Conservatives want to give more votes to white families

And disenfranchise many others.

Welcome to a Monday night edition of Progress Report.

Do you feel a bit relieved? Like you can breathe and stop obsessively scrolling social media and refreshing the news? Liberated from the interminable wait for the next little bombshell to drop, hoping that it might be the one to knock some sense into this incomprehensible world?

Take a minute to enjoy it. You deserve it.

Now, there’s a lot to talk about today, including a look at the latest far-right legal schemes to fundamentally alter the electorate. Plus, some analysis of what happens next in the presidential race. Read to the end!

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After three years of divergent voting rights legislation, with blue states expanding ballot access and red states making it more difficult to vote, this year has largely seen a consensus emerge around the once-fraught topic of re-enfranchisement for former criminals.

This year, six states passed laws that restored some voting rights for returning citizens, as they’re called in the advocacy community, some of which were more significant than others. In Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis put his name on a law that provides new opportunity for eligible incarcerated voters to cast their ballots.

Here’s a good visualization, via Ballotpedia:

Unfortunately, the pro-voter law passed in Nebraska, which ended the two-year waiting period that former felons had to endure after finishing their sentences, is now the subject of a legal fight that could dash the hopes of up to 60,000 people who thought they’d had their rights restored this year.

Last week, Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers issed an opinion asserting that LB20 was unconstitutional because it violated the state constitution’s separation of powers clause. He went further, also claiming that LB53, a law passed in 2005 that created the two year waiting period, was also unconstitutional because it usurped the authority of the Nebraska Board of Pardons. That waiting period was actually instituted to expand the number of former felons who could cast a ballot, because at that point, it required the blessing of the Board of Pardons to reclaim the right to vote.

As a result of this decision, Secretary of State Bob Evnen told county registrars to not allow any more former felons to register to vote, triggering a lawsuit from the Campaign Legal Center. But the AG’s opinion was not the product of a legal challenge, which means that it may not have been binding or provided the secretary of state the authority to deny tens of thousands of people their right to vote.

The Campaign Legal Center is quite busy right now. In Alabama, the organization just filed a lawsuit over a new amendment that expanded the kinds of felonies that cause somebody to be disenfranchised.

In 2017, Alabama lawmakers passed a new law that established a list of more than 40 crimes of “moral turpitude” that can trigger a lifetime voting ban. That list included the headline felonies, including murder, robbery, assault, felony theft and drug trafficking. This year, they amended the law to add crimes against election workers, but before it was approved, a Republican lawmaker slipped in six other offenses that turned the list into a vehicle for mass disenfranchisement.

Now, domestic violence, elder abuse, stalking and compelling street gang membership are also on the list, as is a conviction for attempting or soliciting help to commit one of the existing crimes of “moral turpitude.” According to the Campaign Legal Center, which filed the lawsuit, that effectively expanded the list to more than 100 crimes that lead to a voting ban.

The lawsuit doesn’t seem to block the amendment but instead ensure that Alabama doesn’t enforce the law until after the election. Though the start date on the amendment says that it takes effect on October 1st, existing Alabama law says that new election-related laws cannot take effect within six months of an upcoming election.

This is just stupid — but also scary: Now to be fair, while conservatives have worked steadfastly for 150 years to make voting off-limits to people of color and poor people, some on the right have recently decided that the nation should extend the franchise to another historically disenfranchised group: children.

A new paper previewed in the Koch-owned, libertarian-flavored Reason Magazine advances the idea that parents should be able to cast votes on behalf of their children, and that states have the power to authorize it. Here’s a bit from the abstract:

Children are 23% of all citizens; they have distinct interests; and they already count for electoral districting. But because they lack the maturity to vote for themselves, their interests don't count proportionally at the polls. The result is policy that observably disserves children's interests and violates a deep principle of democratic fairness: that citizens, through voting, can make political power respond to their interests.

If this sounds ridiculous, the authors anticipated that you would say that and came up with an offensive rebuttal. From the intro:

Today it's so unquestioned that even pointing it out can seem like a silly provocation rather than a serious policy proposal. Deep assumptions are like that: questioning them always seems crazy at first. The suggestion that women should be allowed to vote once spurred derision, until wave upon wave of challenging assumptions produced the Nineteenth Amendment. Of course, there's a crucial difference: unlike the women who demanded their right to vote, children really are incompetent to vote their interests, at least at a sufficiently young age. One might disagree whether 18 is the right line, but surely something is: 8-year-olds aren't competent to vote their interests.

So our claim isn't that children should be able to vote from birth; our claim is that their parents should cast votes for them.

I was in high school when the Iraq War started and was plenty bummed that I couldn’t vote in the 2022 midterm elections. And in hindsight, my objections to George W. Bush’s disastrous foreign policy proved more perceptive than whatever was going on in the heads of the American adults who voted Republicans into a trifecta. But as they note above, the authors are not talking about trusting kids or allowing 16-year-olds voting for themselves. In fact, it’s the exact opposite.

Instead, they’re arguing that parents should get to cast an extra vote on “behalf” of each of their young children, ostensibly but in no way enforceably based on what the parent thinks is best for those children.

There’s a lot to unpack here, including why this is more a dangerous proposal than a quack idea, so stick with me.

Philosophically, it doesn’t make sense to argue that kids need to be given a vote yet not actually give them control over how that vote is cast. It’s also the sign of sociopathy to suggest that parents need an extra vote in order for their children’s interests and long-term futures to receive proper consideration when they vote. My son is nearly two years old and I can’t imagine ever voting for somebody who supported policies that would make life unfairly difficult for him or imperil his future.

Americans vote for a lot of politicians who believe in things that I don’t think are in a kid’s best interest — loose gun laws, exacerbating climate change, school vouchers, and refusing Medicaid expansion, for starters — but that’s more about political philosophy than basic motivation. I don’t think that most parents would vote any differently if you explicitly told them to make their choices based on what’s best for their kids. And anybody who is voting explicitly and knowingly against their own kid’s wellbeing likely wouldn’t vote differently if given a second one anyway.

But this isn’t actually about children or their rights. The author of the paper is named Stephen E. Sachs, who once clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts and now serves as the Antonin Scalia Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is a right-wing conservative who won a prestigious award from the Federalist Society in 2020 and claims an expertise in originalism, the nimblest of legal theories, which contorts itself to always arrive at whichever outcome a conservative jurist so desires. There is every likelihood that he could wind up as a federal judge and perhaps one day a Supreme Court justice.

Why would conservatives like Sachs want to give parents an extra vote for each of their children? Sachs cites fellow Yale Law graduate JD Vance as a supporter of the pseudo-children’s suffrage idea, and Vance is a key leader of the nascent, Peter Thiel-funded New Right movement, which sprinkles a bit of populism over a Christian nationalist ideology that seeks to make the “traditional family” the center of American life.

Adherents are forming chapters of men’s clubs all over the country and emphasizing the responsibility to have more children than can fit in a standard minivan. As Vance’s newly unearthed comment about Kamala Harris’s family reveals, they look down on people who don’t have children as drains on society. He rails against the “childless left” and has proposed tax credits for families that have more than one child. Another vote per child would be an even better incentive for people to have more children.

The natalist movement overlaps with the New Right. Some may be atheist, but they also fear the Great Replacement theory and seek to secure their cultural future through procreation. Members of the movement would likely benefit most from these policies, both financially and politically, giving them exponential strength in numbers. As Malcolm Collins, a prominent pro-natalist, told The Guardian this spring, “I don’t care if environmentalists don’t want to have kids. The point of the movement is to help those that do.”

Vance spoke at the first major conference of natalists back in 2021, and now with his ascension to GOP vice presidential nominee, he’s poised to bring these fringe ideas and their adherents to the forefront. The Supreme Court has already proven that there is virtually no limit to the lengths it will go to empower this cadre of pious white power perverts, and with Leonard Leo-approved extremists building the legal scaffolding and waiting in the wings to join the far-right supermajority, this is the kind of idiocy that could suddenly become conservative orthodoxy and even law before we know it.

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The big one: It blew me away to find out today that this fall’s presidential election will be the first to not have a Bush, Clinton, or Biden on the ballot since 1976. Those three families have been at the pinnacle of American power for a decade longer than I’ve been alive. Let’s hope that this is the last time a Trump appears on the presidential ballot, because the last thing we need is one of his idiot kids running for higher office, too.

Kamala Harris and her team didn’t get much notice that Joe Biden would be dropping out of the race, but the Vice President quickly sewed up the support necessary to make her the presumptive nominee, clinching the final delegates tonight. The public analysis of her strengths and weaknesses as a candidate and whether she’d be a big improvement on Biden began just as quickly, and while I don’t think she’s going to do much to win back the working class white vote, I do think political analysts underestimate the power and importance of this generational change.

This country has plunged into such deep partisanship and experienced wild electoral swings in part because working and middle class Americans have spent the past 30 years on an economic Catherine wheel of crises, stretching and crushing them to a breaking point. As impressive as the Biden recovery has been, he’s also an avatar of the old political order, while Harris is unburdened by what has been. I think her presence can suggest a generational torch passing, and even if her moderate politics and personality don’t inspire all that much excitement, the context of her candidacy may rally more people than anticipated.

Making a few bold promises on issues that Biden wouldn’t touch, like expanding the Supreme Court, would also allow Harris to carve an identity of her own. I couldn’t tell you whether that’s going to happen, but she does start from a place of relative strength in the polls. There’s no one consensus right now, but for the most part, Harris had a better margin against Trump than Biden had in polls conducted in early July.

The most recent poll, which went into the field days before Biden made his announcement, shows Harris up 48-46 against Trump while Biden trailed 46-44. The shift owes to a major boost for Harris among young voters, Black voters, and Hispanic voters. The Harris campaign also had 30,000 first-time volunteers sign up for shifts and took in over $230 million, indicating a depth of excitement that Biden could not generate.

Remember, a lot of people hate Donald Trump, they just need to feel like change can come from elsewhere.

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