Recent Articles The American Prospect - articles by author en Can Reformers Save Our Election System from the Supreme Court? <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p dir="ltr"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"></span></p> <div class="image image-large"> <div class="field-image"><img src="" alt="" title="" /></div> <div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">AP Photo/Susan Walsh</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"> <p>Cornell Woolridge of Windsor Mill, Md., takes part in a demonstration outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2013, as the court heard arguments on campaign finance.</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p></p> <p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-74638c18-1ec2-3d07-de5c-8797d67f36f8"><span class="dropcap">O</span>ver the past few years, given the bad news that just keeps coming their way, America’s campaign-finance reformers have started to look like eternal optimists. They’ve pretty much had to be.</span></p> <p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-74638c18-1ec2-3d07-de5c-8797d67f36f8">Take the one-two wallop they suffered early this spring. First, Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York state legislators killed reformers’ best chance of a breakthrough in 2014—a public-financing program in which small-dollar donations would be matched or multiplied by public funds. (New York City already runs its own “matching” program.) The idea was to give less-wealthy donors a bigger voice in legislative and gubernatorial races while decreasing the clout of those with deep pockets. Instead, reformers ended up with a microscopic pilot program for the state comptroller’s race. A few days later came much worse news: In <em>McCutcheon v. FEC</em>, the Supreme Court threw out the limit that Congress had put on the total amount wealthy donors can give to campaigns and political parties. While there are still caps on how much donors can give to a specific candidate, now anyone can give to as many campaigns as he or she pleases. </span></p> <p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-74638c18-1ec2-3d07-de5c-8797d67f36f8">As they reeled from their latest setbacks, clean-election advocates tried to find a reason to be hopeful. Ian Vandewalker, counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which advocated for the New York proposal, told me that in the wake of <em>McCutcheon</em>, “public financing is the most promising thing that’s left.” But <em>McCutcheon</em> illustrated just what makes the Roberts Court so pernicious when it comes to money and elections; slowly but steadily, decision by decision, the justices are decimating every legal justification for reform.</span></p> <p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-74638c18-1ec2-3d07-de5c-8797d67f36f8">Underpinning the Court’s infamous 2010 Citizens United ruling was the belief that giving less-wealthy donors more of a voice in elections is not a good enough reason for Congress to regulate political money. A year later, in <em>Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett</em>, the Court struck down a public-financing program that tried to decrease the power of wealthy “self-funded” candidates.   </span></p> <p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-74638c18-1ec2-3d07-de5c-8797d67f36f8">The Arizona law offered grants to those who agreed to spend only $500 of their own money on their campaigns and agreed to debate their opponents. The funding increased as opponents and independent groups spent more; the idea was to prevent less-affluent candidates from being disadvantaged. The Arizona decision threw similar state programs into legal limbo. The Court decided the program was unfair to candidates who chose not to participate; in other words, candidates with more money to spend have a constitutional right to overwhelm their competition.</span></p> <p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-74638c18-1ec2-3d07-de5c-8797d67f36f8">“Some people might call that chutzpah,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent.</span></p> <p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-74638c18-1ec2-3d07-de5c-8797d67f36f8">Even so, the Arizona decision left room for reformers to argue for a different kind of public financing system in the interest of quelling political corruption. <em>McCutcheon</em> put an end to that. The Court ruled that Congress and the states cannot justify limits on campaign donations because of concerns about corruption. In other words, if there isn’t a guy with a suitcase full of cash trading it for a lawmaker’s vote, it’s none of lawmakers’ concern.   </span></p> <p dir="ltr"><span>The blow from <em>McCutcheon</em> has dire implications for American democracy. But it should not mark the end of the reform movement. While continuing to pursue reforms that haven’t yet been quashed, activists and legal scholars now must step back and cook up new laws, and new justifications for those laws, that could pass muster with the Court. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has been on a mission to fight originalism with originalism. The conservative justices base their decisions on a reading of the Founding Fathers’ original intent in writing the Constitution, so Lessig has been combing through the records of the framers, citing every use of the term “corruption” and showing how the Founders used the term to mean much more than “quid pro quo” bribery. Lessig writes that “corruption” encompassed “improper dependence” on the powerful as well. Trying to persuade the justices to change their minds may be an uphill struggle, but Lessig’s work may prove useful when new campaign-finance laws are defended in court. </span></p> <p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-74638c18-1ec2-3d07-de5c-8797d67f36f8">Reformers’ fondest hope now lies with disclosure laws—a form of regulation the Supreme Court majority endorsed in <em>Citizens United</em>. Laws to make tax-exempt “social welfare” groups, which spend billions on elections, disclose their donors are percolating in the states. And in a demonstration of how un-killable the idea of reforming elections can be, some activists have come up with a new twist: If some groups are allowed to keep their donors’ names secret, why shouldn’t their political ads be required to say so? The idea is that when voters hear the words “This advertisement is sponsored by a group that does not disclose its donors,” it would make shadowy political groups look, well, shadowy.       </span></p> <div> </div> </div></div></div> Wed, 21 May 2014 12:32:06 +0000 220382 at Abby Rapoport Pardon Me, Mr. President? <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"></span></p> <div class="image image-large"> <div class="field-image"><img src="" alt="" title="" /></div> <div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Flickr/Victoria Pickering</div> </div> </div> </div> <p></p> <p><span class="dropcap">T</span>his week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) <a href="">announced</a> the start of a new initiative on clemency, encouraging thousands of inmates—particularly those convicted during the Drug War crackdown of the 1990s—to send in petitions to have their sentences commuted. The new initiative offers six new criteria by which petitioners will be judged, including the following: prisoners must have served 10 years of their sentence, must not have lengthy criminal records or gang convictions, and show that they would have gotten off with a lighter sentence had they been tried today. In his more than five years in office, Obama has been the stingiest president in history when it comes to granting pardons; the new program could make him one of the most generous.</p> <p>But the biggest news for criminal-justice reformers has been the administration’s appointment of a new pardon attorney to oversee the program: <a href="">Deborah Leff</a>, who spent her years at DOJ working on the Access to Justice Initiative, an agency meant to help low-income defendants get a fair hearing in court. “Poor people often do not have access to counsel, and when they do get an attorney, that lawyer is often overworked, undertrained, undercompensated, and placed in a system that encourages a quick plea bargain and discourages carefully listening to the needs of clients,” she wrote in an article with Melanca Clark for the American Bar Association. Those who come from the prosecutorial side of things—which is most everyone at the Department of Justice—tend to be more skeptical of the idea that convicted criminals can be reformed. But Leff's background makes her more likely to be sympathetic to requests for clemency.</p> <p>“One thing about law and particularly this kind of law is that almost always people are more important than rules,” says Mark Osler, a law professor at St. Thomas University and founder of the nation’s first federal clemency clinic (I recently <a href="">profiled</a> his story in our most recent print issue). “Leff’s work within the DOJ has largely been about making sure that people who have a petition or grievance have a way to have it heard fairly.” For those hoping to see a robust clemency push, her background bodes well.</p> <p>The administration’s clemency criteria have plenty of wiggle room, which makes the selection of a new pardon attorney all the more significant. The department wants petitions from applicants who are “non-violent, low-level offenders without significant ties to large scale criminal organizations, gangs or cartels.” Depending on how the U.S. pardon attorney exercises her discretion, an offender who grew up with gangs and was loosely affiliated with them could either be an ideal candidate for clemency or excluded altogether. Similarly, petitioners must have “demonstrated good conduct in prison”—a criterion that could include or exclude prisoners with one or two black marks on their records depending on the pardon attorney’s views. All in all, Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University and editor of the influential law blog <a href="">Sentencing Law and Policy</a>, estimates 5,000 or more prisoners will have a plausible claim for meeting all six criteria. But again, ultimate discretion is in the pardon attorney.</p> <p>Ron Rodgers, the U.S. pardon attorney until this week, was known for his opposition to clemency requests. Rodgers and <a href="">David Margolis</a>, the Department of Justice assistant deputy attorney general, both <a href="">got blasted</a> in a 2012 report for the <a href="">dramatic mishandling</a> of one particular petition during the Bush regime: Clarence Aaron, who received a triple life sentence for his role a drug conspiracy. </p> <p>Leff’s appointment helps send a clear signal that this new initiative isn’t just lip service to the reform community, which until now hasn’t seen much action from the Obama administration. Despite rhetoric in the 2008 election about the casualties of America’s War on Drugs, in his tenure the president had done little to help those still serving decades-long sentences. Between 2003 and 2008, the courts had already helped to ensure judges didn’t need to follow draconian sentencing requirements. There were efforts to help people charged with drug crimes in the future; the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010 lowered the huge disparity in sentencing for crack and powder cocaine. But meaningful though the act was, it didn’t retroactively help most of the people who’d been put in prison for crack in the '90s. After the 2010 Republican tsunami, with Congress barely passing even minor measures, hope for broad legislation to help drug offenders still in prison all but vanished. </p> <p>With Congress gridlocked, the presidential pardon had been left as one of the few actions the administration could make without congressional approval. There was only one problem: Obama granted a total of one pardon in his first term, and the fewest overall of any president in history. The caution is not unwarranted: Pardons have become political risks. When Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a tax evader who was the husband of a major Democratic donor, the scandal was enormous. George W. Bush didn’t help matters when he commuted the sentence of former vice-presidential adviser I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was convicted for his role in exposing a CIA operative. The scandals had reverberations—Holder came under some fire for his role in the Rich pardon during his appointment hearings. “In the last few decades, there’s been no political upside, only political downside” to granting clemency, Berman says.</p> <p>But in the last few years, there’s been growing support on both sides of the aisle to see more common-sense approaches to dealing with drug crimes as well as a decrease in the prison population. At the state level, Republicans have been working for years to implement more cost-effective methods of handling drug offenses—such as probation, rehab programs, and restitution payments. On the left, advocates have been saying for years that the Drug War policies only made things worse, particularly in low-income black neighborhoods where people were disproportionately likely to get picked up and then face long sentences. Now, after years waiting for the politics to settle, prisoners and their advocates have renewed hope that the administration will finally take action. As Berman notes, Leff’s arrival helps show “this is not just a lot of sound and fury.”</p> </div></div></div> Fri, 25 Apr 2014 15:27:48 +0000 220199 at Abby Rapoport Get Ready for the Datapalooza of Election Performance! <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">D</span>uring the brief time in the election cycle when the voting booths are actually open, we hear a lot how smoothly elections are going—where voters are waiting in long lines, where ballots are getting rejected, and the like. Elections expert Doug Chapin, who heads the University of Minnesota’s Elections Academy, calls it “anec-data”—anecdotes substituting for hard numbers.  In a presidential election, we tend to hear all about problems in swing states, since the national press corps is already there, but we’re less likely to hear about issues in Montana or Connecticut, where the election outcome is almost a foregone conclusion. Good data would make it easy to compare states’ election performance, and more importantly, let us see how states are improving or declining from one election to the next.</p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">That’s why Pew’s </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">2012 Elections Performance Index</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> is a big deal. Released this week, the index uses standardized data from the U.S. Census, the Elections Assistance Commission, and a major survey to assess states on 17 different variables and judge just how well they are running their elections. Because Pew offered an index for 2008 and 2010, we can now compare two different presidential elections to actually see whether election administration is getting better or worse—rather than just guess. It’s the first time such a tool has been available.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">For the most part, the results are encouraging. A quick perusal shows 40 of the 50 states have improved since 2008—wait times are down an average of three minutes and online registration is spreading quickly, with 13 states offering online voter registration during the 2012 election, up from just two in 2008. (Since the election, another five states have started offering it.) Many of the top-performing states in 2008, like North Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Colorado, stayed on top in 2012 while low performers, like Mississippi, Alabama, California, and New York remained at the bottom.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The process of collecting and analyzing elections data, mundane though it may sound, is extremely important, and relatively rare. Without it, we cannot really assess how elections are functioning. For a long time, there was less pressure on states to fully report on important factors, like the number of returned absentee ballots or access for disabled voters. In the index, states are judged for the complete-ness of their data collection. “States are reporting better quality and more data but that doesn’t mean they’re all the way there,” says David Becker, who, as the director of Pew’s elections initiatives, oversees the index project.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">“The fact that we have data as opposed to anec-data is really important,” says Chapin. If state officials take issue with the index, they’re more likely to produce more data to challenge Pew’s conclusions—which only gives citizens more information to use.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">But the index is not the be-all-end-all in judging elections. Chapin compares the index to </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">U.S. News and World Report’s</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> ranking of college campuses—useful in broad strokes but certainly not the whole picture. “Not everything that’s good is in the Pew index,” he says. For instance, California, which ranks at the bottom, has a robust elections program for voters speaking different languages. The state offers elections information in 13 different languages, and tries to make sure communities that speak other languages have poll workers available who can communicate. There’s no category in the Pew index for such an effort.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">More notable is the absence of the most controversial voting measures that have dominated debate in states—like voter ID and restrictions to early and weekend voting. There’s no mention of “voter fraud” or “voter suppression.” Pew has clearly chosen to steer clear of these issues, in part because we have so little data on their effects (and likely also to avoid a political row). Presumably, the potential ill-effects of such measures—many of which weren’t implemented in 2012—could come out in other parts of the index, like voter turnout next time around.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Meanwhile, Pew gives strong preference to certain reforms, like online voter registration and tools for looking up voting information. There are good reasons for that—online voter registration helps make the voter rolls more accurate while saving enormous amounts of money (as much as two dollars per registrant.) Tools for looking up voting information have obvious positive impact for the millions of Americans who can remember what precinct they’re in or where their polling places are.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">But regardless of the methodology, any attempt to bring hard numbers into a field dominated by allegations and unfounded statements is a welcome change.</span></p> </div></div></div> Fri, 11 Apr 2014 13:18:02 +0000 220103 at Abby Rapoport The Quality of Mercy <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">O</span>n a Sunday in September, a few minutes before the 10 A.M. worship service, Mark Osler stands in the lobby of the First Covenant Church in downtown Minneapolis. He’s just been fitted with a pencil-thin, flesh-colored microphone, the kind that pop stars wear so they can dance while belting out lyrics. Fifty-one years old and of average build, Osler is the opposite of imposing. As usual, his wiry hair is a mess. A strand flops over his forehead, giving him a slightly boyish air. With his mouth set in a straight line and his thick eyebrows knitted together, his expression tends to be serious or, if he’s lost in thought, dour. “I look like Britney Spears,” he says, a bit doubtful about the microphone.</p> <p>First Covenant is one of the largest churches in Minneapolis. Built in 1887, it was originally known as the Swedish Tabernacle, named after the evangelical immigrants who constructed the three-story redbrick sanctuary. Reflecting the city’s demographic change, First Covenant has moved away from its roots. There’s Bible study in Spanish, “holy yoga” on Sunday, and an 11:30 A.M. Ethiopian service. The church works with other congregations, including a synagogue and a mosque, to address Minneapolis’s homeless problem. The worshippers this Sunday are white, black, Latino, Hmong, young and old. As they sing the first praise songs of the service, some hold out their palms. A giant screen displays the lyrics, most of which can’t be found in an old-fashioned hymnal. Even the version of “Amazing Grace” has additional verses sung to a different melody.</p> <p>Dan Collison, First Covenant’s pastor, has invited Osler to speak about Christianity and justice. A professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, a Catholic institution located a mile away, Osler is one of the country’s leading advocates for reforming the criminal-justice system. Over the past ten years, he’s fought to dismantle the mandatory drug sentences that have left tens of thousands of black men in prison for decades. More recently, he’s called for pardons and commuted sentences. He’s won in the Supreme Court and lobbied on Capitol Hill and in the White House.</p> <p>A former U.S. attorney, who prosecuted some of those black men, Osler can claim credibility on these issues. But what has made him particularly effective is that his efforts are rooted in his identity as a Christian. Although not well known in progressive Christian circles, Osler has emerged as one of the most eloquent spokespeople for what in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was commonly referred to as the “social gospel”—merging the precepts of Protestantism with the principles of social justice.</p> <p>“I would rank him up there with the quiet heroes of the civil-rights movement of the ’60s, as a person who’s taken his values of faith and applied them to progressive ideals,” says Chet Edwards, a former Democratic congressman from Texas, whom Osler lobbied but didn’t always win over.</p> <p>Osler prefers speaking at conservative or evangelical churches like Covenant. It offers a chance, he says, to engage people who view the world differently than he does. He’s delivering two more sermons in the next four weeks—at the Church of the Holy Comforter in Richmond, Virginia, and at St. Mary’s Episcopal in Anchorage, Alaska.</p> <p>At the conclusion of the first set of music, Collison welcomes the congregants. He reminds people about upcoming meetings, introduces a skit, and conducts a brief Q&amp;A with Osler. By the time Osler gets up to talk, an hour has passed, and the congregation is restless. He begins, as he invariably does, with the week’s reading from the lectionary. This week, it’s Luke 6.</p> <p>“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh,” Osler reads before getting to the less frequently cited sentences. “But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn. Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.”</p> <p>Osler pauses. “Sometimes,” he says with a grin, “the Bible is not very reassuring for a fairly affluent straight white guy from Edina,” referring to the Minneapolis suburb where he and his family live. “But that is me, and this is one of those times. In this passage, Jesus is talking about turning everything—everything—upside down. The poor will have the kingdom, while the rich will face woe. The hungry will be filled, while those who are full will be hungry. Those who are reviled will be blessed, and it’s bad when all speak well of you. This teaching, this idea of turning everything upside down, is dangerous.”</p> <p>No theatrics inform the sermon. Osler doesn’t pace and only occasionally gesticulates. He speaks methodically and conversationally, as if the congregation were a jury he has to persuade. “At the very least,” he continues, “when Jesus tells us the world should be upside down from where it is today—‘woe to you who are rich’—at the very least it means we have to ally ourselves with the poor, with the hungry, with the reviled. That’s our team. That’s the side that, as Christians, we’re on, we’re assigned to.”</p> <p>In five minutes, Osler has done what he likes best—reveal the radical, challenging side of Christianity. He has identified himself as “someone from the pews.” But Covenant isn’t his church, and he doesn’t fully fit in here. He also doesn’t quite fit in at St. Stephen’s Episcopal church, where he currently worships, nor did he quite fit in at the Baptist church he attended when he taught law at Baylor University and lived in Waco, Texas. It’s unlikely he was a perfect match for the Congregational church he was raised in or the Quaker meetings he sometimes joined when he was in his twenties. A progressive among evangelical Christians and an evangelical Christian among progressives, Osler has spent much of his life subverting expectations.</p> <p>Osler pulls out a copy of Ernest J. Gaines’s 1993 novel <em>A Lesson before Dying</em>. He outlines the basic plot, which centers on a schoolteacher in a small black town in 1940s Louisiana, who counsels a man on death row. During this time, the boxer Joe Louis was a hero to black Americans. Osler reads a passage: “As vividly as if I were there, I had seen that cell, heard that boy crying while being dragged to that chair, ‘Please, Joe Louis, help me. Please help me. Help me.’”</p> <p>Putting the book down, Osler says, “I get letters that cry out like that. Every week. They’re from people who want my students and me to seek clemency for them—desperate men and women serving life terms very often. And they come with carefully handwritten return addresses from those places we warehouse men and women in this country.</p> <p>“Inside each one, painstakingly written, is a story. And it’s always a tragic story. They think I’ll know a way to get them out of prison after 25 or 30 or 37 years for a narcotics case that almost no one remembers. In the end, probably writing to me is as hopeless as writing to Joe Louis. But I can’t throw the letters away. I have to try to do something. And so I do. I try to get the law to change. I try to get the president of the United States to try to take seriously his constitutional duty of showing mercy with the pardon power. I try sometimes to work with my students to save just one of them.”</p> <p>The squirming and occasional cough that could be heard early in the sermon have ceased. Some members have their eyes closed. Others look around with concern.</p> <p>“Because the people who write those letters,” Osler goes on, “are Jesus. Because he said, ‘When you visit those in prison, you visit me.’ He didn’t say, ‘When you visit the innocent person in prison,’ or ‘When you visit the political prisoner.’ ‘When you visit those in prison,’ and these are the people in prison. They are Jesus. And their mothers who write to me and beg that we help their child so that she can see him again before he dies—they are Mary. Dutiful. Heartbroken. Watching their child die.”</p> <p>There it is: the message Osler has spent years delivering—that mercy has been stripped from Christianity and society and must be restored.</p> <p>“So we do have to seek social justice, as hard as it is—and it is hard,” he says. “To ally ourselves with the hungry, with the reviled, we have to make ourselves vulnerable. And that’s a hard thing to do. We have to open ourselves up to do things we don’t usually do. That’s part of the deal: that it won’t be safe or painless."</p> <div class="embed right-margin"> <div class="image image-large"> <div class="field-image"><img src="" alt="" title="" /></div> <div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Dan Epstein</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"> <p>Federal defender Andrew Densemo's speech in court against mandatory sentences pushed Osler to rethink his views. </p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p><span class="dropcap" style="line-height: 1.538em;">U</span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">ntil he was six years old, Osler grew up in a middle-class neighborhood on the east side of Detroit. His mother, trained as a bacteriologist, stayed at home to raise Osler and his two younger siblings. His father worked in sales at a commercial photography studio. Osler’s first memory is of running into the street after being kept in for days, smelling gasoline, and seeing a National Guardsman near his home, before his mother scooped him up. The 1967 Detroit riots, he says, “are why I take criminal law so seriously.”</span></p> <p>Within two years, the Oslers moved to Grosse Pointe. It was a chance to buy a house by a lake in a suburb with a highly touted school system. The family wasn’t religious. So Osler’s parents were taken aback when his kindergarten teacher suggested they might want to consider some sort of church for their son. “He’s always talking about God,” she explained.</p> <p>His parents eventually chose Grosse Pointe United Church (it has since changed its name), which was affiliated with Congregationalists, a Protestant denomination with a long history in New England. According to Osler, the church was moderate for Grosse Pointe but conservative for the country. After his confirmation at 16, Osler told his minister he wanted a full-immersion baptism. “No one in my church had ever done that,” he says. “It was not something Congregationalists do.” The minister complied, conducting the ceremony in a Baptist church. “It was,” Osler says, “something I was proud of at the time.”</p> <p>Osler attended the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he majored in history with a government minor and gained a reputation as smart and independent. He moved back to Detroit after he graduated, finding work as a florist’s delivery boy. Looking to supplement his income, he answered a newspaper ad for “a young, resourceful person.” Osler had landed his first job in law—as a processor. Sometimes he’d bring a bouquet to fool people into thinking he was delivering flowers instead of serving them with legal documents.</p> <p>In 1987, he entered Yale Law School. “Suddenly I’m around the smartest people in the world, it felt like,” he says. “It was like an intellectual vacation.” One of his mentors was Daniel Freed, perhaps the country’s leading authority on sentencing. Osler thrived at Yale, and in his third year, he was named a senior editor at the law review. He also started regularly attending Quaker meetings. “I just really loved the practice of silence,” he says. “I liked the idea of faith being as much about questions as it was about answers.” The year after graduation, he clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Jan DuBois in Philadelphia, where he continued going to meetings. When he married three years later, he did so in a Quaker service.</p> <p>By then Osler had returned to Detroit, where he was a junior associate at Dykema Gossett, the city’s biggest law firm. His goal was to become a federal prosecutor, and in 1995, the Clinton administration named him an assistant U.S. attorney for Eastern Michigan. The job revolved around putting away crack dealers.</p> <p>Osler had seen crack ravage Detroit, a city he loves. “It’s being in love with someone who breaks your heart the same way over and over,” he says. “You think it can’t get worse, and then it does.” Bleeding jobs, its population shrinking, Detroit experienced a dramatic rise in violent crime in the 1980s. “I was really a believer,” he says. “Crack’s a serious problem—you’ve got to do something about it, and this seemed like something.”</p> <p>Crack didn’t exist until the mid-1970s, when a street chemist, now lost to history, discovered that mixing cocaine with baking soda and cooking it yielded small rocks that could be melted and smoked. Drug dealers had been trying to find a way to offer smokable cocaine, which would provide a higher high for a shorter duration. From an entrepreneur’s point of view, the “baking-soda method” was a brilliant stroke: It required no skill and made the drug cheaper. A glut of cocaine from South America and the Caribbean in the early 1980s further drove down prices. By the end of 1985, you could find crack in most major cities.</p> <p>The stereotype came quickly: This was a black drug. Racial anxieties added to the specter of crack addicts being especially dangerous. A study of 23 infants spawned extensive coverage of “crack babies,” who, it was claimed, would be permanently disabled and require a slew of services for life. The message was “this was the most horrific drug ever,” says Nkechi Taifa, a senior policy analyst on civil and criminal-justice reform at the Open Society Foundations. “It was a bad drug, don’t get me wrong. But all of that was hyper blown out of proportion.”</p> <p>The hysteria peaked in 1986 with the death of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, who overdosed two days after being drafted by the Boston Celtics. Although he likely died from snorting cocaine, many presumed that, because he was black, crack was the cause. Within a few months, Congress had passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which created mandatory minimum sentences for crack and treated one gram of crack as the equivalent of 100 grams of powder cocaine.</p> <p>The new law was part of a wave of “tough on crime” legislation. Daniel Freed, Osler’s mentor at Yale, had spent years calling attention to the radical and unjust disparities in federal sentencing. In 1984, drawing on Freed’s work, Congress passed a set of mandatory minimum sentences for certain crimes, making them statute, and established a commission to institute sentencing guidelines. Intended to prevent extreme variations in punishments for the same crime, the new system offered judges a massive grid that incorporated multiple variables to consider when sentencing. A person could be found guilty of drug dealing, for instance, but the presence of a gun would bump up the mandatory sentence; the presence of a gun and a prior conviction would bump it up even more.</p> <p>In 1988, Congress singled out crack as the only drug with a five-year minimum jail sentence for possession. For the next ten years, Congress continually made mandatory sentences harsher. Democrats were as hard-line on crack as Republicans. When, in 1995, the U.S. Sentencing Commission proposed guidelines stipulating that crimes involving crack and powder cocaine be treated equally, Congress passed a law overruling the recommendation, which President Bill Clinton signed.</p> <p>Freed came to oppose the new structure. “Discretionary actors, including judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and probation officers, find themselves torn between allegiance to rigid rules and an urge to do justice in individual cases,” he wrote in 1992, warning that the new guidelines might soon “lose all credibility.”</p> <p>One of the consequences of mandatory crack sentencing was that it gave prosecutors an enormous amount of power. Once a prosecutor determined the charges, defendants, the vast majority of whom were black and poor, had few options. The choice they faced was often between a lengthy prison term from a plea bargain or the prospect of an even lengthier prison term from a trial. Because sentences were mandatory, judges had little discretion once a verdict came in.</p> <p>“Being a prosecutor in Detroit in the late ’90s was about bullying drug defendants to try to get to their bosses,” says Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University, who would later become one of Osler’s closest allies in reforming drug-sentencing laws.</p> <p>“That doesn’t seem like much fun if you’re virtuous. It’s only fun if you like being a bully.”</p> <div class="embed right-margin"> <div class="image image-large"> <div class="field-image"><img src="" alt="" title="" /></div> <div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Ohio State University Moritz College of Law</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"> <p>Ohio State law professor Douglas Berman oversees a journal and blog at the heart of the criminal-justice reform effort. </p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>Andrew Densemo, a federal defender who worked in Detroit courts at the same time as Osler, remembers a client who was tried for intent to distribute marijuana and cocaine. The prosecution offered ten years in federal prison. “I told the prosecutor, ‘You can kiss my ass. I don’t plea for ten years,’” Densemo says. “We went to trial and the client got 15. Looking back, I would have taken those ten years.”</p> <p>Prosecutors wanted to scare defendants into giving up information about major dealers in exchange for a lighter sentence. But few low-level dealers had much information, and those who did rarely snitched for fear of repercussions. Instead, defendants often named other low-level dealers, and they usually exaggerated, making the crimes sound as bad as possible so that they could have a shot at a better deal.</p> <p>Prosecuting, Osler says, took its toll. “Levels of tragedy piled one on top of another,” he says. “I’d hear one of those stories and think, how can there be a creator who would let this happen to his creations? Where’s the god that gives a damn?”</p> <p>At 32 years old, Osler was living in Grosse Pointe, not far from his childhood home. He and his wife had started a family and attended the same Congregational church where he’d been baptized 16 years earlier. For five years, he drove nine miles to his office in Detroit’s federal courthouse, where every day he tried crack cases—in the end, hundreds of crack cases. “He was a nice guy, who did what he was supposed to do,” Densemo says. “He was told to lock people up, and he locked people up. He did it very well.”</p> <p>Sometimes, Osler would arrive at a sentencing hearing without any preparation. The defendant’s fate had been sealed when Osler had decided which crime to charge him with. The cases bled together so much that for years afterward, he misidentified the case that changed his life.</p> <p>He likely walked up the seven steps of the imposing, block-long courthouse carrying the minimum amount of paperwork. The defendant was likely a young, poor black man who had spent his life in Detroit and was likely guilty of using or dealing crack. Osler would have risen from his chair and told the judge he wanted the mandatory minimum. Then Andrew Densemo would have given his speech.</p> <p>Osler has referred to the case on numerous occasions. He calls it the “futile speech” story. The heart of the story he tells is the trial of Anthony “Bull” Sheppard, a teenager arrested with a little more than four grams of crack and for possession of a gun, with Judge Anna Diggs Taylor presiding. As it turns out, Densemo never defended Sheppard. Perhaps this doesn’t matter, because during this time Densemo nearly always gave the same speech, and Osler’s memory of what he said is accurate, even if the specifics of the case are not.</p> <p>Densemo, Osler remembers, made “a passionate 20-minute argument against the imposition of the mandatory minimums. He described the way it affected the black community, the failure of the law to stop crack trafficking, the unfairness of locking up this teenager for a longer period than the bank robber Judge Taylor had just sentenced, and the absurdity that crack was punished so much more harshly than powder cocaine, from which crack was made.”</p> <p>The speech had no immediate effect. The defendant—whoever he was—went to prison, and Osler went back to his office. But he recalled the speech as he tried more cases, and he remembered it after he left the U.S. attorney’s office in 2000 to teach at Baylor Law School.</p> <p>Densemo would continue to give the speech at sentencing hearings for another decade. He, too, no longer recalls which case was which or in which of his cases he went up against Osler. “They were all the same,” he says. “The numbers were the same. The defendants were the same. I had argued against that law so many damn times. It all merges.”</p> <p>And the intention, Densemo says, was always the same. “The goal was to get those in power to realize that these sentences were wrong—that they were hurting citizens, they were hurting the society. That was my main goal. To just add my voice to all those saying change the law. The hope was that someone on the Court of Appeals would see it. Some prosecutor, some judge—somebody. That it would strike a chord with somebody and somebody, who had more power than I, would say, ‘Hey, maybe we do need to change that law.’ Eventually it did happen, thank God.”</p> <p> </p> <p><span class="dropcap">W</span>aco, Texas, a city of 125,000, contains more than 200 Baptist churches. Families say grace when their meals arrive at Cheddar’s, and “God bless” substitutes for “goodbye.” Located a few blocks from downtown, Baylor University is the largest Baptist school in the country with more than 15,000 students. Alcohol is forbidden at events, dormitories are single-sex, and almost all professors are practicing Christians.</p> <p>In 1999, when Osler decided to leave the U.S. attorney’s office and teach law, Baylor was one of two schools interested in hiring him. During the second-round interview, the president and provost discussed his religious leanings with him. In retrospect, he says, the conversation gave a “pretty foundational impression of what Baylor is like. People are going to ask you, ‘How is what you’re doing influenced by your faith?’” Baylor was Southern and conservative and offered an ideal community for Osler to explore the connections between his Christian beliefs and his love for the law.</p> <p>Soon after arriving, Osler joined Seventh and James Baptist Church. By Waco standards, the church was moderate. The congregation included a number of Baylor professors, and members were encouraged to give classes on a wide range of subjects in a Chautauqua-like setting. With adult Sunday school, prayer breakfasts, and services on Wednesday nights as well as on Sunday, the church was more fervent than Grosse Pointe United. The Mark Osler who at 16 had insisted on an immersion baptism had found what locals call a new church home.</p> <p>A year after joining Seventh and James, he proposed that he stage the trial of Christ, with himself as prosecutor and members of the congregation as the jury.</p> <div class="embed right-margin"> <div class="image image-large"> <div class="field-image"><img src="" alt="" title="" /></div> <div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Thomas Whisenand / University of St. Thomas</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"> <p>Osler argues that Jesus should receive the death penalty in his staging of the trial of Christ. </p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>Osler had arrived at the idea one Sunday when he read about a death-row inmate’s last meal. While taking the communion wafer, Osler says, he realized that the Last Supper represented the last meal of a condemned man.</p> <p>“I was a prosecutor for five years, attending church the entire time, and I never contemplated that my vocation and faith had a strange and strong narrative link,” Osler writes in Jesus on Death Row, a book he later wrote about restaging the trial. “The fact that God’s son came to earth as a man subjected to capital punishment seems to reveal God’s intent that we care about not only that man but also that process.” Osler designed the trial and discussion, which stretched out over four Sundays, to show how the legal issues that drove Jesus’s trial still had bearing. But his purpose was more provocative. Texas conducted more executions than any other state, and he wanted to ask his congregation why Christians, especially Christian Texans, supported capital punishment.</p> <p>From the first, Osler was a popular teacher. He created a course with two ministers on the similarities between advocating in court and giving sermons. His classes were packed and, according to his research assistant, Dustin Benham, “he was beloved. You wanted Mark to be satisfied, and you wanted to be like Mark.”</p> <p>In 2003, Osler received a call out of the blue from Graham Boyd, who was then director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Drug Law Reform Project. Boyd had been brought into a case in nearby Hearne, Texas, where 28 residents, all but one of whom was black, had been arrested in a drug sweep. An informant, who later recanted, had given the names of supposed drug dealers. Rather than investigate the allegations, the county prosecutor charged everyone, threatening them with decades-long prison sentences unless they accepted plea deals. When the cases went to trial, all were dismissed but the seven whose defendants had agreed to the pleas.</p> <p>Boyd had called Osler for help on a civil suit on behalf of the defendants against county officials, because he needed local counsel—someone who looked and sounded like a Texan and wouldn’t alienate the Waco court. “I was as much of a Yankee as Graham Boyd,” Osler says. But he knew whom to call: David Moore. Although born in Louisiana, Moore is about as Texan as they come. “I don’t own a pair of shoes,” Moore likes to say. “All I’ve ever worn are cowboy boots.” Moore, Boyd, and Osler made a formidable team, and the county eventually settled (the terms were not disclosed).</p> <p>For Osler, the Hearne case was the first time he worked closely with people accused of dealing drugs. “It was huge,” he says, “to see someone who’d been arrested in what was basically a racially motivated jam-up.” Almost from the moment he had arrived at Baylor, Osler had begun to examine the doubts that had been brewing since hearing Densemo’s speech. He did this mostly by writing and lecturing about the war on drugs and mandatory sentencing, arguing initially that the guidelines needed to be revamped. Like most everyone else, he didn’t think it was possible to eliminate mandatory sentencing. “I should have had a broader imagination,” he says.</p> <p>Filing briefs on behalf of the ACLU and others, Osler joined the effort to reform the sentencing guidelines at a critical juncture. Around the time he was helping on the Hearne case, the U.S. Supreme Court started to weigh in. In 2004, the Court took up Blakely v. Washington. The case concerned a man named Ralph Howard Blakely accused of kidnapping his wife. Blakely negotiated a plea deal for second-degree kidnapping, which, according to Washington state’s guidelines, required a prison term of between 49 and 53 months unless there was a “substantial and compelling” reason to increase the term. The judge concluded that Blakely had acted with “deliberate cruelty” and sentenced him to 90 months. Blakely’s lawyers appealed the decision, arguing that because the judge had found their client guilty of “deliberate cruelty,” he had violated the defendant’s right to a jury trial under the Sixth Amendment. The Supreme Court concurred.</p> <p>“It really rocked the world,” Osler says. “My little world anyway.” Though the case pertained only to state law, the federal sentencing guidelines worked in a similar fashion. “Everyone knew,” Osler says, “the shit was going to hit the fan.”</p> <p>“Blakely….. WOW!!” Osler’s colleague, Ohio State law professor Douglas Berman, titled his blog post. Berman oversaw a mini media empire for sentencing nerds. He edited the highly respected Federal Sentencing Reporter journal, and six weeks before the Blakely decision came down, he’d started a blog called Sentencing Law and Policy. Both Osler and Berman felt that with the Blakely decision, reformers needed to be, in Berman’s words, “all hands on deck.”</p> <p>According to Graham Boyd, “Mark and Doug were the most important among the academics working on this.” At first glance, they were an unusual pair. Berman, a secular Jew, had been a law professor the bulk of his career, while Osler had been teaching for only a few years and was trying to bind his Christian faith with his profession. They both believed that the Supreme Court was now open to more reform. Justice Antonin Scalia, considered the most conservative voice on the Court, authored the majority opinion in Blakely, which was supported by liberals like Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens. The split in the Court over sentencing was not liberal versus conservative but was between pragmatists who wanted incremental change and formalists who wanted to throw out the system of mandatory sentencing.</p> <p>Six months after Blakely, the Court delivered a landmark decision on sentencing guidelines in United States v. Booker. In a rare instance, the court offered two majority opinions of different aspects of the case. One, written by Stevens and supported by Scalia, addressed the merits of the case and argued the guidelines violated the Sixth Amendment. The other, written by Justice Stephen Breyer, addressed the legal solution and argued the guidelines could be treated as advisory, rather than eliminated altogether. Dissenting from Breyer, Stevens quoted one of Osler’s articles for the Federal Sentencing Reporter.</p> <p>Breyer’s opinion allowed judges to diverge from the guidelines, but they would continue to be held to a standard of “reasonableness.” “The guidelines still had a significant gravitational force,” Berman says. “Prosecutors were saying, ‘You don’t have to follow them, but it’s a really good idea to keep following them.’” When it came to crack, federal prosecutors went further: They argued that because Congress had specifically sought to preserve the 100-to-1 ratio, it was not reasonable for judges to throw out a congressional mandate.</p> <p>Osler, Boyd, and Berman began searching for the right case to challenge the sentencing guidelines for crack. Osler filed an amicus brief in a slew of federal courts, arguing that the 100-to-1 ratio was unconstitutional, in the hope that the Supreme Court would eventually take up a case: Perry in the First Circuit, Castillo in the Second, Ricks in the Third, Kimbrough in the Fourth, Spears in the Eighth, and Starks in the Ninth. Each argument was posted on Berman’s blog.</p> <p>In 2007, three years after Booker, Osler took his students to Washington, D.C., to hear Kimbrough v. United States argued before the Supreme Court. In another victory for the reformers, the Court ruled that judges, applying the sentencing guidelines, could indeed conclude that 100-to-1 wasn’t a reasonable standard.</p> <p>After the decision was handed down, Boyd and Berman were all over the media—Boyd as the ACLU’s lead advocate for drug-policy reform and Berman as the most prolific sentencing expert. On his own blog, Osler reflected on his role: “There is a part of me that would love to be in the Times and on NPR as a part of this, but then I remember what I teach my own students. I show them … Degas’ ‘At The Milliner.’ There are two women; one is buying a hat while the other is placing it on her head. The woman in the foreground is fully formed and in the light; she will wear the hat and be complimented on its beauty. In the background, the milliner is in the shadows. She made the hat, chose it for this customer, brought it out, but will not be there when it goes out into society to hear the compliments. I tell the students that the lawyer is not the customer, but the milliner.”</p> <p>As it turned out, Kimbrough wasn’t the victory many thought it was. The Department of Justice continued to resist, arguing that judges couldn’t categorically replace 100-to-1 with a ratio they thought was more just. “Kimbrough was our shot,” says Benham, now a law professor at Texas Tech, and it seemed like prosecutors were “finding a way to wiggle out of it. It was like we won, and it wasn’t complete.”</p> <p>Many sentencing reformers, including Berman, started to focus on other issues. Osler was no longer filing on behalf of the ACLU. However, he decided to continue working on Spears v. United States. In the case, a judge had sentenced a crack dealer based on a 20-to-1 ratio. The prosecutor appealed, arguing that the Court ruling in Booker barred the judge from establishing his own sentencing ratio and that he should have sentenced based on 100-to-1. The case had already gone up to the Supreme Court once, and the Court had sent it back down in light of the Kimbrough ruling.</p> <p>When Spears arrived at the Court a second time, it ruled, without oral argument, that judges could now ignore 100-to-1 altogether. Because the decision was delivered the same day as Barack Obama’s first inauguration, Spears did not make the waves Booker and Kimbrough had. Still, congratulations poured in from friends and colleagues. Amid the messages, Osler received a call from Berman. His friend did not begin with the usual compliments. “No celebration, nothing,” Osler recalls. Instead, Berman asked, “What do we do next?”</p> <p> </p> <p><span class="dropcap">O</span>sler’s office is on the fourth floor of St. Thomas’s new law school building in downtown Minneapolis. A painting by his father hangs by the door. One of a series, it depicts a man sitting in the back of a church. Above a couch, Osler’s Yale Law School diploma fits awkwardly in a too-large, fake wood frame. “I got that at the Dollar General store in Waco,” he says. “I had it taped to my wall originally.” Displayed on the coffee table is Christ and the Gallows, Or, Reasons for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, a book first published in 1870.</p> <p>It’s early in the fall semester, and Osler is holding a yellow-brown packing envelope that just arrived. Without opening it, he knows what’s inside: documents pertaining to a trial that concluded with the defendant spending years or, more often, decades in prison. He points to the six stamps, in two neat rows of three. Four have either “liberty” or “justice” written beneath an image of the American flag; two feature the Statue of Liberty. Osler pays attention to the stamps, because he knows they represent a lot of labor. Inmates make only 45 cents an hour.</p> <p>The envelope is from Roy Blount, a prisoner in the federal penitentiary outside Beaumont, Texas. “Sentenced to life, conspiracy, selling crack,” Osler says. “I know who this guy is.” Blount’s public defender had already reached out to Osler. He reads from the transcript. Blount wasn’t even the one selling; he was a lookout, pointing people to where they could purchase the drugs.</p> <p>“Well, if he’s a kingpin,” Osler asks, “how much money does he have?” He flips to the sentencing portion of the file. Before determining the punishment, judges look at the convict’s life and possessions. Osler reads from Blount’s testimony: “I hang at a store begging for nickels and quarters and dimes. I stayed at the front porch of my mama’s house. I don’t, I don’t sell dope. I didn’t even have one change of clothes. I had to do my wash every day, judge.”</p> <p>Osler looks up and asks, “This impoverished ninth-grade graduate is your drug kingpin?” He shakes his head. “I get these every day.” He gestures to a bookcase. Dozens of unopened yellow-brown envelopes are piled on top of one another. Many arrived when he was on summer vacation, and he hasn’t gotten to them yet.</p> <p>On the surface, Osler’s decision to leave Baylor in 2010 for St. Thomas doesn’t seem like a natural step. Unlike Baylor Law, which has been around for more than 150 years, St. Thomas’s law school is only 15 years old; it ranks 124th, according to U.S. News and World Report, 70 spots below Baylor. Part of the appeal of St. Thomas was that it offered a lighter teaching load and more time to focus on public policy. Osler still has close ties to Baylor, but he was ready to go to a school that offered more flexibility integrating faith with scholarship. “There’s no institution I’ve ever been close to that worries more about orthodoxy than Baylor,” he says. “People there were constantly talking about ‘What does it mean to be a Baptist university?’ And it usually came down to, ‘Well, we make people go to chapel, and we don’t have gay professors, and no one writes in favor of abortion.’ Which is really a bizarre way to define it.”</p> <p>Two months after starting at St. Thomas, Osler wrote a piece for The Huffington Post titled “Repentance of an Anti-Gay Bigot.” “I was a bigot,” he wrote. “My bigotry was consistent with what the culture, the church and my friends thought and said, and it was not countered by those who knew better.” He credited gay men and women, who had showed him “undeserved grace,” for gradually changing his view. In 2012, he lent his voice to the campaign that prevented an anti-gay-marriage amendment from becoming law in Minnesota.</p> <p>At Baylor, Osler had been discreet about his work with the ACLU. By contrast, St. Thomas encouraged him to start the first federal commutations clinic in the country. Over the past three years, the clinic has prepared petitions for seven prisoners, which ask President Obama, in Osler’s words, “to grant mercy.” The students in the yearlong class choose among the yellow-brown envelopes that sit on Osler’s bookshelf.</p> <p><span class="pullquote">Osler’s interest in clemency heightened after the 2008 election. Along with many others, he thought Obama’s election would signal a shift in sentencing law and the war against drugs. </span>“We think the tide in Washington and elsewhere is beginning to turn in our favor,” wrote the pro-reform group Families Against Mandatory Minimums in a post-election statement. Even the ever-skeptical Berman wrote a post titled “Are We on the Verge of a New Changed Era concerning Federal Sentencing Law and Policy?”</p> <p>The Spears decision only amped up the excitement. Osler blogged that the decision “should encourage the Obama administration to pro-actively use its power of commutation to lessen the sentences of those who are serving unduly harsh crack sentences.”</p> <p>Osler hoped the administration would embrace the president’s clemency power. Under the Constitution, the president can forgive a crime (a full pardon) or let a prisoner out early (commutation). Under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, pardons and commutations had often been awkward and messy. Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a tax evader who was the husband of a major Democratic donor. Bush commuted the sentence of former vice--presidential adviser I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was convicted for his role in exposing a CIA operative. What was supposed to be a tool for curbing congressional excesses had become a tool for granting political favors.</p> <p>Initially, from Osler’s perspective, the policy debate under Obama seemed to be moving in the right direction. Transition documents discussed the need for drastic sentencing reform, especially when it came to the crack-cocaine disparity. Although the Supreme Court had weakened the sentencing guidelines, only Congress could undo the mandatory minimums, many of which were tied to the disparity, like the five-year minimum for possession of crack.</p> <p>In 2010, the Democratic-controlled House and Senate began to consider the Fair Sentencing Act. Osler and other reformers hoped the crack–powder cocaine disparity would finally disappear. The bill did eliminate the five-year minimum for crack possession, but rather than erasing the disparity, it introduced an 18-to-1 ratio. Crack, it seemed, still bore the stigma it had 15 years earlier. The law wasn’t fully retroactive, so many of those who had been sentenced under 100-to-1 still faced decades in prison.</p> <p>“My first reaction was ‘This is abominable,’” Berman says, “and everyone shouted me down and said be grateful we got something. To call it half a loaf is to insult bread. It’s more like a slice.”</p> <p>Osler was more measured about the bill’s failings. “That whole negotiation was so fragile,” he says. “Is it what it should have been? No. But it’s what seemed possible.”</p> <p>Nkechi Taifa, the Open Society Foundations’ senior analyst on civil and criminal--justice reform, immediately began looking for the next step. Taifa had been active in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s and the black-power movement of the 1970s. By the 1990s, she saw sentencing reform as “the civil-rights issue of our time” and became an early advocate, organizing conferences and lobbying Capitol Hill. Osler calls her a legend in the field of sentencing. She suggested to groups that they push for some sort of “blanket pardon” from the president for those still in prison. “That didn’t even get much traction in my progressive circles,” she says. “People said that’s not going to happen.”</p> <p>In 2011, while she was poking around databases, she happened on an article by Osler called “The Ford Approach and Real Fairness for Crack Convicts.” Published in the Federal Sentencing Reporter, the piece proposed creating a system of commutation panels for crack defendants similar to those President Gerald Ford had established for Vietnam War draft evaders. “Mark was my dream come true,” she says.” She got in touch with him and invited speakers to discuss his proposal on Capitol Hill.</p> <p>Osler soon entered the world of Washington lobbying. As a reformer, he had a perfect résumé. He uses words familiar to Christian conservatives and sympathizes with the needs of prosecutors. “Mark is a very credible advocate in the sense that he’s not one of the usual suspects,” Boyd says. “He’s not being a soft-on-crime person. When you’re coming from the ACLU, it’s a lot easier to be pigeonholed.”</p> <p>Osler’s articles and op-eds became more frequent, and he began appearing on outlets like MSNBC and CNN. After his commutations clinic was up and running, he traveled to other universities, including Stanford and Harvard, urging them to start their own. When former Governor Robert Ehrlich of Maryland, a Republican, began a clinic for pardons at Catholic University, he modeled it on Osler’s program. In 2012, Taifa and Osler, along with others, met several times with White House and Department of Justice officials.</p> <p>Until late last year, the lobbying seemed to have no effect. Obama has granted the fewest pardons and commutations of any president in history. Over Thanksgiving, Osler, Berman, and others wrote about the irony in the president pardoning a turkey while leaving thousands of people in prison sentenced under laws many Republicans as well as Democrats now agree were far too harsh. Berman was particularly cynical, writing that he no longer believed the White House’s claims to be interested in clemency reform.</p> <p>Then things began to change. Right before Christmas, Obama commuted the sentences of eight people convicted of crack crimes. At a New York State Bar event at the end of January, Deputy Attorney General James Cole announced that the administration was seeking other drug cases to consider for clemency. Cole said the Justice Department would work with the Bureau of Prisons to encourage inmates to seek commutations, with the hope that state bar associations would help in preparing the petitions.</p> <p>Osler was quick to point out the flaws in the administration’s proposal. In a post for MSNBC, he argued that the White House was “only halfway there,” explaining that the president already has 3,500 petitions sitting on his desk. What was needed, Osler asserted, was a system for processing all the requests. Once again, he called for a version of the Ford plan, in which clemency boards considered 21,000 petitions in one year.</p> <p>If Obama pursued such a course, the political risk might not be as great as many suppose. Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation have joined liberal organizations like the ACLU, the Open Society Foundations, and Families Against Mandatory Minimums in pressing for reform. Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois have co-sponsored the Smarter Sentencing Act. Introduced last summer, it would reduce mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders and allow the nearly 9,000 in prison for crack crimes under the old 100-to-1 regime to return to court for a new hearing. In late January, the bill passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with support from Tea Party Republicans Ted Cruz of Texas and Jeff Flake of Arizona.</p> <p> </p> <p><span class="dropcap">“W</span>hat the defendant does is threaten the things that our society rests upon: our economy, our family, our ability to defend ourselves, and our cultural heritage. What if we listen to him? What if we did what he said?” On an early afternoon in November, Osler addresses an audience of about 50 students, professors, and priests at Loyola Law School in New Orleans. No one stirs as he makes his closing argument that Jesus Christ should receive the death penalty. “Everything that makes our economy go forward would be gone. That’s what he teaches. That’s what he taught consistently. Is he dangerous? Yes, he’s dangerous!”</p> <p>Less than a year after he arrived at St. Thomas, Osler set about reviving the trial of Christ he had put together ten years earlier in Waco. This time, however, he wanted to take the show on the road, traveling to churches, seminaries, and schools to highlight the special relationship he believes Christians should have with criminal justice. Rather than spend hours enacting the entire trial, the new format focuses on the sentencing portion. Jesus would be presumed guilty of blasphemy, but it was up to the “jury” to determine whether he should receive the death penalty. Over the past two years, Osler has performed the trial 16 times at institutions like Regent University, the school Pat Robertson founded in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Fuller Theological in Pasadena, California, considered by many the country’s leading evangelical seminary.</p> <p>His opposing counsel in the trial is a Chicago public defender named Jeanne Bishop. When Bishop was 30, her sister, who was pregnant, and brother-in-law were murdered in their home. The 16-year-old killer offered no motive and was sentenced to life in prison. A member of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, who sometimes quotes Bible verses to friends having a bad day, Bishop has recently attempted to reconcile with the killer. Tall and thin, with an intimidating gaze, she presents a striking figure in the courtroom, even a mock one. She’s used to defending poor black kids who don’t garner nearly as much sympathy as Jesus.</p> <p>Osler makes a worthy opponent. He never raises his voice or descends into staginess; instead, he maintains an earnest concern. During the first part of his close, he highlights the stickier parts of the New Testament: when Jesus said he had come “to set a man against his father, a daughter against her own mother,” or when Jesus was being arrested and allowed an apostle to lop off a slave’s ear (which he later healed). “These are the parts no one ever preaches about,” Osler told me beforehand. The Bible he carries is marked up like a law document and has so many tabs he sometimes has trouble finding the passage he’s looking for.</p> <p>The trial isn’t scripted. Not only do Bishop and Osler not know what the other will say, but they don’t know how witnesses, like the apostle Simon Peter, who are played by people in the community, will respond to their questions. The performers must abide by the Bible, but everyone approaches the roles differently.</p> <p>During Osler’s lengthy questioning of Simon Peter, whom he treats as a hostile witness, he zeroes in on Jesus’s power. “You’ve seen other things that demonstrate certain powers—a form of magic, really—displayed by the defendant. For instance, his ability to walk on water,” he says to the young man playing Peter.</p> <p>“I wouldn’t consider it magic, really,” the man replies.</p> <p>“Have you met anyone else who has that ability?” Osler shoots back.</p> <p>Bishop’s job is less transgressive, as she makes a plea for the life of Jesus in front of audiences, most of whom believe in his divinity. She points to his good works, his attempts to get away from crowds, and his focus on nonviolence. “No one is beyond the forgiveness of God,” she says.</p> <p>This is the most explicitly religious project Osler has tackled. He makes a point of performing the trial in front of skeptical audiences. <span class="pullquote">In general, Osler does little to engage with progressive Christians because, as he puts it, “they’re not the people I have to convince.” </span>During a question-and-answer session at Loyola, Osler reiterates that his purpose is to challenge Christians on the death penalty. “The death penalty would not exist in the United States without Christian support,” he says. So far, only one jury has sentenced Jesus to death.</p> <p>When Osler discusses his faith, he comes across as someone who is comfortable in his own skin, capable of making bad jokes and trenchant observations in the same breath. His earnest questions and his willingness to grapple publicly are rooted in a deep certainty—in God, in faith, and in his place in the world. In his view, everything he does connects to a central belief that he is a Christian and should therefore try to cultivate mercy where it’s lacking and justice where it’s needed.</p> <p>In the tradition of Anabaptists, Osler is non-creedal and never joins in when his church begins prewritten prayers. His prayers are his own. “A creed is written by someone else,” he says, “and because of that, it’s someone else’s statement of a relationship with God.”</p> <p>As some of his admirers note, Osler doesn’t conform to the standard expectations of an evangelical. He doesn’t abstain from alcohol, he doesn’t regularly say grace before meals, and he’s not eager to convert nonbelievers. Even the way he talks about abortion is not hard-line. “If a baby is capable of being born alive, I really struggle with justifying the practice,” he says, explaining that he believes the state should offer to assume the costs of delivery and early care for any woman considering abortion at the point the fetus is viable.</p> <p>But Osler’s identification with evangelism is strong. “An evangelical means you’re unashamed of your faith, you’re willing to let other people see it,” he says. “That’s a form of evangelism. I talk about faith all the time. I don’t always do it in a way that’s conscious. It makes some people uncomfortable.” Osler says he wants to reclaim the word “evangelical,” in the same way that the radical gay-rights group Queer Nation uses a slur as a term of empowerment. “Embracing the word and defining it for yourself is a powerful thing,” he says. “I want ‘evangelical’ to mean someone who is deeply broken and seeks community.”</p> <p>The idea of being broken and seeking community—whether you’re a drug dealer serving a prison term or a former prosecutor seeking reform—is fundamental to Osler. It was why he ended his sermon at First Covenant Church not with a passionate plea for social justice but with an account of his own vulnerability. He described spending the previous July teaching in Rome. Many days, he felt lonely and grumpy, wandering the city and taking a strange solace in the toys sold in piazzas by immigrant men—little rockets that shot up and then helicoptered down with a glowing blue light, “like angels.”</p> <p>One morning, he received a phone call from his parents back in Michigan. “My nephew, who’s eight years old, had died. I traveled to Detroit to see my brother and his wife. Those of us who were left. To try to get over the loss of this vibrant child, the loudest of the gaggle of loud cousins who’d been so full of life. Heartbroken, all of us.”</p> <p>Women in the audience started to sniffle. People began to realize the sermon had taken an unexpected turn, that it was going somewhere far more personal than they anticipated.</p> <p>After the funeral, Osler returned to Rome and found himself in the piazza where the immigrant vendors sold the rockets. He approached a vendor who spoke little English or Italian and asked if he could buy one. “He looks behind me, and he says, ‘Where is the child?’ And there was something about that question that just broke me.”</p> <p>The pauses between Osler’s sentences became more frequent, the words more halting.</p> <p>“I told him in English, ‘There is no child.’ Then something changed in him. Because he may well have been from a country where children who are eight years old die. They die of diseases that are curable. They die because they don’t have enough food. They die because the roads are bad and they get hit by a car. They die from drinking the water.</p> <p>“There’s something that just softened in him in that moment. He looked at me and said something that I understood to be, ‘What happened?’ And I told him, ‘My brother was canoeing with his son, and the boat capsized, and rescue didn’t come soon enough. My brother survived, and his son did not.’</p> <p>“And I cried. He didn’t say anything. He reached out and touched me on the shoulder and he gave me this.” Osler pulled out a toy that in any other context would look like schlock but at the moment had all the weight of a holy object. “The man put his hands out that he wouldn’t take payment—because he was from a place where children die.</p> <p>“That was grace. And it’s grace that seeps into the cracks of ourselves, if we let them be seen, let ourselves be vulnerable, let ourselves get to that place where we can both show mercy and receive it. Because it is the same place. Grace can come, our unclean spirits cleansed, if we acknowledge in our hearts the essence of humility that there is a god and that is not me. The god that is—the god that is—turns the world upside down.</p> <p>“Lord, you are greater than our imagination. Let that humility be a force in our lives. In our chasteness, drive us to what is good. Amen.”</p> <p>Osler smiled and sat down.</p> </div></div></div> Mon, 07 Apr 2014 12:31:03 +0000 220073 at Abby Rapoport Daily Meme: A Rough Week for Democracy <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <ul><li>Once, long ago, lawmakers from both parties worked together to pass campaign finance reform legislation. It was a simpler time, albeit with terrorist attacks and wars in the Middle East and a presidential administration bent on giving tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans, and in 2002, Democratic Senator Russ Feingold Republican Senator John McCain (remember him?) saw their efforts to decrease the role of money in politics turned into law, adding to an overall campaign finance regulations.</li> <li>But since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 <em>Citizens United</em> <em>v. FEC</em> decision, which allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts on independent political advertising, and the rise of super PACS, the whole system has been wobbling.</li> <li><span data-term="goog_2135498501" tabindex="0">On Wednesday</span>, another vestige of the system fell to First Amendment claims. <em>McCutcheon</em> <em>v. FEC</em> knocked down the total limits on individual campaign donations. While there are still caps on how much donors can give to a campaign or party, they can now give to as many campaigns or parties as they like. There’s already<strong> <a href="" target="_blank" title="">a book out</a></strong> about the decision, because apparently some people write fast.</li> <li>People in the reform world<strong> <a href="" target="_blank" title="">promptly freaked out</a>.</strong></li> <li>Some say the opinion is actually <strong><a href="" target="_blank" title="">bad news for rich people</a></strong>. Conservatives, however, appeared <strong><a href="" target="_blank" title="">pretty pleased with the news</a>.</strong> Shaun McCutcheon, the plaintiff in the case, explained he was your average freedom fighter. “As an American engineer in the land of the free,” <strong><a href="" target="_blank" title="">he wrote</a></strong>, “I wanted to understand just exactly why my First Amendment rights were being limited.”</li> <li>At any rate, the opinion isn’t immediately apocalyptic—the number of people who want to give away hundreds of thousands of bucks to campaigns isn’t exactly high—but reformers worry in a “death by a thousand cuts” scenario, this is cut number 999.</li> <li>Because the decision explicitly states that Congress can only regulate contributions to prevent <em>quid-pro-quo </em>bribery, rather than more nebulous kinds of political favoritism, the <strong><a href="" target="_blank" title="">door is wide open for more lawsuits to bring down what’s left of the system.</a></strong></li> <li>For instance a case moving to strike down campaign contribution limits themselves may soon appear, which would leave the wealthy free to give as much as they want to as many campaigns as they want. Yale Professor of Law Heather Gerken <strong><a href="" target="_blank" title="">worries</a></strong> public financing programs could be also at risk of a successful lawsuit.</li> <li>Meanwhile Congress remains <strong><a href="" target="_blank" title="">committed to doing nothing</a></strong> and the Republican members of the Federal Elections Commission seem <a href="" target="_blank" title=";_r=0"><strong>eager to follow the same model</strong>.</a></li> <li>So what’s left for reformers to propose? Well, Gherkin, along with Yale Law student Webb Lyons and Wade Gibson of Connecticut Voices for Children, say at the very least groups that don’t have to disclose donors should be <a href="" target="_blank" title=""><strong>required to state that fact</strong>.</a> “That could help voters figure out how much trust to put in the ad,” they write.</li> <li>But at <em>Salon</em>, Alex Pareene has a<strong> <a href="" target="_blank" title="">more effective idea</a>. </strong>Just take away money from rich people. The “socialist” in the White House has yet to comment on the proposal.</li> </ul></div></div></div> Fri, 04 Apr 2014 20:20:54 +0000 220071 at Abby Rapoport It’s Andrew Cuomo’s Fault! <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">T</span>his year was supposed to be different in New York. After failing to pass a comprehensive public financing system during the last legislative session, advocates for the measure believed this year, they would get the deed done, and New York state would match small-dollar donations with public funds, allowing campaigns with low-level donors to compete with those whose supporters can write big checks. But on Tuesday, the effort to get public financing in New York had been dealt a major (if not a fatal) blow. Highlighting the stakes of such legislation, Wednesday morning the United States Supreme Court removed one of the last vestiges of the nation’s campaign finance system, banning caps on the total amount individuals can give to candidates in the <em>McCutcheon</em> <em>v. FEC</em> decision.</p> <p>Now, the progressives who formed the Fair Elections Campaign have begun a new set of strategies to pass their public financing plan, largely by going to war with the most powerful Democrat in the state—Governor Andrew Cuomo.</p> <p>Ostensibly, Cuomo, whose office did not respond to interview requests, is in favor of public financing. It was part of his campaign platform, and he’s mentioned it in every State of the State address. Last year, however, the legislature ended without passing any legislation on the issue, despite proposed plans being offered by the governor, Democratic lawmakers, and the Independent Democrats who currently share power with Republicans in the state Senate’s “coalition” model.</p> <p>At the time, many advocates <a href="">blamed Cuomo</a> for his inaction. The New York governor, who has national ambitions, plays the angles. He does not always back incumbent Democrats, even in general elections, and benefits from the state senate’s unusual set up. Even though Democrats have the majority, a faction of rebel Democrats, the Independent Democrats, joined with the Republicans to rule the legislature, which means Cuomo has an easy pressure-release valve. He doesn’t receive any legislation that’s too far to the left of him. Despite the Republican hold on the Senate, the governor usually gets what he wants—his state was the first to pass a major piece of gun regulation after the Newtown shootings and he also rammed through a marriage equality measure. Cuomo can usually find Republican votes when he needs to, but public financing didn’t make the cut in 2013.</p> <p>After the session ended, the Fair Elections Campaign got active in districts, including that of the head of the Independent Democrats, Senator Jeff Klein. Phonebanking and blockwalking helped raise awareness of the issue and showed lawmakers the reformers meant business. Among the coalition was the Working Families Party, a third party that endorses Democrats but pushes them left, and Friends of Democracy, a super PAC funded by Jonathan Soros, son of the famous philanthropist George.</p> <p>Most importantly, this year advocates expected Cuomo to have more leverage. He included a public financing plan in his budget proposal. By tying the plan to a must-pass piece of legislation—which also had plenty of room for deals to placate Republicans—advocates thought they’d have more tools available to get a plan over the finish line<strong>.</strong> Furthermore, the governor had set up a commission, known as the Moreland Commission, to make recommendations about how to clean up the system. Advocates expected the governor would only agree to end the commission when lawmakers passed a public financing measure. With Democrats controlling the governor’s office and the state House, and a Democratic faction with major clout in the Senate, the Fair Elections campaign had a strong hand it seemed, and over the last two months, the New York legislature frequently seemed close to getting a deal. Senate Republicans, the only group that didn’t have explicit support for the measure, <a href="">appeared open to negotiations</a>.</p> <p>But, according to advocates, Cuomo was largely absent on the issue and when he did get involved, only complicated negotiations. He agreed to disband the Moreland Commission for support on some other anti-corruption measures, without a deal on public finance. On Tuesday night, the legislature passed a budget with a number of carve-outs for business, but only a paltry pilot program for public financing. Rather than some sort of matching system that could be implemented carefully and would apply to the governor and legislators, the pilot program is simply for one race, the 2014 state comptroller, and would have to be put together in a matter of weeks.  Many in the Fair Elections coalition once supported such a pilot program, but not on such a short timeline and not after comprehensive reform seemed so close. “In obsessively driving for an on-time budget, Governor Cuomo and his office actively worked to both spoil and shut down negotiations that may have led to a more comprehensive result,” wrote David Donnelly, in a memo to supporters this week. Donnelly, in addition to his role as executive director of the pro-reform Public Campaign Action Fund, is also involved in Soros’ super PAC,</p> <p>If advocates were looking for a silver-lining to the Supreme Court’s <em>McCutcheon</em> decision, it’s timing. Coming a day after the budget passed without a comprehensive plan, the decision helps illustrate how public financing has become one of the only options left for reformers, after years of the court chipping away at key campaign finance laws. “It’s the most promising thing that’s left,” says Ian Vandewalker, counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program, one of the leading legal groups pushing for campaign finance reform. According to Vandewalker, Wednesday’s decision leaves the door wide open for more cases that can knock down the few remaining limitations for donors. Because the court argued that the only reason Congress can regulate donation is to prevent bribery, any regulation that doesn’t explicitly tackle bribery is now an easy target for lawsuits. A voluntary public financing system, which would help small-donation campaigns compete, may soon begin to look more appealing across the country.</p> <p>Blaming Cuomo for the loss—and in so doing, trying to show some muscle—has become the coalition’s main goal.  “For those among us who want very tangible things to do and to ask others to do, the best thing that can be done is to blame the Governor for failing to achieve what would have been an historic victory,” read Donnelly’s memo.</p> <p>Cuomo’s national ambitions put him in a tough position. While he obviously isn’t eager to take huge political risks for public financing, he does want to curry some favor with progressives. For instance, the Working Families Party often will put progressive Democratic candidates on their ballot line, rather than nominating independent third party candidates. Cuomo is eager to win big this November, and show his popularity. But without a public financing win, Karen Scharff, the head of Citizen Action New York, one of the lead groups in the Fair Election Campaign, says “it’s certainly a very open question as to whether he gets the line.” A<a href=""> recent report</a> from the progressive New York Public Interest Research Group showed that 170 wealthy contributors, each of whom donated $50,000 or more to state politics, represented half of all the money campaigns received last year. Cuomo was the main recipient of those big checks.</p> <p>But Cuomo won’t be the only official facing electoral pressure. Scharff says a session with no public financing will also show the failure of the power-sharing model in the senate, an arrangement from which, as noted, Cuomo benefits. While the Fair Elections Campaign will not engage in political activity together, Friends of Democracy has promised to fight against those who didn’t do enough to pass the measure. “Every single political actor in this mix, from the assembly to the senate to the governor know that their actions have consequences,” says Donnelly, who declined to name any targets and says he’s hoping the legislature will still find a way to pass public financing before the legislature adjourns.</p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Still, that possibility is looking increasingly remote, and as advocates look to new strategies for November and next year, support from the governor is no longer part of the plan. “We went into this fight with the governor, the state assembly leadership, senate Democrats and Independent Democrats all in favor,” says Scharff. That the campaign could not get public financing in the budget is “a real sign of either the governor’s weakness or his lack of commitment.”</span></p> </div></div></div> Thu, 03 Apr 2014 14:49:36 +0000 220059 at Abby Rapoport George Takei, Living Long and Prospering from Social Media <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">O</span>n March 20, in between jokes—“You can’t spell ‘diet’ without ‘die,’” and sharing a picture of a man dressed as a giant iron (Iron Man, get it?)—George Takei put up a serious post on his <a href="">Facebook feed.</a> Fred Phelps, the founder of Westboro Baptist Church, known for its vitriolic picketing at the funerals of soldiers and gay people, had just died. “He was a tormented soul, who tormented so many,” Takei wrote to his nearly 6.5 million followers. “Hate never wins out in the end. It instead goes always to its lonely, dusty end.”</p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">To newcomers, the abrupt change of tone might sound odd. But Takei's followers weren’t likely surprised; in the midst of humor, they know, he often delivers wise and solemn messages to fans.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">For decades, Takei, who turns 77 in April, was most famous for his role as Hikaru Sulu on the original </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Star Trek </em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">series (catchphrase: “Oh my!”). But since he started his Facebook page in 2011, the actor has been a social-media whiz. He’s got more than a million Twitter followers, in addition to his Facebook throngs. His feeds are fun mix of dad-humor—puns and silly photos—and the occasional dirty joke, all of which get tens of thousands of “likes” and thousands of comments as well. He frequently mentions his husband, Brad, and his daily life in Hollywood, attending premieres or giving a birthday shout-outs. His fan base has grown from Trekkies to people who simply like some humor in their Facebook. He’s even popular on Amazon, where his funny reviews of products have made him a top commenter on the site. If you’re not following Takei, a bunch of your friends probably are. I learned that when I went to his page to discover 87 of my friends had already “liked” him. Anyone following, however, will also notice the occasional, pointed comments about civil rights, politics and history.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">You might say that Takei is playing a long game. Speaking at SXSW earlier this month, he explained to interviewer Matthew Segal, the president of </span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">a civic education organization that targets millennials with social media, </span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">, his reasons for starting the Facebook page that would renew his celebrity for a new generation.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">He began in an unexpected manner. “I grew up imprisoned in two U.S. barbed wire prison camps, internment camps,” he said. He wanted to “raise the awareness of that dark chapter and make sure it never happens again, and the best way to do that [was] through a Broadway musical.” But to get a musical to Broadway, Take would need a much larger audience of likely ticket-buyers. Takei began work on </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Allegiance</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">, which follows a Japanese-American family as they’re relocated from California to rural Wyoming, but meanwhile, he set out on social media to find new fans. He didn’t start out mentioning internment camps though. “Kitten [photos and memes] got people to like and share,” he said. “You catch more flies with honey and then you sock it to them with the meat.”</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Takei’s social media approach is a bit like Buzzfeed—he aggregates the funnier stuff from the internet: “someecards” and giant quotations with pretty backgrounds, to silly signs. He gives fans riddles or asks them their Oscar picks. It’s like a much better version of the friend who sends along chain emails and long jokes to everyone they know. Only in this case, the people come to Takei.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Takei’s posts, all done by him personally, give him a unique voice on social media. Many celebrities make impassioned pleas on social issues, at least when they're not hawking their brands, but few have been able to use Twitter or Facebook to both get people to like them more </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">and</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> take them more seriously. But Takei’s blend of jokes and serious commentary has allowed him to be both the internet’s funny uncle and moral grandfather at the same time. He’s a host on the </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Howard Stern Show</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">. He talks about gay rights while making jokes about clothing-store signs for “active male tops” and “active male bottoms.” Then he brings up the horrifying stories of Japanese internment to audiences who usually aren’t expecting a gut-wrenching history lesson.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">In person, he uses the opposite formula, speaking seriously and sprinkling in a few lines that bring down the house with laughter. At SXSW, Segal, his interviewer, seemed surprised by his forthright and non-humorous discussions of his childhood, American history and politics. He invoked his father’s love for the former Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, the progressive Democrat who lost twice to Dwight Eisenhower, and discussed the importance of political participation. He criticized Edward Snowden’s decision to leave the country rather than stand trial and embrace a civil disobedience tradition. (“He’s talking about freedom and liberty and he goes to Russia of all places.”) and excoriated the International Olympic Committee’s decision to keep the Olympics in Russia after the passage of anti-gay laws. “The Olympic Committee is absolutely spineless.”</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">But he still knew how to lighten the mood. He told the audience how, for decades, many—if not most—mispronounced his name as "Tak-</span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">kai</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">,” which sounds like the Japanese word for “expensive." But when, in 2011, he heard about the Tennessee Legislature’s proposal to ban teachers from using any language that assumes the existence of gay people—a bill known as “Don’t Say Gay”—Takei suggested that people could substitute his name for the word “gay,” as in Takei Pride Parades. His strategy, he now says, was two-fold: Mock the measure and get people to pronounce his name correctly: "Takei, rhymes with gay."</span></p> </div></div></div> Fri, 28 Mar 2014 13:30:04 +0000 220027 at Abby Rapoport No Fear of Flying <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <div class="embed"> <div class="image image-large"> <div class="field-image"><img src="" alt="" title="" /></div> <div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">AP Images/Kathy Willens</div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>I was terrified for the first 15 minutes of watching <em>Born to Fly</em>. Okay, maybe for closer to 30 minutes. For much of the documentary film by Emmy-nominated director Catherine Gund, you watch dancers with the STREB dance company fling their bodies across the stage, landing loudly on their backs or stomachs with hard thuds. They leap around giant iron beams and slam against hard plastic screens. Thanks to beautiful cinematography from Albert Mayles, who’s made 36 films and helped create the narrative nonfiction film genre, you feel the height in every jump and the fragility in the bodies moving fast through time and space. There’s little music and instead, it’s the performers’ grunts and thuds that accompany the movement, so even on film<strong>,</strong> it’s hard not to wince and seriously fear for the safety of those on screen.</p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">If you’ve ever struggled to appreciate avant-garde artistry, </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Born to Fly </em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">is the movie to see. The film, which premiered March 8 at the SXSW festival, explores the artistic vision of choreographer Elizabeth Streb, a MacArthur Foundation "genius award" winner who created this form of dance she calls “pop action.” It bears little in common with tap shoes or pink tutus. Instead, performances incorporate a massive amount of hardware; sturdy bodies, male and female, get strapped in harnesses and run through giant wheels, sometimes showing more force than grace. Early in the movie, Streb, whose spiky hair and black clothes don’t quite match her intense, serious demeanor, explains her goal of challenging the limitations of gravity and the human body to achieve something transformational. “You have to get beyond the barrier of self-protection before you can really fly,” she tells the camera.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Just watching other people leave their caution behind can be scary to those of us who prefer to remain rooted to the ground. Helping the audience to get beyond that fear to appreciate the movement is the film’s central accomplishment. It's no small feat. Even those familiar with avant-garde choreographers like Merce Cunningham or Twyla Tharp will find Streb’s work to be on a different page. Since arriving in New York in the 1980s, Streb has always involved props in her movements—first balls, hoops, and sticks, later harnesses and vertical walls. Streb only stopped dancing herself when, in her late 40s, she began to feel the focus became too much on her age—45 is ancient in dance years—rather than the movement itself. Now she choreographs for her dance company; her dance notebooks are a series of sketches for contraptions that allow dancers to go faster or higher.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The dancers’ stories and experiences figure prominently into the movie. Streb calls her company “Extreme Action Heroes” and in performance, they can come close to looking super-human. But in their tiny apartments, sitting with partners, they look young and earnest and vulnerable. Sammi Jakus does her hair in front of the mirror, trying to get it just-so, while Jackie Carlson races the camera crew’s car on bike, laughing as she pedals harder and harder. Carlson, like many of the dancers who have come through Streb, had a career in traditional ballet before finding this new form of movement. None of the dancers have qualms about the risks they encounter, and instead, ooze appreciation for the opportunity to perform in Streb’s productions. “You get a chance to be Elizabeth,” one of them says.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The film is less successful at grappling with the physical risks the dancers take on. We see Streb getting shots in her own knee, while one of the dancers goes to a chiropractor and describes how her body’s started to feel the beatings it takes during performances. But though it’s clear that catastrophe lurks behind each flip off a platform, only one company member has been severely injured, shattering her vertebrae in a gruesome fall. The film focuses on the tragedy of one woman’s dance career cut short, yet refuses to draw any conclusions or lay blame. Streb says she feels responsible, yet the accident never appears to result in major changes to performances. The obvious question—the ethics of asking people to put themselves in peril on a nightly basis—is never fully articulated.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">What’s clear is that these people are a unique breed and in Streb, they’ve found a leader. They like to feel extreme sensation: Jackie laughs when her partner describes the bloody patches she gets from performing one solo, and John says even as a kid, he liked to see how long he could go ignore his asthma and without an inhaler</span><strong style="line-height: 1.538em;">. </strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Streb herself describes her pleasure and pride when, as a girl, she was left to hold up a roof for an hour after her father forgot he left her there. Most of us aren’t so willing to put our lives in peril for the sake of exhilaration, but by the end, the assault such choreography takes on our senses—much like the assault it takes on the dancers’ bodies—begins to have a certain kind of beauty.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Streb takes her performers to London for a series of performances ahead of the 2012 London Olympics. At a party, after the dancers have leapt off the Millennium Bridge attached to bungee cords and used harnesses to string themselves along the 500-foot Ferris wheel known as the London Eye, Sammi explains that no one else can know just how it felt. But in </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Born to Fly</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">, the audience comes as close as the earth-bound can.</span></p> </div></div></div> Thu, 20 Mar 2014 13:29:28 +0000 219960 at Abby Rapoport When Death Comes to the Festival <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <div class="embed"> <div class="image image-large"> <div class="field-image"><img src="" alt="" title="" /></div> <div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">AP Images/Austin American-Statesman/Jay Janner</div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p><span class="dropcap">O</span>n Monday, 26 year-old Sandy Le died in the hospital, the third fatality of last week's crash at the SXSW music festival. Another person, 18 year-old DeAndre Tatum, is in critical condition, and seven others remain in the hospital. The incident occurred shortly before 1 a.m. on March 13, when a drunk driver, chased by police, sped into a crowd outside Austin’s Mohawk Bar, on a closed-off section of road, injuring a total of 23 people, and leaving two dead at the scene.</p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Hours before the crash, I stood at the Parish, a downtown music venue, waiting for the Kooks to play. First up, however, was Claire, an electronica band from Munich. They seemed to personify every idea I had about what going to a music club in Munich would be like. Lead singer Josie-Claire Bürkle came out in a black, witchy outfit, with her midriff exposed, with her long blond hair in a slicked back ponytail. She sang overly mysterious lyrics in a low sonorous croon while dancing around, as colored lights lit up the stage. In between songs, however, her serious mask fell; her patter was full of a youthful exuberance. “We’re so excited to be here,” she told the crowd beaming. “You’ve been the most awesome audience!” She didn’t remember to give the band’s name until the end—“By the way, my name’s Claire, like the French name.” Then she bounced off stage.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Whether or not electro-pop is your thing, Claire’s performance was enchanting, and personified what remains the best part of SXSW: young, excited musicians happily doing their thing. The sheer number of bands is amazing—thousands of them, mostly undiscovered and unknown, most with an earnestness that peeps through the swagger. I always find the accompanying aesthetic alluring as well: leggy girls who wear overalls with lacy bras, women who manage to spend a day walking from one concert to the next, standing for hours in high heels, men in skinny jeans and with notable facial hair. People who look beautiful, even when they’re sweaty. For anyone over 25, it’s hard not to feel a little old and a little worn by comparison to the fresh-faced kids who really shouldn’t be smoking or drinking so much. I remember my first time going to the festival, being 22 and driving 17 hours straight from my small-town Iowa college to show up in time for the sets I wanted to see, figuring out how to see bands without paying a dime. It seemed easier to do SXSW for free then—we stood in lines, but we didn’t have any online RSVPs or required app downloads, now requirements for getting in anywhere for free. The iPhone didn’t even exist yet. Now I live in Austin, with bills to pay and a fear of getting a hangover. This is the third time I’ve covered SXSW as a reporter, always slightly annoyed that the demands of normal life don’t go away just because the hipsters have come to town.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The crash occurred at midnight, in one of the festival’s crowded pedestrian intersections, and by early the next morning, everyone seemed to have heard. I responded to Facebook messages that yes, I was okay, and wondered if I knew anyone among the dead or injured. The police close off streets for the festival and given the tens of thousands of concert-goers milling around at any moment, I always revel my chance to walk on the road rather than the sidewalk. Red River and 10</span><sup>th</sup><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> St, the scene of the accident, usually has a crowd.</span></p> <p>Death in public spaces carries a unique meaning. Drunk drivers kill people every year, but these were the first deaths at the SXSW festival. The sudden tragedy came in the midst of revelry on a massive scale, and the festival’s corporate excesses suddenly seemed glaringly gross. Dan Solomon of <em>Texas Monthly</em> <a href="">wrote a piece</a> immediately after the crash hoping the rest of the festival would be more somber, noting that “while this incident appears to be the sort of outlier for which it's impossible to prepare, it's nonetheless also an opportunity for SXSW and the brands that sponsor it to consider the culture of excess that the festival, as it's currently set up, encourages.” A<em> New York Times </em>article titled “<a href=";rref=us">After Fatal Crash, Soul Searching for South by Southwest,</a>" said the accident “crystallized a question floating around the edges of the festival for years: Has South by Southwest become too big and too rowdy, and has it lost the original spirit of what it intended to be?”</p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Sometimes it seems like people come to the festival expecting some sort of county fair for music, and instead they get an international </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">marketing conference</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">. SXSW was always a place for little fish to find bigger ponds— films try to find buyers, bands try to find labels, and start-ups try to find investors—but now enormous mega-brands use the event to do, well, something. I’m never sure how it’s worth it to the companies, but I’ve become inured to downloading an app in exchange for a grilled cheese or limiting my drink options to the vodka sponsoring an event. Chevrolet, eSurance, and Subway were among the biggest sponsors this year, their logos plastered everywhere. T-shirts and coozies abound in exchange for email addresses; Oreos and Doritos seem to flow steadily. There’s the Marlboro Black Lounges for smokers, while VUSE branded itself as the “official e-cigarette of SXSW.”</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The carnage from the crash seemed to highlight the more distasteful elements of the festival, and mainstream publications didn’t hold back in criticizing just how corporate SXSW has become. An </span><a href=",0,5741937.story#axzz2wEhTgblR" style="line-height: 1.538em;"><em>Los Angeles Times</em> piece</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> excoriated the constant branding while the </span><a href=",0,5741937.story#axzz2wEhTgblR" style="line-height: 1.538em;"><em>New York Times</em></a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> slammed the festival’s attention on the already-famous, at the cost of what made it famous to begin with: bringing fame to unknown indie bands.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Early Thursday afternoon, I walked downtown and could find almost no sign of the horrific scene that had taken place just 12 hours prior. I walked by the intersection where the car slammed into the crowd. The bars there were quiet still, with few people around, but I saw nothing to mark the space. As I walked on, into the convention center, around the other major pedestrian thoroughfares, no one mentioned the crash or the dead as we waited to see movies or waited in line for concerts. I don’t know what I was expecting, but somehow, I thought that the whole festival would feel different because something had happened, and people had died.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The festival organizers clearly wanted to make clear their concern for the tragic events. Initially press releases explained that though the festival would go on, events at Mohawk and nearby Cheer Up Charlie’s were cancelled. But by late afternoon the day after the crash, a new notice went out explaining that the shows would go as planned. By email and Twitter, they encouraged blood donations, and phone numbers for grief counseling. There was a prayer service at St. David’s Church downtown. Around 100 people showed up for the service; by evening the church was a music venue again. Festival organizers also started a new organization, SXSWCares, meant to raise relief funds for victims. “This is our number one priority – their care and support,” read the press release. “We are a community here that exists far beyond the 10 days of SXSW.”</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">But at this point, at this scale, SXSW isn’t a community. It’s just lots and lots of people—estimated at over 70,000—including revelers enjoying spring break, music lovers coming to find new bands, business people looking for new markets and new products.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">With three more days left in the festival, people didn’t want to be somber. Bands commanded you to get excited, get pumped up, and the largely young, happy spring breakers went from show to show. Samsung kept offering free phone batteries and Yahoo continued operating its lounge. It seemed almost impolite to mention the deaths: this was not a place for memorial. Perhaps that’s inevitable at a festival about youth and talent.</span></p> <p>At 6 p.m. on Thursday, I went to hear North Dakotan Tom Brosseau played folk songs in the lobby of the Hyatt Place. Most SXSW showcases happen at official music venues, but with chairs pulled up around Brosseau’s stool, and people talking in the background, his set almost had the feel of a lounge act. In his late thirties, the singer-songwrit<wbr></wbr>er is blonde, thin, and clean cut enough to be a Mormon missionary. The audience here was older, heavier, and decidedly less glamorous. Stroking his 1947 guitar, he spoke in a quiet voice about his grandma, who’d taught him to play. “She said, behind every tree, a pretty girl,” he said. “But there are no trees in North Dakota.”</p> <p>His folk songs were haunting and beautiful for the few dozen people in the audience. The woman in front of me wore sensible shoes with a long cotton skirt; during a pause in the music, she nudged her friend. “That’s us,” she said, pointing to the TV screens on the wall. CNN showed images from the crash before moving on to the missing Malaysian airplane. The audience seemed to notice, as did Brosseau. While he didn’t say anything about the incident, his songs were somber, and I stared at the TV long after Austin was off the screen.</p> <p>Six hours later, at the Central Presbyterian Church, I sat listening to Typhoon, an ensemble band whose songs focus, with unabashed emotion, largely on the lead singer’s fight against Lyme’s disease. The band had been playing for 20 minutes or so when the church minister appeared on stage. He explained that the festival organizers had asked for two minutes of silence, that everywhere the music would cease in recognition of the victims. For two minutes everything was still, and everyone solemn. Then the band picked up their instruments and began to play again.</p> </div></div></div> Tue, 18 Mar 2014 14:18:37 +0000 219951 at Abby Rapoport SXSWedu: How to Keep Friends and Influence No New People <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p style="margin-left:.5in;"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"></span></p> <div class="image image-large"> <div class="field-image"><img src="" alt="" title="" /></div> <div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">AP Images/Erich Schlegel</div> </div> </div> </div> <p></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><span class="dropcap">A</span>nyone who survived high school knows just how much blood, sweat, and tears must come before someone gets voted “Best All-Around” in the school yearbook. Being liked is one thing, but to be liked by lots of groups often requires that one always stay on the safe side of every conversation, never fully engaging. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same is true in education policy, where ideological differences rule the community. The cliques and lunchroom politics are serious business, and the jargon makes it all the worse. EdTech-ers sit at a table near EdReform-ers, while community-schools people sit beside the teachers’ unions. And because no one talks much to each other, it’s easy to affirm your beliefs and vilify your opponents without much challenge.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">So to its credit, the education-technology conference South by Southwest EDU—SXSWedu, as it’s known—is trying really hard to be friends with everyone. It’s trying to become a platform for serious policy debate, it’s trying to help for-profit vendors sell products to schools, it’s trying to encourage teachers while also challenging traditional methods. The Austin-based conference has become well-known nationally, with around 6,000 attendees from around the country, and major players look to the conference as a place to talk about important potential shifts in education. But despite its clear intentions, the four-day conference, which began in 2011 and has grown rapidly to now include some of the biggest names and companies in education and education-technology, this year exemplified the policy silos in education, rather than transcending them.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The SXSW brand in general is far more corporate than most would guess. Its big festivals, currently in full swing, are mostly about marketing—lounges and parties give away free stuff in exchange for major exposure, and little guys, like bands and inventors, try to find corporate sponsors for their work. SXSWEdu is no different. Amplify, the education-technology company now owned by Rupert Murdoch, kicked off the week by unveiling a new product and sponsoring the first party. Pearson, the London-based education conglomerate that dominates the standardized-testing market, not only offered conference-goers a swank lounge with coffee and children’s snacks—jars of Goldfish, pretzels and popcorn—but also hosted the next party, at a big Austin bar. Plenty of people in attendance were hoping one of these big companies might buy their product and make it famous. The corporate goals of selling more products tends to align with that of education reformers, those who are critical of traditional public schools and push for a more free-market approach, with more charter schools and parent choice. For instance, many in the reform movement believe in the importance of standardized assessments—which Pearson and some others provide.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The reform agenda has traditionally ruled the conference. Occasional panels have examined policy questions, like the need for a “community” approach, where neighborhoods try to invest more into a failing public school rather than closing them down. But on the whole, the message has been one that the combination of privatizing and spending money on technology is the formula for better public schools.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">This year was different. Policy panels were mixed in with those on the more technical aspects of merging education with the hardware and software. In addition to big-name reformers like Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, and Rod Paige, the Secretary of Education who championed No Child Left Behind, there were a number of voices questioning reform tenets. Randi Weingarten of the teachers’ union American Federation of Teachers, was a panelist for the first time, as was Wendy Davis, the Texas gubernatorial candidate who famously filibustered the 2011 budget to protest education funding cuts.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Among the first featured speakers was Diane Ravitch, once a leading advocate for charter schools and No Child Left Behind, but for the last several years a constant critic of the policies she once championed. She saves particular criticism for the emphasis on standardized testing and the role of private, for-profit companies in schools. Her speech last week, predictably, laid out the same arguments she’s been making around the country to anyone who will listen: that a decade of standardized testing has not improved schools, that spending money on technology is not the solution, and that the poverty, not poor teachers, is the biggest hurdle to educational achievement. “The purpose of education is not to get higher and higher test scores,” she said. “The purpose of public education is to make good citizens.” Her entire message was almost a direct critique of SXSWedu.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">There was only one problem. At the same time Ravitch was speaking, there was a panel on “Investing in Education Innovation,” and another on electoral politics and education. Ravitch spoke to a group that seemed to already know, and like, her message. One audience member questioned Ravitch’s opposition to paying teachers based on student test performance, a mechanism known as “merit pay.” As a teacher, she said, she felt that merit pay was a way to reward good teachers while letting them stay in the classroom; normally they are named administrators. Ravitch talked about school funding and the need for nurses—and never really addressed the teacher’s question. She gave a similar non-answer when an ed-tech entrepreneur asked how business people could help support traditional public schools. Earlier, Ravitch had exhorted the audience against spending money on technology at the cost of teachers’ salaries. “Please do not make money by destroying the teaching profession,” she said. “You will hurt America.”</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The conference does little to bring people in opposition together. Ravitch didn’t hold back in her criticism of Teach for America, the program that gets students from elite universities to commit to teaching in a low-performing school district for two years. The program offers only five weeks of training; Ravitch asks if people would get on a plane with a pilot who’s only been studying his profession for five weeks. Yet the day after Ravtich spoke, Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, gave her own keynote, on how there are “no silver bullets” for improving education. Kopp was far more critical of traditional public schools, but she also argued that policymakers were often too hopeful that one specific change or another would fix everything. Had Kopp and Ravitch shared the stage, the conversation would at least have been revealing. Instead, each gave her message free from the other.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">That wasn’t the only missed opportunity for debate. Several panels dealt with the importance of student data; meanwhile one of the conference's sponsors, inBloom has come under direct attack for its use of student data in New York City schools. A panel titled “When does EdTech become Education?” made fascinating points about the need for rethinking classrooms in light of how students learn from YouTube and online academies, but no classroom teacher or administrator sat on the panel. The tensions implicit in education policy debates—what are the costs of reform? How much should we be willing to throw out traditional methods?—simmered throughout the conference but never came to boil.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">It’s a typical problem in policy discussion generally, and education policy discussions particularly: Speakers talk to like-minded audiences and wonder why anyone disagrees. SXSWedu is trying to provide a big tent, but the conference would further conversations more successfully if it dared to make its speakers a little less comfortable, and pushed opponents to engage each other.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">After a four days of panels that frequently offered neat world views actor Jeffrey Tambor (of </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Arrested Development </em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">fame) gave a weird and rambling final keynote about teaching and life lessons that was appealing in spite of—or maybe because of—its messiness. He talked about his own children, about the need for encouragement, about being unafraid to be vulnerable and personal inside the classroom and out. At one point, he had an audience member on stage, reading a speech in different accents, hopping on one leg. He didn’t seem to have a larger point—except perhaps that you don’t always </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">need</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> one to be a good teacher. The talk’s authenticity was unimpeachable, and stood in stark contrast to those of the last two years. In 2012, the conference ended with </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Star Trek </em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">and</span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;"> Roots</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> alum LeVar Burton, who once hosted the PBS kids’ show </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Reading Rainbow</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">, hawking a new </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Reading Rainbow</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> app. Last year, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whose foundation has pushed for more teacher assessments and loudly criticized traditional public schools, invited a charter school CEO and the head of inBloom on stage for a weird education-reform talk show. By contrast, Tambor at one point began to clap, shouting “Bravo” to show his appreciation for the teachers in the audience.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Tambor's talk began with a selfie and a slideshow of families’ photos; it ended with the actor reading a series of pithy pieces of advice for the audience. Among them: “You will be fired—tell your kids that,” and “Tell these kids never calm down.”</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">He also told the audience, “Don’t live your life trying to be liked. If everyone likes what you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong.” That’s advice the SXSWedu organizers need to hear. </span></p> </div></div></div> Thu, 13 Mar 2014 13:31:57 +0000 219927 at Abby Rapoport This Year’s Moderates <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"></span></p> <div class="image image-large"> <div class="field-image"><img src="" alt="" title="" /></div> <div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Flickr/Newshour</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"> <p>New Jersey governor Chris Christie at the Republican National Convention in 2012</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p></p> <p><span class="dropcap">F</span>or those anxiously awaiting the emergence of a less-extreme Republican Party, 2014 got off to a depressing start. The Bridgegate scandal in New Jersey changed Governor Chris Christie’s image from lovable, gruff straight-talker to retributive, partisan bully. In Virginia, the once-rising star of former Governor Bob McDonnell—who came into office with strong Christian-right credentials but left after granting voting rights to ex-felons and spearheading a bipartisan effort to improve transportation infrastructure—crashed to earth when he was charged on 14 federal corruption counts of taking loans and gifts from a nutrition-supplement mogul and doing favors in return. He’ll be lucky to escape prison time. It’s not quite so bad for Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Many have posited him as a “moderate” possibility for 2016—moderate in that he limits his extremism to demolishing unions and killing government programs. But now he’s damaged goods, with an ongoing investigation of his 2012 recall election after a probe into improper campaign activities in 2010 resulted in the convictions of six Walker aides and allies.</p> <p>Looking down the bench of big-name GOP moderates—which, let’s face it, really means right-wingers who occasionally reach out to the center—pundits tend to point to Jeb Bush, who not only shares a family name with the most unpopular president in recent times but who also hasn’t held an office, or campaigned for one, in quite a while. Then there’s Paul Ryan, who’s moderate, apparently, because he doesn’t say vicious things about minorities or women in public and only wants to privatize Medicare and Social Security and cut just about every remaining tax on the wealthy. Or Marco Rubio, who has remained loyal to Tea Party interests aside from one toe-dip into the scalding waters of immigration reform. (A toe-dip now qualifies you as a moderate.)</p> <p>Of course, running for president—or hoping to—makes it hard to buck your party’s prevailing drift. Christie earned some bipartisan cred by embracing President Barack Obama after Hurricane Sandy. On other issues, from gay marriage to union-bashing, he’s thrown the hard right plenty of red meat. How else to win the Republican primaries? But in less-watched corners of the country, hidden away from D.C.’s chattering classes, more successful models of pragmatic conservatism can be found—governors who have been freer to govern and used that freedom to sometimes-surprising ends.</p> <p>Nevada’s Brian Sandoval was elected in the Tea Party stampede of 2010; a former federal judge, he beat out the scandal-plagued sitting Republican governor in a primary that stressed Sandoval’s anti-immigrant, anti-tax, anti-government views. <span class="pullquote">Once in office, though, Sandoval—while never straying from his version of fiscal conservatism—proved less predictable.</span> He loudly criticized the Affordable Care Act, but after the Supreme Court upheld it, he became one of two Republican governors to both sign off on Medicaid expansion and allow the state to create its own health-care exchange. He’s called for comprehensive immigration reform and backed a successful bill to allow undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s permits. Earlier this year, when the state party sent out a 13-question survey for candidates—one that looked suspiciously like a purity test—Sandoval refused to fill it out.</p> <p>If he sounds like the next Republican who’s likely to face a big-money Tea Party challenge, think again. Sandoval is one of the five most popular governors in the country, maintaining approval ratings in the 60s. As of late February, with just a month to go before the filing deadline, not a single Tea Partier or Democrat had lined up to run against him this year. That might be rotten for democracy in Nevada, but it’s a good sign for Sandoval’s political future.</p> <p>Governor Susana Martinez of New Mexico has less of an independent streak than Sandoval, and she’s taken some flak for her unusually combative relationship with her state’s Democrat-led legislature. But she’s the only Republican governor besides Sandoval to back both Medicaid expansion and a state-based exchange. She’s popular, too, and expected to cruise to re-election with ease in November. </p> <p>Sandoval and Martinez are the country’s only Latino governors, but they aren’t worth watching because they represent a magic formula for wooing Latinos to the GOP. (Sandoval actually fared worse among Latinos in 2010 than the previous Republican governor, an Anglo.) <span class="pullquote">Diversity isn’t just about voting blocs; it’s also about broadening the definition of what a party can be, in terms of governance as well as race and ideology.</span> Republicans need that kind of diversity in the worst way. The party has become extreme partly because it’s so homogeneous—and it has become even more homogeneous because it’s grown so extreme. If Republicans can welcome pragmatists—if not moderates—back into the fold and learn to look west for models of a saner conservatism, the GOP may yet have a future that Ronald Reagan could recognize.</p> </div></div></div> Tue, 11 Mar 2014 12:34:18 +0000 219905 at Abby Rapoport Why Does the National Media Get Texas So Wrong? <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">T</span>uesday, as Texas primary voters headed to the polls, <em>Politico</em> published an article titled, “<a href="">The Texas tea party’s best days may be behind it.”</a> Below the headline were photographs of Governor Rick Perry, the state’s junior U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, and Congressman Steve Stockman, who had decided to wage a last-minute, barely visible campaign again Texas’s senior U.S. senator, John Cornyn. The article focused on the Cornyn-Stockman race, and it mentioned a congressional primary in which incumbent Pete Sessions faced a Tea Party challenge from Katrina Pierson.</p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">To anyone familiar with Texas politics, the article was baffling. It made no mention of the state’s most-watched (and most important) GOP primary, the race for the lieutenant governor nomination, and it made only a passing reference to the attorney general race, even though both contests featured bloody fights between so-called “establishment” and Tea Party candidates. The state’s hardest-right election force, the Empower Texans political action committee, also didn’t figure anywhere in the story.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Even after results poured in showing that for the most part Texas remains a dangerous place to skate too near the center, </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">The New York Times</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> </span><a href=";emc=rss&amp;smid=tw-nytimes&amp;_r=0" style="line-height: 1.538em;">headlined its recap</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> with “Texas GOP beats back challengers from the right.” The </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Times </em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">reported that “conservatives inspired by Senator Ted Cruz largely failed to topple mainstream incumbents”—largely because Stockman and Pierson lost.  </span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">From these write-ups, you would never guess the significance of incumbent Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst’s poor showing. Dewhurst, whose U.S. Senate dreams were toppled by Ted Cruz in 2012, managed only 28 percent, while his challenger, the pro-life, pro-Tea Party state Senator Dan Patrick, hit 44 percent. The two will run off May 27 but things don’t look great for Dewhurst. The lieutenant governor, who occupies the state's most powerful office, has personal wealth that can provide whatever funds he needs, but Patrick’s fan base is larger—in addition to being a state senator, he’s a talk-radio personality in the state.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Results shook out similarly in the attorney general’s race, where Tea Party-backed state Senator Ken Paxton got the most votes and will run off against state Representative Dan Branch. You’d also have no idea that veteran state Senator John Carona, one of only a few moderates left in the Texas senate, had fallen to a Tea Party challenger, as did a handful of state representatives. Stockman may have garnered the most national attention, but he was never a serious contender. He ran a </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">haphazard campaign</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> that received little support from the state’s strong Tea Party network, despite his extreme rhetoric.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">So how did </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Politico</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> and the </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Times</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> miss the big picture? Texas is complicated because there’s no binary opposition between “establishment” candidates and those affiliated with the Tea Party. Should we define “establishment” as Speaker of the House Joe Straus, who has himself a relatively moderate record but has presided over one of the state’s most conservative legislatures? Outside Tea Party groups have tried to topple Straus, yet he also commands support from Tea Party-backed state representatives. Or is the “establishment” closer to Governor Rick Perry, the state’s longest-serving governor, who gave one of the first major speeches at a Tea Party rally in 2009? Or is it David Dewhurst, who hung tight to Perry’s message, passed extreme measures, but then watched his political dreams crumble as Cruz rose to power by accusing Dewhurst of being a moderate?</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">There’s no clear leader of the Texas right. Cruz may be the current face of the Tea Party movement, but he’s busy gumming up the gears in Washington; when it comes to state politics, particularly in a dominant party with several different factions, there’s a lot more to consider than just Cruz’s endorsement. Ever since his “oops” moment while running for president, Perry’s iron fist has been slackening back home. And Empower Texans, the state PAC that frequently bullied elected officials with threats of a primary challenge, managed to annoy too many incumbents and is </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">now facing ethical charges.</a></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Incumbency is the least helpful method for judging whether someone is Tea Party or establishment. This is the Tea Party’s third election cycle. The candidates of 2010 are now veteran lawmakers, and many moderate Republicans have peeled off over the last four years. Plus, a number of prominent party members currently affiliated with the Tea Party predated the movement anyway. Arguing that the right is getting beat back because incumbents largely escaped unscathed misses the whole point. Many incumbents are Tea Party already.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">In the attorney general’s race, for instance, three candidates ran. Ken Paxton, a state senator who, as a House member, challenged Straus for the speakership and earned plenty of Tea Party accolades, got the most votes and will run off against Dan Branch. Branch is a state representative from Dallas’s wealthiest suburb, and he’s been a loyal Straus lieutenant. That’s relatively straightforward until you throw Barry Smitherman in the mix. Smitherman came in last, but during the campaign he may have won the award for most extreme comments, including his promise for a “</span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">conservative crusade.”</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> So is his loss a loss for the Tea Party? Don’t tell that to Paxton.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Tea Party isn’t monolithic and it sure as hell isn’t represented solely by national fundraising groups like FreedomWorks or figures like Ted Cruz. There are rural Tea Partiers and suburban ones who are bound to have different views on issues like public schools or water policy. There are stylistic differences and substantive differences, from those who are more libertarian to those who are more business-oriented, and of course the social conservatives. They all hate President Obama, but that doesn’t mean they’re all going to look just like Ted Cruz.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The “movement” may no longer be the powerhouse it was in 2010, and certainly its splintering means there’s no central “Tea Party voice.” But Tuesday night’s results don’t show the ultra-conservative candidates fading away. Maybe by the May runoffs, the national media will see that too.</span></p> </div></div></div> Wed, 05 Mar 2014 15:57:57 +0000 219872 at Abby Rapoport Primary Day Means Baby Steps for Texas Democrats <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Tuesday, as Texans head to the polls to select their parties’ nominees, Republicans will see a more exciting ballot than they’ve seen in years. When Rick Perry announced he wouldn’t run for a fourth term as governor of Texas, the ripple effect was immediate and dramatic: Republican officeholders who’d been stuck in place began looking for where to head. Attorney General Greg Abbott announced his expected bid for governor, prompting three other GOP candidates to announce their intention to run for the space Abbott leaves open. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, who thought he’d be a U.S. Senator until Ted Cruz foiled his 2012 plans, found himself with three challengers—including the current state land commissioner and agriculture commissioner. In all, six different statewide positions in Texas are without incumbents this year, and 26 Republicans are vying for them. There will likely be runoffs in a number of tight races, including lieutenant governor, attorney general, comptroller, and railroad commissioner.</p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">But while Republicans battle in high-dollar, high-profile primaries, Democrats remain short on candidates—especially good ones.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Of course there’s Wendy Davis, the state senator who became a national darling after filibustering an abortion ban. (It later passed in a second special session.) Davis’s gubernatorial campaign has earned national attention, including a front-page </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;"><em>New York Times Magazine</em> story</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">. While there have been serious missteps, there’s still no question Davis’s candidacy has infused energy into a state party that desperately needed it, and fellow state Senator Leticia Van de Putte, who’s up for lieutenant governor, has proved to be a solid running mate. Helping with that perception of reinvigoration is Battleground Texas, a group created by former Obama campaign staffers to </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">make the state competitive for Democrats</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">. The group promised to invest in a long-term engagement strategy to boost turnout, especially among voters of color, increase Democratic vote-share among white women and start recruiting more candidates at the local level. Executive Director Jenn Brown admitted it was a process that would likely take several election cycles. But the group also sought to capitalize on Davis’s stardom. While it continues volunteer recruitment and training around the state, the group’s Facebook page largely focuses on the gubernatorial race, including helping the candidate raise money with a joint political action committee.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">But a look at the Democratic primary ballot shows just how important it is for Battleground Texas to focus on its central, long-term mission if it seriously wants to make the party strong again. Most notably, last week, </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">a poll showed</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> that in the race to unseat U.S. Senator John Cornyn, Kesha Rogers, </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">a disciple of radical conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche,</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> was running ahead of the establishment pick. Rogers has pushed to impeach Obama, comparing his health-care plan to a Nazi program, and argues for a return to the gold standard as well as the colonization of Mars. She’s also won the Democratic nomination to run against Congressman Pete Olson not once, but twice.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The odds are still high that Rogers loses; word is that her competitor David Alameel’s campaign kicked into high gear after the poll came out, and all the candidates were largely unknown to the poll’s respondents. The Democrats don’t even list Rogers as a candidate on the state website and sent out an email with the subject line “Don’t Vote for Kesha Rogers.” But if the Democrats had a stronger bench, Rogers likely wouldn’t have successfully captured two party nominations already.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">In the other statewide races, the Democratic candidates have little name recognition and little experience. There are only two actual statewide primaries. The most crowded Democratic race, for agriculture commissioner, includes Jim Hogan, who does not appear to have a website, Kinky Friedman, a songwriter and author who’s focused on an issue, legalizing marijuana, over which the Agriculture Office has no say, and Asa Hugh Fitzsimmons III, who is a rancher but has never run for office before. The other Democratic primary is for railroad commissioner, a position that’s supposed to regulate the oil and gas industry. This one features two candidates, one of whom has </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">a website</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> out of Geocities that notes “We must DRILL, DRILL, DRILL, and FRACTURE.” Among the unopposed, Mike Collier, the Democratic candidate for Comptroller, has also never run for office before.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Regardless of the gubernatorial race, Democrats in Texas have a long-term problem. Because their candidates have been losing for the better part of two decades, few with political capital are eager to run statewide. The party has a 100-race losing streak in statewide races. It needs more candidates in local and legislative elections, and it needs to show high-quality candidates there will be support for them if they run. Candidates don’t want to run if they can’t win and the party can’t win if no one runs.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Despite its underdog status, Davis’s campaign is already helping to change that dynamic—for a time last year, it was unclear if the Democrats could even get a big name to run for governor—but it’s Battleground Texas that could have a major impact. If the group does spend the years it will take investing in a more engaged political culture, with more candidates, then local races could start to yield strong statewide candidates. That’s when Texas Democratic primaries might start looking a little more exciting. And not in a tinfoil-hat kind of way.</span></p> </div></div></div> Tue, 04 Mar 2014 16:03:04 +0000 219863 at Abby Rapoport Why Obama Should Take a Cue from Gerald Ford on Crack Pardons <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">I</span>n late December, the Obama administration announced that the president would commute the sentences of eight prisoners serving decades-long sentences for crack-cocaine distribution (or intent to distribute). Last week, at a New York State Bar event, Deputy Attorney General James Cole <a href="">announced</a> that there may be more—many more. The administration, he said, will seek other drug cases to consider for clemency, working with the Bureau of Prisons to encourage inmates to request commutations and asking that state bar associations help with preparing their petitions.</p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">After five years of organizing and lobbying the president to use his pardoning power for thousands still jailed under draconian sentences for crack, you might have expected the news to have clemency advocates jumping for joy. But they responded with well-worn skepticism. On his widely read blog, Sentencing Law and Policy, Ohio State law professor Doug Berman speculated that Obama's actions were more about holiday traditions than new presidential priorities. Even after Cole’s speech, Mark Osler, a law professor at St. Thomas University in Minneapolis and the creator of the country’s first clemency clinic, argued in </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">a piece for MSNBC</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> that without a plan for dealing with the influx of petitions, the administration was “only halfway there.”</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Osler has a point: Obama officials already have 3,500 petitions sitting on their desks, awaiting a response. The problem isn't that prisoners aren’t asking—it’s that the administration isn't responding.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Obama remains the stingiest president </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">in history</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> with pardons and commutations. Given the sullied recent history of presidential pardons, that's probably no surprise. Presidential pardons and commutations have been awkward, messy affairs in the last two administrations. Bill Clinton’s exit from the White House was indelibly marred when he granted clemency to tax evader (and husband to a big Democratic donor) Marc Rich. George W. Bush found himself in hot water when he commuted the sentence of former vice-presidential adviser Scooter Libby, who was convicted for his role in outing Valerie Plame as a spy</span><strong style="line-height: 1.538em;"><em>. </em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Pardons are almost always met with some skepticism since, by definition, the president is letting someone off the hook early or giving them a second chance.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">But the political risk of granting clemency to long-serving drug offenders had already lessened considerably by the time Obama took office. Over the four years before he moved into the White House, the U.S. Supreme Court made a series of decisions that dismantled many of the War on Drugs sentencing policies in general, and crack sentencing in particular. After the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 decreed that a gram of crack would be treated like 100 grams of powder cocaine, hundreds of thousands of predominantly black defendants received lengthy sentences for using or dealing crack. Additional laws ramped up the sentences, giving defendants extra time for gun possession, prior convictions, and other factors. The federal government began investing in law-enforcement strategies that often led to conspiracy charges, in which everyone involved in a drug scheme would get charged with the total amount of drugs dealt. According to the pro-reform group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, the Department of Justice spends </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">one out of four dollars</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> keeping drug offenders, most of whom are nonviolent, in prison.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Supreme Court ruled against the 100-to-1 ratio in 2007. The same day Obama was inaugurated, the Court ruled that judges could use other ratios they deemed more appropriate. In 2010, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act, moving the crack-cocaine disparity down to 18-to-1—not the 1-to-1 ratio that activists wanted, but still much closer.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The rulings and the new law weren’t universally retroactive, though, and nearly 9,000 inmates are still serving sentences meted out under the old regime. Obama had talked in his campaign about unfair crack-cocaine disparities, lending hope to advocates for the thousands still jailed under policies now deemed unfair—and to those seeking commutations. But no action was forthcoming.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Five years later, encouraging more people to seek a pardon is a welcome gesture. But what will it yield? “The problem is that the process doesn’t work,” writes Osler. “The pipeline is clogged, and the solution can’t be simply to jam more things into it.”</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">So what </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">is</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> a possible solution? Believe it or not, many activists think it involves rewinding back to the '70s, to the Gerald Ford administration. Osler and organizers like Nkechi Taifa, a senior policy analyst for civil and criminal justice reform at the Open Society Foundations, have proposed the creation of a clemency board similar to the one Ford used to deal with Vietnam draft-dodging cases. That board handled 21,000 clemency petitions in just one year, granting 90 percent of the petitioners some form of clemency, from immediate pardon to two years of alternative national service. Osler, whom I'm profiling for the next print issue of </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Prospect</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">, details his proposal </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">here.</a></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Ford model would make it easier to deal with cases that don’t pull at the heart strings. Pardoning the most sympathetic cases—the girlfriend who took the fall for her boyfriend, the guy who was just the lookout for a drug deal—is politically appealing. But a board structure makes it easier to handle the many, many more cases of people who may have been clearly guilty but still didn’t deserve to spend half of their life in prison. By the same token, Ford’s boards made it easier to give draft-dodgers more just sentences; they considered each application individually, but the sheer number of cases meant that the media and public didn't—</span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">couldn't</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">—scrutinize each pardon individually. </span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The political winds have shifted enough in recent years that clemency for crack offenses would hardly cause a fuss. In one sign of the change, Republican Senator Mike Lee co-sponsored the Smarter Sentencing Act last summer with Democratic Senator Dick Durbin. In addition to reducing mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders, the measure would allow the thousands in prison for crack crimes under the old 100-to-1 regime to return to court for a new hearing. The bill just passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support. The conservative Heritage Foundation has </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">lent support</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> to the cause. </span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">If Obama sets up a Ford-style system for dealing with pardons, it will mean more than extending justice to those who have been serving overly harsh sentences. It could also help redeem a presidential power that for too long has been associated with political favors, and restore its role as a tool for justice.</span></p> </div></div></div> Thu, 06 Feb 2014 16:42:16 +0000 219669 at Abby Rapoport High Enrollment, Low Standards <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="dropcap">F</span>or a state with an infamously threadbare social safety net, Texas is surprisingly good at getting kids into prekindergarten. With more than 227,000 children enrolled, Texas has the largest publicly funded pre-K system in the country. Families qualify if they&rsquo;re economically disadvantaged or if a parent is in the military; children who have been in foster care, do not speak English, or are homeless are eligible as well. Any district with 15 eligible students must have a program. With 51 percent of four-year-olds covered, Texas appears to be doing well when it comes to providing pre-K. That is, until you consider what these programs look like.</p><p>By almost every measure, Texas has one of the lowest-quality pre-K programs in the country. The state offers funding for only three hours a day; it did away with the funding for full-day programs. In addition, Texas places no limits on class size for pre-kindergarteners. (By comparison, Head Start requires a teacher and an aide per 15 three- to four-year-olds, and the state mandates a 22-to-1 student-teacher ratio for kindergarten through fourth grade.) A recent survey of Central Austin school districts turned up one school that had a pre-K class of 26 children presided over by one teacher; most teachers are lucky if they have 22 students.</p> <div class="rightfloat" id="table-of-contents"> <h4>Table of Contents</h4> <p>Introduction: <a href="">A Second Chance for the Youngest Americans</a></p> <p><a href="">The Abbot District's Fortunate Few</a></p> <p>Sidebar: <a href="">China Goes Big</a></p> <p>Sidebar: <a href="">The Robin Hood Plan</a></p> <p>Sidebar: <a href="">The Fade-Out Debate</a></p> <p>Sidebar: High Enrollment, Low Standards</p> <p>Q&A: <a href="">The Genius of Early Intervention</a></p> </div> <p>Anyone who has ever spent time with four-year-olds knows that the challenges teachers face under these circumstances are daunting. Rebecca Palacios, who taught pre-K in Texas for 24 years, says with only one teacher in a classroom of 20 or more, any issue&mdash;a tantrum, an illness&mdash;can uproot the entire class. &ldquo;If one kid throws up, who&rsquo;s going to stay with the other 21?&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;You have to find a floater teacher. You only go to the restroom at lunchtime.&rdquo;&nbsp;</p><p>According to the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), which surveys pre-K programs throughout the nation, Texas meets only two of ten benchmarks for quality. The state, for instance, does not require that teachers specialize in early childhood education or that programs provide auxiliary services for children, like vision or hearing exams. Spending per child in Texas ranks among the lowest in the country, which means there are few funds to go toward teacher professional development.&nbsp;</p><p>But for advocates, the biggest concern is the lack of information about the state&rsquo;s pre-K programs. Because of a series of budget cuts, the Texas Education Agency collects almost no data on pre-K. There&rsquo;s only one staff person to oversee the nation&rsquo;s largest program. The agency doesn&rsquo;t track which districts found ways to fund full-day programs or which districts serve a population beyond those eligible under the state guidelines. Because the agency does almost no monitoring of student performance in pre-K, it can&rsquo;t track differences between children who received pre-K and those who did not. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s hard to make a case for pre-K when you don&rsquo;t know what&rsquo;s going on,&rdquo; says Caroline Neary, a data analyst with the Texas early-education advocacy group Children at Risk.</p><p>Texas isn&rsquo;t the only state with a problem of quality. California and Florida have large pre-K programs that are considered below standard. NIEER has named 2011&ndash;2012 as &ldquo;the worst year&rdquo; for pre-K quality standards; five programs eliminated key indicators of quality, like classroom monitoring and technical support. With the recession, there&rsquo;s been a sharp decrease in monitoring and site visits as well as funding for both classrooms and professional development.&nbsp;</p><p>In Texas, a number of local districts have taken it upon themselves to improve their prekindergarten programs. The rural town of Levelland in West Texas offers full-day pre-K to everyone. The school district partners with Head Start and meets the 20-to-2 student-teacher ratio. Some big cities are also taking action. In 2012, Mayor Julian Castro of San Antonio successfully championed a sales-tax increase to fund more high-quality pre-K programs. In Austin, the school district created a tuition-based system for those ineligible for free pre-K, with the additional funds helping to support a full-day program.&nbsp;</p><p>Thanks to grants from foundations, Children at Risk is preparing to survey every district in the state, to find out what kinds of pre-K classes they offer and how many kids have access to high-quality programs. It will be released in September 2014, just months before the Texas Legislature goes back in session and decides whether this will be the year the state invests in pre-K.</p></div></div></div> Thu, 16 Jan 2014 17:17:13 +0000 220155 at Abby Rapoport Want to Rock the Vote? Fill the Election Assistance Commission. <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">J</span>ust days after the 2013 elections, former Congresswoman Mary Bono and I were on MSNBC discussing voter-ID laws. A moderate Republican, Bono tried hard to shift the focus to a universally hated aspect of American elections—the lines. “There should be no reason there should be long lines, ever,” she said. “Why [can’t they] orchestrate and engineer a solution that you get to the polls, and there’s 15 minutes, guaranteed in and out, and you vote?”</p> <p>It’s a good question. Even if we forget about the disturbing rash of voting restrictions—the ID laws, the cutbacks to early voting, the efforts to make it harder to register—a basic problem remains: We don’t invest enough in our elections. Across the country, machines are old and breaking down, and we’re failing to use new technology that could clean up our voter rolls and make it easier to predict—and thus prevent—those long lines. The odds of Congress allocating the billions it would take to help localities buy new voting machines and solve other voting problems are slim to none. But there’s already an agency in place that can help jurisdictions run better elections. All Congress has to do is allow it to function. But for House Republicans, that’s asking too much.</p> <p>It was only 12 years ago, in the aftermath of the 2000 election, that Democrats and Republicans together passed the Help America Vote Act. The law put $3.9 billion toward new machines and created the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to oversee their distribution, approve standards and certifications, and study elections administration to find patterns of problems and models for solving them. The commission, with spots for two Democratic appointees and two Republicans, worked well for a while. But for the past two years, the EAC has operated—after a fashion—with zero commissioners. President Barack Obama put forward two nominees in 2010 who fell victim to Republican gridlock; now, with the Senate’s filibuster rules scaled back, they may get a chance to take their positions. Even then, however, the “zombie commission,” as it’s sometimes called, will lack the voting quorum the law requires to get big things done; Republicans are not exactly itching to nominate their two commissioners.</p> <p>This means that we’re relying on ever-more-outdated technology; the commission hasn’t updated its voting-machine standards since 2005. Compliance is voluntary under federal law, but the vast majority of states require election officials to follow the EAC standards. The only approved voting machines were built in 2005 or earlier; imagine being stuck using a laptop that old, and you’ll have an idea of what elections administrators are facing. The software is usually proprietary, meaning you can’t just go online and get an update. If a machine breaks down, there’s no easy fix; instead, it most likely has to be replaced—and voting machines are not sold at Best Buy. The jurisdictions that need new equipment—and could afford it without federal help—are stuck choosing among machines that were designed a decade ago.</p> <p>Without updated standards, companies have little incentive to come up with new technologies. Even so, we’re missing out on some promising innovations. In Texas, for instance, Travis County is creating a system that would give voters the same technology that restaurants use to place orders. In drawings, these machines resemble tablets—equipment most voters already know how to use. But without the EAC commissioners to approve this new technology, it’s unclear whether it can be implemented.</p> <p>If lawmakers don’t make functional elections a priority between now and 2016—at a minimum, approving a full slate of commissioners—we could see even longer lines than the ones that plagued the 2012 election in states like Florida and Wisconsin, and in counties such as Richland, South Carolina, where some waited a whopping seven hours. Why so long? Because Richland County, like so many others, had a lot more voters than in 2010—28 percent—and 12 percent fewer working machines.</p> <p>We need a fully functioning elections commission that can approve new machines, if not help pay for them. The commission doesn’t have to be a missed opportunity; already, despite the lack of leadership, it’s the national clearinghouse for elections data and information on voter registration. With congressional authorization, the EAC could do far more; for instance, it could help states coordinate—and tidy up—their voter rolls.</p> <p>You might think this would be one issue ripe for bipartisanship; couldn’t we at least agree to let the commission do its job? But Republicans—the same folks who are constantly bemoaning the peril of voter fraud—are so hostile to the idea that they’ve voted multiple times in the House to dismantle the commission, arguing that it’s just another example of wasteful spending.</p> <p>Both sides of the aisle continue to think of ways to run elections better. But until we get a quorum of commissioners, those bright ideas will languish, long lines will continue to discourage voters, and we’ll all have to cross our fingers that the problems don’t blow up into a crisis.</p> </div></div></div> Thu, 09 Jan 2014 13:50:45 +0000 219506 at Abby Rapoport The Year in Preview: Post-Preclearance Voter Protection <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><em>Lots of things happened in 2013. President Obama was sworn in for a second term. We got a new pope and a new royal baby. Two bombs went off at the Boston Marathon and scared a nation. The Supreme Court stripped power from the Defense of Marriage Act and the Voting Rights Act. But these are all stories we've heard before, and if you haven't, you certainly will in the millions of "Year in Review" pieces set to be posted between now and New Year's. Over the next two weeks, our writers will instead preview the year ahead on their beats, letting you know far in advance what the next big story about the Supreme Court—or the environmental movement, immigration reform, reproductive rights, you get the picture—will be. You're welcome in advance for not making you read a dozen more retrospectives on Ted Cruz and Twerking and fiscal cliffs and shutdowns and selfies. Below, we tackle voting rights.</em></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"></span></p> <div class="image image-large"> <div class="field-image"><img src="" alt="" title="" /></div> <div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">AP Photo/Tony Dejak</div> </div> </div> </div> <p></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><span class="dropcap">A</span>nyone concerned about voting rights will remember 2013 as the year the Supreme Court neutered one of the strongest protections against voter suppression, the “preclearance” requirement of the Voting Rights Act. Sections 4 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) had required that nine states</span></p> <style type="text/css"> <!--/*--><![CDATA[/* ><!--*/ article .skyscraperad {display:none !important;} article div#articlead1 {display:none !important;} article div#articlead2 {display:none !important;} article div#articlead3 {display:none !important;} /*--><!]]>*/ </style><p><sup class="sidenotenumber">1</sup><span class="sidenote"> <span class="sidenotenumber">1. </span>Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia all needed to abide by Section 5 preclearance requirements. Three counties in California, Five counties in Florida, three counties in New York, 40 counties in North Carolina, two counties in South Carolina, and two towns in Michigan also needed to have new election laws approved by the Department of Justice until last June.</span> (as well as dozens of counties) with long histories of voter discrimination get any changes in election law approved by the Department of Justice or the D.C. District Court. This preclearance requirement was an invaluable civil-rights protection. It stopped many discriminatory elections laws, including gerrymandered maps and photo-ID requirements, like those in Texas and South Carolina.</p> <p>In June, however, the court ruled the  while requiring preclearance was okay, the manner in which states and counties were selected was unconstitutional. While preclearance is theoretically still possible, Congress will have to come up with a new list of states for it to go back into effect. That isn’t likely to happen any time soon. In the meantime, states have been passing restrictive laws at a steady clip. Within hours of the Supreme Court decision, Texas announced its voter-ID law would go into effect immediately. Within a month, North Carolina passed one of the most sweeping sets of restrictions in memory, limiting registration drives, cutting back early voting and (of course) requiring photo ID to vote</p> <p>But voting-rights activists still have other ways to fight back. In 2014, we’ll  see a number of cases brought under an array of laws and provisions that can also be used to protect the right to vote. “This is a period of real ferment, with the potential maybe to fully realize our already-existing protections for the right to vote,” says Wendy Weiser, director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which has litigated a number of voting-rights cases. The outcomes of these cases will have an enormous impact on how the 2014 elections are governed and will help determine how the courts read the laws in the future. Here are some of the key voter protections still left in place.</p> <h2><strong>The Constitution</strong></h2> <p>While the Constitution doesn’t include an explicit guarantee of the right to vote, the 14<sup>th</sup> Amendment comes close to doing so when it declares, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” In 2008, voting-rights activists went to the Supreme Court challenging Indiana’s voter-ID requirement. While the court ruled the law was constitutional, it also opined that states must justify any burden placed on voters. “The more serious the burden, the better the justification has to be,” says Justin Levitt, an expert in voting rights and civil rights at Loyal Law School in Los Angeles. Under a number of other voting laws, plaintiffs must show a “discriminatory effect”—that a law makes it harder for one group to vote relative to other groups. (It is actually the 15<sup>th</sup> Amendment, which explicitly guarantees that the right to vote cannot be denied to citizens “on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” But the Supreme Court has said that 15<sup>th</sup> Amendment violations must show proof that the state intended to discriminate, which is usually very difficult to show.)</p> <p>Still, Levitt cautions, making claims under the 14<sup>th</sup> Amendment isn’t easy. To show that a law creates a serious burden on voters, lawyers must find those people who cannot vote because of the new regulation or requirement, which is difficult.  For instance, those who don’t have the requisite ID are often hard to track down, particularly because they don’t have ID. The argument is especially hard to make successfully before a law takes effect—how can someone have been denied the right to vote if the election hasn’t taken place yet? “It makes it really tricky to stop bad voting practices before they’re implemented,” says Levitt.</p> <p>Since the 2008 SCOTUS decision, civil-rights groups haven’t pursued many cases using the U.S. Constitution as a defense, but many have used state constitutions, where the right to vote is often more explicit. Such cases, like Fourteenth Amendment cases, need not necessarily claim that a law discriminates—only that it interferes with citizens’ right to vote. In both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, cases alleging that voter-ID laws violate the state constitution are ongoing, and have already prevented the laws from being in effect during the 2012 election.</p> <h2><strong>The Rest of the Voting Rights Act</strong></h2> <p>With Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act out of commission, civil-rights activists may have lost their most potent weapon, but a number of voter protections remain in place. The act is concerned almost entirely with discriminatory voting practices: to win a case, lawyers must show that a state law is unfair to one group in comparison to another. Some parts of the VRA are quite straightforward. For instance, there’s a provision to ensure that election materials are available in all the languages that citizens need, as well as provisions to ensure disabled voters have the tools they need to cast a ballot.</p> <p>The Act is also very contextual—violations depend heavily on the specifics circumstances at play in a state. “The history matters,” explains Levitt. “Engagement of minority groups matters.” That means a voter-ID law that’s legal in mostly-white Indiana may not be legal in Texas, given the latter’s diverse voting population and long history of discrimination. Moreover, the VRA includes provisions to ensure not only that voters can cast their ballots, but that they do not feel intimidated or bullied while they do so.</p> <p>Most significant of all for voter-protection efforts is Section 2, which prohibits any rules that have a discriminatory effect on voters. Until the recent Supreme Court decision, voting-rights advocates mostly relied on Section 2 for gerrymandering cases. But now Section 2 serves as the best remaining vehicle for making other sorts of discrimination cases. A number of pending cases, including two in Texas and one in North Carolina, rely on such claims. One Texas case challenges the state’s new voter-ID law, while the other challenges a set of redistricting maps. The North Carolina case challenges that state’s recently-passed omnibus bill, which includes all sorts of voter restrictions, from eliminating early voting days to making voter registration harder, as well as voter ID.</p> <p>Weiser says whichever of these Section 2 cases reaches the Supreme Court first will likely have a big impact on how useful the provision will be going forward—the specifics of each case may determine whether the Court issues a narrow ruling  or a broader one. . Whatever happens, Section 2 cases are likely to remain labor-intensive by Section 5 standards. Under the old preclearance regime, states had to prove that they were not discriminating—now the burden is on activists to prove that states are. For instance, when the DOJ tossed out Texas’ voter ID law, it was because the state had failed to show that the requirement would not leave nonwhite voters with a greater burden. Now lawyers litigating the case must prove that the law <em>will</em> make it disproportionately harder for nonwhite voters to cast a ballot—which requires a lot more work.    </p> <h2><strong>Voter-Registration Laws</strong></h2> <p>Voter registration is both fundamental to voting and—increasingly—one of the most popular targets for voting restrictions. North Carolina’s omnibus bill limits voter registration drives. Also, in 2012 a number of states attempted voting-roll purges that disproportionately targeted nonwhite voters and newly naturalized citizens. Several of those attempted purges occurred shortly before an election, with little time for purged voters to reassert their rights.</p> <p>To combat such efforts, civil-rights lawyers often turn to the National Voter Registration Act, or more colloquially, the Motor-Voter law. The law is most famous for requiring departments of motor vehicles to offer citizens a chance to register while they’re in the office. But the law also protects voters from purges by requiring that jurisdictions do voter roll maintenance throughout the year, but not within 90 days of an election. Florida stopped its 2012 purge when a lawsuit was brought under the Motor-Voter act.</p> <p>The fights around voter registration also highlight another key strategy for activists—pressuring politicians. Online voter registration is growing despite the new efforts at voter restriction; 13 states now allow voters to register or update their information online, and another six are in the process of making it available. Republicans and Democrats alike have pushed for better integrating data to keep the rolls accurate and make it easier for people who move to have their registration move with them. In addition to fighting in the courtroom, voting advocates will thus likely start investing more in political work</p> <p>Political organizing is important because, as Levitt puts it, “laws [can be] bad policy even if they’re not illegal at all.” For instance, early voting is not required, and therefore cutting back early voting days is, in many cases perfectly legal. But it makes voting harder and more time-consuming. In Florida, after the legislature cut the early voting period, some lines were hours long and the public outcry was so great that lawmakers quickly moved to restore most of the days. Similarly, the Ohio Legislature backed down from its proposed early voting cuts after activists promised to put the restrictions on the ballot and bring more attention to the issue.</p> <p>“Making life difficult for voters may not always be illegal but if voters care enough, their representatives will listen to them,” says Levitt.</p> <p>But that’s assuming that those voters can, in fact, vote. It’s a theory we’ll soon see put to the test.</p> </div></div></div> Tue, 10 Dec 2013 13:47:19 +0000 219392 at Abby Rapoport Fifty Shades of Purple <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he second week in October, while Tea Partiers in Congress were tanking the GOP’s approval numbers with a government shutdown, the Republican National Committee traveled to Los Angeles to make an announcement: The party was investing $10 million to woo Latino voters in California and 16 other states. This might seem newsworthy, considering that Republicans spent much of the 2012 campaign repelling Latinos. But the event received little attention, though the Los Angeles Times did note that it featured “roast beef and cheese enchiladas.” (Ick.) The notion of Republicans competing for Latino votes in California seems ridiculous; ever since Governor Pete Wilson led an effort in 1994 to keep undocumented immigrants from accessing state services, Latinos have viewed the party as toxic. With Republicans in Washington blocking immigration reform and Medicaid expansion, the divide between Republicans and Latinos has only grown. It will take more than $10 million to bridge it.</p> <p>But the Latino outreach is part of a larger scheme that emerged from party leaders’ post-2012 soul searching: a road map to build Republican infrastructure and mobilize voters in all 50 states. If the concept sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In 2005, Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean unveiled a 50-state strategy, putting organizers and fundraisers into provinces his party had ignored, and lost, for decades. Conventional wisdom said it was a nutty idea. Why should Democrats waste money in Utah and Mississippi? Indeed, the party would abandon the plan as soon as Dean left his post in 2009. But the strategy paid dividends in 2008, when Democrats carried formerly red states like North Carolina, Virginia, and Indiana.</p> <p>The Democrats’ current version of red-state outreach is more narrowly focused. Battleground Texas, an initiative launched in February by ex-Obama field staffers, hopes to spend $10 million a year registering, engaging, and persuading voters in a state that Republicans have come to see as their birthright. It’s an effort funded by individual donors, not by the party. But Texas shows why such outreach could make a difference for Democrats elsewhere. Voters who are disengaged, in Texas and the rest of the country, tend to be low-income, young, and nonwhite—all groups that lean liberal on social and economic issues.</p> <p>To win those voters, Democrats don’t have to change their message; they have to motivate people to go to the polls. In states like Texas, Republicans always win—they’ve carried 100 statewide elections in a row—and Democrats hardly put up a fight. State Senator Wendy Davis, who had liberals across the country cheering for her filibuster of an anti-abortion bill last summer, is generating excitement over her gubernatorial bid in 2014, but it’s doubtful her party will find a full slate of statewide candidates to run with her. If Democrats had been organized and invested in the state over the past decade, Davis might be the favorite; instead, she’s a long shot.</p> <p>For Republicans, the benefits of contesting blue states are less obvious but could be more significant. If the GOP gets serious about wooing Latinos and speaking to blue-state voters, it can’t stick with its current message of right-wing radicalism, which has driven away moderates and minorities. Given the country’s demographic and ideological drift leftward, Tea Party purity is a losing long-term tactic. A 50-state strategy that nudges the party toward the center could prevent the GOP from fading into irrelevance.</p> <p>The real winner, if the parties started competing for votes across the map, wouldn’t be Republicans or Democrats; it would be small-d democracy. Voter turnout would surely rise. When only one party is courting them, voters disconnect. In 2012 battleground states, where both parties poured resources into voter outreach and engagement, turnout was high. In Ohio, 65 percent of the voting-eligible population cast a ballot; in Virginia, 66 percent did; and in Colorado, a whopping 70 percent turned out. But one-party states like Texas (50 percent) and California (55 percent) were both below the national average.</p> <p>Voters can’t hold elected officials accountable if their party affiliation virtually assures their re-election. A weak opposition party can’t serve as an effective watchdog on those in power, either. Politicians in unchallenged parties also tend to move to ideological extremes. When general elections are largely decided in party primaries, as they are in Illinois and Texas, small numbers of highly motivated voters can carry the day; that’s how the Tea Party took over the Republican Party in states like Texas. It’s what elected Ted Cruz and what emboldened him to orchestrate an unpopular government shutdown without having to worry about his own political future. In the strange world that noncompetitive politics has wrought, Cruz is doing precisely what Republican primary voters back home elected him to do.</p> <p>Neither party, of course, will pursue a 50-state strategy because it thinks such a plan is good for democracy. But we’re at a juncture when both believe they can benefit from talking to voters they’ve long ignored. If the parties embraced 50-state strategies, rather than putting most of their resources into a handful of battlegrounds like Ohio and Florida, who would gain the most by 2020 or 2030? It’s impossible to say. Democrats would win over a lot of people simply by giving them a reason to vote. Republicans might acquire even more converts by revising their message to appeal to Latinos and other voters who have written them off. One thing’s for sure, though: American politics would be a lot healthier.</p> </div></div></div> Tue, 12 Nov 2013 13:18:44 +0000 219181 at Abby Rapoport How Virginia Ended Up with a Stinker of a Governor's Race <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"></span></p> <div class="image image-large"> <div class="field-image"><img src="" alt="" title="" /></div> <div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">AP Images/Steve Helber</div> </div> </div> </div> <p></p> <p><span class="dropcap">K</span>en Cuccinelli wasn’t even supposed to be running. Among Virginia Republicans, everyone knew the order of succession—after Governor Bob McDonnell wrapped up his term in office, Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling was supposed to be next up. That was the bargain the two men struck in 2009 to avoid a messy primary battle. But no one had consulted Cuccinelli, the attorney general and the state’s social conservative darling, and he wasn’t content to wait his turn. In December 2011, Cuccinelli, the man who made his name fighting against abortion and gay rights, announced his candidacy.</p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">It looked like a smart move. Cuccinelli had national ambitions; already, some saw him as a contender for the 2016 presidential nomination, following in the footsteps of Rick Santorum and other far-right figures. But first he needed a higher-visibility role—and he needed to prove that he could make his message attractive to a wider audience. His vehement opposition to abortion and gay rights, as well as his ardent denial of climate change may have given Cuccinelli plenty of support in the Republican base, but overall, he was a mediocre candidate. He was awkward at speaking engagements and loath to talk much about his faith and family in detail. Furthermore, the qualities that made Cuccinelli so attractive as a far-right presidential candidate were a liability in Virginia. If Cuccinelli had a shot, he needed a weak opponent, and the Democrats’ presumed nominee seemed to fit the bill.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Terry McAuliffe, the lone Democrat who stepped up to the plate, had spent most of his life in and out of the business world. He was famous for asking for big checks from donors during his stint as chair of the Democratic National Committee in the early 2000s. His only other campaign was the 2009 Virginia gubernatorial race, when he limped home from the Democratic primary with only 26 percent of the vote and a bad rap for being a shady operator—his style smacked more of Syracuse, his hometown, than the Old Dominion’s genteel ways.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">But on Tuesday, voters will head to the polls and very likely elect McAuliffe as Virginia’s next governor. Contrary to all of the best political soothsaying, Cuccinelli is flailing in the polls, hoping for an unlikely comeback after a disastrous campaign. Between scandals and Republican infighting in a state with a rapidly-changing identity, Virginia’s governor’s race has been anything but predictable. More than anything else, this campaign has highlighted how, when it comes to state-level races, conventional wisdom doesn’t get you very far.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span class="dropcap" style="line-height: 1.538em;">F</span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">or Virginia Democrats, Obama’s victory in 2012 meant an uphill battle to retake the governor’s mansion. Virginia holds its state elections in odd-numbered years, and the governor’s race always comes just one year after the presidential election, when voters are most likely to feel buyer’s remorse. Pundits are fond of noting that for the past 36 years, the party that wins the presidency has gone on to lose the governor’s race.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">But this year, Republicans had to contend with the sweeping demographic shifts that enabled Obama to carry the state in both 2008 and 2012. In other states, demographic change usually refers to the rising numbers of Latino voters, but Virginia’s is mostly due to the explosive growth of the Washington D.C.’s northern Virginia suburbs. In 1970, the region accounted for about 12 percent of the state population; one-third of the state now lives there. The influx of well-educated, high-earning government employees and contractors is transforming Virginia, once predominantly rural, religious, and working-class, into a battleground state, full of young, secular, white-collar voters. The result is peculiar: It’s as if an imaginative cartographer excised a handful of New Jersey suburbs and glued them onto Georgia.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">These new voters favor Democrats—but only if they vote. In 2009, Republican Bob McDonnell was elected in a landslide, thanks to low turnout among young people and minorities. This year, McAuliffe was eager to harness the Obama campaign’s extensive infrastructure to coax more of his base to the polls. Meanwhile, Republicans were divided over the best approach: Should they back a moderate candidate—like Bill Bolling—who might be able to compete with McAuliffe in northern Virginia? Or should they nominate a social conservative—like Cuccinelli—who could help energize their base?</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">In addition to representing two competing futures for their party, Bolling and Cuccinelli hate each other. A primary struggle would have brought a long-simmering rift between moderate and extreme Republicans, as well as a personal rivalry, to a full boil on a public stage. Cuccinelli was more popular among the Republican base—primary polls from the spring of 2012 showed him ahead of Bolling by 20 points—but his win wasn’t in the bag just yet. Bolling was the underdog, but had backing from establishment Republicans and a financial advantage; in the first six months of 2012, he out-raised his competitor nearly two-to-one. He was also serving as Mitt Romney’s state chairman for Virginia, a role that—if all went well—could yield an endorsement from a sitting president. Before Cuccinelli announced his candidacy, the state Republican party had decided that the candidate would be nominated in a primary held in June 2013. Both sides geared up for a bitter, expensive battle.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">But then Cuccinelli scored a decisive victory. In the lead-up to the Republican Party convention in June 2012, his Tea Party supporters quietly took control of the state GOP leadership. Over protests from Bolling and McDonnell, the newly elected party officials voted to nominate the 2013 ticket at the GOP convention the following June, where the extreme wing of the party was more likely to be in attendance. Cuccinelli was all but assured victory.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Late in November of 2012, Bolling announced he would abandon his quest for the GOP nomination, and gave a Cassandra-like warning to his fellow Republicans. “The party has to decide whether we’re more interested in engaging in great ideological debates, or winning elections and earning the right to lead,” he told the </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Richmond Times-Dispatch</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">. “At a time when we need to be involving more people with more diverse views in our party, our party’s leaders selected a method of nomination that is by its very nature exclusive.”</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Terry McAuliffe declared his candidacy for governor the day after Obama won Virginia for the second time, but after his erratic performance in the 2009 primary, he seemed ripe for a challenge. McAuliffe had been the glad-handing operator who helped get other people elected; in his autobiography, he recounted abandoning his wife in the hospital while she was in labor to run to a fundraiser—not the kind of anecdote politicians are supposed to share.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Pundits held their breath, but no rival emerged. Mark Warner, the popular former governor and current senator, quickly quashed speculation by announcing that he was staying out of the race. Rumors circulated briefly that Tom Perriello, a one-term Virginia congressman and president of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, might step up to the plate, but he, too, denied them. Brian Moran, the former chair of the Virginia Democratic Party and McAuliffe’s major rival in 2009, told the</span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;"> Prospect</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> he didn’t even consider running. Part of the calculus may have been financial—any primary challenger was sure to be outspent by McAuliffe—but Moran says that at least among the Democratic establishment, there was a consensus that McAuliffe was the best man for the job. Many pundits, however, were skeptical about whether he could run a serious campaign and get away from his image as a schmoozy insider.  </span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">With two flawed candidates, the race was always going to be negative, as each sought to define the other. McAuliffe and Cuccinelli were tied in the polls in January 2013, but few voters knew enough about McAuliffe to form an opinion, giving Cuccinelli ample opportunity to shape it for them. Cuccinelli planned to hammer McAuliffe as a sleazy carpetbagger with few real ties to the state and little governing experience. McAuliffe, meanwhile, prepared to dangle Cuccinelli’s record as attorney general before the voters, painting his rival as a wingnut with intolerant positions on social issues. He needed to show the voters who rarely turned out in off year elections that electing Cuccinelli would turn Virginia into a far-right dystopia.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span class="dropcap">F</span>or the first few months of the year, the campaigns seemed evenly matched. McAuliffe outraised Cuccinelli by a large margin, but the attorney general had greater name recognition. By March, Bolling had announced he wouldn’t run as an independent, which would have split Republicans and handed McAuliffe a win. The two campaigns ran pretty much even in the polls for the first few months of 2013. In April, Cuccinelli began to pull ahead.</p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Then things began to fall apart. At the end of March, <em>The</em> </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Washington Post</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> ran a lengthy piece uncovering Governor McDonnell’s deeply problematic relationship with Jonnie Williams, the CEO of Star Scientific, a nutritional supplements company. Williams had given the McDonnell family numerous expensive gifts, including paying for part of their daughter’s wedding. The article also mentioned that Williams had let Cuccinelli use his boat and stay at his home.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Star Scientific scandal dominated the news for months, and hamstrung the Cuccinelli campaign. While the attorney general was not involved in the worst parts, he was a little too close for comfort. Cuccinelli had failed to disclose his more than $10,000 in Star Scientific stock. He had accepted $18,000 in gifts from Williams, and he had failed to disclose $5,000 of them. McDonnell was embattled in ethics probes, and the once-popular governor was no longer a suitable surrogate. Meanwhile, Cuccinelli lost his best argument against McAuliffe; he now looked like as much of a shady operator as his opponent.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">When the state GOP convention finally rolled around in mid-May, Cuccinelli wasn’t the only hard-liner to get nominated. Far-right attendees chose a virtual unknown, minister E.W. Jackson, to be their candidate for lieutenant governor. Within hours, journalists had revealed Jackson’s long history of incendiary comments, including that gay pride month </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">made him feel “ikky”</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> [sic] and that Planned Parenthood was “far </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">more lethal to black lives</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> than the KKK ever was.” Mark Obenshain, the Republicans’ nominee for attorney general, had worked with Cuccinelli to sponsor a “personhood” bill that would have given fetuses the same legal rights as citizens. With such a far-right ticket, Cuccinelli couldn’t easily try to position himself close to the center. A Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage didn’t help things. Amidst the coverage, Cuccinelli was stuck defending his 2010 decision to tell public universities they could not prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation among students, staff, or faculty unless the General Assembly gave approval.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Cuccinelli’s seemed to misread Virginia’s changing character. He hammered McAuliffe for being non-native to the state, but less than half of Virginia’s population was born there. He eventually focused on a riling up his base, but in Southwestern Virginia, where his support was likely to be highest, Cuccinelli was embroiled in a scandal after one of his assistant attorney generals helped advise two out-of-state companies in a case against landowners in the region. Cuccinelli needed to fight for votes, even where his support should have been strong.</span></p> <p>The rift between moderate and extreme Republicans had never seemed wider. Cuccinelli had spent the legislative session trying to kill McDonnell’s prize piece of legislation—a bipartisan transportation bill. Many Virginia Republicans were still angry at Cuccinelli for working to find primary challengers for incumbent senators, and refused to champion him when the campaign started going south. “Cuccinelli burned a lot of bridges among other Republicans,” says John McGlennon, a political science professor at the College of William and Mary. “Nobody will defend him because he screwed everyone over.” Moderate Republicans jumped ship. Boyd Marcus, one of the best-known GOP strategists in the state, endorsed McAuliffe, as did the Republican mayor of Virginia Beach. Bolling never officially threw his weight behind McAuliffe, but he did endorse many of his positions, including expanding Medicaid under Obamacare. A long-shot libertarian candidate, Robert Sarvis, <a href="">began climbing in the polls</a>, a sign that many Republican voters weren’t satisfied with Cuccinelli.</p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Meanwhile, as the summer progressed, McAuliffe’s outlook got sunnier and sunnier. He had more than double Cuccinelli’s money and used it to hammer his opponent on the ethics scandal and the attorney general’s extreme positions on social issues. McAuliffe began visiting just about every university or community college in the state to fire up younger voters. Despite plenty of effort from the Cuccinelli campaign, no one seemed to care much about GreenTech, the company McAuliffe had once run, which had failed to build a plant in Virginia and now is embroiled in a scandal over offering visas to foreign investors. By August, the Democrat was consistently leading the polls.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Perhaps most significant was the shift in the two parties. According to Jennifer Duffy, a senior editor for </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Cook Political Report</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">, as McAuliffe proved himself to be a stronger candidate than in 2009, his party began to coalesce around him.</span></p> <p>“Democrats waited to see if he had changed, and once they had that confirmation and things got comfortable, things started to fall into place,” she says.</p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">His former opponent, Brian Moran, agrees. “Terry had been doing everything he needed to do since the day he lost in 2009,” Moran says. “He established relationships and got more polished and substantive and policy-oriented.”</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">By September, two leading prognostication sites, the Rothenberg Report and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, both showed the race favoring McAuliffe. Women preferred him by a 24-point margin, according to one </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Washington Post</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> poll in September. When, in October, the Congressional Republicans shut down the government, Cuccinelli dove even further in the polls.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span class="dropcap" style="line-height: 1.538em;">A</span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">fter Tuesday’s election, Virginia’s Republicans will face a quandary. Regardless of the outcome, the party will continue to be controlled by a Tea Party faction. Moderates like Bolling who did not endorse Cuccinelli will have to determine whether there’s still room for them in the Grand Old Party. If Cuccinelli loses, as many expect he will, it should be a wake-up call that extremism doesn’t represent the new face of Virginia voters. But nationally, as the Tea Party increasingly becomes representative of the GOP, Republicans have been slow to embrace such a message, despite the results of the 2012 election.  </span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Of course, Cuccinelli could still win. The election has had so many strange twists, that the final outcome is still hard to gauge. Despite McAuliffe’s efforts towards a robust get-out-the-vote effort, the election will still turn on a relatively small number of voters. The campaigns have been extremely negative on both sides, a necessary evil for the two largely unknown candidates, but such ads often drive down turnout.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">With a state changing as rapidly as Virginia, if Democrats can continue their unified front, they’ll likely make headway in future elections. Republicans, on the other hand, will have to decide how much room their party has for newcomers—and whether they will accept those who don’t conform to one definition of conservative.</span></p> </div></div></div> Mon, 04 Nov 2013 17:06:17 +0000 219115 at Abby Rapoport Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux Texas's Ruling on Abortion Law: A Silver Lining to a Storm Cloud <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"></span></p> <div class="image image-large"> <div class="field-image"><img src="" alt="" title="" /></div> <div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">AP Photo/Tamir Kalifa, File</div> </div> </div> </div> <p></p> <p><span class="dropcap">W</span>hen the court ruling came down on Texas’s law restricting abortions, media outlets didn’t hold back. <em>The Huffington Post</em> went <a href="">with the headline</a> “Texas Abortion Restrictions Declared Unconstitutional by Federal Judge” while CNN <a href="">blared</a> “Judge Blocks Parts of Abortion Law.” Let’s just be clear: The law still bans abortions after 20 weeks and the state is still in the process of creating codes so that next year abortion clinics will have to meet the same building code standards as hospitals that perform invasive surgery. The lawsuit instead, focused on two other provisions of the law—one requiring doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at hospitals, the other requiring anyone using abortion-inducing pills to follow an outdated medical regime, approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000.</p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakal’s ruling, knocking down the admitting privileges requirement, while approving the outdated FDA protocol, helps to highlight what have both been ongoing trends in the abortion-rights battle. The law takes a two-pronged approach, making it harder to keep clinics open (because of the new code requirements) and then requiring that women appear at those clinics for an extra visit to administer pills that could otherwise be taken at home. The measure was first made famous when state Senator Wendy Davis successfully filibustered it during a special session, drawing a national audience during the 13-hour effort. The victory was short-lived; the legislature then turned around and passed it in a second special session.</span></p> <p>This incremental line of attack on abortion rights remains successful. Since the FDA produced a protocol for oral abortion drugs in 2000, creating the recommendations for how to administer the drugs, doctors and researchers have worked to improve on the protocol. The new regime, endorsed by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, has become the norm because it uses lower doses of drugs and requires women to come in for the first dose but then take the second without doctor supervision. Under Texas law, doctors must now follow the older standard, meaning heavier doses and a risk of side effects. Medication abortions can only be administered up to seven weeks into a pregnancy, instead of nine weeks. The court largely concurred, with only minor exceptions.</p> <p>Most significantly, though, women will now have to come into the doctor’s office for the second dose. Women in Texas must already show up for one appointment to get a sonogram, then wait 24 hours before coming in for another appointment to get their first dose. There’s usually a follow-up with the doctor as well. In addition to being unpleasant (the second dose prompts bleeding and cramping most people would rather experience in private), the FDA protocol means another day spent at the doctor’s. Particularly for low-income women, the requirement of several doctors appointments means several days of missing work, arranging childcare for any other children, and other challenges.</p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">That difficulty is compounded by the fact that clinics are already closing.  In 2011, the state made enormous funding cuts to the state’s Women’s Health Program and specifically de-funded Planned Parenthood’s non-abortion services, like pap smears and contraception. <a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">According to the </a></span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;"><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">Texas Tribune</a>,</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> nine abortion clinics have closed since January and another facility stopped performing abortions. Once the new building codes go into effect next year, only six of the state’s remaining 38 abortion facilities will meet the requirements to stay open.  Meanwhile, medication-induced abortion may become even harder to get; Oklahoma passed a law that as written, banned medication abortion. </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">While a court on Tuesday struck the law down, the case is headed to the Supreme Court.</a></p> <p>But not all anti-abortion rights tactics have been successful, and the Texas case helps reveal where the pro-life attacks are failing. Requiring doctors at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at hospitals, according to Elizabeth Nash, the state-issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, which studies women’s health, has become “shiny new toy in the anti-abortion arsenal.” But everywhere it’s been introduced—North Dakota, Wisconsin, Alabama, and Mississippi—it’s been struck down. Yeakal, the Texas judge, had a similar position. Not only did the requirement not improve patient care, he ruled, but it created an “undue burden” on women seeking abortion. In his opinion, Yeakal pointed to the 24 counties in the Rio Grande Valley that would no longer have any abortion providers, since no one currently had admitting privileges.</p> <p>For abortion-rights advocates, the judge’s decision gives a glimmer of hope. But the case is headed to the Fifth Circuit, which approved the state’s pre-abortion sonogram requirement.</p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">In the meantime, as access to safe abortion decreases, there’s increasing concern more women will start to look for dangerous alternatives. The Texas Public Policy Evaluation Project, which studies abortion access, has found that while there’s no evidence that Texas abortion clinics are unsafe, the biggest safety factor has come women trying to terminate pregnancies themselves. Nationally, 1.2 percent of women who arrive at abortion clinics have </span><a href="" style="line-height: 1.538em;">first tried to end the pregnancy</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> themselves. But according to the Public Policy Evaluation Project, in Texas, it’s 7 percent, and along the Texas-Mexico border, it’s a terrifying 12 percent of women.</span></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">With cases still going through the courts, there’s plenty of fear things could get worse.</span></p> </div></div></div> Wed, 30 Oct 2013 17:07:57 +0000 219065 at Abby Rapoport