Daily Tribune (Mount Pleasant, Tex.), Vol. 141, No. 137, Ed. 1 Wednesday, August 12, 2015 Page: 4 of 10
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4A • Mount Pleasant Daily Tribune • www.dailytribune.net • Wednesday, August 12, 2015
Opinion
Another View
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TRUMPTOWERS
Voting Rights Act limps on anniversary
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Whitaker
Obama’s EPA regs will be challenged
- San Antonio Express-News
MALLARD FILMORE ®° by Bruce Tinsley
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Consolidated with Mount Pleasant Times
and Times Review on July 31, 1972.
1 hose who view things through
a religious prism got plenty
to contemplate last week
when, on the eve of the 50th
uring the 2008 presidential
campaign, Sen. Barack
Obama
anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, the
U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a
reliably conservative court, ruled Texas’
Texas hurt by Ex-Im
Bank’s demise
Bill Whitaker is the opinion editor
for the Waco Tribune-Herald.
controversial voter ID
law violated the historic
act, discriminating
against blacks and
Hispanics.
And like so many
things of divine cast,
the ruling was open to
diverse interpretation.
State Attorney General
Ken Paxton called it a
“victory” and said the
law remained in effect;
former attorney general
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to obtain required birth records.
No wonder Paxton was grateful. Had
the court concurred state legislators in
2011 acted to intentionally discriminate,
Texas might have wound up back on a
list requiring all our voting laws pass
federal muster first. And evidence of
intentional discrimination is strong.
Amendments in 2011 that would have
relaxed document costs and expanded
office hours to process voter documents
for poor working stiffs were tabled. Were
state legislators discriminatory or simply
careless in regard to Texas voters’ rights?
It’s one or the other.
That all conceded, the appeals court
made it clear the law nonetheless “has a
discriminatory effect” and it sent the case
back to the lower court to effect solutions.
That should be interesting, given the
intellectual vigor with which U.S. District
Judge Neiva Gonzales Ramos lambasted
state lawmakers in her own compelling
2014 ruling — required reading for all
voter ID apologists.
Whatever solution Judge Ramos does
recommend (and expanding the sorts of
acceptable identification was mentioned
by the appeals court), I advise state
officials to accept it and move on. If
mostly white Republicans are to repair
frayed relations with minorities —
particularly those who are a part of our
state’s fastest-growing demographic —
they should accept all reasonable fixes to
this badly designed law and forge ahead.
Appealing this is legal lunacy.
And for anyone living in a cave, this
has nothing to do with the principle of
showing a photo ID. No one argues that
aspect. Go back in your cave.
Last week’s ruling proves something
else: the need for a pre-clearance
provision in the Voting Rights Act. Yes, a
U.S. Supreme Court majority gutted just
such a provision in 2013 but only because
that provision relied on half-century-
old standards. The high court correctly
invited Congress to update and revise.
Fair enough.
Yet Congress is dragging its feet. Is
this because fixing it doesn’t benefit the
Republican Party in the short run?
The pre-clearance provision might seem
onerous to some but it actually prevents
costly, time-consuming lawsuits like the
one we just witnessed. It allows a federal
court or the Department of Justice to
screen anything from shifting precinct
lines to a state voting law to ensure it
doesn’t discriminate against people of
color.
Unfortunately, little appetite exists for
revamping the pre-clearance provision
of the Voting Rights Act. Earlier this
summer, amidst all the fighting over
Confederate battle flags on the 150th
anniversary of the Civil War’s end,
Democrats and black lawmakers on
Capitol Hill threatened to hold up critical
spending bills minus an agreement by
Republicans to fully restore the Voting
Rights Act — hardly the way to get the
nation’s business done.
Given that some Republicans now
threaten to shut down the government
over Planned Parenthood funding, maybe
Voting Rights Act advocates should
persevere in their tactics. After all, they
press a principle just as sacred as life, at
least in our country — the right to vote.
And as our readers regularly remind
us, many Americans gave their lives to
protect that right. Surely, those lives were
sacred, too.
5 I GON
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John Calvin “Cal” Thomas is an
American syndicated columnist, pundit,
author and radio commentator. Email Cal
Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com.
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Tina Vincent, Business Manager
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3
immediately, then eventually.
The EPA regulations are likely to reach
the Supreme Court. In 2007, while the
court did grant authority to the EPA to
regulate carbon emissions (Mass. v. EPA),
it said it was not giving the agency an
unrestricted license to do what it wants.
It ruled that costs and outcomes must
be taken into consideration as part of its
regulatory mandates. The court decision
was one of two rebukes it has delivered
to the EPA in the last two years for
exceeding its statutory powers.
As the court noted, “When an
agency claims to discover in a long-
extant statute an unheralded power to
regulate a significant portion of the
American economy, we typically greet
its announcement with a measure of
skepticism. We expect Congress to speak
clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency
decisions of vast economic and political
significance.”
These are bound to be the issues should
the EPA regulations again reach the
court, as they should.
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bankrupting the coal industry never
waned. On Monday he announced that
the Environmental Protection Agency
will impose new regulations throughout
the country limiting carbon emissions
from power plants powered by fossil
fuels. Several states are challenging
the EPA rules “that aim to cut carbon
emissions in the power sector by 32
percent.” EPA Administrator Gina
McCarthy, testifying before Congress,
was asked about claims that the new EPA
plan would affect global warming by a
measly 0.01 degrees Celsius, to which
she replied, “I’m not disagreeing that
this action in and of itself will not make
all the difference we need to address
climate action, but if we don’t take action
domestically, we will never get started. ...”
The Washington Post, which believes
that the Earth is warming and humans
are responsible, acknowledged that the
regulations have “shortcomings,” but
endorsed them because they set a good
example for the rest of the world.
So these regulations are likely to cost
jobs, raise electricity prices and have a
minimal effect on global temperatures,
but they will set a good example? Is that
the new policy standard?
Among many reasons Americans
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should be suspicious of this “climate
change putsch,” as a Wall Street Journal
editorial labeled it, is that McCarthy has
refused to release the “secret science”
her agency used when drafting the new
regulations. This “most transparent
administration in U.S. history” has now
added to the secret side deals with Iran,
secret scientific “evidence,” which may
not be evidence at all. Cults do that by
suppressing any information and facts
contrary to the imposed orthodoxy.
After the initial fusillade from critics,
the president fired back, arguing that
addressing “climate change” is a moral
obligation and a matter of national
security. It would be helpful to know
the president’s standard for determining
what is moral and what is immoral,
especially since he has said nothing about
those Planned Parenthood videos in
which high-level employees are shown
explaining how the organization can
abort babies in ways that preserve body
parts. And there is ISIS, which continues
to operate and appears not to have
been “diminished and degraded,” as the
president promised it would. Is ISIS not a
bigger national security issue?
The president might have more
political success and even attract
Republican and conservative support had
he framed this in a different way. Instead
of attacking coal plants and other users of
fossil fuel that have produced electricity
and elevated the American lifestyle,
he should have launched a campaign
to deprive terrorists and Islamic
fundamentalists of oil revenue. Instead of
picking the controversial “climate change”
horse to ride roughshod over Congress
and a skeptical public, the president
might have embraced an alternative
fuel agenda that would have achieved
his desired end without the crushing
blows that almost certainly will impact
states where fossil fuels have provided
jobs that probably will evaporate, if not
ongress must reauthorize
the Export-Import Bank, an
agency that has served Texas
exports well, when it returns
from summer recess.
The agency’s charter expired June 30.
It has helped U.S. companies sell their
products abroad. And though some
big national companies benefit greatly,
most of the bank’s transactions have
been for smaller businesses. Between
2007 and 2014, the bank helped 1,629
Texas exporters sell about $26 billion
in goods; more than half of these were
small businesses. Congress adjourned
for the summer without reauthorizing
Ex-Im, as it is also known.
The Senate included its reauthorization
in its version of a highway bill. The
House stripped it out. The bank has
become a target of the tea party, which
characterizes the bank as corporate
welfare. And it’s true that corporations
such as Boeing, Caterpillar and GE
have benefited greatly in securing
the larger dollar amounts, but last we
looked, big businesses employ a lot
of Americans, and their competitors
overseas have government outfits that
are often even more generous than the
U.S. agency. Without reauthorization,
these big companies will be at a
competitive disadvantage. Last month,
the retired head of Boeing said the firm
is considering moving some of its work
overseas if the Ex-Im isn’t reauthorized
this year. That means the loss of U.S. jobs.
But most of the agency’s transactions
are for smaller businesses, in any
case. And these will be at a greater
disadvantage overseas without Ex-
Im. Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Dallas,
chairman of the House Financial
Services, is a leading critic. He didn’t let
reauthorization out of his committee.
The critics really have intrinsic
objections to government involvement
in matters that they believe should
purely be market-driven. Perhaps in
some ideal world this makes sense,
but the world in which U.S. companies
compete features agencies overseas that
more actively help their companies
sell both internally and abroad. The
objections are highly selective. We’re
certain a careful look at the U.S. tax
code will show examples of “corporate
welfare” that could command more
attention. The kind of help Ex-Im has
provided — loan guarantees, direct
loans and other means to help U.S.
firms sell overseas — is less corporate
welfare than a leveling of the playing
field. Notably, the bank has generated
$7 billion worth of revenue over costs
during the last two decades, and the
default rate on these loans is negligible.
Congress should reauthorize Ex-Im.
[INjsuts“62-
said: “If
somebody wants to
build a coal power
plant, they can. It’s just
that it will bankrupt
them ...” He added that
under his now defeated
Cap and Trade bill,
“electricity rates would
necessarily skyrocket.”
In 2010, Cap
and Trade died in
the Senate, but the
president’s goal of
Greg Abbott, who defended the law in
district court before becoming governor,
saw the situation differently and was
hardly so pleased with the ruling.
Granted, the court made its decision
in a way palatable to conservatives. It
dismissed the argument, embraced by a
lower court, that all the hoops in expense,
logistics and bureaucracy that the poor,
elderly and many minorities must jump
through to get a state-sanctioned photo
ID amount to a subtle, updated “poll tax.”
And it refused to conclude, as the
lower court did, that Republican state
lawmakers crafted the voter ID law in
2011 to intentionally discriminate, even
though we have a rich history of it in
Texas and evidence of in-person voting
fraud is outrageously scant. The court
almost too happily noted legislators
this year even passed a law to defray
or eliminate costs originally viewed as
onerous to poor people diligently trying
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Davis, Marcia. Daily Tribune (Mount Pleasant, Tex.), Vol. 141, No. 137, Ed. 1 Wednesday, August 12, 2015, newspaper, August 12, 2015; Mount Pleasant, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1428720/m1/4/?q=kitchen: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Mount Pleasant Public Library.