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I didn’t watch the entire Goodling hearing (about 60%), but I had two quick impressions. First, Monica Goodling pretty much handed the House Judiciary members their asses. She was impressive, frankly. Second, the preparation of the Democratic committee members was disgraceful. They were woefully unprepared, and apparently unaware of those strange little creatures sometimes called follow-up questions. With one exception – Artur Davis (D-AL) (Orin Kerr noticed him too).

I can’t take credit for catching this — a friend (commenter kovarsky) directed me to both Davis’s questioning and his resume. And it’s impressive stuff. Davis is a Democrat from Alabama – double Harvard, and a former Assistant US Attorney. And it shows. It wasn’t just that Davis efficiently obtained the most damaging testimony, it was the way in which he did so. Looking closely at the mechanics of his examination illustrates that he is a skilled, experienced questioner (and a master of linguistics). More below the flip.

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Discussing voter disenfranchisement, Scott Lemieux writes, “It’s almost impossible to overstate how much this matters.” I agree. So today, I want to follow-up on Hilzoy’s excellent post on voter fraud with some thoughts of my own.

Our national voting system is a disgrace. And while sham “voter fraud” plays an important role, it’s only one slice of a much larger and more systemic problem. To understand the scope of the problem, you must first understand that voting consists of far more than merely showing up on Election Day. There are many different phases along the way – and vote suppression can and does occur at any one (or all) of these phases, from the registration process up through voting day.

Before I outline these different phases, I should say that almost all of the information in this post comes from the Brennan Center for Justice (NYU) and its tireless efforts to protect the vote and educate the public. In particular, today’s post relies on this powerpoint (pdf here), which was part of a larger Brennan Center presentation at an ACS event in DC last year (which was great).

As the powerpoint explains, there are five different methods that states are using (or could use) to suppress turnout of eligible voters: (1) restricting voter registration drives; (2) erecting barriers to getting on voter rolls; (3) purging existing voter rolls; (4) imposing voter ID and proof of citizenship requirements at the polls; and (5) failing to ensure electronic voting machine security. Note that these suppression efforts arise at different stages of the voting process, often months prior to Election Day.

#1 – Registration Drives. Some states’ restrictions on voter registration drives are so absurd and punitive that they are, frankly, hard to believe. According to the Brennan Center, these restrictions include imposing insanely high fines and even criminal penalties on voter registration groups for what are essentially administrative errors. In Florida, for instance, the legislature imposed the following fines on voter registration groups: (1) “$250 for each application submitted . . . more than ten days after the form was collected”; (2) “$500 for each application . . . submitted after the [registration] deadline”; (3) “$5,000 for each application collected but not submitted to election officials.” These potential penalties obviously make people think twice about initiating, or participating in, voter registration efforts.

The Brennan Center has documented similar efforts in other states. In Ohio, individual registration volunteers had to personally turn in the forms they collected. In other words, they couldn’t hand them to a supervisor to be turned in collectively. They had to walk them to the office themselves. In New Mexico, they went a step further. There, “groups are given only 48 hours to submit the forms they collect to the state board of elections or face criminal charges.”

The effects are obvious. States are either making voter registration efforts extremely risky, or are increasing their administrative costs. The net result is less voter registration. And again, all this happens well before Election Day and outside the (watchful, Sauron-like) eye of the media.

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In this column, Dahlia Lithwick explores one of the most fascinating sidebars to the U.S. Attorney scandal — religion and the DOJ. Using Monica Goodling as an example, she documents how deeply Regent University Law School graduates have penetrated the upper echelons of the Bush administration. Like Lithwick, I don’t have a problem with the administration hiring Regent grads (assuming they’re qualified). In fact, I’ve worked with outstanding attorneys who graduated from Regent.

What interests me then is not so much why DOJ hired Regent grads, but why Regent grads like Monica Goodling acted like they did. In particular, it’s the psychological and sociological dimensions that intrigue me. How did someone like Goodling justify her actions in her own mind? How did she square them with her religious faith? [For what it’s worth, these questions extend well beyond Goodling. How (and why), for instance, do so many social conservatives tolerate and even applaud our detention “policy” and war and unprogressive tax structures and so on?]

With respect to the more narrow Goodling question, Lithwick proposes an answer — people like Goodling started mistaking Bush for God. She writes, “[T]he real concern here is that Goodling and her ilk somehow began to conflate God’s work with the president’s.” While that’s true in a sense, I don’t think it goes far enough. Assuming Lithwick is right, the more fundamental question is how Goodling (and other evangelicals) got to that point in the first place.

To take a step back, although liberals are not hostile to religion, I do think that they — in their own minds anyway — often conceptualize evangelical Christians in very simple ways. People get these visions of brainwashed automatons marching to the beat of Dobson and his P-Funk All-Stars. The truth is, though, that social conservatives — like all other groups — have a unique and complex psychology. And in their own mind, they (like everyone else) think of themselves as good people doing good things. That’s why it’s interesting to explore the specific rationalizations they use to justify actions that are hypocritical in light of their religious faith.

The first rationalization relates to our old friend, liberal hatred. I believe that evangelicals like Goodling are not so much pro-Republican as they are deeply, and even pathologically, anti-liberal. In this sense, Goodling represents the political coming-of-age of a generation of young social conservatives that has been taught from childhood to hate “the Left.” And it’s not just that the Left is bad, it’s that the Left is constantly attacking them from all directions — e.g., the courts, the media, Hollywood, academia, etc. It’s all one big attack. I mean, Regent University is premised on the notion that Christians are under attack. (The Federalist Society was too – check out their mission statement).

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I need some help. I’m having trouble discerning a thesis in George Will’s tirade today against the ERA. The argument seems to go like this: (1) Liberals like bell bottoms and love beads [cue Stayin’ Alive bass line]. (2) The ERA is bad because it duplicates the equal protection clause (Will’s favorite constitutional provision no doubt). (3) Hairy, bell-bottomed, love-beaded ERA-supporting hippies cheated back in the 70s. [Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk . . .] (4) The ERA is bad because it’s an end run around the legislative process. As #4 is the most ridiculous part of a fairly ridiculous op-ed, let’s start with that one.

The Will column is a textbook example of how conceptual narratives can harden to the point where facts become irrelevant. Remember that one of the central (and sometimes accurate) arguments of modern conservative jurisprudence is that post-World War II liberals use vague constitutional doctrine to do an end run around the legislative process. Inevitably, conservatives argue that if liberals want to change the Constitution, they need to do so through the proper channels – i.e., the Article V amendment process.

Funny thing, though. That’s exactly what the renewed effort to pass the ERA is trying to do. But to Will, these efforts are merely an even-more-cleverer way to avoid legislatures:

All amendments generate litigation, but the ERA’s purpose is to generate litigation. It is a device to get courts to impose social policies that supporters of the policies cannot persuade legislatures to enact. ERA — now WEA — supporters, being politically lazy, prefer the shortcut of litigation to the patient politics necessary to pass legislation.

If Kennedy and like-minded legislators think that the condition of American women needs improvements, they should try to legislate them. Instead, they prefer to hope that liberal judges will regard the ERA’s language as a license to legislate.
To sum up, commanding legislative supermajorities at the federal and state level in the manner explicitly provided for by Article V is a “politically lazy” “shortcut.” What legislators who want to help women should really do, Will explains, is to “try to legislate” rather than, you know, legislating.

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