Senate will vote on repealing Citizens United today

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has set up a procedural vote for September on a constitutional amendment to limit money in politics.

...Reid filed cloture on the motion to proceed to S.J. Res. 19, which is designed to overturn two recent Supreme Court decisions that allowed corporations, labor unions and wealthy individuals to spend more money on federal elections.

The procedural vote on the constitutional amendment is set for 6 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 8.

Here's Bernie Sanders.

One day before the U.S. Senate votes on a constitutional amendment to restore limits on big money in politics, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called the drive to undo Supreme Court decisions that gutted campaign finance laws “the major issue of our time” and said Monday’s showdown vote is “a pivotal moment in American history.”

“Billionaires buying elections is not what our Constitution stands for,” said Sanders. He is a cosponsor of the amendment to reverse Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and later court rulings that let millionaires and billionaires spend virtually unlimited and unregulated sums to sway elections. 

“The major issue of our time is whether the United States of America retains its democratic foundation or whether we devolve into an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires are able to control our political process by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to elect candidates who represent their interests,” Sanders said.

Vermont and 15 other states along with voters and city councils in more than 500 cities and towns already have passed measures supporting a constitutional amendment. A survey last spring conducted by the Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner polling firm found that the Citizens United ruling was opposed by 80 percent of those surveyed. Despite such overwhelming and growing public support, Sanders warned that Republican obstruction tactics could block the Senate from even taking a vote on the proposed amendment to overturn the Supreme Court ruling.

Emphasis above is mine.  That eighty percent unquestionably includes many Republicans, and it puts conservatives like Greg in the thin minority usually reserved for the number of adults in the United States who can read at the level of a fifth-grader.

No correlation between those two groups, I'm sure.

Call your Senators and tell them how you feel.  Watch as the Senate Republicans block the bill (and understand precisely why they do so).  And then observe as the sewage flows -- straight from the Koch Machine -- right out of your teevee for the next couple of months.

It's no exaggeration to say that we cannot begin to fix the other ills in our body politic until we fix this one.  So if you like Republican governance and think we need more of it... you know what to do (sit around and do nothing, like always).  And if you don't, you also know what to do: the exact opposite of what the GOP does.  Except for voting.  Everyone who doesn't like Republican rule and doesn't think it has earned continuance needs to do exactly what they do, just a little bit more and better than them.

I think that can happen, but I'll feel better about it happening once I see some more trend lines.

Update: Senate invokes cloture, 79-18.

The vote was an election year ruse. Senate Republicans have no intention of letting this bill pass. Republicans have no intention of ever letting a constitutional amendment be ratified. What this vote today proves is the power of the issue.

Senate Republicans don’t want to be publicly linked to the Koch brothers before an election. The Kochs are toxic, and Republicans are trying to trick voters into ignoring the right-wing billionaire dollars that are trying to buy the government.

Ted Cruz voted no, John Cornyn voted yes.  And more from TPM.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance commends Sen. Wendy Davis for her courage as it brings you this week's roundup of the best from the Lone Star blogosphere from last week.

Off the Kuff thinks all the statewide candidates should engage in at least one public debate and applauds Sam Houston for pursuing the matter in the AG race.

Libby Shaw, now posting at Daily Kos, is both shocked and pleased that the Houston Chronicle's editorial board spanked Greg Abbott hard for his disingenuous and exaggerated claims about voter fraud in Texas. Texas: "Voter Fraud? What Fraud?"

In a state with a rapidly growing population and the mounting set of challenges associated with that growth, Texas Leftist can't even believe how much money Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick and other TEA-publicans are leaving behind in their refusal to expand Medicaid. Trust me, you won't believe it either.

If you’re in the “coverage gap” – someone who doesn’t have health care because Perry and the GOP declined to expand Medicaid in Texas – and don’t vote, then WCNews at Eye on Williamson says you’re choosing not to have health care coverage: To Expand Medicaid in Texas, Those Without Insurance Must Vote.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wants you to know that cutting Medicaid reimbursements has shut down pharmacies in Texas. Cheap, short-sighted, heartless Republicans are to blame.

The disclosure by Wendy Davis in her forthcoming memoir of her pregnancy terminations pushed a reset button in the Texas governor's race. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs says that whether it more greatly mobilizes her support or her opposition is something still to be determined.

Neil at All People Have Value said you should consider helping the Davis/Van de Putte ticket even if you are not a political person and if you have great skepticism about Democrats and our political system. The Abbott/Patrick ticket is a very extreme ideological team. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

Egberto Willies has video of Texas comptroller candidate Mike Collier, and Texpatriate has an update on the race for Texas attorney general, between Sam Houston and Ken Paxton.

Bluedaze reports that Range Resources, a member of the Big Gas Mafia, is SLAPPing the hell out of the First Amendment, and Texas Vox has more on the Earth, Wind, and Fire energy summit in Dallas this October.

Dos Centavos noted that Greg Abbott declined to appear at UT-Dallas at the students' invitation, then showed up on campus and kept students locked out.

================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Socratic Gadfly has some thoughts on Wendy Davis' disclosure and its political fallout.

Somervell County Salon is thinking about Rick Perry's wife, Anita, and when she came out as pro-choice.

Juanita Jean sets a Republican straight on Tom DeLay's criminal record.

Carol Morgan says it's time to bust the GOP prostitution ring in DC and in Texas.

Grits for Breakfast reflects on Rick Perry's criminal justice vetoes.

Lone Star Ma reminds us that Texas law protects a woman's right to breastfeed in any place where she would otherwise be allowed to be.

Nonsequiteuse blazes with fury at the "Greg Abbott crushes Houston Votes" story.

Texas Clean Air Matters wants a clean energy plan that rewards Texas, not Wyoming coal interests.

BOR issues the #TacosOrBeer Challenge.

The Texas Election Law Blog dismisses the lesser arguments in favor of voter ID.

Sunday Funnies

A strategic retreat

The DMN nails Obama hard for quitting on immigration this year.

Sometimes the White House has a strategy. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Turns out, it doesn’t much matter. Either way, President Barack Obama can find a way to tick off pretty much everyone.

Just over a week ago, he invited all kinds of derision by conceding that when it comes to military action in Syria to deal with the brutal Islamic State terror group, “We don’t have a strategy yet.”

On immigration, he did have a strategy. By the end of summer, he would roll out executive actions to overcome stalemate and obstruction in Congress. “In the absence of action by Congress, I’m going to do what I can do within the legal constraints of my office,” he said Friday in Wales.

The next morning, this morning, he abandoned that approach.

The details never came into focus. The White House kept playing for time, stalling on the fine print even until Saturday’s bombshell.

In order to mollify a few Senate Blue Dogs, the president has capitulated.  It's losing the war in order to hope to win a couple of battles.  It could not be more in keeping with his profile as a weak leader.  I'd like to say I am not surprised he chickened out, but I have to say that I am.  I can only imagine how frustrated Latinos must feel.

I'll outsource my remaining disgust to Jorge Ramos.

Back in 2012, Ramos brought up that first broken promise about getting immigration reform done his first year as president. Ramos pressed Obama to admit he didn’t keep his promise, but Obama insisted that he had to switch priorities to deal with the global financial crisis.

Ramos responded, “You promised that. A promise is a promise. And with all due respect, you didn’t keep that promise.” Obama maintained he still wanted to get it done, he just needs cooperation from Congress first.

If the GOP wants to impeach Obama after they take control next year, I'm going to find it difficult to stand in their way.  I always thought Joe Biden would make a better president than Hillary Clinton anyway.

Update: More here and here.

Davis discloses medically necessary abortion in memoir

Your Friday evening bombshell.

Sen. Wendy Davis, in her memoir due out next week, discloses the most personal of stories preceding her nationally marked fight against tighter abortion restrictions: a decision she and her then-husband made 17 years ago to end a much-wanted pregnancy.

It's very candid and very emotional.

Davis, in a copy of the book obtained by the San Antonio Express-News, wrote that her unborn third daughter had an acute brain abnormality. She said doctors told her the syndrome would cause the baby to suffer and likely was incompatible with life.

After getting several medical opinions and feeling the baby they had named Tate Elise “tremble violently, as if someone were applying an electric shock to her” in the womb, she said the decision was clear.

“She was suffering,” Davis wrote.

The unborn baby's heart was “quieted” by her doctor, and their baby was gone. She was delivered by cesarean section in spring 1997, the memoir says.

Davis wrote that she and her then-husband, Jeff, spent time with Tate the next day and had her baptized. They cried, took photographs and said their good-byes, she wrote, and Tate's lifeless body was taken away the following day.

“An indescribable blackness followed. It was a deep, dark despair and grief, a heavy wave that crushed me, that made me wonder if I would ever surface. ... And when I finally did come through it, I emerged a different person. Changed. Forever changed,” Davis wrote.

The issue of choice has once again laid bare the seething, boiling misogyny of the extreme right.   If the article's comments are any indication, that is.  Mark Jones gets it right for once.

Rice University political scientist Mark Jones said he doesn't expect the revelation to lose any votes for Davis, since he said it's a relative small proportion of voters who oppose abortion in cases of severe fetal abnormality.

“The group that will be most bothered by her having an abortion of a baby with a severe fetal abnormality is a group that wasn't going to vote for her anyway,” he said.

“The positive side of it for her is it humanizes her, and also makes it a little tricky for opponents to attack her on the abortion issue because now, it not only is a political issue for her, but it's a personal issue,” Jones said.

It energizes her core support, and it energizes her core opposition (to the extent that they could be any more angry and bitter and unhinged).  In this Kos diary you find some anecdotal evidence that there are Democrats who weren't supporting Davis before because of her stand on choice, and have, like conservatives, hardened their hearts to a greater degree with this revelation.  This is going to be your news of the day, all weekend.  And the court of public opinion will render a verdict on the political influence it gives both sides in less than 60 days.

Update: More from Socratic Gadfly, and this from Vox.

Talking about abortion is rare — but the actual experience isn't. More than one in every five pregnancies —  21 percent, excluding miscarriages —  are terminated, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit research organization that supports abortion rights. Each year, 1.7 percent of American women between 15 and 44 have an abortion.

There are literally millions of women who share a dark secret.  They are bonded in their... whatever emotions you wish to assign to their experience (a tricky game, for certain).  I stand in support of those women who are the only ones that can understand the heartache, the social stigma, and the consequences of their experience.  All they should receive from all of the rest of us is unequivocal, unconditional support of their choice, whichever choice they made.

But as long as we live in a state and a country that believes there is an invisible man in the clouds watching every thing you do -- and judging you for potential admission into his afterlife paradise -- then his minions in this realm will keep taking on the judgmental part as their personal privilege.

Fuck those assholes. We ain't going back in time to the days when coathangers and pennyroyal tea were the only choices women had.

More updates: Greg Abbott responds, and the UT poll results from last summer are worth repeating.

"Overall, 76% of Texans thought a woman should be allowed to have an abortion when her life was in danger, and 57% thought that a woman should be able to obtain an abortion when there was a strong chance of a serious fetal abnormality."

Those numbers include a lot of Republicans.

The battle for the US Senate, updated

It's been almost six weeks since my last update, and I am not as enthusiastic about the Democrats maintaining control of the upper chamber as I was then.  Nate Silver has something to do with that.

The FiveThirtyEight Senate model is launching (September 3). We’ll be rolling it out in stages, with additional features, functionality and further methodological detail. We’ll also be unveiling our new set of pollster ratings and publicly releasing our database of all the polls used to calculate them. So there’s a lot more to come.

But if you’re looking for a headline, we have two. First, Republicans are favored to take the Senate, at least in our view; the FiveThirtyEight forecast model gives them a 64 percent chance of doing so.

The reasons for the GOP advantage are pretty straightforward. Midterm elections are usually poor for the president’s party, and the Senate contests this year are in states where, on average, President Obama won just 46 percent of the vote in 2012.¹

Democrats are battling a hangover effect in these states, most of which were last contested in 2008, a high-water mark for the party. On the basis of polling and the other indicators our model evaluates, Republicans are more likely than not to win the six seats they need to take over the Senate. This isn’t news, exactly; the same conditions held way back in March.

An equally important theme is the high degree of uncertainty around that outcome. A large number of states remain competitive, and Democrats could easily retain the Senate. It’s also possible that the landscape could shift further in Republicans’ direction. Our model regards a true Republican wave as possible: It gives the party almost a 25 percent chance of finishing with 54 or more Senate seats once all the votes are counted.²

There is much more and deeper analysis at the link.  The other factor clouding my optimism is the Brothers Koch and their massive piles of campaign money coming to the Republicans' rescue.

The secretive political network of conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch has aired more than 43,900 television ads this election cycle in an attempt to help Republicans take control of the Senate in the upcoming November election.

That amounts to nearly one out of every 10 TV ads in the 2014 battle for the Senate according to a new Center for Public Integrity analysis of data provided by Kantar Media/CMAG, an advertising tracking service, covering spending from Jan. 1, 2013, through Aug. 31, 2014.

The total includes the six most active nonprofit groups in the Koch brothers’ coalition: Americans for Prosperity, the American Energy Alliance, Concerned Veterans for America, the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, Generation Opportunity and the 60 Plus Association.

Their prominence has led to denunciations by Democrats, and praise from Republicans, as they’ve bombarded incumbent lawmakers with negative ads and exulted conservative challengers. No other right-leaning coalition has been as active.

Didi I mention that Harry Reid has called a Senate vote for Monday, September 8 on revoking Citizens United?  Now's the time to call your Senator, especially if their names are John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.  That's after you sign the petition and send them a personal e-mail (find them at the link in this paragraph).

Koch-connected groups reportedly intend to spend $290 million to help Republicans make gains in Congress this November. Thus far, Kantar Media/CMAG spending estimates indicate the groups have invested at least $14.5 million. This amount is undeniably a conservative estimate, as it includes only TV ad buys — not production costs or expenditures related to radio ads, online ads, direct mail, canvassers or other activities.

These so-called “dark money” nonprofit groups are not required to disclose their funders to federal election regulators, unlike candidates, parties, political action committees and super PACs.

And although election-related advocacy can’t be the “primary purpose” of these groups, they’ve nonetheless established themselves among the nation’s most powerful political forces.

The dark money is gushing into our democratic republic like a pipeline leak into our water supply, fouling everything it touches.

Through the end of August, this spending spree has included about 8,600 ads in North Carolina, 6,900 ads in Louisiana, 5,800 ads in Iowa, 4,900 ads in Michigan, 4,700 ads in Arkansas, 4,600 ads in Colorado, 3,600 ads in Alaska and 2,400 ads in Oregon, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of Kantar Media/CMAG data.

And it's only a drop in the bucket of what's to come.  We'll be immune to much of it in Texas, since Cornyn's challenger, David Alameel -- deep-pocketed, but too weak progressively speaking -- has yet to make a difference in his race.  But dark money in Texas is definitely a concern.  You may recall that Rick Perry vetoed a disclosure bill that came out of the last legislative session.

Let's review again the Senate races that will tip the scales.

In three states currently held by Democrats - Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia - Republican victories are all but certain, leaving the GOP only three pickups to wrestle control from the Democrats.

In North Carolina, New Hampshire, Arkansas, Colorado, Alaska and Louisiana, Republican challengers threaten to knock off Democratic incumbents. Three more races - Iowa, Georgia and Michigan - feature open races where the Republican candidate stands a good chance, offering nine possibilities in total.

It's not all about the Republicans on the offensive, however. While far fewer than the Democrats, Republicans still have a few seats they'll have to vigorously defend: Kentucky, Georgia and, to a lesser extent, Kansas.

To a greater extent, Kansas.  And that's despite the KSSOS ruling yesterday that the Democrat who quit earlier in the week must remain on the ballot.  The Republicans are officially panicked that one of their locks is now a tossup.

I also think Mitch McConnell is toast, and Michelle Nunn is all but a prohibitive favorite today.  Mark Begich, despite this recent misstep, has run an extraordinarily good race -- he's effectively distanced himself from Obama in deep red Alaska -- and New Hampshire is smart enough not to elect that carpetbagger Scott Brown.  I don't think Michigan is flipping, either; they have a deeply unpopular Republican governor and a lousy economy, and that state is still blue.

Iowa is a real horse race and will be all the way to the end, and the other states I will watch to see if the GOP can get the three they need are North Carolina (Kay Hagen, D inc.), Arkansas (David Pryor, D inc.), Colorado (Mark Udall, D inc.), and Louisiana (Mary Landrieu, D inc.).

Hagen and Landrieu aren't running away from Obama; they need boosted African American turnout in their states to get past the finish line.  Pryor seems to be both savvy and lucky.  Udall's contest is see-sawing back and forth between he and his challenger, the odious Cory Gardner, and it has many moving parts, among them women's issues and immigration.  Of the four Democratic incumbents, Udall's race is the closest IMHO.  If Mitch McConnell rights the ship, Kansas and Georgia hold, Iowa falls, and one of CO, LA, NC and AR go red, the GOP gains the narrowest of majorities.

Still a tall order but within their grasp.

But if McConnell loses, Nunn wins, and Iowa stays blue then the Republicans have to win all four.  I don't see that happening, but it depends, across the board and across the country, on weak Democratic turnout defying somewhat historical odds and turning back the red wave.  We'll only know more about that as Election Day draws close.

Update: A few third party candidates might have a say in the matter.