Weekly Address: President Obama – Reaffirming Our Commitment to Protecting the Right to Vote

August 8, 2015 JanF Editors' Choice, From the White House 11

The President’s Weekly Address post is also an Open News Thread. Feel free to share other news stories in the comments.

From the White House – Weekly Address

In this week’s address, the President celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act by underscoring the importance of one of the most fundamental rights of our democracy – that all of us are created equal and that each of us deserves a voice. The enactment of the Voting Rights Act wasn’t easy – it was the product of sacrifice from countless men and women who risked so much to protect every person’s right to vote. The President reminded us about their struggle and that while our country is a better place because of it, there is still work to be done. He promised to continue to push Congress for new legislation to protect everyone’s right to the polls, and asked that all Americans regardless of party use every opportunity possible to exercise the fundamental right to vote.

Transcript: Weekly Address: Reaffirming Our Commitment to Protecting the Right to Vote

Remarks of President Barack Obama, Weekly Address, The White House, August 8, 2015

Hi, everybody. The right to vote is one of the most fundamental rights of any democracy. Yet for too long, too many of our fellow citizens were denied that right, simply because of the color of their skin.

Fifty years ago this week, President Lyndon Johnson signed a law to change that. The Voting Rights Act broke down legal barriers that stood between millions of African Americans and their constitutional right to cast ballot. It was, and still is, one of the greatest victories in our country’s struggle for civil rights.

But it didn’t happen overnight. Countless men and women marched and organized, sat in and stood up, for our most basic rights. For this they were called agitators and un-American, they were jailed and beaten. Some were even killed. But in the end, they reaffirmed the idea at the very heart of America: that people who love this country can change it.

Our country is a better place because of all those heroes did for us. But as one of those heroes, Congressman John Lewis, reminded us in Selma this past March, “There’s still work to be done.” Fifty years after the Voting Rights Act, there are still too many barriers to vote, and too many people trying to erect new ones. We’ve seen laws that roll back early voting, force people to jump through hoops to cast a ballot, or lead to legitimate voters being improperly purged from the rolls. Over the years, we have seen provisions specifically designed to make it harder for some of our fellow citizens to vote. In a democracy like ours, with a history like ours, that’s a disgrace.

That’s why, as we celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, I’m calling on Congress to pass new legislation to make sure every American has equal access to the polls. It’s why I support the organizers getting folks registered in their communities. And it’s why, no matter what party you support, my message to every American is simple: get out there and vote – not just every four years, but every chance you get. Because your elected officials will only heed your voice if you make your voice heard.

The promise that all of us are created equal is written into our founding documents – but it’s up to us to make that promise real. Together, let’s do what Americans have always done: let’s keep marching forward, keep perfecting our union, and keep building a better country for our kids.

Thanks everybody. Have a great weekend.

Bolding added.

~

11 Comments

  1. President Obama:

    … get out there and vote – not just every four years, but every chance you get. Because your elected officials will only heed your voice if you make your voice heard.

  2. An interview with Chris Brook, legislative director of the ACLU in North Carolina in the WaPo:

    BROOK: There’s grounds for optimism, because over the course of the trial, we were able to put on a strong case featuring dozens of North Carolinians who were disenfranchised in 2014. These restrictions are not mere inconveniences. They resulted in many North Carolinians not being able to vote. […]

    PLUM LINE: But don’t you have to prove discrimination?

    BROOK: You need to prove that there’s been a discriminatory effect, and that there’s been a burden placed on African Americans and their efforts to exercise the right to vote. We think we’ve been able to show that. The legislature had data when it was considering the bill that indicated that African Americans relied upon out-of-precinct voting, same-day registration, and early voting, disproportionate to the broader community in North Carolina.

    We were able to show through the course of the trial that there has been heavy reliance upon those means of exercising the right to vote by the African American community. We contextualized why those measures have been so heavily replied upon by the African American community.

    What is at stake?

    BROOK: The voting restrictions in North Carolina have been called “the mother of all voter suppression bills.” If such legislation is found to comport with the the 14th Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, that could easily encourage other state legislatures to adopt similar voter restrictions in other states.

    Right now North Carolina is an outlier. But if these measures are allowed to stay in place, it might not be an outlier for very long. That would be devastating. The Voting Rights Act was one of the monumental steps forward for our democracy in the 20th Century. We should stand together to ensure it continues to serve its purpose of allowing all Americans to access the right to vote in the 21st Century. We shouldn’t take steps back now.

  3. In the News: Debate takes

    Focusing on what matters? Counting eyepokes …

    “Gov. Christie should be pretty happy with his performance. He got into scrapes with Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee and won them both,” said Matthew Hale, a Seton Hall University political science professor.

    Women’s health? How about women’s life or death?

    Kelly’s question to Walker pointedly played from the left: “Would you really let a mother die rather than have an abortion, and with 83% of the American public in favor of a life exception, are you too out of the mainstream on this issue to win the general election?”

    His answer was yes, he would rather let a woman die. And the reality of saying no exception?

    Even for the party long aligned in opposition to the procedure, the issue of exceptions has been politically challenging. Though the Republican party platform calls for a ban without exceptions, previous GOP presidential nominees Mitt Romney, John McCain and George W. Bush generally said they favored such exceptions. The politics around rape and the specter of a woman dying are considered too toxic for a general election.

    Still, in a presidential debate in 2008, John McCain put “women’s health” in scare quotes and sneered, “ ‘Health for the mother.’ You know, that’s been stretched by the pro-abortion movement in America to mean almost anything. That’s the extreme pro-abortion position, quote, health.” The party’s last vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, once said of another abortion bill, “The health exception is a loophole wide enough to drive a Mack truck through it.” On Monday night, that impulse won out.

    Please proceed, GOP.

  4. In the News: Dr. Frances Kelsey, FDA pharmacologist who fought against approving thalidomide, died yesterday at the age of 101.

    Canada invested her with this honor

    OTTAWA, Aug. 6, 2015 /CNW/ – Today, on behalf of His Excellency the Right Honourable David Johnston, Governor General of Canada, Her Honour the Honourable Elizabeth Dowdeswell, Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, presented the insignia of Member of the Order of Canada to Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey. The private ceremony took place in London, Ontario. Dr. Kelsey was appointed on May 7, 2015.

    Frances Oldham Kelsey, C.M.
    London, Ontario
    Member of the Order of Canada

    Throughout her career, Frances Kelsey helped to improve pharmaceutical oversight procedures in the United States. As a pharmacologist at the Food and Drug Administration in the 1960s, she was tasked with reviewing the drug thalidomide, which was already in use around the world to alleviate morning sickness in pregnant women. Despite pressure to approve the drug for the American market, she refused, citing safety concerns. As a result, thousands of children were saved from serious birth defects and new standards were created to prevent future tragedies. Over the next four decades, she remained an instrumental figure in shaping and enforcing drug licencing protocols.

  5. In the News: Georgia quietly drops Confederate names from state holidays.

    Confederate Memorial Day has been struck from Georgia’s official 2016 state holiday calendar. So has Robert E. Lee’s birthday.

    Most state employees will still get days off for both events, but the controversial names have been replaced with the more neutral term “state holiday.”

  6. In the News: The Donald

    Smartypants points out that Fox had a debate strategy, to winnow the field to Fox Friends:

    First of all, most Republican strategists – including Fox News – want to see Carly Fiorina in future debates. That’s because she has a job to do: blast away at Hillary Clinton while avoiding any touchy implications of “sexism.” So it should come as no surprise to anyone that she has been universally declared the “winner” of the happy hour debate.

    To get an idea about how that happened, all you need to do is compare how viciously Chris Wallace went after Trump about his company’s bankruptcies to the fact that Fiorina’s complete failure at Hewlett-Packard was never mentioned.

    To the extent that the remaining candidates in that debate have a sugar daddy (i.e., Santorum/Friess), they’ll probably hang around awhile. But they’re all toast. And Carly gets an invitation to the big boy’s table.

    On to the main event. It was no accident that Christie was chosen to take on Rand Paul. That job was not given to one of the top tier candidates in case something went wrong. But Fox knew Christie would throw some ugly punches in the process and he didn’t disappoint. The result: a knock-out of Paul.

    Beyond that, the main objective was to eat into Trump’s lead. […]

    It’s interesting to note that most of the talk these days among pundits has been about how the big money SuperPacs are affecting this primary. That is certainly an important story. But last night Fox News showed their muscle as well. They accomplished exactly what they set out to do.

    Why Trump won’t go away … Voxplainer: Donald Trump is an embarrassment who is impossible to embarrass. It’s his superpower.

    You cannot embarrass Donald Trump. You cannot back him down with questions that make other candidates buckle. And the crowd loves him for it. They love him because he does not back down. The fact that Trump doesn’t back down is the core of Trump-ism. It is the answer to how he will negotiate with the Democrats, with China, with Mexico. He will get what he wants because he doesn’t back down.

    Is it lunacy? Sure. But it’s an appealing kind of lunacy. It’s the ultimate Green Lantern Theory of the American Presidency. Candidates always promise that by virtue of their force of character, they will be able to do what their predecessors couldn’t, while making fewer compromises than their predecessors made. It’s what the people want to hear.

    Predictions of Trump demise? STILL exaggerated: Margaret Carlson

    The real debate was the one between Trump and the moderators. In the category of “what doesn’t kill me makes me strong,” Trump survived accusations from Kelly that would have killed any other candidate. […]

    Fact-checkers may catch up with him and his Teflon may soon crack, but he didn’t self-destruct in that arena. Trump will fade, as everyone but Trump predicts, but predictions of his death so far have been greatly exaggerated.

  7. Paul Krugman, NY Times:

    This was, according to many commentators, going to be the election cycle Republicans got to show off their “deep bench.” The race for the nomination would include experienced governors like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, fresh thinkers like Rand Paul, and attractive new players like Marco Rubio. Instead, however, Donald Trump leads the field by a wide margin. What happened?

    The answer, according to many of those who didn’t see it coming, is gullibility: People can’t tell the difference between someone who sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about and someone who is actually serious about the issues. […]

    The point is that while media puff pieces have portrayed Mr. Trump’s rivals as serious men — Jeb the moderate, Rand the original thinker, Marco the face of a new generation — their supposed seriousness is all surface. Judge them by positions as opposed to image, and what you have is a lineup of cranks. And as I said, this is no accident.

    The adults have all fled the Republican Party. Here is what is left:

    … modern Republican politicians can’t be serious — not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume. […]

    What distinguishes Mr. Trump is not so much his positions as it is his lack of interest in maintaining appearances. And it turns out that the party’s base, which demands extremist positions, also prefers those positions delivered straight. Why is anyone surprised?

  8. In the News: Right Wing STILL trying to kill the Affordable Care Act

    SCOTUSblog: Health insurance mandate survives again

    A new challenge to the federal mandate requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty stirred up a major constitutional debate in a federal appeals court on Friday. However, in the end, all eleven judges — relying on sharply conflicting views — rejected the challenge.

    A three-judge panel rejected the suit and the losers (both meanings) asked for an en banc review by all 11 judges. Four of the judges wanted to (Brett M. Kavanaugh, Janice Rogers Brown, Thomas B. Griffith, and Karen LeCraft Henderson) but seven rejected that request.

    Sissel’s lawyers now have ninety days to decide whether to ask the Supreme Court to hear the case. Review by the Justices would be a matter of discretion; this would not be a mandatory appeal. It would take the votes of four of the nine Justices to grant review.

    I hope that SCOTUS is sick of this. King v Burwell was a 6 to 3 ruling for the ACA and I can’t image that those 6 want to do anything other than to treat that ruling as the Last Word on the Affordable Care Act.

    • Once again, I am struck by the utter selfishness and stupidity of the people who let themselves be used as plaintiffs in these cases:

      The challenge was made by lawyers for an Iowa artist, Matt Sissel, who said he is a healthy individual who does not want or need health insurance but faced the prospect of paying the equivalent of a fine if he did not obey the ACA mandate to get coverage.

      How stupid do you have to be to not understand that “healthy” is a transient state? And how selfish to refuse to contribute to the common good, a contribution that also helps to insure that the person standing next to you on a street corner does not have a deadly contagious disease that he can’t afford to get treated … and is about to give it to you?

  9. Opinion piece from David Atkins, WaMo: There Is No Liberal Donald Trump Because Liberals Don’t Need a Donald Trump

    Pundits keep pretending that Donald Trump is a media creation—a charlatan and entertainer who is crashing the otherwise serious political party to generate headlines. But he wouldn’t make those headlines without having an enormously popular appeal to the Republican base, which pundits attribute to general frustration with the political system on both sides of the aisle.

    But that’s just not true. If it were true, then the Democratic Party would be just as susceptible to a liberal version of Trump. But it’s not. It’s hard to even imagine what that would look like.

    The reality is that mainstream Democratic positions also happen to be broadly popular positions already without the need for demagogic bluster. Left-of-center positions tend to be based on science and a more complex, nuanced understanding of social problems. Even more importantly, liberals in the United States promote solutions that have already been shown to work elsewhere in the world.

    Extremism is uniquely Republican, at least in the most recent election cycles:

    Once again, it’s important to note that both sides don’t, in fact, do it when it comes to political extremism. American conservatism has gone far, far off the rails. Donald Trump’s successful candidacy is only the latest—but far from the only—proof of that.

    Liberals don’t have a Donald Trump because we don’t need one.

    When you have no ideas to reach the minds of your followers, all you can do is appeal to their reptilian brains with fear and loathing. Trump is the perfect vehicle for that: unfiltered, unbowed, and owing nothing to anyone.

    • David also wrote a superb piece right after the debate pointing out that the pundits who claim that Anyone-But-Trump won the debate are not paying attention:

      Traditional analysis of the debate would suggest that while no one seriously damaged Trump and he didn’t do himself much damage, other candidates seemed far more presidential and therefore attractive to seriously-minded Republican voters. But these are not normal times.

      As I said two weeks ago, base Republican voters are not choosing a president. They’re choosing a rebel leader who will lead an insurgent war against what they view as an increasingly dominant liberal consensus aided and abetted by establishment Republicans.[…]

      The Republican base isn’t looking for specific policy fixes. They’re looking for a cultural warrior and savior who will put the last 60 years of progress back in a bottle and give them their country back.

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