-controlled government since the 1870s, those days are over. If the Justice Department prevails, NC will be covered by the VRA just like every other state run by neo-Confederates, and will have to submit its plans for changing voter regulations to the courts in advance for approval.
Ted Cruz Calls for Electing a Senate of 100 Jim Crow Racists and Homophobes Like the Late Jesse Helms
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Back in the Bush era, GOP Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi lost his job as Senate majority leader after he remarked that the United States “wouldn’t have had all these problems” with African Americans if only S.C. Sen. Strom Thurmond had been elected president when Thurmond ran on the segregationist Dixiecrat Party ticket in 1948.
But Thurmond, who had turned 100 years old at the time Lott made that career-killing remark — had long ago swung decidedly to the left on civil rights, in part because he needed African-American votes to get elected and possibly because at least one of his children was black.
McCrory Makes It Sound Like What’s Happening in N.C. Is a Good Thing
We’re stepping on the toes of a lot of the establishment that’s been controlling this state government for a long, long time, on both the left and the right.
— North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R), quoted by the Washington Post.
Fact Checking GOP Propaganda in North Carolina
Rob Christensen at the Raleigh News & Observer fact checks 10 key planks in the North Carolina Republican Party’s propaganda platform:
Myth No. 1: North Carolina’s public schools are failing its children.
North Carolina fourth and eighth graders performed better than the U.S. national average, according to the 2011 Trends in International Mathematic and Science Study. They out-scored students in Australia, Israel, Sweden, Italy and Norway.
A Blue Tide Terrified North Carolina Republicans into Launching Their War on Voting
Rachel Maddow covered the North Carolina Republican Party’s war on voting live from Elizabeth City, N.C., last night. She led off by explaining what it was that so terrified the state GOP that became desperate to kill the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of their own constituents. The source of their terror can be summed up in the two charts above. The chart on the left shows the demographics of the most motivated voters in 2008: students and African Americans. The chart on the right shows how efforts by the formerly Democratic-controlled North Carolina government to make voting easier helped improve the state’s turnout record from one of the worst in the nation, in 1991, to one of the best in 2012.
North Carolina Republicans realized that their days were numbered if these trends were allowed to continue. But instead of coming up with policies that might be more popular or candidates with better appeal, they chose instead to change the rules for voting in ways that specifically targeted students and African-Americans, among others.
Watch the entire segment from last night’s Rachel Maddow show below:
Colin Powell Publicly Criticizes N.C. Voter-Suppression Laws
I want to see policies that encourage every American to vote, not make it more difficult to vote. … It immediately turns off a voting block the Republican Party needs. These kinds of actions do not build on the base. It just turns people away.
— Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, taking aim at North Carolina’s new voting law — with N.C. Gov. Pat McCrory (R) in the audience — the Raleigh News & Observer reports.
Maddow Interviews Nine-Term Dem N.C. Sen. Ellie Kinnaird, 81, Who Has Resigned to Fight Republican Voter Suppression Fulltime
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Here is the statement Sen. Kinnaird released, via the Daily Tar Heel, the newspaper published by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is in her district:
GOP Voter Suppression Is Underway in North Carolina
Jim Crow is already on the march in North Carolina:
Within hours of Gov. Pat McCrory signing a Republican-backed bill this week making sweeping changes to the state’s voting laws, local elections boards in two college towns made moves that could make it harder for students to vote.
