Fulton DA delivers fiery testimony against Trump, co-defendants quest to disqualify her

By: Stanley Dunlap 

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Thursday fiercely defended herself against allegations of prosecutorial misconduct while she had a romantic relationship with the special prosecutor she appointed to oversee the 2020 presidential election interference case.

A surprise appearance in a Fulton County courtroom saw Willis agree to testify in response to defense attorneys and a witness contradicting her statements that she only became romantically involved with Nathan Wade a few months after she hired him as a lead special prosecutor in a sweeping racketeering case charging interference in Georgia’s 2020 election. Former President Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants were indicted by a grand jury in August on charges of illegally trying to alter the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia and several other swing states.

Willis repeatedly denied allegations that she or Wade misappropriated taxpayer funds for personal gain based on her relationship with Wade outside of work. The motion to disqualify her is centered on that issue, as opposed to the just-admitted nature of the romantic relationship between Willis and Wade.

Willis’ appearance also means another day of testimony Friday in the judge’s hearing on defendants’ request to have her disqualified.

Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee scheduled the hearing last month to address whether Willis should be barred from overseeing the election interference case in the future. Wade’s estranged wife revealed in a January divorce filing that airline tickets were purchased for him and Willis for trips to San Francisco and Miami from 2022 to 2023 under Wade’s name on credit cards.

Willis’ harshest barbs Thursday were targeted at Ashleigh Merchant, the attorney for Trump co-defendant Michael Roman, who publicly surfaced the existence of a romance between Willis and Wade in January. Merchant, along with Trump attorney Steve Sadow and others representing co-defendants, raised doubts to the former couple testifying that Willis repaid Wade thousands of dollars in cash for several flights, cruises and other trips they took together while dating from March 2022 until summer 2023.

Merchant repeatedly questioned Willis about whether she tracked each cash payment and why she didn’t provide documents showing withdrawals from her bank account or other financial changes that would support her testimony.

“So you have no proof of any reimbursement for any of these things because it was all cash,” Merchant said to Willis.

Willis called her line of questioning insulting, especially the charge that the DA had started the affair as soon as she met Wade at a 2019 conference. She said she would reimburse Wade for her share of travel expenses with cash she kept at home over time that she incrementally saved. According to her, the largest reimbursement was about $2,500 for one trip.

”The testimony of one witness is enough to prove a fact. Are you telling me that I’m lying to you, is that what you’re intimating here?” Willis asked.

Merchant said Willis should be aware that how she uses public funds will be scrutinized as a district attorney. Since November 2021, Wade’s firm has received more than $650,000 from Fulton County.

“You understand that you’re under a microscope,” Merchant said. “You have reporting requirements to all types of things. You have no record other than your testimony of the money that you’ve given Mr. Wade.”

Willis rejected defense questioning if Wade visited her south Fulton home before Willis launched the investigation into Trump’s role in Georgia’s election. She also reaffirmed her decision to pursue the felony racketeering case against Trump, several members of his inner circle and other Trump supporters because they attempted to illegally influence election results in his favor.

One of Willis’ angry reactions to pointed personal questions led McAfee to order a five-minute break after Willis repeatedly told Merchant “It’s a lie” while holding court documents filed by the Marietta attorney.

“He never came to my house, let alone live with me, as you falsely put in these documents,” Willis said about the residence she lived in during 2019 and 2020.

As pressure mounted in the high-profile case, Willis and Wade ended their relationship last summer, they said. The two continue to be friends as well as professional colleagues, she said.

“Mr. Wade has been my friend since 2020,” Willis said. “He started out as a mentor and professional colleague and he became my friend and somebody that I really respected. I feel very indebted to Mr. Wade for taking on the task of this job.”

On Thursday, defense attorneys also criticized Willis for not listing Wade’s travel expenses on financial disclosure reports that require public officers to disclose gifts of at least $100 or more from anyone contracting with the government.

The district attorney said she never considered the vacations with Wade to be gifts since she would later cover her share of the expenses.

Wade provided his own testimony in advance of Willis’ time on the stand, disputing the testimony of a former longtime friend of Willis, Robin Bryant-Yeartie, who claimed that Wade and Willis were intimate before he began working on the election investigation.

Wade testified that he never discussed his relationship with Bryant-Yeartie or with anyone else in social settings, and that Willis frequently reimbursed him for trips with cash. Occasionally, the two took one-day trips to Tennessee in order to escape the spotlight on Willis as she became well known around Atlanta due to the case, Wade said.  

He told the court that because of a cancer diagnosis in 2020 and 2021, he was focused more on staying healthy rather than dating anyone.

“It wasn’t secret. It was just private,” said Wade, a former prosecutor who also spent a decade as a Cobb County municipal judge. “I wouldn’t have discussed my relationship with Ms. Yeartie or anyone publicly.”

Bryant-Yeartie testified Thursday that she sublet her condo to Willis in April 2021, and that the two were close friends from the early 1990s until March 2022. Bryant-Yeartie said that she was certain that she witnessed Willis and Wade hugging, kissing and holding hands on a few occasions prior to November 2021.

Under cross examination, she acknowledged having a falling out with Willis that ultimately led to the DA telling her to resign or be terminated due to poor job performance.

Reaction split on Willis sparring with defense counsel

The reaction to Willis’ testimony was split along partisan lines with election officials and for many spectators who monitored online livestreams that attracted tens of thousand of people at a given time watching the tense-filled moments play out.

Trump sounded a defiant tone in an interview with Fox News Digital during Willis’s testimony.

“There is no case here,” Trump said. “It is so badly tainted. There is no case here. There was a perfect phone call. It was perfect. But by going after Trump, she’s able to get her boyfriend more money than they ever dreamed possible.”

Legal experts also had mixed reactions to Willis and Wade’s testimony. While some experts criticized Willis for being overly defensive, they also doubted that the defense attorneys had provided enough evidence to remove her from the election interference case.

Norman Eisen, an attorney who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee majority during Trump’s first impeachment and trial, said Willis has so far defended herself from the allegations.

“The spectacle generated by the allegations and by counsel for the defendants today was not pretty,” said Eisen, who also served as ambassador to the Czech Republic during the Obama administration. “But at the end of the day, it is clear that those who are trying to disqualify DA Willis have not met their steep burden under Georgia law to prove a conflict. On the contrary, the judge has made clear that he’s assessing financial benefit, and the unrebutted evidence shows that Wade and Willis split expenses. There was no benefit to Willis.”

Rep. Shea Roberts, House Democratic Caucus treasurer, described Thursday’s hearing as nothing more than a sensationalized attack by Trump on Willis for pursuing charges against him and others. 

“We all heard the smoking gun recording of the phone call in which Trump pressured Secretary (Brad) Raffensperger to alter Georgia’s election results, and no amount of manufactured controversy the Trump team tries to conjure up can change that,” Roberts said in statement.

Georgia Recorder reporter Ross Williams contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared in the Georgia Recorder on February 15th, 2024.  

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North Carolina AG’s office pushes for delay in key Racial Justice Act hearing

Johnston County prosecutor once compared Black defendants to wild dogs and hyenas, hunting their victims “like the predators of the African plain”

A hearing scheduled for later this month could clear a path for the 136 people on North Carolina’s death row to one day get resentenced to life without the possibility of parole — or bring them one step closer to the execution chamber.

Beginning Feb. 26, attorneys are scheduled to present evidence to a Johnston County Superior Court judge arguing that race significantly affected prosecutors’ actions during jury selection, not just in the underlying case of Hasson Bacote, but in capital cases throughout North Carolina. 

But if the state attorney general’s office gets its way, these findings will not be heard in court — at least not this month.

“Racial discrimination in jury selection is abhorrent in all respects and has no place in the criminal justice system,” reads a recent court filing signed by lawyers in the attorney general’s office, including the Attorney General himself, Josh Stein, a Democrat who is running for governor this year. “Nevertheless, like all claims, a claim of racial discrimination cannot be presumed based on the mere assertion of a defendant; it must be proved.”

According to a recent court filing, the evidence to be submitted by Bacote’s lawyers includes several findings:

• In 176 capital cases across North Carolina between 1985 and 2011, Black people were two and a half times more likely to be struck from jury pools than other jurors.
• Similarly, in seven Johnston County capital cases over that same timeframe, Black people were four times more likely to be struck from the jury pool than other jurors.
• In four capital cases in that timeframe tried by Gregory Butler, an assistant district attorney, Black people were 10 times more likely to be struck from a jury pool than other jurors. Butler also prosecuted Bacote, the defendant in the underlying case.

The attorney general’s office, however, called the evidence “insufficiently supported.” It took issue with a study conducted by law professors at Michigan State University, arguing that the state Supreme Court has already deemed that research irrelevant and misleading.

Last year, the state Supreme Court ruled that a study by the same MSU professors was “unreliable and fatally flawed” because it “assumed racial animus in cases in which defendants did not make any such claim, or in which the trial court or appellate courts did not make or sustain any such findings.”

In light of that opinion, the AG’s office asked the trial court judge to deny Bacote’s jury selection claims without holding a hearing. The judge denied the request.

The attorney general’s office is now seeking a second opinion. It has petitioned the state Supreme Court for guidance on how lower courts should use the MSU study in assessing claims of juror discrimination. This decision could drastically impact pending RJA claims, since they rely on the MSU study to support juror discrimination arguments.

Attorney Shelagh Rebecca Kenney, one of the attorneys representing Bacote, filed a motion last week criticizing the AG’s office for trying to derail the pending hearing: “The State appears motivated by its knowledge of the strength of Defendant’s evidence, its reluctance to face that evidence in open court, and its fear of losing.”

The Racial Justice Act’s lead case

Hasson Bacote, who is Black, was sentenced to death in Johnston County in 2009 for a crime he committed when he was 20 years old.

Ten white and two Black jurors convicted Bacote of killing Anthony Surles during a robbery. According to attorney Kenney’s motion, Bacote is one of 11 men sentenced to death in North Carolina after being convicted of first-degree murder solely under the theory of felony murder; that means the killing was not premeditated or deliberate, and instead happened during the commission of another violent felony.

All 11 of those men are people of color.

The core of Bacote’s case is the Racial Justice Act, a landmark law passed by Democrats in 2009, repealed by Republicans in 2013, and preserved by the Democratic-controlled state Supreme Court in 2020. The law gives people on North Carolina’s death row an opportunity to be resentenced to life in prison without parole if they can prove racial discrimination played a role in their death sentence.

The hearing would be the first since 2020, when the Supreme Court ruled that all claims brought under the RJA were still valid and could have their day in court.

Lawyers for the state started sharing discovery with Bacote’s team in 2022, after a Superior Court judge ordered them to turn over data on how prosecutors across North Carolina pick juries in capital cases. Over the past few years, the state has turned over 680,000 pages of discovery, which Kenney called in her motion “the most comprehensive discovery provided by the state on jury selection issues in North Carolina.”

Bacote’s is the RJA’s lead case, which means it will set the standard for how other cases are handled. How the Supreme Court handles the attorney general’s request — or a later appeal — will affect how judges deal with future Racial Justice Act claims.

Lawyers with the Attorney General’s office wrote to the state Supreme Court noting that if the hearing takes place on Feb. 26 as scheduled, it would “waste time and resources if it is later determined on subsequent appeal that the claims should have been dismissed at the pleadings stage.”

Kenney, meanwhile, rebutted that claim. She argued the research referenced by the attorney general’s office dealt with a 2011 MSU study; that data was updated for Bacote’s case, using information gleaned from the hundreds of thousands of documents turned over by the state. That data, she continued, hasn’t ever been presented or considered by any court.

She also contested the relevance of the state Supreme Court ruling referenced by the state, since that ruling explicitly said it did not address the defendant’s RJA claim.

The MSU study is also not the only evidence Bacote’s lawyers plan to use to make their case. Included within those 680,000 documents were prosecutors’ handwritten notes, which Kenney wrote in the motion “reveal that race permeated the State’s approach to jury selection.”

Prosecutors’ notes from various trials show a preoccupation with prospective jurors’ race. In one Washington County case, for instance, a prosecutor wrote that they didn’t want a particular person on the jury out of concern she would be “sympathetic to plight” and that she “had a child by BM [Black Man].” In that same case, a prosecutor scribbled that they wanted one juror who seemed favorable to prosecution, noting she seemed like she would “bring her own rope.”

Race didn’t just figure into jury selection, but into the prosecutor’s racist views as well. Kenney’s motion includes a newspaper article from another of Butler’s capital cases where he compared the Black defendants to wild dogs and hyenas, hunting their victims “like the predators of the African plain.”

The Supreme Court could issue a ruling on the attorney general’s petition as early as the end of this week.

This article originally appeared in NC Newsline on February 7th, 2023. 

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Alabama Department of Corrections seeking over $800 million

By: Ralph Chapoco

Three law enforcement agencies told Alabama legislators Monday they were seeking a total of over $1 billion in funding.

The Alabama Department of Corrections (DOC) is seeking over $800 million from the state. The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA) is looking for $159 million. The Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles is seeking slightly more than $100 million.

The Alabama Legislature will ultimately decide how much funding the agencies get, and most do not get their full request.

Sen. Greg Albritton, R-Atmore, the chair of the Senate Finance and Taxation General Fund Committee, noted those requests are higher than they were three years ago, when the agencies asked for roughly $635 million combined.

“I am not trying to cast stones,” Albritton said after the meeting. “I am only trying to do it as a means of education as to how much more money it is taking to do the same old thing.”

While ALEA had the largest increase in percentage terms, DOC made the biggest jump in terms of total dollars. The Legislature budgeted $661.7 million to DOC from the General Fund in 2023. Alabama Department of Corrections Commission John Hamm asked for almost $820 million from lawmakers for the coming fiscal cycle, $158 million higher (24%) than the current year’s budget of $661.7 million.

Bennet Wright, executive director of the Alabama Sentencing Commission, who addressed the joint committee prior to Hamm’s presentation to give members some context regarding the ADOC request, said increased capital costs, increased personnel costs and staffing shortages are  driving up the cost to continuously incarcerate people. Corrections held 20,403 people last November.

“There is a common myth that money travels with offenders in correctional systems, I hear it all the time,” Wright said. “We get 500 people out of prison, and we can save money on the prison system. That is just not true. Most of those costs are fixed costs.”

The DOC spent roughly $145 million in 2002 on personnel, about $240 million in 2012 and roughly $280 million in 2023. Despite that, the number of corrections security staff decreased, going from 3,000 in 2012 to about 1,800 in 2023.

“So, what are some of the things that the state has chosen to do, it has increased correctional officer pay, that has increased,” Wright said. “There has been increases in health insurance over the past 20 years, retirement contributions, et cetera. So, while the officers have gone down, the obligation of the department to pay personnel costs and benefits has increased.”

Vacancies in the department remain. The DOC said in its presentation that 858 of its 3,800 positions (30%), both administrative postings and corrections officers.

Medical costs to address the health care needs for people incarcerated continue to increase, going from $120 million in 2012 to $235 million in 2023.

“I would also point out to people, the state of Alabama was the first state that was taken into federal court on a lot of these issues,” Wright said. “That was 1975. Alabama has been in and out of federal court, whether it is litigation or receiverships oversight, we have new pieces of litigation for the past 50 years. And medical care has been an ongoing thread of a lot of the federal litigation involving our Department of Corrections.”

Hamm said DOC will rely on the construction of a $1 billion men’s prison in Elmore County to improve safety in the department. About 325 people died while incarcerated in Corrections in 2023.

“Every legislator on this dais has received emails about the conditions within our prisons, and the violence within our prisons,” said Rep. Rex Reynolds, R-Huntsville, who asked how a single-cell design could address the issues.

According to Hamm, about 80% of the inmates are placed into dormitories, spaces with rows of bunk beds where inmates sleep. With the new prison, almost 80% of the population will be in cells.

“If I was a correctional officer in this room, with everybody here, it is going to be a little bit more difficult for me to control everyone in this room as opposed to everyone in their own cell and dealing with you all one at a time,” Hamm said.

ABPP requested slightly more than $100 million, an increase of about 14% from the $87.8 million in funding from the General Fund budget for the current year’s budget. About $52 million of that will go toward personnel costs, with another $20.6 million to fund benefits. The next highest item, utilities, fees and services, will be another $12 million.

“I will say this—the support staff, the officers, one thing I will say, these are some of the hardest working people you will ever know,” said Cam Ward, the director of ABPP. “If you have to go out to someone’s house, you know they violated their parole terms, and you have gone into their home, and they know you are coming, let’s just say it is not always the safest circumstances.”

Ward also addressed the number of people granted parole by the Board of Pardons and Paroles. According to the numbers he presented, the rates have fluctuated between 2% and 18%. The rates were lower in the beginning of 2023 at 2% in January and 5% in February. As of December 2023, it was 18%.

“When you only have two members, if it is a split, one to one vote, it is a denial,” he said.

Ward said target rates for parole are less important, the decision must be made with respect to the individuals.

“Realistically, the peak of the parole grant system was in 2016-2017,” Ward said. “Sometimes it got over 50%. I think realistically, you are probably talking about a number closer to 25%-30% considering the population that is inside DOC. However, I would caution anyone who talks about parole grant rates to not use an arbitrary spreadsheet or number system. I have seen too many articles talk about that. I think it is a mistake. I still think you still have to look at it as the individual, and realize the board still has that discretion as to who they grant or don’t grant.”

ALEA is asking for more money from the Legislature as well, about $44.7 million more (39%) than the $114.3 million the agency is slated to receive this year. That money will be spread across equipment and vehicles, as well as a new driver’s license office in Montgomery.

Rep. Brett Easterbrook, R-Fruitdale, said the request was “a little bit hard to understand for me.” He added he wasn’t opposed to the increase but requested a breakdown of the expenditures from the agency to better understand the reason for the increase.

This article originally appeared in The Alabama Reflector on February 15th, 2024.  

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DeSantis says homelessness isn’t a big problem in Florida – yet; supports legislative crackdown

By: Mitch Perry

‘We’re not going to let any city turn into San Francisco,’ the governor said.

Saying that while no city in Florida is contending with the issues of homelessness that are prevalent in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday came out in support of a proposal moving through the Florida Legislature that would ban local governments from allowing people to sleep on public property without a permit.

But he added that he would be willing to provide financial resources to any city or county who requested help in adding shelter space or for programs dealing with mental health issues and substance abuse.

“The Legislature is considering doing something to just ensure from a statewide perspective we’re not going to let any city turn into a San Francisco,” DeSantis declared at a press conference held in Miami Beach. “Not on our watch. We’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to have protections for people.”

The governor said that he was supportive of the Legislature moving in this direction as long as it was focused on “ensuring public order. Ensuring quality of life for residents. Ensuring that people’s property values are maintained. Ensuring that businesses are able to operate unobstructed without these problems bleeding.”

The homelessness-related legislation refers to a measure sponsored in the Florida House by Clay County Republican Sam Garrison (HB 1365), which would prohibit any city or county in Florida from authorizing or permitting public sleeping or camping on public property, public buildings or public rights-of-way without a lawfully temporary permit. It’s Senate equivalent (SB 1530) is sponsored by Lee County Republican Jonathan Martin.

The measure also says that if a city or county wanted to continue to provide a public place for the homeless, they need to provide a wealth of public services: access to clean running water and bathroom facilities; 24-hour security; a ban on drug and alcohol use for all users and access to substance abuse and mental health treatment resources; and it may not be in a location where it “adversely and materially affects the value or security of existing residential or commercial properties.”

Though critics charge that the legislation “criminalizes” being homeless, there are no criminal penalties in Garrison’s bill. There are civil penalties, however. The bill says that a person or business may bring a civil action in any court against any local government that did open a space for the homeless without those public services. If that person or business was successful in their lawsuit, the bill says that they could be reimbursed for court costs and attorney fees.

DeSantis added that he was “open” to providing financial support for local governments when it comes to issues of public shelters for the homeless, as well funding for programs that affect the homeless, such as mental health and substance abuse.

Joining DeSantis at the press conference was Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner, who discussed an ordinance approved by the Miami Beach Commission last fall that allows the police to arrest homeless people for sleeping on public streets or the public right of way if they decline placement in a shelter, as reported by the Miami Herald. 

DeSantis and Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Mark Glass boasted about how homelessness has decreased in Florida, but that’s not actually accurate.

According to the most recent “point in time” count conducted in January of 2023 in Florida, there were approximately 15,706 individuals who were unsheltered, which is defined as people sleeping in cars, park benches, abandoned buildings, or other places not meant for human habitation. That was a 34% increase from the year before, according to the Florida’s Council on Homelessness’ most recent annual report.

DeSantis said that while the level of homelessness in Florida isn’t nearly as bad as some cities on the West Coast, part of being a good leader is to “see what hurdles could be 5 years out. Ten years out.”

This article originally appeared in Florida Phoenix on February 6th 2024.  

Photo credit: Jerry Meaden

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‘If You Can’t Choose Your Own Leaders, Nothing Else Matters’

JANINE JACKSON

Janine Jackson interviewed People For the American Way’s Svante Myrick about roadblocks to voting for the January 26, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

      CounterSpin240126Myrick.mp3

Janine Jackson: We can argue that, with gerrymandering, Citizens United and the power of money—and even the Electoral College—“one person, one vote” is not the simple recipe for fully participatory democracy that we might wish. Still, voting—voting rights, voting access—is the definition of a keystone issue that shapes many, many other important issues.  So how and why have voting rights become a contested field in a country that, as I say, has democratic aspirations, and what can we do, what are we doing about it?

We’re joined now by Svante Myrick, president of People For the American Way, and former mayor of Ithaca, New York. Welcome to CounterSpin, Svante Myrick.

Svante Myrick: Thank you so much for having me on. Really appreciate it, and all of us here at People For the American Way appreciate the chance to talk about this issue.

JJ: Wonderful. Well, let me just ask it simply: What are currently the chief impediments to voting rights that you see, that have led you to say, “It’s up to us to march again,” or that have led Sen. Raphael Warnock to talk about “democracy in reverse”? What are we up against?

SM: I wish I could tell you that, hey, there are simple, small fixes. There’s a challenge in a country of 360 million people making sure ballots arrive on time. I wish I could tell you that there was a bureaucratic or technocratic problem. But the truth is, it’s something more akin to a war, in which one half of the American political spectrum, that half that is beholden to extreme MAGA Republicans, is set out to intentionally disenfranchise people of voting. And they really have not been more plain-spoken about this at any time since the ’60s, since George Wallace and since the KKK.

There was a time where both sides agreed that voting is good, and everybody should have a right to vote. Especially after the 2020 election, led by Donald Trump, state legislators—people who are not household names, folks that you won’t often see on CNN or MSNBC—state legislators are taking their cues from Donald Trump and passing dozens and dozens…. I just came from Utah, where yet another law was passed that makes it harder to vote. Utah used to have very good voting laws. Everybody got a ballot in the mail. You could just fill it out, send it back in. You had weeks and weeks to do it. They just repealed that. Why? Is it because Donald Trump lost Utah? No, it’s because the state legislators are trying to curry favor with a president that just, frankly, does not want everyone’s vote to count.

And if it’s OK, if I just say what probably is obvious to many of your listeners, but I think it deserves to be said: They’re not trying to take away everyone’s right to vote. They’re trying to take away certain people’s right to vote. I’m a Black American, and I just know for a fact that this Trump-led faction of the Republican Party would love for Black Americans’ votes not to be counted. And I know that because they are moving with almost surgical precision to disenfranchise people like me and my family.

JJ: And then we see it also, you’re talking about a kind of top-down motivation, and then we see it also at the Supreme Court, and listeners will know about Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, but there were serious impacts from that as well.

SM: We here at People For the American Way, we are fighting really hard at every state legislature, at every level, to make sure people have a right to vote. Because we think if you can’t choose your own leaders, then nothing else matters. As they say, if you can’t choose from the menu, then you’re what’s for dinner, right?

And that is about voting rights. It’s about the voting laws. But, as you mentioned the Supreme Court, it’s also about money. It’s about money in politics. And if a few wealthy billionaires can throw their weight around, as we’re seeing now, and extort university presidents, and donate unlimited amounts of dark money to whatever shady person that they like because of whatever deal they’ve made behind closed doors, then we don’t live in a true democracy anyway.

And so when the Supreme Court made its Citizens United decision, it allowed that corporations were people, and money was speech, and that money and speech should be unlimited. They really put us on a dark path, one that we’re still living with today.

So we were also here, People For the American Way, fighting to get money out of politics, to overturn Citizens United, but also to pass things like matching funds for elections, and the stuff that would make it easier for people, frankly, like me—people who grew up without a lot of money, folks who are not the sons of senators, folks who are not in the pockets of big corporations—to run for office and to win.

JJ: Despite what we’ve just said, or in part because of it, I am surprised when people are surprised that people don’t vote. While I lament it, I see the fact that some people just don’t see a connection between this lever they pull, and the policies and laws governing their lives. I see that as an indictment of the system, and not of the people.

And so I wanted to ask you to talk about what we’ve seen labeled “low-propensity voters,” and different responses, like what People For is talking about, responses that are better than saying, “These people are so dumb, they don’t even know how to vote their own interests.”

SM: And that’s so well-said. Certainly our system has failed in many ways. But extreme right-wingers have also been waging an 80-year war, maybe longer, to convince Americans that government does nothing for them, that their representatives don’t improve their lives. And so when they do things like starve schools and school budgets, starve road budgets so that there are potholes in the street, and try to shrink government down to a size where you can drown it in a bathtub, they make sure it is dysfunctional, from Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump, they break the system, and then say, “Hey, see, government, it can’t work at all. Why bother? Why bother to vote at all?”

And so I think it is good to remind yourself that, for the average American, who is not listening to CNN or MSNBC all day—first of all, they’re probably happier; their blood pressure’s lower—but that they’ve also been subject to generations of misinformation about the power of collective action and how much better their circumstances, their lives, the quality of their life, the health of their finances could be if we lived in a country that took more collective action, like we see, frankly, in some Scandinavian nations, where folks really trust that the power of their vote is going to lead to positive, progressive change.

JJ: Is there legislation, or are there moves afoot, that could be responsive or would be responsive to the suppressive efforts that we’re seeing? Are there things to pull for in terms of policy?

SM: Yes, absolutely. So if people go to PFAW.com, you could see all of the work that we’re doing at each state legislature.  Now, of course, fighting state by state is an inefficient way to do this. The best way to reclaim our own democratic power is to pass federal legislation, what we call the For the People Act, that would make it easier for people to run for office, easier for people to vote, easier for people to have their voices heard.

We’re also fighting at the federal level to overturn Citizens United. This is a complicated and lengthy process, to overturn a Supreme Court decision, but you can do it. We are well on our way, and we encourage people to join us.

JJ: Finally, let me ask you about journalism. Certainly we see all kinds of problems with election coverage, from ignoring down-ballot races that we know can be critical, to focusing on horse race and heavy-handed polling, almost everything but candidates’ actual plans for what they would do and how that would affect us. Coverage of voting rights is not the same as election coverage, but certainly, election coverage gives an opening to talk about those issues. Are there things that you’d like to see more or less of from media?

SM: For sure, and you’ve just listed a whole host of them. Honestly, the constant coverage of polling does have a suppressive effect on the vote, because people, when they just listen and follow the polls, they feel like the vote already happened. At least they feel like they know what’s going to happen, why bother, we’re down two, we’re up four, they don’t need my vote. It’s already done. So that’s one problem.The media can help people understand that all this harping about elections and voter disenfranchisement is not dweeby and nerdy. It can seem it, a little bit. It’s like in my family, I was the one that always had the rule book for Monopoly, and I was like, “You can’t do that. The rules are important. Do not pass Go.” And other people are like: “I don’t want to talk about the rules for how we decide this stuff. I just want my streets to be better paved.”

I think if the media could help folks understand that he who makes the rules determines the outcome. Whatever it is you care about, whatever it is you’re voting for, if it’s for better healthcare, if it’s peace in the Middle East, if it’s for more money for you and your family, if it’s for a better quarterback for the New York Giants, finally—whoever sets up the rules of the game helps make sure that their outcome is more likely. 

And Republicans know that, frankly, better than Democrats do. The Republicans have turned their entire apparatus, not into improving people’s lives, but into taking away their right to vote. So that as soon as they have total power, like they do in places like Tennessee, for example, they can start expelling lawmakers that they don’t like. They can cut corporate taxes basically to zero, and they can abandon the poor and the middle class. And they do all that by making it harder for people to vote first.

JJ: And we won’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone. Yeah.

We’ve been speaking with Svante Myrick. He’s president of People For the American Way. Svante Myrick, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SM: Absolutely my pleasure. Thank you.

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