Can a former coal miner win an election against a millionaire? Just ask Clyde McKnight.
A retired coal miner from southern West Virginia, he worked for more than 30 years in the mines and currently serves as the South Central AFL-CIO president. McKnight defeated millionaire and former gubernatorial candidate Melvin Kessler in the Democratic primary by a razor-thin margin of 52 votes this past Tuesday, a win in large part to the grassroots efforts of working people.
A former coal miner beating out a millionaire for a state representative seat was just one of the success stories in West Virginia’s primary election. More than one-third of the 100 candidates that the West Virginia AFL-CIOendorsed this year were union members. And they’re enjoying a high success rate –of the 34 union members who ran in the state primary on Tuesday, 30 won their races.
Many of these candidates see elected office as an extension of the work they are already doing within their unions to give back to their communities.
Drawing on his experience in the mines, McKnight campaigned on a platform of investing in affordable energy and bringing back American manufacturing. “As a coal miner, I understand the unique struggles we have in West Virginia,” McKnight said.
American manufacturing was built on affordable energy, on coal. We can’t afford gas prices at almost $4 per gallon.
The debt-ceiling deal and the Supercommittee were unnecessary exercises in political posturing, but they were also a game with real consequences for real people. Now the House Republicans have used the opportunity to push broad and devastating cuts to federal programs.
Yesterday, House Republicans pushed through (by a 218-199 vote) a bill to override the “sequester” in the debt ceiling deal and instead cut around $240 billion from domestic programs, with big impacts for the most vulnerable. Meant to replace the (smaller) defense cuts mandated by the debt ceiling deal, this bill really shows the House GOP’s priorities: they are 100% unwilling to ask anyone for any more tax revenue and deeply uninterested in maintaining programs that help keep families afloat and healthy.
Question: Are the House Republicans pursuing this ideological crusade in defiance of public opinion? Answer: Do you even have to ask? As Jonathan Bernstein notes, either they don’t believe what the polls say about what their constituents want, or they don’t care.
Instead, let’s talk about the things that would be cut under this bill:
• The American Community Survey, a part of the census which gives the largest-scale picture available of the what and where of poverty, housing and income.
• The Community Services Block Grant, a fund that support programs for children and seniors like foster care and Meals on Wheels.
• Food stamps, which would see 2 million lose their benefits entirely.
• Affordable Care Act subsidies, resulting in some 350,000 people losing coverage.
• Free and reduced-price school lunches.
We’ve said all along that there’s no reason for us to be here, except that congressional Republicans turned the routine debt-ceiling vote into a manufactured crisis. Now the House Republicans are trying to take advantage of that crisis to cripple our ability to help working-class people, retirees and kids. It’s appalling, but not surprising. We hope the Senate will refuse to join in with these devastating cuts.
On June 5th, voters in Wisconsin will go to the polls in an historic recall election, where they will decide who will serve as Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and State Senator in several districts for the rest of the current term. Nearly all the elected officials targeted by recall, who are in danger of being removed from office on the June 5th ballot, have something else in common: past or present affiliation with the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.
At the center of the firestorm is Governor Scott Walker, who earned the ire of Wisconsin voters for his relentless drive to restrict collective bargaining rights for 350,000 state workers, as well as his negligence toward Wisconsin’s job crisis. But before he became a household name, Walker served in the State Assembly from 1993-2002, where he was an ALEC member from 1995-1998.
During that time, Walker worked with fellow ALEC politician Governor Tommy Thompson to pass a model “Truth in Sentencing Bill,” which was developed by ALEC’s now-shuttered Public Safety and Elections Task Force. The bill required all criminal defendants to serve “no less than 85 percent” of the sentence imposed. For those convicted of violent crime, the bill called for them to serve 100 percent of the sentence imposed by the court; no parole, and no chance for early release.
This bill was developed specifically to benefit an ALEC member corporation, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which for many years housed overflow Wisconsin inmates in other states. CCA was on ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force at the time.
Walker’s Lieutenant Governor, former TV anchor Rebecca Kleefisch, has not previously held office, and therefore has not officially been an ALEC member. However, the three Senators targeted for recall on June 5th are all members of ALEC task forces, as was Sen. Pam Galloway, who was targeted for recall before she resigned in March.
Sen. Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau), like Gov. Walker was a member of the ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force, which helped develop model Stand Your Ground and voter suppression bills. He also served as ALEC State Chairman.
Sen. Terry Moulton (R-Chippewa Falls) was a member of ALEC’s Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force, which developed model bills that cut state worker pensions and gave tax handouts to corporations.
Sen. Van Wanggard (R-Racine) was also a member of ALEC’s Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force.
When we talk about the uprising in Wisconsin, we frequently talk about the way Walker and his allies have attacked workers’ rights, or ignored the jobs crisis. But folks are also upset by the idea that these politicians just don’t have their best interests in mind, in matters ranging from voting rights and public safety to the regulation of drinking water.
As the records show, Walker, Fitzgerald, Wanggard, and Moulton are affiliated with an organization that seeks to impose with narrow, corporate, profit-oriented goals into the laws that govern our communities. All of them have sat down at a table where corporations and legislators are equals and developed pieces of model legislation, many of which have become the law of the land in Wisconsin.
They are all subject to recall on June 5th in part because the people of Wisconsin want true legislators, true public servants; not just human delivery systems for ALEC’s cookie-cutter, corporate-backed agenda.
The Census was good enough for Thomas Jefferson. But apparently not so for today’s House Republicans. Yesterday, they passed, by 232 to 190, a measure to cut the American Community Survey, conducted annually as part of the U.S. Census.
Republicans “attacked the survey as an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, according to Michael McAuliff at The Huffington Post. McAuliff notes that none other than left-leaning, government-loving George W. Bush in 2005 expanded the Census survey from every 10 years to an annual survey of 250,000 households, “making the survey more manageable, cheaper and more timely.”
As McAuliff reports: “Rep. Chaka Fattah, who ran the floor debate for Democrats, seemed especially vexed.”
“We’ve been doing surveys in the long form since 1790 as a nation,” Fattah said, referring to the time when Thomas Jefferson oversaw the census. “It’s critically important. The idea that we’re going to leave the greatest country in the world with less information about the condition of communities and of our families—and that we’re going to do that appropriately—defies logic.”
The good news is that the Democratically controlled Senate is too smart to pass such a dumb bill.
But House Republicans weren’t done. David Waldman at Daily Kos sums up the other stellar moves yesterday by House Republicans (our letter of opposition to this bill that we sent to House members is here.):
The House snuck in a few suspension bills early on, before diving back into the Commerce, Justice, Science appropriations bill. It was another marathon session, and by late last night they debated some 20-plus proposed amendments. Oh, let’s see…there was one prohibiting the use of funds for defending court challenges to the Affordable Care Act. And one to prohibit the use of funds to litigate against any of state on behalf of the National Labor Relations Board pertaining to secret ballot union elections. And one to prohibit the use of funds by the Department of Justice to bring any action against any state for implementation of a state law requiring voter identification. And of course, one to prohibit the use of funds to implement a section of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which allows miniature horses to be used as service animals. Gotta have that.
Meanwhile, America’s unemployed workers struggle to find jobs in an economy in which there are more than three jobless workers for every one job, yet these are the issues congressional Republicans are occupying themselves with.
What do you think? Should House Republicans focus on miniature horses and Census surveys?
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and her allies in the state legislature are seeking to use millions of dollars intended for struggling homeowners to pay for prison construction and tax cuts instead, echoing a policy put in place earlier this year in Wisconsin by Governor Scott Walker.
Remember the $26 billion foreclosure settlement, the one agreed upon by the five biggest banks and 49 state Attorneys General? As one of the hardest hit states, Arizona is getting $1.6 billion, as well as an additional $97.7 million to be overseen by the office of Attorney General Tom Horne, to be used for “housing counselors, legal aid, hotlines, and to help stressed homeowners with their payments.”
Two main things to understand about these funds: they are wildly insufficient given the scale of the problem, but all the same they are extremely crucial. In March, Arizona had the highest foreclosure rate in the country, according to RealtyTrac, with 9,497 foreclosures. If any state needs all the help it can get when it comes to homeowner education, assistance, and relief, it’s Arizona.
Even so, Governor Brewer and Republican state legislators want to siphon $50 million from those funds to “relieve pressure on the budget.” So in other words, use money intended to help homeowners for…other things.
Lawmakers say the money amounts to a pricey outreach and education fund. It won’t hurt to take half of it, House Speaker Andy Tobin said.
“We’re using the funds to relieve the pressure on the budget,” said Tobin, R-Paulden. Those stresses range from a push to replace welfare dollars lost to federal budget cuts to prison construction, he said.
How is this justified? You can thank a loophole in the settlement language, which says the funds can be used “to compensate the state for costs resulting from the alleged unlawful conduct of the defendants.” Arizona lawmakers like House Speaker Tobin are claiming that since foreclosure fraud hurt homeowners, which in turn hurt tax revenues and by extension the state budget, they can use the money for whatever they damn well please.
They can make this logical jump without acknowledging a.) that the big banks committed any actual fraud, or b.) that maybe Gov. Brewer’s $538 million tax handouts to businesses has anything to do with budget problems.
In February, Walker and Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen decided to use $25.6 million of Wisconsin’s share of the foreclosure fraud settlement to plug holes in his state budget. For justification, he used the very same loophole in the settlement language:
“Just like communities and individuals have been affected, the foreclosure crisis has had an effect on the state of Wisconsin, in terms of unemployment. . . . This will offset that damage done to the state of Wisconsin,” Walker said.
A week later, Missouri followed suit, taking $40 million from their share for the state’s general fund. Ohio decided to allocate $75 million meant for homeowner assistance to actually demolish vacant homes. South Carolina legislators insidiously pushed for using $31 million of settlement funds for corporate tax breaks.
Of all the horrific policies that have come out of the offices of governors like Walker in the past two years, this is one of the worst – and the most under-reported. With Walker and Brewer giving out huge tax handouts to businesses, cutting services and education, and then dipping into foreclosure fraud assistance to pay for their bad decisions, they are no different than a modern day Bonnie and Clyde. Robbery in multiple steps is still robbery, even if you’re a governor.
David Waldman @KagroX Total cloture motions from World War I thru end of Reagan admin: 385. Total filed since Republicans lost the Senate in 2006 elections: 359.
Today, voters in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Indiana will go to the polls to nominate candidates and make their voices heard on certain issues. All three states have unique races that will reverberate far beyond their borders.
North Carolina. Voters will choose Democratic and Republican nominees for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Treasurer, and other statewide positions. With Governor Bev Purdue retiring after her first term, former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory is expected to become the Republican nominee, while the Democratic slot is between Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton and former-Rep. Bob Etheridge.
But the most interesting development is actually a ballot amendment, known as “Amendment 1,” which would add a ban of same-sex marriage to the state constitution. North Carolina already has a ban in state law, and Amendment 1 goes further to bar the state from recognizing any legal domestic union other than marriage.
Director of Personnel Linda Coleman is seeking to succeed Dalton as Lt. Governor, and State Treasurer Janet Cowell is running for reelection.
Indiana. Hoosier voters are expected to make history tonight in the Republican Primary for U.S. Senate. Six-term incumbent Dick Lugar is trailing Tea Party primary opponent Richard Murdouck. If Lugar loses, he’d be the first six-term incumbent to lose in a primary since 1952.
Some are also looking at this race to gauge if the Tea Party will be as big a factor in the 2012 election as they were in 2010. Democrats are also watching: polling shows that a (relatively) moderate Lugar would easily beat any Democratic challenger in the general election, while a Tea-flavored Murdouck nomination would result in a tied race with expected Democratic nominee Rep. Joe Donnelly. So who will win – the Tea Party firebrand or the safe pick?
Wisconsin. And now, our feature presentation. After Wisconsinites turned in nearly a million signatures to trigger recall elections, May 8 was the date set by the state’s elections board to choose the Democratic nominee to take on Gov. Scott Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, and four of their allies in the State Senate.
As we wrote last month, the Wisconsin Republican Party decided to “protest” the recalls by running “Fake Democrats” as primary opponents. Scott Walker has not expressed any disapproval about this tactic, even though it ends up costing taxpayers more money. Scott Fitzgerald, the Senate Majority Leader and recall target, even suggested to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Republican voters should crossover just to meddle in the Democratic primary. “There’s nothing to keep the Republicans from messing around,” he said.
The race to take on Walker is largely between Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk. Mahlon Mitchell, the president of the Wisconsin Association of Firefighters, is expected to be nominated as Democratic challenger to Lt. Gov. Kleefisch. Firefighters and police officers gave a boost to the Wisconsin revolt when they joined the historic protests in Madison against Walker’s collective bargaining ban, even though they had been exempted from it.
