Blog
By Kelly Williams & Laura MacCleery – 10/02/08
Cross-posted from The Hill Blog
It has been a long time since there has been such an outpouring of voter outrage on Capitol Hill. Although partisans are busily pointing fingers across the aisle about the defeat of the hurried, behind-the-scenes bailout deal in the House on Monday, the failures are so fundamental that it is increasingly clear that Washington will never be the same again. The bailout is stirring an intensely populist backlash across the political spectrum, and that much anger will not dissipate anytime soon.
On Monday, when Congressional leaders most needed constituents to trust them to negotiate a deal that would protect their interests, both the deal and the trust were not there. The reasons for this lack of faith are obvious: Congress snoozed through a housing boom that replaced our national economy with, as President Bush personally acknowledged last week, a house of cards.
As an institution, Congress abdicated its core job of safeguarding the interests of retirees, taxpayers and homeowners. While politicians lambaste Wall Street and blow airy kisses towards Main Street, suspicion of the K Street machinations that were on conspicuous display over the past week are equally problematic for a public largely shut out of the political process.
The economic bubble years were a time in which the members of the Senate and House banking committees - with jurisdiction over the nation's financial markets, banks, and insurance companies - allowed private equity and hedge fund barons to continue to claim preferential capital gains tax treatment of their outsized incomes, left the SEC underfunded and with a free-for-all mandate, and, perhaps most regrettably, bowed to industry pressure to leave large segments of new, complicated markets, such as the credit default swap market, unregulated.
Wall Street routinely doles out large campaign contributions to members of Congress. In the current election cycle, the financial services sector (which includes insurance and real sector), contributed more money to candidates for Congress, the presidency and political parties than did any other sector, totaling $339.6 million from 2007 through today. Both chambers' banking committees also benefit handsomely. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, PACs and employees of the securities and investment industry are the second largest source of cash for members of the Senate Banking committee. During the 2008 election cycle, these contributors raised $11.7 million for the 21 members of that Committee. Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn) received about $4.3 million since 2003, or half of all contributions to his campaign coffers.
Does campaign cash influence legislation and regulation? When Congress last debated regulation (or rather, de-regulation) of the financial industry in 1999, a study by the Center for Responsive Politics showed that members of Congress who supported the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act received twice as much money from commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance companies as those who opposed the measure. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was the product of many years of lobbying by the financial industry and allowed for the loosening of bank regulations that had been in place since the Great Depression.
Even more worrisome, in hindsight, is how campaign cash from generous industry donors might have influenced the lack of legislation, regulation and oversight. Since 2000, when passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) ensured that the credit default swap market would remain unregulated, the market for credit default swaps grew from $900 billion to $45.5 trillion, or twice the size of the entire U.S. stock market. Unregulated and private, difficulties valuing the instruments contributed to the current collapse and were the direct cause of the now-failed American Insurance Group's problems. Bank examiners, a few economists and others had expressed concerns, but Congress never seriously considered a proposal to allow proper oversight of the market. Passage of the CFMA was furtively pushed through by then-Senator Phil Gramm, himself a beneficiary of industry largesse while in office who, since leaving the Senate, has become vice-chairman of the investment bank UBS.
Since the bailout package was announced a week ago, industry lobbyists have swarmed Capitol Hill, a spectacle that fed the fires of public anger. As a consequence, the current bailout does not include a single proposal for greater regulation and oversight of swaps, derivatives and the other private, unregulated markets now in panic and disarray. Instead, the mainstream press is filled with stories of weekend efforts by lobbyists to forge broad changes to the recovery plan to benefit their clients - by convincing the Treasury to allow foreign banks to participate and otherwise expanding the definition of financial instruments, which will likely add billions to the cost of the plan. They also defeated a key consumer protection that would have allowed homeowners to renegotiate the terms of their loans in bankruptcy court and prevented a tax on banks to pay for part of the costs of the bailout.
Lobbyists for groups like the American Bankers' Association (ABA) get their clout in a traditional way: they buy it. A weekend story in The New York Timesdescribed this week's Herculean efforts of ABA's large lobbying staff, and the details of a $1,000 per ticket fundraiser sponsored by ABA for House Financial Services Chairman Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) last spring. Members of Congress benefit mightily from the largesse of financial interests. "I'm not allergic to business, I'm not hostile at all," Dodd reassured his listening potential donors when he assumed the reins of the Senate Banking Committee in December 2006, according to a report in The Hartford Courant. Dodd was the single largest recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie PACs and employees in the Congress since 1989.
Such clear evidence that the system is broken demonstrates the need for a fundamental restructuring to assure that members of Congress act as the people's representatives, rather than merely as powerful proxies for monied interests. A solution to break the stranglehold of special interests is already being considered, and must be taken up by the new Congress when it returns in the spring.
Just last week, the Fair Elections Now Act, which would establish a system of voluntary public financing for Congressional elections, was introduced with bi-partisan support in the House. Last year, Senators Durbin (D-Ill.) and Specter (R-Pa.) introduced the Senate version of the Fair Elections Now Act, which would create a voluntary public financing system for Senate candidates. With the introduction of its House counterpart this week by Representatives Larson (D-Conn.) and Jones (R-N.C.) (both from Clean Elections states), lawmakers are presented with a bipartisan, bicameral effort to undertake serious and lasting structural reform. Public financing would eliminate the perils of special interest cash by establishing strict spending limits, enabling small donors and greatly increasing the power of ordinary voters to hold Congress accountable. Dependent on Wall Street cash, Congress has proven incapable of effectively regulating the financial system; Congressional public funding offers voters a timely way to insist that Congress end the reign of big-money politics.
Public financing systems are already in place for legislative and statewide candidates in Maine, Arizona, and Connecticut, for judicial candidates in North Carolina, and for municipal candidates in several cities.
In language crafted before the current economic crisis, the bill's sponsors presciently warned in no uncertain terms that our democracy is being undermined by the "large, unwarranted costs on taxpayers through legislative and regulatory outcomes shaped by unequal access to lawmakers for campaign contributions." The costs of business-as-usual politics, it turns out, are staggeringly high. The American people deserve a political system that answers to their interests first, and public funding of elections would return power to the people, where it belongs.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform
By Wendy R. Weiser – 10/02/08
Update (4:30pm): Ohio Supreme Court unanimously rules to require election officials to accept the absentee ballot requests.
Ohio's Secretary of State recently announced that election officials should reject absentee ballot requests sent by thousands of registered voters whose eligibility is not seriously in doubt. The rejected voters used an absentee ballot request form created by the McCain campaign but did not check an unnecessary box on the form. The box in question, which looks like a bullet point, appears next to the following bold-face statement on the top of the form: "I am a qualified elector and would like to receive an Absentee Ballot for the November 4, 2008 General Election." Most readers would interpret this as meaning that filling out the form and signing the card constitutes an affirmation that the applicant is a "qualified elector" who "would like to receive an Absentee Ballot." And indeed, that's how thousands of Ohio voters, many elderly, interpreted the form. But not the Secretary of State.
Ohio law makes clear that absentee ballot applications "need not be in any particular form." But according to a memo the Secretary of State issued on September 5, if a voter did not check the box in question, then the voter did not affirm that she is a qualified elector and her request must be rejected. Never mind the fact that the voters who filled out the ballot request card clearly intended to indicate that they are qualified. And never mind the fact that election officials can look up each applicant on the state's database of all qualified voters who are registered in Ohio. According to the Secretary of State's memo, the question of the voters' qualifications to receive a ballot turns on whether they interpreted a form the same way she does.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Registration, Voting Technology
By Emily Berman – 10/02/08
Better late than never, as they say. America's economic free-fall and the related drama surrounding the on-again-off-again bailout package has all but eclipsed other breaking stories. But, let's not allow the financial news overshadow an important development in D.C. that may actually work to hold the Bush Administration accountable for equally threatening damage done under this Administration's watch. This week, Attorney General Michael Mukasey at last concluded that grave allegations of partisan motivation behind the forced resignations of several federal prosecutors in late 2006 must be followed to their conclusion. The efforts to get to the bottom of this issue might just succeed.
This week, the Justice Department's internal watchdog issued yet another scathing report, which found that the process that led to the dismissal of 9 U.S. Attorneys was "fundamentally flawed;" and that the explanations offered "by the Attorney General and other Department officials about the reasons for the removals were inconsistent, misleading, and inaccurate." The report also noted "significant evidence that political partisan considerations were an important factor in the removal of several of the U.S. Attorneys."
In other words, the report corroborates some of the worst suspicions surrounding the US Attorney firings: The Bush Administration fired nine U.S. Attorneys for partisan reasons and then lied about it.
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Tags: Justice, Liberty & National Security, Checks & Balances
By Lawrence Norden – 10/01/08
By our count, at least twelve Ohio counties have split the presidential
contest over two columns on their paper ballots for this November's
election. This "column split" often
confuses voters and results in double voting in the presidential race — and an
uncounted vote. Today the Brennan Center urged election officials and advocates
in Ohio to make sure that voters are aware of the split, and to make sure they
vote only once for president.
The twelve Ohio counties whose ballots spilt the presidential
race over two columns are: Ashtabula, Athens,
Auglaize,
Champaign,
Delaware,
Lawrence,
Logan,
Madison,
Ottawa,
Seneca,
Shelby,
and Wyandot.
As a quick glance will show, it's no surprise that many
voters cast two votes for president when the contest is listed across two
separate columns. The one on the right is from Auglaize County (click to see larger).
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voting Technology
By Wendy R. Weiser – 09/24/08
Updated (5:30pm): Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) writes to Social Security Administration seeking delay of shutdown. A copy of the letter is here. And a letter from EAC Commissioner Rosemary Rodriguez sent on the 19 can be found here.
A recent alert by the Social Security Administration announces that the agency plans to shut down its databases for maintenance from October 11 through October 13. While this might not sound like an election issue, it turns out that this could significantly impede registration of first-time voters as well as the re-registration of eligible citizens.
Here's why. A 2002 federal law, the Help America Vote Act, requires all states to "coordinate" their voter registration databases with the Social Security database (and state motor vehicle databases) for the purpose of processing new voter registration forms. For the millions of voters who do not have current driver's licenses and register using the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, state election officials are required to try to match their voter registration information against Social Security records. But if the Social Security database is down—as it will be for four days—they won't be able to do that. Across the country, the processing of these voter registration forms will grind to a halt for four days.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Lists and Databases, Voter Registration, Voting Technology
By Adam Skaggs – 09/19/08
Over the summer, we urged Congress to enact legislation that would reverse a Department of Veterans
Affairs (VA) policy that banned voter registration activities in VA
facilities. The unjustifiable policy
erected unnecessary hurdles that made it difficult for veterans to register and
vote—so it was no surprise that veterans
groups and voting rights
organizations actively fought the policy.
The VA stubbornly refused to
budge, though, leading lawmakers in Congress to proposed a statutory fix to the
VA's bureaucratic blunder: the Veterans Voting
Support Act. Along with many others,
we called
for prompt passage of the law in the House and Senate.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Registration
By Adam Skaggs – 09/19/08
Cross-posted from the Huffington Post.
Concerns about matching voter data with motor vehicle records were back in the news last week in New Jersey, Wisconsin and Florida — but for very different reasons. In one case, the matches were conducted in an attempt to add voters to the registration rolls; in the others, to take them off. But the experience in each state teaches the same lesson: matching data between the voter and driver databases is an inherently flawed process — and one that's far too unreliable to make a successful "match" a precondition to registering and voting.
In New Jersey, it was an attempt by Secretary of State Nina Wells to expand the voting rolls that gave rise to the latest kerfuffle. Wells was concerned that some citizens who'd applied for driver's licenses hadn't been given the opportunity to register to vote, as is required under the "Motor Voter Act." So she had the Division of Elections cross-check the voter registration database against motor vehicle records. The data comparison turned up 880,000 driver's license records that couldn't be matched up with voter registration records. Officials concluded that this meant there were 880,000 drivers who weren't registered to vote. So, to be helpful, they began sending all those drivers a voter registration form, along with a letter encouraging them to fill it out and register so they could vote in November.
Unfortunately, a lot of those drivers already were registered, and they weren't too happy to receive letters implying they were not. The confusion arose because minor discrepancies between their records in the voter and motor vehicle databases — like missing middle initials or inconsistent treatment of hyphenated last names— prevented officials from matching a driver's record in the motor vehicle database with the same person's voter record.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Lists and Databases, Voter Purges and Challenges, Voter Registration
By Maggie Barron – 09/17/08
Those of us raised on cop dramas take for granted that in this country you have the right to an attorney, and that if you cannot afford it, one will be provided to you. What Americans don't know is that in courtrooms across the country, there is a lot of room to interpret what "afford" actually means.
This week, the Brennan Center for Justice released a new report, "Eligible for Justice," exposing the lack of standards for determining who is eligible for court-appointed defense counsel. In a national study, the Brennan Center found that many jurisdictions use flawed screening processes to separate those who can afford counsel from those who cannot, and as a result are denying government-funded defense counsel to people who should receive it, in violation of the Sixth Amendment.
The landmark Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright requires that states provide counsel to all people charged with felonies who are unable to afford their own attorney without substantial hardship. Yet states have been provided with little instruction on how to determine which individuals are genuinely unable to pay for counsel. Some courts have no standards at all.
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Tags: Justice, Civil Justice, Civil Legal Aid, Civil Right to Counsel, Fair Forums, Criminal Justice
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