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March 16th, 2018:

Nothing to see here

Mar 16th, 2018
by Charles Kuffner.
9 comments

Remain calm, all is well.

Next Saturday, March 24, hundreds of Texas Democratic Party activists will gather at the Austin Hyatt Regency to nominate candidates for political office in Travis County, a kick-off event leading up to the 2018 midterm elections.

But some people who tried to register will not be attending, among them Candida McGruder. Gustavo Chubb. Geraldo Tinsley. Vincent Amundson. Roxie Male.

That’s because these five individuals and 43 others who signed up to attend don’t appear to be Travis County residents, or Texans, or even Americans. They might not even be real people. They may be pranksters — or they may be Russian trolls, and their appearance in Texas could represent the first public example of foreign probing of the 2018 elections.

Five senior intelligence officers, two current and three former, say the case of the Texas 48 looks like Russian meddling. And they tell NBC News that despite the clumsiness of the failed registrations, the Texas case fits a pattern of Russian behavior seen in its covert operations.

[…]

Earlier this year, as Texas party officials prepared for the March 24 county meetings that would nominate candidates for office, Glen Maxey noticed something odd about online registrations for the Travis County meeting in Austin. Some of the people attempting to register either didn’t fully fill out their online form or provided obviously false information.

Maxey, legislative affairs director for the Texas Democratic Party and a former member of the Texas House of Representatives, said that at the time just over 2,500 Texas citizens had successfully registered online for the Travis County meeting. He went through the aborted registrations by hand, checking to see whether the registrations had been “kicked back” because of simple errors, in which case he would follow up with the individuals.

Maxey found a few unfinished registrations that were simple mistakes. But he identified 48 that were problematic, meaning they seemed unconnected to anybody living in Texas. Twenty-five of those 48 were trying to register with email addresses ending in “mail.ru.” Those last two letters, .ru, are the internet designation for domains in Russia.

Maxey told NBC News he and his team hadn’t seen any other examples of pranks or false registrations in past cycles. He also said he didn’t know who to contact in Texas state government and had received no guidance from either state or federal authorities regarding anything to do with potential Russian interference.

[…]

So are the Russians coming?

On the surface, said cyberintelligence expert and NBC News consultant Sean Kanuck, “this almost sounds like junior high school students ordering pizzas under fake names.”

But beneath the surface, Kanuck thinks perhaps something more sinister could be afoot.

Despite the ham-handedness that announces an obvious Russian origin, said Kanuck, who served as the first national intelligence officer for cyber issues at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2011 to 2016, the methods and even the in-your-face nature of the trolling fit the pattern of “a Russian strategic campaign to delegitimize the democratic electoral process.”

“I would speculate that Russia is testing the waters for possible interventions or disruptions in the future,” Kanuck said.

Nothing to worry about, I’m sure. Boys will be boys, right? Donald Trump will get his top men right on it.

More on the status of SB4

Mar 16th, 2018
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Ed Sills sent this one-pager from MALDEF to his mailing list; there’s no link and I couldn’t find it on the MALDEF webpage, so I’m just going to copy and paste here:

What did the Fifth Circuit Court decide?

On March 13, 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued its ruling on whether SB4 should be allowed to take effect while the lawsuit moves through court. Most of SB4 is in effect today. The Fifth Circuit decision allows most of SB4 to remain in effect, but keeps part of SB4 blocked. In addition, the Fifth Circuit stated several important limitations on SB4.

What is the status of SB4 after the Fifth Circuit decision?

  • Elected officials are allowed to criticize SB4 and speak favorably about immigration reform without the fear of being punished. The Fifth Circuit ruled that SB4’s prohibition on speech about immigration is likely to be unconstitutional.
  • Cities and counties can adopt immigration-neutral policies that preserve scarce local resources. This means that cities and counties can direct their police officers to focus on local priorities such as keeping the community safe and maintaining community trust.
  • Cities and counties cannot bar their police officers and employees from assisting or cooperating with federal agents on immigration enforcement. However, local officials can only cooperate with federal agents when federal agents ask for help. Local officials cannot act on their own. Local officials also must act under federal direction and supervision.
  • Cities and counties cannot prohibit their employees or local police officers from questioning a detained person’s immigration status. However, local officers must still comply with the Constitution. For example, a local officer cannot decide on his own to arrest an individual simply for being undocumented. Local officers cannot stop individuals because of their race or detain individuals for prolonged periods of time.
  • SB4’s mandate to comply with ICE detainers remains in effect. However, jail officers must review detainers and can refuse a detainer if they know a detainee is authorized to be present in the United States or if the detainer does not follow ICE rules.

Where are we in this case?

The Fifth Circuit’s March 13, 2018 decision on the preliminary injunction is temporary. The district court will make a decision in the case after a trial. The March 13, 2018 decision from the Fifth Circuit remains in effect until a new court ruling is issued.

What can I do to help?

Contact MALDEF Staff Attorney Fátima Menéndez at [email protected] with any reports of local officers making immigration arrests or a jail detaining a person after that person has posted bail.

See here for the background. This Trib story discusses the legal strategy.

Attorneys and immigrants’ rights groups who fought against SB 4 said their next move isn’t clear but that they’re considering seeking a hearing before the entire 5th Circuit.

“There are a lot of parties [involved], so we are coordinating on this,” Efrén Olivares, the racial and economic justice director for the Texas Civil Rights Project, told reporters during a conference call. “But procedurally, the next step would be to request an en banc hearing.” There is also the possibility of asking the U.S. Supreme Court, he said.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys admitted Wednesday that they were not surprised at the ruling due to the 5th Circuit’s conservative leanings, so it’s unclear how much faith they will have in pleading their case before the entire court. But, they said, there remains the option to show that in its implementation, SB 4 leads to several constitutional violations.

[…]

Olivares said that while the next step in the appeals process is being considered, the lawyers and their supporters will also prepare for the case to head back to San Antonio. Tuesday’s ruling was only on the temporary injunction of SB 4; now, the district court is set to consider the law itself.

It’s not so much that the Fifth Circuit is conservative but that the specific three-judge panel that heard this appeal was made up of some of its most conservative members. Any time you draw Edith Jones and Jerry Smith, you can probably predict the outcome, and it ain’t gonna be pretty. There’s at least a chance the en banc appeal could get a different result. Beyond that, I’d say focusing on the case on the merits is probably the best thing to do. Either way, it still sucks.

This is our most “run everywhere” election ever

Mar 16th, 2018
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

We already knew this, and have quantified it in a number of ways, but it’s still worth taking a moment to marvel at the surge of Democratic candidates this year.

Lisa Seger

Before she could talk about her campaign for the Texas House of Representatives, Lisa Seger needed to check on her goats. Seger, who lives with her husband and 30 goats on a farm 40 minutes outside of Houston, had a doe in the maternity stall that was due any minute. “Spring is kidding season,” she explained.

If elected, the 47-year-old Seger, a sustainable agriculture proponent who got into farming after reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, would likely be the only member of the legislature with her own brand of yogurt. But what makes her so unusual in the state’s third district isn’t her background, it’s her party—Seger is the first Democratic candidate to run for the seat since 2010, when the Republican incumbent Cecil Bell Jr. was first elected. Seger’s state senator also ran unopposed in her last election.

“I couldn’t remember the last time I was even able to vote for a Democrat in one of our elections here,” Seger says.

In West Texas, two millennial friends, Armando Gamboa, a 25-year-old from Odessa, and 24-year-old Spencer Bounds of Midland, decided to run for neighboring state house districts where Democrats have been AWOL for at least a decade. No one has run in Gamboa’s district since 2004; Bounds’ opponent is a 50-year incumbent who last faced a Democrat in 2008.

Seger, Gamboa, and Bounds are part of a trend. Call it the “Virginia Effect”: A little more than a year after the inauguration, Democrats in deep-red districts are running for office at a historic clip, determined to find and turn out progressive voters in places where no one has competed in years. It’s a sign that the enthusiasm that swept progressive activists in the first year of the Trump administration and led the party to big gains in the Old Dominion and elsewhere in 2017 is still burning heading into the midterm elections. These local races, flying mostly under the radar, could also give a party struggling for relevance in large swaths of the country a quiet boost this fall.

I should note to begin that my wife is friends with Seger, and we are regular buyers of her farm’s goat cheese. Let’s be clear that Seger, Gamboa, and Bounds are running in really tough districts – Donald Trump got 75.2% in HD03, 70.3% in HD81 (the one in Odessa), and 75.7% in HD82 (Midland, and yes that’s Tom Craddick’s district). I don’t know what set of circumstances might be needed to win one of these races, but it would not be something I would expect. That said, there are three obvious reasons why what these folks are doing is important:

– Their odds of winning may be minimal, but they are still greater than zero. You can’t beat something with nothing, and having no candidate to run is the definition of “nothing”.

– Having local candidates to vote for – remember, everyone will have a Democratic Congressional candidate on their ballot this year as well – gives people in these “can’t remember the last time I had a Democrat to vote for” places a reason to show up and vote. Beto O’Rourke is doing a great job getting out to places that seldom if ever get visited by a Democratic candidate, but it’s still the case that someone in Odessa or Midland or the nether regions of Montgomery County is more likely to have their door knocked by one of these three. If we want Beto and maybe some other statewide candidates to win, they’re going to have to do better in these places than previous Dems have done as well as better in the big cities.

– Long term, of course, things can and do change – remember, Republicans were once an extreme minority in Texas. They built up their base one election at a time, competing and eventually winning in places where they had once not existed. There’s no reason why Democrats can’t do well in the not-quite-as-big cities like they do in the big cities, but it’s not going to happen by itself.

That latter point about the medium-sized cities is one I’ve mentioned before – I mentioned it and covered a lot of this same ground in that Rural Dems post – and one I think deserves a lot more thought and effort, but I don’t want to sidetrack this post. What I do want to do to finish this up is to note that right now, Democratic legislative candidates are not doing so hot in fundraising. Some of that as I noted before is due to late entrances, some is due to the zealous focus on the Congressional races as well as Beto’s butt-kicking in that department, and some of it is because the rest of us aren’t paying much attention to State House races. Which, not to state the obvious, we need to do a lot more of, since the Lege is where the really bad stuff will happen if the Republicans have the numbers and the wingnut concentration to run amok again.

So let me put forth a modest suggestion to the big-money types that exist in Democratic politics here: Put together a pool of money to distribute to these lower-profile candidates running in unusual places, so they can at least pay for some campaign materials and maybe hire a manager or the like. I’m thinking something like $50K per candidate, which once you subtract out the incumbents and the candidates in higher-profile races who are already on track to raise plenty of their own money, would probably require $3-4 million all together. That’s actually not much at all in the grand scheme of things – I mean, Sen. John Whitmire could pay for that by himself, twice over – but it could make a real difference in the performance of these candidates as a group, which again would be a boon for Beto and probably more than a few Congressional hopefuls. If nothing else, it would be a loud signal that we’re not screwing around this year. Everyone likes to talk about the examples that Virginia and Alabama set for us in recent months. It would be nice if we did more than just talk about it.