North Carolina Conservatives Celebrate Supreme Court Voting Rights Ruling To Bring Back The Confederacy

North Carolina Conservatives Celebrate Supreme Court Voting Rights Ruling To Bring Back The Confederacy

Just days after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, North Carolina is moving forward with a host of bills to roll back voting rights. Republican lawmakers are accelerating a new agenda to eliminate early voting, Sunday voting hours, and same-day registration provisions. GOP leaders also vowed to move quickly to pass a controversial voter ID law that would make it much harder for minorities, seniors, students, and low-income voters to cast their ballots.

The court’s conservative majority decreed last Tuesday that the formula used to identify states with a history of using election law to discriminate against minorities has “no logical relationship to the present day.” Many of the covered jurisdictions celebrated the decision by promptly advancing voting restrictions that disproportionately target minorities and low-income voters. Texas enacted their previously blocked voter ID law mere hours after the ruling.

North Carolina’s newly unfettered attack on voting rights has three main prongs:

    Require ID at the polls. North Carolina’s voter ID bill could pose problems for 1 in 10 voters, according to an analysis by the State Board of Elections. About 613,000 North Carolinians lack the required government-issued ID. Nearly a third of these voters are black, while over half are registered Democrats.
    Penalize college students for voting. Republicans are also pushing a bill to raise taxes on families with college students who choose to vote at school rather than at home, effectively discouraging college students from voting.
    End early voting and same-day registration. Other states that restricted early voting, like Ohio and Florida, needlessly created mammoth lines on Election Day, forcing some voters to wait until 1 a.m. to cast a ballot. The backlash in Florida has been especially strong, prompting Gov. Rick Scott (R) to reverse his own voter suppression laws. In North Carolina, black voters make up 29 percent of early voters and 34 percent of voters who took advantage of same-day voter registration at the polls.

The Republican-dominated legislature and new Republican governor will likely do all they can to speed along these restrictions. However, polls show that North Carolinians overwhelmingly oppose these new voter suppression measures. “Moral Monday” protests are cropping up all over the state to challenge these bills and a slew of other draconian policies targeting the poor, women, minorities, and seniors.

OK my headline is a little off,  conservatives not only have contempt for Americans of color, but hate students and senior citizens as well. One has to wonder why conservatives don't just pack up and move to China, they don't have voting rights there either. A party of the elite decides what is good or bad - just the way conservatives do. There is nothing humanitarian or logical about conservatives and conservatism, it is all about getting and keeping power - again, much like the political elite in China or Saudi  Arabia or Iraq.

Obamacare, Do Real Patriots Have Two Faces - Republicans To Back Bill Expanding Obamacare Program

Obamacare, Do Real Patriots Have Two Faces - Republicans To Back Bill Expanding Obamacare Program

House Republicans plan to vote on a bill on Wednesday that would shift money from the portion of Obamacare that invests in prevention and use it to expand a temporary initiative that has helped individuals and families with pre-existing medical conditions obtain coverage.

The Helping Sick Americans Now Act would move $4 billion from the Affordable Care Act’s $10 billion Prevention and Public Health Fund into the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP), a program of high-risk pools that has provided coverage to uninsured Americans who didn’t have an offer of insurance from an employer and couldn’t find a plan in the individual market. The PCIP was designed as a bridge to the exchanges, which will become operational in 2014, but the $5 billion program stopped accepting new enrollees in February.

“Like in so many other areas, the President’s health care legislation failed to adequately protect sick patients with pre-existing conditions, like those battling cancer,” Rory Cooper, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), told Talking Points Memo. “House Republicans are determined to do so by taking funding from a slush fund and moving it where it is critically needed.”

But while insuring high-cost individuals in separate pools has long been a staple of Republican health policy, the Prevention Fund also supports GOP-backed priorities. The Fund has invested in community and clinical prevention, research, public health infrastructure, immunizations and screenings, tobacco prevention and public health workforce and training — measures that Republicans touted as critical to lowering health care costs:

    – Former Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) argued that “one of the things we did in the health care legislation was to provide a lot of different incentives for preventive care.” [7/12/2010]

    – Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said the law’s emphasis on preventive care is good “because it costs less to keep people well than to treat them when they’re sick.” [10/18/2010]

    – Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “Congress should be able to work together on our practical ideas that the American people support, such as reforming our medical liability laws to discourage junk lawsuits…encouraging wellness and prevention programs that have proved to be effective in cutting costs and improving care.” [8/26/2010]

    – Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA): “I am an original cosponsor of S. 1099, the “Patients’ Choice Act,” …. The legislation would make health care coverage accessible and affordable for all Americans through private insurance coverage, while also promoting prevention and wellness which can improve lives and lower long-term medical costs. [7/19/2009]

Now, the party is seeking to undermine one priority to fund the other, even after repeatedly voting to repeal Obamacare and eliminate the PCIP and the Prevention Fund.

Conservatives are just spiteful venal children who never grow up. Republicans do not stand for American values. This is an excellent example of what they do stand for, glaringly wanton behavior. Not good government. In their fantasies all conservatives really want to live in Somalia rather than big-government Sweden. I'd suggest taking up a collection to buy them all a boat ticket, but they have stolen so much from American workers they can pay their own way.