Last Call For Motor Voter Over

At every turn, Republicans want to make it harder for American citizens to vote.  They know that if they make it difficult for poor urban, elderly, college and minority voters to vote, they will remain with unchecked power.  No wonder then that they want to now kill the Motor Voter Act, which Mitch McConnell has been trying to destroy for nearly 30 years, and the Roberts Court may be the headsman that swings the axe.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear the newest challenge to the law, concerning whether Ohio can remove voters from the rolls who don’t vote over a six-year period. If a voter in Ohio misses an election, doesn’t respond to a subsequent mailing from the state, and then sits out two more elections, he or she is removed from the registration list, even if this person would otherwise be eligible to vote. Critics of this process say it turns voting into a “use it or lose it” right and will open the door to wider voter purges.

Ohio purged 2 million voters from 2011 to 2016, more than any other state, including over 840,000 for infrequent voting. At least 144,000 voters in Ohio’s three largest counties, home to Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, have been purged since the 2012 election, with voters in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods twice as likely to be removed as those in Republican-leaning ones, according to a  Reuters analysis.

A federal appeals court ruled in September 2016 that the state’s purging of infrequent voters violated the NVRA, which states that someone cannot be removed from the rolls “by reason of the person’s failure to vote.” As a result of that ruling,  7,500 people who had been purged from the rolls were reinstated and were able to vote in the 2016 election.

Ohio says it should be allowed to remove these voters from the rolls under the NVRA, claiming that “a failure to respond to a notice— not a failure to vote—is the sole proximate cause of removal” under its purge program. Ohio adds that if the Supreme Court finds that the NVRA does prohibit its actions, it would raise “serious constitutional questions” about the law. A supporting brief by the American Civil Rights Union, a conservative group that has sued states to force aggressive voter purges, says that if “the NVRA indeed prohibits the states from utilizing inactivity as a factor that leads to deeming a registrant ultimately to be unqualified—as the lower court found—then the NVRA intrudes on the important federalist balance in the Constitution.”

One of the big reasons that Ohio went for Trump by 8 points in 2016 was that Jon Husted kicked nearly a million Ohioans off the voter rolls, the vast majority were registered Democrats.  Now the GOP wants to repeat Ohio's voter purges in other states.

For its part, the Trump administration has come out squarely in support of voter purges. The Obama Justice Department opposed the Ohio purge program, but Trump’s DOJ abruptly switched sides in the case. “After this Court’s grant of review and the change in Administrations, the Department reconsidered the question,” the DOJ informed the Supreme Court in August. “It has now concluded that the NVRA does not prohibit a State from using nonvoting as the basis for sending a [removal] notice.”

In June 2017, the DOJ also sent a letter to 44 states informing them that it was reviewing their voter list maintenance procedures and asking how they planned to “remove the names of ineligible voters.” If Ohio wins at the Supreme Court, it will “certainly embolden” the department and GOP-controlled states to undertake aggressive voter purges, says Vanita Gupta, who headed the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under Obama and is now president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

And that would open the door to broader challenges to the NVRA. “It’s a hugely significant case,” Gupta says. “If the court comes out with a broad ruling that says inactivity in voting is sufficient proof to kick a voter off of the rolls, that could have broad implications across the country for how voters are purged off the rolls per the National Voter Registration Act.”

In other words, if states are allowed to kick people off the voter rolls for not voting, then make it impossible to register to vote, we're done as a free country.

And the GOP knows it.

The Drums Of War

Over in Foreign Policy, Ed Luttwak calls for bombing North Korea, openly saying that the deaths of tens of millions on the Korean Peninsula should not and cannot stop Trump from acting.

Nothing can be known about this week’s talks between North and South Korea other than their likely outcome. As in every previous encounter, South Korea will almost certainly reward North Korea’s outrageous misconduct by handing over substantial sums of money, thus negating long-overdue sanctions recently imposed by the United Nations Security Council. Meanwhile, the North will continue to make progress toward its goal of deploying several nuclear-armed, mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles, having already tested nuclear-explosive devices in October 2006, May 2009, February 2013, January 2016, September 2016, and September 2017

Each test would have been an excellent occasion for the United States to finally decide to do to North Korea what Israel did to Iraq in 1981, and to Syria in 2007 — namely, use well-aimed conventional weapons to deny nuclear weapons to regimes that shouldn’t have firearms, let alone weapons of mass destruction. Fortunately, there is still time for Washington to launch such an attack to destroy North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. It should be earnestly considered rather than rejected out of hand.

Of course, there are reasons not to act against North Korea. But the most commonly cited ones are far weaker than generally acknowledged.

One mistaken reason to avoid attacking North Korea is the fear of direct retaliation. The U.S. intelligence community has reportedly claimed that North Korea already has ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads that can reach as far as the United States. But this is almost certainly an exaggeration, or rather an anticipation of a future that could still be averted by prompt action. The first North Korean nuclear device that could potentially be miniaturized into a warhead for a long-range ballistic missile was tested on September 3, 2017, while its first full-scale ICBM was only tested on November 28, 2017. If the North Koreans have managed to complete the full-scale engineering development and initial production of operational ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads in the short time since then — and on their tiny total budget — then their mastery of science and engineering would be entirely unprecedented and utterly phenomenal. It is altogether more likely that they have yet to match warheads and missiles into an operational weapon.

It’s true that North Korea could retaliate for any attack by using its conventional rocket artillery against the South Korean capital of Seoul and its surroundings, where almost 20 million inhabitants live within 35 miles of the armistice line. U.S. military officers have cited the fear of a “sea of fire” to justify inaction. But this vulnerability should not paralyze U.S. policy for one simple reason: It is very largely self-inflicted.

When then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter decided to withdraw all U.S. Army troops from South Korea 40 years ago (ultimately a division was left behind), the defense advisors brought in to help — including myself — urged the Korean government to move its ministries and bureaucrats well away from the country’s northern border and to give strong relocation incentives to private companies. South Korea was also told to mandate proper shelters, as in Zurich for example, where every new building must have its own (under bombardment, casualties increase dramatically if people leave their homes to seek shelter). In recent years, moreover, South Korea has had the option of importing, at moderate cost, Iron Dome batteries, which are produced by both Israel and the United States, that would be capable of intercepting 95 percent of North Korean rockets headed to inhabited structures.

But over these past four decades, South Korean governments have done practically nothing along these lines. The 3,257 officially listed “shelters” in the Seoul area are nothing more than underground shopping malls, subway stations, and hotel parking lots without any stocks of food or water, medical kits or gas masks. As for importing Iron Dome batteries, the South Koreans have preferred to spend their money on developing a bomber aimed at Japan.

In other words, Ed Luttwak is saying that the coming loss of life from Pyongyang's inevitable retaliation of a decapitation strike against the Kim regime is going to be South Korea's fault, so f'ck em if they die, we've got Evil™ to bomb.

EUUU ESSSS AYYYY!
EUUU ESSSS AYYYY!
EUUU ESSSS AYYYY!

Which, coincidentally, is exactly what the Trump Regime is apparently planning.

The Trump administration is debating a "bloody nose" attack on North Korea, recent reports say, with the president's inner circle split and apparently teetering between endorsing a strike and holding out hope for diplomacy.

Both The Telegraph and The Wall Street Journal have portrayed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis as trying to caution President Donald Trump against a strike, and the national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, as advocating it.

The reports come after months of mixed messages and dozens of shifts in the US's stance on North Korea.

The bloody-nose strategy, which calls for a sharp, violent response to some North Korean provocation, puts a lot of weight on the US's properly calibrating an attack on North Korea and Pyongyang's reading the limited strike as anything other than the opening salvo of an all-out war.

For that reason, even the limited strike envisioned by North Korea hawks carries a tremendous risk of global — and possibly nuclear — catastrophe.

No big deal.  I'm sure the Trump regime's experts will thread the needle and see the world through this mess safely.

Right?

Corker Flips The Script

A few months ago, SC GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham was among Trump's loudest critics.  Now he is firmly in Trump's corner, defending Trump on TV as his friend and golf buddy. Graham still believes Trump won't fire Robert Mueller and he's also currently ruling out joining the Trump administration in a cabinet position, but he's done a complete 180 since last year.

And now we see yet another Republican senator and now former Trump critic is doing the same thing, in this case, Tennessee's Bob Corker.

Sen. Bob Corker, who is traveling Monday on Air Force One with President Donald Trump, has repaired his relationship with the commander in chief after the two men exchanged fierce words in the fall, sources familiar with their discussions told CNN. 

The two have spoken several times since late last year, particularly as Corker was weighing whether to support the sweeping tax overhaul. Ultimately, Corker reversed his position and backed the tax bill -- and endured sharp criticism over what he said was erroneous reporting suggesting he backed the bill because of a provision that would enrich him financially. Corker complained about the news coverage to Trump, who deemed it "fake news," the sources said. 

Corker's moves to make amends with Trump reflect a calculation among many Senate Republicans: While they may complain about what they view as his erratic behavior, they will soothe over tense relations and look past previous disputes to get on his good side in order to influence him over key decisions. Sens. Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul, two men who have exchanged bitter words with Trump in the past, have taken similar tacks, which seem to have worked with the transactional President. 

For Corker, who serves as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, fixing the Iran nuclear deal is a key priority -- one that will require the President's support. As they bonded over the tax bill and their complaints about the media, Corker has been working behind-the-scenes with senior administration officials -- including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster -- to make changes to the Iran deal through new legislation in Congress, sources say.

Here's the thing though, Corker is retiring at the end of the year.  He announced that in September. So why is he suddenly being Trump's buddy?  In fact, so many Republicans are now heading for retirement despite controlling all three branches of government that the Blue Wave scenario is coming true through GOP attrition alone.

Unlike Lindsey Graham, I think Corker wants that Secretary of State job after Rex Tillerson leaves. Or maybe, like Graham, he's being blackmailed like many Republicans may be.

We'll see.  But all these GOP "never Trump" critics are suddenly coming around even as Mueller closes in.  These are not stupid people.  There's a "why" here and we need to find out what it is.

StupidiNews!

• A federal judge in California has blocked the Trump regime from deporting DACA recipients and ruled that the government must resume renewing applications pending multiple legal cases.
• A three-judge panel has unanimously struck down North Carolina's federal election districts as unconstitutional, the 191-page ruling gives lawmakers until Jan. 29 for a new map.
• Senate Democrats have released a report showing two decades of Russian interference in European elections, demanding Donald Trump protect elections in the US. 
• A magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck off the cost of Honduras in the Caribbean Sea late Tuesday, the quake was felt across the region and did light damage, no casualties have been reported.
• GOP Sen. Susan Collins says she will vote for a Democratic bill to restore net neutrality rules, but the bill has no chance in the GOP-led House, let alone surviving a Trump veto.