Three Watauga Voters Sue to Intervene in Civitas Attempt to Throw Out Same-Day Voters

On July 29, 2016, the Fourth Circuit ordered the State Board of Elections to reinstate North Carolina’s same-day registration process, which permits voters to fill out a voter registration form and cast a ballot in the same trip to the polls during the early voting period only.

More than 90,000 North Carolinians used the same-day registration process in this election. On November 21, nearly four months after the Fourth Circuit reinstated same-day registration and 13 days after the November 8 general election was conducted, Art Pope's henchman Francis DeLuca of the Civitas Institute filed suit in federal court challenging those same-day voters in a transparent bid to bollix up the election so that the NC General Assembly could step in and declare Pat McCrory the winner.

Here's what DeLuca asked the court to do, in a nutshell: Spend an additional 30 days total doing two different verification mailings to all voters who used same-day registration, waiting 15 days after each mailing to determine whether those mailings would be returned as undeliverable, thus (Mr. DeLuca hopes) throwing out those votes. DeLuca also asked that even the ballots cast by those same-day registrants for whom mailings are not returned as undeliverable and whose registrations are deemed complete under the statutory process -- that their ballots not be counted until the 30-day period has elapsed.

Delay, delay, delay the inevitable of scooting Governor McCrory's puling carcass out of the Mansion, and hoping in the meantime that the general public will be convinced that something nefarious had gone on for Roy Cooper to win. (People hear that "dead people voted" without pausing also to understand that they're talking about people who cast a ballot in early voting and who subsequently died and whose ballots are not counted, according to law. People believe what they want to believe, and Republicans are in luv with any hint of fraud, furiously projecting their own dark hearts onto the rest of us.)

As of yesterday, there is a counter lawsuit filed on behalf of three Watauga County voters to intervene in the DeLuca suit and asking the court to dismiss it. The three Wataugans are voters who used same-day registration to register and vote in the November 2016 general election. Due to no fault of their own, they failed the mail verification process (that is, had at least one mailing returned as undeliverable), but they are eligible voters. Should DeLuca obtain the "relief" he seeks, these three voters would have their votes discounted and be deprived of their fundamental right to vote, in direct violation of their Fourteenth Amendment rights.

You can read the intervenor's counter-suit here. The description of the three Watauga intervenors begins at the bottom of page six.

The McCrory Administration: The Man in Charge of Protecting NC's Environment

Donald van der Vaart is straight out of an Art Pope/Civitas/John Locke Foundation briefing book. He took over the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) last January from big business toady John Skvarla, who had bungled the response to the Duke Energy Dan River coal ash spill. Van der Vaart is twice as dangerous as Skvarla ever was because he's four times smarter and infinitely better educated.

He holds multiple degrees in chemical engineering including a Ph.D. from Cambridge, plus a law degree. He has a wide mean streak. He's confrontational and is not afraid to use his educational attainments to intimidate lesser human beings. In other words, he's the type of take-no-prisoners, "you're fired!" Republican administrator currently in vogue among conservatives. A Donald Trump kind of guy.

The Raleigh News & Observer delves deeply into his one-year tenure at DEQ in today's edition:

1. He's a free market fundamentalist -- let the corporations rule! In other words, he's "economic" in his perspective in that he knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

2. He's following the Art Pope/Civitas playbook in sneering at "renewable" energy -- solar and wind power principally. He would enthusiastically applaud the elimination of North Carolina’s "renewables mandate" that was enacted in 2007 and which the Art Pope Machine has been trying to eliminate.

3. He loves loves LOVES fracking and is a big promoter of off-shore oil/gas drilling.

4. He has proposed a major policy change to the Environmental Management Commission to eliminate the air pollution permit process for rock quarries, concrete plants, and some 1,400 other small businesses in the state that account for 3.4 percent of air emissions. Terry Lansdell of Clean Air Carolina says the proposal will let "businesses police themselves rather than relying on state oversight."

5. In March, two months into his tenure at DEQ, he signed off on a settlement with Duke Energy over coal ash violations. The fine that Duke deigned to accept was $25 million, the largest in DEQ's history but still considered a mere mosquito bite for the multi-billion-dollar corp with a "bad neighbor" history.

6. He submitted a compliance plan for the federal Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power plan that was "designed to be rejected," because he has a bigger fish to fry: he's part of a law suit against the EPA challenging the entire mandate for clean power. Being a prick to the Obama administration's EPA only wins him more hugs and kisses from fighting mad conservatives.

7. "Van der Vaart has said the only way to make drastic reductions in carbon emissions is by aggressive development of nuclear power."

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article42125817.html#storylink=cpy

A New Wrinkle in NC's Voter Photo ID Law

Yesterday, and completely out of the blue, the NC Senate, followed quickly by the NC House, voted overwhelmingly to soften the photo ID law.

Assuming that Gov. Squishy will sign this new wrinkle into law, it will set up "a process for voters to use a 'reasonable impediment declaration' outlining why they couldn’t provide a photo ID at the polls. Voters could claim one of eight reasons, including a lack of transportation, disability or illness, lost or stolen photo ID, or a lack of a birth certificate or other documents to obtain a photo ID."

The Rev. William J. Barber II, the head of the state NAACP who was arrested on Wednesday while protesting the N.C. voting laws at the N.C. General Assembly, wasn't impressed by this sudden weakening of what had been the most draconian photo ID law in the nation: “These legislators try to distract us from the full bill implications by minimally fixing a leaky faucet but keeping the whole foundations of the bill intact. The pressure of protest and legal action are exposing their actions and forcing them to adjust. If they were truly interested in change and the tenets of our democracy, they would repeal the entire bill....”

Meanwhile, the grandees at Art Pope's Civitas Institute, who had pushed hard for photo ID, were forecasting the end of Western Civilization. Susan Myrick, elections policy analyst for Civitas Institute, said that she was caught off guard by the Senate vote. “To say the least, we were surprised,” Myrick said. The provisional ballot addition, she said, “guts” the ID rule. “It demolishes it,” Myrick said. “There’s no voter ID in North Carolina. It’s over.”

Well, we could hope, but Myrick's hysteria is no more impressive than the small change to the law that they voted on yesterday.

But why this sudden reversal? Astute observers are pointing out that this sudden move comes just two weeks before a federal trial over the constitutionality of the entire new voter laws will begin in a Winston-Salem courtroom. Changing the rules on the eve of trial seems just a little ... too ... transparent. Especially as Republican bosses in the General Assembly -- not to mention their "amen corner" out in the wilds -- have contended for years now that stringent photo ID laws were necessary to squelch widespread and prevalent voter fraud.

“One of the things we’ve been doing over the past two years is getting feedback,” Senate leader Phil Berger, the hardliner's hardliner said. “So what that provision represents is some of the feedback to try to make sure everyone who is eligible to vote has the opportunity to vote and have their vote count.”

Wow, commented someone. "Republicans have ears?"

ASU Research Centers Under Threat of Extinction

A six-person committee of the University of North Carolina Board of Governors (BOG) is weighing the fate of three research centers at Appalachian State University as part of a much larger review of some 34 centers across the entire University of North Carolina system. Savvy observers have noticed that many of the targeted centers study groups and issues that are anathema to Art Pope and the Civitas Institute.

All 32 members of the UNC Board of Governors were appointed by the Republican pooh-bahs in the General Assembly. The six-member "hit squad," drawn from those 32, are all Republicans, save one who is unaffiliated. These six people will issue recommendations next month, at which time the full BOG "could choose to validate these centers, cut their funding, roll them into existing university departments or disband them entirely."

"We have no political agenda," said the chair of the hit squad. (Dearest Mr. Chairman: We may have fallen off the turnip truck yesterday, but we didn't fall on our head.)

Three research centers at Appalachian State University are on the list of 34 for intensive review. Two are housed in the ASU College of Business: Brantley Risk and Insurance Center and the Center for Economic Research and Policy Analysis. The third is much more central to the disdain of the Civitas Institute: the Research Institute for Environment, Energy and Economics, where there's a heavy emphasis on alternative energy and "sustainability," ancient bugbears to the market fundamentalists at the Civitas Institute.

We'll know in January just how free of "political agenda" the hit squad was.

Meanwhile, at other UNC institutions, research centers that focus on women, native Americans, poverty, economic equality, civil rights -- they're also awaiting their fates. As their missions seem "counter to the agenda of the Republican-controlled state legislature," as Sam DeGrave wrote, the personnel at those research centers might best be looking at job openings in other states that haven't yet turned backward.

Another Stinkbomb in the NC Budget: GOP Makes It Harder To Challenge Their Bad Laws

Republican lawmakers in Raleigh don't like it when judges rule that their laws are unconstitutional.

So they've been in a perpetual snit because of developments like these:

1. The notorious Right-to-Life-sponsored "Choose Life" vanity license plates, passed by the Republicans in 2011, never made it to the street because U.S. District Court Judge James Fox in November 2011 temporarily blocked the law, and then ruled in December 2012 that the plates were unconstitutional "viewpoint discrimination," a judgment subsequently upheld unanimously by a 4th Circuit Court ruling.

2. In January 2014, a judge for the US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina ruled that the Republican law requiring women seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound procedure is unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment rights of physicians and patients. The lawsuit was brought by several North Carolina physicians and health care providers on behalf of themselves and their patients as a challenge to the constitutionality of a state law passed by Republicans in 2011.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/02/11/3612005/appeals-court-rules-choose-life.html#storylink=cpy

3. In February of this year, Wake County Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood temporarily halted a program that provides vouchers to pay for private school tuition.

4. In April, Special Superior Court Judge Richard Doughton issued a preliminary injunction against the Republican move to eliminate teacher tenure.

5. May 16, Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood ruled that the law eliminating teacher tenure is unconstitutional. Hobgood said that the law passed by Republican lawmakers in 2013 violates constitutional rights that protect contracts and prevents governments from taking a person’s property.

Senate leader Phil Berger had something of a conniption about Hobgood’s tenure ruling, calling it “a classic case of judicial activism,” which is the line they always fall back on when justice goes against them. 

Berger and his Buds set about writing a law to make it more difficult to challenge the constitutionality of acts passed by the General Assembly. They couldn't really do anything about Federal courts, but they sure as hell did just mandate a wholly new and novel procedure for state courts (it's never been done in any other state before, according to the News&Observer). They slipped their "innovation" into the big budget bill signed by Governor Squishy last week.

What Did They Do?

Under McCrory's signature, if you now want to challenge the constitutionality of a General Assembly law, you have to sue in Wake County, and then the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court will appoint a three-judge panel to hear the case, slowing the process and making summary judgments less likely. Also written into the new law is a provision that any law being challenged can still go ahead into effect if the three-judge panel rules against it and while their ruling is on appeal. It can take years for appeals to advance, so a bad, bad law passed by that bunch of bad, bad people in Raleigh really can't be stopped until the challenge reaches the state's Supreme Court. Hand-picked judges. Delays in receiving injunctive relief. Yeah, we trust that kind of chair-stacking!

The Republican senator assigned to manage this monster provision onto that piece of paper that Gov. McCrory signed, Buck Newton, hilariously said, "We think it will create efficiencies and is a good, common-sense way to streamline the process." By which we take it he actually meant precisely the opposite of what he said.

One of the people who has been most vigorously pushing this deformation of justice is one Frances DeLuca, president of Art Pope's Civitas Institute. Even more hilarious than Sen. Buck Newton's comment, DeLuca said, “You’d have to think hard to remember a time when we had this number of laws declared unconstitutional in this quick a time. Maybe some were deserved...."

DeLuca seems to think that the quickness of the rulings against the laws is the problem and not the laws themselves. (Well ... maybe some deserved to be ruled unconstitutional. Ha!)

DeLuca, incidentally, was thoughtfully appointed by the Republicans in the General Assembly to the state's Ethics Commission, and he delivered an opinion on Friday about the governor's apparent ethics problem regarding the non-reporting (and subsequent dumping) of a large amount of Duke Energy stock. DeLuca is a little bit DeLooney. But he's also a major string-puller for the brand of extremism we're all saddled with.)

Our Shallow and Insincere Governor

Pat McCrory opens his mouth (more than he should, obviously) and out come statements that launch a thousand editorials and blog posts. His brain (such as it is) appears to be disconnected from his mouth, or he simply lacks any filtering mechanism by which he might -- but doesn't -- measure his words for their ramifications.

He lies, because he wants everything to seem rosy: On Charlotte's WFAE this week, McCrory said that he and the new Republican majority in the NC General Assembly did not cut unemployment benefits. A whopper.

He mimics Orwellian "language management": "We didn’t shorten the early voting, we compacted the calendar.”

He is amazingly tone-deaf: About his famous cookie caper and the women outside his mansion protesting his abortion bill, he said, “I don’t care, I felt like doing it. Who cares?”

Meanwhile, Governor Eddie Haskell's minions are charging big bucks for public records requests, in violation of the spirit of our open government statute and as a clear attempt to make access to information more difficult.

His other minions in the Art Pope arm of his administration are meanwhile harassing a UNC-Chapel Hill law professor for daring to criticize The Guv.

Associating McCrory with Eddie Haskell may actually be giving him too much credit, since Eddie was too young to know how transparent he was. McCrory is old enough to know better.

If They Can't Beat You, They'll Shut You Up

Rampant Anne Marie Yates-ism breaking out all over our state. Civitas goes after the emails of a UNC law professor, immediately after he writes a column critical of Governor Squishy.

Art Pope had nothing to do with it, right?

Civitas Plays Aunt Pittypat

Luke Eggers (WRAL)

The Art Pope Civitas Institute has jumped into the Watauga voting rights battle on the side of Luke Eggers and Bill Aceto, the two Republican members of the Watauga County Board of Elections, taking this tact:

"The Watauga County Board of Elections meeting took place on August 12, with a newly appointed Republican member. The lone Democratic member, Kathleen Campbell, cursed throughout the meeting and condescendingly called the Republican board members, Bill Aceto and Luke Eggers, “boys”. And just like Mondays at the legislature, the attendees at this meeting screamed and booed and chanted throughout the meeting."

"...cursed throughout the meeting..."? According to the videotape, Kathleen Campbell said "damn" twice. We realize that Clark Gable's "damn" at the end of "Gone With the Wind" caused a big stir across the nation, but that was 1939, and this is 2013, and it seemed to dozens in that audience that day -- who were, indeed, kicking up a voluble fuss, no doubt about it -- that the suppression of voting ease being rammed through the Watauga County Board of Elections deserved a good deal saltier language than a mere couple of damns.

As far as the horrifying act of calling the Republican members "boys" ... on reflection that moniker seems pointedly appropriate for capturing the total lack of preparation exhibited by the two ... men. They came into that meeting with very complex printed resolutions in their hands that would change the voting landscape of Watauga County in very substantive ways, yet they didn't want to share the content of those resolutions and didn't in fact seem to know what those resolutions said and implied, because, well, they were written by Big Brother.

"Boys"? Would "puppets" sound any better?

The author of that Civitas face-fanning article linked above is one Susan Myrick. That name might ring a bell. She was prominently mentioned last night on Rachel Maddow's live show from Elizabeth City as the Civitas staffer who sat next to the Pasquotank County Republican Party Chair as he successfully challenged the right of a black Elizabeth City State University student to run for city council.

It's certainly the policy of Art Pope's Civitas Institute to applaud the suppression of young and black voters across the state, though they hide their true agenda behind the lace hankies of a supposedly shocked sense of propriety. Civitas certainly expresses no shock at the transparent attempt to discriminate against a class of young and black voters.

They damn well better get ready for a lot more damn cursing.

Sauce for the Gander

Art Pope

The old saying "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" means that if a particular type of behavior is acceptable for one person, it should also be acceptable for another person.

The Civitas Institute doesn't seem to agree.

Civitas published its black list of those arrested during Moral Monday protests in Raleigh -- mug shots, home addresses, names of employers -- earlier this week, and the odor of intimidation was unmistakable.

The Indy Week in Durham decided that it might be fair to list in similar ways all the staffers at Civitas, including Civitas Action, the 501 c (4) lobbying shop attached to Civitas Institute:

Coincidentally, when we were building this database [Thursday] morning, all the names were listed on the Civitas Institute website. Now, only Francis X. De Luca, Civitas Institute president, is listed. 

Civitas Institute is a conservative think tank funded largely by the Pope Foundation, which has given it more than $8 million since its founding in 2005—about 97 percent of its income. It is a tax-exempt nonprofit. Art Pope sat on the institute’s board of directors until Gov. Pat McCrory appointed him as state ... budget director.

The list is quite interesting. Even more interesting, in some case, are the comments attached to the Indy Week on-line publication, especially this property tax listing:

Do you mean this Art Pope? 

3324 Granville Drive
Raleigh, NC 27609
Owner: JAMES ARTHUR POPE & KATHERINE K POPE
Land value: $985,800
Building value: $2,246,926
Total value for property: $3,232,726
Assessments for tax year: 2009/2010
Last sale: $2,995,000 (12/30/2004)
Builtins: Multiple Fireplaces
Year property was built: 2004
Effective year built: 2004
Heated area: 10,057 square feet
Land size: 47,480 square feet 

Other improvements/additions:
Garage Masonry: 857 square feet
Open Porch: 16 square feet
1s Masonry: 300 square feet
Open Porch: 340 square feet
Open Porch: 743 square feet
Open Porch: 45 square feet
Patio: 168 square feet

The ultra-rich are different from you and me.

Civitas Black List of "Moral Monday" Protesters Provokes Blow-Back

Yes, indeedy, the Art Pope-financed Civitas Institute has launched its own version of an old-fashioned black list, using mug shots of those arrested at "Moral Mondays" in Raleigh (so that your average right-wing nut can be sure to recognize them on the street), along with personal information, like street addresses, employers, and "associations."

(Yeah, let's hear again how the Tea Party Republicans are totally ignoring the protests, are uninfluenced by them, and don't give a fig about how citizens feel about their legislation. This black list fairly screams fear.)

Jedediah Purdy, a constitutional law professor at Duke, one of the arrestees at Moral Monday, has written an open letter to the Civitas Institute, thanking the Pope minions for showing their asses so revealingly to the public: "I'm sure I speak for many of those arrested for civil disobedience protesting North Carolina's Tea Party legislature who are happy to find our name, residence, and employer are usefully listed on the Internet."

Thank God There's a Memo

Every politico in the known universe is all a-Twitter this a.m. over The Memo. Haven't read it yet, but I will. In fact, I just printed out the entire thing to study, highlight, underline, and annotate.

Democrats in general and progressives especially are usually the last ones to catch on that there's a war and that they are in the crosshairs. Glad to see someone thinking strategically, which is what conservatives normally do over their Cream o' Wheat.

The fake shock of those same NC conservatives over this particular memo is not convincing. They've been reading their own memos for years. It's not as though the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Americans for Prosperity and the Civitas Whatsit haven't been producing central steering command documents for NC Republicans for a long time. And we see the results.

The results are the point, O my brethren, and if the Republican grandees in Raleigh think we're just going to sit back and mumble our Rosary as they enact their radical program, they're smokin' something with their Cream o' Wheat.

And it didn't take a memo from some consulting group for some of us to see what's going on in Raleigh.

ADDENDUM
Got home late today to discover that Gary Pearce also wrote about The Memo and made some of the same points, only better.

One School System at a Time

What would you say to a liberal think tank conducting a "training" session on budget priorities for School Board members and getting the school system itself to sponsor the "training" on school property and furthermore qualify the "training" to count as four credit hours toward the professional training requirements that school board members in the state of North Carolina are required to complete? And -- oh yeah -- what would you say to that liberal think tank charging the school board members for the "training"?

Sound okay to you?

Flip the "liberal" to conservative, and that's exactly what's going on in Winston-Salem with the Forsyth County School Board. The conservative think tank that has engineered this swell little plan is none other than Art Pope's Civitas Institute.

Art Pope was the power/money behind the takeover of the Wake County School Board in 2009, and that entire city has been in an uproar ever since ... especially with the recent hiring of a pulp-novel-writing ex-general with very little educational experience as the new Superintendent, he whose greatest qualification for the job may be that he thinks Sarah Palin is a genius. Plus in his spare time in 2010, Mr. Pope also took charge of the NC General Assembly. It just came out today that the Republican leadership team in the NC House is busy kissing the Pope's ring by hiring his underlings to run the joint.

"The Good Government State," Art Pope style.

The Alternative: Rabid White People?

For all Glenn Beck and Fox News could gin up, they got a fraction of the 2 million they had hoped for Saturday in D.C. (60,000 - 70,000 actually showed up, according to official estimates by the Washington Fire Dept.). But they were rabid. And lied, incidentally, about their numbers. Of course. Wouldn't you? (More good pics on Scrutiny Hooligans, along with news that promoters of the 9/12 protest used Obama inauguration photos to bolster their claims of 2 million screaming meanies.)

Conservative writer David Frum summed up the current conservative fringe in the Republican Party as a combo of "wild accusations" and "paranoid delusions" arising from "the fever swamps." And he thinks it ain't helping the Republican Party get back on its electoral feet.

Meanwhile, in Raleigh, the John Locke Foundation/Civitas Institute/John William Pope Conglomerate for Doctoring the News hosted a Conservative Leadership Conference which featured (and we're not making this up) a keynote address by deposed beauty queen Carrie Prejean, whose talents include posing topless and opposing gay marriage. The Civitas Institute has been a bit vague on attendance, claiming "hundreds" who were hungry for the philosophical stylings of Miss Prejean, but our inside snitches say they barely hit 200, and several of those paying customers were some young progressive infiltrators from Durham doing oppo.

I dunno. With numbers like these, the Republican Party could hold a really loud, well attended national convention ... which is maybe all they want. Because, clearly, they don't want to attract actual voters.

Polling on Gay Marriage in N.C.

Mark Binker discusses two North Carolina polls on the subject of outlawing gay marriage, the most recent by Elon College which shows the state a good deal more moderate on the issue as compared to the Civitas Poll, which generally gets the results that the John W. Pope Foundation pays for.