After a marathon filibuster which was technically broken on procedural grounds just before midnight, pandaemonium breaks out and abortion bill still fails even after Texas Senate Republicans tried to fudge the clock and give themselves more time to pass the bill. Amazing story.
This isn’t terribly surprising if you’ve been watching the New York City Mayor’s race. But NBC/WSJ just released a poll showing that former Rep. Anthony Weiner, the butt of so many jokes from the NY/DC media set is now the frontrunner in the race, having displaced Christine Quinn, who for most of the last year has carried a Hillary/2008 mantle of inevitability. Read More
Texas is on the brink of passing a law which would effectively close most clinics providing abortion services in the state. But state Sen. Wendy Davis of Fort Worth is currently filibustering the bill. She started this morning just after 11 am and if she can make it through midnight she will effectively derail the bill since that will be the end of the current 30 day session of the state legislature.
President Obama won over no one at Fox with today’s climate change speech.
Buy in now because we’re seeing the start of a bull market for voter ID laws. After Texas said Voter ID or bust this afternoon, now North Carolina is ready to push through it’s voter ID law too.
Texas AG says now that the Court has redeemed his state from the Voting Rights Act, bring on the voter IDs!
South Carolina Attorney General thanks Supreme Court for overturning “an extraordinary intrusion into state sovereignty.”
There’s surprisingly little discussion today of the fact that a jurisdiction can get out of under the pre-clearance standard by simply demonstrating over a ten year period that they’re no longer abusing/discriminating against minority voters in the jurisdiction. And a substantial number of jurisdictions have been able to do that, especially with revisions to the law passed in the early 1980s. Here’s a piece on how New England got entirely out of under the VRA pre-clearances process (yes, there were covered areas) basically by not being racist.