"An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy."
Mon, Feb. 1, 2021, 3PM (CT). POSSIBLE TOPICS: Voting info; “Vote By Mail” apps; TX DMV announces 4/13 end date for waiver of vehicle title, registration; Bellaire roundup: Council sets date for consensus facilitation firm, refers specifications review to commission and more; Analysis: Just when you think campaign season is over, Texas pulls you back in; It’ll be awhile before redistricting happens; Pa. could become national outlier in how it elects appellate judges, worrying some experts; Texas prepares to test for lead in schools’ drinking water for the first time; After Record Turnout, Republicans Are Trying to Make It Harder to Vote; After Record Turnout, Republicans Are Trying to Make It Harder to Vote; ‘We need to work together’: Manchin blasts Harris’ TV hit on Covid relief; MORE. Guest: [AUDIO/VIDEO] #KPFTHouston 90.1FM
This program was recorded early in the morning on SUNDAY, January 17. Due to Covid-19, shows are being prerecorded beginning March 13, 2020 and until further notice. We miss our live call-in participants, and look forward to a time we can once again go live.Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig(@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show airing live every Monday from 3-4 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston). My co-host and Editor is Andrew Ferguson.
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For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:
An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.
You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.
“There’s a reason why you separate military and police. One fights the enemy of the State. The other serves and protects the People. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the State tend t become the People.” ~ Commander Adama, “Battlestar Galactica” (“WATER”, Season 1 episode 2, at the 28 minute mark.)
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Next Election: May 01, 2021 – Uniform Election. Early Voting: April 19th – April 27th
If you are denied your right to vote any place at any timeat any polling place for any reason, ask for (or demand) a provisional ballot rather than lose your vote.
Fill out a declaration at the polls describing a reasonable impediment to obtaining it, and show a copy or original of one of the following supporting forms of ID:
A government document that shows your name and an address, including your voter registration certificate
Current utility bill
Bank statement
Government check
Paycheck
A certified domestic (from a U.S. state or territory) birth certificate or (b) a document confirming birth admissible in a court of law which establishes your identity (which may include a foreign birth document)
Professional facilitation services: Bellaire City Council set Feb. 8 as its date for interviewing two candidates for professional facilitation services — Lyle Sumek Associates and Ron Cox Consulting.
This comes as the council is in the beginning stages of its process to hire a new city manager since Paul Hofmann resigned Aug. 2. Assistant City Manager Brant Gary was appointed Aug. 3 to fill that role in the interim.
The firm would take the City Council through interviews and exercises designed to align council members on what they would look for in a new city manager. …
The interviews will give the City Council an opportunity to request paring down the scope of work.
Zoning specifications review: Bellaire City Council voted to refer to the Planning and Zoning Commission a review of specifications for commercial mixed-use, urban village downtown and urban village transit zones.
Specifically, the commission will be tasked with reviewing multifamily use, minimum and maximum building heights, setbacks, and lot coverage in those zones.
“After seven years of new zoning districts for CMU, UV-D, and UV-T, a timely review of these codes should be done now by P&Z and council,” wrote Council Member Catherine Lewis, who submitted the item to be on the agenda.
A major impetus for the request comes following an announcement from Randalls/Bellaire that it will close Feb. 20. Randalls/Bellaire is located in the UV-D zone. A second consideration is the completion of the new H-E-B and the redesign and narrowing of Spruce and Fifth streets.
You’re right to think this is happening early. The last big election was less than three months ago. If you include the protests of the results, and you should, it wasn’t officially over until Jan. 6.
But it’s always campaign season in Texas.
O’Rourke, the state’s best-known Democrat, launched this trial balloon when asked on El Paso radio station KLAQ whether he would run for governor.
“It is something I’m going to think about,” he said. He expanded on that in a string of tweets Thursday night. …
Here’s the setup: Abbott has been in statewide office for more than 25 years, serving on the Texas Supreme Court, as attorney general and then as governor. He’s a formidable fundraiser and outperformed the other Republicans on the ballot with him in his last reelection in 2018. O’Rourke was an El Paso City Council member and member of Congress who found political celebrity with his 2018 challenge to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, raising millions of dollars and coming within 3 percentage points of winning that election. He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
Neither of the state’s U.S. Senate seats will be on the 2022 ballot; the governor’s race will be the marquee contest. Abbott has said he wants a third term.
And the primaries in Texas are early. What might seem like a contest that’s far in the future is just over a year away.
The U.S. Census Bureau has again pushed back the release of the 2020 census results — a delay that will almost certainly force Texas lawmakers into legislative overtime this summer to redraw the state’s political maps. …
The 2021 legislative session ends May 31, but congressional and state House and Senate districts will need to be reconfigured ahead of the 2022 elections. Under the Census Bureau’s projected timeline, Gov. Greg Abbott would need to call lawmakers back for a special legislative session in the summer. […] However, the delay announced Wednesday is likely to further fan questions among some Democrats over whether the redrawing of legislative maps can legally begin in a special session. …
With Republicans in control of both chambers, the delay in census data could provide a legal opening for Democrats to try to kick the legislative redistricting work out of Republicans’ hands and into the courts.
A proposal moving through the GOP-led Pennsylvania legislature …calls for abolishing statewide elections for appellate court judges and replacing them with races in partisan districts determined by lawmakers and redrawn every 10 years. …
Critics — including a wide array of legal organizations and good-government groups — call the measure a ploy for Republicans to gain more control over the Supreme Court, where Democrats in the majority have recently ruled against the GOP in election- and pandemic-related litigation.
… In one of the last actions by a Trump-led Environmental Protection Agency, the December update to the 1991 federal rule on reducing lead and copper in drinking water — which hadn’t been updated in decades — requires water utilities to test water at elementary schools and child care facilities. The rule also lowers the threshold for doing corrosion control treatments on pipes and replacing lines that contain lead.
In Texas, it will be the first time the state’s roughly 25,000 schools and child care facilities will undergo mandated water inspections for lead and copper — the state did not previously have any testing requirement. Young children are particularly vulnerable to the health effects of lead poisoning on the brain and nervous system, according to the EPA. Lead exposure in children is known to cause slowed growth, behavior and learning problems, difficulty hearing and lower IQs.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality … at times assisted school districts in testing water in the past, but only if the school district requested help …
The EPA rule requires community water systems to sample 20% of elementary schools and 20% of child care facilities per year — full implementation of the rule in Texas will be required by January 2024.
Baker said that if the Legislature cannot help finance the initiative, the agency will be forced to divert other resources to the effort since testing is required by the EPA.
“We feel this is an unfunded federal mandate,” Baker said. “We don’t disagree with the rule; we have needed this for a while. But, it’s quite an expensive undertaking for the state.” …
Testing water and correcting lead levels can be an expensive and time-intensive task, experts said, because the problem is so widespread and can occur from many different sources, particularly in complex facilities like schools. Lead usually enters drinking water through lead-based pipes or plumbing — which were used for decades before being banned in the 1980s. …
The EPA estimates that drinking water can make up 20% or more of a person’s total lead exposure. And identifying which component of a water system is the source of contamination can be difficult — and expensive. …
After the Flint water crisis gained national attention, at least 17 Texas school districts proactively tested drinking water for lead, according to data compiled by Environment Texas, an Austin-based nonprofit. Of the more than 1,000 schools in those districts, 13% found concentrations of lead above the federal threshold for corrective action. …
Environmental groups maintain that the threshold for intervention is still too high. They also said Texas will need significant resources, money and stricter standards in order to prevent children from being exposed to lead.
Even among schools that voluntarily tested and corrected significant sources of lead exposure, many still have some level of lead in the water, said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas. [Metzger] said the Legislature should set a lower standard for intervention.
“There are thousands of schools in the state that we don’t even have information on,” Metzger said. “The $7 million is a good start, but that probably won’t go as far as needed.”
[I]n … Georgia, Arizona and other states won by President Biden, Republicans who echoed former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims of rampant fraud are proposing to make it harder to vote next time — ostensibly to convince the very voters who believed them that elections can be trusted again. And even some colleagues who defended the legitimacy of the November vote are joining them.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, state legislators have filed 106 bills to tighten election rules, generally making it harder to cast a ballot … Republicans who for more than a decade have used wildly inflated allegations of voter fraud to justify making it harder to vote, are now doing so again, this time seizing on Mr. Trump’s thoroughly debunked charges of a stolen election to push back at Democratic-leaning voters who flocked to mail-in ballots last year. …
Those and other proposals … reflect longstanding Republican efforts to push back against efforts to expand the ability to vote. …
Democrats have their own agenda: 406 bills in 35 states, according to the Brennan Center, that run the gamut from giving former felons the vote to automatically registering visitors to motor vehicle bureaus and other state offices. And Democrats in the Senate will soon unveil a large proposal to undergird much of the election process with what they call pro-democracy reforms, with lowering barriers to voting as the centerpiece. Near-identical legislation has been filed in the House.
“The jury is still out on whether the lesson from this election will be that we need to make voting as convenient as possible, or whether there will be a serious retrenchment that makes voting less accessible,” said Nate Persily, a Stanford University law professor and co-director of the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project.
In truth, who controls a given legislature will largely decide what chances a bill has. …
One [Arizona] bill would repeal the state’s no-excuse absentee ballot law. Others would pare back automatic mailings of absentee ballots to the 3.2 million voters who have signed up for the service. One ardent advocate of the stolen-election conspiracy theory … would require that signatures on all mail ballots be notarized, creating an impossibly high bar for most voters. Yet another bill, paradoxically, would require early ballots that are mailed to voters to be delivered by hand. …
[Georgia] Republicans in the State Senate [propose eliminating] no-excuse absentee ballots — a quarter of the five million votes cast in November … But Republicans broadly support a bill to require submitting a photocopied identification card such as a driver’s license with both applications for absentee ballots and the ballots themselves. [Georgia Sec. of State] Mr. Raffensperger has said he supports that measure and another to make it easier to challenge a voter’s legitimacy at the polls.
Brian Robinson, a Republican political consultant in Atlanta, said, “The overall purpose of these reforms is to restore faith in our election systems.” He added, “That’s not to say that it was a giant failure; that’s to say that faith has been diminished.”
He allowed that Mr. Trump’s false charges of fraud “drives a lot of the loss of faith among Republicans,” but he also took aim at Democrats, noting that the Democrat who lost the 2018 governor’s race, Stacey Abrams, also had refused to concede, saying voter suppression had caused an “erosion of our democracy.”
“Both sides have dipped their toes in those waters,” he said.
But it’s clear that Republicans are now dipping much more than their toes. Democrats and some voting-rights advocates say the Republican agenda on voting is less about lost trust than lost elections. A Republican election official in suburban Atlanta said as much this month, arguing for tougher voting laws that reduce turnout after Democratic candidates won both of the state’s Senate seats in runoffs.
“They don’t have to change all of them,” said Alice O’Lenick, who heads the Gwinnett County Board of Registrations and Elections, “but they have got to change the major parts of them so we at least have a shot at winning.”
Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer …, said the reason for the state’s voting-law crackdown was transparent. “These were elections that withstood the scrutiny of two recounts, an audit and a whole lot of attention in the political arena and the courts,” he said. “The only reason they’re doing this is to make voting harder because they didn’t like the results. And that’s shameful.” …
In Washington, a Democratic agenda can be seen in the latest version of a far-ranging elections and voting bill that passed the House last year but died in the Republican-controlled Senate.
This time, the Democrat-controlled Senate will file its own version [,S-1], with committee hearings expected in February.
Its voting provisions include allowing automatic and same-day voter registration, 15 days of early voting, no-excuse voting by mail, and online voter registration, as well as the restoration of voting rights nationwide to felons who complete their sentences. In one fell swoop, it would set minimum standards for American federal elections that would erase a host of procedural barriers to casting a ballot.
It also would require the states to appoint independent and nonpartisan commissions to draw political boundaries, eliminating the profusion of gerrymanders that the Supreme Court said in 2019 were beyond its authority to control.
Few expect much chance of passage in a deeply divided Senate, but the Democratic leaders in both houses have made it the first bill of the new congressional session …
President Biden is trying to shake a Trump hangover in the federal government by acting to remove some holdovers and install his own appointees, but a quiet push to salt federal agencies with Trump loyalists is complicating the new president’s effort to turn the page.
The Biden team, showing a willingness to cut tenures short, moved quickly last week to dump several high-profile, Senate-confirmed Trump appointees whose terms extended beyond Inauguration Day — in some cases by several years.
They include the surgeon general, the National Labor Relations Board’s powerful general counsel, and the heads of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
But other, lower-profile Trump loyalists, some of whom helped carry out his administration’s most controversial policies, are scattered throughout Biden’s government in permanent, senior positions. And identifying them, let alone dislodging them, could be difficult for the new leadership.
The Jan. 16 appointment of Michael Ellis, a former GOP operative who served in the Trump White House, as the National Security Agency’s top lawyer caused such a furor that he was placed on paid leave within hours of taking office.
And in the former president’s final months and weeks, dozens of other political appointees had their status similarly converted to permanent civil service roles that will allow them to stay in government for years to come. These new career officials are protected from partisan removal unless the new administration discovers that they got their jobs illegally — without competition and because of their political affiliation.
As Biden tries to reset the government to match his priorities, Democrats fear the Trump holdovers, who served in partisan roles, could undermine the new administration as they move into the civil service, which is supposed to operate free of partisanship.
The practice of shifting employees from appointee to career status, informally called burrowing, occurs at the end of every presidency — and it is controversial. Trump aides and their GOP allies in Congress, for example, threatened at the start of Trump’s term to remove any Obama-era political appointees who had been replanted in the civil service, and dozens were, records show.
But the just-departed president is on track to exceed the number of Democrats the Obama administration rewarded with permanent roles. In his final year, President Barack Obama moved 29 political appointees into career jobs. As of November, Trump had installed almost that many, 26, in the first 10 months of 2020, according to data provided to Congress by the Office of Personnel Management.
Nine more requests await review by personnel officials. More are expected. Congress has not received data covering December and the first 20 days of January, when outgoing administrations tend to move quickly to reward appointees who want to stay in government.
Burrowing is frowned upon by good-government groups — and by members of the party that is out of power — even when it is carried out legally, which means the appointee competed for the position and was the top candidate on the basis of merit and work experience, with no nod to political affiliation or loyalty.
The hiring of a political appointee for a career job must be scrutinized by the federal personnel office for five years after the person left the partisan job.
Such conversions also can violate civil service laws, as occurred during the George W. Bush administration, when a young Justice Department lawyer from the Republican National Committee, Monica Goodling, was found to have broken the law by using politics to guide hiring decisions for a range of critical jobs.
Goodling was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony, and was reprimanded by the Virginia Bar. She acknowledged during a House hearing that she “crossed the line” and broke civil service hiring rules.
“There’s a great irony here,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), who leads a House oversight panel on federal government operations, referring to Trump’s efforts to place his appointees in government. “The crowd that didn’t believe in government and called its agencies the deep state now wants to work for them.”
Connolly has asked the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s research arm, to tally all of Trump’s conversions over four years.
Many of the new hires were not announced by their agencies, which may have presented a challenge for Biden’s transition teams to discover them.
“The incoming Biden-Harris administration is keenly aware of last minute efforts by the outgoing administration to convert political appointees into civil service positions,” a transition official said in a statement.
“We anticipate learning more in the weeks ahead as our work to restore trust and accountability across the federal government begins, including reviewing personnel actions during the Trump administration,” the official said.
Trump partisans work in Biden’s government at a range of agencies, including the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Many are serving in senior executive roles, the highest echelon of career leaders. They work as assistant U.S. attorneys, general counsel, intelligence leaders, immigration judges. …
In firing the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel, Peter Robb, Biden broke with precedent to end the tenure of a figure seen as a foe by worker advocates and labor unions.
Robb had refused to resign when asked to do so just hours into the new presidency. The request was a departure from the norm that presidents of both parties have followed to allow the general counsel to serve out their term. Robb’s term was scheduled to run another 10 months.
[BIG CHUNK OF DETAIL MISSING; SEE ARTICLE]
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked last week whether Biden is pursuing a political purge.
“That’s an individual who was not carrying out . . . the objectives of the NLRB, and so they were, they are, no longer in their position,” she said. “We’ll make those decisions as needed.”
Joe Manchin has taken aim at fellow Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris over the administration’s approach to pushing its Covid-19 relief plan. …
Manchin is part of a bipartisan group of senators that has pushed back against the administration’s relief plan, urging that the proposed $1,400 direct payments be targeted toward those in greater need.
“We met with his economic team and they put out what they wanted,” Manchin said in response to Harris. “We want to help everyone that needs help. But if a person’s making $250K or $300K, I don’t think they’re in much needs as a person making $40K or 50K. That’s all I said. We’re going to target.” …
Manchin’s bipartisan group held a call Sunday with Brian Deese, director of the White House National Economic Council, Jeff Zients, Biden’s coronavirus coordinator, and Louisa Terrell, head of White House legislative affairs, telling the administration the relief plan provides too much money to wealthier Americans.
Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig 