By Jason Leopold
Consortium News

A senior legal adviser to the Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection campaign is working behind the scenes to help enact a Missouri state constitutional amendment that critics say would suppress the vote in the key battleground state this November by requiring voters to show proof of citizenship.

Mark “Thor” Hearne, Bush-Cheney’s national counsel in 2004 and now a partner in the St. Louis, Missouri, firm of Lathrop & Gage, has been collaborating with Missouri’s Republican state Rep. Stanley Cox, the sponsor of the constitutional amendment, Cox’s office confirmed this week.

For years, Hearne has been a leading Republican figure demanding stricter voter-identification laws and popularizing claims about widespread voter fraud, although many election experts dismiss such alarms as hyperbole.

During the 2004 campaign, Hearne reportedly worked with White House political adviser Karl Rove on “voter fraud” issues and spearheaded GOP efforts to challenge voter-registration drives by pro-Democratic groups.

According to a posting at his law firm’s Web site, “Hearne traveled to every battleground state and oversaw more than 65 different lawsuits that concerned the conduct of the election.”

Hearne also has shown up as a background figure in the Bush administration’s scandal that erupted over the firing of nine federal prosecutors, some of whom came under White House criticism for not seeking pre-election voter fraud indictments in 2006.

More recently, Hearne has been instrumental in pushing state lawmakers to pass strict voter identification laws in Missouri, New Mexico, Indiana and other states. The Indiana voter-ID law recently was upheld by the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Hearne conducted much of this work through his now defunct organization, the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), which called itself a non-partisan group defending voter rights and seeking to enhance public confidence in the fairness and outcome of elections.

However, an investigation into ACVR by blogger Brad Friedman reported that it concentrated on stricter voter-ID laws. “Thor Hearne helped to write that Indiana law, then Thor Hearne submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of Republican U.S. Congress members in support of it.”

GOP Strategy

Rather than an epidemic of illegal voters casting ballots, some election experts point to a nationwide Republican strategy of exploiting those concerns to depress the voting of low-income and minority citizens and thus boost the chances of GOP candidates.

Joseph Rich, formerly chief of the voting section in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said that under the Bush administration the department “shirked its legal responsibility to protect voting rights.”

“Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections,” Rich wrote in a March 29, 2007, op-ed in The Los Angeles Times.

“From 2001 to 2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in minority and poor communities.”

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US Fair Vote has taken note of the SC Progressive Network‘s Missing Voter Project. Check out the blog here.

The voter engagement initiative is gaining traction in Fairfield County. We hope to use it as a model that can be replicated in other counties. It’s a project with great potential, and we’re excited to be doing hands-on work in rural communities. Stay tuned.

What Obama can’t do for the progressive movement
By Joe Brewer and Evan Frisch
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

This is an exciting time for progressives. An inspiring new approach to politics has mobilized millions of politically ambivalent citizens. There is, for the first time in our lives, a genuine optimism that we can reclaim our country from a corrupt and morally bankrupt extremist group that has hijacked the discourse – and thus the dominant institutions – of the body politic.

And yet, there are dangers far greater than the smears we have seen so far.

As members of the Rockridge Institute, we have been unable to comment on the promise of the Obama campaign, and the perils progressives face in its midst, due to the restriction against partisan activities by 501(c)(3) nonprofits such as ours. The Rockridge Institute closed this week and, so, we are able to comment directly on our analyses of political campaigns. Now that we are free from legal constraints, we feel the need to help our fellow progressives prepare to face the challenges that lie ahead.

First, a note about the Rockridge Institute. This nonpartisan progressive think tank was founded by George Lakoff to shift the political debate through insights and analyses from the cognitive sciences. You can read the announcement declaring the end of the Rockridge Era here. In this article, we call for a new era for progressive politics informed by the opportunities and pitfalls we discovered through our work at this small shop based out of Berkeley, California.

A Wake Up Call for Progressives

Obama has ignited the civic passions of millions with an inspiring call to transcend the politics of the past and deliver on the promise of a more perfect union. His campaign is grounded in the fundamental American values and principles that have brought about progressive changes throughout our history. The success of this approach, though often criticized in the media, exemplifies a basic tenet that Lakoff and the Rockridge Institute have advocated for a long time, namely that voters are motivated by shared values and authenticity.

The Clintons and others criticized Obama when he rightly pointed out “Republicans were the party of ideas,” in recent decades, because they “were challenging conventional wisdom.” At a time when his opponents were trying to represent Obama as too far to the right, they linked these comments to his insightful observation that Ronald Reagan had successfully “changed the trajectory of America,” which they spun as Reagan worship. A key insight missed by the media during that trifle is that conservatives have indeed shifted the common sense of our nation – for the worse. For decades, conservative think tanks have churned out and propagated strategic initiatives that have undermined the founding principles of the United States. Meanwhile, progressives have been stuck in reaction mode, struggling to defend the policies of the past, issue by issue.

It has been an uphill battle to get progressives to recognize the need to (a) challenge the conservative principles behind all of their policies and (b) advance progressive principles to replace them. So, for example, when conservatives call for privatization of the central functions of government, progressives recoil in disgust. But when asked how to respond to privatization and the defunding of successful social programs, progressives remain stuck in the reaction trap and position themselves against the conservative thrust.

When prodded about their stance, they generally lack a proactive progressive response – such as the recognition that government has a positive moral mission to protect and empower its people, which led to a large middle class and our historic prosperity. An expansive middle class doesn’t happen naturally as the conservatives have worked to convince us. (Nor will global climate change just go away.) It takes community understanding of shared prosperity achieved through an infrastructure of government support and protection. But progressives aren’t getting this understanding out there. While the rich get richer and the middle class struggles, while we wait for polluters to voluntarily clean up their act, too many people continue to believe that middle class prosperity and clear skies just happen.

This lack of a coherent progressive vision leads to the creation of many single-issue organizations that simply react to conservative efforts to privatize, defund and dismantle X, Y or Z. Such organizations compete with each other for resources and fail to establish a public understanding of the vital role of government. It may be obvious to the people who work in these organizations, but it’s not the current common sense. Why not? Why aren’t good works enough? Because, everyday for the last 40 years, conservatives have been investing in long-term strategic efforts to undermine public appreciation for the positive and necessary role of government in a thriving society. Even failures, such as the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, enable conservatives to strengthen the perception that we can’t count on government to protect us. Too many people cannot separate Republican governing failures from government itself. And, so, we acquiesce to Republican privatization – instead of strengthening the Federal Emergency Management Administration, we get a transfer of governance to private companies like Halliburton and Blackwater.

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As the 2008 election approaches, few issues have been identified as greater concern to voters than the economy. Actually voting, unfortunately, is not always so simple.

Tough to Vote, Tough to Get By: Economic Insecurity and Barriers to Civic Participation, a free online course organized by Demos and YP4, is now enrolling.

Over six weeks, you’ll cover the following topics:

Not Getting By: A Look at Economic Insecurity
Debt: De facto safety net
Middle class insecurity
Youth economics
Election Reform: Breaking Through Barriers to Voting
Allegations of voter fraud and voter ID laws
Understanding the potential of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA)
Improving access to the polls – the case for Election Day registration

Sign up for the free course here.

This course starts April 21 and runs through May 30; enrollment will be open until April 28.

Corporations, industries, labor unions, governments and other interests spent a record $2.79 billion in 2007 to lobby for favorable policies in Washington, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has calculated. This represents an increase of 7.7 percent, or $200 million, over spending in 2006.

And for every day that Congress was in session, industries and interests spent an average of $17 million to lobby lawmakers and the federal government at large. The drug industry spent more than any other, increasing its lobbying 25 percent last year.

Read the full news release here.

See OpenSecrets.org’s Lobbying Database here.