Crooked Media - What A Day: Wish upon a Gar

The Department of Justice has joined the fight for voting rights in earnest, having concluded after months of careful detective work that Georgia’s new all-purpose voter-suppression and election-subversion law is (in technical legal terms) racist as hell. 
 

• Speaking on the eighth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the federal government will sue Georgia, its Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and its State Elections Board, alleging that key provisions of S.B. 202, “were enacted with the purpose of denying or abridging the right of black Georgians to vote on account of their race or color in violation of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.” Garland noted that prior to Shelby County, the Voting Rights Act would’ve empowered the DOJ to block S.B. 202 and urged Congress to restore the VRA’s preclearance requirement. 
   
• DOJ says the racist intent of the law is apparent in provisions that serve to deny Georgians access to absentee ballots, only to impose new restrictions on in-person voting and lengthen the long lines voters of color already face. The challenged provisions include those that prohibit and penalize the distribution of unsolicited absentee-ballot applications; impose an onerous ID-photocopying requirement on most absentee-ballot applicants; shrink the absentee-ballot application window; reduce the number of absentee-ballot drop boxes; prohibit the distribution of food and water to in-person voters; and make it illegal to count out-of-precinct provisional ballots unless they’re cast after 5 p.m.
   
• We should expect more lawsuits along these lines as other GOP-led states pass similar disenfranchisement bills. DOJ’s “Civil Rights Division continues to analyze other state laws that have been passed and we are following the progress of legislative proposals under considerations in additional states,” Garland said. Additionally, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco has issued a directive to all federal prosecutors and the FBI to highlight the prevalence of threats to election officials and instruct them to prioritize investigating such threats. DOJ will also publish new guidance that apprises all jurisdictions of voting protections they must uphold as they redraw their electoral maps. 

Now we wait with bated breath for the Republican-dominated courts to say “haha good luck with that!” 
 

• One of the Court’s few pending decisions this term is in a case called Brnovich v. DNC, which Republican-appointed justices are expected to use to narrow section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, so that it can’t preempt state laws that have racially discriminatory intent. This is almost certainly why DOJ argues the Georgia law was designed to abridge the right to vote on the basis of race—it should survive the coming ruling in Brnovich, but it’s a harder allegation to prove.
   
• The composition of the courts themselves makes that hurdle artificially higher, too. DOJ’s suit against the Georgia law was assigned at random to Trump-appointed Judge J.P. Boulee. The Trumpified courts are notoriously supportive of voter suppression, and, just as importantly, have the power to slow-roll the judicial process, allowing judges to run out the clock before the midterms. 

It’s great to see Garland devote so many resources to defending the right to vote—particularly in the realm of criminal enforcement against those threatening election officials, where DOJ’s powers are strongest. But it’s no substitute for legislative action to override voter suppression and make sure elections are contested on an even playing field. Time to step up Sinemanchin!

Last night, Jon Lovett made his return to the live stage with an amazing lineup of guests including Ronan Farrow, Jared Goldstein, Hannah Einbinder, Ira Madison III, Aida Osman, Louis Virtel, Brendan Scannell, Rhea Butcher and more! "Out of The Closets, Into the Streets" was a Pride extravaganza filled with games, comedy sets, and of course: Gay News! And tomorrow, you can recap the best moments on the newest episode of Lovett or Leave It. Make sure you've subscribed wherever you get your podcasts, and visit crooked.com/pride for more details. 

The Senate Republicans who negotiated a bipartisan infrastructure deal with President Biden with the full knowledge that Democrats planned to pair it with a broader reconciliation package have begun feigning outrage over that dual-track strategy, and demanding that moderate Democrats commit to helping them kill the rest of Biden’s agenda, or they’ll doom the bipartisan bill. That may be for the best, since it turns out to be a huge gift to Wall Street: Investors are drooling over the proposed funding method of “asset recycling,” or selling off existing public infrastructure to private companies, and using the lease money to fund new infrastructure. An experiment with that strategy in Chicago proved to be a windfall for investors but more than doubled the cost of parking meters for users, a state of affairs that progressives might not wanna replicate on a national scale.

A sprawling content ecosystem has sprung up to advance the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, which doesn’t seem ideal. Wealthy Trump supporters have spent millions of dollars to fund its existence, from MyPillow Guy Mike Lindell’s glitchy social media platform and rally circuit to a new propaganda film set to be released online this weekend, financed by former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. That alternate-reality echo chamber has helped sustain right-wing interest in (and raise money for) chaotic state-level ballot audits, fueled threats to election officials, and calcified the statistic that six out of 10 Republicans think Biden won as a result of election fraud. As long as the Big Lie grift continues to prove profitable, Lindells and Byrnes will continue pouring money into keeping the delusion alive, without regard for the consequences.

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Amherst, MA, has created a fund to pay reparations to Black residents. 

The House has voted to undo Trump-era regulations that allowed predatory payday lenders to avoid state laws capping interest rates. The Senate approved the repeal last month, and the Biden administration supports it. 

The House also approved a measure to ditch a Trump-era rule that weakened methane regulations, which has already been passed by the Senate.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) told Dan Pfeiffer that she wants to add election subversion to the Senate’s next voting rights proposal.