Category: Uncategorized

National Edition of ‘Why Andy Taylor Should Have His Law License Revoked’, posted at ILCAOnline

By Greg Moses
Editor, Texas Civil Rights Review

Texas attorney Andy Taylor set out to prove that illegal and fraudulent voter behaviors were the main reasons behind the November election defeat of a Republican incumbent in a West Houston race for the Texas House. But according to archives of original documents that Taylor submitted in support of his case, it appears that he willfully ignored plain evidence that a number of voters were more likely victims, not perpetrators of wrongdoing. He went after them anyway.

Several voters of Nigerian descent discovered when they tried to vote in the November elections, that they had been fraudulently re-registered into a neighboring House District. Sometime in late 2003, someone had submitted new registrations for these voters, placing them into a legislative district that would soon involve a candidate of Nigerian descent. The candidate lost to an incumbent in the Democratic primary election.

During public hearings in the election contest that he brought to the legislature on behalf of his client Talmadge Heflin, Taylor argued that these African-American voters who preferred Democrat Hubert Vo should have their votes tossed out because they were cast in a legislative district other than where the voters were registered.

Yet, anyone with access to the original documents in the Heflin-Vo election contest (including Taylor himself, who submitted the docs in the first place) would have been able to plainly read the explanation that “fraudulent addresses” for voters of Nigerian descent had been allegedly submitted by someone other than the voters. In fact, the assertion was twice stated in carefully written explanations on envelopes for provisional ballots submitted by a husband-wife pair of voters.

The provisional ballots were approved by Harris County election officials who accepted that the voters should be considered as properly registered. And legislative Master of Discovery Will Hartnett (R-Dallas) also ruled the ballots to be legal. Hartnett explained in the election hearing that he had taken the time to call up one of the voters and discuss the predicament.

While it appeared to someone viewing the hearing that Hartnett was being exceedingly perceptive in his discovery of a pattern of fraud against the voters, in fact he was just reading what was plainly written, not once but twice, on the evidence submitted by Taylor. This plainly stated explanation, which was accepted by Harris County officials and Hartnett, never stopped Taylor from trying to suppress the votes of these African-American voters nevertheless, along with their votes for Vo.

The significance of this finding is that Taylor (the same attorney who defended the heavy-handed redistricting of the Texas Congressional map in 2004) continued to pursue allegations in a public hearing that a number of Nigerian-American voters (4-9 cases according to my preliminary estimate) had cast illegal ballots, even as he placed exculpatory evidence on the record that plainly indicated they were victims not perpetrators of fraud.

By pursuing his allegations against these voters in the context of a rare legislative election contest, Taylor used his law license to call down the power of the state to pursue certain voters under threat of arrest, when he had every reason to suspect they were innocent from the start. If the law is going to jealously guard Taylor’s right to pursue election irregularities, should it not just as jealously guard the rights of voters against willful and obnoxious harassment by agents of the law?

Taylor’s bad faith attack on these African-American voters counts as a Civil Rights infringement in two ways. First, it was an effort to criminalize voters of color by deliberately overlooking exculpatory evidence on the record. Second, it counts as a bad faith effort to overturn the election of a candidate of color. Using the power of law to harass voters of African descent in an effort to unseat a candidate of Vietnamese descent, accusing all parties of fraud when your own evidence indicates they have done nothing wrong, this is offensive, outrageous, indecent, and should cost Andy Taylor his license to practice law in Texas.

Note: The Texas Civil Rights Review contacted Andy Taylor via voice mail on Thursday afternoon and invited him to reply. As of Saturday morning, he had not responded.

Got an email tip about Indiana. Democrats staged a walkout there, too, and the Secretary of State spreads more baseless suspicions (Read More).

Google found this March 3, 2005 legislative report from Indiana Rep. Bob Kuzman (D-Crown Point):

House Bill 1439 also sounds deceptively simple. It requires voters to provide a photo ID before being allowed to vote on Election Day. In reality, this proposal is designed to intimidate voters, particularly senior citizens, minorities and people on
lower incomes.

With the type of voter identification system contained in House Bill 1439 in place, I believe that Election Days in Indiana will be similar to what people in Ohio had to endure last November: waiting for hours to cast a vote. In Iraq, a person simply had to put his or her finger in a bowl of ink in order to vote. Do we really think that we should place more
restrictions on voters than they do in Iraq?

I supported an effort that would have enabled voters to offer other pieces of identification – such as utility bills, vehicle registration or Social Security cards – in order to vote. Those efforts were defeated.

Jim Shella of WISH-TV (Indanapolis) reports on March 10, 2005:

Republicans in the Indiana House of Representatives have now revived both of the bills that led to last week’s walkout by Democrats, causing one Democrat to walk out of a committee hearing Thursday.

That walk-out took place in a hearing on the bill that would require voters to show a photo ID. One Democrat objected to both the bill and way the committee meeting was being conducted.

The hearing on the voter ID bill had to be moved to the House chamber when 200 members of the United Auto Workers union showed up to protest. They believe the bill is designed to discourage elderly and low-income voters who may not have a driver’s license.

“If it’s gonna be a law that affects everybody it has to be fair for everybody,” said Connie Thurman, UAW.

Supporters insist the measure is designed to reduce voter fraud. Currently, registered voters are only required to sign in.

Secretary of State Todd Rokita says it’s possible to sign in more than once and therefore vote illegally even though he couldn’t cite a case where it has been done. “Why should we wait to become a problem state? Clearly Washington was, clearly Florida was, clearly New Mexico was… to address the situation,” he said.

“I think it’s just a ploy to erode voter confidence and erode the number of people who take part in the process. It amounts to a poll tax,” said Rep. Mae Dickinson (D-Indianapolis).

When it appeared the committee was about to take a vote, Democrat Craig Fry of Mishawaka objected. “A driver’s license is a privilege and voting is a constitutional right. You can’t do this,” he said.

Fry left and no vote was taken. The committee is now scheduled to vote on the voter ID bill next week.

On Sunday evening, Quorum Report maestro Harvey Kronberg wrote a “Daily Buzz” story about developments in the Texas school funding trial, citing the Texas Civil Rights Review story, “Inaugural Day Betrayal.”

We pasted the “free version” of Kronberg’s accunt under Read More. Or go to the Quorum Report and look under Daily Buzz at quorumreport.com

Harvey Kronberg’s Quorum Report

Hot Buzz

January 23, 2005

5:16 PM

SCHOOL FINANCE PLAINTIFFS UNITED FRONT SPLINTERS OVER EQUITY ISSUES

Property rich districts want fast track to Supreme Court, property poor want Dietz to reconsider equity issues

The first cracks in the education coalition that took the state’s school finance case to court have appeared in the last week as the group has split on the question of equity.

The lawyers from the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which represents the Edgewood interveners, are disappointed that the other plaintiff groups agreed with Attorney General Greg Abbott’s statement of jurisdiction, asking the Texas Supreme Court to expedite the school finance case and hear the case as soon as possible. Even in a best-case scenario, the case will not make it to Court before the session ends.

MALDEF Attorney David Hinojosa told the Quorum Report he was not ready to give up on the equity claims they want Dietz to reconsider. That reconsideration, which could mean a trip to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, could significantly delay the case.

On Friday night, Hinojosa told the online Texas Civil Rights Review he was surprised by the West Orange-Cove plaintiffs’ agreement with Abbott’s office that the case should move forward. The Texas Civil Rights Review, edited by Greg Moses, spoke of the West Orange-Cove brief as “an Inaugural Day Betrayal,” when the property-rich districts who gave “lip service” to maintaining Robin Hood finally tossed aside their property-poor cousins.

The rest of the story, subscribers only

END QUOTE

Editorial
By Greg Moses

The term mainstream keeps coming up as an aspiration for Democratic Party strategists, and this worries me.

For one thing, mainstream to me screams status quo, and how are we ever going to get anywhere with an aspiration like that?

For another thing, if I go to the party website for Texas Democrats, I find mainstream on one page and grassroots on another. And I want to know, how can you do both at the same time?

Grassroots sounds okay to me. It means that you’re looking to the rising aspirations of people who have not yet come to full power. It means that you’re trying to affect if not revolutionize the mainstream. It means, in the words of Amy Goodman, who spoke in Austin yesterday that you are going where the silence is in order to hear what the future needs to be.

By comparison, mainstream is quite a defensive slogan. It tends to increase pressure to NOT listen to new and troubling voices.

Or to put it another way, Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about the difference between a thermometer and a thermostat. Mainstream is a thermometer measurement. It tells you the temperature of the political climate as it exists. Grassroots on the other hand is a thermostat concept, because when you get into it, you start wanting to change the temperature.

So, to Texas Democrats, a word of encouragement: drop the mainstream language.

Danny Glover last night at the benefit for the Texas Civil Rights Project whispered the famous Langston Hughes line: “America was never America to me.” It was a profound reminder that “mainstream” has never been mainstream for so many worthy voices.

If I try to imagine the motivation behind the clinging to mainstream, the best motivation seems to come from a fear of losing the so-called culture wars, of being left (yes left) with the smaller faction of votes whenever the “wedge” issues get pounded on: issues like gay marriage, pot smoking, affirmative action, reproductive rights for women.

But the best answer to this fear was suggested a couple of weeks ago by Damu Smith of Black Voices for Peace when he addressed a peace conference in Dallas. He said if your program is comprehensive enough and is really aggressive on all matters of jobs and justice, then the wedge issues won’t kill you. I’m putting my own words to his message here, but he seemed to suggest that Democrats were vulnerable to wedge issues only because they were so weak on everything else: war, jobs, rights, whatever.

So Democrats have pieces of the answer already in their language and history. Grassroots, civil rights, housing, wages, women’s reproductive rights, workers’ organizing rights, full and fair education, rights to speech and assembly. It would be great if we could add to this list Peace.

Democrats could do worse than follow the general outlines of an American dream articulated by King (and wonderfully revived last night in a performance by Felix Justice). Fight racism, poverty, and war. Work on empowerment politically, economically, and ideologically. Apologize NOT for your attempt to make America BE America. And who knows, someday we might have a mainstream we can live with.

Meanwhile, the focus on mainstream is damaging needed attention to grassroots. How many words have been devoted by official Democratic channels to the bad voter bill introduced by Kaufman County’s Betty Brown? Well, I’m happy to report that the party channels seem to be working very well in this instance. Now compare that to the number of words that official party people have uttered in recognition of Kaufman County Commissioner candidate Brenda Denson Prince, who is STILL fighting her fair election contest, and you’ll find in the word-count difference the tragedy of a mainstream party trying to survive without its grassroots.

Or take another example from the Heflin-Vo contest. How many grassroots Democrat voters were harassed by Republican attorneys in this race? Again, let me applaud any support that the official party mechanisms have thrown toward newly elected state rep Hubert Vo. But let me also wonder out loud, where is the matching concern for the grassroots voters that made Vo’s victory possible?

The mainstream strategy expresses and encourages a politics that will surely wither the aspirations of grassroots values as it ignores the struggles of ordinary Democrats who seek empowerment through voting and elections. So it is PAINFUL for me to watch Democrat officaldom (officialdumb?) holler “Mainstream!” and whisper “grassroots.” Surely, this is a hollow strategy that will collapse under the weight of its own pretensions.

If the leadership of Howard Dean means anything here, then the so-called grassroots movement among Texas Democrats will not prove to be just another mainstream shelter for a wanna-be status quo. But when I look at the recent experience of Houston voters or one Kaufman County candidate, I am NOT encouraged by what I see.

---

Notes:

First posted Sunday, Feb. 20, 2005.

Greg Wythe considers and rejects the argument at GregsOpinion.

In short, even a good thermostat has to compare itself to a thermometer reading in order to measure progress. To do otherwise, is to seek out reform for the sake of reform alone – a chaotic proposition at best. A grassroots without a tether cord to reality is not a true grassroots movement so much as a loose cannon.

Wythe’s response seems to join in spirit with two brief comments posted at Democratic Underground that want to minimize the diff between mainstream and grassroots, as if “grassroots” posed a threat of some kind. These responses prove that any assertion of grassroots urgency will have difficulty even among self-described progressive Democrats. I should not be surprised by this, I know. But I am surprised. I had imagined that “progressive” included a vigorous “grassroots” commitment. Now I have to ask, what does progressive mean, anyway?

While Wythe’s response announces a disagreement, in fact it affirms a main assumption: that a thermostat or a grassroots movement aims to change the existing temperature or status quo. Yet the prospect of such change seems to make Wythe nervous. Again, I have to figure out why a self-described “progressive” thinks that “grassroots” reform cannot be reality based. For me “grassroots” reform is where emerging realities are born. Perhaps this is what makes me a self-described “lefty.”

On the other hand, SoniaS at DU says there is a self-described grassroots movement in the Democratic Party:

We’ve all heard that saying “if ain’t broke don’t fix it”. Well that’s the m.o. around the party still, but at least they are now willing to try. The grassroots committee is completely brand new. They just set that up at the last SDEC meeting in January. The SDEC simply wouldn’t give up on that. Supposedly it had been proposed for many years but never approved. I think the success of the Dean organization finally woke them up. And I mean success, in terms of the Democracy for Texas growing, the Progressive Populist Caucus growing, and what happened with Travis getting bluer etc.

Sonia’s reply indicates that “grassroots” is a term that has finally achieved practical value in 2005. We’ll see what comes out of the Saturday meeting of the Progressive Populist Caucus.

Aside from the philosophical debate, two specific questions remain: will Democratic officaldom respond to the needs of either Brenda Denson Prince or the Democratic voters who were harassed in Houston? Maybe “grassroots” is not the best way to describe what’s being ignored here.